Page 95 of Drowning Erin
65
Erin
Present
Icannot sleep,so instead I tally my losses: Sean isn’t taking my phone calls. My father is getting worse. I’ve got no job. Harper’s roommate returns in a little over a week, and when she does I’ll have nowhere to live and no money with which to acquire something. I’ve sent a few resumes out, but I’ve heard nothingback.
And all of that is minimal compared to the agony of picturing Brendan with that stupid, stupid girl. I know I’m not perfect. I can easily imagine that there are better girls out there than me. Girls who are prettier and smarter and less fucked-up. But she’s not one ofthem.
Just the image of him with his arm around her waist makes me want to vomit. He never once stood like that with me in public. It’s not even about wanting him back, because that was always a lost cause, always impossible. I just want him to stop breaking my heart. I remember when he told me we were in the bubble. Like a pocket of air in a submerged car, he said. What he didn’t say, and what I should have realized, is that when the bubble is popped you don’t shoot to the surface. Youdrown.
* * *
I’m still awakeat 2 AM, when my mother’s name appears on myphone.
I let it ring once, twice, wondering why I always answer. Why does it have to be me? Why can’tshego find him? Or maybe she could just let him spend a night in jail, allow him to actually see how serious a problem itis.
She calls a second time and a third, and my hand twitches, but I don’t pick up the phone. Maybe I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I’ve had enough. For once in my damn life, I am not going to allow them to add their problems tomine.
I must fall asleep after that, because it seems as if moments later the phone is ringing again, but the clock says it’s just after 4 AM. That’s when I start to panic. She didn’t go find him, and he’s still missing, and I’m a terrible daughter for letting it happen. I know all of this before I ever pick up thephone.
My mother is crying so hard she’s almost incoherent. She tells me my father was in an accident. And then she tells me what I already know: that this is entirely myfault.
* * *
By the timeI reach Denver, the sun is coming over the horizon. I’ve only slept two of the past 24 hours, but I feel curiously alert, and curiously empty, all atonce.
I enter St. Joseph’s, a hospital I’ve never set foot in before, but it seems familiar—maybe because I’ve pictured this exact scenario so many times. I follow the directory to the elevators down the hall, and am then led by a somber nurse to my father'sroom.
He looks different. Even if I'd walked into the family room on a regular summer day, if I saw him looking the way he does now, I'd know he was dying. His lips are thin, bleached of color, and his skin is so white it has a blue sheen to it. The veins on his hands stand out like rocky outcroppings across a desertplain.
I press my lips together to keep from making noise, but my mom begins sobbing the moment she sees me, helpless and childlike. For a moment I hate her. I hate her for staying with him for so long, for letting him get to this point, for sitting there blubbering like a lost five-year-old who needs me to come in and fix everything. Just once, I would like to have been the lost five-year-old who gotsaved.
I pinch my lips tighter, though, and go to her side, taking the seat next to her and letting her collapse on my shoulder. She tells me he ran into a telephone pole, and I silently thank God that it was an inanimate object he hit. It goes without saying that he wasdrunk.
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” she cries. “I called andcalled.”
I’m not getting into this with her right now. Yes, I blame myself, but I also blame her. She’s never lifted one finger to solve this problem the whole time they’ve been together, so I’m not the only one atfault.
"I don't know what's going on," she says, continuing to weep. "The doctors keep talking about the bleeding and cirrhosis, and it doesn't even makesense.”
I ask the triage nurse to have the doctor stop by our room. It takes over an hour, and when he does walk in, he looks relieved. I imagine he’s glad to find someone besides my mother in the room. She keeps crying and saying "Please just fix him," like my dad's a brokentoy.
The doctor tells me my father has a subdural hematoma—bleeding in his brain. Right now they’re watching it, but he’s certain my dad will needsurgery.
“So can we get that scheduled?” Iask.
“We’d like to wait, if possible,” he says, “because right now he’s unlikely to survive it. Your father has moderate cirrhosis, which is causing some internal bleeding. The odds of him making it through the surgery, in his current condition, arepoor.”
“How poor?” I ask. “50percent?”
“50 percent,” he replies, “would be extremelyoptimistic.”
My mother cries again after he leaves. She says the doctor is mean and asks me to get a second opinion. I tell her I’ll handle it, and I convince her to go home to sleep for a while. Once she leaves, I take on the other parental role she abandoned, and I call mybrother.
I get a message saying his number is no longer inservice.
In movies, when the heroine hits rock bottom, the world seems to right itself. Things turnaround.