What Doesn't Kill You (19 page)

The phone was on the counter between the kitchen and the family room, maybe twelve feet away. On another day, only a few steps. Just the thought of putting weight on my foot made me want to throw up, but I knew I had to get across that room. I'll never be fully able to explain how I did it. Honestly, that's OK. Some things are worth forgetting. But I ended up with the phone in my hand. Now, what was I supposed to do?

Calling 911 seemed crazy. I wasn't dying, right?

Then I considered taking myself to the emergency room.
My driving foot was OK, and the hospital was only fifteen minutes away. But the room was melting like grilled cheese—not a good way to drive. So I dialed. What was the nature of my injury? Woman versus magazine rack. Yes, it was more than a stubbed toe.

By the time they showed up I remember fussing about getting my purse—like there was money or a health insurance card inside. And I insisted they lock my house.

I remember the ER nurse asked me my name. Then a doctor examined my foot. He said, “Man! That looks really bad. Hey, come look at this…” Which would have been funny on TV, but I was not amused.

And then, mercifully, I got an IV drip that put me out of my misery.

T
he good news—I was finally pitiful enough to get money from my 401(k). That was also the bad news. Do you have any idea how much you can spend on a toe? Not even a big toe. My baby toe was a stumpy thing. There was barely enough nail to polish, but it required X-rays, orthopedic consults, surgical reconstruction. That toe had more medical intervention than I have had on my whole body, in my whole life, which is all well and good when you only have to worry about the copay. But that little episode ushered in a whole new round of bills to add to my collection—wads of them. I couldn't believe they charged for every gauze pad and tissue. How do they keep track? Average per patient by injury, illness or surgery per day, then round it up to the nearest hundred bucks? I got bills for tests I don't know if I passed or failed, from doctors I don't even remember, not that I remember a lot—but I'd have let them take off my whole foot if that would have made my toe stop hurting. What the hell are telemetry, a tilt-table test and transcranial
Doppler? And why do they all begin with the letter
T
? Was it random, or would I have had a whole other set of exams and probing if my name was Mary? Paranoid? Maybe. Maybe not. But thank heaven for modern medicine. They kept me well anesthetized—I will save you from the gory specifics of the ankle block, let's just say it involved lots of very long needles. I am not a big fan of pain. And I don't buy into the Honor in Suffering school of thought. Giving birth to Amber was my last experiment in grin and bear it, and if I had it to do over, I would take the epidural.

Anyway, somewhere along the line, after about the nineteenth person walked past my gurney and examined my tootsie like, “Gee, they don't have one of these in the textbook,” a woman from emergency admitting came to get my particulars. She asked if there was somebody I wanted to call who could meet me there. With Amber and J.J. gone, the first and only person I thought of was Julie. It was a quarter to the late-night news and I hated to bother her, even asked if they could just call me a taxi, but they wouldn't release me by myself. So I dialed and apologized profusely for bothering her so late. She was already in bed, but she arrived in half an hour, wearing jeans and an inside-out blouse, and she installed herself as my own private nurse. I kept apologizing and she kept saying she was glad I called.

It was three-thirty in the morning by the time I was discharged, with bandages that made it look like I had a football attached to my ankle instead of a foot. On the way home we stopped at the twenty-four-hour pharmacy and picked up the pain pills my doctor had prescribed. Honestly, I can't tell you if they took the pain away or if they made me not care if it hurt, because I was floating in my own wonderland and Alice
and the Cheshire Cat were welcome to join me. The warning on the bottle tells you not to operate heavy equipment. They needn't have worried. Under the influence, I couldn't have managed anything more complicated than my toothbrush and the remote control anyway. The stove was out of the question. At the rate I was going, I'd set myself on fire and burn the house down, so if I couldn't toast it or nuke it, I wouldn't eat it.

I took up residence in the family room because my bedroom involved stairs. I wasn't ready for those. Julie got me settled on the couch, propped my foot on a stack of pillows, as instructed. I don't know what I would have done without her because I could barely remember my name, much less how-tos for a nearly detached body part. She made sure I had groceries, figured out what I might need or want before her next visit and made sure it was handy. Then she blotted as much blood off the carpet as she could and brought a throw rug from the spare bedroom to cover the stains that remained, because looking at remnants of my own bloody footprints was a little too
CSI
for me. And the last thing I needed were flashbacks, or a reason to what-if myself into a worse state of mind than I was already in. Like, what if I had passed out from the sight of my own blood and bled to death on my living-room floor? Or what if I had tried to take myself to the hospital, lost control, gone over the double yellow line and right into the path of an on coming truck? Or…well, you get the idea. Definitely not where I needed to be using my imagination.

