I stood as soon as Cora left and turned to Tim.
“I need to get back to Benny,” I said.
“Of course,” he said, opening and holding the door for me. Detective Hudson followed us out, tension emanating from him like heat off a sunburn, keeping me several steps ahead of him with its subtle, insistent push.
It didn’t mean he wasn’t a good cop; I’d been around enough of them to know that. And I should have been thankful for his intensity; he was the kind of cop I knew would stop at nothing to figure out what happened to Benny. He wouldn’t care who he offended to accomplish that—even me.
The three of us made our way back down to the same waiting room we’d used before. There were still plenty of cops milling about, uniforms and plainclothes, and they all moved around me at a respectful distance.
Tim led me over to an unoccupied corner while Detective Hudson huddled with two other men and went over the scant notes he’d made in Cora’s room.
“You want some coffee or something?” Tim asked.
I nodded, closing my eyes as I leaned my head back against the wall, letting the drone of the TV set high in the corner and the cops talking in hushed tones around me fade into white noise as I fantasized about what would happen when the surgeon came to speak to me.
There would be blood spattered across his . . . no, I made him a her, hair tucked up under a cap that she would wearily swipe off her head as she approached. But she would smile at me, maybe even give a little wink—maybe that was too much—maybe a nod before she sat down and put her hand on my arm, a hand that had so recently been saving my husband’s life, a hand I would feel energy from, would feel Benny seeping into me from.
But that wasn’t how it happened at all.
Instead, after I drank the bitter coffee Tim brought, I sought out the cool refuge of the bathroom, and when I returned, cops were dispersing and a man I hadn’t seen before was waiting for me. Tim was there, too, his face white. Detective Hudson wasn’t in sight.
“Ali,” Tim croaked, reaching out for me.
I knew, of course, knew before they asked me to sit, knew before Tim had gotten my name out, before the neurosurgeon—Dr. Young, a man after all, a man in clean scrubs who did not touch me on the arm, whose hands I didn’t even notice—said the words.
A balloon of fear and grief and disbelief began to expand in my chest, pressing against my heart, compressing my lungs, leaving me so little room for air that it seemed I could only breathe into the base of my throat.
A brain hemorrhage. Tracks from migrating bullet fragments, tiny metal birds winging darkly through his skull, wreaking havoc along the way to their final resting place. Brain dead. Benny was brain dead.
He explained what that meant, as if I did not know.
What I knew was that all of what he was, his jokes, his pet names for me developed over more than twenty-five years together, his knowledge of me, of us, of his child, his sense of wonder and delight in the world . . . gone. All of that, a lifetime of experience and love and fights and sex . . . all of it just gone, that fast.
There was so much unfairness in it, so much so substantively wrong with it, that I felt certain that it was a mistake, or even temporary. This would pass. Brain dead, perhaps meaning just a rest, a brain exhaustion, not just gone.
Gone.
I wanted it back.
I wanted it all back.
All the time that was being sucked from me, I wanted it back. I wanted moments, at the least, the very least. It couldn’t possibly work out, in a fair world, in a
karmic
world, the world that I believed in, that it could be taken away without warning.
No, not even warning. I could accept the idea of life ending without warning; it happened every day. But surely there was some force at work that gave you those few moments that you could look back on with relief and say,
Yes, right then, we had that moment and that was the universe allowing us that
, so you could hold on to it.
But no.
No.
Instead, all the things we might have wanted to say would not be said.
We were unfinished.
And I knew this happened to people every day, but not to me. Not to
me
. Not to
Benny
. This was not how our lives were going to go.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He’s been moved to a room. He’s on a ventilator.”
“Why?”
“A neurologist will conduct tests in order to corroborate the diagnosis of brain death.”
Tim, who had been breathing deeply beside me and clutching my hand harder than I was clutching his, finally spoke, his voice low and pained. “Wait, is there a question? I mean, could you be wrong? Could he wake up?”
