My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (32 page)

She informed me that the diagnosis he had just received was over two hours old: “She's being stabilized; she's here, now, in the ICU. You can come see her,” she said and walked me to the room. She parted a curtain and pointed me to a bundle on the bed.

Steph lay on the bed. Except it wasn't Steph. It was her head, but her head was twisted, the top part of it broken and to the side. There were tubes in her nose and mouth, and both her eyes were protruding so far out, her eyelids didn't close. One eye was swollen purple, but you could still see it emerging. This was from the swelling of her brain and the cracks in her cranium. It was the most painful, most horrible thing I had ever seen in my life, and she was right there, with people walking around her like they saw this sort of thing every day. There was no light in her eye. She looked like a fish kept on ice for some days. She looked dead, her arms and legs in awkward angles. A doctor on his own errand pushed his way past me and to Steph's side and began a procedure, put a stint into her aorta, which quickly became bloody. Steph began to squirm and fight, her pain response still as vivid as anything, though her body looked like this.

The nurse could see how it was affecting me. She started to pull me out. I couldn't speak; I had no more words at that point, just fear.

“She'll survive this,” the nurse said to me. I noticed that she had a name tag. Her name was Juliet. That was the first fact that made it through, something I could hang onto for a moment, could trust, if it wasn't, on its own, a laminated lie. There was always that possibility. But it was something.

Next thing I knew I was in the waiting room sitting next to the older black man, who introduced himself as Sidney. When he spoke, he sounded like a jazz musician out of central casting. “You look like you need to sit down, man,” he said, which confused me because I was already sitting.

“You doing all right, man?” asked Sidney.

I managed to nod, weakly. “Yeah, I'm just ... I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know how this works.”

Sidney nodded sagely. “You'll figure it out eventually. We all had to. Is that your girlfriend you've been talking about?”

I nodded again, said, “Yeah, my ... uhm ... ex-fiancée.”

Sidney raised his eyebrows. “Ohh, sorry to hear it. About her, I mean.” After a moment of quiet, Sidney said, “You know, you should talk to her, when you're by her bedside. That's what they tell me to do. Just keep talking to her, telling her how things are at home, like she's not in this place. Tell her how her plants are, and that she's safe, that you're not screwing around while she's in here. Women like to be reassured.”

It was a bit awkward for a moment, but then I remembered my manners. “Who are you here for?” I asked.

“For my son,” he said. “Was in an accident, motorcycle. Broke his neck. Been in a coma for a month now.”

I made a pained face.
A month
? “I'm really sorry to hear that,” I managed.

“Yeah, it's been bad. The way he had been carrying on for a few years now with the drugs, I'm surprised he lasted this long. Something was gonna get him. Anyhow, I've been staying here, waiting for my ex-wife, who's coming from N'arleans to see if we're going to take him off life support. Cheaper than a motel and more interesting than the Discovery Channel, watching people come and go.” He pointed his chin at the clusters of sleeping families. “Hear all kinds of stories here.”

Around 4:30 that morning, Sidney finally nodded off and I walked downstairs, wrapped myself up deeper in my coat, and stood in the ambulance parking lot and made a number of calls. I called Steph's only friend that I knew of, Lisa, and left a tearful message, which felt incredibly weird, and I checked in with Steph's parents to see how they were getting along, see what time their plane landed.

Then I began calling my own people, on automatic pilot. I called Amy, my best friend from my time at
Seattle Weekly
, first. Left a message. Called Sarah, left a message there, too. Called Brenda and a couple other friends from the karate school. After some minutes of thinking about it and realizing my list of support candidates had grown far too short, I called home, to Houston. Called my sister, Marge. Called my mother and left her a weepy message, asking her if she would consider coming up for a while. I had no idea what I was doing; I was calling people and leaving nonsensical high-alert messages on their voice mail, standing outside in a wet parking lot on the deepest, darkest night in my memories of this town.

De profundis.

Though there were far many more sub-basements of profundity already in the mail.

I even called Dan, but didn't bother calling Derek.

It was of course Amy who showed up first, around 5:45 a.m. I had a moment of mild surprise when I saw her walk in from the elevators, catching myself briefly wondering,
What are you doing here, Amy?
when I realized I'd left her that message, and she was first to understand, like Amy does. She brought a bag with her: magazines, water, snacks, anything she had handy that could be of comfort to me in the waiting room. And her knitting: Amy had started knitting a year or two before.

