Wish You Were Here

by Barbara Shoup

  I need music. I grab U2, Rattle and Hum. Listening to it always makes me feel like I’m hitting someone. But when I go to stick the tape in the tape deck, I see my new CD player, and I’m not angry anymore—just sad and scared, the way I have been since the second I found out about Dad. I think of him here in my room with me on Christmas day, whistling, circling the project, determined to get everything hooked up just right.

  It might have turned out to be the last time we were ever together.

  Don’t think that, I tell myself. I turn U2 up loud.

  I stand in the shower a long time, letting the hot water wash over me. Last time I took a shower, I was in Jamaica, another world. Something else to avoid considering.

  Next thing I know, I’m in bed. Mom’s calling, “Jackson, Jackson,” gently shaking my shoulder.

  My mouth is sour, my body awkward, swollen with fatigue. It’s not until Mom says, “Honey, I knew you’d want to go back to the hospital this evening,” that I fully awaken. I sit straight up in a panic.

  “What time is it?” I say. “Jesus, Mom, it’s dark outside. Why’d you let me sleep so long?”

  “You needed it, Jackson. I’ve called the hospital every hour or so, and the nurses say your dad’s doing fine. He’s resting.”

  “So what if he’s resting? That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be there. How would you like it if you were practically dead and everyone deserted you?”

  She’s smart enough to walk away from me. By the time I get my clothes on and go downstairs, I’ve calmed down.

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “I know,” she says. “It’s all right. I defrosted some chili, one of the leftover pies. If you’re hungry … ”

  Mom sits across from me, watching while I eat two bowls of chili, a whole package of crackers, and a huge piece of pumpkin pie, as if pigging out were some form of entertainment. “Honey, we need to talk about some things,” she says.

  “Like what?”

  “You,” she says. “Now that it looks like your dad’s going to be all right—”

  “He’s not all right now,” I say. “He needs me.”

  “He’s going to be all right. And, yes, it’s true he needs you. But, Jackson, you can’t be at the hospital all day, every day. It’s not healthy. Plus, eventually you’ve got to go back to school. The more behind you get, the worse it’s going to be to catch up. You know that.”

  “I’m not going back until he gets out of intensive care,” I say. “Until he at least knows what’s going on, I’m staying there with him.”

  “A few more days,” Mom says. “Then we’ll decide.”

  “You wish I’d just forget about him, don’t you?” I say.

  She ignores me, clears the dishes.

  “Maybe you wish he’d died. Hey, it would solve a lot of problems. We could all live happily ever after in the dream house. We could just pretend Ted’s my father. We could pretend Dad never even was.”

  To my astonishment, she marches over and slaps me. Hard. My face burns in the shape of her hand. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that again, Jackson Watt,” she says. “Ever. Ever. Ever. Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” I say, but I don’t apologize, even though I know that what I just said is the worst thing I’ve ever said to anyone. I guess the slap makes me feel we’re even. Or maybe I’m just afraid to speak. I’m like some warped clone of myself. If I tried to apologize, how do I know what I’d say?

  We drive separately to the hospital, and once there we stay clear of each other. Tom and Mary Beth arrive. Oh, it’s been such a long time, Mom and Mary Beth say. They talk about how they always meant to keep in touch after the divorce but somehow didn’t do it. Ted comes, having driven Kristin and Amy back to St. Louis. Mary Beth smiles and says, “Oz told me you’d finally met the right guy, Ellen. It freaked him out, though. Even after all this time. I think he was just beginning to get used to it—

  “Is. Is,” she corrects herself. “Oz is going to be fine.”

  Tom joins in and they talk about old times, laughing, telling Ted this story or that about things the four of them did together when they were young. Ted goes for pizza, and they wolf it down. It’s weird, like a party, except when one of them remembers why we’re here. You can see it on their faces. Then it gets quiet for a while.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mom says. “Two days ago I was lying on the beach in Jamaica.”

