Six Figures (Harvest Book), page 13
He wasn’t going to call his brother. It was bad enough, this weird infantilization, having to have his father with him. It was bad enough getting the phone call from work, Monique telling him, “Richard needs to talk to you,” and Warner having to say, “I’ll make it easy for him. I’ll send a letter.” It was bad enough not having a job, not having a shred of savings, the checking account dribbling to nothing. The waiting for his turn to see the kids, the awful falseness of Nan as she rushed out the door, the breezy cheerfulness of her return, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. At least she trusted his father.
He was so set aside, set off, from his own life, as if he stood on a corner while his life and everything that mattered to him was happening inside a house set back from the street. And he had to stay on that corner. He wasn’t supposed to budge from it.
“I need to go see her,” he said. “It’s Megan, for Christ’s sake.”
“Doesn’t matter. Wouldn’t matter if it were your mother,” his father turned to him and said harshly, “and you were accused of trying to murder her. Wouldn’t matter if it were me. Or your brother. Or one of your sisters. Until they say you can, you are going to have to stay away.”
“What if,” he tried, “what if she requests it?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” he shrugged, “but I wouldn’t count on it. Especially with Nan around. She’d get Megan ruled mentally incompetent or something.”
“Fuck Nan,” Warner snapped.
“Yeah,” his father said with empathy. “I know what you mean.”
“You what?” she said.
“I called him,” Megan admitted, Daniel trying to reach under her hospital gown.
“Mommy,” Sophie cooed, snuggled into her side. “Are you guys talking about Daddy?”
“He did this to you,” Nan said.
“Mom, we don’t know that. I don’t know that.” She felt tired, caved in, but what a relief it was to be able to talk, to interact, to go to the bathroom. To have the kids crawling all over her. “Please don’t do this now.”
“The fingerprints on the hammer. Your fighting shortly beforehand. Nothing missing from the gallery. No sign of anybody else even in there. His history.” Nan counted out each element with a finger. “What more do you need?”
“Look. I’m tired. I’m confused. Why don’t you go down to the cafeteria for a little bit.” She wrestled Daniel in her arms, and he giggled. “I can handle these guys.”
“I’m so glad you’re awake, honey,” Nan said, making herself leave. “But if I have to, I’ll have them take out that phone.” She tried to snap the door shut, but it was hydraulic and wouldn’t close. She gave it a look and marched out.
“Granny Nan is cranky,” Sophie said. “Mommy, what was it like?”
“What, honey?”
“Being asleep so long.”
She sighed. She felt so sleepy. At least she knew what it was from. “It was like nothing, honey. It was just like being asleep. But I don’t think I dreamed.”
“I had bad dreams,” Sophie said. “I haven’t been to school all week.”
“I’ll bet.” She held Daniel close, and he was still the way he was when he was thinking of a nap or he just woke up—a comforted stillness, his contented solid weight sunk into her. Sophie folded herself in as close as she could.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you, too.”
Sophie laughed. “You were asleep. You couldn’t miss anybody.”
“Well, when I woke up then. Honey, don’t hold me so tight. It hurts.”
Sophie whimpered and withdrew.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. It’s going to take me a little time.”
“Is Daddy going to jail for whacking you?”
“Honey, listen.” She set Daniel on her lap and reached for Sophie, held her by her arms. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what will happen. So I can’t really say what I think will happen.”
“Are you going to let Daddy see you?”
“I think so,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Sort of like with you,” Sophie decided. “That’s what everybody kept saying about you. We’ll have to wait and see. We’ll have to wait and see. Wait and see is boring.” She looked away toward the wall. “Does your TV work?”
“I don’t know. Probably TV isn’t such a good idea for me right now.”
“Because you might see Daddy?”
“No, sweetie. Because I’m so sleepy and all the sound and pictures kind of get to me.”
“Do me and Daniel kind of get to you?”
“I don’t think so, honey.”
“But we could, right? If we jumped up and down and made a lot of noise and shouted and stuff. That could get to you. Right?”
“Do you want to get to me?”
“No,” Sophie said. “How long have you been awake, Mommy?”
“Almost two days, I think.”
“You’ve been awake for two whole days? You haven’t slept at all?”
“No, no. I’ve slept. I’ve slept off and on. And I slept for most of the night.”
“Were you afraid you wouldn’t wake up?”
Megan sighed. “Don’t ask so many questions, honey. Okay?”
She sank deep into the pillow and let the children control the bed. Soon she heard the television click on, but she couldn’t lift her eyes. She couldn’t see. Her head felt heavy, pointed, and she knew she should call the nurse, but Daniel had the control and she couldn’t seem to reach it. Just reach it, she thought. Just lift your hand. It weighed too much, attached to her wrist like that, anchored to her arm, her shoulder glued in its socket. Just move. Oh god, she was tired. Maybe it was the kids, the way they took it from you, the way they’d been taking it from you from the start, from that first moment inside. She’d come back too fast. Two days wasn’t very fast. But they’d said it was fast. Warp speed. They looked warped, their heads softening through her eyelids. It wouldn’t be good to drift off like this, with the children here. Her mother would disconnect the phone. She’d be disconnected. She was disconnected, something between herself and everyone else, and it was the back of her head. She couldn’t see. She was drifting off. Drifting. Ring the bell. He could fall off the bed if she didn’t stay awake. Stay awake. He was moving to the edge. She could feel it. Ring the bell. Mommy, someone was saying. Mommy.
