She burst into honking sobs. Eddie saw that the nurse who had washed his face was looking at her without much sympathy.

All through this aria, Dr Handor had been stuttering, 'Sonia . . . please, Sonia . . . Sonia . . . ?' He was a skinny, limp-looking man with a little mustache that hadn't grown very well and which, in addition, had been clipped unevenly, so it was longer on the left side than on the right. He looked nervous. Eddie remembered what Mr Keene had told him that morning and felt a certain sorrow for Dr Handor.

At last, gathering himself, Russ Handor managed to say: 'If you can't control yourself, you'll have to leave, Sonia.'

She whirled on him and he drew back. 'I'll do no such thing! Don't you even suggest it! This is my son lying here in agony! My son lying here on his bed of pain!'

Eddie astounded them all by finding his voice. 'I want you to leave, Ma. If they're going to do something that'll make me yell, and I think they are, you'll feel better if you go.'

She turned to him, astonished . . . and hurt. At the sight of the hurt on her face, he felt his chest begin to tighten down inexorably. 'I certainly will not!' she cried. 'What an awful thing to say, Eddie! You're delirious! You don't understand what you're saying, that's the only explanation!'

'I don't know what the explanation is, and I don't care,' the nurse said. 'All I know is that we're standing here doing nothing while we should be setting your son's arm.'

'Are you suggesting — ' Sonia began, her voice rising toward the high, bugling note it took on when she was most upset.

'Please, Sonia,' Dr Handor said. 'Let's not have an argument here. Let's help Eddie.'

Sonia stood back, but her glowering eyes — the eyes of a mother bear whose cub has been threatened — promised the nurse that there would be trouble later. Possibly even a suit. Then her eyes misted, extinguishing the glower or at least hiding it. She took Eddie's good hand and squeezed it so painfully that he winced.

'It's bad, but you'll be well again soon,' she said. 'Well again soon, I promise you that.'

'Sure, Ma,' Eddie wheezed. 'Could I have my aspirator?'

'Of course,' she said. Sonia Kaspbrak looked at the nurse triumphantly, as if vindicated of some ridiculous criminal charge. 'My son has asthma,' she said. 'It's quite serious, but he copes with it beautifully. '

'Good,' the nurse said flatly.

His ma held the aspirator for him so he could inhale. A moment later Dr Handor was feeling Eddie's broken arm. He was as gentle as possible but the pain was still enormous. Eddie felt like screaming and gritted his teeth against it. He was afraid if he screamed his mother would scream, too. Sweat stood out on his forehead in large clear drops.

'You're hurting him,' Mrs Kaspbrak said. 'I know you are! There's no need of that! Stop it! There's no need for you to hurt him! He's very delicate, he can't stand that sort of pain!'

Eddie saw the nurse lock her furious eyes with Dr Handor's tired, worried ones. He saw the wordless conversation that passed between them: Send that woman out of here, doctor. And in the drop of his eyes: I can't. I don't dare.

There was great clarity inside the pain (although, in truth, this was not a clarity that Eddie would want to experience often: the price was too high), and in that unspoken conversation, Eddie accepted everything Mr Keene had told him. His HydrOx aspirator was filled with nothing more than flavored water. The asthma wasn't in his throat or his chest or his lungs but in his head. Somehow or other he was going to have to deal with that truth.

He looked at his mother, seeing her clear in his pain: each flower on her Lane Bryant dress, the sweat-stains under her arms where the pads she wore had soaked through, the scuff –marks on her shoes. He saw how small her eyes were in their pockets of flesh, and now a terrible thought came to him: those eyes were almost predatory, like the eyes of the leper that had crawled out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Here I come, that's all right . . . it won't doyou any good to run, Eddie . . .

Dr Handor put his hands gently around Eddie's broken arm and squeezed. The pain exploded.

Eddie drifted away.

5

They gave him some liquid to drink and Dr Handor set the fracture. He heard Dr Handor telling his ma that it was a greenstick fracture, no more serious than any childhood break: 'It's the sort of break kids get falling out of trees,' he said, and Eddie heard his ma respond furiously: 'Eddie doesn't climb trees! Now I want the truth! How bad is he?'

Then the nurse was giving him a pill. He felt her bosoms against his shoulder again and was grateful for their comforting pressure. Even through the haze he could see that the nurse was angry and he thought he said, She's not the leper, please don't think that, she's only eating me because she loves me, but perhaps nothing came out because the nurse's angry face didn't change.

He had a faint recollection of being pushed up a corridor in a wheelchair and his mother's voice somewhere behind, fading: 'What do you mean, visiting hours) Don't talk to me about visiting hours, that's my son! '

Fading. He was glad she was fading, glad he was fading. The pain was gone and the clarity was gone with it. He didn't want to think. He wanted to drift. He was aware that his right arm felt very heavy. He wondered if they had put it in a cast yet. He couldn't seem to see if they had or not. He was vaguely aware of radios playing from rooms, of patients who looked like ghosts in their hospital johnnies walking up and down the wide halls, and that it was hot . . . so very hot. When he was wheeled into his room, he could see the sun going down in an angry orange boil of blood and thought incoherently: Like a great big clown-button.

'Come on, Eddie, you can walk,' a voice was saying, and he found that he could. He was slid between crisp cool sheets. The voice told him that he would have some pain in the night, but not to ring for a pain-killer unless it got very bad. Eddie asked if he could have a drink of water. The water came with a straw that had an accordion middle so you could bend it. It was cool and good. He drank it all.

There was pain in the night, a good deal of it. He lay awake in bed, holding the call-button in his left hand but not pressing it . A thunderstorm was going on outside, and when the

lightning flashed blue –white, he turned his head away from the windows, afraid he might see a monstrous, grinning face etched across the sky in that electric fire.

At last he slept again, and in his sleep he had a dream. In it he saw Bill, Ben, Richie, Stan, Mike, and Bev — his friends — arriving at the hospital on their bikes (Bill was riding Richie double on Silver). He was surprised to see that Beverly was wearing a dress — it was a lovely green, the color of the Caribbean in a National Geographic plate. He couldn't remember if he had ever seen her in a dress before; all he remembered were jeans and pedal-pushers and what the girls called 'school-sets': skirts and blouses, the blouses usually white with round collars, the skirts usually brown and pleated and hemmed at mid –shin, so that the scabs on their knees didn't show.

In the dream he saw them coming in for the 2:00 P.M. visiting hours and his mother, who had been waiting patiently since eleven, shouting so loudly at them that everyone turned to look at her.

If you think you're going to go in there, you've got another think coming! Eddie's mother shouted, and now the clown, who had been sitting here in the waiting room all along (but way back in one corner, with a copy of Look magazine held up in front of his face until now), jumped up and mimed applause, patting his white-gloved hands together rapidly. He capered and danced, now turning a cartwheel, now executing a neat back-over flip, as Mrs Kaspbrak ranted at Eddie's fellow Losers and as they shrank, one by one, behind Bill, who only stood there, pale but outwardly calm, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans (maybe so no one, including Bill himself, would be able to see if they were shaking or not). No one saw the clown except Eddie . . . although a baby who had been sleeping peacefully in his mother's arms awoke and began to cry lustily.