The Ram (4 page)

What seems to be a second later to Riley has been over two hours to those awake. He comes to in a recovery room, nurses swarming in and out with tubes of liquid and rolls of gauze. The hot anesthesiologist is absent and he can feel the effects of the anesthesia in his system. The room spins while he lies in his hospital bed and his stomach ripples with nausea.

Riley shouts twice for Harlequin. He doesn’t realize the dog is long dead before he starts to cry.

The surgeon who removed his toes comes into the room and pulls a clipboard from the base of Riley’s bed. He flips some papers around and puts a hand on Riley’s good leg. His touch is stabilizing, warm, and Riley does his best to stop his weeping. But he finds it difficult to keep the tears at bay. They’re marshaled on by the drugs in his system.

“You’re going to heal nicely, Mr. Wanner,” the surgeon says. He’s an older man with white hair slicked close to his scalp and a pink polo shirt poking up from under his white doctor’s coat. “Some recovery time in the hospital and then some physical therapy to help you regain your balance and you’ll never know you’re missing those toes.”

Riley gets his sniffling under control but the water flows steadily out his eyes. He forgets Harlequin and his captive rodents for a moment and remembers why he’s in the hospital. And suddenly, because of his taxed emotions and chemicals in his blood, the cause for his trauma is more nefarious than a broken link in a chain.

“Someone’s trying to kill me, doctor,” he says between heaves of his chest. “It wasn’t an accident. There are forces, universal energies, trying to kill me. I had it too good for too long. My happiness is over, doctor. Life wants me dead.”

The surgeon puts down the chart and moves around to Riley’s side. He puts a hand to Riley’s forehead, less out of medical practice than bedside comfort. “It’s the drugs they gave you to knock you out, Mr. Wanner. You’re completely safe. No one is trying to kill you.”

And the tears keep coming. Riley squeezes his eyes shut to try and halt the water but the tears push past his eyelids, leaving his eyelashes damp and soft. He remembers the anvil now, how it was his fault it fell. He thinks of Harlequin, dead at five years, her inexhaustible energy propelling her in front of a maroon minivan.

He feels like he’s in her body now. He imagines the heat of summer asphalt under his foot pads and the scent of musky squirrel on his moist nose. He knows he’s the only one trying to kill himself. He knows he will unconsciously keep running in front of cars, anvils, pain. No matter if he keeps calling his own name, trying to get himself back to safety, trying to get himself to just stop.

08 Peach

She blows on Linx’s face to wake him. His eyes flutter open and meet her hazel irises. “Get up,” she says. “You can’t stay over. I’ve got chores to do.”

Linx yawns and looks at the watch on his wrist. His back is damp and the sheet underneath him wet with sweat. “Peach, it’s ten at night. Let me stay. I was sleeping well without my Ambien.”

“I would,” she says, sliding out of bed and putting back on her soft jeans, “but you know the rule. I’m just sticking to what we’ve agreed to do.”

Linx grumbles something about dreaming of dead livestock and sits up. Peach takes in his soft face and his olive skin and a circular dent in his cheek from where he slept on his watch. He can’t stay, even if she didn’t have things to do. It was something they’d decided on months ago, when they started sleeping together. Both of them thought if they kept the intimacy to a minimum, and this meant sleepovers as well as dates and displays of public affection, they could handle the fuck-buddy status. Peach found herself enforcing the rule more than Linx, which only made sense, given her desire to be anything but his girlfriend.

He leaves her apartment with his shirt on backwards, cardigan unbuttoned and his hair sticking up in a flurry of cowlicks and dry, flaking gel. He doesn’t hug her goodbye but gives a flippant wave with his hand as he shuts the door behind him.

Peach watches him leave from the window near her desk, his blue Vespa stalling once before he gets out of the parking lot and on the main road. As he drives away, the apartment complex lights illuminate his departure. She wonders how the cold doesn’t cut through him, his torso jacketless, his figure seemingly transported out of some chic European capital.

