Bradley Wallace Murphy just turned thirteen, and he's not happy about it. He doesn't fit in at school, he's no good at sports, a bully torments him, he's a disappointment to his parents, and his only "friends" are fictional characters on a TV show c...
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CHAPTER 17
I'm NOT Crazy... Am I?
Bradley Wallace fought against delirium for three days, calling out for Whilly and begging everyone who addressed him not to shoot his friend. At least one of his parents remained in the Marin General waiting room every moment—usually his mother—and Mr. O'Conner also hovered about, never letting the boy's room out of his sight for an instant. His features were drawn with the harsh lines of guilt and he muttered imprecations to himself about how he'd failed the boy. Neither Marge nor Jack, caught up in their own private fears and doubts, paid the old man much heed.
A team of surgeons, assisted by Doctor Cooke, had performed emergency surgery to repair the shattered arteries and damaged muscle tissue in Bradley Wallace's chest and worked desperately to replace the massive amount of blood he'd lost. The jagged path made by the bullet was sewn up and the arterial damage remedied, but the wound had become infected during his frantic attempts to help Whilly, and that infection sent a life-threatening fever raging through his debilitated body. Everything possible was being done, Cooke repeatedly told Marge and Jack, and all they could do now was wait and hope.
Mr. O'Conner told the boy's parents what little he could when they arrived at the hospital emergency room that night, but did not answer their slew of questions: how could Bradley Wallace have gotten shot? And why did he go to the old man instead of them?
The short, stocky plainclothes police lieutenant who appeared on the scene to investigate the shooting had no immediate answer to the second question, but candidly suggested the reason behind the shooting could have been drugs.
Both Jack and Marge immediately protested such a preposterous notion and the rather gruff lieutenant commented that all parents react that way. The only way to find out what happened, the stocky man suggested bluntly, was to ask the boy when he regained consciousness, if he ever did. That sent Marge off in a flood of tears and an angry Jack was forced to attempt to comfort her.
Marge blamed herself for Bradley Wallace's current predicament. "I should've been more alert," she blubbered to Dr. Cooke, preferring the white-haired surgeon's comfort to that of her husband. "He'd been acting strange for months and I should've made him tell me what was wrong."
Cooke smiled ruefully. "That's one thing no parent can do, Marge, make a child trust you. And if you try to force them, they fight back that much harder."
His words, however true they may have been, did little to ease her anguished soul, which repeatedly told her she'd failed as a mother. She roamed the stark white halls of Marin General like a tortured zombie, sleeping barely a few hours over those three terrible days.
Jack did not so much feel that he'd failed as a parent but rather that fate had dealt him a cruel hand in a son with whom he couldn't communicate. He supposed it was to be expected, given how the boy had come into their lives, but lamented, all the same, the reality that he and Bradley Wallace had nothing in common.
