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

  My roommate let another one rip. “Whoops,” he said. “Excuse me again.” I tried to ignore him. Maybe I didn’t have to go to the trouble of offing myself, after all. Maybe all’s I had to do was lie here and get asphyxiated.

  “Hey, you want the newspapers?” he said. “I got the Record and the New York Post. I’m through with ’em.” Before I could say no, he’d swung his legs to the floor and started over.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look at ’em later.”

  “Whenever you want,” he said. “I don’t want ’em back. Hey, no kidding, I’m sorry about all this gas. It’s this diet they got me on. I can’t help it.”

  “No problem,” I said. Thought: Okay, now get back in bed and shut up. I don’t want to be your hospital buddy. Just let me lie here and think—play with the idea of dying.

  “By the way, my name’s Steve,” he said. “Steve Felice.”

  He waited. Kept looking at me. “Dominick Birdsey.”

  “Housepainter, right?”

  I shrugged. “Used to be. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. With my leg.” He just stood there, waiting. “What . . . what do you do?”

  “Me? I’m a purchasing agent. Down at EB.” He told me we were both in the same boat, in a way. Hell of a thing—not knowing from month to month if the next round of layoffs was going to zap you. It got to you after a while. That was how he’d gotten his ulcer—not knowing if he was going to have a job by the end of the year or not. He’d always been pretty easygoing before all this. Relatively easygoing, anyway. He thought so, anyway. But what the hell, he said. He heard the Indians were going to start hiring in the spring. They’d need purchasing agents down there, right? Big operation like that? They’d need to order things. Buy things. Or maybe he’d go down there and try something completely different—deal blackjack, maybe, or train to manage one of the restaurants that were going in down there. That’s what life was about, right? Taking chances? Shuffling the deck a little?

  I told him my stepfather worked down at Electric Boat.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Big Ray. We been shooting the shit last couple of days, him and me. He’s been here three or four times to see you.”

  He had?

  “He’s going to be glad to see you today, I tell you. You know, clear-headed—back to normal again. You been a little discombobulated. He’s been worried about you.”

  “Has he?”

  “Well, sure he has. He was telling me how he got over to that place where you were working just as they were loading you into the ambulance. He was supposed to pick you up over there, right? Hell of a thing to have to drive up to: your kid being loaded into an ambulance, screaming bloody murder, and you can’t do a damn thing about it. Sure he’s been worried. My two are grown up and out of the house now and I still worry. It never stops. You wait till yours comes along. When’s the little woman due? May, is it?”

  What had Joy done—stood up on a chair and made a big announcement?

  “You’ll see. When it’s your kid, you’re going to worry no matter what.” Climbing back into bed, he cut another fart. “Whoops,” he said. “Thar she blows again. Pardone.”

  I reached for the phone. Dialed Ray. Figured I’d give him the big medical bulletin: that I’d come back to Planet Earth. But there was still no answer over there. I dialed my own house again. This time, she answered, groggy-voiced. “It’s me,” I said. “I’m back from the dead.”

  There was a pause at the other end. “Dominick?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t cash in my life insurance policy yet, did you?”

  She sounded relieved, I’ll give her that. She kept repeating my name. She might have been crying—she’s not a big crier as a rule, but she might have been. We talked for half an hour or more. Caught up. She did most of the talking. By the time I hung up, she’d filled me in on her three-day vigil at the hospital, all the ways that Ray had driven her crazy, how her morning sickness had begun to set in in earnest. She’d finally gotten through to Dr. Spencer the night before, she said.

  That was the surgeon’s name: Spencer, Dr. Spencer. . . .

  He said they’d know more after the swelling went down—it was a waiting game until then, but he was cautiously optimistic. He was a little concerned about the amount of painkiller they’d had to give me. A necessary evil, he’d said, due to the severity of the break—breaks. But he didn’t want me to end up drug-dependent on top of everything else I was facing. It was going to be a tough enough row to hoe. Eight to ten days in the hospital, he figured—limited physical therapy beginning on Monday. I’d probably need PT for a good six months, minimum. They still weren’t sure about permanent damage; it could go either way. I might be facing more surgery—six to nine months down the line, maybe. “He said it was one of the most complicated breaks he’s ever worked on,” Joy said. “He might even write about it for some medical journal. He said he’d like you to sign a release so that—”

  “What about Thomas?” I said. “Did you hear anything? How he made out?”

