Water Dogs by Lewis Robinson Read Free Book Online

had piped a feed of liquid drugs directly into his arm: first morphine, which helped, then Dilaudid, which helped even more. He had remote controls: a red button inhis right hand fed more narcotics, and the nurse call button was within reach of his left hand. He talked on the phone with Julian, who told him he’d visit as soon as things at the restaurant quieted down. Littlefield didn’t visit, either—like their father, he hated hospitals—but he called Bennie’s room the next day and said
Listen up, it’s your brother
, and he told Bennie he’d be feeling better in no time. High on the painkillers, with the static on the line and the certainty in Littlefield’s voice, Bennie felt like they were characters in an old-style radio drama.
    “That kid, LaBrecque. He’s still missing.”
    Bennie wanted to know the details, immediately, but the shock he felt in his chest made him afraid to ask.
    “Bennie, are you there?”
    “I’m here.”
    “LaBrecque got lost in the woods. He might have fallen into the quarry. Like you did. But no one’s found him yet.”
    “People are still looking?”
    “The cops. Folks from Musquacook and the island. But he might have skipped town, too. Hard to say right now.” Before he hung up, Littlefield told Bennie to get home as soon as he could.
    It wasn’t the head injury that had him fouled up, or his broken leg. It was knowing that surely he could have died. Waiting to be released, Bennie had a decent amount of time to think about dying. Where was LaBrecque? Had the same thing happened to both of them and only Bennie was saved? In the bed, Bennie was floating, encased in softness, a quiet ocean. Once he even had a vision of raccoon babies, a tight bundle of fur beneath the spruce tree, at the bottom of the ravine. Under normal circumstances, he wasn’t one to think much about mortality, but in the hospital he started seeing himself disappear, melting into the snow right beside LaBrecque, the guy he didn’t know, with the gray eyes and the large white snowsuit. The way it seemed to have happened was that when Bennie fell off the edge of Keep’s Quarry he’d landed in the clean sheets and soft blankets of Parkview Adventist, and suddenly there were round-faced nurses wearing colorful shirts deliveringfood and checking his blood pressure. Where had LaBrecque landed? Bennie knew his own body was twisted up and broken, but he couldn’t feel any of the pain. In addition to the concussion and broken leg, his hip and left shoulder were bruised. When the nurses asked him about the accident, though, the drugs he was taking kept him from the shame he might have felt for being a grown man playing paintball in the first place.
    On Helen’s first visit to the hospital—the day after his fall, she’d heard about the accident from Julian, at the restaurant—she’d walked slowly into his room, unannounced, and Bennie mistook her for a nurse. He lowered the volume on the TV and brought his arm up out of the covers for a blood-pressure check.
    “Hi, Bennie,” she said. She was holding one arm behind her back.
    “Oh, wow,” he said, blinking. Her cheeks were bright from the cold outside. His vision seemed especially sharp—just minutes earlier, he’d pressed the pain button for a surge of Dilaudid, which had settled him, and brightened the room—and he focused on her eyelashes, both above and below each eye.
    “I brought you a present,” she said, looking down, then bringing her hand out from behind her back and placing a miniature sailboat on the bed. “I don’t think this one’s a Sunfish. But I thought it was cool. They sell them in the bookstore, in the back, with the kids’ books.”
    He looked down at the boat, with its blue hull and white sails. “It’s amazing,” he said, dreamily, indebted to her. “You’re amazing. I love you.”
    Helen smiled, but her eyes showed some concern and she took a tiny step away from the bed. It was quiet for a minute before she said,