“Now go change,” her mother insisted.
Mary did as she was told and went upstairs to get ready for church. As she dressed she felt a bitter form of certainty. She knew her mother had thrown out the silver snowflake decoration a long time ago.
When Mary called to check up on her husband, the shift nurse had been reading one of those celebrity magazines, and after they spoke she went right back to it, licking her fingertips so they gripped the cheap waxy paper, her mind idling.
Eden and I used to read those magazines when we were deployed, waiting for a flight or a convoy, just trying to kill time. Whenever you’re stuck somewhere with time to kill you can always find one of those magazines. I’ve often wondered if the people in their pages read them too. They’re probably too busy. Now both he and I are killing a fuckload of time and neither of us has even so much as a single magazine.
That morning the shift nurse had yet to look in on Eden. She kept tabs on his vitals from the monitors at her desk, and hoped to finish her stint with him from there. Looking at him wasn’t something she’d planned on doing. She was new to San Antonio, just months out of nursing school, and burns weren’t her specialty, pediatrics were. She didn’t want to see what she’d heard he was. Still, sitting at the burn center’s main desk, alone, and on Christmas morning, she wondered about him. Even though he powered the relentless pounding of vital signs that surrounded her desk, she didn’t know if you could call what was in that room a person. Not alive, not dead, what it was didn’t have a name.
She’d heard the stories about when they’d brought him in. The rush to the roof, his helicopter landing, and how close to death he’d always been. Between shifts, the older docs and nurses spoke quietly about the guy up on the fourth floor burned so bad it was a miracle he’d survived. They always talked about him quickly, in murmurs over their coffee or standing close to each other in an elevator. What they’d say was always the same: worst wounded guy in both wars, don’t know if I’d want to live like that, and just a matter of time. They all said that one: a matter of time. And Jesus Christ if it wasn’t true. For my friend it was a matter of days, weeks, months, years, lying there, not being allowed to just die.
The shift nurse wondered how long he might live. Maybe someday he’d leave the hospital and go home. They all wanted that, but it’d never happen. And if it wouldn’t, she thought he should at least get to die, but not getting to do that either, and for so long, well, that was enough to keep her from wanting to go into his room. She’d told herself that she’d just sit at her desk and watch the monitors. That was enough. She’d do that. Then it’d be over. She’d go back to pediatrics and, she hoped, never draw a shift on the fourth floor again, especially not over Christmas.
Now, I may be making out this particular nurse to sound cold, but she wasn’t. She was just too young and too tired to be dealing with the seventy pounds laid out down the hall from her.
On her desk was one of those little Christmas trees, like the one Snoopy used to put on his doghouse, all done up with lights, each bulb fat as a grape and each branch tangled with tinsel. After a while she felt all tight in her chest looking at it, knowing she was spending her Christmas with him, and his with her, and that this might be his last Christmas and with all that winding up inside her, she did the only thing she could do: she unplugged that Snoopy tree and took it down to his room.
Inside the room, the shades were drawn. Some light snuck out along the seams, glowing a bit, but mostly just graying the room. As the shift nurse came in, she didn’t look at him, I mean not right at him. She looked around him. A set of monitors, same as those by her desk, sat next to him. Those machines and others surrounded his bed like a drum set, their tubes and cords running into his body as though he were the battery that powered them.
The squeak of her shoes against the floor’s linoleum and the pump that breathed for him were the only sounds in the room. She walked to the window and opened the blinds. A swell of light broke over Eden’s bed. With the light came color, and she could see him now in a way she couldn’t before. The white of his linens, the little pink stains where pieces of him had stuck against them, the great hollows of his wounds, dark and asking to be stared into. She found colors there she’d never known in a person before, but they were inside him and, by that measure, inside her. The browns, the greens, and the subcutaneous yellows of deep scars coiled like knotted yarn against his skin and deeper, and she saw his eyes and they blinked at her, unprotected by lashes, and she could see where they were rheumy without rest and soapy with pain, and how they teared against his pillow, always.
She shut the blinds.
A heater blew against her hands. It was mounted inside a vented ledge beneath the window. She set the Snoopy tree on the ledge and searched for an outlet. She found one behind his bed and plugged in the tree next to a cellphone that had been left there. Now the tree’s lights filled the room with the twinkling of Crayola-pure colors: red, blue, yellow, green. She looked at him and his eyes followed her as she made for the door. Then, as she passed by the foot of his bed, she wanted to touch him. Her heart beat fast, its rhythm like fingertips thrumming anxiously against a table. She felt a little sweat ease down the arch of her back, in that place where her skin was softest and faintly layered with hair.
Now she came to the side of his bed.
His eyes looked away from her, toward the tree, and she could see the lights reflecting off their sheen. She moved her hand over him, and put the pad of her middle finger on one of the gauzy bandages that covered his side. Then she ran her finger up to the edge of the bandage and looked at his eyes again, and seeing that they saw nothing, her finger leapt from the bandage’s edge onto the bare skin of his chest. It was burnt and smoked, bloodless, but not lifeless. This surprised her. The little piece of flesh she touched had more struggle in it than her whole body. Beneath her finger was survival, it was what a body could and would be when battered just to the edge. It was man suffering into the anlage of whatever came next, the amphibian crawling onto land, the first primate standing upright. It was that grotesque and purest form of adaptation: life.