  A sigh. A long pause. “Dominick,” she said. “Why don’t you worry about yourself for once instead of your brother? Maybe if you’d been taking care of yourself instead of running around like a chicken with your head cut off for the past—”

  “I missed his hearing, Joy. I failed him.”

  “Honest to God, Dominick. Listen to me. You have to stop trying to be his big savior and start taking care of Dominick instead. Why do you think this happened to you, anyway? Have you stopped to think about that? The way you’ve been rushing down there every two seconds, losing sleep, getting all hyped up over your brother? Worry about yourself, Dominick. Worry about me. About our baby.”

  Our baby: how could she do it? Just lie through her teeth like that? Because she was basically dishonest, that was why. Because truthfulness had never quite gotten hardwired in Joy. And I was supposed to just live out this charade with her? Act the part of the chump and pretend I was this baby’s father? Become Ray, the substitute dad I’d hated all my life?

  Joy said she’d be down to see me as soon as she got cleaned up and had something to eat. If she could even stand to eat. She hadn’t been able to keep anything down except strawberry Slim-Fast.

  “That crap?” I said. “That’s all you’re eating?”

  She told me not to get on her case about it—that it was better than nothing, wasn’t it? Did I need anything? Did I want her to do anything for me?

  “Yeah,” I said. “Call Ray. Tell him I’m better.” Dead air. Five, six, seven seconds’ worth. “What?”

  “I just . . . Why don’t you call him? I’m sure he’d rather hear it from you than from me.” I told her yeah, all right, I’d call. Told her not to rush. To try and eat some eggs or something before she left. “Eggs?” she said. Groaned. I told her that when she got there, she got there. It wasn’t like I was going anyplace.

  “I love you, Dominick,” she said. “I don’t think I even realized how much I love you until the past few days.” She said she hadn’t meant to jump all over me about my brother. It had just been real hard, that was all. God, she felt so sick.

  “Okay,” I managed to squeak out. “I’ll see you when you get here.” Got off the phone quick.

  Jesus, I thought. Felice over there was going to think I was the biggest sob sister ever born. And why was I crying, anyway? Because she’d just said she loved me? Because I couldn’t say it back? I just wished I could have grabbed my keys and gotten the hell out of there. Bolted, like I always did. But I was grounded. I was good and stuck.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bleeding Ulcer’s efforts to pretend not to hear me. He got out of bed again. Walked over to the window. Whistled. . . . They were worried I’d get addicted to the painkiller? Not likely, if one of the little side effects was hallucinations like I’d had in the middle of the night. . . . Suffocated my own brother. Jesus. Doc Patel would have a field day with that one if I ever went back to that whole thing—that big waste of time.
Dredging up your whole childhood as if you were dragging the bottom for a dead body. And then what? What was the point? . . .

  Carry the corpse.

  But he’s alive.

  Kill him.

  Was that what Thomas had been putting up with the past twenty-one years? Talking monkey voices? Had the morphine let me peek inside my brother’s brain? I couldn’t remember what the voice had sounded like—only the power it had over me. I hadn’t questioned it or anything—I’d just done what it said. . . . Maybe Miguel was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the morphine. Nothing I’d ever read said anything about an onset as late as forty, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe I was headed for the bed next to Thomas’s down there after all. Twin beds for twin schizophrenics. Monkey voices, in stereo. Except I’d never let it get that far. Never.

  “Yeah, you should have heard us here yesterday, your dad and me,” Felice said. “Both of us bellyaching about the Boat.” He was standing at the door now—rocking on the balls of his feet, watching the world go by.

