I didn’t have anything to say to Grandma, but I didn’t feel weak like I had the last time I stood there. I was a warrior woman. I thanked her for keeping the timer. It was disfigured, but still lived a long, purposeful life. Sitting on my mother’s counter, it reminded me to forgive. I got back in the car.
“I don’t know what happens to my body part,” I said.
“They incinerate it,” he said.
“Then I can scatter the ashes,” I said. “But I doubt they incinerate it all by itself. That’s a lot of fire for one body part.”
“Then we’ll do it.”
“A backyard cremation? I don’t think so.”
“They have to give it to you, some religions would insist on it. We’ll take it to a pet place, like a hamster. Or, a Dachshund. Depending.”
“I like that idea. I can send an advance messenger to Margaret.”
“That’s a new one.”
I looked out the window and it hit me.
“A Dachshund?” I asked.
We started laughing. Chance and Meggie paused in their background vocals to look at us, and then they started laughing. Such a fine edge. We drove down the road laughing. Chance was checking Meggie’s face to see if that’s what we were still doing. Wait until they grew up. I would tell their dates that they laughed about their mother having her arm cremated like a Dachshund. I’d put it in their letters too.
SEVENTEEN
I had a preliminary meeting with the prosthetics people in San Diego and settled on something cosmetic to start with. It would depend on what I had left. Every centimeter counted. I would fly back after I was healed to have it fitted and color matched.
The waiting room was like the staging area of a horror movie. At least half the people were missing body parts. I should have felt better hanging out with my new homies. I was going to be fairly intact compared to most of them, but one thing you learn in Alanon is that trying to feel better about your own predicament by comparing it to the awfulness in other lives is a nonstarter. Once you leave the meeting, you’re back in your car stewing in your own dysfunctional juices. People, who you’d think would just stay in bed in a dark room until they died of their psychic wounds, could be miracles of the rebound. While others, who were just whiners, couldn’t put together even the most rudimentary life.
As we sometimes say in the business, it’s all in the script. I sure as hell hoped we had some wiggle room with the rewrite, because I left the prosthetics place and all those horrible stories, still pissed about my situation. I might be one of the whiners.
∞
We soldiered through the next few days. Anna had waved the lawsuit flag to be sure I was scheduled for Wednesday, high noon. Everyone was solemn as I disappeared into pre-op. They let Jon go in with me, more Anna at work.
The surgeon would make the call about what could be preserved once he had me under and had a chance to look around. I asked if they could just deaden the arm, keep me awake so they could tell me what was happening as it went along so I wouldn’t wake up to shocking news. The surgeon said no. The anesthesiologist said I would be happier asleep if they pulled out the Skilsaw. Doctors need to rein in the offhand language; my production designer mind was already in the power tool aisle at Home Depot.
I’d read that my unfiltered subconscious would hear the whole thing anyway. He said that was true, and suggested I listen to music. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wreck a piece of perfectly good music by linking it to a Skilsaw event. He said to get the music; it was good for all involved.
I asked Jon to pick something I liked, but could live without. He came back with Four Seasons. Man was always thinking. He knew I’d heard it performed in Paris, with Steve. He held my hand until we reached the doors of the surgical suite.
∞
It was as cold as the walk-in cooler at the restaurant. The nurses hadn’t gotten the Vivaldi memo. They were setting up to blasting rock and roll that shot through my nerves and made me anxious. Their voices jangled to the music. I was too overwhelmed by cold and fear to complain. So I smiled.
They transferred me to the operating table and exposed my left arm and shoulder, swabbed it with disinfectant and attached it to a board. A cutting board. My stomach clenched. I should have had him knock me out while I was still at home.
“I’m so cold,” I said.
They were smiling and efficient. They attached leads and piled heated blankets on me, and dug out my right arm for the IV line.
The anesthesiologist came in and started Valium. The surgeon appeared over me in surgical scrubs, hat and mask. The apparition patted the arm he might be cutting off in a few minutes. It looked a hundred years old. I was getting drowsy.
“Save every centimeter,” I said. “It’s important.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
“Do better than that,” I said.
The anesthesiologist replaced the rock and roll with Vivaldi, put an oxygen mask over my face, and said they’d see me in a little while. Vivaldi eased into autumn and took everyone down a few notches.
∞
I woke up, throwing up. The nurse got me over a pink plastic pan. Why is it shaped like a kidney bean?
I woke up looking at the ceiling. Jon was sitting, watching me. He looked sober. It couldn’t be good; he wasn’t supposed to be in the recovery room. Tears ran down the sides of my face.
“Hey,” he said.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Just the finger.”
“Nothing else?
“Nothing else.”
“Promise me?”
“I promise you.”
I went back to sleep.
The next time I woke up the surgeon was standing over me. No mask or hat. He had a long nose and long delicate fingers. I’d started noticing fingers, the same way I noticed everyone who drove a Subaru. So far everyone had four tires and ten fingers. He was a tad flip about losing just one finger when it could have been the entire arm. I told him I very much appreciated his work, and then pointed out that, of all people, a surgeon should appreciate the importance of fingers. He thought I’d hardly miss one finger doing production design. I tell ya. Like Mother Nature gave us ten fingers on a whim.
