The doctor would come through the door soon, I knew, and tell me that Lizzy was drinking a bit of broth, that she was tired and ready to go home. He might ask me if the parents had been notified, or if it wasn’t easier for me to take her back, drop her at Vermont Acres. The trip to the hospital wouldn’t amount to anything more than an outing. The brain, with its folds and wrinkles, its inscrutable network, as heavy as granite,
was resilient. Lizzy hadn’t been missing for more than a heartbeat. It had seemed a long time, to be sure, but it probably hadn’t been more than a minute or two. Everything would be fine; I was sure it would be fine. The rescue squad and the emergency room would cost a fortune, but we would pay. Maybe Howard could ask his mother in just the right way, to lend us the money. Nellie was unpredictable at best, but if Howard could make her think something was her own idea she was often only too happy to write a generous check. We could have the hospital bill paid by the end of the month. Lizzy, understandably, wouldn’t want to come over to our house for a while. We couldn’t very well put a fence around the pond, so it was for the best if she stayed at home. Next year she would be able to follow directions and learn to swim enough to paddle, and blow bubbles under water.
I ducked, head to my knees, because I could hear someone running down the ramp in the section that had not yet been carpeted. Theresa’s white sandals with the small heels made a bright clacking noise. She and Dan were pounding down the ramp. When they hit the carpet the sound stopped. There wasn’t a trace for a minute. As they advanced I could hear the whisper of their exertion, and as they came closer I could make out the anguish in their breathlessness. They tore past me, to the nurse who was waiting to take them through the stainless-steel doors of the emergency room. The doors swung behind them and then banged and vibrated and glinted, catching the light from the ceiling. In the flickering steel I could see Lizzy’s pink-and-white seersucker bottom bobbing in the sunlight. I began to pray, without thinking, without realizing. I was doubled over, my clenched hands to my cheeks, my eyes shut tight, knowing by some unexercised impulse how to assume a beseeching posture. Although I had had very little practice, the prayer, as crude as an old stick, was surely the genuine article. I could feel the words, feel them crawling on their hands and knees through my hollow bones, clamoring and shouting.
As for religion, I was dimly aware that I had no more tools than a child, and in addition I had the obstruction of skepticism. And yet there was the gaunt old man with a white, flowing beard and soft, blue, one-hundred-percent cotton robes, the kind that has been professionally distressed, draped around his shoulders. Behind my closed eyes He was holding a staff and looking down upon me with His brows furrowed. He
pointed his long index finger to Lizzy alive. Look, he seemed to be saying, Look at her playing in the grass, rising and falling, fluttering and clapping.
She was just beginning to speak in short sentences. She was at the juncture in her babyhood when it was possible she knew everything worth knowing. She understood the texture of her family; she understood territory and rage and love, although she couldn’t say much more than
ball
and
moo, I want, pretty girl
, and
bad dog
. As her language shaped her experience and limited her ideas, she would probably lose most of her wisdom for a time. Watching my own children grow had reinforced for me the notion of Wordsworth’s, that a child’s knowledge of infinity escapes him as the years pass, perhaps, I thought, through a little pinprick at the nape of their necks. Lizzy, at two, was on the brink, between stations. It was tempting to think that if only they could speak, infants could take us back to their beginning, to the force of their becoming; they could tell us about patience, about waiting and waiting in the dark.
When I heard the word “Alice,” it took me a minute to receive it, to understand, to jerk up. I stumbled into Theresa’s midriff. She had her jaw set in such a way that I recovered myself without embracing her. “What?” I cried. Her curls were plastered to her forehead in circles and her glasses were teetering at the end of her nose. She looked, with her feet far apart, her knees slightly bent, and her splayed hands at chest level, as if she was bracing herself, waiting for some great weight to be hurled in her direction. I stood six inches away, flapping my arms at my side.
“She’s breathing about ten respirations a minute,” she said. “It’s slow. Dr. Hildebrand from Children’s Hospital just happened to be visiting this morning and he recommends keeping her here. He says he doesn’t know what sort of”—she looked up into the neon Exit sign—“brain activity there is, but the next few hours will—”
She was speaking as if we always met each other and began comparing the children’s oxygen intake. Our small-town hospital was civilized, a place where babies were carried full term and then born, where prostates were mended, and tonsils removed only when necessary. Children didn’t go brain dead in the newly remodeled facility with track lighting and carpet on the walls.
