But what I wasn’t seeing was a more obvious problem, that I was too emotionally close to this story to write honestly about it; a part of me felt sorry for that boy I’d been, and I was angry at his mother and father for not doing a better job of taking care of him and his brother and sisters. This anger was new, and it was a surprise to me.
After writing, I’d drive the ten miles to my father’s house to try to do whatever had to be done. Peggy was pregnant with their second child, and she needed help caring for Pop, who was bedridden and in constant pain.
Before the accident, they’d moved to East Rocksvillage, the rural part of Haverhill, where they’d built a small house into the side of a hill overlooking acres of open field and a ridge of trees. Their paved driveway was long and steep, and because their front door was four feet off the ground, Jeb and I had had to rip out the steps and build a winding forty-eight-foot ramp for Pop’s wheelchair. We did this two days before he came home from the hospital. Jeb and I lay out the ramp’s angle which by law could be no higher or lower than one inch per foot. This allowed a crippled person to wheel himself up or down it without help from anyone else. We went to work digging three-foot holes for the posts, and because we thought this ramp was temporary, we skipped mixing and pouring concrete footings. Friends came over and pitched in, Sam Dolan one of them. When the sun went down, we turned on the porch light and set up a halogen lamp and aimed headlights and kept working. We lagged treated two-by-tens into the posts and nailed in crosspieces and ripped sheets of plywood and tacked them down. There was a hopeful, nearly festive charge to the air; there was nothing we could do to save Pop from what had happened to him, but we could do this. We were also still under the illusion that Pop would walk again one day, that his casted left leg was not nearly as damaged as it was, and that his main challenge would be learning how to walk on the new prosthetic leg for his right.
The first time I saw him home from the hospital he was lying on his living room couch, his casted leg propped on three pillows, the right leg of his sweatpants folded up under his stump. He wore a Red Sox T-shirt that used to be tight around his chest but now was loose, his upper arms thinner than I’d ever seen on a grown man. His beard, always trimmed, was long and shaggy, and his cheeks were gray, the whites of his eyes yellowed, but he was smiling up at me, raising his atrophied arms to hug me as I leaned down and kissed his cheek. It was rough with stubble, and he smelled like oily skin and damp hair and cotton bandages.
My five-year-old sister Cadence was talking to him, asking him about a drawing she’d done, did he like it? It was dusk and the TV was off and their golden retriever Luke lay on the floor in front of it. Peggy was cooking in the small kitchen.
Now it was a month later, and Pop hadn’t even left the house. He lived in a haze of pain that never lifted and most of it came from his left leg. If it wasn’t positioned in just the right place on the pillows, he told me it was as if sharp knives were slashing into his nerve endings across bone. Peggy was the one who took care of Pop, but when I was there I learned how to prop the leg at an angle that did not hurt him as much as another. Sometimes half an inch to the right or left or up or down is all it would take to make it far worse or far better, but like a neighborhood bully, the pain never quite went away. And he told me the phantom pain of his right was sometimes worse, that where his lower leg and foot had been, the actual air there hurt. Sometimes I’d see him reach down and pass his hand through it, this limb he no longer owned but haunted him like some disgruntled ancestor.
I laid a towel across his chest, took scissors and trimmed his beard. I lathered his cheeks and throat and shaved him. Sometimes I’d take over bedpan duty, a task Pop made easier by rolling onto his side and calling out in a weakened Marine Corps voice, “Get in there, boy, and wipe that ass!”
But there were times he clearly hated having to get help for this, and he would thank me more than once and I’d tell him not to worry about it. What I did not tell him was that I felt joy doing these things, an emotion I then felt guilty about because how could there be any human room here for joy at all?
In January my father and Peggy had their second child, his sixth. It was long after midnight at a hospital in Boston, and Pop was well enough to be in the delivery room, but there was no space for his wheelchair where the husband and father usually sat at the head of the operating table so he watched from the foot, and he and Peggy asked me to sit where the young father would. I was twenty-seven years old. Peggy was twenty-eight. I held her hand and watched over a raised blue sheet as the surgeon made an incision in her belly and parted the flesh and in seconds there was my crying infant sister being lifted from her mother’s womb, the umbilical cord purple and wet, and I was crying too, saying, “It’s a girl, you guys. It’s a girl.”
Later, while Peggy was in recovery and my fourth sister, Madeleine, was being cleaned up and examined, Pop and I sat in a dark hallway sharing an illegal cigarette. It was just before dawn. The sky outside the windows was black, and down the street a traffic light turned green for no one. I didn’t smoke, so I drew on the Marlboro as shallowly as I would a cigar. I’d been up all night with my father and his wife, and I should’ve been tired but I wasn’t; I kept seeing my baby sister being pulled from her mother’s womb, this completely formed, healthy human being two other human beings had made. I rarely thought of God or angels or anything otherworldly or good that may be among us, but in that hospital hallway with my father, I was feeling that something other than just us and our daily stumbling and striving may be here after all.
