I’m spiraling. Flip-flop-flapping. Massive.
The whole crank thing slams me like a careening snowplow to the guts and I hole up in Oma’s cellar. Like one of her dead and done ghost cats, I prowl, slow and coma, haunting again the cold, mildewed dungeons. I find a sixer of Auntie Kay’s Coronas in the fridge and chug-a-lug the brew, and when I think of Nate and Eve, my heart splats and shatters.
I sift through Oma and Opa’s old drawers, find a lifetime supply of Old Spice and a secret stash of Reese’s Pieces. I shuffle about, sloshing back brews, munching stale candy, looking at the many hanged paintings, mostly done in a hasty, thick-stroked style by Uncle Remmy—my dad’s once twin—who died before I was born. I stuff my face with handfuls of sugary, peanutty bits and check behind every dusty cabinet door. I find a slide rule, a horde of pre-sharpened No. 2’s, graphing paper, and an old fold-up yardstick. Piles of massive ugly fabrics, scratchy cheap yarn, needles and pins and a little, red-and-black stuffed cushion like a ladybug.
On Opa’s old drafting table, I see Marta’s initials are carved just under Opa’s blocky scratch. I scrape mine in with the tip of an industrial-sized diaper pin, run the edge along the thin skin of my wrist, up my arm a few times, a few times more. Leave a visible series of thin red lines. Stupid. Something I haven’t done in a while. But I can breathe again. It does the trick, always.
I switch on the static of an old radio and the faint noise of Oma and Opa’s favorite ole-timey jazz crackles and hums.
And my soul grinds to sand. I exhale and am blown away to dust.
To ashes, and back again.
I drag tar after tar out an open cellar window, shivering in my smoke plume as the whole house sleeps, quiet as a lifetime. A deep chill creeps into me from outside and over the cold, tiled floor, eventually ushering me away to the warmth of upstairs. An invisible force leads me past open, dark doorways, Jacks fast asleep, dead to the world. Like a phantom, I wander, zigzag-style into Oma’s room, past her old, dusty dresser, glaring white porta-toilet, the Night Nurse snoring quietly in her chair.
She startles as I sit, the old rocker creaking under me and the weight of my heavy heart.
“Sorry,” I cringe.
“Oh,” the nurse mumbles, blinking open tired, heavy eyes. “I must have dozed off.” I never noticed how young she is. Thirty, maybe less.
“S’okay,” I say, turning back to Oma. I cough, then burp. “No harm, no foul.”
She shifts, and straightens. After a moment, she speaks again.
“You mind if I pop out? I need to make a call. My little girl’s been fighting a fever.” She looks at me. “You’re okay, right?”
I nod, even though I’m so clearly not. She stands, says something about pain, morphine, tube. Needle. Syringe. Something. Fill to, what? First line? Whatever. I nod again.
And I sit. I really am kinda drunk.
I watch my sleeping, dying Oma and the heavy slack of her jaw and I listen to the thick sucking of her lower lip as she breathes in and out, in and out. It’s at this moment I realize she’s brave. Infinitely so.
I cross my arms and pull my shoulders up, nearly touching my ears. I rock the chair, back and forth, back and forth.
And Oma, she breathes in and out, in and out. She mumbles softly in her sleep and I turn my head to watch the night creep between the leaves of a dogwood tree that push branches heavy with delicate, flying-saucer blossoms into the glass of the closed window.
I hiccup, giggle, then start to cry.
And slowly, raindrops blink before me on the window and I scope an apparition of myself heeling it up the back hill, smoke trailing like the string of some beheaded balloon. That other half of me, pre-Eve, long gone, gone for long. Far away.
Goodbye.
I hold up tar-stained digits and wave.
Goodbye.
A sudden catch in Oma’s beeps snags my ear and I jump, realize I must have dozed off. I watch her and she’s still, breathing softly. I sit back.
I take a deep breath. Her eyelids twitch, and suddenly, they shoot open and then shut again. She frowns and her fingers grip the sheets. Forehead creasing, hard. In pain.
