All the Major Constellations (3 page)

“I'll leave now and get tickets,” he said.

“There's some cash on my dresser,” Sara said.

Marcia dug around her pockets and produced a pile of lint. She looked up at Andrew, embarrassed.

“Pay me back later,” he said, waving away her explanation. “You coming with me or you want to ride with Sara?”

“I think I'll go with Sara,” she said.

Andrew stepped outside. It was six o'clock. The sun was just settling back into the green mountains and leaving a soft pink blush in the sky. He thought of Laura, of the color of her skin, how it was like the light of the setting sun reflected in the sky and bouncing off the clouds of a perfect spring day. Pale yet golden,
cool yet warm. He sighed. Sometimes, often in fact, he wished he could stop thinking about her. He felt cursed with obsession. He considered confessing his crush to Marcia and Sara; perhaps this would ease the sting and make him feel less like an actor in his own life, pretending everything was cool when really he was half out of his mind.

He was about to drive away when Marcia came running down the steps. He smiled as she hopped into his car and buckled up.

“Sara's still messing with her clothes,” she said.

Andrew shifted gears and pulled out of the driveway. He wondered if, on the way to the movies, he could get a glimpse of Laura. She would be heading to some sort of church event, even on a Friday night. Andrew thought it must be miserable to be at church all the time, but Laura and her friends always seemed happy.

The movie theater wasn't in the direction of the church, but he could take Maple Lane to Autumn Road, then loop around Hunger Street . . . yes, that would work. The circuitous route would eventually bring them to the theater. He turned the car sharply.

“Where are you going?” Marcia asked.

“Shortcut,” Andrew said. He was glad that Sara hadn't come with them. Unlike Marcia, Sara would have known that he wasn't taking a shortcut and would have teased him about it. Thoughts of confession were now far away.

They drove in comfortable silence for a few minutes, the
special trick of their old friendship. Despite Sara's beauty and flirty charm, Andrew actually preferred being alone with Marcia. He often felt calm and strong when he was with her. Marcia was a small person, five feet tall and thin; she almost looked like a child. Something about Marcia's size, her fatherlessness, and even her precocious intelligence made Andrew feel like an older brother to her. He tried to treat her like the loving and protective brother that Brian had never been to him, and her own brothers had never been to her. Other times he idly fantasized about her, or Sara for that matter, and it satisfied him more than porn.

Andrew and Marcia had become friends when they were in the sixth grade. He had seen Marcia around at school. She was new to town. She had been born in Korea but was white, a paradox that intrigued and repelled some of his classmates. “That's just weird!” had been the common refrain.

When she was young, Marcia had had a subtle but strange global accent, having attended an English language school for the children of diplomats, politicians, and other international types. Her accent was gone, but her speech, especially at times of great emotion, was still peppered with the occasional “Bollocks!” or “Shiza!” or “When I go to University—I mean
college
.”

Marcia's father had been a military doctor stationed in Korea. While volunteering at a free clinic, he was brutally murdered by an insane patient. Marcia's family moved back to the States shortly after the tragedy.

People were kind to them but left them alone. Marcia's
brothers were older than she was and very close in age to each other, sixteen and seventeen when they moved to town. The brothers had passed imperceptibly through high school, quietly scoring the highest marks in everything and then vanishing into college. They had attended the same state university on modest academic scholarships. Neither studied medicine.

He slowed down as they drove past Laura's church. A large placard on the lawn read
ALL ANSWERS HERE!
About a dozen cars were parked in the lot. He thought he saw a flicker of long amber hair out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned his head, it was gone. He silently cursed.

“Sometimes I wish I were religious,” Marcia said.

“Oh?”

“I kind of envy people who have that.”

“All the answers?” Andrew said.

Marcia laughed. “Yes, that. But also . . . peace, calm, certainty in the face of a storm.”

“But religion has caused a lot of conflict and oppression, even warfare. Maybe religion
is
the storm.”

“That's true.”

“I don't know. I'd never really thought about it,” Andrew said.

“No?”

“I mean, I figure we're all going to die someday, and it'll be just like before we were born.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“And while we're here?”

“If you need God or Buddha or whatever to help you through life, that's . . . fine, I guess.”

