Going the Distance (15 page)

The pain in my leg was like a fire on the horizon, a small spark indicating a distant blaze.

“Stay here, Danny,” she repeated, leaning forward to kiss my forehead. “You have to stay here.”

My arm began to throb with pins and needles, like I had fallen asleep on it for days. Again the pain was muted, far away, but this time I knew it was mine. I tried to focus past it to look at her. “I wanna go with you!” I cried as the feeling moved up my arm to my shoulder.

“Stay here,” she whispered. “Stay with your dad. He needs you.”

As the pain in my chest hiked up, I could feel myself being pulled violently away from wherever I was. From her.

With all my focus, I tried to grab at her, but the darkness was fading, and I was being pulled back toward the light.

I screamed for my mom to stay, but it was useless… she was gone.

I awoke gasping in my bed, a doctor and three nurses surrounding me. I tried to sit up. “
Mom!
”

I felt one of the nurses push me back down to the bed with one hand; it was an indication of how weak I was that she succeeded.

“He’s okay,” the doctor said in that same clinical way all doctors seemed to talk. “That was close.”

“I’m sorry, doctor,” one of the nurses said. “The father didn’t indicate any allergies—”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, cutting her off. “He’s obviously reacting to the codeine. Check his scripts and change them. He can’t take another one of those.” He sounded like a jerk, but something…. I thought I saw his jaw twitch… but I lost the thought as quickly as it had come.

The nurse seemed pissed, but she was doing a pretty good job of holding her tongue. She just nodded at him and said, “Yes, sir,” before walking out.

“Danny?” he said, looking down at me. “How you doing?”

“Where is she?” I asked, each word feeling harder than the last. I was exhausted, but I needed to know where she went.

“Who? The nurse?” he asked, flashing a light in my eyes, obviously not listening to my questions. “Danny, you had an adverse reaction to the painkillers we were giving you. I need you to follow my finger with your eyes.” He began to move his index finger to the left and right in front of my face.

I tried to slap it away, but lifting my hand seemed almost impossible. “Where is she?” I asked again, my eyelids getting heavier by the second.

“Pupil dilation looks okay,” he said to the nurse behind him. “Okay, Danny, looks like you’re over the worst part. Just try to relax and get some rest.”

“Need to know…,” I said as I fell back into unconsciousness.

T
HE
FIRST
person I saw when I really woke up was my dad.

He was out cold in a chair tucked away in the corner, and he looked like he was the one who got hit by a car. He was unshaven. To Dad, being unshaven in public was like walking around naked in public would be to the rest of us. It just wasn’t done. Every memory I had of him was clean shaven, hair high and tight, and clothes clean and pressed. Seeing him looking like that drove home how bad the accident had been way more than the cast on my leg did.

I tried to sit up, but pain exploded from my knee all the way up to my hip. It was so unexpected I cried out loud before I could stop myself. I bit down on my bottom lip hard as I looked over at my dad, hoping he had slept through it.

“Danny?” he said, instantly opening his bloodshot eyes and pushing out of the chair wide awake, on alert. “Don’t move!” he commanded quietly; he knew I was holding my breath to keep from screaming. I watched him as he fumbled in my covers and came up with the nurse call button. He jammed it, like, half a million times. I tried to find a way of lying still that didn’t cause me to cry like a bitch. My hands clutched the covers, and I realized there was no way I was going to find an escape from the agony that used to be my left leg.

He grabbed my hand and held it tight as we waited for the nurse.

The pain faded for a second as I looked down at his hand holding mine. My dad had never been the most touchy-feely person in the world, and as I grew older, expressions like this grew rarer and rarer. I moved mine to grasp his and marveled at how small it seemed compared to mine. His hand had always been like a paw that engulfed my hand whenever I had to hold it, but as I held his now and tried not to break his fingers when the pain took over, I saw they were about the same size. When did that happen? He kept glancing at the door as his other hand pushed the button, which gave me time to stare at him and, for the first time in a long time, really look at him.