Pop looked beleaguered. In the delivery room he had smiled and there’d been tears in his eyes, but now he looked fatigued and gripped by a fresh pain he could barely tolerate. His torso was still weak with atrophy and both elbows rested heavily on his chair’s armrests. He’d be starting physical therapy soon, and it was time to get him ready for that, time to build his upper-body strength back to where it was just so he could work the crutches, and later, a cane.
MONDAYS, WEDNESDAYS, and Fridays I’d drive to Haverhill and set up his old weight bench in the living room. This was the same bench his second wife, Lorraine, had dumped in our front yard on Columbia Park, and while Cadence played or read or drew, and Peggy breast-fed baby Madeleine or lay her down for a nap or went off to do errands, I’d help transfer Pop from his wheelchair to the weight bench, an act which required him to have the strong triceps and pectoral muscles he no longer had. He’d be pale and sweating before he even lay down on the bench, something he could only do with help. His left leg was no longer in a cast but it did not bend, and his right was a stump so he wasn’t able to plant two feet on the floor on either side of the bench. This made this exercise far more difficult for him to do, but once he was in place and ready, we began anyway and with just the bar.
Before his accident and in the early years married to Peggy, Pop had worked himself up to a 200-pound bench press, but now this 20-pound bar had clearly taxed him by the eighth or tenth rep, and he set it back in its forks and looked up at me standing there behind them, looked up at his son’s upside-down face. “I’m fucking weak.”
“But muscle has memory, Pop.”
I told him what I’d read in one of my muscle magazines years earlier, that once you’ve built muscles and then neglect them, each cell remembers what it once was, and so the lifter starting over is miles ahead of the one beginning for the first time.
“Muscle memory,” Pop said the words slowly and to himself, the way he’d always done whenever he heard a line or phrase or human situation that intrigued him. Usually it would end up in a published story of his months or years later. One night he’d called me down in Austin just to shoot the shit. “Hey, it’s your father who art in Haverhill.” We talked awhile, then I told him about the gym where I was working out, about a bumper sticker on the locker of one of the powerlifters there: I don’t know how I feel till I hold that steel.
“Wait,” he said. “Tell me that again.”
An
d I knew he’d just reached for the pen he always carried and was writing those words down. A few years later they became the opening line for his novella “The Pretty Girl.”
But this time, as he lay crippled on the bench, ready to do his next set of presses, he seemed to be taking it in for his use only, words he would need, not to help build a character, but to build himself.
EIGHT WEEKS later his upper body was back to what it had been before the accident. We’d learned it was easier for him to bench-press only if his torso couldn’t slide to the left or right, so we’d hook his leather weight belt under the bench and around his waist, cinching it in tight, and he stayed that way till his bench presses were done. For his shoulders he did overhead dumbbell work from his wheelchair. For his back I installed a chinning bar in his kitchen doorway that he could reach but could be taken down afterward. For his upper arms Pop did seated dumbbell curls and overhead triceps extensions, and with each passing week he got stronger and stronger.
One afternoon Pop told me that the day before his accident he’d gone out and bought a compass because he’d wanted to walk wherever he went, to get his exercise that way and learn more about where he lived.
“Can you believe that, man?” He was between sets and he glanced over at me and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm. “I had plans to walk.”
And now he wanted to do something for his heart and lungs, too. But what can a man without legs do? There was swimming, but his entire life he’d been afraid of water. There were those racing wheelchairs you could take out on a track somewhere, but Pop and the rest of us still held out hope that he’d walk again one day and the thought of buying another wheelchair was a dark one.
Then I remembered shadowboxing. I told him how it could wind even the fittest boxers, how you could probably do it in a sitting position, and I pulled up a chair beside him and showed him how to throw a few punches. I felt like I was lying to him, though, because these punches were not themselves without pivoting feet and legs and hips to power them. But Pop liked the movement, needed the movement, and he remembered boot camp in the Marine Corps, how much harder the running became when you had to count cadence too, when you had to sing “the D.I.’s fucking song.” So Pop began singing. After his weight workouts, he’d put on some Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Peggy Lee, and he’d shadowbox in his chair and sing from his diaphragm, Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars…, his left leg sticking out straight from his chair, his right gone, his eyes closed as he hit notes and punched the air.
I’d drive down the hill feeling more joy than sadness. I had never grown anything before, never planted a seed and watered it till something blossomed that had been waiting there all along. At least I thought I hadn’t. But I had. It was me I had built up. And I imagined that helping Pop get his strength back gave the kind of sustained creative satisfaction a gardener must feel, or a coach, or a father.
18
IT WAS THREE years later, and because of what I’d just done, a big man offered me his place in line, another squeezed my shoulder and said, “That’s the way to do it,” and the woman who took my boarding pass glanced at me quickly, her eyes passing over me as if she were trying to memorize something. My heart had finally slowed back down. My legs felt unsteady. I needed water.
It was a big plane, and I took my seat in the center row. Beside me sat a young woman in a Boston College T-shirt. She had long blonde hair, a thin gold bracelet clinging to her tanned wrist, and she was reading Cultural Literacy, which I’d just read. She glanced at me. I asked her if she liked the book, told her I thought it was pretty good, my voice still high and reedy from where the adrenaline had put it. She said she’d just started it, and she smiled and stared at my bare arm. She went back to her book.
