Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (8 page)

“He’s adorable,” Josie said to Artur and the woman. “Krasivyi,” she said, trying another Russian word.

Meg gave her a funny look. The boy was not adorable. The skin on his arms was pale and grayish, and it was difficult to tell whether he was dirty or this was just his natural state. Josie didn’t care. She stepped up and took him. All concerns about acting her part fell away. She didn’t care what any of them thought. This was her boy.

And he went to her, clutched her shoulder and chest as if she were the vortex of a spinning nightmare. His chest heaved against her with a raspy, wet sound. When she leaned back to get a look at his face it was anguished and red, in need.

“Tikho,” she said. “Quiet. It’s okay.” But he wasn’t crying. He was just struggling without tears. His body was hot and soft, and Josie realized that, like Sveta, he smelled unlike any other baby she had ever held. There wasn’t a trace of Johnson & Johnson’s on him.

The woman smiled and chuckled a little. “Maybe you each found baby,” she said. “Maybe you want him?” she asked Josie.

Josie glanced at her only briefly, then closed her eyes against Meg’s gaze. She wanted to be alone with the boy. She thought she felt his muscles relaxing into her body. She had no idea how long this took, or if she might have imagined his calm or only grown accustomed to his struggling, but by the time she remembered Meg again and turned to look, Meg wasn’t where she expected. She wasn’t standing nearby watching, taking pictures or video. She was over by the window, staring outside at the empty, muddy courtyard.

T
hat night at the apartment Meg played dolls with Natasha for a long time after dinner. They spoke nonsense to each other, giggling and bumping the battered Barbie dolls along the coffee table in different imagined scenarios. Josie sat at the small kitchen table with Sana, drinking tea and looking through a photo album at vacation pictures from Sana’s trip to the Black Sea. The jet lag was getting to her, and she and Sana had long ago exhausted their limited vocabularies in each other’s language, but still it seemed hours before anyone decided it was bedtime.

At last, alone in their room, Josie said, “So, what did you think?”

Meg yawned and turned out the light. They lay down in their separate, narrow beds, with all of Natasha’s toys well hidden around them.

“I think we should sleep on it,” Meg said.

“No,” Josie whined playfully, trying to pace herself and keep the mood light, because she knew how much lay ahead of them. “I mean, he’s a redhead like you, Meg. And petite. Think of the pictures.” She was stooping to Meg’s basest weakness for perfect appearances.

“I have an idea,” Meg said.

“What?”

“Let’s let the doctor at home make the call. We’ll show him the video tapes and their medical records, and leave it up to him.”

Josie was quiet.

“I mean, on the one hand, she has the hearing deficiency—”

“You know that’s no big deal,” Josie said.

“Well, maybe.”

The boy, on the other hand, had some sort of issue with his stomach, they’d been told. This might or might not have been the cause of his discomfort today. He was older and thinner and more complicated. He had spent more time in bad hands, as they said. There could be other problems lying in wait, of course. But wasn’t that true of any child?

“You’re just saying that because you know the doctor will choose Sveta.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Just be honest. I mean, if you want the girl, you should just say you want the girl.”

Meg didn’t respond for a long time. Then she said, “I think the doctor will know best. Will be impartial.”

“You’re saying I’m not.”

“How could you be? How could either of us be?”

Outside, a car alarm started wailing. “
You
seem to be pretty impartial,” Josie said. “You know what else? So is that little girl.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Meg said.

They had the same cool insulation of indifference, Josie thought. She’d be surrounded by them. Across the room, in the strange light, Meg’s profile looked foreign, unfamiliar. Josie wanted to be the kind of person, for once, who could insist on something at any cost. But she just listened as the car alarm cycled through its various warning songs. So this was how it would go, she thought. A stranger would enter their lives, muscle in, take up residence in the rocky, dangerous, delicate space between them.

“She’s just, she didn’t have any…emotion. It was spooky.”

“Listen,” Meg said in a peacemaking tone. “I don’t think we should say things like this about
either
of these babies. Either one of them could become
ours
very soon.”

Josie’s insides swooned at that comment. Finally Meg had allowed the possibility.

For a few soaring minutes Josie let herself think about nothing at all. When her thoughts drifted back they had turned against her, grown tentative. Maybe Meg was right, she thought. Maybe it was best for a doctor to take this decision off their hands. Wasn’t it normal to wish for a healthy baby? Wasn’t it agony to watch a child suffer?

The ideas twisted around inside her. She thought of the car being burgled outside, of its windows smashed and its dashboard gutted. She thought of the owner, the thief, the assaults of the world. She thought of the baby boy’s parents too, who could be out there as well, maybe thieves, maybe homeless, maybe buried underground in a place she would never find. “But, you know,” Josie said very quietly, working her way back to the surface, “if we don’t take him, who will?”

