The Memory of Running Read online

  “I’m going now, Mom. What I’m going to do is go back to the camp and pack up the stuff and drive up and get a room or something. I won’t be gone long. You rest.”

  I waited in the lobby for Trooper Anderson, and after a while I figured he was busy—so I took a cab back to Bridgton. It cost seventy-four dollars. My old Buick was already packed with our summer stuff. The folding chairs, coolers, tackle boxes, et cetera. I cleaned the cabin quickly, then paid Pop’s friend who owned the cabins, asked him to return the rented boat for me, and drove back to Portland in the deepest Maine dark ever.

  2

  I was a running boy. That’s what our next-door neighbor, Ethel Sunman, called me. I went from one place to another like a duck somebody was shooting at. I made beelines.

  In 1958 my pop bought me a new maroon three-speed Raleigh English bike, and I became a running-wheel boy. I would ride every day after school, and on Saturday I usually took a long eleven-miler to Shad Factory in Seekonk, Massachusetts, which is one county over from East Providence, Rhode Island. Even in winter, if the roads were clear, I’d ride to Shad. Nobody ever went with me. Nobody ever went to Shad Factory either—that’s why it was my favorite. There were no houses or anything. The Palmer River, on its way to the Atlantic Ocean, formed a lake above the Shad Factory waterfall. The fishing above and below the falls was terrific. Bass and pickerel above the falls, bluegill, perch, and hornpout below in the keep holes formed by the falling water. It looked perfect for trout, but there was always a little salt, just a bit, that backed in from the ocean, so only the tougher fish lived there. They changed in the brackish water. Bluegills got metally looking, and the perch’s belly got even deeper orange. I’d fish no matter what time of year, so long as the water wasn’t frozen over. In winter I’d take a small path across a footbridge and into the crumbling factory. It used to make metal rims for wagon wheels. I’d build a fire and have a day camp.

  When Bethany began posing in places other than our house—those times when she was away from us, and hours would pass, and she didn’t come home from school or from one of her friends’ houses when she said she would—we’d fan out and look for her. I think that’s why Pop got me the Raleigh. I had a pretty good American bike, but it wasn’t light and fast, and I’d usually just run, looking, and I’m sure Pop figured that riding a good bike would be faster in a Bethany search.

  A lot of the Bethany searches run together in my head, but some of them I remember clearly. These are the ones I think about or talk to myself about. I talk to myself after I have some drinks. It helps to get it all in some order. For a while anyway. I may say, “Jesus, Bethany, c’mon, you’re getting Mom and Pop all upset.” I always said that when I found her. I’d say, “C’mon, Bethany, stop standing like that. Put your jeans on. C’mon!”

  Now, my sister was never a dirty person, or lewd or anything, but this thing inside her would tell her to take off some clothes—and she’d do it, or she’d talk right out loud, like she was answering somebody. It was strange. Crazy, really. Mom and Pop took her to about every doctor there was, but after the Bradley Hospital, Bethany said if they took her any more places, she’d kill herself. She wouldn’t, though. My pop wasn’t a profound man in the way he talked, but I remember once, right after Bethany was brought home by Winnie Prisco and she had been saying she’d kill herself and stuff, I remember Pop sitting at the kitchen table with Mom, putting his arm around her and saying, “Life expects a lot more out of some people than it does out of others.” Then he grabbed Bethany’s arm, put her in the Ford wagon, and drove her back to Bradley.

  About a week later, we brought her back home. We needed Bethany in our little house. There’s always unfinished business when somebody you adore is sick. I can’t explain this, but you know what I mean. We had a great four or five days. Then she didn’t come home again. My parents drove to the high school and started looking there. Pop’s plan was to go to the school, then drive up and down Pawtucket Avenue, which ran from Riverside Terrace to the Seekonk line. My plan was to ride around our plat, yelling “Bethany.” I started looking around four in the afternoon, and I heard her crying under the water tower in Kent Heights about seven. I remember it was March, and there was some snow. I dropped the Raleigh and ran to where my sister was crying.

  “Bethany?”

