49

Rose

Michael has been staying out later and later, and lots of times he doesn’t come home at all. Any scare he got from being arrested has disappeared, and Rose has her hands full with Taco Bell and the girls and deciding which bills to pay and which she can hold out on for another month. What with trying to keep everything else going, she doesn’t have time to figure out what to do about Michael. Vince just sits in his chair and drinks his beer and continues to ignore her, so he isn’t any help at all.

Sometimes she thinks about calling Liddy and asking to borrow the money she once offered. But Rose has got her pride and they’re not that desperate. Other times she thinks about contacting Garrett. Jason said Garrett is threatening to tell the police that Liddy pushed him, and Rose bets Garrett would be thrilled to know there was an eyewitness to back up his claim—and pay her handsomely for the information. It wouldn’t be a very nice thing to do to Liddy. But even though Liddy hasn’t been much of a friend to her lately, Rose can’t bring herself to do this.

When she finally gets up the energy to confront Michael about the stealing, he acts like it’s no big deal. It breaks her heart that her own son can think like this, can be like this. “Michael,” she pleads, “your six months isn’t up yet and if you get into trouble again you’re going to have to go back to court. And then it’s juvie, like the judge warned you about.”

As usual, Michael’s eyes are slits, and from what she can see of them they’re all bloodshot. He leans against the wall as if he needs it to keep him standing up. Which he probably does.

“You can’t go around stealing other people’s things, and you can’t do any drugs, like I know you’re doing and—”

“All my drug screens have come up clean,” he interrupts.

“I’m not a fool and I know that doesn’t mean anything. It’s obvious to me and to anyone who looks at you that you’re high all the time. So don’t add lying to your mother to the rest of your sins.”

“You’re making a big thing over nothing. Like always.”

“It is a big thing! Stealing is a big thing. Getting sent up is a big thing. It’s like jail in there. It is jail. If you don’t do everything the judge told you you’ve got to do, they could make you stay there for years.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“What’s not going to happen? You’re not going do what the judge says or you’re not going to go to detention?”

“Ma, stop trippin’,” he says. “I’m cool.”

“You aren’t cool—not even close—and you’re only fourteen, and you’re going to destroy your life before you’re old enough to even have one. And you’ll destroy mine and your father’s along the way!” Rose wants to slap his face like she did when he was little and mouthed off to her. But she doesn’t dare. He’s not that boy anymore, and even though she doesn’t think he’d hit her back, she’s not sure he wouldn’t. And what good would a slap do anyways? In his condition he probably wouldn’t even feel it.

This time when her phone rings in the middle of the night, Rose doesn’t think it’s a wrong number and she knows that Michael isn’t asleep in his room. She doesn’t want to answer it because she doesn’t want to hear what the man on the other end is going to tell her. But she has no choice. If it’s something bad like Michael has been arrested again, she’s going to have to do something about it.

It’s a woman cop this time, and Michael hasn’t been arrested. He’s been shot.

When Rose gets to the hospital, she’s not sure how she managed to find it, seeing that it’s all the way into the city and in an area she’s never been to before. The lady cop told her they took Michael to the ER at Boston Medical Center because they were the best equipped to handle gunshot wounds. Gunshot wounds. Her boy has a gunshot wound. Dear Jesus, dear Jesus, dear Jesus, please make him be okay. She wishes Vince were with her, but she didn’t want to tell her mother about Michael until she knew more, so Vince had to stay with the girls.

She pushes through the ER doors and skids into the room, which is packed. There are three people already lined up at the desk. “Michael Gentilini!” she yells as she races forward. “Michael Gentilini! Is he here? Where is he? Is he alive?”

“There are people ahead of you,” the woman behind the desk says. “Please wait your turn.”

“I can’t. It’s my boy. He’s been shot. I don’t know if he’s—”

“I’m sorry. You still have to wait your turn.”

“He’s only fourteen!” Rose cries. “I need to know what’s happened to him!”

A Black man with a white beard looks at the two women in line behind him. They nod and the man waves Rose ahead.

“Bless you, sir, bless you,” Rose says, and turns to the receptionist. “Michael Gentilini.”

“Are you immediate family?”

“I just told you I’m his mother! Where is he?”

“The receptionist stares at her screen. “Michael Gentilini, you say?”

“Yes. Yes. That’s what I say!”

The woman raises her eyes. “And you are . . . ?”

