by Chris White
“We left her at the gas station! And I don’t fucking want to hear about that.”
Jeff lifts his empty hands into the air. “Sorry, man, it was both of us, it totally was.” He pauses a moment to recoup their losses. “Where’d you meet this girl?”
“Hospice nurse. I’m still thinking about her. But all I want is for Stell to forgive me, so . . .”
Jeff slowly nods. “So, you’re not gonna see her again?”
“I don’t know, Jeff. My mother just died. I got through yesterday, and today. You know?” He smiles, a little maniacally.
“Fair enough.”
Jeff takes out his wallet and makes a move toward his debit card, but Adrian snatches it and tosses it back into his lap.
“Thanks, bro,” Jeff says. “Hey, good news tonight, though, right? Only one more bird!”
“One more bird.”
Chapter Ten
* * *
Zander’s Halo game drones its ominous Gregorian chant through the house. The kids started playing right after Adrian brought them home from Gertrude’s, after convincing her to allow him one night with his own children, and it’s been on pause since he found out they both have tests the next day. The music loops every twenty seconds, always the same, the intense foreboding.
Adrian is making a spice rack for Stella’s return.
“All spice racks are too small. Your father was a contractor, wasn’t he?” she once said. “Why can’t you just build me one?”
Woodworking isn’t Adrian’s strong suit, and he told her so, but he did finally design something a couple of years back. It took him two nights lying in bed with graph paper and a ruler, and he bought and cut some beautiful cherrywood, then never finished it. He’d glimpsed it stacked along a shelf in the garage when they came in this evening. Now it’s all laid out on a tarp on the kitchen table. He’ll put it together, give it a natural stain, and hang it before she gets back. It feels overly important, like if it doesn’t happen now, it never will.
Meanwhile, through the double doors to the living room, Zander holds Michaela’s spelling sheet in his hand.
“How do you spell kneel? Hurry up.”
Michaela lies along the back of the couch. “N-E—”
“No,” Zander clips.
Michaela lifts her head and frowns at him in consternation, begins again. “N-E—”
Adrian can see them, working together in a pool of yellow light. It’s a little eerie to be back home with them again, everything uncertain and in pieces.
“No, Michaela!” Zander raises his voice. “That’s not right. This is the screwy one, remember? Kneel.”
Michaela slides down off the couch and picks up her recorder. She blows two notes and looks soberly at Zander. “Okay. N . . .”
“No!” Zander shouts.
“Then what is it?” Michaela stands, legs slightly spread, arms in a gesture of disbelieving indignation.
“K, Michaela! Kneel starts with K-N!”
“Well, what do you think I’ve been saying all this time!”
“N! You’ve been saying N!” Zander shouts again.
Michaela looks at him, stunned. “Oh, I meant K. Now, what was the word?”
Zander slaps the paper down and storms into the kitchen.
“Dad! Can you help her with her idiotic spelling words?”
“Hold this a sec,” Adrian tells Zander. “Just hold these together so I can get the vise on here.”
Zander sighs dramatically but holds the pieces. “She’s driving me friggin’ nuts.”
“Come on, Zander, my man. Help me out. Just quiz her. She’s got a test tomorrow. And turn off that music.”
“Dad! I’ve got a test tomorrow! And it’s a lot harder than that crap. You’ve got to help me study. If I get one more failing grade in history, I fail for the whole nine weeks.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? It’s not my fault I’m failing history!” Zander picks up a bottle of glue and slams it back down on the table.
“Whose fault is it, then?” Adrian chuckles, wryly. “Now settle down.”
“Daddy!” Michaela yells. “My nose is bleeding!”
Adrian leaves the glue to dry, tension building along his shoulder blades, and strides into the living room with Zander tailing him like a mad dog. “That’s just great, Dad! Mom says if I do my best, that’s all I can do. And you make me feel like a retard!”
“Zander. Language.”
“Dad! My nose!” says Michaela, her fingers full of blood.
“Hop up off the couch, honey.”
She stands, and he presses her head back along the crook of his arm, then produces a handkerchief from his pocket to pinch over the bridge of her nose.
