Chapter 22
Jake
R
ain pelted the glass pane beside his shoulder. He thought he heard hail. He turned away from the computer and toward the window. It was only rain—thick, lead-like drops driven by the wind. A flash of lightning shot through the room. Two breaths later, a clap of thunder rattled the glass, gently nudged his body. He listened while it trundled off into silence.
Spring storms—the crashing, the thrashing, the wildness—took him back to his youth, to the times when he hid in Buckthorn’s cave, when he got lost in the woods behind the school, when he swayed like a bear cub from the top of an apple tree, and when, during midnight thunderbolts, he huddled under his quilt—safe, warm, and dry. There was an odd comfort in those storms. They were always the same. After the flashes and the racket and the blowing, they always stopped and the world became quiet again.
Outside, it was wet and blustery, but inside, in the residents’ room where he slumped before the electric blue-gray of the computer screen, the air scratched at his nostrils. It smelled of oily hair, sweaty clothes, stale pizza. X-rays of someone’s femur and a discharge summary from a referring hospital cluttered the table where his elbows rested next to a cardboard box with stale bagels, yesterday’s sign-out sheet, and a postcard from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
He stared at the words and numbers—the results of Mr. Bender’s laboratory tests—on the computer screen. Hemoglobin—normal. White count—normal. Differential—normal. Hepatic enzymes—normal. So, why was this guy jaundiced? he wondered, twirling a paper clip between his thumb and index finger. Maybe his liver was giving out and the enzymes had been elevated earlier but now were on their way down—the ominous arc of a dying organ. He decided to order additional hepatic function tests.
The thunder and lightning had stopped and now he felt the lulling rhythm of the rain. He glanced at his watch. Almost four o’clock in the afternoon. Things were winding down, both the storm and the workday. If he finished his patient notes soon, he might be able to go home early, but first he would check with Anna and visit Eddie. Fortunately Anna’s parents were still around. He couldn’t deal with Chris’s exuberance tonight, at least not alone. He needed a buffer, someone else to absorb a portion of his son’s energy. He’d been up half the night—four admissions and two open-fracture reductions—and was exhausted.
He stared at Mr. Bender’s lab results again, but the numbers seemed to pass through his eyes, through his brain, and out again without sticking. Far in the distance, he heard one last roll of thunder, a grumbly straggler at the tail of the storm.
The rain on the window brought it all back. They were speeding down Huron River Drive in his friend’s ancient El Dorado convertible, the top down, Gary at the wheel, Monica huddled in the middle. It had begun to sprinkle. Gary kept driving up U.S. 23, toward Independence Lake. Soon the raindrops were fat and heavy and slapped at their faces like a wet mop. Finally Gary edged the car to the side of the road to unfold the convertible’s top. Yanking at the rusty levers and pulling at the unruly canvas, his friend filled the air with profanity.
“Why don’t you help him?” Monica had said. She pulled her sopping-wet hair away from her eyes. Her blouse, soaked through, clung to her chest.
“What do I know about convertibles?” he said. “Besides, I have to see a man about a horse.”
With that, he stepped into the woods to take a leak. The rain was diffracted by the birch branches overhead. When he returned, the top of the El Dorado was up, Monica sat alone in the front seat, and Gary was wiping his greasy hands on a fistful of wild grape leaves. Jake stopped just short of the car and stared at its top. A piece of faded Levi’s was stitched to the roof’s black fabric with orange thread. He burst out laughing. That denim patch was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. He bent over and held his sides. He could barely breathe. Finally, weak from giggling, he crawled into the front seat, put his soaked arm around Monica’s wet shoulders, ran his damp fingers through her wet hair, and planted a juicy kiss on her wet cheek.
Now, as he remembered the patch from the blue jeans, he couldn’t figure out what had been so funny. He could see the mended convertible top clearly and even chuckled to himself as he recalled the peals of laughter, but he no longer understood the humor. Must have been something mystical about the rain and the old car and the evening. And, of course, there was the magic of Monica.
He clicked on the next patient’s laboratory results but still couldn’t concentrate on the numbers. They swam like hieroglyphics on the computer screen while thoughts of Monica filled his brain. For the past day, she had seemed to follow him everywhere: to the scrub sink, into the john, to the Coke machine. Where was she? Right now, at this very moment, where on the planet Earth was she?
Slowly, as if from the bottom of a bog, the idea bubbled upward into his head. It’d be harmless, he thought.
No, it’d be ridiculous. He twirled the paper clip.
He wanted to know what’d happened to her.
Leave it alone, he thought. He shut down the laboratory results page and aimed the computer’s arrow at the Internet Explorer icon.
Just for the hell of it.
