by Dani Shapiro
“Go ahead in,” he says gently. “I’ll park the car.”
I look at him out of the corner of my eye and realize he’s thought this through, he’s trying to do the right thing. No one can help me with this moment.
Morton pats my back as I open the passenger door, says he’ll be waiting for me in the lounge.
This fear is unlike any I’ve ever known. It begins in my bowels and spreads through my heart, into my brain, a psychic brushfire—visceral, primitive. I’m terrified that I will see my parents and break into a thousand pieces. All around us, just to either side of this hill, the families of Summit, New Jersey, are stirring awake. Children, cozy in their Doctor Dentons, are dreaming of the snowmen they will build, with carrot noses and Oreo-cookie eyes. Life goes on as usual, and I am entering a parallel universe. Nothing is usual, and nothing can be taken for granted. With each step, I am moving closer to the end of my life as I have known it.
I follow signs pointing to the ICU. I hear popping sounds in my head like snapping wires. For years now, I have worried about my sanity. I have known that the combination of drinking, drugs, isolation, starvation, and Lenny could not possibly be good for me. I have even called Susie from time to time to ask if—in her professional opinion—it’s possible for an otherwise healthy person to give herself a nervous breakdown. Susie always responds to this with a kind of analytic cool. She cites textbooks, the Physician’s Desk Reference, the DSM-III. She seems not to think a psychotic break is in my future. Garden-variety neurosis, perhaps. A particularly rough late adolescence. Would it make it easier if you were really crazy? she once asked, offering a free interpretation.
My vision is shaky, as if I were seeing through a handheld movie camera. The gift shop, potted plants, orange plastic chairs in the lobby all look like pieces of a puzzle, but I can’t quite see the whole picture. Passersby are looking at me, heads turning. I must look like a crazy woman with a face rash and dirty hair, reeling through the lobby in a panic, a spinning top, circling and wobbling until finally I end up at the glass-paned doors of the ICU, and I am shaking so hard I’m afraid to move.
I peer through the doors. The unit is a semicircle of curtained partitions with a nurses’ station at its center. I see a few nurses in white, a bank of complicated-looking monitors, but beyond that I can’t make anything out. As a child, I used to crouch by my parents’ closed bedroom door, listening for sounds. I didn’t know what, exactly, I was after—but I couldn’t stop myself, each night, from tiptoeing down the carpeted hallway in my bare feet and flannel nightgown and pressing my ear to the keyhole. It seemed to me that my parents had each other and I had no one. They had secrets and stories—even their terrible fighting was a form of intimacy. Now, once again, I am standing on the other side of a door separating me from my parents. Are their beds next to each other in the ICU? My parents have always called each other Wahoo, a mutual nickname long held over from an Indian movie they saw early in their courtship. Can my mother whisper Wahoo? Can my father hear her?
I push the door open and walk directly to the nurses’ station, focusing straight ahead. I want somebody to tell me how my parents are before I see them.
“I’m—I think my parents are here—” I say haltingly to the first nurse who makes eye contact.
“Shapiro?”
I nod. There are six beds in the ICU. I wonder how often they get a husband and wife in here at the same time. The nurse points to the second bed from the left, which is completely surrounded by curtains.
“Your mother is in there. She’s been asking for you.”
I inhale sharply. The air smells preternaturally clean.
“And my father?”
“Why don’t you see your mother first,” the nurse says.
Tears are rolling down my face in spite of myself. I swore that I’d hold it together, that I wouldn’t fall apart until some time down the road. I’ve been pretending to be a grown-up for so long that for a moment I thought I actually was one.
The nurse reaches across the counter and pats my hand. I realize I’ve been gripping the edge so tightly my knuckles are truly white.
“Come with me,” she says, “I’ll take you over.”
My mother is swathed in white bandages and casts from head to toe, and her legs are in traction, dangling above her like the tangled appendages of a marionette. Susie’s words come to mind—like a caricature of someone who’s been in a bad car accident—but I’ve never seen a caricature like this. Her head is turned to the side, away from me, her cheek against the pillow. I don’t think she hears me approach her. I walk around the foot of the bed, my breath shallow, all my focus on keeping my expression impassive.
“Mom?”
Her face is bloated, one eye swollen shut. Her nose is black-and-blue mush, and a deep gash above her left eyebrow is stitched together, painted with an orange tincture.
Her right eye struggles halfway open. She fixes a watery gaze on me, rheumy and unblinking like a sick old dog’s.
“I told them not to call you—” she whispers thickly.
Is she hallucinating? I note the IV slowly dripping into a vein on top of her hand. What is she on? My mother, who loathes Tylenol, is probably being fed six different kinds of painkillers and tranquilizers. She is too drugged to even know she is drugged.
“You had to come all the way from California.…” she murmurs, eyelid fluttering.