  He’s not my father, I wanted to say. He’s my stepfather. But I kept my mouth shut for a change. Give it a rest, Dominick. You’ve been correcting people for years and the only one who ever gave a shit about the distinction was you.

  “Hell of a thing they’re doing to the older guys like your dad, though, isn’t it? Screwing around with their retirement packages like that? I mean, I been there seventeen years. That’s bad enough. But your pop says he started in what—fifty-two? Fifty-three? Gives them almost forty years of his life and that’s the thanks he gets?” He walked back to his bed and sat. “Big business—what the hell do they care? Your rank and file are nothing more than chess pieces to those guys: it’s always been like that. You think Henry Ford gave a rat’s ass about the guy on the assembly line? You think, what’s his name down there in Atlanta?—Ted Turner?—you think he cares anything about the poor slob that sweeps the floors down there at CNN?” He swung his legs back onto the bed. Let go another fart. “Hey, is the TV going to bother you if I put it on for a while? Not that there’s much on on a Saturday morning, but I’m starting to get a little stir crazy in this joint. Sometimes you can catch a fishing show or bowling or something.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “You fish?”

  I told him I used to—that I probably hadn’t dropped a line in since I’d started up my business.

  “Yeah, well, when you work for yourself, you know? That’s the other side of the coin. . . . I like to fish, though. Got my girlfriend into it, too, now. When we started going together, she didn’t even know how to hold the pole. Now she loves it. About a month ago, she caught a trout as long as my forearm. I practically got a hernia helping her lift that Big Bertha out of the water. I got a picture of it on my desk at work—her and that fish.”

  “I used to fish a lot when I was a kid,” I said. “My brother and me. Used to go down past the Falls and catch snapper blues.”

  “Really? No kidding? Whereabouts past the Falls?”

  I didn’t want to do this: get suckered into telling fishing stories with Gadabout Gaddis over there. “Down, uh . . . down by the Indian cemetery,” I said. “There were these three white birch trees right in a row. Just past—”

  “You’re not going to believe this!” Felice said. “We used to go to that exact same spot. My old man and my uncle and me. I know exactly the place you’re talking about. What the hell. We probably ran into each other down there, you and me, and we don’t even remember it. Small world, huh?” He turned on the TV. “My name’s Steve, by the way. Steve Felice.”

  “Uh-huh. You told me.”

  “Did I? Jesus, my mind’s like a sieve in this place. Lack of stimulation, I guess it is. Makes me nuts just hanging around like this. My girlfriend says if I’m getting antsy, that’s a good sign. I’m not the sit-around type, you know? Wash the car, mow the lawn—I always gotta be doing something, whether it needs it or not. You know what I mean?”

  He flipped through the channels—cartoons, the Frugal Gourmet, that smug, head-up-his-ass George Will. Felice finally settled on a nature show—mountain lions stalking an antelope. “She pounces,” the unseen British voice said. “She goes for the throat.”

  “Oh, hey, I forgot to tell you,” Felice said. “My fiancée says she knows you.”

  “Hmm?” I looked away from the mountain lions.

  “My girlfriend. She was in here yesterday. She says she knows you from someplace. Didn’t recognize you at first and then it dawned on her.”

  “Yeah?” The polite thing—the hospital buddy thing—would have been to ask her name, verify for him again that it was a small world. But I didn’t care about being polite. Didn’t give a crap who his girlfriend was. I closed my eyes to shut him up. . . . Maybe I could get ahold of Dr. Spencer on the weekend, I thought. And when was Sheffer going to get here? For someone who was coming right over, she was taking her sweet time.

  “Yeah, it’s funny,” Felice said. “If you’d have told me a year ago I’d be thinking about getting married again, I’d have asked you if you’d been smokin’ wacky weed. My first wife and her lawyer took no prisoners. You know what I’m saying? And I’m not just talking about the stuff she finagled away from me, either—the house, the better of the two cars. I’m talking about the bitterness, too. The emotional stuff. At the time of the divorce, I said to myself, Uh-uh. Never again. Not me. I even went so far as to write it down on an index card and tape it to the medicine cabinet: never again. That’s exactly what I wrote down. And now, here I am, planning to get married again. In Utah, maybe. We traveled out there this past summer. You ever been out West?”

