I Thought You Were Dead

by Pete Nelson

  She had a sexy voice, slightly smoky and tinged with a Northeast Corridor Boston-Rhode Island-New York accent that made her seem tougher than she really was. It was far too late to return her call.

  The second message was from his mother, who always began her messages, “Hi, Paul — it’s your mom,” as if he wasn’t going to recognize her voice.

  “Hi, Paul — it’s your mom,” she said. “It’s about eleven o’clock here, and I’m at Mercy Hospital. Your father is still resting comfortably and your sister is here and I’m going back just as soon as I get some coffee. Pastor Rolander was here visiting but he’s left too. I think Bits will meet you at the airport, and she has your flight number and all that, so don’t worry. I’m looking forward to seeing my little boy. Love you lots. Bye.”

  It was nice to think there was at least one person left on earth who thought of him as a little boy.

  Paul filled a glass with ice and poured himself a scotch, adding an extra splash for good measure, because it had been an extradifficult night, and tomorrow was likely to be worse. He took the drink to bed with him, where he read another paragraph of Anna Karenina. He’d been reading the book about one paragraph a night for the past three years. He heard toenails clicking against the floor. Stella had risen from her dog bed all on her own and had come to join him.

  “You want up?” he asked her.

  “Sure.”

  “Promise not to whimper in the middle of the night to be let down?” he asked. “I need my sleep. Chester’s owners are going to come get you and take you to their house while I’m gone.”

  “No whimpering, I promise,” she said.

  He lifted the dog up onto the bed, where she made a nest for herself at his feet. He tried to read. Levin was convinced that Kitty thought he was an asshole. Paul was inclined to agree with her. He put the book down. He wondered if his father knew the difference anymore between being asleep and being awake, or if he had no words in his head at all and felt trapped, bound and gagged. Maybe the opposite was true and he was engaged in some kind of unbroken prayer and felt entirely at peace. Strokes could occur in any part of the brain, couldn’t they? Each stroke was probably unique, immeasurable or unpredictable to some extent. His mother said that before it happened, Paul’s father had complained of a headache and his speech had seemed a little slurred, though she hadn’t made anything of it at the time. “I saw him shoveling, and then when I didn’t see him anymore, I thought he’d gone down the block,” Paul’s mother had told him on the phone. “Then when I went to look for him, I saw him lying on the sidewalk and I thought at first that he’d slipped on the ice.”

  When he didn’t get up, she’d dialed 911, fearing he’d had a heart attack. The operator told her not to move him because jostling could cause a second heart attack. Paul’s mother had covered her husband with blankets where he lay and stayed by his side. They took him in an ambulance to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed a stroke. There they gave him a drug to dissolve the clot, but it would only work, they said, if it was administered in time, before too much damage had been done to the tissues in the brain that were being deprived of blood and therefore oxygen. Maybe the old man simply thought he was dreaming and couldn’t wake up. Maybe it was a good dream. Maybe it wasn’t.

  “What?” Stella asked. “You sighed.”

  “Just thinking,” Paul said. “If you could be a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?”

  “Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?”

  “There’s been some debate. Why would you be a tomato?”

  “To get next to all those hamburgers,” the dog said.

  “But if you were a tomato, you wouldn’t want to eat hamburger.”

  “Of course I would. Why would I change, just because I’m a tomato?”

  “You’d want tomato food. This has got to be the stupidest conversation we’ve ever had,” Paul said.

  “Actually, this is fairly typical,” the dog said.

  “You think my dad is going to be okay?” Paul asked.

  “Sure. He’s a tough old bird, right?”

  “He used to go to the park and play pickup hockey with the high school rink rats until he was, like, sixty-five years old.”

  “The only guy alive who thinks Gordie Howe was a quitter.”

  “That’s right,” Paul said. “The only guy alive who thinks Gordie Howe was a quitter.”

  “Your dad’s not a quitter.”

  “That’s got to be in his favor.”

  “On the other hand,” Stella said, “everybody gets old and dies. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I know that.”

  “It’s supposed to work that way. If it didn’t, the whole planet would fill up with decrepit, useless old wrecks everybody else would have to take care of. And that wouldn’t be good, would it?”

  “No, that wouldn’t be good.”

  “If you ask me, you humans have already artificially extended your life spans to the point where you’re seriously screwing up the environment for the rest of us. You’re supposed to die at forty or forty-five, tops. You’re not supposed to gum up the works by hanging around for an extra thirty or forty years.”

  “That’s a bit insensitive.”

  “Nothing personal.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Paul said. “How old are you? Fifteen? What’s that in dog years?”

  “Fifteen and a half,” she said proudly. “And it’s all relative. In tortoise years, that’s nothing. In butterfly years, it’s forever. I want your dad to be okay, but if he’s not okay, that’s no less desirable, in the grand scheme of things. That’s all I’m saying. If he goes, it means more food for you.”

