Stay Awake (20 page)

About fifteen yards down, O’Sullivan sees a white cross.

It is a little bit shorter than O’Sullivan himself is, and it is wearing a hat. Or—rather—a hat has been attached to the top of the cross, a baseball cap. At the base of the cross is a pile of brightly colored objects. There are some plastic flowers—pink roses, yellow
daffodils, white lilies—and a green Christmas wreath, and a cluster of stuffed animals, bunnies and teddy bears and duckies, and ribbons, which wave lethargically in the light breeze. There is something written on a banner, but he can’t make out the words. As they’ve driven across the country, he has been noticing that there are a lot of these little roadside memorials dotted all along the highway. A lot of people die in car accidents, obviously.

But it seems like there are more of them these days. Or maybe it is just that they are more elaborate. When did people begin to decorate these accident sites as if they were shrines?

“Hey, Smokey,” he says. “Check this out.”

And then he notices another one, just a few yards farther down. He can only barely make it out in the darkness. Another cross with a circle of offerings beneath it.

They were pulling into an interstate oasis, and the sudden reduction in speed slowed the conversation into an ellipsis.

“… ” O’Sullivan said, and Smokey shook his head silently.

“I’ve got to get some gas.”

When they stopped, O’Sullivan got out of the cab and walked quickly toward the bathrooms and vending machines. He was hoping to quickly throw up and then buy himself a Dr Pepper and a candy bar to cut the taste of vomit. It had occurred to him, suddenly, as his feet touched the asphalt, that he might die. His heart was pulsing alarmingly against his rib cage, and as he stumbled woozily toward the restrooms, the distant door frame began
to waver. The solid rectangle appeared to quiver gelatinously, and an irregular twitch started up under his left eye.

Am I having a heart attack?
he wondered.

Then he was in the stall, holding the metal-gray graffiti-scratched walls as he retched.

Then he felt a little better. He stood there at the sink, cupping cool water in his palms and pressing his face into it. He looked at himself, drawn and sallow in the mirror, and dipped back down.

“Are you okay, man?” said Smokey, behind him.

“Sort of,” O’Sullivan said, but then, when he lifted his head, it wasn’t Smokey. It was actually some other guy who he didn’t quite know, and the guy was now standing at the row of fluorescent-lit sinks beside him. O’Sullivan felt certain that he recognized this person from somewhere. He had the uncomfortable presentiment that it was one of the many people he had wronged in his life.

“Hey, man,” O’Sullivan said familiarly, as if he completely recognized the person. “What are
you
doing here?”

Then he realized: It was the motorcycle guy. They’d passed each other probably a dozen times in the past three hundred miles. Once, he’d seen the guy pumping gas at the same gas station where they were pumping gas. Later, the guy was throwing away his trash at a fast-food place just as O’Sullivan and Smokey were walking in.

“Dude,” the guy said, “you have a little fleck of puke on your chin.”

“Oh,” O’Sullivan said. He brushed at the spot with his fingers. “Thanks,” he said.

“No problem,” the guy said. He considered O’Sullivan’s face
for a moment, not unkindly. “Get some fresh air, man. I’ve been there before myself.”

“Yeah,” O’Sullivan said.

“You’ll be all right,” the guy said. He patted O’Sullivan on the back with his black-gloved hand. “I hope you’re not driving,” he said.

“I’m not,” O’Sullivan said.

“That’s good news for the rest of us,” the motorcycle guy said, and gave a grin, the same grin he’d had when they passed on the interstate, the one O’Sullivan would see in his mind a while later, when he thought back to this day, when he thought about the bad things he had done in his life.

O’Sullivan lowered his face into the cold water. When he raised up, the guy was gone.

Then O’Sullivan found himself standing outside the rest stop, holding an RC Cola and a Reese’s peanut butter cup, taking in the sharp late-autumn air. His brain felt unusually empty, and when Smokey finally came up behind him, he was standing near the dog-walking area, trying to remember the names of constellations he should’ve been able to recognize, after a full semester of astronomy.

Sagittarius? Pegasus?

Centaurus?

“Jesus Christ,” Smokey said. “I thought you died. Where the hell have you been?”

“Right here,” O’Sullivan said.

“Well, let’s go, then! This isn’t some fuzzy-chinned collegeboy yankabout. I’m a working man.”

“All right,” O’Sullivan said.

