My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (33 page)

Within a half hour, Steph's work people had made preparations for her family to stay nearby, arranged for rides from the airport, were bringing food in shifts, creating a network where for the last six hours it had just been me, then Amy and me.

I was finally feeling something along the frequency of support and order when Amy and I returned from the cafeteria and I saw Sarah, standing there looking absolutely attractive and concerned, walking toward me with a face full of worry.

I thought,
Oh, fuck
. The two split halves of my simultaneous worlds I was desperate to keep apart had become one, and that stroke that started some six hours ago felt like it was ramping into high gear. Sarah had herself shifted into caretaking mode and was incredibly helpful and kind, made herself useful and supportive. The fear and worry that I carried alone that morning had shifted partially, and I was breathing a bit easier, and yet it felt like this ordeal was really just beginning.

Amy had to report to work, but not before she insisted I speak to my mother and family, and when I finally had my mother on the phone, I broke down and cried like I'd been needing to since 2:30 a.m., or since I was twelve years old.

Mom heard the anxiety and grief in my voice and asked, “Do you need me to be there?” and I had to admit that I wanted my mother with me, for the first time in my life since I had forcefully broken my emotional tethering to them when I felt they could no longer be trusted, as a kid.

I said, “Yes, I think so. I need you, Mom. I can't do this alone,” and over the course of a few hours, she was on her way from Houston, arriving that next afternoon.

When we had a moment alone, Sarah asked if there was anything she could do, and I gave her my key, asked her to please go to my apartment and remove all beer cans or bottles so that my mother didn't see how far down I'd fallen in my depression.

I was barely holding on, as it was, both Sarah and Amy could see, and I needed all the help I could get if I was going to make it through this and be of any use to Steph and her family, which I clearly felt honor-bound to do.

By the time Steph's parents arrived, I had done as much as I could to prepare them for the advocacy of and participation in Steph's care. I had doctors and nurses designated as primary contacts, had given as much pertinent information as possible to her care providers about Steph and her medications and previous medical histories, what I knew about her, sort of laid the foundation for her parents' arrival with the help of Steph's work friends. And still, I felt like I was guarding an element of Steph that her family didn't know, this life she had built out here, the way she had reinvented herself, the secrets that she had shared only with me, and I couldn't disengage, not like this. It just didn't feel right.

When they finally made it to the hospital, I was down at the lobby to meet them, and Harold hugged me close, but there was little to say. Instead I simply took them up the elevators to the ninth floor, pointing out landmarks so that they would be able to navigate their way through the labyrinth of this old hospital on their own later.

With her parents there, I felt I could now step back a little, take up my position as ... whatever role it was that I was playing in her life. I was entirely uncertain as to whether I was the grieving ex-fiancée or the deeply concerned friend, and I wasn't sure how much Steph had told her family about our situation.

If they were shocked, neither parent gave it up when they saw their daughter in such a state. I was unsure whether I deeply admired this quality or wanted them to show their grief in a bit more Catholic manner, maybe render a bit of cloth or put a knife through one of their burning hearts, a la Jesus. Maybe cover a mirror or two.

They were stoics, and by this time, both quite well-versed in speaking to doctors and navigating a hospital ward. And while I'm sure they were entirely grateful for the help, I could also sense that Steph's mother was quite practiced at receiving the attention that was waiting for them that afternoon.

It was still too painful for me to spend much time by her bedside, but I would try. Steph's only friend, Lisa, came to visit sometime that afternoon and walked around with a dazed sort of half-moon smile, and I studied her for some time before I realized she was out of her mind on antidepressants, and that if she understood why she was in the hospital for her close friend, it was only partially leaking through to her ability to appreciate it. She was able to sit by Steph's bedside and stroke her hand, speak in soft platitudes about the tulips that were going to bloom that week and that Cleo had been walked that morning, what they had seen in the neighborhood.

Now,
this
? This befuddled me entirely. I was incapable of talking small on most days, but with this much agony in the room, it was impossible. I mean, I understood what they were doing by talking to Steph about the small stuff: I was just unable to bring my anxieties down to that hemisphere, and I began to notice sideways glances and indications of disapproval from others.

Even the waiting room camaraderie began to show symptoms of fatigue.

There was no comfort coming from anywhere, those first few days. I thought when her parents and friends arrived, I'd be able to find somewhere to catch my breath, square my heart and thoughts, and be able to take the next steps. That place never showed itself—every minute just shifted into the next torturous minute, awaiting the results of the next CAT scan to reveal the amount of neurological damage, MRIs to diagnose the extent of her body's injuries. There was no place in my mind to run to, no safe place to hide from worried thoughts. There was nothing that didn't put me right back here, right back at this bedside with this broken ex-girlfriend who looked like she had no chance of recovering.

