NINA
I must have fallen asleep with the TV on. Whatever I was watching has given way to the ten o’clock news, which glows garishly in the darkness of the house, the volume obnoxiously loud. Lying on my side on the sofa, my eyes half-open, I watch it. Today, a midrise apartment building in the city caught fire and collapsed. There was a shooting on the south side. It’s all bad news. The news puts this on because it’s what people want to see. It’s a sickness. It’s not that the world is innately bad or that bad things happen more often than good things. It’s that we’re drawn to bad things. Death sells. I turn the news off. I hate watching it.
I push myself upright on the sofa, into a sitting position, rubbing at a kink in my neck. I must have been lying on it funny. Despite the nap, I don’t feel any more rested. If anything I feel more tired. I just need to carry myself up to bed, but Jake isn’t home yet and I don’t want to go to bed before he is. I want to talk to him. I want to talk things out. Things got heated last night and I feel bad for it now. Looking back on it, it was mostly my fault, but, in the moment, I was being stubborn. I didn’t see it that way. I said things I shouldn’t have said and it’s been eating at me all day. I thought over and over again about calling him at work to apologize, but I didn’t want to interrupt him because he’s so busy when he’s at work, doing things that matter, like saving lives. He never likes it when I call him at work.
The papers I was grading are fanned out on the coffee table; I only got through a few of them before nodding off. They’re for my honors English classes. We’ve just finished reading 1984 and the kids were asked to write about ways in which our modern society is Orwellian. I love reading their responses. I didn’t mean to sleep for as long as I did. I told myself I was just going to close my eyes for a bit, and then get back to grading, but I must have slept for hours. I feel guilty now because I promised the kids I would have them graded by tomorrow. They put so much work into them and are anxious to know what they got. The honors kids are hard on themselves. But now it’s dark outside and I’m tired, worried about what happened with Jake and needing him to come home so that we can talk.
I stand from the sofa and go to the kitchen for coffee. It’s been a long time since I’ve pulled an all-nighter but a good night’s sleep is not in the cards for me. I fill the Keurig’s water reservoir, replace it on the unit and let it warm, checking my phone to see if I missed a call or a text from Jake. It’s ten thirty-five at night. I don’t know why he isn’t home.
Jake saw patients in his office today. These days tend to be his shorter days because there’s a predictability about them. Patients come in for consults or pre-op appointments. They have set appointment times, which may run over a few minutes if a patient is late or Jake gets behind, but never by more than a few minutes. The rest of the time, Jake spends these days catching up on paperwork. If anything, he’s said, nonsurgery days are boring. Jake prefers being in surgery because that’s when he’s at his best.
Despite that, the days he performs surgeries are astonishingly long. He wakes up at four thirty in the morning when the alarm goes off on his watch. The workday starts just after dawn with rounds, prechecks and discussing patients on his list with the rest of the surgical team. They end sometimes as late as nine or ten o’clock. Surgery days are the most unpredictable too. While surgeries are sometimes planned, like removing a tumor, sometimes, like last week, a patient comes in with a gunshot wound to the head and Jake has to spend unanticipated hours trying to save a life. That gunshot victim died. She was practically dead to begin with. That’s how Jake phrased it. There is a detachment in the way he speaks of his patients because there has to be. He can’t get all emotional about it, otherwise he wouldn’t be a good surgeon. There is a whole psychology about how doctors like him get through the day. It started in med school for Jake, where he referred to cadavers as things, not people, so he could cut into them more easily. For most people, seeing a dead body is a defining moment in their life; for Jake, it’s frequent.
With this gunshot victim, Jake said that, even before she landed on his operating table, before he cut into her, she was fucked. Her odds of survival were infinitesimal, something like 5 percent, with even smaller odds of her having a good quality of life if she survived.
“That must have been hard for you, then, knowing she was likely to die and still doing the surgery anyway. It must feel futile,” I’d said, trying to be empathetic because there’s been a rift between Jake and me these past few months. He says it’s my fault, and I’ve been trying so hard to be present in the moment, to not be distracted by other things when I’m with Jake.
He was drinking a whiskey sour. He lowered it to the table, his eyes watching me intensely over the glass. I think he took offense at what I’d said. I wasn’t trying to suggest that what he did for a living was futile, but that was what he heard. What I did often felt futile too: talking for hours to students who were half-asleep and not listening.
“How could you be so sure she wouldn’t survive?” I asked.