  “Hook!” she cried, running over and hugging me so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  “C’mon, huh? You got Mom and Pop all upset.”

  “Oh, Hook!” she cried again.

  She called me “Hook” because she said I never stood up straight, and I was the skinniest human being she ever saw. I didn’t like to eat, and I was a runner. It was true.

  “C’mon.”

  “I took all my clothes off. I’m a monster,” she said, all slobbery. Bethany looked so beautiful-sad when she was crying. When she didn’t cry, she was pretty.

  “No, you didn’t, Bethany. You’ve got your clothes on.”

  Bethany loved kilts. She had a black-and-green plaid one on. I remember her clothes. No one dressed more like she ought to. She was a girl who ought to wear plaids and kilts.

  “After school I was going to ride home with Pat Sousa, and I was over at her car. There were a whole lot of kids around, and everybody was being nice, and Bobby Richardson had a new Vespa motor scooter his father bought him, and he was giving people rides and . . . oh, Hook . . . it told me to take all my clothes off. It said it would be good to do it.”

  “I hate your voice!” I shouted.

  “I took my clothes off. I took all my clothes off.”

  “Did anybody hurt you?”

  “Oh, Hook.”

  “C’mon, Bethany.”

  “Pat just drove off. Everybody laughed. Everybody laughing at me and pinching me . . .”

  “It’s all right, Bethany. C’mon.”

  “Everybody laughing . . .”

  Another thing about love that I remember. It’s good and bad, but sometimes when you love somebody so much, you just can’t forget how they are when they’re hurt. When Bethany was hurt, when she cried and hit herself, it was kind of, I guess, complete. All of her hurt. When I got taken to the hospital in Thailand before I got flown to Fitzsimmons in Denver, I saw things. But I never saw things so complete as Bethany’s sadness.

  “It’s not you, Bethany.”

  “Pinching and . . .”

  “C’mon.”

  She held my hand, and we walked out from under the gray water tower to where I dropped my bike. It had some snow on it, and the lights from the Kent Heights plat looked pretty and clean.

  “You can ride the bike, Bethany, I’ll run alongside.”

  “You’re a runner, Smithy.”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t ever stop running.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will, I know it.”

  She did, and I did.

  3

  I was staying at the Tidal Motel, pretty much in between Portland General and Biddeford. Goddard gave me an unpaid leave and trusted another guy with the SEAL Sam arms quality control. The night I pulled into the Tidal from Bridgton, I called the hospitals and left my number. It was about two in the morning. I had some beers and some vodka, smoked some cigarettes, and made a list like Mom always did, because I wanted to be sure that, somehow, things were okay.

  Call Bea Mulvey about picking up the folks’ mail. (Bea was our neighbor forever.)

  Call Mr. Lowrey at Goddard. (He was my supervisor.)

  Call Aunt Paula and Uncle Count (Mom’s sister and her husband).

  Call Grace Church (their church). (It’s what Mom would have done.)

  I made one more vodka and orange juice and went to sleep. I dreamed I had just done something wonderful—it wasn’t clear what—and a girl I liked in high school kept calling me on the phone because she was in love with me. Bethany was perfect in my dream, and she would say, “Smithson, I think it’s Mags on the phone.” My pop would say, “Va-va-voom.” In my dream I nev
er touch Mags, but I let her tell me how wonderful I am. I’ve had that dream a lot since then.

  Hospitals are hard. Everything is hard, really, but hospitals have a special rockiness about them. I never got used to the ones I was in, even after I’d been in them quite a while. The only way I made it through was by simple ugliness. I was awful to people—especially when they tried to be nice and sympathetic. It surprised me, my nastiness. At least Portland General and Biddeford were more pleasant than the others, even though, as I said, Portland had the feel of dried clay.

  My pop died of pneumonia ten days after the accident. It was about ten in the morning when I got there, and some young doctor and the fat nurse intercepted me before I got to his cubicle.

  “Well . . .” the doctor said.

