ODD NUMBERS

by M. Grace Bernardin

  “I know, honey. I know,” the nurse said patting her forehead and cheeks with the damp cool cloth. “Hang in there. Hang onto my arm. I’ll make it quick. I promise.”

  The questions began to run together. “Are you more aware of sounds around you? Are they harsh? Do they frighten you? Does the light hurt your eyes? Does your head hurt? Does it feel like you have a band around it? Are you seeing things you know aren’t there?” She tried to fib about the swirling grey cyclone in the corner of the room, the one that so often came to life when she went without booze too long, the one that threatened to suck her up and consume her and destroy everything in its’ wake. She tried to ignore Fatty and Blondie who stood in the corner with the cyclone, just waiting to unleash it in her direction because they thought it might be funny to see a poor drunk get eaten by a figment of her own imagination. She tried not to look at how tight their ponytails were because it made her head hurt. She had to ask the nice nurse if someone had pulled her hair back tight like that too and would they please undo it because it was giving her a headache.

  “I’m f-f-flunking. I’m not doing well? Am I? A p-p-perfect s-s-seven hundred. Seven thousand.”

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “It’s Monday. No, Tuesday. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “What about the date and the year?”

  “It’s November, 2006. Never thought I’d make it this long. November 20 or 21.”

  “Yes, very good! It’s Monday, November 20. You’re doing better than me. I usually never know the date.”

  “It’s Thanksgiving this week. Right?”

  “Correct! You’re doing very well. What’s two plus two?”

  “Four.”

  “Four plus four?”

  “Eight. And eight plus eight is sixteen.”

  “Very good! How about two plus three?”

  “Five.”

  “Three plus four?”

  “C-c-can I use my f-f-fingers? Just k-kidding. It’s s-s-seven. Please don’t m-m-move up to d-decimals and f-fractions. I s-s-suck at Math. Drunk or s-s-sober.”

  The kind nurse laughed and told her to hang onto her sense of humor. Vicky gripped her arm tighter. The nurse told her she sucked at Math too, and not to worry, she got a perfect score, a zero, under the orientation category. And then Vicky was confused and argued that zero was a bad score and seven was a perfect score. The nurse reminded her that a lower score was better, and Vicky had to think about it until she got it again, at which time she pleaded with the nurse not to up her score because she was confused about the scoring. The kind nurse assured her she wouldn’t do anything to up her score anymore, since it was already pretty high. She liked the way this nurse was honest with her and didn’t talk down to her.

  Medication was quickly ordered and administered. The kind nurse had to leave but told her she’d check in on her and would be there to give the zero to seven test for drunks again in an hour. She watched as the kind nurse left and she wanted to cry. It felt the same as the first day of kindergarten when she watched her mother leave her there all alone at school; all alone with a strange teacher, only this time she was all alone with Fatty and Blondie.

  She wanted to yell at the two nurses in the corner of the room, talking and laughing like two mean girls from school who were probably talking and laughing about her. She wanted to yell but the medication was taking effect. The rough edge around all those excitable emotions was sloughing off a bit and she had less of an impulse to yell. She cried instead.

  The next thing she remembered was being awakened, not that she was startled awake exactly but something in the room shifted suddenly, like the air had been stirred up by a quick movement, and all at once Vicky was aware of a presence. She knew that some time had passed but just how much she wasn’t sure. She opened her eyes and there stood a doctor in a white coat with a file under his arm. He introduced himself without a smile but she didn’t catch his name.

  The doctor was tall and thin with tufts of silvery gray hair sticking up on top of his head. He had a dictatorial, superior sort of nature which was evidenced when he immediately began spouting off orders and scolding Blondie and Fatty. He was someone whose bad side you wouldn’t want to be on. But Vicky was glad he was there. He was just who she needed to put Blondie and Fatty in their place.

