Tattoos: A Novel (6 page)

Right then, with my stomach doing the tilt-a-whirl and my head not far behind, I wasn’t so sure I’d made the right decision. The anesthetic had been light, but I still managed to feel sick afterwards, not to mention that my neck felt stiff and the place on my chest where the port was, was quite tender.

“One more X-ray and we’ll send you back to your room,” the recovery room nurse said. The anesthetic had made me giddy. I wanted to laugh at her bottle cap glasses that made her eyes look huge. It didn’t help that her pixie hair cut just added to the whole looking like a bug motif. I knew she’d told me her name, but there was no way I could remember it.
 

Not long after, the portable X-ray was positioned over me. A lead vest was placed over my vital parts, didn’t want to ruin my ovaries and the eggs that could someday be my children. That was if I lived long enough to have children. Another giggle slipped from my lips because I was a child, thinking about having a child. It was so messed up my mind just couldn’t compute.

“That looks just fine, we’ll take you back to your room,” the nurse said, bringing me out of my drug induced stupor. Once again time had flipped forward without me knowing because the X-ray machine was gone. I didn’t even remember it being taken away.
 

I nodded feebly. I tried not to stare at her glasses because every time I did, I felt laughter gurgle in my throat. I guess what they said about the laughing gas was true, it really did make you laugh. She helped me into a wheelchair. The brief time when I was standing I felt really woozy. The nurse must have anticipated this and easily caught me before I fell. She positioned me in the wheelchair which I absolutely hated. Being in it made me feel like a helpless invalid, but I knew there was no way I could make it back to my room without it.
 

It
 
struck me as very strange that I was actually happy when I spotted my hospital room. Somewhere in the three days after I’d been admitted I’d adopted the space as my own. As expected, neither Mom nor Harold were there. Mom had only been by a handful of times, usually just for a couple of minutes. She was always too happy to tell me that she was so busy and had appointments to keep. Far be it for me to remind her that she didn’t have a job and whatever commitments she did have, consisted of either lunch dates with her self-centered friends or beauty treatments. Harold had a better excuse for not being there since he had an actual job. I had to give him props, he did make an effort to see me when he could.
 

The surprising thing was, it was better when Harold came without Mom. Without his Luanne to dote over, he was fully engaged in any conversation we had. Not that we talked about anything that mattered. Usually he’d mention who’d called to ask about me, and other superficial stuff like the weather and what Mom was up to. Still I savored his visits, appreciating every moment he spent with me. I only wished there had been more of them.
 

The nurse helped me into the bed and pulled my pink and lavender fluffy duvet up and around me. My duvet from home didn’t hide the fact that I was still in the hospital, but it at least made the bed seem less stark. The oddest thing was that the duvet actually matched the colors of the room, as if it had been part of the plan the whole time. She pulled up the side rails of the bed, something I normally would have hated. But I was feeling so off, there was a good chance that I might have rolled on my butt onto the floor without them.
 

I closed my eyes and visions of sugar plums danced in my head, not really I just felt really weird. I felt like the time I’d got drunk on lemon gin. It had been fun at first, downing huge swigs of the gin straight from the bottle and chasing it with 7-UP, but when I’d started puking my guts up the fun quickly vanished. And as if the memory of my encounter with lemon gin was a catalyst, my stomach started to turn. I bolted upright in bed.

 
I fumbled for the nurses call button with one hand, while I used my other hand to cover my mouth, as if the action could stop me from throwing up. When my free hand made contact with the button I pushed it with strength I didn’t think I had. But from the way my stomach was doing the Harlem Shake I knew even a rocket propelled spaceship wouldn’t have been quick enough to get to me. I was going to barf all over myself and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Then out of nowhere, Jax, like a rock star in coveralls was there. His hair was all
 
methodically mussed and his eyes, as blue as the sapphire in the ring Mom sported at dinner parties, were staring straight at me. And all I could think was this couldn’t be happening to me. I was not only about to vomit all over myself, but I was going to do it in front of a guy who was more than a little hot. I couldn’t speak but that didn’t stop the string of obscenities that played through my mind. It was like a foul mouthed sailor had taken residence in my brain.
 

