Find Me (8 page)

During my first week in the Hospital, my blood pressure was jumpy and I sweated rivers under my scrubs. I kept thinking about the time Ms. Neuman found out about me stealing from a neighborhood kid, the time I took a girl's red barrettes and lied about it and her mother called. “You can be any kind of person you want,” Ms. Neuman told me in her kitchen, kneeling in front of me, an unlit Virginia Slims behind her ear. “Why would you choose to be this?”

Which was exactly what I thought on my last birthday, standing in Produce, my skin dewy from the vegetable misters: Why did I choose to be this?

GOOD HEALTH IS CONTAGIOUS AND YOU HAVE CAUGHT IT,
the Pathologist says on the speakers, his latest meditation.

I turn on the TV. A show called
Mysteries of the Sea
is just starting on the Discovery Channel, the twins' favorite station. A woman stands on the deck of a white fishing boat with a navy blue hull, speaking into a walkie-talkie. I hear wind and static, a tumble of voices. The railing is dotted with orange lifesavers.

A scattering of birds in the sky. They cross over, white wings flapping, disappear from sight. The camera pulls away and for a moment the boat is just a spot on the water. A voiceover says it's spring in Las Tumbas, Cuba.

This woman is wearing a baseball cap that says
AHOY
and a blue jumpsuit and black boots, the laces pulled tight. On the deck, she discusses coordinates with her chief engineer. I hear official-sounding words like “dew point” and “barometric pressure.” The captain keeps her eyes on the water, even though there is nothing around them except dark, undulating waves.

She is slim, but her sleeves are cuffed and I can see the muscle in her arms. Her hair is an inky knot at the base of her neck. She points the walkie-talkie antenna at something off in the distance. The chief engineer nods.

This captain, she is striking, serious. The more I look at her, the more I can't stop looking.

I get on the floor, on my hands and knees. A primal feeling takes hold and I move closer to the TV on all fours. The paper lei swings from my neck. I get close to the screen, so close I can feel static on the tip of my nose.

There are things aging changes and things it preserves. It's like looking into a mirror and having my future self projected back at me. Still, it takes me the entire episode to believe what I am seeing.

 

8.

In an hour of TV, here is what I learn about my mother:

Her name is Beatrice Lurry. She is an underwater archaeologist, a member of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. A ship detective. She is the person who is called in after a ship has gone missing and the coast guard has failed in their pursuit. She has a special talent for searching.

A special talent for searching, for finding, but not for holding on. I am proof of that.

A Russian ship, named after an old film star, that vanished on its way to the Dominican Republic—recovered by my mother off the coast of Newfoundland. A cabin cruiser that disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico. That vessel had a unique gravity weight, was designed to be unsinkable, but my mother discovered that it did in fact sink, as did the yacht that went missing in the Indian Ocean, drowning its sixteen passengers.

Of course, it's not every day a ship goes missing. When she doesn't have a live case, she searches for the wrecks, the long lost—the cruise liner that disappeared in the Arctic Ocean a hundred years ago; the merchant vessel abandoned in the South Pacific in the fifties. The wreck that made her famous was found near the Wallabi islands: in the hold she uncovered a mass grave, the casualties of a mutiny.

She got her start on the wrecks, but it's the live cases she loves best, the urgency of the search.

In that hour of TV, I learn about her first expedition, when she was part of a maritime team looking for a steamship that sank in Lake Michigan a century ago, during a storm. They found the ship nearly intact, thanks to the freezing lake water. She was one of the technical divers, in charge of taking photos. She dove two hundred and fifty feet below the surface.

Once she was down that deep, she never wanted to leave.

I learn that she takes medication for migraines. When she is struck by one, she has to lie down in a dark room with a wet towel over her eyes. When she's not at sea, she lives on an island called Shadow Key, just beyond the coast of Key West. The only way to reach the island is by boat. There are images of a red houseboat with porthole windows docked in a still harbor. She can't sleep in a regular house, can't sleep in anything that doesn't float.