She hugged and held me and was then quiet, before asking questions.

I answered as best I could, but then after a while just shook my head helplessly, admitting I knew nothing else, could speculate on nothing at all. Instead, I walked her through the doors and took her to Steph's bedside.

They had her in an upright position by this time. She was in a harness of a sort, her arms extended forward like she was imitating Frankenstein, or Stephen King. A metal spike protruded from her forehead to indicate cranial pressure. Tubes and sensors emanated from her like vines. Amy didn't wince; I watched her out of the corner of my eye to see if I could adjust my startle mode to what Amy was seeing, but I couldn't get a bead on her. If Amy was as frightened as I had been, she was keeping it to herself. Instead, she put her hand warmly on Steph's shoulder and began speaking to her, reassuringly.

“Hey, Steph,” she said, barely above a whisper. Amy is shy, keeps her voice down usually. “You're safe now. You had a car accident, honey. But you're at the hospital now, you're in ICU. No one else was hurt. You're doing fine, and the doctors are optimistic. We're here for you. Your parents are on their way, and we'll take care of Cleo. You have nothing to worry about except getting better, Steph.”

I hadn't done any of that. At that moment, I simultaneously felt an immense amount of love for Amy and like I was the worst person in the world for not thinking of that previously, reaching out and reassuring Steph.

My friendship with Amy went back years and years, and she was the target of terrible jealousy on Steph's part. There was no reassuring Steph that Amy and I had never been romantic: We'd simply bonded over Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds while working at
Seattle Weekly
, then found we had an identical wit and penchant for being crafty, and we disliked all the same people. What better way to establish a lifelong friendship?

But Steph was never having it, and I gave up trying to convince her otherwise. So be it.

Amy had never been bothered by it, more amused than anything, and watching her be so kind and tender to Steph like this wrenched my heart open, made me feel another level of affection for my dear friend, who was here at the hospital first, before 6:00 a.m., before she had to be at work.

She took me back out to the waiting room and we sat in silence for a good long while, saying very little. There were no platitudes, no words capable of reaching across this worry, and Amy's presence, her sitting there with her knitting, was enough witness to Steph's pain, my grief, and without even speaking about it, we both innately understood it.

Finally, I had to tell her that my mind was exploding with guilt.

“Did she do this because we split up? Did she find out about Sarah somehow? Maybe someone from the karate school somehow told her. What the hell was she doing at 11:30 last night? Was she at work all that time?” She was driving back from Aurora, the bad part of town she felt she could travel with impunity, against all my warnings. Steph would always conduct her life like she was inoculated from harm, the sort of entitlement white people and children on playgrounds have in their sense of justice. What the hell was she doing out there at that time of night? Maybe she was buying silverware. I had taken back all my silverware when I had moved out. Maybe that's what she was doing when she drove off the overpass.

“This is my fault, Amy.”

“Stop it. You did not give her epilepsy.”

“Well, no, but ...” I said, weakly.

“Stop thinking like that. Did you call her boss?” Amy asked.

“I left a message for her two workmates,” I said. I figured they'd be able to deliver the news to the right people. This had been the second tragedy to hit that department, I was thinking that morning. A few months before, one of their department heads had suffered a stroke in the bath and had remained undiscovered for a few days. Her husband had been out of town, and she had died alone in their bathroom. It had been left to Steph to cycle through her voice mail to separate any work calls from personal ones, and her husband had kept calling and calling, leaving increasingly hysterical messages as the weekend progressed and he had not reached his wife. It had been torturous to go through them and had left Stephanie a tearful, weeping bundle of nerves, and I'd held her and talked her down for hours when she came home sobbing that afternoon.

Around 7:00 a.m., Steph's boss showed up and sat with us, after she visited Steph's bedside for a while, stroked her hair, and talked to the doctors. She was an MD, now doing research, and an incredibly reassuring and strong presence. I remember feeling my whole body relaxing for the first time since 2:30 that morning when she entered the room and began asking the right questions from the doctors, began using her resources to help manage this new tragedy.

I was like a terrier introduced into a family with no strong alpha, thinking that it was up to me to take that role, nervously yapping and nipping at the other omegas. (I had been watching a lot of Cesar Millan's
Dog Whisperer
, at this point.) I gratefully relinquished the position to Steph's boss and encouraged her to be the lead advocate, until Steph's parents arrived.