The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  Telling myself that Elle would want me to save this baby didn’t change the fact that I also knew she’d be appalled she was in that bed unable to control her bladder or her bowels. There was nothing pretty or dignified about the way she was dying. And it didn’t matter that I believed she would throw herself at the base of the Space Shuttle at launch time if it meant saving this child. I’d made the bed she had to lie in. Staying with her was my duty. “I’m sleeping now and then,” I said.

  “Here and there doesn’t cut it. You look like death. Listen, Matt, we should trach her and put in a PEG. Clint will do it. Do you want him to give you the risks and benefits talk or can you just sign it?” Phil set a consent in front of me for the tracheotomy and a PEG, a surgically placed feeding tube.

  I drew the consent closer and scribbled my signature.

  Phil nodded. “Go shower and shave, and when you come back, it will be done. You are not staying to watch.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “By the way, I upped Mark Nguyen’s dexamethasone. His cerebral edema was worsening. Thanks for getting the ball rolling with the MRI.”

  “Sure.” I stood, and for a moment the room wobbled.

  “You need to sleep. Grab a few hours in the on-call room. You want me to write you a script?”

  “No.” I needed to keep a clear head. When I returned an hour later, the room seemed even more silent. Elle’s mouth no longer bore the elephant’s tusk of an endotracheal tube. Instead, they’d cut open her throat and inserted a trach. Her beautiful neck, the hollow where I’d kissed her so tenderly, now hosted a tube.

  I pulled a picture of her from my wallet. As always, her eyes glimmered as she smiled back at me. I couldn’t remember a single instance when she didn’t look like she knew something I didn’t, and the mystery of what always held me captive.

  But not now. Now she didn’t react at all and her eyes were—vacant. I cleansed her cracked lips with water and smoothed Vaseline on them. “It’s all right, Peep,” I said. But the words were lies, and I said them not for her benefit but for mine.

  10

  Day 4

  I slipped out an employee exit and left the hospital without the press or the Pro-Lifers accosting me. I walked fast, urgently, barely taking note of the adjacent park. The hospital is situated on a hill that overlooks the western end of Portland, and on a clear day the White Mountains are visible. Today the air was heavy with the promise of an afternoon thundershower, and still, it felt good to be outside and moving. After a few minutes I slowed down and breathed and looked around.

  Although it was only mid-August, a few stray maples were masquerading in autumn colors. I bent down and picked up a prematurely fallen maple leaf with red and gold striations. It was beautiful and sad, a little like Elle. Damn, I saw her everywhere. My exhaustion was making it difficult to focus.

  I was supposed to meet Jake to discuss the case. Despite his aversion to hospitals, he and his wife lived nearby, and when I reached the far end of the Promenade, I saw them standing arm in arm and staring out at the view. Both were dressed in muted shades of linen, casual and neutral. Yvette nearly disappeared into him. Back at Columbia, I thought Jake set his sights on her because of her stature; she made him look tall—a short guy with a shorter girlfriend. She was pretty enough, but always so quiet she made me uncomfortable.

  Elle once described Yvette as “diminutive.” At the time I raised an eyebrow at Elle. Anyone else would have said “short” or “tiny” or maybe “petite,” but no, Elle summoned a less common adjective. “Think about it,” she said. “She’s like a perfectly proportioned doll. Even her voice is small.”

  “You never struck me as one of those catty women,” I said.

  “I’m not,” Elle said, stretching her back as we finished our morning run. “They’re a perfect example of how opposites attract. She’s shy. He’s not. She’s sweet. He’s … never mind. I’m not going to win this one. I do sound like a catty woman.”

  I pulled her to me and tipped her chin up. “Are we opposites?”

  Elle cocked her head to one side and measured my question. She slipped her arms around me. “Well, the attraction is strong, but no, we’re kindred spirits and need each other to be whole.”