“Now you hold it,” he says. “I’m making something for Mom. If you get your studying done, you can help, okay? Come on, guys. Everything’s cool.” Everything’s cool, and everything’s cool.
“Dad,” Zander pesters, “what about my test?”—gathering his history book and notebook from the coffee table and holding them up as evidence.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Zander. Study. Don’t study. It’s not the end of the fucking world.” Things are getting away from him.
“What? You’ve got to help me,” says Zander, thrusting the books into his father’s chest.
“No, Zander, I’m not your mom, I don’t do everything for you.”
“Oh, okay, great!” Zander flings the spiral notebook out into the room, which opens a moment as it flies and lands splayed out on the floor.
“Oh, okay, great!” Adrian apes, grabbing the history book. He flings it too, to show the boy how ridiculous he looked, but it’s heavy. It doesn’t travel as far as he might have imagined, just skids on the entry table, scattering the coffee mug of pens, the brass Tibetan bell, and the framed photographs of them all at the sunny Denver zoo, at Longs Peak, of Gertrude in the sunny front yard. Glass shatters into thin shards along the wooden floor.
Zander and Michaela go silent.
Adrian’s face is only inches from Michaela’s; it’s as if she’s trying not to breathe, as if she’s trying to make herself invisible.
“It’s okay, honey,” Adrian coaxes her, his voice calm as he can make it. His knees are weak under him. “Hey, Zander? You know I didn’t mean to do that.”
Zander nods haltingly, then clambers up the stairs by twos.
Adrian eases the handkerchief from Michaela’s hands—her nose and mouth a sticky mess. “Come on, Micki,” he says. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Does that sound good?”
She looks at him like he’s a stranger but lets him lead her toward the bathroom.
When Adrian catches a glimpse of his face in the mirror, he doesn’t recognize himself either.
Michaela dabs at her nose with the heel of her hand. She says, “We’re going to Oma’s house again tomorrow, though, right?” timid as a lamb.
• • •
Later that night, blood caked in Michaela’s nostrils and tears dried into pale blots on Zander’s pillow, the snow begins to fall. Adrian has just taken a Klonopin and three of his last four Vicodin and passes through the living room like a wandering spirit. He kneels to pick up Zander’s history book, extracting it like a dead thing from the litter of glass. “Goddamn it.”
He should clean up this mess, for all of their sakes. But later, before he goes to bed.
He sits heavily on the couch with the book in his lap, staring vacantly at its cover: The History of Our Nation. Regret fills his stomach like a cold, weak tea. He opens the book, thumbs through discovery and expansion and agriculture and government, until he comes upon a section marked with a turned-down page with its title highlighted in yellow. He’s pretty sure children don’t own their textbooks anymore and wonders whether he’ll be charged for Zander’s impropriety. He takes in the title of the chapter: “Chief Niwot and the Sand Creek Massacre.”
Every Boulderite knows about the legendary Ar
apaho chief who came across the first gold prospectors arriving in Boulder Canyon in the mid-1800s. When the travelers attempted to dazzle Niwot’s hunting party with whiskey and gunpowder, Niwot refused it all, uttering the words that became known as “Niwot’s Curse”:
Seeing the beauty of this valley, your people will be compelled to stay, but their staying will be the beauty’s undoing.
What a radical concept this would have been in the Americas: that such a thing, the very world, could be undone.
On November 29, 1864, the book says, five days after the newly proclaimed “Thanksgiving,” Colorado territorial governor John Evans ordered a group of two hundred peaceful Arapaho and Cheyenne, Chief Niwot among them, to camp near Fort Lyon along Sand Creek near Boulder Valley, while his cavalry searched for hostile Indians in the vicinity.
Chief Niwot quieted his people’s fears of betrayal, telling them that nonresistance was the only way to coexist. Still, he flew an American flag outside the encampment so no mistakes could be made, nothing forgotten or misunderstood.
Just before dawn the next morning, frustrated in their impotent search, seven hundred US Cavalrymen rode thundering into the dim camp.
