There's Been an Accident

and midwest-nice

Anaya is standing in the doorway of our bedroom with one hand gripping his hair and the other clutching his phone.

Strike 1

Our Big (7) is reciting the alphabet to Little (4), presumably having him copy her sticks and loops of each letter. I’m studying the average morning sounds floating into our bedroom from their post on the couch. I am studying his face and that hand in his hair at the same time.

Strike 2

I’ve thought about how I will write this- the hospital tropes of muted colors and food and Nurse Ratched-esque characters. It feels fraught and overdone. The shitty coffee. The god-awful “decor” and upholstery. I think the attention to privacy-related details is sweet. The high, albeit tragically uncomfortable, backs of the couch-benches are welcomed. Nobody wants to watch the grief of the folks next door unfold. Better to have a Home Improvement-like fence to be a buffer. To witness for you. To shield you from the other’s facts and feelings.

Strike 3

xxx

I’m in a mixed-weight relationship.

You should know that typing that sentence sent me into a fit of howls as I watched a front-loader scrape up chunks of asphalt from the lot below our Marriott-window. This Marriott is-

A. somewhat nice in the small, midwestern town we’re currently staying in

B. close proximity to the hospital that holds my husband’s brother.

This is fresh on all accounts and I’m not writing about him, not today. Just know that my husband who simultaneously commands and soothes the edges of a room, crawls into my lap like our children do- his arms wrapped around my neck, and breathes in and out. On his own, no help from a machine. All the hospital cliches are true and right on the tip of my tongue.

Anyways, I’m fat and he’s not lololllllllll

“Mixed-weight relationship”- the very idea that this is a label in existence, is so fucking stupid that I cannot and will not offer a counter or participation in that discourse. Know that it elicits howling, though. Right from the Marriott room. 

xxx

An accident. Accident- such an encompassing and vague word-turned-sentence. I know you want to ask what kind or how bad but you won’t like most people don’t. There’s been an accident is a full sentence. If you don’t receive much more information otherwise I think it’s safe to say, encourage even, to leave it.

xxx

You can secure childcare for an undetermined amount of time, dog and yard/garden care for the same amount, and pack two bags for two adult humans in under an hour as it turns out. For those of you offering or have offered see? shared custody isn’t so bad, now is your time to shine. We’re lucky enough that all I had to relay was there’s been an accident and can be in the car staring at a map telling you to expect to arrive at your destination save traffic and bathroom breaks in 14 hours. With 4 stops we did it in 16, straight shot.

xxx

I love a snack mix. Chex Mix, Gardetto’s, whatever. I had a bag of Gardetto’s a couple weeks ago that I shared with Moonie on our way to pick up her brother. She picked out every single fucking rye chip and I wanted to scold her, I did later, and not even a scold but more of a those are everyone’s favorites, k? They’re the best so keep that in mind. They’re my favorite, too. I found a ranch mix complete with weird corn snacks and the sesame sticks that I love and Anaya hates. He tries, repeatedly, to show me how to open the bag with one hand and tilt the snack mix in my mouth while I drive. I can’t do that well, not without spilling, and I don’t like to anyways. I like to eat one or two pieces at a time, of anything, and I do not like having whatever dust or powder on my fingers and hands. When I can, when I’m not driving across the country because of an accident, I prefer to pour them in a bowl to reduce the powder transfer to my fingers. Driving, even with your knee, makes this impossible. Anaya dumps some out into his palm so I can take one at a time that way. He is the greatest human I know. The dill pickle pretzels I found at Casey’s were fine but they’re not Dot’s pretzels and it was midnight when I opened the bag. I’ll bet the midwestern-damp is clinging to the inside of that bag that I’m sure I didn’t zip up all the way.

xxx

I need a vegetable. A sunlight that touches my face and not just through the tall windows in the waiting room of the hospital but the size of the windows does help. I love big windows. I bet his brother doesn’t give a shit about sun on his face right now, but actually, if you know him, he probably would. I let myself wish for that for a little while longer- the fact that I can simply get up and walk outside to find the sun makes me sick with guilt. I’m not a martyr but I am a human.

