My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (45 page)

When she was in this state, she said she sometimes saw me as the bastard who left her at the altar and married someone else and had children and a family now. So she hated me and wanted to throw things at me.

She said she even imagined her best friend, Jake, was there, for a month.

“No, that actually happened,” I told her.

“You mean Jake was here?” she asked. Jake was her boyfriend in college, before she jumped buses and started dating women. They were able to make better friends than they had been lovers, and Jake, by far, was the best friend Steph ever had. He had flown out after he heard about the accident and was able to get some time off from his work as a physical therapist.

“Yeah, he was here by your bedside for a couple of weeks. He was really helpful. He made charts,” I said.

“Charts of what?” she asked.

“Charts of what your recovery might look like. Charts of a brain and its synaptic reconfiguration, which is what the neurologist said was happening to you.”

“Oh,” she said.

“He also told me about the time you punched him, too,” I said.

“I punched him?” she asked, genuinely curious.

“Yeah, when he tried to break up with you back in college,” I told her. “He said you brought a rock into the library and set it next to him while he was studying, as a threat.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, then later, you punched him in the eye. We actually high-fived, since we were both the victims of your right cross.” I giggled, but she looked confused. This had actually happened in front of Steph's mother, who, I think, managed a glimpse of who her daughter really was at that point, and looked stricken.

Now, by recounting these conversations, it might seem that Steph was nearly back to her usual self, but this is far from accurate. Steph believed herself to be at 100 percent recovery when she was really just starting out at about 25 to 30 percent, and it was painful to watch because she felt she was back in command of all her faculties, and she was making decisions where it was clear that she was still very much suffering from a traumatic brain injury.

One afternoon, back at Harborview, where Steph was doing rehabilitative treatment, her parents thought it would be a good idea if they helped her down to the canteen for a coffee or a juice. Steph insisted on using her crutches, and when they were down in the basement level and in the queue, her mother upset her with something and Steph let out a scream with the C-word, aimed at her mother, who flushed and ran out of the room.

I felt a number of things, not least among them a sadness for her mother, but also a bit of responsibility because it had been me and my predilection for British gangster movies that taught Steph how to unleash that particular word, and so I felt guilty, on top of everything. I was exhausted from guilt by this time, but I could still muster it on a moment's notice.

By this point, I had pretty much made it past my resentment of her family, understood the high-stress situation they'd been put in, moving to a foreign city and having only me to depend upon, so of course they'd eventually aim their frustration at the bastard who'd left their daughter. Even further, I had an overwhelming realization that I was standing between a daughter and a mother who had a second chance at rebuilding their relationship, and that my standing guard and defending a person who was not happy with herself and indeed wanted nothing more—at her very core—than to be with her family, and have her mother's approval, wasn't helping. It made so much more sense now to step away and let these things unfold, rather than try to be some sort of bedside hero for a woman that I had no claim to, who had no claim to me.

That final realization was incredibly liberating, and I was able to visit Steph without the crushing sense of guilt or trauma or responsibility, but instead as a friend, and someone who cared for her, but up to a limit. It gave me boundaries. And it also helped when she started doing really crazy things and I saw that there was nothing I could do anymore to keep her safe, that she would have to navigate the world as she was, and I couldn't stop her from making terrible choices.

She had been moved back to the hospital for a rehab treatment, on a different floor, as a part of her ongoing therapy and was now sharing a room with other patients, and one afternoon I came down to the hospital to see her and she was dressed, sitting upright on her bed and flipping through a magazine. She moved in slow motion, her eyes unfocused and glazed from the medication, and she limped and winced from the pain of all her fractures, so watching her perform simple tasks was like watching her move underwater.

I knocked and walked in, sat down in the chair beside her. I noticed a family in the other part of the room, around the other bed. They were Mexican, and an old man was in the hospital bed, and I caught from their conversation in Spanish that he'd had a heart attack but was recovering. They kept giving Steph dirty looks, I noticed. She said she wanted to walk a little, so we wandered slowly down the hallway to a little nook with couches. She told me the family was mad at her because she complained that the man dribbled on their shared toilet when he relieved himself.

“There's pee on the toilet seat,” she said. “He says he lifts the seat, but it's always there.”

I felt a compulsion to intervene but decided I didn't want to take that on, as a part of my new boundaries. In the end, the Mexican man was moved to another room and the pee was still appearing on the toilet seat, and Steph realized the droplets on the toilet seat were caused by the cleaners emptying buckets into the toilet. I felt bad for the old man and his family, who were in Seattle from eastern Washington, alone downtown and frightened, and then accused of this humiliation, like he was a barn animal incapable of simple hygiene. But again, this was no longer my fight.

I came back a couple days later and there was a new family in Steph's room, and this time I was getting dirty looks from a young Arab guy. Four generations of people gathered around a woman in a black hijab, covered head to toe and lying on the bed, and the guy, in his thirties, kept looking at me like I'd done something to insult him or his family.

“Let's go sit,” Steph said to me, and we walked to the nook.

