What Happened to Lani Garver (12 page)

If it's possible, I think, she started drinking too much because she cared too much. She would get all looped when I was sick, saying a couple of drinks helped her to sleep. Fine. But she'd be crashed out by nine o'clock, then wide awake at two. I would jump awake in the night, realizing she was standing right over top of me, like, breathing Old Sweat Sock right in my face. I would ask her what was wrong, and she'd say, "I just love you, that's all," and leave the room again. One time I heard her on the phone right after, and my dad was yelling at her. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I could overhear her sniffing, all "... sorry, Chad, I just have this overwhelming fear she's going to stop breathing..."

I felt like her stupor drinking was all my fault, though I still kept going home some weekends, for a while, because I missed her and the island. But it got to be too hard to watch, and my big hope was that she didn't drink so much while I was at my dad's. I stayed away entirely the last few months. It didn't help. She never went back to her old self. If I was sick again now, she might take an even bigger fall—turn from a night drunk into an all-day drunk. There didn't seem to be any way I could stay with her.

I could have elbowed Lani in the back and woken him up, but instead I sat there muttering curse after curse under my breath, because there was not much else to say about my choices.

I quit cursing when I fell hypnotized under the sky blue girders as we came onto the Ben Franklin Bridge. Those steel girders always had that mood-boosting effect on me. They reached so high that a few white, silky clouds wandered through the suspensions and touched the tips, which looked like steeples. It was such a contrast to Hackett's little drawbridges, which had to rise and back cars up for half a mile when any decent-sized boat passed into the bay.

All the islanders hated waiting in their cars when the Philadelphia people's beautiful yachts passed. The fish frat and their parents called huge yachts "fag hacks," and the wait for a toll bridge to go down "faggots on parade."

The water under the Ben Franklin was so far down that an enormous navy ship could pass underneath. And I looked ahead at the six lanes of traffic dotted with all sorts of blinking signs and lights.

It made me feel like the city was a bigger and better sort of "island" ... a magical place full of skyscrapers and other proof of how people thought harder and bigger here. I started feeling relieved that I was coming back. Maybe a cure for cancer had been discovered in Philadelphia just last week.

The waiting room of this real-life, no-pay clinic changed my mind about that. It was nothing like Children's Hospital, where I had done chemo, and I was freaked by the hullabaloo of people who looked like they had very big problems. Sick babies cried, methadone addicts twitched, pregnant teenagers sat stone-faced with toddlers running around their feet. There was an AIDS clinic within this clinic, and so beyond the serious-faced people, there was a silent majority of pale, unhealthy-looking adults, some so thin that their sad eyes took over their faces.

I stared at my feet most of the time, playing invisible patient.

And Lani, who had seemed like such a freak show in Hackett, kept running into people in there that he actually knew by name. Before I went off to get my blood taken, he had talked to a guy, then a pregnant girl who yackety-yacked in his ear like they had months to catch up on. Both conversations were long and made me feel more isolated.

He just kind of left me sitting there stewing for almost the whole hour. When they finally called me for blood testing, I felt so snubbed that I didn't even holler to him to go with me. Big comfort he was turning out to be.

I sat there in a stupor while they took my blood, trying to answer their questions with the least amount of words and not get all upset by them. I had already accepted the worst. Some Dr. Lowenstein came in, a woman, who looked busy and barely smiled at me. Last, a triage nurse appeared, because the first nurse had seen my butterfly and wanted to know about it.

"Could all this dizziness be caused from hitting your head?" she asked, pushing at the wound.

"No. I did that last night, and I've been dizzy for three weeks."

She kept playing with the butterfly and didn't look happy. "Butterflies work best when they're applied properly. Look ... you've got hair in it, and—Who did this to you? A blind person?"

Scott, the neurosurgeon.
"My boyfriend. I fell out of a moving car. We were trying to solve too many problems at once. It's not his fault."

"Whose fault is it?"

Mine. All I'd wanted to think about was kissing Scott.
"Don't lecture me, okay?"

