Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  “Let’s sit.” Owen steers him inside the waiting place. People are spaced out, no one wanting to sit next to a stranger; only two empty chairs are left together. I force Owen to take the second one, but then a girl on Shevlin’s other side says, “Here, sit, I’m going out to smoke anyways,” so I take her seat. Somebody has turned the TV on again. Instinctively, Owen and I lean toward each other, forming a protective half circle around Shevlin.

  “What happened?” Owen asks. “Tell us what happened.”

  “It was at home. She was fine, she was just starting supper, standing in front of the sink washing lettuce. Gonna make another goddamn salad.”

  Owen doesn’t move, but I can tell he’s startled. Shevlin never swears.

  “I wasn’t paying attention. I was gluing a cup handle back on a cup, sitting at the table, not paying any attention. Now I recollect she said something like ‘Whoo’ or ‘Whoa,’ some such, but I didn’t even look up.” He stares down at his rough, open palms, moving his knobby fingers. He has a black nail, the fourth finger on his right hand. “Then she said my name, and I knew. She said it real calm, but her voice wasn’t right. She was looking at me, holding her chest. ‘Call 911,’ she said, and I started to, but she—she called to me again. I rushed up—she’d’ve fell if I hadn’t caught her. She still dropped like a stone, she’d’ve broke something, I barely got ahold of her head before it could hit the floor. And then…” He whispers. “She wasn’t breathing. I felt her neck, she wasn’t breathing.”

  He can’t stop the tears that overflow his red-rimmed eyes and roll down his cheeks. He turns toward me, away from Owen, while he hitches up his jacket and pulls a blue-checked handkerchief out of his back pocket.

  He gives his throat a harsh clearing. “I called 911 and told them, and they said do I know CPR. I learned it here,” he says to me while Owen nods, “they did a course back in January, I took it on purpose.”

  “That’s right,” Owen says. “You took it for her.”

  “So I started up, and I kept on till they came.” He scrubs his eyes again with the handkerchief. “They shocked her with the machine, and she come to. They said I could ride on the ambulance with her, and she was talking and everything. She said it was like her heart running backwards—but she was good, saying she felt all right and not to worry—but just now it started up again, the racing. I couldn’t watch.” He covers his face with his hands.

  “They’ll fix it.” I clasp his shoulder and hold on. “That’s what they do. She’s in good hands, she’ll be all right. She will be.” He looks up and nods, searching my eyes the way Owen did. This is all I can do for them, say the things they desperately want to believe. “You did everything right, Shevlin. You saved her. If you hadn’t been there and done everything exactly right, who knows what would’ve happened? But you were there, thank God, and now all that’s left to do is wait.”

  “Yeah.” He blows his nose. “I didn’t call Danielle yet.”

  Owen is sitting ramrod straight, gripping the sides of his chair, as if by staying strong and stoical he can control this situation. Shevlin may break down, but Owen never will. “I’ll call her,” he says.

  “She’s not in Richmond, she’s down in Charlotte, North Carolina, at some convention. I don’t have the number on me.”

  “I’ll get ahold of her.” If it bothers him that his father-in-law knows where Danielle is but he doesn’t, Owen doesn’t show it. “I’ll be right back.”

  I reach for my purse. “Do you want my cell—”

  “I got mine.” He walks out into the hall.

  I keep my hand on Shevlin’s shoulder, bony-feeling and trembling under his corduroy jacket. I rub it softly, and I think it’s a comfort to us both. It’s a fluke that I’m here; it should be someone he knows better, or one of the church ladies who helped Cottie after her operation. Then again, would he feel better with or be any likelier to confide in one of them than me? He’s a much tenderer man than I thought, Cottie’s strong-hearted lover. I think of him sneaking into her father’s house to see her. I think of him diving out the bedroom window and landing on a hydrangea bush. They’ve been together for forty years. She wants to have “intimate relations” again, but he wants to be “careful of” her.

  I don’t want their love affair to end. I want to put my arms around Shevlin, who would be horrified. Why is life so mean sometimes? Why are we here if it’s just to lose everything?

