You feel selfish when you watch the parents who cry in the hallways or push children past in wheelchairs; or when you peek in open doorways, adults huddled around a small figure in a bed, tubes and machines accessorizing the scene, balloons with teddy bears and smiley faces bouncing in the artificial wind from the vents. You want them all to get better. You want them all to go home and be fine. But you know they all won’t, they can’t, and then you pray that your child does get better quickly, that your child doesn’t stay, that if there must be a choice, let it be your child who leaves fine—gosh, did you say that? This makes you feel small. And no matter how kind the nurses are—and they always are—and how many times they smile and reassure you, you never want to see them again, ever. You never want to come back. And it makes you feel reckless to feel this way; it makes you feel shallow. It makes you question what gives you the right to expect it all to go well all the time. It makes you question why it never goes well for some—not just for children in other parts of the world dealing with violence, war, hunger, poverty, and disease. Because you know children die in your suburb. They get sick, have tumors, have cancer, get in car accidents, overdose on drugs. You know you are lucky. Some children die. And that’s just one reason you cry when you walk back into the room.
The hospital halls were empty this night. The pediatric floor was on lockdown, the nurse explained. Only parents can visit after visiting hours, a brief window that had already passed.
Coach Powell called my cell phone. He wanted to visit Colin and said he would be there later in the evening. When I told Colin Coach Powell was coming, he was elated.
“Really? He’s coming to see me?”
“You’ll have to say you are his father; only parents can visit,” I told Coach Powell on the phone. I explained what door to use to enter after-hours and what room we were in.
At about 9 PM, after practice, Coach Powell walked in the room; the doctor was checking in on Colin again. They chatted about Colin’s leg and about wrestling.
“We’ll take good care of your son,” the doctor said to Coach Powell.
None of us corrected him.
I slept on what the nurses called a bed; it was a windowsill, really, with a one-inch foam mattress in a vinyl covering, the width of my laptop and only about six feet long. I wondered how taller or larger parents could fit. But it was the first time I could be there for Colin without worrying about the other boys or having to call someone to pick up another son, stay at the house, or make sure it was all fine while I was here. Weldon was in Madrid; Brendan was away at school. Colin made jokes; even in the hospital on IV antibiotics, his leg throbbing and sore, he made jokes. We watched a movie, Back to the Future.
Colin didn’t get better quickly. After that overnight stay, we went back to the hospital to have the wound checked, and it was relanced the day after he was released. It seems the doctors didn’t get all the infection out. They didn’t give us the right antibiotics, so we needed to switch, and it took another week for the wound to start healing properly and for Colin to start to feel healthy again. MRSA invades your system so you feel tired, rundown, and out of sorts. The doctor told him to eat lots of protein. And rest.
Because he didn’t qualify for individual state, Colin did not get to go with the team to Champaign, Illinois, where his teammates, Chris and Nick Dardanes and Sammy Brooks, each won first-place medals. Benny Brooks took third. Charlie Johnson and LaQuan Hightower were contenders. Colin had to keep his leg elevated with warm compresses. Sitting in the cramped stands for two days would make him even sicker.
Caryn texted me all the updates on our team’s wrestlers. Colin was on the phone with his teammates.
Colin missed wrestling in team sectionals the next Tuesday, where Oak Park prevailed. He was hoping he could be well enough to wrestle at team state in Bloomington the following Saturday. That was his goal. But he wasn’t; he never could have passed a skin test. The scar was still puffy and paler purple, but odd. By the time team state rolled around, the scar was scaling and still red. Coach Powell told him not to rush it; he had two more years to wrestle. Two more years for individual state and team state.
Colin wrapped the wound—now scaly and discolored, though flattened—and went to team state on the bus with the team. We lost to the team from Minooka, Illinois. Coach Powell talked to the boys, many of whom were extremely distraught. And like he always does, Coach Powell gave them perspective.
