If You Could See What I See

by Cathy Lamb

  Seconds later, the ambulance with Lacey came screaming in. Neither had been able to drive fast in the ice. I rushed to it, and held Lacey’s hand. She was on her side, clutching her stomach, crying. Lance had gone with her.

  I held her hand as long as they let me, then let go.

  “The baby’s coming,” she panted. “It’s coming. It’s too soon. Call Matt. Call Mom. Call Grandma.”

  I had said the same words about Josephine.

  It’s too soon.

  Oh, baby, I thought, please live. Please, baby, live. We love you, baby. Stay with us.

  I collapsed against the hallway yet again for a minute, then stood up, my legs weak. I made those tragic calls to Matt, my mother, and my grandma, who had been at home resting.

  They are exactly the sort of calls that no husband, no mother, no grandma ever wants to get.

  I called Scotty, too.

  I knew that Scotty still loved Tory. She was impossible to live with and exhausting, but the love was still there. It was confirmed by his reaction. A stricken “What?” and a “Where are you?” and an “I’m coming.” He hung up.

  I saw him minutes later as he sprinted through the emergency room doors, like a cannonball that had been shot off. That tall, lanky, kind man was crying, and he didn’t bother to hide it. Yes, the love was still there, going strong.

  When I arrived at my cavelike ex-apartment in Los Angeles, I saw Tyrone and Johnny from next door and chatted with them for a minute.

  “Aaron’s still a prick,” Tyrone told me pleasantly.

  “He was livid when you left. Trashed the place,” Johnny said, his voice singsongy. “Outta control.”

  “He accused me of having an affair with you,” Tyrone said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Nah. You’re way too good-looking for me.” I smiled. I was proud of myself. I’d made a flirty comment.

  “No, sugar,” he drawled, winking. “You’re way too pretty for me.”

  “Why are you back?” Johnny said. “Want more of the torture chamber? You think we didn’t know what you were going through over there?”

  “We couldn’t understand why you didn’t take off sooner than you did,” Tyrone said, shaking his head. “Bad, bad move, girl.”

  “We told you to get your butt outta there,” Johnny said.

  “I know.” They had. “Aaron isn’t well.” It was a long story. It was a hard story. I didn’t even want to think about it. “He said he had some things of my mother’s and grandma’s, so I came by to get them. We have an appointment tomorrow with the attorneys to sign the divorce papers.”

  “Atta girl, Meggie.” They high-fived me.

  We chatted more, and I caught up on their lives. I’d met their mothers so I inquired about them, plus Tyrone’s brother and Johnny’s sister. They asked about Alaska and my future plans.

  A few minutes later I knocked on Aaron’s apartment door. He didn’t answer, so I opened the door, walked in, tried to shut down hard on all the tarlike, clingy memories, and called his name.

  The bathroom door was open and I saw his black boot sticking out of the tub. I thought that was strange.

  Aaron was wearing his black rat T shirt, black jeans, his chains around his neck, and a silver hoop in his left ear. His black feather floated in the water.

  The water was red.

  Someone started screaming from the depths of a tortured, ruined soul.

  Tick . . . tock.

  The waiting room at the hospital was soon jammed with people we knew.

  “Waiting room” is incorrectly named. It should be named “The Room From Hell.” Waiting to see how a loved one is after a bloody accident. Waiting to see how a loved one is after a heart attack, liver failure, surgery, stroke, or a new cancer diagnosis. That is hell.

  Time does not move in The Room From Hell. It’s as if someone has a tiny, shriveled finger on the hands of the clock and won’t remove it. Your life stops. Every other worry in your life becomes irrelevant. You understand how insignificant those other problems are. You beg for problems that are small instead of that one, and while you’re begging, you believe the fear inside you will rise up like a vengeful phantom and choke the life out of you.

  Time stopped when Lacey and Tory were behind those closed doors. Time stopped in The Room From Hell.

  Tick . . . tock.

  My grandma, in a lavender-colored suit with four-inch matching heels and her amethyst baubles, sat controlled and quiet. Jaw tight.

