Bleeder (16 page)

“Let’s sit him up. See how he does,” Nurse 1 advises.

They talk of me in the third person as if I don’t exist. I let them. Exhausted from my upchuck workout, I don’t care.

“Time to try and sit up,” Nurse 2 coaxes as she places her green pan on the nearby sink.

I sling my feet over the bed’s edge, right my head. Everything spins. A pan appears before me, and I gag over it. The roll of water in its corner tells me that it has been cleaned for reuse, that I have been spitting up in this one earlier. Stomach clenched, muscles ribbed, liquid comes up, and then I am done. Nurse 3 rolls a wheelchair into the room, and I try to remain vertical, yet the world seesaws around me. I huff an unproductive nauseous gag. Then helped into the chair, I am pushed to the elevator, down, and out the front door while Kaitlin follows and carries our things.

Outside, the sky is a soft purple and a spring zephyr cools my hot face, reminding me of the summer nights I spent sitting outside with Dad, but this vague nostalgic memory fades as my wheelchair and I are hoisted into the shuttle and I throw up once more. Two passengers move toward the rear, away from me.

Nurse 1 and 2 unload me in front of the main hospital near the smokers, and they wish me the best before leaving. “You’re gonna be jus’ fine,” Nurse 1 says. “I’d stay but I don’t have a babysitter for my boy,” Nurse 2 adds. And then they wave good-bye from the shuttle window.

Beside me, Kaitlin anxiously watches for our ride. She nestles her chestnut hair behind her ears and turns her head toward me.

“How you feeling?”

“Maybe better,” I offer, shrugging my shoulders. “Don’t want to call it too early.”

“I hope it’s over,” she says quietly.

She returns her gaze to the road, and I feel a pang of guilt and sadness toss inside me. I know she hates this. I was supposed to have had a quick checkup and—thinking that we’d have the rest of the afternoon to stroll Franklin Street, search for books, and sip coffee before driving back home—Kaitlin had skipped her classes and had ridden with me. Yet this has become the unpredictable hemophiliac’s day.

A few minutes pass. Smokers come and go, pretending they don’t see the sick boy in the wheelchair. I am a common fixture in this setting. I nod to a lady whose eyes I catch and she blinks back, tugs on her smoke, exhales, looks away. A lone pigeon pecks near her feet and then toddles to another spot, pecks again. I sit full into the chair and begin to feel as if my strength is returning. My stomach is quieting, my vision stabilizing.

As we wait and watch the patients being loaded and unloaded into passing vehicles and as my thoughts drift and recount the day, a silver Porsche whips through the drive and stops. Appearing oversized in his tiny toy car, Dr. Cameron half stands and half sits as he draws my attention with the back-and-forth jerk of his waving hand. He yells out over the engine’s roar.

“Feeling better?”

I nod my head yes.

“Just a matter of time now. Those ear drops will soon be evaporated and you’ll be just fine.”

His motor roars. I nod yes again.

Dr. Cameron lowers himself back into the driver’s seat and speeds away, giving me a backwards wave. The powerful rev of his polished car and its pristine engine is muffled in my blood-clogged ear.

“Jerk,” Kaitlin whispers. “What an asshole. Don’t go back to see him,” she says.

“I won’t.”

The sky darkens, and cars motor by our silent thoughts as the evening cools around us. I watch as a woman swaddled in hospital sheets is wheeled
out and packed into her car while her newborn infant sleeps in its child seat. I smile for a moment.

“There he is,” Kaitlin announces, breaking our soundless pass of time.

A red Chrysler pulls near us, and Kaitlin’s father steps out. I notice another man driving.

“Sorry,” her father says. “Raleigh traffic was horrible. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Thanks for coming,” I offer, feeling terrible at the situation I’ve gotten him and his daughter into. I offer to drive, but her father takes my keys, asks me where I parked. I don’t argue.

“Your uncle George is going to drive you guys home.”

“Okay,” Kaitlin says. They hug and then her father hurries away.

Kaitlin and I get into the Chrysler with her uncle and we leave, the sky now growing stars.

