Page 23 of Be Not Far From Me

There’s a weird comfort in having all of me back in one place as I crawl onto the mattress. I’ve got an oxy in one hand and the bag in the other; I dry-swallow the first and hold the second close to my chest.

There’s a small TV in the corner, sitting precariously on a shelf that wasn’t built to hold that kind of weight. It’s the only kind of TV I’ve ever had, the heavy ones with so much ass on them you’ve got to wrap your arms around them to pick them up. No flat-screens in my family, no sir.

The screen can’t show anything but a reflection now, the slats of the blinds and the moonlight coming in. Makes me think about being out with Meredith and Kavita one night, driving around looking for a field party. Jason and Duke were supposed to meet us at the gas station, but Uncle Chuck said they’d already come and gone and neither one of them was answering their phones, so we headed out to the back roads to find them ourselves.

There were three different places we got together for drinking, an old abandoned barn out on 149, under the bridge that the county closed a couple of years ago, and—if it was a hot summer—the dried-up creek bed on the low side of the dam. We didn’t find the boys or anyone else at any of the usual spots, so we ended up just cruising with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Until I spotted a TV in the ditch. I made Meredith stop and carried it back to the car, cutting my hand on the cracked screen when I put it in the back seat beside Kavita who was working on a bottle of peppermint schnapps. I was pissed at Duke and Jason for leaving us behind and not answering their phones, angry at the person who threw anything they didn’t want in a ditch, and ready to kill over the fact that their trash was something I couldn’t have afforded in a month of Sundays. I had Meredith drive us back to the gas station and asked Uncle Chuck if I could put a TV in their dumpster. He didn’t seem at all fazed by that.

“Sure,” he said, eyeing me and Kavita over the rolls of lottery tickets. “By the way you’re bleeding and your friend smells like a candy cane.”

He took an ACE bandage off the shelf for my hand and gave Kavita a stick of gum and told us both to go home before we got pulled over. She helped me heave the flat-screen into the trash, the broken pieces of a hundred beer bottles grinding under our feet as we did. When we got back into the car Meredith snapped off the music.

“I think I saw a microwave down by the creek out on Twenty-Eight,” she said.

And that’s how I ended up drunk and wandering around the countryside with a car full of busted-up housewares. By the end we had that microwave, a blender, the footboard of a child’s bed, two alarm clocks, and a lamp that still worked but needed a shade. We went back to Meredith’s, and she found one in her attic and draped a scarf over it while Kavita poured more schnapps. Duke texted around one in the morning to see if we wanted to hang out, and I took a selfie of the three of us, snockered, with middle fingers in the air, that lamp lighting up the room.

It was the background on my phone for the longest time—me, my friends, and the ditch lamp. In it I’ve got a bandage around my hand from the cut I got on the TV, and if I looked at my palm right now I could still see the scar.

But I can’t.

I can’t open my hand and I can’t turn my head and I don’t even know if my eyes are shut or not. Everything is slippery again, and I think the balloons are back, especially the red one, filled near to busting and tempting me to swat at it so it can break, raining all the pain down on me.

The blue and the white are there too, and now that I think about it I guess maybe there are more than that, even. Like someone brought me a whole bunch of balloons and they thought it was a gift but all it really does is make me think of something I’ve done wrong for each one, or somebody I hurt.

My mom’s up there still, and Duke. But so’s Dad from that time I blamed him for her leaving. Meredith and Kavita are here too, I can feel them hovering, reminding me of every time I made Meredith feel dumb, or disappointed Kavita by not being a better person. There’s a whole cloud of bad hovering over me, and all I can do is pull Davey Beet’s hat down tighter over my head.

Even though everyone I’m thinking about makes me feel bad one way or another, I’d give anything to have one of them here with me right now. So I do the only thing I can think of and start calling for them. I yell for my mom and my dad, Meredith and Kavita, Davey Beet and Jesus, too. I call for Duke, in the end, because Jesus is all about love and forgiveness, and while that’s nice, what I really need is someone with basic first aid training and enough muscle mass to carry me out of here.

When I’m done yelling, I cry.

Day Seven

I open my eyes, and the first thing I think is, This is the day that the Lord has made, followed by the answer, Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

It’s so funny I could puke, but there’s nothing in my stomach.

They taught us all kinds of stuff at Camp Little Fish, but that one kind of stuck, mostly because I was the only camper there on what they called a scholarship instead of charity. But the other kids would say this, eyes big and bright over breakfast, like maybe they were happy about something I didn’t understand.

I still don’t understand.

What I can say is that while I’m not exactly glad right now, and rejoicing is off the table, I also don’t feel like I’m dying. I sit up, expecting a wave of blackness in my vision or a revolt in my gut, but I get neither. I’m light-headed and weak, with nothing but opioids and alcohol in my system. I’m still in a camper with more of my blood on the floor than inside me, and part of my body in a sandwich bag, but weirdly, I feel okay.

“Huh,” I say, which is the best kind of thanks I can manage right now.

What’s left of my foot looks better, the red lines receding for sure. The bleeding has stopped, and the flesh from where I amputated looks healthy and pink. The bone nubs sticking out are cut cleanly, a small miracle.

I start unraveling Davey Beet’s hat.

I don’t want to, and it hurts my heart more than a little when I pick out the knot at the crown that his mom tucked in when she finished it. I pull it through and bite it off, the yarn coming loose and free, tightly kinked from years of being a hat, soaked in rain, snow, Davey’s sweat, and my tears. I take it down about an inch, which gives me a decent length of yarn. I bite it off again, retying a knot and putting Davey’s hat back on, the top of my head now poking through it.

I slip a sandwich bag over my hurt foot and push open the door to the camper.

It’s a beautiful day, and I could almost rejoice and be glad in it if I had more than dandelions to eat. I chew for a bit before I swallow, like a cow with cud. Making my way down to the water isn’t easy, but I manage, the Erlenmeyer flask bumping against my side from where I tied it to my belt loop with a bit of yarn. I fill it up at the stream, drink good, and fill it again.

I strip down and clean myself as best I can, my clothes too. I’m resting on the bank, stark naked, the sun warming me and actually feeling a little decent.

Nice things haven’t been all that easy to come by in my life, but I do have one or two good memories, like the time a lifeguard taught me to swim at the public pool, or when I was ten and Duke’s older brother, Wayne, kicked the shit out of a sixth grader for trying to pull me under the tube slide for a kiss during recess. I took another oxy before I came down to the water, and I’m all messed-up again in my head, every thought seems connected to the next, cascading one to the other without pause. It’s like pulling weeds after a good rain, each one bringing up more earth than you bargained for and leaving a hole behind.