I stare for one stupid, stunned second and then stumble over, grab her hand, her too-cold hand and those knuckles, going white, white. Gripping mine. She gasps, her head tilting back and my heart is in my chest and the ten pounds of corn-syrup-chocolate surprise is quick coming up hot tubes, into the back of my throat. And then my speak, it’s ringing. Ringing. RINGING. I can’t think, I answer.
“Flap-Jack, you’re alive!” Zoë’s voice comes like a gunshot through the earpiece and I’m a bumbling fool, grabbing at tubes, wires. Bitsy comes bounding in and leaps up into Oma’s lap, whimpering, digging softly with her paw at Oma’s too-thin thigh, looking to me with watery, alien-dog eyes.
“Zo!” I bark. “Holy crank. Oma, she’s—”
“Butler, you sound weird. What’s what?”
“Zoë, I’m totally tweaked. She needs her meds and the nurse is somewhere, I dunno. And I just don’t remember. Holy goddamn crank, Zo! Her Beep Beeps are all over the place!” I grab a tube of clear liquid from the table, remembering the nurse. Morphine, needle. What else?
Pain.
“Butler, are you for serious, right now?” Zoë says. “Are you sauced? Are you strung out? Did you take something? What the flip is going on?”
“Jack, I dunno! I dunno a goddamn thing!” I stare at Oma’s face, contorting, twisting. “Ah! What am I doing? What was I just doing?” I remember. “This! I’m doing this,” and I focus down at my hands, shaking, shaking, and I plunge the needle tip into the vial of meds, suck up the magic juice. Oma’s face contorts in pain.
“How much, Zoë? How much?”
“Are you for real? What’d the nurse say?”
“Something, something, like. Ah—” Something, but what? First? First line?
And I’m lifting the IV connector tube by Oma’s arm, the one that goes to the needle sunk down deep in that dark blue vein, the one I’ve watched the aunts and Dad shoot a dozen times. “I’m gonna shoot the meds, Zo. I gotta.”
“Lu, holy crank. Are you sure? Where the flip is your dad?”
“Zoë!” I yell. “I don’t know. But she needs this now. Okay? Okay. Here I go,” and through tremors of biblical magnitude, I guide my two earthquake hands, the needle sliding, sticking, then slipping finally into its connector and my thumb, it slowly depresses the syringe. Bitsy gives a little yelp as Oma takes another gulp of air, her face a map of agony.
And then, and then …
“Lu?” The line crackles and Zoë’s still there. Oma’s eyelids, they flutter open, find my eyes. Then, then, they relax. They close and go slack and Oma, she’s sighing a great big groan and her head is sinking soft into her hospital bed pillow. I wait. I listen. I watch.
Beep … Beep..…. Beep. It slows.
And my face is going numb, my arms, limbs, fingers, buzzing from life. Like a snuffed-out candle. Going going gone.
“Holy Mary Jesus,” I barely whisper, my whole frame collapsing forward, my head falling into the gristly mass of Bitsy’s little body, my speak dropping from where it was pinned between my ear and shoulder. I breathe deep in her dry, doggy scent and then her soft little licks pepper my face, my forehead, my ears. I shiver all over and drip sweat from every single pore at the exact same time.
Then there’s a hand on my back and when I straighten up, the nurse, her dark brown eyes are fixed on mine. Bright, shimmering spots speckle her face. I blink through them, but they won’t go away.
“No harm, no foul,” I hear myself mumble, my speak vibrating in Oma’s lap and I fish it out from within Bitsy’s curled up joints. And then I’m shuffling through the kitchen and out the front door.
It slams behind me and in blinking stop-motion, I’m stumbling, sliding down the steps and the spots, they go bigger, bigger still. A buzzing, deep and loud, like a swarm of green flies around my head, like pesky beach flies. Like that day at the beach, with Eve. And the stinking white ray. And What’s eggs in the sand. And I manage two steps, then a third and then I’m aloft, too soon finding ground. I’m Man Down. On the tar I fumble with fingers like marshmallows for my speak, for Eve’s number. I need to call her but my chest is clenching and my lungs collapse and there’s a scrape of rubber on tar, the slamming of a car door. And someone’s face fading in, just there before my own, just as I’m going down, down, down.
Then everything, it all goes black.
I hear my name, and then nothing.
Nothing.