Bleeding Kansas (26 page)

“You can't say about the cow, no one can't say,” Eddie cried, thrashing his arms on the couch. To Jim's horror, his nose started to bleed.

“Eddie, Eddie,” Ardis stroked his hair. “It's okay, it's all okay, baby. Come on. You come with Mommy. She'll fix you up, put ice on your nose, make you some fries in the oven, okay? Come on.” She led the bleeding, snuffling Eddie from the room.

Clem turned to Jim. “Is that why you come here, Grellier? To get my boy all stirred up?”

I came here because I couldn't stand to be at home. The sentence popped into Jim's head, so upsetting him that he blurted out, “Someone was hiding out in the Fremantle house yesterday afternoon. They pasted a roach, a joint, on a picture. I wanted to make sure it wasn't Eddie.”

“Eddie don't use dope, and don't you say otherwise. What are you going to do, report him to Arnie Schapen so Schapen can put on his tin star and put my boy away?”

“Yes, he does, too,” Cindy said unexpectedly from the floor. “I seen him and Junior together a hunnert times, smoking and laughing and carrying on.”

“So now you're a damned stool pigeon, too?” Clem demanded. “You gonna rat your own brother out to Mr. Sheriff's Deputy Schapen?”

“I know better'n talk to Mr. Schapen or any of them Schapens. I hate Junior, only him and Eddie are friends, so I have to do like they say, even when it's something dirty.” Cindy's face turned red as tears of misery spurted out of her eyes.

“Oh, for chrissake, Cindy, get over it,” Clem said. “And stay away from them boys if you don't want to get hurt. Jesus Christ, who is the retard in this family? Look what you started, Grellier!”

Jim began edging his way out of the room. He stepped on the cat, which yowled and spat and ran behind the couch. Turk laughed, which made Clem yell at his uncle not to treat the family like it was a TV show.

“And you, Grellier, go mind your own goddamn business. Maybe it was your wife over there yesterday, she's plenty friendly with that stuck-up dyke who won't even give me the time of day when I seen her at the food pantry. She'll talk to that drunk whore Elaine Logan, but when I offer to carry her bags for her she gets all snotty and looks at me like I'm a hole in the floor she has to step around.”

Jim nodded, and backed out of the room. The bathroom was in a little room off the kitchen. As he passed it, he could hear Eddie crying still, and Ardis's wheezy voice crooning to him.

W
HEN JIM GOT HOME,
he washed the dishes, scrubbed down the countertops, and swept and washed the floor. Since getting the news about Chip, he and Susan had let things slide around the house. He didn't want to slide down to Burton-style living.

What had he been thinking, to go over there at all? It was completely against his philosophy of not messing with the neighbors' business. All it did was set people's backs up. He'd told his kids that a thousand times if he'd told them once, and here he was a walking, talking example of how to get everyone stirred up against you. Clem Burton was a loose cannon; in the same half minute, he'd damned Arnie and Jim impartially, as if they were the same man, and who could blame him? Jim would have done the same if Clem came over claiming Lulu or Chip—claiming Lulu was breaking into someone's house.

He went up the stairs, into his bedroom. Susan was asleep. Anger was building in him. How dare she lie around like this, self-indulgent, hugging her grief while he tried to keep the farm going?

His ever-so-great-grandmother's diaries were on the bed, partially visible beneath the landfill of papers Susan had created. Papers covered the bed; more were scattered across the floor. He waded through them on his way to her side. He shook Susan's arm, lightly at first, but, when she didn't respond, more roughly.

She moaned; her eyes were puffy slits, but she didn't move. He bent down next to her. “Susan! Susan?”

He lifted her head, which lolled back on his arm. Fear chased his anger; for a long moment, he stood still. Was it her heart? Starvation? The drugs? A hoarse gasp from his wife goaded him to action. He slid through the mass of papers to the bathroom and scrabbled in the towel caddy for a washcloth. Scraps in Susan's sprawling handwriting littered the sink and bathtub; she'd even written on the wall while sitting on the toilet. As he ran cold water onto the cloth, he read “No vision, television, tell-a-vision,” scrawled over so many times the letters blurred together.

He hurried back to the bed with the cold wet cloth and draped it across his wife's forehead, so that water ran down her ears and neck, but she only twitched and moaned again. Her breathing was shallow and fast.

“Lulu!” he yelled. “Lulu! Come here!”

