A Small Indiscretion (2 page)

PART I

I
T
’
S NOT ALWAYS WISE
to assume that just because the surface of the world appears undisturbed, life is where you left it.

Monday morning, September 5, 2011. Twenty minutes after eight. I was doing the breakfast dishes when the phone rang. I wiped one hand on a dishcloth and picked up on the second ring. I spoke a quiet hello. You were sleeping directly upstairs in your sister’s room, and after the commotion of the night before, I didn’t want the noise to wake you.

There was static on the line. I was about to launch into my “national-do-not-call-list” speech when a stranger spoke your name.

“Are you related to a Robert Jonathan Gunnlaugsson?”

“Yes,” I said, “Robbie’s my son.”

There was a brief silence, into which I said what I believed—that you were still asleep. You couldn’t come to the phone.

I heard voices in the background, then a contusion of words—automobile accident, broken rib cage, possible brain injury, blunt renal trauma. I began to shake. I called for your father. I thrust the phone at him as if it were burning my hand.

He grabbed a pencil and pad off the kitchen counter and made a
few notes. “Get a helicopter to take him to the trauma center at Stanford,” he barked into the phone. “We’ll be there in an hour.”

I ran upstairs. Part of me was certain I would find you where I’d left you, on top of Polly’s bed, her decorative pillow, shaped like a ballet shoe, still cradling your head.

I flung open the door to her room. I stepped toward the bed. But you weren’t in it. Your truck was in the driveway, Robbie, but you were nowhere in the house. We learned later that you’d been riding in the passenger seat of an old Volvo sedan when it flipped just north of Santa Cruz and expelled you into a ravine. The driver’s seat belt had held, but yours had not.

J
ONATHAN AND
I battled our way through the San Francisco traffic and sped thirty miles south on the highway, out of the fog and into the sunlight. We reached the peninsula and took the off-ramp and argued over the route in voices clipped with panic. We made our way through that alien topography—the university, with its low, wide sandstone buildings and flat expanses of sky and lawn, the shopping center, with its vats of flowers and its acres of parking lot, the hospital inside its immaculate suburbia—that sunlit peninsula pressed between the green bay and a bank of hills the color of straw that five months later your father would begin to call home. We drove up the hospital’s main drive and circled the extravagant brick fountain, an oasis of shaped trees growing in its center.

I was the one who’d counted your drinks the night before. I was the one who’d somehow incited a riot, then, in the aftermath, set about making sure my three children were safe for the night under the same roof. I was the one who’d moved a sleeping Polly in with Clara so you could have Polly’s bed. If I had not made you stay, if I had not altered that sliver of fate, if I had not plucked that single
wing from that single butterfly, you wouldn’t have ended up in that car. You’d have said your goodbyes and driven across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley and fallen into bed and slept until noon. You’d have returned to the lab a day later to carry on with your investigations in particle physics, along with the pursuit of other elusive truths.

At the main entrance to the hospital were two dogs—eyes half closed, chins flat on the ground in a posture of patient defeat. That was the attitude to avoid. The task at hand—my task—was not to wait patiently but to act. To undo the twist of fate. To be vigilant and merciless in advocating for your medical care. To accept nothing less than a full recovery. To ask every question. To overturn every stone.

Did I suspect, that first morning, that there were some stones better left buried in the dust? That I might wish for the results of certain biological interrogations to be kept hidden, not only from you and from your father, but from myself? I don’t think I did. Denial, as any addict in recovery will tell you, is not defined as knowing something and pretending you don’t; it is failing to see it at all.

T
HERE WAS NO
parking at the hospital that morning. Up and around we went, three, four, five levels, then down again, your father taking the corners hard and fast. When we ascended and emerged a second time onto the top level and into the onslaught of the September sun, a car just ahead of us was pulling out of its spot. Jonathan kept his foot on the brake and undid his seat belt and reached into the back for his jacket and his wallet. I dug in my purse for my sunglasses. In that momentary lapse, a car angled into the spot from the other direction.

“What the fuck,” your father said.

He thrust the car into neutral and leapt out. He was not so different from when I’d met him. He was as windblown and rugged, as blue-eyed and broad-shouldered and good-looking as he had always been. He still had a full head of dirty-blond hair that made him seem younger than forty-seven, as did his calm, positive, compact energy, his effortless refusal to bend to the mood of the day. So it was shocking to watch him now, storming toward the offending vehicle like an animal protecting its young—vicious, and angry, and so unlike himself, but in a way, beautiful.

