Lee Fitts Read online

  “I wasn’t even asking about your money,” Reid said surprised that even before he had finished his prepared vision of the next landscaping empire, his friend had known exactly where the discussion was leading. “I hadn’t even thought about your money.” Reid said, in feigned indignation. “All I want you to know is that if you need a job, I got one waiting for you.”

  “You have always been my friend, Reid.”

  “Damn right, I’ve always been your friend.” Reid reached into one of the boxes for something that had caught his eye. “Don’t know how this ended up in there,” he said as he tossed the Wilson 2000 football to Lee.

  “I have been looking for this; I knew I had a least one left.”

  “Yeah, maybe you should start practicing again. Want to make your Dad happy? Start slamming that pigskin through the uprights if you can. So, what is going on with you and Christie? I mean are you going with her or what?”

  “Yes, I think I am going with her. I think. I like Christie very much and she is always very kind to me. I am going to see her tomorrow night.”

  “That’s good, man. That’s good. Bring her next time you come over. You guys are always welcome.”

  “Christie and I are going to the movies this afternoon. I cannot be late to the movies. What time will you be here?”

  “Lee, you have to stay at the house until I get there. D.H. and I should be there in ten minutes. You must stay at home until we get there. I have something very important to tell you,” Ellie Wilson told her brother.

  “If this is so important, you can tell me now. I cannot be late for the movies. Christie really wants to see this movie. Tell me what is so important.”

  Ellie fidgeted with her hair band and rolled-up the sleeves of an over-sized sweatshirt. She had just finished making spaghetti and had started to run the water for her shower when the call came and now for a moment thought only of how she would make the unwashed image reflected in the sun visor mirror more presentable. She pulled herself back to her brother’s question. As her throat tightened, she fought to retain a patina of assurance in her voice. “Lee, I am asking you. Please do not leave until we get there.”

  “Ellie, I hope this is important. I am supposed to be going to the movies with Christie.”

  Ellie placed the cell phone on the console and took her husband’s hand. She held on to his hand as memories of her father floated through her head. The other girls were laughing too and their fathers were trying to be as patient as Jim Fitts as they assembled pieces in the birdhouse kit. Her Brownie leader was busy preparing refreshments at the other picnic table. Ellie and her father finished first and as he handed her the birdhouse, he kissed her on the forehead and told her how happy the birds in their yard would be to have this fine new house.

  She had had her driver’s license for one day. She told her father she would back the Jeep out of the driveway, but she had neglected to adjust the mirrors. With more acceleration than she anticipated from the pedal, she slammed into the pole holding Lee’s basketball net. Her father came to her first before inspecting the damage. You all right? he asked. Daddy, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to. He went back to look at the bumper and the pole. Ellie, we all make mistakes, just have to make sure you learn from them.

  The Friday afternoon she found out she hadn’t made the cheerleading squad till that point had been the worst, the absolutely worst time of her young life. She had made the first two cuts and was sure she had done much better than usual in the final routine. That was what made it more unbearable. She knew she had done well; better than the two other girls that made the squad. That’s what some of the older cheerleaders had told her. They didn’t understand why Ellie didn’t make it, but they were on to other things. People don’t make the cut. That’s the way the world works. The girls told her it’s a shame she didn’t make the cut, but having paid their condolences they just left her and expected her to just carry on. Her father managed to get off work early that day and stayed with her through the night telling her every possible way a father could that things would be all right, that things happen for a reason, that he was very proud of her, and that she brought so much joy to him and to her mother. The medicine of the next morning’s light picked up where her father’s words had left off. Getting down from her bed, she placed the comforter on him as he lay asleep on the floor next to her bed.

  “Ellie, El,” D.H. said as he slightly shook his wife’s arm. “Ellie we’re almost here. I know you want to collect your thoughts, you know, what you’re going to tell your brother.”

  She looked at her watch; a few minutes longer than the ten minutes she told Lee. He was standing outside the door and looking down at his watch several times as Ellie with D.H. not far behind, approached the front step. D.H. watched as her words turned Lee into a trembling little boy. His sister put her arms around him and they walked quickly to the car.

