by Rufi Thorpe
But you couldn’t prove it was the Misoprostol that had caused the uterus to rupture. There wasn’t any science to establish a connection; no studies had been done; it was an ulcer medication. The doctors couldn’t be blamed for using an FDA-approved medication, even if its FDA approval was for the drug as used orally to treat stomach ulcers. There wasn’t any protocol in place since the drug was being used off-label, so you couldn’t even get doctors for using an inappropriate dosage.
And it’s true: everyone ignores a woman in labor.
This was just the way babies got born.
This was just the way women were hung, like meat, from hooks upon the wall.
When Lorrie Ann came back into the room, I slammed shut the drawer that hid the pregnancy test. I didn’t want to tell her I might be pregnant. I didn’t want to take the test in front of her, to find out yes or no, and then to have her ask, to have to tell her, what I was thinking, whether I thought: yes or no.
“So did I tell you about the Indians?” Lorrie Ann said.
“Indians?”
She swept past me to the table and resumed her place before her teacup. She looked phenomenally better. She had redone her braid and splashed water on her face. Her eyes were bright and sparkling.
“That’s the first part of the story,” Lorrie Ann said, “of how I lost Zach. By the way, I love the plants in your bathroom.”
“Thank you,” I said, coming to sit at the table with her, as the understanding of what she had said settled inside me like a heavy stone. So this was the Story of How I Lost Zach. I found that my lungs would not inflate fully.
“So when my mother came out of her coma, she claimed she had had a vision.”
“A vision?”
“A vision about the genocide of the Native Americans.”
“Like a dream? Is there a difference between a vision and a dream?”
Lorrie Ann sighed. “I don’t know,” she said, “but my mother got all fired up about the injustice of what we did to the Native Americans. She told me parts of it, the dream. She had some kind of guide, an Indian that, like, I don’t know, showed her all of history? She claims to have been adopted by the Blackfoot tribe in her dream. It’s—none of this matters, it’s just something that happens with traumatic brain injury. The pressure from the swelling—it made her brain fire in all sorts of weird ways.”
“But after she came out of the coma? Was she okay?”
“Well. Yes and no. I mean, she wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there or anything, but she became convinced that the reason Zach was born blue was because our ancestors had participated in the genocide. Cause and effect. Karma. Whatever you want to call it, like history is some big Rube Goldberg machine. So now we had to go around doing good works in order to lift the curse off our family.”
“This is just so weird,” I said.
“Actually, apparently lots and lots of people have visions about the Native American genocide. They have a Web forum. She goes on there all the time. She’s obsessed.”
“Holy fuck,” I said, setting down my empty teacup.
“I know,” Lorrie Ann said, letting a trill of laughter escape. The drugs were making her feel good, I could tell. She was enjoying talking, leaning toward me. Her pupils were tiny. “She can’t work anymore. Her old work wouldn’t hire her back after the accident.”
“Just because of the Indians?” Lor’s happiness was eerie, as though she were actually enjoying her mother’s misfortune.
“They say she can’t be trusted around children,” Lorrie Ann said, waving her hand dismissively. “That part’s bunk. I think she’d be fine around kids. The worst she would do is tell them about Indians being slaughtered. But because of stuff at the hospital, she had to see a shrink and then Social Security and on and on, and now she’s in the system as being mentally disabled. She bit a nurse.”
“She bit a nurse?!”
“Yeah, when she first woke up. She claims not to remember biting the nurse.”
“It’s totally impossible for me to imagine your mother biting a nurse,” I said. Underneath my almost overdone exclamations of surprise was a strange, furtive seed of doubt: What if Lorrie Ann were making all of this up?
“Honestly, I suspect the nurse provoked her in some way.”
“And there are Web forums for these people—for people who have visions about Native Americans?”
“Oh yeah,” Lor said. “Can I have some water? Or juice? Do you have juice? There’s a ton of them.”
“I have seltzer.” I got up to pour her some from the fridge. All the hairs on the backs of my arms were standing up.
