This Is My Daughter

by Robinson, Roxana;

  The car was hers, humble, restrained, powerful in her hands. She had the perfect circle held in her hands. The perfect circle to hold forever. She thought of saying that out loud to Tess, but Tess was too young to understand it. She smiled to herself. Everything would turn out right. She was somehow protected, magically. She laughed out loud to think of this, laughed with happiness. She thought of her father, he would be pleased by this. He would be pleased by her.

  The road kept coming up to them, fast, the line down the middle moving slightly from side to side, the way it did in a movie. Amanda tried to keep precisely in the center of the line. It seemed the right thing to do, it seemed symmetrical, fair. The line down the middle leapt up at her, shifting, thrilling.

  “You’re going too fast,” Tess said. Her hand was on the door handle and she looked straight ahead, as if by watching the road she could control it.

  “No I’m not,” Amanda said, and to prove it she put her foot down further on the gas pedal. There was lots more speed that she wasn’t using. The meadows flashed along beside her, the long dense grass, white in the headlights. Now it did feel fast, to Amanda. She could not remember what to do: what had Alison’s father said? But she felt in a stasis now, flying along in the car, along the straight road, the meadow grass standing soft and fluid beside them. It seemed right, it seemed exactly right, but it was not exactly right; at the same time there was something else she was thinking of.

  “Amanda,” Tess said, her voice more urgent.

  “What,” Amanda said. She knew there was something else, but could not remember. What had Alison’s father said? What had he said? She was a wild woman, but it was not that. They were coming past the church now, the white building, the sides sprang up suddenly into the black windshield.

  “Amanda!” Tess said, now loud. She was frightened.

  “It’s okay,” Amanda said. She heard her own voice now, high, mystical. She could hear all that she knew, it was all in her voice. “It’s okay,” she said again, to Tess.

  The curve was coming up, after the church. There was the curve. She saw it in her mind’s eye, saw it coming smoothly, the car sliding decorously around it the way it did when her father was driving, or Emma. She knew how the car would go around it, without slowing, like those tiny metal cars on metal game tracks, slipping around it hypnotically. She could not tell which she was watching, which was real and which was an image in her mind. She watched the road leap along in the light. She watched the road swing around, on the curve. But everything was going faster than she meant it, the curve was jerky, things swiveled, jerking, the hedge was not where it was meant to be and then everything changed, the tempo of everything changed, and the white line moved beneath the car, it went suddenly all the way around, spinning and pivoting, and then there was the hedge, springing powerfully toward the windshield, and the tree.

  PART THREE

  24

  The room is semiprivate, which means that a pale green curtain could be pulled out between the two high metal beds, separating them for privacy. But the other bed is empty, and the curtain is pulled back against the wall. The room is a narrow rectangle, not large, and it is nearly filled by the two beds. A straight-backed chair faces the bed where Tess lies. Emma has been sitting in that chair since eight o’clock in the morning. It is now the afternoon of Tess’s third day in the hospital.

  For the first two days she was in the Intensive Care Unit. In the ICU there were no curtains to pull, no privacy. The beds stood exposed, away from the walls, so they were accessible on all sides to doctors, nurses, machines, the equipment of saving lives. The head of the bed did not stand against a wall, anchored there against the pull of the night. There was no bedside table, no lamp. No lamps were necessary: the overhead lights there were always on. There was no need for darkness, there, the patients had created their own night, their own darkness and silence. They slept on, in spite of everything, the noise, the activity, the unremitting light.

  In the ICU, underlying all the other sounds, was the steady wheezing gasp of the respirator, forcing air relentlessly in, lengthily out, of the lungs of those patients whose bodies no longer breathed for themselves. Tess did bravely breathe for herself, but still she was put for a time on a respirator. This was to hyperventilate the brain, in case of swelling. Tess lay with her mouth stretched horribly open around a flexible ribbed hose. The hose was too big for her mouth, Emma thought, it was made for a grown-up’s gape, not for Tess’s soft lips. But there was no child’s size, Emma was told. The machine breathed loudly, and too hard, Emma felt, into Tess’s narrow chest. It rose and fell mechanically under the hospital gown.

