A car horn blared as smoke wrapped around them like a blanket, warm and fluffy, but more suffocating than one would expect a blanket to be. Boris had trouble opening his eyes, thanks to the blood that had crusted over them, but when he finally managed to, he could see he was looking upwards at the roof of his car. He could feel the slight hint of sunshine that had managed to peak its way through the shattered cracks of his windows and spill onto his face, and the warmth it brought felt surprisingly comforting. Boris had never really been much of an advocate for the sun, but for once it actually was nice to feel its presence on his skin. He groaned and looked around best he could, but his neck was cricked and hurt every time it moved.
And then he remembered he wasn't the only one in the car, and he hurt himself as he craned to look at the backseat where his daughter, Ellen, was sitting, or rather had been seated, her legs now bent at impossible angles, and she appeared completely unconscious. Boris shut his eyes and started to cry to himself, as quietly as possible, because he needed the grieve, even if only momentarily and by himself, for the fact that he was a terrible father. But that wasn't what upset him the most, actually. What he was really mad at was Ellen, and this made him even angrier at himself for being mad at her. But he couldn't help it, this was - in effect - all her fault. If only she'd been better at hiding things, none of this would've happened. *** The thing about anniversaries is that they happen no matter whether you want them to or not, because it's tied to a date, and a date isn't something you can skip past. It's a day you have to live through. Sure one could spend it sleeping, or busy so they don't think about what the day is supposed to represent, but in the back of their head it's always itching at them, like a dog scratching at a door to be let in. That's what it felt like today, of all days, as Boris sat at his desk and tried to jot down some thoughts into his journal. He couldn't help but be irritated at the one thing he was trying so hard to ignore gnawing at him, keeping him distracted from the things he was trying to use to distract himself. Had it really been almost 25 years? Ridiculous. Time flies. He sighed and set his pen down, then cracked his knuckles, stood up, pulled on his coat and his cap and - grabbing his pen and journal - headed out of his room. Perhaps a change of scenery was necessary to facilitate the ability to ignore it. As he walked down the hall, he could hear the sound of shoes clacking on the floor behind him, clearly trying to catch up to him, and before long he noticed Carol was walking alongside him, eating a pudding cup as she walked. "Good afternoon," she said, "Where you going?" "For a walk, want to come?" he asked. "Sure, where we walking to?" Carol asked as she tossed the empty container into a nearby trashcan on their way to the front door and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. "It's a walk, that invariably means there's no preset destination," Boris said, "You just walk for the sake of walking." "Alright, alright, jeez, no need to get snippy about it," Carol said as they pushed their way through the doors and headed outside. The sun outside on his face, it felt nice again, just like it did that very day, and he remembered that no matter how hard you tried, you simply couldn't escape anniversaries. *** Boris was seated in the waiting room, having somehow escaped relatively unscathed, bar a few nasty scratches on his face and his right hand being fractured. He couldn't even hear the people around him, not that he was trying all that hard, it was just that everything else was blocked out by the fact that his mind was so heavily preoccupied by what he'd endured. He was so out of it that he didn't even hear Lorraine approach him and speak to him. It wasn't until she snapped her fingers in front of his face that he finally came to, and looked up at her. "Hey," she said softly - in the nicest tone she'd spoken to him in months, actually - as she knelt in front of his chair, "...are you okay? You don't look too worse for wear." "I'm...yeah, I'm okay. I'm alright enough," Boris said, "...when did you get here?" "Like, five seconds ago," Lorraine said, unclasping the top of her purse and pulling out a small pillbox, "Do you need Ibuprofen?" "Rest assured they already gave me plenty of pain medication. We are in a hospital, after all," Boris said. "Fair enough," Lorraine said, standing up and seating herself next to Boris; she was momentarily quiet, but then, in almost a whisper, she said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for arguing this morning, before you left. This made me realize that perhaps you should never leave a conversation angry, because that might be the last time you ever speak to the person you're currently angry with and you really don't want your last words to someone you actually love to be that you hate them." "I'm sorry too," Boris said, grabbing and holding her hand, squeezing it, he added, "...this was all my fault. I was so busy being mad that I didn't focus enough on driving. I should've been more present in