My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  I forget how long I’d been at the hospital at this point, but it was late, and we’d each put in our share of vigilance by Steph’s side, and it was time to call it. I’d been there a day and a half and was depleted, needed to get my mother home after her flight across the country.

  I took her to dinner and she allowed me to tell her the story of the last few months, the absolute truth about my relationship with Stephanie, even about Sarah and my profound confliction, and Mom listened to me as an adult child and son, and this, too, felt like confession, like a relief, like absolution for being human.

  Sarah had indeed removed all my empties from my apartment. And she had done my dishes and prepared my place for my mother’s arrival. I felt a bit exposed, weirded out by this. I summoned the courage to call her and ask her to back away, expecting—I don’t know what. But I didn’t have the bandwidth or emotional capital to take on our relationship along with everything else, and for a moment I was expecting an emotional blowback like I would normally receive from Steph, but instead Sarah was understanding and apologetic, said she understood entirely and that I should instead focus on supporting the family and my mother; we would sort ourselves out later.

  I was suspicious: No one I knew was that rational. What gives?

  But, no: Sarah was simply that levelheaded and rational, even in the midst of something like this. It baffled me, as I was accustomed to emotional knife fights and fisticuffs in order to get anything done, so this was unusual for me. This is how trust begins.

  That night, my mother slept on my couch, which is huge and oversized, dwarfing her further and reinforcing the perceptual distortion I kept experiencing with her. I left the French doors leading to my sleeping nook open so I could see that she was there, because I was afraid to be alone. When I closed my eyes, seriously nodding off from exhaustion, I could hear Stephanie yelling for me, “JUNE!” when I would briefly lose consciousness, right before the hypnic jerk, like it was a frequency open for panic, and she was trapped in her own nightmare, and I was the person she was calling for help, from under the wreckage of the Jeep.

  The next morning, we were back on the ninth floor before 8:00 a.m., and Steph’s parents were already there. They were sitting quite a distance from Sidney, my friend from the first night. I went right over to him and introduced my mother, and pointed out Steph’s parents, who managed a small, pursed smile and slight hand wave. They were unaccustomed to black people, I knew, from Steph’s stories. Once, Steph liked to recall, when she took her mother to a larger urban center outside of their idyllic New England town, Steph and her mom had passed a group of three black teenagers, and when they were just out of earshot, her mother had asked, “Are those REAL rappers??”

  But Sidney hadn’t noticed, or made any indication he felt slighted. I brought him a cup of coffee in my rounds and then went in to see Steph, who looked the same, if a bit more bruised. There was more diagnosis, more discussion with doctors and immediate care nurses, and nothing was guaranteed or assured, and we counted the amount of broken bones and were told what to expect, what was coming next. “Pneumonia,” the attractive younger internist had said. “It’s a process of the body, with so many broken ribs. It’s guaranteed.”

  About the only thing they could guarantee, it seemed, was the bad news.

  Steph’s head remained distended, her eyes protruding and needing to be covered in an unguent to retain their moisture. An orthopedist to help set her crushed foot. An optometrist to work on her eyes. A neurologist to review yet another series of scans.

  And it went on like that: We normalized to the everyday trauma, learned once again how to listen to the doctors and interpret their dithering hodgepodge of Greek and Latin terminology, nod our heads like we understood, and tried to draw something optimistic from their desiccated sense of duty, their fatigued ability to offer hope to the families of the broken.

  Next door, a revolving cast of extras moved through the trauma unit. A gang member who’d been shot and refused to stay longer than it took the doctors to stitch up his torso. A stroke victim who moved in and out the same afternoon. His wife and daughter moving from the terror of initiation to the trauma unit, to the good news that he’d be released and sent home tomorrow, and the look in that woman’s eyes when she looked at me and nearly apologized for the good news, and I shook my head at her, and her nodding back at me, an entire conversation exquisitely delivered in seconds, wordlessly. Another car accident survivor from eastern Washington whose family had no place to stay, could hardly speak English, so it became my role to help them like Sidney had helped me, that first night. It was what you did.

  A routine eventually develops, even under circumstances like this, because routines give humans a semblance of control and normality, and for that first week my mother was there, we all worked together to make sense of the symbols and signals we received from Steph’s bedside and each of the machines and reports, learned the personalities and habits of the nurses and a language from the sounds and alarms of the ICU station, exchanged information and kept watch as much as we could. I was still trying to be the good guy, and I think my mother was proud of me for that period. I spoke to my family daily, even called my father and grandmother in Brownsville, Texas, and sent Gramma fifty dollars to make a petition at her creepy, Aztec Catholic church service and walk on her knees until they were bloodied so that Steph would recover. I’m actually making that part up: I think she just gave her church thirty dollars and kept twenty for herself. This was, after all, my Gramma.

