The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Taking the scenic route?” calls Peach up to the cockpit. I’m glad he’s the one who said it. He’s older than me, and not afraid of anything, not even a superior officer. “Where’s that fucker going?” he says, maybe to me, maybe to himself.

  The Snoopy ahead is hovering along the treetops like a metal dragonfly, a lure to draw fire from hidden VC. If they take the bait we’ll pick them off. We haven’t had a nibble and the sun is fully up now. We’ll have to turn back soon. I am glad; I don’t like the shooting. I hate how the people run and scatter. I know about the things they’re capable of—the punji pits and the tiger traps and the other hundred brutal ways they have devised to torment and slaughter us. But when I see them up close they’re just people. Some of them are just kids.

  Today there won’t be any of that; either we’re in the wrong place, or the snipers below are too smart to go for the Snoopy. The engine drones on, the blue above, the green below. With the breeze coming in the window, it’s much cooler up here than on the ground, and no mosquitoes. If I close my eyes, shut out the noise and the gasoline fumes, this could just be a nice ride in the country.

  A folded map hits me in the face, thrown back from the cockpit.

  “Since you’re so smart,” calls Ticky over the roar of the engines.

  He wouldn’t have thrown it at Peach.

  I unfold the map and compare it to the view from the open window, try to match anything on it to the anonymous vista of jungle canopy below. There is a blue line of water bending on the map; a river, surely large enough to see from the air.

  “We need to go west from the river,” I say.

  “What river?” says Peach, leaning out his window. “Ain’t no river down there.”

  Ticky’s heard us, apparently; there is a jolt and then he is taking us down and down, in a deep descent. He does this occasionally, intentionally, kind of a midair tantrum. I wouldn’t ever do that. I wouldn’t leave the Snoopy without cover, or expose us this way. But I’m a gunner, not a pilot, and I don’t make the decisions.

  “There’s your river,” says Peach while my stomach is straining to come up my throat. “Turn right,” he yells to Ticky.

  We’re turning right, cresting in the air with the dragonfly doing the same beside us, when the new noise comes. A tiny noise. Just a ping on the skin of the plane. By now, I think I know all the noises this airplane can make. I have never heard this one before. I look out the window: no dragonfly.

  Another ping.

  “Jink it, jink,” yells Peach. “Go up.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” cries Ticky. “You wanna come up here?”

  Maybe those seconds he takes to scream this are our downfall. There’s a tearing sound, and a pop, and then the motor cuts out and we are plummeting. No frighten-the-kid about this; nobody’s playing. I am on my back, then on my face, then on my back again, and then I am hanging from my harness, belly down over the world. The green rushes up at me. Peach is yelling something but I can’t make out the words, and when I look over he is not there. There’s a smoggy space of air where he just was, his unmanned gun jerking crazily on its pivot.

  I scrabble for the hook that clips my harness to the side of the plane, release the catch. And though it is the most frightening thing yet, I dive out of the open window and into freefall.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  * * *

  Lucy

  NO ONE CONJECTURES ALOUD, BUT it might turn into a good night. A good night is something that can be decreed only in retrospect; everything can change in a minute. A little medical Zen: we accept the peace we are given. Only a few days in the ER year are predictably, almost-without-exception slow: Thanksgiving morning through afternoon (before the surfeit of postprandial bellyaches); Christmas (pretty much all day); and Super Bowl Sunday (only while the game is being played). A thick snowfall will impede shenanigans too, at least while the snow is falling and before the snow-shoveling heart attacks start coming in.

  And then there are nights like this one, random jewels. The stream of injury and illness is steady and manageable, the trauma bells going off only rarely. There’s time for luxuries like legible documentation and chatting with the patients, time even for teaching the medical student something more useful than hold that and get out of the way.

  Next chart in the rack: Kayla, a four-month-old whose triage note says won’t stop crying.

  “I know exactly how she feels,” quips her nurse as Bryan, the medical student, and I go into the room. But it’s a sham complaint, delivered with a smile.

  The patient’s mother is sitting by the stretcher, her hand on the infant’s belly as it wails up at the ceiling. She’s a slender girl with long hair parted zigzag, who can’t be more than sixteen. Teen mom dings a warning bell in my head—it’s a risk factor for child abuse.

  “I’ve changed her, fed her, burped her,” she says over the baby’s cries. “Maybe I’m not doing it right. She just won’t stop.”

  Kayla has some lungs on her; we have to half shout the interview. Two days of almost nonstop crying but no fever, no vomiting, no cough, no change in appetite or diaper contents, no rash, no trauma. Not left in anyone else’s care for any period of time. No obvious explanation for Kayla’s distress.

  “So what do we do?” I ask Bryan. The best way to teach, the best way to learn: the Socratic method applied to a real patient.

  “Rule out sepsis,” he says. “Blood culture, urine culture, spinal tap.” The mother’s eyes widen at spinal tap.

  “Keep in mind that she’s four months old.” Which, thank goodness, puts her out of the age range where rule-out-sepsis would be mandatory. Four months is practically elderly for an infant.

  Bryan looks blank, and I relent.

  “First we examine her.” His face says, Damn it, I should have said that.

