“And it was successful? It’s working?” Joe asked.
“Yes, sir, the distal pulses have been restored and the limb is warm. She must be closely monitored through this first night.”
“And then what,” Joe said. “You’ll close the wounds tomorrow?”
“Sir, you must understand,” Dr. Jinani said. “The incisions must be left open until the pressure is fully relieved. I am thinking for a week.”
“Oh my God,” Francine whispered, putting her face in her hands.
“And it can take up to a month for the fasciotomies to heal completely.”
“A month,” Erik whispered. “She’ll be in bed a month?”
“Not necessarily. My thought is she will remain in the ICU for a week while the wounds remain open. I will close them one at a time, roughly speaking, over a period of ten to twelve days. Then she will be able to walk, either with crutches or a walker, and we can send her to rehab.”
Nobody spoke then. The hospital hummed with quiet purpose around them. A voice over an intercom. A nurse walking by, her sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. A phone ringing sedately.
“Can I see her?” Francine said. Her eyes were closed but her spine was straight.
“She’s heavily sedated right now, Mrs. Bianco, and—”
Her eyes opened. “I don’t need to have a conversation with her,” Francine said, her voice velvet around steel. “I just need to see her.”
“This is our only child, doctor,” Joe said.
“I understand. Just for a few minutes,” the surgeon said. He looked at Erik. “And you?”
Every particle of Erik’s being resisted. I can’t, he thought. I can’t do it. Not with her leg sliced open. I can’t look at her like that. Don’t make me.
Joe put his hand on Erik’s face. The firm, warm palm. A soft tug on his earlobe. “Come,” he said. “I need you to come, Erique. We’ll make each other strong.” The pat of his hand again. “I am afraid, too. Come with me. I ask you.”
Erik shut his eyes tight. Teeth set together, he nodded.
He got up.
* * *
Back at the hotel, Erik collapsed on one of the queen beds, heeling off his shoes.
“Bad?” David asked.
Erik ran his hands through his hair and held them there. “They were long cuts, man,” he said. “I thought they’d be little.”
“Show me.”
Erik freed a hand and drew a line a couple inches beneath his knee bone to the top of his sock. David drew in his breath with a hiss. “Just on one side, right?”
“Both.”
“Jesus.” His face twisting a little, David crossed his arms tight on his chest. “And you could like…see her muscles and shit?”
“Sort of. I mean, her leg was bandaged but…” The incisions were dressed but you could see something wasn’t quite right, see beneath the light gauze something was bulging from them. Erik shook his head, trying to flick away the image. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Don’t. You’re done. Hit the sack. You want tea or something?”
“No.”
“Don’t forget to call your mom. She called before, I talked to her a little while.”
Erik’s hands were numb and stupid as he brushed his teeth, pulled on sweats and a T-shirt. He called Christine. Again the sensation of his mouth making coherent conversation without his brain’s participation.
“You went out of the booth,” she whispered. “David told me how you… Oh, Erik…”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“No. No, honey, I… I just need to get to you.”
“I’m so tired.”
“Put your head down. Stay with David. I’ll be there tomorrow.” More comforting, murmured words flowing over the line, saying goodnight, saying she loved him. She was coming.
After hanging up, Erik toppled into bed like a felled tree. David brought him a glass of water and a blue, triangular pill.
“What’s this?”
“That, my friend, is a valium.”
“I’m human valium,” Erik said.
“Not tonight. Take it or I’ll find one in suppository form and get Daisy’s mother to help hold you down.”
Even with the dire threat, Erik hesitated. And David smiled at him. His true, genuine smile. “Nothing will keep you from waking up if she needs you,” he said.
“I know.”
“She’s asleep, Fish. You should be, too. I’ll wake you up, I promise.”
Erik swallowed the little helper and lay down. He pushed the pillows around, piling them behind him. Dave could laugh, he didn’t care. The way Erik went to sleep best was with Daisy spooned up against his back. If she couldn’t be here, he’d fake it.
