The Light

The doors open and raucous laughter bursts from the bus as I haul my scooter aboard.

“It’s my favorite rider,” the driver who thinks she knows me says, continuing to laugh. “I’ve never seen anyone so stubborn. I never know what I’m going to get when I stop for you.” I need to reiterate that I do not have any sort of history with this woman, and that she must be mistaking me for someone else. 

“I won’t be on here anymore after Thanksgiving,” she says. I ask what line she’ll be on and she says the 72 and the 33. 

“Ugh,” I say.

“No I’m really excited. Three days a week, ten hour shifts. Four day weekends, baby!” She again erupts into wild laughter.

I ask what line she would drive if she had her pick. She thinks a moment, then says, “I really like the 2.”

“Oh you like those really big buses?” The 2 is the only line in town that uses double-sized buses. I love them myself, they’re really roomy, and they arrive every fifteen minutes. 

“Oh yeah I love those bad boys, even though –you probably can’t tell when I’m in the seat, but I’m really short. I mean, crazy short.” I ask if she sits on a phone book before realizing there aren’t phone books any more. She says she has a cushion. “My daughters are five six and five seven, though. My husband’s six two. Ex husband.”

We chat the entire way, insipid small talk about the various bus lines and the colorful characters who patronize them. We have to shout to be heard over the roar of the vehicle. She says her own car is a tiny, sleek Ferrari. “I have a really heavy foot,” she laughs.

 When I disembark, she once again explodes with laughter. “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you,” she says.

When I get to the admissions desk, the usual woman isn’t there, which disappoints me; I had been all set to practice flirting with her. A brusque woman asks me my birth date a number of times before it sticks. 

“Do you know where you’re going?” she asks. 

“I think I remember,” I say.

Bridget greets me in the waiting area. “I heard the good news,” she says. I wheel into room one and I lay my coat and hat on my scooter and she rolls it away. 

“Uh oh. There’s drainage,” she says. I sigh. I’m disappointed but not surprised; I walked a few blocks to the Schnitzer Concert Hall Friday night to see the Decemberists play with the Oregon Symphony. I took it slow and careful, but apparently not slow and careful enough. 

I feel myself start to sink into the earth, but then I think: No. It’s frustrating, but don’t let yourself give in to despair like you usually do. You don’t have to.

She wipes and prods the wound then says, “It’s very shallow. Now that it’s cleaned up it looks a lot better. I want a second opinion though.” She leaves and returns with Jenny.

“Well it’s definitely open again,” Jenny says. “That’s a bummer.”

“It’s my fault, I walked on it,” I say. “It was stupid, I know, but I thought it would be okay.”

“These things happen,” she says. “It’s not your fault.”

She’s kind of comfort me, but is really is my fault. I’ve been through this so many times that I know that I really need to take things extremely slow. How long did Taggert say it takes for the skin to be even three quarters of its normal strength? Six months, a year?

“I’m just so impatient,” I say, without bitterness. “I want to pretend things are normal, and they’re just not. They’re never going to be. I need to get this through my head.”

Jenny tells me her and her husband were at the Decemberists show as well. “It would have been so fun to see you there!” she says. She was happy they played her favorite song, Down by the Water. “I forgot how beautiful that place is,” she says. I usually find the Schnitz gaudy, but during one song they lit the walls deep blue, and I looked up toward the wedding-cake ceiling and saw that one of the balconies was lit golden yellow, with a huge sculpture of a woman’s face looking out of it. It looked truly magical. 

When she and Bridget leave I force myself to look at the jagged horizon line of where my toes once were. The skin is mottled and dry and I know it would be immensely satisfying to reach down and peel off some of the flakes. But I don’t. 

Karen pokes her head in and asks how the foot looks and I smile and give her a thumbs-down. “Aw,” she says.

Vicki and Bridget come in followed by Doctor Thompson who, having been appraised of the situation, she greets me warily, no doubt expecting me to be upset. I say hi and ask how she’s doing and she says it’s been a strange day. She takes the gauze off the foot and says it doesn’t look bad. “It looks like you had a blister,” she says. Bridget says the skin was very macerated. I ask what causes that and she says usually moisture. “Maybe you got it wet in the shower by accident,” the doctor says, as she carefully scrapes away the dead skin. “This is the fun part for me. There’s really no need for debridement, I’m just going to remove this so it doesn’t become a bacteria cafeteria. Ha, I rhymed!” I tell her she should make Schoolhouse Rock-style cartoon about wound care. That would’ve had Dr. Taggert howling but Thompson just asks me if I want another football or if I want to do a hard cast. I tell her if she thinks a football is enough then I would prefer that.

“I think it’ll be fine. This really doesn’t look bad.” 

As Bridget starts the football, Vicki reminds me that they’ll be closed Thanksgiving and the day after. “You actually get a four day weekend? Did you win that with the strike?” They laugh and I say “I’m glad you reminded me, I can’t come in next Thursday, it’s the grand opening of the new museum wing and my boss said I had to be there.” Vicki leaves to get Bree, who appears with a paper schedule. I make an appointment for Tuesday at 3:40, which will give me an extra hour of work. I realize I may be subjected to Dr. Taggert’s ministrations, but I also know that KC works that day. 

As she wraps my foot, Bridget keeps dropping things on the floor. “I guess I’m tired,” she says, throwing half a roll of batting in the trash. She asks how things are going at work and tells me her boyfriend works for Laika, the local stop-motion animation company. She says he does the lighting for their movies. “Coraline, Boxtrolls…it’s intense work, twelve hour days.” It must be fascinating, figuring out how best to illuminate all those little worlds with their tiny, incredibly detailed inhabitants.

When she finally finishes the cast, Bridget says, “This’ll be better by Tuesday.” I tell her I doubt it but she says, “No, it will.” As if there is not a shred of doubt in her mind.

Maybe. And maybe it will open up again, and close back up again, and open back up again, a light blinking on and off and on and off until it finally becomes burns out.

Unwilling to let myself get upset, but trying to make sure I’m not suppressing anything, I remain cheerfully dour to the end, and tell them all that barring any unforeseen incidents, I’ll see them Tuesday. As I head downstairs the floor does not open up beneath my wheels, the vortex does not swallow me up. I do fee that I’ve just missed my bus, but instead of being aggravated I do something I never do, and treat myself to an espresso at Starbucks. The place is aggressively festive and the staff is already dressed in Santa hats and sweaters. I don’t like their coffee but the caffeine gives me a pleasant lift as I sit in the lobby before finally rolling up the hill. 

An old woman sits beside me in the bus shelter, smelling of something rotting on the beach. When the bus arrives, I gesture for her to get on before me, and she smiles sweetly and says thank you. As we drive off, drops cover the windshield like a curtain of jewels. The sun tries and fails to break through the clouds, giving them a sickly yellow glow that is reflected in the windows of the houses and the cars, all painted blue with dusk. It’s eerily beautiful, and I want to cry because the world is awful and people are terrible and everything is going to be fine.