Will & I

by Clay Byars

  24

  When Will and I were in high school, the Home Depot came to Birmingham. Its aisled warehouses and ubiquitous customer service have since become a model for many other chains, but it was somewhat revolutionary at the time. One weekend my father went to one in a shopping center near our house, whether just to browse or for something specific, I don’t know. As he was walking back to his car in the fairly crowded lot, a man appeared beside him and started chatting. My father returned the small talk. (He was not only a master of small talk, he could cut people off just as quickly. “Well, good enough.”) Once they reached his car, the man, obviously realizing his plan wasn’t working out as smoothly as envisioned, reached into my father’s inside jacket pocket as he was climbing behind the wheel and took his wallet. From my father’s recounting of the incident, I don’t know how the man could have thought this would be taken as just an accidental brush, but apparently he did. My father hadn’t seen the man take it, but he felt it leave his pocket. Nevertheless, he patted his chest and said, “You son of a bitch, you just took my wallet.”

  The man said, “Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My father said he just had it next to his glasses and now it’s not there. Then the man said, “You’re welcome to frisk me if you don’t believe me.” He knew then he was part of a scam. The man had passed the wallet off to someone else walking by at just the right moment that my father hadn’t noticed, but my father frisked him anyway. He of course didn’t find it. The man said he must have dropped it on the floor and said he would go check himself. My father followed him back inside, but of course it wasn’t there either. The man even offered to take his card and call him if it turned up.

  I don’t know if the man just expected him to go back to his car and curse his bad luck before going home to cancel his credit cards, but my father went back to his car and moved it until he was out of sight. Then he sat there waiting for three and a half hours. My mother finally called his cell phone to check on him. When the man finally came out, he looked around before walking to a car in the lot next door. My father sped over and blocked him in while he began to write down the license plate number. As he was doing this, the man jumped out of his car and came back to my father’s. My father admitted this next part was stupid, and he could easily have been shot. The man said something he had to roll down his window to hear. He was asking my father what he thought he was doing. When my father told him he was writing down his tag number, the man said, “I’m sorry about your wallet, sir, but you can’t do that. You’re violating my civil liberties.”

  My father said, “I suggest you watch me,” and rolled up his window.

  By the time he returned home, the local Wal-Mart had called, and his wallet, without missing a thing, had been found on the floor there. He called the police nevertheless.

  * * *

  In the early fall of 2006, my father fell ill. His stubbornness had helped get him to where he was in life, but as he admitted himself, it could blind him. Stubbornness kept him from going to the doctor before he and my mother left on a trip for Italy. He’d sold his company, so he and my mother began traveling a good bit, to be able to deal with the leisure. He’d been complaining of stomach pains, to the point of almost getting himself checked out. He said after the trip that he knew he shouldn’t have gone, but I understand why he did. Immediately on returning, after complaining to us about all the hills and stairs in Italy, he checked himself into the hospital. Two days and a battery of negative tests later, he was released. His pains didn’t stop, however, so he went to see his internist, who couldn’t find anything either, but urged my father to check himself back into the hospital.

  When I got into town that night, my mother was just leaving to take him his toothbrush and a change of clothes. His stay was indefinite, at least until they found out why his stomach hurt. We were in the kitchen, and I told my mother not to worry about my dinner, I would just heat up some leftovers. Then I said, “The fatalistic way Dad’s handling all this isn’t going to help him. You even said yourself he’s sure he has cancer. I told him he hasn’t always been like this. He’s basically being a pitiful, passive patient.”

  My mother glared at me in disbelief. “But Clay, he’s sixty-seven years old.”

  “I know. All I’m saying is that he’s one of the main reasons I’ve been able to recover at all. He hasn’t always been this mentally pitiful. He’s just waiting to die.”

  She got that caged-animal look in her eye. I wasn’t getting my viewpoint across, and she was getting angry. “But he’s your father,” she said.

  “That’s not…”

  “You could have a little compassion, you schmuck!”

  I don’t remember hearing the phone ring, but I was awoken at two o’clock the next morning and heard her talking on the phone across the hall. It was one of my father’s nurses. My mother said, “Oh, my God!” He’d started throwing up blood, and they were taking him to the ICU. He was still lucid enough to have the nurse call home. I walked in to find my mother frantically getting dressed. My sister was on the way to pick her up. They would call and let me know what was going on as soon as they knew themselves. “Don’t worry,” my mother added, opening her umbrella by the front door and stepping out into the pouring night, “it’s all under control.”

  We learned that polio can cause problems later in life for people who’ve had the disease when they were young. My father had always been in remarkably good health, apart from being overweight, and neither his family nor my mother’s had any history of cancer. Were his years catching up to him?

  They gave him an emergency endoscopy that night, hoping to find the source of his pain. The doctor had to put him to sleep for this, but my mother wanted Will and me to see him first, in case he didn’t wake up. Her cell phone went straight to voice mail when I called to tell her to stop being so theatrical, and not to wait on us. Time was obviously of the essence. I called again and got the same result. I felt like I was back in the hospital, having another needless test that no one had ordered.

