More Than Enough (4 page)

“We're going to work this out,” he said, looking at my mother and me. “This is not going to be a problem for us.”

When the nurse returned, he stood behind his desk. “I'm sorry. I'm afraid we're overbooked tonight and won't have room for you.”

“You're joking,” my father said.

“You'll have to go to General. We've already called them. They're expecting you.”

“Look at him,” my father said, standing up now and pointing at me. He was a full head shorter than Nurse Douglas and noticeably smaller. “He's in pain and you're asking us to drive across town!”

“We can't treat him here. We're full.”

“Horseshit,” my father said. “No one's here.” He pointed behind him at the waiting room. I noticed again that my father was wearing his flannel pajama top, that his Levi's were old and worn, that he was no match in any way for Nurse Douglas. “My son is in excruciating pain and your clinic is going to treat him.”

“I'm not. I'm not in that much pain,” I said. In fact, it hurt to say even those words. As I slowly stood up from my chair, I felt the muscles in my right side clench. But I wanted my father to lower his voice. I knew that the people in the waiting room were witnessing our humiliation, and I wanted to hurry out of that place.

“Mr. Parker,” Nurse Douglas said in a calm voice, “we have called General. They know you're on your way. They're expecting you.”

My mother gestured to me then, and we headed back to the waiting room. “Where are you going, Mary?” my father asked.

“To General,” she said.

“You stay right here,” he said. But we kept moving. “Jesus,” he said. In the waiting room, the few families and elderly couples pretended not to notice my father, who was yelling at the nurse again. “I've heard about this happening,” he was saying. “On the news, on TV, in the papers. But I can't believe you're doing this to us.”

Jenny had stretched out over two seats and was sleeping. “What's wrong?” she asked when my mother woke her.

“Put your coat on. We're leaving.”

“Where's Dad?” she asked. “What happened?”

“Shush,” my mother said.

Outside we waited for him in the car. It was completely dark now. The lighted windows of The Richmond Clinics were dim and blurred in the heavy snowfall. Sheets of white covered the parking lot and streets. “We're going to somehow have to drive in this,” my mother said. We knew that we might have to wait a while since in situations of personal injustice my father did not relent easily. He would argue with that large, bearded nurse until he had exhausted himself and his sense of moral outrage and injury. We'd all seen him do it before over less: parking tickets, a drink on a restaurant bill that he'd insisted he'd never ordered. Once, for a period of weeks in Boise, he'd stopped at the telephone company after picking Jenny and me up from school to argue with them about having disconnected our phone. We always stayed in the car and had no idea what he could have been saying to them since our case had been very simple; we hadn't paid the phone bill in months. My father was unemployed then, and we simply couldn't afford to pay it. Still, he would fight. He did not have our sense of shame, and I knew even as I sat in pain in the cold car that I would have to be patient.

“Do you want me to go scream him out of there?” my mother asked. “I will.”

“No,” I said. “I'm okay.” I knew she didn't want to go back in there any more than I did.

“You're not okay,” she said. She looked at her watch. “Your father is no good. No damn good.”

“Please don't say that,” I said, trying not to listen to her, trying to concentrate instead on the pain that was rising and falling inside me like a current now.

“Is your sister asleep?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said.

“When we're done taking care of you tonight, I'm leaving him.” She corrected herself. “We're leaving him. Jenny, you, and me.”

She had said this before and not yet done it. But every time she said it, I believed that she would do it. And I believed her now. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “We're going to finally do what we should have done a long time ago. No more dragging our feet.”

“You can't do that,” I said, because I didn't know what else to say.

“I'm not the one who can't pay for your arm,” she said. “I'm not the one who let our insurance lapse. I'm not the one who moved us out to this God-crazy city where the Mormons beat up my kids.” She was yelling, and Jenny moved a little and said a few indistinct words in her sleep, soft, dreamy, childlike utterances that made my mother's anger seem cruel and terribly adult. “What did she say?” my mother asked, worried that Jenny might have been awake and listening. As the younger sibling—skinny and girlish—Jenny was treated like a kid; my mother and I had an unspoken agreement that she should be protected, that she should know none of my mother's worries. But she had heard nothing. She was curled up on her side of the backseat, breathing rhythmically, steadily, still fast asleep.

