by Abby Maslin
The doctor is doing his best to explain everything in the simplest terms, so I am nodding rapidly, assuring myself that I’m understanding it all just fine. It’s only neurosurgery. No big deal.
Brain surgery, check. Acute subdural hematoma, check. Fractured skull, check. Skull removal and potential brain swelling, check, check. Comatose state, check. Unsure if he’ll wake up, check. Next seventy-two hours are critical. . . .
I know I ought to pay better attention, but I am anxious for Dr. Kalhorn to get to the end of his speech, the part where he tells us if TC made it out of surgery or not. My brain is not moving quickly enough to recognize he’s already made it perfectly clear from his explanation that TC is alive. At least for now.
“Seventy-two hours?” I repeat.
“Yes.” He nods gently. “Usually within that time we see some response from the patient and they start to wake up.”
Dr. Kalhorn is kind and immeasurably patient with us. He offers to answer questions, but I am stumped, still trying to put together this mental jigsaw puzzle. So, somehow TC hurt his head. And then his brain was bleeding. And then this man cut it open. But how do you even do that? What kind of tool makes it safe to cut open someone’s head? My mind is so wrapped up in the brass tacks of such a surgery that the phrase brain injury is not yet fully formed in my consciousness.
I can’t help but think how fascinated TC would be by all this brain talk. A few years ago, we were passing time in an airport bookstore when he stumbled upon a book called The Brain That Changes Itself and became immediately hooked on neuroscience. More than once he’s mentioned it as a possible career change.
“Of course, I’ll have to go to medical school,” he would often say with a mischievous grin. “I’ll do it later, though, you know, like when our kids are in college and we have some money.”
TC’s ambition has always been difficult to rein in—the medical school joke nearly gave me a heart attack—but ambition is also an undeniably attractive quality. To my husband, life is all about the constant evolution: exploring new places, developing new interests, always pushing to become something more than he was yesterday.
When we first got together, it was dizzying, trying to take in the world as quickly and skillfully as TC could. He wanted to do and try everything: this art museum, that cooking class, some Rosetta Stone Spanish course before a trip to Costa Rica. I was intoxicated by his curious energy but daunted by it as well. How could I ever keep up?
I remember fingering the titles on his beaten IKEA bookshelf during those first months. Khalil Gibran. Franz Kafka. Vonnegut, Chomsky, Kerouac, and Eggers. If thinking was a competitive sport, TC was going for gold.
“I didn’t read anything until I got to college,” he admitted as I eyed his collection. “And then all of a sudden I was at Bucknell, surrounded by all these prep school kids who had already read everything, and I felt like I had to catch up. I didn’t know where to start, so I sort of just dove into the classics.”
I wished for some of that motivating curiosity, envious of the way it jump-started TC. He reminded me of my sister and all the ways I knew my parents looked upon Bethany with admiration. For although they’d tried hard to light intellectual fires within us both, I’d been resistant to their teachings—more interested in people, relationships, and emotions than the content of any history book.
Our parents have begun asking Dr. Kalhorn questions, and I am nodding seriously as if I understand what the hell we are talking about, realizing again that in TC’s absence, I’m going to need to harness some of his maturity. Although I may not be absorbing the content of the conversation, I’m doing what I do best: reading people. Making copious mental notes about the doctor’s body language and subtle inflections of voice.
The things I notice about Dr. Kalhorn have nothing to do with his words. As he speaks, his eyes reflect genuine compassion. His voice achieves that careful balance of authority and empathy. I find myself wanting him to respect me as much as I’ve grown to respect him over the course of the conversation. Act intelligently, Abby. Ask some questions.
However, the only real question I want answered is “When can I see my husband?,” which I blurt out as soon as there is a pause.
“They’re moving him up to ICU right now,” responds Dr. Kalhorn. “But I want to warn you that he’s going to look quite different.”
