Naked, she crawled into bed, leaving on the dim, bedside light. She picked up the two shotgun shells form the bedside table, rolled the shells in her left hand, and stared at the heavy ceiling.
Back in the lodge, with his brandy and the fire, Harry closed his eyes, and, though he intended to rest them only for a moment, he drifted off to sleep.
When he was sure the young man was asleep, the captain took the wool throw from the upholstered chair across from the couch and draped the blanket over the young man’s legs. Delicately, so as not to disturb the young man’s slumber, the captain took the brandy glass from the young man’s hands. The captain paused at the wall to turn off the chandelier in the den, walked across the dining room (smoothing the tablecloth with his free hand and putting the lid back on the little caramel pot), and went through the swinging door into the kitchen.
You close your eyes and lean back in the chair after you read the story, gripping the pages in both hands at your lap. You question whether you should have read the pages. You recognize the sadness and hopelessness of the two main characters in the story. You wonder about their loss of the ability to enjoy the things they obviously once enjoyed, their isolation, their feelings of worthlessness, and their inability to communicate with each other. You wonder what the mention of the two live shotgun shells was all about. Was the story finished? You think about how you would finish it.
You wonder about the author, whom you assume was the young man you left in the hospital room with his wife and baby. Was he recognizing that he and his wife were unable to discuss the things in life that mattered and was trying to capture that loss in his story? One thing was clear. The author was not as innocent as the young lawyer in the room with his wife and their dying child appeared to be. In a way, his story (which you decide had to have been written before tonight) seemed to presage the events that had unfolded here. You fold the pages up and return them to the breast pocket of the jacket that you hang over the back of the chair.
The male nurse walks up and pauses. You stand and you loop your arm in the nurse’s arm just as you had looped your arm into your mother’s back when. The male nurse seems grateful for the gesture and you feel him sigh and lean his shoulder against yours. You wonder for a moment what experience he has had in his life that he relives at times like this. Maybe he has been to a room like this one to see a family member of his that wasn’t going to make it. Maybe he just remembers similar occasions with other patients. You tell yourself that it’s a sign of your improving mental health that you can consider what others around you are going through and not just think about your own life experiences.
The two of you pause at the door to the room, each of you taking a deep breath. He looks at you and you nod, and you wait for the nurse to knock gently on the door and go inside. You follow him over to the bed.
28
MICHELLE’S ROOM, LIKE THE HOSPITAL lobby, reminded me more of a hotel than a hospital. There were dark wooden cabinets, upholstered wingback chairs, and an Impressionistic painting of a field of flowers above the bed. Early morning light was coming through the window, and a standing lamp illuminated one corner of the room. There was no noise at all in the room.
Michelle was in the bed. If the family in front of the glass in the hallway I had just left had most of the life drained out of them, it seemed Michelle had been wrung like a washrag until every ounce of life had been wrenched from her. Exhausted but beautiful, she was reclining against a stack of clean, white pillows.
For the first time since I had met her, I couldn’t tell what Michelle was thinking by just looking at her face. In the past her expression told you exactly what was going on with her, and how she felt about what was happening around her. She had been incapable of artifice or guile. But beyond the physical depletion of the last few hours and the grogginess she still felt from the surgery, Michelle’s affect had changed. I had known, though I had never articulated the thought even to myself, that my deception would have a profound effect on how Michelle would see the world. I could tell just by looking at her as she lay in the hospital bed that she was now less able to trust, less inclined to love.
I didn’t know where to stand or sit, and I couldn’t force myself to speak. I wanted to rush to her and to bury my head next to her in the pillows until this all went away, but I just stood there by her hospital bed waiting numbly to see what was going to happen next.
The door opened and the attendant who had been standing over our child in the NICU incubator walked in carrying our baby. His concealed running shoes squeaked on the tile floor as he walked in. He held the baby in his left arm as he caught the door with his right hand so that it closed gently behind Dr. Godsman who came into the room behind him.
Paul was tightly wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, and his head was now covered by the smallest stocking cap I had ever seen. The man walked directly across the room to Michelle, without hesitating or speaking, and placed the infant in the crook of her arm. As Michelle made sure that she had a comfortable hold on the baby, the man adjusted the pillows behind Michelle, and said in the most gentle voice that I had ever heard, “He’s breathing on his own right now. I don’t know how long he’ll be with us. Dr. Godsman and I will be available by this button here, if . . . when . . . you need us.” He turned to look at me and then the doctor, and then the two of them started to leave the room.
“Doctor, there is one thing,” Michelle said.
“What is that?” Dr. Godsman asked softly and walked back over to the bed.
“It’s my breasts. I know I’m probably on some kind of pain medicine, but my breasts are really starting to hurt.”
“After a while, I can give you something to help you stop lactating. But for now we should massage the breasts gently and then let you try to nurse the baby,” Dr. Godsman said.
“Would you do that?” Michelle asked.
“Actually, Luke here is the best at the massage. All our new mothers think so.” Dr. Godsman took the baby from Michelle, and the male nurse walked back over to the bed. He pulled back the covers, untied Michelle’s gown from around her neck, and with his fingers tried to release delicately the knots that were developing in Michelle’s breasts. At first the massaging appeared to be painful, but after a moment a soothed, relaxed look came over Michelle’s face.
