Quicksand
Rachel Kovacs
Copyright 2010 Rachel Kovacs
Quicksand
“My boy sees things.”
Lily hadn’t meant to blurt it like that, but there it was…out there. Morgan sat across from her with salad dangling from her lips as if she had been instantaneously frozen.
“What do you mean he sees things?” Morgan finally said as she sucked the lettuce into her mouth and laid down her fork, “Like floating pink elephants? Spots?” Her eyes grew large and she paled for slightly a second, “Dead people?”
Lily knew that she now had to talk about it. She was, after all, the one who brought it up, but she wished that she could say only that. Just verbalize it. Put it behind her and pretend that none of it really happened. Morgan was her friend though and wouldn’t let that happen.
“He sees things and hears things that aren’t there. He has bad headaches. He vomits,” Lily whispered. She could not allow herself to form the words that she heard the doctor use. “They say it is a type of seizure.” Lily coughed in an attempt to hold back her tears.
“Well, honey,” Morgan said as she patted Lily’s arm. “Seizures are treatable. I’m sure that Samuel will be just fine.” Morgan was obviously relieved and went back to her salad.
“No,” Lily whispered. Her voice was now barely audible. She felt the knot in her stomach quadruple in size. No amount of antacids this morning had calmed the waves of nausea. The words were spinning in her head and she could no longer hold back. Her body convulsed in pain as tears spilled down her cheeks. Glioblastoma multiforme. Malignant. Grade IV. Cancer. Several people at nearby tables glanced her way and then quickly averted their eyes as they dug back in to their entrees.
Lily felt heat rising in her cheeks. Obliviously, she pounded her clenched fist on the table sloshing water in the glasses and causing her fork jump on her uneaten plate of salad. Lily was angry that Morgan minimized her fear. She was angry that Marcus could not even talk to her about it when she so desperately needed her husband to be strong. She was angry that God allowed her child to have an inoperable brain tumor. She was even angry at Samuel and she could not even explain why. She violently pushed her chair away from the table and flung her plate onto the floor.
Now the restaurant was silent. The other customers staring silently as Morgan had a few moments before. She no longer cared. She looked at them all accusingly and shouted, “My child is dying. He’s seven-years-old and he’s dying!” Lily’s body began to tremble and she sank onto the floor, crumbling her loose cotton skirt up underneath her as she clung to the rungs of her overturned chair.
Only an occasional cough and the clang of the swinging door as the manager burst into the dining room cut the deathly silence that filled the room. Faces of cooks and other waiters peered through the still swinging door while the manager surveyed the broken plate on the floor and then the broken woman. He quietly picked up the pieces and began to gather up the strewn food.
A large man across the room slowly pushed himself away from his table and eased his way onto the ground next to Lily. Breathlessly, he wrapped his arm around her shoulder as his body cushioned her sobs. She buried her face into his shoulder and soon was surrounded by other people who knelt around her and shared her tears.
~~
Marcus sat at the end of the bar and set the empty bottle down with a thud. The bartender glared in his direction then popped the cap on another Budweiser and slid it in front of the silent man.
“I’m going to have to cut you off soon, man,” the bartender said as he wiped the counter in front of him. “If you need to call a cab, there’s a phone at the end of the bar.”
It was still early, only a quarter till twelve, and Lily would still be awake. Marcus couldn’t deal with her again tonight. He couldn’t deal with any of it.
He slid his card across the counter toward the man and contemplated where to go next. There was that little hole in the wall place down next to the hospital. He had become a regular fixture there over the past several months. He tipped his head to finish of his drink and then sauntered out the door.
He hadn’t gone to the doctor with Lily and Samuel when she got the news. He thought it was nothing. It was always nothing—just a nonsense medical bill over a sniffle or a sore throat. Samuel just had headaches and felt nauseated. That’s all. All little kids complain of aches and pains before school. All little kids have imaginary friends and get scared when they hear a noise. It was nothing, except this time, it wasn’t nothing. He knew Lily blamed him.
When Lily called him, he didn’t understand what she was saying. She was hysterical on the other end of the line. He’d told her to wait until he got home, and then they’d talk about it. By the time he arrived, there was only a note on the table. Samuel had been admitted. The word tumor glared up from the page at him. Surgery. Emergency. He raced out the door, but he’d been too late. Samuel was already in surgery by the time he arrived and Lily sat there surrounded by her family, all of them looking at him with utter contempt.
~~
Lily could not pull herself from his bedside although several people urged her to go. She held his hand, cold now, as she buried her face into his tousled hair. The room was silent. No more beeps or blips or alarms. No more rhythmic inhalations of the ventilator. For three months, those sounds kept her awake during her bedside visuals. Now the silence screamed over her muffled tears.
She knew the day would come. Logically, she had listened, took the information in as the doctors spoke, but her heart would never acknowledge it. He was her baby. Parents aren’t supposed to bury their child. She had felt him kicking in her womb. She had held him, fed him, taught him to walk. She had put him on the bus the first day of kindergarten and carried him off after school when he fell asleep on the ride home. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. She just needed rest. She needed to sleep and when she woke up, he’d still be here with her. She kissed the back of his pale hand, and closed her eyes.