  My mother had been, fortunately, on a plane from San Francisco to Portland. She came straight from the airport. She had on her glasses, beige slacks, and a white blouse, buttoned almost to her throat. In her last talk show interview she had been wearing a cat suit. She was trying to encourage people to wear costumes in the bedroom.

  They were holding hands. Both had been crying, but they had done it privately, walking out to the fountain in the atrium. “No need to blather in public,” my grandma told me.

  We were brought food, coffee, and water from friends, employees, neighbors. We couldn’t eat or drink. People patted us, hugged us, murmured inane things that meant absolutely nothing. Matt was with Lacey.

  I sat down next to my mother, and she reached over and hugged me. “I love you, Meggie.”

  “I love you, too.”

  We waited, clawed with insidious panic and grief.

  The hands of the clock didn’t move.

  My hands shook.

  My mother held a handkerchief to her face, gasping for breath.

  My grandma’s shoulders slumped.

  The hands of the clock didn’t move.

  My mother bent over. I knew she was close to fainting.

  My grandma put her shoulders back up, rubbing the pain out with both hands, “patting the fairies” from the whippings. Her mask slipped, and her eyes filled.

  My whole body shook.

  A doctor walked by and greeted my grandma. She uncrossed her legs, grabbed his elbow, and steered him away down a hall. I had no idea how he knew her. It hardly registered.

  The hands of the clock didn’t move.

  I wanted to call Blake.

  I wanted him here with me.

  I wanted to hug him and sit in his lap.

  I wanted to cry on his shoulder.

  I wouldn’t call, though.

  No, he was not in my life, so I couldn’t.

  He was in my head, though, always in my head.

  And my heart.

  We waited, for news of the unconscious and bleeding Tory, for news of the laboring Lacey, for news of the curled-up baby who shouldn’t be here yet, there in The Room From Hell.

  Tick . . . tock.

  27

  Aaron had made a movie before he died. He was the star of it.

  It was on his dresser. I found it after the police, paramedics, the coroner, and detectives came to the apartment; after they’d lifted his soaking, bloating body out of the tub; after the water and blood mixture had sunk into the floor and the carpet.

  The envelope with the DVD said, “To My Meggie. Watch this.” It was titled, “Why?”

  I knew what it was.

  It was another instrument meant to mangle me.

  Aaron had gotten into the bathtub clothed in black.

  He had turned on the water.

  He had slit his wrists.

  I’m sure he watched the blood draining out of his body with some sick, vengeful, perverse pleasure.... But now and then I wonder if at some point, in that blood-soaked tub, he tried to live, tried to fight, changed his mind, reached for the edge, but it was too late . . . too late.

  The doctor told me he was loaded with enough scotch and painkillers alone to kill him.

  He was loaded with misery and manipulation and desperation and illness, too.

  My grief for Aaron, my shock, my horror, knocked me to my knees.

  I am still trying to stand.

  Tick . . . tock.

  “Okay,” Lacey’s doctor said to us in a private room off The R
oom From Hell. She pushed a strand of brown hair off her face. “Unfortunately, Lacey’s in labor. We’ve done all we can, tried different medications, but we have not been able to slow it down.”

  My mother covered her mouth, both hands, her face crumbling.

  My grandma swayed.

  My whole body clenched tight in rejection of her words. “It’s six weeks too early. Six weeks.” As if that could reverse anything.

  “We know.” The doctor nodded. “We’ve given Lacey shots that will help the baby’s lungs.”

  “What about Lacey?” I asked.

  “Lacey’s okay,” the doctor said. “She has bruising up and down her right side. She broke her right wrist in several places, and she hit her head. We think she has a minor concussion, but we will not be running a scan, even later, because we don’t think it’s that severe.”

  Tory’s doctor walked in. Her face was grim, too.

  “Tory’s still unconscious. Bad head injury from hitting the windshield. Left shoulder broken. Left collarbone broken. Both will heal, of course. Severe bruising on her legs and hips. We’re waiting for her to wake up.”

  They talked more. I could hardly hear a thing.

  When you hear incredibly bad medical news, it’s hard to hear past those first few sentences.

