We waited breathlessly for the rest.
“But the angioplasty triggered a massive heart attack. Dad is having a quadruple heart bypass right now.”
Elizabeth put her arm around me. “Now we’re all going to be cheerful and hopeful. Mom is under enormous stress. So no moping or crying. She’s worried enough about Dad without worrying about us, too.” Lucy and I nodded.
“Did the doctors say what his chances are?” I asked quietly.
Elizabeth and Evan looked at each other. “They said his chances are fifty-fifty,” Evan finally replied. That’s what Sammie heard as she came racing down the hallway pulling a suitcase behind her. She had come straight to the hospital from the airport.
“His chances are only fifty-fifty?” Her voice was several octaves above normal and had a hysterical edge. She dropped her suitcase and ran toward us. “Evan, do something! Find another doctor! Another hospital! Do something!”
Elizabeth spun Sammie around so she was facing her. “Shut up! Mom doesn’t know!” Sammie stared at her as Elizabeth commanded, “Take a deep breath and calm down!” Sammie did as she was told.
A doctor strode toward us and Evan went to meet him, with Elizabeth, Sammie, Lucy, and I trailing behind. Evan wanted to hear the news before Mom. He shook hands with the doctor. “Hi, John.”
“Evan, sorry we have to see each other under these circumstances,” the doctor responded. I vaguely recognized the doctor as one of my brother’s high school classmates.
“He made it through the bypass,” the doctor said. “Now we just have to wait to see how your father responds.”
“When can we see him?” Evan asked.
“He’s in recovery now and he’ll be groggy for quite a while.” The doctor hesitated before adding, “Do you have a family priest?”
Elizabeth answered crisply, not acknowledging what this question meant. “Yes, Father Whippet.”
“I’d suggest you call him here as soon as possible,” the doctor said as his beeper went off and he excused himself.
I wrapped my arms around Elizabeth. She put her chin up in the manner of my mother. “I’m going to go tell Mom he’s safely out of surgery.” I nodded at her. “And you are going to go get Father Whippet,” she continued.
“I can just call him, Elizabeth,” I said. “That way I can be here if, you know.”
“No, I want you to go because I want you to take Sammie with you. She doesn’t handle trauma well and I don’t want Mom to be more upset. The drive will give Sammie a chance to calm down.”
I nodded again. She was right. Elizabeth turned to speak quietly to Sammie, then disappeared into the waiting room. Sammie stomped over to me and I tried to hug her but she shook me off. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she stormed toward a bicycle rack in front of the hospital and untied a large white dog that promptly planted both paws on my chest.
“What the hell is this?” I asked, backing up under his weight.
“That’s Snowflake.”
“Get him off of me.”
Sammie hauled Snowflake down and we walked to the car. “I had to bring him home,” she said. “I couldn’t find anyone to take care of him on such short notice.” Sammie pushed him into the backseat.
Sammie railed the entire way to the church about the inadequacy of medical care in Muskegon and why hadn’t Mom and Evan seen fit to have flown him to a better hospital, at least one in Grand Rapids, for God’s sake? I didn’t bother trying to tell her that the medical care in Muskegon was actually pretty good. I finally pulled up at the church. Sammie said, “I can’t stand that sanctimonious old bastard and I’m not going in there.” So I climbed the steps alone, walked down the hall, and, without knocking, opened the door to Father Whippet’s office.
“Oh for God’s sake!” I gasped while covering my mouth with my hands. Father Whippet had Roly Poly pinned against his desk with her skirt hiked up over her hips. I caught a glimpse of a tan Playtex slip. Dropping my hands, I demanded, “Can’t you do this somewhere more private? Don’t you ever think some parishioner might walk in here in a time of need?” Roly Poly shoved Father Whippet away, giving me an unwanted view of his erection. It died quickly, but still. Yuck.
