Patricia Gaffney (31 page)

“T
hey’re stabilizing her.”

Owen and I take heart from that, but a few vague, semireassuring sentences later the nurse rephrases. She says, “They’re
trying
to stabilize her,” and that’s different. We go back to our scared, stiff-shouldered stances, next to each other but with nothing to say, in the hallway adjacent to the ER waiting area. We tried to sit in there at first, but we had to stand up and move even after Owen turned off the television set—some entertainment news program; listening to it was physically painful.

“Her husband is with her,” the nurse adds, but we knew that already. What we can’t decide is if signifies something good or bad.

“I’ll go get us some coffee.”

Owen shakes his head. “Not for me.”

I don’t want any, either.

I squeeze back against our section of wall, where we’re trying to stay out of the way of aides, office staff, nurses, doctors, patients, relatives, even a policeman bringing in a drunk. Who knew there were so many emergencies in this sleepy county on a sunny afternoon in May? It’s good, that means they know what they’re doing here, but also bad, because what if the doctors are overwhelmed? I don’t know what to wish for. I hate hospitals. Owen asked me to meet him here, to wait with him for news, and I wanted to, but if he knew how profoundly disoriented I am here, he might do without my company.

But this is not my story, it’s his.
Not my drama, not my drama
, I tell myself, and take hold of Owen’s wrist. “She’ll be okay. They’ll stabilize her, and she’ll be as good as before.”

He looks into my eyes, trying to see if it’s true. “Yeah. She’ll be good.” He twists his hand around till we’re palm to palm, our fingers locked. “She’s gonna be okay. This kind of thing happens, I read about it. It’s not that…”

“

I follow his eyes. Shevlin, coming around the corner, stops when he sees us. His foxy face seizes up, like a baby’s before it starts to cry. I’m frozen; can’t move or speak. It’s too much, I can’t bear it. He pulls on the bill of his cap, and when his hand comes away he’s himself again, just older looking, grayer. He doesn’t seem surprised to see me, but I doubt he’s paying attention to details right now.

Owen goes to him and takes his arm. “How is she?”

“It happened again. She was fine, and then it started up, same as before. They had to shock her again, and I…can’t watch that.”

“Let’s sit.” Owen steers him inside the waiting place. People are spaced out, no one wanting to sit next to a stranger; only two empty chairs are left together. I force Owen to take the second one, but then a girl on Shevlin’s other side says, “Here, sit, I’m going out to smoke anyways,” so I take her seat. Somebody has turned the TV on again. Instinctively, Owen and I lean toward each other, forming a protective half circle around Shevlin.

“What happened?” Owen asks. “Tell us what happened.”

“It was at home. She was fine, she was just starting supper, standing in front of the sink washing lettuce. Gonna make another goddamn salad.”

Owen doesn’t move, but I can tell he’s startled. Shevlin never swears.

“I wasn’t paying attention. I was gluing a cup handle back on a cup, sitting at the table, not paying any attention. Now I recollect she said something like ‘Whoo’ or ‘Whoa,’ some such, but I didn’t even look up.” He stares down at his rough, open palms, moving his knobby fingers. He has a black nail, the fourth finger on his right hand. “Then she said my name, and I knew. She said it real calm, but her voice wasn’t right. She was looking at me, holding her chest. ‘Call 911,’ she said, and I started to, but she—she called to me again. I rushed up—she’d’ve fell if I hadn’t caught her. She still dropped like a stone, she’d’ve broke something, I barely got ahold of her head before it could hit the floor. And then…” He whispers. “She wasn’t breathing. I felt her neck, she wasn’t breathing.”

He can’t stop the tears that overflow his red-rimmed eyes and roll down his cheeks. He turns toward me, away from Owen, while he hitches up his jacket and pulls a blue-checked handkerchief out of his back pocket.

He gives his throat a harsh clearing. “I called 911 and told them, and they said do I know CPR. I learned it here,” he says to me while Owen nods, “they did a course back in January, I took it on purpose.”

“That’s right,” Owen says. “You took it for her.”

