He thought about it. "I'd rather be a sophomore," he said.
Then he got out of the car and walked across the street with his new backpack, a plain navy one with no patch, and went in through the front doors, and I sat there for twenty minutes after the bell, the way I'd sat in the car after Colby, until I could drive.
He swam the 200 butterfly at the district meet in February. He didn't win. He came third, by eight-tenths of a second, behind two seniors, in a time that qualified him for regionals and knocked four seconds off his best. I sat in the bleachers with Mr. Oyelaran, who'd asked to come and who'd never been to a swim meet in his life, and who stood up for the entire race, all two minutes and four seconds of it, and shouted "Go, Isidore!" in a voice that made the people around us turn and stare.
I want to end there. I'd like to end with my son climbing out of the pool with his chest heaving and his cap in his hand, looking up into the bleachers for me. But it doesn't end there, because life doesn't, and because there's one more thing I promised myself I'd be honest about.
On the second Sunday in March, two weeks before Bobbie's sentencing, at 3:40 in the morning, they brought a seventeen-year-old boy into the St. Brigid's ICU from a residential facility near Toledo, ninety minutes away, by helicopter. He'd taken something that someone had smuggled into the program. He'd stopped breathing on the floor of his room and the night staff had given him naloxone twice and gotten him back, and then he'd stopped breathing again in the ambulance on the way to the helipad. By the time he got to me he was intubated, sedated, and on my ventilator, and I was standing at the head of his bed adjusting his oxygen before I looked at his chart and saw his name.
I didn't ask to be taken off. I thought about it. There's a policy; I could have. I looked at his face, which was long and pale and narrow and younger than I'd remembered from the white Jeep, and at his hands on the blanket, and his fingernails, which were pink again, which was the important thing. And I thought about my son on the floor of a locker room, pushing hard enough to break ribs on a boy he barely knew. And I did my job. I managed his airway for the rest of that shift and the next two. On the third night his numbers came up enough that the attending decided to start weaning him, and on the fourth, after I'd gone home, they took the tube out, and he breathed on his own.
Bobbie was in the family waiting room on the second night. I knew she would be. I walked past the glass doors at about 2 a.m. on my way to the supply room and saw her there, alone, in a cardigan, sitting in the far corner under the television with her hands folded in her lap, not reading anything, not looking at her phone, just sitting. The way she'd said she'd sat for sixteen years.
I stopped. She looked up and saw me through the glass.
I didn't go in. I couldn't have told you what I'd have said. But I stood there long enough for her to understand that I knew who was in Room 9 and that I was the one breathing for him, and I watched her understand it. I watched her face do something I'd never seen it do before, not in her bay window, not by the mailbox kiosk, not in that conference room. It didn't stop, the way it had when the footage started. It did the opposite. It came apart.
I nodded to her once. Then I went to the supply room and got what I'd come for and went back to my patient.
Her sentencing is next Thursday. Ruthanne says the prosecutor will ask for two years. Ruthanne says the judge will probably give her six months and probation, given her age and her plea and her lack of a record, and given that, as her lawyer will certainly point out, she has spent sixteen years in emergency rooms and is about to spend more. Ruthanne says I have the right to give a victim impact statement, in person or in writing, and that it might make a difference, in either direction.
I've written it three times.