Father Whippet yelled at me angrily as he stuffed his offending member into his pants and fumbled with his zipper. “I’ve had about enough of you!” He advanced on me and I backed away. “You’re spying on me! I know people spy on me. They have cameras on me all the time!” He kept coming toward me. Christ Almighty, I was going to get decked by a man of the cloth. I’d like to say that what I did next was only in self-defense, but the events of the previous few days seemed to have incited a rage in me. I grabbed a heavy book off the end table and swung it hard. It clocked him on the head and he went down like a stone. Roly Poly and I stood over him, staring at his chest to see if he was breathing. He was. Then Roly Poly picked up the book. “I guess this is appropriate,” she said wonderingly. It was a Bible.
“He’s a nutcase, you know,” I stammered.
“I know.” She looked at his still form fondly.
“When he wakes up, tell him that my dad might need last rites. He’s at Northern Hospital.” Then I turned and ran. I heard Roly Poly shout after me, “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry! Give my best wishes to your mom, and I’ll pray for your dad!”
When I opened the car door, Sammie was more composed. “Is he coming?” she asked.
“Yeah, but he needs a few minutes.” I threw the car into drive and headed back to the hospital. When we arrived, Elizabeth and Lucy came out before we even parked. I rolled down my window anxiously. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing,” Elizabeth said and got in the car. “Mom just thought it would be better if only she, Evan, and Anna stayed. She said we girls were making her nervous.”
Lucy got in the other side and slammed the door. I pulled away from the hospital and started for home. They didn’t even ask why there was a large, smelly dog in the car. Lucy just shoved Snowflake to the middle of the backseat and said, “It’s not us making her nervous. She doesn’t handle true trauma well. That’s where Sammie gets it from.”
“What do you mean, I don’t handle trauma well?” Sammie snapped her head away from the window to look at Lucy.
“You always fall apart,” Elizabeth said.
“That is a total lie!” Sammie stormed.
“Why are you saying mean things about Mom, Lucy?” I blurted. “She’s under pressure.”
“She’s under pressure because she puts herself there,” Lucy said while picking ferociously at a cuticle.
“That is such a cruel, bitchy thing to say! Dad is really sick! He might die!” Elizabeth retorted.
“And if he does, she’ll somehow figure out how to blame herself for it. She’ll spend the next twenty years mentally flogging herself for not getting Dad to a doctor for his annual checkup.” Lucy’s voice was rising.
“Lucy, why don’t you just shut up? Nobody needs to hear any of this right now,” I said as I clenched my hands on the steering wheel.
“Nobody in this family says what they really think, or what’s really real, except me!” Lucy roared. I slammed the car to a halt in the middle of the street. All four car doors flew open and all four of us stormed out. We each took up a defensive position by our door.
“Nobody says what’s real except you? Is that what you just said?” I shouted at her over the car roof. “Then why don’t you just say what’s real in your own life, Lucy? You married a guy that you didn’t want to marry because you didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad that you didn’t want to get married. And you don’t even realize that they don’t like the guy and they wish you never married him! And why don’t you tell Elizabeth and Sammie how he nearly killed his boss at work!”
“Don’t you tell me what’s real!” Lucy screamed right back. “You’re engaged to a guy who barely gives a shit about you. Is that how much you think of yourself? Ooooh, he goes to Princeton! Ooooh, he can win the regatta! So big fucking what! An
d you hardly try at school because God forbid you should not measure up! Better not to know, right?”
“I think that’s about enough, you two,” Elizabeth snarled from her side of the car door. “Get back in the car.”
I turned on her. “You! You say that’s enough? Not hardly, Miss I-Don’t-Have-Any-Money-Because-My-Loser-Husband-Stole-It-All! Miss I’m-Having-My-Baby-at-Home-Because-I-Don’t-Have-Health-Insurance-But-I’m-Telling-Mom-It’s-So-I-Can-Be-Close-to-Her! Do you really think Mom and Dad don’t know something is wrong? Why can’t you tell the truth? Is that so hard? Do you think we’d care any less about you?”
“Goddamn it!” Sammie screamed over the car roof. “I can’t take this. This isn’t about us, it’s about Dad! You’re all being selfish bitches!”