  “Yes?” I asked quietly. Hospitals are places your instinct tells you to be quiet in. The army hospitals were loud, but that was different. Bethany’s hospital, Bradley, was awful loud, too, but Bradley wasn’t a real hospital. It was for a different kind of thing. Portland General said “quiet” and meant it.

  The young doctor, I forget his name, was a skinny blond guy who talked in a deep voice. It was as if he wanted everything to sound important and serious, so that if he told anyone bad news the words wouldn’t leap out like snakes, all over the poor patient. He could say “coffee” with the same weight as “cancer,” and “It may snow” with equal importance to “You are going to die.”

  “My name is Dr. Lapham. I’m the neurologist assigned to your father.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  “Are you at all familiar with the brain?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Well . . . the brain is sort of our command center. Did you see the movie WarGames?”

  “Uh . . . no, no, I didn’t.”

  “Hunt for Red October?”

  “No.”

  “Star Wars?”

  “I saw Star Wars,” I said, happy to be helpful.

  “I loved that movie,” the fat nurse said. “I loved how you always wanted everybody to be all right and not be killed by Darth Vader.”

  The doctor held his hand up to the nurse but looked at me.

  “Do you remember how Darth Vader had a place in the spaceship that ran everything? That was totally in command of everything?”

  I nodded yes, but I only remembered how I knew that wasn’t really him talking, right off. I didn’t remember the other stuff.

  “Well, the place on the spaceship where Darth Vader ran everything was, to his space fleet, you see, as your father’s brain is to the rest of his body. The heart. The lungs. The stomach and so on.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, do you remember that scene at the end of Star Wars when Luke lobbed a photon bomb down the chute and there was a computerized picture of this red blip running all around until it got to Vader’s command room?”

  “And Han Solo saved him by shooting the emperor’s fighters that were sneaking in behind him,” the fat nurse added excitedly.

  “Yes,” the doctor said, “so Luke Skywalker was saved by Han Solo, but what about Vader’s command center?”

  “It . . . blew up?” I asked, pretty sure I was right.

  “Exactly,” the doctor said in his deepest voice. He ran his white fingers through his short hair. “Exactly,” he said again.

  “Darth Vader escaped by jettisoning in the emperor’s fighter. He was in the other movies,” the nurse volunteered.

  “But what good was the fleet without the command room?”

  “He could, like, read minds. Maybe he had—”

  I could tell that the doctor was getting mad at the nurse.

  “The point is, it’s the command post that’s like Mr. Ide’s brain. Once the photon explodes in there, it’s very bad.”

  “My pop’s not doing good?”

  “The only section of the brain that’s showing any electrical activity at all is the brain stem. The brain stem really has one purpose, and that is to regulate breathing. It’s a very mechanical thing, breathing.”

  “But he’s breathing.”

  “Yes, he is. But the command center is gone.”

  “Gone?” I repeated.

  “The photon bomb,” added the nurse, as she squeezed my arm.

  My pop went about an hour later. The bed had stopped tilting, and most of the big machines were gone. Pop had a lot of congestion, and his breathing was a struggle. I held his hand, and his eyelids fluttered, and then he stopped breathing. I put his hand down, and I was all right, but then I said, so soft I could barely hear myself, “Bye, Pop,” and I cried. I didn’t let them see me cry. I waited until I had it under control, then splashed some cold water on my eyes and went to the nurses’ station.

  I called a funeral home in East Providence that Aunt Paula had told me about. I talked to a woman named Polly who said she wanted me to know I wasn’t alone. That was part of the service this funeral home offered. She said she would send a man up to Maine for Pop, and we could finalize details tomorrow. I thought it sounded odd that somebody comes and gets somebody and takes them for their funeral. When you think about death, there’s really nothing else like it.

  I packed up the Buick with some stuff and told the motel guy I was keeping the room but was going to be gone for a while. Then I drove over to Biddeford to fill Mom in on my plans to go back to East Providence for a few days, without telling her that Pop was gone.

  “Mom?” I said sitting close and touching her shoulder. “Mom, it’s Smithy, Mom. Everything’s good, and Pop’s doing good and everything, but I have to go back to East Providence for a couple of days. Goddard called and stuff. So I can water plants and things. But Pop’s okay. Really.”

