Don't You Ever

by Mary Carter Bishop

  I described the day I was back home to help the folks pack up the farmhouse. Daddy and I were gathering his tools down by the dairy barn when Mrs. McIntyre (we still called her that) and her new husband drove slowly by in their station wagon. “She gave us a little wave from the passenger seat, like Queen Elizabeth parading by the peons,” I told him, gesturing as she had. “I jammed my hands deep in my jeans pockets and glared at her. They drove on off.”

  After I’d finished, Ronnie looked me hard in the eye for a few seconds. Then, with the most malevolent face I’d ever seen on him (and I’d seen plenty), he croaked, “Would you like to see that place burn?” He drew the word out so menacingly that it had flames licking off it. It took me a while to comprehend what he was saying. He meant burn down the big house.

  I stared back at him, trying to comprehend this dark proposal. Finally, I stammered out, “Good lord, Slim. No.”

  I went home that night chilled to the bone. It wasn’t surprising to me, really, that Ronnie could be vengeful. In our barbershop talks, his cynicism had often bled over into vindictiveness. But I’d never heard him suggest anything so evil, and my response to him had been weak. I’d been too shocked to be emphatic enough.

  Now I wondered: What has he done in the past? What is he still capable of, even now, even when he’s sick? For all I knew, he’d dial some arsonist thug over the hospital phone that night and put him on the road to Keswick.

  I was back in Ronnie’s room extra early the next morning.

  “I couldn’t sleep, worrying about what you said.” I didn’t even want to repeat it; it was so awful. “If anything happened to Mrs. McIntyre, I couldn’t live with it. You’re not gonna hurt them, are you? If anything happens, I’ll know it was you, and I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Oh, shit, calm down,” he said, half laughing. “I was just running my mouth.”

  But then, in a sinister voice, he coolly stated something just as ominous. His eyes turned to slits, and he boasted, smugly villainous, “I’ve righted some wrongs.” He’d gone to a coal mine and burned it up—or did he say he blew it up? Later, I couldn’t remember which word he used. Either one shook me up.

  He told me that years before, on Roanoke’s Williamson Road in the days when young people cruised the strip in their cars on Friday nights and people milled in and out of bars and pool halls, Ronnie had spotted an Albemarle County man he’d once known. He’d had a run-in with the guy back in Keswick long ago. He beat the man up and left him for dead on the sidewalk.

  “He didn’t even know me,” Ronnie said with a wicked sneer.

  * * *

  ONE AFTERNOON I was looking out the window of his hospital room. The office buildings of downtown Roanoke sat below. I seldom had time to regard my new home like this. It looked dear to me.

  “I love this little old town. I feel so at home here,” I said.

  “You could own a piece of that, girl. You could be somebody.”

  He proceeded to go on a rant. I shouldn’t be only a reporter. I should be running the newspaper. Or I should have learned to ride horses back in Keswick. I should have married one of those rich men. Then I’d be sitting pretty in one of those mansions. He was getting all worked up about my failings.

  “No, no, no,” I protested. “I don’t want any of that.”

  “Ya meek!” he suddenly stormed, his eyes blazing into me. “Ya meek! Just like your daddy!”

  Several times Ronnie had implied to me that Daddy was a wimp. Ronnie jeered, for example, at the image of Daddy giving up guns. Daddy had long kept a .22 rifle near the back door to kill rabid animals and chicken-throttling varmints, but that was his only firearm. He’d quit hunting long ago, and fishing too. He felt rotten causing a fish to struggle on a line with a hook in its mouth. Daddy’s decision to quit killing wasn’t far from Ronnie’s own turn away from slaughtering wildlife. In his last years in the woods, Ronnie told me himself, he shot far more pictures than animals.

  But Ronnie embraced any evidence that Daddy was a weakling, a failure as a man. If Ronnie was ostracized by Mom because of the blood he shared with the man who impregnated her, he was turning that around. I was tainted by Daddy’s blood. Ronnie didn’t understand me or Daddy. I didn’t want to live in a mansion. I didn’t want to be an editor or a publisher. Those people sat at their desks all day. I wanted to be out talking with people. I wanted to hear their stories, just as I was hearing his. And goddamn it, I was somebody.