  It turned out that my father’s liver was failing. It had been for a long time. The diagnosis, cirrhosis, made me assume that alcohol had played a part, but as it turned out, this wasn’t the case. My father did drink, but he wasn’t an alcoholic. His unchecked diet and the curvature of his spine were factors, the doctors said.

  His relief at not having cancer was short-lived. He needed a new liver, and soon. He began to turn yellow—not yellowish, but comical, face-paint yellow. They put him on a quarantined ward. Before entering, we had to put on gowns and masks and scrub up with antibacterial soap. A friend of ours, Will’s best friend from elementary school, was doing a residency in the hospital at the time. He visited my father every day of the two weeks he was there. He told us later that if a new liver hadn’t arrived when it did, my father would surely have died. “You don’t think he could have made it another day?” I asked. He responded, “I don’t think he could have made it more than a few hours.”

  The color of my father’s face went back to normal almost immediately after the transplant, but he remained certain that he was dying. Yet there was none of the expected fear in his eyes, of the kind that might prompt him to act, either to end it or to get better. We gathered around the bed, and he began writing out what he wanted to say. His throat being intubated for so long had left him unable, or too weak, to speak. Then he got tired and had me go through the alphabet letter by letter, while he spelled out his thoughts. He wanted to know the date. He wanted to say that his nurse was a bitch. That his back was hurting. As we were leaving, he tried to tell my mother something, which couldn’t have been that important, because he didn’t want to spell it out. He wanted to make us guess. He made a halfhearted effort to pantomime his thoughts, at one point folding his hands over his chest. When none of us could figure out what he was trying to say, he fell back on the pillow and shook his head in disgust, like we’d failed him.

  I don’t think he ever really gave th
e transplant a chance to take. He’d decided he didn’t want to live anymore. Yet he was afraid to die. I didn’t blame him—neither for the fear nor for no longer wanting to live. There was something intuitive between us. We understood each other, and he now trusted me. At the same time, I couldn’t escape mixed feelings for having gained it this way. It had required his complete dependence on someone he knew could relate, whereas his instinct was to act for me.

  The house became a theater of blame. For my mother and sister, it all came down to something one of the doctors was doing wrong. Will had two little girls by that time, and it was easiest for me to be involved. Once I drove downtown in the middle of the night, after my father had called home raging in frustration, demanding his street clothes. I arrived only to find him asleep. He called on Christmas morning to tell the family that it had been a good run. He ended up deciding he’d been having a nervous breakdown, and his doctors even sent the psychologist on staff to see him. I walked into his room while she was there, but he wanted to tell her all about me instead of discussing what was going on with him. She rolled her eyes after a while, and he looked at me and smiled before continuing. I explained to him that he could leave as soon as he was able to sit in a wheelchair for ten minutes. “But I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “How do you know if you don’t try?” I said.

  It was like a fog moved in. He looked straight ahead, then he made his eyes roll back in his head, as if to blot out what was happening.

  He died a few weeks later, after a prolonged refusal to eat. A machine was the only thing that kept his heart beating. His final moments were appropriately theatrical. A minister friend of his was there. We gathered around his bed in the ICU as they unplugged him, which was surreal because he was conscious, although intubated and groggy, as if he’d just woken up from a dream. His eyes were open. The doctor had said it would be just a matter of seconds before he flatlined, once he came off the cardiopulmonary pump, but he was lucid enough and had time to gesture first. He moved his hand. The minister beckoned us all to huddle up.

  25

  One day a few months later, after I’d moved from the lake to Shelby, I went to lunch with Caldwell’s father, who I still saw fairly regularly. He wondered if I had ever considered teaching, at which I just laughed. He said he could really tell a difference in my voice and thought I could do it if I wanted. Then he told me about this experimental school downtown, where inner-city kids, most from single-parent families, from all over the area applied as a first step on their way to college—the school only went through the eighth grade. Charter schools hadn’t yet come to Alabama, but that’s essentially what this was. He had donated some money to the school, but wasn’t involved otherwise. He said he’d love to take me to go meet the principal if this was something I might want. I could tell he had put some thought into this, so I said sure. The man we met with was the interim principal—the acting principal had stepped down the week before—and was an ex–army officer. Caldwell’s father explained what he had in mind, that I teach or tutor some of the older kids in creative writing and help them with their papers. The principal agreed to it before Caldwell’s father even finished, which automatically made me suspicious, but then we met with the volunteer coordinator and I felt better. (I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had to fill out a background check, either.)

  Right away, I realized I’d severely underestimated these kids. Even though I later discovered that the two girls I first taught were the best writers in the school, there was none of the lively discussion that I’d envisioned. This was beginning creative writing, for which they both had an intuitive feeling, but which they couldn’t have talked about and I wasn’t prepared to teach, and I was expected to talk the entire time. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Not long after, I happened upon an exercise guide for college graduates that was divided up, loosely, by the different parts of a story. It saved me. I had to tailor some of the exercises for seventh- and eighth-grade level, but except for the ones dealing with sex, they all more or less worked. Plus, I couldn’t give homework, so this seemed perfect. This was creative writing, after all. They would learn by doing it. I later found other exercises, as well as ones for poetry, and came up with some on my own, but that became the format—making them think for themselves in a framed setting—from then on. The biggest group I had was eight students, sometimes just one. We would do an exercise, then everyone would read what he or she had written and we, or I, would talk about how it could be better—only rarely did they actually rewrite.

