My Life as a Doormat (in Three Acts)

  I looked at him. I wanted to stay here as long as possible. I smiled. “I’m fine.”

  It was nine thirty by the time I arrived back at the hospital. I had walked faster than usual. Maybe it was because I felt like I needed to be back with Dad. Maybe it was because I was running from the experience I’d just had. I didn’t know, but I was out of breath.

  On the elevator, crowded for this late in the evening, I stood near the back and thought about Cinco. I wondered if there was ever a chance I could be like him. I had already learned a lot about myself in the conflict resolution class and had proved that I could haggle for pennies in front of a crowd. But how did that translate into real life? How did that make a difference? I still couldn’t say what I wanted to say to people. I still couldn’t just speak my mind. Maybe it was going to take some practice, some time. I mentally went over the acronym that Marilyn said could change my life. It was a long list of unparallel attributes to remember when dealing with conflict. I could only be so lucky that an acronym, any acronym, would change my life.

  Control (Keep yourself calm, no matter what the other person does.)

  O-penness (Don’t hide your feelings, because you’re not fooling anybody.)

  N-egotiable (Realize that there may be some negotiation needed.)

  F-airness (Don’t make overblown statements; only state the facts.)

  L-ove (Remember, the person with whom you’re engaged has feelings too.)

  I-nvaluable (This class, so don’t forget what you’re taught.)

  C-haracter (Keep your character; don’t stoop to below-the-belt tactics.)

  T-ruth (Telling the truth is the only way to resolve conflict, no matter how hard it is to hear.)

  I wasn’t sure, but I think this was everything I’d learned in kindergarten.

  My floor arrived, and I apologized as I scooted through the crowd. The floor was quiet and the windows were dark. A few nurses milled about, looking as tired as I felt. I found Dad’s room. The door was cracked open, so I knocked softly.

  “Come in,” I heard. I opened the door, and there was Dad, sitting up a little.

  “Hi!” I beamed, rushing to his bed. “You’re awake.”

  “I’d feel better if I were dead,” he grumbled.

  “The first few days will be difficult,” I said, patting his barely clad shoulder.

  Dad huffed and tried to sip the water in front of him. “It tastes like dirt.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I don’t have any appetite. Every part of my body hurts. I’d be better off dead, I tell you.”

  I pulled up a chair. “Dad, you’re going to be okay. This is the rough stretch. You had your chest cracked open and three out of four arteries worked on. I wouldn’t expect you to be feeling good.”

  Dad glared at me. “You’re a doctor now, huh?”

  “I’m just relaying what the nurses told me.” I felt a little sting in my throat. Dad wasn’t normally this combative, and it was throwing me.

  “The nurses.” He laughed joylessly. “What a joke. They’ve got all these initials after their names, but I swear they don’t know a thing. I’m getting mixed messages about what I am and what I am not supposed to be doing. With every shift change comes a different set of instructions and a new nightmare. If my heart doesn’t kill me, one of these nurses will!”

  I took a breath to try to settle myself. Dad wasn’t ever down and incapable that I could remember, so maybe it was pain that was making him moody. I’d never seen such a fierce scowl on his face, though.

  “Where’s Mother?”

  “Down getting something to eat,” he growled. “I had to send her away. She was fussing over me, about to drive me insane. I told her if she didn’t take a break, I’d have to be transferred to McLean.”

  I sighed. McLean was a mental hospital in Belmont.

  Now Dad was getting downright obstinate.

  The door to the room opened, and as I turned a young man walked in, wearing light blue scrubs and a dreary expression. He didn’t look a day over twenty-five.

  “Good evening, Senator Townsend,” he said. I was glad the doctor was here. I planned to pull him aside after he was finished and ask him if Dad’s attitude was normal. “I’m Jeff.” He picked up my father’s chart and scrutinized it.

  Jeff? Since when did doctors use their first names?

  Dad eyed him. “Jeff?”

  “I’m the nurse on duty,” he said without looking up.

