The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  My foot went through the drywall.

  Ah, shit. I shook my foot loose and stood, feeling for the light. Shit.

  I tried to bend the Sheetrock back into place, but it crumbled. I crept out of the bathroom and straight into Jillian Waters, the nurse manager, who was staring at me.

  “I—uh, put a hole in the wall.”

  She stuck her head through the bathroom door and then turned to me. “Nice one. Are you okay?”

  I struggled to find my voice, but it cracked when I said, “Yeah.”

  “Listen, go take a walk. I’ll let maintenance know. Not that you did it, but well … Do you want me to call someone for you?”

  “No. No thanks.”

  I trolled down one long corridor after another, hit a staircase, walked up a flight, circled the loop of Orthopedics, hit the staircase, up another flight to Telemetry, repeat, Pediatrics. I was halfway around when I saw the twelve-year-old boy I’d operated on the night before Elle’s accident. He was sitting in a wheelchair, and his parents were pushing him in my direction.

  I stopped and feigned a professional smile. “Hello. You probably don’t remember me. I’m Dr. Beaulieu. I did your surgery.”

  The boy raised his hand in a half wave.

  Mrs. Nguyen squatted, eye level with her son. “Dr. B. said you a strong boy.”

  The boy nodded, twisted his lips, but his tongue struggled to wrap itself around his garbled words. I couldn’t understand him.

  The father held out his hand and shook mine. “Dr. Grey is very happy with Mark’s progress. The speech therapist said he could start on Monday.”

  “Good, very good,” I said.

  “We’re sorry to hear about your wife’s accident. We saw you there, in ICU room next to Mark’s, but you looked busy,” Mrs. Nguyen said.

  I nodded. “I haven’t been seeing patients, but I’m happy you’re doing better, Mark.” And I was glad he was doing well, but at the same time I didn’t really want to be there talking to them.

  Mark waved again.

  I waved back this time. “You’re doing great, kiddo. I’ll come by later,” I said, although I had no immediate plans of taking up my normal life or making rounds.

  “Doctor, Mark says he’s seeing double,” the father said.

  Damn. I’d only stumbled onto Pediatrics. I wanted to walk away, let someone else handle it. “Give me a few minutes to chase down an ophthalmoscope, and I’ll meet you in his room.”

  Handmade get-well cards decorated Mark’s wall, drawn by a younger sibling, a sister, judging by the smiley faces, sunshine, and purple daisies. Or were those echinacea? Elle loved echinacea.

  Mark’s mother plugged the boy’s IV pump into the wall outlet while I examined him. Funny how the mothers always did that, jumped right in, learning whatever they needed to know to take care of their children.

  That’s when I realized that the baby inside Elle would never have a mother to do those things for him. I’d have to do them. I’d have to be father and mother.

  Mark’s neuro exam was good. Cognition was difficult to assess because of his speech difficulties. He had aphasia, a neurologically based language impairment, receptive as well as expressive, from what I could tell. When I asked him to point to his mother, he failed, and her eyes welled with tears, but he probably didn’t know what either the word point or the word mother meant. He might have known who she was.

  I squatted, eye level with the boy. “We know you’re having trouble understanding us, but I think you’ll improve.” I smiled, hoping that my tone and my smile would reassure him. I glanced up at his father. “How’d you know Mark was seeing double?”

  “Earlier today, he said, two, two, hai bà m hai cha. And he reached for my hand, next to my hand.”

  “You speak Vietnamese at home?”

  Mrs. Nguyen leaned toward me. “But we speak English, too.”

  “Before, when I first met you in the hall, was he speaking Vietnamese?”

  “He said hello,” she said.

  “Okay. And now he’s responded with a mishmash of the two. In Vietnamese, ask him if he can point to his father,” I said.

  She did, and he pointed appropriately. Relief flooded her eyes.

  “Good. He understands,” I said. “There’s still cerebral edema, swelling in his brain, but I would expect this to improve with time, with therapy. In the meantime, I’ll let Dr. Grey know.”

  When I returned to the ICU, Phil was examining Elle.

