Inland (4 page)

MY ROOM IS FULL
of doctors. Doctors who look like doctors.

After a while, you learn that there are two types of doctors: the ones who wear their profession like a uniform, and the ones who don’t. The doctors who do are numerous and unmemorable: a dark suit under a white coat under a blank face, holding my chart like a shield. You could switch their clothes, their shoes, their heads, and never know the difference. They pass through like LEGO people wearing lab coats, stiff and all the same, regarding my stats with interest but never looking at my face.

I’ve learned not to mind. Here, I’m a person of interest, an unsolved case. All symptoms and no cause, and certainly no cure. I have the elusive celebrity of sickness; when they roll me down the hall, people automatically know my name.

“Collapsed lungs and chronic fluid buildup,” one says. Nearby, the other doctors put pens to paper. One angles his pad just enough that I can see the words “pulmonary” and “pleural” and “undiagnosed.” The speaker is pointing at my chest—his stubby index finger hovering just next to the place where the needle goes in, close enough to touch me, but with no intention of doing so—when Dr. Frank barks from the doorway.

—

“Party’s over!” he says, and they scatter. Dr. Frank is a doctor who doesn’t: doesn’t fit the mold, doesn’t toe the line, doesn’t disappear into the crowd of white coats and stethoscopes. He is long and lean, with sinewy hands and an extravagant mustache that twitches and jumps when he speaks, stiff on his lip like a gray wire brush. After my first Laramie hospital visit, after answering all the usual questions and letting them examine all the usual parts, I saw him from the window of our car—waiting to make a left turn from the parking lot as we drove past, down the road, into the orange western sun. He was behind the wheel of an ancient Chevy pickup, cigarette dangling from his lips, cowboy hat pulled low to shield his eyes.

The times I’d seen him since—smokeless and hatless, with charts in his hands and pens in his front pocket—it seemed to me that some essential parts of him were missing.

“Are you ready, Cal?” he says.

“Let’s roll,” I say, and he grins.

—

Rolling is what we do, down the hallway and through the swinging doors, into a bright white room. I lay back with my arms aloft and feel the brief pinch of local anesthetic, the warm, thick spread of numbness on my torso.

“Pain?” asks Dr. Frank, pressing a latex finger into the soft place between my ribs.

“Nope,” I say. “It’s fine.”

“Well, no need to dally. You’re an old pro at this one,” he grins, and the needle slides home.

I prefer not to think about the days before this became familiar, or the dismissive doctor from three years previous who’d disbelieved me when I said it wasn’t numb enough. The feeling of long, slender steel sliding into my rib cage was so terrifying that I’d passed out cold. I much prefer Dr. Frank, whose mustache twitches with concentration as he guides the needle in, who squints at the fluid he drains from my lungs as though it’s a curious enemy. I’ll even laugh every time, if I have to, when he brandishes the syringe like a fencing sword and calls it “The Big Sticker.”

When it’s done, he squeezes my shoulder before they wheel me out. His smile is broad as ever, but there’s a line between his eyebrows. A crease made out of worry. It hurts to see it; my father has the same one.

He says, “I don’t mind telling you, kiddo, I’d really like to figure out what’s going on in there.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky this time,” I say.

He won’t, of course; they’ve been sticking me three times a year since sixth grade, drawing out the fluid and examining its parts, and the only word we ever hear is “inconclusive.” No cancer, no tumors, no disease from which you could draw a straight line to my fragile lungs and murmuring heart. But if someone were to find something, even if the something was bad news, I’d want it to be him.

“Sweet of you,” he says, and the mustache twitches again. “You know, Doctor Salvatore and I have a running bet. If I can figure out why your lungs hate doing their job before he gets that rash of yours under control, he’s gotta buy me a steak dinner.”

I giggle, and the nurse swoops in and waves a finger in his face.

