My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (34 page)

But, no: Sarah was simply that levelheaded and rational, even in the midst of something like this. It baffled me, as I was accustomed to emotional knife fights and fisticuffs in order to get anything done, so this was unusual for me. This is how trust begins.

That night, my mother slept on my couch, which is huge and oversized, dwarfing her further and reinforcing the perceptual distortion I kept experiencing with her. I left the French doors leading to my sleeping nook open so I could see that she was there, because I was afraid to be alone. When I closed my eyes, seriously nodding off from exhaustion, I could hear Stephanie yelling for me, “
JUNE
!” when I would briefly lose consciousness, right before the hypnic jerk, like it was a frequency open for panic, and she was trapped in her own nightmare, and I was the person she was calling for help, from under the wreckage of the Jeep.

The next morning, we were back on the ninth floor before 8:00 a.m., and Steph's parents were already there. They were sitting quite a distance from Sidney, my friend from the first night. I went right over to him and introduced my mother, and pointed out Steph's parents, who managed a small, pursed smile and slight hand wave. They were unaccustomed to black people, I knew, from Steph's stories. Once, Steph liked to recall, when she took her mother to a larger urban center outside of their idyllic New England town, Steph and her mom had passed a group of three black teenagers, and when they were just out of earshot, her mother had asked, “Are those
REAL
rappers??”

But Sidney hadn't noticed, or made any indication he felt slighted. I brought him a cup of coffee in my rounds and then went in to see Steph, who looked the same, if a bit more bruised. There was more diagnosis, more discussion with doctors and immediate care nurses, and nothing was guaranteed or assured, and we counted the amount of broken bones and were told what to expect, what was coming next. “Pneumonia,” the attractive younger internist had said. “It's a process of the body, with so many broken ribs. It's guaranteed.”

About the only thing they could guarantee, it seemed, was the bad news.

Steph's head remained distended, her eyes protruding and needing to be covered in an unguent to retain their moisture. An orthopedist to help set her crushed foot. An optometrist to work on her eyes. A neurologist to review yet another series of scans.

And it went on like that: We normalized to the everyday trauma, learned once again how to listen to the doctors and interpret their dithering hodgepodge of Greek and Latin terminology, nod our heads like we understood, and tried to draw something optimistic from their desiccated sense of duty, their fatigued ability to offer hope to the families of the broken.

Next door, a revolving cast of extras moved through the trauma unit. A gang member who'd been shot and refused to stay longer than it took the doctors to stitch up his torso. A stroke victim who moved in and out the same afternoon. His wife and daughter moving from the terror of initiation to the trauma unit, to the good news that he'd be released and sent home tomorrow, and the look in that woman's eyes when she looked at me and nearly apologized for the good news, and I shook my head at her, and her nodding back at me, an entire conversation exquisitely delivered in seconds, wordlessly. Another car accident survivor from eastern Washington whose family had no place to stay, could hardly speak English, so it became my role to help them like Sidney had helped me, that first night. It was what you did.

A routine eventually develops, even under circumstances like this, because routines give humans a semblance of control and normality, and for that first week my mother was there, we all worked together to make sense of the symbols and signals we received from Steph's bedside and each of the machines and reports, learned the personalities and habits of the nurses and a language from the sounds and alarms of the ICU station, exchanged information and kept watch as much as we could. I was still trying to be the good guy, and I think my mother was proud of me for that period. I spoke to my family daily, even called my father and grandmother in Brownsville, Texas, and sent Gramma fifty dollars to make a petition at her creepy, Aztec Catholic church service and walk on her knees until they were bloodied so that Steph would recover. I'm actually making that part up: I think she just gave her church thirty dollars and kept twenty for herself. This was, after all, my Gramma.

I tried to sit shiva, next to Stephanie, in that chair, but I couldn't do it for very long some days. It was tragic to me, somehow, more than to the others. I'm still not certain why. Her chemicaled friend, Lisa, could come in there with that distance, looking like Luna Lovegood, and talk to Steph about a project she was working on at school or update her on how the dog was doing, who was now staying in that huge pack at Sarah's house and learning dog manners, which was something Cleo was clearly unaccustomed to. She had no dog sense, would get corrected often by the other dogs who did not like the new addition to the pack. It was like junior high, for teen girls, except with more shedding, and better teeth.

