Dear Kurl,
The emergency room was teeming with emergencies. There was a wheezing toddler blue around the lips. There was a drunk man with a nail through the palm of his hand. There was an old woman lying across three seats crying and moaning and clutching her side while a younger woman spoke to her angrily.
Shayna and I sat side by side in egg-shaped orange plastic chairs. She’d somehow found my shirt on the pool deck, so I was wearing that, but they’d peeled off my wet pants en route so I had just the ambulance blanket wrapped around me from the waist down. They’d talked about leaving me on the gurney, but then they needed the gurney for a man whose appendix had exploded.
The chairs were bolted to the ground but they swiveled, which I thought was a curious design idea for an emergency room. Why did they think patients would want to swivel back and forth in their chairs? Was it supposed to encourage self-soothing? Was I supposed to swing myself gently side to side and imagine I was rocking in my mother’s arms? The hard plastic slope of my egg knocked against Shayna’s each time I turned it in her direction.
“What’s the point of an ambulance if they just abandon us here?” Shayna said. “They may as well have left us at a bus stop.”
“Why do you think these chairs swivel?” I asked her.
“Your ribs will be healed if they wait much longer,” she said.
“Maybe they’re designed to calibrate your inner ear,” I said, swiveling. “Or lull your pain receptors.”
Shayna got up and went to the Plexiglas check-in booth. She bent to speak into the intake nurse’s microphone. STOP! said the sign taped to the window next to her head. DO YOU HAVE A COUGH WITH FEVER?
I was enjoying the foggy, floaty feeling of the drugs in my bloodstream. It was like lying on an air mattress inside my own skin. Time passed unevenly, in little spurts with long lapses in between. The paramedics had found Lyle’s prescription bottle in my trouser pocket, and apparently the dosage wasn’t high enough to kill me, even if I had ingested more than those three or four pills I’d managed to lick off Bron’s kitchen counter.
Shayna came back and sank into her egg chair.
“You know what all the doctors are probably doing?” I said. “They’re probably all working on Dowell.”
“Fuck Dowell,” Shayna said. “I should go unplug him.”
“You think he’s on life support?”
“Fuck if I know,” she said. Then, after a minute: “He’s not on life support. I’m sure he’s fine, Jojo. Bruises. At most a concussion.”
After another minute she said, “It turns out Mom was a hooker.”
I paused my swiveling, knocking my chair into hers. “Don’t say that.”
“She was. She went to be a prostitute in LA.”
“Did Axel tell you that?” I said. “Because if he did, he’s full of crap. It doesn’t even make sense.”
“He didn’t say it to me; he said it to Lyle.”
“What did he say, exactly, though? What were his exact words?”
“He said, ‘She turned her own tricks, man. You can’t put that on me.’ And it does too make sense,” Shayna added. “She was a heroin addict. She needed money.”
I resumed twisting my chair.
“Jojo,” she said, “I’m really sorry about what I said to the cops.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m really sorry. I just thought Kurl would—”
I cut her off. “It’s okay.” I couldn’t stand the way your name sounded in Shayna’s mouth. It jumped out from the rest of her words and hit me like a punch to the face.
“I thought he’d get in less trouble, you know? If we said—”
“I get it,” I said.
“I’m sorry for lying, though,” she said.
I shrugged. “Or it was the truth.”
I felt her look at me. “No.”
“Maybe it was.”
“No. Did he say something to you? Kurl and I are not—no.”
The swiveling had the opposite of its intended lulling effect. I had to vomit. I clutched my ambulance blanket around my waist and made a dash for the restroom but only got as far as the garbage cans.
“Nice save,” a man said. He was wearing scrubs and had paper slippers over his shoes. He handed me a tissue to wipe my face.
I rinsed out my mouth in the restroom sink and then locked myself inside one of the stalls and sat on the closed lid of the toilet with my forehead resting against the metal wall. I thought of Shayna, who had just apologized to me for lying while simultaneously lying to me some more. Who did not know I knew she was lying. Who did not know that I’d walked in on her having sex with you, Kurl.
I thought of you hunched by Bron’s hot tub with your hands in the foam. Your eyes like black holes. Nausea ripped through me again, bile rising in my mouth.
There was a knock on the stall door, and Lyle’s voice said my name. When I came out he threw his arms around me, then dropped them and apologized when I squeaked at his touch on my shoulders.