  She and Ted and Mary Beth settle into a Scrabble game. Tom watches IU basketball on TV. I pretend I’m reading. Every hour, I go see Dad. Alone, or Tom goes with me. I figure Mom’s afraid to go after what Dad said to her this morning. Kim never shows up at all. No one mentions her.

  Dad’s oblivious, sleeping. The nurse says that’s good. Being knocked out on drugs all those hours didn’t count as real sleep, so his body needs to catch up.

  Now that I’m not so scared, I can look at him more closely. His left arm is bent, immobilized in a cast that covers his hand and goes all the way up to his shoulder. Both legs are suspended, held in place by ropes and pulleys attached to the metal pins that protrude from just above his knees. There’s a long vertical incision on his upper abdomen, red at the edges, held together by metal staples. Just below it, a catheter tube emerges, the yellow urine bubbling down through it into the bag hooked on the side of the bed. The IV needle is pushed into a thick blue vein on the inside of his right wrist. There are cuts and bruises all over his body. It makes me feel sick when I think of his skin bursting from the impact of the fall.

  The terrible swelling in his face has gone down; that’s one good thing. But without its usual animation, it is still not quite truly his face. What I notice are the wrinkles around his eyes, the creases deepening in his cheeks. The white in his curly black hair. Somehow, the fact that Dad came so close to dying makes it seem like just a matter of time before he does. I don’t mean that I think he’s going to die now, from the fall. Just that for the first time in my life I truly understand that someday I will actually be without him. It might be ten, twenty, even thirty years before it happens—I could be older than he is now. But that doesn’t matter. Since the moment Grandma said, “Jackson, your father…” time has made no sense to me. I don’t know if it ever will again.

  twenty–nine

  Each day he gets a little better, a little more like himself. I know he’s really going to be all right when I walk into his room in the middle of the night and find him playing poker with one of the nurses, betting with Q-tips. The next day they move him into a regular room. He says, “Okay, pal, here’s what I want you to do. Go over to my house and get me one of those little barbells, one of the five-pound ones I run with sometimes.”

  “Barbell?”

  “Yeah, barbell.” He raises his one good arm and waves it around. “Gotta start somewhere getting back in shape; might as well start now. So bring me the damn barbell, okay? And Christ, bring me some real clothes, too. These hospital gowns are driving me crazy.”

  I’m such a chickenshit, I call The Peak and ask what hours Kim will be working to make sure I won’t run into her at Dad’s. I haven’t seen or heard from her since the day they took the tube out, but I’ve driven past Dad’s house a couple of times and seen her car in the driveway. So I assume she’s still living there, at least for the time being. Once inside, it doesn’t take much time to figure out I’m right. Her workout clothes are draped all over the place in the bathroom, drying. I open the refrigerator and there’s tofu and health drinks. Her sprouts are still growing on the windowsill. Her bicycle is in the bedroom. The bed’s unmade, magazines scattered on Dad’s side.

  I never have liked Dad’s house that much, maybe because it’s always seemed kind of like a stopping place to me, not a real home. When Dad left, he gave Mom everything. He wanted to. Now he has one nice leather chair, but other than that chair, a great stereo system, and
one of those huge TVs, he’s perfectly happy with mismatched, secondhand stuff. From time to time, various girlfriends have moved in and tried to fix things up, but none of them has really made a mark. They leave and take their knickknacks and framed art posters with them.

  He did make a special place for me in the extra bedroom, though. Together we painted the walls white. We bought Star Wars posters and curtains and a Star Wars bedspread. He bought me my own little TV, complete with Atari. It still works. Little spaceships float across the screen, and I zap them with the joystick. I bet if I dusted for fingerprints on it, I’d find Brady’s. We must’ve passed a hundred Saturdays in this room, playing Space Invaders or Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, drinking Cokes, eating junk food, grooving to the Moody Blues or the Stones turned up full blast on Dad’s stereo. Brady was in heaven.

