My Stupid Girl (45 page)

“Can I ask you something, Sean?”

“Anything, man. Go for it.” 

“If I did become a Christian, but it was
because I needed the stability, not because I really bought into all of it,
would that still count?” Sean gave me a wry look.

“That’s kind of like asking if going to
rehab will work if you don’t actually participate in any of it. What’s the
point, if you’re not going to give it 100%?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking down and
chuckling at myself. I was still glad I asked. It was a question that had been
bugging me ever since Lucy invited me to church.

“Listen, David. I’m not saying that what
you have right now doesn’t work. Jesus hung out with prostitutes and tax
collectors because those were the people who really needed him. God doesn’t
want you when you’re perfect; he actually wants you broken. That’s when he can
do you the most good.” He considered me carefully. “If you’re going to do it,
though, don’t go into it thinking ‘I don’t buy any of this.’ Try to do
something closer to, like, ‘ok, God. Show me what you got.’”

That made me laugh. He said it like a
cowboy, but I understood what he meant.

“Okay.” That made way more sense, it was
honest. Sean smiled.

“See what happens, man. Decide for
yourself.” I wanted to have what Sean had. He was the furthest anyone had ever
been from trying to force religion on me. He was just telling me what had
worked for him and what he truly believed.

That had been what I needed.

“Thanks, Sean.” I put my hand out to shake
his. I felt bad about keeping him from his sleep. He took my hand and stifled a
big yawn, his lower lip ring stretching with his skin.

“Hey, did you ever draw that tattoo I asked
for?” He came awake with excitement.

“I did, actually. I’ll have it with me the
next time I come here. I think I’ll be here a lot, actually.” I could feel my
face drop as I remembered where I was.

“I’ll be here tomorrow, and I’m going to
bring a bible I don’t usually use so you can take a look at it. Or pass it on,
whatever works for you.” He reached his hand out and shook mine. “Good to see
you, David.” I shook his hand and watched him walk away, then walked slowly
back to my grandma’s room. I wasn’t really ready to be alone again, but I
wanted to be there when she got back.

I was too late. Grandma was sleeping on her
bed, looking pale and completely worn out. Big strides took me to her side
where I kissed her forehead, so happy to see her alive.

“David?” I heard a deep voice ask. A man in
a lab coat stood at the door. He motioned that he wanted to talk to me. It took
me a minute. I did not want to hear what this man had to say to me.

I took in a deep breath and fought the urge
to pick my grandma up and run away from all this. I already knew, by the look
on his face, that it wasn’t good news. Finally, I walked over to him. He wasn’t
going to disappear if I ignored him, so I went.

“You’re David, Doris’ grandson?” He made
sure of my identity. God forbid the bad news went to a random stranger
wandering around in patients’ rooms. My head bobbed in answer and my hands
shoved deep in my pockets. My shoulders hunched, preparing for the blow I knew
was coming. 

“I’m sorry to tell you this, David, but
from all the tests we did today it looks like your grandma has colon cancer.
It’s progressed so much that it is inoperable.” He gave me a second to take it
in and then dropped the final bomb. “Best case scenario, she has a few months
left.”

I felt like a cold bucket of water was
suffocating me, dousing me with terror. I looked back into the room at my
grandma, that sweet woman who took me in and cared for me, the punk. She was
lying on a hospital bed, being given a death sentence. The doctor put his hand
on my shoulder, snapping me out of my daze.  

“I’ll give you some time. Why don’t you
write down some questions you might have? I’ll be glad to answer them when I
come back in a little while. We haven’t told her yet. We can or you can, that
choice is up to you, but we’d like to do it in the next few hours so she can
make some decisions about her care.” He turned around and walked to the next
room, hopefully bringing them better news than he brought us. 

I walked back into my grandma’s room and sat
down in the stupid reclining chair facing her bed. Her little feet hardly made
a bump in the end of the sheets. She looked cold so I grabbed another blanket
and placed it on top of her, pushing in the sides around her tiny body. I bent
down and put my face on her bed, feeling completely and utterly broken.

