Oxygen

by Carol Wiley Cassella

  Toby is probably recovering in his mother’s lap right now—I am sure Will took excellent care of him. Better than I was capable of giving. Deserting Toby in the operating room was not any random act of fate, as might have occurred with Jolene. No lawyers or mediators will be needed to judge this.

  Twelve years I trained for the work I do. Seven years more I have coaxed fact and experience into talent and skill. I’ve learned how to make the few waking moments I spend with my patients feel personal and reassuring. I have discovered how to sense my patients’ rise and fall in consciousness and pain beneath their chemical sleep and mechanized breaths. I have earned my rank among First Lutheran’s staff. I matter here. That can’t dissolve in one mistake.

  Someone raps on my window, startling me. A security guard points to the reserved parking signs. I begin backing out of the space and someone shouts, “Hey,” and bangs on the trunk—two women push jogging strollers just behind my car. I jerk to a stop as they pass, and wait for my pulse to slow down before starting out again. The guard glares at me until I leave the lot.

  Cresting the hills above the lake, the glare off sun-glittered water stings my eyes and I raise my arm to shield them. I pass beneath the mansions of Denny-Blaine and Madison Park and wind west again, toward the city. Now the streets stretch along vacant sidewalks and the dust-colored blocks of subsidized apartments—buildings born of thrifty bureaucracies, fortresses of poverty. At the intersection of Beacon and Sixteenth I turn left and park opposite a dark green bungalow.

  Bobbie Jansen’s windows are still shuttered against the night. Black metal railings brace the sloping, shadowed porch. Someone, maybe Bobbie, has started a vegetable garden along the side yard—early tomatoes and beans crawl up skeletal frames. There is a single narrow window under the peaked eaves with a colored-glass unicorn dangling inside the lower panes. The shade is pulled down. Like a waking dream this house replaces the inventions of my guilt. Now, when I stare at the dark, unable to sleep, I will know this place.

  A screen door slams and I jump to start my ignition; two men stand outside the neighboring house. Their voices pitch and rise in some quarrel before one slams his fist against the siding and stamps down the plank steps. The other slips back inside. He peers out of a front room window at me before shutting it and dropping the blinds.

  I still sense someone watching me, a face behind a curtained window or cracked door—or perhaps my own conscience. Then I turn back to look at Bobbie Jansen’s house, and she is standing on her front porch, a straw bag and summer jacket over her arm. She is looking right at me. As I drive away I see her in my rearview mirror following me with her eyes, looking as if she has been waiting for me to find her.

  22

  Exhaustion finally overcomes my resistance and I drive home. All I can think about is sleep. There’s already a message from the hospital—Frank Hopper wants me to call him as soon as possible. I’d expected the call to come from Phil. I should have guessed that a professional lapse as dramatic as I’d displayed last night would rocket right up to the hospital’s CEO.

  Frank is on another line when I call him back, and I wait on hold trying to invent a reasonable explanation for why I’d walked out on a patient in the midst of an emergency.

  “Marie,” he answers at last. “Thank you for calling back so promptly. I spoke with Dr. Noonan this morning.” He pauses, as if to let me preempt him with my own justification. After a silence he continues, “Well, we’ve been discussing the case you had together last night. The baby. He’s concerned about you.”

  I sit on the floor next to the phone and listen, wishing I’d had the courage to call him first, waiting for him to say what I can’t.

  “Marie? Are you on the line?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Listen, this is a difficult subject, I know. But we’re all aware here of what you’re going through. The strain must be terrific…it would undermine anyone’s composure. We want to help you get through this. I’m not calling to take your job away—you’ve been a valued member of our staff for a long time and we’re backing you. But I think it would be in everyone’s best interest—in your best interest—to take a leave of absence for a bit. Don’t you think that’s a sensible thing to consider?”

  I fold into a knot, lift my chin to keep my voice collected. “Yes, Frank. It’s a sensible thing to consider.”

  “All of us reach points in our lives, in our careers, when some time off could help us maintain perspective. I think it takes a lot of professional integrity to address that, out in the open. Don’t worry about this affecting your standing with us—your job will be here for you. We’re here for you. And, Marie, if you’re interested in seeking some professional input—you know, some counseling—the hospital can arrange for that.”