“That must have been some day,” her uncle says over the quiet motor’s hum. “Some day,” he repeats in a faint whisper.

“Yeah,” Kaitlin answers back. “It was that, to say the least.”

Kaitlin rests her head full into the seat and stares straight ahead as I recline in the back, feeling something more than that seat divide between us. The vomiting over and the world no longer spinning, my ear reminds me of its pain. I recall the spike inside me and the procedure to heal me. The left stings and itches, and I still cannot hear for all the blood sloshing inside it. I palm the gauze against it, but the constant ache persists. The pain out of my reach, I leave my ear alone, for I understand something about being unable to touch the thing that hurts.

YACHTS

M
AY 1994.
A
S COLLEGE GRADUATIONS GO, MINE IS NO DIFFERENT
: full of fanfare and celebration and the excitement of another rite of passage achieved. I cross the stage—the sun smiling overhead—and accept my B.A. in English. And then my family, Kaitlin, and I lunch at a restaurant overlooking the Wrightsville inlet. Dad and Mom chime their wine glasses and toast me, and later they pass me cards filled with green bills; my life after college begins. As we part, Mom squeezes me and effuses about how proud she is of me; she yanks a tissue from her purse to blow her nose, dry her eyes. And then, Dad hugs me and leans in close and whispers in my ear, while his lanky arms encircle me, “Now all you need is a job with insurance, Son. We can’t keep you on there much longer. You’re aging out.”

“I know, Dad. I know . . . And I’m looking.”

He pats me on the back, hugs me again. And then, we part.

The next morning, I scan the want ads, seeking a summer job to tide me over until something more permanent presents itself. Later, I call the Carolina Yacht Club, which needs summer help, and after a short interview, they hire me as a summer cabana boy. After doing some rough calculations based on their offer, I accept and cross my fingers that these wages will pay the bills for my apartment living. Indeed, with rent, utilities, car insurance, and so forth—it’s going to be tight.

A series of two-story wooden structures whose length would match a football field and whose width—when considering its several buildings—spans the three blocks from the ocean to the inlet side of the island, the Yacht Club blends in with the surrounding beachfront properties in décor and color: beach gray. Its many rooms—kitchen, bar, showers (indoor and out), changing rooms, dining hall—serve as a haven for club members and their guests. Club members can bronze their skin on the property’s private beach; swim in its delineated ocean; lunch over rounds of canasta; dine with cocktails of vermouth; dance beneath a solstice sun long gone down; and, well, simply drink beverages poured heavy with vodka, gin, or bourbon. And of course, there is, occasionally, yachting.

At the club, I become known as “The Help.” And I help. Sitting in my small cabana, I fetch Band-Aids for children who’ve cut themselves on oyster shells or who’ve received splinters from the club’s weathered decks; I answer phone calls about luncheons, bridge tournaments, the bar’s hours, the ocean’s temperature, the weather forecast, and, sometimes, for those interested in taking a boat out, the wind knots; I sell the monogramed hats, T-shirts, shorts, towels, highball glasses, and beer huggies; and, ranking as my most important duty, I screen members and their guests for admittance to the club.

A lady walks up. She gives me her name, says that she is a guest of Barbara Hightower, and I scan my list.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Clairedale. I don’t see that you’re admitted for today.”

“Well, I declare. Barbara surely just forget to call me in. I told her I was coming. She just forgot.” Mrs. Clairedale lowers her large-eyed sunglasses down the stem of her aquiline nose, secures her blowing bonnet atop her head, and gently strokes my wrist, which rests atop the approved guest list. “Can’t I just run out there,” she asks, pointing to the ocean, “for a quick ray of sun?” She gives me a flirtatious wink. I look right, left.

“Sure. I don’t care. It’s all ocean to me.”

“Thanks, honey. You’re a doll.”

Hoisting her bag—heavy with towel, book, and lotion—and with her beach chair flung over her shoulder, she saunters off into the sun.

“Was she approved?” my manager asks from behind me. His rough voice
startles me, and I jump slightly as I turn to him. “I don’t recognize her. Whose guest is she?”

“The Hightowers’, sir. She was on their list.”