“Mommy is so tired, Samuel. I can tell that you are tired too. Mommy is just going to sleep for a little while, but I’ll be here when you wake up. I love you, baby.”
Lily felt someone lifting her and walking her out of the room. Her legs felt like Jell-o. She started to turn back. She felt like she needed to go back to Samuel’s room; Something was wrong, but the arms kept directing her toward the elevator. Once the door closed, the elevator seemed to plummet, falling thousands of stories before she woke up in her own bed.
~~
Marcus stood silently in the doorway. Uncles and brothers patted him on the shoulder as they walked away from the room. His sister and mother huddled in the lobby sobbing loudly. But all that Marcus could do was stand there. Lily was falling apart by the side of his bed as she had done almost nightly after Samuel had gone to sleep. Marcus stared over at his son, or what had became of his son over the past few months, and felt an agonizing pain.
When the operation failed, the doctors came out to explain how devastating the tumor was, how it fingered deep into the crevices of his brain, and was impossible to remove. They methodically explained what would happen over the next several months, but the cancer spread even faster than the doctors had predicted. Marcus felt numb.
He wanted to shake the doctor and tell him to go back and try again. He wanted to shake his son and shake the cancer right out of him. He wanted to shake his wife who could only seem to cry. But as he stood in the doorway, he was the only one shaking.
When they turned the ventilators off, Marcus almost felt relief. The inevitable was over, but as soon as the thought entered his mind, guilt overpowered him. How could he feel relief that his son had died? What was wrong with him?
His father was waiting for him in the lobby, but Marcus shoo
k his head. Lily was still refusing to leave the room. Marcus watched his father put his arm around his mother and lead her out.
Marcus reluctantly returned his gaze to the bedside where his wife was stroking their son’s arm and talking. When he saw her lay her head down and close her eyes, he finally went in and took her by the arm and led her out of the room. The nurses, obviously moved by his wife’s grief, quickly shut the door and signaled for the orderlies who had been hovering in the hall.
~~
There was a slight breeze, the day they buried him. Lily clung to the stuffed elephant that had been Samuel’s sleeping buddy for the past three years. Lily wiped her eyes as she remembered turning the car around and retracing the fifty odd miles to her parents’ house the day he left it there. His grandmother’s promise to mail it had not encumbered hours of inconsolable crying. For the past three days, she had not set it down. Samuel wouldn’t be able to sleep without it, she told herself.
After the others left the room, she slowly walked up and laid her quivering hand on the coffin and stroked the soft yellow lining with the edge of her finger.
“Mommy brought your elephant, Samuel.”
With that, she collapsed and cried uncontrollably on the floor. Her mother wrapped her arms around her while someone brought her a cup of water and patted her forehead with a cool clothe.
Lily knew that people were worried. She had not eaten since she left the hospital. She had barely gotten out of bed. Her mother had gone with her when they discussed the funeral arrangements and held her hand. Lily just sat in the seat and stared as people around her talked and selected colors. Her mind was on the day she took Samuel to the park to feed the ducks for the first time. Her lips curved into a soft smile as she remembered how he laughed each time a duck quacked. She remembered him singing in the bathtub and mixing up the words. She remembered Samuel coloring in his Spiderman coloring book…every page scribbled in the same color. His favorite.
“Samuel will want yellow,” Lily said. The director stopped and scribbled out notes on his forms.
“Yellow it is,” the director said, “Is there anything else that you think that Samuel would want or what you would want,” the director continued.
“I want my son back,” Lily said and then she got up and walked out of the room.
~~
Marcus uncomfortably adjusted the tie and contemplated removing his suit jacket. It was nearly 90 degrees and there was barely any movement to the air. He sat next to Lily and offered her his hand. She took it insincerely. The argument they had was obviously still fresh in her mind. He didn’t blame her. She was right in what she said. He hadn’t been there.
He watched Lily carefully place the dilapidated elephant next to Samuel. He didn’t know that Samuel’s favorite color was yellow. He didn’t know that his mother read Where The Wild Things Are to him every night. He didn’t know that Samuel had been picked on at the bus stop and that his mother had gone to the older boy’s parent and taken care of it. He now felt a pang of jealousy. Lily had memories. Lily could grieve. Marcus tucked the leg of the elephant down against the pale yellow lining.
“It should have been me,” Marcus stated under his breath as he slowly closed the lid and turned to his wife who lay crumpled on the floor next to him.
~~
Lily took off her shoes and wriggled her toes into the soft mud at the edge of the water. The current was usually fairly slow here, but the recent rains had saturated the nearby land turning the river into a ravenous cesspool. She slowly turned the small yellow fishing pole in her hands as she remembered the day that she and Marcus had brought Samuel here. They hadn’t caught anything, but still a day along the river had been a treat.
The air was chilly, although it was still overcast. Despite this, Lily had carefully donned sun glasses this morning to cover the paleness of her skin and the deep circles under her eyes. For the past month since the funeral, she had curled up and slept in Samuel’s small twin bed locking herself away from the world that went on without him. To her, everything she saw represented him. His favorite shirt, a song, his toothbrush, his muddy shoes on the back porch. How could everyone possibly go on living without Samuel? It panged her heart to see other mother’s laughing and holding their child when she could no longer hold her own.
