Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Page 8

  Neil says, “So you’re the triple-A miracle everyone’s talking about? That’s your dad?”

  “I guess so,” I say, and since they keep looking at me I do my best to explain my father’s surgery. I tell them how his aorta dilated to eight centimeters from the aneurysm yesterday and then burst, spilling pint after pint into his abdominal cavity. “It’s right along here,” I say, running my fingers down the center of my stomach. “I always thought the aorta was in the heart, but it’s more than that, apparently.” Neil and John nod as if they’ve been learning anatomy too. “It’s like the main river of your body.”

  “And they fixed it?” John shakes his head. “Son of a gun.”

  “Like an inner tube,” I say. Then we return our silent attention to the TV, where the constant flow of news reassures us that horrible things happen to everyone, all the time, all over the globe. Behind us, the coffee maker spurts and hisses, and a can of pop bounces down the chute of a Coke machine. I don’t tell them we’re waiting for my father’s kidneys to fail, or that his lungs are filling up and he’s hot with infection. I don’t tell them there are blood clots shooting around his body, that they have gone to his leg, that they could still go to his brain.

  On CNN, golf legend Payne Stewart’s private jet has gotten a mind of its own for some reason and flies ever northward, upward, into the cold, dry atmosphere above South Dakota. Two Air Force planes follow behind at a distance, ready to shoot it down if necessary. The announcer says it must be on autopilot, that the bodies inside are surely frozen by now. I picture their oxygen masks dangling from the ceiling, just out of reach.

  With the enormous duffel bag weighing him down, it takes my father many hours to descend the rocky sides of the terrace. It doesn’t seem right that he should have to escape a tropical resort, but it’s dream logic he’s following, and dream instinct tells him those hippies and their therapy talk are going to spoil any chances for fun on this vacation. As he climbs down he stops several times for air, wishing for a cigarette. By the time he reaches the beach it’s nearly dawn, and the monkeys are racing from tree to tree back into the forest. The little girl, still digging in the sand, squints across the beach at him. “Mister,” she calls, jumping up. Her face is filthy, and from the knees down she’s coated in sand. “Hey, Mister.”

  My father turns from her and starts walking up the beach. There has to be a town somewhere eventually, a normal resort, a cantina.

  “Hey, Mister.” She trots along in his wake.

  “No comprende.”

  “Where you going?”

  He stops and wipes his face with his hankie. “For smokes.” The duffel bag has grown larger; the strap is tearing the skin from his shoulder. “Where’s a store?”

  Now that she has his attention she smiles coyly. “A store?” She slaps her plastic shovel absentmindedly against her belly.

  “A store. Cantina.” He puts two fingers to his mouth as if to inhale. “Cigarettes. Cerveza.”

  “Want to see my moat?” She squints up at him. Her cheeks are full and sunburned. Her dark hair blows up around her head in all directions, like a fire.

  He sighs and shifts the bag to his other shoulder. The contents are heavy and jagged as bricks.

  “I’m in a hurry.” He starts walking again, faster, focusing on the sand. Dozens of iguanas scramble out of his path.

  “I dug it special for you.” Her voice comes at him from all sides, otherworldly.

  He takes off. She struggles to keep up with him, diving for his ankle.

  The bag digs into his other shoulder. “Fuck off!” he shouts, kicking loose of her easily. As her body flies through the air it shrinks smaller and smaller, receding like a hummingbird, a fly, a gnat. She’s gone.

  With a shudder of revulsion he hurries away, hoping no one has seen this.

  My mother is going to the chapel for Mass and wants to leave him in my charge. “Visiting hours don’t apply,” the nurses say, “in cases like this.”

  “Everyone’s so nice here,” my mother says, genuinely charmed. She doesn’t seem to notice or care that they bend the rules only because they have no hope for us. Her mind has room for only this thought: He has lived twenty-four hours longer than anyone expected. And for this, for whatever slippery, back room deal she worked out with her God last night, she must pay tribute. “I’ll be right back, Tommy.” She kisses my father’s hand, smiles up at him, blinks, and wipes something off his forehead. Then she surveys the urine bag hanging under the bed and pushes aside the curtain to leave. “Talk to him,” she says. “They say he can hear us.”

