My mother stood in the middle of a pediatric cancer ward and told two nurses, “Those are jail marks on him. One for every man he’s put in the ground.” She had already filed paperwork to keep my husband out of our daughter’s room by Friday. Then Derek pulled his shirt over his head, and Amara reached for the purple pen.
Amara is eight.
She had been on the fourth floor of the hospital in Wichita since the second week of June.
Derek slept in the vinyl recliner by her bed for most of those nights.
My mother had visited four times.
On the fourth visit she brought a form.
It was a visitor restriction request, three pages stapled at the corner, and she’d handed a copy to the charge nurse before she ever walked into the room.
“Mom, what is that,” I said.
“It’s what a grandmother does when nobody else in this family will,” she said.
She covered the part of the bill our insurance wouldn’t touch. Fourteen thousand and change. She never once let me forget the number.
Derek is six and a half feet tall, with a beard down past his collar and ink from both shoulders to his wrists.
The nurses had quit looking twice at him by the end of the first week.
My mother never quit.
That Thursday she planted herself at the foot of the bed with the form held against her coat and said it loud enough for the hallway to hear.
“I’ve seen what’s under that shirt, Caitlin. Rows of little black lines. You know what those are. Everybody knows what those are.”
Margo, the nurse on shift, kept her eyes on the pump.
“Those are JAIL MARKS,” my mother said. “Days he did inside, or men he hurt. Take your pick. And he sleeps three feet from my granddaughter.”
Out the window, down in the visitor lot, eleven motorcycles sat backed in along the curb.
They’d been there every Thursday since June.
Ivan Gilligan and the rest rode up after their shifts, ate the cafeteria chili, and went home without coming upstairs unless Derek asked them to.
Four of them were standing in the hallway right then.
They had brought Amara a stuffed armadillo with one eye sewn on crooked. It smelled like a truck stop.
Derek didn’t answer my mother.
He looked at Amara.
She looked back and gave him one small nod.
So he pulled the shirt off.
My mother took a step back like he’d swung at her.
Down his left side, from under his arm nearly to his belt, ran row after row of short black lines in bunches of five. Some were dark and sharp. Some had gone soft and gray.
I knew what most of them were.
I’d held the cap of that marker for every one of them since she got sick.
The single line at the very top, faded and set apart from the rest, I had always figured was from before me. Some dumb night when he was twenty. I never asked.
Amara reached over to the tray table and picked up the purple skin marker the nurses kept in a cup by the sink.
She pulled the cap off with her teeth.
“Lower,” she said. “You’re too tall.”
Derek knelt on the tile.
“Caitlin,” my mother said. “You are not going to let her—”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Amara found the bare space under the last bunch and drew one line.
It came out crooked.
She frowned at it like it had personally let her down.
“Tomorrow you go to Benjamin’s and make it stay,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” Derek said.
Benjamin runs the tattoo shop out by the highway. Every purple line she drew, he went over in black the next morning. He never charged for one.
Then Amara started counting.
She didn’t say the numbers out loud. She touched each bunch with one finger while Derek held his arm up and stayed perfectly still.
“Sixty-one,” she said.
Margo set her chart down on the counter.
“Sixty-one rounds,” Margo said. “That’s her count. I hung every one of those bags myself.”
My mother’s mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.
Derek got to his feet. He still didn’t look at her.
“You wanted to know what they are, Janina,” he said. “EVERY LINE IS A ROUND SHE SAT THROUGH. I wasn’t letting her sit through one alone.”
The hallway went quiet.
In the doorway, Ivan took his cap off and held it against his leg.
Margo held out her hand.
“I’ll tell the charge nurse you won’t be needing this,” she said.
My mother gave her the form.
I thought that was the end of it.
But Amara wasn’t done.
She tugged at Derek’s wrist and pointed up under his arm, at that one faded line sitting by itself.
“So that’s sixty-two,” my mother said, like she was still trying to win something.
“No,” Amara said. “That one’s not mine.”
Derek went still.
“Daddy says that one’s for the boy in Grandma’s wallet.”
My mother’s hand went to her purse and stayed there.
I looked at her. Then at him.
“What boy?” I said. “I don’t have a brother.”
Nobody in that room would look at me.
Room four-nineteen
So I looked at the purse.
My mother had both hands on it now, her thumb flat over the clasp, the way you hold a bag on a city bus.
“Mom.”
“Not in front of the child,” she said.
Derek picked his shirt up off the floor and pulled it back on. The hem caught on the wet purple line and he stopped and held the cotton away from his ribs so it wouldn’t smear.
“His name was Sebastian,” he said. “Sebastian Mulcahy. He was hers, Cait. Before your dad.”
My mother said, “You had no right.”
“I didn’t say one word for two months,” Derek said. “You brought a form.”
I was still holding the cap of the marker. I had been holding it so long it had left a ring in my palm.
Sebastian. I tried the name on my mother’s face and it didn’t fit anywhere. My mother kept a calendar of every cousin’s birthday on the side of her refrigerator. There was no Sebastian on it. There was no boy in any picture in her hallway.
“Where is he?” I said.
