The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [63]
“Somebody shot you, too, Frances.”
Mea culpa, I want to tell him. Sinner, impure, forgive me. But a police questioning is no place for confessions.
Paula stands at my side now. She says, “Frances Catherine is still recovering from surgery. If you have any more questions, she’ll be happy to answer them when our lawyer arrives.”
Who knew Paula would turn out to be such a tactician? Silent when folks are partying, but always there to save our sorry asses when things get sticky.
I wonder what time it is. No windows here.
I spent all night in a hospital waiting room once before. I lay on my babysitter’s lap, but I didn’t sleep. I don’t even remember her name—my babysitter’s. She wore little unicorn decals on her long, pale pink fingernails. Just a woman. Probably a teenager. Who knows? Maybe I’ve invented the whole memory-scene. She smelled of peach nectar.
I later learned that my father was already dead when we got to the hospital, my mother clinging to life in a white bed in a white room, attached to a lifeless machine. But my babysitter couldn’t have known those things or she wouldn’t have packed me into her little purple Honda and perked, “Change of plans! Gotta go meet your parents at the hospital. They crashed the car!”
I understood my babysitter’s words that night to mean that I wouldn’t see the car again, or that I would see it and it would be smashed and mangled like cars on TV. Nothing more grave. I wondered if we could still get my Winnie the Pooh doll out of the back seat. Change of plans. My parents had promised not to be gone long, and it had been a long time. Still, what did time mean to me then? It seemed like it had been a long time. I waited. No windows, but surely morning was breaking when the doctor finally emerged in her white uniform, saying only, “I’m sorry.”
My babysitter rose to meet her.
They spoke in hushed tones, the tones grown-ups speak in when they’re going to give you a present. It occurred to me that the woman in white was hiding my parents in some unseen room.
Calls were made, presumably.
I waited on the puffy vinyl bench alone, wiggling my toes in my footed green pajamas.
When my babysitter finally came back, she had tears in her eyes and no present. “I’m sorry, baby,” is all she said. She scooped me up in those teenage arms that seemed so big to me. “We shouldn’t have come here.” Her hair was long and dark and soft like my mother’s.
Then the endless tired winding sunrise drive up Highway 1 from Santa Cruz in that little purple Honda. I whined, “I don’t wanna go see my Nana.” The old woman had always petrified me, the mass of black polyester and cotton. How could I have understood that she’d become my closest blood relation on this blue planet?
“I want my moooom,” I insisted.
“I’m so sorry.” That’s all my babysitter would say.
From the car window, I watched the ocean.
Chapter 24
A MONK IN THE SKY
In the white bathroom, I have to hang onto railings and hop for the toilet. Sharpie graffiti on the wall tells me: God is dead—Nietzsche. And in another handwriting: Nietzsche is dead—God.
In front of the mirror, I unwrap the bandage from my head, admire the plum welt just above my right eyebrow. I tie my hair into a quick knot.
Back out in the waiting room, Tony cries silent under a muted television.
I wheel myself over next to him. “Hey—”
He doesn’t look up. He talks into his own hands. “To live is to cause suffering.”
“This isn’t your fault,” I try, even though, in a way, I know it is.
“There are so many ways to mess everything up and so few ways to make things right. Do you know what I’m talking about, Frankka?”
This time I do. I know exactly what he’s talking about.
He says, “You were right to leave the show in Sacramento. We all should have left. We should have run away—up into the mountains or out into the