“Not a ton of Native Americans, obviously. But a ton of people who become obsessed with them, or haunted by them. I mean, not any kind of large-scale movement or anything. But more than you’d think. At least hundreds of them.”
“And so do you know why she bit the nurse?”
“It’s unclear,” Lorrie Ann said, using both hands to accept the glass of seltzer, like a child. “My mom was in a lot of distress, and she was shouting things about there being blood on the nurse’s hands, and the nurse was trying to hold her down, so she could be strapped to the bed because she was thrashing, and I guess my mom bit her.”
This didn’t seem terribly unreasonable to me. No disoriented person likes to be held down so they can be strapped to a bed. “Still,” I said, “you’d think they would have experience with things like that. I hope the nurse didn’t take it personally.”
“Actually, the nurse was black, and for some reason she got really upset with the whole thing. She yelled at me about it, and what she was most upset about was being accused of killing the Native Americans. My mom was raving, and I guess she kept calling the nurse a white devil, which really freaked the nurse the fuck out. ‘My people didn’t have anything to do with that,’ she kept saying. And she felt it was unfair that my mother’s anger was centered on the genocide instead of on slavery or any of the other awful things white people did.”
“So then Dana came to live with you.”
“Exactly.”
“And how was that?”
Lor paused, and her eyebrows flared as she considered her teacup. “It was bizarre,” she said finally. “The whole last year has been fucking bizarre.”
CHAPTER TEN
A Bad Mother
Over the breakfast table:
“I’m just saying,” Dana insisted, spreading apricot jam on her English muffin, “four hundred treaties—not a single one of them kept. On not one did we keep our word.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Arman said.
“Well, it should.”
“Anyone want coffee?” Lor asked, holding out the pot.
“After Cain and Abel, who can really afford to be surprised by anything? Genocide?” Arman scoffed. “My people were victims of one of the most successful genocides in modern history and no one even knows about it.”
“But America parades around as the good guy!”
“So does Turkey,” Arman countered. “And Hitler would have too if he hadn’t lost the spear of destiny.”
“Oh please,” Lor said. “Let’s not talk about the spear of destiny. It isn’t even eight in the morning yet!”
“What is the spear of destiny?” Dana asked, chewing her English muffin with gusto. For some reason, ever since the attack, Dana’s jaw clicked every time her mouth closed, not just a tiny click, but a low, deep click that seemed to imply a bone structure much larger than Dana’s and made her sound like a cow or a horse masticating. It drove Lor slightly mad.
And so Arman explained the spear of destiny, the holy lance that pierced Christ’s side and that, it was said, gave dominion over the whole world to whoever possessed it. Today there were six alleged spears, though which, if any, was the real historical relic remained unknown. Hitler had started World War II in order to capture the spear, with which he was obsessed, or so said Trevor Ravenscroft’s 1973 book, The Spear of Destiny. At the end of the war, Hitle
r lost the spear and it fell into the hands of U.S. general George Patton. Part of the lore of the spear was that losing it would result in death, which is perhaps why Hitler committed suicide.
“What did the United States do with it once they got it from Hitler?” Dana asked.
“Do you see what you’ve done?” Lorrie Ann asked Arman. “This isn’t good for her.”
“No one knows,” Arman said. “But most people believe they’ve still got it. After all, look around. Crazy world run by fat-fuck Americans. Don’t make no kinda sense.”
Meanwhile, before Dana even got out of the hospital, Lorrie Ann, in the scramble of trips to visit Dana, doctor’s appointments, and attempts to get Zach to day care, had shown up to work late three days in a row, and then, on the fourth day, had had to call in. Roberta, the bartender, had answered the call.
“No, sweetie, I can tell him. He’s pissed right now because he can’t find the box of silverware he thinks he ordered, but I’ll tell him. It’s crazy you’ve even been coming in with things as nuts as they have been. It’s a Tuesday. We’ll be fine.”
