The Weight of Heaven: A Novel
Page 19
“Babe? It’s me. How are you? How is he?”
“I just stepped out to call you back,” Ellie said, and even at this distance he could hear how raw and weary she sounded.
“So…how’s it looking?”
“Not good.” He heard the sob in her voice. “Not good. I’m scared, Frank. I think he’s not—he may not—make it.”
His jaw locked, but his voice was gentle as he spoke. “Hush, baby,” he said. “Don’t say that. This is not the time to give up. It’s up to us to save him. Those doctors don’t know everything.”
“He asked for you just before they moved him to the ICU,” she said, and he felt the world collapse around him. He looked up with bloodshot eyes, and everything seemed transformed—the spotless, shiny stores melted into rivulets of gold and molten glass; the busy, rosy-cheeked people rushing around seemed absurd and foolish. His son had asked for him, and he was not there. His son was sick—even dying—and he wasn’t at his side, holding his hand, talking to him, pulling him back to the land of the living.
“Frank?” Ellie asked. “You there?”
He blinked a few times before he trusted himself to speak again. “Tell him I’m coming,” he whispered. “Tell him to—hold on until I get there.”
There was some background noise at Ellie’s end, and then he heard her say, “They’re paging me. I gotta go.”
“Call me,” he yelled. “If anything…happens, leave a message on my phone.”
When they finally took off, Paris looked green and tranquil from his plane window. He didn’t trust it. The world suddenly felt sinister, evil, a place where a young boy with the sweetest smile in the world could be fighting for his life. He felt as if he was staring into the bleached bones of the universe, into the ugly pit at the center of all existence. A pit that was usually covered up by grass and trees and butterflies and sunflowers. He felt foolish to have ever believed that the world was a benign place, ruled by a kind, benevolent God. He saw it clearly now—the beauty of the world was a distraction, a sleight of hand, meant to make bearable the irrefutability of death.
I need a drink, he thought. Until now he had refused the free alcohol that the smiling stewardesses had tried to ply him with. But now, he pushed the call button and ordered a Bloody Mary, to still the tremors that kept attacking his body in icy waves and to dull the jagged edges of his thoughts.
After his second drink, something loosened in him. He picked up the phone on the back of the seat in front of him and dialed Scott’s cell number. “Scotty?” he said as soon as he heard his brother’s voice. “It’s me.”
“Hey.” Scott sounded breathless, as if he’d just run a mile. “We’re walking into the hospital right this minute.”
“You’re in Ann Arbor?”
“Yup. Just got in. Didn’t Ellie tell you?”
“No. I’ve barely managed to reach her. Keep missing each other. How’d you—is Mom with you?”
“Yup, sure is. Wanna say hi to her?” And before he could react, Frank heard his mother’s voice say, “Sweetheart? How are you?”
He was trying not to choke up, uncomfortably aware of the fact that the Italian man across the aisle was listening to every word he said. “I’m fine, Mom,” he said. “Trying my damnedest to get home quickly.” He gulped hard. “Kiss him for me, will you, Mom?”
His mother’s tone was calm. “I sure will, honey. And I want you to stop worrying. Benny’s gonna be just fine, now that his grandma is here. You just wait and see.”
His heart sank as he realized that he didn’t believe his mother’s words. Still, he smiled faintly into the phone. “Thanks, Mom. Can I, can I talk to Scott for a second?”
There was a rustle, and then he heard Scott’s deep tone again. “Does Ellie have your flight schedule, Frank?”
“Believe so. I left it on her cell phone.” He hesitated. “Scotty, I want you to do me a favor. You go see Benny, and you tell him that his daddy is on his way and that he should—he should hold on.”
He heard the crack in his brother’s voice. “You just get here, kid,” Scott said gruffly.
“I’m trying. If I thought hijacking a plane would make it go faster, I would.” Too late, he realized that he’d chosen an inopportune place to say those inflammatory words. But when he glanced at the woman sitting to his left, he noticed the ear buds sticking into her ears. She hadn’t heard. Nor had anyone else, thank God.