I reached for both ends of my seat belt. I clicked them together and now saw what she had seen. They were the same size as the fine droplets of paint that come off a roller when working on a ceiling, that winter day Jeb and I painted that closed room, our accidental high, the drinking and driving and more drinking, Devin Wallace knocking my head against the concrete again and again. Covering the backs of both my hands and forearms were hundreds of dots of blood. It was as if I were exposing some shameful part of myself, and I stood and stepped sideways past other passengers and rushed up the aisle and locked myself in the bathroom.
I pulled the faucet lever. The water was warm and I tried to make it hotter than that, as hot as it could possibly get. I began to wash off the man’s blood. When it swirled down the drain I looked into the mirror so close to my face. At first I didn’t see me, only what I’d done, the men’s boom box breaking into pieces, the big one rising up from the floor and swinging at me, a wild hook I’d ducked.
It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving in Miami International Airport, its wide corridors filled with people walking in all directions, every seat in the waiting areas taken, whole families sitting together. Some were tanned or sunburned and heading back north or east. Others were already brown and sat on the floor sharing sandwiches and salads from one of the food stands. Spanish hung in the air, and Southern accents, New York and New England, too. Every few minutes, neutral voices shot out of an invisible sound system calling out departing flights. It was late afternoon, and on the other side of the tinted windows the tarmac and flashing planes were still too bright to look out at.
In Key West I’d bought myself a bolo tie, its center a small TV screen that kept scrolling black-and-white geometric shapes. I didn’t watch TV anymore, hadn’t for years, but I liked the digital patterns that seemed to rise up inside that screen like some positive and innovative future I was part of. I’d just sold my first book, a collection of short stories I’d been working on since Colorado. I’d gotten paid four thousand dollars for it, and now I could afford to go visit my mother where she and Bruce lived in Miami. She’d gone back to school and was studying for her master’s in social work. She and Bruce lived in a carpeted two-story condo in a gated compound of palm trees and aloe vera, live oaks and Spanish moss.
There’d been a plan for all four of us grown kids to go down for the weekend, but only Nicole and I were able to get there, Nicole from California where she, too, was earning a master’s in social work, and me from Boston. Bruce’s drinking years were behind him now, and he was visiting his seven kids and ex-wife up north, his grandkids too. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and outside my mother’s condominium the Florida sun shone on the live oaks and sable palms of her gated apartment complex, a lime green lizard skittering across the concrete patio. Nicole and Mom and I were sitting around the air-conditioned living room talking about getting out and doing something.
Mom wore shorts and a blouse. She looked tanned and pretty and younger than her forty-nine years. Nicole’s red hair was cut short, and she’d spent the morning studying, her focus still on what she’d been reading though this talk of doing something seemed to jolt her into the present, and she said she’d never been to Key West.
“Let’s go there. We’ll stay in some cheap motel.”
“Oh, I can’t afford that, honey.” Mom’s tone was sweetly matter-of-fact, like she was stating the time of day or what she planned to cook for supper. Not being able to afford things was a condition she and we had always known, and I thought of her Mystery Rides when we were kids, her ability to take nothing and make something fun out of it.
I thought, too, of the book money I still had in the bank, enough to stay in a good hotel and eat well and drink well, which we did for the next two nights in Key West. We found a resort on a beach, swam in its pool, ate all our meals outside in the salt air under thatched umbrellas, and we walked from shop to shop under the sun with other tourists, something we’d never been before.
Mom and Nicole seemed to soak in this idleness as a much-needed break from their graduate work, and I couldn’t remember ever being this happy before. There was the light-shouldered feeling that a kind of darkness was behind us for good, that we’d g
otten through it and that from here on out things would be better. But there was this, too: I was finally taking care of my family the way I’d felt called to from the beginning, since I was a boy and Pop had left the five of us in that cottage in the woods.
And how sweet to be able to give my mother a Mystery Ride, to sit with her and Nicole at a linen-covered table overlooking the sea, the sun going down like some gloriously kept promise, to tell her to order whatever she wanted, to eat and drink her fill, how she looked at me once and shook her head, her eyes shining.
On Sunday we drove straight from Key West to the airport in Miami. The sun was brighter than ever, and I sat in the backseat squinting out at marine supply stores and beach shacks and stretches of blue-green salt water. A cormorant swooped off a rotting post and disappeared into a thick stand of mangroves, and my face and arms were sunburned. With my new bolo tie and its digital screen, I felt like some aristocratic bohemian.
I was inside the airport only twenty minutes when I saw a woman crying near one of the shops. She was thirty-five or forty years old. She had curly black hair, and she was short and round, and three young women were comforting her. They wore the same waitressing uniform of a restaurant along the airport’s corridor, a cotton dress the color of peaches, a white apron cinched in at their hips, these pretty Cubana girls asking the woman if she was all right. Did she call the police? Are those men still down there?
I stopped walking. People passed me by. A businessman’s briefcase bumped the backpack over my shoulder, and he turned and apologized, a man in a blue button-down shirt and yellow tie, his cologne lingering in the air. The woman was saying, “No, they’re still there, and I’m afraid to walk to my gate.”
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