  “I got her.” Owen takes his seat, flopping down as if his legs just gave out. He looks worse than before, the skin stretched tighter around his mouth. “She can get a flight out real early tomorrow.”

  Shevlin nods for a long time. “How’d she sound?”

  Owen looks helpless, as if he doesn’t understand the question, or its implications go so far, it’s too painful to answer. He mutters something, then drops his head and covers the back of it with his hands. What could she have said to him that would make him feel even worse?

  Both men seem too desolate to do anything but sit here, not even speaking to each other. I take over as the one who asks the triage nurse, passersby, the occasional white-coated doctor, what’s going on. “They’re still stabilizing her,” they all say. “The husband can go in if he wants.”

  I go to the cafeteria and bring back drinks and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches nobody touches. I study a poster hanging in the hall that says heart disease kills one out of three women in America. I keep saying positive, optimistic things to Shevlin and Owen, but the longer this wait goes on, the less faith any of us have in the words.

  I’ve fallen into the role I always play in hospitals—trying to be strong for my family. Andrew’s a mess, Chloe’s a child, there’s never been anyone else but me. I’m not even any good at it. Less so since my mother died. I don’t want to think about that now, but how can I not?

  I never even got to see her at the hospital, because by the time I got there they’d taken her away. And at the funeral home, she looked so little like herself that the service healed nothing, it only made me feel more abandoned and unconnected. The wax-faced woman with permed-looking gray hair—who told them to curl my mother’s beautiful straight hair?—wasn’t her at all. And yet, when I knelt beside the coffin, I overflowed with harrowing, intense, passionate love. I kept whispering while I patted her shoulder in her beige suit—I was afraid to touch her skin—“I love you, Mama. I love you, Mama. I love you, Mama.” It feels as if I’ve been crying ever since.

  Shevlin should go back in the emergency room. It’s hard to watch, whatever they’re doing to Cottie, but he should go. He should tell her what he feels right now. While he can say it to her face, his eyes wide open.

  A doctor I’ve never seen comes into the waiting area. Shevlin stands up, then Owen and I. The nametag on his breezy white coat says DR. PITTMAN. He’s short, cherry-cheeked, pear-shaped, with intense blue eyes.

  “It’s good news,” he says to Shevlin after perfunctory nods to Owen and me. “She’s stable now, and we’re moving her out to CCU, where they’ll keep monitoring her, give her some medicine to make sure her heart rate stays steady. So she’ll be here overnight, and then we’ll see how she is tomorrow.”

  No one says anything.

  He looks at us. He’s carrying a clipboard. “Okay? Okay, then.” He takes a step back.

  Shevlin takes one forward. “She’s okay?”

  “Should be. In her case we know what caused the V-tach, and she’s strong, she’s in good health otherwise, and I think she’s got a good prognosis.”

  “What happened to her won’t happen again?”

  “Could happen again. We’ll try out different antiarrhythmic meds, try to control it like that, or we might try ablation, although I doubt it, but that’s a curative treatment for certain tachychardias. More likely for something long term we’ll want to do an EPS test to see if she needs an ICD, implantable cardioverter defibrillator. That emits a shock when it senses a V-tach coming.”

  “Like a pacemaker?”

&nb
sp; I stop listening to the exact sense of Dr. Pittman’s words and concentrate on his reassuring voice, the way his intelligent, focused eyes never leave Shevlin’s, how his chubby cheeks expand when he pronounces long e’s. Cottie’s not going to die. An implant, a little machine in her chest is going to save her. I can’t speak or I’ll burst into tears—I didn’t realize until now how hard I was trying to prepare myself for different news—but I join in profuse, extravagant thanking of Dr. Pittman by patting his arm and shaking his hand. We’re as grateful as if he brought Cottie back from the brink of death with his own clean white hands. Who knows, maybe he did! But when he’s gone, I tell Shevlin he did, and he laughs and cries while he gives me the longest, fiercest hug anyone’s ever given me before.