"Kids..." She shook her head. "Did you bother cleaning it out? Butterflies don't work at all when they're covering an infection—"

"Excuse me. I know how to clean a wound," I busted in, but I could feel my bangs sticking up again, making me look like a horned toad. It was too much. I yanked the buttefly hard, thinking,
So long, hairs.
But it had been catching hairs all night and morning, and I ended up ripping the wound wide open again trying to twist and pull.

I was uttering curses as fresh blood dripped down my face, and the nurse's attitude eased up finally when I started to cry. "I just wanted to show you how clean it was! It was really, really clean!"

"I'm sure it was." She sounded serious and not sarcastic as she tried to squeeze the wound together with her fingers. "We would have probably ended up doing that anyway. You can't be walking around with a butterfly that's half in your hair. Now that you've reopened it, we'd better stitch it. Or you'll end up with a charming scar."

I sputtered and spit blood off my lips as she handed me a cold pack, saying, "I'll find a medic. Just try to stay calm."

She left me alone again with my on-fire wound and half my bangs hanging off a butterfly gripped in my bloody palm.
Lani's out there in the waiting room busy talking to everybody else ... This day cannot get worse,
I decided. I thought you could wait forever to get treated in a clinic this size, but a medic showed up fast. Less than five minutes after the nurse ran out, a huge African American medic yanked back the drape, asking, "You the dingle-wop that jumped out of a moving car last night?"

"That's me." I was too stressed to argue with him.

"You trying out for Deep Thinker of the Universe?"

"Don't beat me up. I'm kind of ... way tired."

"Then why don't you kids stay home some nights? You got a home?"

"Yes."

"You got a bed to sleep in?"

"Yes."

"Then you got more than most around here. What are you doin', bein' way tired?"

I told him the head wound was a sidebar and what the real problem was.

"Oooo, damn. Okay. You can be way tired."

I could see a syringe on the tray he carried in, and I shut my eyes until he'd shot my forehead full of some numbing agent. I hardly blinked, used to being stuck. He'd stayed quiet through that part, but then started in again. "You need to go out in the waiting room and find yourself a floating angel."

"A what?"

"They come with you on visits like these. They hold your hand and they tell you good stuff and make sense of this world so you realize it's not so bad—"

"Oh, I came with a friend. He's out there." I jerked my thumb toward the waiting room. "Thinks he's at a family reunion. Not much help."

"That's cuz he's a
friend.
Floating angels aren't friends; they're real angels. They're
real.
Didn't you see any of 'em out there?" His beaming smile flashed, and I gathered he was pulling my leg, the other option being that he was nuts. I decided to be polite and not hate myself more.

"Uh, no. What do they look like?"

"Like faggots."

My eyebrows shot up. I waited for him to laugh, but he was slick. He kept banging stuff around on his cart and whistling until I cracked up, and then he looked all surprised.

"What're you laughing at? There's nothing funny about that. Not if you got your common sense working. Angels don't have a gender. Remember that from church school?"

"I'm Protestant," I responded. "We've got the no-frills religion. No angels, no art, no saints, no Mary—"

"That's not Protestant. That's just white-people trash," he informed me. "Angels don't have a gender. So what they gonna look like?"

He kept staring like I was supposed to answer. Being that I hate examining tables, I switched to the stool that was supposed to be for him, thinking that would distract him. But he kept staring.

I finally said, "My mom watches
Oprah.
She says angels are people who do good deeds."

He slammed the needle and thread down on the tray.

"You
are
trying for Deep Thinker of the Universe. 'My mom watches
Oprah,
' therefore angels are people? Where do you go to school, so's they teach you logic like that?"

"Uh, the islands." I giggled.

"That explains a lot. Don't see too many floating angels down at the shore. Likely to get themselves killed, something. Too many rednecks."

I tried to will my grin off my face, but it wasn't working. So, I was a dingle-wop, white-trash Protestant, retard, redneck. Somehow it was worth it, to run into someone who could make my grin work. I decided to play back.

"So, if an angel is not a person, how do they get themselves killed by rednecks? I thought angels aren't supposed to die."