Nausea swirls in Adrian now, his drugs betraying him. He sees crows, cormorants, mergansers, and finches lift high over Sand Creek like a drove of locusts. He sees scalps stuffed into saddlebags, borne away on the heaving haunches of horses. He sees tiny severed fingers lying in the dry leaves, skulls emptied of their brains. He sees the earth—cool like a mother’s hand on the fevered forehead of its people—befouled by the great lie of domination, told over and over again. Adrian is losing his mind.
Chief Niwot disappeared, the book says. This in a text box at the bottom of the page:
Chief Niwot’s image continued to appear in photographs of the time, fueling rumors of his survival. One report claimed that, each year, a week after Thanksgiving, the regal chief could be seen dancing atop a mountain overlooking what became known as Left Hand Canyon dressed in a loin cloth and red feather head dress, the white bill of a woodpecker swinging from his neck.
Adrian lies back on the couch. The Sand Creek Massacre. Maybe this is what Zander was trying to study. He wanted your help, you dick.
He takes out his phone, looking for a missed text from Stella to find nothing, then lays his head onto the wide, cool pages of the book. Broken glass glitters on the floor across the room, his eyes growing heavy. He feels feverish almost. Two minutes pass. Then five. The clock ticks upstairs. He thinks again about the woman’s life he saved only two days before and about the clouds of peace he sprays, every day, over the ailing world, making feasible what had once been impossible. Not that long ago, the sick and wounded had to bite on leather straps, suffer through bloodlettings or muted hammers to the skull. Pain was pain, and when mistakes were made in their rudimentary surgeries, the consequences were brutal. All Adrian’s ever wanted is to make life less brutal.
He picks up his phone again, studies his grimy fingerprints on the screen, and texts Deborah:
It was actually recently discovered that birds were on the Earth even before dinosaurs dont know why I didn’t say that before
He frowns at his own text, but in a matter of seconds, she responds:
Haha. Thanks for clearing that up! :-) Are you back? Are you ok?
There she is. He swallows and thumbs:
Whats the most important thing about dying?
He stares at the screen. The message says “delivered.” There is no response. He shouldn’t take drugs, read about genocide, and text. Then she says—
For the one dying or the people left behind?
Good question, Adrian thinks. He considers an answer, then types, simply:
Either.
He pictures her, not sexy or teasing, not even in his office, perching friendly on his desk, but as hospice nurse, in her capacity as midwife for the dying, standing in the dim light of any bedside, with anyone, appliances humming monotone in the kitchen, bathroom smelling of sickness and talcum powder, sheets thrown aside and breath rasping. What’s the most important thing about dying? She responds:
That it’s permanent.
• • •
Back in the hospital the next morning, Adrian is walking from the men’s room by the cafeteria to his office when the first dull pain arises under his ribs.
A few minutes later, he’s walking down the corridor from the reception area on his way to Sinowitz’s office with several files under his arm, and he drops unexpectedly down onto both knees in response to a very sharp pain in his lower right abdomen. Files scatter.
“Dr. Mandrick?” A woman from the lab scurries up to him and is herself on her knees in a matter of seconds. “Are you okay?”
“I just dropped these papers and I’m . . . you know, picking them up.” He tucks papers back into folders, masking the pain in his side with haste.
“I thought you were hurt or something. The way you just . . .”
Adrian stands by the sheer force of his will, and the woman stands with him.
“Scared me for a minute there. Sorry,” she says.
Adrian attempts a smile of curt gratitude, but nothing comes of it, so he turns away from her, leading with his shoulders, saying, “No problem,” whispering, “Fuck.” It could be appendicitis, he thinks, or very severe gas. He’s been eating haphazardly all week—grabbing take-out Indian, fish and chips, even Wendy’s. He turns the corner of the corridor toward preop, and the pain shoots out and strikes at him again, harder still—a black, gut-wrenching wallop that collapses him into halves like a switchblade. He’s got to get out of the hospital before someone else sees him looking like an ailing patient loose in the halls.
