Wood Wound

Childhood was one torn edge of shoreline, an island at the northernmost corner of the lake. Tendrils of roots escaped the banks we skidded down to get to the water. Cedar bark, grey stone. My parents, still married then, watched from the shore while my brother and I spun circles in sun-stung inner tubes. I went out too far.

Evie, my mother shouted.

I ignored her. Fingers trailing water. Spinning. Below me a confluence of worlds, shifting sheets of green light.

Evie.

I slipped through the middle. Skin shearing from rubber, feet thrashing, I reached and streams of liquid tore through my fingers. There was nothing to hold onto. I forgot to hold my breath, panicked and gulped water. A few splashes, and I sank beneath the skin of the lake.

My mother took her time, waded through waist-deep water to haul me out.

Now, when she tells the story, she says she found me sitting on the stone bottom, waiting. I let her tell it her way. But it's not true. I fought the whole way down; snatched at everything I could, bubble, water. I learned to swim by drowning.

________

Ours is the last in a string of islands connected by bridges. When I get the call, it takes fifteen hours and three planes to return me to the island of my birth, and to my father in his hospital bed.

My mother and I are forced to pause at the drawbridge. People kill their engines; car doors click shut and we stand at the rails and look out at the lake. The air is sweet with autumn spray. Tall, regal sails coast by.

She says: It's good you came home.

When I don't answer, she adds: Althea will miss you. She's getting big.

Eight, I say. Not too big.

Evie, he's very sick. You need to be ready for that. You can't drink and drink and drink your whole livelong life and not pay for it.

The bridge scrolls down.

We get back in the car, and when she drops me at the hospital I find my father cranked up in his bed. He points an oxygen-monitor–tipped finger at me. It glows red.

Like E.T., I say.

The food here is terrible. When I get home I'm going to make a stew.

That would be nice.

Yes. I can see it now. Steam in the window. I've got to pee.

I press a button and a male nurse comes, helps him to the bathroom, fits my father's penis into a plastic urinal.

I'm just letting it all hang out these days, Dad says.

It doesn't matter, says the nurse. No one minds. And he is right. Someone comes over the loudspeaker in the hall: Code something-or-other. I wonder what the code means.

Difficult patient, says the nurse.

Later, I will come to know this nurse well. My family will nickname him ''Nurse Code.'' We will make up a code for bad jokes. When my father can no longer get to the bathroom, Nurse Code will close the curtain so he can urinate beside the bed.

I'm glad you're home, Dad says. And I am, too.

________

It has stopped storming like it did when I was a child. I remember white sheets of snow, snow you could part like sheets hung on a line. The whole world, white-flaked. We had a long driveway, and my father plowed drifts into gargantuan piles.

In the memory, my brother and I wait by the woodstove, wool mittens in our mouths, until he finishes. Then run, snow pants swishing. We clamber up and slide down until our path is worn slick and hard, then use shovels, our mittened hands, to burrow deep inside. Lie on our backs inside narrow tunnels and look up. Blue shadows.

It could cave in on them, my mother always said. All that weight.

But it never did.

________

The doctors pause at the door. There they stand, three wise men hands tucked in the pockets of white...