Jaguar

by M. L. Hamilton

She didn’t respond, just leaned her shoulder against his. It was enough. He knew she didn’t have words for what he was going through.

  “Pam asked me to meet with her.” He glanced over at Zion, turning the paper cup in his hands.

  “Pam? Who’s Pam?”

  “Nancy Osborn’s sister.”

  “Oh, wow. Did you?”

  “Yeah. We met at Nancy’s business.”

  “Does she want you to help her with child support?”

  Jaguar leaned his head against the back of the couch. He was so damn tired. “She wants me to take Sophia when Nancy dies.”

  “Take her? You mean raise her?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What about your career? Going on tours? Living in LA?”

  “Exactly. Not the place to raise a child, is it?”

  Zion shifted to face him. “You don’t have to decide anything right now. You just need to concentrate on your mother.”

  He met Zion’s gaze. “Once Nancy dies, Pam’s done with Sophia.”

  “What do you mean done with her?”

  “I mean that if I don’t take her, she’s putting her in foster care.”

  “That’s a bluff,” said Zion, her back straightening.

  “I thought the same thing, but she didn’t look like she was bluffing, Zion.”

  She slumped back in the chair, her shoulder touching his again. “Wow, this is a whole lot to digest.”

  He gave a bark of laughter and lifted the paper cup. “Ya think?” he said.

  * * *

  Jaguar paced the small, dated waiting room in intensive care, back and forth, back and forth. He stopped as his father and a woman in scrubs entered the room. The woman was in her fifties, black hair pulled up in a bun at the back of her head. She wore wire-framed glasses and no makeup, her face fresh-scrubbed and unembellished, lines radiating out from her dark eyes. She was tall and fit, her arms toned. His father looked old beside her, stooped and ashen, as if the weight of everything lay on his shoulders.

  He met Jaguar’s gaze and looked away. Jaguar felt a dropping in the pit of his stomach. This couldn’t be good news. He glanced at the clock over the doorframe. 10:00. Zion had left an hour ago to get back to her shift at the coffee shop. He’d tried to nap, but he couldn’t, so he paced.

  The woman held out her hand. “I’m Dr. June Bishara.”

  Jaguar took it.

  “I’m the attending physician for your mother.”

  “What’s going on?” He couldn’t keep the dread out of his voice.

  Dr. Bishara motioned to the arm chairs. “Let’s sit and talk for a moment, okay?”

  Jaguar and his father took the indicated chairs, while Dr. Bishara pulled up one from across the room. Glancing at his father, Jaguar marked that his head was bowed, his hands clasped, his forearms resting on his thighs. He didn’t return the look.

  “Mr. Jarvis,” she said.

  “Jaguar,” he corrected, but his father gave a snort of disgust. “Please, just call me Jaguar.”

  “Of course,” she said, laugh lines crinkling around her eyes as she smiled at him. “Jaguar, as you know, your mother was hurt very badly in the car accident.”

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  “We know there was internal injury, internal bleeding, which requires surgery to stop, but her heartbeat’s too irregular. We’re afraid to put her under anesthesia.”

  “But I thought you were giving her blood and trying to slow the bleeding so you could operate. I don’t know why she wasn’t taken in for emergency surgery.”

  “Because the bleeding’s slow but steady. We’ve tried to stabilize her every way we possibly can, but it’s not working.” She leaned forward, clasping her hands before her. “This morning we did a brain scan to check for activity.”

  Henry curled in on himself, closing his eyes.

  Jaguar studied the doctor’s face in confusion. “Okay?”

  She paused, giving him a moment to think about it. “I know how hard this is. I know how devastating this must be.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “There’s no sign of brain activity.”

  “How can that be? How can there be no…” He caught himself. Looking away, he rose to his feet and paced toward the window. How could this be? How could this be happening to them? His mother in her fashionable clothes with her self-assurance. His mother, who taught him to be whoever he wanted to be and not conform to what society wanted him to do.

