The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  Again, that measuring moment, her scrutinizing gaze before she replies. “I believe that the trauma caused retrograde amnesia. And now the wrong memories are coming back.”

  “The wrong memories,” I repeat.

  She seems to come to a decision.

  “I had a cousin,” she says. She keeps her voice low, her eyes on mine. “From the time he could talk he spoke of his village, which was not the place we lived. He said he’d been killed in an accident there.”

  “What?” I say, but she talks over the syllable as if I haven’t spoken.

  “He was very angry at his brother-in-law, who’d stacked bricks improperly on a cart; the bricks had fallen on him and broken his neck. He demanded to see his wife. He worried about his children.” She pauses. “He was three years old.”

  As she speaks, scenes flurry in my mind: crowded unpaved streets, ragged children clambering on a heap of trash. I can’t connect any of it with Ben.

  “What exactly are you saying?” I ask.

  “I think Ben is Leo,” she says. “Or that he used to be called Leo, in a life before this one. Just as my cousin was also the man who died from the falling bricks.” She puts a hand to the side of her neck. “My cousin was born with a scar here, where he said the bricks cut him. Ben has a place on his ear.”

  I know the place she means. The divot in the flesh where the auricle joins to the head, just a tiny flaw on that side and not the other, which I’d noticed under the penlight beam during my initial exam.

  I have the most extraordinary feeling, as if the surface of everything is lifting, the world peeling back to reveal a deep complicated beauty.

  “What happened to your cousin?” I ask. My voice sounds far away, as if someone else is talking.

  “We took him home,” she says. “To the other village, so he could talk with his children and his wife. It was what he needed. In time, the memories faded. He was able to be present in his new life only after making peace with his old one.”

  For a breath Preeti and I stand looking at each other.

  A white-coated resident goes by, her heels ticking on the hard surface of the corridor. The sound reorients me. High heels are worn by office doctors, the kind who work easy daylight hours, far from the raw landscape of the Emergency Department. Like a compass needle swinging back to true north, I am brought back to myself, from wherever I have gone during this conversation.

  “It’s a nice idea, Preeti,” I say. Her face falls. “I wish it were that simple for Ben.”

  I unclip my badge and slide it through the security sensor. The electronic lock releases with a chunk. When the doors swing closed behind me, Preeti is still standing there, looking determined but helpless, like a widow abandoned on shore.

  * * *

  CHEST PAIN IN a seventy-year-old, chest pains in a twenty-year-old, twisted ankle, “drank too much,” vaginal bleeding, “stepped on a broken tile and cut my foot,” cold symptoms for one week, penile discharge, pinkeye.

  Surgical team to Trauma 1.

  William Barber, eighty-two, scalded in the shower.

  “Now why do I need all this fuss?” He holds his arm out cooperatively while Brenda knots the tourniquet around his biceps. “It’s just a little hot water.”

  “You’re going to need some intravenous fluid,” Brenda says, wiping an alcohol swab over the blue ladder of vessels in his antecubital fossa.

  “If I was home I’d just put a little aloe on it and go about my business.” He looks up, sees me. “We’re from Texas.” He pauses as if he’s a comedian expecting a crop of Yeah!s from the audience. Brenda tapes down the IV catheter and dials open the occluding wheel with her thumb; the Lactated Ringer’s solution chases the blood from the tubing. “It’s the first time in my life I ever had one of these, can you believe it?” says Mr. Barber.

  “What happened?” I ask him.

  “My wife was in the shower. One of those tubs with the old ball-and-claw feet? I was all for the Motel 6, but we’re being fancy.” I know what he means. The cobblestoned downtown historic district called Downcity has a boutique hotel on every block. “Here’s a tip for you, honey: after sixty, unique means uncomfortable.”

  His wife had slipped getting out, clutching at the tap as she fell, turning the water to boiling. He had been helping her navigate the high step over the tub side; while she lay under the spray he had put his own body into the steaming blast to protect her. He’d managed to turn the water off, but not right away.