“Here,” Jax said.
 

He handed me a kidney basin that he’d somehow managed to get his hands on. Relief that I’d been saved from making a mess on myself was intertwined with absolute embarrassment. Without fanfare I retched and heaved, mostly amber colored bile since I hadn’t eaten all day, into the basin that he was still holding. As my stomach continued to go through the motions of evacuating its contents, I prayed to anyone who’d listen that nothing would splash onto Jax’s hand. If that happened it would have only made an already horrific scene even worse.

Tears that involuntarily accompany vomiting, trailed down my cheeks and my nose was a runny mess. Disgusting strings stretched and glistened from my nose to the basin, like drool from a dog’s mouth. After a few minutes that felt like an eternity, my stomach decided it had done its duty and the nausea subsided. I drew in a long inhalation. Before I sat back, Jax already had a box of tissues in front of my face.
 

I grabbed a handful without
 
comment. I knew I should have thanked him for saving me but I was too mortified to speak. I wiped the snot and tears from my face then closed my eyes and leaned back against my pillows. I gave myself the luxury of a few minutes to decide how I was going to handle it. What were the right words to say when you upchucked in a basin that a gorgeous guy just happened to be holding?

When I had the courage to open my eyes again, Jax was at the sink rinsing out the basin. Thankfully washing away all evidence of my sickness. By the way he rinsed and dried out the kidney basin then washed his hands with the pink soap, it wasn’t the first time he’d handled this kind of situation. But that didn’t matter to me because it was the first time he’d ever done it with me. I made it a life long goal never to do it again.

He strode back to me and gave me a half grin like he’d done the first time I’d met him. The dimple in his cheek winked at me.

“Just keep it in the bed with you, in case…” He motioned with his hand in what must have been his code for throwing up.

I nodded. “Thanks,” I said. I tucked the basin against my side. It was at that very moment that a nurse with a teddy bear covered scrub top and white pants, came racing into the room.

“Marilyn did you ring?” she asked. Obviously she was new, because I’d made it a point to let everyone know that I hated the name Marilyn.

“Marilee,” I said.

“What?” the nurse said.
 

She didn’t look much older than me with straight black hair, brown eyes, a tiny upturned nose and a stethoscope draped around her neck.

I opened my mouth to speak.
 

“Her name’s Marilee not Marilyn,” Jax said. I felt a smile curve my lips. When he said my name it made my heart do this strange flutter thing.

The nurse seemed almost affronted by Jax’s statement, as if people that did the kind of work he did, should be seen but not heard. It reminded me so much of the way Mom treated people who she labeled, not our kind. The only problem was that Mom wasn’t any different than any of the folks she looked down her nose at, she’d been born poor and had only come up in social standing because of her marriage to Harold.

 
“Oh, okay…Marilee,” she said, gazing at me. “Did you need something?”

“She just vomited about 200cc, I’m not sure if you’re doing an intake and output on her or…” Jax cut in again. A smirk worked across his face. I had to cover the grin that was quickly spreading across my face. He’d noticed her attitude too, but unlike me he wasn’t going to let her get away with it.

“Oh okay, thank-you…I’ll mark that down,” she said. Then she appeared stumped for something else to say. She went crimson, turned on her heel and was gone.

“I’ll probably take some heat for that but she just doesn’t know how it works around here,” he said, locking his eyes on mine. “There’s no hierarchy for helping, you just do what needs to be done, even if it isn’t exactly your job.”

“Thanks, you really saved me there,” I said, unable to wipe the smile from my face. For some reason Jax seemed to have this aura around him, that made you forget about all the bad things in your life, for a few moments at least.

He cocked an eyebrow, an action that I was sure would have made most girls swoon like love sick puppies because it was definitely having that very effect on me.

“I better get back to it,” he said.
 

He retrieved a dust broom from the corner of the room and moved to leave. I so wanted him to stay because I knew when he’d left he’d take the light with him. I wasn’t sure if I could cope with that right then.
 

“Are you in a band?” I blurted out. I knew it was the most stereotypical assumption I’d ever made, but I was grasping for anything that would keep him there a little longer.

