Here in the Real World

One

Ware patted the two bricks stacked beside him on the pool deck, scored on the morning’s ramble. Tomorrow he’d bash them into chips to build the ramparts of his castle, but tonight he had another use for them.

He swirled his legs through the water, turquoise in the twilight, and at exactly 7:56, he snapped on his goggles and adjusted them snug. “The boy began to prepare himself for the big event.” He whispered the voice-over, in case anyone had their windows open, or the Twin Kings were lurking around.

The Twin Kings weren’t twins, just two old men who dressed alike in plaid shorts and bucket hats. They weren’t kings either, but they paraded around Sunset Palms Retirement Village like royal tyrants, making life miserable for anyone they encountered.

Ware had studied the Middle Ages in school. Back then, kings could be kind and wise, kings could be cruel and crazy. Luck of the draw: serf or knight, you lived with it.

The first time the Twin Kings had come across Ware, he’d been cheek down in the grass, watching a line of ants patiently climb up, then over, then down a rock, thinking about how much harder human life would be if people didn’t know they could just go around some obstacles. “Space Man” they’d dubbed him, claiming they’d had to yell at him three times before he’d lifted his head.

Now, whenever they found him, they delivered some zinger they found so hilarious they had to double over and grab their knees. The comments were not hilarious, though. They were only mean.

Which was okay—people made fun of him for spacing out; he was used to it.

No, the mortifying thing was when Big Deal came out and sent the kings slinking away with a single glare. An eleven-and-a-half-year-old boy was supposed to protect his grandmother, not the other way around.

“Oh, they’re harmless,” Big Deal had said last night, laughing and making him feel even more ashamed. “They’re deathly afraid of germs, so just tell them you’re sick. Diarrhea works best.”

As if he’d called them up by thinking of them, the Twin Kings rolled around the corner, hands clasped around their royal bellies. “Earth to Space Man!” the shorter one cackled. “Don’t get your air hose caught in the drain down there!”

Ware glanced back at his grandmother’s unit, then faced them. “Better stay away. I’m sick.” He grabbed his belly and groaned in a convincing manner. The Twin Kings scuttled back around the corner.

Ware raised his eyes to the clock again: 7:58. He kicked off the seconds in the water.

At 7:59, he picked up the bricks. Then he slowly filled his lungs with the sunscreeny air—hot and sweet, as if someone was frying coconuts nearby—and slipped into the deep end. The bricks seemed to double in weight, sinking him softly to the bottom.

He’d never been on the bottom before, thanks to a certain amount of padding that functioned as an internal flotation device. “Baby fat,” his mother called it. “It’ll turn into muscle.” Witnessing his bathing-suited self in his grandmother’s mirror every day, he realized his mother had omitted a crucial detail: how it would turn into muscle. Probably exercise was involved. Maybe tomorrow.

Ware located the four huge date palms—each one anchoring a corner of the pool. Their chunky trunks staggered in the ripples like live gargoyles.

At eight, the twinkle lights winding up those trunks were set to come on. Tonight he would see it from the bottom of the pool. Okay, the big event was not exactly a dazzling spectacle, but he’d discovered that everything looked more interesting through water—mysteriously distorted, but somehow clearer, too. He could hold his breath for over a minute, so he’d have plenty of time to appreciate the effect.

Five seconds later, though—a surprise. The palm fronds began to flash red.

Ware understood right away: ambulance. Three times already in the weeks he’d been at Sunset Palms, he’d been awakened by strobing red lights—no shock in a retirement place. He knew the drill: the ambulance cut the siren at the entrance—no sense causing any extra heart attacks. It parked between the buildings, and then a crew ran around poolside where the doors to the units were sliders, easier to roll the stretchers in, haul the people out.

Don’t be afraid, he telegraphed to whoever lay on the stretcher, the way he had the other times. Scared people seemed like raw eggs to him, wobbling around without their shells. It hurt just to think about people being scared.

