The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  I closed my eyes and tried to unsee Rood. Wandered back, instead, to my morphine nightmare. The monkey, the cedar tree. . . . I’d strangled my own brother, for Christ’s sake: morphine or no morphine, what kind of a sick son of a bitch would dream up something like that? A wave of nausea passed through me. I grabbed for the plastic tray on my bedstand and missed, retching bile and melted popsicle all over the front of me.

  When Miguel came back, he cleaned up the mess and changed my johnny. “How you doing now?” he said. “You feel better now?”

  I managed a weak smile. “Can you . . . Are you real busy?”

  “What do you need, man?”

  “I was . . . I was wondering if you could sit with me. Stay with me for a while. I’m just . . . I . . .”

  “Yeah, all right,” he said. “It’s a pretty slow night. I guess I can swing that.” He sat beside my bed.

  “What . . . what day is it, anyway?” I asked. “I don’t even know what day it is.”

  “It’s Saturday,” he said. He craned his neck around to see the clock in the corridor. “1:35 A.M.”

  “Saturday? How can it be Saturday?”

  “Because yesterday was Friday, man. You been in and out of it for a couple days now. More out than in, to tell you the truth. That first night you came in here, you were one of the most out-of-it dudes I ever seen at this place. Kept trying to get off the bed, yank out your IV. That would have been something, huh? You getting out of bed and trying to walk on that foot? Between the surgery and the Percoset and then the morphine drip, you were—”

  It began to sink in: I had never made it to Thomas’s hearing. I’d blown it for my brother. “What . . . what’s the date?”

  “The date? Today? November the third.”

  I saw Thomas, the bag over his head. I grabbed hold of the bed railings and tried to raise myself up. “I’ve got to use the phone,” I said. “Please. I’ve got to find out what happened to him.”

  He looked at me as if I were hallucinating again. “What happened to who?”

  “My brother. Did you hear anything? About what happened to him?”

  Miguel shrugged. “I heard about your truck. I didn’t hear nothing about your brother. Why? What’s the matter with him?”

  I told him it was too complicated to go into—that I just needed to make a call.

  “Who you going to call at one-thirty in the morning, man? Look, you’re a little disorientated, that’s all. It happens when you been laying in bed for two, three days. You call somebody this time a night, they’re gonna come down here and bust your other foot. You ain’t thinking, man. You got to wait till morning.”

  Before, I might have balked. Might have jumped all over him. But I had nothing left to fight with. I felt helpless, overwhelmed. I burst into tears.

  “Hey, hombre,” Miguel said. “Come on. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s the morphine.” He reached over and took my hand. I could call whoever I wanted in the morning, he promised. If he was still on, he’d dial the number for me himself. He held my hand until the shaking subsided.

  Miguel said he had worked a double shift the night before. Had met my family. He asked if my brother was the tall guy who’d been here with my father and my wife.

  He’d visited me? Thomas? Had they released him, then?

  “Did he . . . We’re twins,” I said. “Did he look like me?”

  Miguel shrugged. “This guy was tall, a little on the stocky side. He had dark hair like you, but I wouldn’t say he looked like you. He kept talking about how he was going to be in some movie.”

  I closed my eyes. “That’s my friend,” I said. “Leo.”

  Had he just said my wife had been there? I had no recollection of visitors.

  “I seen that guy someplace. I just can’t remember where. Is he really going to be in a movie, or was he just b-s-ing me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My . . . You said my wife was here?”

  He nodded, his face breaking into a grin. “Hey, if you don’t mind my saying so, that’s one fine-looking woman you got there. And you and her got a kid on the way, right? Beginning of May? She was telling me all about it.”

  Joy. It was Joy who’d been here. Not Dessa.

  “Hey, just think: by the time your kid gets out of the oven, you’ll be back on your feet, running around good as new. Changing diapers and everything.”

  I closed my eyes again. Suppressed another shudder.

  “Me and my wife just had a kid last month,” he said. “Our third. Plus I got a daughter from my first marriage. Blanca. Four kids in all. Blanca’s nineteen already. I can’t even believe it sometimes.” He took out his wallet and showed me their pictures.

  A kid in the oven . . .