  My heart squeezes when I pull back the sheet. It’s worse than I expected, the front half of his torso red and bubbled, chalky white in places. The anterior thighs and perineum. Most of the left arm. I calculate rapidly: over 40 percent of this man’s body surface area seriously burned, a life-threatening proportion even in a young person.

  “Can’t be too bad,” he says. “It barely hurts at all.”

  His lack of pain is the opposite of reassuring, signifying that the skin has been destroyed to a depth below the layer containing the sensory nerve endings. Second degree hurts; third degree does not.

  “Two-fifty bolus to start and let’s give him two of morphine,” I tell Brenda, and set about calculating his fluid requirements.

  “I’ll call for a bed in the burn unit,” she says.

  “Can you find out how my wife is?” he asks me. “The ambulance brought her in too—she had some pain in her leg after the fall. You won’t have any trouble finding her. Just look for the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen.” Do men really talk like this?

  The computer reveals that she’s in bed 5, out in the urgent area. I punch up her films and review them.

  “She’s all right,” I tell Mr. Barber. “Nothing broken.”

  I expect him to smile, but instead he closes his eyes.

  “Praise Jesus,” he whispers. When he opens them, he’s blinking tears away. “We’ve been married fifty-nine years. I know it can’t last forever, but I’m not ready.” I feel answering tears start in my own eyes and turn to Brenda, who’s wheeling a Mayo stand to the bedside.

  “Central line,” she says.

  Burn protocol requires aggressive intravenous access—two large lines in the arms would suffice, but this burn involves the left arm, so that can’t be used. To get adequate access we’ll need to go central, into the largest vessels in the body at one of the points where they travel with least obstruction: the neck or chest or groin.

  “I’ll need to put an IV right here,” I tell him, touching just below his clavicle. He nods.

  I’m always surprised how calmly people take that information: I’ll need to put a needle into your chest. The chest is a horrible, unthinkable place to put a needle. When I was an intern, it seemed an impossible task: sink this needle into this chest to find the deep invisible vein, and avoid puncturing the lung that is right there, or the huge artery that is right there, or any of the ropy important nerves that run right there. I learned it the way I learned every other medical procedure, segmenting the challenge into a sequence of steps, blotting out the instinctual horror of the whole. By now, I’ve done it so many times that it’s almost routine. Mr. Barber has never had this done, though, so by rights he should be terrified. He’s not—because he trusts me. Joe doesn’t see this part of my job; if he could, would it change things? I tell him in my mind, this is the purpose of all the training: to be worthy of such trust.

  The procedure goes smoothly; less than ten minutes after nudging the first needle under the flare of collarbone I am finished and suturing the subclavian line into his skin.

  “Tell me, Doctor, are you married?”

  Talkative Mr. Barber has stayed quiet under the sterile paper as long as he can.

  “Sort of.” I clip the nylon suture, squiggle some antibacterial ointment over the place where the catheter tunnels under the skin, apply an occlusive dressing. “I mean. Separated.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Me too.

  “All done.” I tear away the sterile paper and turn off
the overhead surgical light.

  “Will you accept a little advice from an old fogey?” he says as I pull the stretcher back up to a sitting position. His white hair is damp, standing up like flame; it gets hot under the strong light.

  “Sure.”

  “Is he a good man? Don’t think about it—yes or no?” I nod yes. “Then unseparate.” His blue eyes are like an oracle. “Put aside the wrongs and go forward. We’re none of us made perfect for each other. We have to grow to fit together. That growing—that’s marriage.” I’ve kept nodding while he speaks: Okay, I’ll do that. As if it is that easy. As if any of it is my choice.

  His face lights up as his gaze moves to fall on something behind me. I turn to see Mrs. Barber being wheeled in, a small nondescript woman in a zippered flowery gown.

  “You look like a mummy,” she says, reaching up and touching just her fingertips to his where they protrude from the gauze.

  “Hey there, punkin,” he says.

  The joy of reunion is palpable in the room.

