The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  “Call my wife.” He composed himself in the bed, smoothing his gown, folding his hands over his belly. “I’ll wait.”

  “Yes, you do that,” she said, and he couldn’t read her expression well enough to tell if she was mocking him or she truly intended to call Hattie.

  After she took her leave he went to work, peeling the electrodes from his chest. Their leads ran down his legs as well as his arms and he had a hard time figuring their source. He worked at the task until he was clean of all wires and electrodes. Then he set himself to the challenge of figuring out the IV that ran into his forearm. A simple-enough solution, he thought, if you had a head for mechanics. He worked at the tape until it was loose enough to peel up. Where the needle ran under his skin a bruise had formed, but little by little and without too much blood he was able to work out the needle and the tube. Clear fluid seeped onto the sheets near his hip, but he was free.

  A frantic beeping had erupted from the monitor. He tried to pull the thing toward the bed with the attached tubes so he could switch off the alarm but the angles were wrong. Then the door flew open and Nurse Jenny hurried in. “What’s the trouble? What’s going on?”

  “I’m leaving,” he said, matter-of-factly. He struggled to sit up and put his legs over the edge of the bed. Lightheaded, he saw stars, floating there at the upper rim of his vision. “I’m getting my coat and I’m leaving.”

  The girl smiled reassuringly. Probably they taught them in nursing school to be pleasant no matter what the patient did. “I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere just yet. I’ll run and see where they put your coat.” She turned and was gone.

  He put his feet on the floor. It was an effort to bring his body to a standing position, and it made him dizzy, but he did it. Using the bedrail to steady himself, he worked his way around the bed. His legs seemed impossibly weak, as they sometimes were in his dreams when he would attempt to walk but could make no progress against the heaviness that held him back, like trying to make headway against a swift current. He reached the closet and opened the door. No coat. Only a pair of his house slippers and the pants and shirt he’d had on the day before. Draped over a hook was the green blanket that he kept secured to his mattress at home with a row of wood clamps. For a time he contemplated it, trying to puzzle out how this blanket had come to be in this place when he was sure he’d left it on his bed. Why, in the middle of winter, he had no coat.

  Nurse Jenny was back with another nurse, a woman who appeared to be even younger than she. The new nurse was tiny and sharp-featured, with short red hair. Her head made him think of an old sulfur kitchen match, the kind they used to call lucifers, and he told her so.

  The new nurse spoke softly, slowly. “I’m Rachel. I’ll be helping to take care of you tonight.” She stepped forward, addressing him in a teasing, lilting voice. “Are you giving Jenny a hard time? You wouldn’t be a troublemaker, would you?”

  He eyed her. The smallest of thrills coursed through him. “Why, yes. Yes, I would be.”

  “I thought so,” she said, laughing. “I took one look at you and knew you were trouble.”

  Suddenly he saw her tactic, and he summoned a glower. “Have you called my wife?”

  “Don’t you want her to get her sleep?” Nurse Rachel asked. “It’s not even morning. The sun isn’t up.” She approached. “Come and let’s get you back into bed and then we’ll talk about this.”

  He let himself be led and found that he was relieved to lay his head on the pillow. Nurse Rachel asked to see his arm where the IV had been pulled out.

  Proudly he showed her what he had done. “Didn’t hurt a bit,” he told her.

  “You must be strong,” she said, and this, too, pleased him.

  She held his hand and gave a good impression of examining his arm but then, before he knew what was happening, she drew an object from her pocket, a metal band of some kind, and attached it to his wrist and snapped it shut.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “A WanderGuard. Just to keep track of you,” she said, patting his arm. “In case you get lost.”

  “I’ve never been lost a day in my life,” he said indignantly. “I’ve always been exactly where I’ve found myself to be. Now, unless you plan to change the Constitution of the United States at this hour of the night, you’ll need to release me. You can’t keep me here against my will. I know my rights.”

