The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (149 page)

Be patient, honey,
I heard Ma say.
You need to be more patient with people.

And how much was this whole fiasco going to cost me? The truck, a five-hour operation, an extended stay at Club Med here. I’d crunched some numbers back in September—just before Thomas’s “big event” down at the library—and even
then
I’d figured I was probably only going to clear twenty-two, twenty-three grand for the year, give or take a few inside jobs in November and December. Of course, those jobs were shot to hell now. And what if my climbing-up-and-down-ladders days were over altogether? There was no way in hell I’d be able to afford contracting out. . . . My insurance
had
to cover falls, right? I’d have to wait until Monday for answers on that, too. Doubted I could decipher that mumbo jumbo the policy was written in. Just the
thought
of making those insurance calls exhausted me.
If you want to file a personal claim, press one. If you want to file a business claim, press two. If your entire life’s going down the toilet, please stay
on the line.
. . .

I pictured that house of horror over there on Gillette Street—framed in scaffolding, scraped and burned down to bare wood, waiting for primer and paint. Jesus Christ, that house was like a curse or something. Maybe I could talk Labanara into finishing the job for me. Or Thayer Kitchen over in Easterly. Kitchen did drywall, mostly, but he’d paint if he was between jobs. Whoever I got to finish it, I’d just have to pay him out of pocket. Screw it. It’d be worth taking the loss just for the privilege of not having to go back there again. . . .

I wondered how Ruth Rood was doing. Hell of a thing: goes up to the attic and there’s her husband’s brains all over the place. Who gets the fun job of cleaning up something like that, anyway? Not Ruth, I hoped. That son of a bitch Rood. Once she got past the shock, she’d be better off without him. Who wouldn’t drink, married to
that
guy?

Better off without him:
the exact words Dessa’s father had used when she made her big announcement to the family that she was going ahead with the divorce. Leo told me that. It was after the dealership’s annual Fourth of July picnic out at the Constantines’—after all the employees had gone home and it was just the family.
We’d been separated for a couple of months by then. . . . Jesus, that hurt, though: hearing from Leo that the Old Man had said that.
Better off without him
. We’d always gotten along okay—Gene and me. We’d had a kind of mutual respect for each other. Plus, there’d been all that time we’d logged in together after the baby died, when Dessa had had to keep calling her mother, having her mother come over. Big Gene would always come, too. We’d just sit there, him and me, staring at the idiot box and waiting for time to pass. Waiting for Dessa to stop crying and realize that Angela’s death wasn’t, somehow,
her
fault.
Our
fault. . . . Hey, I’d wrestled with that one, too.
Still
wrestled with it sometimes: if only I’d done this, if only I’d done that. “You’re like a son to me, Dominick,” Gene had said to me one of those nights. One of us must have turned off the TV; guess he had to say
something
. “Like the son I never had.” And I’d bought it, too—believed Big Gene, who’d made his fortune selling half-truths and false promises to car buyers. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been looking for my real father my whole life. . . . But what had I expected? That he’d be loyal to
me
instead of his firstborn daughter? His pride and joy? What did I even
know
about a father’s loyalty, anyway? I’d had a great role model in that particular department, whoever the guy was who’d knocked up my mother. Left her pregnant with twins. As far as fathers went, I was unclaimed freight. Me and my brother—left on the
loading dock for life. Ray Birdsey’s twin step-burdens. . . .

