Vital Signs (15 page)

“Fred,” I repeat.

“What’s so special about you, then?” he asks.

I let go of his hand.

“It’s not like you’ve ever done anything—” He stops himself and shakes his head. He checks his watch and looks around, craning his neck to see out into the corridor.

I take another deep breath.

“Do you ever fantasize about things, Fred?” He looks at me as though I might be perverted. “I mean, do you ever dream of things you want, like a job, a house, a car, a lover … I don’t know, anything. Do you fantasize about having them, imagine yourself with them, and get some sort of private joy from that?” He still looks confounded.
“I used to lie in bed at night, before I met your mother, and I used to picture myself in the future—sometimes just the near future, like the next weekend and the perfect woman I’d meet; or two years on when I’d be having a gallery show of my work. I used to pretend that I was being interviewed by a magazine journalist about a particular commission I’d just done, or about winning awards and giving speeches, thanking my parents for making David the banker and me the creative one.”

Fred’s reaction is still impossible to discern. He looks like me at that age. But if he shifts his lips towards a smile, he instantly becomes Anna. I want him to smile, to react somehow, to stop me.

“But I don’t fantasize about the things I want anymore. Do you?”

“Yes, I do,” he says, but still doesn’t smile.

“Like what?”

“Like fantasizing that if and when Mom wakes up she’ll be completely fine,” he says. “I’m going to check with Rosie.” He rises abruptly and walks out.

I close my eyes and try to picture a year from now with Anna; she is well and we are on a trip somewhere—the Caribbean, or Italy, or even Indonesia. When did I actually stop this little game? When did fantasies become so proven never to come true that it hurt to have them?

I see us now, in this yellow-grey corridor of illness with death’s door ajar, creaking on its hinge.

The dome of the aneurysm in Anna’s brain has likely now been punctured with a needle and carefully drained
to ensure that blood doesn’t continue to fill it up. Once the clip is in place, the retractors holding the brain lobes apart are removed and the tissue gently unfolds towards the centre, disturbed but intact.

But where is the bone flap? Lost? Hidden amongst soiled swabs and discarded tongs?

No, it is there, placed gently in sterilized gauze, safely on the tray. Now it’s being unwrapped and levered into its crook. Titanium plates cover the fissures and, here, the screws that will secure them to the skull are put in place. The needle that sutures the muscles and skin back together is tough but thin as it pierces through the fabric of my wife’s head. I see the ribbon of gauze dressing that the nurse is slowly unravelling over the wound; she will wrap it once, twice, many more times around Anna’s head, and my wife will resemble a turbaned Egyptian nomad.

“You’re an asshole!”

Charlotte’s face is nearly mauve with anger. I don’t understand all that has just happened, what it is exactly that we have been told. I don’t think I can feel anything as I watch my children react to the news. But my bottom lip is the Geiger counter of the distress that is no doubt taking hold of me, ticking in millisecond beats.

“I realize you’re upset,” Fred says to Charlotte calmly, in his doctor’s voice.

“Go back to your own patients—you’re probably more compassionate with them!” Charlotte shouts.

“Stop it, stop it!” Sasha mumbles, also trembling, her tears more timid than Charlotte’s. I can do or say nothing
to help these three. Gottlieb has spoken a series of words. I have followed their trail to these children, who are reacting for me. One of the words was “complication.”
Complication during the surgery
. I have followed that word to Charlotte’s distraught face, and I slowly realize what is happening. Charlotte has comprehended immediately what the rest of us have not yet clocked. She believes that the complication experienced in surgery might well result in her mother becoming a vegetable.

“The bone flap.”

Dr. Gottlieb pronounced it mechanically, as he stood in his surgery greens in his small consulting room. The Hunt and Hess assessment before the surgery determined that Anna did not have subarachnoid hemorrhage, and her symptoms pointed to a low risk. In normal circumstances, the bone flap is replaced during the craniotomy. Dr. Gottlieb had fully expected to be able to do so in this case as well. But during Anna’s surgery, he detected larger swelling in the area than they had anticipated, and the possibility of infection. Gottlieb’s other key words were “pressure” and “damage.” I slowly began to understand that normal procedure could have caused increased pressure on the brain, resulting in damage that could be as severe as a stroke.

“The bone flap was not replaced,” said Dr. Gottlieb to the four of us standing stone-faced in his office. And now that my senses are returning, I can remember his words in their precise order: “But we expect to do so within seven days, after the swelling has been reduced. It’s a precaution.”

“You’re kidding, right?” said Charlotte.

“Char, please,” said Fred, embarrassed and trying to keep his professional composure. “It’s not uncommon, right?” His tone contained a plea to Gottlieb.

“It’s not common, but it does happen. The methods for preserving the bone flap sterilized and intact are exceptional. She’s through the worst of it now. She’s in recovery. You can see her within the hour.”

Dr. Gottlieb stood silent. I could see from his face that he thought his duty was done, and that the people in his office should be grateful that he saved this woman’s life and they should now leave him alone. He told us he knew we had a lot to discuss and, guiding us towards the door, said that the nurse would let us know when we could see Anna. We stumbled out of the consulting room like lost tourists.

There have been times in the past when I have seen people in wheelchairs, in vegetative states, when I accidentally have said “sorry” out loud, in a moment of uncontrolled there-but-for-the-grace-of-God empathy, or fear. Anna was superstitious about accidents, though, and would not discuss with me her wishes, not the “do not resuscitate” of a living will, nor the organ donor registry, which she found morbid. The kind of outcome that Charlotte fears is not something I have prepared for.

Perhaps Charlotte has overreacted.

But if she hasn’t, my trembling bottom lip tells me I have not equipped myself sufficiently for this outcome. Until now I have not considered what it is that my wife
wants. I remember what she said to Susan that day when I overheard them in the kitchen: “I won’t be like her. I won’t.”