  Looking over at Jake and his wife nestled together, I experienced the sharp pang of envy. Whether they loved each other the same way—or in some different way than Elle and I did—they still had each other. All I had now was loneliness. And its weight bore down on me with such heaviness I wondered if I could even lift my feet to return to the hospital and to Elle.

  Before I could decide whether I should interrupt them, Jake waved, and then Yvette looped her arm through his as they strolled toward me. He shook my hand, and she barely made eye contact. “Bring Matt to dinner,” she said to Jake.

  I shook my head. The last thing I needed was to make polite dinner conversation. “Thank you, but I have plans,” I said.

  She smiled, but there was pity in her expression as she reached out and touched my elbow. It was the warmest gesture she’d ever made toward me in all the years I’d known her. “I’ll let you boys talk,” Yvette said. They kissed and she wandered away.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, Jake dove into his plans. After talking to Phil, he’d decided he would not make a good witness for our side.

  “Would any of Elle’s friends tell the judge that all Elle wanted was a baby?” he asked.

  I told him about Keisha and that she’d been on sabbatical down in New Zealand. “But she’ll be home in a couple of days.”

  “I need to talk to her before Friday. I have an appointment with your priest after he does a christening tomorrow afternoon. The Church wasn’t much use in the Schiavo case, but then, she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “You realize we aren’t devout Catholics,” I said. Even Elle only attended Mass a few times each year.

  “You need to start going to services, if only for appearances. When were you there last?”

  The last time I’d been inside a church was six months before. “Dylan’s funeral,” I said. “We had a Mass for him. Just the family.”

  “That’s too long,” he said. “Catholics have Last Rites. Has she had Last Rites?” It was like he was groping for anything. Even Last Rites were a ploy to him.

  “No,” I said. “Her name is Elle. I didn’t even think about it. And by the way, it’s called Anointing of the Sick, not Last Rites.”

  “Fine,” he said a little more respectfully. “We need to establish that you and Elle are practicing Catholics. So it would be good to have the priest come in. I know you were never very religious, but you two were married by a priest.”

  “Elle wanted a church wedding.” And she might want to be anointed, so for her sake, not Jake’s, I would call the priest. “She went to Mass occasionally—without me—usually.”

  “Has she been to church since the funeral?” Jake gestured toward a park bench.

  I dropped onto the weathered park bench and looked out at the view, but fog was rolling up the embankment. “Good Friday. She always did the Stations-of-the-Cross thing, something she did with her mother.” Something Alice made a big deal about. Even all these years after her mother’s death, Elle still attended church on Good Friday and then she put fresh flowers on Alice’s grave.

  “My associate told me priests are sticklers about saying someone is a member of the congregation if they aren’t. I need to be able to put him on the stand.” Jake sat beside me and took a rubber band off a stack of index cards and started flipping through them.

  The funny thing was everything he said about Catholicism was off by a degree. I never heard a Catholic call it a congregation. It was a parish. It was Mass, not services. Reluctantly, I realized these things, these Catholic terms, were ingrained in my identity; I was tied to Sunday mornings, the Eucharist, and bowing my head during the Nicene Creed: by the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary … no matter how much I resisted.

  “Moving
on, when you testify,” Jake said, “for expedience, I’ll ask you about her neurological status instead of asking those questions of Phil. You’re as much of an expert as he is. You’ll tell everyone that a person in her condition is incapable of experiencing pain. Or awareness.”

  I nodded. She wasn’t in pain. She wasn’t afraid. I kept trying to reassure myself.

  “If they make any case that your testimony is tainted by your closeness to the situation, I’ll get another neurologist or neurosurgeon to back you up. Then you’ll summarize your relationship with Elle and tell the court about your efforts to have a baby, about how she still wanted to have a child even after multiple miscarriages. That will say something about what she’d want done on her behalf.” Jake flipped through three more index cards. “Given the judge’s abrupt dismissal of the fact other states revoke advanced directives during pregnancy, I won’t use that issue for now.”