David dropped into the easy chair in the corner of the room, clicking the reading lamp over his head. “The light gonna bother you?”
“No.” Then Erik sat up on an elbow. “Dave, are you reading the bible?”
“Yes,” David said, licking his finger and turning pages. “Shocked?”
“Only because you’re the least religious person I know.”
“True. But there’s this one prayer, my Aunt Helen likes it. Here, Psalm 41.” He looked up with his irreverent grin. “That would be one of the Psalms of King David, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
David read out loud:
Blessed are those who have regard for the weak; the Lord delivers them in times of trouble. The Lord protects and preserves them—they are counted among the blessed in the land—he does not give them over to the desire of their foes. The Lord sustains them on their sickbed and restores them from their bed of illness.
A long moment of silence. “Read it again,” Erik said.
David did, lingering over the last line, “Sustains them on their sickbed and restores them from their bed of illness.”
“Thanks for being here,” Erik said.
David looked back at him. “Go to sleep, Fish.”
Erik put his head down, wiggled back into the pile of pillows on his shoulder blades, willing them into Daisy’s pliant body.
“Fishy, fishy in the brook,” David said, “go to sleep while I read the Good Book.”
Smiling, curled on his side with the charms of his necklace tucked in a hand, Erik closed his eyes. He took roll call of his talismans: Saint Birgitta, the fish, the boat. And Daisy’s charm, the tiny gold scissors.
The sax.
He opened his eyes again.
“It’s all right, Fish. Go to sleep.”
Erik shut his eyes. He waited. For either sleep or panic. Neither came.
“Dave?”
“Yeah.”
“Read the rest of it.”
“All my enemies whisper together against me; they imagine the worst for me, saying, ‘A vile disease has afflicted him; he will never get up from the place where he lies.’” David’s voice cracked.
“Keep going,” Erik said drowsily. The edges of his mind were beginning to unravel. The pillows were warm and soft on his back, like Daisy. One of his hands became her hand. Daisy’s long fingers woven with his. He ran his fingertips over the edges of his nails, but they were her nails. She was here now. Holding his hand.
“But may you have mercy on me, Lord; raise me up, that I may repay them. I know that you are pleased with me, for my enemy does not triumph over me. Because of my integrity you uphold me and set me in your presence forever.”
“In your presence forever,” Erik said, yawning.
Forever, Daisy whispered on his neck.
And Erik was asleep.
Shaped By Our Scars
“I am such a practical person,” Daisy once told Erik. “To a fault. I don’t like drama. I don’t coo over babies or cry at movies…”
She didn’t cry at movies. Erik had to think hard to remember if he had ever seen Daisy cry. Really break down and weep from her guts. Sometimes she choked up in the throes of an emotional moment with him, but he was always choking right along, whic
h made it a sweet, shared cry. Once or twice he saw her reduced to teary-eyed frustration after a grueling class or rehearsal. But if dance were a cause for sobbing, it was with an air of “I’m letting it out. I’ll be over it in a minute.” Productive crying. Cathartic and purposeful.
But when they dialed back the sedation the next morning and let her come up through the fog. When she opened her eyes and took in where she was. When Dr. Jinani explained, and Daisy gradually began to comprehend what had happened. And when she finally went grabbing at her leg, struggling to sit up but only getting as far as an elbow, just enough to push aside the draped cage over her calf and see what had been done to her…
No, Erik had never seen her cry like this. It tore him apart, how helpless she was against it. She couldn’t roll on her side or roll against him or curl in a ball or fall on her knees with her face in the floor. She had to lie there on her back and take it. Take in how her leg was deliberately and gruesomely sliced open.
It didn’t matter it was done to save her life. It didn’t matter Daisy Bianco was a pragmatic girl who veered away from unnecessary drama and found comfort in practical action.
Nobody was tough when their leg was cut open from knee to ankle.
