Mend the Living (6 page)

H
e knew right away who she was – stunned look, eyes in a tailspin, cheeks bitten from the inside – so he didn’t ask if she was Simon Limbeau’s mother, just held out his hand and nodded his head: Pierre Revol, I’m a doctor in the department, I’m the one who admitted your son this morning, come with me. She walks with her head instinctively down, eyes on the linoleum, without a glance to either side that might slip off to find her child at the back of some dark room, it’s twenty metres to the end of the pale-blue corridor and then an ordinary door with a label in the form of a visitor’s card, and written on it, a name she can’t make out.

This Sunday Revol spurns the family room, which he doesn’t much like, and instead invites Marianne into his office. She stays standing, finally sits on the edge of a chair as he walks around the desk to slide into his seat, chest forward, elbows spread. The more Marianne observes him, the more the other faces she’s seen since her arrival disappear, the woman with the unibrow at the front desk, the young nurse intern in emergency, the doctor with the pink collar – as though they had only spelled each other off until they led her to this face, superimposed one on top of the other until they formed a single one, the face of the man sitting in front of her, ready to speak.

Would you like a coffee? Marianne jumps, nods. Revol gets up, and turning his back to her picks up the coffee pot that she hadn’t seen, pours the coffee into white Styrofoam cups, it steams, his movements are wide and silent, sugar? He’s buying time, arranging his words, she knows this, and she goes along with the tempo, feels the paradoxical tension as time drips out like coffee from the coffee maker while everything else simultaneously screams the urgency of the situation, points to its radical nature, its imminence, and now Marianne has closed her eyes, she drinks, concentrating on the liquid burning her throat, this is how much she dreads the first word of the first sentence – the jaw moving, the lips that open and stretch, the teeth that show, sometimes the tip of the tongue – this sentence saturated with sorrow that she knows is about to be formed; everything in her recoils and defects, her spine presses against the back of the chair – wobbly – her head leans back, she wishes she could get out of here, run to the door and escape, or disappear through a trap door that might suddenly open beneath the legs of her chair, poof! a hole, an oubliette – wishes she could be forgotten herself, yes, and that no one would be able to find her and that she’d never know anything other than Simon’s beating heart – she wishes she could leave this cramped room, this dismal light, and run from the announcement; she’s not brave, no, she writhes inside and zigzags like a grass snake, she would give anything to have someone just reassure her, just lie to her, tell her a story with some suspense, sure, but with an acidulous happy end, she’s shamefully cowardly, but holds firm: every second that passes is another bit of war spoils, every second that goes by stops destiny in its tracks, and as he sees these agitated hands, these legs knotted beneath the chair, these closed and swollen lids smudged with yesterday’s makeup – a coal-grey eyeshadow that she applies with the tip of her finger in a single sweep – the blurred transparency of these irises is touching, a cloudy aquatic jade, and the trembling of her splayed lashes, Revol knows that she understands, knows that she knows, and it’s with infinite gentleness that he consents to stretch out the time that precedes his words, picking up the Venetian paperweight and rolling it in his palm: the ball of glass sparkles under the cold fluorescent light, venous, it rainbows the walls and ceiling, passes over Marianne’s face and she opens her eyes, and that is Revol’s sign that he can begin.

– Your son’s condition is serious.

At the first words uttered – clear timbre, calm cadence – Marianne presses her eyes – dry – into Revol’s own and he looks back at her, steady, even as his phrase sets to swaying, even as it’s being composed, crystal clear without being brutal – semantics of a direct precision,
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woven in with silences, a slowing that weds itself to the unfolding of meaning – slow enough that Marianne can repeat each of the syllables inwardly, inscribe them in herself: during the accident, your son suffered a head injury, the scan shows a serious lesion on the frontal lobe – he brings his hand to his head, at the top of his forehead, illustrating his words – and this trauma caused a cerebral hemorrhage – Simon was in a coma when he arrived at the hospital.

The coffee cools in the cup, Revol drinks slowly and, before him, Marianne stays frozen, a stone statue. The telephone reverberates in the room, one, two, three rings but Revol doesn’t answer, Marianne stares at his face, absorbs every detail – silky white complexion, mauve circles below large transparent grey saucers, heavy eyelids creased like nutshells, a long and turbulent face – and the silence swells, until Revol begins again: I’m worried – his voice surprises her, inexplicably loud, as though its volume had malfunctioned – we’re doing tests at the moment, and the first results are not good – but even though his voice makes an unfamiliar sound in Marianne’s ear and immediately causes her breathing to accelerate, it’s not cloying, doesn’t sound like those disgusting voices that pretend to comfort while they’re pushing you into the charnel house – instead it marks out a place for Marianne, a place and a line.