  “How much time away are you thinking of?”

  “Well, let’s see how things stand once this suit is behind us. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of months at the most. We’ve already got a locum anesthesiologist lined up, so the workload will be manageable for the rest of your team.”

  I want to ask him how he can pretend to so much empathy when he has just cut our legal defense in half. I choke on the words, stumbling over the dawning awareness that, of course, he couldn’t have hired another anesthesiologist overnight. That must have taken weeks.

  “Erin’s buzzing me about a JCAHO meeting I’m late for. We’ll be in touch about your return date—don’t hesitate to call me anytime. My door is always open here.”

  My bedroom is quiet and dim. The blinds are still drawn against the sun; the comforter still billows over the empty space in my bed where I last lay, a day ago. I drop my clothes to the floor, slip into the soft nest of sheets and struggle at the boundaries of consciousness, begging sleep to drag me into a temporary peace.

  The phone is ringing again. I’ve unplugged my bedroom extension but the noise radiates across my kitchen wall and through the pillow I’ve wrapped around my head. Four rings and then a pause, in which I know my most cheerful and self-confident voice, eternally imperturbable, is telling the caller to leave a message.

  It’s dusk outside now; I must have slept all day. The street noises are picking up with the flirtatious laughter of college students opening the bars on a Friday evening. The ringing starts again and I fumble down the hallway into my kitchen to pull the cord out of the wall. Outside my living room the towers of downtown are glittering shadow boxes—squares and rectangles are illuminated as cleaning crews replace secretaries.

  And there is Joe. Staring up at my living room from the street corner, waiting for my lights to go on. Waiting for me to finally pick up the phone. I coil my fingers around the braided cords of the slatted blinds and lower them to the floor. But fifteen minutes later when I hear him at my front door I unlock it.

  “Hi.” He stands with his hands tucked into the fraying pockets of his old blue jean jacket. He is exactly what I need right now, though I would have denied that a minute ago.

  “How’d you get into my building?”

  “I still have your key. Karen called me after you left this morning—she was worried. The baby’s fine. He went home early this afternoon.” He lifts his shoulders slightly and says, “So, should I come in?”

  I reach out and take his hand and lead him inside. We walk to the sofa, he sits and draws me down against him, my back curved against his chest, his arms wrapped across my abdomen. I sink into him and remember his solid weight, the comfortable arc of his neck along the back of my head.

  “Marie.” He hugs me closer as he pulls words together, his breath so soft through my hair. “This…this little girl’s death has been terrible for you. Harder than the malpractice suit. But it’s eclipsing everything else in your life. It’s overshadowing all the care you’ve given a thousand patients before her death. It’s jeopardizing all the patients you’ll take care of in the years ahead.” He rocks me, quietly and rhythmically; his beard lightly brushes my ear. He waits for a response, but I hav
e none.

  “This time will pass. This lawsuit will come to an end at some point. None of the OR staff hold you responsible—the nurses and techs think the world of you, you know that. The hospital is behind you. You’ve got a great legal team. And you have a life ahead of you filled with work I know you love—work you do superbly.”

  I stare into the darkening room, lit only by wedges of city light gleaming between the blinds. Familiar paintings and sculptures take on odd shapes in the gloom.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you yet,” I say at last. “No one knows about it yet. The hospital is cutting me out of their defense. Donnelly isn’t representing me anymore.”

  Joe stops rocking me and we both sit still, locked together as if we shared equally the weight of this news. After a moment he says, “What did Donnelly tell you?”

  “As little as he could get away with. He never should have represented both of us, probably. But if the hospital can prove I caused her death, they come out blameless.”

  Joe seems to grow heavier against me. His hands beneath my hands are dry and rough from sport and sun. I trace the hard, sleek curves of his nails and the winged bones of his clasped fingers—so fragile and so strong. I imagine myself small, a bird, crawling into the refuge of these cupped palms.

