Derailed

by Siegel, James

  “Tim asked you to fix it?” I said.

  “Yeah. I’m pretty good with computers, didn’t you know that?”

  No, I didn’t.

  “We’ve got a computer department, Winston. To fix computers.”

  “Well, what do you know? Guess I don’t have to, then.”

  “Winston?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tim didn’t ask you to fix his computer,” I said.

  “Not in so many words. No.”

  “You don’t know anything about computers, do you?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Winston . . .”

  “I know how much they sell for.” And then he shrugged. Okay, the charade is up, he was saying. Can't blame a guy for trying.

  “Why are you stealing computers, Winston?” Maybe that was an odd question to be asking the person stealing it. After all, why does anyone steal anything? To make money, of course. But why Winston—the human baseball encyclopedia and all-around agreeable guy. Why him?

  “I don’t know. Seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

  “Jesus . . . Winston . . .”

  “You know what a G4 sells for? I’ll tell you. Three thousand used. How about them Apples? ”

  “It happens to be illegal.”

  “Yeah — you got me there.”

  “And I saw you stealing it. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Tell me not to do it again?”

  “Winston . . . I’m not sure you — ”

  “Look. I didn’t steal it, right? See — the computer’s still here. No harm done.”

  “This is the first time?”

  “Sure.”

  But now I remembered hearing something about missing computers. That’s why they’d fastened them to the wall with steel wires in the first place, wasn’t it?

  “Look,” Winston said. “It would really be inconvenient for me if you said anything.”

  And for the first time, I felt a little uncomfortable. A little nervous. This was Winston here—my baseball trivia partner and mailroom buddy. But this was also a thief, standing here late at night with no one else around, with a wire cutter in his hand. I wondered what kind of weapon it’d make and decided probably a good one.

  “So can we just forget about it? Okay, Charles? Promise I won’t do it again.”

  “Can I think for a second?”

  “Sure.” Then, after that second went by, and then another one: “Tell you what,” Winston said. “I’ll tell you why it would kind of fuck me over. Aside from getting fired from this job, of course, which wouldn’t be the biggest deal in the world, relatively speaking. I’ll be honest with you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Here’s the deal.” He sat on Tim’s chair. “Sit down, you look like you’re going to jump through a window.”

  I sat down.

  “The thing is . . . ,” Winston said.

  Winston had served time.

  “Nothing major,” he assured me. “I was a recreational drug user.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, I was also a recreational drug pusher. ”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t like I was dealing H. Mostly E.”

  When did drugs become designated by letters of the alphabet? I wondered. Was there one for each letter now?

  “It was my college job,” Winston said. He scratched his upper arm over by his tattoo. “I suppose I could have worked in the school cafeteria. This seemed easier.”

  “How much time did you . . . ?”

  “Sentenced to ten. But my bid was five. Five and a half up at Sing Sing. Which is like a hundred years old.”

  “I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t sure if I was sorry about Winston going to prison or sorry about catching him in the act of stealing a company computer, which might necessitate his having to go to prison again. Maybe both.

  “You’resorry. Talk about a bad career move. I came out and I’m six years behind everybody else. I’ve got no college degree. I’ve got no work experience except for stacking books in the prison library, and I don’t think that counts. Even if I did have a college degree, no one would exactly be welcoming me into the executive ranks. I carried a three-point-seven GPA my first year and now I’m pushing mail.”

  “Do they know you served time?” I asked him.

  “You mean here? ”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure. You should come down to the mailroom sometime. We’re a liberal’s wet dream. We got two ex-cons, two retards, an ex-junkie, and a quadriplegic. He’s our quality control man.”

  “When you came out — why didn’t you go back to college?”

  “Were you going to pay my tuition?”

  Winston had a point there.

  “Look, I’m on parole,” Winston continued. “They have these rules when you’re on parole. You can’t go out of state without permission. You’ve got to check in with your parole officer twice a month. You can’t associate with any known criminals. And—oh yeah—you can’t steal computers. I may have fucked up on that one. On the other hand, there’s this other rule they have when you’re on parole. You can’t earn a living — not really. Know what they pay me to deliver your mail?”

  We could talk sports all we liked, but we were on two different sides of the socioeconomic spectrum, Winston was saying. I was an executive, and he was just a mail boy.

  “How many computers, Winston?”

  “Like I told you, this is the first time — ”

  “You got caught. I know. How many times didn’t you get caught?”

  Winston leaned back and smiled. He flexed his arm — the one with the wire cutter in it. He shrugged.

  “A couple,” he said.

  “Okay. A couple.” I suddenly felt tired; I rubbed my forehead and looked down at my shoes. “I don’t know what to do,” I said out loud. I might have been saying that about everything now.

  “Sure you do. I just bared my soul to you, man. I was stupid, I admit it. Won’t happen again. Promise.”

  “All right. Fine. I won’t say anything.” Even as I was saying this, I wondered exactly why I’d come to that decision. Maybe because I felt like no less of a thief than Winston. Yes. Hadn’t I stolen money from Anna’s Fund? Late at night, too, when no one could see me — just like Winston? Wasn’t that criminal etiquette — never turning in a fellow criminal? Do the same for me, wouldn’t he?