She cried into her hands at first, but then her fingers hooked into claws, her nails were in her forehead. She was scratching her face and then she howled like a widow, like a madwoman.
Erik peeled her hands away from her face, where already red welts were rising at her temples. He took her wrists, put them up around his neck, and he bent over the bed to hold her. Into his chest she screamed, her breath hot and wet in his sternum. No words, just a keening moan—a thick, drunken blur of despair.
He held her, knowing these tears would do her no good—they served no purpose, they would do nothing to fix her. But he didn’t say a word. Nothing he could say would console her. He wouldn’t insult her by even trying. He just made himself a strong and immovable wall for her to fling herself against. He held her tight and held still.
It was a long and ugly jag, with streaming eyes and running nose and dripping mouth all soaking into Erik’s shirt. Her hair a wild, sweaty tangle in his fingers and her skin hot like fire beneath her gown. She cried so hard she spiked a fever. She wept until she made herself sick, another moment Erik had never seen. Not once in twenty-eight months.
Daisy was particular about puking in private. She practically made Erik leave the state whenever she was hungover or laid low with a stomach bug. But now she was retching helplessly on her misery. A nurse was supporting her back. Erik was holding the basin with one hand, Daisy’s hair with the other, and he was helping her heave it up. As calm and unconcerned as the nurse.
“I’m sorry,” Daisy said, gasping between bouts.
“Don’t be,” he whispered, gently wiping her face with a damp cloth. “Just get it out of you.”
At Dr. Jinani’s order, the nurse put some kind of magic in Daisy’s IV line and within minutes she was out. Erik sat bedside, one hand holding hers, his other laid flat on her cooling forehead. Within his grip, her fingers twitching intermittently. Beneath his palm, her eyelids trembled and fluttered. She was asleep, but hardly peaceful.
Erik knew the fasciotomies were necessary and they saved her leg. Yet he sat with his insides twisting in misery. He could not bear to see her sliced open while he was whole and unscathed. The scales needed to be balanced. While he had no intention of putting his eye out or recklessly slashing himself, he still felt a desire to be scarred. He needed some kind of ritual injury, too. A permanent reminder.
Daisy, he thought. And he finally connected his love to an image of the flower, a little white-petaled ringlet. The spirit of Daisy, crushed and broken on the ground, trod upon and left to die.
I won’t leave. I will never leave you.
He set his lips on her temple. “I won’t let you die,” he whispered.
He had an idea.
* * *
He went to see Will. He still hadn’t had a minute alone with his friend. Either Will was asleep or in pain, or his parents were there, or Lucky. But right now he was alone, staring out the window, his heavily bandaged hand on his chest.
“What’s up, asshole,” Erik said, putting a bottle of pineapple juice on the bedside table. Will glanced at it and his mouth briefly formed a smile.
“Don’t steal my line,” he said.
“How do you feel?” Erik asked.
“Like I got shot. How do you feel?”
Erik breathed in and out. “Changed,” he said.
Will nodded.
Erik sat in the chair next to the bed. “How bad does your side hurt?”
“Percoset’s a beautiful thing.”
“How about the hand?”
Will held it up, letting Erik see it from both sides. “This is going to make jerking off difficult.”
“You’re a lefty?”
“Isn’t everyone?”
Erik laughed, but Will didn’t join in. He watched Erik with troubled eyes.
“Is Daisy awake? I mean… Does she know?”
Erik nodded.
“Bad?”
Erik shook his head. “Not good.”
Will closed his eyes, let his head fall back on the pillow. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry for what?”
Will turned his head toward the window. “I know why I was shot. But why he had to…put a bullet in her—”
“Hey,” Erik said, putting a hand on Will’s arm. “Hey. Look at me.”
Will breathed in and looked back.
“You talk to the police?” Erik asked.
“Yeah. A little last night but I was kind of loopy.”
“Kind of? You were stoned.”
“You saw me?”
“I came in. You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“You kissed me.”
