by Kate Ledger
“How far’s Ogden?” he asked, sinking into a chair next to Bev.
“What’s in Ogden?”
“A hotel. Maybe.”
“Ogden! That’s ridiculous.”
“Everything’s booked.” He confessed, “I didn’t plan ahead exactly.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I have a big room, and I’m all alone. You’re welcome to stay with me, if you want. No funny stuff,” she cautioned, “just a place to stay.”
He actually blushed. “I couldn’t trouble you.”
“You won’t find anything this late.”
He looked at her, deeply appreciative. “Can I take you to dinner?”
“You can.” Her smile reminded him of a commercial for a breath freshener.
It was something like a date, and he had to keep reminding himself that he was in Salt Lake City for the sake of the sulmenamine infusion therapy and for the patients who desperately needed it. But it was also relieving to leave the conference and to put off trying to present himself and explain what he’d observed in his office so far away. It was exhausting to try to pitch himself and his ideas to an audience that didn’t want to hear from him, the kid on the schoolyard trying to get in the game. Under the suspended red lanterns of a Chinese restaurant down the block from the hotel, Bev Pinkney was lively, sweet and staggeringly uncomplicated. She lived with and took care of her mother, who had multiple sclerosis. She’d come close a few times, but she’d never married. “I liked them, but I didn’t love them. Each time it seemed like I’d be settling,” she said. He’d almost never met anyone with as little angst. “I like what I do,” she said, “but at the end of the day, I don’t take it home with me.”
They went back to her hotel room. “You can have that one, if you want.” She pointed to the far bed, the one near the window, tucked neatly with its mottled purple comforter, just like its twin closer to the door. “I don’t care.”
“I don’t care either,” he said. “Don’t let me put you out.”
Her pajamas were a set, a button-down top and baggy pants, like a man’s, only pink. He got the theme, Pinkney, pink. Everything about her was simple and straightforward. It was relieving. He had only his boxers to wear and a T-shirt, and he got under the covers quickly, as unobtrusively as possible, in the far bed. So much kindness from a complete stranger—he felt gratitude that made him close his eyes and exhale. As his feet reached down in the covers, it seemed the sheets possessed an exponent of thread-count he’d never experienced before. They felt glorious along the hairs of his legs. The pillow received him. He felt the weight of his eyelids, and the heaviness of the skin on his cheeks, and he nestled into the bed, luxuriating in the feeling of being looked after. It was lovely. He waited for the sound of her turning off the light.
She’d said what she’d said about no funny stuff, but she was the one who sat on his bed instead of twisting the switch between them on the nightstand light, and she was the one who invited herself under his covers. The strange part was that he felt better in more ways than he could count, but as soon as they kissed, he knew he was going to be useless. His penis hunched like a timid hamster. His lips moved perfunctorily, but his tongue felt dry. His hands stroked the skin of her arms, trying to think of something, an image of Emily that might help. He was aware of Bev’s breasts pressing against his chest, but he didn’t feel desire. “Sorry,” he said finally, pulling away from the kiss. She murmured reassurance, “It’s okay, don’t worry about it,” and her hands worked with surprising and unusual industry. His thoughts strayed into his usual file of images, Emily’s breast, that gentle, promising pink, which only made him sad, and then he considered the sulmenamine in his suitcase. Was it sexual dysfunction he was suffering from? He felt like laughing to consider taking the drug he’d brought as his trophy. But ultimately, he didn’t want to sleep with Bev, as kind as she’d been, and there was no point in trying.
It seemed strangely like luck when his cell phone rang in the middle of the night. The blood was thick in his fingers as he picked it up and saw Emily’s number. His first thought was that she was calling because she knew that he’d betrayed her, as Bev stirred next to him in her man-shaped pink sleepwear. His heart cringed and then thudded with hope. Perhaps she’d changed her mind. But the hope was tinged with panic: If he’d ever had any chance of changing Emily’s mind, he’d now ruined it. Slowly, it occurred to him that if she was calling him, it wasn’t because she knew he was lying in a bed in Salt Lake City with another woman. It was that something had happened.