  “Thanks,” Winston said.

  “If I hear about another computer being stolen . . .”

  “Hey — I’m larcenous. Not stupid.”

  That’s right, I thought. The stupid one is me.

  SEVENTEEN

  Daddy . . .”

  The word you almost never tire of hearing during the day, becoming the word you dread waking to in the middle of the night. It came like a fire alarm in a pitch-black movie theater, and right in the middle of the film, the current feature a kind of domestic drama involving me and Deanna and a woman with green eyes.

  “Daddy!”

  I heard it again, and this time I woke up for good and nearly fell off the bed.

  Memories of other nights like this clamored for my undivided attention even as I tried to deflect them, to concentrate on the physical act of standing up and running barefoot across a dark and frigid hall.

  To Anna’s room.

  I flipped on the lights even as I entered it — one hand pressed against the switch, the other already reaching out for her. Even with my eyes squinting from the sudden brightness, I could see that Anna looked exceptionally and spookily weird. She was, I was fairly certain, smack in the middle of hypoglycemic shock.

  Her eyes were rolled back, to that part of her brain that was reeling from lack of sugar, her body caught in one unending stutter. When I put my arms around her, it was like holding on to a frightened puppy, all shake and quiver. Only if Anna was frightened, she was incapable of telling me.

  When I shouted at her, she refused to shout back.
When I shook her head and whispered into her ear, when I slapped her gently — no response.

  I’d been told what to do when this happened. I’d been prepped and trained and reminded and warned. I just couldn’t remember a word of it.

  I knew there was a syringe sitting in a fire-engine-red plastic case. I thought the case was downstairs in a kitchen cabinet. I believed that the case needed to be opened and the syringe filled with a brown powder that was also in the case. And water — some amount of water was to be added.

  These things were flying through my mind like a dyslexic sentence I couldn’t quite grasp. I caught the general drift, though, which was horrifying and merciless.

  My daughter was dying.

  Suddenly Deanna was right behind me.

  “The shot,” I said to her, or possibly yelled.

  But she already had it in her hand. I felt a momentary surge of pure love for her, this woman I’d married and created Anna with, even in the midst of terror feeling like falling to my knees and hugging her. She opened the case for me, calmly plucked out the syringe, and studied the bold-lettered directions on the way into Anna’s bathroom. I cradled Anna in my lap, whispering that it would be okay, Anna, yes, it would, you'll be fine, Anna, yes, my darling, as I heard the water running in there. Then Deanna was back out, shaking the syringe in her hand.

  “Deep,” Deanna said, handing the shot to me. “Past the fat into the muscle.”

  I’d dreaded this moment—had imagined over and over what it’d be like. When they’d first trained me on the fine art of insulin giving, pricking thin quarter-inch needles just into the fatty tissue on hip, arm, and buttock—they’d also mentioned this. That eventually there would come a moment when I’d probably have to use it. Not every parent had to, but given that Anna had an especially virulent case and given that Anna had gotten it so young . . . This needle not a quarter inch long, more like four inches, and thick enough to make you turn your eyes away. Because it had to get its pure sugar mix into the brain cells fast enough to keep them from starving.

  This syringe was in my hand now, only my hand was quivering as much as Anna was, because it was like stabbing her, even if it was with the gift of life. I placed it by her upper arm, but since we both were shaking, I was afraid to push it in, afraid I’d miss and blunt the needle, waste the liquid.

  “Here — ” Deanna took the needle from me.

  She put it against Anna’s hip, hand steady, and stuck it all the way in. Then she slowly pushed the plunger down till all the brown liquid was gone.

  It was almost instantaneous.

  One minute my daughter was lost. Then suddenly her eyes rolled back into focus, and her body gently quieted and settled back onto the bed.

  And she cried.

  Anna cried, worse even than the morning she was diagnosed and we told her more or less what was in store for her. Worse than that.

  “Daddy . . . oh Daddy . . . oh Daddy . . .”

  So I cried, too.

  I took her to the hospital — the children’s wing of Long Island Jewish, just to be on the safe side. I hadn’t been back since those first excruciating weeks, and the very smell of the place was enough to take me back to the time when I’d paced the halls at four in the morning, knowing that the best part of my life was over. Anna felt it, too; she’d managed to calm down on the twenty-minute ride to the hospital, but the moment we entered the waiting room, she’d shrunk back into my body and hid there, so that I nearly had to carry her inside.

  It was 2:00A .M.; we were given an Indian intern who seemed overworked and distracted. Deanna had been calling Anna’s doctor when we’d left the house.

  “What happened, please?”

  “She was hypoglycemic,” I said. “She had an episode.” Anna was sitting on the examining table, virtually slumped against me.

  “You administered the shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh . . .” He was examining her even as we spoke, doing all the things doctors do — heart, pulse, eyes, ears — so maybe he was competent after all. “We’d better take her blood sugar, no?”