“As long as you're not causing wars.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“It sounds so simple, talking about it in your car,” Marcia said with a nervous laugh. “You know, it's weird that they're even here.”

“What do you mean?”

“The ‘All Answers' church. I think they're pretty conservative.
Here
, in liberal Vermont?”

“Please. That kind of stuff is all over the place. Vermont's not special. There's poverty and drugs and all kinds of shit. We're just like every place else.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Need plus fear plus ignorance equals religion.”

“That's pretty harsh, Drew,” she said as she looked out the window.

Drew.
She had invoked the childhood nickname she'd given him years ago. She rarely used it now, and when she did it usually meant, as when she swore in German, that her emotions were running high. He mentally noted all this and bit back a sarcastic retort. Besides, he wasn't even sure he felt that way about religion; it just sounded cool. Every once in a while he was meaner than he'd intended to be, like an instinct he couldn't control. It
happened with his mom sometimes, and now it had happened with Marcia, who was probably talking about religion in the first place because of her father, the eminent surgeon who loomed large in her imagination but dim in her memory. He tried to think of something comforting to say, but Marcia was prickly about her family's past. He glanced at the clock and pressed the gas pedal harder. The movie started in five minutes. Sara was a fast driver and would not have taken his ridiculous “shortcut
.
” She could be there already.

But she wasn't. They left Sara's ticket at the window and entered the already darkened theater. It smelled like nutritional yeast and hot oil. They sat down just as the movie began.

As the images flickered before him, Andrew realized that there was no dialogue at all. Maybe Sara had found this out and decided not to come. He leaned back. She'd probably be outside when the film ended. He put his arm around the back of Marcia's chair and glanced at her. She looked anxious.

“You okay?” he whispered.

She nodded, not taking her eyes away from the screen. She flinched at what she saw.

“I WONDER WHERE SHE IS?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—I—I don't want to be here,” Marcia said. Her voice cracked and gave way to sobs.

Not for the first time that night, he pressed his fingertips to the corners of his eyes and tried to push the tears back.

They had sunk to the floor with their backs against the wall of room seven in the intensive care unit. They had not stopped holding hands for two hours. Now their fingers lay loosely intertwined, their palms sweaty with fear and with the constant hopeless pressing of skin on skin. Across from them lay Sara. Motionless, supine, comatose, beautiful Sara.

“There are so many tubes,” said Andrew, who was now gasping with the effort not to cry.

“I know.”

“So many things coming out of her.”

“I know, I
know.
”

They'd had this conversation many times that night. A kind nurse had explained to them what all the tubes were for.
This one helps her breathe, this one sucks out the secretions that congeal in her throat, this one drains her urine, this one reads the blood pressure in her heart, this one feeds her, these ones deliver medication to her bloodstream.

“Oh. Oh. Oh,” they'd said in response.

They were permitted to stay in the room as long as they promised to be quiet and not touch
anything
. Sara's mother was heavily sedated and half-conscious in the waiting room. A few of her friends from work had come to sit with her and help fill out paperwork. Sara had no siblings, no father to speak of, no cousins or aunts or uncles. There was a grandmother, somewhere, but Janet and her mother had not spoken in years.

Sara only has us,
Andrew thought, and it made him feel protective and scared all at once. He heard Janet moaning from the waiting area. He glanced at Marcia, who was frowning and crying and picking at a bleeding hangnail on her thumb.

“Stop that,” Andrew said. He pried her fingers off her thumb and found himself clutching her wrists as she tried to pull away.

“Maybe you two should get something to eat.”

Andrew looked up as one of the nurses entered the room. He noticed that she was carrying a diaper. Didn't Sara have a tube for
that? Then it hit him, and he felt stupid and disgusted and mad at himself. He also didn't want Marcia, who'd been to hysterics and back again three times that night, to see the diaper. Through some empathetic telepathy the nurse hid the diaper behind her back while Marcia wiped the dribbling tears from her cheeks.

“You're right,” Andrew said to the nurse. He stood up. Marcia stayed on the floor, staring at Sara. He gave the nurse an embarrassed shrug and hoisted Marcia to her feet.

