That Very Night

So, hugs all around and blah blah blah. My career as a runaway finished, my mother started our dinner.

She fried hot dogs in a pan and enveloped them in bacon and slices of cheese. As I set the table my sister watched television in the living room, "Bewitched" I think. I carried dishes and flatware, napkins and ketchup. I grabbed three glasses and began to set them out at our places, but one slipped and broke, slicing my left index finger pretty deeply. I screamed. Pam screamed and ran into the kitchen. My mom rushed me to the sink and had me hold it under cold water.

Pam and I cried and cried. I cried because I sincerely thought I was about to lose my finger; the cut was so large and deep I was convinced that one wrong move would send it flying down the drain, lost forever. Pam cried because I was crying and she was probably scared shitless, and more than a little freaked out.

My mother called the neighbor to come and assess the damage. My father had died that year and my mother, though a strong, tough woman at her best, was still unsure about some things. It if were me, I'd've had my daughter at the hospital before the last glass shard hit the floor, but mom, I guess, needed validation that my injury was severe enough to warrant a trip to the ER. (We were no strangers to the ER, and that may have been where her hesitation was born. I had been cursed with frequent and severely painful ear infections so often in the middle of the night that we had become virtual regulars in the Providence waiting room. Once we even had the unexpected surprise of running into my Aunt Sharon and cousin Danny there when he got horrible, gross poison ivy and got to sit together! But the waits were so long and in all the hours spent were way too many.) Our neighbor took one look at my finger, which I was sure was hanging by a mere thread, and sent us straight off to the hospital.

We left him with my sobbing sister and jumped into the car. I cried hysterically all the way there, begging my mom to run red lights, lest my finger decide to give way in the car and the ER staff stuck searching under the seats for the remains. I held a washcloth to my hand and gave up on even peeking at it anymore. I already knew what it looked like underneath - an angry, red gash that threatened to make me a nine-finger for the rest of my life. And my left hand, too!

I don't remember how long we had to wait to be seen, but I do know that when I heard that I was to be given a shot IN THE CUT in order for it to be sutured, I wished that we had never come. Possibly, it was better to lose one's finger entirely than to have a strange doctor stick a needle in your exposed, raw flesh and drag needle and thread through it. Alas, I had no decision to make really, as leaving the hospital with me minus a finger or at the least, leaving it hanging, just wasn't one of the options presented to me. I was pretty much stuck.

I remember the feeling of the thread going through my skin. It felt pretty cool really; no pain, just a distant pulling sensation. They made my mom leave the room, so it was just me and the doc and he was awfully nice. As traumatic as the whole experience was for me, I was most likely his easiest case all night - I only required about five stitches and then I was on my way. My finger had been saved, I was sewn up like the seams my mom fixed on my clothes, and home we headed, back to cold hot dogs and a sister who, hopefully, had finally composed herself.

My hand was bandaged in new bright white gauze and I rested it on a pillow and kept it elevated. Pam and I sat in the den that night watching TV; everything I had missed so desperately that day during my 30 minutes as a nomadic 11-year-old wandering the streets of Oak Park finally fell back into place as I sunk into the warm cushions of the couch. I turned to Pam and said something about my finger and the horrors I had lived through. She had gotten over her initial shock and, I then found out, had gone back to her original opinion of me when I went on the lam.

"That's what you get for running away from home," she said.

Ouch.