Edward Adrift

by Craig Lancaster

  “Hi, Kyle.”

  The young man in the white shirt steps forward.

  “Hello, Mr. Stanton. I’m Dr. Ira Banning. Do you remember me?”

  Even with all the activity in the room, some things are starting to return to me. I remember stopping for gas in Kit Carson, Colorado, after we left Sheila Renfro’s motel in haste, when I looked down at the gas gauge and realized we were nearly empty. I remember the storm that kicked up between Kit Carson and Limon, where we got onto Interstate 70 and headed for Denver. I remember the snow flying sideways across the windshield and I remember not being able to see. I remember growing impatient at our pace and deciding to drive through the swirling flurries, thinking I could get ahead of them. I remember pulling into the passing lane.

  “I remember you, Dr. Banning,” I say.

  I remember him because I remember not being able to breathe. I remember Kyle looking into my face and asking me what happened and what was wrong. I remember another man—I don’t know where he came from—opening the door on my Cadillac DTS and saying “Oh, shit,” and running off. I remember gasping for breath and not making any words come out. I remember the other man coming back and saying, “They’re on the way, buddy, so just hold on.” He grabbed my hand and held it, and Kyle cried, and I couldn’t tell either of them that I couldn’t breathe.

  I remember waking up, my back stiff on a board, staring into yellow lights. I remember Dr. Banning—not in a white shirt but in a blue smock like the one Donna wears when she goes to work—telling me that they needed to take some scans to see how badly I was hurt inside. I remember being able to talk at last and saying that I needed a drink.

  “Soon,” the doctor said. “Let’s see what’s going on first.”

  I remember waking up. I remember Sheila Renfro talking to me and telling me to close my eyes and stroking my hair.

  I don’t remember anything else.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “You drove into a snowplow,” Sheila Renfro says. “Remember how I told you that? You broke your ribs.”

  “Three broken ribs on your left side, Mr. Stanton,” Dr. Banning says. “Probably from the seat belt when you crashed. Your lung got punctured. We fixed that. The ribs will take a couple of weeks, maybe a bit longer, but they will heal. You have a concussion. Do you understand what that means?”

  “My brain got hurt.”

  “Yes, that’s it. You’re very lucky, all things considered.”

  I turn to my friend. “Kyle, are you—”

  “I’m fine,” he says.

  He squats beside the bed and he sets his head on my right shoulder. Donna reaches across me to stop him, but I shake my head to let her know it is all right, and my side hurts when I do. She pulls back. I pat Kyle on the head.

  “What happened to my Cadillac DTS?”

  Sheila Renfro makes a slashing motion across her throat, crossing her eyes and flopping her tongue out of her mouth. It’s very funny, and I laugh, which hurts really bad, and I yell out in pain. Donna looks annoyed with Sheila Renfro.

  As the pain diminishes, I regain my breath. “How am I supposed to get back to Billings so I can fly to Texas?” I ask.

  “I don’t want you on a plane for a while,” Dr. Banning says. “It puts a lot of stress on a body, that pressurization at thirty-five thousand feet. You’ve been through a trauma.”

  “But I have to go to Texas on December twentieth. I’m going to see my mother.”

  “You’re going to be here for a couple of days yet,” the doctor says.

  “Edward,” Donna says, “don’t you think maybe you should just concentrate on getting better?”

  I have to concede that Donna is a very logical woman and that she’s probably correct about this. And yet I am disappointed, because I was looking forward to going to Texas and seeing the Dallas Cowboys play in their new stadium.

  “Does my mother know I’m in the hospital?” I ask.

  Sheila Renfro holds out my bitchin’ iPhone. “She’s waiting for you to call,” she says.

  I have an audience as I make the call to my mother, with Kyle holding the bitchin’ iPhone to my ear so I don’t have to lift my arms and aggravate my broken ribs. It’s not a fun phone call. Not too many phone calls are fun; I don’t like to talk on the phone. This one is especially difficult. I’m happy to hear my mother’s voice, but almost immediately she begins crying and telling me that her world would end if something bad happened to me, and that I must be more careful.