  It seems so quiet now with both of them gone. I grab a pile of T-shirts from Dad’s drawer. Socks, sweats, running shorts. I find the barbells back in the closet, underneath a pile of Kim’s dirty clothes. When I get back to the hospital, Mom’s there. She’s sitting in a chair in Dad’s room, working on a piece of needlepoint. Dad’s leafing through Rolling Stone. Standing in the doorway, the instant before they see me, I get that same weird feeling again, like I’m seeing something from another time. In fact, I keep having that feeling on and off all day and the next. We sit around, talking, reading, playing cards. Tom and Mary Beth come by. If I close my eyes, I can almost believe we’re at the lake cottage we shared a couple of summers, making the best of a rainy afternoon. I can believe that the divorce never happened, that Ted doesn’t exist. That when Dad gets better, he and Mom and I will all go back to the old house together.

  It’s not until I go back to school Monday morning that I begin to feel half normal. The bells, the round white-faced clocks with their black numerals make time familiar again. The ugly puke-green walls, the battered lockers, the foul graffiti in the rest rooms are a comfort after an entire week of antiseptic white.

  The day is a grind, repeating the story of Dad’s accident a dozen times, trying to figure out all I’ve missed being absent for a week, getting clear on all I have to do to make it up. It’s a relief when Mrs. Blue turns out the lights to show slides in Western Civ. We look at Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings with writing you have to hold up to a mirror to read, the Last Supper, the Mona Lisa. Then just a detail of the ceiling he painted in some castle. Trees. That’s what you see at first glance. Then you notice that there are some knots of golden rope among the branches.

  “But look again,” Mrs. Blue says. “Look closely.” With her pointer she traces the rope twisting and turning, unbroken throughout the whole design. Soon it’s all I see. For a second, I get the idea that it’s holding the whole world together. That something beautiful enough could.

  Like Amanda. I get this twisting feeling inside just at the thought of her. I want to write to her; I even tried a couple of times at the hospital when I was alone. But I couldn’t write the funny letter I’d worked out in my mind, and I didn’t know how to begin writing about Dad’s accident. If I could just see her—talking to her, it would be easier to explain. I try to imagine us sitting on the beach in Jamaica, but I can’t. Jamaica seems as distant to me as my own childhood. The time with Amanda as unreal as those times before Dad went away.

  “Jackson?” Mrs. Blue’s voice.

  The bell’s rung. I didn’t even hear it.

  “Good grief, you’re exhausted, aren’t you? Your dad is okay, isn’t he?”

  “He’s going to be,” I say. “Those first few days, though—” I tell her how scary it was. How I used the right-brain exercise to take Dad back in time to calm him.

  “That is really interesting,” she says, and smiles at me. “Of course, probably not as interesting as the fact that school actually turned out to be useful. Or should I say ‘amazing’?”

  We both laugh.

  “God,” she says. “You don’t think it’s a trend!”

  “Doubtful,” I say. “But there was something else I thought about while I was hanging around the hospital.” I tell her about being with Mom and Dad, just the three of us, the weird feeling it gave me. “Remember last year, when you told us about all the different endings of that Hemingway book?”

  “Yes,” she says. “A Farewell to Arms. Thirty-seven of them.”

  “That’s what I was thinking about. Those couple of days with my parents were like another life. Like maybe we were trying out another version of how things could have turned out. Anyhow, it made me think about the endings and how you said writing is like real life. You just keep trying and failing till you get it right—”

  “But it’s not, is it?” Mrs. Blue says. “Not really.”

  “Nope,” I say. “No rewrites.”

  She looks sad for one split second, then she laughs and says, “Good for you, Jackson; good thinking.” I knew she would. That’s why I like her: she doesn’t freak out just because you say something that’s true.

  thirty

  Stephanie’s waiting for me in the parking lot at the end of the day. She gives me a big hug and tells me she’d never have cut today if she’d known I was coming back. “I’ve missed you, Jax,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about you all the time, ever since I found out about your dad. I’ve been imaging him better.

