Two
11
I caught Vicky looking at my face in the light — I was sitting at my desk with some old pictures I’d dug out from an unmarked box. Me and my grandma running with geese somewhere. The zoo, I guess. Or on vacation. I wasn’t sure.
If I’m in a bathroom out there in the world someplace I’ll catch the glint myself on the raised ridges on either side of my mouth area, the dully shining skin. “Pretty bad?” I said.
“No, now, no,” she said, with a little catching laugh in her breath. “You know I work doubles on weekends out at Loma Linda, though.”
“No,” I said. My conceptions of people’s outside lives are pretty crude: basic, two-dimensional stuff.
“I do, I do,” she said. “Anyway, my sister’s friend works reconstructive. They had somebody like you in there just last week.”
Our eyes met. This doesn’t happen for me often, with anybody. It felt so naked. I tried to stay with it, to be present for it, to see where it would go.
“They can do so many things now, honey,” she said, returning her eyes to her work. She was prepping some swabs for my cleaning. “It’s a lot they can do since you first got hurt.”
“I–I know. I talked to them about it a couple years back.”
“How long ago was that?” she said, her gaze back on me, pretty steady. You forget how well people know you, when they know you.
I opened a drawer on the left side of my desk, the personal business side, which doesn’t see a lot of traffic. I moved some stuff around and found a few brochures. One was even from Loma Linda. Imagine.
Vicky looked them over. “They’re in their own building now,” she said. “This one is from when they were still over in the main surgery building.” The western desert gives way a little. Marsh gas? Some smell on the wind. DON FACE MASK. TRACE BACK. CONTINUE DUE EAST. DIG SHELTER.
“Anyway,” she said, “you could call them,” and she swabbed my cheeks with some glycerine on a compress, so gentle it barely stung at all.
“It’s your grandmother,” Dad said on the phone after we’d finished up our opening moves today. “Last night she — she died last night.”
When you shoot yourself in the face with a Marlin 39A, one thing you don’t think about is what your father will tell his mother when it becomes necessary to tell her something’s happened. My grandfather on my father’s side had been dead for over a decade; he had a heart attack one day in the supermarket. I’d overheard my dad explaining it to Mom after he came home early from work. “The aisle was empty, it was early,” he said. “He was lying there for — for a little while.” I was twelve; they took me to the funeral at Oak Park and I stood quietly imagining what the screams would sound like if the coffin lid sprung open and something crawled out.
Grandma stayed on alone in the giant house where my dad and his brothers had grown up. When, eventually, the climb up the stairs got to be too much, she moved downstairs, and the second floor became an accidental museum commemorating the last day anybody’d lived there. I used to hide out up there when we’d visit and try to get lost in the dusty, abandoned feeling of a place where nothing ever happens.
What they told my grandmother after the accident was that I had been in a car accident and that everyone else in the vehicle had been killed. This was an important detail, because lots of people get into car accidents and come out basically OK. They break arms or they get concussions, and maybe they get brain damage and can’t remember things like they used to. But they don’t look markedly different, unless maybe their face hits the windshield and the car catches fire and everybody else inside gets burned to death. These were two of the details my father had asked me to memorize in case Grandma ever asked me about the accident and to mention if she did. “She’s not going to ask you to talk about it, I know she won’t,” he said. “But in case she does.”
One of the therapists I had to go to later on tried getting me to talk about why I was angry at my parents, and I’d say I didn’t think I really was particularly angry at them except maybe at my dad for making me lie to his mother. I only had one grandma left; it felt wrong to tell her stories. “Is there anything earlier?” she’d say then, and I’d shake my head no: the main thing is having to lie to my grandmother. “So if that’s the main thing,” she said, once, “what are some of the other things?”
It gets to the point where you almost want to make something up just to keep them happy, to keep from being the person who makes them feel like they’re wasting their time. But I try to be honest always. It’s important to me.
“There aren’t really any other things,” I said.
In the early days there hadn’t been anybody my parents weren’t going to sue. But they would have needed my cooperation to go after anybody besides the gun people, so that’s who they settled on: the gun people. Most lawyers would have strung them along for a while, I think. But the one they did find, in the Yellow Pages, was a good guy, and he told them point blank that nobody was ever going to get a dime from the gun people. That was the end of that idea. He told them their legal money would be better spent on somebody to negotiate with insurance companies — somebody who knew that accidents happen, and that that’s what insurance is really for, after all. Accident: this was the great gift, free and clear, that the Yellow Pages lawyer gave my parents when they called him. He did also say that they might have a case if they wanted to sue whoever’d originally sold my father the rifle, though.
The gun shop where my father’d bought it was on Mission Avenue, down between the drive-in and a used-tires place. It was a stand-alone cinder block building on a weedy asphalt lot. The shop’s owner, Ray, was the man who’d sold it to him; Ray had served in the First World War with my grandfather. My father hadn’t yet been old enough to walk on the day his own father had introduced him to his old army buddy Ray. Ray owned the building and lived in a small room off the office. At some point before I was born his wife died; he hadn’t remarried, and when my parents talked about him — when Dad would say, at dinner, that he was thinking about going to see Ray this week — I got the feeling that some unnamed duty was being invoked. And so I knew, when Dad told me we were going to Ray’s one morning, that my father had undertaken some kind of internal strategic shift in his approach to dealing with what was left of his only son. His rage was still fresh, but he must have begun to sense the slow beginnings of its ebb.
I remember feeling perilously light in my body. As though a sudden wind might lift me and carry me across the parking lot. I think now I’d be able to identify that feeling as fear, but at the time it was strictly physicaclass="underline" the heaviness of my head, which was with me most days, seemed ignorable. Though I couldn’t yet walk without help, I felt as we cruised down Monte Vista like I might have been able to go a block or two. It made me think about the future, whose actuality was very slowly coming into view for me. The days ahead, the months and years. I was seventeen, so my sense of time was still necessarily limited, but the hospital ceiling had taught me a thing or two about it. I could see it from the window of the car: even when my view hit the vanishing point, I knew there was more beyond it.