“With gunshot wounds, it depends mostly on the location and trajectory of the bullet,” Jake said, sounding smart. “This bullet entered her head at the anterior temporal lobe. It traveled from one side of the brain to the other, crossing the midline, which is not ideal,” he said, as if there was an ideal way for a bullet to travel in one’s brain. “The bullet went in, but it didn’t come out. It tore through both hemispheres, all four lobes of the brain before getting lodged in there.”
“Did she die in surgery?”
“After.”
“How?”
“Brain stem death.”
“What does that mean?”
“The brain stem.” I could see him thinking in his head how to dumb this down for me. I was grateful, not offended. Sometimes he throws out words like globulus pallidus and acoustic neuromas as if I should know what they mean. He’s so used to tossing them around with ease among colleagues, he forgets I’m not one of them, that I didn’t go to med school for years. “It’s responsible for all the things that keep us alive. Breathing. Blood circulation. Digesting food. When the brain stem is dead, you are too.”
“Like being in a vegetative state?” I’d asked.
“No,” he said. He took a sip of his whiskey sour while I waited for an explanation. “It’s different, because a person in a vegetative state still shows signs of brain stem function.”
“How old was she?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Who shot her?”
“Her husband.”
I wished I hadn’t asked. I didn’t want to know any of it. Unlike Jake, I couldn’t be detached. I thought about it for the next twenty-four hours at least, wondering what happened between them to precipitate her husband shooting her in the head.
On surgery days, there is never any telling when Jake will be home. If an emergency surgery comes in, he stays until it’s done. But today isn’t a surgery day. He should have been home hours ago. I try calling him now, but Jake’s phone is off or dead because it routes straight to voice mail. It’s not like Jake to let his phone die. I leave a voice mail for when he has a chance to charge it, keeping it light, asking him to call me when he can. I don’t say that I’m worried or that I’m wondering where he is because maybe I’ve mixed up my days and today was a surgery day after all. I’ve been distracted lately. My mother’s health is failing. She’s going blind and then, if that wasn’t bad enough, the doctors recently found a mass in her left breast. We need to do a biopsy and see if it’s malignant or benign. I’m a pessimist and so, in my head, I’ve already decided. It’s malignant. If that’s the case, we will have to decide what to do: keep the breast or get rid of it. My mother can’t make a decision to save her life, which leaves all the decision-making to me. She’s not that old to be going through all this but both things, macular degeneration and breast cancer, are in her genes, which means they’re in my genes too. The doctor’s appointments are endless: the general practitioner, mammographer, ophthalmologist and soon, a surgical oncologist. I’ve had to take days off work for them. The appointments fill the hours when I’m not teaching and, when I’m not with my mother, I’m thinking about and worrying about her, obsessing over decisions like lumpectomy or mastectomy, knowing if I make the wrong choice when the time comes, my mother will die for it.
Because of it, Jake and I have grown distant from each other. It was the impetus for last night’s fight, how I care about everyone and everything but him. It’s not true. But I can see why he would think it. Except that last night I’d turned it around on him. I devalued his feelings and made him feel bad for the way he felt. After screaming at each other, Jake took his pillow and slept on the sofa. He left this morning after hardly speaking to me and without really saying goodbye. Now he’s not home and he’s not answering his phone, and I’m worried I know why.
CHRISTIAN
In the middle of the night, Lily is crying.
“What is it, baby? What’s wrong?” I ask, curling myself around her. Her crying is a quiet whimper that she tries to suppress. But I’m a light sleeper. It doesn’t take much to wake me. I hear her cry, but more than that, I feel the vibration of her body against mine.
Lily is turned away from me in bed. Her back is pressed into me. She doesn’t tell me what’s wrong. “Bad dream?” I ask, feeling the back of her head nod against my chest. “Here,” I say, “let me get you some water,” pushing against the weight of the quilt, which levels us in bed.
“No,” Lily says, reaching for my hand. “Please just stay here, Christian. Just stay with me.”
I lower my head to the pillow. I sink back into bed and wrap my arm around her.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Lily was scared.
In the morning, Lily is awake before me. She always is. She’s showered and dressed and she’s downstairs, standing at the kitchen island in the dark, eating a piece of toast, while I just rolled out of bed.
“Will you tell me about it?” I ask, coming to stand at the island opposite her. “About the dream.”
Lily stares back, her brown eyes reluctant. “I didn’t have a dream,” she confesses.