  There were other machines. Tess was also connected to a black screen that tracked each quick living beat of her heart, recording it as a small meteor, bright and silent. While Emma stood by Tess in the ICU she was nearly afraid to touch her, afraid to do much more than stroke her arm. She was afraid that she would disturb the bandages on Tess’s head, or the black cuff of the heart monitor that clasped her upper arm, or the small IV needle that pierced the delicate skin on the back of Tess’s soft hand, or the clamp on her finger that measured, in some mysterious way, the oxygen in her blood. Tess was given CAT scans, and her blood, her urine, her reflexes, all were tested, to see what sorts of injuries there might be besides the hemorrhage. The tests showed nothing but bruising and the hemorrhage.

  These things, the hospital, had taken over Tess’s body. They fed Tess, tended her, kept Emma from her. This felt like punishment to Emma, for negligence, perhaps. For where had she been when Tess’s body had so terribly collided with hard unyielding things? Where had her mother, her protector, been? Emma stood timidly by Tess in the ICU. She has always felt that she owned Tess’s body; it has been hers since its birth. She feels that it is a part of her, an extension. She has touched it almost as often and as familiarly as her own, stroked it, washed it, tended it. She has known it with such deep and steady attention that it seemed indisputably to be hers. Now she has been shown to be wrong. Now she can barely stroke Tess’s arm. She does that very carefully, afraid of disturbing the equipment. Emma is desperately afraid of disturbing anything. She holds the machinery, the doctors, the nurses, all of it, in superstitious esteem: these are the forces that are trying to save her child.

  Now, Emma is alone with Tess in this small narrow room. Periodically Emma rises and goes to stand by the bed. She leans over her and strokes Tess’s motionless arm.

  Tess lies still, her eyes closed. Her face is swollen and battered. The blood has raged angrily everywhere, under the tender skin. There are darkened patches, welts, raised islands of bruise, small continents of deep discoloration—purple, a dreadful greenish brown. On the left side of her forehead is a wide lump, a line of dried brown blood along its crest. The shape of her mouth is distorted by swelling, the sweet line of her lips is changed. On one side of the upper lip there is a vertical line, where the skin has split.

  Still, beneath the bruising and alterations Emma can find her daughter. Along the hairline are Tess’s tiny blond hairs, fragile, shining. The eyebrows are smooth and unchanged: long pale arcs, soft and gleaming, like rabbit fur. Tess’s freckles are still visible, pale apparitions among the deep reds. Her sweet light hair is glossy, her face clean. Someone else has washed Tess: not Emma. Someone else took a cloth and gently washed the blood from her face, cleaned her fragile translucent eyelids, the soft skin around the swollen nostrils. The thought that someone else did this is painful to Emma, she has been denied something.

  Emma stands next to Tess and watches her closed eyes, resting deep in the sheltering sockets. Behind the swollen lids, the eyes are not always still. Sometimes Emma sees them move, a swift underwater flutter, staccato blinks. Sometimes the eyes open, and then Emma leans forward, her heart pounding. But the eyes are unfocused, the pupils sluggish, the stare vague. Even when the eyes move they do not see. Then they close, and then there is stillness, nothing.

  Emma looks down at Tess’s face.
Tess’s mouth is slightly open, relaxed, the beautiful cushiony lips just parted. She breathes without sound, but Emma can see the long slight rise of the chest as Tess inhales, the faint shift in the hollows of her throat, then the fall of her chest as she exhales.

  Watching her daughter breathe is what Emma does when she stands by her bed. It is soothing. This is completely normal, this breathing. Emma leans over, watching intently, as though she must memorize this rhythmic motion. It is what Emma used to do at night when Tess was a baby in her crib. Emma remembers this, waking in sudden alarm, slipping out of bed, moving through the dark apartment, stepping softly into her daughter’s room. Standing by the crib, leaning over the bars, listening, watching, until she was assured that Tess was breathing, her small body alive, secure.

  It is this feeling that Emma tries to recapture as she leans over Tess now. She strives for that feeling of reassurance and relief, as she sees her daughter breathe.