  “Did something happen?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, pulling off his gloves. “The nurse wanted me to take a look at her incision. I removed one of the sutures and put a steri-strip on it. It’s nothing.”

  I peeked at the occipital incision and nodded. Innocuous erythema. Okay. I needed to refocus. “The Nguyen kid is having double-vision issues on top of his aphasia. His exam is in keeping with your last progress note,” I said.

  “I’ll order an MRI.”

  “Already done. I ordered it stat. They were taking him down when I left.”

  “Okay. I’ll check the results. About Elle, you didn’t like what I was saying in the conference room—to your lawyer.”

  “No, not much.” I rubbed my eyes. “Clinically, I understand why you said what you did. The odds are against us. Against her. Against getting a live baby out of this. So? Don’t you get it? I have to try.” I shook my head at him. “Go take a look at the Nguyen boy. Just go.”

  Phil slogged out, glancing back at me.

  Damn it.

  “Hey, Peep. Remember that kid I operated on the day before the accident—instead of spending those hours with you? He’s doing pretty well, considering, but so you know, I would never have left you for a minute if I’d known we were almost out of time.”

  The silence, punctuated by the hiss of the ventilator and beeps of the hospital, condemned my pretense. “I miss you, Elle. Jesus, I miss you.”

  I headed back to the conference room. The intensive care doc, Clint Everest, was still answering Jake’s questions. He was one of those lanky guys with little to no hair and didn’t care who knew it. Instead of a comb-over, he buzzed it down to nubs. Although we were about the same age, he gave the impression he’d done it all and seen it all. Board certified in both intensive care medicine and immunology, he always took the autoimmune cases, lupus, Guillain-Barre, Addison’s. He was giving Jake a primer in Elle’s autoimmune issues, which were relatively minor, except when she was pregnant—like now.

  I knew the material and didn’t feel patient enough to listen in on the remedial version. “If you need to talk to me, I’ll be with Elle,” I said.

  “It’s getting late,” Jake replied. “I’ll come in to talk to you in the morning.”

  I wandered back into Elle’s room and took the seat next to her bed. Her hand was starting to gnarl into a contracture. In the past I’d written orders for physical therapists to come and deal with things like this, delegating the neurological sequelae away. But not now. I couldn’t just look elsewhere. Elle’s brain had sustained too much damage for any neurosurgeon to repair, but I could try to keep her body healthy. I pulled open the drawer of the bedside table, rummaged for the hospital-supplied lotion, took her hand in my own, and began working the muscles for her.

  In one of the deeper catnaps I’d slipped into, I heard my name being called. “Dr. Beaulieu?” Deb was one of the charge nurses on the night shift and one of the sharpest nurses whose path I’d ever crossed.

  I shook my head awake. Elle was still beside me. “Yeah. You know, my name is Matt.”

  “Right,” Deb said. “There’s a woman on the telephone. Keisha? She says she’s in New Zealand, and she can’t get through to your cell but that you’d want to talk to her.”

  I was already out of the chair and on my way to the nurses’ station while Deb finished her story about being afraid the woman was another reporter.

  “No, it’s okay,” I said.

  The unit secretary pointed at a line and I pi
cked up. “Keisha?”

  There was a moment of delay before Keisha’s soft Bahamian accent came through the line. “Matthew, tell me the news reports are wrong.”

  I sank into the chair and stared into Elle’s dimly lit room. “She fell,” I said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what you’ve heard.”

  A whimper on the other side of the world can sound as cataclysmic as two planets colliding. “Say she’s not really dead.”

  I exhaled and told Elle’s dearest friend about the baby.

  9 x

  Day 4

  Hank stood in front of me, stroking Elle’s forearm. She’d never resembled her father. She looked like her mother, fair-skinned and fine-boned, while he was dark and rugged. Rather, he used to be dark before his hair thinned and turned gray, but that only served to make him look more distinguished. Hank had always carried himself with certainty, pressed, ready, and confident. At least that’s how he appeared for the last twenty years.

  Unlike how he was—before he stopped drinking. His world was different then, rumpled and edgy.

