She trailed off as I shook my head.
“No, baby. No, your daddy’s on a ventilator right now. It’s keeping his body alive, but he’s gone.”
I wanted to be straightforward, but I could not bring myself to say the word dead. I didn’t want her to be confused, but I simply could not say it right that second.
“What? What do you mean?”
Her voice began to climb and the elevator doors opened on the floor. As requested, I didn’t see any cops. I held on to one of her hands and began to step out of the elevator, but she pulled out of my grasp and shrank back against the wide metal rail. I held my foot in front of the door to keep it open and held my hand out to her.
“Oh, God, sweetheart. I—he’s, he’s gone. His brain function is—he’s—” I still couldn’t say the word. But I was going to have to. Somehow, I was going to have to say it if I wanted Letty to understand.
She stared at me, her eyes huge in her pale face. “So, he’s like, he’s in a coma?”
I shook my head. “No. I can explain this better—”
“No,” she said, her face contorting as she slid down to the floor against the back of the elevator. “No, no.”
I hadn’t considered this, hadn’t considered her simply refusing to move. Refusing to believe, yes, but I didn’t know what to do with her immovable. I wasn’t going to force her into the room with Benny. I had wanted to see him as quickly as possible, but that didn’t mean she was ready to. I wanted every single second I could get with him, but if Letty wasn’t ready, I couldn’t just leave her here.
“Okay,” I said soothingly, crouching down in front of her. “Okay, honey, you don’t have to see him if you don’t want to right now. What do you want to do? You want to just go sit in a waiting room? There’s one right here, we’ll close the door . . .”
I stood, drawing her up with me. It was working. She stepped forward as I stepped back, and I continued to coax her out of the elevator and into the waiting room, where we sat in chairs next to each other. I pressed my hand against my eyes for a moment to block out the look of horror that had been frozen on my daughter’s face before I rose again to shut the door.
It settled closed with a hard thunk, and, again, we were sealed into a small space together. I turned slowly and leaned against the door, my head bowed, unable to look at her yet.
“Mom?” she whispered. “What’s happening?”
I took a deep breath and raised my head, and said it.
“He’s brain dead, sweetheart.” And then I slowly, carefully explained what had happened, and what the neurosurgeon had told me, what I believed about death and dying, and what would happen next. It was a horrific parody of the conversations I’d always fantasized having with my child, the wisdom I would impart about what I believed about the universe and life and our souls.
In the daily routine of raising her, I had too rarely had those conversations with her, but I’d always been grateful when we managed to have one.
The lightweight reality of them embarrassed me now. Letty looked at me as if she had no idea who I was, had never heard words or ideas like this coming from my mouth, and I suppose she hadn’t.
“What happens after the other doctor does the stuff?” she asked, still dry-eyed.
“Well,” I said, “I’m not really sure. I suppose we’ll have to give our consent to have the ventilator removed.”
“And then he’ll just die? Why can’t we just leave it and maybe he’d wake up?”
Her tone was accusatory, and I went over what brain death meant again.
“But how do you know?” she asked. “How does anyone know?”
I pushed myself off the door and sat next to her again. She kept her hands clutched together on her lap, her knuckles white.
“I think you just have to decide what it is you believe and then stick with it until a more compelling argument against it comes along,” I said. “And I don’t . . . I don’t believe for a second that your father would want to be kept alive like this. He can’t hear you, or see you, or respond. He can’t feel anything, sweetie, he’s in no pain. He has no conscious thought. He, the essence of him, his soul if you want to call it that, I think that’s already gone on to a better place.”
She stared at me intently.
“What does he look like?”
I described the bandages, the machines and what they did and where they were hooked up. The telling of it served to calm me somehow.
“What if you don’t tell them to, you know, stop?”
“But I would.”
“Don’t I get any say? What if I don’t want to?”
“I think it’s way too early to even talk about this,” I said cautiously.
“It’s just tomorrow,” she said, and now came the tears, choking out of her in great ragged gasps. “He’s mine, too,” she protested, hitting herself on the chest with both hands, making me jump and reach out to stop her from doing it again. She pulled away from me before I could touch her.
“No,” she wailed. “He’s mine, you can’t do it, you can’t just . . . you can’t just kill him.”
“Letty,” I said, reaching for her again, catching her at last and holding on tightly. “I won’t tell you that your opinion doesn’t matter. It does. But in this case I know better than you do, and you have to trust me to do the right thing.”
She struggled in my grasp for a moment, but then she stiffened and stilled against me, and then, finally, she collapsed into me the way she hadn’t since she had been a little girl, the weight of the world on her impossibly thin shoulders.
I, too, could not hold out any longer, but my tears weren’t just for my loss of Benny; they were for Letty’s loss, for the uncertain future we now shared only with each other, and for Benny, too, knowing that he would never have the comfort of consoling our daughter when she cried. All the things he would never do.
We both slowly quieted, and I pulled away to find tissues in my purse, coming up with nothing but a few old drive-through napkins. I cleaned her face, her arms hanging slack, her hands loose on her thighs.