  Nurse Jenny moved forward, smiling. “We’re going to let you finish the night with no electrodes and no IV, but first thing in the morning you have to agree to let us hook you up again.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” he growled, but he sank into the pillows and closed his eyes. His exertions had tired him.

  He dozed briefly and when he woke again the nurses were gone. Again he got out of bed and went to the closet. Laboriously he dressed, and when he had finished he reached for the green blanket and wrapped it around himself like a cape. He opened his door and peeked into the hall. Quiet, no nurse in sight, the coast was clear. Barefoot, inching his way so as not to make noise, he headed along the wall toward the elevators, thinking that he would take the stairs to the main floor and from thence outside.

  But he’d no more pushed open the stairwell door when a terrible buzzing came from the metal band on his wrist, and before he could think of what to do two burly security officers appeared beside him. He couldn’t think fast enough to fight them. They flanked him, marching him back to his room, where Nurse Jenny waited. They delivered him to his bed, settled him in it, and left the room.

  A large portable nurse’s station was moved into the doorway and match-headed Rachel took a seat as if preparing for a long siege. So here he was, trapped. Banded like a bird and all exits blocked. He was furious, and he planned to mount an attack if she came near him. But she kept her distance, sitting quietly at the computer station, looking up from time to time to see how he was doing. Somehow this had a calming effect, and he was able to master his emotions.

  He lay back and tried to think. He closed his eyes and an image came to him, a beautiful Venn diagram, red and pulsing, intricate as a rose in bloom, enfolding him, his wife, his friends, his children, his brothers and sisters, his parents, and then the rose that was somehow his life began to spin, to whirl toward the sky, the moon and stars, the outer dark. The peace that had come to him some months before when Jeff had visited him in this same hospital returned. He, Abel, was ready to go. This time, should Jeff come around again, he would follow. There would be no feeding tube to prolong his life, to keep him here. But neither would he be truly gone, he understood. Matter didn’t disappear. He wasn’t fool enough to think this law meant the universe was eternal, but he had come to the conclusion that matter was just energy that was tired of happening. He determined that he would from this moment be a body at rest.

  “Young woman,” he called out to Nurse Rachel, who sat at the blockade’s computer. “Do you believe in eternal life?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The afterlife, reincarnation, heaven? What do you think happens to us when we die?” He felt like having an argument, his body fairly buzzed with it. He looked forward to shredding everything she said.

  “Nobody’s dying,” she said lightly. “Let’s just get through the night. Things are going to look much better in the morning.”

  But he pressed her, engaged her in talk, and by and by she loosened up. He’d intended to trap her into admitting a belief in the pearly gates and streets of gold and then beset her with argument. He summoned his old geniality, courting her with his questions and striving to give the impression of a man in full possession of his faculties, one who was interested in her. They chatted. She told him about her grandfather, a Vietnam veteran who had died in this hospital and that was why she had become a nurse, about her mother, who was in a hospital across town, dying of cervical cancer. He told her about his parents, his boyhood, his first bout of pneumonia with Lizzie Glutz as his bedmate, of meeting Hattie at the schoolhouse corner. He told her that
he’d grown up on the edge of a prairie that seemed endless and that when he was very young he thought the place where the far expanse of waving grass met the sky of the horizon was the end of the earth. He’d known, even as a child, that he was on a road that led there, and that his life would one day end. He told her many more things—of his vision of Jeff and of a saddle-dream he’d once had while riding herd on his uncle’s cattle, a dream of designing a self-piloted airplane. “My sons do not love me the way I loved my own father,” he told her, surprising himself.

  “They will,” she said. “When you’re gone.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s just it. I know. And they don’t.”

  He told her what happened on Saipan. He’d never told another soul. He wept soundlessly for his young self still in his poor aged body. After he calmed, she gave him a sponge bath that made his eyes well for the tenderness with which she cleansed his flesh. They went on talking until daybreak, and when the sunlight streamed through his window and the murk and shadow of night retreated, he felt good, relaxed, and though no IV line dripped into him, he felt as if a strange, strong medicine was coursing through his veins.