  But I never could talk to him, never could hold his attention. To do so now, with him captive like this, would seem like cheating. And what would I say? “These antics of yours, will they end soon, will they ever?”

  My father has always been the loudest voice at the party, the luckiest man in the casino, the widest grin at every ruthless joke. He eats with abandon, drinks every day, and even after his bypass surgery last year continued to go through two cartons of cigarettes a month. In my twenty-six years I have seen how intoxicating he is to his friends and how savage he can be to the rest of the world. As the person who made him a father, I was born to the wrong side. The death of the party, I learned to sit quietly and watch.

  So I stand here obediently, feeling the heat rise off his body, wondering where the real Tom Kernes has gone. With its tangle of tubes, its whir of ventilation, this broken thing in front of me is more machine than man, yet still it sweats, it throws off energy. I extend my hands, palms out, over his belly.

  Would I say, “I search every man I meet for what you wouldn’t give me?”

  The nurse charges in, and I draw back. She wants to check on his legs, which are wrapped in long vinyl inflatable cuffs. A machine at the foot of the bed inflates them in sections, then releases, inflates, releases, pushing the blood up and down through his legs. She puts her stethoscope on the top of his right foot. “Hi Mr. Kernes!” she shouts, and I jump. “Just checking your feet!”

  Leave him be, I want to say to her, or he will make you sorry.

  “Yeah, this one is colder,” she says to me, tapping his left foot. He doesn’t wake or stir. She rolls in an ultrasound machine and rubs some gel on his left foot, then scans it for a pulse, for anything. There’s a blood clot in his thigh, they think, cutting off circulation. “Can you feel that?!” She slaps at his foot and shouts, “Mr. Kernes, can you feel that?”

  I glare at her. “It’s OK,” I say. “You can leave him be.”

  “Wake up! Mr. Kernes, come on!” she shouts.

  And it happens, his head stirs, his eyes open. He comes to life before us, a giant tied down. I shudder and step back, gripping the chair behind me. The machines wake up too, in a chorus of beeps. His blood pressure flashes impossible numbers: 213/165, 224/173, and he writhes, eyes searching. “You’re in the hospital, Tom,” the nurse shouts, nearly smiling, and I wish her dead. He blinks and gags, rips his head side to side. Where is my mother? Why can’t she take this from me?

  I level my gaze, fighting the urge to run. “It’s me, Dad.”

  His glance flickers wildly from her face to mine. I am no one, anyone to him. His arms are strapped down so he kicks, shifts his body.

  “I’m here, Dad. It’s Ellie,” I say. I put my hand on his arm and squeeze. His mouth gapes and clenches at the tubes down his throat, and I can feel the muscles knotting under my hand. I won’t cry here, never in front of him.

  The nurse unwraps his next dose calmly. I can see him straining against the pain, but even in his confusion he knows this is a weakness to be hidden. He turns his gaze to the fluorescent light over his head, blinking into it, gnawing fiercely on the ventilator tube, until the morphine hits. Then he brings his eyes back to mine for a moment of lazy, dazed blinking, and in that half a minute it seems he’s trying to remember me. Against my better judgment I find myself wishing all over again that he would see me, that he would linger on me. Instead he sinks dow
n into his dream world like a fish heading for dark waters. The nurse snaps off her gloves and leaves without saying anything.

  I sit down on the chair and press my palms to my eyes. I squeeze the sides of my head to keep things in. When I look up, a Mexican woman in pink scrubs is mopping the floor around me. “Don’t get up,” she says. “You’re all right.”

  I say, “This is my father.”

  She nods and smiles, then works her way gradually out of the room.

  I push down the bed railing and lean over it so my forehead touches his sweat-soaked sheets. “Hi Dad,” I say into the mattress. “It’s me. Hi.” I pause and search my brain. “It’s pretty outside,” I say at last. “The leaves are changing.”

  The machines hum and beep.

