She didn’t see him at first. She had her head turned away and her eyes closed. Outside her window, a construction crew was building a new parking garage. A big crane swung a metal beam around. It looked like whoever was operating the crane didn’t quite know where to put the beam.
Lindsey held a plastic cup of water to her chest. The surface quaked with the beating of her heart. She’d had a brush with death, Ella had said on the phone. If Ella hadn’t stopped by Lindsey’s apartment to check in on her, her heart might have stopped. It was beating at 150 beats per minute. It bothered Harris that Lindsey had just been sitting in her apartment not doing anything about her heartbeat. That wasn’t a normal heartbeat; everyone knew that.
As though Lindsey could feel his thoughts turn to her, she opened her eyes and looked his way.
“My girl,” Harris said.
“Dad,” she said.
She smiled. It was a smile he hadn’t seen in years. All the other smiles he saw every day didn’t seem to matter compared to the one small crooked smile of his daughter, whose lip was draped with an oxygen tube.
The smile disappeared, though, and Harris felt himself panic as Lindsey threw her head back against the pillow and began to cry. At first it was mostly silent sobbing, but she picked up steam. Harris wouldn’t have guessed such a loud sound could come out of someone so thin and sick.
A nurse rushed through the curtain. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
Harris put his hands up, guilty of he didn’t know what.
Then he heard the scrape of a walker, and Ella poked her head through the curtain. “What did you do, Harris?” she said as she pushed her way inside. It was crowded and dark in the cubicle now. The metal beam still swung uncertainly outside. Harris noticed that there were two additional IVs stuck in Lindsey’s veins. Unknown fluids maintained a steady drip.
“He didn’t do anything,” Lindsey said, but she didn’t stop crying.
Still, the nurse asked him to leave for a minute because anxiety wasn’t good for her body right now.
Not knowing what else to do, he went to the cafeteria and got a coffee. It burned his tongue when he took a sip, and he went back up to Lindsey’s floor with his tongue feeling bald.
There were still tears in her eyes, but she didn’t seem as upset anymore.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
There had been many times over the past six years when Harris had been angry with Lindsey for shunning him. He’d wondered if she was cruel, or had no empathy, or was just so self-centered she couldn’t see he’d struggled every day not to be the addict he was. In a way, he’d wished this illness on her by thinking she didn’t understand how lonely it was to be sick. Now he wanted to tell her she’d done everything right in her life and that she never had to be sorry about anything.
But instead of saying any of this he gave a strange and formal nod.
Ella eyed him. They’d only spoken through lawyers since the call about the money. But none of that money stuff seemed to matter right now, with the three of them tucked away in this small cubicle in the large hospital, a place where it seemed they could hide forever and never be found.
Harris left the hospital late, and while Ella offered to drive him to a motel, she didn’t say he could sleep on her couch. For some reason, he’d expected to sleep on her couch. He’d never seen her apartment but could envision himself stretched on the sofa under a blanket, the light above the stove on, as she’d always left it on when they lived together.
Instead he checked into a Days Inn. He sunk into the bed, too soft, and flipped through the channels. He suddenly remembered to call Claudia and was surprised he’d forgotten. It was like his life with her was a parrot in a cage and now that he was here he’d put a white sheet over it to keep it quiet.
He told Claudia what the doctors had said. The tests they’d done were inconclusive. They’d ruled out certain infections and cancer. There were other things they’d ruled out, and Harris wondered how many things they were going to rule out before they found the right thing. That could take a long time. He didn’t have a return ticket booked. Claudia asked what he was thinking about that.
“About what?” Harris asked.
“Coming home. When will you?”
He put her off, like he’d put off the pool guy.
They hung up and Harris thought back to the first few weeks after Ella had kicked him out of the house. He’d almost given up hope, and the memory of that feeling haunted him. He’d been in a motel room not unlike this one. He was empty, bereft. No feelings had crashed down around him or flooded him or made him cry. There had just been silence, and it had been heavy, and he’d held it in his arms.
Back then, he drank to feel better, or at least to fall asleep. Now he got up and got dressed again and walked down the block to the CVS to buy cigarettes. He shouldn’t be smoking, but he could be doing something worse, which made smoking seem okay.
* * *
He got to the hospital early and found Lindsey alone in her room. They chatted. She wasn’t unhappy, and she said she was feeling a little better. She fidgeted uncomfortably and a mortified look fell on her face when the nurse popped his head in and said they would still be using the bedpan today but would bring in a toilet tomorrow.
“Jesus,” she said. She got this look on her face like she didn’t know what kind of person she’d become.
She looked a lot like Harris. Their baby pictures were identical, separated by thirty-five years but otherwise identical. Sometimes Harris thought about how there was this woman who looked like him walking around. Not a girl anymore, but the last time he’d seen her, she’d been fifteen. He could feel all that time taking up space in the room. All the questions he could ask got lost because of the sheer number of them.
Lindsey took the burden of speaking first. “How are you feeling after your surgery?” she asked.
“Good,” he said. “But that’s old news. They took veins from my leg and put them in my chest. Good as new.”