I drove home with Brendan, who was home from school, and Liam’s mom, Danne. Brendan was on the phone with one of his teammates from the 2009 team.
“What did Coach Powell say to the team?”
“I didn’t get to hear it,” Brendan said. “But I bet it was really great.”
It was a good season. Colin had won first in regionals. I was proud of him. I brought a sheet cake with me to Bloomington for the team to share if we had won first place, as we did the year before. Last year we ate the cake as champions. This year I was careful with the wording on the cake, not wanting to be arrogant or presumptive. I kept the cake in the car.
CONGRATULATIONS FOR A HUSKIES STYLE YEAR, I had the woman at the bakery write on the cake in orange and blue.
After we got home from Bloomington, I put the cake in the freezer. We would use it at the wrestling banquet; it wouldn’t go to waste.
21
Back
* * *
September–October 2010
On this Thursday September morning, Colin chose the gray suit with the thin blue stripes that he wore to his homecoming dance in his sophomore year. That was last year, and standing on the square platform while the chatty tailor chalked the legs and coat, Colin looked tall and thin, still with a little boy’s face on a man’s body. The tailor on Oak Park Avenue with the thick Greek accent called me “Mrs. Weldon” or “dear,” depending on whether or not he was looking at the receipt.
We sat in traffic court waiting for the judge to arrive, a few minutes before 10:30 in the morning. Colin was summoned here for a speeding ticket he had gotten a month earlier for driving ten miles over the limit in a school zone on our street a block from our house. We sat stiffly purposeful and apologetic in the first wooden pew; each row was crowded with teenage boys, mothers, a few fathers, and some nervous young women dressed in clothes too tight, colorful, and revealing for the sobriety befitting a courtroom.
A neighbor of my sister Maureen slid beside me. She was here for her own son’s traffic ticket. “Your ex-husband moved back to Chicago, did you know?” she said crisply. “He called the house, it was odd. He’s working in the city as an attorney. Been here a while.”
I couldn’t answer right away; I felt as if the wind was pushed out of me.
Colin overheard and immediately tensed, began tapping his foot. I didn’t react to her, though I wanted to shout. I asked a few questions about where he was working and living, thinking, OK, maybe now I can get some of the tens of thousands of dollars he owes in child support, now that he is in this country. Support plus five years of college tuition and expenses. Half of all food, clothing, and hospitalizations; his part. The father part. The part he completely forgot.
If the revelation at this moment had not been so bizarre, I would have chuckled at how random it was to learn he was back in the same city—our city. I would not have known. My former in-laws had stopped inviting us to any family events about a year earlier; a round of graduation parties had passed and nothing since Christmas 2009 came our way. Some of my former in-laws sent Christmas cards, but nothing personalized or signed; I gather we were just on some computer-generated list.
Even though the boys’ aunt lived a few blocks away, there was no communication from that side of the family. Their only grandparent, their father’s mother, had not called the boys in close to a year. She sent us Christmas cards. I thought about my own mother, who even in the months of hospital stays, always asked me to bring the boys with me, had snapshots of them in her wallet, and would bring out photos of her twenty-one gra
ndchildren for anyone who cared to see. Perhaps the freeze from the in-law side was in preparation for their father’s return. Who knows. I stopped being polite and accommodating, stopped forcing the boys to attend events on that side of the family. More than six years had passed since their father left, and so much had happened since he dropped off all his belongings in the front hall for the boys to save for his return. The boys had grown to men since Weldon had thrown away everything that was his.
I was tired of being polite.
I could see in Colin’s face the hurt; he was blanched. He was a wonderful young man, always tried, was accommodating and pleasant, and everyone who met him liked him. And his own father did not know.
“I am a good son,” Colin said.
And my heart almost shattered.
A few minutes later I recognized a friend’s husband—an attorney—as he walked to the desk to the left of the judge’s bench. I waved nervously.
He walked over to us.
