A Beginning

Saving Scout
By Amy Wilensky

Chapter 1:

The day they moved him in was rainy and cold. An omen, thought Andy, as he watched from his bedroom window on the second floor. First, a van turned into the driveway and pulled up to the house near where the ramp had been installed leading up to the rarely used side door. Then, the driver and a young guy wearing some sort of uniform—a nurse, Andy figured—got out of the van and said something to Andy’s mom, who was standing with her arms folded tight across her chest, back to the van. She shook her head no. He could see her hair swing with the force of it.

“Andy?” his dad yelled from the bottom of the stairs. “Can you come give me a hand?” Andy stood up. His legs ached from crouching, so he pulled one foot back for a stretch, then the other, as though preparing for a run. He wished he were going for a run; he felt a nearly irrepressible urge to run down the stairs, past his cowardly father, past his angry mother, past the van from the hospital and down to the river, where the air would be colder, bitter, even, and his palms wouldn’t feel sweaty and the tears forming in the corners of his eyes would sting in a way that felt good, like the way running did when he’d run so long that he could no longer feel his legs, his feet roll one after the other on the pavement.

“Coming,” he yelled back, with a final glance out the window. He caught the back half of the wheelchair, a glimpse of his grandfather’s shock of white hair.

Andy had been surprised when his mother had told him his grandfather, her father, would be coming to stay with them. His mother had never been close to her father. At thirteen, Andy had probably met the man a dozen times, if that, at relatives' weddings, a tense family reunion outside of Los Angeles, once in New York City, when he and his mother had taken the train in from the station in Fairfield because his grandfather had been giving a lecture at NYU.

Andy knew his grandfather was a professor, and he knew that he had cancer, was dying, he thought, from the snippets of conversation he’d overheard late at night, when his parents thought he was sleeping and felt safe to argue, their voices becoming sharper and louder as the arguments intensified.

“I thought he was dying,” Andy had in fact asked his mother, when she’d broken the news, and for a moment he thought he saw her eyes flicker, the suggestion of sadness. But then she’d tilted her head, almost imperceptibly, and he decided he'd imagined it: a trick of the light.

“He is,” she said. He’s coming here from the hospice. He’s lived longer than they thought he would, and he can’t stay any longer. He’s coming to die.”