“Would you like to try nursing the baby now?” Dr. Godsman asked.
Michelle nodded and Dr. Godsman nestled baby Paul to her right breast. “A little lower fellow,” Michelle said and adjusted her breast with her left hand. For a brief instant, he tried to nurse but then stopped.
“He is probably just too tired,” Dr. Godsman said. “He has had a long night also.” She helped Michelle with her gown and repositioned the baby. The doctor and nurse then looked at each other and left the room.
I walked over and sat down on the bed next to Michelle and Paul. The dimly lit room was perfectly still. I touched his face with my hand. Both Michelle and I smiled at each other before tears began to flow down each of our faces. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered between tears.
“I know, Davy. I know,” she said and nodded. Her voice told me that she was too tired for apologies or long explanations about what had happened. She kissed Paul gently on the top of his little stocking cap and shut her eyes tightly to stop the flow of tears.
“I don’t know how I ever let things get this messed up,” I said. “I never meant to hurt you or the baby. I’ve ruined everything. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“I know, Davy. I know.”
And then, it just came flooding out of me. The words, pressed down inside of me by the weight of my guilt, escaped like they had a life of their own and needed to be in the open air to breathe.
“I just couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t admit it to myself. I had an affair. I got a venereal disease. I was afraid that I gave it to you, to the baby. I didn’t want you to see me like that kind of person, like the kind of person that would cheat on his wife or lie to her about
what he was doing. I know it sounds unbelievable now, but I just couldn’t talk to you about it. I was afraid. I was afraid to tell you. I was afraid of what might happen. I’m so tired of carrying around all these secrets. I’ve got to get rid of them, get them off of me, out of me. I can’t carry them anymore. I feel so guilty and horrible. I just want to feel good. I need this all out of me and over. I wish I could save him, Michelle. I’d do anything to save him for you, Michelle. I’d trade my life for his, Michelle, but I can’t. I can’t fix this. I can’t fix this. I’ve destroyed us and ruined our lives, and our baby’s life, and I can’t fix this. I’ve practiced and practiced at controlling everything and every situation, and making sure it all comes out the way I want it to come out every time, but I can’t this time. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. There is nothing I can do. There is nothing the doctors can do. There is nothing I can say that is going to make this any better. I’m sorry, Michelle. I am so sorry. I wanted everything to be perfect for us: the perfect house, the perfect cars, the perfect baby, the perfect life. And now, I’ve fucked it all up so badly, it can never be straightened out.”
I took a deep breath and let it out before beginning again. “I got so caught up in the success part, the money, the power, and the prestige, the trappings of success that I lost sight of us, of what was important, of what it was I really wanted or needed. Trappings of success. It is a trap. It is all a trap. I’m so sorry, Michelle. I wish I could—we could—go back to law school. I wish we were back in law school, sitting on that gold couch in your apartment, pretending to be studying, worried about tests, thinking we were under a lot of pressure. There was no pressure. That was just pretend. Our lives stretched out before us, and we could do anything. I felt like I could do anything. I felt like you thought I could do anything.
“It was all so clean and perfect, and there was no guilt and no shame, and it was all about us and what good things we were going to do. Not about what money we were going to make, or making partner, or moving into West University so that we could move into River Oaks. It was about doing something that might actually help somebody. At least, I thought it was. Somewhere, that focus shifted to helping me. Me helping me. My home, my wife, my law practice. Mine. Mine. Mine. I deserve this. I work hard. This is good for me. Look at me. Watch me. I can win this case. I can make these facts. I can control this situation to my advantage. I can take what I want when I want, as long as it’s good for me in the end. But, it’s just a trap, Michelle. I can’t control anything. I can’t fix anything. I’m so sorry, Michelle. I am so sorry.”
With her free hand, Michelle wiped the tears from her eyes. “Davy, I knew everything wasn’t right. We haven’t had sex in months. We never talk. We rarely sleep together in the same bed. You rarely sleep, period. Usually, just until the scotch wears off, and then you’re up and showered and off to work or God knows where. I could see you becoming just like my dad. I guess you thought that was what I wanted. But that isn’t what I wanted. I may not have been perfect, but I didn’t deserve this, Davy.”
She was right, of course. Nobody deserved this—alone, with a dying baby, in an eerily still tomb of a hospital room, trying to sort out what had gone wrong before the child passes away, because after he’s gone, you know that you will never be able to talk to each other again in a meaningful way. Neither of us had said it, but I didn’t see how there would ever be any life for us, for Michelle and me together, after Paul was gone.
That was the very moment I saw God.
“Oh, sure,” you’re saying, “God appeared and raised the baby from the dead, like Lazarus, another first born son if I’m remembering my Bible stories correctly.”
No, God didn’t appear as a beam of light streaming through the morning window or as an angelic doctor that rushed into the room with a miracle cure for an incurable disease or as a gossamer apparition induced by an alcohol haze.