  Although I believed Elle would want me to keep her on life support, I wasn’t certain how I felt about the blanket revocation in other states. I had to think about that one, but I wondered how many women were aware. “Can you ask the judge to ban the press from the courtroom? Our life together doesn’t belong on the front page,” I said.

  He leaned toward me. “I know you’re a private man, but—their presence is good for our case. The more this is in the public eye, the harder it will be to ignore the baby’s plight. Politicians may even rally and pass a statute about pregnant women and advanced directives. It’s true the judge won’t decide this case on public opinion. But he’ll want to look good; he’ll want his rulings and procedures to be above reproach. He doesn’t want to get overturned on appeal. This could work in our favor or against us because I want him to exercise a measure of judicial activism if we petition for fetal guardianship. I have it on good authority Judge Wheeler’s been lobbying for an appointment to the court of appeals. The better news is the people he’s talking to lean to the right. Unfortunately, that means they are constitutionally conservative, too. We just have to hope Pro-Life trumps that.”

  Jake flipped to an index card with a calendar printed on it. “In three weeks, Elle will be in her second trimester. My understanding is most miscarriages happen in the first three months.”

  “Not with her autoimmune disorder. With APS, miscarriages tend to come later.” I swallowed. One was at twelve weeks, one at fourteen—and one at nineteen. Then Dylan’s stillbirth. “You haven’t interviewed Elle’s OB/GYN yet, have you?”

  “No. Dr. Clarke is coming to my office Monday morning.”

  “I’m more concerned about Elle’s overall status, her life support. The longer she’s on it, the likelier other complications will develop,” I said.

  A couple of women, holding a bouquet of Mylar get-well balloons, strolled down the walk. Jake stood and beckoned them. “These are some people I want you to meet, Matt. This is Sherry O’Reilly and Patricia Kent from Children from Conception. Are you familiar with that organization?”

  I drew a deep breath as I rose. “I told you. This isn’t about your cause.”

  “If you could just give us a minute of your time, Dr. Beaulieu.” The woman who spoke had the round cheeks of a retired nursery school teacher. “If you just listen, you’ll see how this can help your wife and preborn child.”

  I turned away from them, intent on holding my temper. Yet after stomping less than ten feet, I spun back. “For thirty or forty years the antiabortion movement has made a spectacle of their continued inability to overturn laws. Why the hell do you think you can help?”

  “Because it’s always easier to see an isolated situation and empathize with it,” the one who looked like a nursery school teacher said. “People talk about a woman’s rights, and it seems to me that in this case, a woman has lost her rights. If she hadn’t fallen, your wife wouldn’t have had an abortion, would she?”

  “No. That’s not the issue, though,” I said.

  “Sure it is. There’s a lot of chatter about your situation in Pro-Life circles already. What we want to do is organize, form a comprehensive plan that will include everything from contacting legislators to prayer groups.”

  “We can rally the best legal minds to look for a loophole,” said the other woman.

  I glared at Jake. “The thing is,” I said, “you’re all begging the question. This isn’t about what Elle would want done if she were healthy. The case is about what she would have wanted done if she were brain-dead.” Is brain-dead, I thought.

  “Yes,” I said to the women. “I believe she would have wanted me to save the baby. So go ahead, pray. But stay the hell away from the court. You are only going to aggravate the judge. That’s what happened when that woman called out in court.”

  Then I directed my attention—or was it wrath?—at Jake. “You saw Wheeler’s face. And as you pointed out, he’s the one who will decide. And the fact is, I don’t want any part of your circus. This is about my wife and my baby.”

  Two blocks later, with Jake on my heels, I stopped and faced him. “You ever ambush me like that again, you’re fired. Fuck it. Maybe I should fire you right now.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” he said. “You want to save one life. And we can, but quite possibly we could crush legalized abortion, too.”

  “Last warning,” I yelled, not caring who might overhear. “I will not allow you to use Elle to serve your agenda. Take my terms or leave me alone.”

