Storage

Danny is still screaming and sitting on the floor holding his head when I walk into his closet, which is stuffed with toys. At the far end are four shelves packed with bins of Hot Wheels tracks and Legos and the top shelf is usually packed with board games, but not now. They lie on the floor around Danny, parts loose. I want to rearrange his closet, but first I need to determine the number and sizes of storage bins needed to hold his loose toys, the ones without boxes beyond the board games, which since most are rectangular fit nicely on the top shelf, until now, when he climbs up and pulls the stack down, including a Battleship game, on his head. He’s holding his head. The blood on his fingers looks like water paint.

Many storage bins now have latches. For some reason, though, Danny has trouble with spatial reasoning and fine motor skills. He can’t work latches. Once he got stuck on the deck in the back and pounded the glass. Instead of opening the sliding glass door for him, I yelled, “Press the button down, Danny, and push to the left.”

“It’s too hard.”

“It is not,” I said. “Just try it. I’m not going to open it for you. It’s inappropriate for you to keep pounding on the glass. One day you’re either going to crack the glass or put your hand through it, and I don’t have time to take you to the hospital.”

“It’s too hard.”

Dad didn’t open up or get reflective on me. Instead, he kept saying, “Get the chisel and the scissors.” I looked at the nurse, but she shrugged and drew some blood from his fingertips. Then she asked him if he wanted more morphine.

“You want more morphine, Chester?”

He nodded yes and then no. “In the drawer over there,” Dad said. “The chisel and the scissors.”

“What chisel and scissors?” I said loudly like a dumb guy addressing a retarded kid.

“In the drawer,” he said, breathing hard. He shut his eyes and winced.

The nurse grabbed my elbow and pulled me outside the room. At the main desk, she showed me numbers on a piece of yellow paper on a clipboard. I nodded when she said, “Understand?” His blood was filling with poison. Maybe he figured he could fix his guts himself if he had the chisel and the scissors. He always fixed his own shit.

When I walked back in the room, some cousins stood by the bed. They wore sweaters like they’d just come from church. Dad’s eyes were closed and his hands were bouncing at the wrists, drawing circles in the air.

“Is he seizing?” I asked the nurse.

“He’s cranking a winch,” said my cousin Tony. “Uncle Chet’s dreaming he’s cranking a winch.” Tony was forty, only a couple years younger than me, and he said something like that. Jesus. I shook my head. Whatever makes a guy feel better, I guess.

I shook Tony’s hand. “Good to see you again, Tony.”

“Me too. I just wish the circumstances were different.”

Tony and his wife and two kids stood between me and Dad. “Is Uncle Chet going to wake up?” one of the kids said. Another said, “He’s got good color” even though his skin was piss-yellow. Those kids were ten years old and they walked around the room straightening things up and making comments like they’d done this before, like professional deathbed participants.