The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (148 page)

“Better,” I said.

“You sure?” As he lifted the blanket and sheet to have a look, I raised my head. Looked down at my swollen, stapled leg, my purple eggplant of a foot. “Jesus, what a mess,” I said. Looked away and shuddered.

“Coulda been worse, man,” Miguel said. “Coulda been worse.”

According to Miguel, when the EMTs had arrived at 207 Gillette Street in response to Ruth Rood’s hysterical 911 call, they’d found me unconscious in the front yard, adrift on a pile of broken shutters. The medics made two incorrect assumptions: that I was Henry Rood and that the tumble I’d taken was the suicide attempt Mrs. Rood had been screaming about over the phone. My left leg was splayed beneath me; my foot was cocked at a right angle to where it should have been. My fibula had separated from its ball-and-socket joint, splintered, and was poking out of my leg. They had me sedated and were readying me for transport before someone finally deciphered Ruth Rood’s ranting about the attic, her husband, the gun he’d fired into his head.

I remembered the fall but not the landing. Flashes of the aftermath flickered back at me: a barking dog among the sidewalk gawkers, someone screaming bloody murder when they tried to take off my work boot. (Had the screamer been me?) I told Miguel I didn’t remember the pain. “That’s cause your brain acts like a circuit breaker,” he said. “When it gets too intense, a switch flips you unconscious.” He flipped his hand back and forth to demonstrate. “Computer this, computer that,” he said. “If you want high tech, give me the human body any day.”

Henry Rood had been pronounced dead on arrival at Shanley Memorial, Miguel said, although he’d probably died a second or two after he pulled the trigger. According to what Miguel’s friend had told him, the back half of Rood’s head was all over the wall and the floor. I arrived at Shanley shortly after Rood, I was told, in a
second
ambulance with a
second
trio of EMTs. Dr. William Spencer, chief of orthopedic surgery, was called away from a father-and-son golf tournament halfway across the state and arrived at Shanley somewhere around 6:00
P.M.
It was he who made the decision that my shattered foot and ankle and the broken and dislocated bones of my lower leg required reconstructive surgery right away. That night. The operation began shortly after seven and lasted until sometime after midnight, by which time fourteen bones and bone fragments had been rejoined with screws and plastics and two curved steel
plates. My leg had so much metal in it, Miguel said, it could probably conduct electricity.

I asked him how Mrs. Rood was doing—if he’d heard anything.

Miguel shrugged. “The funeral’s Monday. I seen it in the paper. Hey, you better excuse me for a minute. I gotta check on your buddy over there.” He tiptoed to the other side of the room and disappeared behind the drawn curtain.

When I closed my eyes, I saw Rood at the attic window, staring. He’d gone out angry, that was for sure. I’d read that someplace: when they leave that much of a mess behind, they’re getting even with the cleanup crew. Ruth, probably: he must have been evening some score with his poor, pickled wife. But why had he dragged
me
into it? Gone up there and given
me
the evil eye just before he did it? I started to shake, a little at first and then uncontrollably.

“Miguel? . . . Hey, Miguel?”

His head popped out from behind the curtain. “What’s the matter? You cold?” He told me he needed to check on a few things but that he could come back in a few minutes with another blanket. He left the room.

I closed my eyes and tried to unsee Rood. Wandered back, instead, to my morphine nightmare. The monkey, the cedar tree. . . . I’d strangled my own brother, for Christ’s sake: morphine or no morphine, what kind of a sick son of a bitch would dream up something like
that
? A wave of nausea passed through me. I grabbed for the plastic tray on my bedstand and missed, retching bile and melted popsicle all over the front of me.

When Miguel came back, he cleaned up the mess and changed my johnny. “How you doing now?” he said. “You feel better now?”

I managed a weak smile. “Can you . . . Are you real busy?”

“What do you need, man?”

“I was . . . I was wondering if you could sit with me. Stay with me for a while. I’m just . . . I . . .”

“Yeah, all right,” he said. “It’s a pretty slow night. I guess I can swing that.” He sat beside my bed.

“What . . . what day is it, anyway?” I asked. “I don’t even know what
day
it is.”

“It’s Saturday,” he said. He craned his neck around to see the clock in the corridor. “1:35
A.M.
”

“Saturday? How can it be Saturday?”

