Long Island Noir (6 page)
I hung up the phone and turned on all the lights downstairs although it wasn’t dark out yet. I was sitting in the kitchen watching
The Bionic Woman
on TV when Mick walked in through the back door, without knocking. He must have seen that by dad’s VW Rabbit was gone; he must have known they weren’t home.
“Plants are looking excellent!” he said with his usual enthusiasm. “My dad’s in Huntington Hospital. They’re running tests.”
“Oh. Whoa.” He put out his hands as if attempting to stop the charge of a big dog.
He stood behind me and placed his warm hands on my shoulders, kneading the muscles there, which were tighter than I’d realized. “Wow, you’re tense! Come on, let me give you a massage.”
Mick opened a bottle of my dad’s French wine, which he could no longer drink, and in one hand carried the bottle and two long-stemmed elegant crystal glasses into my bedroom downstairs, his other hand around my waist, guiding me. It felt sacrilegious, letting him lie on my bed in my room while my dad and Yukiko were at the hospital. It felt wrong but Mick didn’t seem to think so and pretty soon he’d expertly slipped off my shirt and bra. He pulled his own shirt off right over his head. His body was thin, his muscles strong and taut. He pressed my hand against the bulge in his jeans, which felt entirely too big and unfriendly. I wasn’t ready and I was scared. I pulled my hand away. Already I’d let this go too far. I’d let it get out of hand.
“You have to go,” I said uncertainly. “If someone sees your car in the driveway they’ll tell my dad.”
“Suck me off,” he whispered hoarsely.
I said no.
“I don’t care about your dad,” he muttered. He unbuttoned my cutoffs and started to tug them down my legs. I didn’t know what to do. This was my fault. I’d let him into my room, into my bed. I’d let this go too far. People would blame me no matter what.
“Oh, baby,” he said against my neck, his mouth wet and sticky, “you’re so hot.”
I started to struggle, trying to push him off. He was not a tall guy, but his muscles felt like steel. “Oh, yeah, that’s it.”
What was he talking about? The rest happened so fast it was like one of his juggling tricks. The same way he rolled joints while driving, or cut lines on his wallet, or could carry a bottle of wine and two glasses in one hand. One second we’re just lying there rolling around and I’m struggling a little, and the next he’s got a lubricated condom on and he’s pressing his fat penis into me, ripping me in two.
I couldn’t wait till it was over. I couldn’t wait for him to leave.
No one would think rape. My dad would surely have shot him, but my poor dad had problems of his own. I couldn’t impose this upon him now, in his weakened state. What if it killed him? It would kill him.
I finally convinced Mick he had to leave (it wasn’t too hard once he’d finished); I bolted the front and back doors behind him, and all the windows in the house. I called my dad in his hospital room. My voice was shaking and his sounded distant, vague, but perhaps they’d drugged him. I told him I loved him, my voice breaking. He told me to take good care, to lock the doors and leave on some lights. He told me to sleep in their room if I wanted to. “No one is going to try to break in,” he said calmly, “this isn’t L.A. But just in case, if it makes you feel better, you know where the gun is.”
My dad came back from the hospital looking thin and worn. But his spirits were good; he wasn’t giving up hope. By mid-August, the pot plants were seven feet tall, branching out in all directions thanks to Mick’s careful pruning. Their stalks were now as thick as celery. My dad brought out his old Lica and took pictures of me in front of the plants, for posterity’s sake, willing to take, but not to be in, the photographs. Mick stopped by around sunset every day to check on the plants, and his demeanor with me was easy and unconcerned. I made sure to never be alone with him. I could feel my dad watching, considering this new development.
My dad was growing concerned that Mr. Wisnowski the potato farmer might become inspired to call the police. It was time for his pot-growing experiment to come to an end.
“Nah,” Mick insisted. “He wouldn’t know what they are anyway.” Then he said the plants needed several more weeks, a month at least, to reach their maximum potency. They had to flower, but not seed. My dad sat there at the kitchen table, shaking his head slowly, trying to decide. He finally agreed to wait a few more weeks.
