What Lies Between Us (15 page)

Her husband is handsome. He's tall and well built and towers over her. His jaw is sharp, and a tumble of hair falls over his eyes. He might be kind or he might not be. It is impossible to read the quality of his tenderness from where I sit. I remember Dharshi jumping from couch to couch with the hairbrush clutched in her fist yelling about how much fun girls want to have, about being a material girl, about feeling like a virgin. I have to turn away so that no one sees the lone bridesmaid in the terrible pink sari tearing up.

When we hug goodbye, she says in a shaking voice, “He's handsome, right? You should be happy for me.” I nod against her neck, kiss her under the ear where her own dark shade is spared. A surge in my heart almost spills through my lips. The thing I want most to tell her: “I love you. Come away with me.” But the words stay stuck, and then the crowd carries her away from me, a hail of confetti obscuring the bloody rosebuds in her hair. She climbs into a car bedecked with trailing jasmine; Roshan follows her. The car starts and she is gone. In my hands, her bridal bouquet, crimson roses so dark their edges crisp outward toward midnight.

 

Part Three

 

Twelve

So much happens
before
we are born. We come into being in the middle of the narrative, midway through stories that have been unfolding long before us. We totter in on our fat infant feet and attempt to take our places on the stage, but we know only a fragment of the bewildering plotline, only a sliver of the odd characters we encounter. The big people have been practicing their lines and playing their parts for decades.

I pitied my child from the moment she dropped away from me. Even then, tiny as she was, she tried so hard to understand events that had started decades before her birth. She moved her head, looking from one face to the other, back and forth, trying to read the emotions, the moods, the secret signals that would reveal what had occurred before she came. She was wise. I looked into her eyes and saw that she had come armed with ancient knowledge. But at the same time, so much of what came before was beyond her knowing. This is the worst kind of disability, the primary disadvantage of childhood.

*   *   *

But that was much later. At this moment I have outrun all my nightmares. I am a young nurse working at the old brick hospital in the city. There is a saying: “Someone who saves one life is called a hero; someone who saves thousands is a nurse.” It is my guiding principle in these days.

I live in a brightly lit apartment over a Mexican grocery store in the Mission District of San Francisco. This is a mountainous city of dramatic views, great steel bridges rising in either direction, their heads lost in clouds. This is a place where one is shaken awake by earthquakes in the middle of the night. The planet beneath you moves in long liquid waves or quick gasp-inducing shrugs. It jolts you awake and reminds you that this is a precarious spot on the earth's skin. You wait to see if the bookshelves stop moving. When they do, you go back to sleep.

We are casual about it, but we know that one day the Big One will come, the colossal, catastrophic earthquake that will destroy us. It will snap the bridges like long beans. It will smash the buildings, as if under the invisible foot of a Japanese movie monster. The sea will rise and swallow this place; it is an apocalypse in waiting.

We know all this and are willing to ignore it because we are seduced by these forty-eight square miles. Here are streetcars rushing up and down the sinuous slopes, ferryboats skirting the island of criminals, with dolphins rollicking in their wake, sunshine falling like a blessing of the gods through the whispering fog, raucous crowds in Dolores Park, ice cream worth waiting in block-long lines for, a park that stretches even farther and more luxurious than Central Park, with bison and boats on lakes, street-corner flower shops spilling blossoms onto the streets, and it is all completely magic.

*   *   *

On a corner, tucked on a slight hill, is the old brick hospital. I spend my days and nights here, and I'll tell you this: when you are dying, small and alone in your hospital bed, it will be a nurse who will make your existence horrific or bearable. It will be a nurse who holds the bedpan, catches your quivering hand, gives you the begged-for extra shot of morphine. It will be one of us who shifts the bed those few inches that make the difference between agony and, yes, even pleasure. It will be one of us watching over you as you face the toothed abyss.