  He turned and faced the doctor again. “Are you saying she’s brain dead?”

  She nodded, looking up at him. “We’re keeping her breathing through a respirator and pumping blood in to make up for the blood she’s losing. If we take her of the ventilator, she’ll go peacefully.”

  Jaguar came back and sat down again, hard.

  “I know how difficult this decision is, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t present it to you. Whatever your decision, you need to know that she’s not going to make it back from this. She’s too fragile for surgery and without surgery, she’ll bleed to death.”

  Jaguar covered his mouth with his hand, his eyes burning. Dr. Bishara gave him a sympathetic look, but Henry didn’t move.

  “You and your father need to talk this through,” she said, rising to her feet. “I’ll be around, just ask a nurse to page me if you have any questions. Again, I know how hard this is, so I’d be willing to help you make this decision.”

  Jaguar didn’t respond. A coherent thought just wouldn’t come to the foreground. Beside him, his father buried his face in his hands.

  “Jaguar?” asked Dr. Bishara. “Are you okay?”

  He looked around the room as if he were just seeing it for the first time, then he took a breath, but it stuck in his chest, blazing. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Um, we need to talk. We need to…um, discuss things.”

  “Right. Again, have them page me if you have any questions. I’ll be around all day.”

  “Thank you,” Jaguar heard himself say, but he was back to studying the linoleum, hardly seeing that Dr. Bishara had made her quiet exit.

  He wasn’t sure how long he and his father sat in the same position, but finally Henry stirred and rose to his feet. He paced to the window as Jaguar had done, his motions jerky and tense.

  “I know what you’re going to say. I know what you want to do.”

  Jaguar looked up at him. He did? Because Jaguar frankly had no damn idea.

  Henry turned and pointed a finger at him. “You want to get back to your debauchery and hedonism.”

  Jaguar hadn’t thought about debauchery or hedonism once, but he wasn’t going to argue with his father. Henry was overwrought and didn’t even know what he was saying.

  “But she’s my wife!” he shouted, pointing out the doors. “You don’t just pull the plug on your wife!”

  He paced to the door and then back, moving toward the window. Jaguar watched him, wondering how someone aged overnight. How did someone get old in the changing of a sunrise? Henry looked stooped and broken and fragile as if a breeze would blow him away.

  “You don’t get it!” Henry continued. “I’m all she has. I’m all she can count on. You went away! You went and lived your life and did your drugs and slept with your women. Or men!” He waved a hand in the air. “How would I know? All these earrings and tattoos!”

  Jaguar drew in air and released it slowly, letting Henry rant because he had no words to comfort him, even if their relationship hadn’t been strained, even if they had been close. There were no words to make this easier.

  Henry stopped in front of him, slapping a hand against his chest. “I stayed here. I took care of her. Some days she didn’t even remember who I was, but I stayed. Now you want me to just pull the plug on her, let her go. Well, I can’t do it. I can’t!”

  “Okay,” said Jaguar softly.

  Henry stopped pacing and whirled to face him. “What?”

  “Okay. We won’t do it. We’ll let things happen as they’re goin
g to happen.”

  Henry sat down hard in the chair the doctor had vacated. “Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  His father’s face twisted. “You blame me. You think I’m responsible for this. For her. That I didn’t watch her close enough.”

  Jaguar shook his head.

  “I don’t need your patronizing!”

  “I’m not patronizing you, Pops,” he said wearily. God, he was so tired. “I don’t blame you. I don’t blame anyone.” Except God. He deserved the blame, Jaguar thought.

  Henry’s shoulders slumped and he covered his face with his hands. Then he started to cry. At first, Jaguar wasn’t sure that’s what he was doing, but after listening for a while, he knew that it was.

  He sat in the chair for a few minutes, unsure what to do. He knew Henry would not welcome any comfort from him. In fact, he’d lash out in rage if Jaguar acknowledged his vulnerability, so he waited until the sobbing died down, then he rose to his feet and walked out of the waiting room, headed for his mother. No use making Henry embarrassed anymore than he’d already be by staying to watch him pull himself together again.

