The Free (P.S.)

by Willy Vlautin

  “He’s nervous because he’s never been in a hospital before,” his wife said.

  “Not ever?” Pauline asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “You weren’t born in one?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re lucky.”

  “That’s what I keep telling him,” his wife said. “But there’s no talking with him when he gets upset. Anyway I’m the one in pain. I’m the one with stitches and the scar. What’s he whining about?”

  He laughed and stood up and kissed her. Pauline checked her vitals and the incision, and together they helped his wife to the toilet, and took her on a short walk up and down the hall.

  At dinner break she went to the cafeteria and ate two bowls of tapioca pudding and drank a cup of coffee. When she came back to the sixth floor she went first to the girl’s room. The TV was on, but the sound was down and the channel changed, and Jo watched it half-asleep.

  “I knew you couldn’t take NASCAR,” Pauline said.

  “I hate NASCAR,” Jo whispered and turned her head to see her.

  “I was betting you had some smarts. Alright, you know why I’m here. It’s that time. We have to change the packings.”

  The girl’s face fell.

  “How’s your pain right now? Do you think you can manage it?”

  “It doesn’t hurt too bad,” she said. “I just don’t like seeing what you’re doing. Is it okay if I keep my eyes closed?”

  “Of course,” Pauline said and pulled the curtains around the bed. She took back the sheet and blanket. Jo pulled up her gown showing the three bandages on her left leg. Pauline washed her hands, put on a pair of sterile gloves, and went to work removing the old dressings from the open wounds.

  The girl kept her eyes shut and clenched her fists tightly. “My dad had the NASCAR station at home. He watched races every night after he got off work.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Where I grew up.”

  “Where did you grow up?” Pauline asked. She had taken two of the dressings out and had one to go.

  “Rainier, Oregon.”

  “But you don’t live there now?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I hated it there, so I ran away.”

  “Where’d you go when you ran away?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m just curious,” Pauline said.

  “Why?” she gasped.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I opened my eyes for a second and saw what you’re doing. I have to remember to never open my eyes.”

  “When I was your age all I thought about day and night was running away. I just never knew where to run to.” She finished removing the dressings. “That’s why I’m asking. We’re halfway done, how are you doing now?”

  “I’m alright. It doesn’t hurt that bad. It just feels weird.”

  Pauline pulled off her gloves, washed her hands again, and put on a fresh pair. She began cleaning and repacking the open wounds. “It won’t take much longer, so just hang in there, and keep your eyes closed until I tell you . . . So when you ran away where did you go?”

  “I went to Seattle. I met Bob and his friends there. Bob’s the guy who stinks. After that they went to San Francisco, so I went with them. But we didn’t stay long because they found out about the house.”

  “The house with no water?”

  Jo nodded. “There’s no electricity either, but there’s a mini-mart a mile away. We go there almost every day. It’s near Tampico.”

  “What’s the house like?”

  “It’s old and white. It’s a farmhouse. There’s a huge yellow barn behind it. The barn’s really nice.”

  “And nothing works out there?”

  “Everything’s shut off.”

  “Don’t you get cold?”

  “They have a fireplace, but you’re right. It’s always cold in there. I spend most of the time in my sleeping bag.”

  “Whose house is it?”

  “It’s Captain’s grandparents’, but I guess they’re dead. So his parents own the house but they live in California somewhere. It’s just sitting there empty.”

  “Who’s Captain?”

  “He’s just one of the guys,” she said and flinched. She grabbed part of the blanket and squeezed it.

  “You alright?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re pretty tough.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Abscesses really hurt. I know that.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “I’ve seen grown men cry from what I’m doing right now. You’re tough.”

  “I just wish they’d go away.”

  “They will soon enough. How did they start?”

  “You know how they started.”

  “I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “From needles,” she said softly. “You know they’re from needles. They started to get bad a month ago. Captain said they’d go away but they didn’t.”

  “What were you using?”

  “Heroin,” she admitted.

  “Have you been using a long time?”

  “No,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t even like it. I don’t like the way it makes me feel. Bob and Captain say I’m just a chipper. I only do it once in a while. I don’t like seeing blood, so they do it for me. I won’t do it on my own. That’s why they put the needle in my leg. Even seeing a bruise on my arm makes me queasy. They say it’s too much of a waste to snort it. But they keep most of it to themselves anyway. When they do give me some, they just give me a little. And now I just feel sick all the time, so I don’t know if it’s from that or the abscesses.”

  “What about your parents? Aren’t they worried about you?”

  “I’m emancipated. Anyway, I’m not going back there.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Why do you ask so many questions?”

  “I don’t know,” Pauline said. “I’ve always been like that.”

  “I wish you’d stop. It’s starting to really hurt now. You’ll go faster if we don’t talk.”

  “Of course,” Pauline said. “We’re almost done. Just a couple minutes more.”

  Jo winced and again squeezed her eyes shut.

  Pauline did the rest of the work in silence. The girl’s face became red and tears leaked down her cheeks, but she said nothing more and made no sound. Pauline finished bandaging the new packs, covered her again, charted, and then left the room.