“Kind of, if you want to call it that…” he said with a low chuckle. I almost laughed with him; I was shocked that I’d actually hit the mark.

I straightened up in the bed, surprised at how lucid I was since I’d thrown up. “Where do you play?” I asked.

“Wherever they let us play,” he said with a shrug.
 

“Is it a metal band?” I asked. Once again judging a book by its cover.

“Nope, just top forty pop, we’re a cover band really…”
 

He leaned against the broom. I knew he was a cleaner and that there was nothing wrong with his job, but it just didn’t seem to fit him.
 

 
“I really have to get back to it,” he said with an apologetic smile. He positioned the broom in front of him, pushing it toward the door.
 

Every fiber in my body wanted to keep talking to him but I didn’t. The last thing I wanted was for him to get into any more trouble than he was already in.

“Thanks again,” I said with a wave. When I thought about what I was doing, waving like a model in a parade, I dropped my hand to my duvet and shrugged. As expected, as soon as he was gone all the reality of my world pushed back into the room, and I was alone with my cancer.

6. Jax

As usual the bar was too hot. Cigarette smoke swirled in the air like toxic dragons, but I didn’t care. Nothing could get to me when I was in the zone, belting out a tune we never usually played. After quite a bit of shameless begging, Zeke and Max had agreed to play Radiohead’s Karma Police. Singing, even if it was other people’s material was the one thing that managed to completely disentangle me from the real world. When I held the mic in my hand and the music started, it was as if everything around me was swept away and it was just me and the tunes. No matter how wiped out I was, I hated when we took a break between sets because as soon as the band stopped playing, I was shuttled back to the dive we were in.
 

Most of the people that still crowded the bar were wasted and trolling for someone to take home with them for the night. Girls giggled too loudly, beer glasses clanked, and piped in music filled the air. I couldn’t wait to get back on stage. Not that it was much of a stage since it was barely bigger than a table top. Our drummer, Zeke had to put his gear on the floor at the side since it wouldn’t fit on the stage with Max, our guitarist and me. We were a three man band but still managed to make it work. Max had a bass and guitar that he interchanged according to the track we were playing. Zeke played the drums and also sang backup for a few songs.
 

The three of us had been friends since grade school. We’d started our first band when we were fifteen, not that it was much of anything more than a name The Vitals, since we didn’t have any instruments to play until a few years later. Despite the fact that we didn’t have instruments we had our voices. Zeke used to make percussion sounds with his mouth and beat on empty ice cream containers and boards, pretty much anything that would serve as mock drums.
 

 
“This place is brutal,” Max said, sweeping his sweat soaked dark bangs back off his face. His black eyeliner had smudged around his eyes. Combined with his sharp cheek bones he was more sinister looking than even he knew. A head shorter than me, Max was skinny to the point of skeletal and the fact that he always dressed in unrelieved black only added to his scrawny appearance. Max liked piercings as much as I liked tattoos, and had studs in his eyebrows, nose, a lip ring and at least ten earrings in each ear.

Max tipped the last dregs of his beer up to his lips and grinned. “At least we get free beer though,” he said.

I nodded, not that I’d enjoyed any of it. I’d found out the hard way after way too many hangovers after our gigs, booze and performing didn’t go together. Especially not when I was expected to work during the day and was perpetually sleep deprived. Max and Zeke didn’t have day jobs, relying on what we made from the gigs and of course a few scams here and there to make ends meet. For the most part they were good guys at heart, who were doing the best they could with what life had dealt them.

 
Zeke’s mother was a cokehead who was in an out of rehab since he’d been around six, his father wasn’t much better, and had been busted for dealing and pimping Zeke’s mother. It was a miracle that he’d turned out as good as he had. Max had been marginally luckier, if you could call it luck. He’d grown up in foster homes and though he’d had mostly shitty excuses for parents, he’d managed to get adopted when he was twelve. The couple that had adopted him weren’t druggies, they just liked to run computer scams. They’d been caught and arrested when Max was seventeen, but up until that time he’d enjoyed three square meals, a roof over his head and a little pocket money. After they were hauled away to jail, Zeke and Max got a one bedroom apartment together. It was so small that it made my place seem like a palace. But they didn’t care because it was theirs.