With his arm around her shoulders, Andrew carefully guided Marcia through the ICU. The ICU was a large, white, U-shaped hallway with four rooms on each side and a nurse's station in the center. There were no doors in the ICU. There was just an open frame through which a person could hurriedly pass in an emergency. There were curtains in the rooms, but the walls facing the nurse's station consisted of large clear windows so the patients could be continuously observed. Television screens displayed the brainwaves and heart rhythms of those being monitored.

The first thing Andrew had noticed about the ICU was that it wasn't as bustling as he imagined it would be. It wasn't like the TV shows he'd seen where people in hospitals were in constant motion and yelling orders at one another. In fact, many of the nurses and doctors seemed to speak in a deliberately quiet way. The machines that beeped and whirred had an almost muffled quality. Or was that just him? Andrew had a curious sense of drifting, as if the ICU were a spaceship and he were a humble
passenger. He was on the wrong deck and belonged somewhere else and was being told to go to his assigned area.

When they walked past the waiting room, Andrew gently moved Marcia to the other side of his body so that he, not Marcia, was facing Janet and her friends. Before Janet had been sedated, she'd kept grabbing Marcia by the shoulders and saying “Marcia! Marcia!” in an insensible, questioning tone of voice. He looked in on the women, who were crying and holding hands. Janet was lying on her back on the couch. Her face looked sluggish, and her mouth curved down into a sickly and unnatural-looking frown.

Janet was usually such a fun person. “You look like I need a drink,” she'd say to Andrew when she came home from a late shift and found him writing hopeless Laura poems in her living room, Sara and Marcia fast asleep on the couch and curled around each other like puppies. She'd make him a Pop-Tart and pour herself a glass of wine. They'd talk about her job and his college prospects. Janet was interested, unlike his own parents.

When Andrew and Marcia reached the hallway, he released her and they walked toward the elevator. He pushed the button for the first floor and crossed his arms over his chest. The doors closed. They looked at each other.

“I could kill that guy,” he said.

“He's already dead,” Marcia said.

“I know that. I'm just saying.”

They didn't know much. Sara had been speeding, but the guy who'd hit her had been drunk. He crashed through his
windshield and split his head open on the street. Sara's car tumbled and tumbled. It tumbled down into a granite ravine. Sara was, in the muttered words of one of the doctors who'd been swarming around, “a vegetable.”

“That's not certain,” another doctor in a long white coat had said quickly to Janet. But Janet was already screaming.

The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open with a jarring chunky sound, as if the mechanics of the thing weren't lined up properly. Andrew followed Marcia out into the hallway. A directory in front of them indicated that they should take a left for the cafeteria. They walked a few steps and were met by the congested and comforting smell of hot grease. They bought doughnuts and coffee.

The lights were low in the seating area. The only other occupant was a sleeping doctor in green scrubs and a wrinkled white jacket. He looked young. He was slumped over a table, his breathing heavy and uneven.
That'll be Marcia in a few years,
Andrew thought. He looked at her serious little face and wondered if she were thinking the same thing. They sat down and picked at their doughnuts. Andrew cleared his throat.

“Why did one doctor say she'd be a vegetable and the other said that maybe she'd recover?” he asked.

“Because they disagree?”

Andrew looked out the window, but it was so dark, inside and out, that he couldn't see anything, not even his own reflection. He turned back to Marcia. She was a certified Mensa brain; she generally knew a little something about everything. She leaned
back in her chair. She had chocolate on her face, and for some reason this irritated the hell out of him.

“You've got food on your face,” he said.

She turned to inspect herself in the window.

“You can't see yourself. I tried,” he said.

“What do you want from me?” she snapped.

A high-pitched beeping sound made them both jump. The doctor awoke with a start. He grabbed his pager from his waist and leaped up from the table, running off in the direction of the elevators. They stared after him.

“Listen, after the swelling in her brain goes down, they'll need to assess how much damage has been done. See how much she's retained. That's why no one knows for sure,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

“I heard one of the doctors saying it to another doctor,” she said.

“They all seemed to say something different. How do you know who to believe?”

“The guy with the longest coat said the thing about the swelling.”

“So length of coat indicates degree of knowledge?”

“Interns, residents, attendings—the higher up the food chain, the longer the white coat.”

“Really?”

“Really.” She took another bite of her doughnut.

“So, what's next? More surgery or something?”

She swallowed. “Andrew, I really don't know.”