by Howard Owen
“Willie,” Jeanette says, “there’s been an accident.”
Andi was going down Main Street. Apparently she had the green light at Harrison, but the son of a bitch on Harrison apparently wasn’t fazed by such trivial matters as stoplights. He T-boned her little Subaru on the driver’s side, hard enough to drive it across two lanes and up on the sidewalk.
“Is she OK? Where is she?”
“They don’t know,” Jeanette says. “They took her to VCU.”
It’s a big teaching hospital. They don’t take you there for hangnails.
When I arrive, it’s the usual cluster-fuck trying to get information from the aggressively stupid people protecting the gravely ill from their loved ones. When I finally fight my way through security, Jeanette and Glenn are in a small waiting room reeking of anxiety and spent adrenaline. Everyone in here is waiting for news, and everyone knows there’s no guarantee the news will be good.
Jeanette fills me in while Glenn, certainly the best of her two husbands, retreats into an inconspicuous corner.
They had a hard time getting in touch with Andi’s next of kin, especially since Andi apparently didn’t have her wallet or driver’s license with her. The very phrase “next of kin” chills me. She was conscious enough to give them her name and address. They finally got one of her feckless roommates to answer the phone, but she didn’t have any idea who Andi’s parents were, or where, but she remembered that Andi had an old high school friend who worked at F.W. Sullivan’s and—wonder of wonders—the friend was working that day and gave the authorities her own parents’ number. And her parents, praise God, had Jeanette’s number.
Andi has some kind of head injury, plus a broken left arm and some broken ribs. Jeanette hasn’t seen her yet. By the time she got here, they’d already taken her to the operating room.
Hospital time is slow as molasses and faster than light. You sit there for what seems like hours, and you look up and see that ten minutes have passed. And then, in the twinkling of a derelict father’s eye, three hours have disappeared.
It’s sometime after eight fifteen when the surgeon comes in. We’ve already seen half a dozen life or death dramas played out in front us as we tried not to watch or hear. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I’m just about to wet my pants as I realize the moment of truth is at hand.
The doctor, who might be thirty-five or fifty-five, gives nothing away. Life is cheap in his world, and I know he’ll give it to us far more straight than we want it.
Andi, he says, is resting comfortably. She has been in and out of consciousness and has been given a lot of pain medication.
“Is she going to be OK?” I can’t stop myself from asking.
The doctor doesn’t answer for the three longest seconds of my life.
“We hope so,” he says.
I note that we all goddamn hope so, that we were looking for something a little more definitive. Jeanette puts her hand lightly on my arm and I apologize.
The surgeon seems taken aback. I have a feeling that most people who spend time in this claustrophobic hell just accept what the doctor says and move on.
“She should get through this,” he says after taking a deep breath. “She’s young and healthy. But the next few days will tell.”
Brain injuries, he goes on to tell us, sitting down now and really talking, are hard to diagnose and treat. Often, what’s done is done, for better or worse.
“The fact that she is at least partially conscious is good news,” he says, and then his beeper goes off, and he excuses himself, almost running out of the waiting area and down the long hallway. I realize he must do this all day, and I think that I’ll never bitch about doctor’s salaries again.
He’s told us that we can see her, but only briefly. She’s in intensive care, and we have to be buzzed in. There are supposed to be only two of us in her room at a time, so Glenn waits outside.
I’m not prepared for how beat up my daughter looks. I want to lie on top of her and somehow transfer all her pain to my worthless, dissipated body. Other than writing a few tuition checks, I’ve been a spectacularly negligent father, leaving her and her mother when they really needed me, for a woman whose charms had the shelf-life of your average dress shirt. Then, I was too wracked with guilt to force my way back into her life in any real way. Kate, Wife No. 3, was the one who finally got me to try, albeit too late, to rise above scum level as a father.
Andi’s eyes are black. Her chest and the top of her head are bandaged, and her arm is hanging in a sling. She seems to be sleeping, but then she opens her eyes, which are more bloodshot than any I’ve ever seen.