“There she is.”
“Yeah.”
“Keep going.”
“Uh-hunh.”
“Excellent.”
“Yes.”
“It was just the epi drip?”
“Yes.”
“Good catch.”
“Of course I was right here.”
“Guess she wasn’t ready for the kids. Where are they?”
“Outside.”
“Good, good. Never again, okay? Tell them never again, the kids alone like that.”
“Right. Right. I’ll let everybody know.”
“They couldn’t know.”
“Well. They could have.”
“Okay. Okay. They could have.”
“Ms. Kendall, if you can hear me, move your fingers. Excellent. Excellent. You’re coming around nicely, Ms. Kendall. You’ll be back to where you were in no time.”
“So they were just in here alone like that, hunh?”
“Yeah.”
“She d-c’d herself as smooth as any nurse.”
“Uh-hunh.”
“Tie it like that?”
“Yeah. Ankles and wrists.”
“Here she is.”
“Hey, Ms. Kendall. I bet that was interesting.”
“We lost your epi drip there for a moment. But we’re all set now.”
“We’re going to give you a bit of space now, okay? You’re all secure. Do you understand?”
She wriggled her finger.
“Good. We’ll let you rest. Okay? You can rest. It’s perfectly safe. Let’s let that epinephrine catch you up. Okay?”
“Okay.” Faintly, but there it was. Her voice.
“Take care.”
But she couldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t seem to move her arms. She was too tired. There was probably nothing to see or reach. She didn’t want to see or touch it anyway. That was close enough, a close call. She shouldn’t have called him. What had he done? What hadn’t he? Warn her. Warner. Every word was new the first time you said it again. You.
“Don’t you want anything to eat?”
“No.” Warner shook his head.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw you eat. You haven’t eaten in what? A couple of days?”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“You have to eat.” His father took a large bite from his reuben, the fleshy pink of the Thousand Island dressing oozing out against the white skin of the napkin. The layers of purple meat.
“I know,” Warner said.
“When you don’t eat,” his father said, chewing, “you know what happens? Your stomach gets smaller and smaller. Shrinks until it’s probably the size of a pea. And then you don’t ever want to eat. And then you can’t eat. And then, you know what?”
“What?”
“It’s too late.” His father smiled happily over the sandwich. “You’ve got to want to eat, Warner. Eating’s a good thing. It can keep you going.”
They sat in the car in the parking lot outside the deli, both of them listening to the satisfying crunch of his chew.
“They were talking about you on some radio show this morning,” his father said with a full mouth. “How does everybody down here know you’re Jewish?”
“When did Nan say she’d bring the kids back?”
He shrugged, still chewing. “She didn’t.” He swallowed with some finality, wiped his mouth with the tail of the napkin, took a swig of root beer. Warner had grown up in a house placarded with health ads that his mother had torn from magazines. Eat to live, don’t live to eat. That belly will kill him before he’s fifty-five. He’d learned to feel revulsion watching his father eat. “What do you want to do?” his father said, folding up the detritus and storing it in the paper bag. “I’m easy.”
“You could call the hospital, find out what’s going on, make a plan for later. I’d like to see the kids later.”
“I could do that.” He began to squeeze his belly out from behind the steering wheel. The door pushed open.
Warner pointed at the oversize chain bookstore at the corner of the shopping center. “We could meet in there.”
“Okay.”
He watched his father lumber toward the pay phone, then got out of the car, locked it. The day was sunny and warm on his back, nearly spring weather to him. Outside at the massive Harris Teeter they were cooking lamb sandwiches on an open grill.
In the bookstore he paged through various home medical guides. He should have done this earlier, but his father had been with him virtually constantly, and he knew it could look unsavory. Of course there was nothing in them that he hadn’t read in the newspapers. The steaming arm of an espresso machine whined from the café. He wished he could talk to her. He wished he could talk to her doctors. Everything he learned was from Nan through his father. She would recover. It was all good. Polly Edwards felt “relieved” for him. He might be looking at five years or three years or even less, if he plea-bargained. Would she testify? What could she say? That he was angry, that he had a temper, that he’d hit her once? It was doubtful how much of the day’s argument she would remember. It was doubtful, he knew, that she’d testify. He hadn’t told Polly, but he knew. He knew that she wouldn’t testify, that there’d be no trial, no case, that he’d never plea-bargain. If a trial could somehow clear him, he’d beg her to testify, but it couldn’t. It wasn’t “he said, she said.” It was “he said, she had nothing to say.” So what would happen now? Could they live together again? Did he even want that? Did she? How would he earn money? Not here, not ever. He couldn’t see a place where they could live next. He had little sense of the real future. Maybe, finally, his want had changed, but there would always be need. You had to need—that was life, his father would say in that fat way of his. Need. It was all too far ahead. He had to wait and see.
“Can I help you?”
