Emma thinks of brave little Tintin: maybe his image is the one that could reach Tess, break through to her. In his tidy V-necked sweater and droopy knickerbocker trousers, his argyle socks, his neat little quiff of hair: maybe Tintin will scale the distant peaks of Tess’s sleeping mind, as he did the icy ridges of the Himalayas. He might, Tintin might do that.
Emma does not want Peter to look at her or speak to her. She does not want him to come near her. She does not want to hear his ideas. She is trying to get through the next moment.
25
On the fourth day, Tess is moved into a fully private room. It is on the same floor, seven, which is Pediatrics. The new room is square, and seems large, compared to the last one, since there is only one bed. The window faces west, and overlooks Central Park. The wide blank shimmer of the Reservoir is slightly to the south. The window is just above the trees. Whenever Peter looks outside, at any time of day, he sees small figures pounding doggedly around the perimeter of the water. The runners’ bright shorts and T-shirts are vivid among the greens and browns of the path, against the surrounding shrubbery. It seems strange to him that they continue their daily runs, that they carry on just the same, as though the world has not stopped, as though Tess were not lying here, motionless.
The bed commands the room. It is imposing, high and squared off, with polished metal rails. Facing it are two chairs, with a low Formica table between them. In the window corner of the room, facing the bed and suspended high in the air, is the glazed blank gray screen of a television set. Emma has not turned it on.
It is Tess’s fourth day in the hospital. Each of these days seems vast, enormous, apart from all other days. This evening when Peter came in, the first thing he saw was Emma, sitting in one of the chairs. She was leaning forward, toward the bed. Her chin was thrust out, her arms were folded on her chest, and her legs were crossed and wrapped around each other.
For a moment, seeing the intensity of her posture, the urgency of the angle, Peter thought Emma was listening. She looked still and focused, as though she was listening with great concentration. He thought she must be listening to Tess, who had not, so far, made a sound since the accident. As he realized this his heart lifted, for just a split second, before he saw from her expression that Emma was not listening to anything. She was leaning forward and simply waiting, waiting, waiting, in this silent room, for Tess to return.
“Hello, Em,” said Peter gently. He was always the first to speak now.
“Hello,” Emma said. Without moving she watched him come in and set down his things. He put down his briefcase, and the big shopping bag that held their dinner. He came over to Emma and leaned down to her. She lifted her face for his kiss without warmth.
“This is a much nicer room,” Peter said, looking around.
Emma said nothing.
Peter moved to the bed. “How is she?” he asked, leaning over the bruised face.
“The same,” Emma said.
The fourth day. Tess lay still, her breath slipping invisibly through her swollen lips. It was painful to look at her.
“Hello, chickadee,” Peter said gently. He stood watching her. “She looks better to me.” He turned to Emma. “Don’t you think her color’s better?”
Emma said nothing. He looked at her, waiting for a reply, and finally she shrugged her shoulders.
“The swelling’s going down,” he said. “Her eyes are less hidden. You probably don’t see it, because you’re with her all the time, but they look much better today, to me.” Peter leaned over Tess again. He spoke to her very quietly. “Wake up, little chickadee,” he said coaxingly. He was almost whispering. “Come on, Tessie, wake up. We’re here waiting for you. We love you. We want you back.” As he said the words, Peter imagined how it would be if, right then, hearing him, her lips parted slightly. He imagined how it would be if she opened her eyes, slowly blinked, saw his face. How it would be when she returned. His whole body focused on that moment, wanting it. He felt his chest seized with that feeling, with his wanting her back.
There was no sound in the room. Tess lay still.
Peter’s eyes filled with tears, and he turned away from her, toward the wall, his back to Emma.
“I think she’s better,” he said, when his voice was firm. He turned to Emma. “What did the doctor say?”
“Nothing,” said Emma. “The same.”
Peter sighed. He came and stood next to Emma. He imagined Tess’s small bright spirit, floating somewhere, waiting. He imagined it a sort of transparent image of her, perfect, intact. Unhurt, but out of reach.