“It’s Jamie,” Emily breathed. “We’re at the hospital.”
He was at the airport within an hour.
When Caleb was born, Simon became aware of a perceptible shift in the nature of time. At one point in his childhood there had been something unremarkable and true about how one minute became the next. The days dragged before summer vacation. In school, the minutes passed with syrupy slowness as he sat on the edge of his chair, waiting for the last bell to ring at the end of the day. But the day his son was born, time seemed to lose distinction, good or bad, tolerable or intolerable, memorable or lost forever. The minute-to-minute experience stretched in all directions at once, weaving and overlapping and, most frightfully, disappearing. The nights were long, and yet he could barely remember them in the morning. Each second felt precious, and yet he couldn’t wait for them to pass.
It began with the panic at the office, Emily’s labor and the process of sifting through the medical knowledge in his head and trying to listen to his wife at the same time.
“Do something,” she’d insisted.
“Wait a moment,” he’d responded, rushing to the cabinets to see what he had in stock to give her.
But how long was a moment? The time between contractions collapsed like a spring and then stretched as they counted the length of each one. And it was only half an hour, maybe forty minutes, from the instant she arrived at the office to the minute that Caleb appeared, slick with vernix, but it seemed like he lived through medical school all over again in that shard of time. The moments with emotional weight—the initial ecstasy of holding his son, the terror of dropping him—were pinned in the mind. The others just vaporized. How had Emily looked holding their son? He was sure they’d spoken to each other plenty those early days, but what had they said? The mind had a way of trimming what it considered unnecessary fat. But certain images seemed as though they must remain somewhere.
For instance, he didn’t remember what his son looked like that first month. What he remembered was the wonder of such extreme fatigue, more thorough and more desperate than any exhaustion that he’d experienced during the call nights of his residency. He remembered one morning of great pride, walking down the street pushing Caleb’s stroller in Sherwood Gardens near their home, and the feeling that he’d entered a brotherhood of men. But he did not remember Caleb the baby. With the exception of his son’s shockingly flattened nose at the moment he emerged from the birth canal, he didn’t remember what Caleb looked like.
A month and a half later, at the hospital, Simon was watching the stirrings under those same fragile eyelids, his own heart racing, his insides feeling like tin. The details of the death scene—those that he could remember—were stilled in his head like an ant in amber. He could look at those moments from every angle, if he chose to, and he didn’t, but what about the others? It had begun with a fever. Emily picked Caleb up after a nap and thought he might be warm. But the baby was not febrile. Was Caleb lethargic? It was impossible to tell: He slept and he woke and he slept again. Was his cry distressed? Again: It sounded like the same ribbon-thin wail he’d made since he was born. Emily picked him up in the middle of the night, and then they panicked. Even dialing 911 seemed like it would take too much time. Emily cradled Caleb in her arms in the car, and Simon tried not to crash.
The triage nurse still had her mouth open when they were whisked to a secluded area in the ER. Simon pressed against the partition curtain, but Emily hung back at t
he periphery, biting her thumbnail, her arms close across her chest as if she were holding herself. The baby was feverish, and as they pulled away his clothes and then his diaper, there was a faint, purple rash dotting the crevice of his buttocks. There it was, the menin gococcal hemorrhaging under the skin. How long had it been there, and why hadn’t they seen it?
“We’ll do everything right here,” a nurse informed them as the medical team surrounded Caleb’s body, and Simon crowded in with them, obedient, dry-mouthed, attentive. They gave Caleb oxygen. Another blood test. A spinal tap. The white blood count was nearly fifteen thousand, a doctor told them, and Simon had to think hard to remember normal would be under ten thousand. He wanted to know: which antibiotics? what doses? Only gradually, like climbers in a slow rain, step by step losing footing, did Simon and Emily begin to realize the situation was desperate. They watched and they waited.
Then, all of a sudden, or maybe it was longer than that, they were in a free fall, and nobody could save him.
