Christmas, Present

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Triple-A will be here soon,” he soothed her, more out of fear than any disbelief in her agony. “They can give us a jump, unless it’s the alternator . . .” Elliott regarded Laura’s stretched, strained face, which before his eyes seemed to fade, like the watercolor Santas and pumpkins the girls used to paint on the windows, draining from the glass in the rain. “You really are in a bad way, aren’t you?” he asked, reaching for his wife’s neck, hoping to cradle her. “Let me rub you down a little. Let me get in there and hold you.”

  “I need to go to the hospital now, Elliott,” Laura moaned. Cringing, Elliott recalled how during Rory’s breech birth, Laura roared at him that she wished he were dead. How did a woman who could do backbends and cartwheels with the girls, and jump up from a fall on a friend’s horse with a giggle instead of a limp, be so undone by a headache? That was Laura, though, contradictions all over the map, fitting sweetly into an amiable, slightly off-center jigsaw.

  “Wait a few minutes and see,” he suggested, “and then I promise I’ll call for an ambulance.” If he could, in fact, he would have run with Laura in his arms to the hospital. He would later realize he’d been too frightened to act, too leery of making this very real thing more so. Or had he only been embarrassed? he cursed himself.

  “Officer!” Laura then screamed, and Elliott, unprepared, jumped and nearly shed a layer of skin. “Officer!”

  Tony came trotting, his cigarette dangling from one corner of his lower lip. “My husband won’t let me go to the hospital and I’m sick, I’m very sick!”

  “I’m . . . I just said . . . ,” Elliot stammered. “Laura! I’ll get you to the hospital!”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Tony asked. Elliott shrugged helplessly.

  “What’s wrong with you, miss?” Laura rocked faster, faster, then suddenly stopped, dropping both hands limp at her sides.

  “It stopped,” she said. “My headache.”

  “See?” Elliott told her, baffled, trying to sound assured.

  “But something is wrong, Elliott! Something is still wrong! There’s a rushing in my head! I don’t want to sit in this dirty hole anymore! I want to go to the hospital, where it’s bright and clean . . .”

  “The tow truck will be here any minute . . .”

  “I need an ambulance! Elliott, now! Do you hear me?” She turned to Tony. “Can you cuff him? Or shoot him?” Laura asked. “I have to go to the hospital!” Tony’s eyes widened, and he whirled and quickstepped back to his radio.

  “She’s ordinarily a very docile person,” Elliott said, as he trotted after Tony.

  “Sure, I have no doubt. Who knows about this stuff? I could drive her,” Tony told him, “but it’s my ass if I leave here. I’m going to radio for an ambulance. Mercy is only six, eight blocks . . .”

  “That’s probably the best idea,” he agreed. “She’s way over the top. This isn’t Laura. She may have food poisoning or something.”

  “Nothing they can do for that.” Tony shrugged, cupping his lighter. “Except wait. It’s gotta work itself out of her system.”

  “Still,” Elliott persisted.

  With Laura whimpering against his chest for what seemed interminable moments, her shoulders shrunken in a queerly boneless huddle, he finally heard the dim whoop of the ambulance, distant, then closer; then Tony went rushing to block the tunnel traffic with sawhorses as the vehicle backed onto the construction site. Elliott watched as Laura’s hand was repeatedly jabbed for a saline IV—Laura’s veins were tiny, buried, and tended to roll away. She had fainted on occasion during the most routine blood draw. When, now, she did not react nor even grimace, Elliott’s stomach roiled with dazzling concern. Something was wrong, very wrong. The paramedics pressed ice packs to Laura’s head, as waiting firefighters who had rumbled up in full gear, for no reason Elliott could discern, looked on. The smallest of the team, a woman no taller than Elliott’s seventh-grader, asked if he would like to ride with his wife or follow in their car. “It’s inoperative,” Elliott told her. “That’s how this all started.”

  “She struck her head?” the tiny paramedic asked, motioning for an immobilizing collar.

  “No, nothing like that,” Elliott told her. “The car just stopped in the tunnel, and it wasn’t until we were here, waiting to be towed, that she felt the pain. No, that’s wrong, it was back at Suffolk, in the parking lot.”

