Kate,
A long time ago, in high school, we left a party one night to take you home. You made Jake drop you off blocks from your house late at night under a streetlight. I can still see you standing there under the light. We drove away and I watched you out the back window of Jake’s car.
You waited until we turned the corner.
I’m sixty years old.
Early
It happened around midnight.
I was alone at home, as usual. The house was quiet. I remember standing slowly from the wooden chair at my desk.
It was like the lights went out. It was like God turned off all the lights in the universe with no warning except a tingling sensation in my brain.
I woke up on the floor beside the desk. I knew where I was, but I couldn’t seem to move my body. The inside of my head pounded and pounded like my brain was swollen against the bones of my skull. It was very hot, and I tried to decide what had happened to me.
I couldn’t collect my thoughts, almost like being on the edge of sleep, or drugged, or chained to the floor of a smoke-filled garage watching blackbirds fly against the walls.
I would tell my arms to move, but nothing would move. I would tell my mouth to speak, but no words would come out. The room smelled like burnt hair. There was a telephone on the small table a few feet away, but a few feet was like a mile, and I began to imagine ants on my body. The same ants that bit Gretchen’s feet and legs, leaving raised white welts on her skin and wet tears in her little eyes. I could feel them crawling on me, in my cracks, under my shirt.
Maybe it was a heart attack, I thought, but my chest didn’t hurt. Maybe I’d been shot or struck by lightening. Maybe I was in Heaven and this was what Heaven was like, lying on a floor with my head pounding and ants crawling on my body, unable to reach the phone two feet away, as helpless as the day I was born into the world.
I could hear a clock somewhere, ticking, ticking. After a while the room began to lighten, the morning sun rising outside somewhere, and I guess I started to cry. I could feel the cold teardrop slide downward from the corner of my eye and slowly across the skin on the side of my face to a resting place in the hair around my temple. I knew I was crying, but it was more like someone else was crying and I was only watching.
My arm moved. Not so much moved as jerked, spasmodic, knocking my hand into the leg of the small table, the phone falling to the floor. The dial tone was a relief at first, a noise, proof I was still alive, but then the noise changed to a beeping sound, and I was trapped in the shell of my body. Unable to defend myself. Unable to separate my thoughts from the beeping sound.
Two days later, they tell me, I woke up in a hospital with Allen above my bed. It was a stroke, the doctor said, and I could hear him but couldn’t answer his questions. I was in my house for twelve hours on the bloody floor. I’d cracked my head on the desk on the way down and bled all over myself waiting to be found, jerking on the hardwood.
It was Allen who found me. Keith Perkins called him from the office. Said I was never late, never missed work, something was the matter. The black-nose-hair lady and her farting friend were worried. Everybody was worried about Early Winwood. So Allen went to the house and found me on the floor next to the desk. He said he thought I was dead.
When the doctor left and we were alone, I looked up at Allen. The words came to me from nowhere. The perfect words to tell him what I had done and why, written neatly across my mind, words I’d never found before in all those moments of thinking and smoking, smoking and thinking.
I opened my mouth to tell him what needed to be said, knowing he might turn and walk from the room, but the words wouldn’t come out. Nothing came out. Nothing at all. And I wasn’t even sure my mouth had opened because Allen looked down at me in the way my father must have looked down at me in the white crib of the hospital the day I was born, wearing the t-shirt he wore in the picture I kept in my sock drawer.
I absolutely know my father’s last thought was of me. Nothing else, and no one else but me. I absolutely know it, but I waited too long to tell Allen the truth, and now I’d come full circle. Back to the beginning.
seven
I so longed for my chance to die, and then it got
complicated. I woke up in a hospital unable to speak, with the right side of my body basically useless. When Allen’s family had gone home, a nurse came into my room. She talked to me the way people sometimes talk to pets.
“Well, does somebody need a little bath?”
I watched her scurry across the room, marking off chores on the checklist inside her mind. She was short, but her ass was wide and flat. I think she preferred to work with patients who couldn’t possibly blurt out, “No, I don’t want a bath, and by the way, your ass is wide and flat.”
“It’ll feel really good,” she said. “Nice and cool,” she smiled and wrapped her arms around herself pretending to shiver when she said the word ‘cool’.
The woman pulled back the blankets and began to undress me. I didn’t have the energy to stop her and heard myself mumble a few words. Not really words.
“You’re welcome,” she said, misinterpreting my sounds.
I was naked and had the feeling drool was escaping the corner of my mouth and dripping off my cheek to the pillow.
The cold sponge touched my chest. I stared directly into her face. There were lines around her eyes. A fever blister on the top lip was visible under a smear of skin-colored makeup. She was lonely. No wedding ring. Her hair was going gray despite the best efforts to dye and pluck, probably standing in front of a mirror until she was sick of who she was, memorizing every blackhead and undesirable blemish on her generic face.
When I was young I was so sure my potential lay in a special awareness I possessed. The ability to notice and dissect other people and the world around me. Somehow, I’d lost touch with it through the years of my life. Too busy to notice, I suppose.
