At the Altar

It was probably for the best I had trailed behind the lectern, where he dared not cross. Disgruntled as he was, a decade of catholic school dies hard. Even if you’re only there because the public schools suck. Even if you’re only there because the tuition isn’t too high and the entrance exam is, really, pretty easy. Even if you caught your dad rolling his eyes during the family welcome mass and saw your mom kick him playfully under the pew and suppress a smile. It was probably for the best he had taken one or two or five of me before he dropped to his knees and I tumbled to the ground. It made me a little harder to find. A little harder to pick apart: to crush up and devour. A little harder for me to see.

And all in all, I didn’t mind my spot back there quite so much. It was better than the bedside. The sign outside the room called it an “interfaith chapel”, so I guess they stripped Jesus away, and I was grateful for that. No more emaciated company or delirious eyes. But they left the cross up, the only evidence of its former occupant in a couple rusted nails and some chipped faux blood. And I’d seen enough of that too, but I figured it was alright to cut my losses.

So there were no prayers to Saint Theodore when I went missing. No pleas sent high overhead for my safe return. But there were other prayers. Visitors slipping in to find somewhere quiet for a change. Away from the beeping of monitors and rush of Code Reds and Code Blues and some other indiscernible cry of panic.

And there was the father insisting: maybe I really was just lost.

And the mother assuring him: there was just no way.

Because, frankly, “how could a bedridden little girl lose a bottle of pills?”

And the father’s reminder, “well, it’s not exactly like she administers them herself.”

And the mother, “so you’re saying you think I lost them? You’re seriously blaming me for this?”

And, “I’m not saying that. It could have been a nurse or something. I’m just saying we don’t know for sure it was him.”

“None of the nurses have been wandering around clearly strung out. Did you see him this morning? He could barely keep his head out of his cereal bowl.”

“He’s just tired. We’re all tired.”

And I knew they were. I had spent enough time with them to know that drawl. To recognize the foggy bite that punctuated the father’s voice when he was subsisting on an hour or two of sleep and hankering for a Malboro. And the false chirpiness the mother picked up when she hadn’t had a good rest in a week and was waiting for him to try and sneak the cigarette. Waiting to remind him about their daughter’s oxygen tank and acrid lungs. I was happy not to have to see them then. The tousled hair and wrinkled clothes; the paper coffee cups and shadowy eyes.

I was happy not to see any of them in their pews. Non-believers begging; devout Catholics’ crying, clutching rosaries. There were prayer mats laid out at sunset, pleas in Arabic and Hebrew, an unforgiving cross. There was silence; heads held in hands and tears stifled the second the door creaked open. There was desperation, desolation, and death rites. Harangued priests and the occasional rabbi stopping in for a breath. Kneeling and kneading over their careers. And then an interrupting doctor, fresh from surgery or the emergency room. Questioning the four years of medical school, four decades of debt, just for this? For flatlining and rotted arteries? And the mutual relief at the sight of the other. At the bloodied scrubs and weathered vestment. The “at least I’m not that guy.”

There was a lot of that too. A man hobbling in with a broken leg thanking a God he long forgot that he got to keep it; an amputee sobbing in gratitude that he escaped with his life. The wife of a traffic cop who bled out above the knee on the side of the road, grateful that he wouldn’t have to suffer. Just as quickly ashamed when a boy wheeled himself in behind her, praying he would one day walk again.

There were celebrations too. Don’t let me get you down! Sure, they were fewer, further between. It seems gratitude is best shouted down the hallway, celebrated over dinner. I heard most of it through the door: the sound of a bell being rung or a new grandparent cooing about their fresh faced grandchild over the phone. A balloon would pop, or a bottle of champagne. And someone would shh and giggle and clink their glass. Flowers and cards and stuffed animals would make their way from the giftshop to the rooms, but would seldom find their way near me.

Occasionally though, the traces of joy would trickle through my door. An anxious father thanking me for his new, little family. A doting wife grinning, waiting for her husband to wake from surgery. A patient, starved and hollow, on their way to clang that recovery bell.