“The waiting is the worst,” he said. He patted Emma’s head gently. Her head, beneath the springy hair, felt immediately warm: the brain, he thought, the blood. In this new world everything, everything around him spoke to him of Tess. He sighed and sat down beside Emma.
Grief was an actual weight, he thought. It felt like a physical burden. You carried it with you all day, unsheddable. Your shoulders, by nightfall, felt dragged down. Then he corrected himself. This that he felt now was not grief, not true grief. This was fear and sadness. True grief would be something that allowed no hope. He did have hope. He was waiting for Tess to get well. He waited for her improvement every day. The fourth day.
Every day, when he realized that there was no news, no good news, no change, he felt an ominous settling, a lowering feeling, the orchestra sliding down into deeper and deeper bass chords. Things somehow were descending, moving toward a dark, frightening, nether region that he did not want to explore. There was nothing you could do. You had to carry on, ignoring these terrible doom-filled chords, keep on with the business of living.
He leaned into the shopping bag.
“Dinner?” he asked.
Emma said nothing.
“We’re Italian tonight,” Peter said. He lifted out a stack of shallow aluminum pans with white cardboard lids. “I got one ravioli and one linguine with scampi.”
“I can’t remember what linguine is,” said Emma. “Are.”
“Have a look,” said Peter. “Take whichever you want. I’ll take the other.”
He set the pans out on the table between them. The pans were still warm, in a vague, unfocused way. He folded back their flexible edges and pried off the cardboard lids. The dishes were revealed, the pallid chalky forms awash in gelid red sauce. He opened a plastic container of salad, which held pale shredded lettuce with drops of water clinging to it. There was half a loaf of Italian bread, sliced most of the way through.
Emma looked without interest at the two pans. She chose ravioli, the little pillows, half-submerged in red murk. Peter took the linguine, a snarled skein of narrow snaky cords. From the bag he produced two plastic glasses and a big bottle of mineral water. He twisted the top off with a tiny pneumatic hiss.
“I think you’ll like this vintage, madam, it’s the same one that you had last night,” he said.
Emma, bent over her tray, turned to look at him. Her eyes were unblinking. It was a stare you might receive on a subway, from a stranger. Peter looked down at his food.
“Actually, I meant to bring some wine,” he said. “Tomorrow I will.”
“Don’t,” said Emma.
“Why not?”
“Not here,” Emma said.
“There’s no rule here against drinking. For visitors,” Peter said reasonably.
Emma shook her head, not looking at him. “I don’t want it in this room.”
Peter, his heels braced awkwardly against the metal legs of the chair, his lap full of the messy pan, said nothing. He took another forkful of the linguine. The fourth day. There was no logic that you could use, he thought. Anything could happen, for any reason, and no one knew what it would be. The doctor said there was nothing to do now but wait. The longer Tess was unconscious, the graver it was. The less chance of recovery.
Peter tried to imagine the site of the hemorrhage: the tissues clogged with blood. Tess’s brave cells struggling to rid themselves of this intrusive flui
d, to cleanse themselves. In his mind Peter urged them on. Imaging: wasn’t that what they called it? You imagined the body healing itself. But did it have to be the patient herself who imagined it, or could it be someone very close to the patient, someone sitting right next to the patient’s bed?
The CAT scan, done on the first day, had shown hemorrhaging. The clearing of the blood would take time. That was all anyone would say. The neurologist said his tests showed some disturbance; he wouldn’t say more. No one would say more than that. No one knew, he supposed, or perhaps they all knew and wouldn’t say. Perhaps that was the way it worked: he and Emma were not ready to hear it, if it were something they could not bear. Maybe you were meant to live with this until it was borne in on you, slowly, that this was the way things were. That this was the natural order of things, this was the way nature made it possible to bear things.