“Oh, baby,” I said as I wiped my own face. “I don’t know how—” I cut myself off. Telling Letty that I didn’t know what we were going to do, how we were going to live without him, would not help her. “I don’t know how everything works right now,” I said instead, a faltering substitute.
But she didn’t seem to notice.
“I have questions to ask the doctor about what happens next,” I said. “Would you like to be here?”
“I guess,” she said, her tone dull and exhausted. “Is there . . . blood?”
It took me a moment to catch up with her.
“No, no, honey. You can’t see any blood. The bandages cover everything. It’s just like I told you, with the breathing tube, the monitors. Would you—do you think you’d like to see him now?”
I didn’t know if it was better for her to see him or not. When she’d arrived, I had been on auto-pilot, assuming that what was best for me was also best for her. There was no time to check a parenting book on this one. I thought, at fifteen, that she was old enough to tell her father good-bye. Not everyone got that chance, and I didn’t want her to regret it later.
She bit her lip, but then she nodded.
“You want to go now? Or do you want to wait?” I asked.
She stood, and I was surprised at her height. She had seemed so small just a moment ago, in my arms. I stood, too, and we walked to his room together. Tim was waiting down at the nurses’ station, and he gave us a tentative wave.
I nodded at him and placed my hand on the door, but before I pushed it open I said, “I’m going to go in with you, but if you want some time alone with him, let me know, okay?”
She nodded, gripped my hand, and I opened the door. We entered together, Letty trailing me slightly, but coming willingly. She kept her head down, her eyes on the floor, until I stopped a couple of feet away from the bed. When she raised her head, her hand tightened on mine.
/>
I just stood still, letting her look, silently willing her strength.
Within a few moments her breathing evened and she let loose of my hand. It took another moment, but she eventually walked over to the side of the bed, then looked back at me questioningly.
“He really—he really can’t hear me?”
“No, not through his ears, no. He’s not there,” I said, gesturing toward the Benny on the bed. “But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t hear you—” I waved my hand in a vague motion toward the ceiling.
She looked, understandably, extraordinarily dissatisfied with this answer. I had to do better.
“I’ve been talking to him. Out loud,” I clarified. “I can’t—I don’t believe that he’s just gone, I just know that he’s not there.”
“How?” she asked incredulously. “How do you know?”
“Because we’re not our bodies. And he’s done with this one,” I said, barely above a whisper. I closed my eyes, feeling myself sway, and a lovely, welcome graying out of my thoughts and softening of my knees began.
It felt like minutes that I hung there, between responsibility and blissful unconsciousness, but it must have been only a split second, and my eyes opened when someone knocked lightly on the door.
Cora stood outside, looking as tragic as I felt, Drew hovering a few feet away. She didn’t say a word, only raised her eyebrows and I nodded, pushing the door open wider and allowing her in, her arms spreading out to encompass me, and within seconds Letty was there, too, the three of us clutching each other, Cora holding her bandaged arm off to the side gingerly.
And I realized that it was not just the two of us. For a little while, at least, I did have one other person to lean on, and she was, miraculously, here.
There were others, I realized. Others I would need to call: Benny’s brother, our friends, though I was sure word had already spread rapidly through the police family and more people would soon be arriving.
I pulled back from our embrace, but Letty stayed where she was, and as I stepped away she fit herself more fully into Cora’s arms. Cora met my eyes over Letty’s shoulder, her face filled with anguish, as much for the child in her arms as for me or for Benny himself.
Letty mumbled something I couldn’t hear, but I caught Cora’s answer easily: “I don’t know, I just don’t know. I don’t understand either.”
The night passed in a haze of medical personnel and cops, of coffee and sleeping pills. The nurses moved some patients and set us up a room next to Benny’s, allowing us to sleep in shifts, though I don’t know how much any of us slept despite the pills. The next morning Drew tracked Dr. Young down for us.
We sat in the closed waiting room, all of us this time, and listened as he explained it all over again, whole- brain death, how long until his heart gave out, all the grim reality of the body that lay in the room down the hall. Letty huddled between Cora and me and asked him the same questions she’d asked me.
But she seemed to hear his answers more clearly than she’d heard them from me, and she asked the one we’d both wanted an answer to before I could.
“What happens if the other doctor says he’s . . . you know, too? I mean, do you just, turn things off?”
The doctor looked at me quickly, and I nodded.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ve discussed what I would do, we just don’t know what the process is. It might be easier to handle if we know what’s coming.”
“Okay,” he said. “Dr. Tulley will be coming in this afternoon. She’s a neurologist, and she’s already aware of your husband’s condition, but she’ll carefully go over his file and will consult with me both before and after she sees him. She’ll conduct several physical tests, as well as an EEG, and then there will be a few decisions you’ll have to make. Most people want to make sure anyone who would want to say good-bye before support is withdrawn are notified. He’s on file as an organ donor, so they’ll have the transplant coordinator come in to discuss possible organ donation . . .”
