Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift (23 page)

“Drink up,” she says, and I do.

Every time I swallow, it hurts.

When I’m done, I say, “How did I break my ribs?”

“You drove into the back of a snowplow.”

“Is Kyle all right?”

“He’s fine. A little sore, but he wasn’t hurt.”

“Where is this?”

“St. Joseph Hospital in Denver.”

“Is Kyle all right?”

“Yes. I said he is.”

“How did you get here?”

“I drove. You left your phone and your medicine and I followed you.”

“You brought us here?”

“I brought Kyle here. The helicopter brought you.”

“Where’s Kyle?”

“He went to the bathroom. I told you that.”

“What happened?”

“I told you.”

“I’m sorry I lied.”

“Don’t lie to me ever again.”

“I’m sorry I lied.”

“Close your eyes, Edward.”

I close my eyes as Sheila Renfro tells me to do, and a new image fills my head. It’s my father in the Cadillac DTS that used to belong to him and now belongs to me. It’s midday and the sun is out, and my father is wearing sunglasses.

“Where shall we go, Teddy?” my father asks.

“You’re driving, Father,” I hear myself tell him.

“Damn right,” he says, and we’re off.

The dream blinks out of my head like a television being turned off. I open my eyes.

Sheila Renfro is stroking my forehead, pushing my hair back slowly and rhythmically, and she’s looking at me. She’s smiling at me.

When I wake up again, it is to the sound of multiple voices talking in my hospital room.

I open my eyes and wait for the adjustment to the light, for the retina and the iris and the rods and cones to do their jobs.

It’s Donna and Victor and Kyle and Sheila Renfro and a young man in a white shirt and a black tie.

“Hi,” I say. My ribs ache when I do.

My friends all jump as if they are surprised to hear my voice. Donna comes over and dips her head down to mine and kisses me on the cheek, and I feel suddenly warm. Sheila Renfro lingers behind her, watching. Victor shakes my hand gently; I think he sees me wince as I reach across my body with my right hand, and he spares me the vigorous shake I usually get from him. Kyle walks around to the other side of my bed, opposite the grown-ups, and says, “Hi, Edward.”

“Hi, Kyle.”

The young man in the white shirt steps forward.

“Hello, Mr. Stanton. I’m Dr. Ira Banning. Do you remember me?”

Even with all the activity in the room, some things are starting to return to me. I remember stopping for gas in Kit Carson, Colorado, after we left Sheila Renfro’s motel in haste, when I looked down at the gas gauge and realized we were nearly empty. I remember the storm that kicked up between Kit Carson and Limon, where we got onto Interstate 70 and headed for Denver. I remember the snow flying sideways across the windshield and I remember not being able to see. I remember growing impatient at our pace and deciding to drive through the swirling flurries, thinking I could get ahead of them. I remember pulling into the passing lane.

“I remember you, Dr. Banning,” I say.

I remember him because I remember not being able to breathe. I remember Kyle looking into my face and asking me what happened
and what was wrong. I remember another man—I don’t know where he came from—opening the door on my Cadillac DTS and saying “Oh, shit,” and running off. I remember gasping for breath and not making any words come out. I remember the other man coming back and saying, “They’re on the way, buddy, so just hold on.” He grabbed my hand and held it, and Kyle cried, and I couldn’t tell either of them that I couldn’t breathe.

I remember waking up, my back stiff on a board, staring into yellow lights. I remember Dr. Banning—not in a white shirt but in a blue smock like the one Donna wears when she goes to work—telling me that they needed to take some scans to see how badly I was hurt inside. I remember being able to talk at last and saying that I needed a drink.

“Soon,” the doctor said. “Let’s see what’s going on first.”

I remember waking up. I remember Sheila Renfro talking to me and telling me to close my eyes and stroking my hair.

I don’t remember anything else.

“What happened?” I ask.

“You drove into a snowplow,” Sheila Renfro says. “Remember how I told you that? You broke your ribs.”

“Three broken ribs on your left side, Mr. Stanton,” Dr. Banning says. “Probably from the seat belt when you crashed. Your lung got punctured. We fixed that. The ribs will take a couple of weeks, maybe a bit longer, but they will heal. You have a concussion. Do you understand what that means?”

“My brain got hurt.”

“Yes, that’s it. You’re very lucky, all things considered.”

I turn to my friend. “Kyle, are you—”

“I’m fine,” he says.

He squats beside the bed and he sets his head on my right shoulder. Donna reaches across me to stop him, but I shake my
head to let her know it is all right, and my side hurts when I do. She pulls back. I pat Kyle on the head.

“What happened to my Cadillac DTS?”

Sheila Renfro makes a slashing motion across her throat, crossing her eyes and flopping her tongue out of her mouth. It’s very funny, and I laugh, which hurts really bad, and I yell out in pain. Donna looks annoyed with Sheila Renfro.