  * * *

  Jaguar took a seat beside his mother. Her once lovely face was a mess of bruises, black, purple, blue. Even her hand was discolored as he gently lifted it, tubes and wires snaking all over. The rhythmic compression of the ventilator pulsed in his head along with the beep of the heart monitor. He reached up and smoothed her hair. It was wispy and soft against his palm.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said, fighting against the tightness in his chest. He had an ache in his belly, a twisting in his gut, and his eyes burned. “I don’t know if you’re still here with us, but I want you to know…” His voice faded away.

  What? What did he want her to know? How did you tell your mother everything you wanted to tell her, everything she’d meant to you? Some things were bigger than words, bigger than talk. Some things were impossible to quantify.

  He rubbed his thumb gently over the prominent veins on the back of her hand, staring at the music notes that danced along his inner forearm. “I feel like there’s a hole in me,” he said finally. “It’s like nothing’s right without you. I miss you so much.”

  He closed his eyes, fighting for composure, fighting to maintain his control. Forcing them open again, he glanced up at her, but he hated seeing her with all of the tubing, the wires, the artificial air being pumped into her. He scrubbed his face on his shoulder, then kissed the back of her hand.

  “You always let me be me. You never tried to control me.” He gave a laugh. “Maybe you should have, I don’t know. Who the hell knows what’s best? You just do what you think is right and then, even if it turns out great, you still doubt.”

  He realized his leg was jogging up and down, a nervous tick. He didn’t try to stop it. He figured if he stayed sober at this moment that was accomplishment enough.

  “So, it turns out you have a granddaughter. How crazy is that? And they want…well, her aunt wants me to raise her. Me? Raise a child? And a girl?” He smoothed the covers with his free hand. “That’s nuts. Right? I mean, me with a girl? She’s five. There’s a whole lot of raising left to do and I can barely take care of myself.”

  He leaned back in the chair.

  “Desmond hasn’t called me back. Something’s going on there, but I don’t have time to figure it out. It’s like everything’s falling apart at the same time, and then…well, then there’s Pops.” His eyes tracked back to her face. “What do I do about him? The old bastard hates me. He always has, but he really hates me now.”

  “You always said he just didn’t understand me. I think that was over-simplification. I think it’s pretty safe to say it’s active hate now.” He gave a weary laugh. “You should see the way he looks at me. Like he’s smelled something foul or seen something so disgusting, he can’t look away.”

  Tears filled his eyes suddenly and he closed them, trying to fight it back. Ida Jarvis had been the only one who never asked for anything from him, who didn’t want him to be something he wasn’t. Maybe she should have pushed him more, but she’d always accepted his choices without question, without prejudice. As he sat there, watching her life bleed away, he realized he’d just lost the only person who truly gave a damn about him and he was all alone.

  * * *

  Jaguar jerked awake as the alarm sounded, shrieking through his skull. He bolted upright and his gaze landed on his mother. His father bolted up at the same time, bending over her to see what had happened. A moment later, the room filled with nurses and orderlies in scrubs.

  Jaguar found himself shunted aside, pushed to the back of the room, while they frantically played with dials and pressed buttons. The cold window pressed against his back and he curled his arms around his middle, watching the frenetic motion in the room and not really comprehending it.

  His gaze passed over the many bodies and found his father. Henry had been pushed to the side by the door, his hands pressed against the wall behind him, his entire face stark with shock and terror. Jaguar had never seen his father look so vulnerable and he had to turn away.

  He wasn’t sure how long the bodies raced around, shouting commands, fiddling with things, hovering over his mother, but without warning, all motion suddenly ceased. Jaguar realized that Dr. Bishara had arrived at some point in this maelstrom and she reached over, pressing a button on the machine by his mother’s bed, silencing the alarm.

  Jaguar felt his legs give out and the next thing he knew, he was sitting on the ground, his legs tented, his forearms resting on his knees. He felt like he was watching through thick water as Dr. Bishara turned to his father and clasped a hand on his shoulder.

