by Abby Bardi
I stayed there like this for about twenty minutes, my arms crossed around my waist, hunching over, rocking, praying, and after a while I started to notice that I wasn't feeling very well. Holy shit, I thought. I had totally forgotten about my dope. I hadn't brought any with me, and it had been several hours since I had had any, though luckily I had done a little extra while battling boredom.
I decided that I had better call Alice. She was relieved to hear from me, since she'd been sitting by the phone hoping for some information about Mary Fred, and even though I had absolutely no news for her, she seemed to feel better receiving word from the front. I asked her how Puffin was, and she said Puffin was okay, she was wrapped in a blanket in front of the TV. Alice had tried to talk her out of watching the news coverage, but she refused to move, so Alice was giving her hot chocolate and cookies and keeping her warm. “She's still shaking a lot,” she said.
I contemplated telling Al to take Puffin to the Emergency Room, but it was such a big mess there I thought better of it. Finally, I suggested that we trade places in a while, since she was probably in a better position legally to get information about Mary Fred, since she was her guardian and I was just her guardian's crappy brother. Alice said that was a good point, and that she would drive over soon. I told her to ask Paula to take care of Puffin so we weren't leaving her alone at all, and Al thought that was a good idea. I could tell that Al was going all fluffy in the head from stress and panic, and thatsomeone needed to tell her what to do, including reminding her to put shoes on before she left the house, since it was winter and all.
But I wasn't in such good shape myself. I sat in the corner feeling worse and worse, and by the time Al finally showed up, I had gone into a sweat and was shaking. She didn't even seem to notice that there was anything wrong with me, though. I told her I would go home and check on Puffin and then come back. She handed me the car keys and I made my way through the jumble of people outside and drove home. It was just late enough in the day that the rain, which had just started, was really ice, and when I got out of the car it felt like little needles were driving into my face. But the cold against my face felt good, and when I walked into the house, I looked more frosty than sweaty.
Paula was sitting on the couch next to Puffin, and they were watching Father Knows Best on one of those retro cable channels. “There you are,” Paula said, as if I was somehow late, though I wasn't. “We're catching up on the nineteen-fifties. That was all Auntie Paula could handle right now.” She (or he, whatever) looked up at me through a lock of fake ginger hair that fell in the path of her right eye.
“How's my little Puffin?” I asked in a voice that was so tender it surprised me. Puffin looked up at me with woeful eyes and nodded, as if she was too tired to speak.
“I gave her some Xanax,” Paula whispered. “I think it's helping. She was a little bit stressed.” She was wearing an oversized Garfield T-shirt, and I found myself trying not to glance at her body.
“Yeah.” I walked over to Puffin and gave her a hug. When I stood up again, Paula was looking at me strangely. “Can you stay here with her for a while, Paula? I'd like to go back over to the hospital.”
She said she would, and then added, “Have you been running? You're all sweaty.”
I nodded. “I've just got to dash upstairs for a minute.” I ran into my room, grabbed two capsules of dope, went into the bathroom, snorted some, peed, snorted some more, and went back downstairs again. When I glanced at Paula, she was still looking at me funny, but I didn't care, since everything seemed fine now.
I found Alice in the lobby, parked in front of the TV with a bunch of other parents. She was talking to some of them, since she knew everybody from the PTA or whatever they called it these days, and every so often she and some other woman or man would hug and cry a little bit together. I almost hated to bust in on her, but when she saw me, she jumped up and ran to hug me, and started introducing me to people and telling me that I remembered them from something or other ten years ago, though I didn't. I had never understood why Alice insisted on staying in this goofy neighborhood, but I guess she felt it supported her in some way. I don't know. Myself, I didn't feel like talking to anyone, and I could barely manage to say hi.
