Page 17 of The Wrong Track
“And you don’t like to read, but maybe if you’re trapped in a bed, you might start,” I said. “Reading is really helpful.”
“How so?”
“You know.” He apparently didn’t, so I elaborated. “You can put yourself there. You don’t have to pay attention to anything else when you’re reading. Nothing else has to exist.”
He studied the cover. “Like my fake pain?”
“I didn’t mean it was fake,” I told him. “I’m sure you really experienced it. I meant that you can hurt and keep going.” I looked at the pile of books in the bag, a small offering. “I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad.”
“I didn’t feel bad.” He smiled. “Don’t worry.”
Maybe I had been worried that he’d misinterpreted my words as an insult, because I felt glad to hear him say that it was ok.
“The thing is about me and reading,” he started, but then paused. “The thing is, I have a learning problem, that kind of thing. You know.”
I did, actually. “My sister has a reading disorder. Dyslexia. She had a hard time in school for years.”
“What’s her name?”
“Lily,” I heard myself tell him, and then I kept on telling. “I used to read stuff for her, read books and assignments out loud so that she could listen and follow along with the page. That helped but she also worked a lot with specialists and aides at school. They gave her a lot of strategies.” I thought of all the wonderful things I’d just found out at the library, all her successes. She was going to go so far and she obviously didn’t need me anymore. “She’s really, really stubborn. As a kid, a toddler, she was so pigheaded and it was so annoying. She’s the same way with reading, with anything. She just won’t quit at it until she gets it. But I used to find her crying over homework and I…” I stopped.
“Go on,” Tobin urged me, but I was done, and I shook my head. “I’ve never heard you say so much before,” he noted.
I didn’t usually let myself talk about my sister, because that was what happened: I ran at the mouth. “I could read out loud to you, too,” I said. “That book looked interesting to me.” I tookThe Wilde Wonback from him. “I’ve never heard of this guy.”
“Really? You’ve never heard of Warren Wilde?” He started to tell me about the quarterback, which led to a discussion—monologue—about other Woodsmen football players and the Woodsmen football team in general. He was a big fan, it seemed. I excused myself after a minute to check on the dinner that Hazel had been preparing and I brought back food on the tray she’d also set out.
“Thank you,” he told me again.
“Thank Hazel,” I said. “She did it all.” I looked at the crutches leaning against the wall. “Are you using those?”
“Some. I’m not really trapped on this bed. In fact, I’m supposed to get up and put weight on my leg,” Tobin told me. He pulled his body higher and I put the tray on his lap. “It’s been a little painful, but I have tried to push through like you were saying.”
“You also don’t need to be a hero.” I picked up one of the pill bottles. “These are good ones. Want some?”
“No, they make me sick. Why were you taking those? Did you get injured running?”
I ate a small bite of pasta and Hazel’s sauce. “How long do you have that cast?” I asked him, and the answer was a long time, weeks, then he’d have a few more months of healing before he was totally back to normal.
“I don’t know when I’ll be able to go back to work. At least not while I’m in this huge-ass thing,” he said, frowning at the blue cast on his leg. “We’re a small department so they need me there, and there’s not a lot of desk work I can do. Answering the phone. Helping walk-ins.” He seemed resigned to those tasks, but unhappy.
“I’m interested in cold cases,” I said. “Do you have any of those?”
“Sure, we have a cabinet full of file boxes, and we’re also too small to have someone devoted to solving them. That’s an idea.” He smiled at me and I wondered how he felt about reading through the files. I bet it would be ok if he took his time, because judging by how his mom had leaned over him like a bird of prey the night before, I didn’t guess that she’d let him struggle in school. He must have also learned strategies to help himself along.
“How’d you get interested in cold cases?” he asked.
“Books, I guess.” I twisted some noodles around my fork and let them fall back into the bowl. “How long do you keep looking for answers to them?”
“Some crimes have no statute of limitations. Sometimes the incident happened so long ago that there’s no hope of punishment, but we still want to find out what happened. Like Jack the Ripper, how people are still wondering about his identity.”
I played with the pasta. “How long do you think that crime victims wonder about things?”
His one eyebrow raised, a darker arch than his blonde hair. It drew attention to his eyes, which were a nice color, like a blue-grey. “Crime victims don’t usually forget what happened to them. My cousin’s girlfriend has looked for her brother for fifteen or so years, since he disappeared.”
And the way he was looking at me with those blue-grey eyes told me that I’d better change the subject. I knew perfectly well that a reading disorder didn’t mean anything about how intelligent someone was, and Tobin Whitaker might start asking a lot of questions that I wasn’t prepared to answer. So I put my bowl of pasta next to the pill bottles and picked up the book about that football player.
“I’ll read,” I announced.