“Stop being so goddamn above it all, Sammie!” Elizabeth yelled as her hair whipped around her face in the cold wind. “You look down your nose on all of us because you’re an artist!” Elizabeth fairly ripped the word out. “You’re so much deeper than all of us. You’re so much cooler than all of us. You are so much better than all of us! I may not have any money now but at least I’ve made some in my lifetime!”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Lucy had her hands over her ears. “I hate you all!” she screamed.
I felt a desperate need to be as far away from my sisters as possible. Reaching into the car, I grabbed the car keys. Then I arched back and threw them as far as they would go into the woods off the side of the road. They wouldn’t be able to follow me.
I broke into a run and I didn’t stop for a long time. I saw the playground ahead of me and collapsed against the chain-link fence. I sank down among the dead leaves that were stuck in its crevices at the bottom. I buried my head in my arms and gulped air until I thought I was going to throw up. I said every prayer that I could remember for my dad to be safe. I apologized to God for every bad thing I had just said to my sisters and for every bad thing I had ever done. I swore to be a better person. When I finally threw my head back to plead to the sky, I saw that it was snowing.
Sammie and Lucy found me a few hours later. They knelt beside me and took my hands and rubbed them to warm them up. Then they helped me to my feet and into the car.
Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief when we all came into the living room. Her swollen, red feet were propped up on the table. She held out to me the hand that wasn’t caressing her belly. I took it and sank down next to her on the couch. “Is Dad okay?”
Sammie stroked my hair from above. “He’s out of the woods. The doctor said so far so good.”
“Thank God.” I closed my eyes against the tears. “How’s Mom?”
“She’s doing better now. You know her; she toughs it out. She’s staying with him tonight.”
Throughout the years, on the rare occasion when one of us was in the hospital—Elizabeth with her tonsils, Evan with his broken collarbone, me with mononucleosis—Mom had sat up all night in a hospital armchair right there at our bedsides. She said that there was nothing worse than waking up in a strange place in the middle of the night without a loved one there to comfort you. Even though it was against hospital policy, no nurse or doctor had ever taken her on. One look from her and they were out the door.
I looked around at my exhausted sisters with a sudden clutching of my heart. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said all of those horrible things.”
“No, what you shouldn’t have done”—Elizabeth stroked my hair—“is make a woman who is seven months pregnant walk three miles in twenty-degree weather.”
My hands flew to my mouth. How could I have been so stupid and selfish?
“Lizzie, don’t torment her,” Sammie said. “We didn’t walk at all. We found the car keys pretty much right away.”
“Thanks to me,” Elizabeth said and poked Sammie to ease her off to a more comfortable position. “Sammie and Lucy were all set to race into that field and start mucking around. But I made Sammie stand where you had been. Then she threw a rock from there, and bingo, it landed right next to the car keys. You and Sammie both throw like girls.”
“I’m still sorry, you know, for everything,” I said into the cushion. My sisters had obviously made their peace with each other before I got home.
Lucy shrugged. “As Mom says, sometimes you gotta shake things out. I think it was a good thing we got everything off our chests.” It must be real love when you could say terrible things to each other and then accept it and move past it. After all, who is going to tell you the truth if not your family?
The phone rang and nobody moved. We were all afraid it could be Evan with bad news. Lucy finally got up on the third ring and answered it in the kitchen. When we heard her laugh, we relaxed. She came back into the living room and crowed, “I won the Squirrel Board!” She did a little dance around the table. “That was Tommy. It’s the first time in BLT history that someone hit it smack-dab on the minute. Normally the celebration and crowning would be tonight, but Tommy is postponing it until tomorrow because of Dad.”
“He knew about Dad already?” Sammie said.
I thought about how fast bad—and good—news flies through our town.
Evan and Anna came in carrying casserole dishes and stomping the snow off their feet. “Didn’t you see these piled up on the porch?” Evan griped good-naturedly as he pulled off his boots. “Half the town must have left food for us.”
“Did Dad wake up yet?” Elizabeth asked anxiously.