No one knew what would happen now, that was what the doctors said. There was no more reason to think one thing than another, Peter believed. Who knew what delicate shift, what unknown factor, would bring Tess’s soul back to them, unharmed? Who knew what might keep it away? Maybe Emma was right. Maybe alcohol would, in some mysterious way, be obstructive. They would never know, and how could they risk it? In any case, there was no point in upsetting Emma. Peter thought again of Tess, fleetingly, a sort of radiant ghost, drifting somewhere clear and blue, the soul fine, healthy, perfect. Waiting for something.
The linguine was tepid, and the sauce glutinous. The plastic spoon scraped unpleasantly against the aluminum. Peter sucked in his cheeks at the sound. He tried to eat slowly, drawing out the process, pleasureless though it was: nothing to look forward to, afterward. Dinner was the only event of the evening.
“Was Warren here?” he asked. Emma said nothing and he looked up. She nodded.
“He came this afternoon,” she said. She lifted her glass and drank from it, still looking at him steadily. Her gaze was open and empty.
Hurt, Peter looked down again at his food. Before all this, before the accident, the mere speaking of the name Warren had drawn Emma and him together, in complicity. They were allies, and Warren was their mutual antagonist, the outsider. Peter did not voice his criticisms of Warren, but he felt them very strongly: Warren was a fool. Emma complained to him about Warren, and Peter sympathized.
Now all that had changed. The complicity was gone, Peter and Emma were no longer allies. Now Warren was the father of Emma’s child. It was Warren whom the doctors consulted. It was Warren who helped Emma make the decisions. Now Peter was the outsider. He was the father of the person who had nearly killed Tess.
So Warren had come in the afternoon, when Peter was not there. Peter gave him credit for tact, at least. He felt another leap of rage, remembering how he had come in to find his wife in the arms of another man, that other man. At least that had not been repeated.
Peer took a long drink of the mineral water; it bubbled fiercely in his throat. He set down the plastic glass. In front of him was the hospital bed. Everything fell away before the silence in this room. This was Warren’s child.
And really, Peter thought, he had no idea, now, what Warren was like. He had always thought of him as immature and selfish. Years ago, during the divorce, he had been those things, but they had all behaved badly, all three of them. What was more selfish than leaving your spouse? You were at your worst during a divorce. Not only did you behave at your worst, you were also at your most suspicious, judgmental, intolerant. You gave people no latitude. Each small thing your antagonist did was deemed intolerable, it seemed like final, crucial, irrefutable proof of something. Over and over this was proved, and amidst mounting animosity, you cried excitably to yourself, You see? More! More! Worse, and still worse. You forgave the other person nothing. There were no mitigating factors, there were no excuses. You were merciless.
Well, you had to be. If you were wrong about this, about your own guilt, then what you had done was intolerable. You would not be able to live with yourself. You were struggling for your moral life. The other person must be sacrificed, if you are to survive. Outrage is useful. During a divorce it runs at flood level, high and foamy. It is aroused by the smallest gesture: any lateness. The least request. Any change in plans. All financial transactions. Everything is final, irrefutable proof. Your own side, your own argument, seems so transparently reasonable and benign; the other’s so patently absurd and malevolent.
Peter looked over at Emma. Her head was bowed. The line of her bare neck rose to meet the cropped hair, the map of dark plush, at the base of her skull. She ate slowly. Her knees were pressed tightly together, under the aluminum tray. Her feet were set pigeon-toed, toes just touching, heels apart. Her shoulders were hunched, drawn together as though she had been wounded, as though she were protecting herself from another blow.
He remembered Emma weeping with rage over Warren’s behavior. He had taken her side, always. After she stopped crying she was bitter, vindictive. There are no margins for forgiveness during a divorce. You make no allowances for this person as you would for a friend. This person is not a friend but an enemy, an enemy with whom you must make the most intimate and revealing arrangements. There is no forgiveness on either side, and you operate in a continual state of astonished rage. Underlying it all, of course, is the true, great and unspeakable outrage of abandonment, betrayal—the withdrawal of love. There is the intolerable answer to the intolerable question: Do you love me? This is a question you cannot bear to hear, cannot bring yourself to answer. You cannot allow yourself to confront that. You choose to focus instead on immediate issues, the fact that the child is brought back late once again, the fact that the weekend plans have been changed without notice, things that are final, irrefutable proof of intolerable behavior.
