It Must Be Me - 1. Chapter 1

It Must Be Me

By P. M. Dacey

When I emerged from the elevator there was a nurse in white, unoccupied wheelchairs and color coded stripes on the walls and floor: Follow green for oncology, follow red for emergency or follow yellow for obstetrics. I briefly wondered if there is a colored line for the mortuary, but I decided the people that are going there already know where it is or they are already beyond caring.

I have an aversion to hospitals and most things medical. Maybe it is because I was a sickly baby and I spent a lot of time in them before I was ever consciously aware of my surroundings, though recent studies show that babies are much more cognizant of their environment than previously thought. A trip to the dentist as a small boy was a Herculean exercise in patience for all involved. Like the cat knows it is going to the vet, there was no fooling me with a sudden trip to get ice cream, mostly because there was no such thing as a sudden trip to get ice cream. If anything special was proffered in my home as I was growing up it was immediately suspicious. A special desert was only a dangled carrot to clean the garage; a family night only occurred if it was a birthday or a serious family meeting. If my mother suddenly said, “Let’s go for a ride,” I started crying. She pulled my arm out of the socket once forcing me into the car for a doctor’s appointment. If I had been born several decades later we would not have left the doctor’s office without a visit from a social worker or even the police. The only time my mouth was open at the dentist’s was when I was screaming, but I swear to god, I could feel everything from the first prick of the needle to the grinding of enamel beneath a drill bit to the pliers yanking a decayed tooth. A booster shot from a nurse might as well have been a bullet from a gun.

Before walking through the smoothly operating doors of the county hospital I had spent the day driving across the plains of Kansas and Colorado, heading towards the Rocky Mountains, towards home in a borrowed car, chain smoking unfiltered Camel cigarettes. The carefully installed insulation created by the miles of a self imposed exile slowly eroded away as the odometer numbers advanced and sign posts became a traveler’s haiku:

Next gas thirty miles

Left lane for passing only

Food, lodging next exit

All that remained of the “amber waves of grain” this late in the season was gray stubble beneath a sky of washed out blue and a sun without the power to warm this land anymore. Instead it was starting to hug the southern horizon, retreating to suntans and places with exotic names like Boca Raton and Acapulco.

I was not suppose to be smoking in the car and I drove with the window open, the air burning my face red and numbing the bare smooth skin of my knuckles as I gripped the steering wheel.

The nurse temporarily abandoned the station in front of the elevator leaving it to a sort of orderly chaos of computers, charts and trays of vials. I was left alone with a small man sitting hunched over, elbows on his knees, intently examining his palms. His hair was gray, thinning and tinged tobacco yellow.

I hesitated before going up to him. I always paused before approaching people, no matter who they were.

“Hi,” I tossed the miniscule salutation into the quiet of the hallway. It landed with the offensive thud of excrement in the serene sterile environment.

“Oh, hey there,” my father looked up from his hands, placing them palm down on his knees and straightening his back. The backs of his hands were a healthy, fleshy pink with short fingers and the unwrinkled finish of a younger man’s skin. His face was dark and round and he put on his salesman smile, eyes wide and accepting and a slight gap visible between the grinning teeth. He always gave the impression of being on the top of the world with grand schemes that would change his paycheck to paycheck life to one of largesse, but always seemed to come up short, if he ever got them started.

“How’s it going?” I managed an anemic version of his smile that I fear comes across as more of a smug smirk. My hands had been thrust deep into my pockets since entering the hospital. I am itching to engage in the ritual of the chain smoker; lighter to cigarette to mouth, keeping the hands busy, exhaling a protective screen of carcinogens. Instead the thumb of my right hand obsessively rubbed the chrome of my Zippo lighter as I tried to keep from flicking the lid open and shut producing its satisfying ka-chick-click. I kept my left hand balled into a fist. It is tempting to jangle the turmoil of change and keys in the bottom of my other pocket, but my voice alone was already too much of a disruption in this place.

“Good as can be expected. You know me, I know how to cope.” Do you? I thought to myself. “More importantly, how are you?” he finished.

“Dealing,” I lied. It is my pattern to not “deal,” but to avoid and hide. Even as I stood talking in a hospital hallway my mind was going through my own personal passageways of diversions and menial tasks, being careful not to open doors. In that way my father and I are very much alike, suffering from the same insecurities. I never learned to cope and fled far away into a world of books, libraries and their esoterica. He learned how to pretend that people didn’t scare him.

I asked him where to find her room.

“Oh, sure,” he replied, “It’s a semi-private at the end of the hall, but she is the only one in it. The rest are with her now.” The rest would be my step-father and step-sister. It would also explain why he was sitting in the hall by the elevator.

“Thanks, I’ll see you later then.”

“Oh, I was wondering…” he stopped me as I turned away.

“Yes?” I tried not to sound exasperated. He was holding his hands up, examining the palms again.