He stood up close to the driver’s side window and the car door opened a crack, whacking his shin. A leg reached toward the ground. Your father could not see the leg, since he was almost on top of it, but I could see that it was thick and squat and encased in knee-high nylons, the ankles swollen with fluid, the calves mottled with varicose veins. The shoes were flat and white with rubber soles. The foot, and the leg, were attached to a woman to whom your father said, “My son was airlifted here, and this is my fucking parking spot.”

The woman hauled herself out of the front seat. Her face wrinkled with the effort and her small, old eyes leaked and blinked in the sun. Your father took a step back. He stood for a moment, shoved his hands in his pockets, and crossed the parking lot toward me, the rage fading and his face becoming again the mask it had been since I’d returned from London and, four days before, made my foolish confession—a mask I no longer had a right to question or remove.

We exited the structure and pulled into a handicapped spot in front of the emergency room entrance and ran. I held my sunglasses in my left hand and clutched my purse with my right. I had forgotten my sweater. Your father flung his windbreaker over his shoulder and the zipper stung my cheek, the beginnings of retribution, perhaps, for a past that had long ago laid down the invisible blueprint of our future.

W
HEN WE RETURNED
to the car at midnight, there was a ticket tucked under the windshield wiper.

“Two hundred and seventy dollars,” Jonathan said. He didn’t tear the ticket up but dropped it on the ground and crushed it beneath his foot, the way he might have snubbed out a cigarette. By then, a serious traumatic brain injury had been ruled out. But you had a concussion, a punctured lung, four broken ribs and a chipped right kneecap. And, most threatening, a severed renal artery that had potentially compromised your kidney—the only one, it turns out, you had.

They say the human body can lose 50 percent of its body parts and survive. But it depends on which parts, and which body. Renal agenesis. They don’t call it a disease; they call it a condition. The condition of being born with only one kidney, occurring in roughly one in two thousand people. Most never know the condition exists, because the single kidney grows large enough to accommodate the body’s needs.

What was it that hit you? Not a tree. Not the hard ground. Not a rock jutting up from the ravine. But something manufactured, plastic or glass or steel, some man-made, hard edge of the car that caught the curve of your body as you flew, piercing you on impact.

When we arrived at the hospital, you were in a medically induced coma, which I was made to understand was a sort of freezing of you, a fabricated reprieve from your own body that would allow your internal organs to rest. We had been informed that while your body was in that state, there was not much we could do. The coma might be necessary for a few days, or a few weeks, or even a few months. It was too soon to tell.

We called my mother. She said your sisters were sound asleep. She said that my father, whom I hadn’t seen in more than twenty
years, had indeed finally arrived from Maine. She said the two of them would hold down the fort. Jonathan and I drove up and down El Camino Real until we found a room in a motel close to the hospital, the Mermaid Inn, a pink stucco affliction squeezed between a Starbucks and an independent bookstore. Aside from its proximity to you, and the coffee that could be procured next door, the single feature that can be put forward in that motel room’s defense was the price—sixty-three dollars a night.

P
EOPLE SAY
a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. But what if the state of that child’s happiness has become a mystery? What if that child is no longer a child but a young man who has removed himself to a great distance and encased himself in a great silence? In June of last year, you arrived home from Northwestern for the summer, and a photo arrived in our mailbox. That September, the car flipped. Between those bookends was a family whose happiness might still be intact if only I’d been able to see the threats to it more clearly.

Kids are resilient. That’s another thing people say. But what choice do they have? Polly is only six. Six-year-olds cry. Yet I worry that she cries more, this winter, than she used to. I worry about Clara, too. I wonder whether it’s normal for a nine-year-old to spend so much time alone in her room making pencil drawings in a sketch pad. I wonder how much is simply their budding natures, and how much the result of our family’s new arrangement, in which you are absent, and your father and I live in separate houses, and your sisters are passed between us like a restaurant dessert.

This morning, Polly sat at the kitchen table trying to write a story, squeezing the pencil hard between her fingers. She’d printed her name and the date at the top, writing the month as “Marsh” and
making the
7
for the day, and both
2
’s in 2012 backward. If you’d done that, I’d have whisked you off to a reading specialist. But she’s only in kindergarten. I’ve learned to wait that kind of thing out. And the whispers of small worries are silenced now, mostly, by the volume of the worry over you.