He kept talking, but everyone else in the room seemed to have stopped breathing.
LETTY
It was so cold in the room, and Letty could swear that when he said that, about the transplant person coming, it got even colder. Nobody said anything for a minute.
Her mom and Aunt Cora’s boyfriend looked at Aunt Cora. Everyone except the doctor; he didn’t even notice that they were all freaked out, he just kept talking. Aunt Cora didn’t look up; she just sat there with this really weird look on her face, staring down at her boyfriend’s hand.
He was the one who finally said something, or, he didn’t really say anything, but he cleared his throat like he was going to, and the doctor finally stopped talking and looked confused.
“What?” Letty asked, but nobody even looked at her.
“Wait,” her mom said. “Go back.”
But she didn’t tell him where to go back to.
“Ali,” Aunt Cora said, and she was the only one whose words actually sounded like they might mean something, like she knew what she was going to say. But then she only said, “Don’t.”
And then everyone else started to talk at the same time.
“This is not an appropriate time to discuss this,” Aunt Cora said.
“Discuss what?” Letty asked. “Discuss what?”
“Is that possible?” Drew said.
“Just hold on,” her mother said.
And the doctor said, “Slow down, now tell me what the situation is here.”
They all talked over each other, talking about Aunt Cora, and how sick she was, and how she needed a kidney. It got even colder, and Letty started to shiver, and then she was shaking. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, leaning her head down on her knees while all the words jumbled around her.
But in a second she felt Aunt Cora jump up from her chair and grab her by the arm, making her feet thump down on the floor.
“Look,” she said, and she sounded really mad. “You two”—and she pointed at her mother and Drew—“can stay in here and talk about this, but I’m not going to sit here and listen, and I’m not going to make Letty sit through it either. Come on,” she said, pulling on Letty’s arm.
She was just glad to have someone tell her what to do. Her mom reached out for her hand, and Letty wasn’t mad at her or anything, but she just wanted to go, and she slipped away from her.
“I’ll be right there, Letty,” her mom said, but the door shut behind Aunt Cora and they were out in the hall before she could say anything.
“What do you want to do?” Aunt Cora asked her.
“Is it true?” she whispered.
She didn’t say anything for a minute. But then she looked at her directly, just like Aunt Cora always did, and she knew she would tell her the truth.
“Yes, Letty, it’s true. But it’s going to be okay, and this is the last thing you need to worry about right now. I’m going to be fine, just fine. I’m sorry you had to find out now, like this. And they can talk all they want, but the only thing I’m planning on doing for the next year is being here with you and your mom, okay?”
“What’s wrong with your arm?” Letty asked, finally noticing the bandages.
“They put in an access point for when I start dialysis.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what else to say.
“Letitia Makani,” she said softly, and for the first time Letty wanted to hear it again, wanted to hear her whole name said by someone who loved her. “I’m okay. And you’re going to be okay, too. And I’m going to be here to make sure of that. Now, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said, even though she did.
“Hey,” Aunt Cora said, crouching down a little to peer at her. “I know it doesn’t seem possible right now, but we’re going to get through this. We all will. Come on.”
She put her arm around her and started to steer her toward the elevators, but Letty pulled back.
“Maybe we could go back? You know, to . .
. Dad,” Letty said, afraid she wouldn’t want to, but Aunt Cora turned right around.
“Of course,” she said, and they walked down the hall.
Letty hesitated at the door.
“Do you want to be alone?” Aunt Cora asked. “I’ll just stand right here and wait for you if you do.”
She shook her head. “Do you—I mean, don’t you want to see him, too?”
Aunt Cora looked like she was thinking about it hard.
“I’d appreciate that,” she said, like she was thanking Letty.
She wasn’t afraid to go right up to him this time, and even though her mom and the doctor said he wasn’t “there,” which was just another way of saying he was dead, it still only seemed like he was hurt, and unconscious.
When she was little, they used to nap on the sofa together, and she would wrap her hand around one of his fingers, and he would tell her a story about when he was little, or about when he and her mom were dating, or even about when she was born. But his stories about that were different from her mom’s. She never felt like she needed to be anyone different than who she was, any more special, when her dad told the story about her conception.
He never said it was a miracle. He just said he was happy.
“Do you think I could sit there?” she asked, pointing to the space beside her dad’s knees, on the right side, away from the bandages on his arm and shoulder.
“Of course,” Aunt Cora said. She helped her scoot his leg over a little and Letty kicked her shoes off and climbed up, crossing her legs against his. She felt like she was going to fall backward off the edge of the bed, but she inched a little closer, and Aunt Cora moved a chair behind her and sat down, and when she wrapped her hand around his finger, she knew she was safe.
It felt like him, mostly, but she also sort of felt what her mom was saying, like there was just something missing. Even when he fell asleep on the sofa and she was awake, his hand still felt . . . alive. This didn’t, not at all the way like it used to.
She didn’t care, it was something, and she held on.
Between Friends Page 23