Page 9 of The River Is Waiting

His question stops me cold. “What?”

“Because if he was unconscious, or if they sedated him, he wouldn’t know one way or the other if you were there.”

I just stand there, silenced by his logic, his fucking cruelty.

“Come on, Mr. Ledbetter,” he says. “You’re right. He’s going to need his dad. His mother, too. Has she been contacted?” I say I’m not sure—that her phone is turned off but I had someone call the school. He probably got the office secretary.

“Okay, good, so let’s go. Cruiser’s over here.” What’s his name again? I glance at the name tag pinned to his shirt pocket. Fazio. Sergeant Fazio.

As he walks me toward the car, I hear the other cop talking into the radio. “He may be EtOH, too. Not sure, but it’s a possibility.… Copy that. I’ll see if I can get someone at the hospital to draw it for us.”

“Officer Longo,” Fazio says. Longo turns around, surprised to see us right there. Fazio opens the back door of the cruiser and tells me to watch my head. Then he walks around to the other side and gets in the back seat next to me. As Longo pulls away from the curb, I watch three people, a woman and two men, jump out of a white van that has pulled up in front of the house. I recognize her: one of the reporters from the local TV news. Fazio watches them, too, shaking his head. He advises me not to talk to any reporters, something I’m not about to do anyway.

“So why don’t you give me the particulars again on the way over in case you forgot something,” Fazio says. “That way you’ll have the sequence of events clear in your head when our detective interviews you.”

“Butyou’reinterviewing me,” I say.

“Yeah, well, the thing is, you’ll probably have to go through everything two or three times. There has to be an investigation so they can rule things out.”

“What things?”

“Well, negligence, intentionality.”

“Intentionality? Like I might have injured him onpurpose? What kind of sick person would—”

“It happens, Mr. Ledbetter. You’d be surprised. But we’re not accusing you of anything. The opposite, actually. We just want to help you to get your story straight so that when our detective interviews you—”

Longo interrupts him. “They’ve assigned Sykes. She’s meeting us at the hospital.”

“Copy that,” Fazio says, as if his partner’s said it from a radio, not the front seat. “So like I was saying, Corbin. Can I call you Corbin?” I shrug. “You want to get your story straight so that when Detective Sykes talks toyou, she can determine that the injury to your son happened accidentally. Especially if your boy doesn’t—”

“Don’t keep saying that! Because hewillmake it! He’s like a little bulldozer, that kid. Last week? He banged his head on the coffee table but got right up and kept going as if nothing happened. His sister’s a different story, but Niko—”

“How did he bump his head?” Fazio asks.

“What? He fell. Clunked his head on the way down.”

“What made him fall?”

“I don’t know. Kids that age fall all the time. Why am I getting the feeling that you’re reading into whatever I say?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Ledbetter. Whyareyou getting that feeling?”

“Look,” I tell him. “I don’t think you get what I’m going through right now. I can’t focus on these things you want me to talk about when part of me is still trying to convince myself that any of this is really happening. And all the other part can think about is what’s going on at the hospital and how I’m going to break all this to my wife. And I’m trying not to lose it in front of you two, but… but…” And then my anguish overtakes me and losing it in front of them is exactly what I do.

When I get ahold of my composure, Fazio says, “Okay, Corbin. We can talk more about this when we get to the hospital.”

“And what do you mean when you say I should get mystorystraight? I don’t need to practice anything because it’s not a story. It’s what happened.”

No reaction from the sergeant. Not so much as a fucking nod.

I lean forward. Address the driver’s right shoulder. “Officer? When you were talking on the radio before, what were those initials you said?”

He glances in the rearview mirror at me.

“ET something. You said you’d bet that he was an ET something.”

He keeps me waiting, then finally answers. “EtOH.”

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