  It should be pitch-black out, not just starting to get dark. It should be the next day, not a measly six hours since I was playing with pictures of Sock in my darkroom. But time’s not real in hospitals, I should know that by now. A soft, clear twilight is falling over these hills I love. I lean over the steering wheel to watch a flock of birds flapping their wings in a lazy, unmistakable, going-home-to-bed frenzy. The sun comes and goes depending on whether I’m at the top or bottom of a hill, and even its setting is gentle and soft, not piercing or dramatic. I should feel completely at peace. I smell fertilizer when I pass the just-turned fields, honeysuckle by the fallow meadows. All’s right with the world—so where’s my contentment? I can’t explain the restlessness I feel until I catch myself grappling for my cell phone in my purse and dialing one-handed.

  It’s been a long time since I couldn’t quite savor an experience fully, couldn’t possess it, before telling Andrew about it.

  And he’s not there! This is so wrong.

  “Hi. I wanted to tell you something,” I say to his voice mail. Now I realize it isn’t even about Cottie. No, it is about Cottie, but she’s only the starting point. “Call me. Let’s talk—I really want to.”

  In fact I almost start in, fill up his answering machine with words, because I am so tired of not talking to my husband. Cottie’s going to be fine, I want to say. There can be happy endings. Life is very dear, but it’s so short, it’s so short, and pride takes up so much precious time. I don’t give a damn about Elizabeth O’Neal. Shouldn’t I come home? Shouldn’t we be doing something? Cottie’s going to live!

  But he might think I’m hysterical. I must be more systematic and organized, at least get him on the phone before I start speaking. If it were the other way around, I’d rather he said these things to me than to my machine.

  No, hell no, I’d take them any way I could get them. He could tell Sock for all I care—how in the world did we come to this? Enough is enough. I trail my hand out the window and let the cooling air blow through my fingers. Things seem to be falling away, all the…weeds, the nettles, everything that was obscuring the object underneath. It’s this house of ours, somewhat decrepit—it needs paint, shingles, new glass in the windows—but it’s still sound. What it needs is someone to stand up for it. If Andrew won’t, I will. I wanted him to go first, but this is fair—I’m the one who started the breakdown process. First me, then him: We let it go, didn’t do the upkeep. Turn your back on an old house, immediately it begins to sag. Rust never sleeps. Constant vigilance, that’s what you need. It’s not romantic, God knows, but neither is dry rot.

  I’ll go first, I’ll commit to the rehab. It’s not too late. It couldn’t be. Andrew just needs to see me with my sleeves rolled up, a bandanna around my head, carrying a hammer, one of those long silver level things on my shoulder. Why am I thinking in all these contractor analogies? My God—Fogelman! Oh, Andrew’s going to laugh and laugh when I tell him. All this craziness and confusion, all the running around and fretting and dead-ending—when what we should’ve been doing was moving purposefully together from room to room, remodeling the House of Love.

  andrew

  twenty-three

  “Hey, man, you ain’t puttin’ that on the grave.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “’Cause that is the ugliest flower I ever saw.”

  “I’m not putting it on Hobbes’s grave, I’m just setting it out in the sun.” And just his luck, Wolfie happened to be skipping by in the alley at that very moment. Under other circumstances, Andrew would’ve been happy to see him.

  “Good, ’cause that is one ugly flower.”

  “It’s a tree. A cedar of Lebanon. Very old. It’s mentioned in Gilgamesh, which was written thousands and thousands of years ago.”

  Wolfie came closer, squinting at the squat, drab, short-needled sapling in the elegant porcelain pot. Elizabeth’s peace offering. “Wow,” he said more appreciatively. “It look old, but not that old.”

  “No, the species is that old—this is a…” Oh hell, Andrew didn’t have the strength to explain it. When he bent over to slide the pot farther into what was left of the sunlight, he felt, in tandem, a stitch in his back and a roll of nausea in his stomach. What the hell was that? Was it one ailment with two separate manifestations, or two discrete afflictions?

  Wolfie had his basketball under his arm, as usual. “Wanna play some one-on-one?”

  “Not right now. But some other time.”

  “Yeah, you don’t look good. You movin’ like a ol’ man. What up, you sick?”

  “No, no. I’m fine.”

