Jake howled as Jessica stood in front of him holding his wrist, trying to force his arm from stomach to chest level. “Jesus, Jess. Ease up.”
She pushed even further. “This is what those hospital handouts told us to do for your range of motion exercises. Extended arm, shoulder high.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have to take it out on me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Take what out on you?”
These small, passive-aggressive digs had become his feel-good default response to the more vulnerable moments he couldn’t control. Like this one. “I’m the patient you never got to have, since you didn’t finish school and get to be a nurse. Frustration’s turning you into Nurse Ratched.”
Jessica let his arm drop to his side. “You don’t want my help? Fine.”
She might as well have taken a sledgehammer to his shoulder. “Was that fucking necessary?”
But Jessica was already out the front door, probably sulking in that stupid garden.
Just as well. She could apologize when she came back inside.
Jake grabbed hold of his walker and stood up from the living room couch. He shuffled toward the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, hoping a beer might magically have appeared since he last checked.
He balanced the club soda on the handle of the walker and shut the refrigerator, watching the wallpaper of Hailey’s drawings swing back to stand guard over the linoleum.
Was there such a thing as too many stick figures?
He made his way back to the living room, past the crayons on the table, and flopped down on the couch next to a couple of her stuffed animals. Even some of Hailey’s pajamas were still on the floor in their bedroom.
If he could, he’d clean this stuff up.
Why wouldn’t Jessica?
He sank as low as he could into the cushions, searching the stuffed polyester for any support for his back. Plywood would be more comfortable than the bed in the downstairs guest room, which is where he’d been relegated until he could climb stairs. He’d probably be there for a whole lot longer than that, the way things were going with Jessica. He knew he wasn’t the easiest person to deal with right now, but she’d been no cakewalk, either.
Especially since last summer.
He probably shouldn’t have brought up that thing about her not finishing school, though. And she wasn’t really a Nurse Ratched, either. He downed the rest of the club soda, reached for his phone resting on the arm of the couch, and scrolled to their text thread.
Hey, sorry.
Jake knew she had read-receipts turned on, because she didn’t know how to turn them off, so he watched for the indication that she’d seen the message. More than likely, she had her phone turned off. She’d been doing that lately, which frustrated him, because that’s how he communicated most of the time. Even if they were in the same house, sometimes texting was easier than talking.
He checked his phone one more time before pushing up from the couch and embarking on the journey to the bathroom. These small trips had become odysseys, where a whole day’s worth of thoughts could unfold as he lurched down the hallway. So, he’d learned to get ahead of having to pee.
He made his way around the couch and out of the living room, then looked for Jessica through the dining room window, expecting to see her in the garden.
She was on her knees in the dirt, talking to someone.
Who was here?
He turned his head toward the living room window, but no one was parked in the driveway.
He left the walker and lumbered around the dining room table, using the chairs for support, until he could see the full width of the garden. Jessica had twirled vines around her forearms and was waving them like some kind of plant monster, laughing as she pretended to attack someone.
Someone who, best as Jake could tell, wasn’t there.
On her way back into the house to get some water, Jessica saw Jake standing without his walker by the dining room window. She wasn’t ready to make up, but she didn’t want to have to peel him off the floor if he fell, so she pushed the walker within his arms’ reach and headed into the kitchen.
She filled a glass and walked into the screened-in back porch, which served as their graveyard of records and receipts. The paper tombstones were scattered through the file boxes stacked on the counter above the washer and dryer, in a proprietary organizational system that only she understood.
She’d had a thought while she was playing with Hailey in the garden … more of a nagging, really, that there was something more she could do, and with one hand gripping her water glass, she dug through the cardboard casket that read Hailey for her medical records.
She found the file and started flipping through the papers for anything she might have missed, as far as treatment recommendations. They’d thrown the kitchen sink at Hailey’s leukemia, but she was still desperate to find a better answer. So many advances in medicine, so many miracles, every day.
Why not her little girl?
Leukemia was so rare in kids, and the survival rate was getting better and better, which made the Hailey situation all the more frustrating … not responding to chemo as well as they’d hoped, bad days broken up by good ones, no real remission.
Had to be something she missed.
But nothing here.
Jessica closed the file and stuffed the folder back into the drawer. At least she felt like she’d been coming to terms with life post-diagnosis. She’d found a smile here and there, gotten a lot of healing from that garden, and focused more on her own health. And Hailey was still here, whenever Jessica wanted to color with her or play hide-and-seek. Letting Hailey go completely would ruin her, but there was no need for that.
Thank God.
Jessica returned to the kitchen to see Jake barely managing to ease down into a chair at the table. She watched him struggle to sit comfortably, and his failure to hide his pain hit a sympathetic nerve. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’m alright. The more I eat and drink, the more’s gotta come out. Listen, about that Nurse Ratched thing—”
“Forget about it. We’re both running on empty.”
She watched Jake turn one of the crayons on the kitchen table with his index finger, familiar with this variation on spin-the-bottle. He’d do the same thing with the remote control on the coffee table and his phone on the kitchen counter, whenever he was hesitant to talk.
True to form, he waited until the tip pointed at him to speak. “You think we should leave these crayons out like this?”
Jessica turned to the sink and refilled her water glass. “I like having them there. Makes the place feel lived in.”
“I was just thinking, we could put some of this stuff in her room, and—”
She pivoted toward him, digging her hands into her hips. “Since when have you been concerned about clutter? I’m thinking an early dinner tonight, as soon as you’re back from your doctor’s appointment. I’ll make your favorite … chicken-fried steak. Rules are meant to be broken every once in a while.”
