The Moment Before (15 page)

St. Vincent’s Medical Center is the hospital where Sabine and I were born. It’s also the hospital where Sabine’s body was hauled for organ harvest after the accident. Now, it’s where Dad is hooked up to monitors behind a curtained slice of hospital room. Not only was he in a car accident, but apparently suffered a heart attack as well.

Connor had dropped me off in front of the hospital, his face stiff with fear, but trying to look hopeful. “This is the best heart place on the West Coast,” he said. “Your dad will be fine.”

Inside my own heart was squeezed, having its own attack. My father, the minor league ball player. The Nike executive. The strongest man I knew. How could his body fail him? Who would dare to run into him after all he’s been through? “Thanks,” I said, shaking, and trying so hard not to explode into a zillion fragments. “I’ll call you. OK?”

Connor moved in to hug me, but I couldn’t do it. It was like my entire body had been flattened—a freezer bag before you seal it up. I had nothing. And what I did have, I needed to fold and tuck somewhere safe. Instead of hugging Connor back, I hugged myself as I scrambled out the truck and into the well-lit building of miracles.

Mom is in the waiting room area making calls, and she opens her free arm, guiding me in an awkward embrace. “I’ll call you Ma, soon as I know anything.”

She gets off the phone and has me sit down next to her on the hard foam seat cushions in the glassed-in visitor’s lounge. Soothing aqua paint, a flat panel TV, and an intercom announcing hospital coded alerts every so often keeps us company while she unfolds the sequence of events that led to now.

A buzz of words I half understand. Hypertension, ventricular arrhythmia, myocardial infarction. And this. He’d been drinking. The car accident, running a light in his Fusion, it was his fault. He slammed into another car and thank God nobody else was hurt. “Thank God,” Mom says, and as though conjuring her inner Nona, she makes the sign of the cross.

“He’s pretty drugged up now, Brady. But I know he’d love to see you. Can you handle it? Seeing him on a gurney all hooked up to monitors?”

I’m scared. Really freaked, but I nod, biting down hard on my lip. I don’t tell Mom, but the image in my head is the one in the paper. Sabine under a tarp.

Mom puts her arm around my shoulder and together we walk down the shiny hall toward a pair of swinging doors. Cardiac Care Unit reads the marquee above them. There’s a poster-sized sign to the right: TELEMETRY. ABSOLUTELY NO CELL PHONE USE. I turn mine off, and so does Mom, and the doors magically part, like we’re in some James Bond world.

Inside the CCU everything revolves around the nurse’s station, which is like the hole of a doughnut. The unit is arranged in a circle, with the patients spoked out in their little critical care cubicles. Dad’s behind a glass wall and two sets of curtains, and I can hear him snoring as we walk in. “That’s good, right? That he’s asleep?”

Mom pushes me in front of her because it’s too narrow for us to walk in side-by-side.

What I see before I see Dad are all the monitors and their jaggedy lines. It’s like “the wave” in a stadium where people rise and fall as a group. Dad’s heart. There’s beeping that sounds like something’s wrong, but no nurses are rushing in, so it’s probably just part of the normal state of affairs.

It’s dark in this micro-room, and Dad’s eyes are closed. Green, black, red and yellow wires emerge from Dad’s hospital gown. On his index finger there’s a little clip and another wire tethering him to one of the bleeping monitors. I can see some of Dad’s chest in the split his gown makes, and all his hair has been shaved off. Small suction cups hold the wires in place. Dad’s covered in suction cups. I touch his hand, the one with the clip, and he quivers.

Mom whispers, “The doctors want him to rest as much as possible. Steady rhythm, they keep saying is the goal.”

I jerk my hand away, thinking, I’ve probably already screwed up. Dad’s five-o’clock shadow covers the bottom half of his face. He’s a twice-a-day shave guy if the occasion calls for it. Now, he looks a little like a bum. “I love you,” I whisper. “I love you so much.”

Dad stays asleep the whole time we’re there, and at some point in the middle of the night, Mom suggests we go home, get some shut-eye, and then return the next day.

Shut-eye. I can’t imagine it. But I do as she says, and we creep home like zombies. Neither of us can talk. All we can do is look straight ahead and go forward.