“So I started up, and I kept on till they came.” He scrubs his eyes again with the handkerchief. “They shocked her with the machine, and she come to. They said I could ride on the ambulance with her, and she was talking and everything. She said it was like her heart running backwards—but she was good, saying she felt all right and not to worry—but just now it started up again, the racing. I couldn’t watch.” He covers his face with his hands.

“They’ll fix it.” I clasp his shoulder and hold on. “That’s what they do. She’s in good hands, she’ll be all right. She will be.” He looks up and nods, searching my eyes the way Owen did. This is all I can do for them, say the things they desperately want to believe. “You did everything right, Shevlin. You saved her. If you hadn’t been there and done everything exactly right, who knows what would’ve happened? But you were there, thank God, and now all that’s left to do is wait.”

“Yeah.” He blows his nose. “I didn’t call Danielle yet.”

Owen is sitting ramrod straight, gripping the sides of his chair, as if by staying strong and stoical he can control this situation. Shevlin may break down, but Owen never will. “I’ll call her,” he says.

“She’s not in Richmond, she’s down in Charlotte, North Carolina, at some convention. I don’t have the number on me.”

“I’ll get ahold of her.” If it bothers him that his father-in-law knows where Danielle is but he doesn’t, Owen doesn’t show it. “I’ll be right back.”

I reach for my purse. “Do you want my cell—”

“I got mine.” He walks out into the hall.

I keep my hand on Shevlin’s shoulder, bony-feeling and trembling under his corduroy jacket. I rub it softly, and I think it’s a comfort to us both. It’s a fluke that I’m here; it should be someone he knows better, or one of the church ladies who helped Cottie after her operation. Then again, would he feel better with or be any likelier to confide in one of them than me? He’s a much tenderer man than I thought, Cottie’s strong-hearted lover. I think of him sneaking into her father’s house to see her. I think of him diving out the bedroom window and landing on a hydrangea bush. They’ve been together for forty years. She wants to have “intimate relations” again, but he wants to be “careful of” her.

I don’t want their love affair to end. I want to put my arms around Shevlin, who would be horrified. Why is life so
mean
sometimes? Why are we here if it’s just to lose everything?

“I got her.” Owen takes his seat, flopping down as if his legs just gave out. He looks worse than before, the skin stretched tighter around his mouth. “She can get a flight out real early tomorrow.”

Shevlin nods for a long time. “How’d she sound?”

Owen looks helpless, as if he doesn’t understand the question, or its implications go so far, it’s too painful to answer. He mutters something, then drops his head and covers the back of it with his hands. What could she have said to him that would make him feel even worse?

Both men seem too desolate to do anything but sit here, not even speaking to each other. I take over as the one who asks the triage nurse, passersby, the occasional white-coated doctor, what’s going on. “They’re still stabilizing her,” they all say. “The husband can go in if he wants.”

I go to the cafeteria and bring back drinks and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches nobody touches. I study a poster hanging in the hall that says heart disease kills one out of three women in America. I keep saying positive, optimistic things to Shevlin and Owen, but the longer this wait goes on, the less faith any of us have in the words.

I’ve fallen into the role I always play in hospitals—trying to be strong for my family. Andrew’s a mess, Chloe’s a child, there’s never been anyone else
but
me. I’m not even any good at it. Less so since my mother died. I don’t want to think about that now, but how can I not?

I never even got to see her at the hospital, because by the time I got there they’d taken her away. And at the funeral home, she looked so little like herself that the service healed nothing, it only made me feel more abandoned and unconnected. The wax-faced woman with permed-looking gray hair—who told them to
curl
my mother’s beautiful straight hair?—wasn’t her at all. And yet, when I knelt beside the coffin, I overflowed with harrowing, intense, passionate love. I kept whispering while I patted her shoulder in her beige suit—I was afraid to touch her skin—“I love you, Mama. I love you, Mama. I love you, Mama.” It feels as if I’ve been crying ever since.

Shevlin should go back in the emergency room. It’s hard to watch, whatever they’re doing to Cottie, but he should go. He should tell her what he feels right now. While he can say it to her face, his eyes wide open.

A doctor I’ve never seen comes into the waiting area. Shevlin stands up, then Owen and I. The nametag on his breezy white coat says
DR. PITTMAN.
He’s short, cherry-cheeked, pear-shaped, with intense blue eyes.

