More Than Enough

by John Fulton

  “We’re not a day care center here,” she said, still marching me down the hallway.

  “I know,” I said.

  She must have heard something in my voice then because she changed her tune. “A mess,” she said, “is just a mess.”

  Locked inside a large shower, I undressed and deposited my jeans, underwear, and socks in one of the white garbage bags, then handed the bag off to Nurse Brown, who stood outside the door. On the wall opposite the shower, a full-length mirror reflected me—naked, tall, and skinny with a film of gray liquid running down my legs. I hated my body at the age of fifteen. I hated the new patches of hair, the boniness of it, the awkward dangly limbs. I tried not to look, but I was no more capable of looking away from that strange sight than I had been of looking away from the colonel. As I breathed in the thick odors of shit, I thought of the singing bum and tried to hum, as he had, the melody to “Stormy Weather” but produced only cracked, splintered tones—noise and not music. I gave up on feeling better about anything that had happened that day and went limp beneath the hot drum of water from the showerhead.

  When I stepped back into the hallway, I was dressed in the blue pajama bottoms worn by every old man in that place. Luckily, my red winter coat with the vial of Mr. Warner’s urine zipped into the pocket and my T-shirt that said TEAM PLAYER on it distinguished me from the two old men who were just then dawdling by. “Here,” Nurse Brown said, handing me my dirty clothes, which she had double-bagged in the white garbage liners so that, I guessed, the stink wouldn’t get out. Dressed in the uniform of Oak Groves and carrying my shitty clothes in a bag, I followed Nurse Brown.

  * * *

  She took me back into the front room where Jenny sat now looking down at her lap. “I caught your sister playing with Mrs. Smith’s hair,” Nurse Brown said. “I’m afraid you two are just going to have to sit here until your mother is done. And I mean sit. I don’t want you doing anything else, and I don’t want you going anywhere. Understood?”

  Jenny lifted her head and nodded at her. “Understood,” my sister said.

  I knew that Jenny had not ratted on me, and I was thankful. All the same, I refused to play the part of a five-year-old. “Whatever,” I said, which was a favorite word of mine in those days.

  “Sit down,” Nurse Brown commanded, pointing to the seat next to Jenny. I sat down and put the bag with my shitty clothes on the chair next to me. “And don’t go anywhere.” As she said those words, I looked right at the part of her mouth with the bloodred mole and watched the mole twitch as her mouth moved. Then her mouth was gone, and once again Jenny and I were alone.

  “Thank you for not saying anything,” I said, not looking at Jenny.

  “What happened to you? Where are your clothes?”

  “Nothing happened to me.”

  “Your hair is wet,” she said. “You smell like soap.”

  “I just washed my hands.”

  Jenny poked at the garbage bag. “Are your clothes in there? Did you get sick or something?”

  I moved the bag away from her. “I just washed my stupid hands.”

  She was too tired to keep on bugging me about something I wasn’t going to tell her. “I would have told,” she said. “I wanted to. But I didn’t know how to say it. It was too terrible to say about you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why you did that to Mrs. Smith.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “You were really trying to hurt her.” I could hear from her voice that Jenny was still shaken. “I didn’t know who you were. I didn’t recognize you.”

  “I wasn’t thinking, I guess.” She didn’t say anything for a while. “I was still me. I wasn’t anybody else or anything.”

  “You were such a bully.” That comment bothered me. It made me think of Danny Olsen and what he had done to me and how my sister seemed to think I had done the same to old Mrs. Smith. “You were worse than a bully.”

  “I had to do something,” I said. “That was that man’s mother.”

  “She was an old woman,” Jenny said. She actually stood up and moved a seat away from me.

  Seeing her move, seeing the empty seat open up between us, I became anxious about all the wrongs I’d committed that day. “Jenny,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it.” She looked away from me then, and someone down the hallway, in a place where we could no longer go now that we had been grounded to the reception area, screamed loudly, almost insanely. God, did I want to leave that place. “I just sort of lost it. I wish I hadn’t acted like that. I wish I hadn’t scared her. I just wasn’t thinking, Jenny.”

  Jenny turned a little toward me. “Are you thinking now?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m thinking.”

  She sat next to me again and put her head on my shoulder. “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Is this really happening?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I’m not going to let it happen. I’m going to do whatever I have to do to keep it from happening.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t do anything,” Jenny said. She was tired and yawned and rubbed her nose against my shoulder. “Maybe we should just see what happens.”

  Then she lifted her watch and said the time out loud, which she’d gotten in the habit of doing as a way of showing off her new Swatch. “It’s half past five already.”

  That’s when I thought about our father at home. He’d been home all afternoon on what was supposed to be one of his days for studying. He was probably wondering where we were, since Mom usually arrived home by four-thirty. He was probably worried about us. He was probably looking around him at the empty house and starting to feel alone and left out and maybe irritated. “We should call Dad,” I said.