The mother felt guilty, she did, really, each time that bell rang. Felt guilty each time the staff cheered and the family cried and some bald, brittle smile crept across a patient's face. She felt guilty and bitter and all together sick of herself each time she felt that familiar rage crest. Because why should it be that patient? That man or woman or child? Why should that mother get that triumph and relief while she sat at her daughter’s side for another day in that putrid, too-cold hospital air? Why should she layer on another set of blankets when the fever broke, only to wake up to her daughter’s delirious cries at the heat’s return? Why should she be content with VIP passes to Disney World and visiting superheroes? Were these things supposed to make up for missed graduations and the altars her child would never see? Was she meant to flood albums with photos of Mickey Mouse and Spiderman and her spindly daughter instead of flying caps and wedding gowns? Was she supposed to pretend the knit hat and three sweaters her daughter kept pulling on and off under the thick Orlando sun were any replacement? So one day, when she was asked about her children, she could swear she had two and have evidence on the matter? Was she supposed to let her son drift aimlessly into the druggy habits of a tragic only child? How was she supposed to do anything else? So she felt guilty, she really did. And though he would never say anything, the father felt guilty too.

He felt guilty when he snuck away with a lighter hidden in his back pocket, and he felt guilty when he slipped through my door instead of his daughter’s. He felt guilty he needed quiet, needed rest. Needed the break his wife never seemed to take. He felt guilty when she slept upright in the chair at their daughter’s bedside and he felt guilty when she squeezed in next to her and he had the chair to himself. He felt guilty when he played the TV in the hospital room too loud and he felt guilty when he got caught humming. He felt guilty when he slipped off for a cup of coffee or a sandwich, guilty when he forgot to get his wife one, guilty when he remembered and she refused to eat it. He felt guilty when she complained he wasn’t at the hospital enough and guilty when she said he just got in the way. And he felt guilty when she screamed at their son, in front of the doctor and all, that she knew he had taken his sister’s pills. That if he wanted to be some depraved fuckup and throw his life away, that was his problem, but that he wouldn’t take his sister in the process. Wouldn’t let her writhe in pain so he could get high with his fuckup friends. Or make some quick cash off their fuckup acquaintances. That some people actually needed prescriptions, needed pain management. Because some people actually had problems. And when his son just looked at his mom, through his too-long hair that no one had bothered to tell him to cut, through those eyes dark without the sleep that no one had told him to get. When he just looked at her and said nothing. Just took it. Just left the room. He felt guilty.

Actually, he felt like he needed a cigarette. But he settled for a xanax. And came to see me. He felt guilty sitting in the pew, the unsettling, unwavering Catholic guilt he had never quite shook, even as he abandoned Hail Marys and communion. And he felt guiltiest when another father came in, one he recognized from the pediatric oncology ward. Guilty when they exchanged the half hearted smiles of passing recognition and that other father moved past him, approaching me with a grin he couldn’t quite shake and mumbled words of appreciation. “Thank you for saving my daughter, Lord. Thank you for saving my daughter.” Oh, the father felt guilty then. As he thought about how quickly he would trade that man’s child for his own. As he considered how easy it would be to hit that man over the head while he wasn’t looking, like he could take his good fortune from his back pocket like a money clip if he could just get him down. Yeah, he felt guilty then.

And whether his mother saw it or not, whether she could even believe it, the boy felt guilty too. Guilty when he took me, guilty his sister was sick. Guilty he wasn’t. But mostly, he just felt regret. Regret he had refused to go to Disney World, had said it was lame. Had rather sit in his room with those friends, who, admittedly, were fuckups. Regret he hadn’t been able to stomach all the cancer shit and the forced cheeriness on those half-pretty princesses’ faces when they looked at his sister and pretended in their pinched little voices like she wasn’t dying. Regret that now they would never go, not that he gave a fuck about Disney World. Not that he gave a fuck about Florida.

“Do you even give a fuck about your mother?” his dad had asked when he had declared he was staying home. When his mom had launched into one of those epic fits and cast an epidemic of a fight that took the whole house down. He had thought to shout back at his dad. Something like: do you guys even give a fuck about me? But his dad had looked so tired, so defeated, when he asked, really in earnest, “what about your sister?” So the boy just shut his door and pretended not to hear when his dad started sniffling behind it.

