This is Just Exactly Like You (14 page)

“Eastern Red,” Jack says right back.

Warehouses and a warehouse that’s been turned into a wedding and special events hall and a few more churches and he’s there, north on Elm and the half-mile up to the hospital. He parks the truck off on the edge of the lot, leaving himself room to turn around. It’s been a couple of years now since they’ve been to the hospital with Hen—long litanies of EEGs and tests for metals and yeasts and physical therapy—but he still knows all this by heart. The small signs, the calm lettering:
Parking. Outpatient. Maternity.
Even EMERGENCY, even in its capitals, seems demure. As if every situation here might still be equal. It’s all sort of sickly familiar, like knowing the words to a song mainly because it’s eternally on the radio.

He has not called Rena. He couldn’t understand how the conversation would go.
So. Beth moved in with Canavan. Right. I know. Also, there’s been an accident.

The emergency room is empty. Theirs is apparently the only emergency today. There are no kids who’ve fallen out of trees, no dads who cut hornet nests out of hedges. No pellet gun accidents, no head wounds, no meningitis scares. Jack gets Hen set up with the tree catalog and his fire helmet, sits him next to an enormous fish tank. There’s one huge yellow fish, and about a hundred glittering silver-green ones the size of nails. Hen puts two fingers on the glass, takes off The Duck so he can see better. Jack walks up to the desk. Find out how he is, get the hell out of here.

“May I help you?” the nurse says. She looks exhausted, looks like she could do without one more emergency.

Jack says, “I’m a friend of Terry Canavan’s. Acquaintance. I work with him. Terrence Canavan. He should have come in about a half-hour ago? Maybe a little less? Chainsaw cut on his leg?”

“Yes, sir,” she says. “Are you family?”

“No. He works with me. For me. He works for me.”

“Well, sir, unless you’re family, I don’t think they’ll let you back there. But I can check.”

“That’d be super,” he says. She vanishes through a set of doors. Jack walks back over to Hendrick and the fish, thinking
super, super
. All of this is super. “Are you watching the fish?” he asks Hen.

“I am watching the fish.”

“Are you hungry?”

Hen hits the sides of his thighs with his fists:
Yes
. Jack digs in his pockets for change, for dollar bills, and takes him over to the vending machines. “No candy,” he tells him, and starts pointing to the sleeves of crackers, orange ones, brown ones. Something with peanut butter in it, something with protein. “These?” he asks, pointing. “These?” Hen shakes his head no, then no again, makes his noises.
Fnh
.
Fnh.
He finally settles on the orange ones, square, salt shining in the light of the machine. Jack taps in the letter and number and the package spirals out and down, thudding into the bottom. Hendrick discovers the flapping door and sits down in front of the machine, in front of the door, pushing it open, reaching his hand in, taking it back out. A new entertainment. Jack opens the crackers, eats one himself, sits down nearby to make sure Hen doesn’t get his head stuck in the door. Though if he did, they’d be in the perfect place for it. Jack wonders if you can have emergencies in the emergency room. Who you call.

The one time they went to the hospital for any real emergency—the only time it wasn’t appointments or Hen with the flu in the middle of the night—Beth had almost cut the end of her thumb off slicing onions. He was in the back of their old house, the rental in Burlington, putting Hen down in his crib, and she’d called to him.
Jack?
She was so calm.
I think I just cut myself really badly.
They were making chili. He got to the kitchen and there was blood on the cutting board, on the counter, on the floor, small drops tracing her walk to the sink, where she was running her thumb under cold water, the sink draining pink beneath it. He remembers thinking,
We’re going to have to cut new onions.
He remembers being hungry, being frustrated with her. Wondering when or if they’d eat. He turned the heat off under the pot, threw the onions away, told her to hold her hand over her head.
I am
, she said, sitting down, leaning against the cabinets. They kept wadding paper towels against it, kept checking every few minutes, probably kept reopening the cut. They tried ice. Jack cut a T-shirt into ribbons, tried tying off the base of her thumb to slow the blood down. Nothing worked. After an hour and a half Jack gave up, decided to take her in.
Here,
he said, giving her a bowl of cereal.
Eat this
. He poured one for himself.
I don’t know how long this’ll take.
She had her thumb wrapped up in a dishtowel, blood coming through. Jack couldn’t believe she was still bleeding, that so much blood could come out of her. Was this the kind of thing that would have killed prehistoric man? With no hospital, did those guys cut the shit out of their thumbs and just lay there at the mouth of the cave and bleed out? She never cried, even when the doctor told them the cut was too close to the end of her thumb for stitches, that she should just bandage it tightly and go home. This after two hours of watching cable news in the waiting room, Hendrick asleep across two seats between them. They just went back home.

