I Laid a Hand on You

Keegan stared straight ahead as if not present in the hospital pre-op room awaiting heart surgery. He needed a replacement valve, the medical establishment dreamed up and made real the use of pig heart valves. Keegan was ninety-one but they, the medical people, were willing to do the surgery on his heart because he was in very good shape for a ninety-one year old, spry, alert, well-off with a wife who cared about him, and a daughter who attended all of his medical appointments and sat right there at that moment in the pre-op room with him.

Quinn, Keegan’s daughter, stood up in the room, hands in the pockets of her baggy jeans, gripping her iPhone in the right pocket, and wanted to go get coffee. These days, she spent a lot of time in hospitals as her parents were elderly and they went in and out for medical procedures and illnesses. Before this admission with her father, she most recently went with her mother who had surgery to repair a splenic aneurysm, it was like a balloon ready to burst, they could not remove it, but they filled it with tiny platinum coils that would encourage clot formation and block blood flow into the blown-up sac of blood. Every time one of her parents went in for some kind of surgical procedure, Quinn wondered if that would be the one that would cause death, she further wondered if she could deal with losing them. They would not be calling anymore. There would be no one to visit.

The truth was, even though Quinn stood by them, she was in a rage at them. She finally understood that she was groomed to care for them. She had no choice. She was not helping them out of love or being a good person in the world. No, she was there for them because she was supposed to be there for them. Did she love them? Probably not. She cultivated some kind of nostalgia, but it was fake and mostly she could only remember her mother’s mean comments, once she told Quinn she looked like a snowman. Quinn was in her twenties and waiting for her mother to pick her up at the train station. She had come on the Long Island Railroad from Penn Station, she was wearing parachute pants and a white puffer jacket. She walked to Penn Station from her fourth-floor walk-up on East 57th Street, the one room with a crumby kitchen, not useable because of roaches.

And the mentally off brother always making sexual comments to Quinn, and Quinn looked back and was so perplexed that she humored this guy. He was a doctor that could not hold a job. He was let go from a psychiatric residency at Nassau Medical Center, and he had the fucked-up nerve to ask Quinn if her orgasms were clitoral or vaginal. What was so bewildering was that Quinn answered him and told him her orgasms were clitoral, and he said, oh that means you’re suicidal. Now she would walk away in disgust but at that time, she thought maybe he was right, maybe she was suicidal. She said no to him when he wanted her to be tested to see if she could be a bone marrow donor for him when he was dying from leukemia. She thought to herself that this would be perfect, he would take more of her, not only verbally abuse her, but take her body into his, and then she would be in him, and most likely she would suffer a complication and die, and he would live on with her cells keeping him alive. No, by then, she knew she would not give any more of herself to him.

She was groomed for that too, to rescue this brother, his name was Doug. At family gatherings, for example, when he would first bang ragtime on the piano and then go up to his room, and her mother would say to her, go upstairs and get your brother, her mother so desperately wanted to see him as normal, she created illusory worlds, like when Quinn’s other brother, Kiran, sat Doug and his family way in the back of the ballroom at Kiran’s daughter’s wedding. The mother could not understand this wondering why Kiran would place Doug and his family so far away from the family. She said to Quinn, Doug and his wife are both doctors, why would Kiran disrespect them. And Quinn knew that Kiran and his wife wanted little to nothing to do with Doug and his wife, they were both crazy eccentrics.

Years later, the mother would urge Quinn to call Doug. She said, he would like to hear from you sometimes. Quinn responded, that’s not going to happen, it is impossible to have relationship with him and Quinn did not want to tell her mother the dirty secret of his sexual intrusion.

At the hospital in the pre-op room, Quinn told Keegan she was going to get coffee and asked him if he wanted any. Apparently, the doctor was delayed so they would have some time to wait there in the pre-op room. The anesthesiologist already came in as did the resident to get information, and the nurse to start the IV. Quinn walked down the hospital corridor saying Hail Mary’s, not because she was praying for Keegan, but because she said Hail Mary’s like a mantra, over and over in her head, silently, reverently, seeking clarity, the world seemed so complex and overwhelming at times, and yet sometimes it seemed very manageable. This was Quinn’s strength – she dove deep into her interior emotional world, and yet, she was very capable of staying organized and successful on the outside, even though she often did not see herself as successful.

When she re-entered the pre-op room with her coffee, Keegan motioned for her to come to him. She walked up to him where he was reclining on the hospital pre-op bed. He said, I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while. I remember there was that time I laid a hand on you, and I hope you can forgive me. Quinn shrugged it off and said don’t worry about it, things happen in families, it was so long ago, don’t worry about it. Keegan said, well I think about it, and I am sorry.

It might be a good ending if Quinn really meant that about letting him off the hook. But in the moment, she remembered she came into the house late at night after being with her boyfriend who was fifteen years older than Quinn who was twenty-two at the time. Keegan was waiting at the top of the stairs, Quinn started up the steps and he brought is arm back and struck her, punched her in the face. She fell backwards, got up and lunged at him, and pushed him over. She was crying as she went up to her room, the room with the yellow walls and the single bed where she masturbated herself to sleep every night since she was a small child. Quinn also wondered if he meant something else, did he sexually abuse her? She could not remember anything like that but as she researched childhood sexual abuse, she observed that she had all the symptoms, every one of them. But she would not say anything if she could not remember.

Keegan finally left the pre-op room, wheeled by the medical team who pushed and pulled the hospital pre-op bed with Keegan reaching for Quinn’s hand and she took it and told him she would see him in a little while. Quinn exited the pre-op area, found the surgical waiting area, pulled out her phone and started playing SpellTower.