  “Hey, come on, buddy,” Miguel said. “You gotta think positive. Look. That’s my wife right there.” His thumb tapped a stocky, long-haired brunette at the center of a family portrait. Even through the blear of my tears, I was taken by the directness of her gaze back at the camera. At me. I mumbled something about her being a nice-looking woman, too. “Yeah, and she don’t take no crap from nobody, either. Me, especially. She’s three-quarters French Canadian and one-quarter Wequonnoc. You don’t mess with that mix. Know what I’m saying?”

  I handed his pictures back. Blew my nose. Cleared my throat. “Married to a Wequonnoc, huh?” I said. “Once the big casino goes in, you’ll probably have to quit nursing to stay home and count all your money.”

  He laughed. “Hey, I like the way you think, man. Maybe in a few years, you might be looking at the Puerto Rican Donald Trump. Who knows, right?”

  There was a lull for the next few minutes. The intermittent whir of the IV machine, the sound of snoring across the room, behind the curtain.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “She’s my girlfriend. Joy. She’s not my wife.”

  “Yeah? Well, if you two are having a kid together, it’s the same difference. You and her got married as soon as that test said ‘positive,’ know what I’m saying? This your first?”

  We lost eye contact. “Her first,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I . . . had another kid. A daughter.”

  “Sounds like you don’t see her anymore.”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s gotta be tough, man. Not being able to see your kid. That’s one thing my ex and I did right. We worked it out so I saw Blanca every weekend. It was worth it, too, because she turned out good. She’s studying to be a legal secretary. . . . So where’s your daughter at? She live in another state?”

  “She’s dead.”

  It stopped him for a minute. I didn’t usually come clean like that—unload on people about Angela. But I was too tired to keep up the front.

  “Wow, that’s tough, man,” Miguel said. “Ain’t nothing tougher than that. . . . But, hey, now you got this new one coming, right? You gotta think positive. And I mean it—she’s a very good-looking woman, your girlfriend. I wouldn’t mind checking out of the hospital and going home to that myself, you know? I don’t mean no disrespect.”

  “Was there . . . Did anyone else visit me?”

  “Anyone else?” He shook his head. “Not on my shift. Not that I seen, anyway. Just your girlfriend and your father and that other guy—the movie star.”

  The Three Rivers State Hospital switchboard answered promptly at 7 A.M. and transferred my call to the security station at Hatch, Unit Two. No, the guard who answered said, they weren’t authorized to give out patient information over the phone. No, he could not give me Lisa Sheffer’s home phone number, even if it was an emergency. The best he could do was try to contact her and give her my message.

  There was no answer at Ray’s. And when I called home, all I got was the sound of my own voice, yapping about free estimates, satisfaction guaranteed. Five minutes later, the phone rang.

  “Dominick?” Sheffer said. “How are you? When I found out what happened, I was like, ‘
Oh, my god.’”

  I asked her if they’d postponed the hearing.

  There was a pause. “Look, you know what?” she said. “Why don’t I come see you? I think it would be better if we went over all this in person. You feeling well enough for visitors?”

  “Just tell me,” I said. “Did they postpone it or go ahead with it?”

  “They went ahead.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Where is he? Now? He’s at Hatch, Dominick. Look, let me just make sure my friend can watch Jesse for an hour or so, and I’ll get there as soon as I can. Okay?”

  I got the phone back on the cradle, but dropped the whole damn thing trying to get it back on the nightstand. Tried unsuccessfully to grab it by the cord and pull. When I looked over at the other bed, I saw my roommate—lying on his side, awake, watching me. “You want me to get that for you?” he said.

  Getting out of bed, he let go a long, rumbling fart. “Whoops. ‘Scuse me,” he said. His slippers scuffed across the room. “One of the side effects of this diet they started me on. Gives me terrible gas.”

  He picked up the phone. Stood there, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Nice to see you back among the living,” he said. He was about fifty or so—gray hair, beard, beer gut under his cinched bathrobe. Go back to your bed, I felt like saying. I don’t want to socialize. Leave me alone.

  He looked down at my uncovered leg, my foot. “Ooh, baby, that’s gotta smart,” he said. “How’s it feel?”