The shameful truth is that Lor had had to call in not because she needed to bring Dana home from the hospital and spend the night getting her settled in as she claimed—Dana wasn’t coming home until Friday at the earliest—but because she didn’t think she could emotionally handle waiting on people for one minute more. She couldn’t smile and say, “My name’s Lorrie Ann. I’ll be your server tonight. Let me just tell you a little bit about our specials.” She couldn’t pretend to laugh at the new head chef’s jokes. Instead, she stayed home in sweatpants with Arman and Zach, getting high and watching Watership Down, which terrified Zach and sent him into hysterics.
Roberta didn’t call Lorrie Ann that night to say that Zipper had fired her. (Zipper was the owner of The Cellar. I had met him once or twice. He was a greasy, middle-aged cokehead who had been the proud owner of John Travolta good looks in his youth, of which all that remained was the braggadocio.) Roberta hoped that Zipper would change his mind in the morning when he was sober. After all, Lorrie Ann had worked there ever since Jim died and she moved back to Costa Mesa, almost four years ago. It would be insane to fire her for calling in sick when her mother was in the hospital, as everyone well knew.
But that was precisely the kind of insane Zipper was, apparently. When Lor showed up for work the next day, even more tired from her all-night vigil with Zach, the chorus of which had been, “Bunnies aren’t really like that, baby, I promise. They don’t hurt each other like that. I’m so so sorry, baby. Mommy didn’t know,” Zipper asked her what she was doing there.
“I’m the five-to-ten shift.”
“You don’t work here anymore,” Zipper said, coldly stapling a stack of receipts together behind the bar. “Or were you too busy to read the memo?”
“There was a memo? Wait, what are you talking about, Zipper?”
“We had one server on, Lor. One!”
“My mother is in the hospital,” Lor began. “She—”
“I don’t really give a fuck,” Zipper said. “I need reliable servers. You are no longer reliable. End of story. We’ll find someone else who can be reliable.”
And so that was that.
When Lor got back to her apartment, still in her blacks, Arman was surprised to see her. “You get cut early?” he asked. He was making an egg-salad sandwich in her kitchen.
“I got fired,” she said.
“No,” Arman said.
“That’s what Zipper said.”
“He’s just mad,” Arman said. “Give him a couple days and he’ll change his mind.”
But he didn’t. And so, by the time Dana moved in, Lor was unemployed, and she, Dana, and Zach lived mostly on Lor’s unemployment and relied heavily upon Arman’s kindness.
The state of Arman’s finances was always slightly mysterious to Lor. He owned the smoke shop, but not really. In order to keep receiving his disability, he had to seem unable to work, and so his family, more precisely his uncle, “owned” the smoke shop and filed all the taxes. All of Arman’s family owned 7-Elevens, and they had offered him one of these, but Arman had wanted the smoke shop. “It’s more ‘me,’ ” he had explained to Lorrie Ann. “Can you even picture me running a 7-Eleven?”
In any event, Arman turned over the majority of his income to the family and kept some small amount for himself. Always there was drama regarding this amount. Sometimes, Arman would begin to cook the books and cheat his uncle; other times, he would claim that his uncle took everything and that he made next to nothing on top of his disability checks, which were by no means extravagant. “It doesn’t pay very well to get your legs blown off for your country,” Arman said. “You’d think they’d at least keep me in booze.”
“They keep you in opiates,” Lor pointed out.
“True,” Arman admitted.
Whatever the true state of Arman’s poverty, during this period of crisis, he did genuinely help Lorrie Ann. He filled her fridge with groceries. He sent in the payment on her car insurance. Eventually, he pointed out, Dana would probably get some sort of settlement for having been beaten nearly to death. Perhaps he was generous with Lorrie Ann because he assumed he would get a slice of the pie.