  “Was she in a lot of pain?”

  “She thought she was having a migraine headache . . .”

  “Does she often have them?”

  “No, never. That’s why she thought she must be having one,” Elliott explained. “It hurt too badly for an ordinary headache.”

  “Have you or your wife traveled in any foreign countries recently?”

  “Not unless you count Lynn,” Elliott joked weakly, of the grubby neighborhood where he managed a paperback book warehouse that stocked discount chains.

  “The doctor in the ER was speculating on the radio about the possibility of a virus,” the paramedic said, with no trace of a smile. “Will you be coming with us, then?”

  “I’ve ruined it,” Laura whispered faintly, as he settled on a hard bench beside her and the ambulance began its impossibly rattling, jolting progress—this, Elliot thought, is how they move the frail and dangerously sick?—through the three a.m. streets. “I’ve ruined our anniversary. I didn’t even give you your present.”

  “Just feel better.” Elliott patted his wife’s hand, noticing the odd, liverish cast of her fingernail beds. “That’s the best present you could give me.”

  “It’s in the nightstand on my side, in a silver box,” Laura told him; she seemed unable to control a sagging at one side of her mouth. “There’s a card. Will you look for it?”

  “We’ll do it tomorrow,” Elliott said, as Laura was swept out of the ambulance and into the phalanx of white trousers and blue shirts.

  “Wait here,” a pleasant older woman instructed Elliott, “while I make a copy of your insurance card. Then we’ll take you back to see what’s going on with your wife.” Shamed and elated that Laura had been diverted past the noisy, filthy turbulence of the waiting room (like a photo from a Third World country, head wounds seeping through gauze, mothers whose infants lie crouping, translucent green glazing their mouths and noses) Elliott scribbled what he knew of his wife’s health history, splendid except for hay fever, and followed the bustling woman through automated steel doors.

  In a room deliberately darkened, a physician was peering into Laura’s eyes, instructing her to look up, left, right, right again. “And the pain, it started when?” he asked.

  “Dinner,” Laura said. “At dinner.”

  “You didn’t tell me that!” Elliott interrupted.

  “I thought it was only a headache,” Laura pleaded.

  “Do you have an aura?” the doctor asked, as Laura made a motion of incomprehension, as if whisking away a fly. “Did you see lightning flashes or spots at the corners of your vision?”

  Laura said, “No. Just a pain that kept tightening and tightening . . . I can’t explain what I mean by that . . . until it was unbearable . . .”

  “I want to check something, with someone, Missus Banner,” the doctor told Laura, and noticing Elliott, he said, “Hi. I’ll be right back.” The young doctor returned more quickly than Elliott had ever seen anyone arrive in a hospital—including during Annie’s near-death joust with encephalitis—a senior colleague in tow.

  The older man was perhaps just ten years Elliott’s senior, but his luxuriant hair was completely white. From his bearing alone, even before he spoke, Elliott could tell that English was not his first language.

  “I am Doctor Campanile, and I think we need to take some pictures of this head of yours,” he told Laura, with amiable and absolute tenderness.

  “Bell tower,” Laura whispered.

  “Do you speak Italian?”

  “My choir went to Florence in high school. Florence for two days, and Paris for three days.”
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br />   “Firenze.” The doctor smiled approvingly, nodding as a nurse swabbed Laura’s neck with a numbing solution, then inserted a white probe that appeared to have the circumference of a meat thermometer. “My parents lived in Siena. I have not seen Florence since eighty-seven.”

  “I went before then, in seventy-seven,” Laura told him, as the doctor murmured instructions to gently move Laura onto a rolling bed at the count of three.

  Elliott sat on the floor outside the imaging lab as Laura was moved slowly through the cavernous space capsule of the scanner. Since the use of his cell phone was forbidden on the corridor, he roused himself finally and found an unoccupied office with a telephone. He called AAA and learned that his car had been delivered to the dealership three blocks from his house. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly four a.m. Reluctantly, he dialed the home of his mother-in-law, Miranda, who answered on the first ring, as if she had been waiting for his call. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but the girls may need you. Laura has taken ill; we’re at Mercy Hospital, and Annie is alone with Rory and Amelia . . .”

