Between Friends (32 page)

I would get through them because she needed me to.

It was our pledge, mine and Benny’s, our covenant, entered into as seriously as we entered into our marriage, to protect and love this child, even more so for how difficult she was to conceive.

I met Cora’s eyes, her mouth agape, cradling her bandaged arm, Drew’s arm around her shoulders. He looked traumatized, as I supposed he had every right to be. He’d come here to take care of Cora, and instead had been thrown into the role of errand boy to our devastation. At any other time I might have cared, but I didn’t now. I would use him, and anyone else who was around, as selfishly as I needed to in order to get through this, for myself and for Letty.

“Mom, how is he? Is he going to be okay?” Letty asked, pulling back to search my face.

“We’re going to go see him right now,” I replied, saving my real answer. “We’ll be in 8211,” I said to Cora, and she nodded. “Give us a bit?”

“Okay.”

She and Drew watched us with sad eyes as the door closed, sealing Letty and me in together, the way we were going to be from now on, the two of us.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did they get the bullets? Is he awake and everything?”

“Sweetie,” I said, turning toward her, holding her hands in mine at our sides, an odd pantomime of a dance about to begin. “I don’t have good news for you.”

Her head slowly tilted to the side, her eyebrows drawing together, Benny in all of it.

“They couldn’t get all of the bullet fragments out—”

She interrupted, talking quickly. “But he’s okay, right? I mean, people walk around with things in them all the time, you know . . .”

She trailed off as I shook my head.

“No, baby. No, your daddy’s on a ventilator right now. It’s keeping his body alive, but he’s gone.”

I wanted to be straightforward, but I could not bring myself to say the word
dead
. I didn’t want her to be confused, but I simply could not say it right that second.

“What? What do you mean?”

Her voice began to climb and the elevator doors opened on the floor. As requested, I didn’t see any cops. I held on to one of her hands and began to step out of the elevator, but she pulled out of my grasp and shrank back against the wide metal rail. I held my foot in front of the door to keep it open and held my hand out to her.

“Oh, God, sweetheart. I—he’s, he’s gone. His brain function is—he’s—” I still couldn’t say the word. But I was going to have to. Somehow, I was going to have to say it if I wanted Letty to understand.

She stared at me, her eyes huge in her pale face. “So, he’s like, he’s in a coma?”

I shook my head. “No. I can explain this better—”

“No,” she said, her face contorting as she slid down to the floor against the back of the elevator. “No, no.”

I hadn’t considered this, hadn’t considered her simply refusing to move. Refusing to believe, yes, but I didn’t know what to do with her immovable. I wasn’t going to force her into the room with Benny. I had wanted to see him as quickly as possible, but that didn’t mean she was ready to. I wanted every single second I could get with him, but if Letty wasn’t ready, I couldn’t just leave her here.

“Okay,” I said soothingly, crouching down in front of her. “Okay, honey, you don’t have to see him if you don’t want to right now. What do you want to do? You want to just go sit in a waiting room? There’s one right here, we’ll close the door . . .”

I stood, drawing her up with me. It was working. She stepped forward as I stepped back, and I continued to coax her out of the elevator and into the waiting room, where we sat in chairs next to each other. I pressed my hand against my eyes for a moment to block out the look of horror that had been frozen on my daughter’s face before I rose again to shut the door.

It settled closed with a hard
thunk
, and, again, we were sealed into a small space together. I turned slowly and leaned against the door, my head bowed, unable to look at her yet.

“Mom?” she whispered. “What’s happening?”

I took a deep breath and raised my head, and said it.

“He’s brain dead, sweetheart.” And then I slowly, carefully explained what had happened, and what the neurosurgeon had told me, what I believed about death and dying, and what would happen next. It was a horrific parody of the conversations I’d always fantasized having with my child, the wisdom I would impart about what I believed about the universe and life and our souls.

In the daily routine of raising her, I had too rarely had those conversations with her, but I’d always been grateful when we managed to have one.

The lightweight reality of them embarrassed me now. Letty looked at me as if she had no idea who I was, had never heard words or ideas like this coming from my mouth, and I suppose she hadn’t.

“What happens after the other doctor does the stuff?” she asked, still dry-eyed.

“Well,” I said, “I’m not really sure. I suppose we’ll have to give our consent to have the ventilator removed.”

“And then he’ll just die? Why can’t we just leave it and maybe he’d wake up?”

Her tone was accusatory, and I went over what brain death meant again.

“But how do you know?” she asked. “How does anyone know?”

I pushed myself off the door and sat next to her again. She kept her hands clutched together on her lap, her knuckles white.

“I think you just have to decide what it is you believe and then stick with it until a more compelling argument against it comes along,” I said. “And I don’t . . . I don’t believe for a second that your father would want to be kept alive like this. He can’t hear you, or see you, or respond. He can’t feel anything, sweetie, he’s in no pain. He has no conscious thought. He, the essence of him, his soul if you want to call it that, I think that’s already gone on to a better place.”

She stared at me intently.

“What does he look like?”

I described the bandages, the machines and what they did and where they were hooked up. The telling of it served to calm me somehow.

“What if you don’t tell them to, you know,
stop
?”

“But I would.”

“Don’t I get any say? What if I don’t want to?”

“I think it’s way too early to even talk about this,” I said cautiously.

“It’s just tomorrow,” she said, and now came the tears, choking out of her in great ragged gasps. “He’s mine, too,” she protested, hitting herself on the chest with both hands, making me jump and reach out to stop her from doing it again. She pulled away from me before I could touch her.

“No,” she wailed. “He’s mine, you can’t do it, you can’t just . . . you can’t just kill him.”