the...well, in the present." "Hah," Lorraine chuckled, squeezing his hand back, "sure, but these things also just happen. I don't think it's very fair to assign blame. Especially not immediately after it happens. Has anyone said anything to you about Ellen yet?" "No," Boris said quietly, clearly simultaneously afraid to ask about his daughters status and ashamed he hadn't asked yet. He wrung his hands and bit his bottom lip, trying not to cry here in front of all these people. He didn't mind crying in front of Lorraine, but he was always afraid of crying in front of strangers. These last few months, however, he hadn't liked showing any emotion whatsoever in front of Lorraine either, as things had grown more and more stressed between them. "Boris," Lorraine said, touching his shoulder as he turned to look at her; she smiled and said, "it'll be okay, it's not your fault." Everyone would tell him this for years, but he would never allow himself to believe it, no matter how many times he'd come to hear it. *** "God I spend so much time indoors I often forget how good the sun feels," Carol said, slipping her hands into her cardigans pockets, adding, "It's so nice and warm, it feels like the sky is hugging you like a grandmother used to. A hug you could actually feel and appreciate the sentiment behind, you knew it was genuine." "Wouldn't really know," Boris said, "never really got to know my grandparents. The ones on my moms side died young, and my father didn't speak to his parents. Overly religious, and he wasn't, so that kind of created a wedge between them." "That's rough, pal," Carol said, "grandparents are simultaneously one of the greatest and worst gifts you can give a child. On one hand, you get memories you'll cherish forever, and love you'll always appreciate having gotten, but on the other hand you're the first person to break that childs heart because you'll be the first one they love who dies." "Dark," Boris said, making Carol smirk. "Honest," Carol corrected him, "I mean, you're the first person outside of their parents that they love, and often you spend more time with them than their parents do when they're little, so when you finally bite it it really does a number on them. Suddenly this person who loved them unconditionally, who spent all their waking time with them...is just...gone. You know?" "I do know," Boris said, "I was that person." "I didn't know your daughter had children." "She doesn't. I did it to her." Carol stopped and watched as Boris came to an intersection and looked at it, and then looked down at his journal, pen tip still pressed to the page in an eternal placement of 'about to start writing'. What the hell did he mean by that, Carol wondered. *** Having someone in your family in a wheelchair changes the whole dynamic of not just your life, and their life, but also the layout of your home. Suddenly ramps were necessary to simply get in and out of the house, and stairs were no longer a viable means of movement. Now, whenever she needed to get up the stairs, Boris simply had to carry her. This wasn't a problem when she was a child, of course, but as she got older - got bigger, got heavier - it became more of an issue, especially since the crash wound up tweaking Boris's back indefinitely in a way that nobody, no matter who it was he sought treatment from, could ever fix. And Boris did it all, because, not only was it the right thing to do of course, but he felt responsible for putting Ellen in that chair. Her legs not working now were a direct result of his automotive ineptitude, or at least that's how he saw it. After the first few weeks of getting things in order, life mostly seemed to resume normal as before; Ellen went back to school, Lorraine and Boris went back to work, and Ellen, much to her enjoyment, no longer had to play Soccer after school. Boris never understood why she hated it so much, but now it was a moot point, as she could no longer play it. Boris tucked Ellen in one night, then read her a few stories from a collection of old fables, and as he got up to leave, he kissed the top of her head and, reaching the door, heard her speak. "It's my fault," she said quietly. "What?" Boris asked, turning back to her. "What happened. It's my fault," Ellen said, "Because...I hid your keys. If I hadn't hid your keys, we would've been on time and that accident wouldn't have happened. It only happened because we weren't leaving at the right time." "This wasn't your fault," Boris said, trying not to sound enraged that she actually thought this, "Do you hear me? This was NOT your fault. These things just...happen. If anything, it was my fault, because I wasn't paying attention. I was...I was yelling at you, I wasn't focused. I was mad, I was angry and yelling because you kept telling me you didn't want to go to Soccer practice, and I couldn't understand why, and I...I simply wasn't paying enough attention to the road." Boris came and sat down on the side of her bed, looking at her and scratching the back of his head. "Why do you hate Soccer so much?" he finally asked flat out. "I'm not good at sports, I don't like it," Ellen said quietly, "I feel embarrassed playing in front of other kids who like it