The Irresistible Henry House Part 8

"No!" Annabel shouted, understandably alarmed by the seeming menace behind Leo's gesture.

"Leo, don't!" Mary Jane scolded. "She's scared!"

"I'll push you," Henry said. He stepped forward, leaving the concern for Annabel frozen on Mary Jane's face, where-with Henry standing behind Annabel to push her gently up into a rainy white sky-it quickly melted into something more like shock.

THE NEXT DAY, Henry pushed Annabel on the swing again, and after that was over, Mary Jane said she wanted a turn, too.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Mary Jane spent a long time drawing, and then she gave the picture to Henry.

"What's it of?" he asked her.

"A castle," she said. "It's where Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse live."

"Who made you Miss Fancy?" Annabel asked.

"I did," Mary Jane said.

"Can I be someone?" Annabel asked.

"You're Annabel," Mary Jane said.

"Tag! You're it!" Leo shouted, and chased all three of them through the backyard, their Keds pounding the dry, cold dirt, their mouths open, their ears red.

Back inside, Henry drew a picture for Mary Jane and another one for Annabel, and so it went, on into the next weeks: Henry being entirely democratic with his attentions, a fairness that Mary Jane could not miss and in truth could hardly bear.

HE WOULD NOT MAKE a choice. At home, despite the drama he had shared with Vera, Henry had gone back to treating her no differently from the other practice mothers and Martha. At nursery school, he sat between Mary Jane and Annabel during lunch, tagged Mary Jane and Annabel equally often at tag, gave pictures to both of them now, and never said whose anything he liked better.

When he played in the block pile, he would not build his houses in the direction of anyone else's with the goal of joining them. Instead, he quite often would be happy just sorting the blocks, enjoying the pleasure of the semicircle fitting inside the arch, the sound the blocks made when he stacked them, like single claps of applause, the simple beauty of two quarters making a half, two halves making a whole. When he did construct buildings, he made sure to leave lots of s.p.a.ce around them. That way, he explained to the others, if one of them toppled, it wouldn't knock the others down.

Outside, he could sit by himself for a long time, just noticing how some things looked like other things. Patches of light spotted the trees, as liquid and clear as puddles of paint. Five-fingered leaves fell down from the maple trees, open hand upon open hand.

ON THE LAST THURSDAY in October, Henry was in the playroom, building a tall tower from squares and cylinders. Annabel, stretched out on her stomach, regarded him through lazy, contented eyes.

For the fourth time in as many minutes, Mary Jane walked in from the kitchen, where Leo and she had been coloring. As nonchalantly as possible, she stepped over Annabel's legs, picked up a few blocks of her own, and settled down on the scratched wooden floor. Silently, she started to build, laying rectangle upon rectangle, as if she was bricking a wall up. She was careful not to encroach on Henry but eagerly went on building her wall, essentially making a barrier between Henry and Annabel. He didn't seem to notice. Annabel didn't seem to notice.

"Henry," Mary Jane said, and he didn't answer, too absorbed in his own construction project. "Henry," she said again.

She took a foot-long block and used it to sweep down the wall she had just made. Standing with the block in her hand, she sighed, exasperated and plaintive. "Henry, I'm trying to make a castle, you know," she said.

Henry nodded vaguely.

"It's where Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse live."

"Okay," he said.

Tears filled her eyes. "Henry, don't you want to play Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse?"

Annabel perked up at this. "We can both be Miss Fancy," she said.

"No," Mary Jane said. "You're not Miss Fancy."

Henry still hadn't looked up.

"I can be Miss Fancy, too," Annabel said, sitting up.

"No," Mary Jane said again. "Henry," she said, increasingly impatient.

"What?"

"Can we both be Miss Fancy?" Annabel said.

Henry, much to Mary Jane's astonishment, merely shrugged and again said "Okay."

Annabel stood up, radiant with bridal antic.i.p.ation. Mary Jane turned red.

"No you can't!" Mary Jane shouted, loudly enough so that Leo emerged from the kitchen to see what was going on.

"Can't what?" Henry asked.

"She can't be Miss Fancy too!" she said to Henry. Nearly two months of pent-up jealousy and more than a year of pent-up love dissolved Mary Jane in that moment. She burst into tears but stayed on the spot, daring Henry to change his mind.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because there can't be two."

"Why not?" Henry asked her.

"Because there can't!" Mary Jane shouted.

THE BUILDING BLOCK-one of the semicircles that fit so perfectly inside the arches-should not have done the damage it did. Having been handled by generations of children, plunged into water experiments, and left out in backyard soil and morning dew, it had no hard edges and not a hint of a splinter left. And yet, possibly the force with which it was thrown, or the angle at which the corner of its base entered the deep blue center of Mary Jane's left eye, made it an extraordinary weapon. At the moment Mary Jane started screaming-even before the blood began to stain her perfect face-Henry knew that by throwing the block, he had done the worst thing he'd ever done in his life. There would be days in Henry's future when the women who wanted his love would try to trace him back to this moment-like rings around a pebble in water trying to embrace their source.

THE BLOOD CAME OUT of Mary Jane's eye exactly the way that water-colors, if you used too much water, would rush down a page of paper and then pool in blotches rimmed by darker color. Blood flowed from the corner of Mary Jane's eye, descended the half globe of her cheek, slid past the side corner of her mouth and then down under her chin, finally settling onto the collar of her s.h.i.+rt, which it was immediately hard to remember as any color but red.

