Almost Paradise

by Susan Isaacs

  “Pamela, I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Nicholas, think before you talk. Please. Who would you have if something happens to her?” Pamela’s hair looked dry and stood out from her head, like a child’s drawing of hair made with a red crayon. “Think. You know you need me.”

  “I’m sorry. I need Jane.”

  “All right, then. All right. I’ll go. I’m hurt, deeply hurt, but I understand. And when you want me—Nicholas, listen to me. If something happens to her—”

  “No, Pamela.”

  “Listen, please. I’ll come back.”

  “No!”

  She clutched her left hand to her chest. “Do you want the ring back?”

  “No. It’s yours.”

  Once more she knelt before him. “Nicholas, try to understand. You think I’m being selfish, not wanting to leave. But I’m thinking of you. In all seriousness, if she—if something happens, who would you have?”

  “I’d have no one,” he said.

  “Daddy.”

  “Dad.”

  Nicholas could not get enough of his daughters. He had not held them for two years. He stood outside the door of Jane’s tiny room in the intensive care unit and held them against him. Through their light summer dresses, he felt their warmth, just as he had when they were infants, holding them in diapers and their undershirts with the tiny snaps. Elizabeth’s bare arm was the same texture as Jane’s, as soft as anything could be: velvet, talc, new moss, baby skin.

  “Can we go in?” Victoria asked.

  “Yes. But remember what I told you about the way she looks. And she’s still unconscious.” Victoria stepped away from him. Her glance was of surprise and anger, as though he’d failed her by not planning anything better.

  “You’ve seen her this morning?”

  “No. I spoke with the English neurosurgeon and the Americans I told you about. They’re doing everything that can be done.”

  Elizabeth stayed with him, and he put his empty arm around her and stroked her brown, fuzzy hair. She was the affectionate child, still cuddling with Jane at an age when most teenage girls could only bare their teeth at their mothers. “I’m scared,” she whispered.

  “I know. Come on.” He reached out and brought Victoria back to him. “We’ll all go in together.”

  When Victoria saw her mother, she gasped and went rigid. Elizabeth began to sob, “Mommy, Mommy.”

  Jane remained absolutely still, wires and tubes reaching out of her, searching tentacles. Nicholas stood holding his daughters for several minutes. After two years he should be saying something properly paternal to them, but he couldn’t think of a single thing. He felt almost as young as they, surely as frightened. He thought, I am forty years old, but that neither consoled nor energized him. The best he could do was act.

  He inched away from the girls, closer to Jane. She looked old enough to take charge. Strong enough too. Her nose and jaw asserted themselves even in repose. If she would just open her eyes, the family could fall into place again. He would revive, feel like the man he was supposed to be. He lifted her hand and kissed it, but it was a completely unselfconscious hand, unaware it was being kissed, heavy to lift. Her skin had taken on a medicinal smell, as if someone had sterilized her during the night. He laid her hand back on the bed. He remembered the French soap she loved, a shelf full of it in the linen closet in Connecticut, all wrapped in crinkly paper and sealed with red wax. My not-Cincinnati soap, she’d called it. He’d love to wash her hand with that creamy pink soap and warm water.

  “Dad,” Victoria asked, “is it very bad?”

  “Yes. That’s why I had you come.”

  He reached out to his daughters, a correct, fatherly gesture. Victoria stayed back. Elizabeth came to him. Her shoulders shook with the heaves of her silent sobbing. “My baby,” he whispered. He almost said, It’s going to be all right.

  Then he glanced around at Victoria. She turned her head away from him, staring at an intravenous bottle that dripped into the tube in Jane’s arm. Victoria’s cheeks were burned and slightly puffy from her first week as a tennis counselor in the girls’ camp she’d attended since she was seven. Her arms, with the athlete’s bulge of bi- and triceps, seemed too competent for her pale blue dress with its scalloped cap sleeves.

  “Come back here, Vicky.” He put his arm out.

  “What about her?” Victoria asked. Her eyes, blue-green like his, looked from under their heavy, hooded lids into his eyes and held them.