∞
The pain was intense at first, but eased off until I felt pretty good. A few days and I was able to go to Eric and Anna’s and hang out with Jon and the kids. It was a relief to have it behind me. My hand was bandaged so I wasn’t dealing with reality yet, but I’d seen enough pictures at the prosthetics place to have a good idea of what I couldn’t see. Fingers don’t look big, but the space they leave is huge.
Jon and I were in bed. Meggie had taken up residence in Eric and Anna’s bed. They loved talking to her in the morning. She loved a more appreciative audience. She even acted like she was in charge of Chancie who was sleeping in there too.
“I’ve enjoyed our time together,” said Jon, “but I think I’ll take my kids and go home.”
“Hostages?”
“Yep.”
“Lucky babies. Did you take care of my finger?”
“Yep. They’ll ship it to us in a cedar box with brass hinges and a lock. The receptionist freaked out when she realized what she was holding and I even had it in a beer cooler. We can do a paddle out.”
“Can we go to the shrimp shack after?”
He got close to my ear so no one could hear.
“Forget shrimp. We’re going some place private and fuck our brains out. The dating bullshit needs to end.”
“Dating was your idea.”
“I’m over it. Come home.”
“I like the first thing you said better. The brains out thing. I don’t want to wait, it will be weeks.”
I slid my good hand down his belly. He looked surprised, then smiled.
“That is so inappropriate,” he said.
“I know. I’m a nine-fingered hillbilly tramp on drugs. I can stop if you want. I don’t want you to feel bad about yourself in the morning.”
>
It didn’t feel like we’d be stopping for a while.
“Jesus, Hannah.”
“You’re welcome to service my jugs.”
“Okay.”
“Atta boy.”
∞
Eric, Anna and I saw them off at the airport and headed back to their house.
“What ever happened to the girl who hit Meggie?” asked Anna.
“She’s with an auntie on Maui. Going to school. She might make it. She’s the youngest of five. Detective Kawasaki said her father beat every one of them out of the house.”
“What did they do with your finger?” asked Eric.
Anna and I looked at each other. She was the one who had burrowed it into a pint of ice cream until Jon could get it into their vet. It was wrapped in plastic. The ice cream was still edible. Eric looked at us.
“What? Is that insensitive?” he asked.
“No. It’s fine,” I said. “We’re having it cremated through your vet. Like a hamster. Not like a Dachshund, fortunately. Then Jon and I are going to scatter the ashes, light a candle and flick water, or something. Should take about thirty-seconds. We’re going to fuck our brains out after that.”
“Whoa. Talk about too much information,” he said. “Like a hamster? Did the hospital set that up?”
“No. Jon.”
“Next he’ll buy a plaque. He have to pay someone to take it over there?”
“He took it. We stored it in your freezer until they agreed to do it.”
Anna looked out the window and hummed. “William Tell Overture,” I think.
“Our freezer? The one where we keep food?” asked Eric.
“You have one for fingers?” I asked.
Anna’s humming got louder. Eric looked at her and realized she knew.
“You let them put a finger in our freezer?”
“Nice, Eric. Now we’re them. We’re going to be grandparents together, you know,” I said. “It was triple wrapped, way in the back. Mint chip ice cream. You don’t like that flavor.”
He looked at Anna again. She hummed across the windshield and into his face. Then smiled. He looked back at me.
“Now I understand why you do so well in third world countries,” he said. “It’s probably illegal here.”
He looked at Anna. “Didn’t you take some kind of sacred vows to uphold the law when you were sworn into the bar?”
“It’s not any more illegal than having your grandmother hauled around in a semi,” she said. “That was your idea.”
She rolled down the window to release the pressure building up inside the car and hummed on.
“Well, you took vows with me,” he said.
“Sickness and health. Till death do you part,” I said. “Nothing about missing or freezing fingers. Jon and I already checked, Mr. Head-In-A-Planter. It didn’t bother Mom.”
“She knew?”
“She likes mint chip, we had to warn her.”
“Fuck me,” he said.
We drove for a while longer with Anna’s humming as traveling music. Eric’s brain whirred, no smoke out the ears yet. He looked in the mirror again.
“You know what you sound like?” he asked.
“A nine-fingered hillbilly living the Percocet dream?”
“What?” he asked.
“Never mind,” I said.
He looked at me in the mirror again.
“You sound just like you did when you were a little kid in the back seat of the plane. Always with the come back in the headset. Dad thought you were a crack up.”
“Dad loved me,” I said.
“Yeah, he really did,” he said. “I think he loved you best. He would have put your finger in the freezer.”
I choked up. I didn’t have a come back for that. Eric looked at me in the mirror again, but didn’t say anything. Anna stopped humming.
“Did Mom ever meet the other woman?” I asked. “She said no. It didn’t sound right.”