  In the streets the hoarse calls and hearty cursing of an older crowd has displaced the rollicking college crew—men who drink to forget life rather than enhance it. I get up from the sofa and raise the blinds; a checkerboard of lit windows brightens the room like candle glow. I walk to the kitchen and pull a bottle of wine from the rack and bring it to the living room with two glasses and a corkscrew. Joe twists the spiral down into the cork and pulls it free, then pours the glasses full.

  I haven’t eaten all day and the first half glass feels potent and soothing. It makes me understand why people drink too much. Joe sits opposite me now, backlit by the skyline. He narrows his eyes for a moment as if considering his words. “Have you ever figured out, more or less, why we stopped seeing each other?”

  My pulse gives a small jump. “We still see each other.”

  “All right. Are you telling me I shouldn’t go there?”

  “No,” I say, fighting an urge to fend this off. “I don’t know. Is that always something you can analyze? Sometimes love just finds its own way, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it? Maybe.” He swirls the wine in his glass and stares into it as if it held some hidden message. “Maybe. Or maybe neither of us could trust that much friendship to a lover. Maybe we both suffer from the same fault there. We do keep our secrets, don’t we, Marie.”

  Tears collect in my eyes as he says this. All the pain of these last weeks, and now this is what threatens to make me cry. And even though I can’t answer him, I don’t want him to leave. I am worn out by it all—by the mediation, by the betrayal, by the lonely bearing of my remorse.

  The wine begins to loosen me. I want it to take me further. I want it to sweep time and strain away. Joe hardly seems affected by it at all, and pours us each another glass. I reach out for his hands, even if I can’t meet his eyes.

  “Stay with me tonight, Joe. I want you to stay with me. Just to sleep. I can’t…I don’t want to sleep alone tonight.”

  He hesitates for the barest instant, then brings his hand to my face and traces the outline of my cheek with his finger, the soft and the rough paired. He rises and leads me into my bedroom. The bed is rumpled from my day’s sleep, and he lifts the covers, lofts them up to float down, smoothed and waiting. He takes off his jeans and unbuttons his shirt. I turn out the light and let my bathrobe slip from my shoulders to the floor, then slide beneath the sheet.

  When I close my eyes the room spins and I have to open them again. I’ve had too much to drink. As Joe lies down next to me, I turn toward the wall and he wraps his arms around my waist. The long muscle of his thigh cradles my hip; his shoulder rises above me like a guardian. Each breath he takes presses his chest close against my back.

  I’m not aware I’m crying until my tongue tastes the salt, and then I curl against the waves of tears, shudder as they overtake me like some physical being of flesh and bone. Joe strokes my hair from my temple and murmurs, “Shhh, shhh,” his mouth so close to me his voice is inside my mind. He holds me until I’m quiet, and we breathe in a slow and deep union.

  Tears of grief are unique. They contain chemicals that aren’t found in the more mundane droplets of moisture that bathe the eyes, as if our tears wash us free of some noxious cause of sorrow. And tonight, after crying until I am empty, I have a rare glimpse of my own interior landscape—wounds piled like tiny skeletons into the reef of conscious adult life. I am aground amid my conquered traumas, stranded as a consequence of my achievements.

  Joe tightens his grasp around me, or perhaps he is asleep and dreaming of his own struggles. Late in the night—the clock reads 3:30—he is tossing restlessly, hot and sweating. He throws the covers off and gets up to go to the bathroom. When I wake again at dawn, my head throbs and I have an acrid taste in my mouth from too much wine. He’s no longer beside me.

  Out my window the summer sun is buried behind dense clouds; they fold upon one another all the way out to the rim of the mountains. I climb out of bed and walk into the living room expecting to find Joe brewing espresso and reading the morning paper—or at least to find a note. But his jacket is gone.

  23

  Charlie Marsallis is tall; his olive-colored eyes are draped by full lids that curve downward at his temples. He stands back against the open door to let me walk by, one long arm cocked across his waistband and the other extended to show me into his office. My head barely reaches his shoulder. He indicates the cushioned Windsor chair opposite his cluttered desk. A gold basketball trophy stands on the bookcase below his framed degrees; every other surface on the tables and shelves is stacked with legal briefs and medical charts and thick white sheaves of stapled papers. The files I can read from my chair are labeled Jansen vs. Heaton. A framed picture of a young woman and a boy paddling a kayak balances on top of a pile of memos stamped with Donnelly’s letterhead.