“It’s time to hop,” Smokey said. “I hope you don’t mind if I
put the pedal to the metal
, as they say in truck-driving parlance.”

“All right,” O’Sullivan says. “Let’s hop.”

Smokey comes walking down the berm toward the roadside memorials, where O’Sullivan is standing.

“What have you found, little brother?” Smokey says, wiping the high beam of his flashlight down O’Sullivan’s face and across his chest. Then he stops.

He shines his flashlight into the darkness beyond the memorial, and O’Sullivan notices another one, just a few yards farther down. He can only barely make it out in the darkness. Yet another cross with a circle of offerings beneath it.

He catches his breath. Because just beyond
that
cross is another one. And another. Five. Six. Seven crosses! Clustered there at the edge of the road.

And then—O’Sullivan stands frozen in the flashlight beam—he sees the deer, coming slowly toward him. The deer is stepping delicately through the little forest of memorials—
clip clip, clip clip
, the sound of hooves slowly approaching over asphalt—

“Well,” Smokey says. “There’s your fuckin’ deer, I see.”

The deer, the buck, is standing about fifteen yards away. It pauses for what seems like a long while, peering at them alertly,
and then bolts abruptly. O’Sullivan has a glimpse of its sudden, jagged startle and leap, and in a moment it is gone, in a moment it is little more than a dark shape, a flicker, vanishing into the trees; there is a shudder of leaves and the shadows in between them.

“Oh,” O’Sullivan says. It’s funny, because all of a sudden, okay, now he gets that joke. The Russian guy had mixed things up. He’d fucked the bear and then was going to shake hands with the beautiful woman, instead of vice versa.

He doesn’t know why the memory of that joke should make him shudder. He doesn’t know why the sight of the living deer should fill him with such dread, such a weird sense of

What now? O’Sullivan thought as he stared out at the unreeling

Such a weird sense of something missing, something unremembered—a stove burner that you might have left on, an alarm clock that didn’t go off. Instinctively, he puts his hand to his front pocket, to feel for his keys, but he has no keys. No car. No apartment.

He gazes at the cluster of crosses, the blank face of a stuffed bear, a silver pinwheel revolving slowly, glinting with the red of Smokey’s emergency lights, the shuddering rustle of plastic flower petals, a ragged bit of ribbon flapping, undulating like long hair blown back in a breeze.

It will come to him in a moment, O’Sullivan thinks, though actually he doesn’t want it to. It’s that awful, inevitable feeling, the sound a bicycle makes when it is on its side, as the wheel’s spinning slows and comes to a stop. The ticking of a roulette wheel as the marble finally settles in place.

“Oh my God,” O’Sullivan says.

This girl I’ve been seeing falls out of a tree one June evening. She’s a little drunk—I bought a couple of bottles of hopefully decent Chardonnay from Trader Joe’s on my way over to her house—and now she’s a little drunk and a little belligerent. There is something about me that she doesn’t like, and we’ve been arguing obliquely all evening. It’s only our fifth real date, and though we’ve slept together once—it was the week after my mother died; pity sex, so it doesn’t exactly count—we don’t know each other that well.

For example, I just found out that she has an ex-husband who lives in Japan, who technically isn’t an ex-husband since they haven’t officially divorced.

For example, I didn’t know that she thought I was a bad kisser: “Your kisses are unpleasantly moist,” she says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Actually, no,” I say. “I’ve always gotten compliments on my kisses.”

“Well,” she says. “Women very rarely tell the truth.”

I smile at her. “You’re lying,” I say cleverly. But she doesn’t seem to catch the interesting paradox. She looks at me blankly and downs the last bit of wine in her glass. Then she turns her attention to the tree that rises up alongside the railing of her deck, her eyes following the trunk upward to where it branches out. She locates her cat, Mr. Niffler, about ten feet above us, where he has fled to escape the terror that is me, his claws affixed tightly into the bark, an expression of dyspeptic alarm on his face.

“Mr. Niffler,” she calls. “Kitty, kitty, kitty. What are you doing up there?” And then she gets up and goes to the base of the tree. She hoists herself up on the two-by-six ledge of the railing and stands there, teetering for a moment.

“You know,” I say, “that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.”

My mother appears in the doorway, silhouetted in the morning light. Her dark hair stands up stiff, like a shrub. Smoke from her cigarette curls up. I’m half awake but I can see how bony she is, a
skeleton in a nightie, barely ninety pounds. She’s not much heavier than the two Brittany spaniels that hover behind her—Lady and Peaches, my mother’s dogs, watching as she wakes me, alert and so quiveringly shy around men that they sometimes pee a little when I speak to them. I can feel their tension as I stir in my bed.