Jeez, drop it and go see Eddie, he said to himself. With his finger trembling against the mouse, he aimed the arrow at the stored addresses in the search engine and double-clicked on
www.Google.com
.
He glanced around the room to see if anyone was watching. A urology resident, his forehead pressed against his folded arms, dozed at the next table. A medical student closed the chart she had been reading and walked out the door. Why be so secretive? he wondered. The residents connected to Google every hour of every day. They looked up the URLs for Cabela’s or Amazon, hunted for bed-and-breakfasts in Saugatuck and Traverse City, trolled for stores that sold Rockport shoes. Did they check up on former girlfriends or boyfriends? Probably. In fact, he was sure of it. He typed “Monica Daley” into the advanced search window and hit Google Search.
As the computer ticked through its files, a sense of creepiness folded over him. Peeping Toms are sick, he told himself. They’re loathsome, vile. Still, when the list of 540 items popped up, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the screen.
Did he really want to be a voyeur? Is that what Jake Campbell had become? Was Chris and Eddie’s dad a sneak? Dr. Dunwoody had advised him to be a father but he hadn’t warned against being a stalker.
He opened the first link—Monica Daley, a librarian in Seattle. The second Monica Daley ran a women’s clothing store in Rochester, Minnesota. The third sold car insurance in Miami. No. No. No, he said to himself as he clicked his way through the list.
Then he found it. Monica L. Daley, MD. Yes, he thought, his fingers sweaty on the keyboard, his intestines twisting behind his belt buckle. Her middle name was Lynn. On the staff of a hospital in Maine. He clicked on her name. Her link in the staff directory popped up. Pediatrician. Graduated from Ohio State University. Residency at Boston University. Board certified. No photo. Clinic phone number for appointments. No office number. He needed her office number.
He searched Google for the American Medical Association. On the site page, he hit the tab that said “AMA Membership List.” An error message popped up. “You must log in to access this page.”
“Shit,” he muttered.
Then he remembered. Dr. Dunwoody had paid AMA dues for all the ortho residents. His heart pounded. He opened his wallet. Wedged between his Blue Cross card and his Western Michigan University alumnus card, he found the AMA membership card, his member number in the upper-left-hand corner.
Soon after he logged in, he found her, along with an office phone number. His thoughts raced. Shut down the computer. Keep going. Go see Eddie. Call her. He reached into the wastebasket beside the desk, pulled out a slip of paper, jotted the number on the back of what turned out to be a pizza receipt, and slipped it into his pocket.
His options collided and fused into a kind of mental quicksand that held him in its grip. He lifted the phone receiver, punched nine, heard the tone of the outside line.
He held the receiver away from his ear. He looked at it and at the number he had written on the receipt. Then he set the receiver back on the phone and headed for the pediatric ICU.
Chapter 23
Anna
I
t was only five days since she and Eddie left home. Seemed like a month. No, more like a century. Their house still looked the same, two stories tall, murky blue front door, siding the color of putty. The deep taupe trim had always reminded Anna of a snail’s shell. She looked up at the roof, squinting her eyes against the cloud-draped sun. The shingles were still shabby; a tiny maple tree had sprouted in the eave over their bedroom. Had she really lived in this house at all? Her memory of the place was like a crooked dream, as if she had known it a long time ago, in another life as a different person. The house seemed very wrong.
Jake had urged her to come home. “Even a short visit would be better than none,” he said, his voice tired. She had never heard him beg before.
Even her mother begged. When Anna heard, “Now, dear, be reasonable,” she was propelled back to her childhood, back to the time when the next words had been, “practice your piano lessons” or “change that sweaty shirt” or “wear a jacket—the night is cool” or “eat your broccoli.”
The final straw, though, came from Chris. “Come home, Mommy,” he had pleaded over the telephone. The tension in his sweet voice was like a thorn in the honey.
Jake stopped the van in the driveway. “Here we are,” he said.
A Subaru was parked in front of the garage door. She knew it belonged to her because the bumper sticker—faded and peeling off the lid of the trunk—said, “It’s my RIGHT TO CHOOSE what happens to my body.” She had been eight and a half months pregnant with Chris when she marched in that Freedom of Choice rally, her swollen feet beating what seemed like miles of pavement. Her pelvis was so unhinged in preparation for the birth that she thought she would come apart with each step. After the rally, soaked to the skin by an unexpected downpour, she had ripped the protective backing off the sticker and slapped it on her car. Considering the rain, she was amazed it had stuck at all. Yet, almost four years later, wrinkled and sun bleached, it still clung to the green paint.
“Jake . . .” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She needed to place the fragments of her memories in the right order. “I drove Eddie and Chris to the emergency room. How’d my car get home?” In the days and nights she spent at Eddie’s side, she hadn’t thought of the Subaru even once.