The surgeon winced slightly when Tim said
wake up
. I imagined he got the question a lot. He shook his head.
“No. It’s hospital procedure, and one I agree with. But in this particular case, it’s a formality. I’m sorry, Mrs. Gutierrez. We did what we could, but there was simply too much damage. If it’s any consolation, there would have been very little pain for him.”
I nodded. I didn’t even know why. There was no consolation. It was simply the only movement I was capable of. Tim dropped his chin to his chest and made a sound deep in his throat, a cross between a growl and a groan.
“Can I . . . can I see him?” I asked.
“Of course. You can stay with him as long as you like.”
But that was patently untrue, wasn’t it?
He stood, and Tim followed suit, but I stayed in my chair. I didn’t trust my legs to hold me, and I didn’t trust my heart to pump enough blood to keep me from passing out, so I stared at the floor while Tim got the room number and shook hands. I realized with a shock that Tim was now my proxy husband. He was performing all the duties that Benny would have.
Dr. Young squatted in front of me, his shirt riding up his thighs as he did so. He must have changed into a clean top before coming to tell me, because now I could see the blood that I had been morbidly looking for earlier on his pants and on his shoes. I wanted to touch it, to run my hands across the front of his pants in a grotesque imitation of foreplay, to take back some part of my husband that was going to be washed away forever later on that night.
And now he did touch me, his hands cooler than I expected. I would have thought they’d be hot, burning up with anxiety over the work he’d just performed, the task of telling the wife.
“Mrs. Gutierrez,” he said, trying to catch my eye. I raised my gaze from his pants obediently. “I’ll be here. If you want to talk to me about anything, if you have questions. You can have the nurse page me, and I’ll be there as quickly as I can, okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered. He nodded and stood, his shirt falling back down over the bloodied pants. Tim held his hand out to me.
“Are you ready?” he asked. “Or do you want to wait?”
I shook my head. Why would I want to be anywhere but beside Benny? I took his hand and we walked through a silent gauntlet of cops outside the waiting room. Some were already crying; most simply looked shocked, or angry. There were murmured condolences, and some reached out to touch me, but I heard nothing, felt nothing.
As we got onto the elevator my cell phone rang, and that was when my legs decided to get wobbly. I grabbed the elevator rail as the doors slid shut, and Tim lunged to catch me as my phone continued to ring. I got myself stabilized and scrambled for the phone, afraid to answer, afraid not to.
“You want me to?” Tim asked, gesturing at the phone as I checked the Caller ID, knowing, for the first time, that it wouldn’t be Benny.
It was Cora. I shook my head and picked up the phone.
“Hey,” I said, my voice already breaking a little just knowing what was coming.
“We’ve got her,” she said. “We’re on our way. Do you want some dinner, you want us to go through a drive-through?”
“No,” I said.
“You sure?” She dropped her voice down low. “Everything going okay?”
“No. No, not at all. But don’t—just get her here.”
She was silent for a moment. “Ali?”
That was what childhood friends could do. There was a huge question in the uttering of my name, and I knew what it was. And she would know what my answer meant.
“Yeah.”
I heard her breathing quicken, and then she brightened her voice, and my heart broke in gratitude for her protecting my—our—daughter for as long as she could.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“Call me when you get inside. I’ll come to you.”
“Will do. Love you.”
“I love you, too, Cora. Thank you.”
The elevator doors opened as I hit the off button, and Tim looked at me hard before we stepped out.
“You ready?”
“Yeah,” I said. And I was. I was ready to see Benny. Not ready for anything else. But ready to see him. When we arrived at the closed door, Tim stepped to the side, holding a hand up to the nurse who was rapidly walking down the corridor toward us.
“You go ahead,” he said to me. “I’ll keep everyone out until you let me know it’s okay.”
“Thank you.” I took a deep, hospital-antiseptic breath and pushed the door open.
