Vee Signs

by Gary Campanella

When I found Vee, more dead than alive, I carried her down to the street.

It was winter, and I wasn’t wearing shoes. I ran a circle around my apartment looking for them, but I couldn’t find them fast enough. I couldn’t find hers, either.

I sucked in air and blew it out hard. I tried to hold off panic. This seething sort of anger rushed in. It surprised me, but I stuck it on a shelf. It could wait. I turned to the phone but changed my mind. No cops, I thought. It was one of our rules. I turned back to Vee. She needed to get up. I put my arms under her arms and lifted her from the bed, pulling her to me, forcing her to walk. Her legs were limp and mine were shaking. I held her up and steadied myself, inside and out.

After a moment, she revived and draped her arms around my neck, holding on. I moved her, pulled her, made her step across the room into the yellowy light of the living room. I dragged and zombie-danced her to the door and out into the hall.

Halfway down the stairs, her legs gave out. She slumped nearly out of my hands and down the stairs. I caught her against the wall, pinned us there for a moment, and held on tight to keep us both from falling. I buried my nose in the smooth skin behind her ear and above her neck, a familiar spot, and smelled her skin, a familiar smell, and recalled for a moment the nine years that brought us here, to this. I felt the circularity — my move from savior to lover to brother — to savior again. I picked her up. I carried her over my shoulder, down the stairs, and out into the mean night air of Boston in winter.

I carried her down the broken sidewalk to my van parked in the street. I laid her on the dirty rubber mat in the back and drove. I don’t remember how I maneuvered out of my parking spot. I don’t remember the potholes I missed or the lights I made.

I remember snow and ice on the roads. I remember passing Carney Hospital and driving on to Boston Medical Center because she had no insurance. I pulled into the ambulance bay and there were people all around, but no one there to help as I tried to lift her out of the van. I fell forward once, on top of her, before stepping into the van and carrying her in my arms, like the Pietà, through the double side doors of the van and the big automatic doors of the ER.

I carried her through the waiting room, pausing to scan the Saturday night ER, the ragtag array of sick and bored, the smell of people waiting, victimized twice. The TV reigned on high. I carried her straight through the middle of it all and into the ER ward itself, where I laid her on the nearest gurney.

Someone who worked there approached. A woman. I said only, “Suicide attempt,” anticipated her question, and added, “Some kind of pain killers, I think.” My mind flashed back to the bedroom. “And vodka too.”

The nurse checked her vital signs and her eyes and her throat, all business and routine, rushed or annoyed. She wheeled us into a patient area, helped me move her to a bed and drew a curtain around us. She took Vee’s pulse, asked me her name, stopped. She looked up in thought, preoccupied, scanned the room for a second, then looked me in the eyes and said, “Wake her up. Keep her awake. I’ll be back in a minute.” And she left.

I froze, near panic again at seeing the work still before me, realizing I landed her in Boston Med on a Saturday night. Her life was still in my hands. And my voice.

I called her name. My voice sounded weak and strange. I called her again, more loudly, more firmly, conscious of my voice on the ward, and conscious of it blending in. I reached down and lifted her to me, calling her name again and letting my anger rise. “Wake up!” And, “WAKE UP!”

My foghorn barely got through her grogginess. She wanted to sleep, fought against my hold, and by instinct I let her win a bit, let her fall back a bit before I pulled her back up. I tried to raise her temper, scold her, belittle her. I kept talking. I tried to keep her awake by making her hate me even more than she already did. She drifted in and out, would try to fall asleep against me so I pushed her away, would then feint backward so I yanked her to me. I kept talking, whispering at times, yelling at other times. I gained momentum and lost it. I lost my confidence and found it. I kept going because no one came. I accepted the task like a lousy job I couldn’t afford to quit.

Finally, a doctor and two nurses came. They told me I did great. They told me it had been two hours. They told me she would be okay.

They fed her charcoal and she threw up black.

I stood down, detached and exhausted.

I stepped aside but not away. I backed against the drawn curtain and realized the bed next to us was occupied. I peeked through to a drunken old man. His head and knees bled through older-looking bandages. Every few minutes he shouted out to the world, “Let me the fuck out!” But no one attended him, and no one paid attention. He leaned up on one arm with his legs hanging off the bed, like he might jump up at any moment.

Somehow, someone had slipped him into a hospital gown. He shouted from deep within whatever fogged him, cursing anyone who passed the opened curtain facing out. I heard other patients too, a lot of them, but could not see them.

I thought how it isn’t as loud in jail as it is in here. And jail is loud. The staff came and went between curtains, milled around, rushed around, shouted medical stuff, quieted screaming patients. And the smells: rubbing alcohol, latex, blood, and vomit. I thought about what a cliché this whole scene was. I mean, the old drunk yelling to be let out, and kids crying, and the hospital lighting, and the urban guts of it all. I thought it couldn’t be real, that I couldn’t be here, that this couldn’t be happening.

I came back to Vee. The doctor and nurses checked on things. The charcoal went down, came up, and the gag and pain and stench of it all cut through cliché and nightmare. I am here, I thought. With her. For this.

