The Promise of Stardust (11 page)

That's when I realized that the baby inside Elle would never have a mother to do those things for him. I'd have to do them. I'd have to be father and mother.

Mark's neuro exam was good. Cognition was difficult to assess because of his speech difficulties. He had aphasia, a neurologically based language impairment, receptive as well as expressive, from what I could tell. When I asked him to point to his mother, he failed, and her eyes welled with tears, but he probably didn't know what either the word
point
or the word
mother
meant. He might have known who she was.

I squatted, eye level with the boy. “We know you're having trouble understanding us, but I think you'll improve.” I smiled, hoping that my tone and my smile would reassure him. I glanced up at his father. “How'd you know Mark was seeing double?”

“Earlier today, he said, two, two,
hai bà m
hai cha
. And he reached for my hand, next to my hand.”

“You speak Vietnamese at home?”

Mrs. Nguyen leaned toward me. “But we speak English, too.”

“Before, when I first met you in the hall, was he speaking Vietnamese?”

“He said hello,” she said.

“Okay. And now he's responded with a mishmash of the two. In Vietnamese, ask him if he can point to his father,” I said.

She did, and he pointed appropriately. Relief flooded her eyes.

“Good. He understands,” I said. “There's still cerebral edema, swelling in his brain, but I would expect this to improve with time, with therapy. In the meantime, I'll let Dr. Grey know.”

When I returned to the ICU, Phil was examining Elle.

“Did something happen?” I asked.

“No,” he said, pulling off his gloves. “The nurse wanted me to take a look at her incision. I removed one of the sutures and put a steri-strip on it. It's nothing.”

I peeked at the occipital incision and nodded. Innocuous erythema. Okay. I needed to refocus. “The Nguyen kid is having double-vision issues on top of his aphasia. His exam is in keeping with your last progress note,” I said.

“I'll order an MRI.”

“Already done. I ordered it stat. They were taking him down when I left.”

“Okay. I'll check the results. About Elle, you didn't like what I was saying in the conference room—to your lawyer.”

“No, not much.” I rubbed my eyes. “Clinically, I understand why you said what you did. The odds are against us. Against her. Against getting a live baby out of this. So? Don't you get it? I have to try.” I shook my head at him. “Go take a look at the Nguyen boy. Just go.”

Phil slogged out, glancing back at me.

Damn it
.

“Hey, Peep. Remember that kid I operated on the day before the accident—instead of spending those hours with you? He's doing pretty well, considering, but so you know, I would never have left you for a minute if I'd known we were almost out of time.”

The silence, punctuated by the hiss of the ventilator and beeps of the hospital, condemned my pretense. “I miss you, Elle. Jesus, I miss you.”

I headed back to the conference room. The intensive care doc, Clint Everest, was still answering Jake's questions. He was one of those lanky guys with little to no hair and didn't care who knew it. Instead of a comb-over, he buzzed it down to nubs. Although we were about the same age, he gave the impression he'd done it all and seen it all. Board certified in both intensive care medicine and immunology, he always took the autoimmune cases, lupus, Guillain-Barre, Addison's. He was giving Jake a primer in Elle's autoimmune issues, which were relatively minor, except when she was pregnant—like now.

I knew the material and didn't feel patient enough to listen in on the remedial version. “If you need to talk to me, I'll be with Elle,” I said.

“It's getting late,” Jake replied. “I'll come in to talk to you in the morning.”

I wandered back into Elle's room and took the seat next to her bed. Her hand was starting to gnarl into a contracture. In the past I'd written orders for physical therapists to come and deal with things like this, delegating the neurological sequelae away. But not now. I couldn't just look elsewhere. Elle's brain had sustained too much damage for any neurosurgeon to repair, but I could try to keep her body healthy. I pulled open the drawer of the bedside table, rummaged for the hospital-supplied lotion, took her hand in my own, and began working the muscles for her.

In one of the deeper catnaps I'd slipped into, I heard my name being called. “Dr. Beaulieu?” Deb was one of the charge nurses on the night shift and one of the sharpest nurses whose path I'd ever crossed.

I shook my head awake. Elle was still beside me. “Yeah. You know, my name is Matt.”

“Right,” Deb said. “There's a woman on the telephone. Keisha? She says she's in New Zealand, and she can't get through to your cell but that you'd want to talk to her.”

I was already out of the chair and on my way to the nurses' station while Deb finished her story about being afraid the woman was another reporter.