Still, Cleo was safe there, even if she'd been nipped at more than a few times for being undogworldly.

What I would do, some afternoons, was sit next to Steph and play some of that Harry Potter audio book, while I rested my head on the side of the frame. When we had lived together and had trouble sleeping, I would play it for us on the long nights we'd lie awake in her bedroom and stare off through the windows at the night sky. Steph would also place her broken-down clock radio directly under her pillow some deep mornings and listen to a small community college radio station that had very little range, and she'd dial in and fall asleep listening to some really obscure radio programs through the PRI network, some Canadian programs that we'd grown to love.

So I figured out how to dial those in through my iPhone, and I would sit there with her and play that until the internal cranial pressure monitor would start beeping, as if the radio was increasing her blood pressure or anxiety, and I'd turn it off. Then the monitor would resume something nearing her regular status, and I'd play the programs again, to the same spiking effects.

During this whole time, this was the only communication I ever had from her; the only way I knew she was still cognitively “in there” was her responding to Harry Potter and her Canadian public radio, like I'd heard her yelling in my sleep.

When my mother left, everything changed again.

We stopped by the hospital so she could say good-bye to Steph and her parents, and it was touching to see how much affection my mother had developed for this woman, and in a way, the life I'd tried to build here away from home. Mom genuinely cared for her, in spite of the fact that she knew I was trying to get out of this relationship when the accident happened. So when she was saying her good-byes to Steph's mother, who thanked her for coming and spending a week helping, my mother said, “Well, Steph is family to me,” and I saw Steph's mother wince at this, and my fight response was once again triggered and I blushed with anger.

That was difficult to forgive.

Mom had changed my entire opinion and estimation of her during this past week, and I had found a new love and respect for her. It had started, interestingly enough, on a walk with Sarah, back at the very beginning. I had been telling Sarah stories about growing up on the Texas border, still uncertain as to whether I wanted to share my writing with her, and I began telling her about my mother, how distant she had seemed when I was a kid.

“Your mother was constantly up to her elbows in diapers,” Sarah said, point-blank. “You're lucky she didn't drown you like Andrea Yates.”

This made me rethink everything. “Hunh,” I think I said. From that moment on, I looked at my mother very differently, and it was during this crisis, when I needed her most, when I saw that Mom really had listened to my grief, knew that I was really breaking apart and heard me call out for help, and she had shown up for it. It changed everything. I had so much respect for her then.

In fact, one moment stands out among many, and it happened in the waiting room. It was a Sunday, and Sundays become entirely too crowded in ICU waiting rooms. Sidney's ex-wife had finally made it up from Louisiana, and about three generations of Sidney's family had traveled with her to help with the hastening of their son's life.

Our little crowd had been in the corner of the room that afternoon as we were leaving, and as we were packing up, my mother turned to Sidney's ex, who was a black woman in her late fifties, with cropped hair dyed hot pink, and Mom was taking the time to show her how to work the tricky pull-out couches when the woman turned on my mom, who was much smaller than her, and let out a string of vitriol, doing that fingerwagging, neck-shifting “attitude” display people do when they have little agency for anything else.

I heard this happening and I was immediately on high alert, thinking the situation needed neutralizing, and Steph's parents both darted out of the room like shots had been fired. Sidney reared up and attempted to pull his ex-wife away and she was of course arguing, and my immediate strategy, as a West Coast liberal, was to begin apologizing—“Obviously this was our fault, so sorry; please, we were only trying to”—and my mother stood there, absolutely defiant and cold, staring hard into this woman's face with terrific dignity.

I should mention, if I haven't, that my stepdad is an African American from the East Texas/Louisiana bayou border country, and my mother is absolutely adored by her in-laws. Mom works for the City of Houston and manages a huge crew of people—builders and carpenters and engineers—and she does not take shit from anyone. I was astonished at this person in front of me, who did not back away from the confrontation.

“If you had let me finish,” she said to the woman, who was still huffing and puffing, “I was showing you how you and your family could be more comfortable tonight.” I led her away, and I caught Sidney's eye, who gave me a “women always be crazy” shrug of his shoulders.