The room was dim, the harsh overhead lights off and only the lights around the bed on. Benny’s head was wrapped in shockingly white gauze, his face distorted by the ventilator. His left arm and shoulder were similarly wrapped, and as I approached I felt the tears begin, pushing their way up from my throat, a tidal wave behind my eyes. I gasped as if drowning as I sat gingerly on the side of the bed and grabbed his right hand.
There was, of course, no response.
I cried out as I brought his palm to my face, laying his fingers flat across my cheek, pulling them down across my mouth, feeling them curl, lax, back into themselves. I pressed the back of his wrist to my nose, feeling the coarse hairs, breathing him in.
Despite everything, he still smelled like Benny.
Later on, I would not remember the following moments I spent with him. But I know I wailed, I know I implored him to wake, to create something from nothing. And nothing was what remained.
By the time my phone rang again I was curled across his legs, my head resting on his hip, his hand still clutched to my face. I wiped my face on his sheet and answered, my voice dulled.
“Are you here?” I asked.
Her voice was hushed, and I knew she must have walked away from Letty for a moment. “We’re downstairs. What do you want me to do?” The anguish was starting to build in her, too.
“Bring her to the elevators. I’ll be right down.”
I kissed his cheek, letting my lips linger, pressing, imprinting the feel of him on them.
“Okay,” I said, straightening up, replacing my lips with my fingers. “I’m going to go get our baby.”
Tim, Detective Hudson, and three other cops were clustered together outside the door. They fell silent as I appeared. I’m sure they had to have heard me in there.
I didn’t care.
Detective Hudson approached, his eyes red. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
I nodded. “I’m going downstairs to get our daughter,” I said. “We’ll be back up here in a few minutes, and I’d appreciate it if we could get into his room without anyone around.”
“Of course,” he said. “We’ll go down to the end there, and I’ll station someone—”
“I’ll stay,” Tim volunteered. “I’ll stay as long as you need me. And, Ali, Ginny said she’d come down in a second, the moment you want her. She’ll do whatever you need, get you guys food, bring some clothes, anything. Just let me know.”
I nodded.
“And we have the department shri—the psychologist, Dr. Weist, he’s on his way, too,” Detective Hudson began. I held up my hand, desperate to get to Letty.
“Okay, I’ll let you know. I have to get my daughter now.”
“Absolutely,” Tim said, taking control. “Okay, guys, let’s get out of here.”
The elevator moved quickly. I stared at the emergency button. If I were a different person, I would have hit it. Stopped the elevator between floors in a last-ditch desperate effort to prolong this in-between time I had.
There was no sinking in of the fact of Benny’s death. He was there. He looked like Benny under all the paraphernalia.
I wasn’t a stupid woman, I knew what
brain dead
meant, and I wasn’t a woman who had ever had a problem understanding that just because something looked one way didn’t mean it wasn’t another. I had no religious qualms about whether it was his brain or his heart stopping that meant he was dead.
Logically, I understood that Benny was gone.
And emotionally, while in that room, I knew that Benny wasn’t there. Aside from a faint trace of his scent, aside from the feel of his skin and the basic structure under it, Benny was already somewhere else, I could feel that.
But I had no idea how I was going to make our child understand it. Twenty-four hours until more neurological tests would confirm that Benny was gone. What was I supposed to say to Letty about that time? If I felt enough hope for those twenty-four hours that I felt breathless with it, even knowing it was hopeless, then how was I going to prepare her for the disappointment that was sure to come? How would I even live through it, much less help her through it?
And just before the elevator jerked to a stop I wondered, for the first time, what happened after the twenty-four hours was up?
I had no time to follow that disturbing train of thought, because Letty was the first person I saw when the door opened. When we were at the beach with Cora, I had been stunned by how much Letty looked like her, but now I was stunned by how much she looked like Benny. I saw him, alive, everywhere on her.
She moved slowly as I opened my arms to her, tucking herself into me. Not a panicked child, but a worried young woman, and as I held her I knew how I would get through the next twenty-four hours and beyond.