  The Locust Shade Mall wasn’t really a mega-mall. But it was the mall that everyone in town, or for that matter in the county, knew you were talking about if you were to say “I’m going to the mall.” It wasn’t very upscale: corrugated siding on the outside with groups of colored flags mounted along the roof. The one-story structure housed about eighty stores. Signs with faded flowers hung from the ceiling to tell you that you were either in Neighborhood 1, 2 or 3. Jim Fitts worked in Neighborhood 2, at Cutuli’s Jewelry Store. Cutuli’s carried an inventory appealing to shoppers to whom a big jewelry purchase usually meant several hundred dollars, tops. Still, there was a counter with several trays of items costing as much as five-thousand dollars. Security Guard Jim Fitts usually stood between that counter and the entrance to Cutuli’s. That’s where he was that afternoon when two Orientals, that was the term the store manager used, with shaved heads, earrings and baggy jeans, rushed past him or almost past him. Maybe Jim had picked up some police skills after being a rent-a-cop for almost eight years. Hearing Cutuli’s manager yell, “Stop him! Stop him!” Jim reflexively reached for the second Oriental. He got a good grip on him, which surprised both Jim and the man in his grasp who was markedly displeased that the old rent-a-cop had done what he had done. “Let go of me, you dumb shit,” the second Oriental said as he whipped around and plunged the serrated-edge of a combat knife first into the upper-right section of Jim’s groin and then a little lower into the top of Jim’s upper thigh. The amount of blood spurting out surprised the attacker who hesitated a half-second before turning and running in the opposite direction of his companion. Jim fell to his knees. His head was light as he tried to stop the bleeding with his hands. The manager was soon holding several polishing towels on the wounds as the assistant manager dialed 911. Jim fell back on the floor as his head and hands began to tingle furiously. Jim’s eyes locked on to the security camera above. The camera recorded his eyes closing as paramedics reached his side.

  Lee listened to the doctors describe his father’s condition –grave, but they thought he’d pull through, they had stopped the bleeding. Ellie asked most of the questions. Lee said nothing. He watched Ellie’s reaction to what the doctors were saying; something about the first stab wound slicing what he thought they said was the femoral artery and the second hitting something they thought might be like a vascular mass, but they weren’t sure why there would be a vascular mass at that site. The younger doctor had that look in his eye that said even though the situation was bleak, somehow, he was convinced that his doctor skills could fix everything. The older doctor did not have that look in his eye. Ellie and D.H.’s questions had shifted early in the conversation to the younger doctor, and his colleague realized that.

  If it had been up to Ellie, she never would have made the call. She had done it for Lee; for some reason, she thought it would comfort him. “Lee.” She tried to temper the harshness she felt slipping into her voice. “I tried to reach Mother. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Anyway, I just got some robot voice so I don’t even know if this is still her number; it’s the cell number she got just before she left. I found
it on some piece of paper in my purse. I don’t even know how it got there.” That was all she told her brother. There was still no reason for him to know that their mother had left an envelope with a short note and her phone number for both of them before she left.

  “That was a very good idea to call Mother. A very good idea and we are very lucky that piece of paper was there.”

  “We’ve got to get back inside now,” the younger doctor said. “We’ll call right to that phone over there when we’ve finished.”

  Lee wondered how long that would be. He could see that Ellie and D.H. were wondering the same thing as they glanced at the phone next to the nurse’s station; but no one asked.

  “Dad will be okay. He’ll be okay Lee,” Ellie said. “Have you eaten today? Have you eaten anything today?”

  It seemed to Lee a reasonable question for reasonable times. But he didn’t know how he could think about eating under the circumstances. Maybe Ellie was trying to make it seem for him a reasonable time even though their father was in critical condition in the operating room on the other side of the very wide doors. “I ate my cereal this morning, but I am not hungry now. I am not hungry even though that is all I have had to eat today. El, what happens if Dad is not all right? What happens if . . .”