She peels off her wig and scratches her scalp with her fingernails, running down the middle of her head and down her neck over and over with both hands. It is the motion of separating strands of wet noodles or digging through shag carpeting for a lost earring. Moving to her bedroom, she opens the bathroom door and peers in at the hairy mess she has yet to clean and decides it can wait. She’s anxious to get started on another project.

Digging in the back of her clothes closet, Peach pulls forth a dark green duffel bag. It is new to her but second-hand and smells faintly of warming ointment used on achy joints. There isn’t much tucked away in it, but she opens it all the same and verifies the contents before zipping it back up.

She takes a hooded sweater out of a chest of drawers and puts it on. It’s charcoal gray and made of wool, the fabric sherpa-lined with cream-colored fluff. She brings the hood over her bald head and pulls the strings tight to secure it to her scalp. The wool fibers cause her bare neck to itch but she represses the urge to scratch.

In the kangaroo pocket of the hoodie is a red kerchief. She rubs at a corner of the cotton with her thumb and forefinger and picks up the duffel bag with her other hand. She stops in the small foyer of her apartment to put on dark runners.

When she opens the door, she’s reminded of the season. It’s below freezing and dark, the cooing of a mourning dove coming from somewhere far overhead on a length of telephone wire. Peach wonders if it looks as though she’s going out for a run. It was a strange outfit to wear for a run and an odd bag to carry. But she decides if she is stopped and questioned by some curious neighbor or late-night wanderer, she will tell them she is aiming to run. She’s running.

She closes the door behind her. Running. It brings a smile to her lips.

Peach hates to run.

09 Riley

In his dream he’s running the 400 meter at Timberline High School. His feet seem to skim the slightly bouncy track. His heels touch earth first, followed by a rolling to the ball of his foot before shooting off again with his toes as miniature springs. He wins the race, coming in just before his best friend Walker, a pair of teal legwarmers around his calves and a girl with pale eyes and blonde hair holding a cluster of blue balloons. His mother is waiting for him at the finish line with a juice box and a ham sandwich.

“You’re going to lose,” she says, embracing him when he comes to a stop.

Riley’s eyes fly open, his mind awake, returning to the present in the hospital room. The room is dimly lit. A light from the nursing station outside shines across the foot of his bed. He can hear people outside. A cluster of nurses exchange stories and one of the nurses greets each ending anecdote with a shrill laugh. Riley looks down at the IV in his arm. He flexes his forearm and he can feel the shaft of thin plastic buried within his flesh.

He feels back to normal emotionally, the anesthesia leaving his system, helped along by the saltines and Sprite he had before falling asleep. He watches the slice of light grow and shrink on his blanket with the opening and closing of doors outside his room and the movement of the nurses. He guesses at their weight based on how much light they keep off his bed in their passing. He notices while they’re illuminated, how his feet both point skyward. His right foot pitches the sheet and blanket up high, the fabric sloping downwards an inch or so to his left foot. The silhouette is of a sloping hilltop bare of tree or radio tower.

Emboldened, Riley flings back the starched sheets and blanket and takes in his amputation. His left foot is swaddled in white bandaging, the end of his foot rounded and stumpy. He looks like a partially-wrapped mummy. A blush of rusty red lines the top of the gauze, blood seeping from his wound.

He can’t sense his toes at all. If phantom pains ever were to arrive, they would develop with time. He’s grateful his entire leg is numb and dead. A reprieve from the pain is welcome.

The dream returns to his attention. His friend Walker hadn’t gone to high school with Riley and the woman must have been some construct of his tired mind. He recalls his mother with the ham sandwich. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, too large for her thin nose, and her hair had been straight, not its actual wavy brown. He looks at his mangled foot hidden by sterile dressings and remembers how she used to play
This Little Piggy
with all his toes. She’d finish with one set and move right on to the other. His favorite, and hers, was the little toe on each foot. Instead of the traditional “weee, weee, weee, all the way home,” his mother would say, “yippee, yippee, yippee all the way home!”

But she was dead now. As were his toes.