  I wondered if he was asking me for my medical opinion or simply being rhetorical.

  “We took it before we came. One forty-three. I don’t know what it was before she . . .” I was going to say passed out, fainted, became unconscious but felt reticent to say it in front of Anna. I noticed a bruise had already formed where Deanna had given her the shot and thought that other parents who bruise their children are brought up on charges and locked away.

  “One forty-three, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’ll see. . . .”

  He asked for Anna’s hand, but Anna had no intention of giving it. “No,” she said, and meant it.

  “Come on, Anna, the doctor has to take your blood sugar to make sure everything’s okay. You do this four times a day — it’s no big deal.”

  But of course it was a big deal. Because she did it four times a day and now they were asking her to do it a fifth — actually sixth, since I’d taken it before we came here. It was a big deal because she was back in the hospital where she’d first been told she wasn’t like everyone else, that her body had this terrible deficiency that could kill her. It might not be a big deal to the doctor, or even to me, but it was to her.

  Still. She was sitting in LIJ at two in the morning because she’d almost died, and now the doctor needed a blood sample. “Come on, Anna, be a big girl, okay?” remembering back to those first days at home when I’d have to beg her to give me her arm, sometimes having to take it from her, brute force preceding brute pain, each time convinced I was committing the worst kind of assault.

  “I’ll do it myself, ” Anna said.

  The doctor was losing patience now; so many patients and so little time. “Look, miss, we have to — ”

  “She said she’ll do it herself,” I said, remembering something else about back then. How after her diagnosis, Anna had spent two weeks here learning how to deal with this thing called diabetes, with hospital protocol demanding that all patients administer one insulin shot to themselves before they could be discharged. And Anna, who feared needles the way other people fear snakes, or spiders, or dark cellars, had made me promise that she wouldn’t have to do that. And I’d said, I promise. And on the day she was due to be discharged, the nurse had come in and asked Anna to do it—to fill up the shot with two kinds of insulin and inject it herself into her already bruised arm. And at first both parents, Deanna and me, had said nothing, letting the nurse gently and then not so gently cajole the patient into doing what she was so clearly terrified of. And finally, with the silence from her only allies nearly deafening, Anna had looked over at me with pure naked pleading. And even though I knew that it probably was a good thing for Anna to give herself a shot, I still told the nurse, No. She doesn’t have to do that. I’d made a promise to her and I kept it. Her body might have betrayed her, but her father hadn’t. It was the kind of moment you feel like bronzing — the one you take out of the cabinet and hold up to the light later on, when you’ve betrayed everything else.

  “She’ll do it herself,” I repeated.

  “Okay,” the Indian said. “Well then, please let her do it already.”

  I gave her the lancet pen and watched as Anna shakily brought it up to her middle finger and snapped the top, a bright bubble of blood already forming as she took the pen away. I offered to hold the blood meter for her, but she took it from me and managed it herself — little Anna not so little anymore, a fighter if there ever was one.

  Her blood sugar was fine — 122.

  I told the intern that my daughter’s endocrinologist, Dr. Baron, would be coming by any minute.

  But Dr. Baron wasn’t coming by. The intern’s beeper sent him scurrying out of the ER, and when he came back, he said: “Dr. Baron says she can go home.”

  “He’s not coming?”

  “No need. I told him her numbers. He said she can go home.”

&nbs
p; “I thought he would come to see her.”

  The intern shrugged. Doctors, he was saying, what are you going to do?

  I said, “That’s great.”

  “Could I please have a word with you?” he said.

  “Sure.” I followed the intern to the other side of the ward, where a Chinese man was sitting in a chair, looking down at his bloody hand.

  “How is her sit, please?”

  “Herwhat? ”

  “Her sit.”

  Her sight. “Okay,” I said. “She uses glasses for reading. She’s supposed to, anyway,” thinking that it had been a while since I’d actually seen them on her. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “There is some damage there. It’s no worse?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Feeling that familiar ache in the pit of my stomach again, as if something were lodged in there that even Long Island Jewish Hospital couldn’t surgically remove.

  “Okay,” the intern said, and gave me a pat on the shoulder. Overworked, a little impatient, maybe, but friendly after all.

  “Is there something I should be telling Dr. — ”

  “No, no.” The intern shook his head. “Just checking.”

  After I signed a few papers and handed over my new credit card, we were told we could leave.

  Outside in the quiet winter air, our breath merged on the way to the car, one vaporous cloud that followed us all across the parking lot. It should be a black cloud, I thought — wasn’t that the metaphor for ill luck?

  “Hey, kiddo,” I said, “you seeing okay these days?”

  “No, Dad, I’m blind.”

  Well, her blood sugars might be running wild, but her sarcasm was intact and healthy.

  “I was just wondering if you noticed anything, that’s all. With your eyes.”

  “I’m fine.”

  But on the ride home, Anna snuggled against me, the way she used to when she was small and needed to nap.

  “Remember that story, Dad?” she asked me after several blocks.

  “What story?”