While he watched the date palms pulse, he thought about being happy instead. How happiness could sneak up on you, like, for instance, when your parents send you away for the summer to your grandmother’s place, which you know you’ll hate, but it turns out you love it there because for the first time in your life you have long hours free and alone. Well, except for maybe two old men so harmless they’re afraid of germs.

An egret, as white and smooth as though carved from soap, glided through the purpling sky. In a movie, a single flying bird like that would let you know that the main character was starting out on a journey. Ware wished, the way he always did when he saw something wonderful, that he could share things like this. You see that? Wow. But he didn’t really know anyone besides his grandmother here, and she hadn’t been feeling well today, had barely stepped out of—

Ware released the bricks, burst to the surface, snapped off his goggles, and saw: Big Deal’s sliding glass doors gaping open like a gasp, two EMTs inside, bent over a stretcher.

A third EMT squinted toward the pool, her white coat flashing pink in the lights, as if her heart beat in neon. Mrs. Sauer from Unit 4 hovered behind her, bathrobe clutched to her chest, face clenched. She raised one bony arm like a rifle and aimed her finger right at Ware.

Ware shot over to the ladder, slapped the water from his left ear, his right, and as he scrambled out he heard, “That’s her grandson. Off in his own world.”

At eight exactly, the twinkle lights came on.

Two

Ware woke, disoriented to find himself in his own bed instead of on the prickly couch at his grandmother’s place. The night swept over him—the grim, silent ride to the hospital, following the ambulance in Mrs. Sauer’s old Buick; the air-conditioned waiting room where he’d shivered, pool soaked and worried, until a nurse dropped a blanket over his shoulders; his mother charging in a few hours later, her jaw set like a rock. He flung off the sheets and got up.

Halfway downstairs, he heard his parents talking in the kitchen.

“Except that’s not what you wanted,” he heard his father say.

“I know, I know,” his mother said. “I only wish . . .”

Ware hurried the rest of the way down. “What do you wish, Mom? Is Big Deal okay?”

His dad slid off the counter. “You all right? Tough night, yesterday.”

“Mom. How’s Big Deal?”

“She’s awake,” his mother answered, looking down into her coffee. “She’ll be okay.”

“Oh, good. So when am I going back?”

“Back?”

His mom’s phone rang just then. She picked it up and gripped her forehead with the other hand as if she were afraid it might shatter, and marched into the bedroom.

His father watched her go with a worried expression.

Of course, worried was his dad’s normal state. “It comes with the job,” he often said, and he always sounded proud of it. Signaling airplanes down the runway meant thinking about every possible catastrophe.

But Ware grew worried then, too. His mother was the manager at the city’s crisis center. She juggled twenty volunteers’ schedules, talked people down from bridges, and got babies delivered. She took control, as if control were a package sitting on the doorstep with her name on it. She didn’t grip her forehead as if it might shatter.

“Dad. Big Deal’s okay. Mom said. When’s she getting out?”

“Well. She is okay, she just let her blood sugar get low yesterday. That’s not good with her condition. They’ll have to—”

“Her condition? Is Big Deal sick?”

“Oh. Well, it’s . . . she’s not young. But she fell, is—”

“Being old is a condition?”

“She fell, is the thing. They need to make sure she’s all right.”

“Oh. Okay, good. So what about the plan?”

“The plan?”

“I spend the summer there, so you and Mom can work double shifts, buy this house. The plan.”

“Oh. Well, that was plan A,” his dad agreed. He picked up a Summer Rec brochure from the counter. “Plan B might be a little different.”

Three

Ware stood at the kitchen door, forehead pressed to the screen, building his argument.

He could stay home alone, so no, he sure did not need to go to Rec again, if that’s what they were thinking. Rec was another name for day care, with heat rash and humiliation thrown in free of charge.

The first time he’d gone to that program had been the summer after first grade, and the memory still hurt. “Go join in with the others,” a teenaged counselor had urged.

