Part Two: HOSPITAL-ity
"Now you're sleeping peaceful, I lie awake and pray that
you'll be strong tomorrow and we'll see another day."

Sunday, November 28, 1999 4:32AM, West Racine, Chicago, IL
I am still, it would seem, on a journey that began nearly five days ago. The road and its path have shifted under me several times, and though I have managed to compensate for changes in both direction and purpose, I have yet to regain my own internal equilibrium. And I still do not know exactly what I'm doing here in Chicago.

I understand the details--don't worry--but if someone were to stop me and ask, What are you doing here? the kind of question that I turned left at the corner doesn't answer, I couldn't tell them.

I had been heading due south on Interstate 74 driving to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my family in Kentucky when events, or fate--serendipity, whatever you want to call it--conspired to have me turn a full 180 and reset my heading north, to Chicago.

Nora Ephron, who is a person that I esteem at least as highly as, say, Victor Hugo, or Mark Twain, once said that writing things down doesn't change anything about them. It's just that now they're written down. And even though I believe that, I'm going to write this down anyway. In the hopes, I suppose, of making some sense of it later.


Thanksgiving: The nearly three-hour car ride with Detective Ray Vecchio to Chicago from my home in Battle Ground, Indiana was nothing like the day's earlier ride from Shelbyville. There was no quiet to envelop us as Interstate 65 sent us past busy industrial cities like Gary and Hammond, car-to-car with other drivers in some spots.

Vecchio's agitation was evident. He drummed his fingers on the dashboard, changed the radio station showing no intent of stopping on any frequency for more than a few moments. And since I didn't know how to help, I stayed silent, still locked in my own dream state--or whatever it was that had descended on me since had I had let Victoria Metcalf into my car the night before.

Vecchio drove fast, and occasionally muttered a concern over his hospitalized partner, always adding a curse as well for Victoria; that she had ever set foot in his city.

Richard Rhodes said he believes eventually everyone reaches the point where they tell you their story. Since Vecchio had already told me the bulk of his the day before, we seemed to be at an impasse. He might have been waiting to hear mine, but my head had begun throbbing to the rhythm of the broken pavement below us, and I was regretting the fact that I had invited myself along at all.


As a result of crossing into Central Time, we arrived at the hospital a little after seven that evening. My own agitation had grown as we approached the intimidating downtown. In my life I had spent little time in large cities, and I knew no one on whom to call should my return be delayed and I need to stay the night.

In truth, I had started to consider one of two things; that I should have stayed home and troubled with the car another day, or that I should have brought along the Saint. He was a good companion on such trips. His size and disposition making me feel more at home--more in control. There were very few people--or places--that could frighten me when he was by my side.

Shortly after getting the call that my car had been found in the visitor's lot of the hospital where his partner was recuperating, Detective Vecchio had managed to locate an unengaged officer via cell phone to post outside his partner's room until we arrived. The officer's name was Huey, and Vecchio had assured me that he would also be able to help work out the details and paperwork involved in getting back my car.

So, once we got to the hospital and parked his 1971 Buick Riviera, we made a bee-line for his partner's room, and Detective Huey.

It may seem strange, seeing as how I had just been in a hospital only the night before getting myself stitched up, (that had been the emergency room--not the regular, death-almost-hanging-in-the-air wards) but I had forgotten how much I disliked hospitals. How much they uncomfortably recalled to mind Kara, my sister, and her long, unending illness, during which time we had become more or less residents of the hospital. How I had briefly become addicted to soap operas along with her, laying side-by-side (which had been against the rules) in her bed, the kind that had knobs to elevate and lower any and every part of yourself. How we would sit there, afternoon after afternoon, hanging on the words and gestures--lives and deaths--of people in Pine Valley and Santa Barbara. And how even in the midst of everything they seemed to matter.

We would talk about the characters when the shows weren't on, imagine fixing them up with each other, or with someone else we knew. We planned elaborate plots there among the starched whites of Good Samaritan, so close to one another that Kara could comb my long hair over her then-bald scalp and shout, "Look at me, I'm 'Aggie! I'm gonna RULE the world."

I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the onslaught of memories as we took the elevator up several floors. But as Vecchio and I passed a nurses' station, one look at the board announcing who was on rounds and who was elsewhere brought back how when people would visit Kara, or new nurses would be assigned to her, she would always greet them with the unreadable announcement, "You may bow," as though she had been Queen Victoria herself.

Sometimes the party addressed would play along and genuflect. For Kara--even though it was her own little joke--I have always thought it was one of the only moments in a long sequence of sponge baths and bedpans, poking and prodding, that she felt like she received even the smallest fragment of respect. Even if only for an instant.

Something switched uncomfortably in my vision as we got off on the floor that kept Vecchio's partner, and I had to hang back and pause a moment next to the wall. My gut lurched and my eyes, after that nurses' station, had quit focusing.

"God," it was not exactly a prayer. "I hate hospitals."

Further down the hall, Vecchio noticed that I was no longer beside him.

"Good idea," he encouraged me.

My announcement having gone unheard, he must have thought I stopped to wait in the visitor's lounge.

"You stay here a second and I'll come back with Huey."

I told him sure, I would do that, and turned into the room. It held several chairs, some out-of-date magazines and pamphlets on various diseases, a TV and some No Smoking signs. I left the TV off and the lights out and sat in the room like someone abandoned after prom, busily trying to convince myself that I was somewhere else, and that the smells of alcohol and rubber gloves and illness were not there, and not familiar.

I had tried to watch our shows after Kara died. I think I thought it would be a kind of tribute, something we could still do together. But I couldn't make it through an episode. All that melodrama, all that emotion. For people who had never and would never exist.

So I quit watching. And then, about two years later I was home with the Saint, sick, with nothing to do but lay on the couch and blow my nose, and All My Children came on the television. I was caught off guard and began to watch, but even though the faces were familiar--even some of the sets--and I knew almost everyone's name, it was like coming home to find my house of full strangers, doing things from motives I didn't understand.

I remember turning off the TV that day and letting myself cry right there into the shaggy side of the Saint. He's good for things like that.

I cried because I had been afraid. Afraid that if Kara were to show up and see me just then--if she were able to peek in on me like I could spy on the Castillo-Capwells or Erica Kane--that after two years she wouldn't recognize me either. That I would have allowed myself to become a stranger to her. And that if two years could produce such a change, what the amount of time before I could see her again would do.

About a year ago, somehow it came up in a conversation I was having that Kara was dead, had been dead going on six years. Another person--I wish I could remember who--just casually announced on my behalf to the others, "Oh, but of course you're over that now." I remember seriously wanting to puke on her. It was the only response that I felt was strong enough at the time.