  I tried to sit shiva, next to Stephanie, in that chair, but I couldn’t do it for very long some days. It was tragic to me, somehow, more than to the others. I’m still not certain why. Her chemicaled friend, Lisa, could come in there with that distance, looking like Luna Lovegood, and talk to Steph about a project she was working on at school or update her on how the dog was doing, who was now staying in that huge pack at Sarah’s house and learning dog manners, which was something Cleo was clearly unaccustomed to. She had no dog sense, would get corrected often by the other dogs who did not like the new addition to the pack. It was like junior high, for teen girls, except with more shedding, and better teeth.

  Still, Cleo was safe there, even if she’d been nipped at more than a few times for being undogworldly.

  What I would do, some afternoons, was sit next to Steph and play some of that Harry Potter audio book, while I rested my head on the side of the frame. When we had lived together and had trouble sleeping, I would play it for us on the long nights we’d lie awake in her bedroom and stare off through the windows at the night sky. Steph would also place her broken-down clock radio directly under her pillow some deep mornings and listen to a small community college radio station that had very little range, and she’d dial in and fall asleep listening to some really obscure radio programs through the PRI network, some Canadian programs that we’d grown to love.

  So I figured out how to dial those in through my iPhone, and I would sit there with her and play that until the internal cranial pressure monitor would start beeping, as if the radio was increasing her blood pressure or anxiety, and I’d turn it off. Then the monitor would resume something nearing her regular status, and I’d play the programs again, to the same spiking effects.

  During this whole time, this was the only communication I ever had from her; the only way I knew she was still cognitively “in there” was her responding to Harry Potter and her Canadian public radio, like I’d heard her yelling in my sleep.

  When my mother left, everything changed again.

  We stopped by the hospital so she could say good-bye to Steph and her parents, and it was touching to see how much affection my mother had developed for this woman, and in a way, the life I’d tried to build here away from home. Mom genuinely cared for her, in spite of the fact that she knew I was trying to get out of this relationship when the accident happened. So when she was saying her good-byes to Steph’s mother, who thanked her for coming and spending a week helping, my
mother said, “Well, Steph is family to me,” and I saw Steph’s mother wince at this, and my fight response was once again triggered and I blushed with anger.

  That was difficult to forgive.

  Mom had changed my entire opinion and estimation of her during this past week, and I had found a new love and respect for her. It had started, interestingly enough, on a walk with Sarah, back at the very beginning. I had been telling Sarah stories about growing up on the Texas border, still uncertain as to whether I wanted to share my writing with her, and I began telling her about my mother, how distant she had seemed when I was a kid.

  “Your mother was constantly up to her elbows in diapers,” Sarah said, point-blank. “You’re lucky she didn’t drown you like Andrea Yates.”

  This made me rethink everything. “Hunh,” I think I said. From that moment on, I looked at my mother very differently, and it was during this crisis, when I needed her most, when I saw that Mom really had listened to my grief, knew that I was really breaking apart and heard me call out for help, and she had shown up for it. It changed everything. I had so much respect for her then.

  In fact, one moment stands out among many, and it happened in the waiting room. It was a Sunday, and Sundays become entirely too crowded in ICU waiting rooms. Sidney’s ex-wife had finally made it up from Louisiana, and about three generations of Sidney’s family had traveled with her to help with the hastening of their son’s life.

  Our little crowd had been in the corner of the room that afternoon as we were leaving, and as we were packing up, my mother turned to Sidney’s ex, who was a black woman in her late fifties, with cropped hair dyed hot pink, and Mom was taking the time to show her how to work the tricky pull-out couches when the woman turned on my mom, who was much smaller than her, and let out a string of vitriol, doing that fingerwagging, neck-shifting “attitude” display people do when they have little agency for anything else.

  I heard this happening and I was immediately on high alert, thinking the situation needed neutralizing, and Steph’s parents both darted out of the room like shots had been fired. Sidney reared up and attempted to pull his ex-wife away and she was of course arguing, and my immediate strategy, as a West Coast liberal, was to begin apologizing—“Obviously this was our fault, so sorry; please, we were only trying to”—and my mother stood there, absolutely defiant and cold, staring hard into this woman’s face with terrific dignity.

  I should mention, if I haven’t, that my stepdad is an African American from the East Texas/Louisiana bayou border country, and my mother is absolutely adored by her in-laws. Mom works for the City of Houston and manages a huge crew of people—builders and carpenters and engineers—and she does not take shit from anyone. I was astonished at this person in front of me, who did not back away from the confrontation.

  “If you had let me finish,” she said to the woman, who was still huffing and puffing, “I was showing you how you and your family could be more comfortable tonight.” I led her away, and I caught Sidney’s eye, who gave me a “women always be crazy” shrug of his shoulders.

  The next morning, when we arrived with coffee to resume our vigil, Steph’s parents were not in the waiting area, and as soon as the woman in the pink hair saw my mother, she ran up, earnest and smiling, acting in an uncomfortable infantile sort of shame dance, looking down, and said, “I just wanted to say I was sorry for yesterday,” and of course, my response was to say, “Oh, no, no, no; don’t think anything of it,” but I looked instead at my mother and her face was once again hard, unyielding, and she said, “You know better than that. You know how to behave yourself better when someone is trying to help you,” and it was just stunning, in that room for that second, and my mother grew ten feet tall in my estimation.