Somehow I didn't mind Julie rambling around in my house. It felt perfectly normal, which is a long way from the Brooklyn girl whose first rule was trust no one. She had certainly seen me through the good, the bad and the loathsome. Guess my problem had been trusting the wrong folks. So I gave her my
spare set of house keys to hold on to because I realized that with Amber and J.J. out of the country there was nobody in a two-hundred-mile radius who had keys to my house—in case I got locked out or something worse. Funny how all those years as “friends” with the Live Five I'd never once thought of doing that—and none of them had either. Maybe it was because we didn't really get to know each other. I mean, what did we really have in common besides whining or bragging about our kids, wining, dining, shopping and bitching? You know, come to think of it, I don't think any of us ever got together unless it was all of us. We were a group—all or nothing.

Julie offered to stay with me. I almost said yes, which gives you some idea how close I'd gotten to her and how wigged out I was, but I decided to be a big girl and made her leave just before dawn. I knew Mom and Daddy would have driven up in a heartbeat if I asked them, but having my parents play nursemaid was more helpless than I was prepared to feel.

For the first few days I dozed on and off, round the clock—days, nights, afternoons, it didn't matter. When I was awake I stared at the tube—programs I'd never ever seen. Before then I had no use for the all-cartoon channel, but suddenly I saw the humor in a talking sea sponge who wears orange knickers. Truthfully, the drugs made the Skycam traffic report just as hilarious.

I also got hooked on design TV. I'd get sucked into the beautiful, serene places with rambling gardens, remote-controlled window treatments and marble palace bathrooms connected to custom closets the size of my garage. Those fantasy décors were miles from the chaos of my life. But really my favorites were the organizing shows. The befores boggled my already clouded mind, because I could not believe the mounds of crap
people ignore. The spare bedrooms and basements piled floor to ceiling with wrapping paper, beat-up toys, three decades of fashion don'ts, stereo equipment, high school sports trophies, hand-me-down furniture, unopened Chia Pets, a FryDaddy and various other gizmos and dodads—they were bad. But the piles of junk people stepped over and moved aside every day in their bedrooms and kitchens—that was even worse. How could they live like that? The afters almost made me cry, because usually the home owners were close to tears too. In the span of sixty minutes it was like they'd been rescued, saved from drowning in their own debris and given another chance at life—sort of
Queen for a Day
with room dividers and modular shelving. And if you're too young to remember that TV show, look it up.

Julie called at least twice a day to make sure I hadn't OD'd or accidentally almost amputated anything else and she came by regularly with provisions—stayed long enough to get me upstairs to take a shower, which was a trick in itself since I had to put on a stylish plastic boot with an adjustable elastic band around the top, because I had been instructed to keep my stitches dry and to change my bandages twice a day—talk about yuck. I don't exactly faint at the sight of blood, but if you remember I did get just a little queasy. I wasn't even good at playing Dr. Mom with Amber's assorted cuts and scrapes but I mommed up 'cause I had to. But dealing with my own toe ooze made me woozy. So Julie would wait patiently outside the bathroom door until I was clean and my wound was redressed. She called Amber in London and assured her I would be well taken care of, and that she didn't need to cut her assignment short and come home. I kept thanking Julie and saying I didn't know how I could ever repay her, and she said, “Don't be silly, Tee. That's what friends are for.” Which also almost made me
cry—something that was happening with alarming frequency, so I blamed it on the drugs.

In my lucid, nonteary moments—those little windows between painkiller doses wearing off and kicking in where I almost felt normal—I pacified my parents enough to keep them in Maryland so I could worry about my job in peace. Julius was a good guy. NAB even sent me a fruit basket, which was extremely decent. I'd have traded it for a check, but I wasn't getting one of those. The sad and sorry truth was I had no sick time. And even though I assured them I'd be back at my desk in two weeks tops, I didn't want them to decide they couldn't hold my job, because believe me, I was all too aware I was expendable. Then my foot would start throbbing and I'd take another pill and drift back into my purple haze.

