The Coward

by Jarred McGinnis

  She came back with two yellow pills. I gripped the rails so tight that my fingers hurt and tried to pull the rail from the bed. I wanted something besides me to be broken. I wanted the nurses to be as scared too. I wanted my roommate to be awake and witnessing. The pain in my head started to fade, but my legs were still being twisted off.

  ‘The pills aren’t working.’

  ‘They will. They will.’

  ‘No! They won’t.’

  The two nurses looked at each other, looked at me, wordlessly conferring. I wanted to shout, ‘Why are you so calm? Look at my legs!’ A nurse left and came back filling a syringe. She gave me the shot and calm and peace and a floating goodness spread through my rebelling body. My legs drifted back to their normal position and I felt warm and exhausted and happy to be going to sleep and, as I drifted off, I heard my roommate’s thick Texan drawl say, ‘Welcome to the shitshow, partner.’

  Later that night, the crack of light under the door flared into full sun then quickly died back to its strip of harsh glow. The curtain around my bed squeaked open, closed and a woman giggled.

  ‘Hey, babes,’ the woman said. By the outline of shadow, I knew her hand was on the bed. Maybe on my legs. Touching me. Even though you are paralysed, you still sense the presence of your legs. They are there and you vaguely know their positions, but the details are scrubbed. She touched my foot, maybe, then I guessed she ran her hand up to my knee. She patted my knee, I think. Was she touching my thigh? I didn’t speak or move. She drew closer, and I smelled the freshness of her soap and shampoo. I realised my mouth was hanging open. I swallowed.

  ‘Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,’ she whispered as she brought her face to mine. I opened my mouth to speak.

  She said, ‘Shit, wrong bed.’ Her shadow disappeared. My neighbour’s curtain squeaked. ‘Hey, babes.’

  The grumbling of my roommate waking up, a hushed conversation, their kisses, the hiss of two beers opening. I thought about her touching my leg, leaning in to give a kiss that wasn’t mine. Longing filled me. Their bed creaked, creaked again, giggles, creak, creak. I didn’t want to listen, but I did. The bed’s motor whirred, too loudly, as I raised the top half. She moaned and I stopped. I felt embarrassed at my arousal and want. Quietly, carefully, I moved my legs over the side of the bed. I was afraid that the unseen hands would start their tortures again, but only a lingering ache in my legs and back remained. Those pills were doing their job, but my balance was off. The noises on the other side of the curtain became steady, gaining in urgency. I took my chance to leave them alone to enjoy this moment.

  3

  I watched in the rear-view mirror as Jack retrieved the wheelchair frame from the trunk, then the wheels, the arm rests. Fingers thick as tap roots manipulated the parts to click into place as if he knew by instinct how this all worked. The broad shoulders and thin frame made him look younger than his sixty-something years. I saw the face I remembered despite the wrinkles he had accumulated in a decade. Age suited him. His black hair was now mostly white but the thick eyebrows had kept their colour. He parted his hair on the right, the cowlick in the back still untamed. He should have been a fisherman somewhere Baltic and wind-swept and not the elderly widower living for decades in an unremarkable two-bedroom one-storey house in the Austin suburbs. At the hospital, he didn’t ask any questions, just, ‘You ready?’ The car ride was silent.

  Jack opened the passenger-side door.

  Brick-coloured shingles capped the white rectangle of his house, which sat at the end of a short driveway marked by an aluminum mailbox. The carved number 99 on the wooden post smacked of Jack’s handiwork.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said.

  I managed a nod.

  Jack pulled the wheelchair back a couple of feet.

  ‘Jump for it. You can do it . . . no?’ He shrugged off his ignored joke.

  The pecan tree was still front and centre, but smaller and unremarkable. In my memories of childhood, it had been a behemoth of rough grey and red bark that dwarfed the house. Its wide canopy of leaves hung with the beards of catkins put the entire front yard into shade so that the grass grew only in patches. Beneath it, I saw an eight-year-old me cracking nuts between two chunks of cement. His fingers were stained black from the too-green husks. From the corner of my eye, a thirteen-year-old me sneaked out of a side window as a police car pulled into the driveway. By the front door painted butter yellow – I remembered it white – the shadow of a younger Jack held sixteen-year-old me by the throat. This house was haunted with memories.

