Surface

by Stacy Robinson

  Claire slumped in her chair.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be harsh, but you know he’s not going to get the emotional piece. Think about all the times we’ve joked”—Jackie placed the word in air quotes, emphasizing the not-so-funniness of their longstanding jibes—“about Michael’s allergy to peoples’ feelings. You just need to keep him focused on Nick’s recovery right now. Go with the broadest of facts, and then let things fall where they will.”

  “Oh my God,” Claire shrieked, jumping out of the chair. “I completely forgot about the guest room. It’s a mess, and Michael—”

  Jackie eased her back down. “I’ll handle it.”

  Claire washed her face with cold water and pulled her hair into a ponytail with a rubber band from the nurses’ station, and resumed her vigil at Nick’s bedside. It was late afternoon when she finally saw Michael walk into the ICU. His blazer and starched shirt divulged nothing of his long trip; his hair was gelled into place, but his haggard, bloodshot eyes told her all she needed to know. Claire walked toward him and buried her face into his chest, feeling only slightly less brittle. He squeezed her tightly.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” Claire said in a whisper. She could feel pounding in Michael’s chest and she looked up to see him gazing at Nicholas, saw the tears in her husband’s eyes. They pressed closer, twining together as if to insulate their hearts from everything around them.

  Finally Michael released her and placed an unsteady hand onto Nicholas’s wrist. “What’s happening here?” he asked. “Why hasn’t he regained consciousness?”

  “There’s been no change since my last message. No more hemorrhaging,” she said, forcing a hopeful smile. “But they’re not sure about the coma.” She couldn’t believe that she was speaking about their son. The words seemed to echo in the small room.

  “They’re not sure?”

  “They just can’t predict when he’ll wake up.” She moved toward Michael, feeling an awkward need to fill the silence around them. “Dr. Sheldon can explain everything better. He’s supposed to be here soon. But they’re doing everything they can. Bruce has been great.”

  Michael ran both hands over his hair, leaving a molded cowlick in their wake. He walked around her to the other side of the bed. His skin had gone ashen, the color of old clay. “Tell me again,” he said, looking directly into her eyes and speaking slowly, “how this happened. It doesn’t make sense.”

  The saliva dissolved from Claire’s mouth and her weedy composure vanished. She looked at Nicky’s face, at his closed eyes. “I don’t know exactly. I never thought, I mean I could never have—”

  Visibly shaking, Michael grasped the bedrail. “Why was Bricker at our house?”

  “I told you. He came by to drop off some paperwork for you.” Claire fumbled for the paper towel totem in her pocket, which had worn thin like the knees of Nick’s favorite blue jeans. “And to discuss the deal.”

  “He called you to discuss his deal?”

  “No. I mean, I’d been interested and I wanted to hear more. So I invited him in.”

  With each word, Claire felt more helpless in her ability to keep things from collapsing. He studied her. She was like a child hoping she wouldn’t be discovered, and wondering what the judgment would be if she were.

  “So you asked him in and he just whipped out some coke?”

  “No!” Claire tried to hold the muscles of her jaw and mouth in a calm line. “We just spent some time talking about the software he mentioned at dinner,” she said, focusing on the gold buttons of his blazer as she spoke. “You know, the diabetes connection, and—”

  “And what? He suddenly wanted to do drugs over your shared interest in software?”

  Claire looked up and searched Michael’s face, trying to read his thoughts, desperate to find some evidence of empathy, of a we’ll-get-through-this-together spirit. But she couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “Help me out here, Claire. Help me understand this. Tell me something to make me feel crazy for jumping to the conclusions I’ve been jumping to. Please.”

  The knot in her stomach tightened. She watched him pace, hugging the edge of the bed like a cat, his neck obscured by his arched shoulders. When he stopped and turned toward her, his eyes darted back and forth somewhere above her ponytail. And she was certain the truth she’d hoped to avoid had already dawned on him. “I—” she started.

