Matters of Faith (10 page)

When he woke, Ada, despite his locked door, was lying on her side at the far edge of the bed, turned away from him. “How did you—” he began, but when she turned over and he saw the tears shining on her face, the knot inside his chest seemed to burst. He was filled with relief, and if he were to admit it to himself, helplessness. He pulled her into him and they clung to each other, he, mindful of her knees, she, mindful of his arousal, careful of each other's individual, exposed pain.

For the first time, they stayed together all night, and after they made love—and there was no mistake that that was exactly what it was, and that, too, was a first, though they'd not known the difference before—they did not pray or ask for forgiveness, from each other or from God.

He took care of her. He carried her to the tub and gently changed her bandages, and gave her the painkillers she'd refused earlier, and then carried her back to bed. He could not heal his sister and had been cast from her presence, but he could take care of Ada, and they finally slept, entwined with each other, breathing each other's air and forming their own faith.

They did not move until morning, when the police arrived to arrest them.

NO change and no change and no change. Almost forty-eight hours and there was no change in Meghan, and no change in what the doctors told us and no change in how Cal and I hovered in her room except for an occasional change of position. Neither of us ate, and neither of us talked about Marshall or Ada.

A nurse brought us a plate of breakfast but it sat on the rolling tray between us, merely a symbol of the fact that it wasn't being rolled over to Meghan's bed for her to eat. Cal took his eyes off of Meghan long enough to glance at me.

“You should go home,” he said. I barked out a laugh.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. Go home? Why would I go home until I could bring Meghan with me?

He cleared his throat. “One of us should. One of us should make sure everything is . . . all right there. And you should shower, and change. Bring us back some food.”

“Then you go,” I said.

He sighed. “I will. But if I'm the one who goes home, I don't know what I'll do when I get there.”

His voice was low and resigned, and I suddenly realized what he was trying to say. He didn't know what he would do to Marshall, maybe Ada. I had no idea where either of them were.

I thought it over, calculated the time it would take me to go home, get back. It was too much time. I stood and grabbed my purse.

“I'll call first,” I said. Cal didn't answer, and I left the room, hesitating at the line of the doorway, superstitious of allowing the door to close behind me. But it was unthinkable to prop the door open, to allow anyone walking by on their way to visit their own damaged loved one to see my child, to see Cal, broken and ancient in the reclining chair. I let the door close softly and shuddered when it clicked.

I raced down the hall, looking for an area where I could use my cell phone. The waiting room had four people in it, their faces drawn with fear or slack with exhaustion. It was four people too many, and I continued on my way, finally boarding the elevator to take me downstairs to the lobby.

When I got off the elevator, the sunlight coming in through the automatic doors of the lobby seemed an affront, and I glanced around to find another outlet. My eyes finally settled on the sign with the hospital map on it. There was a chapel, a gift shop, and a cafeteria in the opposite direction of that obscene sunshine, and I headed that way, turning my cell phone on as I searched.

The gift shop was tiny and glass-fronted, and the cafeteria was nearly full, but the chapel not only had heavy solid doors and no signs saying “No Cell Phones,” but was also blessedly empty and quiet. I sat in a pew barely large enough for three people and dialed home. The phone rang long enough for the answering machine to pick up.

“Marshall, it's Mom. We're still here. There's no change. I need you to call me back. I need to know . . . what's going on. I'll try your cell phone.”

I hung up and called his cell. There was no answer, and I left the same message there, then simply sat, phone on my lap, and stared up at the fake stained-glass window hanging on the front wall. I felt no qualms about prayer. I did it when I wanted to, directed it at no specific deity, and expected no response.

I wondered what deeply religious people thought about this little chapel. Did they find it without reverence? If their symbols weren't there—the crosses or the robes or glass-encased Torah or Qu'ran—did it steal a piece of their faith, distract them from their purposeful prayer? In this hospital, that tried to keep sick people of any faith alive, did the faithful feel forgotten in this empty chapel?

It felt peaceful enough to me, and I closed my eyes and prayed. For my daughter, for my son, for my husband and myself. That Meghan would come out of this as whole as she had been. That Cal could one day look at Marshall without hating him. That our marriage, already in some state of flux I hadn't yet been ready to examine too closely, could remain flash-frozen until it was all over. That when we did get home, Ada would be gone and we would never have to hear her name or see her Winona Ryder face, or the dangerous glint of her eyebrow ring ever again.

I gave it ten minutes. And when my phone did not ring, I turned it off, and returned to Meghan's room, where I simply shook my head at Cal's inquiring glance and settled in for the day.

 
 
THE doctors continued their wait-and-see diagnosis. They discussed scheduling of more MRI and CAT scans, talked about Ran-cho and Glasgow scales, fumbled with the intricacies of the brain that they really knew nothing about, gave us tentative time limits, and threw terms like
minimally conscious
and
persistent vegetative state
around as if we were capable of processing any of it.

I made notes that Cal and I referred to, but I was unwilling to discuss anything except her swift awakening and recovery. It left little to talk about, and our silences were long and filled with nothingness. Late that afternoon, the need for real food finally overrode Cal's refusal to leave Meghan. I could go for weeks longer, months if need be. My body could sustain itself on the water the nurses brought and the dry crackers and flavorless soup from the food tray.

Cal cleared his throat. “I'm going to pick up some food.”

“Okay.”

“You want anything?”

“I'll take whatever you get.”

“All right.”

We fell silent again, and Cal did not move or appear as if he were planning to anytime soon. Our marriage had, in many ways, evolved, perhaps devolved, into daily, silent competitions. Who did more housework, who brought in a larger paycheck, who was better at money management, who got a more desirable result from our children. And now we were down to this: Who was more devoted to our comatose daughter?

