Drug Wives - The Watcher
Funny how the "good guys" are really the true villains.
The stadium lights of the hospital parking lot began to glow in the watery darkness lighting up the rivers on my windshield. The wipers fought for their lives, but succeeded only in slowing the flow. This kind of rain would be hitting every single leaf on every single tree for miles and miles. I notice these details more clearly now with a kind of knowing that comes from no longer being alive in that moment, or at all, that paints every living memory with vivid perfection. I remember my body, heavy and tired, as I worked hard to see the road and maneuver past the ripples that pointed to puddles and lakes too deep for the small 1988 Nissan Sunny. Slowing to a crawl of ten miles per hour, I prayed “God keep me alive for AJ please. Not just for myself. Please please please...” The words had begun to form to say themselves out loud but were swallowed by an involuntary moan of terror and pain. Keep your damn self alive woman. That was the thought that sustained me then. I know the foolishness of that now, so many years dead. But this was not the night I would die, and God must have heard me and found an answer that suited his purpose.
I parked by the old cafeteria. Why the hell do they build hospitals this way? So inaccessible? But better to park it here than block the Casualty entrance. My brothers would be laughing at this thought - there is our stupid sister, ever the servant of Babylon even in her dying moment.
“Goddamn it. I need to get inside before the next one comes.” My thoughts were as loud as the rainfall. “Shit... here it comes.” Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale... hold. Oh God. I can’t do this. I begin to pant. Shut up you idiot. YOU HAVE TO. Exhale. Lord Jesus. Motherfucker. Oh God.
I propped my elbows on the steering wheel and rested my face in my hands, forcing my mind to tell my body to breathe. Fuck this rain. Fuck this pain. Fuck the man who isn’t answering his fucking phone. Fuck... I needed to get out.
“OK. Focus woman, let’s do this. Focus. Seat back. Pull yourself upright. Turn the belly to the door. Oh God, I’m not afraid to get wet, but please save me from slipping. I cannot believe this is happening. It isn’t time. OK. Open the door. Right foot out. Wow. That was hard. Get a grip on the door. Christ but that water is cold! How do I even stand on these wet feet right now? Woman focus! Breathe! Turn. Left foot out.
Already soaking wet. Casualty would have been better. Fuck. Ok. Hands on the door frame. Oh my God my poor car. Water running down the inside of the door down the window handle.
What a fucking great-lake of a puddle. PULL! No. Rest. Breathe. PULL! Slipped a little further this time. OK. It’s ok. The rain is clean. Swallow. Drink. PULL...”
Standing, there was not time to get anything. I couldn’t have made the bend if Id’ tried. I shut the door and began to walk. It would hurt too much to look back and take too much time. Closing the door behind me, I somehow fit the key in the lock as water drenched everything, running down my short hair, washing the sweat off my face, and pouring down between my heavy breasts swollen with effort. A river formed, sliding around my extended belly to soak through my massive ugly underwear beneath my jeans. The jeans had not been buttoned in about two months. But this was still too soon. I wondered... but no time.
Another one was coming.
I climbed the three steps to the cafeteria porch, found one of the poles supporting the roof in their sentinel line along the corridor and clung to it. Breathe, pull. Two steps to the next pole. Breathe, pull, the next. “Come on girl you’re gonna do this. You were made to do this.” Breathe, pull. Step step. Pull. Ok. I was finding a rhythm. Now to stay in it. Think of a song. Step step pull. “Oh Nikki you so fine.” PULL.
“You so fine you blow my mind” PULL. “Hey Nikki” step PULL. Sweet Christ, was that the door? Pull. NO! PUSH! Push.
I pushed. “HELP ME!”
A blast of cold air from the air conditioner caught my shirt front as the door flew open in the effort of my last push. I could hear nurses stirring down the ramp straight ahead and someone running to me from the nurses station down the corridor to my left. The right leg failed me then as the contraction swept out from the epicenter of my belly. My right hand clawed at the wall on my right as strong hands caught me from the left and I sank down into deep deep darkness.
I woke up in a different country. Before my eyes forced their lids up, I knew. I had probably known for days. There is something about almost dying that comes very close to the all-knowing state of being dead. Over the past several years, the similarities between that time and this have not been lost on me. In the moments where I’ve gotten bored of watching her send inconsequential text messages all evening in front of the television, or when I’ve zoned out from watching you smoke a J, get as high as a kite and settle in with a bag of Doritos in front of the TV to be fully entertained by Fantasia I have contemplated many of these similarities. What happened between my falling in George Town and waking up two weeks later in Toronto was forgotten the moment my soul returned to my struggling body. But the residue of my journey, the ethereal sense of knowing lingered. I imagine now that I saw as much then as I do in my current state, the threads of life knotted together by choices and switching direction based on changes of mind. I imagine I saw the strands run deep into the dark past of our heritage and fanning out into the equally obscure future with just a shift of my attention. My formless soul moves effortless in this dimension and definition, more home to me than my life had ever been. But do not struggle with this now, my darling. Your time will come. I’ll try to keep my tale within what you can imagine.