“Because yesterday was Friday, man. You been in and out of it for a couple days now. More out than in, to tell you the truth. That first night you came in here, you were one of the most out-of-it dudes I ever seen at this place. Kept trying to get off the bed, yank out your IV. That would have been something, huh? You getting out of bed and trying to walk on
that
foot? Between the surgery and the Percoset and then the morphine drip, you were—”

It began to sink in: I had never made it to Thomas’s hearing. I’d blown it for my brother. “What . . . what’s the date?”

“The date? Today? November the third.”

I saw Thomas, the bag over his head. I grabbed hold of the bed railings and tried to raise myself up. “I’ve got to use the phone,” I said. “
Please.
I’ve got to find out what happened to him.”

He looked at me as if I were hallucinating again. “What happened to who?”

“My brother. Did you hear anything? About what happened to him?”

Miguel shrugged. “I heard about your truck. I didn’t hear nothing about your brother. Why? What’s the matter with him?”

I told him it was too complicated to go into—that I just needed to make a call.

“Who you going to call at one-thirty in the morning, man? Look, you’re a little disorientated, that’s all. It happens when you been laying in bed for two, three days. You call somebody this time a night, they’re gonna come down here and bust your
other
foot. You ain’t thinking, man. You got to wait till morning.”

Before, I might have balked. Might have jumped all over him. But I had nothing left to fight with. I felt helpless, overwhelmed. I burst into tears.

“Hey,
hombre
,” Miguel said. “Come on. Everything’s going to be
okay. It’s the morphine.” He reached over and took my hand. I could call whoever I wanted in the morning, he promised. If he was still on, he’d dial the number for me himself. He held my hand until the shaking subsided.

Miguel said he had worked a double shift the night before. Had met my family. He asked if my brother was the tall guy who’d been here with my father and my wife.

He’d visited me? Thomas? Had they released him, then?

“Did he . . . We’re twins,” I said. “Did he look like me?”

Miguel shrugged. “This guy was tall, a little on the stocky side. He had dark hair like you, but I wouldn’t say he
looked
like you. He kept talking about how he was going to be in some movie.”

I closed my eyes. “That’s my friend,” I said. “Leo.”

Had he just said my wife had been there? I had no recollection of visitors.

“I seen that guy
some
place. I just can’t remember where. Is he
really
going to be in a movie, or was he just b-s-ing me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My . . . You said my wife was here?”

He nodded, his face breaking into a grin. “Hey, if you don’t mind my saying so, that’s one fine-looking woman you got there. And you and her got a kid on the way, right? Beginning of May? She was telling me all about it.”

Joy. It was Joy who’d been here. Not Dessa.

“Hey, just think: by the time your kid gets out of the oven, you’ll be back on your feet, running around good as new. Changing diapers and everything.”

I closed my eyes again. Suppressed another shudder.

“Me and my wife just had a kid last month,” he said. “Our third. Plus I got a daughter from my first marriage. Blanca. Four kids in all. Blanca’s nineteen already. I can’t even believe it sometimes.” He took out his wallet and showed me their pictures.

A kid in the oven . . .

“Hey, come on, buddy,” Miguel said. “You gotta think positive. Look. That’s my wife right there.” His thumb tapped a stocky, long-haired brunette at the center of a family portrait. Even through the
blear of my tears, I was taken by the directness of her gaze back at the camera. At me. I mumbled something about her being a nice-looking woman, too. “Yeah, and she don’t take no crap from nobody, either. Me, especially. She’s three-quarters French Canadian and one-quarter Wequonnoc. You don’t mess with that mix. Know what I’m saying?”

I handed his pictures back. Blew my nose. Cleared my throat. “Married to a Wequonnoc, huh?” I said. “Once the big casino goes in, you’ll probably have to quit nursing to stay home and count all your money.”

He laughed. “Hey, I like the way you think, man. Maybe in a few years, you might be looking at the Puerto Rican Donald Trump. Who knows, right?”

There was a lull for the next few minutes. The intermittent whir of the IV machine, the sound of snoring across the room, behind the curtain.

“She’s my girlfriend,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“She’s my girlfriend. Joy. She’s not my wife.”