“I am. Joined in with the others,” he’d answered, bewildered.

“No. I mean inside the group. You’re outside.”

Ware had studied the situation, trying to see what the counselor saw. He saw something different. He saw a huge space with kids scattered all over. “The outside is part of the inside when it’s people,” he’d tried to explain, then felt his face burn when that counselor had leaned into another counselor and laughed.

In that precise moment he’d learned that the place that had always felt so right—standing enough apart from a situation that he could observe it, in the castle watchtower, as he’d come to think of it later—was wrong.

Afterward, Ware had tried to forget the embarrassing episode. And that was when he’d learned the cruel irony of memory: you could be capable of forgetting things—Ware himself, at six, routinely forgot to comb his hair or bring home his lunch box—but the harder you tried to erase something from your brain, the deeper it got engraved.

The other kids hadn’t forgotten either. The outside label stuck to him summer after summer, invisible but undeniable, like a bad smell, and outside was where they left him.

Which was okay, although from then on, he made certain to appear to be part of the group if any grown-ups were watching. It wasn’t hard—“joined in” was simply a matter of geography to grown-ups. A few steps one direction or another did the trick.

No matter. He wasn’t going back. Not even for the week or two until he could return to Sunset Palms.

He’d been really happy there. The pool had been barely over his head and so narrow he could practically touch both walls at once. But the instant he’d slipped in, he’d always felt good. Really good. And something about it had worked like fertilizer on his imagination. He’d had dozens of great ideas drifting around that pool. Hundreds.

Even better, when he’d told his grandmother about his report, “Defending Medieval Castles,” and how he wanted to actually build a model to see for himself how life had been for the knights, she’d shocked him by waving her hands over her dining table and saying, “Build it right here. We’ll eat our meals at the counter, and that’s that.”

At Sunset Palms, he’d spent entire blissful days exploring the neighborhood, picking up things for his model. Whole nights happily building it. He’d been a little homesick, sure. But something that had been clenched tight inside him his whole life had loosened.

He stepped into the backyard, looking for something to convince his parents that he could keep busy for a week or so. The yard seemed to shrug in apology. “The boy surveyed a wasteland,” he voice-overed—silently, of course.

“Wasteland” was an exaggeration, but not much. Mr. Shepard wasn’t a spend-money-on-yard-maintenance kind of landlord, and his parents weren’t the spend-time-working-on-a-lawn kind of parents, so the yard was barren. Besides an old shed crammed with junk abandoned when the previous tenants left a decade ago, there were only a couple of rusting lounge chairs and a listing picnic table. They seemed to be gasping for final breaths before the weeds drowned them. “Wasteland,” he repeated.

Which was, he suddenly realized, exactly perfect.

He jumped off the step. A stunningly great idea had just sprung up, even without the imagination-boosting benefit of a pool.

When his parents bought this place at the end of the summer, they’d own the backyard, too. The lounge chairs could be broken down to make armor. The shed would work as a throne room. The picnic table could be a drawbridge once he sawed off the legs. He’d turn the narrow side yard into a barbicon, the courtyard of deathly obstacles for attackers. No boiling oil, obviously, but definitely a catapult. He’d notch toeholds in the wooden fence and take running leaps to claim the top—mounting the ramparts, it was called. This last was such a satisfying image, he replayed it, this time in classic knight’s stance: Chin up, chest out, advance boldly.

Ware dropped to the picnic table and stretched out. Sometimes he wished he lived back in the Middle Ages. Things were a lot simpler then, anyway, especially if you were a knight. Knights had a rule book—their code of chivalry—that covered everything: Thou shalt always do this, thou shalt never be that. If you were a knight, you knew where you stood.

Too often, Ware wasn’t even sure he was standing. Sometimes he felt as if he was wafting, in fact. A little drifty.