His daughter didn't answer. He scrabbled through the wild mass of papers, looking to see if his wife had taken any pills, but he didn't see an empty bottle. He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder. He slipped and almost fell on the paper as he went to the bedroom door but managed to catch himself by grabbing the dresser handle.

Susan swayed on his shoulder like a bag of seed corn, except she wasn't as heavy. He stumbled down the hall to his daughter's room. Lara had her everlasting music stuck in her ears.

“Get those damned ear things out!” he shouted, beside himself with terror. “Your mother! When did you last see her or hear her, or anything?”

Lara stared at him, undone by his fear, by the sight of her mother's body dangling over his shoulder. She couldn't speak.

“Did you see her today?” Jim screamed.

Lara shook her head, not taking her eyes from him. He was unpredictable; he might do anything.

“Go down to the kitchen,” he panted. “Look to see what she's eaten.”

When she didn't move, he screamed “Now!” so ferociously that she got to her feet, sidled past him out of the room, down the back stairs to the kitchen. He took the main staircase, the one they never used because it opened onto the unused front room. It was wider than the back stairs, the risers shallower, easier for him to manage with his wife on his back.

The front room was chilly and dusty, and he moved as quickly as he could through the dining room to the kitchen. Lara was standing next to the sink, trembling so much that she had to clutch it to steady herself.

“Did you just buy blueberry yogurt? I think she ate that, and—and—” She held out her hand with the empty bottle of antidepressants in it.

“Okay, Lulu.” His daughter's panic was like a slap, forcing him to steady himself, to think for all three of them. “We're going to take your mom into town to the hospital. I want you to go out and open the truck, get the front seat moved forward so I can lay her in the back, okay?”

She nodded and ran on wobbly legs out to the yard. It had started to rain again. He waited in the kitchen doorway until Lara had the truck open, then followed and laid Susan on the backseat. He didn't know whether he should elevate her torso, so that gravity would bring any drugs still in her stomach back through the esophagus, or if that might make her choke to death. He compromised by laying her flat.

“Lulu, call the emergency room to let them know we're coming in.”

“Dad—I can call from the truck. I don't want to stay out here by myself.” Her face was wet with rain and tears, a glossy, glassy covering that made her look as though she were a museum exhibit.

He told her to turn on the engine and get the heat on; he had to fetch blankets and their insurance documents. As he drove, she tried phoning the hospital. Whoever she was talking to wasn't helpful, kept asking questions that made Lulu more panicky and tearful. He told her to hang up and to call Sheriff Drysdale.

“It's—it's for my dad, for Jim Grellier, there's a serious problem, he needs Mr. Drysdale,” Lulu gabbled to the receptionist, then handed the phone to Jim.

“Hank? Oh—can you track him down?” He knew the avidity with which everyone would greet the news once it started to spread, but he couldn't avoid telling the receptionist a guarded version of the truth: his wife's life was in danger, he needed help.

By the time the sheriff came to the phone, Jim was already in town, driving down Kentucky Street toward the hospital. Drysdale took in the facts and promised to alert the hospital.

“Where you at now, Jim?”

“Kentucky, just coming up on Seventeenth Street.”

“I'll have a car at Sixth, they'll guide you into the emergency bay.”

When Jim handed the phone back to Lara, he strained to hear his wife's breathing. The
hrunka-hrunka
of the windshield wipers drowned out other sounds. He turned them off, and made out Susan's slow, shallow breath underneath the drumming of rain on the truck's roof.

At Sixth Street, a sheriff's car was waiting, lights flashing. When he dipped his own headlights at it, the driver turned on the siren and led Jim through red lights, over to Fourth Street and into the hospital's emergency entrance. A couple of attendants came out, moved his wife onto a gurney, told him where to park.

By now, he, too, was trembling, barely able to control the truck. He and Lara supported each other across the parking lot back into the emergency room. A young intern, hardly older than Chip, took as much information as Jim could give, how many pills, what time, Susan's allergies, family medical history, then showed him to the room where families waited for news. Jim and Lara went in but couldn't find seats next to each other, so Jim leaned against the wall near his daughter's chair.

Since finding Susan, the need to act had carried him like flotsam in a fast-moving current. When he relinquished her to the hospital, he suddenly had nothing to do except wait. A television, perched high above the room so everyone could see it, was tuned to some drama that kept its characters in a state of feverish emotion. Jim couldn't bear the shouting on the set as a backdrop to his own anxiety and fear. His mouth was dry, and he kept going to the drinking fountain in the hall, but no matter how much water he drank his mouth still felt as though he had lined it with cotton.