  I closed my eyes.

  “You know what me and her did a couple weekends ago? Went out and bought matching Western outfits together—hats, boots, jackets. It wasn’t cheap, either. They don’t exactly give that stuff away. But I don’t know. We just hit it off, her and me. Which is screwy, in a way, because in a lot of ways we’re like night and day. . . . But it’s like if I leave the Boat. End up down there dealing blackjack. Life goes on, right? You gotta take chances or else you better check your pulse. See if you’re still living.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “You know where we met?”

  I pretended I was dozing.

  “At Partners. You know that little steakhouse out on Route 4? My sister and her husband call me up one night, out of the blue, ask me if I want to go out and grab a bite to eat and that’s where we ended up. We were going someplace else—to the Homestead—but they were closed because of some private party. So we stood at the door and said, ‘Okay, where else can we go?’ and I said, ‘Let’s try that place, Partners.’ Don’t ask me why I said it, but it was me who suggested it. I mean, I could have named half a dozen other places, right? But I said ‘Partners.’ So that’s where we ended up.

  “And it was a Thursday night, see? They got line-dancing down there on Thursdays.” He stopped, cut a fart. Sighed with relief. “If you told me a year ago that I’d meet my future wife in a line-dance, I would have told you to go get your head examined. Life’s unpredictable, though—that’s the beauty of it. I’m trying not to sweat the variables so much. Gives you ulcers. I started believing in fate about the time I turned fifty—realized I wasn’t ever going to be master of the universe, you know? What do the kids call it? ‘Go with the flow.’ . . . But anyway, she says she knows you. My fiancée. ‘From a past life,’ she says. Kind of defies logic that we got together—we’re nothing alike. Well, we’re growing alike, I guess. My first wife, Maureen, she’d blow a gasket if she saw me in that Western outfit. But screw her, right? I’m just going with the flow.”

  A growl came from the wall-mounted TV, the sound of stampeding hooves. “But the sleek antelope is not without resources of its own,” the announcer said. . . .

  A long, curving chain of people stands holding hands in a meadow. At the front of the line, Ray holds on to my foot. I’m floating in the air, tethered only by my stepfath
er’s grip. If he lets go, if my foot falls off, I’ll rise into the sky like a helium balloon. . . .

  I opened my eyes. A chubby black nurse was standing beside my bed, taking my pulse. “I’m Vonette,” she said. “I’m going to be your caregiver today. Okay?”

  I stretched. Blinked my eyes back in focus. “Okay.”

  “Did you see that you have company?”

  Sheffer approached the bed, a smile blinking on and off. “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” She was holding a pot of yellow chrysanthemums and a small wrapped gift. “These are for you,” she said. “The little one’s from Dr. Patel; the flowers are from me.” She thunked the mums down on my nightstand.

  We made small talk while the nurse finished checking my vitals. Away from Hatch, Sheffer looked even scrawnier. Looked a little goofy, really: bib overalls, knit hat squashed down to her eyelids. I noticed her lip right away: orangy powder covering up a purple bruise. When she caught me looking, she raised her hand to cover her mouth. Hand hiding a busted lip: same as Ma.

  “I’ll be back to change your bag in about half an hour or so,” Vonette said. “We wouldn’t want you to float out of here before your lunch arrives.”

  “Yeah, what is it?” I said. “Chicken à la wallpaper paste?”

  She turned to Sheffer, shaking her head. “Must be on the mend,” she said. “You can always tell when they start crabbing about the food.”

  I looked over at Steve Felice’s bed. Empty, the sheets rucked up. TV off. I told Sheffer I appreciated her coming down. Told her she should have skipped the flowers.

  “I wish I got carnations instead,” she said. “Something that smells good. I was thinking in the elevator on the way up how chrysanthemums smell like dog urine.”