The nurse who appeared at Simon’s elbow said, in the smallest of voices, “I’m sorry.” This is what they say when it hasn’t gone right, he thought, trying to make sense. Had they tried everything? Maybe there were other techniques that hadn’t been considered? Other drugs that hadn’t been used yet? He expected to hear the nurse say that they’d tried everything, to reason, to rationalize. He realized what he craved to hear from her more than anything in the world was something that sounded like an apology. We’ve failed you, we’ve lost your son, we’ve failed you.
Instead, she said, “Would you like the opportunity to hold him again?” She said many people did, in similar circumstances. She said studies had shown that having private time with the child, just the parents alone, could help the mourning process begin. Begin? he thought numbly. He was bobbing on the open sea, treading water, completely lost. He had to begin a mourning process, as if he could push off from somewhere solid, launch himself from a starting point? But where to? In which direction? How?
In the hallway, Emily resolutely said no: She didn’t want to hold Caleb again. She didn’t want to look at him, either. She didn’t want the image of his body—like this—to be the final one of him in her mind, to carry that with her for the rest of her life. “Fuck the studies,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about any goddamn studies.” She didn’t like hospitals and sickness, blood and veins, in the first place, so he wasn’t entirely surprised by her decision. Tears coursed down her cheeks, alongside her nose, as her shoulders shuddered. She sniffled into a ratted tissue, and she did not glance at Simon. “No, thank you,” she said. And that was the only time he’d seen her crying.
But he believed the nurse, the studies, what others had learned from experience. What else could he believe in? He rocked on his heels for a moment, feeling stunned, and then stepped past Emily to reenter the room where the medical team had fought, valiantly he was sure, to keep his son alive. There were tiny marks on Caleb’s skin where he’d been poked and stuck, where tubes had protruded into his tiny veins. His palms had begun to purple, finally, with the rash that might have helped if it had appeared sooner. He lay with his knees bent, vulnerable and pitiable, but almost comical, too. The bent legs reminded Simon of a dissection frog from his earliest biology class. The head, swollen from the meningitis, made him look more like a space creature than a newborn human. Simon had the macabre thought that if Caleb had been a cartoon, there would be x’s now where his eyes used to be. His son’s skin had already begun to lose its warmth, and its appealing pinkish color seemed more reminiscent of clay. He spent a few moments touching Caleb, stroking the wax-soft arms, covering the tiny cartilaginous feet with his hands, fingering the row of toes like corn on the cob, but, fearing that Emily might have a point about indelible images, he didn’t lift his boy from the table.
They buried Caleb in a quick ceremony with as little pomp as possible. “There’s nothing to say for a newborn that isn’t a cliché,” Emily said. They’d only recently purchased a membership at the Reform synagogue—and they’d only done so because a colleague of Simon’s at Guilford Medical Associates had urged them to as a newly formed family—but joining turned out to be fortuitous. Their membership constituted a network, AAA roadside service for life’s disasters. The middle-aged, soft-toned rabbi, Frank Berg, conducted the funeral with a few words and readings in English and Hebrew. The grass all around the baby’s new grave was shockingly green, the vibrancy of the hue almost painful, even though it was October. “We can ask for meaning from God, but we can’t always have an answer,” Rabbi Berg said, which struck Simon as a way of using religion (actually abusing religion) to say nothing at all. He was reminded of how Charles’s grandparents dumped God, unable to make sense of six million Jews annihilated in Europe. If there was any time to dump God, it was that moment, at the mockingly green gravesite of an infant son. But he could not formulate a philosophy—or an antiphilosophy—because either seemed to constitute involvement and Caleb’s death seemed to have nothing to do with the Jewish people, or an age-old religion, or a set of practices that he only faintly recognized. Simon looked up during the service to see his parents in mute, polite attendance, his mother hanging on Charles’s elbow. Al St. Bern, apparently in one of his funks, didn’t make it.