Worse yet was that I felt she would have wanted me in the position of being her guard dog, being the person who stood watch and kept others from seeing her like this. She had said so, quite clearly, some months earlier when we were talking about her prior accident. She'd been in the hospital unconscious and recovering, and she'd been visited by people she'd known and had hardly cared for, but they'd come by to pay their respects and when she'd woken up, she had been horrified that she'd been visited by people she knew only through work.

This also befuddled me entirely—why not accept all the goodwill offered?—but she was a strange one, that Steph. So I tried to monitor who would see her this time, though it made me feel entirely like an ass-hole, and I stopped doing it after the first day. It just felt wrong.

When her family arrived, they took over the decision making and advocacy, and I was able to take care of myself a bit more. I called my therapist. I called my friend in Los Angeles, Philippe, who was wonderful and comforting, and Mrs. Philippe was kind and reassuring from the background. And in the middle of all this, Dan called me, after nearly three years of mutual distancing.

We lapsed right into talking as if no time had passed, his voice somber and reassuring, and neither of us mentioned the silence. I took his call from the large, yellow hall with a floor-to-ceiling window looking southeast, onto Mount Rainier, and I remember the mountain blazing red with sunset that afternoon while talking to Dan for the first time in the longest estrangement we'd ever had, and how I cried when I heard his voice, how much I wanted to tell him the whole story, from the beginning about meeting Steph through all the bad issues we had, to the breakup and Sarah, and now this, and how I just couldn't leave now. I gave him the short version, as much as I could, and it felt like confession, felt like I was granted a form of absolution in that talk, prepared me for meeting my mother, when I picked her up at the airport a few short hours later.

Before we hung up, there was a moment of quiet, right before he encouraged me and reminded me of who I was, what we'd been through already, and that I could get through this, which choked me up. Then he said, “junebug versus hurricane,” almost in a whisper, which is a line from one of our favorite Lucinda Williams songs, and that was enough.

Junebug vs. hurricane.

For my mother, I drove to the airport myself and waited for her at baggage claim. I think I was suffering from some sort of contextual or proportional distortion, because she looked much smaller than I remembered her, even though I'd just seen her a year ago, when she'd visited for the green belt test. I had an impulse to put her in my pocket and keep her there, until this madness was over.

Instead, I hugged her and wept, couldn't really tell her everything at once, and then she grew in size as I buried my head in her shoulder and she became my mother again, made me stand up to full size and face what was awaiting us at the hospital.

I drove us back, took my mother straight to the ninth floor and led her to the ICU. In the waiting room, I introduced my mother to Steph's parents, and Steph's mother was as ingratiating as ever, spoke to my mother in loud, clear, emphasized language with large sweeping hand motions, as if Mom didn't understand English. My mother smiled and looked at me in bewilderment, like “Is she all right? Why is she talking like this?”

“I'm just so impressed you had so many children!” she said to Mom, and my jaw hit the floor. Steph had warned me previously that her mother was capable of saying idiotic things, since she only had the one eye, and back then I was able to overlook or shrug off her insipid attempts at what, at this point, I think she didn't understand could be insulting forms of backhanded compliments. But this was my mother, and my fight drive was triggered, especially in these circumstances.

Mom, however, was more amused than insulted. “Hunh,” she said. “Well, thank you. They were tough at first, but they're really great kids.” And I took her by the elbow without making eye contact, which would have been difficult even under better circumstances, since she only had the one eye, and led her away.

I think what bothered Steph's mother so much was that theirs was an American family in decline, burning out and dwindling in resources and ambition. They'd seen their heyday and prominence, and she was now standing in front of the next wave of American evolution: My mother, in her own choices with my dad, had given birth to the next generation of American progress, in my sisters and even us, the decrepit boys, and we were pushing forward, and my sisters were nothing if not incredible indications of prosperity, when Steph's own family was in obvious decline. This was a meeting of two maternal wavelengths, one in the ascension, the other in the declension and with nothing else except an attempt at being petty, even if she didn't mean it, or more to the point, couldn't understand it.

I forget how long I'd been at the hospital at this point, but it was late, and we'd each put in our share of vigilance by Steph's side, and it was time to call it. I'd been there a day and a half and was depleted, needed to get my mother home after her flight across the country.

I took her to dinner and she allowed me to tell her the story of the last few months, the absolute truth about my relationship with Stephanie, even about Sarah and my profound confliction, and Mom listened to me as an adult child and son, and this, too, felt like confession, like a relief, like absolution for being human.

Sarah had indeed removed all my empties from my apartment. And she had done my dishes and prepared my place for my mother's arrival. I felt a bit exposed, weirded out by this. I summoned the courage to call her and ask her to back away, expecting—I don't know what. But I didn't have the bandwidth or emotional capital to take on our relationship along with everything else, and for a moment I was expecting an emotional blowback like I would normally receive from Steph, but instead Sarah was understanding and apologetic, said she understood entirely and that I should instead focus on supporting the family and my mother; we would sort ourselves out later.

I was suspicious: No one I knew was that rational.
What gives?