  And so I decide on a lullaby, something he always sang to me. “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me…”

  In the waiting room frail old Neil is making a scrapbook of press clippings, recording the news of the world for the wife he is losing. She has always been addicted to newspapers, and Neil is sure she’d hate to miss out on any developments. His sister-in-law is here too now, carrying her Bible everywhere, even to the bathroom. These are the last days; no one can really believe Neil’s wife will see another remission. But we can’t just do nothing in here.

  “How about this one?” I say, tearing out an article about the apartment bombings in Moscow.

  “She’ll like that,” Neil says. “Thanks.” His scrapbook has a page for each day of this stay, and the cover, when closed, rests at a forty-five degree angle.

  Scratching his goatee with hesitation, John hands him one about Al Gore and Bill Bradley in New Hampshire. “How’s this?”

  Neil nods and thanks him, but puts the clipping off to the side.

  “A Republican, eh? I’m sorry.” John’s smile astonishes me. Yesterday I heard him say brain damage to someone over the telephone. One moron in a pickup truck can steal half his wife’s brain and body, and he still thinks to tell my mother that her sweater matches her eyes.

  MSNBC interviews a man in New York who was trapped in the elevator of his office building all weekend with nothing but a roll of Life Savers and six cigarettes. They have set the camera up in his living room, because he’s too traumatized to leave the house now. He may file suit.

  Walter Payton dies.

  Shellfish are floating up in the Gulf of Mexico.

  I’m afraid to leave the bubble of this hospital, and I’m not the only one. John has borrowed his brother’s camper and parked it at the back of the parking lot so that he never has to go home.

  My father’s doctor wants to speak to us in his room. When we go in, the leg cuffs are off, and the doctor has drawn two lines on either side of my father’s left shin. “Put your hand here,” he says, but my mother backs away like a spooked animal.

  I step up and put my hand there on his leg. It is hard as a baseball bat.

  “It may be,” Dr. Lessario says, “that the muscles are just so swollen that they’re forming a kind of tourniquet here.” He runs his pen over the blonde hair on my father’s calf. “In which case we’ll just make two vertical incisions here to ease that pressure.” This is the best-case scenario; he offers it only to pretend there is hope. We believe him. The other possibility is that the tissue in his leg is already dead, is already poisoning the rest of his body.

  My mother folds her arms and nods, inhaling. They’ll be cutting away at him tomorrow.

  Cerveza.” My father raises his empty bottle. He is free of the hippie resort at last, and has found a reasonable spot on the beach, where people are laughing and eating. “Una más.”

  The waitress pulls a pen from her hair and nods without making eye contact. As she heads to the bar, he watches the back of her dress, the sway of her hips. When she opens the refrigerator, several bright green lizards rush out and scatter across the floor.

  At the next table three surfers and a shady local are playing poker. It is night inside the bar, smoky and dark; little white lights are strung along the tented ceiling. But there are no walls, and outside the sun is high, and the sand’s too hot to walk across. My father wipes his face with a coarse napkin. Somewhere out of sight a heavy metal can drops through the workings of a pop machine, and he’s thirsty. “Whew,” he says to the surfers. “It’s a son of a bitch out there.”

  They tilt the light over their table to shine it in my father’s face. “You want something?”

  “No.” He shrugs. “Christ.”

  “Just kidding,” the smallest surfer says. He looks no older than fourteen, but he has silver caps on his front teeth and a bowie knife in his lap. “You want to play?”

  They each have fifteen or twenty cards in their hands and car keys on the table.

  My father is the luckiest man he knows.

  “You got a car?” the tall one asks, pointing at the keys.

  “One better.” He pulls his chair to their table, working from a memory of something he maybe once had. “I’ve got an airplane.”

  Outside an old, dark-skinned woman in a pink outfit walks her cow along the beach, with a long rope tied around its neck. The weather is shifting; the wind kicks up and inflates the woman’s loose shirt like a sail.

  They cut off his leg today and put him on some new kind of sedatives so he won’t stir toward consciousness again for a while. While he slept, while he dreamed, they cut off his leg, and if he wakes up, we’re going to have to explain what we’ve done to him. At 2:00 a.m., unable to sleep, unable to keep my eyes for too long on this new shape of his, I go out to the parking lot because there’s supposed to be a meteor shower. But the lights everywhere make it too bright to see anything, so I go around to the back of the hospital, hoping for more darkness. I climb up on a cement retaining wall at the darkest part of the lot and nothing shines above me, but below me a ramp leads down to the dumpster area. They have different colored dumpsters for hazardous and non. They make a lot of garbage here each day, and I think, is it in there? Is it in that one, or in that one?