  In the third year I was there, I had the same eight students every time, a few of whom I’d had previously. Because they could get away with almost anything, my class had become somewhat of a club to them. One day we were doing an exercise I had seen about feeling like an outcast, called the Black Sheep. As I was explaining the exercise, asking if they’d ever felt that way and how you would convey such a feeling concretely, it hit me how inherently wrong this sounded. I became embarrassed. Suddenly, the kids all started talking as if I hadn’t said anything, and I blushed without telling them to stop. An eighth grader who sat to my right chuckled and said, under his breath, “You mean like every day.”

  Still, my confidence increased exponentially. Interacting with frank critics was helping my voice as well. I found I liked being able to say I taught, even though it was voluntary and only part-time. When I came into town for it, I went to my mother’s house first to drop off the dogs, and the change in atmosphere was so abrupt it felt like the two places were on different planets. I liked moving between them however.

  26

  I sat on top of Will in our mother’s womb, causing me to be born with too much blood and him not enough. That was the first time they took blood out of one of us and put it in the other. The other time being my surgery in New Orleans. As babies, Will and I would stop crying only if our parents put us in the same crib.

  Every stage of life we’d gone through not just together but as a unit, as a unity. Which makes it less surprising that after my stroke—and especially after my predicted death—things changed. Our twinship wasn’t broken, but it was redefined, physically and in ways that were harder to pin down. For one thing, Will had prepared himself for me to die, and you can’t completely backpedal from that once you’ve done it. He wouldn’t say that, necessarily, but how could he not have done so? His abrupt reactions when I was in the hospital—that was part of his separating himself. His reality changed: all the outside hopes and expectations, familial and otherwise, that people had felt about us, that had been distributed equally between us, were now all on him, with the added burden that he couldn’t avoid feeling responsible for me.

  As I became more patient—in an effort to preserve my sanity—Will became more impatient. After he entered the workforce, he started having panic attacks. He got past them, but while they lasted, I knew they had something to do with feeling alone. He wasn’t used to it.

  And yet the more life told him he was now an isolated individual—Will loves to tell the story of how, after our parents discovered my enthusiasm for writing, they gave me a signed first-edition copy of Faulkner’s The Reivers as a Christmas gift, and gave him a picture book titled The World of Beer—the more biology told him he wasn’t. His ending up with an ex-girlfriend of mine gave him, I think, a strange sense of calm. It suggested that biological destiny might be more powerful even than something as traumatic as what had happened to my body. The accident opened him up. We got to a place, after a period of years, where we were able to discuss what had happened to me, with a candor that would have been unfamiliar to both of us before my stroke. He let go a little.

  For me, although I had always loved Will as a brother (or maybe I shouldn’t even say that; it would be like pointing out that I’d loved myself), I came to value him in a more conscious way, because thanks to him I had someone in my life who knew me so well, so exactly, that he could see into my interior self, regardless of what shape my body was in. B
ecause of Will I still felt known. He could see the world through my eyes. This kept me from total despair.

  I distinctly remember a period of about five seconds, when I was in a wheelchair at one of the treatment centers, thinking how much easier it would be to just become what a lot of strangers already thought I was. Overly friendly, mentally challenged. People would be nicer. I’ve noticed that a lot of people feel more comfortable around me the more handicapped they think I am; I suppose it’s because I represent no threat. Often when I tell them something positive about myself, such as that I’ve had my work published or that I teach creative writing, they instantly become less friendly, as if I’ve forgotten my place. It would be so convenient, in a way, to go along with that attitude. But having Will there—someone who saw me as I saw myself, who knew I hadn’t become someone else—gave me the strength not to take the idea too seriously, to let it pass unexplored. It can be hard to explain how frustrating it is, in my situation—someone’s who’s mentally there, but physically hampered, his voice changed—to have to be constantly proving yourself, insisting on what you are, and because of Will there’s always one person with whom I never feel the need to do that, to waste time breaking even. Besides myself, that is. When I’m alone, I forget.

  27

  My sister called on a Friday in March—the twentieth, according to my journal, though when I look at the calendar, that was a Saturday. I must have been confused about either the day or the date. She said she was calling to tell me not to block the garage if I came home. But she knew I wasn’t coming home that day. The real reason for her call was that she and my mother were on their way to the doctor’s office, to discuss my mother’s MRI results. The doctor had called and requested the meeting. Her leg had been hurting her for a while—she’d even begun using one of my father’s old canes—and either we or the pain had finally convinced her to go to a doctor. They didn’t know anything more, my sister said, than that he wanted to see her in his office. At first I thought, how typical of her, to get me worried over nothing. I was imagining the laugh Will and I would have over yet another example of my sister’s thriving on bad news, when she called back crying. My mother had a mass on her hip, she said, and tumors up and down her spine.