Mom goes into her bedroom and clicks closed the door. I go to Sabine’s room and lie on top of her rose and pink quilt next to the American Girl cheerleader doll with the grassy-green pom-poms wedged into its tiny plastic hands. It still smells perfumy in here, after all these months, but now the perfume is tinged with something else. A rotten, decomposing scent, like flower stems soaked in water too long.

I open and close my fists, like I’m squeezing invisible lemons.
Sabine, what the hell? You’re supposed to be protecting us.

Nothing.

Maybe what Nona says is true about purgatory and praying for limboed souls, lest they remain forever in a state of sin. I wonder if Sabine would have done anything differently had she known her fate. Would she have chosen Connor over Nick for real? Would she have tried less hard to be first and best in everything she did? So now, she’s had to outsource her amends to her living relations. We, the Wilsons and Panapentos, have to kneel before the electric candle version of her, the image of a smiling, sweet Sabine. The image Nona and Nono want to take to their own graves.

I’m furious with her. She doesn’t deserve heaven. Eternal damnation is too good for Sabine. Her father lies in a hospital bed fighting for his life because of her. Connor got kicked out of school because of her. Her beloved cheering squad fell apart after she died. Greenmeadow is now known as “that tragic school.”

How did you turn into such a liar, Sabine?

Somehow, amid the questions and the anger and the sorrow, I fall asleep. A deep, hard, dreamless sleep. And when I wake up in the morning, sun blasting through Sabine’s bedroom window, the first thing I notice is my hands are still covered in charcoal.

Dad is awake and spooning anemic custard into his mouth when Mom and I return Sunday morning. He’s shaved, or been shaved, and he looks pretty much like himself. The wires are still coming out of him like Frankenstein, but his cheeks are rosy and he smiles around his spoon when we arrive.

“Little Bird,” he says. “Your old man’s turned into an old man, looks like.”

The peaks on the heart monitor are little Mt. Hood after little Mt. Hood. I figure joking is probably on the
yes
list. “If you think I’m pushing your wheelchair, forget it.”

Mom leans over his bedrail and gives him a juicy kiss, and he says, “Uh-oh, we’re gonna get kicked out of here if you can’t behave.”

We’re in there a few minutes more, making small talk, and then in comes the nurse, so we’re asked to leave. It’s check this, check that, bed pan, and meds. “Why don’t you give us a half hour or so. Go get something from the cafeteria,” the nurse suggests. “It’s Mother’s Day, after all. They have some strawberry crepes I hear.”

Mother’s Day. I completely spaced it. And I spend the next several minutes, as we’re negotiating the various wings of St. Vincent’s, apologizing. If Mom’s upset, she doesn’t show it. “No worries. Really, the last thing we need to do right now is add some obligatory Hallmark event to our schedules. You just being here, with me and your dad, is Mother’s Day gift enough.”

And then, after we’re sitting in some orange plastic chairs with plates of semi-cooked pancakes in front of us, she stirs her cup of hospital coffee and says, “Anyways, Mother’s Day, so soon after losing a child, is like an entire country rubbing salt in your eyes. Never-the-less, we do need to pay a visit to your grandmother.”

My heart takes this in two ways. First, there’s the sorrow for Mom, any mom, who gets slapped across the face with constant reminders that her baby is dead. But the other way my heart hears this is a different kind of sorrow. The pity kind of sorrow. The,
What am I, chopped liver?
sorrow.
I’m your baby, too, Mom. Can you even look at me?

I, too, am stirring and sipping crappy coffee. Lukewarm watery brown elixir. All around us are visitors. Some happy and balloon-carrying, no doubt headed to the birth wing to sneak peeks at the newborns in their lives. Some heavy-hearted, tired-eyed. Whoever they’re here for is not doing well.

There are nurses and doctors and other hospital workers peppered about on the orange chairs. Expressions range from grim to jubilant. Bad news:Good news
.

Cheer up
, I think.
Get Cheery
.
Keep
Cheering
.
Cheer
. All those variations of an uplifting word.

Mom reaches for my arm and pats it. “I’m hoping that we can just move forward from here on out. Clean, fresh slate.”

Now would be the time to ask Mom. But I can’t form the words. What would I say?
Mom, I know you’ve been cheating on Dad
. Or maybe,
Mom, does that mean you’re going to break it off with whoever you’ve been seeing?
Instead of anything like a confrontation, I smile and nod and agree. “That’d be great.”