  “I’ll go, of course,” Miranda replied, “but what is the matter with Laurie?”

  “She has a terrible pain in her head . . .”

  “In her neck?” They both fell silent, the recollected threat of Annie’s meningitis unmentionable between them.

  “No, her head. And pressure. They’re doing a CT scan . . .”

  “Really!” Miranda said. “Should I simply bring the girls there?”

  “Not yet,” Elliott said. “Don’t wake them. Use the key behind the light. Just wait for me to call you. I appreciate this, Miranda.”

  “Don’t think of it,” she said seriously. “You’ve never asked me to help with anything. I’ve felt quite privileged.” What an odd way to put it, Elliott reflected.

  He wandered back to the scanning lab, but Laura was gone, as was the doctor with the musical name. He saw the younger physician, a resident or an intern, leaning against a cabinet, filling out a form on a clipboard. “My wife,” he said.

  The young man smiled at Elliott, a dog’s grin, slant and cringing. “You can talk to Doctor Campanile”—he pointed with his pen—“she’s upstairs on the medical floor, 202, bed B. They’ve admitted her.”

  “For more tests?” Elliott asked.

  “They’ve admitted her to the hospital,” said the intern.

  “For overnight?”

  The younger man seemed to consider this. Finally, he said, “Yes.”

  Elliott jogged up the two flights and easily found Laura, propped high on pillows, dressed only in her white peasant blouse and satin undies. Dr. Campanile, as if he had been waiting in the wings for his entrance, instantly appeared at his elbow. In the other bed, an ancient, toothless crone with yellow matted hair moaned ceaselessly, “Come here, baby. Come here, baby. Come here.”

  “I know,” Dr. Campanile told Elliott softly. “We will move her the moment we can. They are readying a private room next door.” He took Elliott’s arm, then gingerly, as if waiting for permission, placed his hand on Elliott’s shoulder and led him to an adjacent room, where four chairs faced a low, scarred table. Three hands of poker lay abandoned on the table. Above a battered vinyl couch, a single string of white twinkle lights was strung around a stitchery sampler that read “Peace on Earth.”

  “The poor soul,” Elliott said.

  “She has no children but in her mind,” Dr. Campanile told him. “They are all dead.”

  “Imagine, your child dying before you do.”

  “Yes, it is very bad. Does your wife have a family?”

  “Two sisters and a brother, and her mother.”

  “Close by?”

  “Her brother lives in Cambridge and her mother in Natick. Her sisters live, one in California, one in Chicago. She’s in medical school, Angela, the one in Chicago. She was a science teacher, but she decided one year she’d always wanted to practice medicine . . .”

  “You should call them.”

  “Why?” Elliott asked, stifling the little boy’s frightened pipe in his voice. “Does my wife have a brain tumor?”

  “No,” said Dr. Campanile, without amplification.

  “Is she very ill?”

  “She will be spared a long illness,” he said, “but yes, she is very ill. Let me explain what I have seen in these pictures.” Deep in Laura’s brain, a weakened vein, widened like a dammed estuary, present probably since her birth, had burst. “This is why she feels no pain now,” the doctor continued. “It is already hemorrhaging. The pressure is gone, so there is a relief.”

  “But when did it burst?”

  “We think perhaps in the car, some time ago.”

  “In the car? While we were pulled over? Why didn’t I get her here sooner? What now? Will you operate?”

  The doctor paused, examined his clean, clean hands, and looked up at Elliott with an anguishing discernment more expressive than words.

  “Are you saying,” Elliott persisted, “that Laura will be brain damaged? How bad will this be? Will she be able to function? Speak?” Read? Smile at him? Care for the children? he thought. How would they manage?