“Rose Gentilini. His mother!” She knows her voice is shrill and demanding and if she makes this woman mad it will just make things worse. She tries to calm down. But how can she calm down? “Can you please, please find him?”

“Do you have ID?” the receptionist asks.

Rose digs into her pocketbook and hopes she didn’t leave her wallet at home. She didn’t, but she has trouble pulling her license out. When she frees it, she just about throws it at the woman. “Please,” she says. “Please, he’s only fourteen.”

The receptionist stares at the photo, gives it back, and says, “Your son is in surgery right now. Take a seat, and the doctor will be with you as soon as she’s finished.”

“What kind of surgery? How bad is it? Was he shot? Where? Does he need blood?”

“We have plenty of blood, and I’m not authorized to give information on a patient’s condition. Just take a seat, Ms. Gentilini.”

“How long will it be until I can see the doctor?”

The old man with the white beard makes a noise that sounds kind of like a bark. Rose steps to the side and looks around, but there aren’t any seats. She’s got to ask more questions and get more answers, but the receptionist is already talking to the man. There’s no one else to ask so she sits on the floor in an empty corner and drops her head into her hands.

She prays like she’s never prayed before. Offering Jesus everything, anything, if he’ll only save Michael’s life. Please, Jesus, please let him live. Her sweet baby boy with his pudgy cheeks, grinning his grin with no teeth, and his shiny dark eyes seeing only her and wanting only her, her precious firstborn. It was her job to keep him safe, and she let him down. So far down.

More people pour into the waiting room, and it’s almost like she’s watching one of her television shows. There’s a child with skin so black he’s almost blue sitting all by himself and bleeding from a gash at the back of his head. There’s a man with a broken leg, crying like a baby, and a teenager who’s so skinny his ribs show through his T-shirt, throwing up into a pail. There’s a shriveled-up woman whose face is covered with an oxygen mask, and a girl screaming that she’s going into labor but it doesn’t even look like she’s pregnant. And then there are two junkies with eyes that are a lot like Michael’s. Someone finally leaves, and Rose grabs a chair that has a different view. But it doesn’t matter because it’s the same show.

Doctors come into the waiting room all the time and yell out names. Thompson. Tang. Washington. Qaock. Josephs. Laghari. Clark. Reddy. No Gentilini. Rose calls Vince but has nothing to tell him. When she hangs up she bows her head, waits, and prays some more.

“Gentilini!” a girl in bloody scrubs calls out, a face mask hanging crooked off her ear. “Gentilini. Michael Gentilini!”

Rose doesn’t figure out that this is Michael’s doctor right away because she looks like a kid and Rose expected the doctor to be a man. She jumps up, rushes over. “Me!” she says. “Me. Michael’s my son. I’m Rose Gentilini. How is he?”

“I’m Dr. Hale. It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Gentilini.” The doctor takes her arm and leads her to the side of the room. “I just operated on your son, and the surgery went well.”

“Thank you. Oh, thank you, doctor. I can’t thank you enough.” Rose thinks she’s going to faint. “So he’s okay? He’s going to be all right?”

“We’ll need to take it day by day.”

Rose blinks. “But you just said it went well.”

“The surgery went well,” Dr. Hale says. “Michael has a perforating wound to the abdomen, which means the bullet went completely through. It nicked a number of organs, and there’s a nasty exit wound. He also lost a lot of blood at the scene.”

Rose’s knees start to buckle, and the doctor grabs her by the arm. The doctor waves two young men off a couple of chairs, puts Rose into one, and takes the other for herself. “He has a good chance,” she says. “He’s young and healthy, and those are very strong indicators.”

“A, a good chance?” Rose says. “A good chance to, to . . .”

“To pull through. Yes, Ms. Gentilini, he has a good chance.”

Rose doesn’t know how she’s sitting here talking just like she’s some kind of normal person when Michael got shot and he could be dying right now. It feels like she isn’t here at all, like she’s watching herself on that television show she was watching before. Like she’s some actress sitting and talking. “You, you’re saying he might not, might not . . . ?”

“Let’s not go there, okay? Michael is in recovery right now, and they’ll bring him down to intensive care in a couple of hours. He has a substantial intra-abdominal injury, and I expect he’ll stay in the ICU for at least a week. Maybe more.”

“ICU,” the Rose actress repeats. “That sounds bad. Does he really need that?”

The doctor stands. “I’m sorry, Ms. Gentilini, but for now he does.”