She bears up under things like that better than he does, holds it together, doesn’t yell at the doctors. She’ll yell at him fine, holds her patience for the things she can’t control. He remembers her calmly asking the nurse for an epidural during Hendrick’s birth, saying thank you, telling Jack everything was going the way they’d planned. It all seemed so animal, so wild, and then there was Beth above it all, hovering, almost, giving directions, explaining. He can’t always reconcile this side of her with her hurricane kit side, doesn’t understand it, isn’t sure it makes any sense. And then sometimes he’s not at all sure he’s supposed to be able to, that in fact this is what life with her means, these places where he will not know, will have to navigate for himself. He loves her. He does. He just does not always know how to do it right. And now neither of them seems to know.

Bethany comes in the front door of the ER, all business, walking fast. It’s a disaster, somehow, seeing her this way, seeing her here—though lately it’s a disaster seeing her almost anywhere. She aims straight for the nurses’ station, says something to them.
Are you family?
he hears a nurse ask.

“Yes,” she says, turning around to look at Jack. “I’m his sister.” Smart Beth. The woman gets up and disappears through the same doors Jack’s woman did, and Beth comes over. She squats down next to Hendrick, who has found a squeak in the arc of the vending machine door. She says, “Hey, buddy.” Hen says nothing, squeaks the door. She looks at Jack. “Tennessee,” she says.

Hen stops. He says, “Memphis Murfreesboro Sevierville.”

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” Hen says.

“How are you?”

“I am fine.”

“Good,” she says.

“Good.” He goes back to the door. Another flash where he’s right there with them. Maybe, Jack’s starting to think—maybe—something’s shifting in there. Maybe the diet and the meds and the therapist parade are starting to jiggle things around. There have been moments this week when Jack can almost imagine having a conversation with him about, say, the merits of sending doors back and forth on their hinges. Maybe in Spanish.

“Hi,” Beth says to Jack.

“Nashville,” he says. “Knoxville.”

“Very good,” she says, sitting down next to him. “What’s left? Chattanooga?”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Chattanooga.” He’s hugely tired, all of a sudden, would maybe sell a few of his own toes for a bed, for crisp white hotel sheets.

She fishes around in her purse for a Tylenol, pops one in her mouth. Just one, no water, like always. “I’m not mad at you, by the way,” she says.

“For what?”

“For any of this,” she says. “I’ve thought about it, and I’m not mad.”

“Well, that’s great,” he says.

“You’re mad at me, though,” she says. “I wish you weren’t mad at me.”

“How do you want me to be?” he says.

“I don’t know,” she says. “All I said was I wish you weren’t mad.”

He doesn’t say anything. Announcements come on over the hospital’s PA: Please report to oncology, to pharmacy, to inpatient. He has told no one other than Butner and Ernesto about Beth leaving, about any of this. He has not told his parents. Her mother hasn’t been calling the house, so he wonders if maybe she knows. When his parents call, he tells them she’s fine, that she’s at the grocery or the gym. When anyone else calls, he lets the machine pick up. Her birthday is in August. Hen’s is, too. Something’s bound to shift by then. She’ll be back home, or maybe she’ll have decided she needs some rest of a different sort, will have checked herself into some facility somewhere where people sit around in groups, drawing pictures of their feelings. Or there is the chance—and he starts to get hold of this right there in the waiting room, feels for maybe the first time the full shape and size of what might have landed in his life—there is the chance that she will actually leave him for Terry fucking Canavan and his newly chainsawed leg.