And I watched as they removed her shirt and pants. She wore no bra, and her breasts were bared. Familiar breasts. The breasts I’d kissed on different nights, in different light. And they grounded me from the electric strangeness all around, stayed in my mind after the nurses covered them with the hospital gown, and connected me to the person I used to love, still loved, lying there, even as everything else worked overtime to objectify and medicalize her as just another patient, another suicide, on another Saturday night in the city ER.

The doctor, a dark-eyed woman my age, tried hard to see me and Vee as real people, told me Vee would be fine, but asked me to keep her awake a while longer. She told me to feed her more charcoal, and told me, not with her words but with her eyes and expression, that people died here and Vee’s life, stable now, still came down to me. Again.

So I did.

Through the night. Force-feeding her at times. Holding her close. Letting her throw up all over herself and me. Constantly talking. Yelling at her when she began to drift. Other times telling her stories about our friends. Catching her up on the news of friends, catching her up because she went away and returned, as withdrawn and defeated and alone as I ever remembered.

Sometime after 8:00 a.m., they told me she could sleep.

I still needed to talk to the doctor, and psych, and the billing people. Later in the morning they admitted her, brought her upstairs to the psych ward, where the doctors talked to both of us for another two days while her stomach healed. They tried to get her to check herself into an institution, which she angrily rejected.

Later they tried to check her in by force, and she stopped talking to the doctors, said to them only, “Let me the fuck out.” She tried to leave, but she was on a 48-hour hold, and they tied her down.

When the doctors weren’t around, when only I remained, she begged me to support her, to tell them I would take responsibility for her. She promised to never do it again, to start over, go back to school, and quit drinking.

I know bullshit when I hear it, but of course I did it. I lied and cajoled and convinced the doctors to let her out, then signed her out against their advice, because I knew that a mental hospital for Vee was rock bottom. Being locked up for Vee was worse than dying, and I couldn’t stand to see her suffer. Not anymore. Not ever. Even if she needed it.

This all lay just ahead. But when on that early Sunday morning the dark-eyed woman doctor came to me and said Vee could sleep for a while, I said only, “Are you sure?” And I didn’t try any longer to separate myself from the destitute, desperate, or simply poor and sick carnival of humanity around me. Vee was my patient then, and I released her only when assured by the doctor, whom I didn’t fully trust, despite her authority, and her assurances, and her dark eyes.

I walked through the waiting room and out to the ambulance bay, the telltale charcoal smeared across my shirt, looking like a suicide myself. I didn’t care. I went to my van, still parked where I had left it, though someone had closed the doors.

I got a cigarette from the dashboard. I sat on the loading dock and smoked.

The sun came up that day as expected. The clear winter air pushed against my face and neck. The scent of warm donuts wafted over from across the street, mixed with exhaust, mixed with the trash in the gutters and the stench of urine in the alleys, and swirled around me like old friends, or old ghosts.

The bitter cold felt good. Soothing.

And how I missed it. How I only read the tea leaves in my own tea. And how I didn’t like the taste. I assumed she came to mooch, or torture me again. I missed the clues. The way she slept all day for days. The way she went out for food without her phone. The way she didn’t fight back on the morning of the day she took the pills, when I told her I needed her plan, and said, “I’m sick of being your refuge. You’re not a refugee.”

I went out for dinner and came home after eight to a dark apartment, happy to have it alone. Gone, I thought. I didn’t care where she went. Her previous patterns told me she was close to disappearing again. I thought she might be gone for good.

I fell asleep on my couch but woke after midnight, confused and distressed. It’s still hard to describe, and I don’t need or want to, but I knew, alone in the dark, that she was in trouble. Big Trouble. I knew she was dying.

I went to the spare room where she slept and peered in. The light from the hallway illuminated the bed in the room, and her lying on it. One foot dangled off the bed, the other was on the floor. Her head on the pillow was raised towards me. Her arms were folded across her chest. There were pills on the carpet and an empty vodka bottle on the nightstand.

I called her name. Her eyes shot open and stared right at me. It was not normal consciousness. Her eyes were wild and scared, familiar and strange, still alive, and already dead. They looked both at me and through me. I am not a believer, but I swear some god or angel, some tight connection, stepped in, and lifted her eyes to mine. Just in time.

She didn’t move at all but held my gaze for a moment until her eyes locked on. In a hoarse whisper she said, “Help me.”

And that’s when everything happened.

* * *

In the year since that night and morning, Vee kept her promises. I think. We fell out of touch some months ago, and you never know for sure with people like Vee. When last we spoke, though, she no longer drank, had given up drugs, and met a good man she planned to marry. She returned to school in the fall. The last time we spoke she gave me advice, showed me the errors of my ways. Amazing and strange.

Smoking cigarettes that morning, though, I thought back to the night we just had. To the way things built up. And the way they connected. To the signs I missed, and how peculiar and obvious the signs should have been.

This is the part I keep picking at in my brain, and it is the stuff I will carry for years. Out there on the dock, smoking without shoes or a coat in the cold morning air, I could see how everything happened. How, when she returned a few days before, she returned to live, not to die, to gamble on the only safe bet she ever had. Me.