A nurse comes in the room, a caffeine-free soda cradled in one hand and crackers in the other. He has the morose feeling the sweet bubbly drink is the only liquid he will ever drink again. The salty squares are the only things he will ever eat again. She sighs as she sets down the food on a swivel tray attached to the bed and flips the sheets and blanket back over Riley’s legs.

“No need to look at it now,” she says and rips open a packet of Saltines. “It’ll be there in the morning.”

10 Peach

She beats the dawn back to her apartment. But just barely. Her neighbor, a woman in her early sixties who lost her husband years ago, is sipping steaming coffee on her small slab of a concrete porch. Her hair is in a sharp bob, the strands a mix of silver and black. Peach notes whenever she sees her, she always has it coiffed even though Peach has never seen the woman entertain friends or gentlemen. Her face is flat and heart-shaped and Peach hazards she’s of Inuit descent.

She squints to take in Peach in her dark clothes and hooded sweater. “You been partying?” she asks Peach, never using her name.

She’s told the woman several times her full name, but she doesn’t seem to remember. When she does venture a guess it’s typically Eileen or Randi. Peach pulls the hood tight around her chin and nods her head up and down and thinks of something base and typical to quip.

“I say if you can’t do shots on a Monday night, you’re too boring to live.”

The woman tucks her feet back underneath the patio chair she sits in and snuggles down into her housecoat. “Got a spare drop for my coffee? Might help me find the Sandman.”

“Sorry,” Peach says and digs for her apartment keys in the pockets of her hoodie. “Left it all behind me.” She smiles at the woman, thinks of her name, Mona, with connotations both sultry and aged. But her neighbor can’t see her grin in the dark before dawn, her little patio light casting a
slice of yellow only over the dark gray of the concrete.

“You get your rest, then,” Mona chides like a mother and takes a sip of coffee. “One of us should be asleep at this hour.”

Peach keeps her grin and tries not to think of why only one of them and not both should be in the embrace of slumber. “Will do,” she answers.

Keys found, Peach heads inside and leans against her door to shut it. The smile is etched on her face. Her mouth is turned up so high her cheeks begin to ache.

She drops the duffel bag in the entranceway and moves toward her kitchen. Her stomach is jittery from the adrenaline flowing through her system. Her night out was a complete success, devoid of complications or unforeseen challenges. Peach feels like a winner, which is a feeling she’s never been blessed with having before.

Her fridge yields up a can of guava juice and she downs the tart liquid in one solid swig, dribbling a bit of the pink juice off her bottom lip due to her inability to cease smiling. She eats handfuls of stale popcorn without salt she popped days ago and forgot about, leaving the bowl out on the counter. Pacing the room, she stops once to flick on the light over the kitchen sink and then resumes walking back and forth across the smooth floor.

The popcorn and juice don’t sit well and she stops at the sink, leans over it with her fingers wrapped around the edge of the Formica. She vomits, the adrenaline refusing the food in her system and she tries not to laugh while she pukes pink puffs of corn into the metal sink. Cupping her hand, she washes out her mouth, all the while smiling.

Then she notices the marks. On the refrigerator door handle, the kitchen light switch, the countertop. She can see everywhere her hands have been in her apartment. She reaches up and brushes her cheeks and chin with the back of her hand and comes away with flaking color.

Peach takes in her fingertips in the low light of her kitchen. Several of them are discolored and dark at the very tips. It’s on her sweater, her jeans. Her body, her home, all spotted with half-moons of crimson color. It’s as if red rose petals have been strewn about, defying gravity and never touching the floor.

She washes her hands in the sink, scrubs them with a little nail brush shaped like a hedgehog and laughs and smiles until the sun dares to light up the room.

Wednesday, the 25
^th
of March, 2015

11 Riley

“Hey, douchebag,” says Walker as he strolls through the hospital room door, a leather work satchel crossing his torso, his work suit creased like a ladder across his lower back. Walker Kauffman would have fit in with those young men on Wall Street in the 1980s if he’d been born a few decades earlier. He has ambition and brains and the incessant lust for a good party. But Riley knows what keeps Walker in check is a healthy respect for the law, his own reputation, and the dependable strength of logic.