Meg sighed, though not in an unkind way. She understood, Josie thought; she felt the weight of the choice. She was just trying to be practical, to protect them. Josie heard the rustle of blankets, and then Meg was beside her, pulling back the covers and climbing into her bed. She weaseled her cheek into the crook of Josie’s shoulder, and Josie had to hold tightly to Meg’s back so that she wouldn’t fall off the edge. Comfort. She was coming to comfort her.

“The thing is,” Meg said, “this is the rest of our lives we’re talking about.”

And Josie realized in a cold flash that all this tenderness was being applied toward Meg’s interests. She realized that this was how deals were made, by measuring risk against potential and probing the other party’s capacity for compromise. Meg was good at this; she was a specialist. Someone had to give, sooner or later. This was how families and lovers everywhere functioned. It was not just a business thing; it was a kindness people gave to the ones they loved. Josie told herself to stop thinking now, not to cry, not to ruin the illusion that the choice they were about to make would be mutual and fair. Because if she said it aloud, if she admitted, even in this small public space, that she was willing to sacrifice this desperate, unknown boy for the pleasure of the woman she knew best and nevertheless loved, she would never be able to take it back and hide it away and be swept up in the inevitable feeling she would find for this Sveta, this Sveta who would become their world.

“I’
M SORRY, IS
this awkward for you?” the man next to me says at last. We’re in the back row of a DC9, leaning close to hear over the engines.

He’s been telling me how his next-door neighbor once had an aneurysm. She was mowing the lawn at the time; her death was nearly instantaneous. “I mean, is this a good distraction?” he says. “Or would you rather I leave you be?”

“It’s fine.” I shake my head and smile. In the numb efficiency of panic I have already told him about my father and the call from the hospital chaplain that set me in motion today from Detroit to St. Louis. “I think I would
sense
something if he”—the flight attendant bumps past us in the aisle—“died,” I say. “Died. I think I would feel that.”

He nods and looks into his drink. It is possible he thinks I’m devoted to my father.

I scan the gray air outside, opening myself up for that sensation you always hear about. Does a part of me—however vestigial—feel torn away, missing? It doesn’t. My father is a fierce, invincible giant. Death has come to him three or four times already, and each time he’s sent it running.

But when I see him, when I make my way from the airport to the hospital, down all the winding corridors to his bed in the ICU, I think surely this is it, this is his last life. His body is swollen and rosy, drugged unconscious. He looks as though they’ve filled him with too much blood.

Tucked into the small space between the ventilator and the bed, my mother clutches his right hand with both of hers.

“What do the doctors say?” I whisper.

She’s afraid to move her gaze from the EKG monitor over his head. Every rise and fall of that jagged line assures her: He hasn’t died, he won’t be diminished, they’ll be back home in no time. “They don’t know, Ellie,” she says. “It isn’t good.” She is barely five feet tall, one hundred pounds. He towers over her in real life, as do I. “I just know—” She shakes her head and closes her eyes hard. He is her only monument. “I just know he’s going to end up like one of those
people
,” she says, “dragging an oxygen tank around with them everywhere.”

The adult part of me wants to prepare her for eventualities, to remind her of what the hospital chaplain told me: Almost no one survives a ruptured aneurysm in the aorta. But the child part stays quiet, knowing how expert she is at bending the truth to make things go his way.

There’s a chair in the corner but my mother won’t sit in it, won’t take a nap, so we stare at him, side by side, all through the night. Swaying, feeling my head go tingly, I count the tubes threading life in and out of him, and speculate on the world beneath his eyelids. I think, even now, he can’t fathom that he’s weakened, that he could just sputter out and die like an ordinary man. Instead he dreams bold, kaleidoscope dreams, sees visions twisted by morphine and trauma. As the night chugs along, I imagine he gives himself over to these fantasies, so that the sight of the doctors with their knives and needles fades from his consciousness and he finds himself wholly elsewhere, someplace warm and sunny and festive. It’s the tropics, I think, Mexico or Costa Rica, with the swoosh and salt of the ocean just out of reach. The temperature and humidity are too high, unbearable; the resort is low-budget, with monkeys in the treetops. From his lounge chair on a crude stone terrace, high in the hills above the ocean, he writhes and sweats and curses his travel agent. “What kind of a joint are you running here?” he shouts to no one, to everyone.

The kindly hippie couple who appear to be in charge refuse his requests for cocktails and cigarettes and keep telling him, “Take stock. There will be a group meeting at eight.”

This has the air of a therapy camp or cult, some sort of rehab facility maybe, and he recoils. “I’m parched, for Christ’s sake!”