25. BLACK HOLE

I had my grandma for a little over four months after
that day. They were the sweetest four months of my life.

We spent three days in the hospital, going
over every option they could offer her, but all of them led to the same road.
She had less than a 20% chance of surviving any treatment and her life beyond
that would consist of colostomy bags and pain meds. 

“I’m not afraid of dying,” my grandmother
told me one night, while the two of us sat alone in her hospital room. I had
moved that terrible reclining chair next to her, on the other side of the bed
and away from the wires that were connected to her. They looked like a
multicolored spider web, all coming out of different places on her body, going
to a single machine monitoring everything going on in her body. Her words
interrupted me from studying an informational sheet on chemotherapy.

“Grandma, there are options here.” I shook
the papers at her.

“Oh, hush. You know there are not. They
just gave you those because you asked for them. They told both of us, many
times, that if we opted for chemo I probably wouldn’t survive the first round.
You want me to die all miserable and sick from chemo?” 

“Oh, Grandma.” The papers dropped to the
ground as I buried my head in the bed, my face completely engulfed in her many
blankets.

“I know, Davie boy.” I looked up and saw
that her sassy eyes were filled with tears, but she still looked happy. “This
is just life, bub. We are born, we have good lives, and then we pave the path
for someone else.” She reached her hand up to my hair, pulled it away from my
face, and patted my exposed cheek. “Don’t be afraid of life, David.” I groaned
at her and put my head back down to resume my sulking.

“You don’t have to be so happy all the time
you know; it doesn’t make the situation any better.” My growling voice was
filled with as much frustration as I could get away with.

“No, maybe not. But it annoys enough people
to make the effort worth it.” She peeked at me from the corner of her eye and
chortled. 

We compromised. I let her come home and not
do any treatments when she agreed to a live-in nurse. When I say I let her come
home, I mean to say that I really had no choice at all. But she gave me the win
on the nurse.

I ached to talk to Lucy. Every couple of
days for four months, I would try to call. I’d leave a message and I would get
a short text back, never a return call. But she was the only one that I wanted
comfort from. I wanted her arms around me and I needed her to tell me that she
loved me. I thought about her so much that when I was sleeping and I was in
that time in between being asleep but knowing your dreams weren’t real I could
almost feel her fingers weaving through my hand, her big lips pressed against
the tips of my fingers. She was always the one that made me feel like I could
conquer anything. She was one of the first people who ever believed in me, her
and Grandma. For a long time those were my two girls. I didn’t want to lose
them both. 

But the bitter truth was that I was about
to lose one, the most amazing person that ever existed. That ornery old woman
had called me out on every one of my issues and lit a fire underneath me to go
and get what I wanted. And I had. And now she was on her way out.

My mother Jane’s whole side of the family
was with my grandma Doris when she passed away. Her two sons and their wives
were there, along with all her grandchildren. Their kids, who were all roughly
around my age, didn’t seem to care much. They were sad because their parents
were sad, but they weren’t all that interested. It was a stretch for me to be
hospitable to them and act like they were family. It took my grandma slapping
me upside the head to make me take them seriously. When she had slapped me it
felt like someone was fanning my hair, I had to look to see what she was doing
to know for sure. Then I had to bite my tongue to avoid laughing at her
attempted physical discipline. She glared at me and told me to be nice because
they were family. 

On the night she passed away it wasn’t the
uninterested cousins or their parents that she called for, though. It was me.
The nurse had given Grandma a fair amount of morphine so she wouldn’t be in
pain. She'd had enough to have a conversation, but barely. I walked slowly into
her room, knowing that this was probably the last time I would be able to talk
with her. Each step closer to her made me feel like I was putting the nail in
her coffin. She was even smaller than she had been four months ago, and looked
like there was no blood left in her body. I sat down on her bed and leaned my
head into her bony chest, keeping all of my weight in the air so I wouldn’t
break a rib or something. Her weak arms raised to hug me and she sucked in a
deep breath of air that sounded like it hurt. I tried to lift my head but her
arm kept it in place. She kissed the top of my head. 