“Be safe, Frankie,” Scott said. And then, “He’s in God’s hands, Frank. Pray.”
And Frank did. Prayed to God, fought with God, argued with God, on the long flight from Paris to Detroit. He reclined in his seat with his eyes wide open, staring into the dark cabin. Listen, he said, I haven’t asked you for anything in a long, long time. Not since Dad left, to be precise. So I have a few chits coming due, don’t you think? Though to be fair, you haven’t given me much reason to ask for things over the years. All in all, you’ve been pretty generous. I have everything that I want, really—a great wife, a good job, a gorgeous son. And that’s all I’m asking for, to keep what I have. I don’t want anything extra. Because if you take away what you’ve granted us, well, that’s a dirty, cheap trick, don’t you think? You’re better than that, right, God?
He heard the anger, the defiance in his voice and checked himself. Scott had asked him to pray, to beg, and what he was doing was snarling at God. And so he tried. Sweet Jesus, he started again. Don’t take my son from me. I won’t be able to survive that, please God. You punish me in any way you want to, dear God, and I’ll take it. But not this. Not Benny. He made a few more attempts to continue in this vein, to promise things to God, to strike bargains, but soon gave up. Because it reminded him too much of those awful months after his dad had left. He thought back to that young boy pacing the front porch or lying in bed at night listening for the slamming of car doors, and his stomach turned at the indifference of a God who had stood by and watched silently. What kind of a father treated his children so shabbily? How could someone all-powerful, someone with the ability to perform miracles with the flick of his wrist, perform so few of them? How could an omnipresent being not know the whimpering frailties of the human heart, and if he did, how could he not be moved with pity? How could he bear to witness all this suffering if he had the power to end it? In a human being, these qualities would be contemptible, would be seen as the epitome of evil, the stuff tyrants and war criminals and psychopaths were made up of.
Well, if he could not plead with God or bargain with him, he would fight him for Benny’s life, would wrestle with him for the right to keep what was his. Because Benny belonged here, on mortal earth, with him and Ellie. He would walk into that hospital in a few more hours and keep vigil by his son, not leave his bedside for as long as it took. He and Benny would leave that hospital together.
He called Scott again as soon as the plane landed in Detroit, willing his brother to answer the phone. “How is he?” he asked as soon as he heard Scott’s hello.
“He’s alive,” Scott replied, and Frank’s body went slack with relief. Benny was alive. And now he was in the same city as his son, instead of hovering in the heavens, keeping company with a deity he didn’t like very much at the moment. “Where are you?” he asked.
“At the airport, outside of baggage claims. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
Pete Timberlake had accompanied Scott to the airport. Frank saw the two men startle as they took in his appearance—the crumpled clothes, the unshaven jaw, the bloodshot eyes—and felt a moment’s embarrassment. “Hey,” he said to his brother, who took his bag from him and popped open the trunk. “Thanks for coming, Pete,” he added.
Pete grabbed him in a bear hug. “Are you kidding me?” he said. He took a step back. “You holdin’ up, bud?”
He shrugged and got in the car just as Scott came around and slipped his bulk into the driver’s seat. He was off before Frank could even buckle his seat belt. Frank glanced at his older brother. “How’s Ellie?” he said quietly.
Scott threw him a quick look. “She’s hanging in,” he said. “Anxious for you to get there.”
He nodded. “Did you…did you give Ben my message?”
“I did.” Scott chewed on his lower lip. “But Frankie, I gotta tell you. He’s pretty out of it. The doctors say he’s not technically in a coma. But I can’t tell if he can hear anything we’re saying. And I just want to prepare you for this—he’s…they’ve put him on a ventilator.”
Frank looked out of the window, afraid that he was going to lose control of his body. He willed his brain to forget what his brother had just said, cleared his mind to get rid of the horrifying images that were rooting themselves in there. He felt Scott’s hand on his thigh but ignored it. His task was to sweep out of his mind the debris of Scott’s words. He was so involved in this benign task that he heard the awful sounds coming from his mouth at the same time the other two did and was therefore as startled as they were. He sounded like an animal with a bullet in its leg, which is how he felt, wounded, crippled, helpless.