and are good at it, they're always judging me." "...I'm sorry. I'm sorry I forced you to do it," Boris said, "I'm sorry I put you in the chair." "I don't mind being in the chair," Ellen said, surprising him, as she added, "I mind that I put myself in it." "Please don't think you did this," Boris said quietly, as he leaned closer and put his arms tightly around her, squeezing his daughter to his chest, crying softly on the top of her head, his teardrops falling into her hair, "please, please don't ever think you did this. That would hurt me far more than what actually happened." "Okay," Ellen said, hugging Boris back. After a few more quiet minutes, Boris said goodnight to her, got up and left the room. He made it down the stairs, then into the hall heading towards the master bedroom before he finally leaned against the wall and broke down. The master bedroom door swung open and Lorraine stood there, in her silk pajamas, her thumb stuck in a book as she looked at Boris. Boris was sobbing uncontrollably as he slid down against the wall, and Lorraine walked down the hall and sat down beside him, pulled him against her and stroked his hair, just letting him cry on her. "It's okay," Lorraine said, "you're okay." But it wasn't okay, and it never would be again. *** Standing at the intersection, Boris wouldn't say a thing. He just leaned against the pole and scribbled in his journal as Carol stood back and watched, arms folded, a mixed look of utter confusion and absolute despair on her face. Finally Boris wiped his nose on his coat sleeves and turned to look at Carol. "She blamed herself for the accident, I blamed myself for the accident, and Lorraine...I don't know what she thought," Boris said, "...I signed her up for Soccer after school, and she hated it. She always fought me on doing it, but I always pushed her to keep doing it, I told her it was a good thing to learn teamwork. Only now do I realize there's a million ways to learn teamwork, and often times teamwork isn't even necessary of even worth it in the long run, because you wind up alone." "You're not alone," Carol said quietly. "...she hid my car keys, made us late. I was angry, I wasn't paying attention, I drove into the intersection without thinking and we were just...reamed. She lost the use of her legs, and she blamed herself. A little girl, blaming herself, for being in a wheelchair. I tried to convince her it wasn't her fault, but what child listens to their parent? So she blamed herself, I blamed me and nobody ever really got over it. It happened 25 years ago today. Right at an intersection, just like this one." Carol approached Boris and rested her head on his arm as he ripped out a piece of paper from his journal and, taking out a piece of gum and chewing it until it was good and soggy, used it to stick the paper to the pole. "Accidents happen," Carol said, "Look at most of the people in the home. They're not there because they want to be. They're there because most of them had an accident. You're there because you decided not to be a burden to your daughter as an adult, because you felt responsible for what happened to her, right?" "Right." "But...but that's the thing. It was just an accident. Hell, so much of life itself is an accident. So many babies are born on accident, so many people die by accident, it just...it's all so random. It's impossible to find rhyme or reason for anything. I'm sure Father Kricket would tell you the same thing. Sometimes things happen, and sometimes those things are bad, and that's just existence." Boris nodded, then turned around and hugged Carol as tight as he could, whispering into her ear. "thank you for liking me," he said, and she nodded, patting his back. After the hug ended, Boris turned and began heading back the way they came, saying he'd treat her to lunch. Carol agreed, but stayed back momentarily to look at the paper he'd stuck to the pole. She grabbed it and looked at the words scribbled on it, then smiled and followed him. *** Things never got better, at least not while he still was young and had a family. But when Boris moved into the home, and he met Larry and Burt and Carol, and to some extent Polly, things began finally getting better. It just took a few decades, but now he was happier than he had been in years. But none of that lasted, because then his daughter decided to try and get her legs fixed, and because he'd given his blessing to it, she was now in a coma. Twice now, he felt, he was responsible for what had happened to her. For putting her in the hospital. And that wasn't something he lived easily with. But thankfully, with the company of people like Carol, he didn't have to live with it alone. That's the thing Boris realized, is that pain may be awful, but sometimes you don't have to deal with pain by yourself. And sometimes that's the best you get, if you're lucky, and he was lucky. So sure, things never got better. But they were at least becoming manageable.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About
Golden Years follows the exploits of a bunch of old people in a retirement home as they try to have fun, relax or come to terms with the soon to be end of their lives. Archives
April 2024
|