  Maybe it was her half dazed state that made her more acutely aware of people around her. She had an intuition about this doctor–a feeling that he was brilliant, a born doctor, perhaps a little frustrated to be stuck in this backward town and backward hospital with people who were not naturally as gifted as him and whose incompetence he had to endure. He began to examine Vicky at which time Fatty quickly fled with the excuse that she had to go to the bathroom and that she would be right back.

  The doctor examined her stomach, prodding and kneading with a kind of certainty that seemed he was getting information directly from his fingertips up to his brain. Her stomach was so tender that had she not been so sedated she would have been screaming in pain at even the lightest touch. A moan of discomfort was all that escaped her lips. He examined her chest and the palms of her hands, pulled her eyelids down and carefully looked at her eyes, all the while muttering in harsh tones, though not necessarily directed at her. He grumbled about varicose veins, her swollen stomach, and the hue of her skin, and for “Chrissake, any…” he almost said the word idiot but caught himself and changed it to something more professional sounding, “anyone with a limited medical knowledge can see she’s in the latter stages of cirrhosis.”

  Although she wasn’t quite sure he saw her as human, more like a knowledgeable mechanic looking at the engine of a car, she respected this doctor. She respected him because he took up for her and didn’t talk down to her. He would be her ally, not a tender one like the kind nurse, but one who would fight for her nonetheless. Most people didn’t think she was worth the fight anymore and, who knows, they were probably right, Vicky thought.

  The doctor began ranting to Blondie about getting her off the IV immediately. “She’s got too much water in her blood and tissues as it is. You’re overtaxing her heart with all these fluids.”

  “I didn’t order it, doctor. The ER doctor on call must’ve thought it necessary. What I mean is,” Blondie said pleading for his understanding. “She was vomiting quite a bit when she was admitted. She was dehydrated.”

  “Well, she’s not anymore. Remove the IV. She can take liquids orally.”

  Vicky heard the doctor’s monologue come through in waves. She heard the part about the latter stages of cirrhosis and somewhere in her brain she grasped what that meant. Perhaps she would have been alarmed had she not been so dopey from the medication. She didn’t really feel anything except a dim hope that she wouldn’t suffer too much before she died. She heard the part about taking liquids orally and she wanted to make a joke about it, wanted to say something about that’s what got her into all this trouble in the first place. She tried but it felt like she had a sweater over her tongue and she couldn’t get the words out.

  “And we’ve got to change her meds,” she heard the doctor say. “She’s over sedated. Look at this blood pressure–seventy over forty. Her liver’s too damaged to metabolize the Librium. We need something shorter acting. If her score is still high next time we give her the CIWA I’m ordering Lorazepam. And look at this,” he said thumping the file to indicate another area where they had messed up. “She has a history of seizures with alcohol withdrawal. She has a score of forty-five on the CIWA before she gets anything to help her? What’s that all about? What in God’s name were you people waiting for? She was already beginning withdrawal in the ER!”

  “But she didn’t have a seizure, doctor.”

  “You’re just damn lucky,” he interrupted before she could even finish her sentence. “She was probably just minutes away from one. Plus you add the trauma from the accident…”

  The doctors’ voice began to fade away and Vicky wanted to ask him why he even cared. Then she wonder
ed if he really did care or was it just his job, which he obviously took a lot of pride in? Was keeping this poor pitiful mass of flesh and bones alive and semi-comfortable simply a reflection of his own medical expertise? Was it about her or was it really about him? And why should it be about her anyway, Vicky reasoned?

  She still reasoned. Somewhere in her foggy, clouded, damaged brain there was still some streak of cognitive light that came on every now and then and caused her to try to sort things out, to resolve matters, to make order of all the scrambled jigsaw puzzle pieces of her life. These moments were becoming fewer and farther between, but when they occurred everything was clear, lucid, terribly illuminated, and excruciatingly painful. These were rare sober moments and not particularly pleasant ones for Vicky.