  Nine

  “It’s like he has radar,” ClairBell told Jesse, speaking of Billy behind her cupped hand as they sat at the kitchen counter. She had arrived in Amicus early in order to drive her mother back to the hospital and Jesse had come over to check on everyone and get the lowdown before he went to work. The real reason was to cool down from the night he’d spent. He was as disgusted with Gid as he’d ever been, and that was saying something.

  “The minute Daddy’s gone, here comes the Boy Wonder to pitch his tent,” ClairBell was saying.

  Jesse nodded and pretended to listen as she went on about the way Billy used his mother. He’d heard it all before, and frankly just now the business at home with Gid troubled him more.

  He’d been trying for a long time to get his brother to meetings, to slow-talk him into the program sideways, not by urging but by leading by example. So far Gid had shown no sign of wanting to be led. If anything, he was more set in his ways.

  What happened in the night was that the joint Gideon had fallen asleep with had slipped from his fingers onto the floor of the barn loft where he’d set up camp. The ember apparently caught some dried hay Gid had tracked in, and raced along the floorboards, using dust for tinder. The smoke awakened Gid and he’d either jumped or fallen out the window. He insisted it was a jump but Jesse wasn’t sure—the booze reek coming off him had been strong. Broke his damn ankle and the bellowing woke Jesse all the way up at the farmhouse. He’d put out the blaze with the pressure washer. There’d been no point in calling the fire department—no hydrant so far outside town. The fire burned out before it could take the barn but it had left a great charred hole in the roof. In the middle of the night Jesse had to haul Gid to the ER to get his ankle set. Not a good time, and to make things worse, Patsy had found herself a ride to the Pay Dirt but not a ride home and so when her drunken call came he’d had to go back out and fetch her.

  Hattie emerged from the bedroom wing, dressed in a trim brown skirt, a yellow blouse, and a brown-and-yellow-striped cardigan. His mother looked like a vision from a cleaner, sweeter, more organized life, a life unmuddled by Billy and the Judge and Gid and their doings. “You look nice, Mom,” he said. The last thing he was going to lay on her was his own problem. He would deal with things on his own and no point troubling her. She looked pretty, and she was in terrific health for a woman of eighty-something who’d had a heart attack, but she also looked frail and small and tired. Like a little bird.

  Hattie smiled at the compliment, smoothing her skirt. She liked it when the children were in the kitchen, liked the warm, industrious, and yet peaceful way it made her feel. The feeling was the same one from many years before when they’d crowded into her bed after Billy was born. It was funny, but without Abel in the house it seemed that things were somehow lighter. Quickly she banished the thought. “Have you eaten, Jess? Let me fix you some bacon and eggs. I was just going to make a little something for your brother and it’s no trouble…?”

  “I had a burrito at the Mart, Mom. What’s up with Billy?”

  Hattie didn’t like the way Jesse had sounded suddenly like Abel, questioning her in such … an accusatory way. “Well, that’s not enough to keep you going. Over easy, isn’t that the way you like your eggs?” She tied an apron over her skirt and set to work.

  Jesse went to the carafe and filled his Reddi Mart cup with fresh coffee. “Mom, no eggs. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, a friend dropped Billy off in the middle of the night,” she said lightly, whisking eggs and milk in a glass bowl. “They had some kind of falling-out. I’m not sure about what, but there Billy was. He’s just going to stay here for a few days. Only while your father’s in the hospital. I don’t see anything wrong with that…”

  ClairBell punched down the toaster button. “In Daddy’s room?”

  “Well, yes, for the time being. But only until I can get my quilting off the guest room bed, then I’ll put him in his usual place.”

  Jesse and ClairBell shared a look. This was the way things happened. Their brother was like the camel with his nose in the tent, coaxing open the flap just a little wider to let him in a little farther and a little farther until he was all the way in and he took up all the room. He’d been back and forth for most of his adult life, staying months at a time, and each time had ended in grief, with their father angry, their mother hurt, and Billy skating off to whatever roller rink would admit him next.