The car swerved. Scott was half turning in his seat, one hand on the steering, the other on his brother. “Frankie,” he said. “It’s okay, boy. It’s okay. He’ll be all right. He has a lot of people praying for him.”
But the animal noise didn’t stop. Frank bent from his waist and leaned forward, his hands clenching his stomach. The sounds that came out of him were as old as the world itself. He had never known that the human voice was capable of this range. He knew he was worrying Scott, felt he should reassure him, but human speech seemed beyond his ability at the moment. He was gripped by a fear so large, it was swallowing him alive. It felt almost prehistoric, existential. It no longer seemed as if Benny had only been in his life for seven years. He felt as if Benny had lived within him forever, had been part of his flesh, carved his initials on every cell of Frank’s body for all of eternity. It was as though Benny had begun to exist from the moment of Frank’s own birth, that they had grown up together, irreducible, and the prospect of losing his son was the prospect of losing his own skin. There was no human language large enough to hold such a loss. There was only sound. Like the howling of a demented dog, the neighing of a horse with a broken leg, the squealing of a pig with a slit throat. But older, less specific than even that. It was the sound of an orphaned universe. A wail, a rant, a moan, a keening, that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth.
“Frank,” Scott said finally. “You want me to pull over?”
“No,” he managed to gasp. “Go as fast as you can. I want to be with my son.”
Scott ran three consecutive red lights as they approached the hospital. He pulled up at the front door, and Pete jumped out of the car with Frank. “This way,” Pete said and they walked the long hallway that led to the children’s ICU.
The waiting room outside the unit was packed. His mother was there, of course, and Bob and Anne and Ellie’s parents. Half of their friends and neighbors were also there, and it seemed to Frank that none of them dared to make eye contact with him as he went in briefly to hug his mother. He felt his throat tighten with a resentment he knew he had no business feeling. Why were they all here? He only wanted them to gather this way to celebrate happy occasions—Benny’s birthdays, his high school graduation, his college graduation, his wedding day. He had not invited them to this event. “Where’s Ellie?” he asked his mother, but Pete was already ushering him out of the room and through a set of enormous metal doors. As soon as they entered, Frank noticed how low the lights were in here and how quiet the unit was. A cold fear gripped him as they walked down a short hallway toward Benny’s room.
He almost cried out when he saw Ellie, who was talking to a nurse in the hallway. He had only left for Thailand five days ago, and he was coming home to a different woman. She had shrunk. Gotten older. There were lines on her face that had never been there before. Her shoulders were bent at an angle of defeat. Her mouth curved downward. But what killed him were her eyes. Magpie eyes, he’d always called them, full of mischief and fun. The eyes that looked at him now were friendly but dead. She looked at him with recognition, with gratitude, love even, but behind that look was another. And it was that second look that scared him. That told him how desperately sick his son really was.
He went up to her and kissed her cheek. “I’m here,” he said. He wanted to say more but his voice broke. “I’m here, babe,” he finally said. “We’re going to pull him out of this.”
She rested her cheek against his shoulder for a quick second. Then she looked at him, her eyes searching his face. “I don’t want you to freak out when you see him, okay? You promise?”
“I promise,” he said, and it was a good thing he did, because it took every ounce of self-control not to cry out loud when he saw Benny in the hospital bed, when he found his son’s tiny body under the city of tubes and drains that ran across him. He heard the steady whoosh of the ventilator and thought he’d never heard a more ominous sound. But what really undid him was the rash on Benny’s hands, neck, and face. When Ellie had told him about the rash over the phone, he had pictured something delicate and subtle, like a purple lace handkerchief placed on Ben’s face. Nothing had prepared him for the brutality of what he saw. This rash, these purple blotches, looked like an assault, like an invasion by a genocidal army. He bit down on his lower lip as he looked at Benny’s hands and saw the blackened fingers. How he had loved those hands. It was the first part of his son’s body he had ever kissed, minutes after Benny had been placed in his arms for the first time. He had loved the puffy rise of puppy fat on those hands when Ben was a toddler and later, the smooth stretch of skin. He had kissed those fingers individually and bunched up together. Now, he picked up Benny’s limp hand and held it to his lips. And before he could complete the gesture, he knew that this was one of the last times he would ever touch his son’s alive, breathing body.