“Hi, sweetie,” Jeanette says, leaning down to kiss her gently on her cheek, just about the only place where it’s possible to make contact with our daughter’s flesh.
Andi mumbles something I can’t hear. Then she looks over, and it seems that just moving her eyes brings her pain. She sees me and tries to give me a smile. It’s then that I realize that at least two of her front teeth are missing.
I lose it. Jeanette puts her arm around me, and I finally man up as much as I can. Andi is looking at me, and she seems to want me to come closer.
I lean down over her and put my face as near to hers as I can.
“Don’t worry, Daddy,” she whispers, and then she drifts off to sleep again.
Nurses have been coming in about every ten minutes, and there seem to be about two for every patient in the ICU.
I kiss her cheek, too. The smell of Jeanette’s perfume is still there. Then, I go outside and let Glenn take my place, the way he did all those years ago.
Glenn and Jeanette stay another twenty minutes while I wait outside, and then a nurse tells them it’s time to leave, that Andi needs to rest.
I try to keep from wondering, as we all make our way down the zigs and zags that will finally release us to the world of good health, if I will ever see my daughter alive again.
It’s already past ten o’clock. The nurse has convinced Jeanette, Glenn and me that there’s nothing to be accomplished by staying longer. We agree to meet back at the hospital tomorrow morning.
I forget where I’ve parked my car, and by the time I finally find it, it’s close to eleven o’clock. I feel empty in every way possible, driven nearly to panic at the thought that I might not have Andi forever. I am also empty on a more mundane level. I haven’t eaten since noon. When my drive back to the Prestwould takes me within a block of Penny Lane, the car practically turns on its own.
Inside, I order a burger and some fries. And I start drinking.
I tend to drink for all kinds of reasons. To reward myself for taking a short ride on the wagon. To celebrate special events like birthdays, national holidays and sunsets. To be polite—nobody wants to be the only teetotaler at the party. There are plenty of good excuses to forget that once I start, it’s hard to stop.
The worst, though, is the Feeling Sorry Drunk.
That’s the one where you’re so low, lower than Hell’s basement, and you just want to wallow in it. The one where you’ve just seen the most important person in your world in close proximity to death, and you know how often you’ve failed her, and just about everybody else who counted on you, and you just want to climb up on the high board and do a swan dive into all the liquor there is.
Some people, in situations like this, pull it together and make some kind of vow to be better, set goals, turn a negative into a positive.
Or so I’ve heard.
I’ve had a late start and work hard to catch up. The Harps turn into bourbons on the rocks, because liquor is quicker. Before I know it, it’s one thirty. I have a vague recollection of some co-workers coming in at some time. I only get up to step outside to smoke or to take a piss. I have a dim memory of an argument over the Super Bowl, of a broken glass, and an unfortunate incident with spectacularly bad aim in the men’s bathroom.
If anybody but me realizes how fucked up I am, they don’t give enough of a shit to do anything about it.
Shortly after closing time, I’m in the Accord, on my eleven-block drive home, when I see this cop car coming right at me on the one-way street, blinding me with his blue light. I pull over, wondering what’s so important that he’s risked going the wrong way. As always when I’m blind drunk, I’ve been careful to go the speed limit, stay between the lines.
And then I see that other people are driving toward us, too. Everyone’s going the wrong way but me.
Oops.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sunday
A band of monkeys is playing the anvil chorus on my head.
I look at the clock. Eleven thirty. Jesus, I haven’t slept this late in years.
And then it starts coming back to me. I want to throw up.
Custalow comes in bearing coffee. He places it on the bedside table and leaves. On a better day, the sight of Abe tiptoeing his refrigerator-size frame out of the room would make me laugh, or at least smile.
