I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  I handed his pictures back. Blew my nose. Cleared my throat. “Married to a Wequonnoc, huh?” I said. “Once the big casino goes in, you’ll probably have to quit nursing to stay home and count all your money.”

  He laughed. “Hey, I like the way you think, man. Maybe in a few years, you might be looking at the Puerto Rican Donald Trump. Who knows, right?”

  There was a lull for the next few minutes. The intermittent whir of the IV machine, the sound of snoring across the room, behind the curtain.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “She’s my girlfriend. Joy. She’s not my wife.”

  “Yeah? Well, if you two are having a kid together, it’s the same difference. You and her got married as soon as that test said ‘positive,’ know what I’m saying? This your first?”

  We lost eye contact. “Her first,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I . . . had another kid. A daughter.”

  “Sounds like you don’t see her anymore.”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s gotta be tough, man. Not being able to see your kid. That’s one thing my ex and I did right. We worked it out so I saw Blanca every weekend. It was worth it, too, because she turned out good. She’s studying to be a legal secretary. . . . So where’s your daughter at? She live in another state?”

  “She’s dead.”

  It stopped him for a minute. I didn’t usually come clean like that—unload on people about Angela. But I was too tired to keep up the front.

  “Wow, that’s tough, man,” Miguel said. “Ain’t nothing tougher than that. . . . But, hey, now you got this new one coming, right? You gotta think positive. And I mean it—she’s a very good-looking woman, your girlfriend. I wouldn’t mind checking out of the hospital and going home to that myself, you know? I don’t mean no disrespect.”

  “Was there . . . Did anyone else visit me?”

  “Anyone else?” He shook his head. “Not on my shift. Not that I seen, anyway. Just your girlfriend and your father and that other guy—the movie star.”

  The Three Rivers State Hospital switchboard answered promptly at 7 A.M. and transferred my call to the security station at Hatch, Unit Two. No, the guard who answered said, they weren’t authorized to give out patient information over the phone. No, he could not give me Lisa Sheffer’s home phone number, even if it was an emergency. The best he could do was try to contact her and give her my message.

  There was no answer at Ray’s. And when I called home, all I got was the sound of my own voice, yapping about free estimates, satisfaction guaranteed. Five minutes later, the phone rang.

  “Dominick?” Sheffer said. “How are you? When I found out what happened, I was like, ‘Oh, my god.’”

  I asked her if they’d postponed the hearing.

  There was a pause. “Look, you know what?” she said. “Why don’t I come see you? I think it would be better if we went over all this in person. You feeling well enough for visitors?”

  “Just tell me,” I said. “Did they postpone it or go ahead with it?”

  “They went ahead.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Where is he? Now? He’s at Hatch, Dominick. Look, let me just make sure my friend can watch Jesse for an hour or so, and I’ll get there as soon as I can. Okay?”

  I got the phone back on the cradle, but dropped the whole damn thing trying to get it back on the nightstand. Tried unsuccessfully to grab it by the cord and pull. When I looked over at the other bed, I saw my roommate—lying on his side, awake, watching me. “You want me to get that for you?” he said.

  Getting out of bed, he let go a long, rumbling fart. “Whoops. ‘Scuse me,” he said. His slippers scuffed across the room. “One of the side effects of this diet they started me on. Gives me terrible gas.”

  He picked up the phone. Stood there, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Nice to see you back among the living,” he said. He was about fifty or so—gray hair, beard, beer gut under his cinched bathrobe. Go back to your bed, I felt like saying. I don’t want to socialize. Leave me alone.

  He looked down at my uncovered leg, my foot. “Ooh, baby, that’s gotta smart,” he said. “How’s it feel?”

  I shrugged. “Not bad. I guess they got me pretty well doped up.”

  “Yeah, well . . . How else you gonna get through it, right? . . . They were telling me about it—the nurses—when you came in a couple days ago. Took quite a tumble, huh?”

  “So I hear.”

  “I’m in here with a bum gut,” he said. “Bleeding ulcer.” He tapped his belly with his fist. “They think they got it under control, though. They just want to watch me through the weekend. I’m probably checking out on Monday.”