“Now Mr. Kernes,” the hippie woman scolds, stooping to push at his pillow before leaving him. She is dark haired and curly and widest at the middle. She wears an orange flowered muumuu that gets caught in the crack of her ass as she walks away from him.

“How about a newspaper at least?” my father yells at her backside. The woman shakes her finger in the air without looking back, and then descends the steps of the terrace and disappears. Down on the beach, in the distance, a little girl squats over a pile of sand, working. She has dug a moat near the waterline that is three feet deep and stretches to the horizons. My father shifts in his chaise lounge and wishes someone would wipe his brow. He has been told to watch the ocean for signs, but his insides are rigid for lack of nicotine and he cannot move his arms.

“Hold his hand a minute,” my mother says to me, “so I can blow my nose.”

I step closer and put my gaze hard on him. I have never held my father’s hand. The fingers are swollen big as sausages and hot to the touch. His arms, tangled with IV tubes and monitors, are strapped down on the bed. All around him the machines vibrate and hum, suck and push, bringing his chest up and down. I think of placing candles on his palms, of setting a little bell on every finger.

B
y morning I’ve made friends in the waiting room. It’s a big open space, with room for twenty or thirty devastated people. The chairs—aqua-blue vinyl recliners—are clustered in small groups and rows to give the illusion of privacy, but the room is crowded today so I am forced to sit with strangers. To my left is Neil Hartman, a grandfatherly sort, who is on his forty-first day here watching his wife, Nancy, die of cancer. He is tall and gray haired, slender with worry; he walks as if he’s just finished a marathon. They’ve been in and out of this hospital for several years now, and Neil knows which buttons to push on the phone to get an outside line. On the other side of me is John LaPointte, whose wife, Lorrie, is paralyzed from the waist down after enduring the same kind of accident, as he puts it, “Princess Di died from.” I’m too afraid to ask what he means by this. He’s goateed and portly, thirty or so, and tells me he teaches gym class to high schoolers for a living, mainly so that he can keep on coaching football. We sit in a row, with our chairs kicked back, facing a television hung from the ceiling.

Neil says, “So you’re the triple-A miracle everyone’s talking about? That’s your dad?”

“I guess so,” I say, and since they keep looking at me I do my best to explain my father’s surgery. I tell them how his aorta dilated to eight centimeters from the aneurysm yesterday and then burst, spilling pint after pint into his abdominal cavity. “It’s right along here,” I say, running my fingers down the center of my stomach. “I always thought the aorta was in the heart, but it’s more than that, apparently.” Neil and John nod as if they’ve been learning anatomy too. “It’s like the main river of your body.”

“And they fixed it?” John shakes his head. “Son of a gun.”

“Like an inner tube,” I say. Then we return our silent attention to the TV, where the constant flow of news reassures us that horrible things happen to everyone, all the time, all over the globe. Behind us, the coffee maker spurts and hisses, and a can of pop bounces down the chute of a Coke machine. I don’t tell them we’re waiting for my father’s kidneys to fail, or that his lungs are filling up and he’s hot with infection. I don’t tell them there are blood clots shooting around his body, that they have gone to his leg, that they could still go to his brain.

On CNN, golf legend Payne Stewart’s private jet has gotten a mind of its own for some reason and flies ever northward, upward, into the cold, dry atmosphere above South Dakota. Two Air Force planes follow behind at a distance, ready to shoot it down if necessary. The announcer says it must be on autopilot, that the bodies inside are surely frozen by now. I picture their oxygen masks dangling from the ceiling, just out of reach.

W
ith the enormous duffel bag weighing him down, it takes my father many hours to descend the rocky sides of the terrace. It doesn’t seem right that he should have to escape a tropical resort, but it’s dream logic he’s following, and dream instinct tells him those hippies and their therapy talk are going to spoil any chances for fun on this vacation. As he climbs down he stops several times for air, wishing for a cigarette. By the time he reaches the beach it’s nearly dawn, and the monkeys are racing from tree to tree back into the forest. The little girl, still digging in the sand, squints across the beach at him. “Mister,” she calls, jumping up. Her face is filthy, and from the knees down she’s coated in sand. “Hey, Mister.”

My father turns from her and starts walking up the beach. There has to be a town somewhere eventually, a normal resort, a cantina.

“Hey, Mister.” She trots along in his wake.

“No comprende.”

“Where you going?”

He stops and wipes his face with his hankie. “For smokes.” The duffel bag has grown larger; the strap is tearing the skin from his shoulder. “Where’s a store?”

Now that she has his attention she smiles coyly. “A store?” She slaps her plastic shovel absentmindedly against her belly.

“A store. Cantina.” He puts two fingers to his mouth as if to inhale. “Cigarettes. Cerveza.”