  “You know,” she goes on as if it isn’t ten degrees outside and we both aren’t freezing our butts off, “like you make yourself see the person in good health. Jogging or walking on a beach, whatever. You can image for yourself, too. Whatever you want, you just see it. You make it happen.”

  Waving her arms, her bracelets jangling, she goes into a long, drawn-out description of a workshop she went to at the New Age bookstore. She says she met some people there who had imaged themselves into truly happy lives.

  “So anyhow, ever since I heard about your dad, I’ve been imaging him at a Grateful Dead concert, you know? I mean, Brady used to go on about how your dad was into the Dead, and I always thought that was so cool. Being as old as he is and being, you know, not uptight. You haven’t heard from him, have you, Jax? Brady?”

  “No,” I lie.

  She sighs. “I didn’t think so. I bet he’d feel awful about your dad if he knew. We should go to that psychic. Remember? The one I told you about at the party? Maybe he could send Brady a message—”

  “I don’t have time to go to a psychic,” I say. “I don’t have time for anything.”

  Her eyes fill up with tears. “Oh, God, Jax, what can I do to help you? Like, I could run errands for you or clean your room. Really, I’ll do anything. Ha, I’d give you all my notes—if only I’d been going to class. But, no kidding, I have been so fried since Christmas. I just can’t stand school. It kills me, you know? I could get Kate’s and copy hers for you, though. Or I could get you guys food. Like bring it up to the hospital. I could keep you company up there. It must be a drag.”

  “No, no,” I say. “I mean, Dad’s still in pretty bad shape. It takes all his energy just to do the physical therapy stuff he has to do. Too many visitors tire him out.”

  “So, what if I meet you after? We could do something. You really ought to do something besides go to the hospital, you know. You ought to have some fun.”

  I start laughing; I can’t help it. I mean, is this a gender thing? Is this the line of every single female person in the world? What really cracks me up is the thought that Amanda might say the very same thing. Wouldn’t that be bizarre? I work her up in my mind as being the perfect woman, a genius, and she ends up saying exactly the same thing as my mother and Stephanie Carr?

  Steph looks hurt. All I ever do is hurt her feelings, it seems. “Listen, don’t mind me,” I say. “I’m crazy.”

  “You should get a life,” she says.

  “I know. I am. I promised Dad I’d go to the gym before I go back to the hospital tonight
. In fact, I’ve got to do it now if I’m going to do it. But really, thanks.”

  She shrugs, turns away. Later, I’ll deal with the way we left things between us at Christmas. I’ll just tell her I can’t hang out with her after all, because I met someone. It happens. Then I am going to write to Amanda, maybe even call her, and tell her what happened to Dad, tell her exactly how I feel.

  I am going to get a life. My own. I actually believe this until I walk into The Peak and see Kim. She’s sitting at one of the round tables in the lounge area with a prospective member. She’s dressed in one of her usual ditzy outfits—turquoise today—poring over the club contract. When she glances up and sees me, she looks as uncomfortable as I feel. As I walk past her, I raise my hand in greeting. She catches it. “Don’t leave without talking to me, okay?” she says, then lets it go.

  It’s been almost three weeks since I’ve worked out, and I can tell. My whole body aches with the effort it takes to lift the weight. Sweat pours off me. But it feels good. When I’m finished I feel light and strong at the same time, like taut wire. Until I see that Kim’s waiting for me at the door, buttoning her heavy coat over her leotard.

  “Can we go get a Coke or something?” she asks. “Take a ride?”

  “I have to—”

  “I know,” she says. “Get to the hospital. I won’t keep you long. I just don’t want to talk here.”

  I open the door for her, follow her out.

  “Has he asked about me?” she says once we’ve settled into the booth at Hardee’s. “Tell me the truth, Jackson.”

  “No,” I say.

  “Did he tell you we had a big fight the night of the accident? Just before he left?”

  “No.”