The wet sponge, no longer cold, slid across my arms and beneath my neck. She wouldn’t look at me. All work. Just another chore to mark off the list, her eyes following the sponge as it ended up at my hips and then gently wedged between my thighs. I felt the beginning of an erection.
I was far beyond the point of embarrassment. What would be the point? Naked, spread out in the bed, unable to feed myself, shitting in a pan, drool most certainly in a thin clear line from the corner of my mouth to the white pillow. But regardless, being cleaned by a woman not remotely attractive, my body prepared itself for procreation anyway.
“Something seems to be working just fine,” she said as workman-like as possible, hopefully finding an ounce of joy in the idea she could still cause such a reaction in another living thing.
She avoided any further contact with my private parts, dressed me, pulled up the covers, and left the room humming a song I didn’t recognize. I was left alone to think about the irony of spending each day imagining my death, even wishing for it, only to find myself with a reason to live. I wondered how long it would take in rehab, how many months, to speak the words clearly to Allen. Because once they were spoken, I would be free to go, one way or the other, with or without forgiveness.
Doctors and nurses came and went through the night and into the next day. After lunch, the door opened slowly. A head, Gretchen’s head, appeared, and as the door opened I could see Kate behind her. They’d come from California. Allen must have called. They’d flown together to see me. If things had been different, my wife, Kate, would have been the one to find me on the floor, waking in the other room to the sound of my head cracking against the wooden desk. She would have cried quietly at the kitchen table when they took me out on a stretcher, afraid of the idea I might die and leave her all alone.
My good hand tried to pat down my hair and once again I had the feeling of drooling. Gretchen stopped a few feet away from the bedside, unable to hide her shock at my appearance. If I could have seen myself, I imagined I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, eyes bulging, saliva glistenin
g on my thin lips, strands of antenna-like, wiry gray hair in every direction.
Kate stepped up ahead of our daughter. She seemed strong, prepared, and took my hand in hers with no reaction to my appearance except a soft smile. Even if I had possessed the power of speech, there is nothing I would have said.
“Allen called,” she whispered.
Behind Kate I could see Gretchen lost in the situation. It was the first time in her lifetime she was alone in a room with her mother and father, just the three of us, and it had to happen in a hospital, with her father drooling on himself like an idiot.
Gretchen roamed around the room, in and out for a few days, never knowing what to say, a ball of anger and sympathy rolled tightly together. She left to go back home. Something about her job. “Inventory,” she said. It wasn’t true, and it didn’t matter. Kate stayed.
She hugged Gretchen and sat back down next to the bed. It was outside the realm of possibilities, so I’d never taken the time to imagine such a thing. She read out loud to me deep into the evenings from books she knew I loved. She talked to me like we’d never been apart. Like I’d dreamed all the bad things and we’d been married forever. Smiling. Taking care of me. Telling Allen and Emily she’d be staying a while longer. Whatever I meant to her, she was afraid of losing it.
I watched her face as she read out loud. It was a pretty face. The years hadn’t changed it all that much. Still full of mystery and surprise. She’d been the love of my life, my whole life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, because either you believe in the concept of love or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. No compromise. It’s all or nothing, and if it’s all, there are no limitations other than those you set yourself, and a broken heart doesn’t count.
She was reading from The Catcher in the Rye, and it was making me feel the way it always made me feel, how difficult it can be sometimes to squeeze any real purpose from the day. I started to think about finding her on the street that night, sitting on the curb, her head resting on her knees wrapped in her arms. I watched her face as she read the words, and at the same time I saw Kate as I’d seen her that night, from the back, unsure if it was her at all. She was humming softly to herself. I couldn’t hear the words. And when a car passed, the lights showed me a part of her cheek, just enough for me to know it was Kate Shepherd I’d found, and rescued.
Those days and nights she stayed with me were dreamlike, and I can’t be sure they ever happened. On the day she left, Kate kissed me on the cheek and touched her hand to my hair.
“I have to go home now, Early.”
She said it like she knew it was the last time.
“Through the years you probably thought I was crazy or something.”
I just listened, glad I couldn’t speak. Glad I was able to listen without expectations. She struggled with the words.
“I guess…” she stopped herself.
We both waited a moment. I knew I’d have plenty of time to cry after she left. “I guess,” she said again, “I just didn’t understand how you could love me so much. It was more than I could figure out. Maybe it still is.”
Sometimes it’s harder to identify the problem than it is to solve it. If I hadn’t had a stroke, if I wasn’t speechless and bedridden, I don’t know what I would have said or done. Probably nothing. She figured it out. There was a hole in each of us, and I watched her pick up her purse slowly and then walk out the door for the last time.
It was what it was, and I’d cried about it too many times. There was only one thing left. One thing left to do. I went home to Allen’s house. Emily quit her part-time job to stay with me and they turned the guest room into a place they hoped I’d like to be. Pictures of the kids were on the walls and Allen had thoughtfully packed up everything in the little house, selecting certain items to decorate my new room.