Eric glanced at Anna and then in the mirror again.
“She showed up at Mom’s office a few years after he died. Mom refused to see her, so she wrote her a letter. Mom tore it up. It was right around the time David married Asp. Now that we know, a really shitty time for the woman to come out from under her rock.”
“Poor Mom. Wasn’t she curious?”
“About what? How they met. How much they loved each other. That he was going to ask for a divorce?”
“What if she was trying to make amends?” I asked.
“Mom didn’t know about amends then. She said the only thing that mattered was that the woman had ruined her marriage. There’s no making amends for that, I’ll give her that.”
“He had a big part in it,” I said.
“Yeah. I know,” said Eric. “He managed to escape taking responsibility for his side of things.”
“And Mom wasted all those years blaming herself,” I said.
“He wasn’t around to remind her of how awful it was when she found out,” said Anna. “His part faded and he became a god in her eyes.”
“How did she find out?”
“From a friend,” said Anna. “The woman enjoyed telling her.”
“Some friend,” I said.
“He made it worse,” said Eric. “He denied it for weeks and she wanted to believe him. She defended him to the woman. To Asp. To all of us. She ended up more humiliated.”
“That’s shitty,” I said. “You always said he was a good man.”
“He was,” he said. “But he was an asshole about that.”
“She still sees the woman for lunch a few times a year,” said Anna. “The woman always rehashes the story, and the years that followed. Mom always comes away feeling bad about herself, even now. Arthur keeps telling her to stop seeing the woman, but she won’t. She must get something out of it.”
“She wants a different outcome,” I said.
“The story is never going to change,” said Anna. “Neither is the woman. Not while Mom serves her purpose.”
“Do you think their marriage would have survived if he hadn’t died?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Eric. “Be nice to think so.”
We drove for a few minutes in our own thoughts. Eric looked in the rearview mirror again.
“I should have told you,” he said. “You were still young. Then I just forgot.
“It’s okay. I seem to hear things in the right order,” I said. “So are we still getting a condo?”
“Yeah. We’re heading up the weekend after you leave to look around. The kids are going. We’ll send you guys pictures.”
EIGHTEEN
Jon took my bag and pulled me into his hip when I came through the exit gate. He glanced down at my cowboy boots, a bad footwear choice for airport security.
“The kids are over at Kaia’s,” he said.
“Good place for them.”
∞
The next few weeks at home were mellow. We’d added several people to our extended family over the last six months. Meli and Wiki were back on the job. Jimmy and Keith came for dinner every few nights. Jimmy fed me Chinese herbs to clear my system after the baffling assault of antibiotics. I thought Keith would talk about all the soldiers he’d treated with missing parts, but he never mentioned work. His silence kept it in perspective.
We gave the ramp to a housing program Jon supported, and Jon and Victor spent a weekday afternoon drinking beer and slapping together a new track on the ground. Meggie did test runs to be sure it was challenging, but not so challenging she spent all her time tipped over in the shell driveway. She missed the speed she had gotten from the slope. She was almost five and like me, impatient.
Russ removed the whole hand bandage and gave me back my pincher. The glimpse of empty space hit my stomach. It was no concept; it was reality as a reality.
Jon was teaching Mark to paddle. I had guessed correctly, his torso was covered with a spider web of scars from a roadside bomb. I told him they made a beautiful pattern when t
he skin around them tanned. I went with stained glass, not a shattered windshield.
Mark and I were sitting on the lanai one afternoon almost six weeks after the surgery, watching Meggie and Chance with Meli and Wiki on the sand. They were laughing their heads off at Chance. He was just able to stand up on his own. He’d fart, they’d all laugh, and then he’d laugh, which made him fart and fall down. They didn’t stop laughing until he ran out of gas, literally. Mark smiled for the first time.
“It’s about time, Mark. I didn’t even know you had teeth. Did Celeste send you a gift?”
“Yes.”
“The ride was more than any of us were prepared to do.”
“She’s lonesome,” he said.
“She’ll meet people running her bar,” I said. “Have you been married?”
“Before,” he said.
Mr. Chatty and Celeste had developed an email friendship. Her vacuous but high word count must have soothed his terse soul.
Jon came home and took Mark out for a lesson. Mom called from Nordstrom’s wanting sizes for the kids.
“They don’t need anything, Mom.”
“I thought I’d send something for Chance with Margaret’s birthday present,” she said.
Damn it! Meggie’s birthday was coming and I’d pulled a Jackie and completely forgotten. Mom could sense it.
“Have you planned her party?” she asked.
“Not yet, we’re going to keep it simple with all that’s happened. Maybe a little picnic.”
“Would you like me to get you something?” she asked. “You love their tee shirt bras.”
“I’ll shop when I’m there. Underwear is the least of my problems.”
“Nice underwear always makes me feel better about things,” she said.
“Mom. Eric told me you still see the woman who told you about Daddy, and that she puts you down. You don’t have to do that anymore.”
Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 02 - Spring Moon Page 30