  When she next came back it was an hour later. She entered to find two teenage boys in the room: Bob, the kid she had met before, and another boy who was over six feet tall and looked to weigh more than 250 pounds. He had stringy brown hair and a boy’s beard that was spotty and untrimmed. He wore a duct-taped green parka with layers of shirts underneath. He stood in front of the bed eating Jo’s dinner from the bedside tray.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Pauline said to him.

  “What’s it look like I’m doing?” he said with a mouth full of food.

  “I didn’t know you were a patient here.”

  He took a drink from the soda on her tray. “Jo doesn’t like to eat. You’d have just thrown it out.”

  “Did she say you could have her food?”

  “She doesn’t care,” he said.

  “Don’t you want her to get better?”

  “She won’t eat this. The only thing I’ve ever seen her eat are candy bars.”

  Pauline pointed to the other boy. “I told Bob the last time he was here that I’d make him leave if he was this dirty and smelled this bad. What you guys don’t seem to understand is that your friend is really, really sick.”

  “We don’t have a shower,” Bob said. “I told you that last time.”

  “Not everyone has running water,” the other boy added and finished eating the dinner. He set the plate down hard on the bedside tray. There were bits of food on his face and in his beard.
He was beginning to sweat in all his layers of clothes. Jo’s head was turned facing the wall. She kept her eyes closed.

  “What’s your name?” Pauline asked.

  “Captain,” he said.

  “Captain, I don’t think you get it. Jo almost died.”

  “She’s not that sick,” Bob said. “I’ve seen people with worse ones.”

  Pauline turned to him. “You’re a doctor?”

  “I’m just saying,” he said.

  Pauline looked at her watch. “Visiting hours are over. If you care about her at all, at least clean up in the visitors’ bathroom before coming here. Go to a thrift store and buy a shirt and a pair of pants.”

  “Fuck you,” said Captain. “We don’t have to do anything you tell us.”

  “Then I’m calling security,” Pauline said.

  There was an unopened soda can on the bedside table. Captain put it in his coat pocket. “We were leaving anyway,” he said and looked to Bob and they both left the room.

  When her shift ended, Pauline drove home. She didn’t open a bottle of wine; she just drank tea and finished the application for the school nursing position. She changed the sheets on her bed and for the first time in a month tried to sleep in her bedroom. But her mind raced and sleep wouldn’t come, so she went back to the living room and the TV.

  The next day she dropped off the application at the school’s administrative office, ate at a Mexican restaurant, and forced herself to walk for an hour. As she did, she passed through downtown, and the blocks of struggling and empty stores. She came to a group of high school girls sitting at a picnic table outside a coffee shop and thought of Jo. She had always struggled with bringing her work home with her. There were times, when she had first become a nurse, that her patients would overwhelm her. She would become engulfed by them and intertwined in their lives. It took her years to build a wall around herself, and still at times she struggled. Now she would allow herself only a moment to falter and then she would quickly pull herself together once again. But the girl reminded her too much of herself and the way she’d felt at her age. Alone and voiceless and unwanted and worthless.

  Even though she had desperately wanted to, Pauline had never run away from home. Her mother had left them when she was seven, and Pauline was forced to live alone with her father until she was eighteen. He had worked the graveyard shift at a warehouse driving a forklift. He would sleep during the day and he would yell at her if she was too loud or woke him. Even as a child she had to beg him to go to the grocery store and beg him for money for clothes and things she needed at school. There would be days when he would hardly speak to her, and weeks when he wouldn’t shower. No one explained to her that her father was mentally ill. She had to learn it herself; she had to navigate it alone.

  She had become friends with a girl across the street, Cheryl Wheeler. From age twelve to eighteen she ate most dinners there, at Cheryl’s house, with her family. When she turned fifteen Cheryl’s father hired her to work at his dental office cleaning on Friday nights and doing secretarial work on Saturdays. She saved what money she could and dreamed of escape.

  As the years passed her father’s moods seemed to grow worse. They became poisonous snakes she had to jump over daily. He would pick on her. He would say cruel things to her. He would make fun of her weight or her appearance or her intelligence. One day he would blame her for what he considered “his failure of a life” and then he’d wake her in the middle of the night and tell her how smart she was, how the whole world was meaningless except for her.

  He would forget her birthdays, and for Christmas he would buy her a wrong-size Snoopy sweatshirt, or a Frisbee, or a board game: Candy Land, Monopoly, or Risk. He would be excessively miserly and then for no reason or occasion would buy her an expensive gift, once a watch and another time earrings. Both of which she liked. None of it made sense; it just exhausted her.

  And then two weeks before she left for college in Spokane, she came home from a shift at Shari’s restaurant to find a used Ford Focus in the driveway. Her father had saved two years for it. A car for her to drive to college. She would have student loans for seventeen years, but she had a car. Her whole life she felt both hatred and empathy for him, and in the end only an inescapable responsibility. A vague duty she couldn’t quite understand.

