Mike looked at his grandmother, and really saw her for the first time. Not the hardened woman of war with words, fists, and bullets all ready for action at the same time, but an old woman, with more failures than successes behind her, one who had lost her son, her daughter-in-law, and her peace of mind in the bargain. He felt rotten. It seemed to him that this woman deserved better than to lie on a carpet in pain and call out to strangers and bystanders for help. She had taken from him, but Mike knew she had given him much more in return. He resolved to be the son she deserved, even if she didn't get him, even if her true son had been a devil. He watched her turn away from him again, not angry, it seemed to him, but hurt. He watched her eyes close slowly, and noticed for the first time since he had entered the room that it was not sadness that closed them that way, but pain and fatigue. When her eyes were fully closed, he drew the smaller roll of bills out of his pocket and dropped it into her purse on the side table next to her.
While he still had his hand in her purse momentarily, the doctor walked in behind Mike. Mike drew his hand slowly and smoothly out of his grandmother's purse before the man had a chance to see what he was doing. His first thought was that the doctor would probably think he was taking money out rather than putting it in.
He turned to the doctor, trying to smile, and held out his hand to shake.
"Mike Barnes."
The doctor, a slight short man, vaguely white or Jewish, with curly black hair, fair skin, and a youthful face that made him look far too young to be a doctor, and especially a cardiologist. When he smiled as he shook Mike's hand, he dropped another five or ten years off Mike's best estimate of his age.
"Doctor Wagner," he returned, "You are some relation to Mrs. Barnes, then?"
Mike half expected a weak handshake from this baby-faced white man dressed up in scrubs and a doctor's lab coat, but instead Doctor Wagner's grip was firm, almost too firm, and his smile stayed frozen in place as he made forceful eye contact with Mike, even though he was looking up at him from a couple of inches below.
"Grandson," Mike said.
The doctor gave Mike's hand one last firm squeeze. "Oh, sure," he said dropping his hand and pointing at him, "the one on television. Your grandmother has the whole floor talking about it. Congratulations."
Mike nodded and waved away the words with a swipe of his right hand. "So what's wrong with Grandma?"
Beverly pushed him weakly from behind, her fist planted in his hip. "Get out of the man's way, boy, and stop acting like I'm not here in the room."
Mike looked back at his grandmother, stepped aside and sat on the bed near her feet, and then look up with a sheepish grin at the doctor. Doctor Wagner smiled back at him and nodded complicity.
"She does keep us all in line," the doctor said.
Mike stuck his palm to his forehead and dragged it down his face slowly in an exaggerated show of despair.
"How are you feeling, Mrs. Barnes?" the doctor asked.
"I'm tired of being in this bed." Beverly snapped, "It's making me weak. I want to be back home."
The doctor just nodded and smiled at her, then turned to Mike. "Your grandmother had a heart attack at home two days ago," he said, "Not a severe one, but not exactly mild either. She's actually not that badly off, just one coronary artery in trouble, and that one seems to be only eighty percent blocked. We can clear that out with a stint, do it tomorrow orthoscopically through a vein in her neck, and get it opened up and flowing again."
Mike nodded along, trying to absorb what the doctor was saying. He'd heard about heart attacks from other family members, and remembered it being a lot worse. While he knew that he should be hearing this as good news, he felt ominously like there was more to come. "So, then she can go back home?"
Mike felt a slap against his arm, and turned to look at his grandmother.
"I'm right here," she said.
Mike shook his head and mouthed the word "sorry."
"So after we do this stint, then I can go home?" Beverly said.
Dr. Wagner made a face that was somehow a smile and a frown at the same time, a stiff upper lip in the face of more bad news. "We do want to get her home as soon as possible." He said slowly, with a drawn out emphasis on the last word. "Recipients of this kind of surgery recover best with exercise, even if it's just cleaning the house or walking around in the store."
The doctor looked away from Mike and engaged Beverly directly, stepping closer to her and holding her gaze. "But my concern is that your grandmother seems to be a bit of a shut-in. According to her own account and her neighbor's, she doesn't get out much. This could pose a problem."
Beverly looked away from the doctor, breaking his gaze and scowling at the muted television. A commercial was playing, some lawyer trolling for cases to run down and clients to fleece, but the old lady stared at it as if it were some mystery she was having a hard time following.
"Well," the doctor resumed, looking at Mike again, "we don't plan to hold her for more than two days after the stint procedure. One more day before she's scheduled to receive it, and two days of rest and observation. In three days, if nothing out of the ordinary happens, she can go home."