  “It’s not a question of food,”

  Paul said. “Paul,” Stella said, “everything is a question of food. Everything except where you lie down. And even that has to be somewhere near food. If you had a choice between sleeping somewhere that was soft and warm but a thousand miles from food, and sleeping in a place that was totally uncomfortable but right next to the kitchen, you’d sleep where there was food.”

  “I’m just a bowl of Iams to you, aren’t I? That’s all I am.”

  “You’re more than a bowl of food, Paul. You’re a dish of water too. You even pick up my shit.” Sometimes she’d crap in the middle of the sidewalk downtown and turn and say, “Be a dear and get that, would you, Paul?”

  “All I’m saying,” she continued, “is that there’s a line. And above the line, life is good, so keep on living, because you’re healthy and alert and everything is okay. But below the line, life isn’t good. Below the line, you’re in pain, or you’re hurting others, or you don’t enjoy seeing your loved ones anymore, or you’re embarrassed all the time because you’re incontinent and you’re pissing on yourself. Below that line, pulling the plug is better than not pulling the plug. Just play it by ear when you get there.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” he said.

  She nestled in, resting her head on his leg.

  “If he dies,” she asked a moment later, “will that make you the alpha dog in your family?”

  He’d once explained to her how wolves organized themselves as social animals, referencing research he’d done for the book he was working on, tentatively titled Nature for Morons.

  “No,” Paul told her. “That would be my brother, Carl.”

  “Oh,” Stella said. “So you’re not even going to try?”

  “Don’t worry about it — I lost that battle a long time ago,” he said. “That’s one thing you and I have in common. You don’t remember, but you were the shiest pup in the litter when I got you. Your siblings used to knock you all over the place.”

  “In that case,” she said, “you might want to bring some sort of offering …” But he was asleep before she got the words out.

  She sniffed the air, then cocked her head to listen a moment. She heard the furnace in the basement kick on. A truck, somewhere far off. The pilot light in the gas stove hissing. A
mouse scratching, somewhere behind the mopboard in the kitchen, and of course, her master’s breathing, his heart beating, his teeth grinding slightly, something he did when he was stressed. Other than that, all seemed to be in order.

  How difficult it was now to remember her siblings. She could remember running wild through the weeds, usually last in the order, but it never bothered her to be last, as long as she had someone to run with. She remembered a farm and, vaguely, a fat man playing the banjo in the twilight, singing:

  What you gonna do when the liquor runs out, sweet thing?

  What you gonna do when the liquor runs out, sweet thing?

  What you gonna do when the liquor runs out?

  Stand around the corner with your mouth in a pout,

  Sweet thing, sweet thing, sweet thing.

  “Good night, Paul,” she said. He was snoring, but that never bothered her either.

  2

  Come Home, Waffle Belly

  His sister’s given name was Elizabeth, but everyone called her Bits. She was two years older than Paul, fair haired but not blond by Minnesota standards. She was waiting at the gate, alone, and gave him a big hug. She’d left the kids at home with her husband, Eugene. “They wanted to come meet you,” she said, “but I was afraid with the snow they might cancel your flight.”

  Bits was his favorite sibling, despite the fact that when they were young, she’d occasionally tortured Paul, the baby in the family, as older siblings do. He had to admire the inventiveness with which she had tormented him. For example, she used to pin him to the ground, with his older brother Carl’s help, and sit on him and pull his shirt up and press a tennis racket against his belly and then rake the extruded skin with a hairbrush, so that when she took the tennis racket away, he had what she called a waffle belly. She was even tempered, the fixer, the go-between middle child and the anxious one, fretting over details on a bad day but levelheaded on a good one. Her house was only a mile and a half from their parents’ house, so she’d always been the one to drop by and check in on Harrold and Beverly to see if they needed anything.

  “How is he?” he asked his sister.

  “He’s stable. He’s not good, but he’s not getting any worse. You’ll see. How was your flight?”

  He made a so-so gesture with his hand. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a good conversation on an airplane.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did they feed you?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “I think the coffee shop at the hospital is still open. The food’ll make you ill, but if you get sick, you’re already in a hospital.”

  He’d also had four vodkas on the plane and needed to pee. Airport bathrooms annoyed him, guys bellying up to the urinals with their bags over their shoulders, knocking into you with their luggage and making you tinkle on your shoes. He contemplated draining one of the nip bottles he’d stashed in his suitcase but decided to wait until later. People were waiting for him.

  As they drove, she filled Paul in as best she could. Their father had had about as bad an ischemic stroke as you could have, she said. The only fortunate aspect was that he hadn’t had a hemorrhagic stroke, since burst blood vessels were harder to treat than clots. The damage was primarily to the right hemisphere of Harrold’s brain and to the motor cortex. He would need to relearn how to do virtually everything, she said. He could move his right hand and lightly grip with it but was otherwise paralyzed. He had some spasticity in his left foot and leg, indicating live nerve action, and he seemed to be aware of his circumstances, but he had had two severe seizures in the first twenty-four hours. He was being closely monitored. She warned her brother that he might be shocked when he saw their father, with so many tubes and wires and machines hooked up.