  Today Hank’s eyes shifted back and forth, although his clothes were still sharply creased. He could neither maintain eye contact with me nor keep his voice steady when he looked at Elle, but he told me he’d been on a binge these past few days and that he’d drunk enough to make him pass out in a bar and land in a Brunswick hospital. They released him sober and repentant. He turned to me with downcast eyes. “I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry. I know she’ll be disappointed in me.”

  “She’d tell you she loved you. Just don’t repeat the mistake,” I said, squelching my anger.

  “I fucked up again,” he said.

  Again. Yes. Again. For a couple of years, he’d fallen deeply into the throes of alcoholism—when Elle’s mother was sick and for a while afterward. We were losing Alice, but at fifteen, Elle was trying to cope with her own grief, take care of Christopher, and deal with her drunken father. Those were times all of us forgave, although none of us forgot. He’d made matters worse for everyone.

  But he got sober, and in many ways he became someone I deeply admired, working against his demons, helping out others in AA. And he became my father-in-law and, in spirit, a father to me.

  He wet his lips. “Is it true? What the papers say? She’s pregnant?”

  I nodded.

  “And now you’re fighting for her life in court?” He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for my reply as if he were praying.

  I considered my answer. “I’m fighting for the baby’s life, Hank.” For a second I could see Dylan. My son would be six months old now, babbling and sucking his thumb. I fought for him, and I failed. For Elle’s sake, this time had to be different.

  “I’ll help you,” Hank said. “Do you have a good lawyer?”

  “Jake Sutter. He’s excellent. I went to school with him.”

  Hank grimaced. “The one who was at your wedding? Short guy, gravelly voice? The one who never stops talking politics?”

  “That would be him. He argued a Pro-Life case in front of the Supreme Court when he was just a few years out of law—”

  “Did he win?”

  “No, but it was a five–four vote, which means he convinced some of the justices.”

  “Is he expensive? Is he charging you?”

  “Both. But it doesn’t matter; I have to do it.” I mumbled something more about how this would bankrupt me, but that money didn’t mean anything. Not now.

  “I have money, Matt.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “I can pay him. Who knows? By the time the baby is born, maybe Elle will wake up.” Hank pointed at her. “So we understand one another. I’m fighting for my baby’s life.”

  “I appreciate your help, Hank. Really, I do. And I’d like you on my side, but listen …” I struggled to find the words. I needed to be clear, but I didn’t want to send him back to the nearest bar. “I’d give anything if Elle would wake up, but she won’t.” I hung my head, visualizing the trauma Phil described in Elle’s brain. Not in some patient’s. In my wife’s.

  She would never wake up no matter how much I wanted her to, no matter how Hank denied the reality of her condition, but this wasn’t the time to dissuade my father-in-law of his delusions. The house was in Elle’s name. Her grandfather had left it to her. I would have to ask Jake if I could sell the house if I only had temporary guardianship. Yeah, I was a hotshot brain surgeon, but I was still paying off my school loans. So money, in the pragmatic sense, did mean something: the power to fight. But more than that, I needed someone on my side. “I might need your help, depending on how long this goes on. The medical expenses, Jake’s fees. I hate to ask. I won’t ask unless I can’t swing it on my own.” I could probably get loans, barter with the hospital. I’d figure it out.

  “She’s my daughter,” he said, “and I can afford to take care of her. Having money has only meant one thing to me: I could provide for my family.”

  “That’s supposed to be my job, taking care of her.” We had always taken care of each other. Elle. Me.

  “I was lucky in real estate. Just lucky. So shut up. We’re a family. The bills will get paid,” he said.

  One of Elle’s monitors gonged. Her pulse oximeter dropped to eighty and then to seventy-five as her color deteriorated to an ashen gray. I increased the oxygen coming from her ventilator, then I picked up a stethoscope and listened to her lungs.

  One of her nurses rushed in.

  “She needs suctioning,” I said as my thoughts raced. The constant cacophony and moment-to-moment crises of intensive care were familiar, and I understood that endotracheal tubes frequently clogged up and needed this type of housekeeping, but Elle wasn’t a patient to me. She was my wife. So I watched the nurse’s face for cues. Would I need to step in and replace Elle’s endotracheal tube? Or maybe I ought to call in the intensive care doc.