  A heaviness pinned me to the car seat. My body knew that if I went into that house there was no pretending. I was a twenty-six-year-old paraplegic with no money living back home with a man, my father, whom I hadn’t spoken to or seen in ten years. It would be Jack’s bad jokes, the accusing ghosts and the premature decline that awaited an invalid like me.

  At the hospital, scattered amongst us newly damaged were the returning patients. Men, and they were always men, who had been in wheelchairs for a decade or more. They were back because of kidney stones or pressure ulcers or dysreflexia or thrombosis or embolisms or osteomyelitis or whatever. I had seen my future self in the beds on the ward. A fat, stubble-faced future with a sour sweat smell. A future that burped into the glow of his cell phone, dabbing at it with a crooked swollen finger.

  Jack lifted my legs from the car. The laces of my red Adidas had been removed to make it easier for me to get them on and off. When he set each foot down, the bump against the ground registered at my waist. It unnerved me.

  ‘Hold onto my arm. Grab the oh-shit handle and lift yourself up.’

  My arms trembled with the effort. I shook my head. The wishing you were dead comes at random moments like these. It’s just a flash of pining for nothingness and it’s gone before you can ransack the medicine cabinet for a bottle half-full enough. These moments fade eventually.

  ‘All right. Let me help you.’ He leaned in and lifted me out of the car without effort. He wore the same cologne as he had when I was a teenager. Once in the wheelchair, I concentrated on keeping my balance as I lifted my feet and placed them on the footplate.

  ‘I’ll get some wood tomorrow and build a ramp to make it easier for you to get in and out of the front door.’

  Mom’s rose bushes were no longer where I remembered them. After my mom died, the house always had a smell of emptiness, dust and paint. As Jack brought me into the living room, there was also an oily scent that I couldn’t place until Jack cleared away his shoe-shine kit: a white gym sock stuffed with tins of shoe polish. A single sharp knock rattled the front door.

  ‘You expecting company?’ Jack asked.

  I shook my head. He stepped outside and came back holding a pink training toilet. The three princesses in full evening gowns on its lid were weather-faded. Disneyesque shades doomed for eternity to watch toddlers foul before their royal visages.

  ‘Amazon’s really phoning it in these days,’ Jack said.

  ‘Why would someone throw that at your door?’

  ‘Neighbourhood kids screwing around. There’s a whole gang of them that live a few streets down. Jackasses. I’m going to put it out by the trash.’

  ‘You’re just rearming them.’

  Jack went outside. The strangeness of my childhood home fought against its familiarity. I knew this place. I didn’t know this place. I belonged. I didn’t. I felt a seasick queasiness from the to and fro. Jack returned, talking before he was inside the house. ‘When we were potty training you—’

  ‘Does this happen a lot?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Toilets thrown at your door.’

  ‘No.’ Jack chuckled as if I had asked a stupid question. To be fair, I had. ‘Listen, when you were little, we had this training toilet that would play music when you used it. You just refused to be interested. We were at it for months. I was desperate to have one less butt to wipe. Then one day, your mom heard “London Bridge” playing and rushed in to see her clever boy using t
he bathroom all by his big boy self. What did she see instead? You pulling water out of the toilet bowl with a cup and pouring it out into your potty. Clapping your hands every time “London Bridge” fired up.’

  ‘A kids’ toilet thrown at your door is one weird omen,’ I said, looking out the window to see if the children were going to return.

  ‘You were always too clever for your own good. Never doing what you were supposed to and still getting rewarded.’

  ‘I think the parable here is there is more than one way to make the music play,’ I said.

  ‘That even rhymes; get that on a sampler,’ Jack said. ‘What do you want to do now? You hungry? You want to watch some tv?’

  ‘Just some sleep,’ I said, suddenly exhausted by the effort of speaking.

  ‘All right. I set you up in your old room.’ He pushed the wheelchair into the bedroom, past the door with a hole more than a decade old – as if I needed to be reminded that memories here have consequences. Cardboard boxes sat in the corners. The only evidence of its once having been my childhood room was a painting that I’d done in high school art class. My mother as a young woman, in a western shirt, covering her face from the viewer with one hand.

