Oxygen

by Carol Wiley Cassella

  I fill a mug with sweetened tea and carry it into the bedroom. There are only five more hours left in the night before I will turn off my alarm clock and go back into the hospital for another day of colon resections, cataracts, hysterectomies and hernias. All those patients are now tossing sleeplessly somewhere, suppressing the natural trepidation that accompanies surgery, the reluctance to give oneself up to the control of others and trust them to do their best, to be well rested, well trained and alert.

  I lie on my back and watch the streetlight glint off the slowly rotating ceiling fan, and I try to lull myself into sleep by counting my breaths, letting the growing number crowd out background voices. I let my rib cage lift up and expand, my diaphragm suck down into my abdomen, my nostrils flare and pull in the largest volume of air I can hold. Then I close off my vocal cords and listen in the night to the rocking flush of blood in my carotid arteries. I watch the seconds pass in glowing blue on my bedside clock. I can’t even make a minute. I can’t force my body to fight its own reflexive terror of oxygen starvation for one full swing of a second hand.

  It is an impossible thing to commit suicide by voluntarily holding one’s breath. In psychiatric hospitals and jails we remove the occupants’ belts and scarves and sheets—all possible bridges to death—but no one dies of self-suffocation. Because as soon as the mind goes black, reflex kicks in and volition is superseded by the natural dominance of survival.

  13

  Lori calls more frequently than usual these days. We talk about whether her recent bouts of nausea could be her gallbladder, the cough Gordon brought back from the Far East, an Alaskan baleen basket I found in a nearby gallery, the latest news on my father. The noisy chaos of her household in the background is comfortably distracting, my borrowed family. She laces her conversation with oblique allusions to the lawsuit followed by pregnant pauses that I leave empty. One night I finally ask her what he would think if she found out it had been my fault.

  “But we know it wasn’t,” she immediately answers.

  “But what if the autopsy proved it was?”

  “How could the autopsy prove that? You said this was an allergic reaction or something.”

  I take a deep breath and hold it for a second, then plunge ahead. “It could have been her heart. I think Jolene might have had a heart defect.”

  I can hear Lori thinking, almost picture her biting her lower lip. “Where did this come from? You’ve never even mentioned this.”

  “I had a dream about it. And I woke up just knowing it.”

  “Knowing it? You’re deciding this because of a dream?”

  “Yeah. Well, not really just the dream. I was thinking about how her heart slowed down right before her oxygen level started to drop. It would make sense if it had gone down after she ran out of oxygen. But not before. That’s always bothered me. I just never really separated it out from the whole scene.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Kids’ hearts are strong. When things go wrong in pediatrics it’s almost always a respiratory problem first, and then the heart gets starved of oxygen and fails. Before that a child’s heart should be beating faster.”

  “Have you told your lawyer this?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Good. Don’t. I can’t even understand all you’re saying and it doesn’t sound reasonable. Don’t tell him. You want my honest opinion?”

  I don’t answer her. I know she’ll tell me anyway.

  “Your subconscious came up with this to justify how bad you feel. This was a dream, Marie. A nightmare.”

  I gradually cleave my day into two parts—work and the solitude of my home. Of these two, work evolves into a restful escape. It’s odd, I think, because at the hospital I have to see all the people who were part of that day: Stevenson, Mindy, Alicia. I have to watch the faces of my patients as they sink beneath the spell of drugs and know they believe I will keep them safe, that I will wake them at the end of their surgery to rejoin the people they love. At work I have no choice but to wrap my guilt and anxiety in a tightly bound shroud and place them far away from mental reach. If they tumble from their high shelf for a moment, I might become too much the frightened defendant, too little the collected and confident physician. And then, it might happen again.