  Jake shook his head. “Matt, Matt, Matt,” he said as if I were a naive child. “You think you can find someone more prepared than I am? Or maybe you’re thinking you can waltz into the courtroom and earnestly ask the judge to keep Elle on life support all by yourself?”

  “That’s not what I said.” Although the thought, however fleeting, had occurred to me.

  “Grow up,” Jake said. “This is the law. It works on precedents. And statutes. And obscure rulings. Case law. We need to give the judge a reason to keep Elle on life support when she so clearly stated she didn’t want to ever be put on machines. I’m acting in your best interest. I’m trying to avail you of every legal opportunity. Are you really so blind you can’t see what I’m doing?”

  I studied him with his puffed-up ego and his arrogant superiority. As angry as I was, I wondered if he could be right, that I was naive. Saving Elle’s baby—Elle’s?—ours—would take a medical miracle. Was I being realistic? Probably not. And yet I was willing to do the one thing that terrified my wife. And I was worried about our lack of privacy? I was worried about making this a circus? Which of us, Jake or me, was balancing on a thinner tightrope? I didn’t give a damn about Roe v. Wade. I didn’t believe in forcing women to bear children they didn’t want. But saving the baby in Elle’s womb wasn’t about an unwanted child.

  “Come on,” Jake said. “Let’s go to your office and discuss how we’re going to save your baby.” He held up his hands as if he were about to fend me off. “I have my priorities straight. This case. How about you? What are you willing to do?”

  I swallowed, trying to moisten my very dry throat.

  He tapped my shoulder and pointed toward my office, and we started down the path.

  Jake lifted the framed photograph of Elle from my desk. “She looks angelic in this one.”

  She could look like an angel, but that was too simplistic a description for someone who could banter with an unmatched sarcastic wit or enrapture me in bed. Her depth and compassion simmered with a kaleidoscope of other attributes and a few faults: backseat driver, never put a damned thing away, and she tended to laugh at her own jokes. And because she could count cards in her sleep, she cheated at twenty-one. I loved her. I would always love her. Our relationship was no one’s business but ours. I didn’t want to justify anything to Jake. Or to a judge. Or those do-gooders in the park. And especially not to a courtroom full of the media. But to some degree Jake was right: to win the case I had to put up with the trappings.

  “She could be both angel and devil,” I said, wearing a path down the
newly installed Berber. I’d always been a pacer, and away from Elle’s hospital bed, I was feeling trapped and nervous.

  He glared pointedly at me. Even when we’d roomed together at Columbia, my restlessness annoyed him, and I suppose we knew each other well enough from those four years that I could read him without words.

  “Fine.” I dropped into a chair.

  Jake pulled out his handy stack of index cards again. “You look terrible.”

  “You said that yesterday.”

  “Well, you still look terrible.” He nodded as if to say he’d expressed the appropriate amount of concern for his client, and now he could move on. He shifted both in his seat and in his direction. “Let me get a couple of things out of the way. Did Elle have a will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring me a copy. I need to see it. To the best of your ability, give me a rundown of her assets.”

  “We made wills mostly to designate a guardian when Elle was pregnant—the last time. My brother Mike and his wife were supposed to be guardians.”

  He scribbled something down. “And her assets?”

  “The farm was in Elle’s family for more than a century, so it’s in her name, but it goes to me in the event of her death, to our children if we both died. If we both died, and in the absence of children, it goes back to her brother. We have the usual life insurance policies, and some savings, stocks, CDs, but not a fortune. I’ve only been in private practice for four years. I’m still paying off school loans. And Phil and I needed to invest in the practice, purchase medical equipment and office supplies. We decided to buy the building.”

  Jake looked up from his cards. “What about her income?”

  “People think because being an astronaut is prestigious that the money is there, but no. NASA doesn’t pay a hell of a lot. People work there because they dream about quasars and discovering microbes on Mars. She isn’t tenured at Bowdoin yet. Wasn’t tenured. We’re not rolling in the dough, but we’re frugal, and we put a little away. We have joint savings accounts.”