Of all things I blurted, “We were having a chaotic morning. Emma
was on the toilet screaming, and I thought Lizzy had gone right into the living room. I—I was in the bathroom for just a minute, and when I came out and looked around she wasn’t there.”
“I told Lizzy you were going to take her swimming, that you were going to the pond.” She pushed her glasses up and held the bridge to her nose. In a high, thin voice she said, “I told her she was a good swimmer.”
Now was the moment for me to prove my valor and goodness. Theresa had turned her back and was covering her face, protecting her skin from the scratchy upholstery. I wanted to hold her somehow, and then say just the thing, so that she would look back years from now at that desperate time in the hospital and remember my line. Four or five words that had made all the difference; five words which demonstrated remarkable insight. When Lizzy was well Theresa might ask me how I had known, how I had been able to be wise at a time like that.
I put my cold hand on her shoulder. “It will be fine,” wouldn’t do, because there was no telling. Her back was rising and falling fitfully. To steady myself, I pictured Howard’s size-thirteen rubber boots with the buckles jangling. When Theresa sat up I was going to plow in, take her in my arms. I waited, with my hand on her. I waited until an enormous woman, dark, glowering like a bull, went to the reception desk and beat on the little service bell. Robbie MacKessy’s mother had gone without my noticing. The newcomer ripped open a family-size foil bag of corn chips and started eating them. It is probably not possible to eat corn chips quietly, but she certainly made no attempt to be discreet. “Let’s …” Theresa began, wiping her face with her tissue and walking away toward the lobby.
There was art on the wall, as well as carpet. There was a marble fountain that began in the mezzanine and trickled down a path like a staircase, with ferns on either side. Theresa and I had taken a tour together at the hospital open house, after the renovation. We had studied the renderings, made by local artists, one after the next: the murky police station, Dan’s own Dairy Shrine, the Kiwanis lodge, the old schoolhouse, several churches, and the first freestanding Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in a strip mall in the state. We had been rude and arrogant, secure in our good health and superior knowledge. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might someday feel culpable even for a thing as seemingly insignificant
as passing judgment on local art. In my life I had felt stunned before; I have known how the paintings in a room, the dishes on the shelf, the peaches on the table, how everything comes into relief and looks clear, sharp, against your own emptiness. When we got on the elevator we stood side by side staring at the numbers on the digital panel, as if we expected to read something besides 1 and 2 and 3, as if we expected a truth to be divulged in midair. I took a deep breath and smelled the cucumber soap Theresa ordered by the pallet from a company in St. Louis. It was such a familiar smell, a fragrance that evoked not a hospital elevator, but home, the children, mornings at coffee.
“Am I allowed here?” I whispered, tagging behind her through the doors of the intensive care unit. She didn’t hear me. She had wanted to find me, to tell me and show me, so it made sense for me to follow; it was what she meant. There was ringing and buzzing and beeping coming from every door down the hall. Dan was in room 309, at the far end of the bed, and Reverend Nabor, from the Presbyterian Church in town, was at the foot, his hands folded, his head bowed. Lizzy’s little body was there too, after all, underneath a tangle of blue tubing. The machines supporting her were hissing and clicking, the goods running up her nose and down her throat, into the veins in her arms. She’ll be fine, I said to myself again. The doctor from Milwaukee was an expert and medical technology sublime. There will be a burst of smoke, dense, thick smoke—the machine will make it—and when it clears Lizzy will be whole, awake, unencumbered, looking at our pained faces with surprise.
I’m sure it sounds strange at best, and hardhearted at worst, but I found myself at the side of the bed, concentrating all of what was abject fear into the straightforward loathing of the good Reverend Joseph Nabor. I thought I heard him say something about rain upon the earth, sending waters upon the fields. He came to Theresa then with his hairy hands outstretched, palms down, like a sleepwalker. He took hold of her arms. It was common knowledge that he himself was continuously in mortal peril, that great bearded man who had such acute asthma he had trouble getting through his sermon without the aid of a nebulizer. He spoke so softly I couldn’t hear his words, but I could feel what he was saying from the tilt of his head, a ministerial tilt, a tilt which was supposed to convey both humility and authority. Theresa was a Catholic, for God’s
sake. She didn’t need a Protestant with asthma to lead her through an unfamiliar prayer.