She didn’t answer me. She looked at Derek’s shirt, at the spot over the faded line, like she could see through the cotton.
Margo picked up the chart again and wrote something on it that didn’t need writing.
Out in the hall, one of the riders cleared his throat and the four of them moved down toward the elevators to give us the room.
Amara put the armadillo on her lap and turned its crooked eye toward her grandmother.
“Is Grandma mad at the boy?” she said.
The second visit
The lines were Derek’s idea.
The first week of June, the night before her first round, he asked Margo for the purple marker by the sink. He didn’t explain. He pulled his shirt up in the recliner, drew one line under his arm and handed me the cap.
“One for every one she sits through,” he said. “Benjamin will make them stay.”
Amara laughed so hard at a grown man drawing on himself that the monitor beeped. That was the point. I figured it was a thing bikers did. I figured a lot of things about Derek were things bikers did, and I’d quit asking about most of them the summer we met at Cheney Lake, when I saw the faded line for the first time.
“That one’s from before you,” he’d said, and put his shirt on, and that was that.
He’s a man who answers when he’s ready. I married that.
My mother never liked it. She liked the bill paid and the cards sent and her name on the prayer list at church. When I was eleven my dad came home with a used motorcycle and she made him sell it before supper. “I know exactly what those men are,” she said. I thought she meant from the news.
She never came on a Thursday. Not once. Thursdays the lot filled up.
Her second visit was the ninth of July, a Wednesday. Amara was bored out of her head and went digging in her grandmother’s purse for gum the way she’d done since she could walk. She came up with the wallet instead, and a photo slid out of the clear sleeve onto the blanket.
A boy in a Little League cap, holding a glove up by his face.
“Who’s this?” Amara said.
My mother took it out of her hand so fast the corner tore.
“Nobody,” she said. “A boy from church.”
I was at the window with the doctor’s printouts and I didn’t look up for more than a second. I remember the torn corner because it landed on the blanket and Amara ate it, or tried to.
Derek was in the recliner. He stood up. Then he sat back down.
When she left that afternoon he walked her to the elevator, which he had never done. I thought he was being nice.
Now she stood at the door with that same purse, and Derek was looking at it the way he’d looked at it in July.
July tenth
My mother left without saying goodbye to Amara. She’d never done that either.
Margo caught me in the hall outside the room before I could follow her. She had the form folded long in one hand.
“Charge nurse doesn’t want it,” she said. “You should have it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Read the last page,” Margo said, and went back in to the pump.
I stood by the hand sanitizer and unfolded it.
Three pages, her handwriting, the neat slanted print she used for thank-you notes. The first page said Derek had a criminal history. The second page said he had associations. The third page asked that he be kept from the room “for the emotional safety of the patient.”
He has no criminal history. He has a speeding ticket from 2011 that I paid.
At the bottom of page three there was a line for a signature and a line for a date.
She had signed it July tenth.
The day after Amara found the picture. She’d carried it in her purse for two months, folded behind whatever she kept there, and brought it out the week Amara’s counts came back good.
Derek came out and stood next to me. He’s big enough that people in a hospital hallway walk around him like a cart.
“You knew about this,” I said.
“I knew she’d do something,” he said.
“Tell me who he is.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“I told her in the parking garage in July,” he said. “I said it was hers to tell you, not mine. I said I’d give her till the last round.”
“And she brought a form.”
“Cait, I made a kid a promise one time. Let me keep the one.”
He went back in. Through the door I could hear Amara asking him if the armadillo could get a line too.
My phone buzzed against my hip. A text from my mother.
Tell the billing office they’ll hear from me tomorrow.
I put the form in my back pocket and took the stairs down.
Lot C
The visitor lot is Lot C. It runs along the side of the building under the windows of the fourth floor, and the riders back their bikes in along the east curb so they can roll out without anybody having to move.
My mother’s blue Buick was at the far end, nosed in, facing the building.
She was standing at the driver’s door with her keys out.
“I paid fourteen thousand dollars for that man to sit in a chair,” she said before I got to her. “Fourteen thousand and change. Not one more dollar. I’m calling them at eight.”
“Who is Sebastian?”
“Somebody I couldn’t keep.”
“Mom.”
“Get in the car or go back upstairs, Caitlin. I’m not doing this in a parking lot.”
Down the curb, Ivan had been sitting sideways on his bike with a cup of the cafeteria coffee. He set the cup on the seat and walked over with his cap in his hand. He’s sixty-one and he walks like his knees cost money.
“Mrs. Rutherford,” he said.
“Don’t,” my mother said.
He didn’t look at her after that. He looked at me.
“I rode with his dad,” Ivan said. “Thirty years. I carried that boy up the stairs of this building in May of 2000 because the elevator was slow and he didn’t want to wait for it. He was fourteen.”
I did the math standing there. I was twelve in May of 2000. I was in sixth grade in Derby, eight miles from this lot.
“He was on the fourth floor,” Ivan said. “Same as your girl. Derek was a prospect then. Twenty years old. He’s the one who sat with him.”
My mother opened her door, got in, and pulled it shut.
Ivan put his cap back on.