Our baby was dying, indeed did die in the few minutes that we got to hold him there in Michelle’s bed in the Dunn Tower at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. And truthfully, I didn’t really see God. I just got a glimpse of Him.
At the time I didn’t even know I had seen Him. It was like when you’re quail hunting with your dad and little brother and you’re walking with the sun at your back. You’re watching the field in front of you and trying to keep up with where the dog is and looking for quail at the same time because you don’t really have any confidence in the dog who for ten months out of the year is just a family pet.
The rolling, late-autumn hillside is covered in a low, coarse, Harris tweed of greens (celadon clump grasses, hunter cedar bushes, grey prickly pear, and olive mesquite trees); flecks of burgundies (red clays, cordovan post oaks, flame leaf sumac, and wine-colored cactus apples); streaks of gold (patches of yellow broom weed, outcroppings of eggshell caliche, and bronze sandstone washed in amber, afternoon sunlight); and purples (no longer blue but not yet black shadows of cactus, yucca, live oak motts, and mesquite thickets). And you see another shadow move silently across the field. A hawk is flying somewhere behind you. You don’t look back at the hawk, but you know he is there. Or you hear the call of sandhill cranes that are flying so high and so far out of sight that you can’t see them, but you know they are there.
As I reflect on what transpired in that hospital room, I am sure that I saw a shadow or heard an echo of Him.
I keep saying Him with a capital “H.” I don’t know if It’s a Him or a Her, if It’s Catholic or Protestant, or Jew or Gentile, or Muslim or Buddhist. I don’t know if He or She or It or Whatever prefers Abilene over Lubbock or Austin over Houston. He may like Kentucky, for all I know (though I saw little evidence of His presence there).
But when Michelle turned to Paul and said, “Paul, your dad and that gold couch with the acanthus leaves . . . the stories we could tell you,” I laughed out loud from somewhere so deep within me that I knew something miraculous was possible. It wasn’t that Michelle had forgiven me. She hadn’t. I didn’t know if she ever would, and I didn’t know that I could her ever expect her to forgive me. But I saw for the first time, in Michelle’s attempt at humor with our dying son, that the capacity for forgiveness exists in the world. And forgiveness, even the opportunity for forgiveness, if you haven’t already figured it out on your own, is an expression of love. And God is love.
That is what I always say, Podzy.
We talked to Paul about who we were and how we had gotten to this horrible point in our lives; and we told him in hushed tones things that we loved about each other, and that we disliked about each other; and we told him how we had such great plans for him as he grew up, and that now we knew we weren’t going to get that chance, and that we were grateful to have the chance to talk to him at all. He lay there, listening quietly. When he stopped breathing, I couldn’t say. Then when we noticed it, Michelle looked at the button above the bed, and I pressed it to signal to the doctor to come back into the room.
The attendant and Dr. Godsman both came in quickly after I pressed the button, as if they had been waiting outside the door. The attendant took Paul from Michelle and left the room. The doctor paused by the bed, and asked Michelle if she would like something to help her sleep for a little while.
“Yes, I’d like that,” Michelle said. She squeezed my hand as I got up from the bed to leave the room. “What are you going to do now, Davy?” she asked, sincerely concerned about where I was headed.
“I don’t know,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders. “I think I need to get something to eat. I don’t think that I’ve eaten in days.” I knew that it sounded odd to think about eating at a time like that, but I knew there was nothing that I could say or do that would bring our son back. I guessed that if I ever saw Paul again, it was just another thing I would have to try to explain.
Michelle nodded.
The doctor filled a syringe from a vial, swabbed alcohol on Michelle’s arm with a cotton ball, and gave her an injection. I waited by the bedside un
til Michelle fell asleep.
When I went through the double doors into the lobby in front of the NICU, only my parents were still standing there. I wondered what had become of the other babies that had been behind the window in NICU and whether their families were now with them in private rooms playing out the quiet, final scenes of brief lives or whether the infants had improved and been moved to the general maternity rooms. Apparently the doctor had already come out and told my family that the baby, our baby, had passed away.
Dad told me what was happening with the others while Mom gave me a hug. Tim had left to go see about making funeral arrangements. Jonathan had taken his mom and William home to the house in River Oaks. Rod and his wife had left, and Rod had said that he would take care of notifying the office about what had transpired that night. I thought to myself for a moment that I was glad Rod had taken the job because he would be as sympathetic as possible, and whatever was told to the office would be told to the entire Harris County legal community in a matter of hours.
Of course, with each retelling of the story, it would change. By the time it got to Kentucky, some people would hear that it was Beth in the delivery room. At the same time, I thought to myself, I didn’t really care what Rod told the office or anyone else. I didn’t see how things could get any worse than they were. Dad told me what was happening with the others while Mom gave me a hug.
“What are y’all going to do now?” I asked. We stood there looking at each other for a moment while Dad thought about what he should do next.
“I don’t know,” he finally said shrugging his shoulders and looking at Mom for suggestions. “I guess we need to get a hotel room.”
Mom nodded her agreement.
“Why don’t you just come to the house?” I said. “That’s where I’m headed. Michelle is sleeping. I’ll come back and check on her in a little while. I might try to take a nap myself.”
A Minor Fall Page 37