Little Early made the high school baseball team. Every evening after practice or a game he’d sit down in my room and tell me everything that happened.
“It was the last inning. We were tied six to six. Toby Raines was on third. There’s two outs, and two strikes on me. The first one was high, but the second one I just missed it. No excuses.
“Anyway, the kid pitchin’ was the coach’s son. He throws about eighty-five. Some people say ninety, but I don’t think so.
“He pulls up in the stretch, and you wouldn’t believe it. The ump calls a balk, with two outs, two strikes, tie game, the ump calls a balk.
“That kid wouldn’t come out of the dugout to shake our hands. He just sat in the dugout.”
I went through rehab every day. I didn’t give a shit about walking across the room or holding a fork. I just wanted to talk again. Coherent. Make my tongue move the way I wanted it to move, and my mouth, and the muscles in my face, to form the words.
The wheelchair didn’t bother me. They even loaded me up in the car and took me to a few baseball games. I tried not to look at the people who looked at me. Especially Samantha. It would have been better for someone just to stand up and clear the air.
Someone could say, “This is Early Winwood. He had a stroke. He’s not the man he used to be. Now, who wants popcorn?”
Everybody could look at me openly for a few minutes, get it over with, and go back to watching the game. Little kids could ask, “What’s wrong with your face?” or “Why does your hand look like that?” and I’d have Allen answer their questions calmly.
My speech therapist was named Jackie. She had more patience in the tip of her nose than I had contained in all my bones combined.
“Say corn.”
And I would make a noise similar to “corn,” but since the word corn wasn’t likely to appear in my conversation with Allen, I really didn’t give a damn about the word.
I missed being alone, believe it or not. I missed my little house, and my desk, and the late-night drives to the post office.
I didn’t miss my work, but I missed the office. The half-hour each morning I sipped my coffee and read the newspaper before I heard a key enter the lock and turn the deadbolt.
I missed the woodshop. The smell. The purity of cutting straight lines and hammering nails, making something from nothing, using my mind for a single purpose.
But none of those things changed my plan. At night, alone in the bed, the neighborhood quiet, I arranged scenes. It would be just me and Allen. I would give him a route to escape after the conversation. A door to walk through. A chance to think about what I said.
I’d be prepared to answer questions. Why? How? And explain if he wanted a further explanation. He deserved whatever he wanted, and I deserved whatever he put upon me. If he just chose to sit and listen, it would be relatively short. No more than two minutes to say everything I needed to say, and then I imagined a moment of silence. A moment when neither of us was sure how he’d react.
On a piece of paper I scribbled a note to Jackie, my speech therapist. “I’ll give you $10 for a cigarette.”
It didn’t sound good to me, but I wanted it anyway. Since the stroke I’d lost my taste for meat, peanuts, and ice cream. My favorite foods were suddenly disgusting as feces and caused the same reaction. I prayed God had saved for me the pleasure of tobacco, but I didn’t hold much hope.
Jackie wouldn’t get me a cigarette, but I bought one from a wrinkled-up old bastard with six bypasses and a tube in his throat. He could barely draw the next breath, but he loved cigarettes with a lust rarely seen.
I waited until Early went to the grocery store and wheeled myself out onto the back porch. I struck a long fireplace match and lit the Marlboro. A wave of nausea began deep in my bowels and moved upwards. I vomited in a potted plant before I could take the second drag.
The days moved slowly. On the calendar I marked the day I believed I’d be ready to tell Allen. It was only four weeks away. I was able to talk to people, and they were able to understand, but I wasn’t quite ready. On the other hand, I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made twice before, waiting too long. The doctor said I w
as at a much higher risk of another stroke than the average person. He said I was lucky the first one didn’t kill me, and maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky the next time.
I worked on pronouncing certain words. “Sorry.” “Controlling.” Even small words were hard to say. “Gun.” “Mom.”
Emily and the kids went out of town for Thanksgiving to see Emily’s parents. Allen stayed with me. I insisted he have Thanksgiving dinner with his mother, and I’d be fine. When Allen left, I decided to find a little whiskey. It was off-limits of course, doctor’s orders, but I hadn’t had a sip since the day I woke up in the hospital.
I found a bottle, and a glass, and sat in my wheelchair in the living room, feeling sorry for myself. I thought of Kate, and Gretchen, and the day marked on the calendar. I drank down almost the entire bottle and somehow made my way back to the bedroom and laid down on top of the covers.
I remember crying. That’s mostly what I remember. Just crying, without stopping. My body shaking. Everything running together. Wishing I’d died and then feeling guilty. Waiting to reconcile the irreconcilable, a sin of the highest level, a life unlived.
I remember looking up from my bed to see Allen standing above me. His presence in the room made it full and complete, and it was clear the moment was upon me.
I looked up at him and said, “I killed your father, Allen.”
That’s all I said. The other words I’d practiced and performed avoided me, but those five words, “I killed your father, Allen,” were as clear as any words I’d ever spoken, and as I expected, they were followed by agonizing silence.
The Wait Page 24