“You have grown into a fine young man,
David Johnson.” Her voice was soft. It sounded like each word was difficult for
her to say. I tried to shush her but she beat me to it by telling me to be
quiet. I complied. “You listen to me, David. If there is anything that I want
you to remember--” she coughed and arched her back in pain. Her nurse came over
and fiddled with the morphine tube. Grandma quickly relaxed. Her body spread
even lower into her bed.

She was giving up. 

She opened her eyes and stared straight
into mine, a thing that used to freak me out, but now I longed for. “David,”
she tried again with less energy but more desperation, “I want you to get what
you want, work hard, do the right thing and love.” She smiled at me, grabbed my
face with her brittle fingers, and put our foreheads together.

“Thank you Grandma.” I spoke through
desperate tears. I needed her to hang on until I was able to express myself.
“Thank you so much for loving me.” 

“It was easy, honey.”

Those were the last words she spoke to me.

So there I sat, in a limo with my aunts and
uncles on the way to Grandma’s funeral. She had passed away two days ago, on a
Thursday morning. As much as I missed her, I was glad she wasn’t in pain
anymore. I’d paid for the casket and flowers, her sons paid for the rest. I had
spent way more on Grandma than I would ever spend on myself; she deserved it.
Over the last few months we had gone back and forth about the in-home nurse.
She’d said the only way she would allow one in her house was if the insurance
paid for it. I wasn’t a very good liar, but I got away with that one. I started
chuckling when I thought about it. 

Tears jumped to my eyes when I walked into
the church. The place looked amazing. 

Sean had called me the day after she had
died to tell me his church was offering to have the funeral service there.
People from the church were going to set it up for us so we could be with
family. Sean didn’t realize, of course, that I didn’t really want to be with
this part of my family, but I appreciated it and let them do it.

Johnny and Jennika stood in the far corner,
putting some flowers on a table completely covered with pictures of my
grandmother, starting from when she was a baby to a couple of months before she
died. Sean was setting up chairs and, to my surprise, Isaiah was helping. He
was limping around, straightening chairs and making snarky comments to Sean in
a low voice. I felt a rush of excitement when I saw Evelyn and Rachel setting
up the keyboard and guitar, because I knew if they were there, Lucy had to be
around. I had never seen this crowd without her. I scanned the room again, but
I didn’t see Lucy anywhere. She was there, though. I knew it. She’d loved my
grandma more than almost anyone else.

“Hey, David.” Sean lifted his hand, then
came over to me and gave me a hug. He had a way of hugging that felt real, like
I was important to him. 

“This place looks great, Sean. I don’t know
what to say.”

“Oh, it’s the least we can do. Your grandma
was amazing. I thought she was going to punch me when I met her and she saw my
tattoos. When she found out about yours, that was priceless, greatest thing I
had ever seen.” I started laughing with him, remembering that day: the best
birthday I had ever had. “Speaking of, man, check this out.” Sean looked around
the room, making sure no one was looking, and lifted his left pant leg up. On
his calf was the tattoo I had drawn.

“Whoa, that looks amazing, Sean.” I took in
the two hands I had drawn, a waterfall of water flowing out of two holes in the
base of the palms. It was something I thought Sean would appreciate. And he
had. 

“It does look amazing. You know, the lady
that put this on for me asked me where I got it, she said that her shop would
pay over a hundred dollars for the template of a tattoo like that.”

“Really? That’s a lot of money.” I was
amazed that someone thought that much of my little doodles. 

“I’m telling you, David. If you really
wanted to sell those, you could make serious money.” He patted my back and
looked at me, like he wished he could just do it himself. That was a change,
Sean wanting to be like me.

“Have you seen Lucy?” I blurted, not able
to keep the question in any longer. I was afraid of spontaneously combusting.
That would have been a shame, especially at my grandmother’s funeral.