  This couple married during the Eisenhower years. Surely their time together has contained intermittent dissatisfactions, petty grievances and irritations, as well as deeper, more important rifts. But they’ve weathered it all and come through. My husband and I didn’t even make it to our fifth anniversary.

  I step out to speak with the son, a lantern-jawed man in his fifties wearing a button-down shirt and khakis.

  “Is it bad?” he asks.

  “It’s an extensive burn,” I say.

  “They’re supposed to be going on a cruise next week,” he says, and leaves it there, the silence a kind of negative space, making the question for him.

  In a week, I know with heartbreaking certainty, Mr. Barber will be on life support. His elderly body can’t withstand the loss of so much of its protective covering without dreadful consequences. When that cruise ship sails, he will be swollen beyond recognition, the fluid weeping from his skin, the intravenous replacement building up in his lungs and escaping into his tissues. He’ll be unconscious from sedatives given to prevent him from resisting the ventilator breaths, and he’ll be multiply catheterized: his heart, to measure his body’s delicate fluid balances and assess the squeeze of his ventricles; his bladder, so that his urine may be precisely quantified; his rectum, so that fecal matter will not seep out and infect his perineal burn. He will be beset nonetheless with infections: his skin, despite all efforts, and then his lungs and urinary tract. His stressed heart will fail, a series of infarctions necrosing a patch here, a patch there; his kidneys will falter. His wife will keep vigil at his bedside. Because she’s been told that the last sense to leave is the ability to hear, she’ll talk to him. In her soft voice she’ll comfort the ballooned caricature of her husband, taking his tight swollen hand into hers, wiping away the beads of moisture forcing themselves out onto his skin. He may feel fine now, but he’s doomed. In the next few hours, the siege will begin.

  “You’ll need to cancel the cruise,” I say, watching the son’s face change as he takes in my meaning. “I can write a letter to the cruise line if you need, to avoid a penalty. You should call your brothers and sisters. Anyone who needs to say good-bye. Tell them to come as soon as possible.”

  His face is vague; he reaches one hand up to his collar, puts his hand down again.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  He nods. He puts his hand up again, grasping something invisible between thumb and first two fingers, and I realize he’s used to wearing a necktie and must have a habit of fussing with the knot.

  “I’ll be here all night, if you have any questions or need anything.”

  Before he parts the curtain to go into the trauma room, he rearranges his face into lines of reassurance; when he greets his parents his voice is robust with cheer.

  Such mundane things have the power to unmake us. Six decades of affection and compromise and care brought to an end by a trendy bathtub and a hot-water heater set too high. Ben marooned forever by a birthday party. No one can save this family gathering now under the trauma-room light. No one will save Ben. The world doesn’t work that way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  Clare

  YOU CAN’T LIVE HERE,” SAID Prior Washburn. “There’s no electricity. No plumbing.”

  “A lot of people live that way.”

  “Not a woman alone. Not by choice.” He looked at my hands. “Have you ever farmed before?”

  “I’m not looking for luxury. Give me a year. If I can’t manage, I’ll leave.”

  “A year. Where will you go then?”

  There was no answer to that.

  “I can bring those roses back,” I said. It was a stray thought, but his expression softened as he looked toward the cemetery and the struggling roses.

  “They’re beyond hope, I think,” he said.

  “Maybe not. My mother’s roses were famous.” Mentioning her was like swallowing a lancet of glass. I was lying again. It was true that she’d espaliered roses on the back wall of the bookshop, and that I’d been pressed into caring for them sometimes, but I knew nothing of bringing roses back from the dead.

  “It’s autumn now, and no crops in.” His reckoning tone told me he was weakening. “You’ll have all you can do to get the house habitable again. It’s been a while since the last tenant.” The statement finished a bit abruptly, and I knew he’d left off the word died. “We can give you some supplies to get you through to spring. But you have to promise that you’ll come to me if you fail. Clare”—I looked up at the command in his voice—“please don’t lay a suicide on my conscience.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You must not let your pride lead you.”