What is a mind?

While Charlotte and Fred argue like husband and wife in the waiting room, I am like the child with my hands over my ears. I close my eyes. Come on, come on.

And there, it’s faint, but … She is on a hillside. She is wearing a short, colourful skirt. I hear birds: a parrot’s caw and the twirp of a small red-beaked, turquoise Roller. A Dollarbird. We are in Indonesia. The hill is terraced, and her tight cotton vest makes my wife’s back a curve of crimson against the jade paddies. I walk towards her. She’s barely more than a girl, and so I look down at my own hands and see that they are not marked by years of futile, meaningless work. They are strong, smooth.

“Mike, this is where we will raise our children,” she says softly, with a clarity that is youthful and wise all in one. “Over there, see that land, down below the temple?” she says, and I follow her slim, firm arm to her fingertip and out toward the next hill, where the shimmering, terraced rice fields are like a stretched, swollen Greek amphitheatre. “I’ve asked them if we can build there,” and she unfolds a set of architectural plans she has been holding in her other hand. These are indecipherable to me with their elaborate lines and foreign characters, but Anna seems to know exactly what they all mean. “It’s important that the main room faces the sea—this way,” and she points again.

“What will we do here?” I ask.

“We’ll raise them properly; we’ll learn how to cultivate our land; we’ll grow old with grace,” she says, and her voice is like a wind I want to lie down beneath. “And you’ll do your art,” she adds. At this I stop myself. The ego’s interception of the fantasy has made it all feel contrived.

What is it that I have wanted?

“Dad,” Sasha says as she touches my arm. “Come, sit down.”

She leads me to the couch. Fred and Charlotte are nowhere to be seen, and I am embarrassed, because I know I have been standing in silence for too long.

“Is Charlotte okay?” I ask her sister. I don’t sit down. Sasha shrugs. Her hazel eyes are moist and red. She stands with me, but looks towards the couch.

“She’s okay.”

“But she—”

“She’s worried.”

“We all are, but—”

“She’s got stuff going on too.” Sasha shrugs again, looks at me and finally sits down. “She wanted to tell Mom stuff before the operation, and I told her she shouldn’t.”

My stomach lurches. I remain standing. “Tell her what stuff?” I ask.

“Stuff,” she says sadly.

I examine her face to see where she bears the weight of stuff, where the pain of what she knows about her parents resides. Her cheeks are not drawn; her eyes don’t droop; her lips are full and sure. It could be that my youngest child is not marked in any way by my failings.

“Tell me,” I say. She looks up at me, and in her cheek is a tinge of regret. “Tell me,” I repeat.

“Charlotte lost her job.” She takes a breath. “A couple of weeks ago. She didn’t want anyone to know because she felt humiliated.”

I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that I’m relieved it isn’t about me, or the fact that I do not feel more stirred by my daughter’s suffering.

“What happened?” I manage to say. I remember her casual clothes, the jeans and T-shirt when I picked her up for lunch. Why did she have me meet her there and not at home? How did I become so heartless, so unforgiving in their eyes? I think about this morning and my insistence that she should get a new car.

“She fell out, big time, with her boss, and after months of torturing her, he found a way to fire her.” Sasha grabs my arm. “You can’t let on that you know. She’d kill me, Dad, please.”

“But …” and I am slipping into a cold gulf.

“Sit,” Sasha says.

I do as I’m told.

“Fred has gone to find out more about the bone flap,” she says. “They said it really wasn’t that unusual, it happens sometimes.” She fidgets, crosses her legs, scratches her wrist. Sasha’s body choreographs her distress. “I don’t know why Charlotte flew off like that.” She scratches her wrist again, uncrosses her legs. “I’m scared.”

I wrap my arms around her and hold on tight. “It’s all going to be okay,” I say, as I rub her back and she starts to cry. I feel the tiny eruptions up my daughter’s spine, the heaving of her breath in my hands.

“The thought of losing either of you …” she whispers, but it gets caught in her throat.

“Sshhh …” I offer, and stroke her back.

“Oh, never mind,” she says, composing herself, wiping her nose on my shirt.

“Darling, please, if you want to talk about—”

“No, it’s fine.” She straightens up.

“You’ve been worried about losing us?”

She takes tissue from her pocket and shakes her head. “More about you losing each other.”

I am momentarily confused, and then the shame rushes back in.

“Mom told me, a few years ago … I wish people would stop telling me things,” she tries to joke, and blows her nose again.

“What did Mom tell you?”

She shakes her head, fixes her hair quickly with her hands, scratches her wrist again.

“Please,” I say, not wanting to speak before I am certain, but feeling a rising relief that perhaps everyone, even Anna, already knows, and that my family has been more gracious than I have.

“You know,” she says.

“I do?” My cheeks are on fire.

Leave me alone, Christine finally said, one spring day, when I called, late, desperate, begging to see her after telling her only a week earlier that I was devoted to Anna and that we couldn’t continue
.

“Mom’s affair.”

No air. A rush of sharp blood to my chest.

My mind slips into reverse, scrambling to find an image that corresponds to these words.

“I know, she told me you didn’t want to talk about it,” Sasha says.

My burning cheeks begin to twitch as I engage my lips to play a role I haven’t rehearsed. “When did she tell you?”

“A few years ago, way after it happened.”

Way after it happened
.

Again my mind rushes to calculate, to add up and subtract where in the calendar of Christine this might fall. Should I be relieved? But relief is not supposed to feel like sharp metal churning below my ribs.

“And what did she say exactly?”

“Sorry, Dad, if you don’t want to talk about it …” she waves her hand, as if to clear the air of unease.

“No, no, I do,” and I have to lick my dry, lying lips to stop them from sticking together.