Tattoos: A Novel (3 page)

I grinned again, Gran knew me too well. She was well aware that by doing the dishes right there and then I was trying to put off the inevitable. I dried my hands and peered out the micro-window over the kitchen sink. Rain still pelted the world outside, making the pavement shiny black. Once again I dreaded that I had to go out into the onslaught on my crappy excuse for a bike that had one speed, painfully slow. Even before I’d sat in the chair across from Gran she had the stack of cards in my hands.

“Shuffle,” she ordered.

I shook my head without comment. Any protests at this stage of the process would fall on deaf ears. I shuffled the oversized cards. Though my hands, much like the rest of me, were large, since I was just under six foot four, I always found shuffling tarot cards an awkward proposition. After I’d done what I could, I passed the deck back to Gran. With expert efficiency that never failed to impress me, she laid out what she called “the Celtic spread” in mere seconds.

“Did you make a wish?” she asked.

“You should know by now, I always make a wish… you know that million dollar lottery ticket I’m waiting to get,” I said with a chuckle. Gran was too busy studying the cards to be bothered by my comment. If I knew anything it was that Gran took her tarot seriously. Nothing could pull her focus away when she was in the middle of a reading.

“Here you are Jackson,” she said, pointing at the card that had a guy sitting on a horse in a suit of armor.
 

“The Knight of Wands…a passionate and liberal guy who doesn’t like to be told what to do, yep that sums me up just right,” I said.
 

Gran brought her gaze to me. Her grey eyebrows hiked up in obvious surprise because not only was I paying attention, I’d even known what the card meant. It was hard not to pick up some of it. I’d seen Gran do tarot cards so many times that there was no way I couldn’t know some of the cards and their meanings.

“Well, maybe you should be doing this reading,” she said after a few beats.
 

I shrugged, grinning. She brought her focus back to the cards, flipping them over, all the while having a mini conversation with herself as she read the meanings. As far as I could see I could have left the room and she wouldn’t have noticed. Gran was in the mode, meaning she was too deep in her reading to be aware of much else. I glanced at my watch and realized that I was almost out of time. I needed to wash the stink of smoke and cheap beer off my body and head over to the hospital in less than an hour.

That’s when Gran turned over my most despised card in the tarot deck, the Tower. I was quite sure that even if someone didn’t know the cards meaning it wouldn’t be difficult to know that it wasn’t a good one to get. A picture of a burning stone tower with people falling to the ground was on the cards face. Just like the picture depicted I took it to mean that a person’s whole world was going to be turned upside down, and of course disaster would follow. I might have been a little melodramatic in my explanation but that’s what it meant to me. I remembered the last time I’d had the misfortune to get that card in a reading, and it had been just before my life had gone to hell. I shivered involuntarily and shook my head.

“See, I knew this was a bad idea, I hate that card…” I said, touching the cardboard rectangle with the tip of my finger. I gave it a little shove toward Gran. She shook her head.

“No Jackson, it’s not like before, this is different, this is the end of something and the beginning of a…” She paused and flipped over the last few cards.
 

“It’s about a relationship, a girl and…”
 

“Well that’s crap since there’s no girl, and even if there was one, the Tower isn’t exactly the kind of card I want to have next to a girl,” I said, cutting off Gran.
 

For some reason just the mention of a relationship rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn’t like I didn’t hook up with girls. No matter how sucky a band was, just being in one was like a chick magnet. I knew from personal experience that if I wanted a new girl every night I didn’t need to try very hard. But the whole thing was, I didn’t care about hooking up with someone new every night.

I couldn’t deny that once, before life had dealt me a shitty hand, one that had almost killed me, I’d bought into all that ego driven bull crap. I’d used girls, letting go of them as quickly as I’d picked them up. But that person, the guy who’d took, took and took some more had died a while back.

“No, this relationship is different, not love…well not exactly…” Gran said, locking on my face. Her clear blue eyes that were almost the color of a stormy sea, exactly like mine, seemed to bore into me. Even though I loved her more than the world and knew that she’d never hurt me, the intensity of her stare was unsettling.