He was a handsome guy; he rocked that whole military style in a way that looks stupid on other men. What hit me, though, was how young he looked to me all of a sudden. I don’t know if it was the naked fear on his face or just the scruff, but I could see the guy my mom had fallen in love with and married all those years ago, and I realized I looked like him. He was still young, younger than the dads of anyone else I knew, but I hadn’t realized it until now. My dad was always older and invulnerable in my mind, but I had the feeling I was seeing him for the first time as a human being.

The nurse came in and saw me starting to sweat from the pain and my dad’s panicked look and hit the buzzer on the wall. “I need pain management stat,” she called into the intercom as she moved my dad aside. “Danny, where does it hurt?” she asked slowly, like I was a retard or something.

“My leg?” I gasped out, trying my best not to scream at her.

“Your leg or hip?” she asked, slipping a blood pressure cuff over my bicep.

To be honest, the pain seemed to be everywhere, but I tried to focus past it to see if there was an actual answer to her question. And there it was—just to the right of my ass, which made it more my hip than my actual leg, though there was a throbbing from my knee that wasn’t friendly at all. I tried to move slightly and was rewarded by another explosion of pain.

“
Hip!
” I screeched as I clenched my dad’s hand for support.

The nurse’s expression didn’t waver as she took my blood pressure, but I could hear her cuss just under her breath as she glanced over at the monitor on the other side of my bed. Pulling the cuff off, she turned toward the door and screamed, “
Where are those meds?
”

The pain was getting worse now as it crept from the side of my hip toward the rest of my groin. It felt like my bed had caught fire, and I involuntary tried to raise my hips to get away from it, which only caused it to flare harder.

The nurse’s hands grabbed the sides of my hips and pushed them down. Her eyes locked with mine. “Do not move,” she commanded in a tone that I was pretty sure could have stopped my dad in his tracks. “I know it hurts, but you have to keep still.”

I closed my eyes, and my head fell back onto the pillow as I tried to keep myself as still as possible. Through pained gasps I said, “You should seriously date this chick, Dad.” I took a few deep breaths as another wave of pain passed through my hips. “You guys could just order each other around.”

I heard my dad say something, but it was lost as the feeling of a hot poker being shoved into my pelvis hit me. I didn’t care what she said or who was watching—I let out a howl that was probably heard two states over. I arched my back instinctively, which only made it hurt more. Someone else ran into the room, and I heard my dad calling my name like he was at the end of a tunnel. He sounded worried, but he was so far away.

And then my hand was engulfed with heat, as if someone had put it in a bowl of boiling water. The feeling slowly but steadily made its way up my arm and into my shoulder. When the heat hit my heart, the world ceased to exist. I thought fuzzily that I had jumped up out of my body for a moment from the way the pain ceased to be. The no-pain wasn’t numbness; it was much more invasive than that. I was sure I was hovering above the bed and away from my body, which had trapped the pain.

I knew in some distant way they were doing something to me, but it felt like it was happening to someone else entirely. I was lost in that space of no time, and that was when I knew they had dosed me again. I assume this was what doing hard drugs felt like, and I had to admit I hated it. The lack of control and feeling of just floating made me sick to my stomach in ways I had never felt before. It was so beyond the dizzying feeling you get from heat exhaustion, or even getting hard fouled during a game, that it was insane. If this was the feeling junkies chased, I knew at that moment I would never be one of them.

Time must have passed, because the next actual thought I had was that the room was much darker than I remembered. My dad was there looking five years older than he had earlier today—least, I hope it was today. He saw I was awake and put the paper cup of coffee down and strode to my bed.

“Hey, bud, you okay?” he asked in a tone I wasn’t used to hearing from him.

I opened my mouth to talk, but it felt like my tongue had been deep fried in kitty litter. I croaked out a barely understandable “Water?”

He nodded quickly and poured me a cup of water from a plastic jug that was just out of reach from my bed. I tried to sit up to take the cup but found myself strapped to the bed. I looked, and there was some kind of belt across my waist holding me down. “You really aren’t allowed to move,” he said with a slight smile that seemed more sad than happy. He put a straw to my lips, and I sucked the liquid down as fast as I could manage. I know now it may have just been normal, room temperature tap water, but let me tell you, that was the best-tasting water I had ever experienced.