  The day she left in her new car with her all belongings packed inside, he stayed on the cot in front of the TV saying nothing. After that day she would visit him, but never again did she stay more than a night there, and never once did she let him see inside her apartment or anyplace she ever lived.

  Pauline parked at the hospital that afternoon and walked up the six flights of stairs to her floor. She put her coat and purse away and clocked in. In report the charge nurse told her two things: the girl, Jo, had snuck out in the middle of the night, and the old man, Mr. Flory, had finally gone home.

  10

  Pauline entered room 9 to find Leroy’s mother, Darla, sitting in the chair next to his bed, reading a novel to him.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Pauline told her.

  Darla set the novel on her lap and took off her reading glasses. “You’re not interrupting,” she said tiredly. “I’d about had it anyway.”

  “They say the surgery went well.”

  Darla shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what they said.”

  “What book are you reading him?”

  “The Light Seekers.” She held up the faded science-fiction paperback .

  “What’s it about?” Pauline asked and went to the computer and looked at Leroy’s chart.

  “Do you want the short or the long version?”

  “The long,” Pauline said and laughed. “I wouldn’t mind being in a sci-fi book for a minute or two.”

  “Well, let me see. This one is set on a planet that has seven moons,” Darla said and eased back in her chair. “There’s a group of women, probably around twenty of them, who travel endlessly across the planet. They’re nomads. They hold five golden spears called light wells, and the light wells can find water, which is nearly nonexistent on the planet. When they get close to a pocket of water the golden spears glow. In the water are power crystals. The women eat the power crystals; it’s their only food. The problem is they’re always getting shot at by these creatures called Zybons. They’re aliens with fancy guns, and their only food is the women. Oh, and I forgot, the women are always bathing each other in the water they find. They’ve done it five times in less than three chapters.”

  “Bathing women?”

  “And all the women are gorgeous and are always kissing each other.”

  “I bet was it written by some dumpy, middle-aged man.”

  Darla laughed. “It was. I checked. At least it’s funny that way. I don’t even like science fiction, but Leroy loved it so much. This is an old book of his I found in a box of his things. Maybe it makes him happy somehow to hear it.”

  “And he has a personal reader.”

  “He does,” she said.

  “That’s pretty lucky.”

  “I’m not his first one. His girlfriend, Jeanette, used to read to him. My brother got Leroy into science fiction, and then Leroy got to know her because of it. They met at some science-fiction movie marathon when he was fifteen. He told me that all through high school she’d read novels to him at night, while they were on the phone together.”

  “Really?”

  “Sounds so boring,” Darla said.

  “She must have really loved him,” Pauline said and finished looking through Leroy’s chart.

  “They were crazy about each other. She’d come to our house for dinner three or four nights a week, and they’d have the weirdest conversations. All in science fiction; it was like they were from a different planet.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “To tell you the truth, I loved it. Those dinners were the best part of my day a lot of times. She’d help me cook, she’d cut out recipes and we’d make them together. Jeanette’s a great
girl. You know she and I lived in an apartment together when Leroy first got hurt. Imagine having to live with your boyfriend’s mother. Leroy was in a military hospital in San Diego, and we moved down there together.”

  “Were you there a long time?” Pauline said and checked his oxygen level and adjusted his tubing. She looked at the chest tubes for air leaks, and measured the fluid level on the canister on the floor beside his bed.

  “A couple years,” Darla said. “We rented a one-bedroom apartment next to a freeway. It was an awful place, but the only place we could afford. I should never have brought her into that. Safeway transferred me to a store in Oceanside so at least I had work. She got a job, too. I worked nights and she worked days so someone could always be there with him. The whole time we just passed each other like zombies . . . I can start taking things pretty hard, but she always kept me from being like that. She always kept me from feeling sorry for myself.”

  “It’s hard not to feel sorry for yourself when you spend all your time in a hospital worrying,” said Pauline.

  “It’s been like one long nightmare really,” Darla said quietly. “From that first phone call saying Leroy was in a coma in a hospital in Germany to when they transferred him to San Diego. It’s all been awful . . . Then the doctors told us they thought Leroy would never make a full recovery. We didn’t believe them at first, but it had been over a year by then and he could barely feed himself. He could hardly walk. He couldn’t talk and could barely use the bathroom by himself . . . In the end I made Jeanette leave. I called her mother and told her to come get her. Was she supposed to spend the rest of her life taking care of a man who really didn’t exist anymore? A mother’s supposed to do that, but not a girlfriend. Her mother and I finally convinced her to leave. I guess maybe we forced her to. I was there another ten months, but nothing changed. I got homesick. It took a while but I was finally able to transfer him to the group home in Washington. And now I’m here.”

  “Where’s Jeanette now?” asked Pauline.

  “She lives outside of Seattle. She’s not married. She won’t tell me if she’s dating, but I hope she is. I know she has a good job and I’ve seen pictures of her apartment and it’s cute and in a nice neighborhood. She was mad at her mom and me for a while but she got over it. She calls me on Leroy’s birthday. Calls on Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter. Even on Fourth of July. But we don’t see each other anymore. It’s too hard when we do. But we have the phone.”