“No, it's okay,” I said.

The unit secretary pointed at a line and I picked up. “Keisha?”

There was a moment of delay before Keisha's soft Bahamian accent came through the line. “Matthew, tell me the news reports are wrong.”

I sank into the chair and stared into Elle's dimly lit room. “She fell,” I said. “I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what you've heard.”

A whimper on the other side of the world can sound as cataclysmic as two planets colliding. “Say she's not really dead.”

I exhaled and told Elle's dearest friend about the baby.

   9   
x

Hank stood in front of me, stroking Elle's forearm. She'd never resembled her father. She looked like her mother, fair-skinned and fine-boned, while he was dark and rugged. Rather, he used to be dark before his hair thinned and turned gray, but that only served to make him look more distinguished. Hank had always carried himself with certainty, pressed, ready, and confident. At least that's how he appeared for the last twenty years.

Unlike how he was—before he stopped drinking. His world was different then, rumpled and edgy.

Today Hank's eyes shifted back and forth, although his clothes were still sharply creased. He could neither maintain eye contact with me nor keep his voice steady when he looked at Elle, but he told me he'd been on a binge these past few days and that he'd drunk enough to make him pass out in a bar and land in a Brunswick hospital. They released him sober and repentant. He turned to me with downcast eyes. “I don't know what to say except I'm sorry. I know she'll be disappointed in me.”

“She'd tell you she loved you. Just don't repeat the mistake,” I said, squelching my anger.

“I fucked up again,” he said.

Again. Yes. Again. For a couple of years, he'd fallen deeply into the throes of alcoholism—when Elle's mother was sick and for a while afterward. We were losing Alice, but at fifteen, Elle was trying to cope with her own grief, take care of Christopher, and deal with her drunken father. Those were times all of us forgave, although none of us forgot. He'd made matters worse for everyone.

But he got sober, and in many ways he became someone I deeply admired, working against his demons, helping out others in AA. And he became my father-in-law and, in spirit, a father to me.

He wet his lips. “Is it true? What the papers say? She's pregnant?”

I nodded.

“And now you're fighting for her life in court?” He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for my reply as if he were praying.

I considered my answer. “I'm fighting for the
baby's
life, Hank.” For a second I could see Dylan. My son would be six months old now, babbling and sucking his thumb. I fought for him, and I failed. For Elle's sake, this time had to be different.

“I'll help you,” Hank said. “Do you have a good lawyer?”

“Jake Sutter. He's excellent. I went to school with him.”

Hank grimaced. “The one who was at your wedding? Short guy, gravelly voice? The one who never stops talking politics?”

“That would be him. He argued a Pro-Life case in front of the Supreme Court when he was just a few years out of law—”

“Did he win?”

“No, but it was a five–four vote, which means he convinced some of the justices.”

“Is he expensive? Is he charging you?”

“Both. But it doesn't matter; I have to do it.” I mumbled something more about how this would bankrupt me, but that money didn't mean anything. Not now.

“I have money, Matt.”

“I didn't mean to imply—”

“I can pay him. Who knows? By the time the baby is born, maybe Elle will wake up.” Hank pointed at her. “So we understand one another. I'm fighting for
my baby's life
.”

“I appreciate your help, Hank. Really, I do. And I'd like you on my side, but listen …” I struggled to find the words. I needed to be clear, but I didn't want to send him back to the nearest bar. “I'd give anything if Elle would wake up, but she won't.” I hung my head, visualizing the trauma Phil described in Elle's brain. Not in some patient's. In my wife's.

She would never wake up no matter how much I wanted her to, no matter how Hank denied the reality of her condition, but this wasn't the time to dissuade my father-in-law of his delusions. The house was in Elle's name. Her grandfather had left it to her. I would have to ask Jake if I could sell the house if I only had temporary guardianship. Yeah, I was a hotshot brain surgeon, but I was still paying off my school loans. So money, in the pragmatic sense, did mean something: the power to fight. But more than that, I needed someone on my side. “I might need your help, depending on how long this goes on. The medical expenses, Jake's fees. I hate to ask. I
won't ask
unless I can't swing it on my own.” I could probably get loans, barter with the hospital. I'd figure it out.

“She's my daughter,” he said, “and I can afford to take care of her. Having money has only meant one thing to me: I could provide for my family.”

“That's supposed to be my job, taking care of her.” We had always taken care of each other. Elle. Me.