– He’s in a deep coma.

The seconds that follow open up a space between them, a naked and silent space, and they stay at the edge for a long moment. Marianne Limbeau begins to slowly turn the word “coma” over in her mind while Revol returns to the bleak part of his work; the millefiori still rolls in his palm, smoky and solitary sun, and nothing has ever seemed more violent, more complex than coming to sit beside this woman so they can delve together into this fragile zone of language where death announces itself, so they can go forward into it, together. He says: Simon is not responding to painful stimuli anymore, he’s demonstrating abnormal ocular and vegetative symptoms, in particular an abnormal breathing pattern with early signs of pulmonary congestion, and the initial brain scans are not good – Revol’s sentence is slow, punctuated with pauses for breath, a way of situating his body in the moment, making it present in his speech, a way of turning a clinical statement into an instance of empathy; he speaks as though he were carving some coarse material, and now they hold each other’s gaze, face each other, that’s it, that’s exactly what this is, an absolute faceoff, unflinching, as though speaking and looking at each other were two sides of the same coin, as though it were a matter of facing each other as much as facing that which was happening in one of these hospital rooms.

I want to see Simon – panicked, the voice, the eyes out of control, hands that scatter. I want to see Simon, that’s all she said, while her phone vibrated for the umpteenth time in the bottom of her coat pocket – the neighbour who’s taking care of Lou, Chris’s parents, Johan’s, but still no word from Sean, where is he? She types out a text: call me.

Revol has lifted his head: now, you want to see him now? He casts a quick look at his watch – 12:30 – and answers, calmly, you can’t see him right now, it will be a short wait, he’s undergoing a procedure, but as soon as we’re finished, of course you can see your son. And placing a yellowed piece of paper in front of him, he continues: if you don’t mind, I need to talk to you a little bit about Simon. Talk about Simon. Marianne grows tense. What does that mean, “Talk about Simon?” Does it mean giving information about his body like you’d give information on an application? Marking out the operations he’s had – adenoids, appendicitis, nothing else; the fractures? A broken radius falling off his bike the summer he was ten, that’s all; allergies that affect his daily life? No, none; infections he’s contracted? Golden staph in the summer he was five, which he announced to everyone, enshrouded in the glow of rarity this spectacular name granted him, mononucleosis at sixteen, the kissing disease, the lovers’ disease, he smiled slantways when people teased him, and all that month he wore a pair of strange pyjamas, a combination of Hawaiian shorts and a quilted sweatshirt. Does it mean listing off childhood diseases? Talk about Simon. Images wash over her, Marianne panics: the roseola of a baby in a garter-stitch knit sweater; the chicken pox of a three-year-old, brown crusty scabs on his scalp, behind his ears, the fever that had dehydrated him and left the whites of his eyes yellow and his hair sticky for ten days. Marianne utters monosyllables while Revol takes a few notes – date and place of birth, weight, height – and he seems not to care too much about childhood diseases once he’s noted that Simon has no particular medical history, no serious illnesses, rare allergies, or malformations that his mother knows of – at these words Marianne grows agitated, a flash of memory, a ski outing with his class to the Contamines-Montjoie, Simon was ten and had a terrible pain in his abdomen, the doctor at the ski hill who examined him palpated his left side and, suspecting appendicitis, diagnosed an “inversed anatomy,” in other words the heart on the right side and everything else in keeping, words that no one had ever doubted, and this fantastic anomaly had given him extraspecial status right through to the end of the trip.

Thank you; then, having smoothed the paper with the flat of his hand, he places it back into Simon’s file, a pale-green folder. He lifts his head toward Marianne, you can see your son as soon as we’ve finished the tests. What tests? Marianne’s voice straight ahead in the office and the vague idea that if they are doing tests then nothing is sure yet. The radiance of her gaze alerts Revol, who forces himself to keep the situation in check and to curb hope: Simon’s state is progressive, and this progression is not headed in the right direction. Marianne is knocked off course, says oh, so what is Simon’s state progressing toward? As she says it, she knows she’s revealing her vulnerability, she’s taking a risk, and Revol takes a breath before replying.

– Simon’s lesions are irreversible.