But now he regretted not going, regretted not sucking it up and wearing the atrocious ears, eating the greasy, overpriced food. Regretted not holding his father’s gaze, telling him all he did was care and that it hadn’t done a thing. Regretted not being the one to cry. He regretted not having had enough courage to shave his head with his sister, even as his father urged him, trying to sound casual. Make it seem fun. Even as he veered manic, his voice wavering, desperate and pleading. He regretted not having any courage in the matter at all, not even holding the electric razor. Watching his father pull it raggedly against his own scalp, watching the hair fall to the ground while his father laughed wildly in the mirror with strained eyes.

He regretted not having visited his sister in the hospital enough, that he had been cowardly there too. He had never liked hospitals. The overly sterile smell of class dissections and hand sanitizer. The constant ring of monitors and distant sirens. The sense of monotonous, bureaucratic tedium, broken uneasily by the sudden rush of some bloody shroud and their weeping companion.

“Why aren’t you coming to Disney World?” she had asked. He had visited that day. He hadn’t regretted that. He had regretted his answer:

“It’s lame.”

“Is it?”

“No… no, not really. I mean, you’ll have fun.”

“So why won’t you come?”

“I- I mean I, I’d just ruin it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Sure I would.”

“I would like to have you there.”

“You’ll have more fun without me. I swear.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, you know… me and mom. Not to mention me and the sun! I’d be burned by the time we left the airport. And then I’d just be whining the whole time. Plus I’m a bitch on roller coasters. Not like you, you know that. Trust me. It’ll be more fun without me.”

“Yeah? Swear?”

“For sure. Swear.”

And he regretted the day he lost me. Sure, he regretted taking me. Especially when he saw what a mess it was, having me replaced. I mean, he knew opiates were a problem and all, but didn’t cancer trump addiction? I mean what, say they weren’t lost. Say they weren’t stolen. Say his sister really did have all the meds she needed and that, at the weathered age of nine, had decided to pick up some precocious drug habit. Make up for soon to be lost time. Say she was hoarding them in her pillowcase or had been surreptitiously doubling her dose. Say to give her more would be a disservice, do more harm than good, I mean who the hell cared. Dead by overdose, dead by tumor. Dead at nine was dead at nine.

But losing me? Causing all that drama just to lose me? What a waste. I mean, he couldn’t even remember where we had been together, trigger happy as he was with his loot. He had taken a day or two’s dose, downed it with some whiskey his dad had started hiding in the car’s glove box, and woken up in the chair by his sister’s bed, holding her hand. He couldn’t even remember for sure he had been the one to take me, which had been a weak source of comfort through his mother’s initial interrogation. But the armor quickly cracked when he found some frozen-over vomit at the edge of the parking lot on his way out that night, one of the pills lodged in it whole. He tried not to look, but he knew it was his. He watched his dad instead, who seemed to pretend not to see, studying his keys attentively as he slipped into the car.

I couldn’t imagine the boy would find his way back in. Even in his delirium that day, he hadn’t prayed, hadn’t knelt or begged. He just relished in a moment of privacy. A moment of numb relief, nervous still, as he was, under the cross. Without some pharmaceutical aid, I was sure he could never stomach the room. Never venture back to Jesus’s love. But then, there he was. I figured he had unlocked some memory. Retraced his steps. Would swoop me up and make good on his own degradation. He was moving to the altar, after all. Determined look in his eye. He was just ahead of me. And then he was on his knees.

“Please,” he pleaded softly. “Please, just don’t take her. I know I’ve been bad. I know I’m a bad brother, a bad son. I know I don’t… I don’t pray. I don’t go to church. I know I barely even go to class anymore, and I know I don’t deserve it. But please. Please just don’t take her.”

He was crying now, and I wasn’t sure exactly who he was praying to. I wasn’t sure if he knew himself. But with his knees burying into the ground and his head hung low, he was the picture of piety. And he was crying still. And when the door creaked open behind him, when footsteps fell, louder and louder at his back, he did not stop. He stayed, crouched and resigned, as a familiar hand found his shoulder and knees, not unlike his own though with decades more wear and a slight issue with long flights of stairs, knelt beside him. He stayed as his father held him like that, some flash of news in his eyes. Some news his father did not share. Not yet.