  I shrugged. “Not bad. I guess they got me pretty well doped up.”

  “Yeah, well . . . How else you gonna get through it, right? . . . They were telling me about it—the nurses—when you came in a couple days ago. Took quite a tumble, huh?”

  “So I hear.”

  “I’m in here with a bum gut,” he said. “Bleeding ulcer.” He tapped his belly with his fist. “They think they got it under control, though. They just want to watch me through the weekend. I’m probably checking out on Monday.”

  “Uh-huh. Good.” I closed my eyes. Listened to him scuff back to bed.

  Why couldn’t Sheffer have just told me over the phone what had happened? Because it was bad news, that was why. Break it gently to the poor gimp. . . .

  Bleeding Ulcer over there was getting out when? Monday? How long was I going to be stuck in here? And how long was I going to be out of commission once I did get out? I needed to talk to that surgeon. Doctor . . . ? Jesus, the guy had operated on me for five hours and I couldn’t even remember his name. Couldn’t even picture him. And I’d probably have to wait until Monday to talk to him, too; I doubted chief surgeons showed their faces on the weekend.

  Be patient, honey, I heard Ma say. You need to be more patient with people.

  And how much was this whole fiasco going to cost me? The truck, a five-hour operation, an extended stay at Club Med here. I’d crunched some numbers back in September—just before Thomas’s “big event” down at the library—and even then I’d figured I was probably only going to clear twenty-two, twenty-three grand for the year, give or take a few inside jobs in November and December. Of course, those jobs were shot to hell now. And what if my climbing-up-and-down-ladders days were over altogether? There was no way in hell I’d be able to afford contracting out. . . . My insurance had to cover falls, right? I’d have to wait until Monday for answers on that, too. Doubted I could decipher that mumbo jumbo the policy was written in. Just the thought of making those insurance calls exhausted me. If you want to file a personal claim, press one. If you want to file a business claim, press two. If your entire life’s going down the toilet, please stay on the line. . . .

  I pictured that house of horror over there on Gillette Street—framed in scaffolding, scraped and burned down to bare wood, waiting for primer and paint. Jesus Christ, that house was like a curse or something. Maybe I could talk Labanara into finishing the job for me. Or Thayer Kitchen over in Easterly. Kitchen did drywall, mostly, but he’d paint if he was between jobs. Whoever I got to finish it, I’d just have to pay him out of pocket. Screw it. It’d be worth taking the loss just for the privilege of not having to go back there again. . . .

  I wondered how Ruth Rood was doing. Hell of a thing: goes up to the attic and there’s her husband’s brains all over the place. Who gets the fun job of cleaning up something like that, anyway? Not Ruth, I hoped. That son of a bitch Rood. Once she got past the shock, she’d be better off without him. Who wouldn’t drink, married to that guy?

  Better off without him: the exact words Dessa’s father had used when she made her big announcement to the family that she was going ahead with the divorce. Leo told me that. It was after the dealership’s annual Fourth of July picnic out at the Constantines’—after all the employees had gone home and it was just the family. We’d been separated for a couple of months by then. . . . Jesus, that hurt, though: hearing from Leo that the Old Man had said that. Better off without him. We’d always gotten along okay—Gene and me. We’d had a kind of mutual respect for each other. Plus, there’d been all that time we’d logged in together after the baby died, when Dessa had had to keep calling her mother, having her mother come over. Big Gene would always come, too. We’d just sit there, him and me, staring at the idiot box and waiting for time to pass. Waiting for Dessa to stop crying and realize that Angela’s death wasn’t, somehow, her fault. Our fault. . . . Hey, I’d wrestled with that one, too. Still wrestled with it sometimes: if only I’d done this, if only I’d done that. “You’re like a son to me, Dominick,” Gene had said to me one of those nights. One of us must have turned off the TV; guess he had to say something. “Like the son I never had.” And I’d bought it, too—believed Big Gene, who’d made his fortune selling half-truths and false promises to car buyers. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been looking for my real father my whole life. . . . But what had I expected? That he’d be loyal to me instead of his firstborn daughter? His pride and joy? What did I even know about a father’s loyalty, anyway? I’d had a great role model in that particular department, whoever the guy was who’d knocked up my mother. Left her pregnant with twins. As far as fathers went, I was unclaimed freight. Me and my brother—left on the loading dock for life. Ray Birdsey’s twin step-burdens. . . .