Doctor Wagner stepped in towards Mike as if sharing a confidential note with a colleague. "Then it will be up to you to make sure that she gets out and gets exercise." Both of them glanced over their shoulders at the same time, finding Beverly in the same bitter posture as before, scowling at a daytime small claims court show. "She's not doing herself any favors staying inside all of her life. Her weight and bone density are great, healthy eating, I guess. But her blood pressure and muscle tone are terrible, and that includes her heart tissue. This sedentary lifestyle is going to be the end of her."
Mike looked over his shoulder at is grandmother, nodded sheepishly to the doctor, and shook his hand. "I'm on it."
The doctor nodded back, winked at Mike, and then turned to Beverly, who was still focused on the television, refusing to acknowledge the subject of their talk. "Three more days, Mrs. Barnes," he said, "if things go well enough, that's how long it will take you to get out of here. Not so bad really, right?"
Beverly just stared down the screen and shrugged her shoulders like a stubborn child who knows that disobedience is futile, if not impossible.
"All right, then," the doctor said, turning to leave, "I'll come see you tomorrow before they get you ready for the procedure."
As the doctor walked through the door, tears began to flow from Beverly's left eye. Mike shook his head as he watched her, knowing that those tears were not the product of fear or sadness. If these doctors and lab techs could bottle and analyze those tears, Mike knew they would find nothing but pure anger and rage in them. He had seen them before. Whenever his grandmother was up against something that blocked her every move and thwarted her desires, she would wait until she was alone and then the water would flow. She never sobbed and heaved like some women. Mike had seen hysterics in some of the girlfriends he had known, some of the women he had used and left behind, and he didn't think his grandmother was capable of those weak and empty emotions, maybe never had been. Those tears were the byproduct of a soul girding itself for war.
"Grandma," Mike began tentatively, "I know you heard the doctor and me talking, and I know you don't like it ..."
"Doctor and I. Hand me my purse, boy," she said.
Mike nodded and kept talking as he took the heavy handbag from the rolling tray and set it beside her, just in arm's reach. "I can't stay home with you for long. I have to get back to New York, to finish this thing. So I can't watch you and push you and make sure you do it, but you have to do what the doctor says and get out and exercise." Beverly was already shaking her head. "You have to, Grandma. For your heart. If you don't ..." Mike tried to take his grandmother's hand, but she pulled it away and fished out a tissue from her purse. "You're going to get worse."
"I'm already worse, boy," she said, dabbing the tissue against her eye and her cheek until it was wet all over and through. "Maybe people like me don't need to be out and about."
She tossed the wet tissue aside, missing the garbage completely, and went digging around in her bag again for another.
"Grandma, don't say that." Mike said, scooping the wet tissue off the floor and tossing it in the garbage can. He stepped over to the night table in between the two beds and took the box of tissues there.
"It's not safe any more," Beverly said, still rummaging, growing more agitated, "Not safe. It used to be safer for a woman. Do you know what would happen if I was just walking around and one of those thugs in the neighborhood decided to rob me, attack me?"
She looked up at Mike for the first time since the doctor had left, her eyes stern but imploring him to hear reason.
"I know, Grandma." He offered her the box of tissue, but she batted it away without taking her eyes from his. Her lips pursed and her eyebrows squeezed together, and she went back to digging in her purse, now taking out her wallet and keys and a couple of other objects and laying them beside her on the bed as she searched for her tissues.
"I know, Grandma," Mike repeated, dropping the box of tissue onto the bed beside her, "but you can't live your life afraid of that. If you don't change, you're going to die."
"Maybe I've lived long enough," she said, without looking at her grandson.
Suddenly, she stopped searching her purse and squinted into the depth of it. She reached in slowly and gingerly, as if she had found some live, squirming thing in there. Mike shook is head in annoyance as she drew out the roll of hundred dollar bills between her thumb and index finger. When she looked up at him, her face was twisted into a mask of disgust and anger.
"What is this?"
Mike straightened himself up. "That's money," he said boldly, leaning in towards her, "Money for the hospital, or for medicine, or food and transportation, or whatever else you need to get well."
Beverly was shaking her head violently already, pressing the money into Mike's hand. When he wouldn't close his fingers around it, she threw it at his chest. Before it bounced away, he fumbled with it for a moment and caught it.
"Don't you think I know what kind of money that is, boy?" she shouted at Mike, a redness coming into the whites of her eyes. "Don't you think I have seen you embrace your father's business and trade?"
The heart monitor perched on the top of a pole next to her bed began to squawk, and the blips in the line started coming more frequently and erratically. Mike looked at it, watching the number get higher with the volume of his grandmother's voice. "Grandma," he said, "Calm down. Your heart."
