I Touched His Face

I ran into the house through the garage door. Michelle, my spouse, called me sounding frantic as I was pulling into the driveway.

Vic? Nick is in the bathroom on the floor. There is vomit everywhere.

I looked into the downstairs bathroom, the one with the washer and dryer and the extra shower. My son was lying across the floor, on his stomach, face turned to the side, rhythmically moaning, “uhnnn…uhnnn…uhnnn…uhnnn, incoherent, eyes closed, vomit on his blue sneakers, vomit on the walls and all over the floor.

Nick! Nick! I called out his name. Call 911! Call an ambulance! I shouted to Michelle. She was dissociating. Nick vomited again.

Michelle called 911. Where are they? Where are they? Are they coming? I kept asking, I believed he was dying. I thought he would die there on the bathroom floor.

Call Ellen! Tell her we cannot meet them.

Really? Maybe Michelle thought this wasn’t happening and we would still go out to dinner with our two friends? I could not blame her. I heard the sirens coming down the road. One police car, another police car, an ambulance, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Dying happening? I thought maybe yes. Maybe this time yes. As this was not the first time we called 911 finding Nick just about unconscious on the floor of his room, or a bathroom.

Cops in uniforms and big boots traipsed through the house. Not a time to care about the precious recently redone wood floors or carpets with the deepest colors of maroon, red, midnight blue, haunting mauve, and gray. Trample on them, stomp into our home, see him, keep him alive. The EMTs went in, I don’t know what they did, I could not see, I had hope though, I always had hope. I would never, could never give up hope about this kid. My baby, the baby who I held as I sat at the fireplace in the ski lodge at Quechee, the baby who slept with his round, red face on my shoulder, the baby who awoke sweaty and sleepy in my arms, when I kissed him, and sang to him, Both Sides Now.

And now he is my 25-year-old son who is so persistent about killing himself, oh no not suicide, just behaviors that will kill him, coke use delivering convulsions, comas, seizures, hospitalizations, cardiac freak-out.

The EMTs are glad there is a ramp in the back down the deck. They can put him on the stretcher, and wheel him down the ramp and out to the front of the house, the street where the ambulance awaits. I heard them say, He’s out. And yes, I wondered what that meant as I saw him lying on the stretcher, still in his dirty blue high-tops, gray and pale, I saw a sunken face, and told myself, go, go to the stretcher, touch him, touch is face one more time while he is alive. I touched his face, and would that be the last time I would feel life in my son’s still and hollow cheek?

And he was wheeled out the back door, down the ramp, the ramp that was made for his godmother when she lived with us before she died, and she was in a wheelchair with a transplanted kidney that was failing, and that was so sad, such a loss, because she played Yahtzee with Nick, and taught him about music, Buddy Holly and Aretha, and now he has a passion for music, mostly country, and he has a tattoo on his bicep that says Dini and the date of her death, and a rose, because she loved roses. He spent time with her in her room in the evening and set up the dialysis machine, cleaned the parts and connected the tubes so it would run all night and cleanse her body that could not cleanse itself, how we take so much for granted, the ability to pee, the functioning of our kidneys, and why can’t he have gratitude for his health, and not destroy himself, such an easy but complex question.

He was gone out of the house, I doubled over in sobs that heaved through my soul, I can only remember two other times sobbing like that – once when we were going up to Nick’s boarding school because he had run away to Portland, Maine, and there was talk about how we should leave him there on the street to figure things out for himself. And I sobbed thinking of the sweaty little baby now being left out in the late winter cold of Maine. And I thought seriously? I could not buy that. He was just a kid, a troubled kid. And the other time did not have to do with Nick. It was after my mother died, and it was time to have my brothers and their families over to my mother’s house to go through her belongings and decide what we wanted, her fur coat, the china, silver, crystal, the upright piano, pots and pans, rugs, sofas, everything out on display and all of us picking through it and disrupting the order she had, just upending someone’s life and death, I was in charge and at one point, I had to get them out, they were sitting around like it was a social gathering, I told them all they had to leave and slowly they did, and I was left there in the house, alone, surveying all of my mother’s things out of place, out of order, the dismantling of all the years of her life. And I sobbed. And then I left the house and drove home to Connecticut from Long Island on the Northern State, the Cross Island Parkway, the Throgs Neck Bridge and I-95.

We have to follow the ambulance, Michelle says. And I say yes, but we have to clean the bathroom, and I began to mop and wipe the vomit, his vomit on the walls and floors, and now I was dissociated, let me do this task to check out, but I could not check out, I could just clean, and she said, we can do this later, and I said, no, it will be dried and so much harder to clean.

The ambulance was in the street for a long time, and I wondered if they were trying but unable to keep him alive. Then they drove off, and the bathroom seemed clean or cleaner, but there was still some vomit, I knew, under the radiator and probably in other places too.