1. The Ghosts of Boyfriends and Hospitals Past #2
In fairness, Finch loved the game of advertising.
Closing the deal. Catching the white whale.
I, on the other hand, fell into advertising.
When I moved to New York I didn’t have any plans for work or school, so Uncle Ronnie got me an internship at his firm, Bishop & Black Creative.
I started making copies, taking lunch orders, and fetching coffees, and little by little I found myself offering suggestions to the agents.
Within six months, I went from unpaid intern to the highest-grossing Jr. Associate at B.B.C.
It turned out, I was really good at listening to clients, getting to the heart of their needs, and coming up with creative ways to achieve their goals.
As an only child, growing up in the house with a sick mom and a grandpa who worked twelve-hour days on the farm, seven days a week, I was used to being in my head and creating worlds in there. I’d had to occupy myself a lot of the time.
“What if Finch poaches—”
“I’ll call you after I see my grandfather,” I cut her off for the second time. I understood that the client meeting was a big deal, but right now, I didn’t have the bandwidth to discuss it.
“But, I need—” she rushed out.
“I’ll call you back.” I hung up and took a deep, cleansing breath as I glanced out the back seat passenger window.
It had been over a decade since I’d set foot in Valentine Bay.
Twelve years since the day I’d packed my bags, got on a plane to New York, and showed up on Uncle Ronnie’s front porch asking if I could stay for the night.
That one night turned into four years before I got a tiny 400 square foot basement sublet of my own, but I never looked back.
I’d fled that night heartbroken, angry, and terrified of what my future held in store.
A dozen years was time enough to make a place mythic in my mind, a grainy, oversaturated snapshot.
I braced myself as I inhaled the salty sea air and took in the wide, relentless blue sky, a shade brighter than the waters of the coastline that hugged the town.
But as the Uber took the exit off the Pacific Coast Highway and into the heart of town, it was the sameness that gut-punched me so hard I almost gasped.
The familiar faded “Welcome to Valentine Bay, Est. 1883” sign, with the loopy blue font and the spray of pink hearts, lording over the boardwalk and downtown like a plastic wedding cake topper.
The white clapboard church on the hill where I’d always wanted to say my vows.
The same row of red-brick storefronts, still occupied in the exact same order: Main Street Eats diner on the corner, Be Mine Bakery, Ever After Blooms florist, Valentine Tools hardware, Love Letters & Lace Antiques, all of them probably run by the same people who’d run them when I was a kid.
The same two-block strip of high school banners flapping from the lampposts reading “Go Cupids!” and I felt a ridiculous pang of nostalgia and sadness, melancholy maybe.
Everywhere I looked, I saw him. Dawson Lockhart.
The man who I’d spent six of my formative years with.
He asked me to be his girlfriend the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and we didn’t break up until the day after graduation.
He was as much a part of this town as the ocean, the pier, the marina, the cove, the beaches, any of it.
He was woven into its fabric, woven into my fabric.
The car glided past the fire station, the library, the boardwalk crowded with tourists and locals.
It felt like time had folded itself in half, and I was peeking into my own childhood from across some invisible, uncrossable divide.
Or maybe this was a Ghosts of Christmas Past sort of thing, and I’d get to visit the Ghost of Christmas Future.
I wasn’t sure, but it all felt so strange.
We pulled up to the Valentine Bay Medical Center and the knot in my stomach tightened like it was being twisted in a tourniquet. After taking a deep breath, I got out of the car and stepped onto the sidewalk. The driver retrieved my overnight bag from the trunk and set it beside me.
“Thank you,” I told him. He nodded, got back inside, and drove away.
Dread overwhelmed me as I faced the glass doors buzzing open and shut with the rhythm of exhalation, the faint antiseptic tang already tickling my sinuses.
I could hear my own pulse thumping behind my eardrums and, below that, the low electrical hum of the building, the whoosh of the doors, a child’s shriek echoing off the awning before being shushed and softened by a nurse.
Every part of my body wanted to keep me outside, just for another minute, but I forced myself to walk in. The lobby was smaller than I remembered and yet, somehow, more cavernous—a vault of white tile and flickering fluorescent light, the air so cold my breath fogged as I exhaled.