  “Nurse Brown said we couldn’t leave our seats,” Jenny said. When I got up anyway and walked behind the unmanned reception desk and picked up the telephone, Jenny grabbed on firmly to her chair handles and said, “I’m not getting up. I’m staying right here.”

  “Since when have you been so determined to follow the rules?” I asked.

  “Things are too crazy.”

  The phone rang almost five times before he picked up. “Yep,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said back to him, a little annoyed because he was supposed to say “Parker residence” or, at the very least, hello, which even Jenny was capable of doing.

  “Yep,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Is this a prank call?” He sounded annoyed.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”

  “I thought I’d call to let you know where we were.”

  “Uh-huh.” I could hear the TV in the background, and I could tell that he was more interested in whatever he was watching than in talking to me.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m dandy,” he said. “I’m watching pregame stuff right now and eating a little popcorn. It’s the Jazz versus the Bulls, and things are going to get started in about a half hour. You and me can watch it as soon as you get home.”

  “It’s you and I, Dad,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes I just wanted my father to speak correctly. Sometimes I just wanted him to be studying on his stupid study days and not to be watching basketball.

  “What?”

  “You and I can watch it as soon as you get home,” I said. “That’s how you say that. Not you and me.”

  “You’re acting uptight, kiddo,” he said. “I talk the way I talk.” He ate some popcorn. “God, did you know that Malone is shooting nearly seventy percent right now?” I didn’t say anything. His carefree tone pissed me off. He’d been sitting on his ass for hours, I knew. “Hello. You there?”

  “You flunked,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Mom showed me your report card. You got one D-minus and two F’s.”

  “Where the hell’s your mother, Steven?” He was
n’t chewing on popcorn, and I had the feeling that he wasn’t watching TV anymore. He was mad.

  “She said it cost us three thousand dollars, Dad. That was our money. It belonged to all of us.”

  “Hey,” he said. “You knock that off. You knock it off right now. You put your mother on the line this minute.”

  He was a lousy disciplinarian. He’d never been able to wield authority very convincingly. “Mom can’t talk right now,” I said.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “Why aren’t you all home yet?”

  I felt my forehead heat up and my face flush. I wasn’t sure that I could tell him, even though I knew he needed to hear it. I wasn’t sure I could even open my mouth.

  “Steven,” he said. “Hello.”

  I swallowed. “Somebody died,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “She can’t talk to you because somebody—an old man at Oak Groves—died while she was working here today. She’s doing something right now that has to do with the dead guy. She’s doing paperwork or something. He fell on her and died while she was giving him a bath this morning.”

  “I hope your mom’s okay,” he said. “I guess that stuff happens in those places.” He actually put some popcorn in his mouth and began eating it. “So when will you be home?”

  “She’s not okay,” I said. “Nothing is okay.”

  “What’s that mean?” he said through a mouthful of popcorn.

  “You don’t know?” I asked. I still couldn’t tell him, and I hoped that Mom had left a note or a phone message or something that might have given him an idea of the situation, that might have put her notion in his head so that I didn’t have to be the one to say it.

  “Know what?”

  “I thought Mom might have hinted at it or something earlier.”

  “Hinted at it?” His voice was worried.

  “Or something,” I said.

  “Something? Something what? Hey, Steven. Earth to Steven. This is ground control. You out there?”

  This was an old game we used to play when I was younger because I had been—and still was, really—such a space-cadet kid, always zoning out and daydreaming and reading sci-fi novels and comic books. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”

  “What’s it like up there? You see the moon? You see any stars?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I just see space. It’s dark.”

  “Oh,” he said. He could tell I didn’t want to play that game. “So what’s going on, Steven? What’s happening? Where the hell are you?”

  “How’s Noir?” I asked, because I knew that my dog must have been lonely tied up in his little backyard. I knew he was waiting for me to come home and was probably confused about my not being there.

  “Steven,” my father asked, “what’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you if you tell me how Noir is.” I knew that from where he sat in front of the TV he could just turn around and see Noir through the sliding-glass door.

  “I guess he’s okay,” my father said. “He’s tangled up in his chain again, of course.”

  I didn’t like the thought of Noir out there wrapped up in his chain. “Would you please go untangle him?”

  “He doesn’t care, Steven,” my father said. “If I go out there and untangle him, he’ll just walk around for a few minutes until he ties himself up again.”

  “Please,” I said. “Then I’ll tell you.”

  “All right,” my father said. While he was gone, I turned around and faced Jenny, who was still pretty tense and holding on to her chair handles with both hands.

  “Somebody’s going to catch you,” she said.

  “I’ve got to tell him.”

  “What if they catch you?”

  “Let them catch me.”

  “There,” my father said. “He’s untangled.”

  “Thank you.” I meant it. I was glad that Noir wasn’t trapped and hunkered down in that stupid chain anymore.