“Want to see my moat?” She squints up at him. Her cheeks are full and sunburned. Her dark hair blows up around her head in all directions, like a fire.

He sighs and shifts the bag to his other shoulder. The contents are heavy and jagged as bricks.

“I’m in a hurry.” He starts walking again, faster, focusing on the sand. Dozens of iguanas scramble out of his path.

“I dug it special for you.” Her voice comes at him from all sides, otherworldly.

He takes off. She struggles to keep up with him, diving for his ankle.

The bag digs into his other shoulder. “Fuck off!” he shouts, kicking loose of her easily. As her body flies through the air it shrinks smaller and smaller, receding like a hummingbird, a fly, a gnat. She’s gone.

With a shudder of revulsion he hurries away, hoping no one has seen this.

M
y mother is going to the chapel for Mass and wants to leave him in my charge. “Visiting hours don’t apply,” the nurses say, “in cases like this.”

“Everyone’s so nice here,” my mother says, genuinely charmed. She doesn’t seem to notice or care that they bend the rules only because they have no hope for us. Her mind has room for only this thought: He has lived twenty-four hours longer than anyone expected. And for this, for whatever slippery, back room deal she worked out with her God last night, she must pay tribute. “I’ll be right back, Tommy.” She kisses my father’s hand, smiles up at him, blinks, and wipes something off his forehead. Then she surveys the urine bag hanging under the bed and pushes aside the curtain to leave. “Talk to him,” she says. “They say he can hear us.”

But I never could talk to him, never could hold his attention. To do so now, with him captive like this, would seem like cheating. And what would I say? “These antics of yours, will they end soon, will they ever?”

My father has always been the loudest voice at the party, the luckiest man in the casino, the widest grin at every ruthless joke. He eats with abandon, drinks every day, and even after his bypass surgery last year continued to go through two cartons of cigarettes a month. In my twenty-six years I have seen how intoxicating he is to his friends and how savage he can be to the rest of the world. As the person who made him a father, I was born to the wrong side. The death of the party, I learned to sit quietly and watch.

So I stand here obediently, feeling the heat rise off his body, wondering where the real Tom Kernes has gone. With its tangle of tubes, its whir of ventilation, this broken thing in front of me is more machine than man, yet still it sweats, it throws off energy. I extend my hands, palms out, over his belly.

Would I say, “I search every man I meet for what you wouldn’t give me?”

The nurse charges in, and I draw back. She wants to check on his legs, which are wrapped in long vinyl inflatable cuffs. A machine at the foot of the bed inflates them in sections, then releases, inflates, releases, pushing the blood up and down through his legs. She puts her stethoscope on the top of his right foot. “Hi Mr. Kernes!” she shouts, and I jump. “Just checking your feet!”

Leave him be, I want to say to her, or he will make you sorry.

“Yeah, this one is colder,” she says to me, tapping his left foot. He doesn’t wake or stir. She rolls in an ultrasound machine and rubs some gel on his left foot, then scans it for a pulse, for anything. There’s a blood clot in his thigh, they think, cutting off circulation. “Can you feel that?!” She slaps at his foot and shouts, “Mr. Kernes, can you feel that?”

I glare at her. “It’s OK,” I say. “You can leave him be.”

“Wake up! Mr. Kernes, come on!” she shouts.

And it happens, his head stirs, his eyes open. He comes to life before us, a giant tied down. I shudder and step back, gripping the chair behind me. The machines wake up too, in a chorus of beeps. His blood pressure flashes impossible numbers: 213/165, 224/173, and he writhes, eyes searching. “You’re in the hospital, Tom,” the nurse shouts, nearly smiling, and I wish her dead. He blinks and gags, rips his head side to side. Where is my mother? Why can’t she take this from me?

I level my gaze, fighting the urge to run. “It’s me, Dad.”

His glance flickers wildly from her face to mine. I am no one, anyone to him. His arms are strapped down so he kicks, shifts his body.

“I’m here, Dad. It’s Ellie,” I say. I put my hand on his arm and squeeze. His mouth gapes and clenches at the tubes down his throat, and I can feel the muscles knotting under my hand. I won’t cry here, never in front of him.

The nurse unwraps his next dose calmly. I can see him straining against the pain, but even in his confusion he knows this is a weakness to be hidden. He turns his gaze to the fluorescent light over his head, blinking into it, gnawing fiercely on the ventilator tube, until the morphine hits. Then he brings his eyes back to mine for a moment of lazy, dazed blinking, and in that half a minute it seems he’s trying to remember me. Against my better judgment I find myself wishing all over again that he would see me, that he would linger on me. Instead he sinks down into his dream world like a fish heading for dark waters. The nurse snaps off her gloves and leaves without saying anything.