My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (35 page)

The next morning, when we arrived with coffee to resume our vigil, Steph's parents were not in the waiting area, and as soon as the woman in the pink hair saw my mother, she ran up, earnest and smiling, acting in an uncomfortable infantile sort of shame dance, looking down, and said, “I just wanted to say I was sorry for yesterday,” and of course, my response was to say, “Oh, no, no, no; don't think anything of it,” but I looked instead at my mother and her face was once again hard, unyielding, and she said, “You know better than that. You know how to behave yourself better when someone is trying to help you,” and it was just stunning, in that room for that second, and my mother grew ten feet tall in my estimation.

So it was with a tremendous amount of fear and regret that I was letting her go that morning, on her flight back to Houston. I was going to be on my own now, with Steph's family, in all this craziness.

I wanted to go home with her.

“You can't,” she said to me. “You know you have to stay here.”

“I know,” I said.

“They need you to help,” she said.

“I know,” I agreed.

“You're my son,” she said. “You can do this.”

I put my head into her shoulder, a full head shorter than I was, and I cried and hugged her before she left.

Sarah had given us a lift to the airport that morning and watched all this from the driver's seat. She watched my hulking, 220-pound form break down into a boy needing his mother, and she mentions it to me still, says I can revert to that more quickly than anyone she's ever seen.

The next morning, there was a definite sea change in the routine, palpable from the minute I entered alone for the first time, carrying just three cups of coffee. This was the long haul, and it was just Steph's parents and me now. It wasn't anything immediate or overt, but I could tell there was something going on. Very likely, it originated from a symptom of stress they were experiencing between themselves—they were, after all, nearly in month two of hospital stays, since they started with Harold's hospitalization, then Steph's mother's, and now Steph—and though I was trying to be as helpful as possible, there are just some things you can't handle from a waiting room. In fact, my friend Andrew built up a small laptop and lent it to Harold so he could continue handling his e-mail and business from the waiting room, and as helpful as that was, I'm sure Harold was stressed from feeling unproductive.

Personally, I was thanking God that I had the job I did, and I was able to do most of my management and planning and design from the waiting room, using the hospital's Wi-Fi. The first production cycle after Steph's accident, something like three days after, I was absolutely incapable of concentrating on my layout and design, would work for blocks of ten or eight minutes, then lie down next to my desk for five while my mother watched helplessly from the couch and encouraged me to get up, get back to it. I just couldn't. My mind was coming apart with anxiety and fatigue, but I also knew that I couldn't take the time off because if I did, if someone else saw all the scripts and shortcuts I had made for my production role, I'd lose my job. As a graphic designer, keeping your solutions opaque is a part of your worth; when upper management sees how “easy” it is to do your job, they undervalue it and try to replace you. It was a lesson I'd learned twice before.

So it was with a great sense of self-preservation that I would climb back into my chair and treat jpegs with my Photoshop scripts, lay in type and apply styles, cut and paste something from a previous issue, do everything I could until I was able to meet my deadline and head back to the waiting room, to wait.

When it was just us three, Steph's mother made it a point that first morning to sit me down and give me a speech about how close their family was, and some other important errata that was completely lost on me because I kept focusing more on her contextual meanings and her overly saccharine delivery, rather than her message, and when she finished, I didn't understand why I was feeling like I'd just been attacked, but I knew that I had. Though I wasn't sure why.

I said something like, “You have the most sweetened way of saying the most god-awful things,” and both of her parents stood up and walked away, and for a moment I thought Harold was going to hit me, and I thought,
Yup, this is how it should end; I get hit by him, too
, but I wasn't, and after a while things cooled down, and we each sat at opposite sides of the room.

While I was in the ICU with Steph that afternoon, she received a visitor from work, and for a moment I was confused as to who this person was, when I finally remembered Steph's last phone call about the Japanese PhD candidate, and suddenly here she was with a handmade card that had been written with exquisite care, a small orchid, cookies, and a Hello Kitty doll. I'd been sitting by Steph's side, studying her head and fractures a bit more and noticing that her head was indeed growing back into a regular shape, when I noticed the Japanese woman looking a bit lost, at the same time Steph's mother did, and instead of running interference—if Steph had wanted
anyone
bounced from ICU, it would have been her last enemy—I decided to see how her mother would handle it, from a sense of devilish enjoyment, from being, as my dad would call me,
cabrón
.

The Japanese woman's English was slow, halting, and apologetic, and Steph's mother decided right then she knew how to navigate this one. She started speaking to the PhD student like she was a kindergartener in her class back in Yankeeland.

“I have VISITED your country ONCE!” she said with a big smile, while pointing out the window, I think toward the east. “Thank YOU for the GIFTS!” Here she held each one up for inspection. “These COOKIES look DELICIOUS!” Here she rubbed her stomach in circles. “Are you FRIENDS with Stephanie?” She pointed with exaggeration at Stephanie, still in a coma. “She is still VERY SICK,” she said, and made the “sleeping” hand signal with a pouty face. “I will tell her,” she said, using her hand like a puppet mouthing words, “that her JAPANESE friend was here! Thank you!” By this point, the woman was in tears, though I don't think it was from the moving acceptance speech, but much more from the agony she had witnessed in the coma chair, suffered by the person she'd argued with about protocol two weeks before. She had obviously been feeling guilty about it. So much so that she bought a coveted Hello Kitty doll from Japan; those aren't cheap.