  “Stop crying,” I say, and that makes her cry even more. I look helplessly at Donna, and she’s crying. I look at Sheila Renfro, and she’s not crying. She’s just watching me. Her look is intense, as if something bad will happen if she lets me out of her sight. I guess that’s reasonable, even if it’s not practical. Once I was out of her sight and out of her motel, something bad did happen to me.

  I assure my mother that I will be careful and I apologize to her that I will be unable to make it to Texas for Christmas or to see the Dallas Cowboys.

  “You just don’t worry about that,” she says. “When you’re well, you can come down. Or I’ll come see you.”

  “My car is destroyed, Mother. How am I supposed to get back to Billings?”

  “I will call Jay. He’ll make sure you have a car when the time comes.”

  “Thank you, Mother. I will see you soon, I hope.” Hope is all I have in this instance. It’s not much.

  “I love you, Son.”

  I look around the room at everybody watching me. Only the doctor cleared out of the room. I don’t like to say things like “I love you” in front of an audience. Or at all.

  “Yes, Mother, I know.”

  “Good-bye,” she says.

  “Good-bye.”

  She hangs up. I’m glad that’s over with.

  Everybody stays in the room with me. I ask Sheila Renfro to track down my watch, which is set to the precise second, because the analog clock on the wall is the very definition of unreliable, and it begins to irritate me. We watch an episode of a show called Everybody Loves Raymond, which turns out to be funny even with the wildly overblown title. I highly doubt that there is anyone in the world whom everybody loves. I think even the unassailably wonderful people in the world probably have someone who doesn’t like them. My father, for instance, often made jokes about Mother Teresa. (One I remember him telling: “Why did Mother Teresa stop eating buffalo wings? Because she kept dipping the chicken into the lepers’ backs instead of the blue cheese dressing.” To be honest, I’m not even sure what that means.) I am far from a perfect person—I am rude and self-absorbed, and Dr. Buckley would be happy to say so—but one thing I try not to do is make fun of people. When I was a boy, and even now, I was often made fun of, and it’s hurtful. I’ve learned to forgive my father for many of the things he did, and it’s not my place to stick up for Mother Teresa. Still, I think he was wrong to say those things. I don’t know if I believe in God. Believing in God requires faith, and faith is difficult for me. But just the same, I would be inclined to not make fun of Mother Teresa, because if there is a God—especially the Judeo-Christian God—Mother Teresa has a lot more standing than my father does.

  Leaving God out of it, I think that if someone who dedicates her life to caring for the poor and the sick can be an object of derision (I love the word “derision”), what chance do the rest of us have?

  At 6:31 p.m., after the program ends, Donna and Victor say they’re leaving, that they will be flying home to Boise with Kyle the next morning. Donna gives me another kiss, and this time Sheila Renfro looks angry, which flummoxes me. Victor again shakes my hand, gently, which I appreciate in my painful state.

  The three of them are heading for the door when I say, “Can everybody else wait in the hall while I talk to Kyle?”

  Kyle knows where I stand. I want him to tell his mother and father what he told me.

  “But what if she hates me?” he says.

  I’m pulled between the competing t
houghts of how silly it is that Kyle would fear such a thing and a gentler realization that Dr. Buckley would be apt to make. She told me once that some people hold great shame for things that aren’t their fault, awful things that were done to them by people who were stronger or more powerful than they were. Shame isn’t something I’ve known in my life. Frustration, anger, wanting to be dead—I have known all of those things. But shame is difficult for me to understand. Dr. Buckley said it’s a horribly destructive force, perhaps the most destructive force she has ever encountered.

  I do not want Kyle to know what that’s like.

  “Donna will not hate you,” I tell him. “She will know exactly what to do. Your mother is wise, and she loves you, and she can help you.”

  He doesn’t want to cry, but one tear does spill down his cheek. He wipes it away.