I must have turned left on Franklin instead of Grace. Damn one-way streets. I didn’t get more than three blocks, right by the public library, when they got me. It’s hard to put it down to bad luck, since it was apparently my intention to drive all the way back to the Prestwould like that. Thank God it was two A.M. Not much traffic to scatter at that hour in downtown Richmond.
I wonder if they even bothered with the Breathalyzer, but then I do have some vague recollection of blowing into it. The cops were young, and they didn’t have much patience with aging drunks. That’s OK. I don’t have much patience with myself right now.
It was Custalow who got me out of jail, I remember that. Must have been a few hours later, because I think I remember the sky getting light when we got back home. I was well on the way to sober by then.
Somehow in all that mess, Gillespie showed up, I guess down at the lockup. He’s got reason enough to hate my ass, but I remember his asking me if I was OK, did I want him to call anybody. I gave him Custalow’s number, and Abe got up from a perfectly good sleep to come down here and bail me out.
It’s afternoon before I make my way down the hall. My legs feel like they weigh a thousand pounds. I think it’s mostly the shame dragging me earthward. I would like very much to curl into a ball, turn out the lights and spend a few weeks in solitary. It is almost unendurable to think that it was a careless bastard like me who put my daughter’s life in danger.
I thought I was past all this shit. When I was in my teens and twenties, I had a couple of DUIs. They cost me dearly, and I swore that wouldn’t happen again, no matter how toasted I got. But you get stupid. And you pay the price.
“Want something to eat?” Custalow asks me. He’s watching an old movie. I tell him not just yet, and he tells me Jeanette called. Shit. I remember that we were supposed to meet at the hospital at eleven. Andi. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I ask him if he told Jeanette about last night, and he shakes his head.
“Just said you were a little under the weather.”
I guess I’ll have to tell her about it. But not right now.
I make a quick call to her cellphone. She says Andi’s conscious but is sleeping a lot.
“You don’t sound so good yourself,” she says, and I hear in her voice the suspicion that it’s not the twenty-four-hour virus keeping me down.
Don’t worry, I tell her. It’s not catching.
It takes me half an hour to get out the door. Custalow gets up and says he’ll drive me. I tell him that I’m capable of driving myself, and he observes that I might be taking a chance, without a driver’s license.
Oh, yeah. That, too.
“Just out of curiosity,” I ask him as we’re making our way to the elevator, “what did I blow? On the Breathalyzer.”
He tells me, and I can’t believe a man could nearly triple the state’s definition of drunk in just three hours. I didn’t feel that drunk, which I’m sure will carry a lot of weight in court. Maybe I can blubber about my poor, dear daughter at death’s door and how distraught I was. If I do, I hope somebody shoots me. I wouldn’t mind somebody doing that right now, anyhow.
“It could be worse,” Custalow reminds me. “They don’t send you to prison for DUI.”
I thank him for the perspective. Right now, though, I need a lawyer.
I call Kate. She’s at brunch with friends, apparently not including Mr. Ellis. I hear girls’-day-out shrieking in the background.
“Arrested? DUI? Oh, Willie.”
Oh, Willie, my ass. There were plenty of times when either of us could have blown a point-two-oh when we were married and out partying. Somebody had to drive, and oftentimes it was the one who could actually fit the car key into the lock.
Still, I have to concede to myself that this might be a new low.
She says she’ll look into it tomorrow morning, and find out how much it’s going to cost me to get out of Stupid Town.
I thank her for her time.
I hang up before she can say “Oh, Willie” again.
Custalow drops me off at the hospital. I offer a half-assed excuse that Jeanette and Glenn seem to accept, probably because they’re focused on Andi.
My daughter looks like holy hell, and she probably feels worse than she looks. Jeanette says she can’t move around at all because of her ribs.
The good news, though, is that she is conscious. The nurses and other medical types come in every ten minutes or so to wake her up and make sure she’s still among the living. Hell, I’m not complaining, although I’m sure Andi would if she were a little more coherent. I’m just glad to live in a town with a large, competent hospital.