  “Uh-huh. Good.” I closed my eyes. Listened to him scuff back to bed.

  Why couldn’t Sheffer have just told me over the phone what had happened? Because it was bad news, that was why. Break it gently to the poor gimp. . . .

  Bleeding Ulcer over there was getting out when? Monday? How long was I going to be stuck in here? And how long was I going to be out of commission once I did get out? I needed to talk to that surgeon. Doctor . . . ? Jesus, the guy had operated on me for five hours and I couldn’t even remember his name. Couldn’t even picture him. And I’d probably have to wait until Monday to talk to him, too; I doubted chief surgeons showed their faces on the weekend.

  Be patient, honey, I heard Ma say. You need to be more patient with people.

  And how much was this whole fiasco going to cost me? The truck, a five-hour operation, an extended stay at Club Med here. I’d crunched some numbers back in September—just before Thomas’s “big event” down at the library—and even then I’d figured I was probably only going to clear twenty-two, twenty-three grand for the year, give or take a few inside jobs in November and December. Of course, those jobs were shot to hell now. And what if my climbing-up-and-down-ladders days were over altogether? There was no way in hell I’d be able to afford contracting out. . . . My insurance had to cover falls, right? I’d have to wait until Monday for answers on that, too. Doubted I could decipher that mumbo jumbo the policy was written in. Just the thought of making those insurance calls exhausted me. If you want to file a personal claim, press one. If you want to file a business claim, press two. If your entire life’s going down the toilet, please stay on the line. . . .

  I pictured that house of horror over there on Gillette Street—framed in scaffolding, scraped and burned down to bare wood, waiting for primer and paint. Jesus Christ, that house was like a curse or something. Maybe I could talk Labanara into finishing the job for me. Or Thayer Kitchen over in Easterly. Kitchen did drywall, mostly, but he’d paint if he was between jobs. Whoever I got to finish it, I’d just have to pay him out of pocket. Screw it. It’d be worth taking the loss just for the privilege of not having to go back there again. . . .

  I wondered how Ruth Rood was doing. Hell of a thing: goes up to the attic and there’s her husband’s brains all over the place. Who gets the fun job of cleaning up something like that, anyway? Not Ruth, I hoped. That son of a bitch Rood. Once she got past the shock, she’d be better off without him. Who wouldn’t drink, married to that guy?

  Better off without him: the exact words Dessa’s father had used when she made her big announcement to the family that she was going ahead with the divorce. Leo told me that. It was after the dealership’s annual Fourth of July picnic out at the Constantines’—after all the employees had gone home and it was just the family. We’d been separated for a couple of months by then. . . . Jesus, that hurt, though: hearing from Leo that the Old Man had said that. Better off without him. We’d always gotten along okay—Gene and me. We’d had a kind of mutual respect for each other. Plus, there’d been all that time we’d logged in together after the baby died, when Dessa had had to keep calling her mother, having her mother come over. Big Gene would always come, too. We’d just sit there, him and me, staring at the idiot box and waiting
for time to pass. Waiting for Dessa to stop crying and realize that Angela’s death wasn’t, somehow, her fault. Our fault. . . . Hey, I’d wrestled with that one, too. Still wrestled with it sometimes: if only I’d done this, if only I’d done that. “You’re like a son to me, Dominick,” Gene had said to me one of those nights. One of us must have turned off the TV; guess he had to say something. “Like the son I never had.” And I’d bought it, too—believed Big Gene, who’d made his fortune selling half-truths and false promises to car buyers. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been looking for my real father my whole life. . . . But what had I expected? That he’d be loyal to me instead of his firstborn daughter? His pride and joy? What did I even know about a father’s loyalty, anyway? I’d had a great role model in that particular department, whoever the guy was who’d knocked up my mother. Left her pregnant with twins. As far as fathers went, I was unclaimed freight. Me and my brother—left on the loading dock for life. Ray Birdsey’s twin step-burdens. . . .