The only card we had to play here was time. Who stayed awake longest, who stayed in the room longest. It was about Meghan, but on another level it was also about us. Ada and Marshall had not just placed Meghan in danger, they had forced our marital hand.

So right now my body was holding out longer than Cal's. But my mind was degenerating. Time spent in a hospital room is a void, a time warp, a suspension, and a weight at once. Time moves in great chunks at points, and slows alarmingly at others. During the slow hours there is time to see every age and shape of your child evolve under the sheets of the hospital bed. There is time to see recent memories—Meghan turning on the radio in the kitchen, twisting around on the stairs to get a glimpse of Ada, lying on the roof of the car with her beloved brother and her new friend—framed by the tubes and wires and electronic rhythm of artificial life.

The fast times were the times I saw her on the boat, the times I saw blood—blood I knew now was not my child's but from someone else's child, the child responsible for this—the times I felt the sway of the ambulance. Those times flew, and I was grateful for that.

When Cal finally pulled himself from the chair, I was in slow time, and I was relieved that he was leaving.

“So, do you want anything from home?”

“You're going home too?”

He nodded, looking at Meghan, not me. “One of us has to. Might as well do it while I'm out. I need to cancel my trips. I'll drop my book off with Kevin, have him take over what he can, call the others. Boat needs to be taken care of. You want some clothes?”

“Why don't you just pack us both a bag?”

“All right.”

“What about Marshall?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“Will you bring him back with you?”

“You want him here you'd better go get him yourself. I don't want him anywhere near my daughter, or me right now, and I can't believe you would.”

We were staring directly at each other now.

“This was a horrible mistake, Cal.”

“No. No, it wasn't. And don't you forget it, or next time he brings home some fruitcake they're going to kill her. Or us. For all we know they were making her some kind of sacrifice or something. Still think this is some kind of fun hobby, Chloe, a
growing stage
? We did this.
You
did this, and I allowed it because I didn't want to fight with you. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let it happen again.”

“You're the one who convinced me that this was the first normal thing he'd done since he was ten. Remember that, Cal? Marshall is our son, and he made a horrible, horrible mistake, but he loves Meghan, and he must be going through hell right now.”

Cal's face darkened. “If he's not now, he's going to.”

“Do we have to do this . . . now?” I asked, inclining my head toward Meghan.

I knew it was a risk. But it worked. His face softened and his shoulders slumped. “No. Of course not. I'm sorry.”

“Me too,” I said. And I was, I really was. I made an effort to soften it and said: “Thank you for going.”

He nodded, took one last look at Meghan, and turned toward the door, but hesitated with his hand on the long, silver handle before turning around and approaching me. He bent to kiss the top of my head, but his lips did not land, they merely stirred the air slightly and a shiver ran across the back of my scalp, tingling to a fine point when the door clicked shut behind him. I should have felt bereft, but I did not.

There was already a divided time line, already the old, painful joke of Before and After, and in this After I was just as pleased to have time alone with my daughter as I had been Before. I got up and stretched, then started to bustle around, talking to Meghan as if we were both about to start our day at home.

“So, I was thinking about pulling your bunk beds apart,” I said, adjusting the blinds, allowing more light in, but not too much, not so much that I could see every detail. I didn't want to see the grime, from who knows what, in the seams of the putty-colored, plastic baseboard, the dust in the ceiling vent. I didn't want to see how Meghan's skin wrinkled under the transparent tape holding tubes in their correct alignment. I opened them just enough to offer the illusion of allowing sunlight in.

“If we moved your desk under the window, we could put both beds against that wall with your nightstand in between them. Or maybe it's time to just get a new bed? Maybe a double? Or a queen? I think there's room to get a queen in there. We could repaint too,” I said, stuffing empty water bottles, an unread newspaper, notes written and crossed out on the pad supplied by the hospital into the trash.

There was, of course, no answer. I stopped the busywork and turned around to look at my daughter from the foot of her bed, as if seeing her in it for the first time. This was coma. Life moving around you, conversations had for weeks, months, years, without your input, all the business of everyone else progressing in this one space, while you remained utterly still, the pre-Copernican, unwitting center of a one-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot universe.

Suddenly I wanted Cal back here, with me, more than I wanted anything else, and I sank into the chair he'd been in for almost forty-eight hours and sobbed in great, ugly gasps. I wasn't used to crying. I did not do it much after my parents disappeared. I had thought I'd been all cried out. Even when Meghan was in the hospital after that first episode I didn't cry, except briefly in relief when it turned out she was okay.

And when it became clear that there was a course of action we could take to keep her safe, I never shed another tear over it all. I wasn't tough, I was simply too busy. But there was no course of action to take here. Nothing. I wrapped my arms around myself and stared at the side of Meghan's face until my eyes finally closed and I slept. In that way at least, Meghan and I were together.

When Cal spoke to me I struggled against waking.

“Chloe, come on, honey,” he insisted.

I wanted just another moment, just one more moment of oblivion, one more minute in which I could believe that I was about to wake up in our bedroom, and could start over, could fix whatever had come loose: in our marriage, in Marshall's life, in my baby's immune system. Somehow I had not paid enough attention. I thought I had, but I was clearly so very wrong. And I would change that.

But I was not to have that, neither the chance, nor the dream of the chance, because Cal whispered in my ear: “Come on, Chloe. It's Marshall. Marshall's been arrested.”

He used to watch
COPS
on television, excited by the chases, the way the police tried to trip up a person on their own lies, how at times they seemed incredibly caring and passionate about their job and at others just seemed like arrogant jerks.