  “Why should anything be about me? That’s part of my problem. I thought all along it was. Fool. Fuck up. Failure.” Vicky muttered in a whisper, but the haze of sedation wouldn’t let the thought go any further and it seemed as if thick black drapes like theater curtains were closing in front of her eyes. Her eyelids felt as if they were coated with lead and soon there was nothing before her but black.

  Vicky heard voices conversing in hushed tones. She couldn’t keep her eyes open long enough to see who it was. It was nurses and they were talking about her. She strained to listen but the conversation kept coming in waves like someone changing a radio dial from one station to the next. “They said in the ER it didn’t seem like she’d undergone any trauma…covered in bruises, gashes, scrapes…bleeding like…conscious…still walking around…couldn’t get her to lie down…loud…cracking jokes…perfectly oriented…knew where she was…severe withdrawal…still oriented…a little nervous and shaky…you or me…dead…why?…all these other people injured…nobody killed…thank God…others…pain…off work…months of physical therapy…totaled cars…walks out of here…like nothing…back on the streets…back at it…drinking again…strong constitution…should be dead by now…maybe better off.

  Vicky was somewhere familiar, in a large room with light all around her, natural sunlight, streaming through windows in rays filled with thousands of dust particles dreamily floating about. It was a place she knew from long ago, childhood, perhaps even infancy. There was something about where she stood in this room, something about the space and shape of the room that filled her with some strange old familiarity, some bitter sweet longing for something distant and far away, something long past and forgotten.

  She was facing either east or west because the sun was right there in front of her, low on the horizon, either setting or rising, she couldn’t tell which. But then it occurred to her, it had to be setting. Only the evening sun on its way down could fill her with that kind of nostalgia. The light around her became clearer and objects slowly came into focus as she became aware of her surroundings.

  She was at the River Inn again tending bar. She was doing what she did best, filling people up; filling up their glasses with perfectly shaped, crystal clear pieces of ice that clinked in the most melodious way when dropped into the bottom. She was pouring her magical potions over the ice, some clear, some pale gold, some caramel brown. She filled up wine glasses with deep bowls and long elegant stems. She poured deep red and purple liquids. She mixed up her potions, she shook them, she stirred them, she knew exactly how much was just enough for each person. She was careful, not too much of her magic potions, just enough to make them laugh or cry or talk or whatever it was they needed to do.

  And then the people she was serving came into view. She handed them their drinks and they handed her their money. But they were paying her for more than just the drinks. They were paying her for the stories and jokes she told, and the ones they told that she laughed at. They were paying her for the problems she listened to, the counsel she gave, the ledges she talked them off of, even the fights she talked them out of. Her bosses always said you didn’t much need a bouncer when Vicky was around ‘cause she could stop a fight. She even made one particularly troublesome customer go stand in the corner with his face to the wall until he cooled off like some bad little school boy. And he did it because Vicky told him to.

  She wanted everyone to feel that warmth and comfort that comes with that first gulp of booze as it trickles down your throat. She wanted everyone to stop being afraid; afraid to cry, afraid to laugh too loudly, afraid to talk to someone, afraid of being silly, or being rejected, or afraid to try because you might fail. Most of all she didn’t want them to be afraid of each other. She wanted to fill everyone up with comfort, warmth, friendship, humor, the ability to laugh at their hardships, and just enough rest and release to go back and face those hardships the next day.

  She wanted to fill them up with good food and a place to belong. She wanted to cook for people. She wanted to feed people. She wanted to hear their stories. She didn’t want anyone to be left out. She wanted to take in anyone who had ever felt like an orphan. She wanted her own place. Vicky’s Country Inn. And people would come from all over.

  It was a dream that had long ago died but now it was alive again as she stood in this bright room, elevated above the city streets where you could look out and see the setting sun sinking into the Ohio River below. Every dream she ever had, every hope she ever knew was alive again in this place with the sound of clinking glass and laughter. She could even fly if she wanted. She could get off the ground where she’d always been stuck, and fly. All she had to do was spread her arms and start flapping. Why hadn’t she figured it out before? She wanted to tell everyone how easy it was to fly, because certainly it was the best kept secret. She’d show them! That’s what she’d do. She’d start flapping her arms and take off and everyone would be amazed.

