I have to get this all down before they come in with the next dose of morphine. It smells in here, like bitter shit and the stuff they used to clean up vomit in elementary school. My legs are slick. My bangs are glued to my forehead and my ass is sore from sitting on that bedpan for an hour, while watching the nurse wince every time I said “shit”. “Don’t say that, it’s rude. Say BM.” BM is worse. My mother used to say bowel movement and it always sounded to me like some seismic event. I’ve been dreaming again. Night sweats. Fuck. Focus! I’m not sure how long I’ve been here. There’s only one window and the blinds are always drawn. I think it’s overcast outside. A couple of days, maybe? I’ll see if I can stay awake long enough to ask the next nurse that comes in. Seems like a new one each time. I stopped trying to remember their names. Get it down before you forget. All of it. Every detail. This is important. This is the most important thing you can do right now. It’s the only thing you can do right now. Okay. Go. Here we go. I’m going…
The timeline is a little blurry but maybe it was a month ago or a week, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. My baby. No wait, my sister. My sister was on her way over. Okay. Yes. I asked her to come. It’s coming back now. I asked her to. I asked her to come because I hadn’t been out of the house in a week. I hadn’t showered in a week. I hadn’t done a single damn thing for myself in a week, and I needed a break. I was breastfeeding around the clock and my tits hurt and my nipples were raw. Darby was 4 months old and basically an extension of myself. My foot. My elbow. A toe. I asked my sister to come and give me some relief. A momentary amputation.
Ariel shows up all bright and cheery and coos at Darby in only the way that a childless aunt, devoid of responsibility and replete with sleep can do. “Go!” she says bouncing Darby’s jiggly body on her knee. That child has no bones, I swear. “Go do something for yourself.” As I stood there in spit-up crusted sweats smelling like chicken noodle soup, all I could think was that I wanted to get in my tiny fiat and drive down to the border and start a new life with some handsome twenty-something named Pedro or Javier or Juan-Carlos. A lazy beach life where I’d re-read dog eared novels in a straw hat while sipping mezcal and only taking occasional breaks to be finger blasted in a white cabana by a luxury hotel masseuse. But I could only be gone for a few hours before my breasts would get so full that I might topple over and explode milk all over the pavement like a smashed watermelon. The mezcal and illicit sex would have to wait. Plus, my husband would be rightly pissed. So, I did the next best thing.
I put on my running shoes, and I took the long way to the LA River path. I remember it was a little cold for September in Atwater Village. Brisk. A light cold that made you feel alive, not the dense cold I had grown up with in the Midwest. It pricked up the little hairs on my forearms. It made me want to move. And so I did. I followed my body. I listened to her, and I could hear her this time because there was no one else there but me. She was speaking to me. She said run. So I ran. I ran the half mile to where the Spanish-style bungalows ended, and the sagebrush and wild mustard choked the river path. The river was running today too. We had some unexpected downpours recently and it filled her up, covering the little islet camps and displacing some of the Los Angeles homeless. I felt the gravel beneath my feet and could hear a soft, persistent electric buzzing emitting from the powerlines tracing the sky above me. I looked up at them and kept walking, letting the rocks beneath my soles tell me I wasn’t straying from the path. Nobody was there today. A melancholy breeze in the air mixed with the smell of char from recent fires that swirled with the scent of the rain that helped put them out.
Now I see him. Up ahead of me. A man. He’s about 300 feet away. He’s just standing there staring at me. It’s unnerving. His hair is shaggy. He’s too tan or maybe just dirty, I can’t tell from here. He’s bigger than me but not by much and he’s just fucking staring at me as I walk towards him. Creep. He’s blocking my only way out the gate onto Los Feliz blvd. He’s probably one of the displaced homeless. I don’t see any bags around. His clothes are dirty but not really worn. My pits are sticky. I hate this natural deodorant. Is it humid? He puts his hand up in a motionless wave. I stop. He’s smiling, his hand up still. He wants something. His eyes are greedy. Is he missing a tooth or is my brain doing that thing that laces everything around me in a paranoid delusion? OKAY, I’m turning around. I’m in too good of a mood to have to deal with some insane person that is either selling something or off their meds.
So, I turn around and a young woman is walking towards me. She’s a little taller than me, thinner, bitch, no wait, I didn’t mean it. Jesus, I’m jaded. The stick-creature, she’s moving pretty quickly but oddly enough she’s not wearing running shoes. No workout clothes. She’s in cut-off jean shorts and flipflops and I swear to God if I exhaled too hard, I’d blow her over, bless her heart.
“Hey!” I say.
She slows and looks at me like a kid who got caught shoplifting.
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. There’s a guy back there and he looks a little squirrelly so just be careful.”
Apparently, she could care less that she’s making her way to her doom because she just keeps walking slowly without saying a word. There’s something strange in her eyes. They’re unusually sunken for someone her age. She couldn’t be much more than twenty-two but her eyes were forty-five.