  “No,” Dr. Campanile replied, “she will not be brain damaged. This also she is spared. She is a strong and beautiful woman. We cannot operate, because there is nothing left for us to operate on. Nothing to remove or to clamp. There are smaller vessels in the brain, less important vessels, if you will, that can be clamped if the aneurysm is discovered in time, or the bleed caught on a scan with minimal damage. But this is a major vessel, and it is long since hemorrhaged. That is the tragedy. We could not have known it was there . . .”

  “I should have known!”

  “No, Mister Banner, you could not have known. She herself could not have known. She would not have had symptoms.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now, how can I say this? It is too late. She will die, and I am sorry beyond an ability to tell you. Often, and I say often, though this condition is very rare altogether . . . this, this bubble, which is so thin, will break when the woman is in labor, so in this you are lucky, you have your children . . . and she has lived with her children and loved them. She has told me you have three girls, one large, one middle, one very small.”

  “Wait!” Elliott cried. “She’ll die?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long? How long does she have? How many months? Weeks?”

  “Mister Banner, Elliott, it is not a case of that. I will explain to you exactly how this will happen. In several hours, or perhaps one hour, your wife will have a seizure. She will feel no pain. If she chooses, we can sedate her so that she has no awareness at all of this. She has said she does not wish us to do this.”

  “You told her?”

  “She asked me. I would not lie to an intelligent person.”

  “You told her this, without me?”

  “She has said she knew she was dying.”

  “My God! My God!” Elliott began keening. The doctor rose and gently closed the door.

  “Mister Banner, let me tell you the rest of this, and then I will answer all of your questions. In one hour, or several, your wife will have a seizure, perhaps very small. She will have another, several hours later, in the morning. She may have one more, and then she will sleep; she will fall into a coma, and die this way.”

  “There must be something you can do.”

  “There is not. But, when I leave you, I will go on the Internet . . .”

  “The Internet?”

  “I will go on the Internet and ask all my colleagues I can find whether there is any experiment, any hope or practice . . .”

  “It’s the middle of the night!”

  “Not in England, Australia, Germany . . .”

  “But if you say there is nothing we can do . . .”

  “If there is, I will find it. There are changes daily. Whatever is being tried, we will find. But I think there is nothing that can be done, except this. You can sp
end these hours with your wife and children, and if you wish, her family, and you can learn what she wishes. Do you have a living will?”

  Angrily, Elliott told him, “Of course.”

  “This is a Catholic hospital. I am a Catholic. The practice, barbaric, would have been years before, to place her on life supports . . . we will do that now only if Laura chose to donate her eyes and her heart . . .”

  “Her eyes and her heart?” These are mine, Elliott cried silently. His whole head was a single, black shout. “How long are we looking at?”

  “Eight hours. Twelve. We cannot say.”

  “Twelve hours from now! But my wife was a healthy woman. She lifted weights! She did cartwheels!”

  “She has lived a long time, forty years? With this in her, like, you might say, a time bomb . . .”

  “How will I tell my children?” Elliott asked.

  “We have a social worker who is on her way here. To stand by. And I will tell them, if you need my help. I also have two daughters. And two granddaughters.” The doctor placed his hand over Elliott’s. “Are you a religious man? Is Laura religious?”

  “I . . . was raised a Catholic. Laura takes the children to church when they’ll get up on Sunday morning. They’ve had their First Communions, the older ones. Laura calls herself a practicing Catholic, practicing to get it right,” said Elliott, and astonishing himself, he laughed. “I suppose I’m an atheist. Or an agnostic. Too cowardly to be an atheist.”

  “Your wife has asked to see a priest, later. Father Conley is on his way. He can wait until she is ready.”

  “How . . . is Laura?”

  “Well, she is not afraid. I have told her there will be no pain. That was what she feared. And she has said she is . . . she has said, like the old woman, ‘My babies, my babies.’”

  Now Elliott began crying in earnest.

  “It is comforting, sometimes, to give up our doubts at such occasions,” said Dr. Campanile, reaching out a hand, barely grazing Elliott’s shoulder. “I must do it. Otherwise, I think I could not survive my work and ever eat or drink a glass of wine. We may hope, perhaps, as Our Lady instructs, for a peaceful death. Peace is not to be snored at.”