“Sir,” the nurse was shouting. Greg pushed past him, running around the foot of the bed and toward the door. He was in a hospital gown, open at the back, but they’d blessedly left his undershorts on. He could think of only one place there was left to look, a place he knew GJ could go and find help. He was running now, down the hall, toward the nurse’s station. He felt like laughing, the canned air tasting almost sweet as it filled his mouth and lungs. The male nurse was not chasing him but he ran harder, the hall seeming to stretch and the nurse’s station moving swiftly, cleverly away from him. “Aha!” he shouted, and ran harder. Thirty steps, then forty, then fifty. With every step, his cuts throbbed and whined. Seventy, a hundred. He estimated only about thirty left, and he was nearly correct. Twenty-eight and he was square in front of two nurses behind the counter, each wearing pale peach scrubs and looking at him with bored, slack faces.
“I’m leaving,” he panted. “I need my stuff. Greg Reinart.” He pointed at himself.
“Well, we can’t make you stay,” one of the nurses said. “But it’s probably not in your best interests to leave.” She turned to open a locked drawer, pulled a clear bag out containing his shoes, his cell phone, and his wallet.
“I’ll come back,” Greg said. “Promise.”
The other nurse had been watching him, and she shrugged, looking back down at her computer monitor.
“You have to be admitted,” the first nurse said. “You can’t just come back and check yourself in.”
“Right,” Greg said.
“Meaning you have to have suffered an event.” She tossed the bag onto the counter.
“My clothes?” Greg asked.
Both nurses looked at him, like he’d just told a joke. “They cut them off you,” said the second nurse. She covered Greg’s hand with her own. “They’re gone,” she said firmly, as if reminding a kook that his loved one had died decades ago.
“Right,” Greg said again.
The first nurse went back to the drawer. “Here,” she said. She pulled plastic-wrapped scrubs out. “These should fit. You can’t walk around with your … like that.”
Greg pulled the scrubs on in the hallway, which meant he was nearly naked in front of these young, pretty women, the pale mammoth of his torso exposed, pocked with moles and hairs. But only for a moment; he was quick. He felt thankful that the neck hole was large enough to prevent the fabric from scraping his wounded face. The top was short-sleeved, another blessing. He folded the gown neatly and handed it to the second nurse, who pushed her wheeled chair over to a hamper and dropped it in.
The male nurse made it to the station just then. He put his hands up. “It’s your funeral,” he said. The first nurse snickered.
“Gallows humor,” the second nurse said, as if they were all looking at a rare bird and she’d just thought of the name.
“Have a good day,” Greg said. He no longer felt like running, the appearance of the male nurse reminding him that the doctor had said he’d had a heart attack. His heart suddenly felt raw in his chest, like it had been tenderized with a mallet, like it could shrivel or burble wetly from his throat at any moment. He managed a brisk walk and felt relieved when he turned the corner and could no longer feel their eyes on his back.
The waiting area in the downstairs lobby was filled with people. Children playing in a stingy Kids Korner, where there were tattered Highlights and a nicked bead maze; adults asleep with their mouths open; an elderly man hunched over, making no attempt to hide a deep gash in his forehead. Greg wondered if his vacancy meant one of these people might get a shot at seeing a doctor now, and he walked even faster. The pneumatic doors hissed at his approach and again as they closed behind him. He squinted; everywhere he turned it seemed the sun was glaring down at him as blinding as a camera flash. He shielded his eyes and checked his phone. Its screen showed hash marks and dashes; it could no longer dial or retrieve voice mails. It was officially dead. Greg inserted it tenderly into the slot of a garbage can at the curb, listened as it whumped down into what sounded like a soft landing, for which he was grateful. Deb would be thrilled to know he’d need a new phone; she’d want him to buy one of those phones that had no keypads, the ones with the icons that were just a smidge too small for his thick fingers. Fine, fine, he thought to himself. No biggie. I’ll get used to it and it’ll make Deb happy. What day was today? It was hard to remember; it was hard to dredge up the same feelings he’d had when he started this trip. But he had a destination in mind, one that felt so obvious now, and there was a taxi idling just beyond the garbage can.