Over Labor Day weekend I turned seventeen, and we had a little party. My dad had a friend from the city who owned a summer house down the street on Georgica Pond, an art dealer who was an aficionado of marijuana. Richard had a little joint holder made out of silver that he passed around the crowded table after dinner. Yukiko put her hand up and backed away as it went past her.
I got up from my place and went over to my dad at the head of the table and bent down and asked him if I could have a hit. He thought about it and I could tell he was struggling with his decision. It would be hypocritical to say no, on my birthday no less. But what would Richard think? He’d known my mother before she died. Eventually my dad passed the joint in its silver holder to me under the table. I crouched down low and took three hits, the deepest, fastest hits I could, and passed it back to him, still under the table.
Good thing that’s all I smoked, because this was some serious weed this guy Richard had. It was some kind of hydroponically grown special pot that he purchased from some old hippie upstate. I was practically hallucinating. My dad and I sat in the kitchen long after Richard had left and Yukiko had gone off to bed, shaking her head. We slowly dug our way with soup spoons through an entire gallon of vanilla ice cream. We could taste the different flavors, the soothing vanilla beans surging forth out of the sweet, icy cream. If we could just freeze time, right here, I thought, everything would be right with the world.
Two days later I noticed Mr. Wisnowksi’s John Deere tractor idling by our pot plants. I crept over and watched from behind a tree as the old farmer gazed up at the towering plants, hands on his hips. I ran to my dad. That afternoon, he had Mick uproot the plants. This was done under protest, for Mick felt they were being cut down before their time. He took them away in six black garbage bags, stuffed round like balloons. I was overcome with relief. The plants were gone; Mick would no longer have a reason to stop by every day.
The next morning an East Hampton patrol car cruised up the dirt tractor road adjoining our property, and made a show of driving slowly by the area where the plants had been. We’d had a narrow escape.
One morning I kissed my dad goodbye and drove his VW Rabbit to school. He wasn’t feeling well so he let me take the car instead of the school bus. At 2:36 p.m. over the PA system I heard my name, and was ordered to present myself at the principal’s office. My first thought was that they’d found out about Mick’s pot plants and wanted to interrogate me. When I got to the office I was told to drive to the Southampton Hospital emergency room as fast as I could. By the time I got there it was all over, and Yukiko wouldn’t let me see him. She thought it would be better for me to remember him as he’d been that morning, sitting at the kitchen table with his hands around his cup of steaming black coffee, in his checked flannel bathrobe and matching slippers.
Yukiko, who was kind and quiet by nature, took to their bed, started wailing, and didn’t stop. I called our family doctor and he came over and gave her a shot, and then he handed me a prescription to fill the next day. It was for Valium, twenty milligrams. I thought I’d take some myself. We still hadn’t called anyone, still hadn’t accepted what had happened.
Worried for Yukiko, I took the gun out of my dad’s bedside cabinet and hid it between the mattress and the box spring of my own bed downstairs.
Late that night, I heard glass shattering in the kitchen. I’d left lights on in every room. I heard the back door swing open and bang into the wall and then someone crashing into the hanging pots and pans above the butcher-block island. I reached for the Colt, which felt reassuring in my hand. I crept toward the kitchen and stood in the far doorway, feeling like the last barrier between sanity and utter madness.
It was Mick, his blue eyes swimming in a sea of red. He was completely lit, practically falling down as he crashed his way across the kitchen toward me.
“You can’t come in here like this, Mick. My dad’s gone now.”
“I … heard about your dad on the police scanner …” He banged his hip on the corner of the stove. “Shit. Fuck. I … Uh, here … let me give you a hug …” he uttered, coming forward.
I lifted the pistol, sighted down the barrel as my dad had taught me, and shot him twice in the chest. He gazed at me without the slightest surprise, as if he’d been expecting this all of his life.
M
y eyes were gritty. My feet ached in shoes made tight from hours of standing. Palpitations clattered helter-skelter within me, skidding slipshod on waves of caffeine. I was wired with the barren exhaustion with which only a physician is intimate.