I finished the contents of the cup in one swallow and took a few seconds before asking, “More?”

He chuckled, and this time it sounded more joyful than sorrow filled.

“Take it easy. You have cotton mouth from the meds, that’s all,” he said, putting the straw up to my lips again.

This time I did take a few smaller sips, but the water was no less exquisite than it had been before. If anything, now I had time to relish its perfection as my throat came back to life. “What happened?” I asked after finishing the second cup.

“Today?” he asked, tossing the empty in the trash.

I shook my head and nodded to the cast. “I mean what happened?”

He followed my gaze and nodded. “Ah, you mean what happened with the car?”

“Oh God! Did I wreck your Jeep?” I felt my stomach do a barrel roll as I thought of even a scratch on the Jeep.

He pulled the chair closer to the side of the bed. “One, it was your Jeep; two, your Jeep saved your life; and three… yeah, it’s wrecked.”

I didn’t know how to process that information and lay there feeling like I had just found out a family member had passed away. Dad had owned the Jeep since before I could remember, and it was gone because of me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered after a few moments of silence. He looked down at me in confusion and saw the tears in my eyes. “I know I screwed up,” I said, choking up.

He looked like his eyes were going to fall out. “Danny, the guy jumped into your lane. This isn’t your fault.”

I had no idea where all this emotion was coming from. I was tired and still woozy from the drugs, sure, but it was more than that. The Jeep was just a symptom of a larger problem, and that problem was me. Everything I seemed to touch got fucked up, and no matter how hard I tried to make things right, I just ended up making them worse by the time I was done. Basketball was supposed to be the thing that made me right, and I’d fucked that up just like I had fucked everything else up.

I felt my eyes sting as I got out a barely audible “I mean the other thing.” I forced myself to keep talking. “I know I’m not what you wanted in a son—”

“What?” he said, cutting me off. “Are you serious?”

His voice was angry, and normally I would have been taken aback by it, but all it did was make me feel worse. “I know you would have liked someone who wasn’t—” The word refused to pass my lips. “—who wasn’t wrong.”

He stopped and stared at me with an intensity that made me think he might go off and hit me for a second. In a halting voice that cracked with emotion, he asked, “Did I make you think that? That you weren’t right?”

I couldn’t even look at him. “I know what I am, Dad. I know what it is.”

“Jesus!” he cursed, pulling at what little hair he had in frustration. “I don’t….” He stopped and turned away from me.

“Dad?” I asked, feeling light-headed for a moment

When he turned around, there were tears in his eyes. “Danny, I almost lost you like I did your mother. When I got the call….” He stopped, unable to go on. Fighting back the emotion, he continued, “Son, you are exactly what I wanted in a son, and if I ever made you feel anything different, that is my fault, not yours.”

He took my hand again, and I felt a weight melt off my shoulders as I began to get sleepy. “I just want to be better….”

I never finished the sentence because I drifted off to sleep.

My dreams were haunted by half-glimpsed images that refused to come into focus but were nonetheless terrifying to my sleeping mind. There was a pack of people just outside my vision who were screaming things at me, but I couldn’t understand them. I was wearing a basketball uniform that was too small, and no matter how I tried to pull it down to cover me, it didn’t work. I was supposed to shoot a free throw, but every time I picked up the ball, I could feel my shorts riding up, exposing me to the crowd. I could hear the crowd laughing from inside the darkness, and I saw the shot clock running out.

I woke up drenched in sweat, fighting as hard as I could against the band that kept me strapped to the bed.

“Whoa, Danny,” my dad said, putting a hand on my chest to hold me down before I hurt myself more. “It’s a dream. It was just a dream.”

I could still hear the laughter in my head, but it faded away to the sound of my pounding heart as I realized I was awake. “Dad?” I asked, confused about where I was for a moment.