Lara leaned back, with her music in her ears. Jim pulled out her earpieces and squatted next to her.

“What time did you get home this afternoon?”

“I don't know. Maybe three-thirty, maybe four.”

“Had your mother eaten the yogurt?”

“Dad, I don't know. I don't keep track of what she's eating. She just sits up in the bedroom like a vulture, devouring us while she starves to death.”

“Lara, that is a terrible way to talk about your mother, especially now when she may be—” He bit off the word before it came out.
No more dying right now in this family, please, Jesus, please.
“Anyway, I'm just trying to get a feel for when she might have taken those pills. The doc asked me. It matters whether they were in her bloodstream long enough to hurt her brain.”

“Like it could be more damaged than it is right now,” Lara muttered, just softly enough that Jim could pretend he hadn't heard her.

Jim pushed his palms against his eyes. “Please, Lulu. Help out here. Did you get a snack when you came in?”

“I had some ice cream. I didn't notice the pill bottle in the garbage, but I wasn't looking. Anyway, I don't think she ate the yogurt before I got home, because blueberry is my favorite flavor, which she knows, so I think I would've noticed if the carton was in the garbage. Where were you? Out in the north quarter section?”

“I had to run an errand when I got back from town with the food.”

“Over to Fremantles'? Checking to see if anyone pried your barricades off while Gina was out of the house?”

He felt his cheeks grow hot. He'd been fretting over Gina Haring while Susan was feeling abandoned and desperate enough to take her own life. An
accident,
he corrected himself. She was depressed; it was an accident. She was trying to take enough of the pills to cheer herself up, get back to her everyday life.

“You weren't over there yourself this afternoon, were you?” he demanded. “To see if you could get past Blitz's and my barriers?”

She reddened, but before she came up with an answer a nurse summoned him to a counter in the emergency room. Jim asked one anxious question after another—how was Susan? could he see her? was she going to be okay?—but the nurse just kept repeating that the doctor would talk to him in a minute.

After a quarter hour, while doctors and nurses passed without looking at Jim and Lara, the young intern reemerged with an older woman in a gray gown. She was Dr. Somebody. Was he Mr. Grellier? They were going to keep Mrs. Grellier for a few days for observation.

“Her brain, does she have brain damage?” Jim's voice was tight and high, like it had been when he was thirteen and it first started to break. “Can I see her?”

“We'll have to do some brain scans to make sure there are no lesions. She's lucid. She knows her name and where she lives. But she's a little shaky on the date—at first, she thought it was 1856.”

“She's, like, obsessed with these old diaries about Kansas,” Lara whispered. “Maybe she went to sleep thinking she was living back then.”

“I see.” Dr. Somebody looked as though she might say something else but changed her mind. “The main worry is whether she is a further danger to herself, so we're going to put her in the psychiatry ward for a few days and try to get a sense of her mental state. Very often, after a suicide attempt fails, people develop a newfound desire for living. That may well happen to your wife. Do you know if anything particular was weighing on her these last few weeks?”

“Our son. Our boy, Chip, he was killed in Iraq. She—it's hit her pretty hard.”

“She was protesting the war,” Lara put in. “Chip was mad at her, so he went and joined. And now she thinks maybe she killed him, although she's still against the war.”

Dr. Somebody wrote a note on her chart. The intern took Lara and Jim into a curtained cubicle where Susan was propped up on a gurney, wearing a hospital gown. Her arms stuck out of the sleeves like a stick doll's. Bags of fluids were attached to her arms, which were strapped to the table so that she couldn't take out the needles. She looked at Jim and Lara and looked away.

Jim bent over her and kissed her forehead. “Hi, honey. How are you feeling?”

“Tired. I'm tired. I thought I could sleep for a hundred thousand years. Why did you let them wake me up?” Her voice came out in a raspy whisper, the result of the tubes the doctors had stuck down her throat into her stomach.

Jim bit his lips. He'd been hoping for a miracle—a sudden zest for living, not an attack for saving her life. Words of love, of concern, died on his lips.

He said dully, “They're going to keep you here for a few days while you get stronger. I'll come every day, but do you want anyone from the church to visit? Or any of your friends, like Gina?”

She shut her eyes without answering. Jim went over to Lara and whispered to her fiercely to kiss her mother, to say “I love you,” something, anything, to make Susan feel better.

Lara gave him a murderous look but went to her mother's side. “I'm here, Mom. Your child, Lara, remember me? Any chance you feel like you're my mother, too?”