But Mom has some confronting of her own to do. She says, “We need to talk about the company you’ve been keeping.”

She means Connor.

“I know you have a different version of how things went down with Sabine, but, trust me. That boy is bad news.”

I take in a breath, all set for a rebuttal. So many ways to prove she’s wrong. Unfortunately, she’s not finished yet.

“I’m not telling this to make you feel guilty, Brady, but with your dad, well, I think his worrying about you put him over the edge.”

If she were aiming for a bull’s-eye, she nailed it. I stir the coffee some more, and watch the liquid swirl around. Our pancakes, untouched, are congealing. The syrup mortaring them together. They look as appetizing as a brick wall.

“You have to promise me, for your father’s sake, that you’ll have nothing more to do with him.”

The faint gray of charcoal remains on my fingers. When I close my eyes, I see yesterday’s sketch. Connor’s form emerging from shadows and lines. “Mom, it’s gotten a bit more complicated.”

I tell her about Mrs. Cupworth, and her generous offer to have me use her studio. And how Connor is now her gardener. I leave out the part that he’s also my model. And how his lips feel against mine. And how Sabine used him. And how he makes me happier than anything else right now. I leave all of that out.

Mom looks up at the big shop lights in the hospital cafeteria. Searching for a solution. A next demand. What she settles on is, “I’m one-hundred percent for you and your art, Brady. But I will have to have a conversation with Mrs. Cupworth about the boy.”

She can’t even say his name.

She adds, “Your dad, if everything keeps improving, will be back home in a few days. But, it’s up to us to provide a stress-free environment. Please understand how important that is.”

On the way to Nona’s, my heart is split kindling. I think about that last therapy session, and the way I just walked out. And the comment I made about burning Sabine, and my father’s overly hard slap. The bruises and the wounds. The fractures and pain. I think about Nona’s beliefs: the way to salvation is prayer, sacrifice, virtue. Saint Agatha would see her breasts sliced off her chest rather than allow a man to have her. The Nicene Creed’s way to Heaven: We believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

There is nothing about truth in the creed, only faith. Maybe faith is what’s important. Truth just gets in the way. Maybe shoving truth down everyone’s throats is only a way to invite more pain into your life. At the end of the day, maybe the story of how Sabine died, at the hands of a reckless stoner, maybe that’s the right answer. Maybe that’s the tale that goes down in history because it’s the one that works. Dad’s heart will heal. My heart? Well, I’m young.

We carry a bag of poppy seed bagels, cream cheese, sliced salmon, tomatoes and red onions into the pink aluminum house. I’m holding a fistful of irises wrapped in dark green tissue. My grandparents are in their easy chairs watching an old Doris Day movie, terrycloth towels draped over the headrests of their La-Z-Boys, to absorb the grease from their scalps. It’s one of the things that pains Mom to see, these hints of dying dignity, but, as she says, old age has its own set of priorities.

“Oh, Sonia, with all the worries, you didn’t need to do this.” Nona says, but anyone can see, she’s really happy to see us. “How is he, John?”

“Lucky, actually,” says Mom. “It’s too soon to tell how much heart muscle was damaged, but he’s stable and the doctor thinks he has a good chance at a full recovery.”

Nono turns off the overly loud TV, and calls from the adjoining room. “Does he have a good heart man working on him?”

Doctors with specialties are all “men” with Nono. You don’t see a dermatologist, it’s a skin man. And if there’s something wrong with your knees or your hips, you see a bone man.

“St. Vinnie’s is the best place on the West Coast for the heart,” Mom says, echoing Connor’s assurances.

Mom doesn’t mention anything about the drunk driving, and it occurs to me that Dad’s heart attack will be the story we spin. The booze didn’t cause the accident, a stressed-out heart did. A wave of sadness bowls me over because I understand, for Dad’s sake, why this half-lie must be woven into our fabric, joining all the other lies that are thick as a shawl now. How easy it seems to be to tell yourself the story you want to hear. Dad was a victim, not the cause of his situation. Just like Sabine.

“Well, happy Mother’s Day, Ma,” says Mom.

I hand Nona the flowers, and she makes a fuss. Then directs me to run water into one of the fourteen cut-crystal vases she keeps in the curio. “You don’t look so good,
Nipote
,” she says.