A doctor comes out of the doors, walks across the room and stands in front of them. He’s tall. “Mrs. Canavan?”

A good-sized firework goes off in Jack’s head. “No,” she says. “Mrs. Lang. I’m his sister.”

“Mrs. Lang. My apologies.” He’s got a hint of an accent. Something European.

“It’s OK,” she says, and the doctor stands there. He’s not wearing a nametag.

“Would you like to speak in private?”

“No,” she says. “We’re fine. Jack works with Terry. They’re friends. He saw it happen.”

The doctor says, “Very well. I’m pleased to tell you that Mr. Canavan is doing fine. I’ve just finished stapling his leg.”

“Stapling?” Beth says.

“It’s a superior method to stitches. The healing time is quicker. Though there are a few stitches at each end of the wound.” His accent makes all this sound slightly more complicated than it might actually be. “There was damage to the bone,” he says, “but technically there is no fracture. When the cut begins to heal, we can determine whether or not he will need further measures.”

Beth’s nodding along to all of this. “So he’s OK?” she says. “He can walk?” Jack thinks,
But will he ever be able to play the piano again?

“He’ll be on crutches for at least a week, perhaps two,” the doctor says. “That is just for the wound. Again, as for the bone, we won’t know until later.” He smiles, holds his hands out, delivers his benediction. “These things take time.”

“Can we see him?” Beth asks.

“You may,” he says. “He is awake, but he is medicated. Just so you know.”

“So we know what?” Beth asks.

“So you know that he is on medication. He will be groggy.”

“Will he be here overnight?”

“Oh, no,” the doctor says, smiling. “Just another hour or two to make sure the bleeding is arrested. Then he may go home.”

“Oh,” says Beth. “Good.” It’s clear she had in mind staying the night here. The stoic woman in the waiting room, the late-night talk shows, the terrible vending machine coffee. That he’s hurt, but not quite hurt enough, feels like some odd victory.

“He is in room 271,” the doctor says. “I will be by once more to look at him. Everything went very well,” he says. “Very well.” And then he walks away. He doesn’t take them to room 271, doesn’t ask if they have questions. He leaves them there in the waiting room and they watch him go through the double doors, disappearing.

“Well,” Beth says.

“Yeah,” Jack says.

“It’s good he’s OK,” she says.

“It is.”

“It’s good the bone’s not broken. That’s what he said, right?”

“He said they’d have to see,” says Jack.

“But he said it wasn’t fractured.”

“Right.”

“So,” she says, and as she says it, as they’re standing there in the emergency room, he sees, clearly, that it was a mistake for him to come here at all, knows already what she’s getting ready to ask, knows, too, with what feels like relief, that he’s going to have to say no. That he’s going to be able to. He can’t be part of this. Not this way, not any longer. “Should we go back there and see him?” she says.

“No,” he says. “I don’t think so. At least not me.”

She looks at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I can’t go back there,” he says. “I don’t feel like it.” They’d be standing there together at the foot of Canavan’s bed, asking him if it hurt a lot. “I don’t want to do it,” he says.

“Why did you come here, then?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he tells her. His stock answer, and the truth most of the time. “Because I watched them put him on the ambulance. Because you just assumed I would. So I did.” He looks over at Hen, at the fish tank. There’s a treasure chest with bubbles coming up from it, a pirate who pops out of it from time to time. “And he’s OK,” he says. “The doctor said he’s OK, so I’m going.”

“You’re going.”

“Yes.”

“You came here just to sit in the waiting room.”

“I guess so.”

“He’s not OK. He has staples in his leg.”

“And you should go back there and see him,” Jack says. “You should go take care of him.”

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he says.

“Should I tell him you were here?”

“Sure,” he says. “Tell him whatever you like.” He’s suddenly in a pretty big hurry to go. He wants away from all this, from Beth, from Canavan, from Beth and Canavan. He wants the truck, wants his front porch with the cardboard taped over the broken window, wants the quiet and the noise of his street. And he feels untied, telling her this, feels freed, feels like somebody’s opening up a door and letting him out. He does not have to go back there, does not have to watch Beth minister to the gravely injured Terry Canavan, and so he’s not going to.