  We settled back into The Room From Hell, where a tiny, shriveled finger made time stand still. I clutched my mother’s freezing cold hand. She closed her eyes. I could see her lips moving as she prayed, her flats crossed at the ankles.

  Grandma sat rigid. She did not look well at all. She looked ill, weak. I sympathized. I had seen a mirror. I looked like I’d been run through a meat grinder.

  “Lacey’s baby girl will be fine,” Grandma said, that brogue defiant. “She’ll be fine. She has O’Rourke blood in her.”

  We waited more.

  The hands on the clock were stuck.

  I was sure of it.

  Tick . . . tock.

  The police sat me down to ask questions about Aaron, to make sure I hadn’t killed him myself. My whole body was jerking. I couldn’t control it. Jerk, jerk, jerk.

  They asked me three times if I wanted an attorney, and I said no, no, and no. I told them that I’d flown in from Anchorage that day, and I showed them my airline ticket and rental car stub, which had the time I’d picked the car up stamped on it.

  Johnny and Tyrone confirmed that we’d chatted outside, and they’d heard me a minute later screaming, as Tyrone said, “Like she’d seen Jack the Ripper with his knife pointed at her.”

  Johnny and Tyrone burst into the apartment and called an ambulance right before I passed out. I woke up to the paramedics peering down at my face, running an IV into a vein.

  Jerk, jerk, jerk.

  The police didn’t suspect me. The proof was irrefutable. The medical examiner’s office confirmed it. Aaron had been dead for at least three hours by the time I had arrived. I was in the air when he’d taken his last breath.

  I refused medical care. When I could stand without jerking, I drove to tell Aaron’s mother.

  Rochelle opened the door to her decrepit home, the home that Aaron had come from—endured—and immediately began a tirade. “What are you doing here, Meggie? Come to gloat? You won, you won, you Barbie doll bitch. Aaron told me this morning on the phone that you’re divorcing him. You’re taking him for all he has tomorrow, aren’t you? Taking every cent he earned, you Tinker Bell, tiny-titted psycho who rides his coattails. . . .”

  She had a scotch in her hand. I could smell it seeping from her pores. I was surprised that Aaron had even called her. No, I took it back. Based on what he’d done, I wasn’t surprised at all. It was his last contact with his mother. His good-bye call.

  I asked if I could come inside.

  “No, you cannot. I won’t have the likes of you inside my home ever. Never!” Two of her neighbors came over to see what all the yelling was about. They looked at me pretty sympathetically.

  “Rochelle,” I started.

  “What?” She swayed.

  “Rochelle, I think we should go inside . . .”

  “You and your rocks for brains will never darken my home like a bad smell. You’ve brought enough pain to my life, you stole my son from me—”

  “Rochelle, I’m sorry to tell you, but Aaron is—”

  “He’s what? What lies about things that never happened do you want to spread about my son now?”

  “Aaron’s dead.” I said it softly, as kindly, as I could. The neighbors took a few steps closer to Rochelle as she paled.

  “That’s a lie!” She poked a finger up into the air three times. “I talked to him this morning for the first time in a long, long, and long time. He was mad at me, at me, for things that didn’t happen a long, long, and long time ago. Said I betrayed him. Said I didn’t save him. Save him! None of it happened, and I didn’t do anything about what he told me because I didn’t know. He was lying as a child. His imagination made him say those things! Nothing was wrong. You made him like this. You turned him on me—”

  When she took a breath, I told her what happened—that I’d flown in and found him in the bathtub, that the paramedics had come, that he was at the morgue. I spared her the details.

  “Morgue! Morgue! That’s a place for dead people! Aaron’s not dead!” She threw her scotch glass. It shattered about a foot from my feet. “I didn’t kill him! I didn’t let him get hurt by Dirk. I didn’t give him up to him a long, long and long time ago. I didn’t look away. He’s not dead!”

  She toppled to the ground.

  Another ambulance was called.

  “You’re here.” I walked straight into Blake’s arms in The Room From Hell and held him, my head on his chest.