“Let me see your book.” He grabs it from my desk and spins it around to where he can read the names. “Where? I don’t see her name.”

I lean in and read the names, before eventually lighting my index finger upon one. “Right here,” I say. “Mrs. Rubenstein.”

“That’s not Mrs. Rubenstein! Mrs. Rubenstein is the little old lady that comes here every Wednesday to play bridge. She’s the Harrisons’ guest. That woman you just let use our facilities is definitely not Mrs. Rubenstein.” His face flushes red and his voice quavers angrily. The ocean surf drifts between us. “If you’re going to work here, you’ve got to learn the members’ names. You need to know who’s who.” He pauses, furrows his brows at me. “Got it?”

“Got it,” I answer.

He slams the book shut, gazes around the cabana, and points at the T-shirts for sale. “Be sure you refold those shirts,” he says. “They look disorderly.” I give them a glance, think them fine, but keep this thought to myself.

“Okay,” I submit.

Later, work quiets. I watch the sea, listen to the salt wind. The late dawn wind sounds like a whorling breeze and bends the cattails to and fro; the sweet smell of salt teases the air; and the ocean spray dampens my hair and moistens my clothes. A string of gulls streams by and closely hovers above the waves until one dives in and quickly resurfaces with its mouth full. The sun not yet scorching, not yet blazing hot—the outside is breathable and pleasant. But by midafternoon, the sun pelts heat, driving vacationers to the strand. The horizon blurs and is only punctuated by the infrequent white catamaran sails cutting its hazy line.

In my free moments, I read, thieving glances here and there because it’s against the rules to do anything unrelated to the job. To hide my book, I flatten it in the long center drawer and open to the introduction. No members roam the wooden deck planks and no children squeeze
floatation animals between their tiny arms. With my manager away, I steal time as I can.

The next morning, it rains. Nobody shows, for what good is a wet beach? Gray clouds choke the pewter sky that rumbles with thunder. Lightning flashes send an electric branch of pure light from sky to sea. And in its dim and rainy-blue light, I read more, enjoying such simple pleasures: this storm, this book, this quiet. It is not so bad a living.

When I receive my first paycheck, I take Kaitlin out to dinner. We sit at a table overlooking the long pier that extends past the ocean’s breakers, and we sip merlot beneath a burgundy sky that soon falls black and is lit up with pixels of starlight.

“Oh, I love that you now have a job and money,” Kaitlin says, licking her tongue over her wine-red lips.

“Here’s to being out of college and having money.” I raise my glass and let the wine roll in my mouth, savoring something more than just taste.

We order an appetizer, salads, the catch of the day, and finish the meal off with desserts and a few more glasses of red wine, and when dinner is done and the bill paid, we stroll along the shore, removing our shoes and wetting our feet in the surf. A few other couples go by, but mostly it is quiet, which gives me the sense that we are alone, together. For a time, we playfully kick water at one another, but the wine causes us both to lose our balance, and we fall against the sand, laughing out loud and then holding one another as the sea sends us its endless whisper.

“Look. You can see it from here,” I say, pointing behind us to the Yacht Club, now shut up and dark but looming there yet as a shadowy box. Kaitlin turns around to see. “I can’t say that I love that job, but I sure like its money.”

“Me, too,” Kaitlin adds. “This has been wonderful. Tonight feels rich.” She throws handfuls of sand up into the air as if it were money, and it settles in her hair and mine, and we laugh more. We embrace and kiss and roll around in the sand. We lock fingers, press lips, run our hands along one another.

“Maybe we should go to your apartment,” Kaitlin suggests.

“Or maybe we should walk farther down the beach where the dunes are bigger and are easier to hide behind.”

I smile. She smiles.

She helps me up from the sand, and we scurry along the coast. And when we arrive near the jetty, we slip behind a towering dune and bury ourselves in its darkness, throwing ourselves upon the ground and loosening our pants and using our hands to please each other. She breathes out a heavy sigh of happiness while waves crash and spew foam in the warm night. And after we have done what we can for each other, we turn on our backs and stare up at the sky above, making romantic guesses at the constellations.