Bloodsuckers
Without any distractions besides a nurse checking my IV’s and changing the dressings on my hand, the afternoon slinks by in a haze. I nap here and there. I eat. Over the droning, ever-present sound of the air conditioner, I hear visitors speaking with hushed voices in the stair-fall woman’s room. I catch traces of conversation as the nurses chatter at their station. I listen to the five o’clock news through the wall connecting me to my car accident neighbor. And when there are no discernable noises on which to fixate, I hum songs to the beat of the throbbing in my fingers.
Through all of this, an image visits and revisits my thoughts: that pitiful expression on Tess’s face. It’s imprinted on my brain. But the more I mull it over, the more I’m sure it wasn’t pity. Pity would insinuate some form of condolence, and if that were the case, she wouldn’t have rehashed our argument so soon. It wasn’t anger. I know that look well enough, most pointedly with regard for her good-for-nothing sister. Over the past three years, our son has precipitated quite a few different guises: alarm when she learned she was pregnant, adoration when he was born, and exasperation since he turned two.
Frustration, it seems, is what I most often evoke. When we were first married, it was only for my more monumental mistakes – resigning from my post at the community college before finding another job because I’d had it with the Administration, or tearing down our ugly deck at the end of summer before realizing I didn’t have time to build a new one. But lately, it’s the little things that bring it out, too. Waiting a few too many days to mow the lawn. Not wiping up my whiskers in the sink. I try to tell myself that she’s tired, and that’s the same excuse I granted her when we started having this argument about my mother.
Even now, that could be a viable excuse. She could have worn herself out worrying about our hospital bill. Or maybe it’s residual exhaustion from last weekend when Ryan had an ear infection that kept us up until dawn. But as the pain medicine wears off, I’m less forgiving in my muses. I still imagine her losing sleep, but it’s no longer due to mishap or illness. No, now she’s the car accident victim’s mistress, torn between her duties to me as her son’s father and her allegiance to her lover. She wants to visit him but she’s afraid to show her face, afraid I might happen upon them or hear their fighting through the paper-thin hospital wall connecting his room to mine – she has, after all, been avoiding him for three days and he’s a tad put off by it all.
Stair-fall woman is also involved. She works at Ryan’s day care. I’ve never seen her because her shift starts at nine and I always drop Ryan off by eight, but she’s there when Tess picks him up every evening. They’ve worked out an agreement that stair-fall woman takes Ryan to the park on the days that Tess is running late, thereby allowing her an extra hour in the arms of her lover before returning home to put on airs with twice-baked potatoes and macaroni and cheese. It’s stair-fall woman’s cold that Ryan caught last week, prompting the ear infection that kept us up all weekend. I don’t harbor any resentment toward her, though. I’m sure she would have rather been in bed than watching some cheating wife’s son.
I’m attempting to figure out a scheme in which the nurse is also involved when Tess knocks on my open door.
“Guess who,” she says.