Suddenly, a man in a little green outfit—scrubs, I guess they're called—came out and started reading a list of names. Parents leaped up, ran over to him, and started shouting. A few were shouting in Spanish, and I couldn't understand what they were saying, but some lawyers in the group were saying, in English, that they demanded to know where their sons or daughters were, in tones that threatened litigation. I could barely hear any of the names, but finally he said, “Mary Fred Anderson,” and Alice and I rushed forward. He pointed to a woman in a green sweater, and we followed her to a cubicle. “Are you the parents?” she asked. Alice explained that we were Mary Fred's guardians. The woman wanted to know all about her insurance coverage. This made me feel like punchingher, but Alice just sat there calmly giving her all the necessary information. Evidently Mary Fred was on Alice's policy, which was lucky as they would certainly have thrown her out in the cold otherwise.
“Can we see her?” Alice asked when they had finished. The woman told us to go with the nurse. We looked for a nurse and finally saw a little Hispanic guy in a white coat looking at us impatiently. I found myself running over to him and grabbing him by the arm. “How is she? Is she okay?” asked a hysterical voice that was coming from my mouth. The man told us that she was scheduled for emergency surgery, that they were just waiting for an OR to open up, that the doctor would explain everything to us, and that we were to follow him. He led us into another waiting room and left us there. This was evidently the elite waiting room—it was quieter, and had a better TV. Some of the parents Alice knew had already been sent there, and when they saw her, they hugged all over again, and I sat down and watched Jeopardy! Every so often, I would go into the bathroom for a hit. I was ready to highly recommend heroin to everyone else in the waiting room, but I didn't think that would be advisable.
After what seemed like a million years but couldn't have been, since they were only in the Double Jeopardy round, a doctor came in and called Alice's name. He was a short, bald guy with a paunch, and was probably only in his twenties. He started walking down the hallway, and we followed him. I had trouble keeping up with them and only heard snatches of what he was saying, but I could make out the word “surgery” again, and also “internal injuries,” “extensive bleeding,” “perforated,” and “concussion.”
“Can we see her?” Alice asked. The doctor led us into a curtained-off section of the Emergency Room, and there was poor old Mary Fred, lying on a cart with a board on it, tubesup her cute little nose, wires in her arm, a heavy collar around her neck, and a monitor beeping next to her. Her eyes were closed, but she was stirring slightly, like someone having a bad dream. Just like on TV, I thought. We rushed to her side but then were afraid to go too near. Alice reached out and brushed a little bit of blond hair out of her face, and said, “We're here, honey. Uncle Roy and I are here.” Alice's face was pale and squished up like she was going to either cry or start screaming, and I put an arm around her to keep her from doing either. She leaned her head on my shoulder and we stood there for a moment. Then a nurse burst through the curtains, grabbed the cart, and barreled away before we could even ask what was going on.
For the next few hours, we sat in the waiting room—the nice one—with a bunch of other parents whose kids were in surgery. I kept thinking of us as “other” parents, like we were Mary Fred's folks. Whatever the hell we were, we all sat there, taking turns using the pay phone to call home and check on the siblings. Paula said that Puffin had fallen asleep in front of the TV. She told us to take our time, that she could sleep on the couch, she would just dash home and get her jammies. The thought of Paula in her jammies was kind of scary, but I have to say it was damn nice of her to stay. The lawyers were all on their cell phones, trying to figure out who to sue. When Alice
had seen the picture of the Lone Teen Driver (as they were calling him) on TV, she had cried out, “Oh, God, it's Dylan Magnuson, I know his mom.” Apparently his mother worked for Greenpeace, and his father was dead. (He had killed himself, according to Alice, though no one mentioned that on the news. I didn't know how they could have missed that tidbit.) “Oh, poor Grace,” Alice sighed, her face in her hands. She just sat there sighing for everyone.
It must have been two in the morning when yet anotherdoctor called Alice into the hallway. He was a tall, solid-looking guy with dark, wavy hair, a little too long in the back and too thin on the top. He introduced himself as Dr. Greenberg and said that he had just completed the surgery, that it had been a success, they had stopped the bleeding, so there had not been much damage to the internal organs. They had had to repair her intestine, but her condition was fair. Her concussion wasn't a severe one. “So she's fine?” Alice said in that idiotic way she has. The doctor looked gloomy and said that the bad news was, she had bled internally, due to the nature of the injury, and that there had been some pretty serious intestinal leakage. They were giving her broad-spectrum antibiotics but as soon as the culture came back, they could give her something specific to the organism, or something like that, to prevent sepsis. “She'll be okay, though, right?” I found myself saying, sounding exactly like Alice.