“What’s the matter with you!” she chides him, and her long, long nail with its violet polish sways just beyond his nose. Her accent is musical, island-born. “You don’t go shouting about a lady’s skin rash when there’s strangers all around! Shame on you!”

I try to follow the cue and fix Dr. Frank with a furious look, but I’m laughing too hard, and soon the nurse joins in, and so does he.

“And you wonder why I’m not married.” He winks at her, then leaves.

—

They keep me overnight, for observation, like they always do. I touch the small, sore spot on my rib cage and lay back, one patient among many, a robed and blanketed body in a room full of uncomfortable furniture. The hospital is its own universe. A stark, white world full of wheeled beds and low sounds. If you lie still long enough, you’ll begin to see that things are always moving: the rapid flutter of fluids in their tubes, the soft rise and fall of papers in the wake of an open door, the shallow pulse in the throat of the girl on a stretcher nearby. The air in here is dry and the nurses keep blinking, quick and constant, eyes flicking from the monitors to my face and back.

When I was younger, before this visit became just another routine, my father would sit stone-faced in the room’s only chair, stiff and sleepless, his fingers laced together so tightly that the circulation stopped. With the white, cold hands beneath his chin, below the still and staring face, he was less a presence than an object. A marble sculpture, keeping watch. Portrait of a Desperate Father.

Now, he leaves a preoccupied kiss on my forehead and says he’ll see me later. I should mind, but I don’t.

“He’s not going to stay?” says Jocelyn. My indignant roommate sits up in her bed, a slim hand on the rail, and rolls her browless eyes at Dad’s departing back.

—

We’ve met here before, in this room, during my first visit with Dr. Frank. A hospital friend, one of few. This, the white and sterile world of illness, is where I find connection. The hospital friends are just like me, untethered and always tired, too strange and too slow and too absent from school to play the usual teenage games. We bond over our shared seclusion, waving at each other from our mechanical beds. There have been some for every city, every pediatric ward, every overnight stay. Other kids who know that normal life, and all its small sufferings, is a luxury in and of itself. I still remember their names. There was Paul, age fifteen, slim and pale and waiting to lose his spleen. He had white teeth and yellow eyes, dulled and jaundiced and wet. He read books in bed with a penlight.

Elizabeth, twelve, for whom a boiling pot of pasta had ended in the ER. Who smiled at everyone, waving at the ward with her clumsy, gauze-bandaged hands. At night, she’d wake up screaming when her pain meds wore off too soon.

Andy, age seventeen, tall and lean and insect-skinny, sucking at a tube in the hallway of the university hospital in Albuquerque. He’d waited until the nurses changed shifts before gesturing to our matching oxygen tanks and offering the conspiratorial smile of a fellow sufferer.

—

“What’s your damage?”
he’d whispered, the air whistling in his throat and then catching. I waited until he stopped coughing, watching the way his neck curved, his skin the color of light-brown leather and beading with the sweat of his efforts, sloping up until it was lost in a mess of rough, curly hair.

“A mystery,” I whispered back, leaning in, allowing myself to smile. “You?”

“Cystic fibrosis,” he said.

“That’s not a fun one,” I offered.

“Not so much,” he agreed, but the grin stayed. “A mystery, huh? What’s your name?”

I know it’s not romantic, but we take it as it comes. Hospital friends, hospital life, is better than having nothing. And I never told anyone, but later that night, while a DVD played on the small television in the lounge, he slid in beside me on the rough orange couch where I sat alone, clutching the sea-glass necklace and struggling not to cough. We hid beneath a blanket, and his hands were soft and cold.

Jocelyn and I have shared a room once before, giggling into the night and laughing when the nurses run to shush us. But I won’t see her anymore, and I’m glad. Here, when you begin to care for someone, you also begin to hope you won’t cross paths with them again. You hope for health, for a cure, for secondhand news from the late-night nurse that your friend won’t be coming back again; that she has joined the ranks of the well. When we met in this room earlier, Jocelyn clutched at my sleeve and whispered the good news that her tumors were shrinking.