And as long as I was lying there, not bullshitting myself for once, I might as well admit it: Big Gene was right, wasn’t he? She
was
better off without me. Me and all my baggage—shitty childhood, crazy brother, even that vasectomy I’d gone out and gotten. That had been it for Dessa, the last straw—my vasectomy. Getting myself sterilized without even discussing it. Going behind her back and having it done while she was away so that . . . so that . . .
Your anger poisons everything else that’s good about you
, she’d said that morning she packed her bags.
I’m going because you suck all the oxygen out of the room, Dominick. Because I have to breathe. . . .
And she’d been right, hadn’t she? Lying here in “time-out,” benched by my big fall off the Roods’ roof, I could finally
see
it.
See
what she meant. Getting myself fixed like that, cutting off
even the
possibility
of kids . . . you had to be one angry
motherfucker to do something like that. And what about that father’s loyalty crap I was always so hung up by the balls about? What about
that
, Birdsey? What’s so loyal about a father who goes over there and puts his feet in those stirrup things and has them sever his options. Sever, even, the
possibility
of another kid. That had been
real
loyal, hadn’t it, Dominick? Loyal to her, to your marriage, to any kid that might have come along later. . . . That was why she’d gone away to Greece, she’d said. To decide whether or not she wanted to try again. And she’d come back knowing she
did
want to. . . . So face it, Birdsey. Own up to it.
You
did more to end your marriage than she did. She might have been the one to pack her bags because she couldn’t “breathe,” but it was you who ended it.
You
who’d sucked out all the oxygen. Killed off the possibility, the hope of anything ever . . . And all those reconciliation fantasies
you’d been fooling yourself with—all those rides past that farmhouse where she and her boyfriend lived now. It was
sick
, man. . . . I was like some ghost haunting what she and I had had and lost, instead of just getting on with it. I’d gone out there the night I totaled the truck, come to think of it. I’d been pulling that shit for years now. For
years
. . . . Too bad I hadn’t totaled
myself
along with my truck. Or maybe I had. Maybe I’d totaled myself the day I’d gone down there to that urologist’s and spread my legs and said, “Here I am. Disconnect me. Cut off my options.” Totaled. It was like . . . it was like Angela’s death had been this huge, mangled wreck in the middle of our marriage. And Dessa . . . Dessa had gotten up and gotten on with it. Had walked away from the wreck. And I hadn’t. I was road kill, man.
Road kill
.

Don’t cry. De-fense! De-fense!

Well, screw it, man. I was too
tired
to play D anymore. I didn’t give a crap whether Mr. Bleeding Ulcer over in the other bed heard me or not. I was exhausted. Used up. If I had to cry, then tough shit. . . .

Did Ruth Rood have family to lean on, I wondered. Some friend who’d go over there and sit with her? She wasn’t a bad woman. She’d been decent to me, in spite of all the hassle about their house. . . . I saw Rood up in that window again—the way he’d stood there, staring out at me. Why me, Henry? Why’d you have to go up to that
attic and stare that way at
me
? What were you doing, you bastard—inviting me along for the ride?

God, I couldn’t stand much more of this—just lying there, thinking. Only what was I supposed to do? Get out of bed and walk away from it? Hop into the truck I’d totaled and
go
? Miguel had said something about being able to give me something to make me sleep, hadn’t he? That’s what I
wanted
to do, man: Rip Van Winkle my way through the rest of my sorry-ass life. Wake up after everyone I knew was dead and that baby Joy was pretending was mine had reached the age of majority. Wake me when it’s over, man. Wake me up at checkout time. Except the only catch with sleeping was dreaming. Dead monkeys, dead brothers. Jesus. . . . So let’s see, Dominick. You don’t want to sleep, you don’t want to stay awake. Guess that eliminated everything but the third option. The big
D
. . . . And if I chose that route,
how
? It scared me a little to think about it, but it jazzed me up a little, too. I knew one thing: I wouldn’t make a mess the way
Rood had. No one deserved that. So she’d slept with some guy behind my back. Gotten herself pregnant. That didn’t give me the right to fuck with her head for the rest of her life.

My roommate let another one rip. “Whoops,” he said. “Excuse me again.” I tried to ignore him. Maybe I didn’t have to go to the trouble of offing myself, after all. Maybe all’s I had to do was lie here and get asphyxiated.

“Hey, you want the newspapers?” he said. “I got the
Record
and the
New York Post
. I’m through with ’em.” Before I could say no, he’d swung his legs to the floor and started over.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look at ’em later.”

“Whenever you want,” he said. “I don’t want ’em back. Hey, no kidding, I’m sorry about all this gas. It’s this diet they got me on. I can’t help it.”

“No problem,” I said. Thought: Okay, now get back in bed and shut up. I don’t
want
to be your hospital buddy. Just let me lie here and think—play with the idea of dying.

“By the way, my name’s Steve,” he said. “Steve Felice.”

He waited. Kept looking at me. “Dominick Birdsey.”