  I show him how to go over a baby head to toe. How to examine the infant retina: hold the ophthalmoscope still and let the roving eye scroll a carpet of vessels and optic disk through the path of the light. How to check for common problems like ear infection, and for more occult ones like hair tourniquet. Toe tourniquets in particular are easy to miss, hard to spot if one plump, pea-sized toe is redder than the others.

  We get a urine sample to check for infection and toxicology, and even though there’s no outward sign of injury we order a babygram: a one-shot X ray of the whole infant to look for new or old fractures.

  Everything is completely normal.

  “There’s no other tests?” her mother pleads, her eyes panicked, when we tell her. “She’s gonna start up again when we get home, I know it.”

  Kayla’s not crying now; she’s fascinated by a yellow finger puppet Bryan has produced from his pocket. Medical students’ white coat pockets can be a treasure trove.

  “You said you live with your mom,” I say. “Has she been able to help?”

  “She works a lot.” The tears spill. “She stays with her boyfriend.”

  So this teenager has been alone and terrified in an apartment with a screaming infant for days.

  “I think we need to evaluate Kayla overnight.” Bryan looks up, surprised, when I say this. “Just in the ER. You can stay in this room and we’ll keep her in a monitoring room for the night. Will that be all right?”

  “Okay,” says Kayla’s mother, her features flooding with relief. She suddenly looks her age, which I remind myself is not old enough to vote.

  I take Kayla into my arms and her mother climbs onto the stretcher, turns on her side away from us, and pulls up the sheet. I shut off the light and close the door.

  “Is this legal?” asks Bryan. “I mean, she’s not medically ill.” He’s a modern doctor-in-training, filled with admonitions about door-to-discharge timing and cost-benefit analysis.

  “We don’t need the bed right now,” I tell him. “The tests we already did were the major cost. What’s a few more hours?” Kayla’s begun to whimper again and I pat my hand against her back. “In the morning, we’ll get them plugged i
nto whatever support systems are out there. In the meantime, the baby’s safe.”

  “You think she’s in danger? Should we call CPS?”

  “There’s no evidence of neglect.” Actually, the opposite is true: even after days without sleep, Kayla’s mother made a good choice and brought her here, instead of shaking her or dropping her out a window.

  I don’t have to explain to the nurses; most of them are moms. They tuck a warmed blanket around Kayla’s mother and she sleeps behind the closed door of bed 8 while the baby is carried around the Big Room by various staff. I jog her on one hip as I check on patients’ test results or the effect of administered medicines or fluids. She works baby magic: every patient smiles at the sight of her. She falls asleep in my arms after a while, bubbling spit into the lapel of my white coat, her springy hair tickling my neck.

  We could never, ever do this on a normal night. It couldn’t have happened last night; it’s unlikely to be possible tomorrow. But tonight, it is something we can do. Bryan is right—it’s basically very expensive baby-sitting, and it’s not a permanent solution, but it worked for tonight, and who knows? Maybe that will be enough.

  There is nothing magical or mysterious about the medicine I practice. We save or don’t save, we reassure, we comfort, all our efforts successful only insofar as they lay the groundwork for knitting together the damaged body, the damaged life. There are always going to be things we can’t fix, and it will never stop being terrible to see them. Healing has only its merest beginnings here.

  * * *

  “I’M GOING TO take off early,” says Bryan just before dawn. “If that’s okay with you. Can you sign this?”

  It’s the standard evaluation form that will go into his academic file.

  “I’ve really enjoyed working with you,” he says. It’s the last day of his rotation. This is good-bye. “Do you have any criticisms for me? Anything I can improve?” It’s a routine question.

  “No criticisms,” I tell him. “But I do have some advice.” He waits at attention. “You’re on a long road. I think you know that.” Kayla whimpers and I put a hand over her curly head. A sudden stab of regret: the warm head of my own child under my comforting palm is something I will never know. “Medicine will take everything you give, and some days you will have to give it everything. But not every day. Guard something in your life, Bryan, something that you love. Keep it safe from all the sadness and madness. Because no matter how much you love it, medicine will not love you back.”

  He nods, but I can tell that he has heard it before, and that it doesn’t resonate this time either. I suppose he’ll need to learn it for himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  Clare

  WHEN THE LETTERS STOPPED COMING, it didn’t worry me at first. But when three weeks passed in a row with the postmaster’s head shake no, I felt a clutch of panic.

  “Don’t think the worst,” said the postmaster. “He might be whooping it up on leave, forgetting to write. Boys will be boys.”

  Yes, I could hope for that.

  “No news is good news,” he added. “Bad news comes in a telegram.”

  A telegram. I hadn’t thought of that. But if there had been a telegram, it would have been sent to Leo’s mother, not to me. She could have it already, along with his personal effects if they had been found, his dog tags and the pocketknife I had given him and whatever else he’d carried in his pockets. She could be smoothing out one of my letters right now, puzzled, thinking, Who’s Clare?

  Five weeks; six.

  It was easy to find out where she lived. Only a few blocks from the center of town, in what seemed to be a nice neighborhood. I didn’t know why that surprised me.