I nod in acceptance but quickly brush aside his last remark. I don’t doubt TC will look different. Jesus, he’s just had his head cut open. I couldn’t care less how he looks. I just need to be with him, in the same room. Anywhere there is proof he is safe. Still alive. Still with me.
* * *
The second-floor waiting room, the one intended to serve families of patients in the ICU, is nothing like the private waiting room downstairs. It is loud and crowded, so our family convenes by the elevators in the hallway instead. Everyone is now on their cell phones, trying to organize the crew of family members and friends who have not yet heard the news.
I dial in my personal arsenal of strength: Bethany and Claire. The timing could not be worse. Bethany also lives in D.C., but she left a few days ago for a six-week work trip to Portland, Oregon. She’s been communicating with me via text throughout the morning and is now trying to book the next flight back. Claire, my lifelong best friend, was out boating on the Chesapeake Bay with her husband and kids this morning and is now trying to get ashore so she can jump in the car and get here. My godparents are already driving, abruptly ending their weeklong vacation in Rhode Island. Ruth and Don make calls to TC’s grandmother and relatives and his best friend, Ilya, TC’s freshman-year roommate from Bucknell. Everyone is in overdrive. Must . . . Not . . . Stop . . . Moving . . . , I think, as I observe the storm of activity engulfing me.
I excuse myself to the nearby bathroom and wash my hands, taking a moment to lean into the sink and examine myself in the mirror. The face staring back at me is exhausted and drained of color. The hours I’ve spent crying are clearly visible, turning my eyes a translucent shade of green. My face looks worn but deceptively calm. In fact, I look like myself, a startling revelation since I no longer recognize the details of my life. I close my heavy eyelids and attempt another deep drink of air, but my lungs still won’t cooperate.
When I’m finished, I return to the hallway, where a nurse is approaching our group. “Mr. Maslin’s family? You can come back and see him,” she invites us.
I’m ready to race down the hallway beside her, but in a rare moment of mental clarity, I pause. I can’t be the only one who wants to see TC.
I turn to my mother-in-law and ask if she’d like to come with me.
Ruth nods. “Yes, if you don’t mind. Although, would you rather go alone?”
I shake my head, aware of the possibility that what awaits me in that room may not be a scene I’m ready to handle on my own. “No, it’s fine. Please come with me.”
The nurse flashes her ID, and we make our way through the secure set of heavy double doors guarding the unit. Ruth and I walk solemnly past the nurses’ station, trying to avoid prolonged glances into the dark, stagnant rooms that belong to the unit’s other patients. With the exception of the medical equipment, it’s terribly quiet.
I steel myself and brace for the reunion ahead.
* * *
TC’s room is at the far end of the unit, opposite the double doors. It’s spacious and bright, yet everything inside feels hollow and artificial. Next to his bed, there is a large window that adjoins the room next door, but it’s covered by a photo overlay of a remote forest scene, a perplexing reminder that nature and all its greenery are alive and well, just nowhere inside this sterile cubicle of a room. This is not a place for healing, I think to myself. It’s a place for clean and tidy deaths.
TC is here with us, but it’s not the TC of yesterday—the one in running shoes and shorts, with the mussed hair and slight grin. This TC is a sleeping b
ody, lying motionless on a bed, attached to a mess of equipment that is keeping him alive. My heart races as I mentally assemble the scene before me. I try to ignore the flashing numbers on the machines at his bedside. He’s here. I can process the rest later.
“Look,” I point out to Ruth. “He’s still so handsome.”
As I walk to the right of his bed, I take in TC’s beautiful olive skin, still tanned from last month’s family beach trip. He’s blessed with the type of resilient skin that happily absorbs sun, a genetic trait I hoped we would pass on to Jack, who, unfortunately, seems to have inherited my fair and temperamental Irish complexion.
I focus my gaze south of TC’s neck and am relieved to see his arms look just the same, although mildly swollen from the liquid being distributed through the IV. His legs also appear unharmed. With Ruth present, I resist the urge to lift up the blanket and examine the rest of his body.