Back in the waiting room, Steph's mother looked over the booty and decided she didn't want the doll and handed it to me, said I should take it. She did that, often; people would come in with food or gifts or flowers, and she'd thank them gratefully like fallen Southern gentry, and after they'd gone, she'd regift them to others or to me, and I was developing quite a pile of food at home that I'd never eat, lots of plastic Tupperware containers growing in my sink.

With my mother gone and everyone else seeing to their own responsibilities, I was left alone in dealing with her parents, and I was doing what I could to keep it together, but I was still suffering from some severe anxiety and guilt. I had seen a doctor while my mother was there and she had been astonished at my blood pressure at the intake. It was something like 190/110, and I hadn't been taking anything or wasn't even hungover. That was normal for me, during this time: That was my level of stress. With my mother in the room, I explained to the doctor that I was going through an incredibly stressful event and that I had people counting on me, and that I was also an alcoholic who binge drank in periods of stress. When I admitted to being an alcoholic, I caught my mother's eyes, and she looked at me with a combination of sadness and mild disapproval, almost like she was saying, “You're not supposed to talk about that,” or maybe even, “How did you end up so weak, like your father?” But mostly, it was sadness, I think. I hope.

The doctor listened to me, nodded, and then handed me a prescription for Xanax.

Great
, I thought; I'd heard of these.

Although Dan and I had been talking again, I didn't think of calling him and asking him about the Xanax, or how it could react with alcohol. Dan would always give me the real skinny on this sort of thing, but for some reason, I just didn't think this one through, so I was taking the Xanax as prescribed, and then not.

Back at the hospital, Steph's parents had developed a habit of moving from living situation to living situation in places across the city that were not amenable to easy public access to Harborview Hospital. I couldn't understand their choices after I'd had Andrew's wife, who developed websites for a travel agency, find them a number of low-cost options that were on bus lines or a ten-dollar cab fare away. I offered my own apartment. I pointed out the best and safest neighborhoods. I explained and pointed using maps. Harold loved maps. For reasons known only to them, they ended up in West Seattle, or Northgate, and a huge part of my responsibility became chauffeuring them from the hospital to home, usually at rush hour.

My routine basically settled into getting to the hospital around 8:00 a.m. bearing coffees, sitting with Steph's mother and listening to the latest test results or procedures, seeing if I could do anything else, visiting with Steph for a while and telling her, jokingly, that I was going to force her to deal with my parents on her own when she woke up, then seeing if there were any developments otherwise, finding lunch, and sitting around discussing things in vaguely optimistic terms. Then around 3:00 or so, her parents would begin closing down for the day, and I'd drive them to whatever part of town they were staying in, then I'd drive by a liquor store and buy a quart of gin and go to my empty apartment and slowly come apart, watching something on Netflix. Shows on Netflix became my only constants, my television friends who were the furthest thing from the ICU at Harborview.

I'd come wide awake around 6:00 a.m., after sleeping about four hours, take a hot shower, and then do it again.

This is how I was keeping it together, and it wasn't working.

One afternoon, I saw a tall, elegant priest making his way through the waiting room into the ICU and decided to ambush him on his way back. I stood in front of him and engaged him in conversation long enough that he had to sit down and talk to me, and out of the corner of my eye, I watched as both of Steph's parent were stricken with a shocked look of disquiet (“How
CATHOLIC
!”) as I sat down to explain to the kneeler that I had long lost any sense of comfort from the church, that I didn't agree with the institution and its practices for human management with reproductive issues and its subjugation of women, certainly had issues with its unwillingness to punish pederastic priests and its behavior through World War II, but
right now, right here, this right here is where you are supposed to provide a place for me, as a Catholic, lapsed or not. Isn't that what you Jesuits say? “Give us the boy until he's eight, and I'll show you the man?” Well, here's the man, Padre. Show me what I paid for, show me what my parents bought for all those Sundays
.

“And it's not because I believe in it,” I said to him, “but because I want something to believe in. There should be a safe place, shouldn't there?”

He agreed, began unpacking the Hail Mary for me like it was the Talmud, told me how it was a story about two women, one of them shunned for her choices to be an unmarried mother, the other not understanding she's been the vehicle for the largest social change in human history. He told me about their spiritual choices, broke the stanzas into smaller metaphysical meditations like something from John Donne while I told him that this was what I missed, this was what I needed: I needed somewhere to go, somewhere safe, and I didn't have anyplace like that, not any longer. There were no safe places, and could could could the Church give me that, now?

He said, “Listen, I'm right over here, at St. James Cathedral. Here's my card. When you're having these crises, come to the chapel and I'll talk to you; we can discuss this renewed desire you have to return to Mother Church.”