“Yep. He squeezed Mom’s hand and smiled at us. He managed to get out a few words before he fell asleep again.”
“What did he say?” I prodded.
“He asked if it was his turn in the bathroom yet.”
We all laughed in relief and joy.
“Did Father Whippet ever show up?” I asked.
“Yeah, but by the time he got there Dad didn’t need last rites anymore. Father Whippet seemed kind of pissed off at that.” He yawned. “Anna and I gotta go. I have to prep for my show.”
After he left, I told my sisters, “I threw a Bible at Father Whippet and hit him in the head this morning.”
No one even asked me why. “Too bad it didn’t knock any sense into him,” Sammie said.
We didn’t discuss the grenades we had all thrown at each other. On some level, each one of us recognized the truth in each accusation. They were all things that stirred in the deep recesses of our subconscious. But the secret truths we think are safely tucked away are usually apparent to everyone else. It wasn’t that Walker was mean to me. He wasn’t. I knew he worried I would come off like a midwestern hick when I showed up at Princeton. But I figured he was worried for me, not because of me. I told myself of course he loves me. Why else would he want to get married?
Sammie yawned. “I’m going to bed.” We followed her upstairs. There, we jostled at the bathroom sink trying to brush our teeth and wash our faces. For the first time in a while, everything seemed right again.
Chapter Thirty-three
December 1986
I want to thank everyone who called my family yesterday with good wishes for my dad. I just talked to my mom, and he’s doing much better. She says he’s up this morning and watching the show from his hospital bed. Hi, Dad. Good to have you back among the conscious.” Evan had big vats boiling away on the stove. “Today, we’re making homemade summer sausage. As the name suggests, we should be making this in the summer. But I just got a great recipe courtesy of Mr. Frank Bukowski from way up in Iron Mountain. Seems he caught our show last time he was down here visiting his nephew.
“Frank says he separates out the shoulder, loin, ribs, and all the good stuff. You can put that in the freezer. You’re not gonna need it. Now take the rest and remove the bone and cartilage. Toss that in the garbage or to your dog. What you have left is what you make the sausage with: you know, the stomach, the hooves, and the intestines for the casing. Frank writes that in his seventy years of cooking”—Evan grabbed tongs and lifted out a steaming, droopy-looking flesh-bag—“the most i
mportant thing he learned is patience.” He dropped the disgusting mess back into the vat, crossed to the fireplace, and stirred the logs.
“Damn, it’s getting cold. The ice on Muskegon Lake is almost two inches thick now. Ice fishing shanties are popping up everywhere out there.” Evan shuffled back to the stove and I saw he had on his fuzzy moccasin house slippers.
“It’s like he doesn’t even bother getting dressed for this show,” I said to Elizabeth, who was up early with me. She gestured impatiently to me and I resumed rubbing her feet, which she had plopped in my lap.
Evan pulled something that looked like a cloven foot out of another vat and examined it, then tossed it back in. “Frank says you’ve got to have patience with sausage. Otherwise it won’t turn out the way you want it to. That’s the way it is with most things in life. You have to think things through. Plan ahead. Take these guys I heard about in Wisconsin. They drove a brand-new Toyota truck out on the ice, dragging their fishing shanty. Their big plan was to blow a fishing hole in the ice with a stick of dynamite instead of taking the time to ice-pick one out by hand. One of the guys gets out of the truck, lights the dynamite, and throws it as far as he can. Next thing you know, his yellow Labrador jumps out of the bed of the truck and races after it. The guys are screaming at the dog to stop. But the dog grabs the stick of dynamite and starts back to the truck. The guys are still yelling, and now the dog thinks he’s in trouble, so he crawls under the truck, and ka-blam, everything blows. The dog goes sky-high and the truck drops through a nice, big hole in the ice and sinks.” Evan paused and took a sip of tea. “I think Frank is right about patience. And I say that even though he is from the U.P. You have to think things through, or they may not wind up the way you intended. That, and let it be a lesson not to buy a foreign-made car.”
Born Under a Lucky Moon Page 31