  “Did Jean get you anything to drink?” he asks, turning to slip off his suit jacket and hang it on the rack behind him.

  I shake my head. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Well. Where to start?” He settles into the rolling desk chair and pivots toward me, raking long fingers through his loose blond hair so that it splays in odd angles across his brow. His youthfulness is disconcerting; it almost makes me miss Donnelly’s stern, paternal self-confidence. “I met with Ms. Meyers-Yeager and she’s given me a summary of your case up to last week.” He lets his words hang between us for a moment, as if inviting me to jump in with my own version. He clears his throat and continues, “I haven’t been through everything yet, but she assures me—and I can see from Mr. Donnelly’s notes—that your initial deposition is pretty solid. You don’t have any earlier claims against you or problems with your credentials or complaints on your record at First Lutheran. The autopsy results are a hurdle, but I’ve read your comments about the child’s heart problem. We’ll be calling an expert witness to back that up.” He pauses again. I nod at him, wondering how many meetings it will take to cover the ground I thought was safely behind me.

  He continues, “I have two academic anesthesiologists in mind. But obviously the direction we take will depend on what we learn in the next few weeks.”

  More time. It has already been six weeks since we got the autopsy results. In a profession enriched by hourly billing I suppose Darryl Feinnes has every incentive to uncoil his next attack as slowly as possible. I should feel the heat of adrenaline surging into righteous anger, a demand for prompt justice that might bond me to this young lawyer. But I’m drained by the idea of more weeks of waiting.

  Across from me his office windows face the neighboring building, cement walls blur into a stone-colored sky; illuminated cells of backs and shoulders hunch over flickering computer screens. Marsa
llis stops talking for a minute, and when I glance back at him he is studying my face. This man is a stranger to me—a stranger who has access to more facts about my life than I would share with a lover. Or perhaps I have become the stranger, on the brink of conceding a life I thought I’d earned.

  His voice drops a notch, almost as if he’d read my thoughts. “I know it must be hard, starting with a new lawyer at this juncture.”

  My eyes suddenly sting. Donnelly’s formality had made it easier to mask my feelings. I wait until my throat relaxes and force myself not to think about the autopsy. “Truthfully, my only goal now is for this to end. If it were up to me, I’d settle it for any sum they want. But I don’t suppose the insurance company will let you do that, will they?”

  He hesitates a beat, then nods. “I hear you. Neither law nor medicine are that uncomplicated these days, are they?” He rocks forward in his chair to lean on his elbows, the knobbed bones of his wrists jutting beyond his sleeves. His hands are large, even for his big frame—with long, almost gangly fingers that must feel more natural branching over the sphere of a basketball than curling about the shaft of a fountain pen. “Why did you choose anesthesia?” he asks.

  The question lands so far outside the realm of litigation and legal defense that I am caught off guard. “What?”

  “Why anesthesia? Why did you decide to become an anesthesiologist instead of a surgeon, or a psychiatrist, or—for that matter—a chemical engineer?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I hesitate. “I’m good with my hands, I guess. I like doing the procedures. I aced pharmacology and physiology and so my dean suggested anesthesia.” I’m giving him the rote reasons I always give to friends and patients when they begin such introductory small talk. But then I notice how he’s looking at me, waiting for more, and I reach further inside to reasons I haven’t thought about in months now. “I like helping people through a critical time. Everybody always thinks anesthesiologists are just there to watch you sleep, but it’s the preoperative part, when patients are anxious, that makes the difference. That’s what I went into it for. I always shake their hand—just as an excuse to hold it for a minute, right before their surgery, and see them let go of at least a little bit of fear. I like seeing, just as they go off to sleep, how their faces get almost young again, as if they’re escaping the stress of work or their illness. Even if it’s because of a drug. Even though they’ll wake up to the same problems, at least I can give them some temporary relief. I love figuring out how to take away somebody’s pain. I get to meet people I’d never even talk to otherwise—hear a little about how they live, what matters to them.” Suddenly I feel self-conscious and trail off, shrugging my shoulders.