  “Does that mean Jane is gone?” Dad asked.

  “She just got off her shift, so I’ll be taking care of you now.”

  “Good. She was the stupidest person I’ve ever met.”

  That got Jeff’s attention. He looked up, and his eyelids lowered like a menacing cat’s.

  “Dad!” I gasped.

  “What?” Dad shrugged. “It’s true. She couldn’t answer a few simple questions.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Jeff, who was clearly not in the mood for this kind of harassment. “My dad didn’t mean that.”

  “Yes I did!” Dad barked. “I’m telling you, Jane is an idiot.”

  I put my hand to my forehead, trying to find a graceful way out of this.

  “Sir,” Jeff said, “Jane is as capable as anyone here. She might’ve been tired. She just pulled her third twelve-hour shift in three days.”

  “Son, you’re not going to get any sympathy from me. I worked sixteen-hour days seven days a week. Long hours aren’t an excuse, especially when it’s someone’s life you’re talking about. And speaking of life, what in the world are you doing choosing nursing as an occupation? I know I’m old school, but this is woman’s work, son.”

  “Dad!” I couldn’t believe what my dad was saying. I’d never seen him act this way before. “Nursing is a perfectly legitimate occupation for a man or a woman.” I tried to smile at Jeff for his approval. He wasn’t approving of anything.

  “You know,” Dad growled, “this is the reason our country is going to pot. It’s because men want to be nurses and women want to play professional basketball.”

  I knew the mock turtleneck wasn’t going to cut it: I was splotching clear up to my chin. Jeff took one look at me, did a double take, and raised an eyebrow. “I’m fine,” I mumbled, placing my hand around my throat.

  Jeff returned his attention to my dad. “If you’re finished, sir, I need to take your vitals.”

  “Do you think you can do it without killing me?”

  “Dad,” I urged, giving him a stern look.

  Dad shook his head, ignoring me. “Used to be the only good thing about being in the hospital was getting felt up by a nurse.”

  “DAD!”

  “But even that’s ruined now.”

  Jeff looked like he wanted to break something. I stepped closer to the bed. “Dad, you owe Jeff an apology right now!” My voice was stern, and Dad’s eyes cut to me with unexpected anger.

  “What did you say to me?” he asked, his nostrils flaring. I noticed Jeff was looking at the heart monitor, which was suddenly beeping faster.

  I swallowed and lifted my chin. Dad was wrong, and I wasn’t going to stand for it. Not after all I’d learned in my conflict resolution class. That acronym was coming in handy after all. I lowered my voice a little. “You owe Jeff an apology.”

  But Jeff wasn’t even paying attention anymore. He was punching buttons on the monitor. He turned to me and said, “You need to back off.”

  Jeff’s words tickled my ears, then left and flew into the middle of my stomach with a hard right hook. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t breathe. “What?” I squeaked.

  “This isn’t the time or place for this,” Jeff said. He glanced back at the monitor. “Your father needs to stay calm and rest.”

  A self-satisfied smirk covered Dad’s face.

  “I . . . I just felt that . . . that was . . . inappropriate.” My words were tangled in my shock that this man I was defending, a man a good decade younger than I, was now rebuking me.
r />   “It’s not necessary,” Jeff said drily. He took Dad’s pulse, wrote something down on a chart, and left quickly.

  I stood there at the side of Dad’s bed, trying to decide what to say. Dad wasn’t even looking at me, but instead had found something interesting on the wall to stare at.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. Jeff was right. Dad didn’t need this right now. What was I thinking? I looked down, and my hands were shaking. I wanted to cry.

  “Look, Dad, I’m sorry. I just thought—”

  “Just leave, okay, Leah?”

  “But Dad, I—”

  “Get out of my room.”

  I stared at him. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Dad had never asked me to leave his presence. Not once. I waited, hoping he would change his mind, but he stared forward, his face stony.