  His father curled his chest forward and collapsed on the edge of the bed, cradling his mother in his arms, his head buried against her chest. Dr. Bishara and the nurses stood in a semicircle around the bed, Dr. Bishara’s hand on his father’s back as he wept, their heads downcast in commiseration.

  Jaguar didn’t want to cry. He didn’t want to wail. He just wanted to sit. Sitting seemed like a really good idea. He watched the people gathered around the bed, marking different things – this one had pictures of puppies all over her scrubs, another had yellow clogs on her feet, and a man in blue scrubs had a stethoscope draped around his neck with a 49ers pin attached to it.

  Dr. Bishara detached herself from the group and came over to him, hunkering down. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  He nodded, but he didn’t know why. He didn’t expect any more from her. Sorry about filled it, but it suddenly seemed so inadequate. Everything seemed inadequate. There ought to be something more when a mother dies, when a person leaves her body. There ought to be fanfare or a herald from heaven. There ought to be a bright light or a chorus of angels to escort one away. Not just the silencing of an alarm.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked, resting a hand on his knee.

  “I just want to sit here for a while,” he told her.

  She nodded. “If there’s anything I can do…” She let the thought trail away.

  But there was nothing anyone could do. He suddenly felt sorry for her. She saw this same scene everyday and he figured it probably looked very much the same, no matter what color or creed the person – grief must look all the same. Religion tried to sanitize it, make sense of it, but it wasn’t something where sense had meaning.

  All people experienced this grief. No matter what. All people would eventually lose someone the loss of which would diminish them. There was no way around it. You lived, you died, you grieved.

  He focused on her dark eyes. “She always wanted a duck for a pet,” he told the doctor, not sure why the hell he was telling this. “Because it would imprint on you, follow you around.”

  She gave him a kind smile.

  “When she told me that, I thought it sounded crazy, silly. Why would you want someone to follow you around?” He exhaled, slowly, trying to ease the tightness in his chest, but it didn’t help.
“I didn’t get it, but it’s been with me for days, you know? I keep thinking about it and I think I figured it out.”

  “What did you figure out?” she asked.

  He felt his face twist unnaturally and he couldn’t stop it. He felt another hitch in his chest and he couldn’t stop it. “She didn’t want to be alone.” He shuddered, closing his eyes, then he buried his face in his arms and let the grief flow out of him.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jaguar took a seat on the steps outside his parents’ front door and pulled out his phone. He stared at it for a long time without doing anything, then he pressed the contacts and pulled up Desmond Hifler. His thumb hovered over the name until finally, he forced himself to press his number.

  Hifler picked up after a number of rings. Jaguar lost count, staring out at the bright late summer day. “Hey, Jagster, how are you, my musical prodigy?”

  Jaguar frowned. Was Hifler drunk? It was nine in the freaking morning. “I’ve…um, been better.”

  “Ah, so things aren’t going well? How’s the song writing?”

  Jaguar had an instant desire to hang up. Songs? He wanted songs now? Closing his eyes, he fought for composure. It seemed trivial to him because he was so raw, but it was their business, their livelihood. Of course it was the one thing Hifler would be concerned with.

  “Desmond,” he said, his voice rough. He cleared it. “My mom died and…”

  “Ah, Jag, I’m so sorry. That sucks. That Alzheimer’s a bitch, buddy.”

  What the hell did he think Alzheimer’s was? Cancer? “Yeah, it sucks.”

  “So, I guess you’re gonna be stuck up there for a while more?”

  “A while. I’ve got some other issues that just came up, but I wanted to talk to you about the Greatest Hits album.”

  “Oh, man, all the guys are onboard and we’re really excited. I mean, it’s beyond time for us to put one out.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little early.”

  “No. NO! Definitely not too early. I mean, you wanna hit when the band’s still relevant enough for people to remember your greatest songs. You know, it drums up nostalgia and gets people thinking of their youth.”