Wordlessly, during a modified shiva at the house with a platter of garlic bagels, whitefish salad, half-inch-thick sliced tomatoes, and too-strong coffee, all of which stung at his senses with pungent offense, Simon let himself be hugged. His colleagues from Guilford Medical Associates gave powerful embraces with heavy back-slapping claps against his shoulder blades. He knew he should have felt comforted, but all he could think of was his father’s comment at Caleb’s birth, over and over again in his head like a taunt. A lot of good it had done, indeed. He should have known, he should have seen, he should have predicted, he should have understood the signs. He should have been on top of the information. How had he missed the diagnosis? But the fever had flickered like a candle and then disappeared. Caleb’s mewing cries had sounded like they had on any other night. His muscle tone, appetite, diapers, everything had appeared unremarkable. The blood count had been unremarkable. The rash—where was the telltale rash? Simon’s only solace was that he hadn’t been the only one: Even the pediatricians had missed the diagnosis.
Simon wasn’t able to get a flight from Salt Lake City until Monday morning. When his plane finally touched down in Baltimore, he felt numb. He directed the cab straight to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda. “Fast,” he said. The driver did not ask, and he did not explain.
He made his way to a corridor decorated with paintings of blocky animals, crocodiles with squared-off snouts, turtles that looked like they were Jeeps. Emily was sitting by the bed in the pediatric ICU, holding Jamie’s hand. He noticed his daughter’s hair, stringy and matted on the pillow as she slept, and he was relieved that Emily had not straightened or combed it. He would have read grooming as indicative of a higher level of disaster. The tousled effects suggested that trouble was still fresh. A long time ago, when they’d first married, Emily had joked about his spousal responsibility to her in case she was ever in a terrible accident. She made him promise—swear up and down—if she ever wound up comatose, he’d come daily to the hospital to tweeze her facial hairs. “I’d come just to sit with you,” he’d vowed, embarrassed by the darkness of the conversation. “No idle sitting,” she warned. “Promise me you won’t let my eyebrows meet in the middle.” They’d had a good laugh over it, but he’d appreciated the responsibility, and any time he’d come across her in the bathroom, leaning into the mirror to pluck a hair, he’d remembered his pledge. At Jamie’s bedside, Emily looked like she hadn’t slept in days. Red, bloodshot eyes, hair disheveled. It was perhaps the worst he’d seen her since—when?—he couldn’t even think.
“She’s on antibiotics,” Emily said, not standing up. “And fluids. They think she’s going to be okay. No sign of kidney damage. The blood differential, or whatever that was, came
back normal.” She forced a grim smile. “No meningitis.”
Simon sat at the edge of the bed, opposite Emily, and took his daughter’s other hand. He bent over the bed and kissed her temple, that vulnerable patch. Her chest fluttered up and down, and she looked restful. He was thinking of all the things he’d fucked up in his life. He was thinking of a fight he’d gotten into with Emily. It was shortly after Caleb’s death. He’d suggested going to the cemetery. Of course he should have known better, it was too soon. There were reasons you went for yahrzeit, one year later. But he wasn’t religious, so what did the calendar matter? Emily had not blatantly resisted, but she’d conveniently made a list of other plans that needed to be taken care of first. They needed a hose for the backyard. A friend who was about to leave town needed to stop over. Who was this friend? Why did Emily need a hose that very day? The day had worn on, and he realized they were running out of daylight. Finally when the friend arrived he monopolized the conversation, giving medical advice and taking her down to the clinic for free samples. Emily had resisted his intrusion and so, in front of the friend, he’d made a cutting remark. What shocked him was the look in the friend’s eyes. He and Emily could avoid talking about Caleb forever, but it was impossible to hide how they mishandled each other. And they continued to be unable to hide it even when Jamie arrived. They knew, children did. They didn’t need words. You breathed your pain, and they breathed it with you.
He felt like he should look at Jamie’s chart, in fact had the impulse to find it and rifle through it, but he didn’t move. He just sat holding his daughter’s hand, looking at the small seashell fingernails. Emily held her other hand. He thought how light the hand was, like a leaf, he thought. The torturous green of the cemetery came back to him, and he forced the thought away.