“Okay,” I murmur. “I’m up, I’m up.” But my mother and her dogs just stand there. My mother is a few weeks away from her sixtieth birthday and I am nearly forty, but for a moment, here in my old teenage room, we replay our roles from the past. She knows that if she leaves, I will roll over and go back to sleep. Lazybones.

So after a moment, I sit up. I’m an adult, and I wipe my fingers across my face. “What time is it?” I say, though she can’t hear me.

She’s been deaf for almost five years now. A freak infection shut her ears down despite various attempts at intervention by various doctors—but the truth is that in half a decade she hasn’t done much to help herself. She stopped going to her lip-reading classes early on, and forget about sign language or anything like that. She refuses to hang out with other deaf people.

Mostly, to be honest, I don’t know what she does with herself. I don’t know who her friends are or where she goes or what she does with her soundless days. The dogs make little anxious noises as I pull the covers off myself, and I watch as my mother turns, as her bare, crooked feet slide across the carpet toward the kitchen, where she will make me coffee and breakfast. It’s about six in the morning, time for me to drive back from Nebraska to Los Angeles, where my fairly successful grown-up life is waiting for me.

I am in between my second and third date with Rain at this point, and I’m looking forward to seeing her—things are going well, I think. “I’ve met a girl I really like,” I tell my mother. At the time, I have no idea that she will fall out of a tree. I have no idea that she thinks I am a bad kisser.

In the emergency room, there is a Plexiglas barrier between me and the receptionist, whose name tag says
VALENCIA
.

“I’m here with Rain Welsh,” I tell her, and she asks me how to spell it. I have the purse and the billfold and I put Rain’s driver’s license and insurance card through the little mouth hole at the bottom of the glass wall.

“Are you the husband?” Valencia asks me, and I shift awkwardly, looking at the stack of neatly rowed credit cards in Rain’s billfold.

“I’m the boyfriend,” I say. “I don’t really know that much about her. She fell out of a tree.”

“Please take a seat in the waiting area,” Valencia says. She gestures toward the couches just beyond. A series of five Mexican children—boys and girls, aged approximately two to nine—are sitting politely together, watching a sitcom on the television mounted on the wall.

“Do you know how long it’s going to be?” I ask Valencia. But that’s not the right question. “Is she going to be all right?” I say, and our eyes meet for a moment. I am usually pretty good at these kinds of encounters—I have the face of a nice person—but Valencia
doesn’t approve. “Take a seat,” Valencia says. “I’ll let the doctor know that you’re waiting.”

I’ve been talking to myself a lot lately. I don’t know what that’s about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell herself a joke and clap her hands together as she let out a laugh; she would murmur to the plants as she watered them, and offer encouragement to the food as she cooked it. Sometimes I would walk into a room and surprise her as she was regaling herself with some delightful story, and I remember how the sound would dry up in her mouth. She stood there, frozen in the headlights of my teenage scorn.

Now, as I close in on my fortieth birthday, I find myself doing a lot of the same sort of things. An ant crawls up my leg and I say, “Excuse me? May I help you?” before I slap and crush it. I get up in the morning and narrate my way through the rituals of awakening. “Okay, we’re taking a shower now,” I whisper, and I mumble shampoo into my hair and toothpaste into my mouth and stand mesmerized in front of the coffee machine. At times, the procedure seems heartbreakingly complicated—grinding the beans into dust, separating the filter from the packet (which requires the same kind of fine-motor skills as threading a needle), bringing water from the sink to the reservoir of the automatic
coffeemaker. My God, it’s like building a house every morning, just to get a cup of coffee! I stand there at the counter holding my mug, waiting as the water burbles through its cycle and trickles into the pot. “Okay,” I encourage softly. “Okay, go—go!” At times I get very urgent with my coffee, as if I am watching a horse race that I have a lot of money riding on. Now, in the emergency-room parking lot, I am having a very involved talk with the contents of my girlfriend’s purse. “I cannot believe this is happening,” I mutter to the handbag confidentially. “This is ridiculous,” I say, and then I find what I’m looking for. “Well, hello, beautiful,” I say, to a crumpled pack of extra-long, extra-thin, feminine cigarettes: Misty, they are called.