“Fine,” I said hoping to deflect her gaze. Suddenly she gave her head a quick shake, as if breaking her trance and she was back to my sweet Gran. I was grateful for the rapid change.

“I gotta go Gran,” I said getting to my feet. I turned to walk away, but before I did I spun back to face her.

“So there’s nothing about…” I drew in a deep inhalation. “About you know…” I felt stupid for even asking the question since tarot cards couldn’t really predict the future. Sure Gran had gotten a few things right in the past but it wasn’t exactly science. In my opinion you lived your life according to what made sense, not a reading from a psychic. But that didn’t mean I didn’t like it when the cards seemed to foretell good fortune. I was human after all. A part of me knew that Gran was aware of things about me that even I had no idea about.

She shook her head and her smile was warm.
 

“No, nothing about that,” she said simply. Her words had me releasing a breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding. I leaned over and gave her a peck on her wrinkled cheek. The smell of her face cream, Ponds, one she’d used from the time she was a teenager, surrounded her. And it was funny that no matter how far from home I was, or what was going on in my life, the scent of that cream always reminded me of Gran.

“I’ve got to shower and get out in that mess of weather,” I said, scratching the stubble on my chin.

“Yes, wash that horrible smell of smoke and sour beer off you,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

Less than thirty minutes later I was on my way to the hospital. I knew it would have been smarter to take the bus since it was like a monsoon outside, but I’d wasted too much time having the tarot card reading. I didn’t have the luxury of time to wait for a bus. I grabbed plan B, my beat up racing bike that had been converted to a single speed bike. I’d won it in a bet a few years back.
 

Racing bikes were supposed to be the fastest ones out there, hence the name, but this bike wasn’t anything like that, because the frame was slightly misshapen after an unfortunate accident with a pick-up truck. The tires were bald, most of the padding was gone from the seat and since it was one speed it meant it didn’t have a freewheel, making it impossible to coast on it. Meaning you had to constantly pedal to keep it going. It made for a hell of a workout, but in the rain it was the worst thing in the world because the faster you went the worse the visibility became. Even with swimming goggles I had a tough time seeing, not to mention that I looked like a complete tool wearing them.

Ten minutes later, that had actually felt like a couple of hours of torture, I rolled into the St. Martins hospital for Children parking lot. After I’d locked up my ride, which seemed kind of dumb since no one in their right mind would have wanted to steal it, I strode through the emergency entrance of the hospital. My soaked Converses squeaked with every step I took. I knew I was leaving a trail of water in my wake, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
 

I made my way to the linen room, using a couple of towels to dry my hair and face. My clothes would have to air dry, but at least I’d have a coverall over me while they did. That way I wasn’t completely frozen in the climate controlled environment, which always seemed to be too cold for my taste.
 

Despite my attempts at drying off I knew I still looked like a drowned rat. Water dripped from my hair onto my coveralls and my wet clothes were already soaked through in patches. Not one of my best days to say the least. It didn’t help that I found my thoughts drifting back to the matter of the Tower card that I’d pulled. I didn’t want it to take me down, but I couldn’t help but think back to a time when things had gone terribly wrong for me. I shook my head, unwilling to waste anymore time in the past. The past was best left where it was.

I made my way to the third floor Pediatric Cancer ward. I opened the utility closet that was just outside of the ward with my personal set of keys. I grabbed the utility cart, locked up and moved down the hall, still dimly lit. I checked the time and was shocked to see that I’d actually made it to work on time with a few minutes to spare. I pushed the wheeled bucket down the hall to the bathrooms, the place I knew Chip, the day supervisor, would want done first.
 

It wasn’t brain science and the routine was easy enough to learn. Chip was a good guy to work for but for some reason, there seemed to be a revolving door of people coming and going. Nobody really lasted very long, in fact next to Chip I was one of the longest running employees, having worked there for just over a year.

