October
When the nurse told Robot his mother had been rushed by ambulance to the same hospital where he was, he thought the nurse’s next words would be that she was dead. Her condition had been so frail for so long. The whites of her eyes had been polluted and discoloured. Her fingernails weak and misshapen. Her skin gone hard yellow. He could remember a long-ago time when her drinking had only amplified certain parts of her personality. Made her quicker to anger, louder when shouting, more tearful, more prone to long evenings of what looked from the outside like quiet contemplation. Eventually, the effect of drinking had been to remove her for lengthy periods of time. She’d be at some other drunk’s house, or even if she was home, she’d be in a silent stupor, slumped over the table, unable to do anything but sloppily pour herself another drink. Or she’d be passed out. Asleep. Sometimes the sleeps were fitful, restless bouts, a half-hour long, an hour long, interspersed with partially coherent stretches of wakefulness. Sometimes, after days of drunkenness, she’d sleep for twenty-four hours at a stretch.
When the nurse made clear that his mother was still alive, that she was in hospital, that someone else was looking after her, that the greedy bootleggers who’d been living off her illness and feeding her decline, the same people who’d put him in hospital when he’d threatened to get in their way, when the bootleggers could no longer reach her, his thought had turned to the empty apartment on Lemon Street and the only thing he cared about after his mother: his ukulele.
He pictured it where he’d last seen it, zipped into its nylon gig bag, leaning against the wall in a corner of his bedroom, where he once would have put his old Les Paul, within arm’s reach of the mattress on the floor that he called his bed.
He didn’t worry that someone would break in and steal it. That someone would break into his flat on Lemon Street now that the neighbourhood knew it was empty: that was a given. An empty apartment was like an unbroken pane of glass with a fist-sized rock sitting right on the ledge beside it. And anyone breaking into the apartment of a hospitalized drunk and her convicted killer son was not going to rob the place. They’d break what few dishes remained, whatever food containers they found in the fridge would be emptied over the floor, smeared against the wall. A ukulele was not small enough to be pocketed as a souvenir. It would have to be broken on site. Held by the headstock and swung against the wall until smashed, or simply dropped onto the floor and crushed with a single stomp.
When Sam had brought it in, he’d been asleep. It lay across his bedside tray when he woke up. It had not even occurred to him to play it at first. He’d picked it up and without even removing it from the gig bag, he held it against his side and let himself feel the relief, the relief that the only thing in his life that he both owned and cared about was safe.
“Is that a mandolin?” His eyes had been fluttering before he heard the voice. He’d been passing in and out of sleep for some time. So the familiar voice had not really awakened him. But it did bring him round. He opened his eyes to find a young nurse at his bedside. She’d been there the day before. He vaguely remembered talking to her as he’d dangled somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.
She had a shallow basin with gauze and tape and disinfectant that she placed on his bedside tray.
He realized he’d been holding the ukulele like a child would hold a teddy bear. He was not going to put the instrument away, but he loosened his hold on it a little. Moved it down his side so that it was level with his waist.
“Ukulele,” he said.
“Oh.” The nurse raised her eyebrows without looking directly at him. She was all business, arranging the materials in her basin. She pressed a button to bring his bed upright.
“I’m going to change the dressings on your face. I’ll have to clean up a bit, too. Can you play?”
He had not spent enough time looking at himself in the mirror to have a clear idea of where his head was bandaged. She removed some adhesive at the back of his neck and just above one ear. Each momentary pull had hurt almost to the point that he wanted to cry out. She was slowly removing soiled gauze and pads, brown with dried blood, dropping them into an unseen pail at her feet.
“I can play. Yes.”
Her cheeks were round and full. She was so close he could see the fine blond fuzz on them. Her eyes were large and dark. She wore makeup that made her lashes look angular and sharp at the outer corners of her eyes. She was only a few years older than him, he realized. Her gaze, so focused on what her hands were doing, communicated sharp intelligence and care. Her scrubs were two professional tones of green.