  “She can’t hear us,” he said.

  “Not Mom. Her. Your little friend.”

  “Don’t use that tone with me.” His voice was thin. His words sounded more like a plea than a command. He hadn’t acted like a father for two years. Now he didn’t sound like one.

  But Victoria’s voice softened slightly. “What about her? I mean, she wasn’t at the house and—”

  “She’s gone.”

  “For good?”

  “Yes.”

  Grudgingly, Victoria took a step back into his arm’s reach and allowed him to envelop her too. “You’re positive?”

  “Yes, Vicky. No more questions.”

  “Does Mom know?”

  “I said—no. Not yet.”

  Elizabeth leaned forward and looked at them both. “Daddy, maybe if you tell her…”

  “Liz, honey, she’s unconscious. She can’t hear us.”

  “Christ, Liz. Look at her! What do you want him to do, tap her on the shoulder and—”

  “Enough, Vicky!” he snapped.

  Elizabeth broke from his arm. She ran to the edge of Jane’s bed and grabbed the low iron railing, crib bars for adults. “Mommy!” she cried.

  Jane’s eyes should blink open. But there was no change, not a flutter of movement.

  “Mommy! Mommy!” Her words, chopped by sobs, rang through the tiny room.

  “Liz.” Nicholas tried to pull her back. “Please, baby, she—”

  “Mommy!”

  Her shriek ripped through him, from his throat to his gut.

  “Make her stop!” Victoria began to cry. “Oh, Daddy, make her—”

  “Mommy!”

  The door crashed open. The three neurosurgeons stood before them. “If you don’t mind—” Sir Anthony began. The girls folded against Nicholas, forming a tight triangle. “If you don’t mind, please wait outside. We’d like to get on with it.”

  Nicholas stood. The neurosurgeons entered the administrator’s office in a tight pack, but then the two Americans stayed back. Sir Anthony had been elected. He offered no reassuring smile. Not even a nod. He did not say, Shall we sit? He said, “Mr. Cobleigh.”

  “Yes,” Nicholas said. Victoria and Elizabeth edged away, willing to wait and hear a softer version of the news filtered through their father. He stood alone.

  “There is cause for concern.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve repeated the CAT scan.”

  “I see.” He wanted to say, Why couldn’t you have told me? Why did you let us sit here the whole damn morning? Do you have any idea what we were imagining? “What did it show?” he asked instead.

  “There is a clot in the left temporal lobe. We’d had indications. Mrs. Cobleigh was rapidly developing a weakness in her right side. Her blood pressure was rising, her heart rate slowing. Her left pupil was beginning to dilate.”

  He should ask an intelligent question. He’d thought of many all morning in that awful yellow office, making meaningless conversation with the girls, taking calls from his parents, brothers, and sisters, rubbing his sweating palms together, waiting for the surgeons to get back to him. He’d tried to hide his rising panic at the doctors’ absence. But Nicholas couldn’t ask even an unintelligent question. He was overcome by the overwhelming nausea of terror.

  “The dilation is a sign of increasing intercranial pressure,” Sir Anthony went on. “And indeed, the monitor did register an acute increase.”

  “I see.” He just wanted to sit down.

  “Do yo
u have any questions, Mr. Cobleigh?”

  “What can you do?”

  “Ah. I would like to perform a craniotomy. That is a procedure for the evacuation of a large blood clot.”

  “An operation?”

  “Yes. An operation.”

  Nicholas looked to the two Americans. They’d been staring at him the whole time. They nodded their concurrence. He felt even sicker. “What are her chances?” he managed to say.

  “Fair, Mr. Cobleigh. Only fair.”

  Nicholas had expected Rhodes to burst into the administrator’s office like a matinee idol making his first entrance: all dash and drama. So he jumped when Rhodes sat beside him on the small couch and murmured, “Nick.”

  “Oh, Rhodes. Good to—glad to see you.”

  Nicholas reached out to shake his hand, but Rhodes put his arm around Nicholas and drew him into an embrace. They held each other for so long that at any other time Nicholas would have drawn back, queasy, but now he held onto his brother-in-law’s strong comfort for as long as Rhodes would allow it.