She took her hand away.
Still he didn’t look at her. He watched the Snoopy tree and the lights. She walked quickly out the door and back to her desk, behind the monitors. She wanted to read her magazine but couldn’t.
She sat.
Eventually she managed to thumb through the first few pages, but only after she’d gone to the bathroom and washed her hand.
Before the shift nurse came in with the tree, Eden had been getting ready for a fight. The way he’d counted it, he’d seen that last cockroach, the one in the corner, almost a day ago. But even if that was the only one he’d seen, he’d heard thousands of them coming through the walls, popping blisters in the paint, like your head in a bowl of Rice Krispies with the volume turned up, louder than hell. The way they’d been going at it back there, he could almost see them row on row, their thorny legs and hard little rust-backs in close-order drill formation, all ready to swallow him down.
When the phone rang out in the hall and he heard the shift nurse talking to Mary, he thought the last he’d hear of his wife was her being told the lie that he was fine. This knot of thoughts is what was going through my friend’s head when the shift nurse came in with the Snoopy tree, and goddamn if he didn’t think she’d saved his life and scared off the cockroaches.
Eden was just about blind, so he didn’t really see the shift nurse come in, what he saw was a flash of white move toward him, and he also saw the lights of the tree. They blinked like a neon sign through the window of a bad hotel room and he could feel them on his face. But thank God for the lights, they’d keep the cockroaches away, he hoped. He also felt it when the nurse touched him, and he became embarrassed as he got a big raging phantom of a nonexistent hard-on, tickling all the way up to his burnt-out smear of a belly button. And he la
y there wondering why that ability had come back only once everything was gone and he thought of the nurse’s soap-and-water smell. He wheezed it through his nose, soap and water, soap and water. It took him back to his wife, and before that to his own skin in the shower and the way his fingers would squeak against its wetness, and the smell of his aunt’s wrists when she’d pick him up when he was a boy. Soon he’d breathed in so much of that smell that he’d pulled it all out of the room, and the pump in the corner by his bed had processed all the soap and water there could be.
What came next was different and stronger.
He smelled the Snoopy tree in the corner, the pine sap and dry needles ready to fall to the floor. But this wasn’t a Christmas smell for him, not anymore. No way it could be. This was the smell of granite slopes in low fog, mean tight roads, and well-fed sheikhs and self-appointed emirs with wax in their night-dark mustaches and their young men in the mountains, waiting for him. On the day he burned, this is what we both smelled in the truck mixing with diesel, our hair and bodies. Death smelled like a Snoopy tree.
He started breathing the pine in hard, trying to suck it all out of the room. He wanted a different smell. The pump worked in the corner and he along with it. He could feel his heart champing hard in his chest as he breathed out the pine smell, and then it was all gone and he waited for what would come next. He shut his eyes and on the backs of his lids he could still see the colors of the Christmas lights, each one exploding in planets of red, blue, yellow, green. His heart slowed and so did his breathing and then he opened his eyes and everything went to shit.
Standing right where he’d felt his phantom hard-on was the cockroach, staring at him, the lights flashing against his hard back: rusty red, rusty blue, rusty yellow, rusty green. Eden’s heart started to eat a hole out of his chest. Then the cockroach’s tentacles waggled in the air, and the fucker took one of his thorny legs and set it on the bottom of my friend’s bandages, just taunting him, letting him know that he could climb anywhere he damn well wanted. Eden opened his eyes so wide and hard that tears ran down to his neck, the salt burning in the open parts of him. He tried to stare the cockroach off his bed as he’d done before.
It didn’t work.
The cockroach stood there, looking at him. He was all black eyes beneath bowed tentacles.
Eden bucked his body against the bed.
Still the cockroach didn’t move.
The pine smell left the room. The puke and fear smell of a thousand cockroaches replaced it, filling Eden’s nostrils. Then, behind him, the vibrating sound of their thousand feet exploded. They were coming for him, he knew it; he gnashed his teeth, and just before he howled, he felt the great muscle of his heart tear in two.
The shift nurse was eating lunch at her desk, that’s when she heard it, not his howl, but the monitors go off like an airplane losing altitude. Loud beeps and flashing screens, the great ascents and descents of his vital signs graphed out like the prospects of some collapsing enterprise. She pushed the emergency button at her desk. It was patched in to the senior nurse on call.
Then she ran into his room.
The monitors around his bed were going off too. He ground his teeth against the noise. He thrashed, bucking hard. She collapsed on his body, holding on, trying to keep the tubes and wires in him, and him in the bed. His strength surprised her. It was as though the ghosts of his limbs tossed and kicked at his torso while all three degrees of his burns rose up from his skin, back on fire.