“Your dad rode with me to the hospital yesterday. No, the day before. No . . . I don’t remember when. He drove it home.”
“Oh.” She exhaled into the word. Arranging for a ride, finding the right parking lot at the hospital, locating her green car among the other green cars—the whole process of getting it home seemed an unsolvable problem. Yet, here it was.
“Whose is that?” She pointed to the Taurus beside the Subaru.
“Your folks’ rental.”
She nodded as she held her head, trying to quell the ache that pounded behind her eyes.
Chris’s toy backhoe lay half buried in the sandbox beside the garage, and the old tire twisted slowly from the end of the rope tied high in the oak tree. A child’s brown flannel jacket dangled from the groove of the tire. Chris must have left it there and no one noticed. If she had been home at the time, she would have noticed, would have instantly spotted it there in the tire, would have put it back in the closet.
Without thinking, she placed her foot beyond the loose brick on the back stairs, the one that used to wobble when she stepped on it. As she pushed open the back door, the curtain that covered the window brushed against her hair. Somewhere in her sewing cabinet was the leftover material, a piece of dull citron-colored gauze with thin blueberry stripes. She worried about prowlers when Jake was away at night and had made the curtain a week after they moved in.
“Mommy,” Chris screamed, racing from the kitchen. He rammed full force into her leg and clung to her as desperately as a shipwrecked sailor grasps a piece of driftwood.
“Mommy’s tired.” Jake laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Let her sit down.”
Chris didn’t move, except to bury his face deeper into her crotch.
She peeled her son’s fingers from her slacks and stooped until she was eye-to-eye with him. Cupping his chin in her hands, staring into that bewildered face that seemed to have aged by several years while she was away, she murmured, “Chris, honey . . .”
He wouldn’t look at her.
“Honey, I’m so glad to see you. I missed you very much.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.
She picked him up and pushed his head to her shoulder. His body relaxed against hers.
It had been a good hour with Chris on her lap. Then he became fidgety.
“Honey, I need to go to the bathroom,” she said, trying to move him to the floor.
“Come, Chris, sit on the couch.” Anna’s mother patted the cushion beside her.
“No,” Chris said, wiggling against Anna. She nudged him toward his grandmother. He resisted. She didn’t want a confrontation with him this afternoon. She wanted everything to be pleasant, wanted her son to be cooperative, wanted her mother to see him as a well-behaved little boy.
“Let’s read about Moira.” Anna’s mother opened one of his favorite books,
Moira and the Rite of Spring
, and patted the cushion again.
“You said it wrong,” Chris said.
“Tell me the right way.”
“
Moyra
. Not
Mora
.”
“Okay, let’s read about
Moyra
.”
“No.”
He was digging in, taking on his grandmother in a contest of wills. Her mother wasn’t used to a strongheaded child. Anna had been a very compliant little girl.
Jake lifted Chris from her lap and set him on the couch. “Let Grandma read to you. Mommy needs a break.”
Chris squirmed from Jake’s grasp. Quick as lightning, his foot kicked at the book. It flew from his grandmother’s hands and landed on the carpet.
“None of that, young man.” Jake grabbed Chris’s shoulders and gave him a shake. “What on earth is wrong with you? Apologize to your grandma.”
Chris whimpered as he tried to pull away.
“Jake, don’t hurt him.” Anna raised her voice over her son’s. She had never seen her husband physically discipline Chris. She drew her fingers over her eyes. What weird, awful world was she in?
“I want my mommy,” Chris whined. “You’re mean.” His eyes narrowed with hatred as he squirmed against Jake’s grip.
She knew Chris would never issue an apology while in such a defiant mood and no threat could change that. She moved Jake aside, sat on the end of the couch, and retrieved the book from the floor. “First I’ll go to the bathroom, then I’ll sit next to you while Grandma reads. Jake, could you get my bag from the car?”
As Jake moved toward the door, Chris stuck out his tongue at his father’s back. She pretended she didn’t see it.
When she returned from the bathroom, Chris snuggled against her side and turned his face toward his grandmother. “Moira’s a witch,” he said. “She lives in a coven. Start here.” He turned to the picture of a troupe of Druids dancing around a maypole. “See, that one’s Aubrey.” He jabbed his finger at one of the robed men. “And there’s Aidan.”
“Is this about pagans?” Her mother looked alarmed.
Anna took a deep breath. “Well, yeah. He loves it. It’s kind of cute.” She should have guessed her mother would question the Moira book. It didn’t fit with her Lutheran sensibility. “He got it for his birthday, from his friend Davey.” She shrugged at her mother. “It’s okay, Mom. It won’t hurt him.”
