Jaguar by Bill Ransom Read Free Book Online Page B

get something for me from home and bring it here right away. Can you get home and back in the window again?”
    He nodded.
    “Yes,” he said, “but the rabbit . . . oh, there he goes!”
    The little black thing crept out from under Doris’ bed, testing the air with its quick nose. Eddie started after it and it darted away.
    “Leave it,” his mom whispered. “They’ll be here in a minute. Go home to the bathroom and get my back medicine out of the cabinet. You know which bottle it is? Ok. If someone’s here, wait outside the window. Can you wait out there without anybody seeing you?
    “Yes,” he said, “the bushes. . . .”
    “Go now,” she said, her voice louder, harder. “Don’t stop to talk to anybody, don’t tell grandma or grandpa. Hurry.”
    “But . . . the rabbit. . . .”
    “He won’t go anywhere,” she said. “Catch him when you come back. I need that medicine, Eddie. You have to do this for me. Now, go, they’ll be—.”
    Eddie heard the voices in the hall, and before he knew it he had raised the window, slipped outside and closed it. He waited a moment, listening to the therapist make small talk while she fed his mother. He sat under the window, knowing he should hurry, but unable to move because he wanted to see her face.
    He looked once again down the alley into the lumber yard. Eddie thought he saw the figure of a boy about his age scale the far fence and disappear.
    The metal treads of the fire escape echoed his steps no matter how careful he was. Going down the side of the building was scarier than going up, but he kept hold of the ivy and that helped. The last jump to the ground pitched him forward on his hands and knees. He scraped his palms in the gravel. They bled from the scrapes, but he didn’t cry.
    He didn’t short-cut through the feed store this time, but went the long way down the alley and around the lumber yard instead. Something about the boy Eddie had seen made him hope he’d run into him.
    In the years after his sixth birthday, Eddie would remember many details of this day. He would not remember the run home, nor how he managed to sneak past his grandparents. He did remember finding the big bottle of blue pills behind the cough medicine in his mother’s cabinet, and he remembered the sting of the steel rung of the fire escape when he grabbed it with his scraped-up hands.
    This time, when he listened at the window, he heard hoarse barks of pain from his mother.
    “That’s it, Leda, we’re just about done,” the therapist said. “Let’s try it one more time.”
    His ear was right next to the window now, and he heard his mother’s sobs and heavy breathing.
    “No, please. Let me rest, please. ”
    “We need to keep you moving, Leda. If we don’t keep at it your arms will just lock up like they did at first. Aren’t you doing much better now than when we first started? I think so. You couldn’t move them at all, then. Now look at you. Once more, now.”
    Eddie pressed his head against the cool brick of the wall and tried to shut out the dry, empty screams of his mother’s scorched throat.
    He watched a trail of tiny red ants make their way from a branch of the ivy onto the brick, then into a crack in the mortar. When he looked closer, he saw that thousands of ants used the crack in the wall as a kind of superhighway, some of them stopping to touch antennae in their two-lane scramble.
    Everything was quiet in the room now except for his mother’s heavy breathing. He peeked over the sill and saw that the curtain had been drawn around her bed and he could only see the lumps of her feet near the bottom rail. He raised the window again and stepped inside.
    She was lying on her back with a sheet up to her waist. Her head was flung back on her pillow, and she gulped great breaths of air through the angry slash that had once been her mouth. She didn’t really have a face. From the middle of what used to be her nose on down it looked like somebody just pasted on skin,