What they say is true. The fleeting, that is. I’m not sure how I can’t have that etched in my bones at this point or maybe I do but I’m too stubborn to feel it. How many reminders will I need? How many accidents will there be? Nobody knows.

xxx

By the time my mother was making hospital stays a semi-regular occurrence in my early twenties all the bitterness I had never tasted or allowed myself to feel was suddenly the only thing I had access to. No, I wouldn’t come. No, I don’t want to see her. Do you remember the time I walked to the hospital after she had an emergency appendectomy? I found a puddle of ducklings, somehow, somewhere, secured a coffee canister, piled that puddle of fuzzy headed babies into the can, and carried it to the hospital. A sort of Get Well Soon gesture. She cried, I left with a coffee tin of dead bodies. What about the time her best friend had a brain aneurysm and when I went to find my mother, I found her there, rubbing lotion on Dolly’s hands and asking me to do the other. I did, reluctantly, just long enough for the whisps of white on her black coffee colored skin to disappear. Then I got up and left. That was the last time I saw Dolly alive. Alive-ish? Does it make me a monster that, even at 9, I did not wish I would’ve gone back to aid my mother in her lotion ritual? I still don’t, for the record.

xxx

More hospital tropes. The waiting game. The quiet until it’s not. I can’t hear babies crying and I’m grateful for that. Not because the sounds of crying children is annoying or grating but because a baby under two crying makes my tits scream with tenderness and my throat thick with tears threatening to fall. I miss my kids and even though they don’t understand how whole, how urgent, “there’s been an accident” can truly be, even they get it.

xxx

I love a church. A temple, a place of prayer. I love the ones with ornate windows and the ones that sit dilapidated- leaning against a swamp. I love the sounds and movement of reaching towards what carries you in other languages. I love when I can feel people around me acknowledge that surely this can’t be it, surely there is something bigger than all of us. Of course, I’m not a godly human myself, not like that anyways, but what I believe in means that I believe in what you believe for yourself. That is, of course, unless you wish for the malaise of another- then all bets are off. Even sitting in Catholic Churches throughout my life I have found myself entering and kneeling. Utilizing the holy water because agua de Florida and this pool of water in an indoor birdbath mean the same to me. Even there I can sit and soak. Even there I can understand that what humans have done isn’t what was intended. Even I know this and so I sit and I soak without judgement for this place because I can discern the two. The chapel here in this hospital is as nondescript as a hospital-chapel can get. It’s a little too on the nose, if you ask me. Saying unassuming by these standards is doing this chapel a service. It’s fucking wretched, on all accounts. I’ve got nothing, really. Just know that I want none of you or anybody congregating in a place like that on my behalf. Better to stand outside with your face towards the sun.

xxx

A cousin of Anaya’s sends us back to our hotel with a paper plate piled with fresh fruit and the midwest-staple, scotcheroos¹ teetering on top. If you’ve been anywhere in the midwest visiting a friend or family, this is gospel. This is the way it is.

xxx

You don’t have your mother die of breast cancer when you’re 7 and not immediately carry the idea around sewn into your cells that you are somehow destined for that type of loss indefinitely. I survey my husband’s face, the one that I’ve seen cry hundreds of times, and I can see him at 7, scared and confused by what is to come. What will come or not. The lines that swim out from the outer corners of his eyes, the one that is most pronounced when his head is tossed back and he is laughing from the depths of his belly or he is drunk with sleep and coiled around himself once the light barely begins to shine through our slated blinds. It’s more pronounced today, the last several days, not from the sleep but the anti-sleep. The worry he wipes up and down his face with the tears. I want to shield him from everything. I want him to never anticipate grief like this.

xxx

Things are looking more promising today. Promising seems like the appropriate choice of word. Doing well or even better seems like a platitude at this point. Better than what? Things are looking promising and I hold on to that like an origami crane in the palm of my hand- tight enough to keep close yet delicate enough to discern. I know the implication assuming can possess. Promising isn’t a promise after all.

xx AR

1. Scotcheroos are a rice crispy-like treat made corn syrup and peanut butter instead of marshmallows, then covered in a mixture of butterscotch and chocolate before cooling to set