  “Lee,” Ellie said, so as to stop her brother from raising the subject that a normal brother wouldn’t address. No one normal would discuss that; they might think it, but they wouldn’t ask it out loud, especially not when the younger doctor had that “I’ll be able to handle this look in his eye.” That was the look that Ellie and anyone normal in her spot would expect. Save my father, Ellie’s look had told the young doctor, much as if he had been a lifeguard at the beach and she pointed to her father in distress out among the waves. He’d bring her father back safely. “Daddy’s going to be all right. If you don’t want anything to eat, let’s go over to the couch.” Ellie pulled change from her pocket, shook her head, and walked to the phone.

  Lee and D.H. sat on a couch whose springs and strappings sagged considerably from many hours of supporting troubled families and friends. D.H. stared at the corner around which his wife had disappeared to make her phone call. Lee started to think about another reasonable thing: he had to get in touch with Christie. He was already late. Christie was so kind, but how would she feel about Lee not being where he was supposed to be. He looked at his watch. The movie they were going to see would start in five minutes. He wished he had Christie’s pager number. If she went into the movie, he wouldn’t be able to reach her for hours. Maybe she wouldn’t go to the movies. Maybe she would go to his house. Maybe she would think something happened to him. Lee pictured himself being operated on in the room behind the very wide doors. Maybe she would call the hospitals and ask if Lee had been admitted. He knew somehow Christie would find him.

  Lee looked up as tired nurses with coats and carry bags walked past them. “I gave your message to my relief,” said the nurse to whom Ellie had spoken about a possible call from Marian Fitts. “You all look very tired; you’ve been sitting there a long time. Why don’t you go downstairs and get something to eat?”

  “We will,” Ellie said. “Thank you for all your help.”

  “Really, get something to eat,” the nurse admonished from behind the closing elevator doors.

  There were three elevators across from the waiting area and the doors were opening and closing much more frequently now during the early minutes of evening visiting hours. Rumpled, dripping umbrellas and wet jackets, to which paper visitor badges refused to adhere properly, told of a rain storm that must have punched through the afternoon’s blue sky. Each succeeding elevator unloaded passengers who were more drenched than earlier visitors. One said, “they said possibility of brief showers, they didn’t say nothing about no monsoon.”

  Lee watched the patchwork of puddles grow in front of the elevators. A custodian came with a mop, planted a yellow, plastic sign warning in English and Spanish that the floor was wet, and began to mop. The wet visitors still came and the floor sprouted more puddles and the custodian came back with his mop. Lee looked at the visitors’ facial expressions and mannerisms and tried to determine if the patients these visitors were coming to see were sicker than his father. He gave up; the people who had been caught in the nasty rain storm appeared preoccupied with how wet they were.

  When the doors next opened, only one visitor emerged. Christie, her brown hair soaked, saw Lee and began to walk towards him. He knew they were tears, not rain drops that she wiped from her eyes. He stood first, then D.H., then Ellie.

  “I am so sorry, so sorry. How is your father?” Christie asked as she clasped both of Ellie’s hands.

  “We haven’t heard anything for the past several hours,” Ellie said as she began with great precision to describe their early conversation with the doctors.

  “I knew you would find out where I was,” Lee said. I worked it all out in my head. How many hospitals did you call before you found us?”

  “The whole horrible thing was on the local news, the whole thing about your father. They caught the men that did it. I was at the movies and I waited for a while. Then I went to your house. Then I went home again, and back to your house, and that’s when I heard in on the radio. It was the whole story and they gave the name of the hospital. I came right away.”

  Ellie and D.H. sat down. “Thank you for coming, Christie,” Lee’s sister said. “This is all just too much; you never think something like this can happen to your own. I mean all the things in the police blotter section of the paper; I feel lucky it’s not us. But then, what happened to Daddy is just so much worse. Why couldn’t we have just had our car broken into or even if someone had to rob us at least not hurt us? I mean, we shouldn’t even be having anything happen to us after what we’ve been through.” Lee, D.H., and Christie looked at Ellie, nodding up and down as they did. This was not a question you answered any other way. Ellie and D.H. stared at the double doors beyond which were Jim Fitts and the young doctor.