  I picked up my bag off the chair and placed it gently on my shoulder, stalling, hoping he would stop me before I walked out the door. Then I paused at the door, waiting to hear his voice, but the only sound that filled the room was the steady, pulsing beep that monitored his cold heart.

  I shut the door, and as it clicked, a rush of tears fell down my face. I stared at the carpet, hoping none of the hospital staff would notice. I glanced up. Jeff was at the nurses’ station, oblivious to me, writing something down. Swiping my tears, I headed quickly toward the elevators.

  I punched the down arrow, trying to hold back more tears until I got to my car, but they were brimming and pushing their way forward again, and it was all I could do not to break. The light dinged and the doors slid open. Without looking up I tried to rush in but knocked into someone stepping out. It was Mother.

  “Leah, look where you’re going!” she harped. Kate stood next to her. They both carried boxes of food in their arms.

  “You’re leaving?” Kate asked. “I thought you were going to pull the night shift.”

  I shook my head. I was afraid if I opened my mouth, I would start wailing. And I didn’t want to admit to Kate that Dad was mad at me. He’d never been mad at me. She was always the one who was the recipient of his anger, and for good reason.

  “You can both go home. I’ll be fine,” Mother said. Kate stepped out of the way of the doors, and they closed before I could get on. I glanced up at Mother, and she looked drained. Thankfully, she seemed not to notice my despair. Kate, however, was studying me intensely.

  “How’s he doing?” Kate asked me.

  “Fine,” I answered. “A little tired, I think.”

  “It’s been a bad few hours,” Mother said. “This nurse we had was a real piece of work. I think she just arrived from nursing school. Your father had to have a new IV, and it took her three tries. Plus she couldn’t answer a single question for us! I think her name was Jane. Yes, that’s right. Jane. Because your father said it rhymed with insane.”

  My hand automatically went to my face, where it slid from my forehead down to my chin. I’d admonished Dad, and it turned out he had legitimate reasons for feeling the way he did.

  Kate was still looking at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Tired,” I mumbled.

  “Go home. Both of you,” Mother said. “Dad needs to rest, and you know how he doesn’t like to be fussed over.”

  Kate said, “If you think that’s best. I need to go get my stuff from the room, though.”

  Mother patted her on the back, and they walked down the hallway together. I stood there, watching them. They looked so ordinary, like this was the way things had always been. And I felt like an outsider, gazing on a snow globe that encased the life I wanted.

  I shook my head and punched the down button for the second time, an ironic reminder of how this day was ending.

  This is what happens when you speak your mind, I thought, scolding myself as I repeated the sentence over and over in my head. I got onto the elevator. Thankfully, it was empty. As I rode it down, Jodie interrupted me.

  You could’ve finished strong and told Kate about Dillan.

  “Shut up, Jodie.”

  Shut up? I couldn’t recall ever telling Jodie to shut up.

  I needed a new acronym.

  Chapter 18

  [She tries to explain.]

  It was 5:00 p.m. I’d been up since 4:00 a.m. I’d come home from the hospital and crashed into my bed. Sleep swallowed up all my worries until four, when my eyes flew open and I stared into the darkness, realizing the events of the evening hadn’t been a dream.

  Then sleep would not come again, so I rose and decided to be proactive. My problems weren’t going to go away on their own. I overrode my coffee timer, made a big pot, and had been working on my play ever since. Well, at least I was sitting in front of my computer.

  Inspiration was hard to find. I knew what separated a hobby writer from a professional writer was that a professional writer would write whether or not she felt inspired. Yet, the turmoil that boiled around me made it hard to focus.

  I kept hearing J. R.’s smoldering words: I hate it. So there was no part of the story on which I could focus. I would try to tackle a scene, only to wonder if I should scratch the entire thing.

  This went on for hours, and between those moments of non-inspiration, I would replay the scene with my dad the night before. And every time, it would break my heart.