"Damn my heart," she shouted, "damn my heart for being so weak and soft, and damn my eyes for going blind to your ways. I have pretended not to know about your doings for too long, and now, just when I thought that maybe you had decided to get on a better path, you throw your blood money in my face." She grabbed a handful of the personal things on the bed beside her and threw them all at Mike. They struck him in the chest and stomach and neck, startling him without hurting him. "I watched your father walk that road for years, and I only acted when it was too late, for your mother and for you. I thought that learning and understanding would change things in my home, but they didn't. What your father had was a demon, and it doesn't respond to books and degrees. It has no regard for psychology and community, and it feeds on mercy and kindness and grows fat and strong."
Beverly coughed hard, a hacking, dry cough that sucked in wind after it and forced her palm to her chest. She looked away from Mike only long enough to draw her arm across her mouth and wipe away some of the spit that was collecting there in little bubbles.
"I ignored it so long that it killed your mother," Beverly said, "instead of dealing justly with your father, I let it run rampant until it got hold of me too, and now you." She pointed a long, slender finger at Mike's chest. "I waited too long to deal with him, but I can still deal with you. And before this thing runs wild in you and destroys everything you touch, I will stop it. I waited too long to stop your father, but I will stop you."
Her hand dropped to the bed like a dead thing, and she coughed again, louder and rougher than before. Mike stared at her, seeing his father's features in her angry eyes, the way her skin brightened and her ears bobbed up and down as she yelled.
He slid the money into his pocket, turned around without a word, and walked out of the room. Just before he walked out, he heard the sound of the television burst in again, some man shouting about some car sale at some dealership.
When he passed through the doorway, a nurse squeezed past him in a hurry and opened it again, rushing into the room. He glanced behind him through the narrowing gap in the doorway and saw the nurse tapping on the heart monitor with one hand and checking his grandmother's pulse with the other.
When the door closed, Mike took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked to his left and saw Frank Jenkins sitting in a maroon padded chair next to the doorway, staring back at him. Frank opened his mouth to say something, and then just stopped and scratched his head. Mike looked back at him, shrugged and shook his head. He walked past him towards the elevators at the end of the hall.
Halfway down the hall, Mike stopped suddenly, turned around, and quickly walked back, shoving his hand into his pocket. When he got to Frank again, he pulled the rubber-banded roll of bills out of his pocket and held it out to Frank, who looked back at him as if it were a rat.
"Grandma won't take it," Mike said, "but she needs it." He grabbed Frank's hand, opened it, dropped the money inside, and closed his fingers over it. "Can I trust you to hold on to this, use it for her bills, if she needs it, and get her whatever else she needs while I'm gone?"
Frank stared at the wad of bills, turning it over in the palm of his hand, nodding his head. "Sure," he said, "Course I can. When you getting back anyway?"
Mike turned and walked away. "Not for a while."
He didn't look back at Frank again until he was already at the elevator and had pushed the button to call it. When he did, he saw Frank counting the money, his eyes growing bigger with each bill he peeled off the roll. He thought about telling Frank to call him if he needed any more cash, but somehow he knew the man would.
Once inside the elevator, Mike watched his reflection come together and and watch him back as the doors closed, locking him in with himself. The man who looked at him was drained, not emotionless, but wanting to be, wanting the anger and loss to stop.
He remembered his mother, how angry she would get at his father, and sometimes even at his grandmother too. But she never did anything either. Never left him, never called the police. Any time the cops came, it was always someone else who had called them, someone probably more sick of the noise than concerned about the woman making it. He thought about the night he had lost his mother in a pool of blood, about the explosion and the wet sound of the impact, about the wisp of smoke that trailed from the barrel of the pistol in his father's hand. It had seemed to hang motionless in the air as Mike looked into the black eye of that gun, now pointed at him. His own father's finger was wrapped around the trigger like a black mamba around a tree brach, his right eye squeezed shut and his left eye squinting. Mike remembered waiting for another gunshot to pierce the air, wondering if it would sound the same when it struck his own body as it had his mother's, wondering if he would bleed as much as she had. In his mind, somehow, it had already happened when he saw his father's head jerk to the left as if struck by an invisible brick and the left side of his forehead burst forth with a mixture of blood and bone and brain.
"I am not my father," Mike said aloud to the man watching him from inside the elevator doors. "I am not my mother or my grandmother." Before he could finish his thought, the doors opened, and his reflection parted and departed. He stepped out into the lobby of the worst hospital in Miami, ripped the sticker off his shirt and slapped it onto the front desk as he passed, and left the hospital behind him. He opened the door to one of the taxis outside the hospital and flopped inside.
"Where you going?" the cabby asked him.
Mike realized he had no bags, no plans, and no reason to stay in Miami any more.
"Ft. Lauderdale airport," he said.
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