“Well,” she peeled a sterile pad from its package, dropped the wrapper in the trash, and applied the pad to his forehead, just above the eye, “when I’m done here, why don’t you play something for me?”
Robot felt his cheeks go hot with a rush of blood. She was just being friendly, he knew. But he was not used to being this close to adulthood. So close that a nurse in a hospital would be practically his own age.
“Too sore today,” Robot said. “Too out of practice.” He hugged the instrument closer again. “Maybe by this time tomorrow.” He held both hands up and looked at them, palms out and away from his face. He stretched the fingers wide to test them, clenched both hands into fists, then let them loose again. He looked up at the nurse, who had finished her business with him and was gathering her materials back into the basin. She stole a moment away from her work to smile at him. “I look forward to that,” she said. She picked up her things, placed them atop a stainless steel trolley, and wheeled out of the room with it.
“She took a shine to you!”
Robot looked across the room, and for the first time since he’d been in hospital, his self-preoccupation had subsided enough to let him be aware of someone else in the room. The guy in the bed across from him had both arms immobilized by identical splints. His bed was propped up at the back, leaving him in a sitting position. His arms rested uncomfortably on his upper body. In one hand he had a paperback book with a white cover. His hair was brown, medium length. Days of bed-bound restlessness and a dependence on nurses to brush it had left it a swirl, an unruly halo of stuck-out points around his head.
Robot smiled at him, not too encouragingly. The only thing he’d said so far was about the nurse, and Robot did not go in for the disrespectful way a lot of men talked about women.
“I’m reading The Shining,” the guy said. He held up the book, awkwardly, at the end of a stiff arm. “Ever read it?”
Robot shook his head as slightly as he thought he could get away with. He did not want to encourage any further questions.
“I’ve seen that movie a lot of times. The book is very different. I’m only about…a little more than halfway through right now. I got sick of my cellphone.” He pointed with his chin at the phone on the bedside table, then held up the book with both unbendable arms. “Lucky my eyes are good. I have to hold the book a half a mile from my face. Your girlfriend went down and got this for me.” He must have noticed some look pass Robot’s face at the use of the word girlfriend.
“Maybe she’s not your girlfriend.”
Robot unzipped the gig bag and pulled out the ukulele. It seemed the only alternative to sitting soundlessly while being talked at.
“Is that a ukulele?” the guy said, and although Robot was about ready to tell the guy to shut up, he was close enough to the moment when music would carry him away that he could just look the guy in the eye, smile a tolerant smile, and nod his head.
He muted the strings with his left hand and began with some percussive strumming. It only took a moment for whatever chemicals this released in his brain to take effect. He continued the strum, index finger of his right hand extended, pivoting back and forth with a twist of his wrist where the neck joined the body of the ukulele. Nothing he’d ever done on guitar had prepared him for this. Everything he’d learned about music dropped away, and the crisp, chunky beat he was getting out of the instrument felt more like a sophisticated hand drum than any melodic or harmonic instrument. He got a rhythm going with his index finger, two beats down, one on the upstroke. Once that beat felt solid, he tried working his thumb into the mix, first for double-time downstrokes, then flicking it up for a back-beat when he could fit it in.
“Sounds good,” the guy across the room said. But as Robot closed his eyes and settled back into the mattress, the guy got bored of being ignored. When Robot cracked one eye open for a quick peek, he had settled back into his Stephen King book, turned uncomfortably onto one side, his arms stuck out over the side of the bed like a couple of two-by-fours.
Robot shut both eyes again and continued strumming against the muted strings. He moved his left hand up high on the neck, almost to where his strumming hand met the strings. His body was warning him not to move too much or too quickly. The places where he’d been struck flared momentarily with twinges of pain as he played. The percussive pitch went high and lost most of its resonance. He kept a steady pattern going with his right hand while sliding the muting fingers of the left hand slowly in the direction of the headstock, where the tone and resonance deepened.