“What’s your plan for the ticket?” he asked, leaning toward me.
“Pay the fine?” I answered. It had been more than fifteen years since I had gotten a speeding ticket and was totally out of practice.
“Give it to me.”
He took the manila folder that I had neatly marked COLIN’S TICKET with the letter concerning the court appearance information inside. He sat at the desk, filled out a form, spoke to the prosecutor, and in a few minutes we were standing before the judge with the order that the speeding ticket be dismissed if Colin completed ten hours of community service within thirty days.
I thanked my friend’s husband.
“No problem. I was here for another kid.”
When I got to work later that day, I e-mailed Coach Powell about the sudden reappearance of the boys’ father and warned him that Colin was extremely upset.
“Thanks, I will talk to him today,” Powell wrote back immediately.
I called Paul. I called Weldon. I called Brendan. I called Madeleine. I worried.
“I’ll call Colin,” Weldon said.
“It doesn’t bother me as much,” Brendan said. “He was never all that nice to me.” And then Brendan chatted about his new roommates and the four-page paper he had due in a few weeks.
I know, as clearly as I know that hydrogen and oxygen make water, that their father’s decision to completely opt out of their lives has changed them. It is as startling a contrast as one between a before picture and an after picture, the effects of their father’s choice altering them as distinctly as radiation, silently changing who they are. And his absence changed me. When you witness a car wreck by the side of the highway, with the ambulance sirens screaming, for damn sure you drive more carefully on the way home. You take no risks, you thank God you are here at all, and you do what you must to keep everyone safe.
I am not a perfect parent, and I am not a martyr. I did what I had to do. And I would never leave my boys.
A few weeks later, on Halloween weekend, Coach Powell, Caryn, and I drove eight of the team’s wrestlers to Preseason Nationals at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. Powell drove four boys in his black SUV with the license plate, OP WRSTLR. Caryn and I followed behind Powell in her blue Chevy Suburban, roughly the size of my first studio apartment. Two other wrestlers plus Colin and Caryn’s youngest son, Sam, were with us. We packed turkey sandwiches, apples, oranges, and Gatorade.
The boys were irritable, passing packets of gum back and forth on the five-hour-plus sun-filled ride, mostly because they all needed to make weight at 6 PM. Colin was down to 135 pounds and couldn’t afford to gain an ounce. Sam was hovering at 171, where he needed to be.
After weigh-ins about 8 PM that night, we went to A.J.’s, a local restaurant near the motel with a fish fry and deep-fried everything, a bar with high stools, and waitresses who were confused by how to accommodate a party of eleven, eight of them famished young men.
Powell talked about his health and his fatigue, and said that the next year would likely be his last season coaching. He seemed to be doing better. At least he wasn’t sliding any further downhill.
“I can’t keep doing this, but I’ll stay for Colin and Sammy,” he said to Caryn and me.
Powell was still down about forty pounds since his diagnosis, not the robust young man I first met in 2004. Still, he looked healthy; thin but with good color. He had been strict with his diet and chemotherapy regimen, trying to get enough rest so he could coach. He was trying to push his body into remission. Powell said he and his wife wanted to start a family and because of his heavy doses of medications and the genetic nature of his autoimmune disease, they were looking into adoption.
“I really want to be a father,” he said.
For my sons, he had been.
The next day Caryn and I sat in the purple-and-yellow stands of the Unidome for more than fourteen hours. There were twenty-five mats with simultaneous wrestling of fifteen hundred youth and high school wrestlers from several states and more than sixteen hundred matches in all. Colin won two matches and lost two, so he was eliminated and did not place. Sam won the national championship at 171 pounds, five wins, the last over a wrestler from Minnesota he had lost to in earlier national tournaments. We screamed and cheered and took pictures, so heart-bursting proud of our own winner.
That night we drove to IHOP to celebrate, the boys ordering pancakes, chicken sandwiches, milkshakes, and cheeseburgers. When the bill came, Coach Powell passed it to the boys, eight of them sitting at two tables next to ours.