“She said that she doesn't want you to leave.”

My mother actually smiled. “Stop that,” she said. “I don't want to smile. Don't make me smile.” She tried to recover her sense of rage. “We're leaving him. We're finally going to leave him.”

“My arm is killing me,” I said. “Would you please go in there and get him.” But when we looked out the window, he was already there—marching across the parking lot.

“Here comes our hero,” my mother said. Snow fell into the car when he sat down and a cold wind blew in on us.

“We're going to General,” he said, the fight and anger still in his voice. He turned around and looked at me. “Tomorrow I'm going to get us an attorney and I'm going to sue Nurse Douglas and The Richmond Clinics.” He looked out the windshield at the large battery of buildings, the hundreds of windows filled with distant light and glowing in the dark. “I'm going to sue them. Big time,” he said.

My mother took out a cigarette and lit it. “Steven and I have talked it over,” she said. “We're leaving you. Me and the kids.”

“I see,” he said, not seeming very surprised.

“Tonight,” she said.

“Steven?” my father said without turning around to look at me.

“What?”

“Are you going to leave me tonight?”

I didn't say anything for a while. “I don't know.”

“What?” he said.

“No. I'm not going to leave you.”

“And you, Jenny? Are you going to leave me?”

“She's asleep,” I said.

“Jenny,” he said. She moved a little.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

My father turned around in his seat and looked at me with what I thought was rage. For the first time I can remember, I expected him to hit me in the face, though he had never done so before. But then I saw in the gray shadows of the car that it was not rage he felt; it was confusion and maybe shame. “Please don't talk to me like that, son,” he said. He turned back around. “Okay,” he said in a calm voice, “if you're going to leave me, where do you plan to go?”

“A friend's house,” my mother said.

“A friend's house,” my father repeated. “You don't have any friends in Salt Lake.”

“Sure I do,” she said. We all knew that she didn't. We'd been there for only two months, and my parents were as friendless as Jenny and I. “Or a motel. We'll go to a motel.”

“How are you planning to pay for a motel?”

“Somehow,” my mother said, though it was obvious that she had already lost her case. It was obvious that we had all lost that day. I had been unable to fight off a fat Mormon boy. My father had been powerless against Nurse Douglas and The Richmond Clinics. And my mother could not choose to leave my father. We were the kind of people who lost. Every day we lost, and I was exhausted by losing and hated it.

“Please,” I said not very loudly in the dark backseat of the car. “My goddamn arm is killing me. Please take me to the hospital now.”

*   *   *

Salt Lake General was on the other side of town and would not be easy to reach in the blizzard. My father bent over the wheel and drove slowly, concentrating on the snow-covered road in front of him. We had an old Buick, which my father had bought from an elderly lady in Boise. A classic cream puff. But it had rear-wheel drive; and despite the sand bags my father had put in the trunk, it was fishtailing and sliding. We seemed to be the only car out in that weather. I held my arm and looked down cross streets for signs of anyone else. But I saw only the snow-covered shapes of parked automobiles. The glow from streetlamps passed in and out of the car so that I could see Jenny curled up beside me and sleeping. Dots of reflected light, filtered through the snow, fell over her. The pain had become familiar to me by then—a constant buzz that, now and then, when I breathed in too deeply, became suddenly piercing. “God,” I moaned once when my father hit a bump.

Jenny woke, sat up, and looked around her. “Can we talk about our house again?”

“Not now,” my father said.

“I'm scared,” she said.