Wasn’t that how it worked? When you got nearly beaten to death, didn’t someone give you a ton of money? Lorrie Ann had just assumed it was so, and Arman assured her that eventually it would work out this way, but in fact, it never did. For one thing, though Bobby found out it was Carlos through the grapevine, he never gave the boy up. The case remained unsolved. For another thing, even if Carlos had been tried, what damages could they have squeezed in a civil suit from a boy who had less than nothing and was not even a legal U.S. citizen? In the end, Dana was simply put on disability, just like Arman and Zach. She spent all day on Jim’s old Dell laptop. It ran so slowly that only Dana’s fanatical zeal gave her the patience to wait through the boot-up, writing to various people on her American Indian forums and doing research on what she called “the biggest cover-up ever perpetrated by the American government. Lor, this makes Watergate look like child’s play.”
During this time Lor sank into a profound depression. In his boundless wisdom and generosity, Arman gave Lorrie Ann free reign with all of his prescriptions. Doubtless he thought he was easing her through her tough time. Dana never even noticed when Lor started taking her Vicodin to augment her high because she herself had stopped taking them, didn’t like them: “They cloud my mind. You know, it just figures that the white man would invent this kind of poison and hand it out like it was medicine.” Lor would spend days at a time in the same pajamas. Her relationship with Arman had become almost entirely platonic. (The opiates compromised his ability to get an erection.) If he noticed that she had stopped washing her hair, he said nothing. Neither he nor she attempted to wash the dishes piling up in the sink. Dana sometimes did them. One day the cat got out and was never seen again.
“He’ll come back,” Arman kept telling her. But Lor knew the cat was gone for good. She felt terrible that she couldn’t seem to cry for the cat. Had she even loved the cat? She thought she had, but now she didn’t know. It was unclear. When she tried to remember specific moments of intimacy with the cat, she couldn’t. All she remembered was the way the cat kept its paws so white, and the way its ears seemed too large for its body. Was that enough? Was that love?
Lor spent a lot of time thinking about killing herself. Because of the availability of large amounts of narcotics, she didn’t have to visualize hanging herself from the ceiling fan in the bedroom or slitting her wrists in the tub. She could just wait until the first of the month, when Arman filled all his prescriptions, and then she could take them all. (Actually, she planned to leave Arman the share she had determined he legitimately needed for his legs. She was thoughtful and prim even in wanton despair.) But the truth was, no matter how much Lorrie Ann longed for death, and no matter how peaceful and happy these fantasies made her, she knew she could ne
ver do anything so selfish. She had a child to take care of.
But it was also during this time that Lorrie Ann began to have trouble moving Zach. Dana had firm instructions not to lift anything heavy and Arman had no legs; there was no one she could ask for help. She could barely maneuver Zach between the chair and his bed, and several nights she let him sleep sitting up because she was just too tired. The child seemed to sleep just as badly in his chair as he did in his bed. What did it even matter? He hardly slept anyway. He was in constant pain. The muscles of his spine and legs were so tight that his hips were always on the verge of dislocating. Because his breathing was also compromised, the doctors worried about giving him pain medication that would further suppress his lung function, and so he was allowed nothing but Tylenol. (Even after his many surgeries, the boy was never given anything stronger than Tylenol, which may go some distance toward explaining his phobia of hospitals.)
In other words, moving Zach also hurt him, and every time Lorrie Ann did it, she worried she might dislocate his legs, forcing a trip to the ER. Every time she had to change his diaper, she worried similarly. And so she changed his diaper less. He got a rash; she tried to treat the rash, but still, the rash persisted. Eventually, the rash turned into sores, perhaps also from sitting all day without being able to shift position. The worse the boy got, the guiltier Lorrie Ann felt, and the more, the very more she considered simply ending it, either by killing herself or else by killing Zach.
For the record, she considered killing Zach to be the more ethical of the two options. As far as she could tell, the only profit on Zach’s continued life was his continued agony. She seemed to be the only one who questioned why and for what they were keeping him alive. Even Dana shushed her, saying, “Don’t even talk that way. He’s a beautiful boy.”