Legs

Surgeons took off my grandfather’s leg because of his diabetes.

A few days after, my mother brings me to the hospital to visit him. She’s already gone to see him a few times, coming home smelling like lemon cleanser, the skin around her eyes pink from crying.

As we go up in the silver elevator, she tells me he’s sharing his room with a blind man who keeps the TV on because he likes to listen to it.

The doors of the elevator hiss open and the hallway smells like the boys’ room at school. The white light and air conditioning seep into my clothes. As we walk, I can see into other people’s rooms, light from televisions flickering over their beds. I hear sounds of machines breathing.

There are nurses laughing at their station.

In my grandfather’s dark room, the blind man flips through the channels.

My mother shoves me a little with her hand in the middle of my back. She takes off her fat leather pocketbook and sets it on the floor by my grandfather’s bed.

“It’s me, daddy,” she whispers.

I sit in the big cushioned chair at the foot of the bed. Next to us, there’s a window with the blinds drawn. On the other side of the room, the TV mumbles. I listen to a game show with buzzers and a cheering audience, and miss everything my mother says to my grandfather. He’s still sleeping. He hasn’t moved.

Under his blankets is not the shape of a man. There’s something hidden underneath. I try to imagine. Tubes and bloody bandages. Things I’ve seen in movies. I think about weeks later when he’s home. He’ll have a wheelchair. I can see myself in the chair, speeding down my grandparents’ driveway towards the road. If he has a fake leg, he’ll show me how he puts it on and takes it off.

I touch the scratchy material of his blanket with the tips of my fingers and watch my mother for a moment to see if she notices. I could lift the blanket.

A nurse rushes in, but she doesn’t look at us.

At my grandfather’s side, she lifts the blanket, and I see his eyes open and recognize her. My mother glances at the wall.

I catch a glimpse of the bandage and the shiny white skin of my grandfather’s thigh. A tube leads to a clear plastic bag that’s been hiding under the blanket this whole time. It’s filled with rusty liquid. “What is that?” I ask the nurse, pointing, though I know it’s rude.

My mother is out of her chair and her fingernails are sharp between my shoulders. She’s pushing me away from the bed and back past the talking TV. We stand in the bright hallway until the nurse walks out.

Before we leave, I want to say something to my grandfather. I want to say I’m sorry for pointing at him. When we go back in the room, he’s asleep again. In the hallway, my mother tells me he’s not going to die.

“Do you want to go swimming?” she asks me on the elevator ride down.

We drive to my grandparent’s house. There’s a pond in the backyard I go swimming in every summer. The water is clean, with schools of minnows in the shallow parts and clouds of mosquitoes hovering over the dark water in the middle. When the sun sets, bats come dipping down to catch water bugs.

My mother goes into the house to feed the cats and then comes out to sit at the edge of the water, slipping off her sneakers and resting her feet in the mud like two dead fish.

I never swim to the center. My grandfather once told me the mud is so thick it probably goes down forever. I imagine it sucking me into the earth. I only swim where I can still touch the bottom with my toes. Fish slide past my feet like tongues.

I can see my body, my arms moving under the water. The sun is shimmering on the surface and in my eyes. My legs look so short in the water, and then I start kicking up black clouds of mud and they disappear altogether.