Bloodsuckers
I don’t believe her, of course. But when I replay those words in my head a while later, I wince. Not because of the particular language she used, but because it was another one-liner of hers that landed me in the hospital in the first place. I was in the garage, joining the stretchers to the face frame of a new caster wheel kitchen island – a present Tess requested for her 35th birthday – when she came out to ask what I wanted for dinner. We decided on pizza and she lingered, sitting on a nearby box that was packed with old baby clothes. She tilted her head to the side and her hair fell forward, covering her cheek, and I thought to myself that she looked like a twenty-four year-old again, with that offbeat vulnerability that first attracted me to her.
“I had lunch with Jan today,” she said, fingering a scrap of wood that she picked up off the floor. “She has cancer.”
On my knees by that point, I stopped what I was doing. “Man,” I said.
“It’s just like with my mom,” she said. “Left breast, just below the nipple.”
I watched her, stupidly holding the screwdriver in my hand. “Man,” I said again.
She nodded.
I wanted to approach her, but I remained still. We were in uncharted territory, the topic of her mother’s illness always having been slightly out of bounds, even on the day she died. It was something we talked around, not about, because whenever someone mentioned her mother, Tess would tremble. It always started in her hands. I looked at them in the silence. They were calm.
“I love you,” she said out of nowhere. It wasn’t the mechanical afterthought we’d become prone to, but a true, premeditated sentiment, and I felt myself grow warm. I crawled toward her on my knees and took her motionless hand to my face. Her palm smelled like dish soap, and I thought to myself that even household cleaners smelled better on her skin.
When I looked up, she was frowning.
“I really think we should put your mom in a nursing home,” she said.
She’d suggested it before, but said in that tender moment, it was as if she had knocked me on the head. I stood and grabbed the measuring tape on my way to the workbench.
“I can’t believe you,” I said, my insides knotting. The pencil shook in my hand as I measured and marked the length on a five-inch-wide cherry board.
“Please, baby, let’s talk about this,” she said, approaching me. She rested her hand on my back and I shrugged it away.
The board was too long for my bench, so I shoved a sawhorse under the dangling edge and in my haste to block out her words, grabbed the circular saw and turned it on.
“Will you turn that off for Christ’s sake?” she shouted.
I should have used a chop saw. It’s a cleaner cut and the up/down motion is more efficient for a piece of wood like the one I’d just marked. It’s also safer because there’s no reason, theoretically, for the board to move once you begin to cut. But I didn’t use the chop saw. And as I held the board with my hand, following the line with my blade, I heard Tess yelling over the screeching wood, “You can’t stop her from dying, goddammit!”
After that, it’s hard to distinguish one moment from the next. I dropped the saw when I saw the gushing blood, and all I can remember clearly is the screaming – whether it was from Tess’s mouth or mine, I’m not sure. The pain didn’t hit until much later. It was as if I was intoxicated, stumbling numbly from one place to the next. At some point, I blacked out, and when I awoke, I was in a hospital bed with a bandage covering my hand, the shape of five oversized fingers clearly visible beneath the gauze.
