Just Me and Sadee

John and Sadee leave the hospital and go home

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Lies I Tell My Kids. This is episode 12, “Just Me and Sadee.”

I am in the middle of a dream where in the distance, further away than it seems possible for sound to be heard, I in fact do hear a kind of muffled rumble, a single thing at first, but then subdividing itself into four syllables though still unintelligible, mi huh NAA uhn, and I’m excited that the rise in tone on the fourth syllable might lead to—

“Mr. Nabbon?”

It has the intonation of a question.

“Mrs. Nabbon?”

I shake myself and wake up and can distinctly here my own name now, but my back hurts, and Sadee seems to be asleep on the lower half of my body while we are both grotesquely twisted onto this institutional seating. We’ve been asleep in the hospital. I reach for my phone and the time is showing seven something. I grunt but try to keep Sadee asleep as I move her so that I can stand up. She does remain seated primly for a few seconds, her back straight against the back of the chair, but only for those few seconds, and the three of us now, with the newly arrived nurse, thrust ourselves toward her to prevent a fall to the hard floor.

She wakes up. I sit back down beside her.

“Sadee?”

I can see her eyes blinking weakly, long seconds between each clearing, and then fast and she’s fully awake, and asking for water. The nurse brings her a bottle and twists the plastic lid off quickly causing a little eruption at the top. Sadee sips a few times and then gulps down about half the contents.

“Sadee, how are you feeling?” I ask, stupidly, of the mother who no longer has a son.

She nods. My own head is a crazy movie and lightshow of images and actions, floating in the pool, a flash of red, then paramedics, and sounds I can still seem to here, and, and, how long ago was it that someone told us that Shawn didn’t, didn’t, what did he say, didn’t make it?

I accept a bottle of water from the nurse too. It feels like Sadee and I are on the sidelines of a game, something physical, and we’ve had to come in off the floor in order to rehydrate, in order to be able to continue playing at all and have the strength to make it to the closing seconds. We look at each other like twins and then sip again before holding the bottles tight in our laps.

“What do we do now?” I ask, and this stupid stupid man thinks that what I really have on my mind, what I want to ensure is completed and signed off on, are forms, which he proffers as I stare up at him.

“Not now,” Sadee says to him. “Jesus.”

“We just wanted to be sure th—”

“Please don’t talk,” I say. “We’re just going home.”

The poor young man, who’s only doing his job, is nervous when he tells me that we arrived in the paramedic vehicle but they’d be happy to get us transportation home.

“Hey. Thanks.”

In the cab Sadee is leaning on the back passenger door on the opposite side of the driver and I am leaning on her. I think she’s staring out the window or she may be asleep. I’m looking at her leg and her shoe and then the floor, alternately, sequentially, continuously. The only sensation I have, the only thing I feel that somehow asserts itself through my lack of awareness or interest, the only thing is heat. Too much of it and at times and in places on my body where I don’t expect it. The worst of it engulfs my head and neck and it makes me gasp as though I am coming up for air.

Sadee’s body jerks suddenly now and then and after the first time I realize that she is not trying to make me adjust my position so that she can be a little more comfortable. These are like spasms. I start wondering if we are even going to make it home or if we are going to die here in the back of this shitty cab and the driver will have to turn around and go back where he just came from.

“OK, folks, we’re here,” the driver says instead. I give him a handful of money and Sadee and I exit the car just as he is saying that the amount is too much. I close the car door a little too hard, accidentally, and wave him away, and he drives off, leaving us there.

We both turn around on the sidewalk and look at the house. My head is full of warm water and my son, my—the person named Shawn who used to be my son—and so I can barely process what I am looking at. The 130 on the house in brass seems to trigger some kind of familiarity. I look over at Sadee, who is just staring at the sidewalk now. I have a quick flash where I think that just as I was responsible for his death, I’ve now also abandoned him at the hospital, and maybe paperwork is awry or missing and so he will be placed into some procedure of processing that they call UNKNOWN or something at the hospital.

Sadee moves forward and I follow her. She takes her keys from her purse and opens the door and the bright image of familiarity is harsh. I feel like it envelopes me and I waver a bit on my feet.

“We’re here,” Sadee says and walks in ahead of me. “Come on, John.”

I lead her this time, into the kitchen, because whatever sips of water I got at the hospital have not been enough to sustain me. I take the glass jug of cold water from the fridge and pour it equally into two shiny glasses. There is just enough.

In this palace of middle-class civility, Sadee downs hers as if she’s an athlete who’s just finished a race, and half of the contents end up on her shirt and on the floor. When she pulls the glass away, it’s wet around her mouth, too. She’s oblivious like a baby getting its first spoonfuls of mushy food. My own water sails precisely down my throat in five big gulps. I tap the corner of a paper towel onto my lips.

Things break up then and I remain in the kitchen while Sadee goes somewhere else, to another room. I walk around, not sure what I’m doing, not sure what I’m looking for, and in the end realizing that I’m not looking for anything. The wandering is the only thing I can manage.

Sadee eventually reappears from around the corner of the living room and walks up to me, direct, firm, steady, forceful.

“It was my fault,” she says.