Now, she notes the absence of my father and scowls.

“Did he ditch you before the anesthetic even wore off? Geez!” she says, indignant, and I try not to smile.

“He’s got work to do” I say. “Papers, or something.” My voice is matter-of-fact and not defensive, and Jocelyn slides back against her pillows.

“That’s cold, man,” she says, and her own father scolds,
Jocelyn
, and I realize for the first time that her family is here. They pop out of the background, materializing with the practiced ease of hospital professionals. The parents become experts at being not-here; when the doctors are at work, or if my father should come back, they’ll fade away again. But now, they crowd around her bed, exhausted and uncomfortable and not going anywhere, thank you.

I ache for my own hospital entourage, but just a little. I would rather have my father disappear down to the cafeteria, rather sit alone while he sips bitter coffee and mauls his students’ essays with a red pen, than watch him sit like human wreckage on the chair beside my bed.

I like the distracted father better than the desperate one.

“I don’t mind,” I say, and get three smiles in return.

When they draw the curtain around my bed to listen to my chest, I wave at Jocelyn and lie back in the muted light of what passes for privacy here. I become just another moving part in this machine made up of scrolling readouts, dripping IVs, swinging doors, and purposeful steps. Connected, if only for a moment.

It’s not perfect, but it’s familiar. It’s something. Later, I’ll fall asleep to the sound of Jocelyn’s deep and even breathing, the rush and hiss and beep of monitors making a sound track for my dreams.

You are here.

MY FATHER DOESN’T BELIEVE
that the sea has a voice, but he takes its telephone calls all the same. For a month, the Gulf Coast has been calling. Twice a week, every week. An old colleague rings him up to beg. The sound of the phone is jangling and jarring, reverberant. No one ever calls here, and I snatch up the receiver at the first half ring. I’ve been out of school again, a two-week stretch this time, and the sound makes me feel like my teeth are shattering.

I’ve never met this man, but I know he’s getting desperate; each time I answer, his voice has ratcheted up another half note in pitch.

“Uh, hello,” he says. “It’s Mike Foster again. Is Alan—”

“I’ll get him.”

—

Alan Twaddle, PhD, is more than the frustrated father to an invalid and the widower of a reckless woman. He is a legend, an innovator, an unmatched talent in geotechnical engineering. His brilliance had always been background noise in a life where other things seemed more important. When Mama was still alive, people asked why he hadn’t taken his marvelous gifts to a place where people paid for them, abandoning academia and moving on. It was there for the taking: a blossoming career, a glowing reputation, a life of comfortable luxury for his wife and daughter. At the time, he’d smile at us over dinner and say, “I told them, what’s the point? I’ve already got everything that a man could ever want.”

But then, he lost it. And after she died, for a time, the phone calls grew frequent again. Fat-cat corporations, speculating miners and oil companies, begged his expertise. They need to know what lies beneath the earth, how to seduce it, how to worm their way in and then suck it dry. At the time, he told them no, and I was the reason why. Orphaned, helpless, clinging to the family I had left. I made a good excuse.

Now, he doesn’t have one. Mike Foster’s words spill out of the receiver uninterrupted, and my father only listens. Each time, he lets him go on just a little longer. Each time, his “No” has just a little less force.

And tonight, for the first time, he takes the phone into his study and shuts the door.

—

I know, of course, why they want him now. For weeks, I watched the tragedy unfold. Something had broken in the deep, dark blue, and the oil poured unchecked into the sea. Billowing, streaming, a river of million-dollar blackness cutting like a blade through the underwater world. In the late-night glow of my laptop’s screen, the numbers ticked high, then higher. Death toll. Lawsuits. Damage. Miles of sea and seashore, lost to a torrent of insoluble catastrophe. I saw waves, cresting like liquid rust, pouring oil-slicked foam across the sand. Oozing pools of viscous brown, curling like Rorschach watercolor as the tide recedes. Animals, their airways clogged and fins weighed down by sludge, belly-up and gasping and covered in grease. Red, dead tides of floating fish, pale and with one glazed eye aimed skyward. They lie fin-to-fin like cobblestones, an iridescent landscape of wasted life.