Consider only that something lingered when I returned to my form, something deep and knowing. It left its collection of details too big to bear at the gate of my human comprehension but the residue of its meaning stayed with me. I knew. Everything that mattered before this moment would no longer matter. Things I had taken for granted would now become the center of the rest of my days. I also knew these days would be few. Two things, the only two things I would have space for for the rest of my life, were on my mind as I let the light in through the crusty cracks of my disused eyelids.
“Where are my children?”
I thought I could speak it, but I couldn’t yet. My eyes searched the unfamiliar ceiling, looking for something in the generic worn whiteness that I could hold on to to pull myself deeper into the world. Where are my children? Something shifted in the shadow just at the edge of the narrowed vision of my left eye. Oh my God this is hard work. Where am I? Where are my children? Chrissie’s face slid slowly into watery focus on my left side, coming closer to the bed where I was struggling to reclaim command of my form. As she filled the full focus of both eyes, the excruciating pain bolted through me, drawing me into this place fully. I did not know it yet, but I had just met my constant companion and persecutor who would be with me for the remainder of my relationship with this body. Chrissie held my attention with her voice as I waited for the pain to pass. It never did, but dulled itself to a quiet just low enough for me to hear her.
Her voice came to me as though through water or a bad connection as the roar of my blood filled my hearing. I could make out that she was telling me where I was by the “Welcome back! You are...” but I didn’t catch the where. It didn’t matter anyway. As my hearing settled I panicked. “Where are my children?” The unspoken question must have screamed through my eyes, because she picked up my hand and said to me “AJ is at my house with Carly and Chris. He is fine and he misses you. Your daughter is growing well and is in the hospital. Charm and Jess spend time with her every day singing to her and talking to her. She is strong but she came very early. Don’t worry, she is putting on weight every day and fighting like a champ.”
Oh my God! I suddenly remembered that the baby had only been about four pounds at my last pre-natal visit. What chance did she have of making it? Chrissie still held my hand and felt me squeeze.
“Hush sister, no frettin’. She is perfectly fine, in no danger at all.” She looked up over the bed with that secret smile of hers that would often drive her brother mad. Laughing softly to herself, she looked back at me and said, “You know how I always say babies are ugly as all hell when they are born? And how Kyle was the ugliest baby in the world?”
I managed to move my chin just a little, as I was unable to nod my whole head. I noticed, for the first time, the pipe in my throat.
“Well, we cannot say that about this little girl.” She continued. “Not only is she a fighter, but she is by far the prettiest baby I have ever seen!” My throat found itself and the laugh that bubbled up couldn’t hold itself back, shaking my chest and warbling past the tube in my throat. Of course she was.
“OK sister,” she said, switching to her business-like nurse mode. “Let’s get this pipe outta you.”
Photo by Philippe Murray-Pietsch on Unsplash
When I first met you I was terrified. It was only then that I realized what I had done. For twenty-three years I had ignored pain, rejected medication and avoided doctors. When I had given birth to AJ they had called him a miracle - and he had been. He was as perfect and beautiful as you are now. They had also told me that having another child would kill me - it almost had. But I figured, fuck them. They can’t tell me how to live my life. And he was such a gift, so funny and smart and I wanted so badly for him to have a normal life. So when your father drove right through the latex, I let nature take its course. I’d forgotten what a bitch nature actually is.
I figured he would be ok with it. He had left his crazy wife two years before to be mine. Or so I’d thought. You and I would both come to learn that he had left to be free. And that she was far from crazy. But this would come later.
The terror I felt in this moment held me, but it was only for us. You and I. No one else. When they handed your tiny little perfect form to me, bundled in flannel against the foreign Toronto cold, I feared for you and for me. You didn’t deserve this.
I know now with the perfect hindsight of death that mothers often feel this way in the presence of their daughters. We see so much of our own selves reflected back at us that we struggle to be with it. It isn’t just the things we like about us that come back to us in your little bodies, but the things we don’t like, the things we fear or do not understand about ourselves.
Sometimes it is the sight of our own weak womanhood. Sometimes our mistakes come back to haunt us in your features, so much like your long-gone fathers. Sometimes it is the potential for pain, the volatility of our feminine form beat about by the pull of the moon in a man’s sunlit world. I would not have known then what caused my terror but I felt the surge of my strongest self rise to meet it, and you, with the ferocity of wild love.
My actions, dearest daughter of mine, were far from perfect. I know this. But know, my wonderful little girl, that my love always was. To me you will always be as perfect as you were in that moment - you were a pretty baby - framed in the fuzziness of flannel.
In the weeks between my waking and our meeting, we both had been fighting. Me for my life, for my son, to live to know you, and you with the natural and automatic resilience of a casuarina seed sown in the shade, seeking and rising toward sunlight.
Mine was fought with helpless human trying and yours with effortless divinity new to human form. You were divine. And all that has come of your life has not changed that.
It was in the moment of our meeting, laced with terror and founded on love, that I became your watcher.