Dan had his eyes fixed on Lizzy’s face. He was stroking a small patch on her calf, the one place on her body that wasn’t taken up with tubing, the one place he was allowed to touch.
SIT UP, LIZZY. I clapped my hand over my mouth. I wasn’t sure if I had shouted or if the noise was inside my head. No one looked at me and still I didn’t know if it was their failure to register the sound or my inability to make the noise. I didn’t know if I should stand or sit, stay or leave, wait with my eyes closed or open, offer a word, hold still, or move. I wanted to shout at Dan, too. SAY SOMETHING, DAN, OLD MAN. TALK TO ME. I stared at the floor, at the tiles, because Lizzy now looked nothing like herself.
When the Reverend finished with Theresa he came to me. He was twenty-eight years old, just out of school. I didn’t like him, didn’t want to take his outstretched hand. He was acting a part, putting on airs he hadn’t earned, wearing a solemnity beyond his years. He had privately tried to negotiate a land deal with the McDonald Corporation when he first came to Prairie Center several months before. He had proposed selling a wooded area along the highway, part of the fifteen acres behind the church cemetery, for a restaurant and playland. We had stumbled into a prayer about waters upon the fields because it was the only passage he had memorized at seminary, or else he had come directly from a meeting on drought relief and it was fresh in his mind. I could see that he was going to try to comfort me by leading me through a few Bible verses. “You will be in need of the Lord’s help,” he declared.
I’m afraid I had a momentary and reckless urge to laugh, to belt out, “You can say that again, Joe.” I withdrew my hand and turned to the bed to once more find Lizzy, the Lizzy who would soon be well. The tubes were flooding her with nourishment: air and waters that might possibly, with some assistance from the supernatural, convey Lizzy herself, what was spirit and potential, back into the heart and brain.
Reverend Nabor took me firmly by the elbow and led me away. I thanked him and sat down in the lounge chair outside the intensive care unit. Right away I put my head in my hands and prayed. I would pray all day and all night: I would pray for as long as it took, and after it was over
as well. I would become a devout follower of Reverend Nabor, waiting in the wings to take over the readings when he became short of breath.
I prayed for the rest of the day, with only one lapse, one short length of time when my mind wandered. I implored the old man, Lord God. I said Please and Please and Please, like a child who isn’t disciplined enough to stop asking. It was all I could think to say, begging He who I hadn’t until that very morning considered, much less believed in His amazing powers. I was saying Please when I remembered the fortune cookie I’d gotten two weeks before, at the Chinese restaurant in Blackwell. I had pulled the strip of paper from the inside of the cookie and read, “Happiness is illusion. Pain is reality.”
I remembered saying to Howard, “This is dessert?” His fortune said, “We come only to sleep, only to dream.” I protested then, saying that I should have gotten his fortune. I told him that I’d been having dreams about being one of his sixty beautiful Golden Guernseys with a big wet brown nose, dewy eyes, and that he of course patted my rump with a special twang.
“It’s hard to imagine what you’d be like as a cow,” Howard had said, slowly, thoughtfully. “What part of your personality is most cowlike. You might be too skittery. I might have to ship you—”
“You wouldn’t ship me! You wouldn’t.”
“Okay, all right, I wouldn’t. You’re right.”
We were celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, killing our birds with one stone. Howard noted matter-of-factly that the chunks of beef, water chestnuts, and pea pods tasted as if they had been marinated in bath water. The Chinese husband and wife cook and waitress team were so happy to have customers we already felt guilty for not ever coming back. Howard had combed his thick black hair for possibly the first time since our fifth anniversary. We were the only diners in the restaurant and I felt sure I could detect romance. I imagined a romance meter maid coming along in her narrow little cart, her white wand shooting out to mark our legs with yellow chalk. We were well within the bounds of adequate feeling for a married couple of six years.