  Jack said, ‘I’ll leave you be. You need anything? Coffee? Juice? A kick in the ass?’

  I managed to say, ‘Some pain pills?’

  ‘Yep. Be right back.’ Jack returned with the medicine and a glass of water. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, thanks. Just a nap. The drive wore me out. I’m sore.’

  Jack nodded his head toward the painting. ‘Remember painting that? Do you still do any art?’

  I didn’t respond. Jack was trying to tell me that our past was okay. He was searching through the ashes to show me something that was intact, but I was too newly broken to recognise the chance to heal old wounds.

  He looked around, uncomfortable with the silence. ‘Okay. If you need that kick in the ass, I’m out here. Going to close the door now, okay?’

  On the back of the door was a full-length mirror and in the mirror was a face, thin as a Christ, with dark circles under the eyes. Sadness washed over me like a chill. On the left arm, a ladder of suture marks climbed the slash of flesh where the bone had broken through. Straining to lean over, my balance unsure, I took off my shoes and socks. Taking off my underwear was a struggle. With the muscles wasted away, the skin of my thighs draped loosely over cudgels of leg bone.

  One morning in the hospital, a nurse had woken me to remove the staples the surgeons had used to hold my skin together. The nurse had to help me roll on to my side. One by one, I felt the pinch and bite as he tweezed the metal from my body. Once he was finished, he showed me the kidney-shaped bedpan and the anthill of metal ‘M’s within. As if he was a prideful hairdresser, he asked if I wanted to see my back. He handed me a mirror to see the centipede of sutured flesh that clung to my spine. Its skin-graft of a head rested on the crushed vertebrae above my hips where spinal tissue had become scar. He ran his gloved hand down its length, said oh shit, and I watched him pull a missed staple, my skin stretching as if it didn’t want to let go of that last sliver of metal.

  I shook away the memory until my temples throbbed. In my old room in my old mirror, the cripple from the hospital had followed me. His cheeks were red and blotchy from crying. He looked pathetic. I saw how other people saw him. I positioned the wheelchair beside the bed and pulled myself over. I had to lift my useless legs, one by one. The chill returned and crawled into my chest. I took a huge breath and pulled the blanket over my naked body. The red-eyed cripple in the door’s mirror was there in his bed, blanket up to his neck, staring back. I squeezed my eyes shut, not ready to believe he was me, until the pills pushed me into dreams about Jack and Mom and me and the past.

  4

  It was Christmas Eve. I don’t remember exactly how old I was. That year my big present was a Tonka truck, yellow and indestructible. How old is that, nine or ten? My mom was still with us, that I’m sure of.

  To the left, the tv. To the right, the plastic Christmas tree with its star kissing the cheek of the ceiling. Between the two, a fireplace with logs more smouldering than blazing. Mom and Dad sat on the couch. She had her legs in his lap. He patted her ankle or rubbed her calf while tinselled tv shows happy-ended. Every lost dog found a home, every orphan her parents. And in our house, every glass stayed full. On return trips from the kitchen, Dad got a kiss and a refill.

  At an early age, I recognised that the love affair between Mom and Dad was unique. They flirted like high school students. As Patrick, my older brother, was finishing high school, Mom and Dad had been settling back into their life built for two when I defeated whatever birth control they were using to shield themselves from another eighteen-year distraction from their love affair. They drank and they loved. I just happened to be there.

  ‘I’m going to fix the fire,’ Dad said.

  He brought a gasoline can in from the garage.

  His eyes shone and reflected the tree’s strings of flashing colours. He sloshed the can toward the smoking logs. A fireball burst forth and Dad stumbled back. I froze with panic, watching the crickets of flames ride the splashes of gasoline. They settled on a present, almost igniting the Christmas tree, and half a dozen greedily gnawed on Mom’s handmade rag rug. I jumped around stomping out their fiery bodies. Mom shouted and pointed at a blue cord of flame climbing the side of the gas can. Dad cussed loudly and ran from the room, trailing burning puddles. He threw the can into the bathtub, turned on the shower and slammed the glass door shut.