  “I just don’t want to go back to that school. I hate it. I just want to forget it.”

  In ways that I don’t think I could explain to Kyle—and even if I could, I don’t have the time, because Donna and Victor are waiting outside the door—he and I are more alike than I ever noticed before. The kids who picked on me when I was in school made it miserable for me a lot of the time. I never tracked how often I disliked school, but it would be fair to say that the truly surprising days were the ones that I enjoyed. I liked the work; if I could have been alone at school, just me and my teachers, I might have had a fun time. I don’t want that for Kyle. I don’t want him to have to feel that way about school.

  “Tell your mother,” I say.

  “Edward, can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes.”

  Kyle isn’t looking at me. “Did we have fun?”

  “Kyle, you’re my first and best friend. We always have fun.”

  “After you’re better, will you come see me again?”

  “I promise I will.”

  He covers the distance between us and hugs me, and it hurts terribly, so much that, at first, I think I’m going to pass out. But I don’t pass out, and I hug him back, and it hurts again, and I don’t care.

  Finally he lets me go.

  “Good-bye, Edward,” he says, opening the door.

  “Good-bye, Kyle,” I say. “Tell your mother.”

  He’s gone now, but I can hear Donna say, “Tell me what?”

  I’m sneakily clever sometimes.

  Sheila Renfro comes into my hospital room and closes the door behind her.

  “Don’t get comfortable, silly,” she says. “You have to get up and walk. Doctor’s orders.”

  It’s amazing to me that it’s nearly 2012 and the only cure for broken ribs is to let time heal them.

  I don’t find that approach altogether appealing when I’m made to get out of bed and walk. There is no other way to say it: it hurts like a motherfucker. That’s not a precise statement. Of course there are other ways to say it, but why would I say it any differently? My way is direct and emphatic (I love the word “emphatic”).

  I swing my legs off the left side of the bed, a maneuver that hurts no matter how delicately I try to perform it. As my torso torques (that rhymes, sort of), I try to scoot my back along the bed so I don’t have to aggravate my ribs. I manage this somewhat successfully, but then my feet are on the floor, I’m on my back, and my butt is sliding toward the edge of the bed. This isn’t good.

  Sheila Renfro and a nurse, whose name is Sally, reach for me.

  “Give us your hands,” Sally says.

  I lift my arms, and my ribs scream. Not literally, of course. Ribs don’t have mouths or voices.

  They grip my hands and drop their rear ends like anchors.

  “On three,” Sally says. She counts it off: “One…two…three.”

  Sheila Renfro and Sally pull hard on my arms, and I try to shove myself up with my feet. The pain is the worst it has been, and I scream.

  Sally, I guess, has seen a lot of people scream. She seems unconcerned. Sheila Renfro cups her palm on my face and tells me, “You did good, Edward.”

  Sheila and I make two laps around the hospital hallway. I tell her that I have to pee, and she says, “Go ahead. They put a catheter in you. What do you think this is?” She taps a bag that hangs from the monitor I’m pushing. It has yellow liquid in it.

  “My pee?”

  “Well,” she says. “It’s not mine.” And then she laughs.

  Sheila Renfro is pretty funny sometimes.

  “What are you going to do when you get out of here?” she asks me.

  “I don’t know. Drive back to Billings, I guess.”

  “It’s a long way when you’re feeling bad. It’s a long way under any circumstance.”

  “Yes. The distance is unchanged by my physical condition.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Dr. Banning told me he didn’t want me to fly.”

  “You could come stay at my motel for a while.”

  “You’d let me?”

  “Of course. You’re going to pay, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Sheila Renfro laughs. “I was just kidding. You don’t have to pay. You can be my guest.”

  Sheila Renfro is pretty funny sometimes.

  “I could pay, you know,” I say. “I’m fucking loaded.”

  She puts a hand on the small of my back. It feels warm, and for just a moment, I forget the pain.

  “I know you are, Edward,” she says. “Don’t cuss around me.”