“Yeah? Well, if you two are having a kid together, it’s the same difference. You and her got married as soon as that test said ‘positive,’ know what I’m saying? This your first?”

We lost eye contact. “
Her
first,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I . . . had another kid. A daughter.”

“Sounds like you don’t see her anymore.”

I shook my head.

“That’s gotta be tough, man. Not being able to see your kid. That’s one thing my ex and I did right. We worked it out so I saw Blanca every weekend. It was worth it, too, because she turned out good. She’s studying to be a legal secretary. . . . So where’s your daughter at? She live in another state?”

“She’s dead.”

It stopped him for a minute. I didn’t usually come clean like that—unload on people about Angela. But I was too tired to keep up the front.

“Wow, that’s tough, man,” Miguel said. “Ain’t nothing tougher than that. . . . But, hey, now you got this new one coming, right? You gotta think positive. And I mean it—she’s a very good-looking woman, your girlfriend. I wouldn’t mind checking out of the hospital and going home to
that
myself, you know? I don’t mean no disrespect.”

“Was there . . . Did anyone else visit me?”

“Anyone else?” He shook his head. “Not on my shift. Not that I seen, anyway. Just your girlfriend and your father and that other guy—the movie star.”

The Three Rivers State Hospital switchboard answered promptly at 7
A.M.
and transferred my call to the security station at Hatch, Unit Two. No, the guard who answered said, they weren’t authorized to give out patient information over the phone. No, he could
not
give me Lisa Sheffer’s home phone number, even if it
was
an emergency. The best he could do was try to contact her and give her my message.

There was no answer at Ray’s. And when I called home, all I got was the sound of my own voice, yapping about free estimates, satisfaction guaranteed. Five minutes later, the phone rang.

“Dominick?” Sheffer said. “How
are
you? When I found out what happened, I was like, ‘Oh, my
god
.’”

I asked her if they’d postponed the hearing.

There was a pause. “Look, you know what?” she said. “Why don’t I come see you? I think it would be better if we went over all this in person. You feeling well enough for visitors?”

“Just
tell
me,” I said. “Did they postpone it or go ahead with it?”

“They went ahead.”

“Where is he?”

“Where is he? Now? He’s at Hatch, Dominick. Look, let me just make sure my friend can watch Jesse for an hour or so, and I’ll get there as soon as I can. Okay?”

I got the phone back on the cradle, but dropped the whole damn thing trying to get it back on the nightstand. Tried unsuccessfully to grab it by the cord and pull. When I looked over at the other bed,
I saw my roommate—lying on his side, awake, watching me. “You want me to get that for you?” he said.

Getting out of bed, he let go a long, rumbling fart. “Whoops. ‘Scuse
me
,” he said. His slippers scuffed across the room. “One of the side effects of this diet they started me on. Gives me terrible gas.”

He picked up the phone. Stood there, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Nice to see you back among the living,” he said. He was about fifty or so—gray hair, beard, beer gut under his cinched bathrobe. Go back to your bed, I felt like saying. I don’t want to socialize. Leave me alone.

He looked down at my uncovered leg, my foot. “Ooh, baby, that’s gotta smart,” he said. “How’s it feel?”

I shrugged. “Not bad. I guess they got me pretty well doped up.”

“Yeah, well . . . How else you gonna get through it, right? . . . They were telling me about it—the nurses—when you came in a couple days ago. Took quite a tumble, huh?”

“So I hear.”

“I’m in here with a bum gut,” he said. “Bleeding ulcer.” He tapped his belly with his fist. “They think they got it under control, though. They just want to watch me through the weekend. I’m probably checking out on Monday.”

“Uh-huh. Good.” I closed my eyes. Listened to him scuff back to bed.

Why couldn’t Sheffer have just told me over the phone what had happened? Because it was
bad
news, that was why. Break it gently to the poor gimp. . . .

Bleeding Ulcer over there was getting out when? Monday? How long was
I
going to be stuck in here? And how long was I going to be out of commission once I
did
get out? I needed to talk to that surgeon. Doctor . . . ? Jesus, the guy had operated on me for five hours and I couldn’t even remember his name. Couldn’t even picture him. And I’d probably have to wait until Monday to talk to him, too; I doubted chief surgeons showed their faces on the weekend.