Seasons

By Mary Laufer

            The nurse’s hands are cool on my arm, a stranger touching me, but her touch is not like a stranger’s; it’s more like my mother’s. She rubs saturated cotton on the inside of my elbow and the strong smell of iodine looms over us. I feel the prick of the needle, hold my breath, and look up at the dots on the ceiling.

            My worst fear is that the blood will start squirting out of my vein and the nurse won’t be able to control it. I remember my first aid instructor saying that a person can bleed to death in less than a minute.

            “It takes about ten minutes to fill the bag,” the nurse says. She places a rubber ball in the palm of my hand. “You have a good view, don’t you?”

            From down here all I can see are the tops of trees-- bare branches--and cumulus clouds moving slowly over them. Sometimes with my son I see animals in the shapes of clouds, bears and elephants, but I don’t see any animals today.

            I squeeze the rubber ball and then release it.

            The man lying across from me has one shirtsleeve rolled up. There’s a tube running down from his arm. It leads to a clear bag that is clamped to a rod below the cot. The bag is almost filled with his dark blood.

            That is how I must look, like someone lying in a hospital bed. I close my eyes, unable to watch my own blood flowing out through the tube.  I imagine my bag of blood hanging from an IV pole, my blood trickling into someone else’s arm.  It’s a child, a boy, and my good blood is mixing with his sick blood. His little heart is pumping my blood.

            I squeeze the rubber ball and then release it.

            “Have you ever had malaria?” the nurse had asked me, although I’d already checked the boxes on the form.

            “No.”

            “Convulsions, seizures, or fainting spells?”

            “No.”

            “In the past six months been exposed to anyone with yellow jaundice, hepatitis, or on a kidney machine?”

            I hesitated after she said “kidney machine” and she looked up from the paper. I shook my head. The rest of the questions were easy to answer. “I’m very healthy,” I said.

            I squeeze the rubber ball and then release it.

            There is a bug crawling up the window. A ladybug. She unfolds her wings and flutters a little but then continues to crawl. The ladybug surprises me. Spring is on its way already.

            “Do the weeks go by so fast for you?” I’d asked my father once.

            “Weeks?” he’d said. “When you get my age, it’s the seasons.”

            I must be getting older; it’s the seasons for me now. Leaves bud, bloom and fall and I’m too busy to notice exactly when any of it begins or ends. Lying here, I stare out the window like my son. How much slower time must pass for him, how long the wait between Christmas and Easter must be.  For a moment I’m his age, kneeling on the brown couch in my parents’ living room, chin in my hands. I’m looking through the front window and waiting for the grass to turn green and the breeze to be warm again. I’m watching the clouds.

            When I was five, there weren’t animals in the clouds. Heaven was up there. I used to think a lot about Heaven in the spring. In spring, Jesus had risen and my brother had died. In spring every year, my mother remembered and cried.

            “I’m never going to die,” I would tell myself, feeling the pounding of my heartbeat.

            I squeeze the rubber ball and then release it.

            The man across from me stands and I see the bright blue tape the nurse wrapped around the crook of his arm. A petite volunteer in a smock escorts him to the table with cookies and juice. If he were to faint, she wouldn’t be able to catch him; he’s a big man like my father. I remember my father coming home from work with a small bandage on his arm. He disappeared into the bedroom and took a nap before dinner.

            I squeeze the rubber ball and then release it.

            The nurse returns and shakes my bag. I can’t see the blood, but I can hear it. Shake, shake. I think of my blood jiggling around in the bloodmobile that I’d walked by in the church parking lot. Somebody, somewhere, another B negative will have my blood. The same blood that streams down my wet legs after shaving. The blood that comes every month because I’m not pregnant. The very essence of me.

            I squeeze the rubber ball and then release it.

            “Are you one of Bruce’s girls?” a woman in the office asked me when I applied for a cashier job at the supermarket. She knew about my brother. She said that when Michael was in the hospital, her husband tried to give him blood. “It was the wrong type,” she said, looking down at the floor.

            I was shocked to find out that Michael had blood transfusions before he died. The doctors had even put him on dialysis. My parents told me only that his kidneys stopped working. Their eyes always filled with so much pain when Michael’s name was mentioned, and I learned not to ask for details.

            I squeeze the rubber ball and then release it.

             In my wallet I carry a newspaper picture of my father. The caption underneath says “Ten Gallon Blood Donor.” Ten whole gallons! That’s ten plastic milk jugs, a full tank of gas. My father now becomes that man I never met, offering his blood to my brother, trying to help him live through the spring.

            I squeeze the rubber ball and then release it.

            The tree branches are swaying, the clouds are moving, spring is coming! I shut my eyes again and drift off to sleep. But I don’t dream of spring; I dream of blood.  Fake blood and mortician’s wax on the simulation team, sprawled on the floor in a dark classroom, my first aid instructor yelling, “Apply pressure. Direct pressure!”  Blood hosed off of Route 78 along with shards of glass after a head-on collision, an ambulance speeding toward Mercy Hospital. Monsignor Dempsey at Sunday Mass holding the chalice of wine into the air and saying, “This is my blood, which is given up to you.”  My son demanding a Band-Aid for a scrape, his shriek, “It’s BLEEDING!!” And the child in me still kneeling on the brown couch, counting the beats of my heart with a hand over my chest and wondering where my kidneys are.

            I wake up as the nurse is removing the needle, but I won’t look toward the bag of blood. Instead, I search for the ladybug. She has flown off the window and I’ve lost her in the dots on the ceiling, a million ladybugs now.

            The nurse raises my arm and tells me to hold a square of white gauze tightly over the puncture. I turn my head in order to follow her directions and that’s when I see it—my bulging bag of blood. The nurse glances at her watch and then writes on the bag. All I can think is that it must feel warm to her cool hands.