  At home, the shroud tends to snag and unfurl, and my mind races into black corners of recrimination. I clean my house, dusting the tops of ceiling fans and closet shelves, scrubbing out refrigerator drawers and bathroom drains, organizing food pantries and file cabinets, arranging the books in my library by subject, then again by height or binding color. I polish the sterling my father finally gave me when I finished my residency—tired of saving it for a wedding gift. I alphabetize my CDs and walk from room to room wearing headphones, deafened by Prokofiev and Bizet and Bono. I watch old movies, bundled up in my bathrobe, until I fall asleep on the sofa buried beneath a down comforter. Even if I don’t like the movie, the steady prattle of stilted dialogue blocks out the noise of my memory. And every evening I decide I will ask Donnelly if he has the autopsy report back yet. And every morning I decide to wait one more day.

  It occurs to me late one night that Bobbie and I are more alike than it would seem. We are both without a partner or child.

  Joe calls to try to coax me out of social exile. He leaves unanswered messages three nights in a row and then starts talking to me through my answering machine, cajoling me to pick up the phone.

  “Marie, I know you’re in there. Come on, talk to me. Be my friend tonight, I need one. What are you watching? You’re gonna run out of movies soon.”

  I knew it. He’s spying on me. I wrap the comforter around me and shuffle over to the rain-streaked windows. He is there, hunched into his glossy yellow parka with the hood pulled up to cover his cell phone, squinting against the streetlight as he waves at my TV-silhouetted shadow. I place one palm against the cold glass and he holds his up in return, spreading the fingers into a victory V.

  “Gotcha,” he says when I pick up the phone.

  “Joe—respect for privacy, please. Can’t I escape from the world for a night?”

  “You’ve been escaping for weeks. I want to go out. I want to go out with you. Hell, I want to drink. Things aren’t always so perfect in my life, either, you know. Come on, friend.” He pauses, listening to my hesitation. “I miss you.”

  There is a familiar note of loneliness in his voice that always makes me want to take care of him. He surrounds himself with male friends for the sports betting and bashing, the single malt scotch ratings, the prideful litany of conquered women—but when any real pain starts he seeks me out. What is it that compels women to guard men’s secret frailties?

  “I haven’t even showered,” I say, hearing myself give in to him.

  “What do I care how you smell? Isn’t that the beauty of being friends with your ex-lover? At least when I tell you I love you for your mind, I really mean it.”

  “Joe, please? I’m not very good company these days, anyway.”

  “Marie, please? Would I turn you down in your hour of need? Besides, I’m getting blasted by the rain and my phone’s about to die.”

  “Big surprise.” Joe is notorious for being unreachable outside the hospital. He’s lost three cell phones in the last year. “Meet me at Larry’s in fifteen minutes. But I’m not staying out late tonight. I’m on call on Wednesday, since Sandy had to trade. Order a lemon drop for me.”

  Despite my reticence I smile. The fact that we were lovers once has made our friendship strong enough to bear fallibility, intimate enough to tolerate imperfection. When Joe started at First Lutheran he was thirty-seven, I was thirty-three, we were both single, both apparently straight, and it seemed the entire department assumed we would become a couple—the very fact of which we turned into a private joke, falling into a flirtatious friendship that was secure because we were both utterly committed to separating work and love. It made it easy to counsel one another in matters of romance, easy to fill empty Satu
rdays with a ready-made, obligation-free date. There was no tension about income or personal habits, no whining about schedules or domestic tidiness.

  There was a man I’d liked—seriously liked—when I first moved to Seattle, an avid kayaker and runner who owned a bookstore deep in the bowels of the Pike Place Market. Then I got my job at First Lutheran and started canceling dates when emergency surgeries kept me late, or when my low seniority put me on call three weekends in a row. Soon he quit calling, upset that I didn’t seem to have room for him in my life. I think it was the first time I wondered if my generation had tried to leap a little too far, plunging into the wilderness of equality without our trail of bread crumbs, turning around on the brink of infertility to discover that, enticing as the woods were, we were unaccountably lost. What I needed was some Microsoft executive who could accept my hours and retire early to raise our children. But not Joe. Never Joe. Joe was too close a friend to risk loving. In the meantime he could fill my weekends with bike rides and movies and the occasional symphony he would reluctantly allow me to drag him to—if I let him leave at intermission to smoke a cigarette.