  Sheila Renfro says she’s going to stay with me in the hospital. She doesn’t put it in the form of a request. It’s a declaration.

  I tell her I don’t know if they’ll let her, that hospitals have rules about such things. When Sally comes into the room to give me my Percocet, which is a kind of painkiller, I ask her if Sheila Renfro can stay in my room.

  Sally says, “Absolutely, we can set up a reclining chair for her in here, if you’re OK with that.”

  Sheila Renfro says, “He is.” And she’s right, although I don’t think Sally was asking her for the answer.

  I eat a little bit of orange-flavored gelatin for my dinner, but, to be honest, I’m not very hungry. I ask Sally, when she comes by to change the bag I’m peeing into, if it’s Jell-O brand gelatin, but she says she doesn’t know, that those details are handled down in the kitchen. I suppose it doesn’t matter.

  There isn’t much on TV, which surprises me. Unlike Sheila Renfro’s motel, St. Joseph Hospital has an array (I love the word “array”) of cable television channels. Maybe Sheila Renfro is correct and people shouldn’t watch so much TV, if tonight’s selection is any indication of the baseline level of quality offered on cable these days. Even if she is correct, what am I going to do? I have broken ribs. My options are limited.

  “Do you want to watch Adam-12 on my bitchin’ iPhone?” I ask Sheila Renfro.

  “That will be fine,” she says. “Don’t cuss around me. I keep telling you.”

  I queue up the twenty-third episode of the first season, “Log 12: He Was Trying to Kill Me.” This episode originally aired on March 15, 1969. As the video comes up, I think of how much things have changed for me in just a few years. In my years of watching my favorite TV show, Dragnet, I never would have let so many days go between viewings, but here I am, watching Adam-12 for the first time since the day I left Billings. If I’d known then what would happen to me on this trip—which was impossible, of course—would I have come? I don’t know. I’m asking myself unanswerable questions lately, and that’s not like me. Maybe I’m changing, or maybe I’m just off my game because I’m hurt and discombobulated. If I’m changing—and changing this profoundly—I have a big adjustment to make. If I’ll be back to my old self eventually, I wonder if I will recognize the signs.

  I’m watching Officer Pete Malloy and Officer Jim Reed, but I’m not paying attention; I’m more looking through them, beyond the bitchin’ iPhone in my hands. Beyond this room and even beyond this day. I’m trying to see what’s coming, but that is a silly pursuit. We never
know. I don’t, anyway. It’s all a surprise, and I’m having to learn to live with surprises even though I prefer certainty. Certainty allows you to plan your life, and there are few things I like better than planning. Surprises make you adjust along the way, and I’m not very good at that.

  Sheila Renfro has pulled her chair up tight against my bed, and her head is tilted to the right and resting on my pillow, next to my own head. I can smell her, and it pleases me.

  I’m glad she stayed.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

  From the logbook of Edward Stanton, as recorded by Sheila Renfro:

  Time Edward woke up today: Repeatedly. It’s like he discovers all over again just how hurt he is every time he wakes up, and that’s heartbreaking. I wish there was something more they could do for him, but the prescription is rest and exercise.

  High temperature for Friday, December 16, 2011, Day 350: 44 in Billings. Also, Edward wants me to point out that although he appreciates Kyle’s attempt to keep track of things yesterday, it’s important that the temperatures be correct. I was able to find yesterday’s paper down in the dining area, and it said that it was a high of 33 in Billings on Thursday, December 15. Edward was relieved that I was able to find this out. He is peculiar, but I like that about him.

  Low temperature for Friday, December 16, 2011: 23. And the low was 18 on Thursday.

  Precipitation for Friday, December 16, 2011: 0.00 inches. Same as Thursday.

  Precipitation for 2011: 19.41 inches

  New entries:

  Exercise for Friday, December 16, 2011: We did three sets of two laps around this floor of the hospital. As Edward says, it’s hard to prove these things empirically, but he seemed to get better each time. The only bad part is that it hurts him so bad when we have to pull him out of the bed. It’s heartbreaking.