That evening she scoured the floors and dryers at nearby Laundromats for her stepfather’s lost sock and combed roadsides near his empty apartment. She stole plastic baggies from the dog park to pick up socks she found in gutters and parking lots without touching them. Bagged single tube socks, black gold toes and pompomed tennis anklets piled up in her hotel room corner. At the hospital, she bought a burger and checked the lost-and-found before riding the elevator to Neuroscience.
She paused at the door of her stepfather’s room. “Hey, Wade.”
Interns and residents hovered at the foot of her stepfather’s bed. They concentrated on the doctor’s hands as he replaced a bandage. Even with white gauze dividing his head into shaved and unshaved hemispheres, Wade looked more himself. The bruises from banging his head on his coffee table during the seizure had begun to fade. And his face had lost that pinched look, like the world had been yelling at him through an ear trumpet.
“Your incision’s healing quickly,” the doctor said. “If the scan’s clear, you’ll be released today.”
Underlings shuffled to the back of the room to let the doctor pass.
“But the sock,” her stepfather said. “You put the sock back, right?”
The doctor paused. “What sock?”
“The sock I keep my brain in. In my head.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows.
“As long as his brain’s in the sock, he can’t hear the voices,” she said. Without the sock he’d yell at his neighbors again. Social Services would kick him out of his apartment.
The doctor wrapped his stethoscope’s black tube around his hand.
She said, “He thinks you took it off to take out the tumor.”
The doctor looked at Wade. “Mr. Griggs, there was no sock.” He turned to the resident with her stepfather’s file. “Make sure he gets a psych consult before leaving the hospital.”
She pulled a mauve visitor’s chair to her stepfather’s bedside and handed him the paper-wrapped burger. “Nothing but ketchup and mayo.” She waited for the staff to file from the room before taking an argyle from her purse.
“Wade, is this it?”
“No,” he said. “Mine’s plain. No pattern and fuzzier.” He bit into the burger. “Will your mother come today?”
“No. She said she was done with you. Remember?”
She could hear her mother as clear as if they were still on the phone. “I know he’s my husband, but I told him what would happen if he quit his meds again.” Ice cubes clinked over the telephone wire. Sweet tea with a little something to steady her nerves. “His social worker made it sound worse than usual.” She pressed her forehead against her refrigerator’s cool white door. “You’ve got to go, Patty. It’s up to you this time.”
Patty held up a man’s mid-calf brown sock with a hole in the toe. “How about this one?”
“No,” Wade said. “No. Mine was hand-knit just for me.” He smiled with his mouth full of burger. “This is good. Did you get fries?” He watched her as he chewed. The argyle in her left hand, the brown sock in her right. “The doctor’s wrong, you know. It won’t help if they change my meds. Nothing will help without the sock.”
BB