  Then we went camping. Friends of his were coming in from Boise, two men and a woman, and we were all going backpacking up at Harts Pass. We would meet in Winthrop, the closest town, and head up the precipitous twenty-two-mile forest road chiseled into the nearly vertical mountainside below Slate Peak. Joe and I packed on a hot, late-August day; camping gear littered his living room floor under huge south-facing windows. Butane stove, water filter, kerosene lanterns, cooking pans, a portable espresso maker, Therm-a-Rest sleeping mats, and enough warm clothing to summit Rainier. Joe had a list that ran two pages. I sat in the blazing afternoon glare squashing thick polyfill sleeping bags into bright-colored nylon stuff sacks with sweat trickling down my arms and face. Joe crammed bulky packages of pasta, tubes of pesto, imported Parmesan cheese and bottles of Chianti into the crannies of our backpacks, sculpting an ergonomically balanced gourmet restaurant to be hauled upon our backs. He would carry the heavier men’s tent and I would carry the women’s.

  Joe got up to find more gear, a compass and waterproof matches and Capilene underwear (he should be an honorary Eagle Scout, I teased). I hefted my pack, and took out the fleece pants and jacket and tossed them behind his couch, pulled a wine bottle out from the bottom compartment and stuffed it under the sofa cushions. He found the wine bottle and put it into his own pack, but he missed the fleece. We both missed the fact that my tent stakes were wrapped up inside the jacket and pants.

  We rocketed across the Cascades in Joe’s dented white Jeep to Pearl Jam and the Talking Heads and Van Morrison and, my own contribution, Puccini’s Greatest Hits. I’d never been this deep or this high into the mountains before. Highway 20 is surely among the most beautiful in America, only open in summer, swooping through the brash young mountains in manmade defiance of winter avalanches and rock slides. We passed Diablo Lake, a glacial sapphire blue, like a fragment of tropical sea exiled to a prison of cement dams and mountain walls. We got to Winthrop an hour late and went into the Duck Brand restaurant to meet his friends for lunch. The waitress took our name and said, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “All your life?” asked Joe.

  “Your friends called. They left a phone number.”

  Joe’s friends weren’t coming. Their car had broken down eighty miles east of Spokane. He looked at me and shrugged, hanging up the pay phone on the nearly deserted street that ran through the middle of the three-block town. “Lotta food for two people. Hope you’re hungry.” And we headed up to the top of the pass.

  We trudged four miles in to our campsite, hiking along the spine of the Pacific Crest trail with wildflower meadows and broken rock scree and blue-green pine forest falling away on either side like a grand embroidered skirt. Joe set up the tents under a single enormous evergreen. Then we discovered my tent stakes were still safely hidden behind Joe’s sofa, inside the fleece that I would also dearly miss. I was too exhausted to cut new wooden pegs, so I lodged stones about the corners of the tent fly and fell asleep before the sun set, before the wind herded massive clouds down from the Canadian plains, before the temperature dropped thirty degrees. In the night I was startled awake by a profound, absorbing silence, and a moment later my tent humbly collapsed under the weight of the first autumn snow.

  Joe’s geodesic shelter was as unfazed by this anachronistic winter as any Russian onion dome. I hobbled to it in my sleeping bag. There had been wine for dinner, there had been schnapps and hot chocolate for dessert, and I suspect for Joe there had been a neat whiskey or two to replace the cigarette I had forbidden.

  We began apart, crept closer for warmth, zipped bag to bag as the night grew colder, and finally pressed skin next to skin, not for warmth but because it was what we both wanted and could excuse as an emergency. We lay together in mutual, unspoken acceptance that we would not discuss whether this was wise or rational or intended for eternity. And for the next eight months we continued as the best of friends and the best of lovers.

  In retrospect I recognize the nearly invisible barrier we both defended, careful never to discuss whether we were actually headed to the same place, acting as if time would stand still while we dallied with companionship and soulful conversation and purgative sex. We were so careful, during our eight-month entanglement, to be lovers without being in love—each of us poised in a waiting game for something more real to follow.