“Water is neutral,” my mother tells the camera. “It doesn't have wants.”

On this voyage, she has a live one:
The Estrella
, a freighter that vanished en route from Miami to Argentina, an episode filmed when a memory-destroying epidemic was still something that existed only in the apocalyptic corners of our imaginations or didn't exist at all.

The Estrella
was last spotted near Las Tumbas, in the Gulf of Mexico. When the vessel never reached its destination in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz, the cargo and the crew unaccounted for, including the captain's wife and teenage daughter, my mother got the call.

On the ship deck, she watches the sky and I notice the long grace of her neck. In the Common Room, I extend my neck, feel the muscles in my throat stretch, and search for resemblance. Midway through the episode, a storm blows through and the clouds shimmer with lightning.

During the storm, my mother works in the lower cabin, a tiny wood-paneled room. Black cords snake across the floor and around the metal legs of a desk and a chair. Graphs are tacked to the walls. A cot with a white pillow and a yellow blanket is pressed along one side of the room. A seaside painting hangs above it. In the center of the room, a marine radar beeps; a green circle flashes on the screen. My mother takes off her
AHOY
cap and shakes out her hair. Her roots have been bleached auburn by the sun. I see the familiar middle part, the high forehead. My inheritance.

How strange it is to watch her past become animated, to no longer wonder where and how her life was unfolding, but to know.

She sits hunched over a notebook. A circular clock, the hands shaped like oars, and a map of the Atlantic hang on the wall behind her. Points in the water have been marked with black pushpins. The clock slides back and forth as the boat rocks on the ocean. The low light brings out the shadows in her face and for a moment, that grass scent comes back to me. She switches on a tape recorder and starts talking about microbursts. I consider the way the start of a bad feeling feels, that little pop of dread—microburst, what a perfect name for that feeling, even though I know my mother is talking about things that don't have to do with the body but with the sea. Her voice is soft. There is the hint of something troubling her in the back of her throat. Her knuckles are red and splitting. Her fingernails are cut past the quick.

I wonder if she ever thinks about me. What she remembers. If she dreams of finding the captain's daughter alive and well, floating in a lifeboat in the middle of the sea.

*   *   *

As the weather gets colder, as the recovery progresses on the outside, Floor Groups four and six become harder to control. It starts when a patient from six, a young guy from California, has a dream. In the dream, he wakes in the night to find a Native American man standing at his bedside. His skin is crusted with dirt, like he's just been dug up from a grave. He's wearing a big headdress with feathers and tiny animal skulls. He leans over this patient and breathes breath as hot as death in his face and tells him to wake the fuck up.

“And I did,” this guy tells us during morning yoga, when we're all supposed to be in Child's Pose. “I woke up.”

Now this man is claiming Floor Groups four and six are doing more work than the other patients; he has become a representative. In a Community Meeting, he asks Dr. Bek if he has any idea what kind of crap the patients leave behind in the Dining Hall. Is he aware that under the tables they find crumpled paper napkins and plastic forks, the tines crusted with food, and corn niblets that have been smashed like bugs? Is he aware that microwaves leach the nutrition from our food? That cleaning microwaves three times a day could expose them to carcinogenic radiation?

“Don't we,” he says in the Common Room, his chest puffed under his scrubs, “deserve to simply enjoy a meal?”

“Perhaps you are familiar with the old Norwegian saying
‘Det kjem inkte steikte fuglar flugjande i mun'?
” Dr. Bek replies. “Or, ‘Birds do not fly into our mouths already roasted.'”

At dinner that night, this guy walks over to where Group three is sitting, picks up a tray, and throws it on the floor. Peas scatter like marbles. A roll slides under a table. A water glass overturns. The clatter echoes inside the Dining Hall. The patients drop their plastic forks and look toward the noise. I stop chewing. My teriyaki beef is a soft lump on my tongue. Dr. Bek and the nurses, who are always in the Dining Hall during meals but are never seen eating, stand along a wall, underneath the windows. They don't say anything. They don't move. They wait to see what will happen next.