“Letty,” I said, reaching for her again, catching her at last and holding on tightly. “I won’t tell you that your opinion doesn’t matter. It does. But in this case I know better than you do, and you have to trust me to do the right thing.”

She struggled in my grasp for a moment, but then she stiffened and stilled against me, and then, finally, she collapsed into me the way she hadn’t since she had been a little girl, the weight of the world on her impossibly thin shoulders.

I, too, could not hold out any longer, but my tears weren’t just for my loss of Benny; they were for Letty’s loss, for the uncertain future we now shared only with each other, and for Benny, too, knowing that he would never have the comfort of consoling our daughter when she cried. All the things he would never do.

We both slowly quieted, and I pulled away to find tissues in my purse, coming up with nothing but a few old drive-through napkins. I cleaned her face, her arms hanging slack, her hands loose on her thighs.

“Oh, baby,” I said as I wiped my own face. “I don’t know how—” I cut myself off. Telling Letty that I didn’t know what we were going to do, how we were going to live without him, would not help her. “I don’t know how everything works right now,” I said instead, a faltering substitute.

But she didn’t seem to notice.

“I have questions to ask the doctor about what happens next,” I said. “Would you like to be here?”

“I guess,” she said, her tone dull and exhausted. “Is there . . . blood?”

It took me a moment to catch up with her.

“No, no, honey. You can’t see any blood. The bandages cover everything. It’s just like I told you, with the breathing tube, the monitors. Would you—do you think you’d like to see him now?”

I didn’t know if it was better for her to see him or not. When she’d arrived, I had been on auto-pilot, assuming that what was best for me was also best for her. There was no time to check a parenting book on this one. I thought, at fifteen, that she was old enough to tell her father good-bye. Not everyone got that chance, and I didn’t want her to regret it later.

She bit her lip, but then she nodded.

“You want to go now? Or do you want to wait?” I asked.

She stood, and I was surprised at her height. She had seemed so small just a moment ago, in my arms. I stood, too, and we walked to his room together. Tim was waiting down at the nurses’ station, and he gave us a tentative wave.

I nodded at him and placed my hand on the door, but before I pushed it open I said, “I’m going to go in with you, but if you want some time alone with him, let me know, okay?”

She nodded, gripped my hand, and I opened the door. We entered together, Letty trailing me slightly, but coming willingly. She kept her head down, her eyes on the floor, until I stopped a couple of feet away from the bed. When she raised her head, her hand tightened on mine.

I just stood still, letting her look, silently willing her strength.

Within a few moments her breathing evened and she let loose of my hand. It took another moment, but she eventually walked over to the side of the bed, then looked back at me questioningly.

“He really—he really can’t hear me?”

“No, not through his ears, no. He’s not there,” I said, gesturing toward the Benny on the bed. “But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t hear you—” I waved my hand in a vague motion toward the ceiling.

She looked, understandably, extraordinarily dissatisfied with this answer. I had to do better.

“I’ve been talking to him. Out loud,” I clarified. “I can’t—I don’t believe that he’s just gone, I just know that he’s not
there
.”

“How?” she asked incredulously. “How do you know?”

“Because we’re not our bodies. And he’s done with this one,” I said, barely above a whisper. I closed my eyes, feeling myself sway, and a lovely, welcome graying out of my thoughts and softening of my knees began.

It felt like minutes that I hung there, between responsibility and blissful unconsciousness, but it must have been only a split second, and my eyes opened when someone knocked lightly on the door.

Cora stood outside, looking as tragic as I felt, Drew hovering a few feet away. She didn’t say a word, only raised her eyebrows and I nodded, pushing the door open wider and allowing her in, her arms spreading out to encompass me, and within seconds Letty was there, too, the three of us clutching each other, Cora holding her bandaged arm off to the side gingerly.

And I realized that it was not just the two of us. For a little while, at least, I did have one other person to lean on, and she was, miraculously, here.

There were others, I realized. Others I would need to call: Benny’s brother, our friends, though I was sure word had already spread rapidly through the police family and more people would soon be arriving.

I pulled back from our embrace, but Letty stayed where she was, and as I stepped away she fit herself more fully into Cora’s arms. Cora met my eyes over Letty’s shoulder, her face filled with anguish, as much for the child in her arms as for me or for Benny himself.

Letty mumbled something I couldn’t hear, but I caught Cora’s answer easily: “I don’t know, I just don’t know. I don’t understand either.”

The night passed in a haze of medical personnel and cops, of coffee and sleeping pills. The nurses moved some patients and set us up a room next to Benny’s, allowing us to sleep in shifts, though I don’t know how much any of us slept despite the pills. The next morning Drew tracked Dr. Young down for us.

We sat in the closed waiting room, all of us this time, and listened as he explained it all over again, whole- brain death, how long until his heart gave out, all the grim reality of the body that lay in the room down the hall. Letty huddled between Cora and me and asked him the same questions she’d asked me.

But she seemed to hear his answers more clearly than she’d heard them from me, and she asked the one we’d both wanted an answer to before I could.

“What happens if the other doctor says he’s . . . you know, too? I mean, do you just, turn things off?”

The doctor looked at me quickly, and I nodded.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ve discussed what I would do, we just don’t know what the process is. It might be easier to handle if we know what’s coming.”

“Okay,” he said. “Dr. Tulley will be coming in this afternoon. She’s a neurologist, and she’s already aware of your husband’s condition, but she’ll carefully go over his file and will consult with me both before and after she sees him. She’ll conduct several physical tests, as well as an EEG, and then there will be a few decisions you’ll have to make. Most people want to make sure anyone who would want to say good-bye before support is withdrawn are notified. He’s on file as an organ donor, so they’ll have the transplant coordinator come in to discuss possible organ donation . . .”

He kept talking, but everyone else in the room seemed to have stopped breathing.