  “So what the hell is happening?”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’m going to tell you.”

  “You’re making this sound bad.”

  “It is sort of bad,” I said. “Mom really got upset when Colonel Warner died on her.”

  “Please tell me, for Christ’s sake.” So I did. I told him how Colonel Warner fell dead on her while she was washing him and that now Mom was leaving us. He paused and took in a few breaths and said, “She’s always leaving us. You know that.”

  “I think this might be different.”

  He took in another deep breath and let it out slowly. I heard the TV click off. “She doesn’t have anywhere to go,” he said. “She doesn’t know anyone in this city.” I didn’t know what to say. “Say something,” he said.

  “She might have found someone to know.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure, though. Maybe she hasn’t found anyone. I don’t know.”

  “Who?” he asked again.

  “Another man,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh.” For a long time we didn’t say anything, and I just stood there in these blue hospital pajamas with my red winter coat on looking at Jenny, who was holding on to her, chair with all her life, as if she were sitting over a cliff or something, as she very slowly moved her head back and forth the way you do when you tell somebody no. No, no, no, her head kept saying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t say that. There is nothing to be sorry about. Nothing is going to happen, all right? We are going to take care of everything. Okay?” When I didn’t say anything, he said again, “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

  He was quiet. “Jesus,” he finally said. “Jesus shit Jesus. Who? What guy?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I lied. “Just a guy. He lives somewhere in the Avenues.” He made some sort of noise, and I imagined him pulling on his hair, digging into it with his hands. “Maybe you should come over here and talk to her. We’re at Oak Groves. Maybe you can change her mind.”

  “I don’t have the car,” he said.

  “You could take a cab.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “I don’t have any cash on me.”

  I wasn’t used to my father acting like this—so helpless—and it made me impatient. “You can take a cab anyway.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

  “You’d better hurry. We won’t be here much longer.” Then I said, maybe because I wanted to warn him, “She’s different. She’s not herself, really.”

  “I’ll hurry,” he said. And we hung up.

  * * *

  When I sat back down, Jenny wanted to talk about God again. “Janet Spencer says,” she said, looking at me with groggy eyes, “that if you don’t live by the Ten Commandments, you won’t inherit the Glory.”

  She just said that out of nowhere, and I had to admit it sounded nice—inheriting the Glory—even if I had no idea what the Glory was and even if I didn’t appreciate the sort of brainwashing my little sister was being subjected to. “That’s pure BS,” I said. “Anyway, what is the Glory, and who really wants to inherit it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Jenny said. “It’s just something you get from God after you die.”

  I didn’t know why it sounded so good to me—the Glory—but it did. Maybe because I had spent what seemed like hours—I think it had only been one hour at the most—in a place that had taught me that there was no Glory, that, at the most, there was just an endless darkness or an unbearable light and no soft, in-between spaces and no spaces above or beyond those two things. I was tired and maybe wanted to believe something, if only for a few minutes. Outside a soft drizzle still came down and a swollen sliver of red winter sun bled over the mountains and colored the air this strange, hurt, twilight color that didn’t seem to belong to any hour of the day. I was cold. I felt weak and exposed in those stupid pajamas. When I looked down at the white doubled-up garbage bag, I wondered if I couldn’t sm
ell the stink of myself sealed away in there, if some of that stink wasn’t leaking out. Then I smelled it faintly, though I think it was the thought of that stink and nothing else that I was smelling. And that’s when I had this vision, though it was more of a feeling than something I saw, of what the Glory was. The Glory was hardly an eternity. It was the opposite of eternity. It was a single moment in which I noticed all the red evening light in the room and felt Jenny leaning against me, felt her every breath, and heard a few mindless bird chirps—a black string of Glory sound—coming from some place outside—a treetop, a rain gutter—that I would never see. It wasn’t that you were going to die and go on living for an eternity after death. It wasn’t that at all. The Glory was the way Jenny held on to my arm with her hand. It was the way I felt the softness of her touch through the fabric of my coat. It was the way our shadows stretched across the room in that red light. It was the way it no longer mattered, if only for an instant, that you would live or die. Even though you knew something terrible was about to happen, you didn’t give a damn about it, didn’t give it a single thought, if only for a second or two. That was the Glory and, for that instant, I knew it. Then everything came back to me, and it was gone. I remembered that nothing about that day was right, that my father needed to arrive very soon, and that he probably wouldn’t make it on time, that you could count on him, among other things, for not making it on time. Jesus, could you count on him for that. “There is no Glory,” I told Jenny because I thought she had better get used to that fact. “There is no after you die. When you die, you die forever. You’re just gone.”

  “That’s not what I know in my heart,” she said, nudging her forehead into my arm and seeming to position herself more deeply, more securely into the comforting world that she believed in. “Besides,” she said, “a lot of people believe in God.”