Then she had fallen asleep with a pile of his books, and she dreamed of him. He was in the land where the wild things were and he was king of the forest. She was on the boat calling his name, staring into the mist and waiting for him to emerge. But he did not come. He stayed where the wild things are and she sailed back to his room alone.
So this morning she packed his books away. She folded his blanket and smelled his pillow. She cleared away his collection of bottle tabs and carefully placed them in a marked box. She placed a few of the most significant boxes in the closet of her room. The others she loaded into the backseat of her Scion.
Marcus had been gone for nearly three weeks now. It seemed that Samuel was all that they had in common. She drove the 15 miles to the apartment where he had moved and heaved the boxes up onto the porch. After several minutes of knocking, she sighed and carried the boxes back out to her car. She should have just left them and been thankful not to encounter her husband of more than ten years, but she could not fathom walking away from a box that held memories of her son and leaving it without a caretaker.
As she was putting them in, the small SpongeBob fishing pole had popped out of the top and she realized that there was still a small dried worm dangling from the hook. She put the pole in the passenger seat beside her and pulled away from the curb. The riverside was not far from here.
Now as she walked along the soggy shore, she thought back to the day when her baby had looked up at her from his hospital bed with such fear in his eyes.
“Don’t worry, Samuel. You will be alright. We still have to go fishing this summer, remember?”
Samuel’s eyes had softened and he had squeezed her hand.
“You have to take the fish off the hook,” he said as he drifted off to sleep.
Lily cast the line out into the water and waited, but nothing bit.
“It isn’t fair!” Lily screamed into the trees towering overhead.
“It isn’t fair that he’s gone and I’m left here without him! I don’t want to be here!” she screamed.
She hurled the pole into the water where it landed at the edge a small bar of sand several feet from shore. Suddenly aware that the pole was gone, she ran into the edge of the water.
“What have I done? What have I done? I’m so sorry, Samuel. Mommy is so sorry. I’ll get it back. I promise.”
Lily began wading into the water when she realized that it was quickly giving way beneath her feet. She began pushing herself harder against the shifting sand, only to find she was sinking deeper into the water. Reaching for the small yellow pole, she slipped below the surface then quickly came back up gasping for air. There was no ground beneath her now and the current was carrying her farther and farther away from the pole.
Reluctantly, she stopped fighting and allowed the current to carry her downstream. She felt herself being lifted as she bobbed in the water and she realized that she was floating on a limb that had fallen in from an overhanging tree. She closed her eyes for a moment to catch her breath and organize her thoughts.
When she opened them again, a glimpse of yellow caught her eye. There, tangled in the branch, was the small plastic fishing pole and on the end, fighting its way against the current, was the tiniest of trout. Smiling, she unhooked the trout and let it disappear into the murky water.
~~
Marcus parked his car along the edge of the road and took his license and keys from his pockets and tossed his jacket onto the hood of the car. He stared down at the river. He removed his shoes and loosened his tie and carefully folded everything and placed them in the back seat.
He was supposed to meet Lily. She was going to bring over some of Samuel’s things, b
ut he could not see her again today. Seeing her reminded him of how much he had failed—failed her, failed Samuel, failed himself.
Instead, he took the car and drove around the city. He drove past the park where Samuel loved to play. He drove past his schoolyard. Finally, he ended up beside his grave. It was the first time he’d been here since the funeral.
The grave was marked with fresh flowers and a small teddy bear that he recognized from Samuel’s room. There was a note attached to the bear with a small pin. The words were blurred from the recent rain, but he knew that it was from Lily. Even here, Marcus felt like he didn’t belong. He was still trespassing on Lily’s grief, Lily’s memories, Lily’s life.
On his way home, he crossed the bridge that overlooked the river where he had taken Samuel to fish. He pulled the car to the side just past it and sat on the trunk and moaned. He recalled the promise that Lily had made Samuel that day in the hospital.
“Stupid woman!” Marcus shouted out loud. “You promised him fishing when you knew he was going to die.”
Marcus picked up a stone and hurled it deep into the water. He watched it disappear beneath the surface and send ripples across the surface.
Marcus purposefully began walking onto the bridge. There was little traffic, but a few of the cars passing blared their horns as he walked into their path.
One car stopped near the bridge near Marcus and an older man quickly jumped out, but Marcus kept walking. The man was shouting as Marcus climbed over the rail and quickly looked at the water below. It dawned on him now that he knew he would do this when he parked the car. Why else had he taken off his shoes and jacket? Even so, what difference would it make?
The man was behind him now, begging, but Marcus simply looked at the man with glazed eyes. The man began yelling at someone still in the car as he grabbed a hold of Marcus’ sleeve. He could hear sirens in the distance, but he returned his gaze to the river. Far downstream, he heard a women screaming. The voice sounded familiar, but he was past the point of caring.
He closed his eyes and thought of Samuel and felt himself flying through the air.