“She was here then too,” he said. “Ask her where she parked.”
Three parking stubs
I opened the passenger door and got in.
The car smelled like her, the lotion she’s worn since I was a kid. She had both hands on the wheel. The engine wasn’t on.
“Get out of my car,” she said.
Her purse was on the console between us. The wallet was sitting on top of it where she’d dropped it, half open.
I picked it up.
“Caitlin. Put that down.”
The photo was back in the clear sleeve, the torn corner turned toward the inside. I slid it out. On the back, in her thank-you-note print, it said Bash, 12.
Behind it, folded flat against the leather, were three small cards.
Visitor parking stubs. This hospital’s name across the top. Lot C.
May 11, 2000. In at 9:04 in the morning. Out at 7:40 at night.
May 12, 2000. In at 8:55. Out at 8:15.
May 13, 2000. In at 8:50. Out at 9:52.
Upstairs they stamp your parking stub at the nurses’ station so you don’t pay. None of the three had a stamp. She’d paid for every hour.
“You were here,” I said.
“I was in the car.”
“For three days.”
“I was in the car,” she said again, and her hands didn’t move from the wheel.
Out the windshield, the fourth-floor windows ran along the side of the building. One of them was Amara’s. From where she was parked you could count them.
Ivan was back on his bike. Two of the other riders had come out of the cafeteria door and stopped where they were.
I held the last stub up between us.
“What happened on the thirteenth?” I said.
The blue Buick
She talked for a long time. She didn’t look at me once.
“I was twenty-six,” she said. “He rode. Everybody he knew rode. I had a baby and a trailer in Haysville and a man who was gone four nights out of seven with those people, and I left. I left with a duffel bag. I was going to come back for the baby when I had a place, and his father got a lawyer before I got a place. The judge looked at me like I was trash. Eleven months old. I signed what they put in front of me.”
She started the car and turned it off again.
“I met your dad the next spring. I made a family that didn’t smell like gasoline. I did that. I didn’t go looking. His father called me one time in fourteen years, Caitlin. One time. To tell me the boy was on the fourth floor.”
“Did you go up?”
“They were all in that hallway,” she said. “Every one of them. In those vests. Laughing. I could hear them from the stairwell. I wasn’t walking past that many of them to stand in the back of a room where I didn’t have a chair.”
She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye like she was pushing something back in.
“He died on the thirteenth. Ten at night. I was already on 54 going home.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have anything that would have helped.
“And then that man,” she said, and pointed through the windshield at the building, “that same man, twenty-six years later, walks into my granddaughter’s room with a marker. And in July he follows me to the garage and tells me my son asked for me. Like I didn’t know. Like I needed a man in a vest to tell me.”
“So you filed a form.”
“I filed a form.”
She took the wallet out of my hand and put the stubs back behind the picture, careful, in the order they went.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said. “I’ll keep paying. I’ll pay this round and the next one and whatever comes after, I don’t care what it is. He goes to that tattoo man tomorrow and has that line covered. Black. Solid. And nobody says that name in front of Amara again.”
The riders at the cafeteria door hadn’t moved. Ivan had his hand flat on the seat of his bike.
“No,” I said.
“Then you can find fourteen thousand on your own.”
I got out of the car. I left the door open.
The billing office is on the first floor past the gift shop. A woman named Kirsten had my file up before I sat down. I asked her to take my mother’s card off the account. She asked if I was sure, twice, and turned the screen so I could see the balance. Fourteen thousand two hundred and six dollars.
I signed a payment plan for four hundred and twelve a month.
When I got back upstairs Derek was in the recliner with Amara asleep against his arm. He looked at my face and didn’t ask.
“She’s not coming up,” he said.
“Then she can sit in Lot C,” I said.
The next Thursday
The payment plan came in the mail on a Tuesday. I taped the first page to the inside of the cabinet over the sink at home, where I’d see it every morning, and that was all I did with it.
The faded line got its black the Friday after. Benjamin went over it so dark it looked new. He didn’t charge for that one either.
Thursday the eleven bikes were backed in along the east curb by four. Ivan brought up a second armadillo, a smaller one, with both eyes on straight. Amara said it looked wrong.
Round sixty-two ran a little after five.
When the bag was done Amara held out her hand and I put the purple marker in it and kept the cap.
“Lower,” she said.
Derek knelt on the tile.
She drew her line under the last bunch, straighter this time, and looked at it a while. Then she reached up under his arm to the black line at the top and went over it in purple, slow, the whole length.
“So he knows we’re still counting,” she said.
Derek didn’t say anything. He kept his arm up.
I went to the window.
At the far end of Lot C, nosed in, facing the building, was a blue Buick with the engine running.
I put the cap in my pocket and took the stairs down. I knocked on her glass.
She rolled it down two inches.
“Fourth floor,” I said. “Room four-nineteen. Bring the picture.”
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who’s been sitting in a parking lot a long time about someone upstairs.
For more family secrets and unexpected acts of courage, read the boy whose coffee can held a name from the past and the tape that revealed where the real will was hidden. There’s also the old rider’s daughter-in-law, who carried his wallet for fourteen months.