Greg leaned into the open passenger-side window. “Can you take me?” he asked.
“You Jessica?” the driver asked. He held a word search in his lap, a gnawed golf pencil poised just above it.
“Sure,” Greg said.
“Works for me,” the driver said. “I’ve been waiting over seven minutes.”
Greg liked a man who remembered the details, who said seven minutes instead of rounding down to five or up to ten. “Great,” he said, and got into the backseat. It smelled like oranges in there, fresh and clean, and Greg could have kissed the driver.
Only ten minutes later they pulled into the vast parking lot of the shopping plaza where Mick’s was located. It was feeling more and more like fate that Greg hadn’t been able to escape the orbit of central Florida, and that the hospital was in Ocoee, such a short drive from Mick’s.
“This it?” the driver asked. Greg had told him how to get there, turn by turn, as if Mick’s was his childhood home and the route there was part of who he was, indelibly etched into his brain the way the steps for tying a shoe were. As they pulled in there had been the Publix, the Cato, the Cato PLUS, the Gymboree, the Blockbuster—empty inside, Greg could see—and then, where Mick’s had been, there was something else. Its tall brick façade held melon-colored letters that felt dwarfed in comparison, and they read CROC’S WATERING SPOT. Beyond the darkly tinted windows he could just make out slanted televisions peering down from the ceiling like flickering gargoyles. Greg looked around, out into the parking lot, beyond to the roads bordering the plaza on each side. This was definitely where it had been, but it was not here now.
“You remember a place called Mick’s?” he asked the driver.
The driver met Greg’s eye in the rearview. “This isn’t my part of town,” he said.
Greg thought of asking to be driven back to the hospital, or over to Marie’s, or back to the BP to see if the RV was there, but all of those options felt hazy, like they were hallways in a dream. He held his debit card out to the driver and the driver sighed as if he’d handed over a plate of dung.
“I only have a dollar in cash,” Greg said to the back of the driver’s wagging head, but it didn’t seem to help.
The crocodile theme carried on inside, which Greg saw as soon as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. It seemed the main source of light came from the televisions and the window, which provided only so much, what with the thick brown tint. There was synthetic swamp grass along the bar and a huge painting of a crocodile above the bottles. Three mounted crocodile heads, one of which Greg thought might be an alligator instead, were mounted above the hostess’s station inside the door. When it had been Mick’s there was no hostess station, there was only one television that hung behind the bar, and the only theme it could have been mistaken for was yard sale.
There was news on one of the televisions; the credits to The Price Is Right were rolling on another. He looked around for the woman who’d answered GJ’s phone. There was a blonde at the bar in a cheap suit with boxy shoulders, there was the hostess smiling at him like he was the one to offer her a seat, and there was a plump woman hunched over, her back to him, three booths back. None of them were holding a cell phone.
“Is there a man here by the name of GJ?” Greg asked the hostess. She had short curly hair and a small gold earring clutching her eyebrow.
“Do you mean DJ?” the hostess asked. She had a menu clutched to her br
east like it was a schoolbook. “DJ doesn’t work on Tuesdays.”
So it was Tuesday. Yesterday, Monday, he’d fought off the kid. A whole night had passed without him knowing it. Today is Tuesday, that much I know.
“Not DJ. G. GJ,” Greg said. “He’s my son.”
“Hmm, well, let’s see,” she said, as if she could help him pick something off the menu, as if the menu might offer something just as good as his son. “I can ask the manager.” Before Greg could answer she walked off, disappearing behind double doors that hadn’t existed in the days of Mick’s. Greg walked over to the blonde, who was in the process of lighting a thin cigarette. Greg cupped his hand over the flame, which was what GJ would have called creepy, he knew it as soon as he did it, the blonde’s eyes sweeping his mummified arm. He had only been trying to ingratiate himself.
“May I see your cell phone?” he asked.
She blew a stream of smoke from her pursed lips. Greg looked down at the gold locket she wore, the letter M in its tarnished center. “I’m not up for talking,” she said. Her face was pretty enough, with a strong chin and a dainty nose and big liquidy brown eyes, but there was a mole the size of a boll weevil melting down her upper lip. Even so, Greg guessed she got hit on a lot in bars.