  Shaking his head, Michael stared through her.

  She stepped back, nearly falling into the chair at Nick’s bedside. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because it stinks, Claire. And now . . .”

  Claire saw Michael’s lips tremble, saw his disbelief. She looked down at the floor tiles and the dulled path that marked the way from the entry to Nick’s bed, then back up at their comatose son. And the explanation she sought to speak evaporated. She wished she could do the same. “You know I’d never do anything to endanger Nicholas,” she said, her voice small with surrender.

  Michael raised his eyebrows. The wretched sound of Nicholas’s respirator reverberated around them.

  Claire reached out for her husband’s hands over the bed, but he stepped away. “Not intentionally, Michael. You know that.”

  The curtain drew open with zipper swiftness, startling Claire. Dr. Sheldon entered and introduced himself to Michael, shook his hand. Michael cleared his throat and looked sidelong at Claire, in what the doctor might have interpreted as an attempt to stifle his grief. Dr. Sheldon suggested they go to the lounge to talk. Claire followed, suddenly panicked that she’d allowed such an inappropriate conversation to take place in front of Nicholas. She hoped for any morsel of good news from the doctor, and wondered how she could possibly cool Michael’s simmering anger.

  As Dr. Sheldon explained Nick’s condition in detail to Michael, Claire tried not to focus on the skepticism she read in the doctor’s tired eyes. Those first twenty-four hours, already ticking away, were crucial, he explained. It was positive that there had been no more bleeds, and while Nicholas’s hemorrhage was severe, he did not yet want to characterize it as massive. But the level of the coma was deep, even though Nicholas did exhibit some eye movement when his head was turned. Good always tempered with bad.

  “What about surgery?” Michael asked.

  “We’ve performed some tests to locate the damaged blood vessel, and Dr. Marks, the head of neurosurgery, will be making his evaluation based on the results. But it was critical we stabilized Nicholas before any surgical treatment.”

  “And you’ve done that, which seems to be good news. So how long do we wait for a decision?”

  “Dr. Marks should be down to meet with you both when he gets out of the OR. But it’s not really a question of if we’ll do surgery in Nicholas’s case, but when. We need to go in and drain the hemorrhaged blood. And we may need to remove the damaged area to prevent another hemorrhage, depending on what Dr. Marks finds. Really, it’s the type of procedure that Dr. Marks needs to determine. He’ll discuss all this with you.”

  “Will the removal of the vessel wake Nick from the coma?” Claire asked.

  “It’s possible the surgery could rouse him. That would be the optimal outcome, but unfortunately we just can’t predict these things.”

  Claire looked from Michael, whose stoic veneer revealed nothing, back to Dr. Sheldon. “So would you recommend—?”

  But Michael cut her off. “What are the risks of the surgery?”

  “Dr. Marks is one of the finest neurosurgeons in the country. But I’ll be frank. In a case like this, the potential risks are severe disability, vegetative survival, or death. But Nicholas could pull through this with little or no permanent disability, and that’s what we hope for.”

  Michael stood and walked to the other side of the long empty lounge, his arms folded tightly over his chest. “When can we expect Dr. Marks?”

  “He should be scrubbing out right now. I’d say another ten minutes.”

  When the doctor left, Claire crossed
to Michael, who stood studying a print of hot air balloons floating in the mountain mist. “I think he should have the surgery as soon as possible,” she said in a soft voice.

  Michael closed his eyes for a long moment, then turned and walked out of the room.

  They waited in Nicholas’s room for the doctor, Claire on one side of the bed, Michael on the other, the alternating pings and sloshing noises from the monitors and ventilator punctuating the silence between them. A nurse poked her head in to tell them that Dr. Marks had been delayed for another half hour. Before Claire could respond, Michael stepped around the bed, placed his palm on the small of her back and steered her out of the room and down the corridor to the elevators. “C’mon,” he said. Nothing more. They stepped into the crowded compartment, and Claire felt a split second of relief at seeing all the floors lit up. Five stops to think; five stops until the moment of reckoning. She thought of Jackie’s advice, of full disclosure versus omission, but was unable to wrap her mind around anything more than vagaries.