His mother, like the knights, operated from a clear code, and she was always trying to share it with him. “If you aren’t thinking three steps ahead,” she would say, for example, “you’re already four steps behind.” The trouble was, Ware hadn’t the faintest clue how to unravel an advice-puzzle like that.

His father lived by a code also, made up of sports sayings. It was equally undecipherable.

“Ware!” his dad called just then from the back door.

Given the level of irritation in his voice, Ware knew he’d called a few times already. He jumped up. “Sorry. What?”

“Inside. Team huddle.”

Four

Ware’s mother sat at the kitchen table, still gripping her phone.

“What happened?”

His dad took a seat. He patted the chair between them.

Ware stayed standing. “What’s wrong?”

“When she fell, your grandmother fractured her hips. Both hips!” His mother’s voice was extremely cheerful and determined, but it had gone up into a strange new register. “She’ll have to have them replaced.”

“Replaced?” Images of things that got replaced presented themselves unhelpfully in his mind. Batteries, light bulbs, toothbrushes. A hip didn’t fit.

“Artificial joints. Surgery. Nothing for a child to be concerned with.” His mother smiled hard, but she blinked her eyes quickly.

Ware felt the world collapse a little, as if it had suddenly remembered it was hollow at its core. Was his mother going to cry?

His dad seemed as shaken as Ware by those blinking eyes. He took over. “Hip replacement is a common operation, and your grandmother is pretty tough.”

Pretty tough. Ware almost laughed at that. Big Deal was always asking piercing questions—She’s direct, his mother explained in excuse—and she expected answers. Whenever they saw her—holidays mostly—she ran the visit like a military maneuver. Even the Thanksgiving turkey had seemed to salute when she walked by. He’d been kind of scared of her, actually.

But staying with her, he’d experienced the flip side of her toughness. Instead of holding it up against him, she’d wrapped it around him like a shield, the way she’d done with the Twin Kings.

“I’ll help her out. Do stuff for her when I’m back there next week,” he said.

His dad shook his head. “Both hips at the same time means a longer rehab. She won’t be able to go home for a while. Probably not this summer. Which means . . .”

Ware’s mom straightened. “Don’t worry, Ware, I’ve got your summer all planned out.”

Ware saw her brighten with the energizing pleasure schedules always brought her. “No, Mom, please,” he tried. Schedules made him feel as if he were being sucked into a pit of tar.

“I’ll drop you at the community center on my way to work. You’ll take the three forty-five bus home. You’ll bring lunch, because we’re not paying for the junk they serve there. Now on weekends . . .”

The light seemed to dim over his head. Apparently the city wasn’t content with ruining weekdays—they had weekend Rec, too. Weekend Wrecked, more like. His mother was just explaining dinners when he managed a gurgle from the tar pit. “No!”

“Excuse me? No, what?”

“Rec. I want to stay home. Vashon is around until August, and Mikayla is—”

“Ware. You’ll go. Now, we’ll both stop home for dinner most nights in between shifts, but—”

“I’m old enough to—”

“You’re going to Rec. Now, sunscreen before you leave. SPF eighty at minimum, hypoallergenic, I’ll get a case, remember the tops of your ears. Stay hydrated. Now, by mid-July . . .”

Ware looked to his father. His mother made the rules, but sometimes . . .

His father’s jaw hung open worshipfully. After fifteen years of marriage, he was still bedazzled by the way his wife could snap into action.

“Dad, please. I’m eleven and a half. Nobody goes that old.”

His father tore himself away and refocused on Ware. “We’ll make it up to you. How about a new bike? A basketball hoop? Whatever you want. Now, you’ll take my big first aid kit—”

“What I want is not to go to Rec. Can I have that?” Ware tried to hide how surprised he was at what he’d just said. His skin felt too tight, as if it didn’t fit the reckless version of himself he’d grown into in only three weeks away.

His mom looked pretty surprised, also. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. The news that her body would betray her like this seemed to bewilder her even more.