Lindsey looked stricken. At first Harris thought she was concerned about the surgery, but then he realized she was looking at his breast pocket.
“Dad, are those cigarettes?”
They were. He’d meant to leave them at the hotel.
“Give them to me,” Lindsey demanded. She spoke urgently. She reached out her hand, causing her IV tubes to sway.
Harris gave them to her.
“I’m flushing these down the bedpan,” she said, smiling.
Harris started laughing. It overtook him, the laughter. He felt they were both waking up after a long sleep.
Lindsey laughed too, her oxygen tubes twitching as she did. But then clutched her chest. “Ow,” she said. “Laughing hurts. There’s fluid around my lungs.”
Harris stopped short. “Want me to put the bed back?” he said. “Where’s the remote thing? I’ll put the bed back.”
“I’m okay.”
They were quiet for a while. The parking garage had grown bigger since yesterday. The crane operator must have decided where to put that beam. In a month or so, whoever was in this room wouldn’t be able to see anything out of the window other than the parking garage.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Lindsey said. “About crying.”
“Shh,” Harris said. “No need.”
“I was worried you weren’t going to come.” Her voice grew hoarse. “I didn’t even call you after your surgery.”
He sat with her and told her to breathe, but he was also panicking a little. He didn’t want Lindsey to feel the guilt he’d felt, the guilt of not being there for someone.
“I feel like we both almost died,” she said. “And we would never have gotten to fix things.”
“Don’t say that.” Harris didn’t want to hear her talk that way.
“No,” Lindsey said. “Let me finish.”
But she didn’t finish. She looked like she didn’t know how to phrase what she wanted to say. She would know when she was older, Harris th
ought. He had an idea of what it was. They had another chance, but there was still the possibility they’d blow that chance, too.
Harris sat there, holding her hand and promising himself he wouldn’t blow it. But as the day went on he didn’t know how to keep that promise. He sat in the cafeteria with another coffee—and another burn on his tongue, he didn’t seem able to learn—and as the coffee cooled he realized that even if he saw Lindsey once a year, he’d only see her twenty or thirty more times before he died—if that. It didn’t seem fair that the number was so small, and whatever he filled the rest of the years with would never make up for what he was missing.
He thought of the house in Sioux Falls, and the pool. He thought about whether or not he and Claudia would get married. They’d talked about it, but also talked about how there wasn’t much of a point at their ages. In any case, Lindsey was the one in Harris’s will, not Claudia.
Nothing in Sioux Falls felt as strong as the desire he felt to stay here with his girls. He swirled his coffee in its cup. But what could he do about it?
* * *
Ella arrived and the three of them fell easily into conversation. Lindsey was weak but getting better. Then she spiked a fever, and the nurses made Harris and Ella put on smocks and masks. “She might have a methicillin-resistant bacteria,” a doctor said.
They put Lindsey in theoretical isolation, but all that separated her from the rest of the floor was the curtain that fluttered in the ambient air.
“I’ll be honest,” one doctor said. “I was hoping your blood work would look better by now.”
No one had an answer, but there was always forward momentum in the hospital. Another few days passed. When Lindsey’s fever came down, doctors came by and said they would release Lindsey when she was stable enough, and continue searching for the answer through outpatient care.
“Wait a minute,” Harris said, but no one waited a minute.
“They’re just going to let her out in the world?”
Lindsey shrugged. “Better than being in here. In case you didn’t notice, Dad, it’s fucking awful here.”
Ella snorted. “It’s a good sign that she’s swearing again. Harris, you might not know it, but your daughter has a foul mouth.”
“Takes after her fucking dad,” Harris muttered. But the thought of Lindsey getting swallowed by endless tests and doctor’s appointment, plus the looming threat of something like this happening again, filled Harris with agony.
Some kind of excitement through the curtain interrupted Harris’s pain. A machine beeped wildly, and there were the sounds of a crash cart hurtling through the hall and through a curtain. From the hurried voices of the doctors and the nurses, Harris understood that the man next door—who was there because he’d tried to kill himself, Harris had heard earlier—had just bitten clear through his breathing tube.
Calls of clear rang like crystal bells through the ward.
When it was over and the time of death was noted, one doctor defended himself to another one: “I wanted to save what was left of his brain, so I took him out of sedation. I had no idea he was going to suffocate himself.”
Ella, Lindsey, and Harris listened but didn’t speak. Though they couldn’t see through the curtain, they still looked at it when they heard the man getting wheeled away.
“Please,” Lindsey said. “If I ever want to go that badly, just let me. Just drive me someplace and set me free.”
“Don’t be morbid,” Ella said.
* * *
Lindsey was moved from the ICU to a regular room, and then she started walking again. The steroids they gave her were dangerous magic—they’d ruin her body, the doctor said, but for now they saved her life. The nurses freed her one by one from her IVs. Harris saw his daughter start to emerge.
“We’ll talk on the phone,” Lindsey said, when Harris admitted that he had to leave soon—he’d been gone almost a week already—but that he didn’t want to.
Lindsey, feeling better, did not feel so desperate to connect with him, as she had when she was in isolation, bound to IVs with fluid cushioning her lungs.