  ‘Put the phone down. It’ll go out,’ he said to her.

  Eventually it did. The glass door shattered from the heat and a wide ribbon of soot stained the wall. The shower water didn’t disturb the gasoline fire, of course, and the next day they laughed about Dad’s mistake.

  ‘And that, my boy, is how not to make a fire,’ he said as the rainbow puddles burned in the bathtub.

  They resumed their positions on the couch. Dad sent me to peek at the bathtub and give status reports as the remaining fuel burned away. Mom mourned her murdered rag rug, inspecting the holes with her toes, but neither she nor Jack removed it.

  In the morning I saw that the rug was gone. Instead, the wheelchair cut twin wakes through a light blue carpet that I hadn’t noticed yesterday. The house was silent. After months of hospital clatter, the stillness was unnerving. My tinnitus filled the void, and I forced a cough to give myself a break from the incessant ringing. Jack had already shifted the furniture to accommodate the width of the wheelchair. The coffee table was gone from the living room and stored in the garage, which because of one small step I couldn’t explore.

  The chair’s front wheel nicked the doorframe of Jack’s room. I rubbed at the gouge of yellow wood. It takes time for your sense of self to encompass the extra width. The wheels, the chair become my wheels and my chair. Well-intentioned people who push you up hills without asking first can’t understand the invasion of personal space. Eventually, you gain a cat-whiskered awareness of the spaces you and the chair can fit between without breaking your stride. But that will take time, pinched thumbs and bashed doorways. In every room of Jack’s house, the walls will tell this story in hieroglyphs of scratched paint and tyre marks.

  Jack’s bed was made hospital-corner crisp. Faded cherries on a field of white covered the bedspread. Mom must have bought this and somehow he had made it last. I smiled at the thought of always-thrifty Jack making the bed each morning with his cherry-covered sheets and following washing care instructions meticulously. In the bathroom was his worn-out toothbrush, toothpaste, two soap slivers mashed into one and a small bottle of white spirits, the liquid a cloudy white at the bottom.

  After Mom died, how many mornings had Jack stood there, brushing his teeth while her toothbrush sat in the holder unused? How many toothbrushes had he worn out before he threw hers out too? There was no makeup, no hairbrush or dress on the back of the door to have its wrinkles steamed by a ho
t shower. The closet too was empty of her. I imagined the gaps between Jack’s sparse wardrobe packed with Mom’s clothes: the colourful silhouettes of dresses wrapped in drycleaner’s plastic, her nurse’s whites and rarely worn musky wool coats. What I thought was a women’s shoebox was filled with paperwork and receipts.

  Did Jack ever find someone else? Maybe he remarried and that other woman threw out Mom’s clothes or, worse, wore them? Maybe the cherry-covered sheets weren’t Mom’s? I couldn’t decide if I felt sad or angry or nothing. I wondered if the pistol was still stuffed in the back of the closet, wrapped in its oily cloth. I didn’t have any concrete plan for it – it didn’t work anyway – but it was hard to stay away from black thoughts.

  ‘Good morning, Ironsides. You want to get out of my room and mind your own business?’ Jack said, standing at the door. I rolled back to shut the closet but my chair bumped against the bed. I had to manoeuvre a three-point turn before I managed it. I didn’t dare make eye contact with Jack for fear of seeing the pity I felt for myself.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ The closet door closed harder than I meant it to. Jack stepped aside to let me past, but he followed me into the living room.

  ‘Okay then, sourpuss, how about you go investigate the mystery of the full mailbox? And stay out of my room.’ Jack pointed toward the front door. ‘I’ll put the coffee on. What do you want for breakfast? What do you like these days?’

  ‘I can’t.’ My world stank of can’t and I resented Jack for seeing that. Now, recalling this memory, all I see is an old man as overwhelmed as I was.

  ‘Right. Never mind. You do the coffee. I’ll get the mail.’

  Jack had to help me with coffee too. The coffee and filters were stored in the upper cabinets above the coffee maker. I filled the urn but from the wheelchair I wasn’t tall enough to pour the water into the reservoir. I sat nearby, useless, as he brewed the pot, then followed him to the kitchen table.