Will’s eyes widened. “Did I really?”
“No.”
His face twisted. “Asshole. Anyway, the detective. Kary?”
“Khoury.”
“Right. He came back today and I told him everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. I know you tried to cover my sleeping with James and I appreciate it, Fish. God, I love you for it. You’re my fucking best friend. But I wanted it all out there. If we try to hide shit it’ll only come back and bite us in the ass. And hide it for what? Because it will somehow justify what he did? He had no right…”
Erik nodded.
Will looked away. “But I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry, Fish. I told you I’d take care of it. And you trusted me not to let Dais get hurt. You told me you trusted my hands.”
“Stop,” Erik whispered. He’d never seen Will like this. Inside-out. Frantic and fretful. Sure of nothing.
“It’s killing me,” Will said. He rolled his lips in and his eyes squeezed shut. “What they had to do to her leg. And when I think about how I dropped her—”
“Dude, you were shot. He took your fingers off.”
“I dropped her.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is, Fish. He was coming after me.”
“If he was coming solely after you he would’ve shot you and only you. He was on a tear. He shot his way through the wings and killed five people. He shot Daisy. He shot Marie and Kees. He almost shot me.”
Will looked at him, his mouth working hard to hold back the emotion. “You stopped him.” The tears rising up in his dark eyes began to spill down his face. “I watched you talk to him. You don’t know, Fish. You don’t know what I…”
“I do know.” Erik got out of the chair, moved to sit on the edge of the bed. Will tried to sit up but grimaced in pain. Erik came to him instead, leaned and held Will’s forehead against his collarbone and let him cry. “I do know,” he said. “And it wasn’t your fault.”
“I’m sorry,” Will whispered between sobs.
“It’s all right,” Erik said. “It wasn
’t your fault. It’s gonna be all right.”
He made his hands heavy and soothing and calm. Not rubbing or patting Will to make light of the vulnerable moment, nor thumping his back to couch it in masculinity.
After a minute Will pushed him away, roughly wiping his face. “God, you’re such a crybaby, Fish.”
“Yeah, I love you too,” Erik said.
Will pointed at him. “Don’t. Just don’t. If I tell you how much I love you, it’s going to get embarrassing. You’ll really cry. Then I’ll cry. Someone’s cock will get sucked. It will rapidly get out of hand and we’ll wind up on Jerry Springer.” He ran a hand through his hair and nudged his chin toward the bottle of juice on the table. “You wanna open that for me?”
Erik twisted the cap off and handed it over.
“Thanks,” Will said, taking a sip. “Apparently hospitals make Lucky horny. Who the fuck saw that coming?”
Erik laughed, and even Will managed a smile, shaking his head against the bottle.
“Listen, I need your help.” Erik told Will what he wanted to do, and Will made a short phone call on the spot. After hanging up, he wrote down an address for Erik.
“Ask for Omar. He does all my ink. He’ll be waiting.”
Omar had been following the coverage of the shootings on TV. In the inner sanctum of his tattoo parlor in South Philly, he listened to Erik’s story, then took pencil and paper and began sketching. He grasped what Erik wanted right away. Not cute or cartoonish. Simple. Realistic. He even consulted a botanical book he had on one of his many shelves. He suggested the petals not all be perfect, maybe one or two could be tattered. Erik liked the idea, as long as the flower didn’t look like it was dying.
“Oh no,” Omar said, in his sing-song Jamaican patois. “We’ll keep her alive, my friend, but we won’t ignore her scars. We’re all shaped by our scars.”
Erik watched as Omar went over the pencil with a black pen, watched the design come to life.
“It’s a daisy,” Omar said, “but it’s just a little…dark.”
“It’s perfect.”
“Do you want any lettering—her initials, or the date?”
Erik wanted just the flower head. On the inside of his left wrist. It took Omar less than twenty minutes to ink. It hurt like hell and Erik was glad of it.
The Man I Love Page 18