Siegel, James - Derailed

“ You’re sorry. Talk about a bad career move. I came out and I’m six years behind everybody else. I’ve got no college degree. I’ve got no work experience except for stacking books in the prison library, and I don’t think that counts. Even if I did have a college degree, no one would exactly be welcoming me into the executive ranks. I carried a three-point-seven GPA my first year and now I’m pushing mail.”

“Do they know you served time?” I asked him.

“You mean here? ”

“Yes.”

“Sure. You should come down to the mailroom sometime. We’re a liberal’s wet dream. We got two ex-cons, two retards, an ex-junkie, and a quadriplegic. He’s our quality control man.”

“When you came out — why didn’t you go back to college?”

“Were you going to pay my tuition?”

Winston had a point there.

“Look, I’m on parole,” Winston continued. “They have these rules when you’re on parole. You can’t go out of state without permission. You’ve got to check in with your parole officer twice a month. You can’t associate with any known criminals. And—oh yeah—you can’t steal computers. I may have fucked up on that one. On the other hand, there’s this other rule they have when you’re on parole. You can’t earn a living — not really. Know what they pay me to deliver your mail?”

We could talk sports all we liked, but we were on two different sides of the socioeconomic spectrum, Winston was saying. I was an executive, and he was just a mail boy.

“How many computers, Winston?”

“Like I told you, this is the first time — ”

“You got caught. I know. How many times didn’t you get caught?”

Winston leaned back and smiled. He flexed his arm — the one with the wire cutter in it. He shrugged.

“A couple,” he said.

“Okay. A couple.” I suddenly felt tired; I rubbed my forehead and looked down at my shoes. “I don’t know what to do,” I said out loud. I might have been saying that about everything now.

“Sure you do. I just bared my soul to you, man. I was stupid, I admit it. Won’t happen again. Promise.”

“All right. Fine. I won’t say anything.” Even as I was saying this, I wondered exactly why I’d come to that decision. Maybe because I felt like no less of a thief than Winston. Yes. Hadn’t I stolen money from Anna’s Fund? Late at night, too, when no one could see me — just like Winston? Wasn’t that criminal etiquette — never turning in a fellow criminal? Do the same for me, wouldn’t he?

“Thanks,” Winston said.

“If I hear about another computer being stolen . . .”

“Hey — I’m larcenous. Not stupid.”

That’s right, I thought. The stupid one is me.

SEVENTEEN

Daddy . . .”

The word you almost never tire of hearing during the day, becoming the word you dread waking to in the middle of the night. It came like a fire alarm in a pitch-black movie theater, and right in the middle of the film, the current feature a kind of domestic drama involving me and Deanna and a woman with green eyes.

“Daddy!”

I heard it again, and this time I woke up for good and nearly fell off the bed.

Memories of other nights like this clamored for my undivided attention even as I tried to deflect them, to concentrate on the physical act of standing up and running barefoot across a dark and frigid hall.

To Anna’s room.

I flipped on the lights even as I entered it — one hand pressed against the switch, the other already reaching out for her. Even with my eyes squinting from the sudden brightness, I could see that Anna looked exceptionally and spookily weird. She was, I was fairly certain, smack in the middle of hypoglycemic shock.

Her eyes were rolled back, to that part of her brain that was reeling from lack of sugar, her body caught in one unending stutter. When I put my arms around her, it was like holding on to a frightened puppy, all shake and quiver. Only if Anna was frightened, she was incapable of telling me.

When I shouted at her, she refused to shout back. When I shook her head and whispered into her ear, when I slapped her gently — no response.

I’d been told what to do when this happened. I’d been prepped and trained and reminded and warned. I just couldn’t remember a word of it.

I knew there was a syringe sitting in a fire-engine-red plastic case. I thought the case was downstairs in a kitchen cabinet. I believed that the case needed to be opened and the syringe filled with a brown powder that was also in the case. And water — some amount of water was to be added.

These things were flying through my mind like a dyslexic sentence I couldn’t quite grasp. I caught the general drift, though, which was horrifying and merciless.

My daughter was dying.

Suddenly Deanna was right behind me.

“The shot,” I said to her, or possibly yelled.

But she already had it in her hand. I felt a momentary surge of pure love for her, this woman I’d married and created Anna with, even in the midst of terror feeling like falling to my knees and hugging her. She opened the case for me, calmly plucked out the syringe, and studied the bold-lettered directions on the way into Anna’s bathroom. I cradled Anna in my lap, whispering that it would be okay, Anna, yes, it would, you'll be fine, Anna, yes, my darling, as I heard the water running in there. Then Deanna was back out, shaking the syringe in her hand.

“Deep,” Deanna said, handing the shot to me. “Past the fat into the muscle.”

I’d dreaded this moment—had imagined over and over what it’d be like. When they’d first trained me on the fine art of insulin giving, pricking thin quarter-inch needles just into the fatty tissue on hip, arm, and buttock—they’d also mentioned this. That eventually there would come a moment when I’d probably have to use it. Not every parent had to, but given that Anna had an especially virulent case and given that Anna had gotten it so young . . . This needle not a quarter inch long, more like four inches, and thick enough to make you turn your eyes away. Because it had to get its pure sugar mix into the brain cells fast enough to keep them from starving.

This syringe was in my hand now, only my hand was quivering as much as Anna was, because it was like stabbing her, even if it was with the gift of life. I placed it by her upper arm, but since we both were shaking, I was afraid to push it in, afraid I’d miss and blunt the needle, waste the liquid.

“Here — ” Deanna took the needle from me.

She put it against Anna’s hip, hand steady, and stuck it all the way in. Then she slowly pushed the plunger down till all the brown liquid was gone.

It was almost instantaneous.

One minute my daughter was lost. Then suddenly her eyes rolled back into focus, and her body gently quieted and settled back onto the bed.

And she cried.

Anna cried, worse even than the morning she was diagnosed and we told her more or less what was in store for her. Worse than that.

“Daddy . . . oh Daddy . . . oh Daddy . . .”

So I cried, too.

I took her to the hospital — the children’s wing of Long Island Jewish, just to be on the safe side. I hadn’t been back since those first excruciating weeks, and the very smell of the place was enough to take me back to the time when I’d paced the halls at four in the morning, knowing that the best part of my life was over. Anna felt it, too; she’d managed to calm down on the twenty-minute ride to the hospital, but the moment we entered the waiting room, she’d shrunk back into my body and hid there, so that I nearly had to carry her inside.

It was 2:00A .M.; we were given an Indian intern who seemed overworked and distracted. Deanna had been calling Anna’s doctor when we’d left the house.