Revol has the painful feeling of dealing a blow, the sense of detonating a bomb. And then he gets up, we’ll call you as soon as possible, and he adds, a little more loudly, has Simon’s father been informed? Marianne hooks him with her eyes, he’ll be here around one, but Sean doesn’t call, still no word, and Marianne is suddenly seized by panic, tells herself maybe he’s not at the workshop, maybe he’s not even at home, maybe he left to deliver a skiff in Villequier, Duclair, or Caudebec-en-Caux, or to a rowing club on the Seine, and maybe at this exact moment he’s aboard the vessel, demonstrating it to a buyer, and they’re rowing, sitting on swivel seats, observing how it handles and commenting on it in low tones, using an expert’s vocabulary, and little by little Marianne sees the river’s course narrowing between high rock walls suckered by thick mosses, masses of plants growing horizontally, giant ferns and thick creepers, sphagnum moss, plants of a brilliant green tangled together along vertiginous walls or bowing toward the river in vegetal cascades, and then it grows dim, the cliffs leaving only a thin corridor of sky white as milk, the water grows heavy, flat and slow, surface saturated with insects – dragonflies iridescent with turquoise, transparent mosquitos – it turns bronze, dull with silver flashes, and suddenly, horrified, Marianne imagines that Sean has gone back to New Zealand, and that he is headed up the Whanganui River from Cook Strait, setting off from another estuary and another city, and that he is heading deeper into the interior, alone in his canoe, absolutely peaceful, peaceful as she had known him to be, eyes serene; with regular movements, he passes Maori villages along the banks, portages around waterfalls, the light craft hoisted on his back, and advances farther and farther to the north, toward the central plateau and the Tongariro Volcano, where the sacred river draws its source, retracing the path of the migration to new lands; she sees Sean clearly, even hears his breath swell in the canyon as in an echo chamber, where reigns a suffocating calm – Revol watches her, worried by her panicked face, but needing to wrap up, so I’ll see you with him then, and Marianne nods her head, okay.

Scrape of chairs against the floor, creak of door hinges, they walk toward the end of the corridor, where, without adding a single sentence to their meagre dialogue, Marianne pivots and moves away slowly, not knowing where to go, passes the waiting room, straight chairs and a low table cluttered with well-thumbed magazines, mature women smiling from the covers with healthy teeth, shining hair, toned perineums, and soon here she is again under the immense nave of glass and concrete, on the tiles with thousands of scuff marks, she passes the cafeteria – multicoloured bags of chips, candies, and chewing gum on display shelves, pizzas and burgers in primary colours on signs aligned neatly above, bottles of water and pop standing in windowed fridges – stops suddenly, sways on her feet, Simon is lying in there somewhere, how can she leave him behind? She wants to turn back, but she keeps going, she needs to find Sean, she has to reach him at all costs.

Marianne heads for the main door that opens slowly, far off; four figures cross the threshold and come toward her, figures that soon emerge from the blur cast by her myopic eyes: it’s the parents of the other two
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, Christophe and Johan, the four of them in a line, and again winter coats that weigh shoulders down, scarves rolled into neck braces to hold up falling heads, gloves. They recognize her, slow down, and then one of the men quickens his step to break rank and when he reaches Marianne folds her in his arms, and then the other three embrace her in turn. How is he? Chris’s father is the first to speak; the four of them look at her, she’s paralyzed. Murmurs: he’s in a coma, we don’t know yet. She shrugs her shoulders and her mouth distorts: and you? the boys? Johan’s mother answers: Chris, fractured left hip and fibula; Johan, both wrists and clavicle fractured, also his rib cage, but none of his organs were pierced – she remains sober, of an outrageous sobriety, meant to show Marianne that the four of them are aware of how lucky they are, of their monster’s ball, because for them, it’s only breakage – their children were wearing seat belts, were protected from the shock, and if this woman minimizes their anxiety to this extent, abstaining from any commentary, it’s also to show Marianne that they know about Simon, know that it’s serious, very serious even, a rumour that will have run from the ICU to the department of orthopedic and trauma surgery where their sons are, and that she won’t have the indecency to add anything else and, finally, there is this distress she feels, this guilt that holds her back, because the choice was between their two sons for the seat belt – Chris had to drive, so it could just as easily have been Johan in the middle and then she would be the one in Marianne’s place at this instant, exactly in her place, swaying before the same terrible abyss, disfigured in just the same way, and she’s suddenly dizzy at the thought, her legs go weak and her eyes begin to roll back, her husband feels her wavering and puts an arm under hers to steady her, and as Marianne sees this woman capsize, she, too, perceives the abyss between them, between herself and the rest of them, this chasm that separates them now, thank you, I have to go, we’ll be in touch.