I cock my head. “What were you thinking about, then? Why were you so upset last night?” I ask.
There’s a long pause before Lily tells me.
“I went for a walk yesterday after work, at Langley Woods,” she says. Langley Woods is a large forest preserve. Lily and I have been there before. We’ve gone together to run or to take our dog for walks, when we had one. It’s not far from our house. There is a waterfall, though it’s small, more like a dam than anything, and over ten miles of hiking trails. “The doctor said walking would be good for me. Safe,” she reminds me, as if defending something she hasn’t yet said, asserting that what happened isn’t her fault.
Lily is a distance runner, but she’s laid off running since she found out she was pregnant. There were three miscarriages before this, each pregnancy ending before the end of the first trimester. Lily blames herself for them, as if something she did or didn’t do is what led to the miscarriage.
“That’s good,” I say. “A little exercise, a little fresh air. That’s good.” My voice is calm, encouraging, supportive, but inside my heart is beating a little faster than it was a minute ago because I’m wondering if Lily is going to say that something happened to the baby, that she lost the baby yesterday. My palms are clammy now; they start to sweat. The last time it happened, she was nine weeks along, like now. We’d already been to the doctor. We’d had an ultrasound and heard the baby’s heartbeat. The doctor had told us that the risk of miscarriage went down after detecting a fetal heartbeat for the first time, to something like a few percent, 4 or 5, I can’t remember. Still, the doctor was wrong. She filled us with false hope. We didn’t think anything bad could happen at that point. Shame on us. Lily had a history with recurrent miscarriages by then. She wasn’t like other women the doctor saw. That small 4 or 5 percent included Lily, because she lost that baby even after hearing a heartbeat.
Lily was at work when it happened, sitting in on an IEP meeting when she felt the rush of blood between her legs. She sat there until the end of the meeting, until everyone else had cleared the room. When she stood up, she looked down and saw the blood on the chair. It came as no surprise, but was no less devastating.
Now Lily’s hand shakes as she reaches for her water bottle. She unscrews the cap, brings it to her mouth and takes a long swig. She lowers the water bottle slowly back to the countertop and replaces the cap. It’s dragged out. She’s searching for the words to tell me the baby is dead, that she lost it yesterday when she was at Langley Woods. She came home. She showered, washing the blood away. The baby’s gone. That’s why she was so upset last night. There will be a D&C to clean out what’s left of it. It’s old hat. We’ve done this before. This is nothing new for us.
Lily’s voice shakes when she speaks.
“Jake Hayes was there,” she says. It’s not what I expect to hear. It takes a second to regroup, to replace thoughts of miscarriage with Jake’s face.
“Oh yeah?” I ask, flooding with relief that this has nothing to do with the baby. I let out a breath. I feel my body sag, my shoulders droop forward. I didn’t realize how much tension I was holding in until I release it. They say that emotional pain is far worse than any physical pain you can experience, which makes the relief from it all the more profound. The baby is fine. I’m still going to be a dad. Everything is okay. “Did you talk to him?” I ask, my tone turning optimistic. “How’s he doing? We haven’t seen him in what—six months?”
Nina Hayes teaches at the high school with Lily. She and her husband, Jake, are mutual friends. Lily sees Nina almost every day, but it’s been a while since either of us has seen Jake. He’s a surgeon. He’s too busy saving lives to hang out with us.
What I realize is that Lily’s whole body is now shaking. What started as a shakiness in her hands and her voice has spread. “You look like you’re freezing,” I say, coming around to her side of the island, reaching forward to run my hands along Lily arms for friction. Up and down, up and down. It’s not cold in the house, but I run warm. Even in December I’ve been known to crack a window. But it’s September still. It’s too early to turn on the heat, not when the temperatures still reach eighty some days, even if they do drop to the upper forties and fifties at night. “Are you feeling okay?” I ask, touching her forehead with the back of my hand. She doesn’t feel warm, but still I say, “Why don’t you call in sick today? Take the day off. Rest.”
“I can’t,” Lily says. “I’m giving a test tomorrow. I promised the kids we’d go over their study guides today, so they’re ready for it.” Lily is far too conscientious. It’s her one weakness, if it’s even a weakness.
“Can’t a sub do it?” I ask.
Shaking her head, Lily says, “No. The subs are good, but they’re not me. They don’t always know the answers. They don’t always explain it right. I don’t want the kids to get stressed. If I call in for the day, I’ll have to push the test back, ...
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