“We hope so,” the doctor said. He seemed really sad, as if he had known Mary Fred for years and wanted nothing but the best for her. He told us that they were moving her to ICU and that as soon as they had a room for her, we could go sit with her, though she wouldn't wake up for some time. I guess he figured we knew all the acronyms from watching Chicago Hope or ER, and the truth was, we did. We went back to the waiting room, which by now I totally hated and never wanted to see again, and sat there until someone got us. The orderly, or whatever he was, led us down a bunch of halls, up an elevator, down some more halls, and into one of the scariest places I could imagine, a hospital wing. It smelled bad, and the hallway was lined with lots of small dark rooms full of equipment. The guy pointed us to one of the rooms, and when we walked in, we found Mary Fred lying there, still with the tubes all over the place and the big machines hooked up to her.
Al and I decided to take turns sitting there. By this time, it was about 4A.M.,so I told Alice to go home first, since I wasn't tired, and I knew she felt bad about leaving Puffin. Al said she would be back in a while, and she gave me a big hug and left. When I was sure she was gone, I pulled my chair over to Mary Fred's side and started talking. I told her she would have to be all right, that we all needed her, and that she had to pull through, and all that kind of crap. She just lay there, breathing through her tubes, the machine next to me beeping regularly, which I guessed was her heartbeat, so I was glad about that, and though every so often I thought she was about to wake up, she didn't. I tried to hold her hand, but it had needles in it, so I just sat there whispering to her. I said as much of the Beautiful Prayer as I could remember, which wasn't much, in case she was listening, and then maybe I fell asleep, I don't know. In my dreams, she and Puffin were running around yakking, like everything was normal.
When I woke up, Alice was standing over me. She had washed her hair and changed her clothes but she still looked horrible, pale and drawn, her lips in a stressed-out little line. She pulled up a chair next to me and we sat there, not saying anything, for a while. I could see the sun peeking out from behind the closed venetian blind. After a while, Dr. Greenberg came back in. He talked to Alice for a while about Mary Fred's condition, and asked her some other questions too, and I sat there wishing he would go away, since he was making me feel even more tired. He had a deep, peppy voice. I didn't really listen to what they were talking about, but when he left, Alice looked like she felt a bit comforted, and it annoyed me that I couldn't manage to comfort her like that.
Alice told me to go home and get some sleep, take a shower, check on Puffin, and said she would stay at the hospital. She said she needed to be available in case she had to sign anything,but that she was worried about Puffin, who was still in a kind of shock, and was afraid Paula had something else to do but was too nice to say so. On the way home, I found my runner right where he was supposed to be, so I got enough dope to last me through till Monday. I would have liked to get some more, but that was all the money I had for the moment, so it would have to do.
Puffin was in front of the TV when I got there, still asleep, a little pocket of drool in the corner of her mouth. Paula was sitting on the couch, wrapped in Alice's moon and star blanket, watching a show about dolphins on the Discovery Channel. I thanked her and told her I would stay with Puffin for a while, and that she was free to leave. Paula said that she really didn't have much to do this weekend and could just as easily sit around our house as her own, and that I could go clean up and go back to the hospital if I wanted to. She had given Puffin more Xanax and expected her to sleep a lot. I told Paula to watch it on the Xanax, but she said she knew what she was doing and not to worry. I privately thought that one drug addict in the family was enough, but I had to admit Xanax sounded pretty good to me too. I went up and took a shower, paced around my room for a little bit, thinking about whether I ought to stay or go, decided that I really couldn't stand being away from the hospital, went downstairs, thanked Paula again, averting my eyes from her enormous Garfield T-shirt, and left.
When I got to the hospital, Alice was still sitting next to the bed in ICU. “Has she woken up yet?” I asked.
Alice gave me a weird look.
“What's wrong?”
“Well, I think she's in one of those coma things,” she said, mumbling like she didn't even want to say it out loud.