“It’s good news,” he says to Shevlin after perfunctory nods to Owen and me. “She’s stable now, and we’re moving her out to CCU, where they’ll keep monitoring her, give her some medicine to make sure her heart rate stays steady. So she’ll be here overnight, and then we’ll see how she is tomorrow.”

No one says anything.

He looks at us. He’s carrying a clipboard. “Okay? Okay, then.” He takes a step back.

Shevlin takes one forward. “She’s okay?”

“Should be. In her case we know what caused the V-tach, and she’s strong, she’s in good health otherwise, and I think she’s got a good prognosis.”

“What happened to her won’t happen again?”

“Could happen again. We’ll try out different antiarrhythmic meds, try to control it like that, or we might try ablation, although I doubt it, but that’s a curative treatment for certain tachychardias. More likely for something long term we’ll want to do an EPS test to see if she needs an ICD, implantable cardioverter defibrillator. That emits a shock when it senses a V-tach coming.”

“Like a pacemaker?”

I stop listening to the exact sense of Dr. Pittman’s words and concentrate on his reassuring voice, the way his intelligent, focused eyes never leave Shevlin’s, how his chubby cheeks expand when he pronounces long
e
’s. Cottie’s not going to die. An implant, a little machine in her chest is going to save her. I can’t speak or I’ll burst into tears—I didn’t realize until now how hard I was trying to prepare myself for different news—but I join in profuse, extravagant thanking of Dr. Pittman by patting his arm and shaking his hand. We’re as grateful as if he brought Cottie back from the brink of death with his own clean white hands. Who knows, maybe he did! But when he’s gone, I tell Shevlin
he
did, and he laughs and cries while he gives me the longest, fiercest hug anyone’s ever given me before.

I
t should be pitch-black out, not just starting to get dark. It should be the next day, not a measly six hours since I was playing with pictures of Sock in my darkroom. But time’s not real in hospitals, I should know that by now. A soft, clear twilight is falling over these hills I love. I lean over the steering wheel to watch a flock of birds flapping their wings in a lazy, unmistakable, going-home-to-bed frenzy. The sun comes and goes depending on whether I’m at the top or bottom of a hill, and even its setting is gentle and soft, not piercing or dramatic. I should feel completely at peace. I smell fertilizer when I pass the just-turned fields, honeysuckle by the fallow meadows. All’s right with the world—so where’s my contentment? I can’t explain the restlessness I feel until I catch myself grappling for my cell phone in my purse and dialing one-handed.

It’s been a long time since I couldn’t quite savor an experience fully, couldn’t
possess
it, before telling Andrew about it.

And he’s not there! This is so wrong.

“Hi. I wanted to tell you something,” I say to his voice mail. Now I realize it isn’t even about Cottie. No, it is about Cottie, but she’s only the starting point. “Call me. Let’s talk—I really want to.”

In fact I almost start in, fill up his answering machine with words, because I am so tired of not talking to my husband. Cottie’s going to be fine, I want to say. There can be happy endings. Life is very dear, but it’s so short, it’s so short, and pride takes up so much precious
time.
I don’t give a damn about Elizabeth O’Neal. Shouldn’t I come home? Shouldn’t we be doing something? Cottie’s going to live!

But he might think I’m hysterical. I must be more systematic and organized, at least get him on the
phone
before I start speaking. If it were the other way around, I’d rather he said these things to me than to my machine.

No, hell no, I’d take them any way I could get them. He could tell Sock for all I care—how in the world did we come to this? Enough is enough. I trail my hand out the window and let the cooling air blow through my fingers. Things seem to be falling away, all the…weeds, the nettles, everything that was obscuring the object underneath. It’s this house of ours, somewhat decrepit—it needs paint, shingles, new glass in the windows—but it’s still sound. What it needs is someone to stand up for it. If Andrew won’t, I will. I wanted him to go first, but this is fair—I’m the one who started the breakdown process. First me, then him: We let it go, didn’t do the upkeep. Turn your back on an old house, immediately it begins to sag. Rust never sleeps. Constant vigilance, that’s what you need. It’s not romantic, God knows, but neither is dry rot.