  “Hey risk taker,” John’s football-coach voice booms from the ground beneath me. “You ought to come down from there.”

  I can see his cigarette glowing in the night.

  He climbs up next to me and we sit hanging our knees over the cement wall without speaking. “Neil’s wife died.” John rubs his hands over his large stomach, smoothing his sweater down. “I thought you’d want to know.” Behind us, on the other side of a wooded patch, the cars rush down New Ballas Road, where even at this hour people have places to be in a hurry.

  I think of her scrapbook, of all the useless news clippings. “Oh.” I can’t find any words. “Oh, man.”

  He nods. “She fought hard.”

  “Yeah.” The pavement around the dumpsters is littered with scraps. I think of old Neil driving home alone, stopping at all the yellow lights in caution, pulling into his driveway and into his empty bed.

  “How’s Lorrie doing?” I ask.

  John shrugs, then pauses and shrugs again. “They say she’ll go to a regular room soon.”

  “That’s great news.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Do you not want to talk about it?”

  “Nope. Nope, I do.” The meteors have started bursting overhead, laughing down at us. “Today she pointed at me.”

  “Yeah? That’s good, right? That’s good.”

  He nods, then points at the dumpsters. “It stinks over here.” He lights another cigarette and looks skyward. “I could really go for a drink.”

  “I hear that.” The wind gusts through my hair, and a thought occurs to me. “Hey, wait. Come with me.”

  I pop the trunk of my parents’ car and shove my father’s golf bag aside. The sight of his paired-up golf shoes knocks all my breath out. I step back and shake the thought from my head, then push them deep into the recesses of the trunk. “Here.” I pull out a six-pack of Miller Lite. “My father’s stash.”

  “Lord ha
ve mercy,” John says. “Where’s that lady with the Bible?”

  We sit on the bumper of my father’s Cadillac and the beer goes right to our heads. When John was seventeen, he says, he inherited his grandmother’s ’67 Eldorado. “Sky blue,” he says. “Big as a house inside. Lorrie and me took it all the way to Alaska at ten miles to the gallon.”

  He tells me he’s afraid to drive his car now. It’s not the other people, he says; it’s not the common, easy fear of winding up beside or behind the wrong driver. It’s him, he says. It’s the thought that with one dumb slip of the hand he could kill someone. “Or worse.”

  I realize I’m staring at him, mouth gaping. I close it, look away. I understand.

  He shifts and shrugs. “What’s your dad like?”

  I would like to tell him that my father tucked me into bed at night and took me for bike rides. That he taught me to fish or smoke or mix drinks, that he knew my nightmares or at least my phone number. But he didn’t. I rub my eyes. “He liked to burn things.”

  John sets his beer down dramatically. “What?”

  I sip my beer through a smile and nod. I have what can be a funny story. “He burned up a car once.”

  “A car?”

  “Well, not to the ground or anything. But he tried. He would have liked to. It was a lemon.”

  John’s laughing now, so I tell him about the Ford Country Squire wagon with bad timing when I was eight, and the country road at sunset and the gas-soaked rags my father kept throwing on the burning carburetor. I tell him about the kind little man who pulled over and ran across the road with his fire extinguisher and how my father shoved him away and glared into the fire, declaring, “Just let it burn.”

  I don’t tell how I cowered against my mother in the ditch, crying, waiting for the explosion I feared was imminent. How I wished she would stand up and stop him. How when I asked her, years later, what had happened that day, she said, Nothing. What fire? She couldn’t remember a fire. And I knew then I was alone and she was not to be trusted. The station wagon? I don’t know. I think we sold it, she said. But my memory of that day in the ditch was firm: Her eyes were riveted on my father and those flames, which kept dying out anyway amid all that metal machinery. It must have thrilled her to know that a man that wild, that untamed, had chosen her and stayed so long beside her.