  “I’m done with pride.” And added another lie to the pile that I wouldn’t be confessing. “I will come to you if I fail.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST ORDER of business was the house itself: it was a two-room structure, with walls of stone and a roof of rough square tiles, and a short wooden porch in front that creaked as I walked across it. The front door was ajar; when I pushed it open I could see that the opening had been wide enough to admit raccoons or possums or foxes, judging by the calling cards they’d left behind.

  The main room, filled with piles of animal waste and dirt and leaves, was sparsely furnished: a stove and a worktable in the kitchen area, another sturdy table near the front window, and a settee beside the hearth that had been home to a mouse family, judging from the cotton stuffing bubbling out of a large hole in the cushion. Luckily the door to the bedroom had been closed, so it was dusty and cobwebbed in there, but not actually filthy. It held a single bed, a night table, a tall wardrobe, and an empty trunk. I started in that room with a broom, pulling down the cobwebs and sweeping the floor, taking stock of the few possessions. A Bible and a rosary, both of which I put into a drawer; a figured bowl and pitcher on the night table that would be useful for ablutions. When I swept beneath the bed I found another wide bowl, and it took me a moment to understand its use. When I did, it brought me up short. My childhood had never included a chamber pot. Was I really going to do this?

  What other options did I have? My parents were dead, my child was dead, I had no means. I might have an older brother or two left somewhere, but Hugh had the greatest legal claim on me. That reminder solidified my resolve. I put the chamber pot aside to wash; it would go back under the bed when the room was clean.

  Clean. That was going to take a lot more work, and a good deal of water. There was no sink in the kitchen. Had I seen a pump outside? I went out the front door and stood on the splintery porch.

  Weeds had taken over the front yard in a waist-high, waving sea. Later I would know all the names—dock and pigweed and goosefoot and sorrel—but on that day they were anonymous, an undifferentiated invading mass of green. I stood on my toes to look beyond the wall and down the hill: there lay the overgrown cemetery ringed by the scruff of moribund rosebushes. How long had the property been unocc
upied? Nature was obviously determined to drag it back into wilderness.

  But the weather was fine, sunny with a light breeze, much more cheerful than the gloomy, dusty cottage, and I decided that I’d resume work inside later. In a corner of the yard, surrounded by a forest of pokeweed that drooped purple berries from stems ten feet tall, I found a toolshed. It had been immaculately kept and was as full as the house was empty. I chose a hand scythe and a wooden-handled hoe and a whetstone and honed the blades of the tools, noting how well they’d been cared for: not a speck of rust. My mother would have approved. Again that pang at her memory, and for the first time questions crowded after. Had there been a funeral? Where was she buried? Michel’s name had been on the list the prior had read aloud. How had he died? For a moment the burden of loss buckled me, and I staggered.

  Swinging the scythe pulled painfully on my wound, but it wasn’t unbearable. The rhythm was soothing, anesthetic; after just a few hours I’d reduced the green sea in front of the cottage to a wading pool, ready for the hoe. I’d found the pump in the middle of the yard, an enameled-tin mug tied to its handle, and I pumped until the water was clear. While I stood drinking, the sun went behind a cloud and the fabric of my dress grew clammy against my back. My second-best dress. The monks had laundered and mended it while I convalesced. Suddenly I couldn’t bear its gritty, sweaty tightness and returned to the shed, where I’d seen a pair of denim overalls and a holey plaid shirt. I changed right there, hanging the dress on the nail that had held the overalls, and went back to work. I kept at it all day; at sundown I opened my sack of provisions and made a meal of cheese and bread before crawling onto the dusty bed, asleep as soon as I closed my eyes.

  I awoke the next day almost too stiff to move, my body screaming in protest when I tried to sit up. I had to sidle out of bed, the way I had from my childhood bed under the dormer. I wrestled the mattress outside, a clumsy business, and used a spade to beat it, raising a gratifying cloud. When I tired of that I propped the mattress against the wall in the sun and pumped a bucket of water, taking that back into the house to resume cleaning in there.