break.
WHAT SARAH SAID THAT WE COULD HEAR HER SAY FROM HER BED WHILE WE LAY IN OURS: Mom, Pop, the house is coming apart.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Is it true, can the house break apart?
WHAT I FELT: That it was my heart that was breaking in two. I turned over, switching sides.
WHAT I SAID: The house will be the last thing to go, I said, now facing the wall.
WHO IS NICER THAN THE DAY NURSE: The night nurse. The night nurse brings Sarah and Mia extra blankets and lets them create a very dark fort without having to use Sam’s blankets. The night nurse sees the stack of papers and magazines on the floor and admits that that’s what her house looks like and she is always afraid to throw them away for fear she has missed reading an article in them, an article that will save her life maybe. A recall on her brake pedal, a recall on ground meat, a recall on a faulty crib railing, even though she doesn’t have a baby. The night nurse has glasses with pink rims the color of the eyes of an albino pet mouse I had as a child. I would let the mouse run up and down my arms, liking the way he tickled my skin.
CALL: A prepurchase exam on a horse.
ACTION: Drove to farm. Owner’s daughter held the horse while I took X-rays of the horse.
RESULT: Horse, thankfully, stood very still. The X-rays came out clear. The daughter was a young woman. She talked about snow-boarding. She talked about competing as a snowboarder. I told her about surfing, how she should really try it. I told her how I had lived by the ocean out west and surfed the waves and when there weren’t waves to surf, I still went out on my board, lying flat and eyeing orange garibaldi in the clear water. I told her how waves are not like mountains, and how every wave is different and every ride is different and the ocean always changes. I told her that surfing is learning to spot where the wave out on the horizon will be coming from. She laughed, she threw her head back, mountains are like that, too, she said. The conditions are never exactly the same. Her mother brought me out a scone to eat while I X-rayed the horse, a small Morgan with his winter coat beginning to grow in woolly so that he looked more like some Mongolian pony. The scone was delicious. Bits of orange were grated into the batter. Fresh cranberries and bits of apple were mixed in. I asked the owner for the recipe and after I X-rayed the horse, she invited me into her house. Her husband was a carpenter and had carved the doors between the rooms, and he had carved the moldings and the cupboard doors. He had carved the shapes of trees into the wood, not trees you’d expect to find here, but trees, maybe, from the likes of Indonesia. Their canopies were spread wide and their branches thin and delicate and numerous below the canopies, leading down to trunks that were not smooth but ropy in appearance, as if the trunks were twisted strands. Your house is beautiful, I said, and I feasted on the details, wishing everyone’s house I entered could be so distinct and interesting to walk around in. The owner folded up the paper she had written the recipe on and she handed me a check and I put them in my coat pocket. I wanted to ask her if she had heard about Sam, but I knew she had, everyone had heard by now. When she handed me the recipe, she folded it up right after she wrote it, so I could not see the letters. I hoped walking back to my truck that what she had written was the name of the man who had shot my son.
WHAT I DID DRIVING HOME: Unfurled the recipe. There was no name in it, even though I studied the words “grated orange peel” thinking it was some kind of anagram for a man’s name, but what could it be? I came up with “Pete Darlan George” and reminded myself when I got home to look up the name in the phone book.
THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING HOME: This is a good feeling, a check and a good scone recipe in my coat pocket. What more could a man ask for? Then I answered the question myself, alone in my truck. “For my son to be awake,” I said and as I said the words I passed by a man jogging down the road and he must have seen my mouth moving and he must have thought I was talking to him, because he waved and he smiled as I drove on by.
WHAT THE SPACECRAFT WAS DOING WHEN I GOT BACK HOME: Moving quickly up and down, then back and forth, the way a child would wave a sparkler on the Fourth of July, trying to spell his name out in the air with the burning tip. Was the message the name of the man who had shot my son?
WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAID WHEN I GOT HOME: “Father” in German sounds like “Farter.”
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: They got that right.
WHAT WAS NOT IN THE PHONE BOOK: Anyone named “Pete Darlan George.”
WHAT THE FIRE SAID IN THE WOODSTOVE: You have loaded me with wet wood. You did not cover my log piles over the summer, and now I will smoke instead of burn.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID I DID IN MY SLEEP: Cried.
WHAT THE WIFE DID IN HER SLEEP: Snored.
WHAT THE TRUCK IS TELLING ME: Check engine.
WHAT I TOOK THE TRUCK INTO THE SHOP TO BE REPAIRED FOR: The CHECK ENGINE light.
WHAT THE TRUCK COST ME AT THE SHOP TO BE REPAIRED: $300.
WHAT THE TRUCK IS STILL TELLING ME AFTER $300: Check engine.
WHAT I HAVE DECIDED: That having a light on all the time telling me to check something is a good thing and it will make me check my levels more often. It will make me more aware and alert and maybe I need this constant state of alertness to feel alive. Maybe, just maybe, my high levels are keeping me young in ways I never knew. I have my levels to thank. To show my appreciation, I make the appointment with the doctor when I’m at the hospital visiting Sam. I stand by Sam’s bedside and talk to him and tell him I will be right back, I am going down to floor 5 to make an appointment with my own doctor. I feel stupid talking to Sam. I am too much like my wife for a moment, and I do not want to be like her. Talking to him, having him smell food she has brought for him that he cannot eat, brushing his hair for him when it did not have the chance to get messy-he was not running through the pastel yellow walls of the halls, the window was not open letting through winter’s blustering wind, he was not wrestling with his sisters the way he did before.
WHAT GISELA SAYS: Meine Telefonnummer ist zwei, sieben, neun, null, neun.
WHAT JURGEN SAYS: Do you play chess? (You see Jurgen is always trying to get Gisela to go out with him and do something. He suggested playing table tennis earlier, but Gisela, can you blame her, hasn’t got a thing for table tennis.)
WHAT MY WIFE CALLS GISELA: A slut, and then my wife wants to know how you say slut in German, and my wife guesses it’s something like a
CALL: No call. Just the caller who hangs up. Jen wants to know who it was. I don’t know, I say. Was it the hospital? she says. I don’t know, I say. Well, who was it? How do you know it wasn’t the hospital? she says. Why would the hospital hang up? I say. The hospital hung up? Jen says, then call them back. And then she calls the hospital and talks to the day nurse asking if we had been called, if there had been any change in our son.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS AFTER SHE GETS OFF THE PHONE WITH THE DAY NURSE: Well, he’s fine. There’s been no change. Thank God, Jen says. But I’ve been hoping for a change, any kind of change.
WHAT THE CHILDREN DO IN THE MORNING: Climb into bed with us. Sarah curling around me, pulling hairs from moles off my back. I tell her not to. She reads, her eyes close to the page, words from
