May

My parents visited me for a few days. My father had make extra effort to take off from work to be there, my mother said, trying to inject love where there couldn’t possibly be. I had said nothing, not wanting to rock the boat. Physical proximity was always where I had least control.

“I’ve made reservations at a place nearby, had to pull a few strings because we reserved late.” He said it like it was my fault.

My mother pacified. “It seems like the food will be wonderful.” An offering, I thought. Take it.

“One second,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I walked into my room. Ruby wasn’t there to save me that time. I looked at the window, at the bed, at my computer. I tried to find something that could save me. I caught a glimpse of how crazy I looked, whipping my head around to find something that would help. There were bags under my eyes, purple circles that made my skin contrast like an English essay, for sure that had been the cause. My hair had been combed but the split ends that kept occurring while I slept were fraying. My hair had been falling out, not the point where someone could notice, but pulling it off of my pillow in the morning was getting more and more disheartening. I tugged at the skirt I had chosen because my mother thought it looked “elegant” on me.

I reached out for the mirror, measuring the distance between it and my body. I slammed my fist into the mirror, shattering the glass all over the floor.

My father almost broke down the door trying to get in. “Andi,” he said while pounding against the paper-thin door. “Open up the door. What’s happening?”

I opened the door with my good hand. There were strange gashes starting to separate to reveal the layers of my body below. My blood was warm and felt calm as it flowed down my hand. I just held it up.

“We need to get her to a hospital,” my mother said.

I smiled. Hospitals were where you were never alone.

My father drove down Fifth Avenue like we had all the time in the world. I had a cloth pressed over my knuckles and I was applying pressure, the way I had been taught. My mother kept turning back from the front seat to see if I was okay and then turning away because she couldn’t stand the sight of blood. I had bled through the cloth and created a tie-dye masterpiece with my blood. My mother stopped turning around and put her head on the cold window. Not once did my father ask if I was okay.

“So, we were talking about your grades,” he said after a few minutes.

I thought about punching through the window and realized I wouldn’t be able to. Car windows, I had learned, were made out of different, stronger glass.

“Have they improved?”

I was silent.

“You’re not a minor anymore,” he said through his teeth. “They can only release it to you.”

So he had tried. I knew he had. Why else would he resort to going through me? I played with the threads that were swaying from the bottom of the cloth. I pulled at one and winced. The adrenaline had worn off and I was feeling the pain. I wondered if there was glass still in the wound. That would be awful. The hospital might miss a piece of glass and then my skin would heal over it and get infected and twenty years later it would cause nerve damage and cut through my muscles and then I wouldn’t be able to use my hand and no one would hire me because you can’t hire people who can’t use their hands. Other than professional speakers, and maybe teachers? But they still had to write things down. I would have to learn how to use my left hand for everything and everyone would think that I was slow and had horrible handwriting.

“Are you listening to me?” my father sounded like thunder sometimes. My mother’s twitches were like lightning. You had to count the seconds between them to see how far away the storm was.

One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississi…twitch.

Close, but still okay.

“It’s going fine. I have it under control. I have a tutor.”

“A tutor?” My mother this time, appalled that I had shown anyone I was less than perfect.

“Explain fine. Fine is not an answer.”

“Like, decently well. Figuring things out.”

One-Mississipi, two…

“I asked you a question,” the thunder rumbled. “I expect you to answer it.”

“B-level. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either,” I yelled.

The storm fell away and there was silence. The quiet made my stomach squirm. I knew it couldn’t last for long. My mother had pressed herself against the side of the car, probably doing a trick I had learned from her: making bargains with whoever was up there. I’ll give up this, I’ll be better at this, just please, intervene here. Do something.

It never worked, but it was a great distraction when you knew something bad was going to happen. But we felt it in the air, the way you know that it’s going to rain after you’ve had surgical metal implanted in you.

“You are okay with B-level,” he said, not a question, a fact.

“I’m working to change it. But in the meantime, yes,” I said. Wrong answer.

A security guard tapped at our window, reminding us that we were in a parking lot of a very public hospital. My father rolled down the window.

“How can I help you?” The perfect image of charm.

“Would you folks mind moving up or parking? This is the drop-off lane.”

Even better. I opened the door and got out of the car, safe in the knowledge that my father couldn’t do anything while this guard was next to the car. Had my mother learned the importance of public image from my father or had he learned it from her?