“I was looking at your mother’s hands earlier, the creases and lines, and I’ve been sitting here comparing them to my own. I was wondering, you know stuff, is there anything to reading the future in palms?” I realized he was serious. “You see, there is this line on your mother’s hand that is kind of jagged and broken up. I look at my hand and the same line is pale, almost non-existent.” He points to a line on his palm.

The line he indicated I know is the Life Line, harbinger of vitality in a person’s life. It is indeed barely discernible against the wan flesh where it should be outlining the Mound of Venus, which is almost flat.

“I think,” I started, “that those lines are more indicative of how you have lived your life rather than what the future is going to be,” I took note of the defeated position of his thumb, curved across the palm, “Of course, how we have lived, done things in the past, can certainly offer guidance about how we will probably deal with things in the future. That’s not cheirology, just common sense. What therapists get paid too much to tell us.” My father is overweight, drinks too much and he will probably have a stroke or a heart attack and never fully recover, though he may live a long time. It is transcribed in the weak Life Line and multiple Lines of Health that cut diagonally across the palm, intersecting all the other lines. It is evident in his girth, smoking habit and his two martini lunches. I resisted the urge to look at my own hands and pushed them deeper into my pockets.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” he laid his hands on his knees, palms up in the pose of a supplicant. I couldn’t think of anything else to say and walked down the hall leaving him like a misplaced patient.

The door was open. It seems to me that the doors in hospitals are always open. No privacy. The heavy drapes were pulled back, but the sunlight penetrating the glazing had an anemic quality.

“I am so glad you could make it,” my mother’s eyes lit up and I wanted to believe her. She still looked healthy, sitting up in her favorite nightgown with only an I.V. in her arm. It was too soon for the tubes that would snake from her nose disgorging blackened bile into a clear container and the myriad plastic veins that would feed, console and eliminate before it was all over.

“Of course I made it,” I said though it was not a sure thing. More than once I asked myself if being here would make a difference in the end. In the end, maybe it didn’t, but for now it did seem to make a difference.

“Come over here and sit down,” she indicated a hard orange vinyl chair next to the bed. I had to take my hands out of my pockets to sit. They are moist with sweat and my Zippo comes out too. I stop myself from flicking it open and toss it pack and forth between my hands.

“How’s school going?” My step-father Erik was a presence impossible to ignore in any room he occupied. Standing on the other side of my mother’s bed he is tall, broad shouldered and seemed to take up too much space, though he is not heavy or muscular, but he broadcast an air of authority. I am my mother. We are the same height and I have an embarrassingly feminine figure with the same dark complexion and eyes. Erik exudes manliness with a rumbling voice and an intensity of purpose. I grew a goatee, because my whiskers are too sparse to grow a full beard. Instead of making me look more masculine it makes me look like a teenager that is too proud of his first facial hair to shave it.

“Good . . . good,” I nodded my head. School is the only thing we have in common. He teaches engineering and I study the Dewey Decimal System. I tried to avoid looking down where my lighter flashes, catching the bleached fluorescent light, but that means that I had to meet somebody’s gaze, either my mother’s or Erik’s. I tumbled the worn silver lighter between my fingers. My fingers are long and narrow, good for typing or playing piano. I am good at typing.

“How are you doing Carol?” I tried turning my attention to my step-sister. She was sitting on the end of the bed watching the television with the volume turned down. A junior in high school, before long she decided that she preferred to live with her mother, then she would no longer have to use the television as a wall between her and Erik. She never answers me.

“Let me hold your hand,” my mother said. It was the first time I had known her to make such a request. I knew the invitation was more for my sake, not her personal comfort. She must have known how awkward it made me feel. I shifted my lighter to one and hand and placed the other on the rail at the side of the bed. It felt very cold to the touch. It is hard to imagine that those rails really there to keep people from rolling out of bed. I had not fallen out of bed since I was seven years old. She placed her hand on top of mine. Her grip was light, but warm and it felt like my hand could melt against the steel of the bed.

I finely noticed how thin she had become since I had last seen her. I didn’t come home for summer anymore, or even the odd holiday very often, it was just too difficult. Besides, I had another life in another place and I had for a few years now. Admittedly, I was in my twenties, dateless and still a virgin, but they didn’t know that. At least I don’t think they did. I was home the Christmas before, though most of that time was spent in the backyard by the Sycamore, the only place designated acceptable for my smoking habit. An old coffee can filled with sand was placed there for my spent butts. We were all heaver probably too, full of holiday calories.

Now each of her finger joints was a marble connected by narrow phalanges and the nails were crosshatched and showing signs of cracking. She always kept her nails short, long nails just got in the way and she could never understand how other women tolerated them. Carol’s nails, even across the room were visibly manicured to a good half inch beyond the tip of her fingers and painted a glossy periwinkle. I tried to think of a way to turn my mother’s hand so that I could examine the lines my father described. Instead I grasped the smooth metal tubing harder.

Between the mundane chatter about the windstorm that blew down the fence, my classes and how Carol’s rabbit escaped again, the details of why we were there slowly emerged.