"Henry, what did you do?" Mrs. Donovan shouted, seemingly more eager to blame him than to help Mary Jane.

Henry, meanwhile, went to Mary Jane and did what he always did when Martha said she needed him. He tugged on one of his own ears-the ear with the little extra flap of skin-and he brought his face very close to Mary Jane's, so close that it startled her into a moment of quiet.

But then she started crying again, and she said: "I think you killed my eye!"

THE NEAREST HOSPITAL was in t.i.tusville, which was about twenty miles northeast of Franklin. In the rush to get Mary Jane there, Mrs. Donovan pounded on the back door of the practice house and insisted that Martha take care of the children until their parents could come. Martha-almost as shocked by the sight of the little girl's face as she was by the thought that Henry was responsible for it-merely nodded, in uncharacteristic submissiveness, and went next door. Later, she would claim that she had never given Henry permission to go along to the hospital. Mrs. Donovan would always claim that Martha had actually told Henry to go.

In reality, neither case was true. Henry had simply decided that his place was beside Mary Jane.

Before she put Mary Jane in the car, Mrs. Donovan wrapped a wet dish towel around the girl's eyes, and in her plaid skirt, with her hands stretched out to feel for the car door in front of her, Mary Jane looked to Henry exactly like Jane playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey in one of the d.i.c.k and Jane d.i.c.k and Jane books. Except that now there was blood on Mary Jane's collar, s.h.i.+rt, and hands. books. Except that now there was blood on Mary Jane's collar, s.h.i.+rt, and hands.

AN INJURY TO THE EYE by blunt force-the doctor explained to Edith Donovan at the t.i.tusville emergency room-will sometimes produce no more than a small bruise, a black eye, or dizziness and headaches. At the other extreme, he said, it can fracture the bones that surround the eye, force the bones' splinters to enter the cornea, and require immediate surgery. The latter was what happened to Mary Jane Harmon when Henry threw the block at her.

In the dim green corridor of the hospital, Henry stood by as Mrs. Donovan called Mary Jane's mother and told her what had happened. Meanwhile, two men wheeled away a small narrow bed with Mary Jane on it.

"Is she sleeping?" Henry asked Mrs. Donovan.

"Yes."

"How did they make her sleep?"

"They gave her medicine."

"Where are they taking her?" Henry asked Mrs. Donovan.

"They're taking her to fix her eye," she said.

"Are they going to operate on her?"

"Yes."

"You mean, cut her eye open?" Henry said, and he watched whatever color was left in his teacher's face drain away.

He tugged on his ear and brought his face close to hers, and then, with a gesture of infinite gentleness, he put his hand on her shoulder.

She hugged him so hard that he lost his balance and fell against her legs, and then she picked him up, and held him, just the way Martha sometimes did.

"WHY DID YOU DO IT?" Martha asked Henry that night, kneeling beside the bathtub as she took a washcloth and scrubbed his knuckles, scrubbed his kneecaps, scrubbed behind his ears.

"I don't know," Henry said.

"You have to know. You can tell me," Martha said.

Henry grabbed the bar of Ivory soap, then sank it under the water and watched as it popped back to the surface.

"Henry?" Martha said.

"What?"

"Why did you throw that block at Mary Jane Harmon?"

"I don't know why."

Martha's eyes narrowed, so that she looked a little bit like a fish. "Was she mean to you?" Martha asked. "Did she say or do something nasty?"

"No," Henry said.

"Because I know how little girls can be with little boys," Martha said.

Henry plunged the soap down again, this time with a bomber sound effect that he had learned from Leo.

"Don't do that," Martha said.

"Why not?"

"Because I'm talking to you."

Henry looked at her.

"Did she say something mean?"

Henry just shook his head and discovered, in his silence, a new form of escape.

FOR HER PART, Mary Jane woke the next morning to a room filled with flowers, drawings, and homemade cookies; to doctors and nurses saying how brave she was; to the strange, special self-esteem that can alight on a child in a hospital bed. It would take months for anyone to find out that the damage to Mary Jane's eye would be permanent, and it would take years for her to realize that what had so provoked Henry was her trying to force him to make a choice. She would, however, always remember the look on his face just before it turned to anger: a look that, even at five, she had recognized in some instinctive way as one of unspeakable helplessness and hurt.

MARTHA MADE HENRY WAIT a whole week before she would let him go visit Mary Jane.

"She'll think I don't love her," Henry protested as they sat upstairs Friday evening, Henry coloring while Martha pasted Green Stamps into her books.

"She'll know you love her," Martha said vaguely.

"No she won't!"

"Why don't you make her a card?"

"I've made her a card every day in school," he said.

"That's very nice of you."

"I never used red. I didn't want it to look like blood."

"We still can't go yet," Martha said.

"Why not?"

"Because."

"Because why?"

"Because her mother doesn't want us to," Martha finally said.

Henry looked disbelieving. "Is Mary Jane dead?" he asked.

"No, of course she's not dead," Martha said. Her face looked a little bit crumpled, as if there were words in her mouth but there was something stopping them up. "I'll see if we can go this weekend."

THERE WAS SOMETHING STRANGE, Henry thought, about how nervous Martha was when they were on their way to the hospital Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

"She probably doesn't look scary or anything," Henry said to her.

Martha smiled a little. "I'm sure she's got a big bandage on by now," she said, trying to comfort the comforter. "You shouldn't worry."