  * * *

  AFTER RONNIE HAD been in the hospital a little more than a week, it looked as if he might go home. He sat up in bed grinning. He pressured the doctors to hurry up and let him go. Then, all of a sudden, his airways began to close up again. Cursing his body, he pulled violently, self-contemptuously, on the skin of his nostrils, trying to get air. He burped loudly. White, dried spittle covered his lips. Then he vomited blood. “I hurt so bad,” he said, squeezing my hand. Doctors ran to him. He had a stomach ulcer. The doctors were in a bind. They were desperate to lower his blood pressure and keep him from stroking out, so they kept shoveling drugs into him. His body couldn’t take it.

  As aides rolled him to the operating room, I kissed his forehead and his hand. My apprehensions about him melted away; maybe these were the last words I’d say to him. I told him I’d be there when he got back. As they wheeled him away, he rasped, “Bye, baby.”

  A few hours later, the surgeon came by to tell me the operation went well. All the new medications and the stress of being in the hospital had burst a long-brewing ulcer in Ronnie. The surgeon patched the internal sore. In the operating room, Ronnie’s larynx had once again gone into spasms. They reinserted the endotracheal tube. Ronnie was back on a ventilator. I came home with the smell of urine and blood stalled in my sinuses and the dread of another long recovery ahead of me.

  * * *

  HE WAS ALLOWED no water, only three cups of ice a day. I gave it to him on pink sponge-tipped sticks he popped into his mouth and sucked dry in an instant. With his hand on my shoulder, I rested my cheek on it until he fell asleep. I breathed along with him and the ventilator, like a prayer. As he slept, he dropped his hands into his lap, where they twitched in the motions of cutting hair.

  I told him I loved him, and he gave me the sweetest smile. At home I’d still smell him, and I’d move my hands like his. My psychotherapist warned that I was merging emotionally with Ronnie and had gone beyond anything Ronnie himself would wish for me. Sometimes Ronnie would seem to be asleep, but then I’d notice him watching me through the slits of his eyes. He was observing me through those thin slices of his wavering irises.

  * * *

  SOON HE WAS breathing on his own again. He was better but more ornery. He refused to let his nurse reinsert his urinary catheter. As proof that he was peeing normally and able to control his urine, he presented her with a pee jug of clear water, cooler than body temperature—obviously from his water cup.

  He believed lying in bed was weakening him, so he insisted on sitting in his chair all day. When the nurse’s aides stood him up, I spotted the edema in his upper thighs and the imprint of the plastic chair on his butt. If he didn’t move around more—bed to chair, chair to bed—he’d develop bedsores. He wouldn’t hear it.

  He raged against me. “Damn, woman. If I keep on lying in this bed, I’ll never get out of here!” But as I wearily left his room one night, he pointed to himself, then to me, and squeezed two fingers together. Yes, we were a team, but we were a tense team.

  * * *

  IN RONNIE’S SECOND week in the hospital, Mom and Daddy joined Daddy’s eldest brother, Albert, and his family at a reunion in Northern Virginia. I’d planned to go, but Ronnie needed me. Mom lied about my absence. She told her in-laws I was working on a newspaper story. As I watched Ronnie’s unwillingness to listen to the doctors and to take loving care of himself, I blamed her. He should have learned self-compassion from her—well, if she had any for herself. He should have stayed in school so he’d understand basic biology. H
e should have developed more faith in people. He should have learned some manners.

  When I made my post-supper visit to him late one night after writing a story on deadline, he greeted me with “Where the hell you been?” He could be brutish and very hardheaded.

  It turned out that Ronnie’s health insurance would pay only thirty dollars of daily hospital charges in the thousands of dollars. His bill was at $20,000 and rising. A hospital social worker suggested to me that Ronnie go on disability, but I knew he wouldn’t go through the long process of applying for it. I hadn’t told him yet that scans had shown mysterious masses on his lung and on a kidney. He could be in the hospital for a very long time.

  When doctors switched him to a trach with a valve that allowed him to speak more clearly, he borrowed my blusher mirror to see how to put his finger over it to talk. He studied his stubble and his hair standing straight up. “Slim,” he growled, “you’re in a hell of a shape.” He wanted to go back to work and start paying off his medical debts.