  And as long as I was lying there, not bullshitting myself for once, I might as well admit it: Big Gene was right, wasn’t he? She was better off without me. Me and all my baggage—shitty childhood, crazy brother, even that vasectomy I’d gone out and gotten. That had been it for Dessa, the last straw—my vasectomy. Getting myself sterilized without even discussing it. Going behind her back and having it done while she was away so that . . . so that . . . Your anger poisons everything else that’s good about you, she’d said that morning she packed her bags. I’m going because you suck all the oxygen out of the room, Dominick. Because I have to breathe. . . . And she’d been right, hadn’t she? Lying here in “time-out,” benched by my big fall off the Roods’ roof, I could finally see it. See what she meant. Getting myself fixed like that, cutting off even the possibility of kids . . . you had to be one angry motherfucker to do something like that. And what about that father’s loyalty crap I was always so hung up by the balls about? What about that, Birdsey? What’s so loyal about a father who goes over there and puts his feet in those stirrup things and has them sever his options. Sever, even, the possibility of another kid. That had been real loyal, hadn’t it, Dominick? Loyal to her, to your marriage, to any kid that might have come along later. . . . That was why she’d gone away to Greece, she’d said. To decide whether or not she wanted to try again. And she’d come back knowing she did want to. . . . So face it, Birdsey. Own up to it. You did more to end your marriage than she did. She might have been the one to pack her bags because she couldn’t “breathe,” but it was you who ended it. You who’d sucked out all the oxygen. Killed off the possibility, the hope of anything ever . . . And all those reconciliation fantasies you’d been fooling yourself with—all those rides past that farmhouse where she and her boyfriend lived now. It was sick, man. . . . I was like some ghost haunting what she and I had had and lost, instead of just getting on with it. I’d gone out there the night I totaled the truck, come to think of it. I’d been pulling that shit for years now. For years. . . . Too bad I hadn’t totaled myself along with my truck. Or maybe I had. Maybe I’d totaled myself the day I’d gone down there to that urologist’s and spread my legs and said, “Here I am. Disconnect me. Cut off my options.” Totaled. It was like . . . it was like Angela’s death had been this huge, mangled wreck in the middle of our marriage. And Dessa . . . Dessa had gotten up and gotten on with it. Had walked away from the wreck. And I hadn’t. I was road kill, man. Road kill.

  Don’t cry. De-fense! De-fense!

  Well, screw it, man. I was too tired to play D anymore. I didn’t give a crap whether Mr. Bleeding Ulcer over in the other bed heard me or not. I was exhausted. Used up. If I had to cry, then tough shit. . . .

  Did Ruth Rood have family to lean on, I wondered. Some friend who’d go over there and sit with her? She wasn’t a bad woman. She’d been decent to me, in spite of all the hassle about their house. . . . I saw Rood up in that window again—the way he’d stood there, staring out at me. Why me, Henry? Why’d you have to go up to that attic and stare that way at me? What were you doing, you bastard—inviting me along for the ride?

  God, I couldn’t stand much more of this—just lying there, thinking. Only what was I supposed to do? Get out of bed and walk away from it? Hop into the truck I’d totaled and go? Miguel had said something about being able to give me something to make me sleep, hadn’t he? That’s what I wanted to do, man: Rip Van Winkle my way through the rest of my sorry-ass life. Wake up after everyone I knew was dead and that baby Joy was pretending was mine had reached the age of majority. Wake me when it’s over, man. Wake me up at checkout time. Except the only catch with sleeping was dreaming. Dead monkeys, dead brothers. Jesus. . . . So let’s see, Dominick. You don’t want to sleep, you don’t want to stay awake. Guess that eliminated everything but the third option. The big D. . . . And if I chose that route, how? It scared me a little to think about it, but it jazzed me up a little, too. I knew one thing: I wouldn’t make a mess the way Rood had. No one deserved that. So she’d slept with some guy behind my back. Gotten herself pregnant. That didn’t give me the right to fuck with her head for the rest of her life.

  My roommate let another one rip. “Whoops,” he said. “Excuse me again.” I tried to ignore him. Maybe I didn’t have to go to the trouble of offing myself, after all. Maybe all’s I had to do was lie here and get asphyxiated.

