Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

“What happened to my Cadillac DTS?”

Sheila Renfro makes a slashing motion across her throat, crossing her eyes and flopping her tongue out of her mouth. It’s very funny, and I laugh, which hurts really bad, and I yell out in pain. Donna looks annoyed with Sheila Renfro.

As the pain diminishes, I regain my breath. “How am I supposed to get back to Billings so I can fly to Texas?” I ask.

“I don’t want you on a plane for a while,” Dr. Banning says. “It puts a lot of stress on a body, that pressurization at thirty-five thousand feet. You’ve been through a trauma.”

“But I have to go to Texas on December twentieth. I’m going to see my mother.”

“You’re going to be here for a couple of days yet,” the doctor says.

“Edward,” Donna says, “don’t you think maybe you should just concentrate on getting better?”

I have to concede that Donna is a very logical woman and that she’s probably correct about this. And yet I am disappointed, because I was looking forward to going to Texas and seeing the Dallas Cowboys play in their new stadium.

“Does my mother know I’m in the hospital?” I ask.

Sheila Renfro holds out my bitchin’ iPhone. “She’s waiting for you to call,” she says.

I have an audience as I make the call to my mother, with Kyle holding the bitchin’ iPhone to my ear so I don’t have to lift my arms and aggravate my broken ribs. It’s not a fun phone call. Not too many phone calls are fun; I don’t like to talk on the phone. This one is especially difficult. I’m happy to hear my mother’s voice, but almost immediately she begins crying and telling me that her world would end if something bad happened to me, and that I must be more careful.

“Stop crying,” I say, and that makes her cry even more. I look helplessly at Donna, and she’s crying. I look at Sheila Renfro, and she’s not crying. She’s just watching me. Her look is intense, as if something bad will happen if she lets me out of her sight. I guess that’s reasonable, even if it’s not practical. Once I was out of her sight and out of her motel, something bad did happen to me.

I assure my mother that I will be careful and I apologize to her that I will be unable to make it to Texas for Christmas or to see the Dallas Cowboys.

“You just don’t worry about that,” she says. “When you’re well, you can come down. Or I’ll come see you.”

“My car is destroyed, Mother. How am I supposed to get back to Billings?”

“I will call Jay. He’ll make sure you have a car when the time comes.”

“Thank you, Mother. I will see you soon, I hope.” Hope is all I have in this instance. It’s not much.

“I love you, Son.”

I look around the room at everybody watching me. Only the doctor cleared out of the room. I don’t like to say things like “I love you” in front of an audience. Or at all.

“Yes, Mother, I know.”

“Good-bye,” she says.

“Good-bye.”

She hangs up. I’m glad that’s over with.

Everybody stays in the room with me. I ask Sheila Renfro to track down my watch, which is set to the precise second, because the analog clock on the wall is the very definition of unreliable, and it begins to irritate me. We watch an episode of a show called Everybody Loves Raymond , which turns out to be funny even with the wildly overblown title. I highly doubt that there is anyone in the world whom everybody loves. I think even the unassailably wonderful people in the world probably have someone who doesn’t like them. My father, for instance, often made jokes about Mother Teresa. (One I remember him telling: “Why did Mother Teresa stop eating buffalo wings? Because she kept dipping the chicken into the lepers’ backs instead of the blue cheese dressing.” To be honest, I’m not even sure what that means.) I am far from a perfect person—I am rude and self-absorbed, and Dr. Buckley would be happy to say so—but one thing I try not to do is make fun of people. When I was a boy, and even now, I was often made fun of, and it’s hurtful. I’ve learned to forgive my father for many of the things he did, and it’s not my place to stick up for Mother Teresa. Still, I think he was wrong to say those things. I don’t know if I believe in God. Believing in God requires faith, and faith is difficult for me. But just the same, I would be inclined to not make fun of Mother Teresa, because if there is a God—especially the Judeo-Christian God—Mother Teresa has a lot more standing than my father does.

Leaving God out of it, I think that if someone who dedicates her life to caring for the poor and the sick can be an object of derision (I love the word “derision”), what chance do the rest of us have?

At 6:31 p.m., after the program ends, Donna and Victor say they’re leaving, that they will be flying home to Boise with Kyle the next morning. Donna gives me another kiss, and this time Sheila Renfro looks angry, which flummoxes me. Victor again shakes my hand, gently, which I appreciate in my painful state.

The three of them are heading for the door when I say, “Can everybody else wait in the hall while I talk to Kyle?”

Kyle knows where I stand. I want him to tell his mother and father what he told me.

“But what if she hates me?” he says.

I’m pulled between the competing thoughts of how silly it is that Kyle would fear such a thing and a gentler realization that Dr. Buckley would be apt to make. She told me once that some people hold great shame for things that aren’t their fault, awful things that were done to them by people who were stronger or more powerful than they were. Shame isn’t something I’ve known in my life. Frustration, anger, wanting to be dead—I have known all of those things. But shame is difficult for me to understand. Dr. Buckley said it’s a horribly destructive force, perhaps the most destructive force she has ever encountered.

I do not want Kyle to know what that’s like.

“Donna will not hate you,” I tell him. “She will know exactly what to do. Your mother is wise, and she loves you, and she can help you.”

He doesn’t want to cry, but one tear does spill down his cheek. He wipes it away.

“I just don’t want to go back to that school. I hate it. I just want to forget it.”

In ways that I don’t think I could explain to Kyle—and even if I could, I don’t have the time, because Donna and Victor are waiting outside the door—he and I are more alike than I ever noticed before. The kids who picked on me when I was in school made it miserable for me a lot of the time. I never tracked how often I disliked school, but it would be fair to say that the truly surprising days were the ones that I enjoyed. I liked the work; if I could have been alone at school, just me and my teachers, I might have had a fun time. I don’t want that for Kyle. I don’t want him to have to feel that way about school.

“Tell your mother,” I say.

“Edward, can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

Kyle isn’t looking at me. “Did we have fun?”

“Kyle, you’re my first and best friend. We always have fun.”

“After you’re better, will you come see me again?”

“I promise I will.”

He covers the distance between us and hugs me, and it hurts terribly, so much that, at first, I think I’m going to pass out. But I don’t pass out, and I hug him back, and it hurts again, and I don’t care.

Finally he lets me go.

“Good-bye, Edward,” he says, opening the door.

“Good-bye, Kyle,” I say. “Tell your mother.”

He’s gone now, but I can hear Donna say, “Tell me what?”

I’m sneakily clever sometimes.