  Jesse watched as his mother moved around the kitchen, putting plates in the oven to warm, turning bacon, a happy worker bee in yellow and brown. “What does Doro think about this?” he asked. He had invoked his sister on purpose. Everyone knew what Doro would think—that harboring Billy was a mistake Hattie made again and again. She should have stopped years before. She should stop now. Jesse agreed with Doro and so did ClairBell. And certainly so would their father. But no one had been strong enough to stand up to Hattie.

  With a fork Hattie poked a strip of bacon. “I have no idea what she’d think but I’m not telling her. And I don’t want either of you telling her, either. She’ll just get us all in an uproar. We can deal with this just fine ourselves.”

  ClairBell buttered a piece of toast, considering. If her older sister got wind of what was going on, she’d go into attack mode. She’d fix everything for Billy and this would make their mother happy, and then she’d be the hero again. Maybe Doro could even get the guns out of police custody. That would seal the deal. “I agree with you, Mom. We can deal with this ourselves. We handled it just fine last night, didn’t we?”

  Hattie smiled. “Yes, we did. I’m glad you see it that way, ClairBell.”

  Something hitched itself in Jesse. How was he any different from his mother? Keeping things quiet. Harboring Gid, harboring Patsy, making a soft place for them to land. Suddenly, in a way that he hadn’t before, he understood his mother. It was all well and good to preach the program, to detach with love. It was all well and good to let go and let God. But when it came down to your actual family and their actual ways and the way you actually felt about them, when it came to a brother you loved or thought you loved, a woman you loved or thought you loved, things got a damn sight more complicated. He put on his hat and went outside to smoke a cigarette about it. Hattie and ClairBell waited, but he didn’t come back in. A bit later they heard his Silverado start up.

  “What’s wrong with Brother Bear?” ClairBell asked.

  “Oh, he’s just in a mood,” Hattie said. “I think he might be jealous of Billy.”

  ClairBell didn’t think before she responded sarcastically. With a tone of scandalized astonishment, she said, “No!”

  When Hattie looked at her sharply, she covered herself by saying, “Well, that’s just ridiculous.” It wouldn’t do to alienate her mother just now.

  “That’s what I think,” Hattie said, and we
nt back to tending the bacon.

  After breakfast Hattie put a plate in the oven for Billy, should he awaken, and she and ClairBell got into the car for the trip to the hospital.

  * * *

  They found Abel sitting on the edge of his bed, his IVs out, fully dressed and ready to be sprung. Trying to make light, ClairBell murmured as they entered the room, “He looks like a little kid ready for the first day of school,” but her mother had already hurried to his side. ClairBell swallowed hard. The truth was that the sight of her father so meek-looking was hard to take. Overnight, it seemed, he had grown truly old. She shored up the ruins of her heart, took a deep breath, and bustled into the room to stand beside her mother at his bedside. “Daddy, are you giving the nurses a rough time?”

  She was proud of her quick thinking the day before and she had affected a bright, joking voice, so she was startled when in an angry growl he asked, “Which one of you is responsible for putting me in here? You knew full well what my wishes were.”

  Hattie stepped back from the bed. ClairBell began, “But you could have died if we hadn’t…”

  “And isn’t dying the point of old age? Your mother and I have Do Not Resuscitate orders. Written and signed!”

  ClairBell’s stomach lurched and she couldn’t speak.

  “Abel,” Hattie tried, “we were only doing what we thought was best at the time.”

  He turned his glare on his wife. “The two of you conspired to put me in here. And you knew better.”

  “It wasn’t that way at all, Abel, we only—”

  “I know my rights. And I told them they couldn’t hold me here unless they plan to change the Constitution. I’ve determined to go home and live out my days, no matter how many or few! And I’ll see those ambulance crooks in a court of law!”

  The hospital shift had changed. The night nurses had rotated off and the day-shift nurse who had taken their place stood up from the station’s seat and came toward the bed. “Sir, try to understand. They did what any family would do in their position. They want what’s best for you. They want you to be comfortable.”