  Next thing she knew she was flying, out the window and over the river. She never felt so free. She never felt so alive, so elated, so exhilarated. Then it occurred to her that she must be careful not to get too close to the sun because then she’d burn, like the guy in the Greek myth. Who was it? She’d studied the story in one of her college classes. Icarus. The name came to her with little effort and stuck in her head as she flew. Icarus. Icarus.

  She didn’t have to worry about getting too close to the sun though because she was already above it. The sun was going lower as she was going higher. But still, she was getting hot and sweaty, and she noticed it was getting harder to flap. Her wings were starting to melt, she thought, and her confidence right along with it. She didn’t want to fall into the river so she flapped as hard as she could toward the rocky shore. Each flap was becoming more strenuous as she descended quickly. She braced herself for the impact. She just barely made it over to the shore before crashing into the rocks. She landed hard but it didn’t hurt, only startled her and she felt herself jerk.

  It was an ugly place to be, there on the rocky shores of the river. It was littered with broken glass, beer cans, fast food wrappers, and cigarette butts. All around was the waste and negligence of those who tried to fly but would never leave the earth. Then suddenly there was her Dad standing right there in front of her. She was confused because she thought he was dead. So what was he doing here? Her heart sank. She thought she would never have to worry about fighting with him again. On the day they buried him she thought all that screaming, hollering, name-calling, and slapping around would never occur again. She could lay it all to rest along with her Dad. She could put it behind her and try to find some peace, maybe even remember a few good things, like the times he took her fishing and hunting. Now here he was and he looked mad.

  He hollered at her, called her a “show off” and who did she think she was trying to fly. He accused her of not really flying–he said it was just a trick to make everyone think she could fly. He struck her but she was so angry she didn’t even feel the blow. She struck him back. She called him a stupid drunk and told him she was sick of him putting her down all the time. He said she was a fine one to talk. He accused her of being so drunk she could hardly stand up. He came at her again but she got to him first and pushed him wi
th all her might. He fell against a rock and dashed his head. He lay there bleeding. Vicky felt a mix of horror and pity. She wondered if she was drunk. She was dizzy and seeing double. She must’ve sneaked some drinks back at the bar. She was so good at sneaking drinks even she didn’t know when she did it. Her knees buckled and she fell on the rocks. Her Dad looked at her. He had a big gash on his forehead and blood dripping into his eyes but he was still conscious. Still conscious and still mean as a snake. “See, I told ya,” he said. “You’re so drunk you can’t stand up.” She realized he was right. He always was.

  Chapter 34

  Vicky felt someone touch her arm, gently but with purpose. Were they trying to help her up?

  “Are you all right?” She heard a strange voice ask. She opened her eyes for a fragment of a second, just enough to make out the figure of a man, a priest or minister of some kind dressed in black with a white collar.

  “I didn’t mean to get drunk again. I didn’t want to. I’m sorry.” Vicky blurted out and she could hear the tremulous sound of her own voice.

  “You’re not drunk. You just had a bad dream.”

  “I’m not drunk?”

  “No,” she heard the man of God say.

  Vicky blinked hard a few times but her eyes kept snapping shut again, she struggled to wake up lest she return to that awful dream. She unknowingly held her hand out so that whoever was there could help pull her up off these rocks. “Help me,” she heard herself say in that shaky desperate voice. His hand clasped hers’. It was warm and strong.

  “How can I help you?” the man of God’s voice asked.

  “Help me stay awake.”

  “Maybe if you sit up,” he said and pushed the button on her bed. She heard the mechanical noise and felt herself elevating. He helped her scoot back and moved her pillow out from under her head, repositioning it around her mid-back. All this shifting around succeeded in awakening her. Her eyes took in her surroundings and she remembered.