“Oh my God, look at his feet!” I observe, taking a step closer to the foot of the bed. The soles of TC’s feet are black with grime, a disturbing contrast against the backdrop of his otherwise clean limbs. A group of nurses attend to TC’s various tubes and equipment as Ruth and I circle the bed.
“Can we wash his feet or get him some socks?” I ask, well aware that socks are about as high a priority as a French manicure at the moment. There is something upsetting about his dirty feet, though, as if I’m afraid the dirt will interfere with the nurses’ ability to see beyond it—to the whole and dignified man he was yesterday.
“Of course,” replies the nurse in charge, Sarah. She appears to be my age, and even in unflattering maroon scrubs, she’s lovely. As Sarah moves about his bedside calmly resetting machines, I can see she is also quite competent. I send Mladen a silent thank-you for handpicking her as TC’s nurse this shift.
From the angle I’m standing, it’s almost possible to believe that TC’s condition is cause for only mild alarm, but when we make our way over to his left side, I suddenly don’t want to continue my investigation.
His head. His beautiful head.
It is here that he turns unrecognizable. Half of TC’s thick brown hair has been shaved from the left, leaving an unflattering asymmetrical mullet down the back. The area where Dr. Kalhorn operated is covered in bandages, so I can’t see the incisions, but the plastic drains resting on TC’s pillow give me an impression of what’s underneath. The drains, which look like the plastic squeakers I’ve seen our dog, Spencer, tear out from inside his chew toys, are attached to tubes running beneath his bandages and have already begun collecting pools of bright-red blood. Most startling, however, is the shape of his head. The right side is normal, but the left side has begun to swell, giving him a distorted, bobblehead-like appearance.
I refuse to look away. As frightening as it is to see TC look so very little like himself, I am not disturbed. It’s enough just to know that he’s alive.
Taking TC’s left hand in mine, I lean in close to his face and whisper, “Hey, honey, it’s me. Abby. I’m here. I love you so much. You’re going to be just fine.”
You’re going to be just fine? As I speak, I hear the emptiness in my assurance. Nothing about this situation is anything close to fine, but language falls miserably short in expressing what might be true. I am scared. Please don’t leave me. I love you. Each of these is also a radical understatement, barely scratching the surface, but still better than you’re going to be fine.
In the waiting room, Dr. Kalhorn mentioned something about removing TC’s skull, but I couldn’t visualize what this meant. The surgery he performed, a craniectomy, involves removing a piece of the skull to relieve pressure so that the healing brain has room to swell. I remember his explanation about storing the skull piece in TC’s abdomen and replacing it later, but the whole thing had sounded like a freaky science fiction novel, and I couldn’t really picture what he meant.
I run my hand back and forth over TC’s hospital gown, trying to find the skull piece, and then my palm grazes it: a hard patch on his stomach, just to the right of his belly button. Another scar, I think to myself. One to match the four-inch incision below his navel where they repaired his bladder after a car accident six years ago.
I return my attention to his head and notice that while his right eye is shut tightly, his left is buried underneath another thick layer of gauze.
“What’s wrong with his eye?” I ask Sarah.
“We don’t know exactly what happened to it, but it’s very swollen,” she explains. “We’re trying to monitor the pressure in it to make sure he doesn’t develop a blood clot.”
The dozens of questions I should have asked Dr. Kalhorn in the waiting room are suddenly bouncing through my head like floating bubbles. The moment I grab for one, it pops and my focus is gone. There is so much I need to know about what is happening to my very own husband, but I can’t figure out where to begin.
As I stand there staring, I fight the urge to crawl into bed next to TC. There’s nothing I want more than to be as physically close to him as possible, but there’s hardly a free surface to touch or stroke with all the foreign apparatuses attached to his body. A thick plastic oxygen tube emerging from the right side of his mouth prevents me from even being able to give him a kiss.