  Wilson, said the mailbox; wrong name, but it was the right street number. I went up the path and knocked at the door. Instantly there was an eruption of barking, high yips accompanied by scrambling toenails.

  “Get back, Taffy,” said the woman who opened the door. “Sorry. Can I help you?” She smiled up at me. She was petite, dark-blond, with a high forehead. I couldn’t see anything of Leo in her. A little dun-colored dog leapt about behind her.

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Dutton,” I said. “Someone told me this house.”

  Her face grew sharper, a little suspicious. “It’s Wilson now. Do I know you?”

  She was wearing an apron over her skirt, the picture of a middle-class housewife. I was glad that I’d chosen to wear the dress I’d made over the winter, from fabric Leo had given me for Christmas.

  “I’m a—friend—of Leo’s.” There was no mistaking the recognition in her eyes when I said the name. “He’s your son?”

  “Yes, but . . . He was fostered out years ago.”

  “I—I’m the one who fostered him.”

  She hesitated, then unhooked the screen door. “Come in.”

  The dog backed up against the wall as I entered, then turned tail and ran out of the room. We went into the parlor. Mrs. Wilson motioned me to the sofa and took an upholstered chair across from it. I looked around the room. Modest, very neat. An upright piano against one wall with a metronome on the top, and a child’s lesson book on the music stand.

  “You have other children,” I said.

  “Three,” she said, and blushed. “I had Leo—before.” I nodded: I’d always suspected that he was born out of wedlock. “And then I married Clyde, and we had Tad and Sally and Matthew.” She jumped up. “What am I thinking? Let me get some lemonade.”

  She came back in a few minutes later with a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies. She poured me a glass and sat down; her hands smoothed the apron over her lap.

  “It was hard with Clyde and Leo,” she said. “They didn’t get along.” As if they were quarrelsome peers, as if Leo had not been a child. “Leo talked so much. He was always asking questions. You know.”

  I didn’t say anything, but perhaps she read my expression, because she looked ashamed.

  “What else could I do?” she said. “I couldn’t leave my husband. I had the other children to think of.” Her hands smoothed and smoothed. “I knew he’d get a good Christian education at St. William’s.”

  “It’s a hard place,” I said.

  “He didn’t like it at first. He kept coming back here. It broke my heart every time. And then he stopped.” She added in a whisper, “That broke my heart too.” She looked into my face. “But it got better, didn’t it?” Her voice was beseeching. “When he came here to get his join-up papers signed, he was all grown up. He seemed happy.”

  “I think he was,” I said, watching the relief relax her features. Thinking sixteen was not all grown up, not by a long shot. “Have you had any news of him? He hasn’t written to me in a while.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I—wait a minute.” She left the room and returned with an envelope. She gave it to me. “I thought you knew.” She watched me take the paper out and unfold it.

  Missing, presumed dead. My eyes went straight to those words.

  “I thought they’d tell you,” she said.

  I could barely speak. “Your name was on his papers.”

  “His plane was shot down,” she said. “Over enemy territory.”

  “Presumed,” I said. “Only presumed. Maybe he was captured.”

  We looked at each other dully. Then the clock on the mantel chimed, and she started.

  “The children will be home from school any minute,” she said. “I’m sorry, but it’s better if you go.”

  As I went through the door, she reached out and touched my arm.

  “You did a fine job raising him.”

  Then she stepped inside and closed the door.

  The walk back to Roscommon was slow and long. I kept my head down as I walked, waited until I was out of town before I let the tears come. Up the hill toward Roscommon, making the end of the same walk I’d made all that time ago, trying to follow Bradley. Another boy taken from me in the air, gone without a trace.

  James waved at
me as I passed the farm. He hadn’t acknowledged me for a long time, but I wasn’t up to a conversation; I just waved back and went on.

  Presumed wasn’t certain, I told myself. I had to believe I’d see him someday. Maybe only in Heaven, if I could ever believe in all that again. For a moment the thought of it was so delicious.

  When I saw the long burgundy car parked on the curve of the road before the cottage came into view, my first irrational thought was Leo? and my heart leapt before I came to my senses. It had a fancy convertible top and shiny hubcaps; hardly a military vehicle. No one bringing news of Leo would come in such a car, nor would they come to me. I turned the bend, and now I could see up the path to the front of the cottage. There, sitting on the step of my stone house, my sanctuary, looking irritated as hell, was Hugh.

  * * *

  DAMN CONGA HEART again. It’ll calm down in a minute.

  I’ll come back tomorrow.

  Thanks for the cliff-hanger.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  Leo

  OH NO,” SAYS JENESSA WHEN we’re nearly at the library. “You did not come here.”

  She’s not talking to me. She’s looking at a man across the street who’s leaning against a car with his arms crossed.

  “No,” she says. “Uh-uh.”

  “Baby,” he calls as we get closer.

  “You get out of here,” she yells back, and puts a hand up as if he’s a car and she’s stopping him at an intersection. “I’m working.”

  “Well, work it on over here,” he says with a mock pout that spreads into a wide smile. “Come on, baby.”

  “Oh Jesus God,” she says, and turns to me. “I have to talk to this fool. You go on in. I’ll meet you right outside like always.”