  And as long as I was lying there, not bullshitting myself for once, I might as well admit it: Big Gene was right, wasn’t he? She was better off without me. Me and all my baggage—shitty childhood, crazy brother, even that vasectomy I’d gone out and gotten. That had been it for Dessa, the last straw—my vasectomy. Getting myself sterilized without even discussing it. Going behind her back and having it done while she was away so that . . . so that . . . Your anger poisons everything else that’s good about you, she’d said that morning she packed her bags. I’m going because you suck all the oxygen out of the room, Dominick. Because I have to breathe. . . . And she’d been right, hadn’t she? Lying here in “time-out,” benched by my big fall off the Roods’ roof, I could finally see it. See what she meant. Getting myself fixed like that, cutting off even the possibility of kids . . . you had to be one angry motherfucker to do something like that. And what about that father’s loyalty crap I was always so hung up by the balls about? What about that, Birdsey? What’s so loyal about a father who goes over there and puts his feet in those stirrup things and has them sever his options. Sever, even, the possibility of another kid. That had been real loyal, hadn’t it, Dominick? Loyal to her, to your marriage, to any kid that might have come along later. . . . That was why she’d gone away to Greece, she’d said. To decide whether or not she wanted to try again. And she’d come back knowing she did want to. . . . So face it, Birdsey. Own up to it. You did more to end your marriage than she did. She might have been the one to pack her bags because she couldn’t “breathe,” but it was you who ended it. You who’d sucked out all the oxygen. Killed off the possibility, the hope of anything ever . . . And all those reconciliation fantasies you’d been fooling yourself with—all those rides past that farmhouse where she and her bo
yfriend lived now. It was sick, man. . . . I was like some ghost haunting what she and I had had and lost, instead of just getting on with it. I’d gone out there the night I totaled the truck, come to think of it. I’d been pulling that shit for years now. For years. . . . Too bad I hadn’t totaled myself along with my truck. Or maybe I had. Maybe I’d totaled myself the day I’d gone down there to that urologist’s and spread my legs and said, “Here I am. Disconnect me. Cut off my options.” Totaled. It was like . . . it was like Angela’s death had been this huge, mangled wreck in the middle of our marriage. And Dessa . . . Dessa had gotten up and gotten on with it. Had walked away from the wreck. And I hadn’t. I was road kill, man. Road kill.

  Don’t cry. De-fense! De-fense!

  Well, screw it, man. I was too tired to play D anymore. I didn’t give a crap whether Mr. Bleeding Ulcer over in the other bed heard me or not. I was exhausted. Used up. If I had to cry, then tough shit. . . .

  Did Ruth Rood have family to lean on, I wondered. Some friend who’d go over there and sit with her? She wasn’t a bad woman. She’d been decent to me, in spite of all the hassle about their house. . . . I saw Rood up in that window again—the way he’d stood there, staring out at me. Why me, Henry? Why’d you have to go up to that attic and stare that way at me? What were you doing, you bastard—inviting me along for the ride?

  God, I couldn’t stand much more of this—just lying there, thinking. Only what was I supposed to do? Get out of bed and walk away from it? Hop into the truck I’d totaled and go? Miguel had said something about being able to give me something to make me sleep, hadn’t he? That’s what I wanted to do, man: Rip Van Winkle my way through the rest of my sorry-ass life. Wake up after everyone I knew was dead and that baby Joy was pretending was mine had reached the age of majority. Wake me when it’s over, man. Wake me up at checkout time. Except the only catch with sleeping was dreaming. Dead monkeys, dead brothers. Jesus. . . . So let’s see, Dominick. You don’t want to sleep, you don’t want to stay awake. Guess that eliminated everything but the third option. The big D. . . . And if I chose that route, how? It scared me a little to think about it, but it jazzed me up a little, too. I knew one thing: I wouldn’t make a mess the way Rood had. No one deserved that. So she’d slept with some guy behind my back. Gotten herself pregnant. That didn’t give me the right to fuck with her head for the rest of her life.