They say six months, but you never know. There is always hope.

Didn’t a famous movie star beat this?

No, that was breast cancer.

There are some new experimental treatments; your mother is an ideal candidate.

Will chemo make her hair fall out?

Well, then I won’t have to dye it anymore.

Scott is taking a sabbatical and we are going to go to the Caribbean in the spring.

What about herbal remedies? I know this gals mother who…

Snake oil!

In almost exactly six months it turns out there isn’t always hope. You end up back at the hospital without anymore extraordinary measures and there is a trip to the place without a color coded stripe on the floor.

My mother’s hand never strayed from mine as we sat there and she occasionally traced the veins on the back of my hand with her fingertip. My palm sweat against the metal and I desperately needed a cigarette as the words grew tired in our mouths.

It was time to go. It is late fall and the sun had long ago descended behind the Front Range.

Erik took her other hand gave my mother a gentle kiss on the lips. His lips are thin and pale; my mothers are full, pink and they puckered slightly in response. I have my mother’s lips too. Carol hugged her and gave her a quick peck, leaving a smudge of pink lipstick on the still rosy cheeks.

I felt panicked.

There is a picture taken when I was about four years old, my arms are wrapped around my mother’s neck and I am planting a big wet child’s kiss on her cheek. She is wearing big sunglasses and smiling, it is outside on a sunny summer day and I am shirtless. I remember the picture, but I don’t recall the incident. In fact, I can’t remember ever giving my mother or anyone else a hug or kiss. I can remember my grandmother embracing me and putting a smear of lipstick on me when I was still very young. I also remember racing to the bathroom to wash away the waxy residue.

“How about a kiss from your loving son?” I lamely proposed, unsure what exactly to do next. I leaned over and gave her a five year olds sloppy smacking kiss that I am sure the nurses heard down the hall. I know I have done it wrong.

She gave my hand a squeeze before releasing it. Before I can retreat, blood flushing my face, her hands gripped the side of my face, drawing me close; she delivered a dry peck high on my cheek bone. I finally withdrew with a whispered, “see you later.”

“As soon as I get out of here we will go for ice cream,” she promises as we all exit.

“That sounds nice,” I tell her and mean it.

My old bedroom was offered as a hostel until I go back to school in a few days, with admonishments to keep the smoking to a minimum and outside. It seems impossible, but what was an insatiable craving moments ago was almost forgotten until the reminder of my gross habit.

My father was still sitting in the same spot. Erik and Carol disappeared into the elevator as I walked over to him.

“Still here?” I asked, because I don’t know what else to say. The nurse’s station was occupied by a mousy looking women and the keyboard she worked at made a soft clicking like the tick of the body’s own regulatory systems, fitting nicely into the quiet rhythm of the hospital.

“Yeah,” his hands were still palms up in his lap. I had shoved my hands back into my pockets as I came down the hall. Surreptitiously examining his hands I wondered how accurate my brief analysis of his future could be. I avoided examining what was possibly written in my own palm. The past I understood. There was a scar on the side of my thumb where a pocket knife closed on my flesh as I tried to carve the canoe from “Journey to the Sea” out of a pine fire log. Too ashamed to tell anyone, I wrapped it in an old t-shirt and squeezed it until the blood stopped soaking through. I swaddled it with gauze and tape. It throbbed, but somehow I managed to keep it from view for several days and nobody asked about it until I had downgraded to a simple bandage and then I blamed it on my bicycle chain.

I pondered, is my Line of heart a jagged scar that shows a break six months down the road or is there an unsuccessful branching in my Line of Marriage when I am thirty?

I promised to see him again before I go back to school and that we would all get together at Christmas. I promised Easter too, but I had to come back before that and it was not necessary to return for Christ’s wake too.

He leveraged himself up from his seat to head down the hall. I had forgotten how short he was, the top of his head only came to my chin and I am not tall.

“Wait,” I left my lighter in my pocket and pulled him to me, wrapping him in an embrace that was inept and that probably lasted too long. Despite his protruding belly, his shoulders were narrow and bony. He felt fragile in my arms. I wondered, is it appropriate for an adult son to kiss his father? After the briefest moment of hesitation he returned the hug.

Again, I was at a loss and felt inadequately prepared for a skill that most people seem to exercise freely and without forethought. Why didn’t I know how to do this stuff?

The squeeze I received in return from my father, seemed to me, to lack sincerity. Was it a perfunctory response, the salesman complimenting the nice dress or new tie or the fine children? What was I suppose to get out of it? Did I surprise him with an act so out of character that he didn’t know how to react either? Or was I so self-involved that I was not capable of the empathy found in others?

As we separated and turned away from each other, my hand lingered on his shoulder and his hand loitered on my arm. The strength of the embrace released a smell of ash from my clothing. I retrieved my cigarettes and lighter from my pockets before pushing the button to call the elevator. Watching him retreat down the hall I noticed that he was favoring his right foot.

In the elevator I made my lighter go ka-chick click again and again.