“Me either,” he said. He stepped back a bit and raised his hands to show her he didn’t want a thing, only her cell phone. “I just want to see your cell phone. I don’t even have to touch it,” he added. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the hostess and the manager walking around the bar toward him.
“Hey,” the woman said. “I said no.”
“But you didn’t say no,” Greg said. He felt like she was purposefully misunderstanding him, like she wasn’t listening, couldn’t see how badly he needed her help. “You did not say the word no.”
“You can’t smoke in here,” the hostess said. She and the manager, a pear-shaped butch by the looks of it, were now standing in between Greg and the blonde, who dropped the butt into her beer bottle.
“I was only asking if I could see her cell phone,” Greg said. His tattered heart, barely hanging on. He felt like someone was cutting the strings, one by one, and it was slumping farther into his gut, where his stomach would make quick work of it. It moaned in anticipation but the women didn’t seem to hear. He put his hand over his sternum, to protect it from the harpies before him.
“We got a phone in the office that you can use,” the manager said. She put a hand on his elbow, tried to lead him away. The blonde gathered her purse and cigarettes and hopped off her bar stool and walked away, toward the door.
“I don’t want to see the phone in the office!” Greg bellowed. “I want to see her phone!” He pointed at the retreating woman, who was swallowed by the daylight. “And hers!” He pointed at Plumpy hunched over her plate. “And yours!” He pointed at the hostess, who held the menu out like a shield now.
“Sir, that’s not going to happen,” the manager said. She pulled his elbow harder now and snip, his heart dropped like a stone, right into a pool of acid. He heaved for air, like he was retching in reverse, but none came through. He felt his cheeks sinking inward with the effort. He clutched at the manager; he clawed at the hostess, slapping the menu from her hands. Darkness was crowding in all around him, the way it swallows all but a star. He went to his knees, opening the scab he’d gotten in Marie’s parking lot. The bar stools honked and tumbled. Everything was the same; he’d never escape this fruitless trip. His son being the fruit. Not what I meant! He tried to scream it at the women but they watched him melt into the sticky, gritty floor as if he were a vaporizing cockroach. His heart must be a puddle by now. Night night, that’s how GJ said it as a boy. Night night, Mama. Night night, Dada. Greg always impatient for the boy to go to sleep, leave him alone. Now he was alone. Before Greg went night night at the feet of the two women, he thought with no small amount of wonder that maybe this was what he’d hungered for, year after year. To consume his own heart and be done with it.
It was late spring but there was a smell of ashes and a clap of bitterness to the air. Greg had opened his window to feel the sun on his face but ended up closing it quickly. Not that he didn’t welcome the brace; it was interesting, nice even, to expect warmth but be greeted with ice. He welcomed the gentle disorientation; he welcomed the cold, so opposite of the close heat of Florida. It reminded him that time would continue plodding along, day to day, season to season. Soon it would be summer, then autumn, then winter … time would pass. It was a certainty, a comfort.
Deb was still in the house. He could hear the groaning floorboards downstairs as she walked from the kitchen to the porch, probably filling her bird feeders, as she did every Wednesday. She was afraid to leave him alone for too long, he knew. She’d flown down to collect him—her word, collect, as if he were a tax. She’d used their miles, miles they’d talked about using to visit wine country or Hawaii someday. Instead she’d had to gouge them to fly down and be met at the airport by Marie, and then be driven to the hospital by Marie, and then hear from the doctor that he’d attacked someone in a bar and then had a panic attack. She’d had to take a taxi to the tow lot where the RV was, had to pay for it to be professionally cleaned of the rotting food and moldy cups and puddles of blood and the sewage that had burbled up through the shower drain and dried. She described all of this to him later, when they’d been home a few days, speaking gently to him, every sentence with a tentative question mark at the end of it. And there was food, so much food? And there were empty bottles? As if she was asking him to remember, begging him to confirm it all for her. He had just showered; his hair was too long and was wetting his shirt collar. His feet were bare. The couch had given in underneath him as it always had. Deb had made them mugs of tea. The trees outside hushed each other. This was home; Deb was home. Still, he couldn’t hold back the urge to want to shout, to yell, So? To ask her why she believed everything had to make sense. Instead he sat silently, nodding, his hands upturned in his lap. They hadn’t worked well since Florida. He could no longer make a satisfying fist. He still didn’t know where GJ was and he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was Deb’s fault. She’d put a stop to it all, brought him home. Exactly where he didn’t want to be, it turned out.