  Lee helped Christie off with her jacket. The rain had penetrated through to the shoulders of her blouse. “I will be right back,” he said. He brought her a handful of brown paper towels. Christie blotted at her face and hair and the back of her neck. “I am sorry you got so wet coming to the hospital.”

  “The storm is bad Lee. It’s amazing that they caught those guys on a night like this.”

  “My father tried to stop them. He could have looked the other way. I remember him saying when he first took that job that for what he was getting paid he wasn’t going to be a hero.”

  “The radio said he really went after the guy, Lee.”

  “I hope my father will be okay; that is the only thing I want right now and I have been praying really hard. I have been praying also that my mother will come to us.”

  “Want to walk a little Lee? Just down the hall a bit.”

  “Okay, yes, we can get some exercise.”

  “Lee, I was talking to my parents yesterday. They keep telling me they’re coming to visit, but I knew when they moved they wouldn’t be back. But I told them about you and how we had been out a couple of times and that we were going to the movies tonight.”

  “I’m sorry I made you miss the movies, Christie.”

  “Lee, don’t even say that. That’s not what I meant. I was talking to my parents and they said you were always a very nice boy and to say hello. I felt happy when I was talking about you, I just wanted you to know. I’ll help you through this Lee. While your father’s in the hospital, when he comes home, just tell me what I can do to help. I know if something awful happened to me, I wouldn’t even have to ask and you would be there ready to help with anything I needed.”

  They stopped at the end of the hall and as they turned to walk back, looked into a room where a patient lay expressionless as the laugh track of an old sitcom blared away. Christie took Lee’s hand in hers and they walked back to join the vigil Ellie and D.H. were keeping. Her hand was like his but so
different. He felt the thin bones in her hand tighten. He wanted to be with her forever. Her words, as he pulled every probable meaning from them, could sustain him against anything. At least that’s what he thought until they reached the end of the corridor. Even the lovely weight of Christie’s words couldn’t plumb the deepest reaches of the debilitating fear Lee felt that night. His father, that was his father in there behind those closed doors. Those doors sealed shut any way of knowing if the young doctor had enough skill and luck to overcome seconds of senseless slashing or if those seconds -- one, one thousand; two, one thousand; three, one thousand – would be like those that had thundered from nowhere to show they could take out a school bus if they wanted.

  The custodian had been back again with his mop. He saw the floor dry, but decided to dab at a small area anyway as if he didn’t want his trip to be for nothing. Deciding there was no further need for the yellow plastic sign; he picked it up and walked back down the hall.

  The double doors opened and the young doctor walked out; drained of a lot of the energy he had had four hours earlier. Ellie, helped up by D. H., scanned the doctor’s face which showed no emotion until one of the determined steps of the young physician slid across the custodian’s recently swabbed tile.

  “Damn,” the doctor said as he caught himself on the type of handrail that wends its way along every hospital corridor wall. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. Actually, I have some encouraging news. The doctor turned his neck and stretched his back. “Yes, given everything we’re working with, it’s good news. We’ve stopped the bleeding in the femoral artery. We used a few staples inside and more outside. It should hold; we’ll have a better idea in the morning. In the other area, just above the groin on the right-hand side, that’s a little more complicated, but I think it’s going to be okay. There was a lot of bleeding there. See, your dad in that area has what we call an arterial venous malformation or AVM; it’s a vascular mass so it’s full of blood. Not sure really what causes them, most likely congenital and often as with your dad you don’t even know you have an AVM, especially if it’s small; but your dad’s wasn’t small. We can’t cut out something like that; we wouldn’t be able to stop the bleeding. What we do and it took pretty well in your dad’s case, is patch with a special glue so that the blood flow to and from the AVM can be stopped. We were lucky that the wound only slightly nicked the mass; I think the glue’s going to hold there too. If the cut were a little bigger we would have been certainly faced with a much broader range of problems. But I think we’re okay; I think he’s going to be okay for now. I’ll be in to see him in the morning; we’ll have a much better idea at that time.”