  The second hand made a full and slow rotation on the clock before Elle’s oxygen level climbed to an acceptable level, and finally I breathed again.

  The nurse looked up at me and smiled. “She’s okay.”

  “Right,” I said, noting that Hank had backed away and was gripping the counter by the sink, looking paler and older than he had moments before. “That kind of thing happens all the time,” I said, hoping he couldn’t tell how worried I was.

  “Matt, I want a drink,” he said. Before I had time to protest, he said, “But instead, I’m going to call my sponsor. Again. After which, I’m still going to need a drink.”

  I got in his face. “Don’t. I need you sober. I need your help to get through this. And not because of the money.”

  He rubbed his eyes, smearing away the tears. “She’s really going to die, isn’t she?”

  “Maybe the baby will survive,” I said. I patted his shoulder, and he cried the same way I’d seen him cry in Elle’s arms when her mother died.

  I didn’t cry with him. I couldn’t fall apart in front of my colleagues. But inside, another layer of my denial dissolved as I thought about Hank’s words: “She’s really going to die, isn’t she?”

  No, Hank, I thought. She’s already gone. We already lost her.

  Phil walked in for morning rounds and handed me a small cooler packed with food from Melanie, apple slices and a PB&J sandwich with the crust cut off. He raised an eyebrow. “You can kind of tell we have preschoolers in the house. Here,” he said, passing me the newspaper he’d had tucked under his arm.

  The headline of the Portland Press Herald read:

  PREGNANT ASTRONAUT BRAIN-DEAD

  Family Waging Court Battle

  Phil leaned against the wall as I skimmed the article. My weary brain interpreted the journalist’s words with flat surprise. She reported the courtroom events with little to no embellishments, and I was grateful for that minor indulgence. Still, the translation of Elle’s life into black-and-white newsprint brought a concrete texture, heavy, solid, and subject to popular discussion.
<
br />   “Damn,” I said.

  “It’s in the Boston Globe, too. Probably in every major paper. The networks are going for a more sensational version.”

  “Which is?”

  “This is being done against Elle’s will. Playing up her brother’s contention. The Pro-Life pundits are spewing their vitriol with equal intensity. Turn on the news; you’ll see.”

  I rubbed my neck, glancing at the darkened television mounted to the wall. “It’s not unexpected.”

  Phil drew a deep breath. “You should go home and sleep today. This is my fault. If I hadn’t insisted on doing the surgery—”

  “Would you stop? Just stop and think. If you didn’t do the surgery, the baby would be dead, too. The only reason I’m doing this is for the baby.”

  Phil looked away. “I’m sorry this is happening,” he said. “You didn’t want me to operate at first. I feel responsible you’re in this situation. And the media …” He flicked the newspaper.

  “Damn it, Phil. I said stop. The news involvement is unfortunate. Jake told me to expect the case might get ugly.” The exposure was collateral damage. More and more the war analogy made sense to me. I was at war, and at stake was saving what was left of Elle: the baby. I realized I was a desperate man, and a desperate man is a dangerous one—and a reckless one. I didn’t care if my reputation or my livelihood fell apart. I didn’t care if it killed me or destroyed my relationship with my mother and my brother-in-law. I had nothing to salvage if this baby didn’t survive. I was clinging to the baby as if it could save me instead of the other way around.

  Phil shifted his feet. “Okay. I won’t try to change your mind, but you look exhausted. She’s stable. Her blood gases are good. Why don’t you go home and sleep for a while. You haven’t really slept since it happened. Maybe that will help.”

  The concept of sleep was a seductive one even if I resented Phil’s insinuation that I wasn’t thinking clearly. I also knew he was right—I wasn’t thinking clearly—but I was scared to leave Elle, afraid someone would turn off her life support in my absence. I’m sure I seemed irrational to Phil. Admittedly, I usually believed in the quality of life being as important as its longevity. And I knew I might not approve of my stance in his shoes.