  “You look whipped. You should get in the bed.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  Wolfie thought that was a riot. He followed Andrew to the back porch, bouncing the ball between his legs, showing off. “I could come in,” he said, “but I got a date.”

  “

  “A date.”

  “Yeah, that girl Tina I told you about.”

  “Tina,” Andrew said appreciatively. He put his hand on his midsection and pressed. A pain there came and went. “So the direct approach worked.”

  “Yeah.” Wolfie spun the ball on his fingertips for an expert few seconds. He looked taller, fuller-faced than the last time Andrew had seen him, which was about a week ago. “Sometime we could go out together.”

  “Who?”

  “Me and Tina, you and Dash.” He dribbled the ball in a tight circle, darting Andrew a sly glance.

  “Em. I don’t think that’s very likely.”

  “How come?”

  “I just don’t.” Not today, but sometime soon, he and Wolfie needed to talk.

  “How come? You still like her, don’t you?”

  “I have to go in.”

  “You do, right? So just go get her. It’s easy.”

  “Thank you, Ann Landers.”

  Wolfie’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Who?”

  Andrew wanted to put his hand on his head, the way Dash did. Brush his bristly scalp and feel the hard bones in the delicate skull. “A wise old advice giver,” he said. “Very famous and rich.”

  “Yeah? So, see, that make two of us. You ought to listen up.” He whirled and ran down the flagstone walk, faked a jump shot against a utility pole. “Later, man!”

  “Later! Have a—” He was already too far away to hear. “Nice date,” Andrew finished weakly and went in the house.

  Upstairs, he got the Pepto-Bismol out of the medicine cabinet and slugged down a dose without measuring. His face in the mirror gave him a queasy start. He looked, if possible, worse than he felt. He stuck out his tongue, pulled one eyelid down, felt the glands under his jaw. Symptoms of heart attack included nausea. Restlessness and apprehension as well. With a so-called silent heart attack, there was no chest pain at all.

  “I’m just coming down with something,” he assured his reflection. Stomach flu, a virus. No reason to call Dr. Kim and push up the date for his appointment. If he dropped dead between now and next Thursday, Dash would be sorry. That was something.

  The ache in his middle returned when he lay down on the bed. He tried sitting up on pillows, but then his neck hurt. Every position he tried was either painful or uncomfortable. Chloe had one of those back-pil
low things with arms; he got up and went in her room.

  He could hardly tell she was gone; except for her clothes and her computer, most of her stuff was still here. She took after him: She traveled light and she wasn’t sentimental.

  He thought of their last conversation, a phone call yesterday in which she’d told him he needed to get back into marriage counseling with Mom. She was quite adamant about it. He’d teased her that one freshman psych course had turned her into an expert. And yet today, with Dash, he’d made the same argument, that time was passing and they weren’t doing anything, that they needed to be more assertive, get the ball rolling again. If nothing else, he’d liked the way he sounded, like a man who meant what he said and knew what he was talking about. He couldn’t be sure what Dash had made of it, though. She’d sounded…disengaged. Uninterested. Weary of something.

  It made sense for her to come home and him to move into Tim’s place for the summer. He started a mental list of what he would take. He felt monastic, as if his possessions weighed him down. What was the smallest suitcase he could get away with? Simplify. Really, why take more than one change of clothes and some underwear? His laptop and some books, that’s all he needed. Why was Dash the one who’d gotten to slough things off and live at the cabin? He felt like camping out, like living in a Quonset hut. Minimize. Peace and quiet hadn’t worked very well, but only because they weren’t peaceful and quiet enough.

  He dozed off.

  When he awoke, it was pitch-dark and he had no idea where he was. Oh—Chloe’s room. He staggered into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and swigged down another capful of Pepto-Bismol. Wandered downstairs. The phone hadn’t rung, but the light was blinking on the answering machine. Someone must’ve called while he was outside with Wolfie.

  Dash’s voice. “I wanted to tell you something,” he heard against a background of high static—she was driving. She sounded wrought-up, on edge. He played the message again. “Let’s talk,” it ended. “I really want to.”