She finally passes me on my left, I get ready to do a sprint and BLACK.
I wake up coughing but there’s something in my mouth, I gag. I can’t feel my arms. My legs are stuck together. It’s dark in here but I can feel I’m moving. Whatever I’m in is moving. It’s a car. I can hear the tires as they roll onto new terrain. Bumps. Cough. Gag. Fuck. My face hits the scratchy polyester material lining the trunk. It’s rug burned. I can feel it. My face, all down my side, my shoes are gone. It smells like old milk in here. Sour. And damp cigarettes. I must have been out for a few hours. My boobs are like kettle weights. They hurt, they’re too full. Engorged, that’s what they call it. I hate that term.
Cough. Gag. Gag. Don’t throw up in here. Gag. Breathe through your nose, you’ll adjust to the smell. Bump, I feel it slowing. Cough. Good girl. We stopped. The trunk opens and I can feel the coldness hit streaks of tears on my cheeks, I didn’t know I was crying or maybe it was the gagging that made me do it. The crack gets bigger, it’s bright but not daylight. Harsh blue light, gas station light. There’s two of them. They’re silhouetted. I blink, my eyes adjust. It’s them. The squirrely guy and the scrawny girl peering down at me from above. This is what a corpse feels like in an open casket, I think. A waft of snuff and halitosis stings my nose. Gag. Fuck. Cough. Cough. Cough. He spits, and a long string of brown dangles from his lip. He clumsily wipes it on his shirt, sinew desperately clinging to his fingers. Gag.
“Now don’t go dying on us er nuthin’, sister. Don’t yak up my trunk, neither!” He croaks.
“She’s not dying, ya dipshit.” She drawls.
I try to scream through the rag.
“Woo-hee, she’s a feisty one. My teeth are floating babe. You want me to knock this dumb bitch out or what?”
The scrawny one grabs a maglite from his hands.
“Naw, you got ta do it lasstime. My turn!”
She lifts the metal log up high with that spindly arm and brings it down fast as BLACK.
They want more of my blood now, and I guess I need a CT-Scan and Nurse Ratched is trying to get me to give the silver seat another go. I’ll try to get some more in before the next dose. Three hours and counting.
I’m back for the moment. I think I’m getting a reputation around here. They probed me. They gave me a pelvic and stuck a plastic wand up deep inside me and this poor kid, this poor ultra sound tech, he looked like he just graduated from DEVRY. He was so gentle and sweet and I looked longingly into his eyes while he fumbled his way inside me and told him he should have asked to buy me dinner first. I heard Nurse Ratched snort. He tried to stutter out a response but I pretended to fall asleep because who really gives a fuck.
Okay, where was I?
Let me think, saw the psychos, almost yacked, got knocked out again. Okay. Yes. I don’t know how long we drove for. But guessing by the feeling and general size of my now gargantuan gonzos, I’d say six hours, give or take. Amazing that you can count time on your milk supply. I could set my watch by my boobs.
So, I wake up with my head throbbing. Agonizing, shooting pain through my jaw. My mouth full of pennies. Ears ringing. I cough. The gag is gone. I can feel a chipped incisor. Right side of my bottom lip is full and tender, and my snout is leaking thickness. Something being dripped into my eyes. Gently? I spit. Blech. Milk. Blood and milk. It stops. I open my eyes and there’s a masked face staring down at me. A little girl, about five years old. She’s holding a cup of milk above my head. Her auburn hair is parted down the middle and on each side cascades a French braid tied at the ends with green ribbon. Her cheeks are pillows of peaches and cream and I want to blow raspberries on them. She’s wearing a much-too-small purple and black Batgirl costume dress. Her face dons a black bat mask that only covers her eyes, but I can still tell they’re a light shade of blue with green streams and a dark ring outlining. Darby’s eyes but an older version. She’s crouching on my stomach like that demon from the painting I saw at the Detroit Institute of the Arts last summer.
“SSSSssshhhhhhhhh.” She soothes out, her pointer finger to her lips.
“You snore loud. You’ll wake Lily and then they’ll be cross with you.”
Her tiny voice. Is that what Darby will sound like? I spent hours thinking about what my baby’s voice would sound like. The aching to hear their first tiny words, to speak through more than cries and gestures. Motherhood is lonely. It’s like having all of the secrets of the universe but your tongue has been cut out so you can’t tell anyone. It’s screaming into a void.
“I made you pretty.” She says proudly and she holds up a hand mirror to my face and OH MY GOD.
She has painted me in the likeness of an even more hideous Baby Jane Hudson. A whorish, antique China doll. The combination of the blood, bruising and crude blue eye shadow has turned me into a sad clown that lost a bar fight.
“Your bubbies are wet.” SHIT. She’s right. I’m leaking.