  Then, if my mind continued to be idle for too long, I would see Dillan and the back of that woman’s blonde head. How could I tell Kate this? But I would want to know. Of course I would want to know, even if it hurt at the time. Besides, I reminded myself, there could be an easy explanation for it. Maybe she was a client. A co-worker. But it was the way he leaned in, engaged her eyes, oblivious to anything else around him. I knew it wasn’t an innocent dinner.

  I knew it, because I was doing the same thing. Realizing I would have to go talk to Edward, I closed my eyes, temporarily shutting out the computer screen. I didn’t even know what to say. But sitting there with Cinco made me realize there was something missing in our relationship. I wanted more; I couldn’t help it. I would’ve been perfectly content to leave out the special spice if I hadn’t known about it. After all, you don’t know it’s missing unless you’ve tasted it.

  Somehow, I had tasted it. I didn’t know when, or where, but I had.

  So between feelings of failure, indecision, and guilt, there’d been plenty to keep my mind busy on this Thursday. By evening, I knew one thing for certain: I wasn’t going to tonight’s conflict resolution class. I wouldn’t be able to handle it, no matter what the task. And I knew there was a good chance I would burst into tears without a moment’s notice.

  I had picked up the phone twice, just to make sure it was working. I don’t know who I expected to call. Dad wasn’t talking to me. Cinco, maybe? I laughed to myself, but it wasn’t a laugh of joy. It was a laugh of pity. I was pitiful.

  It wasn’t always so. I’d held my life together for a long time. But things were slipping, more rapidly than I could’ve ever imagined. The relationship that I’d always depended on to be so dependable was making me crazy. The thing that my mother and I had always based our relationship on, the fact that I was the reliable, good daughter who would never let her down, now had competition. The idea that I had a grave weakness, the inability to handle conflict well, continued to draw my attention and was becoming more and more of a distraction. This was what kept me from telling Kate I saw Dillan, from telling Elisabeth she’d gone crazy, from telling my father he was being a jerk, from telling Mother I always just wanted to call her Mom.

  I finally left my computer, realizing there wasn’t anything I could do there. I was convinced Elisabeth had put a curse on me. Or maybe I’d cursed myself. Either way, I was sure that the more conflict I put in my story, the more conflict I’d see in my own life. It was happening already! With each page of the play I wrote, the more crazy my life became.

  I took a moment to enjoy a cup of decaffeinated tea. I didn’t need to shake any more. The adrenaline that had awakened me out of a dead sleep was still working
overtime in my body. Finally, I decided I had to do something.

  I dialed the hospital and asked for Dad’s room. Mother would most likely pick up the phone. I wasn’t even sure what I would say or how much Dad had told Mother.

  “Hello?”

  I froze. It was Dad’s voice. He still sounded irritated.

  “Hello?”

  “Dad?” I said. It came out barely a whisper.

  “I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

  Speak up. Dad and I had never had a fight. Ever. In the back of my mind, Jodie piped up with, Why not?

  “It’s Leah.”

  “Oh.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply. My voice would quiver, but I couldn’t control that. “Dad, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. Mother explained how terrible the nurse had been. I just thought you were being irritable.”

  There was a pause. Then Dad said, “When have you ever known me to be irritable, Leah?”

  It was true. My dad was not one for unsteady moods. Why hadn’t I taken that into consideration before I opened my stupid mouth? Maybe this conflict resolution class was doing more harm than good. My life before had been a tidy arrangement of carefully crafted and thought-out words. What had it become?

  “I know, Dad. I’m really sorry. I’m just horrified at myself.”

  I could hear him sigh, and then his voice was softer. “Thank you for the apology.” Part of me just wanted to start crying, to tell him everything I was going through, to try to explain why I had done what I had.

  Instead, I said, “How’s Mother holding up?”

  He lowered his voice. “I finally got her to get out of here and take your sister. I’m so sick of people hovering over me. Leah, please, talk some sense into them!”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ll try.”

  “Okay. I’ve got to go. They’re getting ready to take me for some test.”

  “I’ll be by to see you later.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Dad, I promise. I won’t yell at you.”