Lyle was pale and teary-eyed with worry. “Are you all right? Are you all right?” he kept saying, and of course, seeing him upset made me start to cry as well.
He’d brought pajamas, socks, and shoes for me, and he helped me get dressed, there in the restroom, while I cried.
I was exhausted. I think I kept crying continuously from that point on, mostly from exhaustion and maybe a sort of relief, too, as though now that my father was on the scene I could safely fall apart. So I cried a bit on and off all through the X-ray process and afterward, waiting for a doctor to come and look at the X-ray and tell us that I’d fractured two of my ribs.
We’d already learned all about the fractures from the X-ray technician, who was a short woman with a very tight pink set of scrubs and cornrow braids. She pointed out the harder-to-spot break, a hairline fracture in the bone under my right nipple, and she told us that they might tape the ribs but it wouldn’t help one whittle. Whittle is the word she used.
The doctor didn’t tape my ribs, though. She felt around until the pain cut through the painkillers and I yelped. “Once we make sure they’re aligned, they’ll figure out the rest,” she said. “Bones know what they’re doing.”
For some reason Shayna giggled at this, and the doctor seemed pleased. She seemed to want to egg her on. “You put two bones in a room together,” she said, “and in a couple of weeks they’ll be one bone.” Shayna laughed so hard I suspected she was edging into hysteria.
On the drive home I rode in the back seat, half-asleep, queasy. Shayna had lit Lyle’s hash pipe but was refusing to pass it to him.
He tried to joke with her: “Don’t stinge me,” he said. Stinge is the verb form of stingy invented by the Decent Fellows to describe the act of not rolling a joint fat enough, or underpacking one’s pipe or vape, in a selfish effort to avoid sharing one’s green.
Shayna didn’t answer him, just unrolled her window to exhale so he wouldn’t even get any of her secondhand smoke.
“It’s my green,” Lyle pointed out, but she remained unmoved.
They’d given me new painkillers, proper ones, but I wasn’t allowed to take the first one until the morning. I had to sit in the back seat, lean forward and hold myself perfectly still so that nothing on my body would make unnecessary contact with anything in the car. It was exhausting, and after a minute I closed my eyes and rested my temple against the car window. I thought of your back, Kurl, how many times you must have leaned forward in a chair, and I fought the nausea that rose anew.
Shayna had turned the music up loud, and when Lyle tried to turn it down a few notches, she twisted the knob even higher.
“How did she die?” I asked.
“What?” Lyle said, over his shoulder.
I leaned farther forward and spoke louder: “How did she die?”
“Who?” Lyle said.
“Raphael,” I said.
“Mom,” Shayna corrected me. She switched off the music. “Yeah. How did Mom die, Lyle?”
“It wasn’t a bicycle accident, was it?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Lyle said.
“What?” Shayna said.
“I don’t know how she died.”
“Stop lying to us!” Shayna yelled.
Lyle pulled over. He unclipped his seat belt and turned in his seat so that he could look at both of us. “They found her in her room, in this motel in LA she’d been staying in. The guy… The man she was with had checked out the week before. He’d used a fake name anyway.”
“Mom was murdered?” Shayna’s face was white.
“No, Shay. No, the man was long gone when she died. She was…” Lyle stopped, took a breath.
“What, Lyle?” Shayna said. “Just fucking say it, will you?”
“He’s trying,” I pointed out.
“They did an autopsy, including a tox screen. She was on everything: booze, heroin, meth.”
“An overdose?” Shayna said.
“She also had pneumonia,” Lyle said, “so it could have been that.”
“So she was sick,” Shayna said.
“She was very sick, yes,” Lyle said.
“And you just let her die.”
“I didn’t—no, Shayna. I couldn’t—”
Shayna cut him off. “Drive the car.”
“Look, I’m sorry I never told—”
“Drive the car,” Shayna yelled, “or I’m getting out right here!” When Lyle pulled back onto the road, she punched the knob to turn the music back on.
At home I went straight up to my tent.
“Do you need an assist?” Lyle called after me up the stairs, but I told him I was fine.
“Drink some water,” he said. “I’ll swing by on my lunch to check on you.”
My clock said it was 8:40 Saturday morning. Lyle had a full day of guitar students lined up at the music school.
I was asleep almost before I could close the flap on the tent.
Sleeping all day. This must be one of the ways people hide from pain.
Yours,
Jo