  “How is she?” Rhodes asked finally, letting go of Nicholas.

  “They took her to surgery about a half hour ago. He said the chances were fair.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Uncle Rhodes.”

  Victoria and Elizabeth stood before Rhodes. He got up and hugged them, separately and then together. Nicholas wished he could stand and join them. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his brother-in-law in the last two years. He looked up at him, recalling the pleasure he used to get watching Rhodes and Jane. They’d called their sparring The Heissenhuber Hour, pronouncing the H in hour with immature, dopey glee. They had so much fun.

  That’s what he was aching for. In two years with Pamela he had not had any real fun.

  Rhodes gave the girls a final squeeze, then let them go. He sat down again beside Nicholas. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, as they crossed the large room back to their chairs.

  Nicholas glanced at him. The whites of Rhodes’s eyes were spidered with red, and under his tan his cheeks were flushed. Nicholas suspected he had been drinking ever since he’d gotten Murray’s telephone call, eighteen hours earlier. He certainly hadn’t looked in a mirror. Rhodes’s long hair flopped over his ears and down, into his eyes, and it was dotted with grains of sand. Unshaven, he did not look rakish, merely messy. “How long do they think the operation will take?” he asked.

  “Three, three and a half hours,” Nicholas answered. “Do you want anything? A drink?”

  “No. I’ve had enough. It doesn’t do anything anyway.”

  They sat in silence. Rhodes’s shirt sleeves were rolled up, and there was sand on the thin gold chain he wore on his wrist, and on the hair on his arm.

  “Where is Philip?”

  “At the flat. He’ll come later. He thought it would be better for us to be alone for a while. Nick…”

  “What is it?”

  “I made her come here. I really pressured her into it. She wanted to talk to you, to try and—you know—try again, and she was going to call you and I talked her out of it. I gave her a lot of shit, told her this was something that had to be done face to face. She was so afraid of getting on a plane, but she did it because I made her feel that if she didn’t, she’d never get you back.” Rhodes rubbed his fingers back and forth across his mouth so hard Nicholas could hear the abrasive hiss.

  “Easy,” Nicholas said. He put his hand on Rhodes’s arm. “What did she say? Please tell me.”

  “She still loved you. She wanted to try and get you back from the wimp.” Rhodes’s head jerked up. “Sorry. I suppose I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  “It’s all right. She’s gone back to New York.”

  “Is she history?”

  “What? Oh, yes. She’s history. Not my most shining hour.”

  “Nick, it wasn’t Jane’s shining hour either. She knew it.”

  “Did she say anything to you about him?” Nicholas asked.

  “The Great Healer? Sure. She told him to take a walk about a month ago, but it was basically over before that. It’s just that she was alone and at least he provided some friction. She said she’d met more amusing turds.”

  Nicholas smiled. “She didn’t say that. You did.”

  “She said he was boring. Same thing.”

  Nicholas glanced across the room. The girls had moved from their chairs to the floor. Victoria was leaning against a wall, her long legs stretched out straight in front of her. Elizabeth lay perpendicular, her head on her sister’s lap. Victoria, usually the least affectionate of creatures, who’d fondle the handle of her tennis racket before she’d stroke a horse or a dog, who found books far more intriguing than people, sat with her hand on her sister’s cheek, patting it gently as the younger girl’s eyes closed.

  Nicholas turned to his brother-in-law. “I can’t believe I pissed away two years of my life,” he said quietly.

  “You both did,” Rhodes said.

  “I only hope…”

  “I know.”

  “A stupid waste. We were supposed to be so damn smart, and look what we did to ourselves.”

  “You know,” Rhodes said, “I was up in Connecticut one time. You were off on location somewhere and we sat around, Jane, me, and Cecily Van Doorn. Jane was in her worst sicko stage, and I was trying to get her to get some more help and she wasn’t having any part of it. And then, all of a sudden Cecily looked up and you know what she said? ‘Life is too short.’ I remember, I looked at her and thought, Well, she should know. She’s had two husbands crap out on her. But I didn’t get her point then. I mean, yes, she was telling Jane how pathetic it was to be wasting all those good years locked in her own jail. But she was talking about vulnerability too. We’re all so goddamned fragile.”