Now the senior nurse on call came in, a squat and thickset man named Gabe. He paused at the door, craning his neck into the dim of the room. He wore scrubs over an old military green undershirt, its collar rimmed pink and purple with bleach stains and stretched around his neck like a yoke. Beneath the shirt, white fuzz escaped from his chest. At what he saw, he squeezed his hands to fists. The muscles of his forearms became taut as old ropes. He had tattoos here, and they ran down to the wrists. These commemorations were faded with age. They were ugly, too.
He headed toward Eden’s bed no faster than a walk, leading with the forceful bludgeon of his chin. Gabe had time as a medic in the Army and years as a nurse outside it, he’d seen all sorts of guys get rejigsawed in all sorts of ways, he’d learned rushing never did any good. He stood next to Eden and studied the monitors that crowded his room.
Eden thrashed against the shift nurse and she struggled to hold him down. She wrestled him carefully, trying not to hurt him, like a hunter holds down a wounded stag before finishing it off, making sure it doesn’t snap any of its points.
Gabe stopped looking at the monitors. He pulled a thick syringe from a steel drawer by the bed. He filled it with some clear juice in his pocket and told the shift nurse to hop off Eden.
She knew little about the senior nurse, just that he always volunteered for the Christmas shift. For a moment she looked back, refusing to move.
He told her again: “Go on. Get off him!”
Frightened of Gabe, she jumped from the bed.
Eden gave one hard flop, knocking every wire from his body. Gabe grabbed his throat, his hands quick as knives. Then he took the syringe and stabbed it right into my friend’s failing heart. The needle went in. The solution poured out. The heart made a fist. It punched once real hard. Eden let out a high gasp, hinting at his voice, which was swallowed long ago. Gabe held Eden’s neck. The heart punched again. Slowly, Gabe eased his grip. As he did, Eden sunk into the bed.
The shift nurse got herself back together real quick. She smoothed down her blue scrubs, which were now flecked pink in the places where my friend had come off on her. Carefully, she walked around his bed, hooking the machines back up to his body. Soon the pump was droning behind him and the monitors returned to their slow beeps.
Gabe drummed his fingers at the foot of the bed. “His family here?”
“His wife went home for the holiday,” said the shift nurse.
He frowned, slitting his eyes as he looked up at my friend’s vitals and then back at his broken gaze. “With cardiac arrest at this stage, it’s likely just a matter of time. Better give them a call.”
The shift nurse walked back to her desk with the news.
Gabe walked back to his office downstairs. He hated the Christmas shift.
Eden’s heart tore as his family arrived at church.
Mary enjoyed the service more than she’d expected. A creeping sense of well-being had found her in the pews. The feeling lingered, and afterward, as they stood in the vestibule, one of her mother’s friends mentioned a Christmas party in the neighborhood. Before her mother could answer, Mary said she wanted to go.
At the party, there was a pack of children. They ran toy trucks across the carpets and played hide-and-seek among the closets and under tables. Andy chased after this pack and Mary stood beside the punch bowl, talking with the other mothers. She pretended these women didn’t know about her, and they pretended back. By the time they left the party it was dark and the girl fell asleep on the car ride home. Mary pulled her floppy limbs from the backseat, carrying her into the house and up into the bed of her old room. Then, downstairs, Mary saw her mother, who stood by the answering machine, unmoving.
It flashed red with messages.
Mary pressed the play button. The youthful voice of the shift nurse came through the machine’s speaker. It was contorted into a deadpan, like a dentist’s reminder for a cleaning. Mary reeled against the words that came next, each one like a flashbulb going off in her face: “cardiac arrest…still trying to reach you, Mrs. Malcom…reduced brain activity…patient unable to sleep…imminent…imminent…”
Upstairs, they took Andy from her bed and drove to the airport.
Along the highway it was silent. The dashed lane markers pulsed toward them, reflecting their headlights. The green and white signs of the interstate passed above them, in a rhythm which soothed like breaking waves. Mar
y thought about her husband, and the word imminent, and maybe once this was over, once he’d gone, things would get better for her and the girl.
They’d start again, and that’d be a good thing.
Her husband dying would be a good thing.
She felt the infidelity of that thought pass between her legs and then up into her stomach in a way I knew she’d felt at least once before.
She looked out at the land along the highway and it was flattened by darkness. It spread to great distances and in them she could see the airport, the lights of its runways and towers. At first the lights seemed close, but driving proved them to be far away. And when her mother took the off-ramp toward the terminal, it was in the earliest hours of the morning. Driving in, they saw no one and continued, past the parking lots, all filled with the abandoned cars of Christmas vacationers. Then they pulled into the long and empty departures promenade.
Mary stepped from the car as it was still rolling. Her mother called after her: “If it’s needed, I can put Andy on a flight so she can say goodbye to him.”
Mary took a step back toward the car. She cupped her hands and placed them on the rear seat’s window, peering inside. There, the girl slept in her nightgown, her hands clasped together, as if in prayer, wedged between her knees.
In the terminal, the only person Mary found was a janitor riding a miniature Zamboni, its shaggy wheel-brush rubbing moons of wax into the vast resin floor. He bumped along in his seat, the crescents of his pattern driving toward her. He shouted over the machine: “You still got a few hours till the early morning flights. Where you headed?”
Waiting for Eden Page 3