  They got out of the elevator at the lobby, and as the pressure of Michael’s hand on Claire’s back grew she quickened her pace. They walked through the sliding doors and out into the gardens where patients in drafty blue gowns, some hooked up to rolling IVs, were smoking in the designated area. Claire imagined joking with Michael about the irony, as they would have done under any other circumstance. He released his grip from her shirt. The hot afternoon sun blazed and the heat gyrated in waves off the cement in the distance.

  “What the hell were you thinking, Claire? That you could screw some guy I was about to do a deal with, and we’d all live happily ever after?” He punched the Plexiglas smoking shelter on which she had been leaning. “Jesus Christ. Were you snorting coke off of each other’s naked bodies?”

  “What? God no!” she shouted through a flinch before regaining her equilibrium. Michael was not a violent man. He was proud, he could be arrogant, and he was hurt. But he would never physically harm her, she reminded herself. “It must have fallen out of his pocket. But I didn’t . . .” She took a deep, slow breath, and turned away from him.

  “Don’t, Claire,” he said. “Don’t lie to me. It’s not one of your strengths.”

  Claire’s body went rigid, but her mind filled with the relief of not having to construct lies she knew she couldn’t sustain. “I’m so sorry,” she said, coming around to him. “I made a terrible mistake and I’d give anything to take it all back.”

  “Yeah,” he replied, shaking his head. “In our home, for Christ’s sake.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, then open. “It wasn’t a rational choice, Michael. I don’t even know how I let it happen.”

  A woman pushed her husband past in his wheelchair, laughing with him as they moved toward the gardens.

  “Our son is in a coma because of—” He stopped short, looking utterly riven. He took several deep breaths. “Because of . . . your recklessness.”

  Claire stood there—exposed, contemptible, small—and watched her husband take her in. The lines of his face filled his features with weariness. And there was a sense of nervousness, she noticed, a darting and twitching of his eyes that conveyed some other preoccupation, as if he, too, struggled under the weight of some fateful secret. But she quickly shook off such deflections, knowing that she alone bore responsibility for bringing them to this frightening place. After several more deep breaths, Claire saw Michael’s face slacken, saw the hint of tears drying up before they could fall. The wheels were turning. She knew the look—business mode, spin. He moved away from her and paced the edge of the cactus garden with his arms folded, deep in tortured conversation with himself.

  When he returned a few moments later, he was stony. He didn’t ask if she still loved him, he didn’t say that he still loved her or that they would work through this together, as Claire had imagined and hoped he might. Michael announced that for now they would keep things as quiet as possible and maintain the story of an accidental insulin overdose. “We’ll deal with the rest of this mess after we get a handle on Nicholas’s situation.”

  “I’m so sorry Michael. You know you and Nicky are the most important things in my life. Please, can we—”

  A formation of jets roared overhead. They both glanced skyward. Claire placed her hands over her face and concentrated on her breathing, trying hard to silence her sobs. When she looked out, she saw Michael walking toward the hospital entrance, head bowed, shoulders slumped.

  She returned to the ICU alone and found Michael already in conversation with Dr. Marks in the lounge. Claire listened as the doctor recommended a craniotomy and clip ligation of the aneurysm, whereby he would open a hole in Nick’s skull and secure the damaged vessel. The other option was to wait and see if he would emerge from the coma on his own before reducing the pressure on his brain, which might put Nicholas at risk for further hemorrhaging. Dr. Marks left them to make a decision.

  Back in Nick’s room, Claire sat next to her son and stroked his arm as she considered the doctor’s words. She touched his lips and eyelids with her fingertips. His mouth twitched, just a reflex—the nurses had explained this to Claire the first time she’d witnessed it. But she took it as a sign, as the response she’d been waiting for. And in that instant she knew that the surgery would work. She felt it as a mother senses the sex of a baby still in her womb, felt it etched in the grout beneath her feet and the soft hum in the air around them. Nicholas would wake up after his surgery.