We should have had more sex. However inappropriate, I’m suddenly filled with appreciation for TC’s beautiful, healthy body. The curve of his lean calves from years of soccer. His strong arms, which, on countless occasions, have bounced a giggling Jack into the air. His defined torso from pull-ups at the gym. This body has been mine for so many years now, I have memorized every freckle and stray hair. But now it’s wrapped in bandages, held together by machines I don’t know how to read, and changed in ways the people in this room can only begin to predict.
Yesterday he was the portrait of health. The kind of guy who never got the flu, not even the common cold. Every three weeks I’d come home with some new disease I’d contracted in the classroom, dragging myself miserably to urgent care or laid out on the couch with fifty bucks’ worth of cold medicine from CVS.
“I don’t believe in that stuff,” TC would declare nonchalantly, pointing to my beloved Advil Cold & Sinus, the only thing, I believed, protecting me from imminent death.
“Well, that’s nice for you,” I’d croak, pulling a fluffy blanket over my shoulders.
Those West Virginia roots showed themselves every so often. It wasn’t likely that a kid who spent the first part of his life without indoor plumbing and learning to skin squirrels was going to develop a dependence on Sudafed. Not to mention the fact that Ruth was a natural healer extraordinaire. If ever TC was feeling under the weather, he either took a nap or ate a bowl of hot soup and found himself instantly healed. He was, dare I say it, snobbishly healthy.
A twenty-nine-year-old in perfect health. It makes the current situation even more difficult to accept. Of all the people in the world, why is it TC lying in this bed? I’m struggling to press pause on the loop of ugly thoughts that now spin. It’s not that I’d want to see anyone in this situation. It’s just the total senselessness in reconciling that it happened to this good man. A husband. A father. Someone with his whole life ahead of him.
The answer to the very large why that looms in my mind is a truth TC has always understood about the world, a truth that I am still struggling to internalize: That anything can happen to anyone. That there is no answer. The random forces of life have converged upon my husband, and it is neither fair nor rational. It is simply happening.
CHAPTER 6
You learn some things after being in a relationship for seven years. To begin with, there are the simple, inconsequential matters. I remember how intent I used to be on hiding my most silly, despicable habits from TC: my propensity to interrupt, my inability to live by a budget, my weakness for rich desserts before 9:00 A.M. So many mornings, obligingly chewing my eggs as I daydreamed about the leftovers in the fridge. It took a while
before he finally caught me digging into the previous night’s cheesecake for breakfast. Chocolate cake with my morning coffee.
“I just don’t know how you can eat that much sugar,” he remarked after my secret was out, his voice only partially masking his judgment.
Just as he pooh-poohed the glory of antihistamines and nasal decongestants, TC was an eater who prioritized routine. Oatmeal for breakfast. PB&J and an apple for lunch. Something hearty like lamb stew for dinner.
If his regimented diet and lack of spontaneity made me crazy, my constant detoxing and one-week diets drove him insane.
“First, stop trying to lose weight,” he’d command emphatically. “You look great to me. And secondly, if you want to be healthy, stop eating cake for breakfast and kale for everything else. It’s totally illogical.”
For as long as we’ve known each other, logic has been the language through which TC communicates. If something doesn’t make sense according to his logic, if the algorithm doesn’t quite compute, he is bewildered, left standing with his hands in the air, wondering what in God’s good name would compel people to act on impulse or emotion alone.
I’ve always assumed that’s what attracted him to me. That our magnetism could be partially explained by an unconscious need for balance. He loved me in part because I forced him into spontaneity. I inspired him to believe in possibility, the existence of a joy beyond his imagination.
“I don’t understand why you don’t want to marry me” became the repetitive anthem of the fourth year of our courtship.
“I do want to marry you,” he’d correct me. “I just don’t know how I feel about getting married right now. We’re still so young.”
There was no rush—no real rush, anyway. Only the perceived rush that had nestled itself inside my head. My dad was getting sicker every day. How long would he be around? How could I imagine a wedding without my father there looking on?