He throws another tray. The patients from Groups four and six rise from their tables. They begin picking up trays and throwing them too—first their own, then others. The other Groups do not join in. There is an old Kansan saying that goes “Not our Floor Group, not our problem.”

They pull trays away from patients who are still eating. Limp green beans stick to the white linoleum like slugs. Ketchup splats across the floor. Under the lights it takes on the color and texture of blood. Louis and I watch from our table, frozen in our orange seats. The falling trays sound like a string of firecrackers detonating.

On my plate, there is a pile of mashed potatoes, molded into a little volcano and filled with peas. This is something Marcus and I used to do at Ms. Neuman's. In the Hospital, I find myself reverting back.

“I'm still hungry,” I call across the Dining Hall, holding the edges of my tray, but it doesn't do any good.

When they come for our trays, we don't resist. I let go of mine, and we watch the red rectangles rise from the table and crash against the floor.

Finally Groups four and six walk out of the Dining Hall, leaving behind a swamp of gooey red footprints. The staff doesn't move. They breathe with monstrous slowness. The trays stay on the floor. The microwaves go uncleaned.

That night, the nurses play
Carrie
in the Common Room. A girl with very long hair gets soaked in pig's blood at a high school dance and uses her paranormal powers to burn the school to the ground. In the dark of the Common Room, I find myself wishing for powers like that. The lights go out at the usual time. Two Groups have broken the rules, but nothing seems to have changed.

In the morning, the Dining Hall is somehow spotless and the patient from California is not at breakfast. No one in his Floor Group knows what's happened to him. He was there when his roommate went to sleep; he was gone when the roommate woke. The staff tells us nothing. I walk the hallways and the stairwells, looking, like a dog on the trail of a funny scent. Not our Floor Group, not our problem, but still I don't like the idea of people disappearing.

In three days, he's returned to us. At his first meal back, he sits by himself. He eats withered blueberries one at a time. He stacks trays. He snaps on cleaning gloves and fishes a green sponge from a bucket of water and wipes all the microwaves. He looks like himself, but acts like a different person—how can we be sure who he is? He never says anything about his dreams again.

*   *   *

In my next Internet Session, I sit down and go right to WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com. As I scroll through the names, I get hot and itchy and keep sending the cursor in the wrong direction. It's possible I will find my mother's name on the list and everything will go back to the way it was before.

My list of worst mothers includes mothers who drugged their daughters with heroin and taught them to shoplift and used them to make porn and sold them and poured hot sauce in their eyes and buried them in the woods. This a list I keep to remind myself that there are worse things than leaving.

I scroll down to the
l
's. I check three times. I do the
b
's too, just to be sure. Her name is not there. It is on another list, on the list for the living, that I find her.

*   *   *

One morning I wake later than usual, because no one has come for our examination. My mouth is dry and sour. Louis is still in bed, his white sheets tangled around his calves. I go into the hall, into the tunnel of fluorescence. The door to the twins' room is flung open and I see N5 swatting at their floor with a mop. Sam and Christopher are standing in the corner, barefoot, their pale toes curled like animal claws. Their floor is coated in water.

“What's going on?” I ask from the doorway.

“Our toilet is overflowing,” Sam says. He swallows, and the freckles jump around on his throat. “We don't know how to make it stop.”

I can make out N5's body, her human body, heaving inside the suit. The shield is fogged. I can barely see her eyes. She keeps pushing the mop around. When she notices me standing there, she tells me to go find N6, the other nurse assigned to our floor.

I wander down the hall, past the bright white walls. There's no one at the window, nothing but snow to see outside. I find N6 at the opposite end of the hallway, completing an exam.

“There's a flood,” I tell him. “In the twins' room.”

A patient, a gemologist from Santa Fe who knows the name of every kind of stone, sits on a narrow bed. Her bare feet are pressed against the floor and she's rubbing the crook of her arm, so I know N6 must have just taken her blood.