  “Yes. I heard about the accident, then heard the names of the people, and came up. I’m sorry, Meggie. I am so, so sorry.”

  “Thanks for coming,” I said, then cried all over his uniform. “I’ll make you spaghetti again soon.”

  “I look forward to it.” He smiled and kissed my temple, then my forehead. “I’m glad to be here with you, Meggie.”

  Blake stayed. When I was in and out of Lacey’s room, and later Tory’s room, he worked on his computer, made calls. A few of his officers were in and out, coming in small groups or individuals.

  All through the afternoon, into the night, he never left me.

  “She hasn’t woken up yet,” Tory’s doctor told us an hour later.

  “What does that mean?” I said. “Why?”

  My mother collapsed in a chair, panting, hands cupped to her mouth. I knew she was having an anxiety attack. I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “It means that we would have thought she would be awake by now. We’re checking a few things. . . .”

  “What do you think is the problem?” I asked, leaning against Blake.

  “Harsh knock on the head . . .” She went off into complicated medicalese. Basically: We don’t know. We’re alarmed.

  “But she’ll be okay?” my mother asked, wobbling as she stood. Blake grabbed her. “She’ll be all right?”

  The doctor’s face was serious, drawn. “We are doing all we can, Mrs. O’Rourke. All we can.”

  All we can.

  Everyone hates hearing those words out of a doctor’s mouth.

  All we can. That means you’re close to hopeless.

  “You certainly are not doing all you can, young woman,” my grandma said, her voice pitching up and down. “You can’t help her when you’re jabbering away here.”

  I apologized to the doctor for my grandma, then Blake and I caught my mother as she fell straight back in a dead faint. Two nurses ran out to help, along with the doctor. My grandma wobbled, collapsed. Blake caught her, too.

  Tory had not woken up yet. She had a head injury. She had broken bones and bruising because she’d pushed Lacey out of the way of an out-of-control truck. Lacey was giving birth six weeks early to a baby who wasn’t ready. She had bruising and broken bones. She probably had a concussion
, too.

  I let the tears flow while holding my mother. My grandma, from her own place lying on the floor in Blake’s arms, said to my mother in a snippy voice that overrode her panic, “Wake up, Brianna. For God’s sakes, buck up. I can’t take any more. Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  Two hours later I hardly noticed when another doctor said to my grandma, who was now sitting in a chair next to my mother, “Oh, hello, Mrs. O’Rourke. What are you doing here today?”

  Aaron’s funeral was immediate.

  We had a graveside service. Lacey and Matt flew down, as did Tory and Scotty, my grandma, and my mother. There were a number of friends there, too, from our work in the indie film business, neighbors, close friends of mine from the University of Oregon and high school, and friends from the company. Rochelle was there, of course. Tyrone and Johnny were there. The naked girl who was sitting on Aaron’s face did not appear.

  The minister spoke. He had never met Aaron, so he said inane things about him.

  Aaron’s best friend, Mikey, spoke. Mikey was stoned and said he hoped Aaron “rocked on” and “kept kickin’ it,” and “your films were awesome when you were working with Meggie.”

  A friend from rehab said, “Man, when you were high, you were high and you could do anything. This is not gnarly.” I expected that friend to relapse any day.

  When it was my turn I gave an overview of his life. I said he was born to a loving mother—not because it was truthful, but because I felt sorry for Rochelle who was half-drunk and stumbling about, muttering.

  I talked about how we worked together as filmmakers. I talked about some of the adventures we’d had, the people we’d met, the states and countries we’d been in, how Aaron could get anyone to talk to him, and how he worked to make the highest quality film he could make. I said that we should not remember Aaron for how he died but for how he changed all of our lives.

  I had to stop in the middle of a sentence because Rochelle screeched, “I can’t take it anymore, you bony bitch!” She stalked right up to me, pear body swaying, arms waving. “Shut up! I was a good mother, and you did this to him, Meggie! You killed him!” Rochelle’s face was squished up tight. “You’re a disease, Meggie. You’re a black widow drunken spider and you poisoned my son!” I could smell the alcohol emanating from her body.