He opened the window again. Where did he want to be? His face began to sting from the cold. Nowhere.
He and Deb had driven the RV back over the course of two days, spending the night in a Sherwood Inn that smelled like a hot Band-Aid. Mostly he’d slept, or pretended to sleep. He saw a sign for a place called Eat ’n’ See and couldn’t recall if that was the same place he’d stopped his first night on the road, a hundred lifetimes ago. Deb was good at letting him be, at not asking questions, or maybe he was giving her too much credit. Maybe she just didn’t want to know.
“Well, this will all make sense with time,” Deb had said that day on the couch. “There’s a purpose for everything.” And over the coming days, she’d hung a leather strap laden with bells on the door to the pantry and trashed all the alcohol in the house, even the gooed-up bottle of NyQuil that had been in the downstairs bathroom for years. The pastor at her church even came to dinner one Friday night, glopped Deb’s taco casserole onto his plate while telling Greg about the men’s group and the AA meetings the church offered. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” the pastor said. There was a bean stuck midway up the man’s fork, and Greg waited for the man to catch it with each bite, but there it remained. Greg laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. Deb stood to offer the store-bought flan but the pastor said he didn’t have a sweet tooth. Deb walked him out and Greg watched as they hugged for just a smidge too long, the pastor’s hand at the back of Deb’s head, their bodies touching from shoulders to knees. He surprised himself by feeling flooded with relief, for her and for himself.
He went downstairs. Deb was still on the porch, hanging her feeders. He opened the pantry, holding the leather strap in his hand to dull the chimes. Multigrain crackers, a jar of purple olives, a box of
Grape-Nuts. He took a handful of the crackers; a difficult seed immediately got caught in his molar. It should have been the end, is what it came down to. In his heart, he was sorry he hadn’t died on the floor of that bar. He’d thought he was dying and he had not, and it was not a polite kind of disorientation. It was not making sense with time.
He dialed GJ’s number and got a recording explaining that the number was no longer in service. He had not heard from Marie and had not tried to call.
Deb came in from the porch, bringing a sail of icy wind with her. “Aren’t those interesting?” she asked, looking at the crackers. “I found them in the healthy aisle.”
“They’re great,” he said. The seed felt like a rock he’d never loosen. This was the kind of conversation they had now, Deb afraid to say anything real and Greg playing the part of a doddering, harmless old man.
“What would you like for dinner?” Deb asked. “Soup and sandwiches? Some kind of noodles? We could have eggs and potatoes…”
“Why don’t we go out?” It was his way of challenging her. Going out meant the proximity of junk food. The possibility of booze.
“Oh,” she said, drifting off.
“Soup sounds good,” he said. She smiled, relieved. “Can I ask you,” he went on, “about Pastor Lawrence?” His heart began to thunder; he hadn’t planned on saying that.
“About the meetings?” Deb asked.
“No…” He stopped himself. Beyond the windows, the trees were tossing about, the green leaves so new, so bright that they hurt his eyes. He would never tell Deb about that night with Marie. “Yes, about the meetings.”
She went over to a drawer and pulled out a yellow pad of paper. “I wrote down the times. There is one tonight at five-thirty—that’s the AA one—and a men’s group meeting in the morning on Saturday.”
He had received a letter about three days after returning home. A letter, of all things. Where had GJ gotten a stamp? Where had he gotten an envelope? The postmark was smudged; it was difficult to tell what the zip code was. Greg had read it standing over the sink in his kitchen, listening to the uneven drip dripdrip drip that had lately begun to infuriate him. The letter was typed. Where had GJ gotten access to a computer? A printer?
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