"Well, they're like the Good Lord, you know? They killed him, but he just jumped back up again when nobody was looking, see? Faked 'em all out."

I guessed I appreciated this medic's dedication to screwing up my pity party.

"So these angels look like ...
f-faggots.
" I shot a glance into the corridor, and he seemed to enjoy watching me smile over my own nerve.

"Yes. Floating angels, that is. There's all kinds of angels. You got your cherubs, what look like fat babies. Then there's big ones, fighter angels; they look like ... water towers or something.
Big.
You don't want to mess with them. Floating angels look like humans."

"Except they float."

He cleaned out the wound again, pressing on my forehead to see if it was numb. When I flinched, he glanced at his watch and sighed.

"They could float in the air if they wanted to, I suppose. But they're more modest than that. And they're way smarter than humans, so they'd rather outsmart them. They're called floaters because they float from person to person, you know? This one's in trouble, so they float here. They fix up that person's life, so they move over there. They float
around,
not up and down."

"Like a ... vagabond?"

"Yeah, 'cept they ain't dirty. Floating angels like to be in the shower."

I totally cracked up, but he just turned his back and started cleaning his scissors with an alcohol wipe. I felt my eyebrows shooting up and got an awful thought.
What if he's nuts? Should I let this guy sew up my face?

The curtain pulled back and Lani stared at me. "Couldn't find you."

"I've only been back here for half an hour," I couldn't resist saying. "Where have
you
been?"

"For the past fifteen minutes, I've been over at the research lab, making sure they can finish your blood work today, like they promised."

"Thanks, Dad. And before that?"

"Don't be jealous." He giggled like I was oh-so-touching, circled around behind me, and put his arms around my neck so we were cheek to cheek. "I've got other friends besides you."

Out flew: "I'm in a foul mood, so I might as well tell you. They look creepy."

"Maybe. But then, you sound bitchy."

"Gawd."

He giggled in my ear, and this enormous black guy giggled in my face. I was being taken apart. The medic started laying sutures in, but my forehead was pretty numb, and if I shut my eyes, all I could feel was pricks and tugs.

"Lani Garver. I'm trying to tell this good woman that she needs to find herself a floating angel. She won't believe me that they're real."

My eyes flashed open as I realized these two knew each other. I turned my eyes sideways to take in Lani's nose without moving my head. "Is there anybody here you
don't
know?"

"Yeah, lots of people. This is a luck-out job. I know Marcus, and you lucked out, Claire. Marcus has won Medic of the Year three years in a row. He won't even leave a scar." I felt better on hearing that news.

But I told Lani, "He's trying to get me to believe in that TV show
Touched by an Angel.
"

"That's not about any floating angel," Marcus said, reaching for the scissors. "I don't know
what
that is. Actors, or something. For one thing, there's two angels with catowees. Explain to me what angels are doing with catowees?" He laid down the scissors, spread his fingers like he was holding two invisible melons out from his chest. "What're they supposed to use them for? Angels don't make babies. They
like
babies, they just don't care about
making
them. If angels don't nurse babies, what're they doing with catowees? Dig?"

"They're like boys
and
girls." I sighed, thinking about my blood work.

"And I'm telling you ... there's a few out there in the waiting room any time, day or night. You ought to go find you one. Take the edge off you, missus. You're a sourpuss."

"Yeah, I know." I sighed again as Lani unwrapped his arms from my neck and started massaging my shoulders. It felt good. Not only was I worried about stuff way over my head, I was worried about little stuff, like Marcus covering the stitches with a small enough Band-Aid that I could make up something believable, in case my mother saw it. I knew I could pick the sutures out myself, later.

I eyed Marcus as he pressed a normal-sized Band-Aid to my forehead. He was wearing a surgical cap, but his hair swung out of it easily. He had hair like Michael Jackson. But he was muscular, reminding me of some of the earlier Motown singers. Between that hair and that kind of more-sensitive musician look, this nicely stacked Marcus resembled the creature he was talking about.