While I’m there, they have what the doctors would call an incident. They have her open her eyes and follow the nurse’s finger. Except only the right eye follows. The left one is frozen. It freaks us out, but the nurse tells us that this is a common occurrence, and that it “usually” corrects itself. Still, they have one of the doctors on call in the ICU come look at her, and he says the same thing.
“Can’t you fix it?” I ask him, knowing as I say it how stupid it sounds.
He indulges me, explaining in terms no liberal arts major can understand just what the problem is. We all nod our heads as if we know what the hell he’s talking about.
A couple of hours later, Jeanette and Glenn go down to get some hospital cafeteria food, leaving me alone with Andi. She seems to be awake, so I start talking to her. She listens for a while, and then she says, “Daddy?” She says it as if she’s just realized I was there.
I’m sitting in the big chair beside her bed, and she turns to look at me.
“Daddy,” she says again, “where am I?”
That’s a little disturbing, but I start explaining, as gently as possible, what’s happened. Then I notice something. She’s following me with both eyes. I want to yell, or cry, and she seems puzzled when I tell her what a good girl she is, as if she’s six years old and learning to ride a bike.
I announce our good news to the nurses, as if I myself had somehow made my daughter’s left eye work again. They smile indulgently, but when I ask the doctor if the “eye thing” is likely to happen again, he’s noncommital.
Jeanette and Glenn are as happy as I was over the news that, for now, our daughter doesn’t seem to have any problems that rest and luck can’t fix. Glenn says prayer can’t hurt either, but I’m thinking that he and my ex-wife have a better connection there than I do.
You have to go all the way to the parking lot to smoke. On the way, I pass two patients, pulling their IVs along with them, headed there, too. I’m sure that, if I were in dire enough straits to be treated in a major teaching hospital, I’d be able to quit smoking. Well, almost sure.
I check my phone messages. There’s one from Baer, trying to pump me for information, insinuating that I owe him something, since my promised interview with Philomena Slade kind of fell apart.
It occurs to me, halfway through the second coffin nail, that there may be a way for the tireless Mr. Baer to help me while he thinks I’m helping him.
I go back to Andi’s room and stay for another hour. Jeanette says she’s going to stay longer, which probably means until they toss her out. Glenn’s going home to make sure their sons haven’t burned down the house. I leave with him, telling Jeanette I’ll try to come by later. She smiles, fully aware of how seldom I actually do something when I say I’m going to “try.”
I do tell her, on the way out, about last night.
She puts her hand on top of mine.
“Oh, Willie,” she says.
I could have called Custalow back for a ride, but the paper’s only a few blocks from the hospital. As I walk in the front door, I can look down Franklin and see where Richmond’s finest found fault with my driving last night.
Baer’s in the office. He doesn’t seem to have much of a life outside the newspaper. I don’t think he and Sarah Goodnight are “seeing” each other anymore. I have to admit that, self-serving backstabber that he is, he does work.
I ask Baer what he’s up to, and he says “Richard Slade.”
I note that the whole sorry Slade-Simpson story appears to have been put to sleep by powers above us.
“I dunno,” Baer says, and frowns. “Something doesn’t seem right.”
Really.
“Like what?”
He scratches his head.
“Like the way Alicia Simpson’s sister wants us to stop writing about it. Like how Richard Slade spent twenty-eight years in prison for something he didn’t do and never got written up for one single violent act—not even a fistfight—and then he murders Alicia the first week he’s out.”
“Maybe he’d been saving it up, for twenty-eight years.”
Baer looks at me.
“No, it doesn’t make sense.”
Baer’s getting warm. It’s probably time to give him a little information. If nothing else, it’ll be a small payback for the fact that I couldn’t get Philomena to talk to him.
So, I tell him about the five A.M. call.
“And it was recorded there, on the incoming calls ID list, at his mother’s house?”
I nod.
“Damn. Why didn’t you tell me before?”