He turned to face the white smile of a bookseller. He’d just been standing there, the last guide returned to its place in the shelf. He’d just been standing there trying to come to terms with the limitations of his future. Nan, who made seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, who owned three houses and two cars and tallied up several weeks of exotic vacations each quarter, whose only real limitation was her utter aloneness, had once told him that your thirties were about coming to terms with your limitations. So here he was. He smiled back at the bookseller.
“No thank you,” he said clearly, spying his father pushing through the glass double doors. “No, I think I’ve got it all covered.”
“Well,” the bookseller said, “just let us know.”
She owns this time. That’s what they tell her. Own it, give in to it. Just rest, try to relax. No, the hands aren’t going to help. We’re just protecting you. Would you like some music? A sleep mask? Ginger ale? No, your kids aren’t going to visit for a while. Your mother either. You need to rest. Everything else can wait.
“I want to go home,” she said.
“A few days,” the nurse said. “Then you’ll be ready.”
“I don’t understand. I’m ready now.”
“Hon. Look at me. Look at me. We need to see some consistent stability. And then you can go home.”
“What about the kids?”
“Soon, Megan. Soon.”
She was restless. You couldn’t help but be restless. The phone didn’t work. The television hurt. They said she was agitated and exhausted. Was the exhaustion making her agitated, or was it the other way around? They couldn’t say. Sometimes she thought she heard her mother down the hall, arguing with them. They told her not to think about it. The incident with the epinephrine had cost her, and now she needed some time. A social worker visited. Own this time, she said, you deserve it. Megan had asked that the social worker not be allowed to see her again. A physical therapist came. She squeezed balls for a while. The physical therapist said he didn’t need to come back. She couldn’t read, she couldn’t listen, she couldn’t watch. It was all too tiring. She couldn’t sleep because she was afraid—not of him, whoever he was, but of not waking up. She couldn’t sleep, and she didn’t want a sedative. Rest. Rest was lying in bed trying not to think. Once she heard the social worker in the hallway begging to see her. Or was it her mother. Or was it Warner and were there police and did she hear shouting? Or was it the children who crawled around like mice and got under the bed and were mice and crawled into bed and she couldn’t stop flailing though she shouldn’t she really shouldn’t but they were mice and they flew around in muscular jolts inside her sheets. This is serious, she thought someone said. Maybe it wasn’t so serious. Maybe it was a practical joke that she was playing on herself or Warner was playing on her or some greater entity was playing on both of them. Maybe her head hadn’t been hurt. Maybe nothing had got to her. Oh yes it had. What was it? Repeat after me. I will relax. Relax.
“Would you like some water?”
She nodded. She reached for the cup but she had no hands to reach. They’d tied her wrists and ankles to the bed. She wasn’t some puppet they could jerk around by the strings like this! When had this happened? How many days were they talking about now? Was it February? Was it March? Months were so big they were easy to track. Days were narrow, thin strips, tiny blocks on the page that you had to cram your handwriting into so you could schedule it all. Hours were. Minutes were. Seconds were. It was all impossible.
She couldn’t quite track it back. The epinephrine had slipped and then she had slipped and then she’d crawled upward and then slipped again, crawled up and slipped.
Was that her mother in the hall?
“We’re going to give you something mild, honey. We need to do another CAT scan. You can keep your eyes closed if you want. Just a little bit of a sedative, honey. To keep you still. Here it goes. It’s going through the IV. You’re going to relax, honey. There you go. Relax, now. Just relax.”
It was the extent and degree and resilience of her confusion and agitation, they told Nan. They worried that perhaps the brain swelling was increasing despite the second operation.
“Could she die?” Nan asked, the question surprising her.
They shrugged. They didn’t know. People with compound brain injuries can return to almost normal, they said. Let’s just wait, they said. It was quite possible that Megan was the kind of person who got agitated, and that her agitation and confusion had less to do with the injury than they thought.
“She used to get migraines.” Nan checked herself from clutching her hands. “For years she got them. I think she took something quite strong for them. Fiorinal. But then they stopped, once she got married.”
Well, they said, we’ll note that in her history. But let’s just do the pictures.
“Okay,” Nan said. “I hope they turn out great.” She forced a laugh, and the two doctors in front of her dutifully smiled.
She sat in the waiting room outside the X-ray department when Megan was inside, as if that would help, and then she took her old seat outside the ICU. She tried to read the newspaper. “I think he wanted more for his family,” Richard Thrasher, Warner Lutz’s boss over at MORE said. “I think he wanted more for us, It was why we hired him.” She snapped the newspaper closed.
Every few hours she would call to check on the children. Alan most often answered, although sometimes Sophie did. “Hello,” she would say. “Is that you, Granny Nan?” They would chat about a show she had watched or a picture she had drawn, and then Nan would ask for Alan. They’d share updates—Daniel’s last diaper, Megan’s vital signs. She never talked to Warner.
“How’s Ruth holding up?” she once asked.
“Oh, she’s working.” Alan sighed. “That’s how she holds up. It distracts her. It’s good.” He caught his breath, as if talking were like running or swimming. “You know,” he began, his voice lowered, “we’ve been thinking about school, about whether Sophie should go back.”
