“Please! No!”
They keep curling me and I can feel the life drain out of me. Jack and my mom leave the room, they have to. They’ve seen enough—probably too much—and they can’t bear it anymore. The nurses put their backs into it, they start to sweat and tremble for what’s about to come. The resident wipes my back and begins.
The very edge of the needle meets my skin, just tickles it, and then plunges into me. It groans through the tissue, severing fiber after fiber, and the pain is a warning bell that goes forever. He pushes it deeper and I want to throw up.
I don’t know what’s happening. I can hear him breathing and grunting. He stabs again and again.
“Please! Stop! You need to stop!”
I can’t hang on anymore, I’m slipping, falling, screaming, crying, I’m going away. The nurses hold me tighter.
He tries again, the needle pops twice, once through my skin and then deep inside, to a chamber of my body that I didn’t know I had. I’m in the jaws of something. There’s a hammer or something pounding the needle in farther.
“Not quite,” he says.
He tries once more, twice more, three times more.
“Just hang on, sweetie,” the nurses say, their faces hot and clammy. “You’re doing great.”
No more. Take me to the barn. Let the mule kick me.
God abandons me in this room. My daddy abandons me. He gores me for what feels like twenty whole minutes.
The sky gets dark early, and mercifully, the resident gives up. They call in a new doctor, who takes me to an operating room and uses a tiny camera to place the drain. It takes about three minutes. Once it’s inserted, they say they fixed the problem, that the damage has been prevented, but I’ve never felt so damaged. In spirit, I’ll never be the same.
I’m discharged from Mayo after just one week. I walk out of the hospital in my big creaky neck brace, one hand in Jack’s, the other clutching a big paper bag filled with pills, many different types of medicine, more than I’ve ever been on before. Tucked into my right palm, tucked into Jack’s hand, is the wire they pulled from my neck. They let me keep it as a memento, a pair of Mickey Mouse ears.
We sit in the hotel room that night and examine the wire. We have to, as so much of the history of us is tangled up in it that we can’t look away. It’s thicker than we thought it would be—more menacing. Jack looks at me hopefully. He brings me my water and kisses my head. “It’s over now, babe.”
I stand in the Marriott bathroom the next morning before we leave with the wire in my hands. I touch it and smell it and turn it in all directions. I hold it up to the light and try to decide how many inches long it is. I don’t know what to do with it. It’s a strange artifact, a part of me. I want to back over it with the car and display it on the mantel all at once. I toss it in the little mesh wastebasket next to the toilet but I can’t leave it there for long. I wrap it in toilet paper, shove it in my bag, and bring it home with us.
We prayed that when I woke up from surgery I would be able to move, and I can. We assumed that if I could move, I would move forward, life would move forward, but it can’t and it doesn’t. We prayed for a new beginning but we forgot that beginnings are work. They’re nasty, struggling, treacherous things. The pain is still excruciating and the little wire never really loses its power over me, over us. The hinge we hung it all on breaks. We slide backward into the mud. We built an entire future around an event we had no control over. Complete recovery was the only bet we placed, and we needed the win. Over and over again, this brand of hope forms the basis of so much suffering.
“Just hang on,” the doctors say, but we lose our grip.
* * *
When we get home, we wait for the new beginning we were hoping for. I wait for the pain to go away; Jack waits for the girl he married to arrive. He stays home with me as long as he can, bringing me breakfast in bed and making sure that I have enough pillows. People show up with dinner and cards and flowers every three days, Jack heats up lasagna after lasagna. He waits and he waits.
For a month, he walks me proudly around the block in my giant neck brace and short, bushy LPGA haircut. They told us the walking would make it better, would help me heal, so we walk for miles, we walk like our lives depend on it, but nothing changes. When I become less of a spectacle, the homemade chicken and dumplings stop arriving on the porch, the friends stop coming by, our mothers come for their visits and they go back home. Everything is quiet and we’re left in the pretty yellow house to try to find each other again, but we just can’t seem to do it. After six weeks the pain transforms into an awful searing, a constant burn. It feels like being bitten by red ants and I need my medicine all the time just to survive hour to hour. I panic when I can’t find the right pill at the right time and Jack has to calm me, he has to reason with me like the toddler we don’t have together. He gets frustrated and I don’t blame him: our new beginning has already begun, but the story is the exact same. He leaves for tour and though he’d never say it, I’m sure he’s glad to be gone.
I walk almost fanatically while he travels. They said it would make me better. I take my medicine fanatically. They said it would make me better too. I follow every instruction precisely and I wait for the chapter to end, for the redemption I’m owed to come to me. I walk past the perfect pine fence that encircles our property, a gift the Amish built to honor my daddy. I put my hands on it every day, trying to soak up all of him that I can. I walk down the street to the little garlicky restaurant at happy hour to watch pairs of girlfriends talk with their hands and splash cranberry juice and vodka on the sidewalk. Maybe if I just keep walking, I’ll find my way out?
“Just give it time,” Jack says chirpily on the phone from Milwaukee or Madison or Mars.
“I love you, babe.”
I don’t have any more time. We don’t have any more time. Come home.
There are a hundred things I feel but I don’t say, don’t feel that I can say anymore.
“I love you too.”
Four months go by, four months of walking and waiting and walking and waiting and trying so hard to make the new beginning begin. I get a fresh set of X-rays done to send to Mayo. I see my daddy’s nose again and his chin again and I miss him so much I have to grab onto the little composite office desk to hold myself up.
The orthopedic surgeon calls on a Thursday. I’m walking the sidewalks through a summer sun shower. Jack is away somewhere—San Antonio or San Diego or Saturn. It is too hot out and the shingles are steaming rainbow mist from their blackness but I keep walking anyway, I keep the promise I made. I do the work, I take the medicine. I get myself ready to be whole.
“Good news, Ruthie!” The doctor’s voice sounds like happy music. “Your films look wonderful. You’ve healed beautifully.”
Healed.
I reach back at my neck to pick at another piece of dead skin above the incision.
“You can begin weaning off the brace and go on to do most exercises and activities.”
Healed.
I reach my porch and sit down on the steps. I suck in a deep breath and the sour B.O. smell of the plastic brace hits my nose.
Healed? But how?
My treatment is complete. They have done everything they could do.