  Mom seemed to be shrinking into her huge bed. I never realized how tiny she was. She always seemed so completely powerful. There’s too much history to tell, really, about all of us and how we’d do things like hike and how she loved that I ran so much. There is absolutely too much, because I’m looking to understand the whole thing and not a part of things. Mom was wonderful, and my pop was wonderful, and that’s it, really. After Bethany disappeared the final time—that was almost twenty years now—my parents’ never-say-die attitude died. I think Mom knew that time that the voice had Bethany, finally, all to itself.

  I kissed my mother’s forehead, which felt dry on my lips, and walked out of her room. I think she heard me. Her eyes were glassed in haze and half open, but you hear with ears. At least that’s what I was always taught.

  I had reached my car when Toni from Intensive Care caught me.

  “Mr. Ide,” she called, “we need you, pronto.”

  We jogged back to the hospital and up to Mom. I felt a pain in my chest, like a pair of pliers had gotten a hold of something important, and sweat poured through my denim shirt. If it was a big heart attack, it was probably one of the best places to have it. I actually thought that. I actually almost said it out loud. My belly lived like another man, all itself. I followed, that’s all, and my heart was an engine that drove both.

  An Indian doctor was in with Mom.

  “This is Dr. Deni,” Toni said.

  “Ahhh,” he said, all smiley, “the boy.”

  Dr. Deni was short and wiry, with long white hair. He wore a beautiful suit, double-breasted, I think, and it fit nicely. There was a stethoscope around his neck.

  “I am Dr. Deni,” he said.

  I shook his hand. “Thank you, thank you so much.”

  He put his hand on my arm and brushed his fingers against me.

  “Now Mother is going to God. In her hurried little breaths, you can hear her prayers.”

  I didn’t hear a thing. Her breathing was as tiny as she was. What was he saying? I started to ask something, but the little Indian cut me off.

  “We call this the sepsis syndrome, and it is an old enemy of the trauma. Mother was responding, but now sepsis is here for her.”

  Toni translated for me.

  “In a sepsis situati
on, the brain—or something in the brain; we don’t know what—orders the body to begin fighting to stay alive, but that just shoots the temperature sky high, and we can’t get it down.”

  Here is how stupid I could be. Here. “Mom used to give me a tepid bath. Have you guys tried that? Have you tried the tepid bath?”

  “Sepsis stops when it wants to. It doesn’t want to.”

  “Mother is going now. Come and sit. Shall I stay?”

  I sat. “Uh . . . no . . . I’m okay. Thanks very much.”

  “We’ll be at the nurses’ station,” Toni said.

  Mom looked the same, except, like Dr. Deni told me, I could hear her little breaths. Puffs, really. Her eyes were still open a little, but I knew she couldn’t hear me. I pushed her thin hair onto the pillow with my fingers.

  “There,” I said.

  I concentrated on Mom’s breathing and told myself that they were small but powerful breaths. Small and powerful, like Mom, and when she got home, I would tell everyone how this Indian doctor had told me she was going to die, but her breathing got more and more powerful, and her body cooled right down, and she lived.

  But she stopped breathing. I never felt so stupid. Mom. I went to the nurses’ station.

  “I think my mom has stopped breathing.”

  Toni and another nurse, an older man, walked into the room, and I followed them. They closed Mom’s eyes, took out the IV, and left. All of the engines and monitors were off. I stood, then sat, then remembered my dead pop and how I had lied to her about him. It was reasonable to lie, because Mom was so tiny and that news was so big, but I have learned you don’t want to lie to your mother at the moment of her death. It seems to never stop bothering a person. A lie like that is one of the main reasons I talk out loud when I’m alone. I say, “Mom, Pop died over at Portland General, but everything’s still okay.”

  A person doesn’t get over a family.

  Sometimes things happen that make a person feel like standing up is just too much. It’s the knees then. Legs. Heart. I put my face under Mom’s until I could stand up.