“A coma?” I hissed at her. “I thought everything was supposed to be fine.”
“She's sick, Roy. She has some kind of bacteria in her blood.”
“I thought she was supposed to be getting better. That's what your pal the doctor said.”
“She will get better, Roy.” She raised a finger to her lips, and I remembered that supposedly, people in comas could hear everything you said.
“Oh, God.” The Smiths song “Girlfriend in a Coma” began playing in my head. “I didn't know people really went into comas.”
“Of course they do, Roy. People have all kinds of bad things happen to them.” There was something incredibly ludicrous about Alice of all people lecturing me about reality.
“I'll be right back. I have to go to the bathroom.” I was starting to get that freaky, not-quite-enough-heroin feeling. When I came back, I was calmer. After Alice had gone home to check on Puffin, I sat close to the Little Chick and talked to her some more, telling her about all the wonderful things in life she had to wake up and do, and reminding her of some of our happier moments. “Remember when you put that chicken next to my plate?” I asked. She just lay there, and the thought of her running around the house with Puffin, just being a goofy teen, in contrast with her lying here, caused my chest to tighten. For a moment I was sure I was having a heart attack, and I thought, well, what better place. But it passed, and I realized that I was just incredibly worried and also very, very sad. I wasn't sure I had ever been aware of sadness before. It felt like I was wearing it, like a shirt or something. It just seemed so strange and awful to me that Mary Fred could be standing there waiting for a bus one moment and lying here the next, and it made me hurt, not just for her but for everyone.Normally I would have done anything to get rid of any bad feeling I might have, but it seemed appropriate now, so I just sat there in my gloom and felt pity for the human race for a while.
Toward late afternoon, something about the Little Chick changed. I didn't know what it was, exactly, but she looked different, even though she still hadn't moved at all. When the nurse came in, I asked her to check everything, which of course she was going to do anyway, and sure enough, her fever was pretty high. The nurse asked me to leave, and a bunch of other people started running in and out of the room. I went and called Alice and told
her that I thought something was wrong and she ought to come. I guess I was afraid that the Little Chick would actually die or something before Alice could get there. I knew that people died in hospitals because our father had died in one, in fact I had not been on a hospital wing since then, come to think of it. Maybe that was why I hated it there so much, especially the smell, though what I hated most was that there were so many people there who were suffering. It made me mad, and I wished I could be the guy who saved everybody, who just put a stop to all of it, sickness, death, school violence, drug abuse (yeah, sure), and the other bad things that you see on television. Though I had always thought of Alice as overly bleeding-hearted and credulous, it began to occur to me that I was apparently cut from the same cloth. This was a weird thing to find about yourself at my age, but I sort of liked it.
I stood in the hall outside the Little Chick's room, swaying back and forth, until Alice arrived. When Dr. Greenberg appeared, he told us that they were changing Mary Fred's antibiotic, that she wasn't responding to the previous one so they were trying something new. Alice broke down sobbing and beforeI could get close enough to console her, Dr. Greenberg put his arm around her and let her cry all over his white shoulder. I found this annoying, but it seemed to make Alice feel better.
After a while, the medical staff let us back into the room, and we sat there, holding hands, not talking, staring at the Little Chick like we were going to heal her with the power of our minds. Alice left a few times, to call Paula, or Diane, who I guess was going to notify Mary Fred's real parents, but mostly we just stayed there. At about seven, I told Alice to go home and take care of Puffin, and that I would take the night shift. I promised to call her if anything changed, but the nurse had said that Mary Fred seemed to be stabilizing. It wasn't too hard to convince Al, since she was worried about leaving Puffin for too long, so she went home, and I spent the whole night in the chair next to the bed. Every so often I would lay my head down on the bed and fall asleep. Medical personnel wandered in and out all night, like that was their favorite time of day to work, and sometimes they threw me out of the room so they could do things I didn't want to know about. I got a fair amount of sleep, though, and when I woke up in the morning, I looked at the Little Chick hopefully, like I was going to find her awake and smiling at me, but she was still just lying there.