  A smooth clean bandage made of thin layers of white gauze has been wrapped over and over across the top of Tess’s head. Except for this, Emma tells herself, and except for the bruising, which will fade, Tess looks asleep. She is just asleep, Emma tells herself. This is how she is determined to view it. Sleep is what Tess needs. It’s the truest, most deeply benign restorative. Tess is deeply, powerfully, usefully asleep. Her brain is healing itself.

  Emma tries to imagine Tess’s brain. She pictures it: intricate and convoluted, the mysterious whorls fitting themselves precisely into the smooth perfect concavity of the skull. She sees it as beautiful and flawless. She cannot picture it as damaged, she will not.

  Tess has had a hemorrhage of the dura, the layer of cells that line the skull. That layer, which should be clean and pale, like the translucent creatures in a drop of pond water beneath a microscope, has been suffused with dark violent blood. The blood, rushing into this landscape, has stopped now, and stilled, but it has not retreated. Those clear pure cells have been invaded, violated. But Emma sees them as only changed in color, as though a different filter has been set across the microscope, the cells still in perfect working order. She cannot hold in her head the images of these darkened cells and that of Tess’s beautiful whorled brain and that of her swollen motionless face. The three together are too terrible.

  Emma wavers between wanting to know all she can and being faint with fear at learning too much, learning something she cannot bear to know. She does not want to know certain things; if they are true she does not want to hear them. There are certain words she never wants to hear. She has, in a split second—the second in which Tess’s warm skull met the dashboard of the car—become deeply, irremediably superstitious. She now believes fearfully and wholly in the power of thoughts, coincidences, bad luck. She believes in an ambient and potent malevolence which she does not want to arouse or attract. On some unexamined level she believes that if she allows certain thoughts into her mind she will be giving them permission to be true. She doesn’t want these thoughts to have any existence at all, not even a silent, fleeting moment of consideration. Resolutely, she does not let herself think of certain possibilities. She does not permit it. She feels that this, at least, is something she can do. This is a willed act that she can perform. It’s the only one. She cannot help Tess in any other way.

  Emma knows that if she has to hear any mention of the worst, or even of the very bad, she will not be able to bear it. There is a kind of panic, tumultuous and overwhelming, that she can feel starting to rise in her as her mind moves toward certain thoughts. To avoid this panic, she asks only certain questions. She asks what the screens are for, what the electronic signals on them mean. She listens carefully to the answers; they are her lifelines. They are all she has. Those answers, and the manner, the looks given her by the doctors and the nurses. Emma watches the doctors and nurses, studies them like a lover. She has memorized and examined every gesture, every word, every subtle alteration of expression. She scans everything for meaning, for the meaning she wants.

  This morning, when she arrived, the morning nurse looked at Emma before she looked at Tess. Jackie, a short broad white woman in her fifties, has a pleasant doughy face. There are deep lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth. Her short graying hair is cut in brief weightless layers, feathered like a bird. She is big hipped and big rumped. Emma loves her, as she loves everyone who has taken care of Tess, she loves them as a prisoner loves the wardens, cravenly, desperately.

  “Good morning,” Jackie said. Usually Jackie looked at Tess when she said this, but today she looked at Emma, and smiled.

  “Good morning,” Emma answered. She hoped her voice didn’t sound too eager.

  Jackie walked to the bed with her clipboard. She began writing down numbers, recording the information from the machines. There was nothing else that was unusual, just her look. Did it mean that Jackie knew something new, something that she did not want to tell Emma, something Emma could not bear to hear? Did it mean that Jackie pitied Emma, pitied her innocence in the face of this new, dreadful knowledge? Or did it mean that Jackie could now look first at Emma because Tess was slowly moving out of danger, and she no longer required such concern, such concentration, such urgency? Maybe the look meant that Jackie was allowing Emma more intimacy with her, because of this undisclosed good news. That Jackie no longer needed to keep Emma at a distance. Or maybe it meant that the door, this morning, had not been pushed all the way shut, and when Jackie came in Emma was in her line of sight. But Emma could not afford to think that. She needed signs to follow, meaningful symbols to interpret that would give her hope. The numbers on the monitors, the steadily rising and falling electronic lines, the brilliant, limpid impulses, like bright stars flowing across the black screen, are too frightening. She can hardly bear to look at them, for fear they will show her something that she cannot deny, cannot bear to learn.