The flow has stopped, but not the damage control. The public’s wary eye is open wide, and everyone has something to prove.

—

Mike Foster doesn’t just want my father’s knowledge. He wants his name, to attach to his project and drop when necessary, to prove that he means business. That the men he works for are thinking of the future, of the children. They want to make amends. Green, clean energy is what the people want now, and Alan Twaddle, PhD, with his long absence from for-profit pursuits and his long history of publication, is more than just a talent; he’s a mascot. A beacon. A poster boy for academic integrity and unselfish good works.

And, best of all, he’s interested.

I can tell. The energy in our beige, bland house has changed. Even before tonight, with the study door shut tight and his voice rising with earnestness behind it, I had been finding small sketches scribbled on a Post-it note, or on the back of an envelope, or in the margins of the newspaper. A long vertex topped by pinwheel wings, bracketed by diagrams showing directional force. And bisecting that straight, slim length, a wavy horizon that can only be water.

When all is said and done, there will be a hundred, all in rows. Spindly towers that spread their three-pronged silhouettes against the blazing southern sun, rising gently above the water like strange white birds.

An offshore wind farm in the gulf.

The sea is calling, and my father is listening.

—

It’s after ten when I hear the door open, the click of the light switch as the bottom floor grows dark. I burrow down in bed, faking sleep, listening to the soft sound of stocking feet on the dove-colored staircase carpet. He is muttering, still with the phone to his ear, lowering his voice as he nears my doorway.

“Mike, it’s a great opportunity. I know it, and you know I know it. But my daughter—”

The man on the other end answers so forcefully that for a moment, it’s as though he’s right there in the room. Tinny, but clear, he interrupts with his final pitch.

“We understand that, Alan. I’ve looked into it—discreetly, don’t worry—and the university hospital . . .” His voice grows lower now, as though he knows I’m listening. I strain to hear, tilting my head toward the door, watching my father’s shadow bleed and amble over the carpet as he paces. He settles closer to the door and then the tinny voice is back, clear and loud: “. . . cutting-edge. She’ll have the best care.”

“But the move—”

“And,” the voice breaks though, “it will be paid for. Everything, one hundred percent. You won’t even see a bill.”

My father doesn’t answer, and the silence draws out, until Mike Foster answers for him.

“You can’t tell me that all these years haven’t taken their toll, financially.”

I don’t hear my father’s reply, if he gives one. The sudden roar of blood in my ears, a surge made out of guilt, drowns everything out. I know, although he hasn’t said so, that my life has not been cheap. It’s in his face when the bills arrive, the way his mouth drags down tight at the corners before he can stop them. Five figures before the decimal point. Dwindling balances on poorly hidden bank statements. Once, back in Grand Junction, I answered the phone when a creditor called. I know enough to know that I am not just a daughter but a money pit, a black hole, an endless sucking lacuna of need.

My father has moved away from the door. I hear his voice, rising and falling, too far away now to be anything but noise. It has a rhythm to it, ebbing like the tide. My eyelids have grown heavy.

The air in here is thin and dry; I picture it rushing over barren mesas and brushing through sun-bleached slot canyons, passing over the long, dead stillness of the Great Basin on its way to reach my lungs. I feel it drag against my throat. It doesn’t want to go down easy, and I swallow with an effort that tastes like chalk.

I am weightless, dreaming, floating far away, when my father’s voice dips low in acquiescence and then stops. I sense, rather than hear, his footsteps in the hall. He is standing in my doorway.

Quietly, he says my name. But when I stir my way out of sleep, peeling my eyelids back and turning my head to answer, he has already walked away.