Dandelions
by Leea Glasheena
It looked as if a family of cardinals had melted onto his black suit, white shirt, and gold tie which all lay crumpled over the back rest of a chair in the corner. His Allen Edmonds had been tossed underneath.
“Gimme a chip!” he yelled as loud as he could, his six-foot-three-inch frame dwarfing the hospital bed. I stroked his forearm, trying to calm him.
“Can’t you see how skinny I am? Gimme something to eat!” A vodka miasma displaced the air in the room each time he opened his mouth.
A young nurse with bunned blonde hair rolled in a cart covered with shiny silver scalpels, clamps, retractors, and forceps. She hurried back out, not making eye contact with the patient who had berated her moments earlier for not giving into his demands.
“Just one little chip,” he yelled after her.
His mom pushed aside the curtain that acted as a room partition. She was still in her house slippers and her usual light blue head wrap.
“Oh no, not you. I don’t need your trifling,” she said to me.
I looked away.
She walked to the foot of the bed. “Now you done it. Look at yourself. Now you done it. They say you done busted your skull open.”
“It hurts, Mama,” he said.
“It should hurt. You wrapped that nice Tahoe around a light post. I gave birth to you forty three years ago to see you come to this?”
She looked at me again, craned her head back and raised her eyebrows, “Oh, it’s
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I told her I was fine, and she asked me how he got like that. I had no idea. I was deep in a REM cycle when my phone rang.
“I can hear somebody opening a bag of chips out there! Gimme something. A half a sandwich. I’m hungry.”
“I ain’t staying here if you gonna act a fool,” his mother said. She meant it too because she turned around halfway through her last word and walked out.
As soon as his mother was out of sight, he yelled, “Nobody loves me!”
“Your mom loves you,” I said.
“She’s gone.” He pouted. “She doesn’t love me. I’m a fuck up. Nobody loves me.”
“I love you,” I said.
“You do?”
“Yeah, sure I do.”
“You’re the only one who ever loved me, Sweetheart,” he said, pulling my hand over to his mouth so he could kiss it even though it meant I was bent over the bed with the guard rail smashed into my liver.
Sweetheart? The last time we spoke, he called me something less affectionate. Not just once. It was a cascade of “I hate you, you bitch. Arrogant bitch. Ugly bitch. Stupid bitch.”
“How could you not have known!” he had screamed at me in the end. “I was drunk at your play! I was high at your birthday!”
He asked me how I let him get away with it for so long when I should have been the one to call him out. I should have known, he said, about the other women he was sleeping with. He wasn’t wrong. Someone else might have.
That was two months earlier, but somehow he forgot all of that and remembered my phone number instead. “Sweetheart, Sweetheart, Sweetheart,” he said when I answered the call, “I need help.” I told him that I could not care any less and that I was going to hang up. But I didn’t hang up. The paramedic got on the line and said that they were lifting him into the ambulance, he was in a bad way, and he was all alone. I rolled out of my snuggly covers, slipped on my fake UGGs, and drove here.
Why?
I no longer felt that pang of yearning for him, but there I was, still standing in a sterile room with stark white lights and a beeping vital stats machine. Was it out of respect for the three years we had before he tumbled off a wagon I didn’t know he was riding? Three years of bouquets of pink lilies and orange roses. He wrote my name on his plate in asparagus at a Senate luncheon, dressed as Raggedy Andy to my Ann though the costume barely fit over his then sturdy chest, and learned swing dance for a Christmas talent show I wanted to enter . . . and there was that triangle-shaped diamond we chose at Jared’s. Memories of love, but not love.
Then, why?
The phone rang and buzzzzzzzzz – I felt the little buzz in my heart, like when Uncle Kevin used to knock on my window at 4:00 a.m. when he got off the night shift at the foundry. “Let’s go for breakfast!” Uncle Kevin would wave me to hurry. I would grab a pair of tennies and a sweater, pop the window screen out, and climb onto the dew-filled grass. Pancakes and scrambled eggs tasted more delicious with the excitement of sneaking out before sunrise. I would be back on time to get ready for school and catch the bus. It didn’t occur to me at the time that an uncle should care more about me getting a solid night’s rest before school than him having company at breakfast. Those breakfasts were at least better than the time that same uncle hung his head out the side of his Mustang convertible, vomiting tequila sunrises while steering with his right hand and crying a confession that should have been heard by social services and then the police and not by fifteen-year-old me.
Half a dozen years earlier than that, I handed my mother a bouquet of sun-yellow blossoms. “I don’t want these weeds,” she said as she pelted them into the trash. I loved her anyway. I didn’t know any better.
Love? Yearning? Excitement? Some of us never learned the difference and ended up with exes in emergency rooms in the middle of nights. I blamed the uncle and mother in those memories for not loving me right, but were they any more capable of being someone else back then than I was now?
“Can’t you see I’m skin and bones! Look at my ribs!” he said to the new nurse whom I hadn’t noticed come back into the room.
She swabbed his head with a Q-tip the size of a bunny’s tail.
“We can’t give you anything to eat until we close this up.”
“Close it up! Close it up! Close it up!” He jerked his head back and forth so the nurse could not do her job. She moved swiftly out of the room.
I urged him to cooperate. He ranted that they were all assholes and that the government and hospitals steal money from the taxpayers and don’t serve poor communities.
A slew of people in scrubs charged in all at once. They put his arms in restraints and one poured some type of liquid over the gash in his head. It was clear when it left the container and bright red when it hit the floor.
“It stings!” he hollered.
“Mr. Ferson, we’re going to stitch up that head wound. We can’t give you a general pain killer because you can’t tell us what you have in your system. We’ll give you a local anesthetic, but it’s going to hurt a bit.” The doctor said this less as an apology and more as if he were passing a just sentence.
“Then are you going to give me something to eat?” he asked.
One of the others pulled out a syringe. I asked if I should leave, but they said I could stay, probably because they preferred not to deal with him alone. Though he was rib-counting thin, his cut biceps protruded out of the faded blue and white hospital gown, and he was scowling at each of them in turn.
A gallon of redness had already splashed onto the bare floor. The one pouring liquid over his head began to work the clots at the edge of the wound with a gloved finger.
His face puckered, and he began to holler a deep “aaaah, aaaah, aaaah.”
I wished they had told me to leave. I held his hand and repeated that he would be fine and that it would all be over soon.
The doctor made his way behind him and started pushing a stitching needle through the open flap of skin.
He no longer yelled about chips and sandwiches. His sounds were reduced to a continual low moan, “oooh, oooh, oooh.”
He squeezed my hand until it hurt, so I pulled it away. When his head was closed, they brought him apple juice in a plastic container with a peel-back lid. He opened his mouth, but before he could complain, a sandwich in brown wax paper and a bag of baked Sun Chips appeared as well. He was silent until all three were in his belly.
“Can you give me a ride home, Sweetheart?” he asked.
I smiled at him and patted his hand.
“Just a minute,” I said.
I sneaked through the opening in the curtain and passed by his mother who was reading a magazine and drinking a Coke in the waiting room. The automatic doors slid open, and I stepped into the fresh 4:00 a.m. air. The stars twinkled in that dull city way that they do. If I need excitement, I thought, I can jump out of airplanes or go ziplining. I didn’t imagine I would suddenly get it a hundred percent right, but I knew I could start by staying away from what was unquestionably wrong. I pulled out my phone, blocked his number, slipped into my car, and headed home.