I work in the ICU, which can be either a place to heal or an antechamber to death. Not much is beautiful here, and yet there can be a grace, a certain painful dignity that happens to those lucky ones when the time has come. I walk from my apartment for the night shift. On the quiet streets the curtains are drawn. I see a few TV watchers awash in the blue glow; the sight of a shambling hobo with hands sunk deep in his pockets makes me sink my own cold hands deeper. Then I enter the hospital and the night is banished. It is always such a relief to arrive and be encased in these ringing halls, to be enfolded into the multitudes working, living, healing, and dying here.

Here then are the evening's cases: rival teenage gunshot victims from the Mission in cubicles down the hall from each other; a girl in a room waiting for the rape kit, realizing she is still wearing her rapist's sweatshirt and screaming anew; an ancient-faced meth-head scratching deep rivets into his legs. I have heard each story a hundred times. I know how to tend their wounds and their souls.

This is a place with its own specific codes: blue for heart failure, some serious malfunction of that most important muscle; pink in the case of a child abduction. When we don't want patients and visitors to panic, there are the secret codes. When the system pages Dr. Stork, it means that a woman in labor is in crisis. A call for Dr. Strong means that there has been a security breach.

But there is no code to signal our most important visitor, no announcement when he comes. I see him often, the night-winged angel of death perched on the highest gabled roof of the hospital, his inky eyes searching for the souls that fly out of our windows. His, the reign of this entire kingdom.

*   *   *

In the wards, the doctors come and go like gods, consecrated by their white coats and stethoscopes. They pronounce and diagnose and stand in judgment. Then they leave and we are still here. In the ICU you are reduced to your barest essence. No possessions, no homes or wallets, all you bring here is your body in whatever state it has fallen into.

There is always a rhythm to it. The family comes in in shock. What happened to the son, the lover, the brother who said goodbye this morning and went to jog along the Presidio? How has he been transformed into this shattered thing? Why are these tubes piercing every part of his tender and beloved body? They will cry, they will rage, they will be exhausted by the decisions that have to be made, the arrangements, and the paperwork. Yet in a few days they will accept this new reality and do the best they can. Tears will become an unnecessary extravagance.

Then another relative will arrive from somewhere farther away and he or she will be shocked by everything all over again. There will again be tears and denial. There will be anger. Then in a few days he or she will also be exhausted, accepting. The cycle will resume. These are the rhythms of our days.

*   *   *

I have seen miracles too. Once a girl came in, gaunt and wasted. Twenty-six years old and dying of a disease that made her prone to stomach cancer. They had cut out two-thirds of her intestines, so she was a tiny wasted thing in the bed. Her mother gave her things to throw and she exorcised her anger by screaming across the room and throwing teddy bears, paper plates, cutlery.

I didn't try to stop her because her screams were weak, more like long, exhausted sighs. The objects she threw fell a few feet away, rolled under the bed. I didn't try to stop her as I might have with a louder screamer, a more adept thrower, because I didn't think she'd make it through the weekend. We made her as comfortable as we could; we checked her vitals hourly, gave her a heady concoction of sedatives. The chaplain came and she wept through instructions for her own funeral. Various family members trooped through the room saying their farewells. And then they left and we waited.

And then miraculously she didn't die. Her vitals went up and she survived the weekend. Then she survived the week and did not stop surviving. There was no explanation for either her having this rare disease so young or for her remaining among the living.

She comes to visit us sometimes. She brings flowers, cookies, balloons. She fills the ward with her laughter. She hugs me tight and says, “I couldn't have made it without you.” She looks deep into my eyes as if she sees me. She makes my heart pound. She is beautiful, thin as a supermodel from the lack of so many coils of intestine, and the men love her for it. They do not realize she is a miracle.

She brings flowers for the nurses, large, waxy white orchids. They are supposed to be for everyone, but I know they're mine. I was her principal care nurse; I watched over her in those crucial days. Once when no one was watching, I folded a sprig of her orchids into my jacket as I left the hospital. I took it home and put it in an old painted vase I had found at a thrift shop and sat it in the middle of my kitchen table.

Then I poured a cup of tea and stared at those incandescent flowers. They lit up my kitchen. Three blossoms climbed the curved stalk, which ended in two perfectly rounded buds. I looked at the flowers with their large creamy wings lifted in flight, the mysterious interiors with all their carvings and curvings, the yellow passages into their hearts. I brought my face to the sprig. There was no scent, only the purity and smoothness of skin against my lips. I couldn't resist. I dipped the tip of my tongue into the innermost crevice of a blossom and the inner lips pulled at me as if to hold on forever.