The fact that I’ve had three hours of sleep and my heart broken, well, that might have something to do with it.
Maybe you should get your own heart man
, says Sabine, making a rare appearance, her first since Dad’s heart attack.

I want to tell my dead sister to leave me alone. You got your way. I’ll keep your secret.

Nona suggests we all eat the bagels and have some iced tea, so we sit down at the Formica table, Nono abandoning his La-Z-Boy, but looking longingly over at it every few minutes.

Mom is trying to lighten things up over brunch, and she brings up Mrs. Cupworth and her generosity. “Brady really must have impressed that woman,” she says.

“That the society lady at the Art Night? The one who made the principal look like he saw a ghost when she got up there and pointed her finger? She bought our Brady’s picture?”

“She’s a huge supporter of the arts. This thing she’s doing, it’s not just for me. She wants to make the studio space available continually.”

“Nono and I gotta fill out the ballots,” she says, reminded about the arts funding initiative. “The election. I don’t know who to vote for. It’s this idiot or the other idiot.”

Our bagel brunch goes on like this. Normal Nona and Nono blather. They go from the election to the takeover of the bagel store by a bigger bagel store to echoing Mrs. Cupworth, whether or not it’s warm enough to plant tomatoes, and then, finally, we talk about Dad’s heart attack. And Dad and Mom.

“We’ve had our problems, but in a weird way, this crisis has served as a wakeup call for us. We’re committed to working things out. And getting Brady back on track.”

Getting Brady back on track?

As if she’s reading my mind, Nona says, “I didn’t think our little
Nipote
was off the track, Sonia. Look what she had to deal with.”

Nono adds, “She’s smart girl. She’ll be fine.” Then he reaches over and pinches my cheek with his overgrown, thick fingernails.

“You don’t know everything, Ma,” Mom continues. “About Brady.”

Sabine’s electric candle is unplugged in the next room. St. Agatha is withholding judgment.

Nona says, “What I know is our Brady is a special girl. Her heart is full of life. You and John, you raised a good girl.”

“Amen,” says Nono.

Mom nods and dabs at some fallen poppy seeds with her index finger. “Yes, she’s smart. And good. But the world is a different place now. The drugs in the school. The casual sex. Navigating a girl through that—it’s one landmine after another.”

I am tired of being talked about as though I’m not in the room. “Drugs? I don’t do drugs. And I don’t have, uh, casual sex.”

“Of course you don’t,
Nipote
,” says Nono, squeezing my cheek again.

“It’s not you I don’t trust,” says Mom.

“Boys are boys, Brady,” adds Nona.

“Connor’s not like that,” I blurt. “In fact, Sabine? She had Nick believing that she and Connor were fooling around, just to get him jealous. If ever there was a girl you should have
navigated
, well, it wasn’t me.”

President Kennedy glares at me from the wall. Sabine says,
Thanks a lot, Midge.

So there it is. I’m that fallen apostle called out on canvas in Da Vinci’s
The Last Supper.
Judas, skulking in his green and blue robes, clutching the bag of money. I put a hand over my mouth because I know the next thing that comes out will be about Dad’s drinking.

And all around the table, our own last supper, our brunch, is silence.

Finally, Mom calmly gets up and starts clearing the table. I get up too. It is Mother’s Day, after all. Wordlessly, we scrape, rinse, wash, and dry. Wrap up the leftover bagels. Nona and Nono go back to their Doris Day movie. It’s not the
Que Sera Sera
flick, but one just as adorable.

When we are done, we offer them kisses and promise to call with updates about Dad. The whole ride back to our house, Mom says nothing. But after we get in the house, and she’s had a chance to call Dad and talk to the doctor, she sits me down at the edge of her bed. For the first time, I see lines around her eyes and mouth. A little gray around her hairline. I’m seeing, in Mom, the old lady she will one day be, and my heart aches for her. She puts an arm around me, and guides my chin so we’re looking eye to eye. She says, “Sometimes love takes a wrong turn, Brady. I’ve taken a wrong turn here and there in the name of love. I want to spare you that pain. You’re my daughter, and I want you to skip right over the heartaches and go directly to the right choice.”

Her dark Panapento eyes. Her eyebrows tweezed just so. She says, “That’s not fair of me, I realize. You have to make mistakes in order to grow. But I’m begging you. Pleading with you. Do not fall in that murky well right now. Not now.”