Retching. It is a sound far better than any alarm clock shriek. It is as effective as any of your boilerplate emergencies, because it is an emergency—it is an emergency to your carpet and mattress and who knows what else.
It is a magical sound, really. It can wake you from a deep sleep when heard very softly a couple of rooms over, as it did for me this morning. It seems to me I have heard someone call this particular time of day—the time between a reasonable waking hour and a time that is entirely unreasonable—the butt crack of dawn. I have never quite been able to make these words into a picture in my head, but I understood their meaning perfectly as I scurried off the couch.
First Big Dog announced, even before the butt crack of dawn, that he was having some sort of stomach issue and needed to be promptly let out. Alright already, was the rough translation for my groan as I crawled out of bed and let him out, then collapsed onto the couch to wait for him to return and stare at me from the window with the sad eyes of a heartbroken abandoned unloved drama-king dog stuck behind a closed door at such a terrible hour as just before the butt crack of dawn.
I was on the couch, dreaming the dreams of an excessively tired person, when the retching jerked me to attention. It now being the conclusion of my day, I can say with confidence that starting your day out to the sound of retching is a very inauspicious omen.
I scurried from the couch even faster than I would have if I had discovered that the sky was hailing cupcakes, and it would be a terrible thing to let a cupcake fall splat onto the ground with its frosting all smeared about. And indeed, it would be a terrible thing for an eight-year-old boy to have his vomit fall onto every available surface with a splat and get all smeared about. You see, the boy sleeps like a log. He has no idea of the present moment until fully awake. He is the perfect individual to be a giant in a fairytale that some tiny regular sized person must sneak by without waking, because if he were the giant we could be assured of a happy ending due to his really good deep sleeping. The boy can vomit across his entire room, and wake up three hours later like who puked all over my stuff?
But Enough Of This Rambling About Unmentionables. Let’s Fast Forward
After dawn I was cleaning up puke. No exaggeration, I literally had a piece of ginger root taped across my nostrils. Packaging tape worked far better than I expected. It was sometime around then, when there was no way I could touch my phone without first washing my hands about five times in a row, that I got a call from an unrecognized number. I figured someone speaking Mandarin wanted to tell me about something that was probably very important, or perhaps the IRS desperately needed to get in touch with me and if I didn’t press one right then I would face dire consequences. So of course I ignored it.
It wasn’t until later when the same number rang again, and I had already washed my hands more than a dozen times over the period of a few hours—you just can’t be too careful with the norovirus—that in the process of trying to hit the “decline call” button, I hit the “accept” button, which was probably because I was distracted by the thought of those little norovirus particles having a party on the screen. The damage was done, so I picked up the phone with an intrepid “hello?”
“This is a call from the _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ County jail,” and then there was a break in the automated voice for the inmate to state a name, but instead it was a recording of the inmate’s voice in the middle of a sentence.
“[I’m in] the jail and I—”
“If you wish to accept this call—”
I hung up on impulse, because I used to take those sort of calls from all sorts of weirdos when I worked in law. But I knew that voice with the heavy New York accent and the ironically self-assured Sure-I’m-In-Jail-But-Everything-Is-Totally-Fine-Clearly-This-Is-Some-Sort-Of-Clerical-Error-Because-I-Would-Never-Do-Anything-Wrong tone of voice.
It was a friend of mine, but not a close friend. She is a neighbor and I’ve known her vaguely for ten years. I’ve watched her go from a stable and loving mom of a seventeen-year-old to an addicted train wreck in the last year. The latest in the growing list of infractions was her failure to appear for a DUI charge—bond forfeited, license suspended, arrest warrant issued.
So I had to look up the mugshot. It was one of those stupid things you do, akin to rubbernecking a car accident. You don’t want to see, and yet you do want to, because the curiosity is eating away at your commonsense. And as expected, the picture was terrible. She was crying and she looked intoxicated and just an absolute train wreck personified, and it was horrible to look at.
Her family won’t take her calls and she is calling me to pressure them, I’m sure. I’m not answering, but I feel bad. I know more calls are coming. I’m just sitting here on my clean bed typing this with a mixture of gratitude at there being no vomit on my floors, and guilt at the fact that there is nothing I can or will do to help her. And I’ve got the thought of her seventeen-year-old son with his father’s calm, level-headed disposition, and the tight bond he had with his mother a year ago.
I think I will make him a lasagna, or some cinnamon rolls—maybe both. Teenagers like food. Sometimes when there is nothing that can be done, the best thing to do is make lasagna.
And Now I Am Approaching Yet Another Just Before The Butt Crack Of Dawn
I hope that when the sun shows us its nether region tomorrow, it dawns a day of smiling spring flowers, gleaming blue skies, and not a bit of vomitus to be seen.
It might even be cinnamon roll scented. That beats ginger root taped to your nostrils any day of the week.