“There's no reason to be scared,” he said. “No reason in the world. Lie down and go back to sleep, kiddo.” She did just that, curling into a tight ball and nudging her head into my leg and in seconds falling into a deep, steady sleep while I stayed awake with my pain and looked out the windows at the storm, afraid and knowing beyond a doubt that there was every reason in the world to be afraid. Once we were swept as if by a strong wind off the road, straddled the curb, and knocked over a short row of garbage cans before we were just as suddenly flung back onto the road. My mother screamed and held on to my father. “It's all right,” he said. “Nothing happened.” And he kept on driving as if in fact nothing had. My mother demanded that we get on the interstate, which she thought would be plowed. But after we had spun our wheels all the way up the on-ramp, we pulled onto a wide, laneless ribbon of snow as far as we could see. “Jesus,” my father said. “Where are the fucking plows?” For the first time that night, I heard fear in his voice, fear and disbelief. All the same, he kept on driving, if still more slowly now, and I tried to think of the house up the hill that wasn't ours, the bathroom across from my room, the long, hushed hallways, the indoor pool. But I couldn't hold on to that picture, I couldn't see a damn thing, and my mother had begun to panic. “We've got to stop,” she said.

“Stop where?” my father asked.

“We've got to get off this road and call the hospital and tell them to come get Steven.”

“Nobody's going to come get him,” my father said. He must have realized how much his statement had scared me since he now addressed me in the rearview mirror. “How you holding up?”

“Shitty,” I said. “I'm shitty.”

“Things will turn out just fine,” he said. “We're almost there.”

I knew then that the pain I suffered through was pain he had inflicted on me, and I hated him for it. “Why didn't you pay? Why didn't you pay the insurance?”

When he didn't respond, my mother said, “Would you please give your son an explanation.”

It seemed like a very long time before he finally said, “I'm sorry,” in a tone so full of misery and self-pity that I could no longer punish him.

Jenny sat up and said in a voice muted by whatever she had just been dreaming, “Why don't we believe in God?”

“Shush,” my mother said. “We're almost there. Go back to sleep now.” And Jenny, with her remarkable ability to obey, once again lay down and slept.

*   *   *

When we finally got to General, the parking lot was full and my father drove up to the emergency room entrance where, before he let us out, he turned around and looked at me. “When this is all done,” he said, “we're going to teach you how to fight. We'll get you lessons or training—whatever it takes. Next time this happens, you're going to pull that kid's arm out of joint.”

I was surprised at the anger in his voice, and for some reason I felt that I should say something. “Okay,” I said.

He took a large breath. “But right now we're going to have to change our plan. We're going to have to calm down and do what's best for ourselves. You with me?”

“Yes,” I said, though I didn't really understand him.

“Good. So who did this to you? What's his name?”

“No one,” I said. “I already told you, it was an accident. I was playing football.”

“I thought you said you were with me, Steven. Besides, we all know you don't play football.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Steven,” my father said.

“I know who did it.” Jenny sat up in her seat.

“No, you don't,” I said. I was pretty sure that she didn't. Jenny and I knew no one.

“I do! I do!” she said, as if she had a great deal to prove to all of us. “His name is Danny Olsen. He has one younger brother and three older sisters and lives up the hill from us on Honeycomb Drive.”

“That's not him,” I said, though from the tone of her voice, I could tell she had told the truth. “How do you know that?”

“I just do,” she said, smiling.

“What are you going to do?” I asked my father. “You can't call his house. You can't.”

My father had turned back around in his seat, and my mother got out and opened the door for me. “Let's go, Steven,” she said. I wanted to refuse to leave the car and fight my father and his plan. But as soon as my mother reached out to me and said, “Let's get you taken care of, kiddo,” I knew I'd do anything to stop the pain.

*   *   *

The emergency room at General was crowded and loud. The white linoleum floor was streaked with muddy, latticed shoe prints, and little yellow triangles placed at intervals said
CAUTION WET FLOORS
! Patients and their families sat in simple plastic chairs, the chrome legs of which screeched against the linoleum. Magazines lay on the floor, their pages torn where people had stepped on them. “I liked the other hospital better,” Jenny said. “Why didn't we stay there?” My mother sent Jenny to find a place for us to sit in the crowded reception area while we waited in a line with other injured people, at the head of which a policeman stood. Voices spoke to each other in the walkie-talkie on his belt.