“Housepainter, right?”

I shrugged. “
Used
to be. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. With my leg.” He just stood there, waiting. “What . . . what do you do?”

“Me? I’m a purchasing agent. Down at EB.” He told me we were both in the same boat, in a way. Hell of a thing—not knowing from month to month if the next round of layoffs was going to zap you. It got to you after a while. That was how he’d gotten his ulcer—not knowing if he was going to have a job by the end of the year or not. He’d always been pretty easygoing before all this.
Relatively
easygoing, anyway.
He
thought so, anyway. But what the hell, he said. He heard the Indians were going to start hiring in the spring. They’d need purchasing agents down there, right? Big operation like that? They’d need to
order
things.
Buy
things. Or maybe he’d go down there and try something completely different—deal blackjack, maybe, or train to manage one of the restaurants that were going in down there. That’s what life was about, right? Taking chances? Shuffling the deck a little?

I told him my stepfather worked down at Electric Boat.

“Yeah,” he said. “Big Ray. We been shooting the shit last couple of days, him and me. He’s been here three or four times to see you.”

He had?

“He’s going to be glad to see you today, I tell you. You know, clear-headed—back to normal again. You been a little discombobulated. He’s been worried about you.”

“Has he?”

“Well,
sure
he has. He was telling me how he got over to that place where you were working just as they were loading you into the ambulance. He was supposed to pick you up over there, right? Hell of a thing to have to drive up to: your kid being loaded into an ambulance, screaming bloody murder, and you can’t do a damn thing about it.
Sure
he’s been worried. My two are grown up and out of the house now and I
still
worry. It never stops. You wait till yours comes along. When’s the little woman due? May, is it?”

What had Joy done—stood up on a chair and made a big announcement?

“You’ll see. When it’s your kid, you’re going to worry no matter what.” Climbing back into bed, he cut another fart. “Whoops,” he said. “Thar she blows again.
Pardone
.”

I reached for the phone. Dialed Ray. Figured I’d give him the big medical bulletin: that I’d come back to Planet Earth. But there was still no answer over there. I dialed my own house again. This time, she answered, groggy-voiced. “It’s me,” I said. “I’m back from the dead.”

There was a pause at the other end. “Dominick?”

“Yeah. You didn’t cash in my life insurance policy yet, did you?”

She sounded relieved, I’ll give her that. She kept repeating my name. She might have been crying—she’s not a big crier as a rule, but she might have been. We talked for half an hour or more. Caught up. She did most of the talking. By the time I hung up, she’d filled me in on her three-day vigil at the hospital, all the ways that Ray had driven her crazy, how her morning sickness had begun to set in in earnest. She’d finally gotten through to Dr. Spencer the night before, she said.

That
was the surgeon’s name
:
Spencer, Dr. Spencer. . . .

He said they’d know more after the swelling went down—it was a waiting game until then, but he was cautiously optimistic. He was a little concerned about the amount of painkiller they’d had to give me. A necessary evil, he’d said, due to the severity of the break—
breaks
. But he didn’t want me to end up drug-dependent on top of everything else I was facing. It was going to be a tough enough row to hoe. Eight to ten days in the hospital, he figured—limited physical therapy beginning on Monday. I’d probably need PT for a good six months, minimum. They still weren’t sure about permanent damage; it could go either way. I might be facing more surgery—six to nine months down the line, maybe. “He said it was one of the most complicated breaks he’s ever worked on,” Joy said. “He might even write about it for some medical journal. He said he’d like you to sign a release so that—”

“What about Thomas?” I said. “Did you hear anything? How
he
made out?”

A sigh. A long pause. “Dominick,” she said. “Why don’t you worry about yourself for once instead of your brother? Maybe if
you’d been taking care of yourself instead of running around like a chicken with your head cut off for the past—”

“I missed his hearing, Joy. I failed him.”

“Honest to God, Dominick.
Listen
to me. You have to stop trying to be his big savior and start taking care of Dominick instead. Why do you think this happened to you, anyway? Have you stopped to think about that? The way you’ve been rushing down there every two seconds, losing sleep, getting all hyped up over your brother? Worry about
yourself
, Dominick. Worry about
me
. About our
baby
.”