  “Hey, you want the newspapers?” he said. “I got the Record and the New York Post. I’m through with ’em.” Before I could say no, he’d swung his legs to the floor and started over.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look at ’em later.”

  “Whenever you want,” he said. “I don’t want ’em back. Hey, no kidding, I’m sorry about all this gas. It’s this diet they got me on. I can’t help it.”

  “No problem,” I said. Thought: Okay, now get back in bed and shut up. I don’t want to be your hospital buddy. Just let me lie here and think—play with the idea of dying.

  “By the way, my name’s Steve,” he said. “Steve Felice.”

  He waited. Kept looking at me. “Dominick Birdsey.”

  “Housepainter, right?”

  I shrugged. “Used to be. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. With my leg.” He just stood there, waiting. “What . . . what do you do?”

  “Me? I’m a purchasing agent. Down at EB.” He told me we were both in the same boat, in a way. Hell of a thing—not knowing from month to month if the next round of layoffs was going to zap you. It got to you after a while. That was how he’d gotten his ulcer—not knowing if he was going to have a job by the end of the year or not. He’d always been pretty easygoing before all this. Relatively easygoing, anyway. He thought so, anyway. But what the hell, he said. He heard the Indians were going to start hiring in the spring. They’d need purchasing agents down there, right? Big operation like that? They’d need to order things. Buy things. Or maybe he’d go down there and try something completely different—deal blackjack, maybe, or train to manage one of the restaurants that were going in down there. That’s what life was about, right? Taking chances? Shuffling the deck a little?

  I told him my stepfather worked down at Electric Boat.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Big Ray. We been shooting the shit last couple of days, him and me. He’s been here three or four times to see you.”

  He had?

  “He’s going to be glad to see you today, I tell you. You know, clear-headed—back to normal again. You been a little discombobulated. He’s been worried about you.”

  “Has he?”

  “Well, sure he has. He was telling me how he got over to that place where you were working just as they were loading you into the ambulance. He was supposed to pick you up over there, right? Hell of a thing to have to drive up to: your kid being loaded into an ambulance, screaming bloody murder, and you can’t do a damn thing about it. Sure he’s been worried. My two are grown up and out of the house now and I still worry. It never stops. You wait till yours comes along. When’s the little woma
n due? May, is it?”

  What had Joy done—stood up on a chair and made a big announcement?

  “You’ll see. When it’s your kid, you’re going to worry no matter what.” Climbing back into bed, he cut another fart. “Whoops,” he said. “Thar she blows again. Pardone.”

  I reached for the phone. Dialed Ray. Figured I’d give him the big medical bulletin: that I’d come back to Planet Earth. But there was still no answer over there. I dialed my own house again. This time, she answered, groggy-voiced. “It’s me,” I said. “I’m back from the dead.”

  There was a pause at the other end. “Dominick?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t cash in my life insurance policy yet, did you?”

  She sounded relieved, I’ll give her that. She kept repeating my name. She might have been crying—she’s not a big crier as a rule, but she might have been. We talked for half an hour or more. Caught up. She did most of the talking. By the time I hung up, she’d filled me in on her three-day vigil at the hospital, all the ways that Ray had driven her crazy, how her morning sickness had begun to set in in earnest. She’d finally gotten through to Dr. Spencer the night before, she said.

  That was the surgeon’s name: Spencer, Dr. Spencer. . . .

  He said they’d know more after the swelling went down—it was a waiting game until then, but he was cautiously optimistic. He was a little concerned about the amount of painkiller they’d had to give me. A necessary evil, he’d said, due to the severity of the break—breaks. But he didn’t want me to end up drug-dependent on top of everything else I was facing. It was going to be a tough enough row to hoe. Eight to ten days in the hospital, he figured—limited physical therapy beginning on Monday. I’d probably need PT for a good six months, minimum. They still weren’t sure about permanent damage; it could go either way. I might be facing more surgery—six to nine months down the line, maybe. “He said it was one of the most complicated breaks he’s ever worked on,” Joy said. “He might even write about it for some medical journal. He said he’d like you to sign a release so that—”