Beside him, Ellie made a sound, like the cry of a small animal. He turned his stricken eyes to her, unable to prevent his last treacherous thought from registering on his face. All his earlier resolutions of striding into the hospital and bringing comfort to Ellie, of bending down and whispering in Benny’s ears and asking him to fight, fight, left him now that he’d seen the terrible face of reality. He felt paralyzed, thankful that his legs were still holding him up. He looked at Ellie, who obviously needed him, with something approaching resentment. He was spent, hollowed out, in shock. The burden of her expectations weighed heavily on him, as did the dismaying realization that he was not up to the challenge of comforting her, that he would fail her on this count. He stood silently at the side of his son’s bed, his eyes darting between the monitor and Benny’s bruised, marked face. “Ben,” he whispered. “Benny. I’m here. I’m home, Ben. And I won’t leave you now, not even for a minute.” Gingerly, careful not to tug at one of the tubes, he stroked his son’s hair.
“Until a few hours ago, I couldn’t even touch him,” Ellie said in a dead monotone. “He was still contagious, they said, so we had to wear a mask. And they started all of us on antibiotics, too. Like I care. Like I want to live if something happens to Ben.”
“Don’t say that,” he hissed furiously. “Nothing’s gonna happen to him.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Scott had entered the room. He watched as his brother put his arm around Ellie’s shoulder. The simplicity of the gesture filled Frank with shame and longing. Ellie’s been up for almost thirty-six hours, he reminded himself. Eyeing the couch at the far end of the room, he said, “Ellie. Why don’t you take a nap for a few minutes? I can take over now.”
She ignored him. “I didn’t know how much to tell you over the phone,” she said. “Didn’t want to scare you. In any case, the rash didn’t look this bad when I brought him in. It’s grown a lot mo—”
He knew what he had to do. “When was the doctor last in? I want to talk to him. Maybe we can transfer him to a bigger hospital. The fact that they can’t even get the fever under control is ridiculous.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but Scott held his gaze, and Frank was the first to look away. “So what do we do?” he mumbled, unable to look at Ellie.
“We wait,” Scott said. His eyes were bright as he looked at Frank, and when he spoke again his voice was gentle but firm. “And we do whatever is right for Benny.”
At five that evening, Ellie suddenly fell asleep halfway through a sentence. “She’s exhausted,” Scott mouthed to his brother. “Let’s let her nap for a few hours. We can wait outside.”
He rose reluctantly, knowing that Ellie needed the sleep but reluctant to forfeit his place in Benny’s room for even a few minutes. When they reached the door, he turned to Scott and whispered, “You go ahead into the waiting room. I’m gonna just sit quietly by Ben’s bed. I won’t wake Ellie up, I promise.”
He silently pulled up a stool and sat with his hand on his son’s wrist. He stared at Ben’s ghastly face, looking for a sign, for the tiniest gesture, the slightest movement that would give him a reason to keep hoping. But Benny’s eyes remained closed, his mouth forced open by the clear plastic ventilator tube that was keeping him alive. He kept staring at the beloved face behind the purple mask smothering it. Except for the gurgling of the ventilator, the room was silent. Frank had been up for over thirty hours himself, and the undertow of sleep tugged at him. He fought it off, forcing his eyes wide open, moving his eyeballs from side to side. He felt himself drifting and, for the first time since he’d received the terrible news, felt a strange peace. He was home. He was in a darkened, quiet room with his son and wife. And Benny was alive. They were in a bubble together, adrift on a strange, dark island, surrounded by strange plastic sea monsters. But they were together. And Benny was alive. That was the main thing. They were all alive, even if a cold mechanical being was drawing his son’s breaths for him. I could get used to this, he thought, spending my days here keeping a bedside vigil. Dear God, even this, these days of talking to and touching a son who could not talk or touch back, would be better than not having Benny in the world. I would settle for this if this were the best you have to offer.