When I was halfway down the hall I notice room 312 was empty. The bed was stripped and all the pictures, balloons and get well cards were gone. Though I’d witnessed more than my fair share of those kind of scenarios over the past months, it never failed to hit me hard in the guts. So much so that it made it hard to breathe. Because none of it made sense, why the hell would a child with almost no experience with life have to get cancer. It wasn’t fair that innocents had to suffer.
 

At times the anger and resentment for a world where kids had to be poked and prodded like miniature pincushions and still died, made me want to quit working there all together. It would have been easy to close that chapter in my life and not have to witness it anymore. Because just seeing that empty bed, where a five year old boy named Neil had spent six long months fighting for his life, but was now gone forever, shook the core of my being. It made me want to run away and never look back. I was a volunteer there, I didn’t need to be there…not really.

“Hey Jax.”
 

I felt the tug at the back of my coveralls and turned to face six-year-old Cindy. She stared up at me with her huge brown eyes. Her tiny lips were bowed into a smile and her bald head was covered in a downy fuzz, just beginning to grow back. She appeared so tiny and cherub-like, in her pink Barbie pajamas, that I wanted to take her into my arms and away from it all, away from her cancer.

 
In that moment all the feelings I’d had about taking off, evaporated. Right in front of me was the reason why I was there, in a place that some people might consider the most depressing environment in the world. Cindy put her hand up for a fist pump, something I’d taught her soon after she’d arrived on the wing. I fist pumped her and crouched down, so our eyes were level.

“What are you doing up so early?” I asked softly. The breakfast trays hadn’t even arrived yet. Morning didn’t officially start on the ward until they came.

Cindy shrugged her petite shoulders. She stared at the floor for a few moments before she spoke.

“Can’t sleep, because…” She thumbed over her shoulder toward Neil’s room. The simple motion made my heart lurch. I should have known better than to ask her why she was up. Neil and her had been inseparable.

“Mom said Neil’s gone to Heaven. I just wish he had taken me with him. We’re best friends and best friends do everything together, don’t they?”
 

She stared at me with an innocence that threatened to break my steely composure.

I swallowed a few times before I attempted to speak. The last thing I could do was lose it in front of Cindy. She needed solid answers not soppy tears.

“I know if Neil could take anyone to Heaven with him it would have been you. But you see Cindy, Heaven is a place we get an invitation to, and if you don’t get an invitation…” I shrugged for effect. “Well you just can’t go.”

She seemed to consider what I’d said. “Is it like when some people get an invitation to a Birthday Party and some people don’t?”

“That’s exactly what it’s like,” I said, smiling.

 
“Birthday parties are fun.” She shot me a sheepish look and shrugged. “I prolly would have gone too if I’d gotten an invitation,” she said. She crossed her arms over her chest and suddenly looked serious. “Do you think I’ll get an invitation there too some day?”
 

I nodded. “Of course you will, everyone gets an invitation to Heaven, we just don’t know when we’re going to get it. When you do get your invitation, Neil will be waiting there for you and he won’t be sick anymore.” I prayed her invitation didn’t come soon.

A grin lit up Cindy’s face. I instinctively sighed, thankful that I’d in the smallest way made her understand that Neil hadn’t left to hurt her.

“Thanks Jax,” she said. She lifted her hand for another fist pump. “Laters,” she said. She skipped down the hall, her bunny slippers not making a sound on the polished floor.
 

“Morning Jax.”
 

I lifted my gaze at the sound of my name and spotted Chip. His huge pot belly pushed at the buttons of his sky blue long-sleeved shirt. He strode down the hall toward me. The huge key ring that he had strapped to the waistband of his black work pants, jingled as he approached. I was sure the ring held every key to every door in the hospital. He slid a hand over the top of his head, as if he were smoothing his hair, the only problem was he didn’t have a strand of hair to fix.

“Can you do up room 312, we have a new patient coming in some time this morning. As far as I’ve heard the mother has already demanded that there not be a flake of dust in the room…”