The pain subsides enough that he risks standing upright, then shuffles the next two doors to Sinowitz’s office, sticks his head in, says to the nurse, “Hey, could you tell Mike I can’t meet with him this afternoon? Emergency with my son.”
Before she can ask questions, Adrian is making for the back entrance door, where he stands for several seconds to ward off another threatening stab, then scoots out to the Saab. The sky is still spitting snow. Secure in his car, he pokes and prods at his lower abdomen, feeling for the tenderness that would signal appendicitis. Perhaps there’s a little something, he thinks, but the pain seems too sporadic.
• • •
He makes it safely home and collapses against the kitchen counter, keys and phone still in his hand. Then he exchanges his work clothes for the silk drawstring pants Stella bought him and a long-sleeved tee shirt printed with the Lunesta butterfly, and walks gingerly to his office, where he hopes to catch up on paperwork while monitoring his situation. Sure enough, an hour passes without incident, and he begins to wonder if he overreacted or whether it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a psychosomatic response.
As he’s checking the balance on his Apple Store account for the MacBook he’s paying off for Zander though, he begins to discern the indisputable symptoms of a fever—a descendant, dense fog of chills and aching. He remains at his desk, warily shuffling Amex bills, FedEx receipts, ABA life list printouts, and his auto insurance policy that needs updating now that he’s bought . . . He has to lie down.
He makes his way, disoriented, to his bedroom, thinks to take a Vicodin, but remembers he took his last one that morning. He’d meant to squeeze a pill from a couple patient orders today, knowing he could get away with justifying the absence of just those two, if asked, but he hadn’t gotten around to it before he fell ill. Now, he has no recourse. No recourse but the bed, which, though unmade and cluttered with newspapers and books, is a distinct comfort, as he settles into the cool sheets still smelling like his marriage.
• • •
Waking in near darkness, still in his clothes, not a light on in the house, Adrian thinks he’s missed work before he remembers having fallen onto his knees in the hospital hallway that afternoon. Oh, he is blazing. He’s always believed in burning through a fever, and he doesn’t want to r
elent, but now he’s not sure. If it were appendicitis, it would mean a rupture (even an anesthesiologist knows this much), but since the pain in his side is all but nonexistent now, he rules it out entirely.
He craves vitaminwater—his lips cracked and crusted, eyes shrinking painfully even from the subtle sunlight now spilling at the horizon, with only the trees moving outside and snow falling steadily. It is morning, he thinks, not night. Was Stella here?
The bedroom door . . . jimmies itself loose from its hinges and stands blankly.
“Stella?” Adrian calls feebly. The door begins moving, shifting quietly through the room like a giant domino. Adrian’s mouth hangs, in foggy anticipation of Stella’s entrance. “Could you bring me a vitaminwater?”
Stella doesn’t emerge, but a succession of sweet, sharp chirps swings percussively through the still air. Adrian knows the bird—not the Brown-capped Rosy Finch but the common House Finch. A female. It has been here all along, but the chirping is soon eclipsed by a low rumbling pulse rising in volume, both rough and silky, echoing, repeating as the snow continues to build a low wall between him and the outside world, and time passes as it does only in sickness—slowly, unevenly, with a texture thick and dense and then obliterated.
He knocks, knocks, knocks, until Ellen Rason opens the door a sliver and says, “Come in, come in.” He’s been running, and there is snow everywhere, sparkling, swirling from the street into the air. He enters the house and she tells him, “Sit down, sit down, what is it?” Hurry, he says, I have to use your phone, but when she shows him where it is, he can’t remember what he wanted to call about. He just wants to be near her. She says, “How about a Dr Pepper?” And he drinks and she drinks. They laugh about how his pants are tucked into his socks, and the movie, Arthur—how, when Arthur says he’s going to take a bath, Hobson says, “I’ll alert the media.” Then when Ellen says, “Be right back, I’ve got to let the dog out,” Adrian says, “I’ll alert the media!” She laughs and gathers her hair in her hand, and he takes her other hand in his. She’s a little surprised, but not that surprised. He’s young, but not that young.