  At twenty it would have been expanding. At twenty-eight it would have been explorative. But at thirty-four it begged to be nurtured or abandoned. Did I consider him a vibrant lover but unlikely father? Did he shudder at the glimmer of lost freedom? All I know is that we reached the precipice of those conversations and backed away, both of us, me when I noticed he still noticed other women, he when I told him I wanted more time to myself.

  There was a sting, for a while, when he dated other women, when I wanted someone to wake up with. It is amazing, though, what pains your subconscious will undergo to achieve sustainable peace. It is amazing how quickly I was able to convince myself that the possessiveness of love would have inevitably suffocated our friendship.

  I pull on a wool sweater and blue jeans, rake a brush through my hair and lick my fingers to wipe the mascara smudges from beneath my eyes. But under the white lights in my bathroom I see an aging face that doesn’t bounce back from a seventy-hour workweek. I put my hands flat up against my ears and pull back to remember what I looked like ten years ago. If I squint a little, even the uneven skin tones blur. I push the right hand up and the left hand down, then put my thumbs in the corners of my mouth and pull them back. There. Now I can see what I’ll look like in seventy years at age one hundred and seven, assuming I’m not cremated. I spritz perfume over my hair and neck—you do what you can in this world.

  I jaywalk diagonally across First Avenue and up three blocks to Larry’s. Posters of hip-hop and reggae bands flank the century-old brick and stone doorway. Odors of smoke and beer and the soft clink of heavy glass tumblers make the long, dark room feel oddly intimate—a dozen or so customers clustered over tables or half hidden behind high booths, the bartender easy with the pace of drinks, sloshing glasses through soapy water with up-rolled sleeves.

  Joe is at the end of the bar and he’s thrown his electric yellow parka across the next stool to save it for me. My lemon drop stands on the polished counter. I sit on the damp bar seat and point to the two emptied shot glasses in front of him. “That won’t fix it, whatever it is. So why aren’t you working tonight? Seems like every time I look at the schedule you’re on call.”

  “You’re one to talk. I think you beat my hours this month. I’m just trying to pay off all my creditors.”

  “Financial or romantic?”

  He lets out a short, sardonic chuckle.

  I sip the sweet martini over the sugar-crusted rim, looking for whatever opening he needs. “Joe, if you’re going to drag me out of my bathrobe into the rain to co
nsole you, at least let me hear the truth.”

  “Oh, it’s no one thing, really.” He grins his crooked, almost sad “Joe grin” that has always made me want to protect him. “Maybe just that. Too much work.”

  “Is it Claire?” I ask.

  He draws circles in the water droplets beading up on the dark mahogany bar. It’s funny. I didn’t understand him nearly as well while we were lovers, but now that the risk of heartbreak has been removed, Joe can tell me almost anything. Almost.

  “She wants to cancel our trip to Mexico. Says she’s too worried about leaving her kids with their dad. I don’t believe her.”

  “I ran into her a couple of days ago. In the cafeteria.”

  He nods. “She came up to drop off my cell phone—I left it at her house.”

  “She said something kind of funny—I’m not sure I should tell you this….” He glances up at me and I know I can’t back out now. “OK. She said she didn’t think she was as good at rescuing you as I was.”

  “Rescuing me, huh.” Joe pulls his parka back onto his lap and fumbles in the inside pocket, then he pulls out a cigarette. “Pass me those?” He reaches across me toward a book of matches resting in a black plastic ashtray.

  “No. I will not help you start smoking again. Smoking doctors! I should drag you through an emphysema ward. Will you remember this woman when you’re plugged into a ventilator?”

  “I used to work on an emphysema ward. And yes, I will remember this woman.”

  I can’t help but smile, even though I know he’s sincere. Joe is hopelessly appealing to women, and hopelessly attracted only to the few he’d never be able to handcuff in marriage. I’ve begun to doubt that he genuinely wants to marry, so his choices conveniently fulfill his secret dreams more than his conscious ones. I reach up and put my middle three fingers across his unlit cigarette and fracture it into a V. He pulls out another one and lights it anyway, squinting and drawing a deep draft of smoke and air into his lungs. He clasps his hands in front of his chin with the cigarette pointing up like a candle on an altar.