Jessica glided to the fridge, opened the freezer, and pulled out a lean slab of beef. “That steer from next door is lasting a long time, huh? Another plus to eating less meat. I’ll come back in to start fixing dinner when I’m done with the squash.”
And she skipped out the back door to the garden, leaving her husband to his spinning crayons.
Jake sighed and stared at the army of stick figures still stuck with Scotch tape to the refrigerator door, before holding his walker for support and pulling himself up from his seat at the kitchen table.
No use talking to Jessica. They’d been on different planets since last summer, revolving around the same sun that was Hailey. He had no idea how to fix something that seemed to be so broken… . The occasional tractor repair was no problem, but metal and grease didn’t have revolving emotions. Just gears.
He dragged himself back to the living room and craned his neck toward the warped front window put in by his great-grandfather. His dad had told him to keep the drafty glass panels in place, just like his dad before him had, and Jake was happy to oblige. One less thing to deal with.
He looked past the driveway and out to the patches of winter wheat bordered by their dead brethren, stems that for some reason had stalled on their journey from the dirt. Weeds crept through the bare patches of ground where the seed hadn’t taken, leaving a tangled mess where there should be even rows.
Bound to happen, the guy at the feed store had said. Considerin’ how much everybody’s sprayin’. Nature’s gonna find a way to survive and fight.
Jake watched the stands of sparse wheat bristle against the stiffening afternoon wind. Survive and fight. His waning will to do either right now looked nothing like the stuff of Hollywood underdog heroics. Hell, his motivation revolved around managing what he drank so he wouldn’t have to shit as often.
Speaking of.
Just as he averted his gaze from the window, he saw a rustle run counter to the wind in the wheat. He squinted to make out the movement, and maybe there was nothing really going against the grain, more through it. Jessica went on her morning walks every day out there, but she’d already done that today.
He was in no position to defend himself, let alone the house. His gun was unloaded and locked in the safe with a combination known only to Jessica, per the dark deal he’d made with himself—and her—not to have an easy way out.
The chime of the old clock on the mantle startled him, and he glanced at the time.
3:00 p.m.
He looked back outside in time to see the silhouette of a man against the late afternoon sun, standing just inside the first curtain of struggling wheat. Long braids hung down his shoulders, intertwined with shirt fringes that refused to be influenced by the wind.
This was no man.
He turned toward the back door and yelled for his wife. “Jessica! Get inside!”
When his head ricocheted back to the window, the figure was pushed up against the glass, mouth widening into a gaping abyss.
Hair burning to ash.
Skin dripping off bone.
Eyes disintegrating into hollow sockets.
His heart started to pound in his chest. “Jessica!”
The back door slammed. “Jake, are you alright? Jake?”
He reflexively turned his head toward her hurried steps thumping from the kitchen, and pointed through the warped glass of the living room window.
Where now nothing but his own field stood under the cobalt-sky promise of spring, in the kind of America that the folks in Nashville wrote songs about.
Mark stood in the waiting room, looking over the chart for his last patient of the day. He’d taken a few shifts at this little clinic in town to cover for the slowly retiring doctor, who’d had a hard time letting go of his patients. The old-timer had actually been his pediatrician when he was a kid, and he had helped just about every family in the county one way or another.
He’d also needed to get out of the house, but still be close enough to keep an eye on his mother. His father hadn’t lasted long … his rugged skin had quickly started to hang even further from the once-sturdy frame, angular bones rising to the surface like tipis pushing to the sky. Mark had been delivering his old man’s breakfast toward the end of his second week back when he thought he saw a shadow drifting down the hall and into his dad’s bedroom. By the time he’d dropped the oatmeal on the floor and rushed to his bedside, the enemy had already identified the target and taken the kill-shot.
His mother had taken his father’s death quietly, like she took most things, and Mark didn’t feel right leaving her to head back to the city. Not yet. She wasn’t eating much, talking even less, and he knew she’d never accept paid help coming to the house.
And so, here he was.
Mark brought himself back to the chart in front of him, belonging to a guy who’d wrapped his truck around a tree last month and was coming in this afternoon for a follow-up. Finally, a patient not presenting the usual characters of COPD, obesity, type 2 diabetes, Crohn’s, ulcerative co—
Sudden movement to his right drew his attention outside the clinic window, where a cat darted down the empty main drag, chasing a windblown Sonic paper bag. The familiar pang of altruistic hubris, which had convinced him he could save the world by resolving the pesky nuisance of cancer, bit at his gut.
I should be in the lab, not begging patients to stop digging their own graves with chili cheese fries.
He hated himself immediately for the thought. Being back home had blown the dust off an unfamiliar negative streak, and the cynicism ran counter to his being. He’d pursued medicine to help people and had sunk a lot of his time, and his parents’ credit, into his education, residency, and research.
The bell hanging from the clinic door jangled against the glass, offering Mark an opportunity to actually help somebody in person. He knew he should be embracing the change, since what he’d been doing in medicine hadn’t seemed to be filling whatever hole he needed filled. “Hang on, be right with you.”
He hurried into the exam room, threw the patient’s chart on the folding chair by the sink, and quickly washed his hands. Inherited crystal blue eyes studied him from the mirror, delivering his father’s cancer origin story. The enemy came from somewhere.
“Okay, old man. I hear you. Haven’t forgotten. Seek and destroy, wherever it comes from.”
A confused voice punctured Mark’s conversation with his reflection. “Huh? Hello?”
Mark turned off the water and straightened at the waist. He checked the chart sitting open on the counter next to the sink and dried his hands on a paper towel as he walked out of the exam room. “You must be Jake.” He offered his right hand. “I’m Mark.”