—

    Nana couldn’t decide on a school. He would often talk through his pro/cons list with me while our mother was at work. He wanted to stay in the South but he didn’t want to feel like he had barely left home. He wanted to go pro eventually, but he also wanted to have a good, normal college experience.

“Maybe you should call Daddy and see what he thinks,” I said.

Nana glared at me. The Chin Chin Man had recently called to tell us that he was remarrying, and since then Nana had stopped talking to him. It hadn’t occurred to either of us that he and my mother had gotten divorced. He was, until that day, our long-distance father, her long-distance husband. Now who would he be?

On the days when he called, which were fewer and further between, my mother would pass the phone to me and I would spend my requisite two minutes making small talk about the weather and school, until the Chin Chin Man asked if I would put Nana on the line.

“He has basketball,” I would say, as Nana stared at me, furiously shaking his head. After I hung up the phone, I would wait for our mother to chastise me for lying or Nana for refusing to talk, but she never did.

She had to work the day of Nana’s game against Ridgewood High. It wasn’t a big game. Ridgewood was ranked second to last in the state, and everyone was expecting an easy win for Nana’s team.

I made a quick snack for myself and then walked to the game. The stands were nearly empty and so I chose a seat in the middle and pulled out my homework. Nana and his teammates did their warm-ups, and occasionally he and I would make eye contact and shoot each other silly faces.

    The first half of the game went as expected. Ridgewood was down fifteen and Nana’s team was taking it pretty easy, treating the game like it was practice. I finished my math homework right around when the buzzer rang for halftime. I waved at Nana as he and his team went to the locker room, and then I picked up my science homework.

I was in the fourth grade, and our science unit for that month was on the heart. For homework, we were to draw a picture of the human heart with all its ventricles and valves and pulmonary veins. While I enjoyed science, I was a horrible artist. I had brought along my pack of colored pencils and my textbook. I spread them out on the bleachers next to me and began to draw, staring from my blank sheet of paper to the example heart in my book. I started with the pulmonary veins, then the inferior vena cava. I messed up the right ventricle and started to erase, just as the second half of the game kicked off. I got frustrated with myself easily, even in those days, whenever I felt I wasn’t getting something exactly right. That frustration sometimes led to quitting, but something about being at Nana’s game, watching him and his teammates win so effortlessly, made me feel like I could draw the perfect heart if only I stuck with it.

I was staring at my heart when I heard a loud shout. I couldn’t see what happened at first, but then I spotted Nana on the ground, hugging his knee to his chest and motioning toward his ankle. I rushed down to the court and paced, unsure of how to make myself useful. The medic came onto the court and started asking Nana some questions, but I couldn’t hear anything. Finally, they decided to take him to the emergency room.

I rode with him in the back of the ambulance. We weren’t a family who held hands, but we were a family who prayed. I bowed my head and whispered my prayers as Nana stared blankly at the ceiling.

Our mother met us at the hospital. I didn’t dare ask who was watching Mrs. Palmer, but I remember being as worried about my mother being able to keep her job as I was about Nana. He was still in pain but attempting to be stoic about it. He looked more annoyed than anything else, no doubt already thinking about the games he would have to miss, the time he would have to take off.

    “Nana,” the doctor said when he came into the room. “I’m a big, big fan. My wife and I saw you in the game against Hoover, and you were just on fire.” He looked too young to be a doctor, and he had that thick, slow drawl some southerners have, as though each word has to wade through molasses before it can leave the mouth. Both my mother and I kept looking at him with no small amount of distrust.

“Thank you, sir,” Nana said.

“The good news is nothing’s broken. Bad news is you’ve torn some ligaments in your ankle. Now there’s not much we can do for that area, other than have you rest it and ice it. Should heal up on its own. I’ll prescribe you some OxyContin for the pain and then have you follow up with your primary care doctor in a few weeks to see how it’s coming along. We’ll get you back out on the court in no time, all right?”

He didn’t wait for any of us to speak. He just got up and left the room. A nurse came in behind him with some aftercare instructions, and the three of us made our way to the car. I don’t really remember much else from that day. I don’t remember going to the pharmacy to pick up the pills. I don’t remember if Nana got crutches or a brace, if he spent the rest of the day sprawled out in our living room with his foot elevated, eating ice cream while our mother waited on him as though he were a king. Maybe all of those things happened; maybe none. It was a bad day, but the nature of its badness was utterly ordinary, just regular old shit luck. Ordinary is how I’d always thought of us, our foursome that had turned into a trio. Regular, even if we stuck out like sore thumbs in our tiny corner of Alabama. I wish now, though, that I could remember every detail of that day, because then maybe I could pinpoint the exact moment we shifted away from ordinary.

28

I was getting too attached to the mouse with the limp. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for it every time it hobbled toward that lever, ready for punishment and pleasure. I watched its little tongue poke out, lapping up the Ensure. I watched it shake off the foot-shocks, then go back for more.

“Have you ever tried Ensure?” I asked Han one day at the lab. After nearly a year of working together, we had finally broken the ice. The fire-hydrant-red, telltale discomfort of his ears had become a thing of the past.

He laughed. “Do I look like an old lady or a mouse to you?”

“I think I’m going to buy some,” I said.

“You’re joking.”

“Aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

He shook his head, but I’d made up my mind. I left the lab and drove to the nearest Safeway. I bought two of the original, one in chocolate and one in butter pecan just for the novelty of it. I had stopped coming to this Safeway because of the cashier I wanted to sleep with, but I faced her boldly, Ensure in hand. I gave her a look that I hoped said I’m trying to take control of my own health. For a brief second I imagined her thinking, What a strong woman, imagined her getting turned on by my unlikely but empowered choice of beverage and then sneaking me into the storage room to show me more. Instead, she didn’t even make eye contact.

    Afterward, I speeded all the way back to the lab. There were often cops patrolling this little patch of road for speeders, but my Stanford Medical School bumper sticker had gotten me out of at least one ticket. The policeman that day had collected my license and registration, all while making small talk.

“What do you study?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your bumper sticker. What kind of doctor are you?”

I didn’t bother correcting him. Instead I said, “I’m a neurosurgeon.”

He whistled and handed me back my things. “You must be real smart,” he said. “You should protect that brain of yours. Go slower next time.”

* * *

—

Han started laughing the second he saw me walk in with the bottles.

“You sure I can’t tempt you?” I asked. “Don’t you want to know what all the fuss is about?”

“You’re pretty weird,” Han said, as though this was just then occurring to him for the first time, and then he shrugged, resigned himself to my strangeness and the experiment. “You know just as well as I do that even after we drink this, we still won’t understand what the fuss is about. We’re not mice. We can’t get addicted to this stuff.”

He was right, of course. I wasn’t expecting to get high from drinking fortified chocolate milk. I wasn’t really expecting anything other than a little fun and, silly as it was, a base point from which I could relate to that limping mouse who had caught my attention.

    I shook the bottle of chocolate and then cracked it open. I gulped down some of it and then handed it to Han, who took a couple of sips.

“Not bad,” he said, and then, seeing the look on my face, “What’s wrong, Gifty?”

I swallowed another sip of Ensure. Han was right. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. “My brother was addicted to opioids,” I said. “He died of an overdose.”

* * *