“I’m being dropped off,” I said. “Thanks for the ride. See you tomorrow.”

“We’re coming in with you,” my father said. “Close the door.”

I closed it, making sure my body was on the outside. He sped off, leaving a cloud of dust that sent me sneezing in his wake. I followed the colored signs for the emergency room through winding hallways. There must have been more hallways than patient rooms in the hospital because I kept turning down another one. Perhaps one day, if they built a few more hallways it would look like a game of pick up sticks.

When I arrived at the welcome desk, I held up my hand, covered in a bloody cloth. It must have looked like I had gotten my hand cut off because the receptionist in front of me lost her cool a little bit.

“In there,” she said. “Go in there. Quickly.”

“My parents are going to come in. Can you keep them out for as long as possible?”

She nodded.

Being analyzed by a medical professional when you are a medical professional, even a minor one, is quite painful. The guy in front of me would ask me questions and I would have to restrain myself from answering the next ones that I knew he was going to ask.

He looked up at me after I answered his question before he asked for the seventh time. “Spend a lot of time in hospitals?”

“EMT.”

He nodded his head like a string puppet. Fake respect for the lowest medical provider on the chain. Well, EMRs were lower but only firefighters became EMRs.

I was sent to Room 410 and asked to remove the bloody cloth from my hand so a nurse could examine it. I felt nostalgic removing the cloth. We had already been through so much together that day. I loved that cloth more than my own mother in that moment. At least the cloth had protected me.

It took my father all of thirty minutes to get back to my room, past the receptionists. He and my mother walked in, side-by-side, but with a few inches too many between them. A nurse was in the process of cleaning the wounds so she could figure out which needed stitches or glue. Every dab of her cleaning solution sent another jolt through my nerves.

My mother took to talking to the nurse. “Poor dear; she fell. Clumsiness seems to run in the family.” She laughed weakly.

I saw right through her game. God forbid the nurse leave the room thinking anything but positive thoughts about us.

“We’ll get it taken care of. There will be a few scars but nothing too noticeable.” The nurse stayed very focused on my hand.

I wanted to give her a hug, a thank you, for appreciating my hand as important. I couldn’t. The nurse would probably think it was weird, but still, it was the thought that counted.

My father counted the number of individual cuts on my hand, loudly, like he was chronicling my sins. No one but my mother and I would know how angry he was. Any outsider would have looked in on the scene and seen a worried father obsessing over how hurt his daughter was. How I wished it were like that.

We spent hours at the hospital in complete silence except for the occasional hubbub in the hallway. They treated me and bandaged up my hand to look like a mummy. It was like the time I had wrapped myself in toilet paper and walked around like a zombie. My mother had laughed, her eyes crinkling at the corners. She had let me chase her around the house as I moaned and pretended to be the aggravated dead. My father had come home early that day. My mother had ripped the toilet paper off of me and shoved it in the garbage.

He had walked in and put his briefcase on his desk. I stood stock still in the corner in the kitchen, hoping that he had had a good day. He had come in and kissed my mother, a peck on the lips. We knew he could sense that something was wrong. He must have felt it in the rigidity of my mother’s back or the size of my eyes.

“Come over here. Give your father a welcome home hug,” he said.

I took the smallest steps I could to prolong my journey over. He held out his arm and yanked the toilet paper I had taped to my leg to start my mummy costume off.

“This doesn’t look like homework,” he said.

I looked at my mother, hoping she would explain that I was tired and the book report wasn’t due for another four days.

She stared at the counter like there was something interesting there.

He threw his briefcase at me, clipping my shoulder as I began to sprint towards my room of my own free will. Later that night, he knocked and I let him in because I had to. He sat on the bed and drowned me in a sea of apologies which I knew I was obligated to accept.

I loved the silence of the hospital. It was a welcoming thrum, the sound of a good machine, the faithful type you’d find in an old car than never broke down. Everyone knew what to do next. Triage, treat, terminate. And again. I loved the way it made my father seem washed out and small. He kept trying to tell the nurses that he was almost a doctor, because he’d done pre-med in college, they brushed him off. He got antsy, walking in and out of the room, sometimes disappearing for an hour at a time, returning in a cloud of smoke. Where he found the cigarettes, I don’t know. This was supposed to be a hospital. Didn’t the people who worked there understand the health ramifications?