  Jackie lifts Tess’s limp arm. She drives the glinting shaft of a needle into it and draws a syringe of bright blood. The color is healthy, Emma thinks, vivid and clear. They have taken so much blood from this small body. Jackie checks the IV bag. The soft transparent sac hangs high over Tess’s motionless form, its fine plastic line carrying a narrow but infinite supply of fluid—medication, nutriments. How can this tiny line sustain Tess? Three meals a day? But Emma has been told that it does. She must trust these people, the answers they give.

  Jackie leans over Tess. She picks up Tess’s hand.

  “Good morning, Tess,” she says. “If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.” There is a long moment, during which Emma does not breathe. Jackie does not move, bent over Tess’s poor bruised face. Emma watches, her whole body listening. Then Jackie sets Tess’s hand down again, gently, next to her side. Without looking at Emma she pushes a button to raise the head of the bed. There is a hum, and slowly it rises. Jackie sets her strong arms underneath Tess and shifts her unresisting form, turning her carefully onto her side. Emma hates watching this, she hates seeing Tess’s limbs fall about lifelessly. She cannot look away.

  This happens every two hours. A nurse comes and turns Tess, moves her arms and legs. And periodically a nurse will ask Emma to leave the room. She is polite and friendly, but she makes Emma leave while she does something to Tess. Emma asked once what it was she did, but the nurse shook her head. “There are certain procedures that we only do without any visitors, even the parents,” she says. “It’s a hospital rule.”

  From her reading, Emma believes that this is testing for reflexes—pain. And they suction out the throat, to clear it. At some point, too, there is the risk of bedsores, and the nurses would cut those out. This is called decubiti, and Emma cannot imagine it. She cannot imagine Tess’s beautiful lithe body breeding sores, or having those sores cut out, raw and oozing. She cannot imagine it.

  She has asked the nurse if she can turn Tess herself: she, Emma, is there all day long, with nothing to do. She can turn Tess every hour, she can turn her every fifteen minutes, if that will help. She knows that circulation is important
to a comatose patient. She has learned this through reading what Peter has brought her. She has not dared ask these questions directly of the doctor; she does not want these words spoken out loud.

  At the foot of Emma’s chair is a canvas book bag. She has two books for herself—a Trollope novel and some essays by Lewis Thomas—and three glossy magazines. She has, so far, not opened either book. She has read one of the magazines, but she cannot remember which. She has brought some of Tess’s favorite books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and two Tintins. During the day, Emma periodically picks up one of the books and reads out loud to Tess, who lies without moving, her eyes shut. Emma reads for hours at a time, giving dramatic inflection to the story, giving each character a different voice. When she reads from Tintin, she barks for Showy the Airedale in the loony words of the French editions: “Ouah! Ouah!”

  Tess and Amanda used to laugh at Snowy’s French bark. Emma remembered a car trip in which the girls both knelt in the backseat, pretending to be Snowy, and barking with French accents at everything they saw. “Ouah! Ouahl A McDon-ahld’s! Ouah! Ouah! A breedge!” They barked in queer growly voices, and talked with ridiculous accents, and this made them laugh so helplessly and loudly that Peter, who was driving, told them irritably to quiet down, as though they had been fighting, not laughing. But they were laughing too hard to pay any attention, their laughter had taken over their world just then, it was all they could do, and they rolled backwards on the seat, their knees in the air, their eyes watering, shaking with laughter, helpless. And then Peter, because they were on a highway and he felt harassed and pressured by the speed and traffic, and resentful of the fact that he was bearing all of the family burden, and they were bearing none of it, shouted at them. Even then the girls did not stop, what had taken them over was more powerful than Peter’s anger, and they crouched down behind the seat, whispering gutturally to each other and laughing, trying to muffle it, but unsuccessfully, snorting and choking, their hands held over their mouths, writhing with hilarity.