“She’s young,” a doctor said. “She’ll bounce right back.”
Harris didn’t want her to bounce back to the way she’d been. Ignoring him at every turn. Hating him. He cornered Ella in the hallway later and said the thing that had been lurking in his mind for days now.
“What if I came back? To be close to you and Lindsey.”
After all, he and Ella had made it through so much together. From that very first stay in rehab, when they’d teamed up and decided to get better and get out of there, to his bypass surgery in Sioux Falls, to Lindsey’s troubles now, they’d stuck it out, elbowed their way to safety. They’d figured it out. They made a good team. In Sioux Falls he never seemed able to figure anything out. Nothing was whole. Even the settlement he’d gotten from his old company was split in half now. If they were together it would be whole again.
“Oh, Harris,” Ella said.
Harris looked for a reflection of what he felt in her eyes, but he didn’t see it.
“We tried that, remember? We didn’t do so well together.”
“So much time has passed, Ella. I don’t want to live so far away anymore.”
“You can move wherever you want. But things aren’t going to be the same again. That’s not such a bad thing. We just have to adjust. We never adjusted.”
Harris couldn’t look away from her. She’d been his higher power. Looking at her now, he wondered if she still was, so strong was the feeling of despair that ravaged him at the memory of the feelings he’d had for her. He remembered what he’d done when she told him the room was filling with Ping-Pong balls: he mimed shoveling them out the window.
* * *
He went back to Sioux Falls the day Lindsey was released. Harris wheeled her to the pick-up zone, where Ella waited with the car, and then they parted ways so Harris could catch a cab. Lindsey hugged him, but now that she had her body back, she seemed distracted. Matters of the heart once again took a back seat.
“It was a good trip,” Harris told Claudia when she picked him up from the airport. “Lindsey and I will be better friends now.”
“Do they know what’s wrong with her?”
“No,” Harris said. “But they’ll figure it out. They always do.”
“Tomorrow,” Claudia said, “we should probably look at finances and figure out the pool.”
“Let’s,” Harris said.
They rode the rest of the way in silence. He’d tried to fix things with Ella, but she’d turned him down, and now he was back here with Claudia, who didn’t know anything about it.
He pulled out his phone and texted Lindsey. I love you, he wrote.
She texted back a picture of a heart followed by an exclamation point. He wondered if her enthusiasm was real or empty. Enthusiasm meant you either really did care or really didn’t care, and it was hard to tell the difference sometimes.
They pulled into the short, wide driveway. He saw Claudia had planted a garden while he was gone.
“Hey, that’s nice.”
“It’s a butterfly garden,” Claudia said.
“So it attracts butterflies?”
“Obviously.”
“Good,” Harris said. “It’s good to be home.”
He brought his things inside. Everything was the same as he’d left it.
“Do you mind if I mow the grass?” Harris asked. He felt the need to keep moving. He worried about what would happen if he stopped moving. Maybe if he never stopped moving, his body would never have a chance to quit. Maybe he could share that idea with Lindsey, and they could laugh about it.
“When you want to mow the grass is your decision,” Claudia said.
So Harris circled the lawn on the riding mower. It was soothing, methodic, like pretending to shovel those Ping-Pong balls had been. He could have shoveled those Ping-Pong balls forever.
It was too windy to be riding the mower, but he kept going any
way. He hadn’t done a sweep of the yard first, so the blade kicked up rocks. Harris made smaller and smaller circles, until he came to the spot for the pool. The stakes had grown weatherworn and splintered. Their little plastic flags had frayed. Only a faint trace of spray paint remained on the grass. He took care to avoid the plot, even though he knew there would never be a pool.
VI
Skeleton
After many years of silence between us, I called my friend from college, Octavia, the one I had bought Pedialyte for that night at the grocery store. I find myself recalling the phone conversation at a reading I give in the city, not long after I publish my book.
The story comes out as a response to a question asked by an audience member. “What feelings went into writing this book?” she said, and as I stare at her serious face I realize she’s not joking. She really wants to know. I can’t recall all my feelings, and the longer the silence extends the more I think I may have never had a feeling before in my life. That was when I stuttered my way into the anecdote.
The story gets too long and the audience looks as though they regret not slipping out of the bookstore before the start of the Q&A. Each passing moment is an opportunity for me to stop talking, an opportunity I glide right past.
“Octavia’s the real name of the character called Maille in the book,” I say. “I mean, the character is real; the story’s not. But you know what I mean. Anyway, for a long time we were very close. I’d heard bits of news about Octavia here and there, but I found her contact information right after I got pregnant and decided to end the pregnancy.”
Aamina is sitting in the front row. Her eyes widen. She presses her fist to her mouth and shakes her head nearly imperceptibly.
When I called Octavia, her voice sounded far away. She’d gotten off social media for good years ago, so she hadn’t heard anything about my life since we last spoke, which was when Ralph and I still lived in Michigan and she’d just moved to California to teach in San Francisco. She hadn’t heard that I’d also gotten sick with an autoimmune disorder, like hers, and she hadn’t heard my father had died. She said she felt like we’d been living parallel lives three thousand miles apart.
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