  To ease his worries a little, I got his keys out of the hospital safe and drove to the Vinton post office to pick up his mail. In his rooms, Maxine and I poked around and found checks so that he could pay some bills. Maxine was becoming my ally. I was calling her Max now, as Ronnie did. In Ronnie’s rubble, I found twenty or more nose sprays—evidence of his long battle against the narrowing of his upper airways from acromegaly.

  Mom was feeling guilty that she’d visited her brother-in-law while I was down in Roanoke looking after her sick son. She called me, wanting to come see Ronnie. She wanted to bake him a cake and send him flowers and gifts. I ran it all by Ronnie. Just the thought of her and Daddy coming back to stare at him again alarmed Ronnie and probably spiked his blood pressure. Please, he begged, don’t let them come. Tell them he’d be glad to see them later on, which was probably a lie. But no, not right now. Please.

  Mom was incensed. “I see what’s going on,” she snarled at me over the phone, insinuating that Ronnie was trying to turn me against her. She went on, her hard jaw audible: “Well, I don’t want to hear any crap about how Adria was down in Roanoke and didn’t go see Ronnie. Everything I’ve offered to do wasn’t wanted.” In her eyes, he was bad. “Someday,” she warned me, “you will see it.” Where was my charitable mother, the compassionate one I knew so well? She vanished whenever Ronnie appeared.

  She and Daddy drove to Roanoke and stayed with me the next night. As payback for my watching over Ronnie, they helped me trim shrubbery and weed flower beds. Daddy was down on his knees in my privet hedges, pulling out poison ivy. In the living room, I was trying to get Mom to talk about Ronnie.

  “It’s gotta be hard,” I said gingerly. “All those years you kept him a secret. Makes sense you’re still conflicted about him.”

  She snapped back, “You don’t know how I feel.” We returned to yard work.

  15

  Trying to Help

  Early in Ronnie’s fourth week in the hospital, he awoke in tip-top form. He was almost jolly. He licked his breakfast plate clean. By lunchtime, though, he’d transformed into a weak, ghostly-white figure. He fainted on his bedside potty. The chief resident quickly determined that Ronnie was losing blood from his small intestine.

  Ronnie grabbed the nurses’ hands. “Help me!” He thought he was bleeding to death. He rushed them to transfer him to the gurney and whisk him to the OR. It had been only two weeks since his last surgery. Once again, I watched as they wheeled him away. Once again, I didn’t know if I’d see him again.

  From a pay phone, I called Mom to let her know he was headed back to surgery. Cheery “uh-huhs” were her odd response. A neighbor lady was visiting. Mom kept a smile in her voice as, on the other end, I described the grim scene at Community Hospital. Mom didn’t want to signal that anything was wrong. She didn’t want her friend to know she had a son fighting for his life down in Roanoke, or that she had a son at all.

  My therapist believed Mom was incapable of seeing Ronnie as a valuable person. That’s why she responded with coldness to my reports of his difficulties. If she were to believe that Ronnie was a worthy individual, she’d have to face a lifetime of her errors concerning him. So it was easier for her to consider him of marginal importance.

  As before, doctors had been throwing medications at Ronnie’s matrix of maladies, doing their best to help him. His body still couldn’t tolerate all the drugs. This time, apparently, an anticoagulant set off the blood loss. His gut was a mess. The surgeon went in and vacuumed out great globs of clotted blood. Once again, nurses began pumping blood and plasma back into Ronnie.

  He went days without eating. He’d lie in bed and imagine the aisles of his Vinton supermarket. “Oh, Kroger,” he said dreamily. “Melons, cheese, peanut butter . . .” He was mastering his new talking trach, so we were conversing again. He was looking forward to dipping a slice of deep-dish pepperoni into the Italian dressing of a tossed salad at his favorite pizzeria.

  I was back at the newspaper but coming by to see him before work, at lunch, and at night. I was keeping up with the doctors’ medical strategies and trying to learn about disability and Medicaid in hopes I could talk Ronnie into applying for them. His hospital bill was at about $60,000 already, three times the amount he had in savings. When I wasn’t thinking about his financial fix, I was still assimilating this awful family history. Plus, I was trying to get some sleep, some exercise, some peace while calling Mom and Max two or three times a day with updates.