It was two a.m. My patient had made it out of the OR. I was hurrying to her in the intensive care unit. A young Pakistani woman, Mrs. Anjali Osmaan, was already the mother of several. This last delivery had nearly killed her. The labor had advanced slowly, and partway through the evening the baby turned, obstructing his own passage. After a brief struggle, the tired uterus ruptured, splitting across an old scar. There was a lot of blood. The EMTs said her mother-in-law had looked on in silent disapproval as the ambulance screamed away. Mrs. Osmaan had arrived in extremis, raced to the hospital by the ashen-faced men. Nobody wants a mother to die.
I prepared to war with young death. As nurses moved her from the gurney, I began gowning, gloving, tying my face mask, focusing my thoughts in the silence of age-old battle rituals. Frank had operated on her. I smiled at my friend. Tearing off his paper hat, he rushed up to fill me in.
“Christ, what a disaster—a complete uterine rupture! I don’t know if she’ll survive the hysterectomy but we had no choice. Baby’s dead. She was peri-arrest half the time, we didn’t think we’d make it out of the OR. Good luck with this, Yasmine. The anastamoses are secure but her coagulation is shot. And her kidneys are dicey. We ran some labs, pending now, should be back any moment. You know the drill. Gotta run, kiddo, an ectopic in the ER.” Thrusting the chart into my hands, he clattered off in his clogs to answer his pager.
With my team of nurses and residents, therapists and orderlies, I began the work of resuscitation. An earnest medical student watched from the corner of the room like a frightened kitten. Seamlessly, the team enacted my terse orders. Ours was a familiar ballet—most of the time it was a dress rehearsal that ended in death; but this was a live performance. We were wrapped in the struggle to win back life.
Within the labyrinth of lines and tubing, Mrs. Osmaan was spectral. Drained of blood, her features were sallow. Arched brows crowned sleeping eyes, lush lashes gleamed moist with Vaseline, as though she’d been crying at her own dismal fate. Her hair was long and unstyled, dull, her premature aging typical of multiparous mothers. This was not a woman with appointments in shrill Long Island salons, who jostled with fur-coated wives. Her nails were unmanicured, but filigree henna patterns ascended both arms, rooted in a deep amber plunge of color at the fingertips. She must have attended a wedding recently. Her pale skin placed her among the elite of Punjab. She was Pakistani, like me. I imagined she had arrived in Long Island after an arranged marriage. I shivered unexpectedly, for hers was a fate I once defied.
I began the examination. She was icy cold, the shock having driven all the blood to her core. Her thready pulse coursed to a furious 160 on jet streams of adrenaline. A firm mouth revealed a determined woman. Chapped lips clasped reflexively around tubing, which shuddered with each mechanical breath. Only the tide of moisture in the tube confirmed the feeble tendrils of life persisting beyond the assault. A clear tube emerged from her nose, ferrying bilious liquid out of the stomach. A tiny stud gleamed in the left nostril of her Mughal nose. In the postoperative nightmare that was now her world, the young Pakistani mother retained her dignity with this glittering decoration, the brave little sparkles escaping the surgical tape overlying it.
The belly wound was dressed, already oozing with thinned blood too weak to clot. Staples gnashed at her anemic flesh, struggling to knit her back to life. Fluids escaped through the futile seams, soaking the dressing. A pristine catheter bag waited for the precious elixir of urine—the first clue of returning life.
Turning her hands over I could see purple flecks speckling her flesh: a very bad sign. Frank was right—after losing her entire blood volume several times over, what circulated was refrigerated blood; her system was badly diluted, distressed, and maybe would never be restored. My patient was punctured, perforated, and powerless to plug the holes. Like sailing a scuppered boat, we were bailing out water as fast as we were taking it in. It was all hands on deck to keep this woman afloat.
Soon we called for more blood products; started antibiotics; added drugs which would drive her heart faster and further; inserted lines to infuse and lines to measure. We dialed up her oxygen and pored over X-rays. We stabbed arteries and cannulated veins. We checked her pupils and emptied her rectum. We pushed and prodded, listened and pondered. Locked in our hive of fervent activity we concealed our worries and fears from each other and ourselves, assuaging our anxieties with yet more intervention. We cross-consulted other physicians, rousing them from fragmented sleep. We wrote orders, dispensed drugs, and finally put her violated body in a clean gown and crisp sheets. Between our many efforts, we suspended the wounded mother in a fragile web of life, wondering if we had built it strong enough to bear her weight.