Looking back at it all, Peter saw with lucid amazement his own selfishness, his deliberate blindness, lack of compassion. Determinedly self-serving behavior. He could hardly blame Warren for acting the same way. If childishness would save a marriage, would prevent one’s heart from being shattered, who would not stoop to it?
But he had never looked back, Peter thought now. He had never looked at his own behavior or at Warren’s, really. He had seen Warren through Emma’s eyes, and only Emma’s eyes when she was angry, and never questioned that view. We see people in one set of circumstances, he thought, and we decide—we can see!—that this moment reveals their true characters. Though we know this is not true of ourselves: our unkind acts are aberrations, moments of duress, mistakes, much regretted. Moments in which we are not ourselves. There must be ways Warren revealed his generosity and kindness, his responsibility and humor. There must be people who know him like that. Peter wondered what Warren was like with the people who loved him: his second wife, Mimi, their adopted son. He wondered how Warren was when he was at ease, when he was at his best. And he, Peter, would never see it. It was like the uncertainty principle: Peter’s presence would change the nature of the event.
But what was Warren’s appeal? What had it ever been, for Emma? She had told Peter he was funny, charming, warm. Peter saw none of that. He saw Warren’s silk ties, his lustrous shirts, his self-indulgent collapse on Emma’s shoulder. He felt again the surge of anger at that image. The way Warren ran his hand through his hair, lifting his chin as he did so, arrogant, self-conscious. Peter disliked him again, detested him.
He took the last bite of the dull linguine, scraping at the corners of the pan with his spoon. Picking up the container of salad, he scrabbled half of the iceberg lettuce into his red-smeared pan. There was no dressing, and it tasted like nothing. Each bite was a brief succulent crunch that dissolved at once, into water, in his mouth.
He looked over at Emma. She had ignored the salad.
“Remember your greens,” he said, pushing the container toward her. She did not look at it. She had eaten only half the ravioli. Earlier she had eaten a candy bar; on the table was a crumpled red wrapper. Usually she was strict about sugar, and he wondered if this were a part o
f an unspoken bargain, if she were abandoning her standards, offering her own health in exchange for Tess’s. Trying to change the balance.
And who knew? Who knew what would work? Who could say for sure, after a recovery, that it had not been prayer, the kind hands of the nurses, the absence of alcohol? Who could say what subtle shift would alter this terrible suspended moment and bring things back to normal, would bring Tess’s spirit back to them? He was not superstitious, but there was nothing now to be certain of, nothing to rule out.
After the sad meal was over, Peter put the aluminum pans back in the bag. He set his briefcase on his knees and unsnapped the brass locks. He took out The Magic Mountain. He had begun reading it before the accident, and now found it unhappily eerie to be reading about sickness, about the impassive responses of doctors, the medical environment, the dangerous seduction of illness. But everything now was like that, he thought, everything now seemed related to the accident, in some sort of ominous and horrifying ironic web. Now, headlines about car crashes, marijuana, teenage criminal behavior sprang piercingly into his awareness. He was surrounded by it. Everything seemed to refer to the accident, although he told himself determinedly that it did not. That was superstition, hysteria, the mad attempt to force coincidence and pattern onto something random and undecipherable. He refused to stop reading the book. He felt as though that would be giving in to something, something that it might be dangerous to give in to, something he could not allow himself to yield to.
He leaned back in the narrow, uncomfortable chair, trying to settle his shoulders between the cramped arms. He opened the heavy book, glancing first, again, at the silent figure in the bed. From where he sat, he could see only the silhouettes of Tess’s feet, shrouded by the blanket. They did not move.
This Is My Daughter Page 39