  Bits maneuvered her minivan past familiar landmarks, a Rexall drugstore, a sporting goods store, the Sears Building. When he got to the hospital, Paul found a men’s room near the gift shop, drained another nip, popped a Life Saver, ran his fingers through his hair in the mirror, and then went to face the music.

  “I hate this place,” he said as they walked down the hall, following a blue stripe painted on the floor. Paul had been to Mercy Hospital three times before, the first time for stitches when a kid in sixth grade hit him in the eye with a snowball, and the second time after he’d broken his arm playing high school football. The last time was when he’d visited his namesake, Grandpa Paul, who’d lain in his bed after cancer surgery, shriveling up like a mushroom on a windowsill.

  “I was in labor for thirty-seven hours the last time I was here,” his sister said. “Oh, the memories.”

  “They should bill you by the hour,” Paul said. “They’d move people out faster.”

  “I did feel guilty for malingering,” Bits said, “but I was having such a good time.”

  Paul stopped her in the hallway.

  “I have to ask,” he said. “Are you mad at me?”

  “For what?”

  “I was supposed to be pricing snowblowers,” Paul said. “If he hadn’t been shoveling, this might not have happened.”

  “I was mad at you for maybe five seconds,” she told him. “You’re not why a blood clot stuck in his head. And if it wasn’t shoveling, it would just have been something else. He could have had a stroke lying in bed. I said the same thing to Mom. She was blaming herself because she thought if she’d been watching out the window, she would have seen him when he fell. You can’t watch somebody all the time. If you could, my kids wouldn’t have so many stitches in their heads.”

  The door to his father’s hospital room, just down the hall from intensive care, was slightly ajar, so he opened it slowly. Paul’s mother, Beverly, was off on an errand, a nurse said. Bits went to look for her. Before she left, she gave Paul’s arm a squeeze and said, “Don’t worry — he won’t bite you.”

  The vodka numbed him, but not enough. His first impression was that his father, with his dentures out and his glasses off, and his snow-white hair, and the tubes in his nose and in his veins, looked a lot like Grandpa Paul, the difference being that Grandpa Paul had been semiconscious and cheerful right up to the last moment. Paul’s father’s eyes were closed, his breathing perceptible only at close range. A pink plastic apparatus resembling a handlebar mustache connected to clear plastic tubes brought oxygen to his nostrils. IV drips fed drugs and serums and nutrients into both arms. A half-full catheter bag hung at the foot of the bed, collecting urine. Other sensors taped to various parts of his father’s body brought data to a multitiered monitor, reporting things like temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and Paul wasn’t sure what else. An array of unused equipment had been pushed against the far wall. Somehow the first impression was that this was more of a science project than a human drama, or a scene from some doctor show on television, not quite real. He wondered what his father might be thinking. He was wearing a hospital johnny, white cotton with blue diamonds on it. On the bed stand next to him was a bouquet of flowers, an empty glass, a Diet Coke can, a half-consumed sleeve of Ritz crackers, a Bible, and his mother’s reading glasses. The television mounted in the corner of the room was off, but Paul wanted to turn it on, in dire need of a distraction. How ineluctably strange, Paul thought, to be able to move, see, talk, hear, and comprehend, while his father couldn’t. Harrold had been the source of whatever strength Paul possessed. If the old man had taught him anything, it was how to persevere.

  “Where are you now?” he wanted to ask.

  His father was only seventy-two but looked ninety in the fluorescent light, waxy and pale. In a sense he’d come full circle, for the odd thing was that Paul’s earliest memory of his father, one of the earliest memories he had, was of Harrold lying in a hospital bed, a different hospital, in a different era, without a tenth of the technology surrounding him today. Paul had been just shy of three years old and had no memory of the accident itself, but he remembered seeing his father with bandages around his head and tubes up his nose, after he’d driven off an icy road and into a
bridge with the whole family in the car. They were coming home from a pre-Christmas reunion organized by some of Harrold’s navy buddies, men he’d served with in the Pacific. Paul could remember holding Grandpa Paul’s hand, walking down a long hospital corridor that smelled of disinfectant, hearing voices in the air, doctors’ names coming over the public-address system. He remembered being told that if he was good he could buy anything he wanted in the gift shop, only to discover sadly that there was nothing there he wanted. He remembered being told to keep very quiet, until he came to believe any noise he made might accidentally kill somebody, so he kept very quiet.

  They’d stopped first to see his mother, who’d been less seriously injured. Beverly had managed a weak smile and squeezed his hand. Then they’d gone to see Harrold, who looked at Paul but couldn’t speak. Carl had broken his shoulder and had a bandage on his head for a while, and Bits had bumped her head and suffered cuts from flying glass. She still had a scar above her right eyebrow, which over the years had become a line that made her look permanently bemused. People who didn’t know her sometimes thought she was being sarcastic or ironic when she wasn’t. Paul had emerged from the accident more or less unscathed, a few cuts, a chest bruise where he hit the headrest, and a collapsed lung that was easily reinflated. The kids had stayed with Grandpa Paul and Grandma Lula while their parents recovered.