Here is the secret of that girl, the one who was cured and who brought us flowers. When we were alone, when even her mother had left, I held her clawed hand and I prayed to whatever power was poised above us, enormous and invisible, weighing her life on its scale, fingering the cobweb of her breath, scissors opened around it and ready to snip. I begged this unseen creature for her life, and somehow it was pacified. The scissors were withdrawn; her life was spared. He looked at me once before he left, the mighty winged angel of death. He promised me he would return, but then I didn't care. We aren't supposed to do such things, of course. We aren't supposed to pray or have favorites, but I did. For her, I prayed. These flowers are my just reward.

 

Thirteen

In these years I stay away from men; I stay away from women. I avoid love; I shun desire. I am creating the purest monogamy. My body belongs only to myself. My heart is as contained as a creature hidden deep in its shell. I know that the hungers of the body, its needs and impulses, are dangerous. They can maim unnamed but important parts of you. It's easier and safer to break the body into its working parts, to learn the names of bones and the functions of organs, the uses of chemicals to stunt or stall the advent of disease. These are the only acceptable ways I can delve into the physical.

There are men who like my slim tallness. They like the tumble of hair that releases when I refashion my ponytail. There are men at the hospital who look at me—doctors, sometimes recovering patients, a fellow nurse. They ask if they can come over and cook me dinner, maybe a spicy curry. I would like that, wouldn't I? They make it easy to reject them. I am a hunger artist in the realm of love.

Amma, who has guarded my virtue like a dragon at the door, is now obsessed with its end. She calls to say, “Yes, it's good for a girl to have a job, to be able to take care of herself. Good-good.” I can hear Catney Houston purring next to her; the cat is ancient now, half blind and mangy, but still alive, still passionately in love with Amma. My mother goes on. “You've done really well … But…” I wait for her to pick up the thread she has left dangling from our last conversation and of course she does, “You need to start thinking about settling down before you get … you know…”

“Get what, Amma?”

“You know, dried up.”

“Amma! I'm not a sponge.”

“Yes, darling. But good to have someone, no? Look at me. All alone. You mustn't end up like me. You can't be happy all alone. With no one to take care of you.”

“I'm fine, Amma. I
am
happy. I have my work, my place. I like my life.” I say this emphatically. Later after I hang up, I think about what it must mean to her that I live alone. In the place she came from, the only reason for this solitary state would be widowhood.

If we had stayed in Sri Lanka, there would be a hundred voices a day reminding me to find someone, to get married and settle down. Everyone from the aunties to the fishmonger would be asking where my husband was. If I revealed that he didn't exist, they would pantomime shock and proceed to tell me about their father's uncle's grandson who had just returned from abroad and was looking for a wife. Here, thank god, only my mother calls to harangue me and warn me against getting “dried up.” I know that she doesn't mean I'm getting wrinkles. She is referring to a more intimate sort of desiccation. I look out of the window at the city street and laugh.

*   *   *

If love is absent, belonging is not. This apartment poised above the Mexican grocery is where I have felt the most at home in years. It is my small kingdom, my patch of earth. A tumble of green vines spills over the bookcase; an anatomy map in lurid detail rests on the dining table; a globe sits on the side table so that I may spin it and come to rest a finger on that single spot of green island in the wide blue sea that was my home a long time ago.

On a dresser by my bed is the aquarium, a two-by-three universe lush with plant life, a stream of silver bubbles constantly rising. It was once populated by a kaleidoscopic array of flitting fish, tiny red shrimp, snails who slid across the glass and participated in huge snail orgies, their shells turning this way and that as they fucked in whatever way snails can be said to do that. But over the years a few careless overfeedings on my part, a few ammonia blooms, have made the fish arc themselves out of the water. I would find them later, tiny and dried as wood chips on the floor. I mourned over each minuscule life and couldn't bear to replace them.