  Meanwhile, Ronnie’s doctors were talking with him more urgently now about lining up pituitary surgery at the University of Virginia Medical Center. A specialist there was eager to get that tumor out. Ronnie said he’d rather die from his disease. He thundered to his doctors, his big hands splayed out in front of him, “Put on the top of the ledger: ‘He is going back to work!’ I want OUT of here!”

  What I was imagining was far worse than Ronnie’s vision of a quick death. Acromegaly could blind him, cause a stroke, and land him in a nursing home, which would be far more torturous than a hospital. A nursing home would spell the end for Ronnie.

  I was growing more impatient by the day with his simplistic views. He thought he could pay a few dollars a month on his medical debts, but the figures he was imagining—ten dollars a month, twenty, twenty-five dollars tops—wouldn’t be enough for his surgeon, anesthesiologist, pulmonologist, radiologist, internist, pathologist, laboratories, or for the hospital itself. Even if they agreed to such tiny outlays, would Ronnie be able to remember payments on a dozen bills each month? He was disorganized. He’d lived an old-fashioned life. He’d been able to walk or drive to his creditors and plop down cash. He rarely wrote checks or mailed them. I offered to help with his debts. I could afford $200 a month.

  As Mother’s Day approached, I toyed with the idea of sending Mom a card “from both of us,” which would have been cruel. In her mind, Ronnie and I were not really connected. Instead, I mailed a card “from your daughter.” She was so distrustful of Ronnie that I had recently asked what awful things had he done. Had he exposed himself as a boy? “No.” Then, “Well, what did he do?” Rape somebody? Injure somebody? “No,” she said, annoyed. “He just stole things, Mary Carter.” She didn’t tell me he’d threatened to kill her.

  * * *

  A MONTH AFTER he arrived at the hospital, Ronnie was out of the ICU and in a regular hospital room. They’d removed his urinary catheter and taken the pesky oxygen cannula out of his nose. He was attached now only to intravenous bags of fluids and to antibiotics. Now that he was out of the woods, I was letting go of some of my watchful edge, and my adrenaline was on the wane. I nearly passed out as I walked back to work after a lunchtime visit. For the first time, Ronnie called me at home that night to make sure I was okay.

  He was back in physical therapy and on the road toward home. I was cutting back to two visits a day. Shortly before he moved from the ICU to a regular room, a nurse looked at him and his bags of belongings sitting there, ready to go, an
d commented that he looked like an orphan. I wondered if he caught that.

  Max had been in to see him. He promised her that he wouldn’t be so grumpy anymore. He was going to be nice.

  * * *

  MAY WAS MY favorite month. I’d spent most of it in the hospital with Ronnie. The tight fern fronds, the purple wild violets, the broad-and-glossy-leafed wildflower called mayapple—I’d failed to even notice them in the lowland Roanoke Valley that year. They’d matured into their thick, dusty summer incarnations by the time Ronnie was better.

  I dialed back the season and found the freshness of early May again in a one-night stay at Mountain Lake, a lodge an hour west and four thousand feet of elevation away from home. Ronnie had taken his girlfriends there in the old days. Tender celery-green leaves were just popping out on the trees. The hotel, set within a nature preserve, allowed trees to fall undisturbed in the woods and be shrouded with moss and lichens. I tromped through the woods with the chipmunks and heard birdsong that was new to me. Even Ronnie was glad to see me get away. “You’ve got a life too,” I was surprised to hear him say.

  * * *

  ON MAY 25, after thirty-nine days in the hospital, Ronnie’s hour of release was set for 11:00 a.m. As he awaited his discharge, he was giddy as a kid heading to Disney World. “Eleven o’clock,” he intoned, watching the second hand creep toward the hour on his wall clock. “Let the sun shine on this poor old country boy one more time.”

  I pulled my Honda Civic hatchback around to the hospital entrance. Ronnie scrunched down to fit into the squat car. When we pulled up to Max’s house, his weakness suddenly made itself known. Walking thirty feet from the car to the front porch was the most work Ronnie had done in almost two months. The rubber tips of his crutches dragged with each step.