“Read,” Chris commanded.
She had forgotten how comfortable their bed was. Jake had often said, as he sank into the sheets after a night at the hospital, “This is the most wonderful place in the galaxy.”
Now, still wearing her stale, wrinkled clothes, she lay under the quilt. Chris curled against her chest like a sleeping cat. Her arms and legs, tight and achy just a few minutes ago, relaxed into the loft of the mattress and she thought how right Jake was about the bed.
Her mother had pulled the window shade to darken the room, but ribbons of daylight streamed past the window frame and puddled on the carpet. Dust motes floated like gnats on its beams. Anna stroked Chris’s neck and picked a piece of a dried leaf from behind his ear. She wasn’t sure if he was asleep or just playing possum, afraid to move because, with just a little jostling, his mother might disappear again.
She closed her eyes. Against the ebony of her lids she saw Eddie in his hospital bed. What was he doing? What had happened since she left? The nurses had promised to call if anything changed, anything at all. She had already phoned them twice, once shortly after arriving home and again before lying down, and they had assured her Eddie was fine. They had suctioned the usual amount of secretions from his endotracheal tube, his blood pressure was normal. His gases were good, his urine output was fine. Maybe tomorrow they would try again to wean him from the vent.
She knew how Jake felt about Eddie. She had overheard him talking with Dr. Farley about the possibilities—their words weren’t clear and they used medical terms she didn’t completely understand, but she was able to get the gist of it. Jake thought Eddie would never be normal again. And Dr. Farley agreed.
Why couldn’t Jake believe, as she did, that Eddie would be okay? Even doctors should believe in miracles, because sometimes they happened. Deep in her soul, she knew he’d be normal. She could see him as a twelve-year-old, rocketing down a hill on a bike, hovering over a puzzle spread across the kitchen table, swimming the length of a pool in one breath, playing a trumpet. At least he could do those things if he wanted to. And yet, in another place deep in her soul, she knew he might die. The unease that rumbled through her—a wave, a cramp, a seething spasm—churned against her insides until she felt she would throw up.
She rolled over, away from Chris’s sleeping body. He lay motionless except for the rhythmic action of his tongue against his thumb. He had stopped that at least a year before, and now had started it again. She stroked his arm, gently so she wouldn’t awaken him, sadly because her heart was breaking to see him like this.
A parade of worries trotted through her head. Her mother. The kicked book. Her defiant older son. Her struggling younger son. Her class at the community college. What day of the week was it? When would she return to work? Ever? She couldn’t grasp the meaning of ever, couldn’t pin it down to a concrete idea. When was ever? Next week? Next month? In an hour? The meaning of never was much easier.
The oven timer pinged in the kitchen below. She had never heard that sound from the bedroom. It had the same pitch as a teaspoon against a fine crystal goblet. Her mind roamed near sleep and her thoughts grew fuzzy.
Smelled like cookies. Her mother must be baking, using her pans, her oven, her kitchen, her home. Hers and Jake’s. Their house, this strange and only vaguely familiar place that belonged to both of them.
And it was Eddie’s house, too. His crib was just down the hall, in the bedroom with purple and red balloons painted on the wall. She hadn’t gone into his room since returning home. That could come later. Nothing in it would have changed. The foam shapes of the mobile would still dangle over the mattress, his clothes and the clean crib linen would still be in the dresser drawers. Soon Eddie would come home, would be back in his own bed nestled under the blanket Grandma Campbell had crocheted for him. Then the world would be in order again.
Dinner was over and Chris was in bed. She had rocked him to sleep, had felt him jump with one of those nervous shudders that happen during slumber. She hugged him tight, hoping to keep another shudder at bay. Perhaps he was dreaming. About what?
She lay on the couch listening to her parents clean the dinner dishes when the phone rang. It must be Eddie’s nurse. She sprang from the sofa and raced to the kitchen.
“Hello?” She had trouble catching her breath.
“Mrs. Campbell . . .”
“Is he okay?” Why was the caller’s voice so chirpy? “What happened?”
“Mrs. Campbell, this is Ben from Friends of the Firefighters. We thank you . . .”
“You’re not from the hospital?” She was confused. Who was she talking to?
“Ah, no. My name’s Ben and I’m from Friends of the—”
“Damn you,” she yelled and slammed the receiver down on the console. As she walked into the family room, her mother called, “What was that all about?”
“Jake, take me back.”
“What happened? Who was on the phone?”
“Some telemarketer. I need to go to the hospital.”
Jake sat upright in his recliner. “Why? Things are fine there.”
“I just have to be there.” Why didn’t he understand? “What if he dies? I can’t be here when Eddie takes his last breath.”