  So it was with a tremendous amount of fear and regret that I was letting her go that morning, on her flight back to Houston. I was going to be on my own now, with Steph’s family, in all this craziness.

  I wanted to go home with her.

  “You can’t,” she said to me. “You know you have to stay here.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “They need you to help,” she said.

  “I know,” I agreed.

  “You’re my son,” she said. “You can do this.”

  I put my head into her shoulder, a full head shorter than I was, and I cried and hugged her before she left.

  Sarah had given us a lift to the airport that morning and watched all this from the driver’s seat. She watched my hulking, 220-pound form break down into a boy needing his mother, and she mentions it to me still, says I can revert to that more quickly than anyone she’s ever seen.

  The next morning, there was a definite sea change in the routine, palpable from the minute I entered alone for the first time, carrying just three cups of coffee. This was the long haul, and it was just Steph’s parents and me now. It wasn’t anything immediate or overt, but I could tell there was something going on. Very likely, it originated from a symptom of stress they were experiencing between themselves—they were, after all, nearly in month two of hospital stays, since they started with Harold’s hospitalization, then Steph’s mother’s, and now Steph—and though I was trying to be as helpful as possible, there are just some things you can’t handle from a waiting room. In fact, my friend Andrew built up a small laptop and lent it to Harold so he could continue handling his e-mail and business from the waiting room, and as helpful as that was, I’m sure Harold was stressed from feeling unproductive.

  Personally, I was thanking God that I had the job I did, and I was able to do most of my management and planning and design from the waiting room, using the hospital’s Wi-Fi. The first production cycle after Steph’s accident, something like three days after, I was absolutely incapable of concentrating on my layout and design, would work for blocks of ten or eight minutes, then lie down next to my desk for five while my mother watched helplessly from the couch and encouraged me to get up, get back to it. I just couldn’t. My mind was coming apart with anxiety and fatigue, but I also knew that I couldn’t take the time off because if I did, if someone else saw all the scripts and shortcuts I had made for my production role, I’d lose my job. As a graphic designer, keeping your solutions opaque is a part of your worth; when upper management sees how “easy” it is to do your job, they undervalue it and try to replace you. It was a lesson I’d learned twice before.

  So it was with a great sense of self-preservation that I would climb back into my chair and treat jpegs with my Photoshop scripts, lay in type and apply styles, cut and paste something from a previous issue, do everything I could until I was able to meet my deadline and head back to the waiting room, to wait.

  CHAPTER 26 Now the Wolf

  When it was just us three, Steph’s mother made it a point that first morning to sit me down and give me a speech about how close their family was, and some other important errata that was completely lost on me because I kept focusing more on her contextual meanings and her overly saccharine delivery, rather than her message, and when she finished, I didn’t understand why I was feeling like I’d just been attacked, but I knew that I had. Though I wasn’t sure why.

  I said something like, “You have the most sweetened way of saying the most god-awful things,” and both of her parents stood up and walked away, and for a moment I thought Harold was going to hit me, and I thought, Yup, this is how it should end; I get hit by him, too, but I wasn’t, and after a while things cooled down, and we each sat at opposite sides of the room.

  While I was in the ICU with Steph that afternoon, she received a visitor from work, and for a moment I was confused as to who this person was, when I finally remembered Steph’s last phone call about the Japanese PhD candidate, and suddenly here she was with a handmade card that had been written with exquisite care, a small orchid, cookies, and a Hello Kitty doll. I’d been sitting by Steph’s side, studying her head and fractures a bit more and noticing that her head was indeed growing back into a regular shape, when I noticed the Ja
panese woman looking a bit lost, at the same time Steph’s mother did, and instead of running interference—if Steph had wanted anyone bounced from ICU, it would have been her last enemy—I decided to see how her mother would handle it, from a sense of devilish enjoyment, from being, as my dad would call me, cabrón.

  The Japanese woman’s English was slow, halting, and apologetic, and Steph’s mother decided right then she knew how to navigate this one. She started speaking to the PhD student like she was a kindergartener in her class back in Yankeeland.

  “I have VISITED your country ONCE!” she said with a big smile, while pointing out the window, I think toward the east. “Thank YOU for the GIFTS!” Here she held each one up for inspection. “These COOKIES look DELICIOUS!” Here she rubbed her stomach in circles. “Are you FRIENDS with Stephanie?” She pointed with exaggeration at Stephanie, still in a coma. “She is still VERY SICK,” she said, and made the “sleeping” hand signal with a pouty face. “I will tell her,” she said, using her hand like a puppet mouthing words, “that her JAPANESE friend was here! Thank you!” By this point, the woman was in tears, though I don’t think it was from the moving acceptance speech, but much more from the agony she had witnessed in the coma chair, suffered by the person she’d argued with about protocol two weeks before. She had obviously been feeling guilty about it. So much so that she bought a coveted Hello Kitty doll from Japan; those aren’t cheap.