“Look at what you ordered and add 15 percent to it, then give me that money,” he said calmly. Then he explained how you arrived at 15 percent. “Tell me how you do that, Chris,” Powell said.
The boys looked confused. They passed the bill one to the next, pulling single dollar bills from their pockets, loose change clanging onto the table. This took about fifteen minutes.
“They don’t have enough,” I said to Powell.
“Oh, they never do,” he said. “They are always at least thirty dollars short. But it’s good practice.”
Powell collected what the boys handed him, then pulled money from his own wallet and paid the bill, leaving a large tip.
It’s what we professors call teachable moments.
“No worries,” I tell students who e-mail or visit my office with questions about a quiz, deadline, or grade. “You’re upset by the small things. Stop focusing on the lint on the car seat. We are on a cross-country road trip so look out the window. Enjoy the view.”
Caryn and I met Powell and the boys for the free breakfast in the lobby of the Fairfield Inn the next morning. It was a bright blue October Sunday, and we loaded the trucks with the overnight bags and wrestling gear. Four boys slept in the middle and third seats behind Caryn and me, their mouths open, hooded sweatshirts pulled over their heads. We drove behind Coach Powell on a two-lane stretch through Iowa, past Masonville and Lamont, Backbone State Park, and into the rolling postcard-perfect hills of Galena, Illinois, just over the glistening Mississippi River, headed straight toward home.
22
Bleach
* * *
January 2011
I took off my coat and placed it next to my gray purse on the conveyor belt at the security entrance. I hate this government building, the Daley Center, more than any other place in the world, more than the dentist’s office with the chatty hygienist who asks me questions while cleaning my teeth, more than the air safety vehicle emissions testing place you only have to visit every few years, more than a dirty ladies’ room off the tollway that smells of retching and beer.
I hate that I am headed to the eighth floor; divorce court is there. I am sixteen years past my divorce and the pleadings and filings and appearances and objections and horror that devoured so many days and so many months and so much of me, that it has taken all my strength to move forward and away from the memory. All that work to make the details and specifics stay in the background, grow so small, so distant, and so unimpo
rtant to who I am now and what I do and what I believe and how I feel that they disappear, vanish.
The woman in front of me is short and wide, and her cotton-candy, orange-yellow hair lies in thick, bedraggled clumps down the middle of her back. Her eyes are heavily drawn with dark blue shadow—midnight blue would be the Maybelline name—and her cheeks are colored with clownish circles of rouge. She scowls as she places her hooded sweatshirt coat on the metal lane to pass through security. Another woman behind me is talking on her cell phone loudly, and the uniformed officer tells her to put her phone in the smudged plastic container now. Cell Phone Woman with the ratted hair—hers in a brunette updo—ignores the security guard and keeps talking. I am afraid there will be a fight or an arrest or a scene. That would be just perfect.
I am headed to the Chancery and Domestic Relations Clerk’s office in Room 802. I retrieve my coat and purse from the conveyor belt and dash to the elevator; it is crowded with lawyers in ill-fitting suits, carting beaten cases bulging with files, and men and women staring ahead. No one smiles.
I am here because I am going to finally do what I should have done years ago. Now that my boys’ father is back in Chicago and working—I have confirmed—I am going to attempt to retrieve years of child support. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. My stomach feels now as if it is somewhere above my rib cage, and I try to act like I am not drowning in all the unhappiness, all the sordid details of who did what to whom, all the shame and the fault and the pain, the long-ago hurts.
Domestic Relations File Request, that’s where I need to go, to read through the files I requested from storage. My copies of the divorce files were destroyed in the basement flood at my house last summer, soaked through. I had to throw them away. I took that as a good sign—finally getting rid of the weight of those years, that divorce that was so much time and money and hurt. Dirty, ruined, gone.
Escape Points Page 19