“I want to see other people,” she told me as we sat on the couch, and I nearly burst out laughing.

“I'm sorry; yes, by all means,” I said, after everyone at the nurse's station looked my way.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “I think we need to split up, and stay friends. I'm seeing someone else already,” she told me.

“What?” I said, taken aback. You can't really trust anything someone with a traumatic brain injury is telling you. But this was surprising, and I was concerned about her making these decisions much more than feeling any sort of jealousy. Any at all. I mean, I would have told her I was seeing Sarah, but I didn't think she could process the jealousy and sense of betrayal a person feels when they discover an ex is seeing someone else.

“Steph, what are you doing? You're not in a condition to start a relationship,” I said, and I was hoping she wasn't taking that as me being jealous. She wasn't capable of consent.

“I'm seeing that guy whose mother is in the bed next to mine,” she told me. “I gave him a blow job yesterday. I cheated on you all the time, by the way. I met people on Craigslist and had sex with them at Lisa's house.”

I heard this and, oddly, didn't care in the least. I could see that her intention was to hurt me, somehow, and it did nothing to wound or affect me, not my honor or sense of nostalgia, nothing. Or perhaps it was also, or more so, that I was relieved to hear that Steph wasn't as dependent on me as I'd thought, that she, too, knew that the relationship was doomed. This revelation freed me further from my guilt.

But the idea that she was “seeing” someone right there in the hospital, in her condition, seemed like abuse of a patient, to me. It just didn't seem right. I felt compelled to say something, but I couldn't: I was done. I didn't want to interfere any longer.

Plus, I was in love with Sarah in a way that I had never before felt with anyone, and I had made the transition to full devotional and physical love with her months earlier, so Steph telling me she was giving blowies now and had sex with other people while we were “together” only made me feel sorry for her, made me worry for her much more than anything else, but not like before: She wasn't my responsibility.

During that year, Sarah miraculously understood the complexity around my relationship and sense of obligation with Steph. Sarah was exhausted by the demands of Steph's accident and my responses, and she watched helplessly at the implosion of my health. She made the hard decision to compartmentalize me and our relationship, as a strategy of self-protection, while she navigated her own difficulties and dissolution of the life she had worked so hard to build with her now ex-husband.

It had been him that had left her, she told me, and right out of the blue.

While Sarah is a gentile, their child identifies with the paternal family's line as Jewish, like only a West Coast Seattle liberal could. Their kid had a huge bar mitzvah one Saturday, and it was quite the shindig, with everyone from the karate school attending. Friends and family flew in from all over the country. Though I had been invited, I was incapable of leaving my apartment from depression that afternoon, so I didn't make it. The next morning, Sarah was feeling a bit rough, so she slept in while her husband drove their kid to the airport to catch a flight to Los Angeles to stay with friends, as a birthday present.

When he returned, he woke up Sarah and told her they needed to talk.

She was about to apologize for sleeping in when he leveled his gaze at her and said, flatly, “I don't want to be married to you any longer.” She was mid-coffee when she realized the conversation they were having, and she didn't even get through the cup before he loaded his simple travel bag and left for his new rented house, about thirty minutes away and fully furnished. He'd been planning this for months.

Her fifteen-year marriage ended in less time than it took to drink that cup of coffee.

I was able to give Sarah a level of distraction and entertainment, in a way, as I unraveled around her in such large, dramatic, and loud catastrophes with huge emotional tsunamis and explosive, potentially life-threatening ways, but still she had her limits and boundaries. When this had started, Sarah had presented me with an oversize postcard she had purchased during her last trip to Spain,
La Virgen Dolorosa
, from one of the medieval cathedrals in the south. It was an image of the Virgin Mother's anguish, and she had seven swords stabbing her heart.

It was, for me, a perfect image of grief, and it was like a signal directly to the soul of my anguish, how I was metabolizing all the pain and confusion and fear and helplessness. It was more than language, it was more than iconic: It was a subconscious, subcultural chorus of angels. I finally understood my grandmother and father, and how they surrounded themselves with these death images of Jesus and
La Virgen de Guadalupe
, the Virgin Mother. It's how Catholics process grief, sharing it with others in order to process the anguish as a community.

Sarah was a descendant from Lutheran homesteaders, from Idaho, and so she firmed up her top lip, dug up her garden, and made gluten-free casseroles to exhibit her suffering. She spent weeks curled up in bed, her covers pulled up over her head, then went to her doctor, who prescribed lorazapam, trazadone, and other medications to help her endure.

I no longer had health insurance, so I turned to booze, which would give me a good one or two hours of deadened thoughts and tissue, and then come roaring back with blades and horror and keep me from sleeping. And I would bewilder and enthrall Sarah sometimes, with how self-destructive I could become, how utterly beyond redemption I could push myself when the mood took me. Once, we had to attend a funeral together for a former student at the karate school. It was a tragic story, and I won't relay it here, but the funeral services were held in a megachurch in one of those outlying Washington towns full of trees and Starbucks, and I prepared for the funeral with a flask of gin and a due sense of conviction.