The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(61)
Driving back, Drew slipped the teeth out from his pocket—where they might have felt sharp against his thigh, or where he might have been afraid they’d break even further, if something like that would even be a concern—and dropped them into the water cup he’d just finished drinking from. He was in the front seat, and held the cup in both hands for a minute or so, looking down the clear plastic tunnel like some prophecy lay inside. I hoped those mangled roots and ground white edges weren’t his future. He sighed, jammed the cup into the small storage pocket on the passenger door and left it there when he climbed out.
“What’s Drew’s thing?” I asked Cassie later that night.
“Methadone,” she said.
“Meth?”
“No. The drug they give you to get off meth. And heroin. He’s a junkie.”
I looked across the tent to where Drew sat on the edge of the stage, waiting for the boss, staring off into the darkness with the two eternal sinkholes of his eyes.
The next morning, I decided I’d ask him more about his daughter, because maybe talking about her would give him some sort of spirit he might have been having a hard time finding lately. Because all the men on the road with us had little daughters they’d left somewhere, and I wanted to believe, had to believe, that the idea of their daughters had the capacity to rouse some love or healing or determination in them, something. I wasn’t ignorant enough to think that it could cure Drew of a drug addiction, or that I could really help, but I still wanted to try. To focus on someone else’s suffering.
I waited, thinking nothing of it when a few minutes after Drew was supposed to arrive passed and he didn’t show up. Then a half hour, an hour, two. Ben was back in the ticket booth. By the end of the day Drew had still not shown up, and that was that. He never came back.
I thought about all the questions I’d asked, the stories I’d tried to pry out of him in the three days he was with us, and wondered if instead of bringing him closer to some nebulous state of peace, I’d actually done the opposite. Maybe he looked at me and saw who I really was: a person who had chosen to run. I was not working to care for my loved ones like he was. I had said goodbye and flown thousands of miles away. My head played the recursive loop of leaving: flying to California to see my mom for a few days, then flying back to Alabama for a few weeks, thinking of her constantly, calling Davy all the time—Davy, who was wildly stressed and depressed and barely hanging in there himself. I had left, and then left, and then left, and then left. And while I was away from her, I made it through the day by imagining that she was already gone.
How might my mother have healed if she’d had my love constantly by her side to buoy her in the months and then years after her massive stroke? Would she have regained her ability to walk? To talk? What if there’d been a chance, however improbable, of her waking up one morning and writing take me to the beach, and all of us bundling her and supporting her on both sides as we crossed the sand and stood at the rim of the Pacific, putting our toes into the cold water and letting that sun warm our faces? It’s impossible to listen to all the echoes of what of might have happened without going deaf from the cacophony.
*
A few weeks later, Sunshine is in the passenger seat and notices them, their brown and gray and white roots.
“Gross,” she says, pulling the cup of teeth from the door. “This is disgusting.”
Tommy grins and starts drumming on the steering wheel with excitement, holds his hand out for the cup. He dumps the teeth into the palm of his giant hand and turns them around in his fingers like golden coins. He is laughing, this high-pitched tee-hee-hee he lets out whenever something deeply delights him.
“Anyone else?” he asks into the rearview mirror, holding the teeth in the air. Everyone shakes their heads. “Your loss,” he says, still giggling. “Thank god for junkies.” He pours the teeth back into the cup and plants it in the dashboard’s drink holder, where it remains for the rest of the season, adventuring with us across the country.
THE TITANIC WAS CHILD’S PLAY
Two years and ten months after the stroke
10 days into my parents’ trip
August 2013
My parents’ train derails somewhere in Nebraska. Or just outside Chicago. Or in the Sierra Nevadas. It happens suddenly in the middle of the night, throwing the passengers out of their bunks and onto the floor, against the wall. The force throws my mother’s whole body up from the flat plane of the bed and into the air, freeing her limbs from gravity, from paralysis. Imagine it, the body loosed and airborne, the soft angle of a shoulder floating through space. Like a woman underwater. For the first moment, at least. Before the body’s smack.
In my dream, the train crash isn’t beautiful. I want to remember it beautiful, to put lightning bugs out in the cornfields, to see the egg-tip of moon up in the sky and the blues of the night fingering over one another like Van Gogh’s starry night. But it isn’t. The dreams are brutal.
The next dream has them in the small room they’ll be living in while they take the boat across the Atlantic. It is Davy this time, dead on the ground while my mom sits beside him in her wheelchair, the pee collecting beneath her, her cries collecting in the room, staring at him for minutes, hours, days, unable to know how to get help, what to do, unable to do anything. Just watching while possibilities for help fade away.