Escape Velocity Read Online Free Page A

How old are you?”
    â€œFifteen.”
    â€œYes.” He looks at me. “Believe it or not, most folks are back home within a few days after this sort of thing.”
    Dana Leigh crosses her legs, bounces one foot up and down, sandal dangling from her toes. “Lou can stay with me tonight.”
    â€œI’m okay on my own,” I say.
    The doctor stands up. “I’ll let the two of you sort that out.”
    I avoid looking at Dana Leigh as we walk toward the ICU. I know she is being kind, but her place is small. I’d have to sleep on the living-room couch, and I don’t feel like listening to her boyfriend’s jokes, don’t want their massive Rottweilers’ wet snuffling noses pushed up against me, don’t want the constant blast of heavy-metal music. I’d rather be alone.

    Dad is lying on a narrow bed in a room full of machines. Tubes and wires snake from beneath his green sheets, from the back of his hand, from electrodes and from needles. A plastic bag filled with mystery fluid hangs from a pole beside him. He looks like a cyborg, or else a human abducted by aliens. I try to think if I have ever visited someone in hospital before. I don’t think I have. It looks exactly like it does on TV .
    â€œLou.” He looks tired, but the grayness in his face has gone.
    â€œYou sure scared me.” If I say anything else, I’m going to start crying.
    â€œSorry about that, kiddo.” He looks past me, over my shoulder to where Dana Leigh is hanging back in the doorway. “Dana Leigh. Thanks for looking out for her.”
    â€œYeah, yeah.” Dana Leigh’s voice is reassuringly normal. “Course. How are you feeling, Garland?”
    â€œLike hell,” he says. He closes his eyes, and I feel another wave of fear. My dad’s fifty, but he’s never seemed old to me. Up until the accident, he always hung out with younger people—musicians, mostly, or the guys he worked construction with. Now he doesn’t hang out so much with anyone, but he still jokes that his developmental age is stuck at nineteen.
    Now, though, with his eyes shut and all those tubes and wires everywhere, he looks every day of fifty. I remember that his father died from a heart attack before I was born. I wonder how old he was. I haven’t ever asked.
    It never seemed relevant before.
    Dana Leigh and I don’t stay long. Dad looks like he needs to sleep, and besides, a nurse came in and told us to keep it short. Dana Leigh drives with her right hand on the wheel and her left hand hanging out the window with a cigarette burning between her fingers. She goes through almost a pack a day, but she tries not to take too many drags. Sometimes she lets a whole cigarette burn down without putting it to her lips more than a couple of times.
    After a few minutes she turns and looks at me. “You want me to stay with you at your house tonight?”
    I shake my head. “I’ll be okay. Thanks though.” I think about how the doctor assumed Dana Leigh was my mother, and I get this ache in my throat like I might start to cry.
    â€œSure,” Dana Leigh says, and I can hear the relief in her voice.
    Dana Leigh drops me off at home. The house is silent and empty. Dad and I have lived here for over a year, and I could probably count the number of times I’ve been alone in the house on the fingers of one hand. Dad hardly ever goes out anymore.
    I put on the album Dad has left on the record player— Lou Reed’s Transformer . Dad is more up on current music than most kids my age, but he also collects vinyl from the seventies: Velvet Underground, Bowie, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd. I lie down on Dad’s couch and listen. This is the album with that goofy song Dad used to sing to me when I was younger. If I could be anything in the world that flew, I would be a bat and come swooping after you . It makes me cry a bit, and in a funny way, I feel better.