I felt as if the place retained every moment I’d ever spent there, the hundreds of visits I’d made over the last six years of my mom’s life: the birthdays and holidays crashed by my mother’s sudden episodes, the endless, helpless afternoons watching her wither toward a finish line we never wanted to believe was coming.
The nurse behind the check-in desk was new but looked exactly like the nurse who used to give me tiny pink bubblegum pops and stickers when I was a child.
“Can I help you?” she asked. There was an accent, not local, but not unfamiliar. I gave her my grandfather’s name, and she gestured me down a narrow hallway. “He’s in the ICU, room 304, sweetie. Just need to see some I.D.”
I pulled out my driver’s license, slid it across the counter, and she printed out a visitor’s badge for me.
I followed the corridor, my stomach leaden, my hands cold and prickling with sweat.
The scent of overcooked vegetables and bleach grew stronger as I neared the elevator.
A volunteer in a maroon vest smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, but my face got stuck somewhere between a grimace and a sneer.
When the doors opened, I ducked inside, pressed the button for the third floor, then stared at my warped reflection in the doors until they split open.
I got off the elevator and with each step I took getting closer to his room, the more my hands would sweat.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. Buddy Shepard was larger than life.
He was invincible. He was a beast of a man.
It had been a couple years since he’d visited New York, and he refused to FaceTime or Skype, so I wasn’t sure what I would be walking into.
A sudden rush of guilt overwhelmed me as I stood outside Room 304. Whatever my reasons were for staying away, and they were good reasons, I should have come back sooner. Over the phone, a few times a year, anyone could fool someone into thinking they were okay. I should have paid more attention.
The door was open a crack. I stood in the threshold and watched for a moment, anonymous, invisible, as my grandpa squinted at the TV bolted to the wall.
His skin looked gray, almost translucent, liver spots blooming up his forearms. There was something so profoundly shrunken about him that I barely recognized the man who, in my memory, had been imposing, almost mythical in his stature.
He was the person who’d taught me to shoot a basketball, to gut a fish, to run the bases with my head up and never look back.
That man wore the hospital gown like a flag of surrender.
My heart broke, and it was difficult to breathe.
He looked up, and his eyes met mine with a flash of startled, almost guilty recognition. “Sadie girl.” His voice raspy but not fragile. “Well, I’ll be damned. Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes. What on earth are you doin’ here?”
I entered the room and lowered down onto a chair beside him, feeling waves of déjà vu from my visits with my mom. I tried my best to ignore them.
He braced his palms on the plastic rails and tried to sit up straighter, as if that might ward off my worry. “You didn’t have to come all this way for an old man’s indigestion.”
“You had a heart attack and a stroke,” I replied, my voice flat. I was careful not to sit too close, careful not to touch anything—him, the bed, the emotional possibility that this would be the last time we spoke.
That’s how fast it happened with my mom. On Friday I visited her, she was up and talking, and Saturday morning I woke up to the sounds of Buddy sobbing downstairs. I knew, without anyone telling me, she was gone.
Her body, which had fought for years, had finally given up on her.
When I was little, I used to tell people that my mom had Julia Roberts disease, because she suffered from the same complications from her Type 1 diabetes as Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias.
Like Julia’s character Shelby in the movie, having me put a lot of strain on her body.
Her kidneys failed. She was on dialysis for years.
I got more time with my mom than Shelby’s fictional son, and the woman the movie was based on, did. My mom passed away a week before my twelfth birthday. Birthdays were still tough for me.
“How did you find out I was here? Was it that Rita? She can’t seem to keep her mouth shut.”
Rita Burrows, local rumor dispenser, was a human antenna, always tuned in and picking up even faint signals of drama. She liked to say she didn’t repeat gossip, so you have to listen closely the first time.
“The hospital called me. Next of kin,” I explained.
He grunted, “They had no right.”
The silence between us bloomed like a bruise. I counted the seconds, waiting for him to crack a joke or ask about my job or who I was dating, something to reset the energy. Instead, he picked at the edge of his blanket with a trembling hand.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, softer than before.
“I’m fine,” he dismissed. “Don’t let them tell you otherwise. I’m just here for the Jell-O and the nice nurses.”
“They don’t keep you in ICU for Jell-O.”