Fortunate Son

She put her knitting down and sat forward in the chair, touching the edge of the mattress with her fingertips.

“I’m okay, Ahn,” Thomas said.

The ageless Vietnamese woman frowned and tilted her head. She looked closely at the weathered, battered, and scarred face. Then she drew back in frightened surprise.

“Tommy?”

2 2 1

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

“Yeah.” The solitary word floated on the music of a life-long apology.

“What’s happened to you?” Fear and guilt clouded her usually impassive face.

“Life, I guess.”

Thomas could see this life imagined in her eyes — the knife wounds and roofless nights, broken bones and empty pockets.

Ahn suffered for him.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t cry, Ahn. It’s not so bad. I’m alive.”

The little woman got to her feet and touched his callused hands, hands that were so big compared to his body that they seemed swollen.

“What happened?” Thomas asked.

“You were shot,” she said. “You saved Mona, but that boy shot you in the back trying to kill her.”

“That was the little girl?”

“Yes. The police came and killed him before he could finish killing you.”

It was as if she were talking about some story in a book or on Madeline’s TV, something far away from Thomas.

“And there was a woman?” he half-asked.

“Mona’s mother, Christie,” Ahn said solemnly. “She died on the way to the hospital.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “He took my cart and shoved it into the door. I tried to stop him.”

“You saved Mona, Tommy. Oh, Tommy, look at you.”

“Where’s Eric?”

“He’s getting ready for the funeral. It’s tomorrow. Dr.

Nolan went with him. They asked me to come here and see about you. But, but they didn’t know who you were. They said your name was Bruno.”

2 2 2

F o r t u n a t e S o n

“Why did you tell me not to call?” Thomas asked. The question had been in his heart for years. Just asking made him feel better.

Ahn couldn’t answer right away. Her eyes filled up, and she slumped into her chair.

Thomas’s back hurt and his breathing was shallow. He wanted to get up and comfort his old nurse but didn’t have the strength.

“It’s okay, Ahn. I’m here now.”

“But you are so hurt. Your hands and face. Your chest.

How can all this happen to a child?”

Thomas found that he could still shrug if he didn’t pull his shoulders too high.

“I thought,” Ahn said. “I thought that if you came back home something bad would happen to you, like your mother. Maybe you get sick. I don’t know.”

“Because of Eric?”

Ahn nodded.

“Eric can’t hurt me, Ahn. He’s my brother. He always saved me.”

There was sunlight shining in through the window.

Thomas realized that it didn’t hurt his eyes. He smiled then and so did Ahn.

“I forgot you,” she confessed.

“I never forgot you.”

Th omas sl i p pe d i nto a coma that evening. Dr. Nolan and Eric came to the hospital when Ahn told them who he was. They stood over his frail body.

“He looks so peaceful,” Eric said. “Just like he was taking a nap.”

2 2 3

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

“There’s less than a ten percent chance that he’ll revive,”

said Dr. Bettye Freeling, the physician in charge of the ward.

“He might surprise you,” Minas Nolan told her. “He’s got something in him that won’t let go. He might be the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

“Do you know his family?” Freeling asked. She was a younger doctor, handsome. “I see that he’s uninsured.”

“I’ll pay for him, Doctor,” Minas said. “I owe him at least that.”

M i c ha e l and R a e la came to Christie’s funeral. Michael wore a medium-brown suit because that’s all he owned. Raela wore an elegant black dress, flat black shoes, and a tasteful ebony tam, and carried a small black purse. When she touched Eric’s forearm in sympathy, there was a loud and painful crackle of static electricity.

By then everyone knew about the tryst between Drew and Christie. Drew had told his father about the affair in their brief conversation before he stole the Luger. And the doorman of the Tennyson saw them coming in late at night and watched them groping each other through the video eye in the elevator.

Almost everyone felt sorry for Eric. He was a poor cuck-old, an innocent bystander. He grieved for his dead girlfriend and held their tearful daughter in his arms. Only Ahn wondered how Eric’s fateful aura had caused the hapless college dropout to murder Christie. She watched him closely. When she saw the teenage girl stand near him, she knew. It was time for him to lose his lover, Ahn thought, and so the stars con-spired to kill her. The Vietnamese woman shivered under her thin silk shawl.

2 2 4

F o r t u n a t e S o n

Christie’s parents hugged Eric and kissed their sweet granddaughter. Half of Christie’s class from Hensley showed up to express their sorrow.

Drew would be buried three days later. Only his parents and Eric came to that ceremony. Drew’s father shook Eric’s hand, thanking him for coming and apologizing for his son.