eyes crinkle. “You’re welcome,” he said, then ruffled the top of my head like we were kids again and walked out the door.
The physical therapist watched our exchange in silence. She was a short sassy brunette who looked like she had never quite lost her baby fat. I had the thought she looked like she should be working in an ice cream parlor or maybe a pet supply store.
“You can’t see it, but there’s a rubber knob on the bottom of your cast, right under the heel of your foot. Like the stopper on the end of these crutches,” she said, holding up one of the crutches for me to see. “When you’re moving around, I want you to keep as much weight off of your leg as possible. But, if you have to put any weight on it, keep it on the knob. That’s what it’s for. That, and to make sure you don’t slip and fall. She tried a smile on so I tried one right back at her, and when my scar lit up, she momentarily jerked the crutch across the front of her body, like a shield. “Uh, anyway,” she said, “here, let me help you. Swing your legs off the side of the bed, but don’t try and stand, yet.”
“Just give me a minute, will you?” I said. Then I gathered myself together and sat upright on the side of the bed and with the therapist’s help I managed to stand mostly on my good leg, my broken one held at an odd angle at the knee to prevent it from touching the floor.
“Good, good. That’s good,” she said. “Now straighten your knee and let the knob on the bottom of your cast rest on the floor, but don’t put any weight on it. I just want you to get a feel for where it is down there.” I did what she asked, and when I did, the pain flared in my shin and the room spun. The therapist grabbed my arm and eased me back down on the bed. “I said not to put any weight on it.”
I nodded, my breath whistling through my teeth. “I didn’t.”
“Well, maybe you did a little. Do you want me to see about getting you a wheel chair?”
“No, I do not want a fucking wheel chair,” I said.
“All right, then, Come on, let’s try again.”
I looked over at the side of the bed where the IV stand had been and wondered if maybe they might hook me back up if I asked. Just for a little while.
“Come on, give it another try. It only gets better from here.”
“I can believe that,” I said. I gripped the handle of the crutches, the therapist standing next to me like a gymnastics spotter. I leaned forward, put my weight on my good leg and pulled myself up.
“All right. Now, let’s try moving around the room a little. You look like a pretty strong guy. Just remember, the key to using crutches is in the forearms, not your armpits, okay? Keep your leg bent, and use both crutches at the same time. Step with your good leg, then follow with your arms, okay?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, and found that I hated her already. But after a few minutes of her help and some painful practice, I had to admit, she had me moving around fairly well.
She handed me some kind of waiver stating that she had demonstrated the proper use of the crutches and asked me to sign at the bottom. Her parting words were, “Remember, if you stumble and think you’re going to fall, and you probably will, just let your body go limp. Don’t try and save yourself. Just relax and go ahead and let yourself go. You’re more likely to reinjure if you try to save yourself than if you just go ahead and let it happen.”
For some reason, her statement made me think about my relationships with my dad, Murton, and Sandy.
A few hours later, one of the nurses came in and told me my ticket out would be to show the doctor I could get around on my own, and that was all the motivation I, Virgil F. Jones required. I picked up my crutches and made my way toward the door. I leaned against the jamb for a few minutes and waited until the hall was mostly clear before I ventured out. I found it was not too bad, the moving around, but the physical therapist was right; the key was to keep the weight off my leg. I went up and down the hall a few times, stopping to rest only once at the opposite end of the corridor from my room. The hardest part really was holding my leg in the air, bent at the knee, and it did not take long before I could feel the burn in my thigh. There was a couch at the end of the hallway next to the elevators, so I decided to sit and watch the business end of the hospital for a while.
As soon as I sat down I knew it was a mistake. The couch was lower than I thought-going down was not too bad-but once I was seated I knew I would not be able to get back up without help. The nurses station was at the other end of the hall, so to get back up I would have to either yell for help, or wait until someone happened by who was able-bodied enough and took pity on me.
Smooth, Jonesy, I thought. I closed my eyes for a while and when I opened them back up my father was sitting next to me and the look on his face told me we were thinking the same thing. “This place will kill you, you know that?” he said. When I didn’t respond, my father looked over at me and said, “You remember your Uncle Bob?”
“No, not really. I might remember the name, but that’s about it.”
Mason nodded. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. You were pretty young when he died. He was your mother’s uncle, your great uncle. He was a mortician. Had his own funeral home up in Kokomo. After he passed, his family sold out to a conglomerate, but I was talking to him one time, this was years ago, before you were even born I think, and you know what he told me? He told me that in the funeral home industry, they call it death care. I always thought that was the damnedest thing, Death care.
“I’d sit up here with your mother, just one floor above this one while they pumped that poison into her veins trying to kill the cancer inside her, and in the end all they did was make the last few months of her life more miserable than they already were. Every time we’d come in here I’d think about that conversation with Uncle Bob. They might call this health care, Virg, but it’s really all the same thing sometimes.” Then, like the concept of a segue was foreign to him, he finished with, “So, when they letting you out?”
I looked at him, not quite sure what he was trying to say, if anything. “Tomorrow, I think. Want to help me back to my room?”
“You bet,” Mason said. “You bet I do.”
We took our time going down the hall, and he told me Delroy and Robert were going back to Jamaica for a week, so he was going to close the bar to sand down and refinish the bar top. When I said I would stop by to help if I could, he laughed, and told me not to worry about it.
When we finally made it back to the room, we stood next to the bed for a moment, and I looked at my father and said, “I can’t explain it Pops, but it was her. She was standing right behind him and her hands were over the top of his. She helped him untie me and get me down. She was smiling at me, Dad. What do you think of that?”
“You were bleeding out from the inside, Son. The doctors said you had about two and a half minutes left by the time they got you here. The mind can play tricks on you when you’re in that kind of shape.”
“I’ve been in that bad of shape before, you know.”
“I know, Son, I know. You saw what you saw. Was it real to you?”
“Yeah, it was.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. We stayed there for a moment, then he did something he had not done in almost forty years, an act that brought tears to his eyes.
He helped his son to bed.
A short while later the nurse came in to take my blood pressure and when she offered me more pain medication, the nature of the conversation that followed must have made her think I might be suffering from brain damage.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked her.
She had her hand on my wrist, my pulse beat steady under the tips of her fingers. She held up a finger in a ‘wait a minutes’ gesture and then said, “Sorry, I was counting. What was that you just asked me?”
“Never mind,” I said. But then I asked her something else. “I keep hearing this muffled little happy birthday tune. Is anyone else hearing it, or is it just me?”
The nurse laughed. “That’s from the maternity ward. It’s one floor below us. Every time a baby is born the new father gets to push a button behind the nurse’s station and it plays the first few notes of happy birthday over the loudspeaker on that floor. You can hear it on this floor because they’re right below us.” She wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm just above the elbow and pumped the bulb. I watched the needle on the indicator