As the pain diminishes, I regain my breath. “How am I supposed to get back to Billings so I can fly to Texas?” I ask.

“I don’t want you on a plane for a while,” Dr. Banning says. “It puts a lot of stress on a body, that pressurization at thirty-five thousand feet. You’ve been through a trauma.”

“But I have to go to Texas on December twentieth. I’m going to see my mother.”

“You’re going to be here for a couple of days yet,” the doctor says.

“Edward,” Donna says, “don’t you think maybe you should just concentrate on getting better?”

I have to concede that Donna is a very logical woman and that she’s probably correct about this. And yet I am disappointed, because I was looking forward to going to Texas and seeing the Dallas Cowboys play in their new stadium.

“Does my mother know I’m in the hospital?” I ask.

Sheila Renfro holds out my bitchin’ iPhone. “She’s waiting for you to call,” she says.

I have an audience as I make the call to my mother, with Kyle holding the bitchin’ iPhone to my ear so I don’t have to lift my arms and aggravate my broken ribs. It’s not a fun phone call. Not
too many phone calls are fun; I don’t like to talk on the phone. This one is especially difficult. I’m happy to hear my mother’s voice, but almost immediately she begins crying and telling me that her world would end if something bad happened to me, and that I must be more careful.

“Stop crying,” I say, and that makes her cry even more. I look helplessly at Donna, and she’s crying. I look at Sheila Renfro, and she’s not crying. She’s just watching me. Her look is intense, as if something bad will happen if she lets me out of her sight. I guess that’s reasonable, even if it’s not practical. Once I was out of her sight and out of her motel, something bad did happen to me.

I assure my mother that I will be careful and I apologize to her that I will be unable to make it to Texas for Christmas or to see the Dallas Cowboys.

“You just don’t worry about that,” she says. “When you’re well, you can come down. Or I’ll come see you.”

“My car is destroyed, Mother. How am I supposed to get back to Billings?”

“I will call Jay. He’ll make sure you have a car when the time comes.”

“Thank you, Mother. I will see you soon, I hope.” Hope is all I have in this instance. It’s not much.

“I love you, Son.”

I look around the room at everybody watching me. Only the doctor cleared out of the room. I don’t like to say things like “I love you” in front of an audience. Or at all.

“Yes, Mother, I know.”

“Good-bye,” she says.

“Good-bye.”

She hangs up. I’m glad that’s over with.

Everybody stays in the room with me. I ask Sheila Renfro to track down my watch, which is set to the precise second, because the analog clock on the wall is the very definition of unreliable, and it begins to irritate me. We watch an episode of a show called
Everybody Loves Raymond
, which turns out to be funny even with the wildly overblown title. I highly doubt that there is anyone in the world whom everybody loves. I think even the unassailably wonderful people in the world probably have someone who doesn’t like them. My father, for instance, often made jokes about Mother Teresa. (One I remember him telling: “Why did Mother Teresa stop eating buffalo wings? Because she kept dipping the chicken into the lepers’ backs instead of the blue cheese dressing.” To be honest, I’m not even sure what that means.) I am far from a perfect person—I am rude and self-absorbed, and Dr. Buckley would be happy to say so—but one thing I try not to do is make fun of people. When I was a boy, and even now, I was often made fun of, and it’s hurtful. I’ve learned to forgive my father for many of the things he did, and it’s not my place to stick up for Mother Teresa. Still, I think he was wrong to say those things. I don’t know if I believe in God. Believing in God requires faith, and faith is difficult for me. But just the same, I would be inclined to not make fun of Mother Teresa, because if there is a God—especially the Judeo-Christian God—Mother Teresa has a lot more standing than my father does.

Leaving God out of it, I think that if someone who dedicates her life to caring for the poor and the sick can be an object of derision (I love the word “derision”), what chance do the rest of us have?

At 6:31 p.m., after the program ends, Donna and Victor say they’re leaving, that they will be flying home to Boise with Kyle the next morning. Donna gives me another kiss, and this time Sheila Renfro looks angry, which flummoxes me. Victor again shakes my hand, gently, which I appreciate in my painful state.

The three of them are heading for the door when I say, “Can everybody else wait in the hall while I talk to Kyle?”

Kyle knows where I stand. I want him to tell his mother and father what he told me.

“But what if she hates me?” he says.

I’m pulled between the competing thoughts of how silly it is that Kyle would fear such a thing and a gentler realization that Dr. Buckley would be apt to make. She told me once that some people hold great shame for things that aren’t their fault, awful things that were done to them by people who were stronger or more powerful than they were. Shame isn’t something I’ve known in my life. Frustration, anger, wanting to be dead—I have known all of those things. But shame is difficult for me to understand. Dr. Buckley said it’s a horribly destructive force, perhaps the most destructive force she has ever encountered.