The Round House Read Free Page B

notebook and a pen, and came out again in about fifteen minutes, expressionless. Each shook my father’s hand and swiftly exited.
    A young doctor named Egge was on duty that day. He was the one who had examined my mother. As my father and I were going back to Mom’s room, we saw that Dr. Egge had returned.
    I don’t suggest that the boy . . . , he began.
    I thought it was funny that his domed, balding, shiny head was eggish, like his name. His oval face with the little round black eyeglasses looked familiar, and I realized it was the sort of face my mother used to draw on boiled eggs so that I would eat them.
    My wife insisted on seeing Joe again, my father told Dr. Egge. She needs him to see that she is all right.
    Dr. Egge was silent. He gave my father a prim little piercing look. My father stepped back from Egge and asked me to go out into the waiting room to see if Clemence had arrived yet.
    I’d like to see Mom again.
    I’ll come get you, said my father urgently. Go.
    Dr. Egge was staring even harder at my father. I turned away from them with sick reluctance. As my father and Dr. Egge walked away from me, they spoke in low voices. I didn’t want to leave, so I turned and watched them before I went out into the waiting room. They stopped outside my mother’s room. Dr. Egge finished speaking and jabbed his eyeglasses up his nose with one finger. My father walked to the wall as if he were going through it. He pressed his forehead and hands against the wall and stood there with his eyes shut.
    Dr. Egge turned and saw me frozen at the doors. He pointed toward the waiting room. My father’s emotion was something, his gesture implied, that I was too young to witness. But during the last few hours I had become increasingly resistant to authority. Instead of politely vanishing, I ran to my father, flailing Dr. Egge aside. I threw my arms around my father’s soft torso, held him under his jacket, and I fiercely clung to him, saying nothing, only breathing with him, taking great deep sobs of air.
    M uch later, after I had gone into law and gone back and examined every document I could find, every statement, relived every moment of that day and the days that followed, I understood that this was when my father had learned from Dr. Egge the details and extent of my mother’s injuries. But that day, all I knew, after Clemence separated me from my father and led me away, was that the hallway was a steep incline. I went back through the doors and let Clemence talk to my father. After I’d sat for about half an hour in the waiting room, Clemence came in and told me that my mother was going into surgery. She held my hand. We sat together staring at a picture of a pioneer woman sitting on a hot hillside with her baby lying next to her, shaded beneath a black umbrella. We agreed that we had never really cared for the picture and now we were going to actively hate it, though this was not the picture’s fault.
    I should take you home, let you sleep in Joseph’s room, said Clemence. You can go to school tomorrow from our house. I’ll come back here and wait.
    I was tired, my brain hurt, but I looked at her like she was crazy. Because she was crazy to think that I would go to school. Nothing would go on as normal. That steeply inclined hallway led to this place—the waiting room—where I would wait.
    You could at least sleep, said Aunt Clemence. It wouldn’t hurt to sleep. The time would pass and you wouldn’t have to stare at that damn picture.
    Was it rape? I asked her.
    Yes, she said.
    There was something else, I said.
    My family doesn’t hedge about things. Though Catholic, my aunt was not one to let butter melt in her mouth. When she spoke, answering me, her voice was quick and cool.
    Rape is forced sex. A man can force a woman to have sex. That’s what happened.
    I nodded. But I wanted to know something else.
    Will she die from it?
    No, said Clemence