J.J. came by directly from the airport—Amber had given him his marching orders—not that she needed to. I know he would have come on his own. But thank goodness, he called to see if he could bring me anything, because it gave me time to stash the mail I was sorting between the sofa cushions, comb my hair and slap on some lipstick so I wouldn't scare the boy to death. I mean, he'd caught me with my hair in rollers once or twice over the years, but around about then, personal grooming was at the bottom of my to-do list. He came bearing flowers, and since Amber obviously hadn't schooled him on the no sombreros rule, he also brought me a replica of the Tower of London—how appropriate (of course, I think they only did beheading there, no betoeing). I acted happy for my souvenir and, thanks to my medication, I was jolly enough to send him on his way with a satisfactory report for my daughter.

I was glad I hadn't already tackled the mail before J.J.'s arrival, and grateful for my chemically induced cushion, when I
opened the letter from my mortgage bank—the one that upped the rate on my adjustable-rate mortgage. The envelope didn't look any more important than junk mail, but as soon as I saw my loan number on the letter I knew exactly what it was. In the back of my overtaxed mind, I also knew it was time, but I had no place to put that information, so I let it surprise me. And it did. Right into as near hysteria as I could come while taking a controlled substance. Three percent sounds insignificant. I remember thinking that back when I was signing my name next to the yellow arrow on all those refi papers. They wouldn't lend me the money if I couldn't afford it. Right? But even in my impaired state I knew there was no place in my budget to add another $937.54 a month.

So instead of freaking out, I laughed like I didn't have good sense as it dawned on me that it was completely inconceivable for me to come up with enough money each month to stay in my house—not possible, not in the cards, the bad joke was on me. From the time Markson showed me the door, I'd been playing Duck, Duck, Goose with my finances, so it was almost a relief to be officially busted, game over, uncle, I surrender. I would have waved a white flag if I had one. Anything to make it stop.

Then I fell asleep with the letter still in my lap. I dreamed about driving, not in the jalopy. I was in my old car, the snazzy one, and I was so happy. The day was sunny and lovely, and I was traveling smooth and fast on a winding mountain road. With no warning the car cut off, but it kept rolling downhill, faster and faster, and there was no guardrail, just a steep drop with no bottom. I stomped on the brakes, but they didn't work, and the wheel was so tight I could barely steer, and the sun was in my eyes, but it started to rain, and it was harder and harder for
me to keep from going over the edge. Just as I felt the front tire leave the road, I screamed. And I woke up screaming, sweaty, heart pounding. That's when sleep ceased to be a refuge. From then on my dreams were plagued by giant rats chewing on the roof shingles, derailed trains tumbling from bridges, ferocious bears banging on my patio doors, mazes of staircases with no exits leading to nowhere—and that wasn't because of the drugs. Where could I go if I wanted to? My world had shrunk to one room, the kitchen and the guest bathroom.

Being awake was no picnic either. I obsessed over whether the lights would stay on. I'd pick up the phone to make sure I still had a dial tone but jump when it rang, shudder when the mail dropped through the slot. I might have continued doing the backstroke through the doom lagoon, but Amber came over after she got back, and she was appalled at the condition of my place. She had some choice words for me too, like, “You look scuzzy, Ma.” Yes, she is my mother's grandchild. “J.J. said you looked bad, but not like this.” And here I thought lipstick had fooled him. So I let her cheer me up while she changed my sofa sheets, did laundry and picked out more outfits for me to wear, because I'd pretty much settled into two pairs of sweatpants and a baggy blue hoodie—I don't even know why I owned it. And she searched my shoe racks until she found sandals I could buckle around the bandages. It was a pair I didn't remember. When did I buy sensible footwear?

I at least made an effort to appear chipper, which was hard to do while we went cane shopping. I wanted the smart black one with the mother-of-pearl handle. I bought the standard issue, adjustable gray metal jobby, which really perked me up. I caught a glimpse of myself in the store window—right between a portable commode and a truss. I looked like kin to
Miss Jane Pittman. But I also knew the next stop on our lovely little mother-daughter afternoon was a follow-up at the orthopedist—ka-ching.

All the while Amber chattered—about the elegant hotel on Park Lane where her company put her up, and the swell boutiques and the clothes she bought because she was moving in a different circle at work and she needed to look the part. She wanted J.J. to buy a suit in London too, because the tailoring was so sharp, but he wouldn't spend the money. And she couldn't wait to go again. I mean, I had a great time when I went to London with Olivia, but was I ever that perky? And what was wrong with J.J.'s American suits?