  “Last night,” Nicholas said, “I stayed up with the girls until about two. I finally got them to sleep and I was so wiped out I could hardly make it back to my room. But then all of a sudden I was wide awake. I had this shock of realization—a real shock, an electric shock. I realized that some part of me always believed Jane and I would get back together. We had to. We’re made for each other. You can laugh, but I truly believe that.”

  “I’m not going to laugh,” Rhodes said. “Look, Nick, if the two of you weren’t made for each other, you would have married Miss Perfect Person, the one you were going with first. The only way someone like you and someone like my sister could have gotten together is if it were meant to be. The old match-made-in-heaven number. A gift from the gods. It happens. I know.”

  “I know you know,” Nicholas said. “But I threw the gift away.”

  “You put it aside for a little while. So did she. And look what both of you got: Dr. Dirty and the wimp. The gods’ way of saying ‘You stupid fuck-ups.’”

  “Pamela was—I don’t know—a diversion. She was never real to me. Remember what I was telling you about, that I always knew I’d go back to Jane? I guess I thought, What the hell, at our fiftieth anniversary party who’s going to remember a few years when it wasn’t so great? What are two or three lousy years in a whole lifetime? How can they matter?”

  “Just for a moment,” the neurosurgeon said.

  Her head swathed in bandages. Her silky dark hair gone, recollected only by her brows, two black accent marks.

  He’d once taken her braid, put it across his upper lip, and demanded, Well, do I look like Clark Gable?

  Her skin was still so wrongfully white.

  “Jane. Jane!”

  He expected nothing, but her eyes opened. His filled with tears. She saw him. She knew him.

  “I love you,” he said. “Jane, I love you more than anything.”

  “Nick.” He could hardly hear her. “Love you.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  She closed her eyes.

  The neurosurgeon called him at home at midnight. “There’s been an obliteration of consciousness.”

  “What?”

  “
I’m afraid Mrs. Cobleigh is comatose. We did another CAT scan. There is no clot, but the intercranial pressure is increasing again. The contusions are quite severe. There is a great deal of swelling.”

  He made himself ask, “Will she live?”

  “It looks grim. Of course, we are doing everything possible and there is a chance that we can turn things about.”

  “How big a chance?” Nicholas whispered.

  “Not very, I’m afraid.”

  Dear God, please. Don’t take her.

  They return to the yellow office that night and do not leave. On the second day after surgery, in the late afternoon, Sir Anthony Bradley comes and stands in the threshold. “Mr. Cobleigh.”

  They all rise.

  “Both pupils have dilated. She is no longer triggering respiration on her own.”

  “What does that mean?” Nicholas asks.

  But he knows. He does not have to hear Sir Anthony’s answer. He stands alone with his children and his brother-in-law and knows in his heart that what Cecily said was true.

  Life is too short.

  Author’s Note

  I sought advice and information from the people listed below. All of them gave it freely and cheerfully. I want to thank them—and to apologize if I twisted the facts to fit my fiction.

  Arnold C. Abramowitz, Eric Bregman, Robert Carras, Teresa Cavanaugh, John B. Comerford, Jr., Frederick T. Davis, Mary M. Davis, Jonathan Dolger, David Dukes, Robert F. Ebin, Janet Fiske, Robert B. Fiske, Jr., Mary Fitz-Patrick, Michael J. Frank, Phyllis Freeman, Lawrence Iason, Helen Isaacs, Morton Isaacs, Leonard S. Klein, Edward M. Lane, Susan Lawton, Josephine McGowan, Bonnie Mitchell, Catherine Morvillo, Otto G. Obermaier, Estelle Parsons, Frank Perry, Paul K. Rooney, James Rubin, Jeffrey M. Siger, Paul Tolins, Alfred F. Uhry, Herbert Weber, Stephen Wilson, Brian Winston, Jay Zises.