  “If he comes out of that surgery a vegetable, or if he . . .”

  “Shut up,” she hissed, seizing Michael’s hand and yanking him through the curtain to the hallway. “Don’t you ever speak like that in front of him again. Ever.” She hit his chest with her fists, thud after thud like low drumbeats, and Michael grabbed her, pulling her to him as she began to shout. She felt his arms grow tighter around her, felt her anger peak and then tick slowly down like a blood pressure monitor with one final, muted scream into his chest.

  “Calm down,” he whispered, guiding her to the lounge and away from the eyes and ears in the corridor. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Claire yanked herself free and wiped her eyes, putting as much distance between them as the room would allow. “I think Nicky should have the surgery as soon as possible,” she said.

  “Why?” His tears were flowing freely now.

  “Because I know it’s going to work.”

  Michael moved into her line of sight. “And you think you can trust your instincts? They’ve served you well up until now?”

  “Damn it, Michael,” she said, the ticker soaring again, “I know I made a terrible choice, but don’t ever question the choices I make about Nicky’s health. Just remember who’s been there for every doctor’s appointment, and who’s done all the middle-of-the-night blood tests. I know our son.” She rested her arm on the wall. “Nicky’s going to wake up.”

  “I want Bruce to get us a consult with one of his colleagues at Mayo. I could fly someone out tomorrow,” he said, stiffening his body.

  “The doctors here are excellent, Michael. Bruce has total confidence in them, and it’s not like you can just snap your fingers and have someone here immediately. There’s no time for that.”

  Michael cradled his face in his hands. A buzzer sounded in the distance. “I know,” he finally said, his voice stained with grief. “I know.”

  Claire returned to Nicholas’s room and took out the blood-glucose monitor she kept in her purse. Another test between the nurses’ checks to give her some peace of mind. As she pricked the pad of his middle finger with the lancet and squeezed a droplet of blood onto the meter, she thought of Nick’s diabetes diagnosis years earlier, of how traumatic and overwhelming it had been. And how manageable, in light of the present circumstances, it really was. What she wouldn’t give for just diabetes now.

  CHAPTER 6

  She remembered the moon peeking through the shades over Nicholas’s bed that night it all started, illuminating th
e silver stars on his ceiling and casting a strange glow on his then tiny nine-year-old face. His eyes were open and his brows were drawn tightly together in an angry V. Claire noticed a large, empty bottle of water on his night table as she sat down on the edge of his bed and stroked his hair.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said, his voice unusually high, almost whiney.

  “What’s wrong?” Claire looked at his heavy lids and the hint of black circles beginning under his eyes.

  “I’ve had to go to the bathroom like ten times tonight.” Nicholas sat up, knocking Claire’s hand away.

  She picked up the water bottle and wiped off the sweat ring from the night table with her fingers. “Did you drink this whole bottle before you went to bed? If I’d have drunk that much water, I’d have had to go to the bathroom like eleven times.” She poked his tickle spot and hoped for a smile, but the visible fatigue and irritability in his face worried her.

  “I was having a bad dream and I woke up real thirsty, so I went downstairs and got the water.” Nicholas sat up against the headboard.

  “What was your dream about?”

  “I was in the backseat of Dad’s car and we were driving to soccer practice and I didn’t have my ball because Dad threw it out the window.” His jaw clenched and his watery eyes narrowed.

  “You know Daddy would never really do that, don’t you?” She took Nicholas in her arms and hugged him tightly. “You’re going to be okay, buddy.” After a few minutes, Claire went to his closet and rummaged through the shelves, returning to the bed with a short-handled net, its rim decorated with dangling superheroes and dinosaurs.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your dream catcher. Remember?”