“Ssshhh—don’t talk—”
I look for a place on her body to touch her. One hand is bandaged into the IV, the other is beneath the sheet. Both legs are in casts. Her color is an appalling yellow, like the ring around a bruise. I’m afraid to stroke her face, the fragile, shattered bones of her nose and cheekbone. When I was a little girl I used to crawl into the enormous bed she and my father shared, which was really two twin beds, and I would lie in the crack between the beds, picturing the place where the two beds met as a fault line, a fissure that could open up and swallow me whole, pushing my parents away from each other and me into the vast, dark, swirling cosmos. I would scoot to my mother’s side of the bed, pressing myself up against her warmth until finally I would feel safe enough to fall asleep.
Now I want to crawl between all these wires and tubes and wrap myself around my mother. I want to hold her bones in place until they knit back together. I can’t let her see the fear in my eyes. She is staring at me, her one unblinking eye filled with tears.
“Paul …” she mutters, her brow creasing.
“Daddy’s just over there,” I point through the closed curtains. “I haven’t seen him yet. Do you want me to go see how he is?”
She nods.
“Okay. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I say, rising from my knees, feeling the room buckle and swirl. I lean over the rail of my mother’s bed and kiss her gently on the forehead, next to the stitched-up gash. Her skin is burning.
I make it to the other side of the curtain, then feel my hands rise up to my head. If I’m going to pass out, I’m in the right place. I try to take some deep breaths, but my throat closes up and suddenly I’m fighting for enough oxygen. Panic, I tell myself. You’re panicking. I close my eyes and try to formulate a single, coherent thought.
“Are you all right?” the nurse asks, raising her head from a medical chart.
“My father—” My voice cracks.
She gestures to an open curtain in the semicircle.
“He’s over there, but he’s not awake.”
My legs are rubber, but somehow they propel me to the foot of my father’s bed. If my mother is yellow, my father is a pale, sickly green. He is lying flat on his back, his head rolled to the side, an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. I hear a steady beeping, and realize that he’s hooked up to an electrocardiograph. My eyes dart to the peaks and valleys on the monitor, neon green on black. The rhythms of my father’s heart look jagged. I feel my own heart speed up.
I bend over him gingerly, careful not to disturb the oxygen mask, and press my lips to the top of his
head. My father has been bald since before I was born. His head has always seemed fragile to me, round and soft, slightly dented like a grapefruit. I inhale deeply, breathing him in. There are no casts, no broken bones. Except for his color, he looks like a man taking a midday nap.
I reach for his hand.
“Daddy?”
Nothing.
“Can you hear me?”
Not a flicker, a reflex, a blink. He may look as if he’s sleeping, but the word coma, that terrifying word, focuses itself into sharp relief. How is it possible that my mother is shattered but conscious, and that my father barely has a scratch on him but is in a coma? Roz said my mother was wearing a seat belt, and my father wasn’t. None of it makes sense. What happened when he passed out behind the wheel? Did he fall forward, his foot deadweight against the gas pedal? Did she try to unbuckle herself so she could reach across him and take control of the car?
“Ms. Shapiro?”
A man a few years older than me in a white lab coat materializes at my side. He introduces himself to me, and while I try to adjust to the idea that someone this young can already be a doctor, he lifts my father’s eyelids and shines a pinpoint light into them. My father’s eyes are murky, the color of a fish’s underbelly, and his pupils are dilated.
“I want to talk to you about—” he begins, but I motion him out of my father’s earshot. I’ve heard too many stories about people in comas who later repeat back whole conversations that took place while they were unconscious.
We walk into the corridor.
“I was in the ER when your parents were brought in last night,” he says. “They’re lucky to be alive.”
He looks at me, this doctor, taking in my rash, my twenty-four-hours-and-counting rings under my eyes, my emaciated body in its black cat suit, and steers me across the hall into a staff lounge. He pours some orange juice from a plastic pitcher into a Dixie Cup.
“Drink up,” he says, handing it to me.
“No, really, I—”
“No, really. If you’re not careful, I’m going to have to put you in a bed, and we’re running short on beds here.”
I take a few sips of orange juice, and look at the doctor again. He’s the kind of guy I should be going out with instead of Lenny. A nice young Jewish doctor.
“Tell me the truth.” I finally find my voice.
He pauses for a fraction of a second, as if debating how much to tell me.
“The truth,” he says. “Okay. The truth is, we just don’t know.”
“About my father? Or my mother?”
“Well, your mother has over eighty fractures, and she’s lost a lot of blood, but the good news is, she doesn’t seem to have any internal injuries.”
“What are her chances?” I ask. I want the world divided into numbers, percentages.
“I can’t make any guarantees. I’d say last night she had a thirty percent chance of survival. Now it’s up to fifty-fifty.”
I don’t try to digest this. Instead, I shift gears.
“And my father?”
His eyes dart to the exit sign. He doesn’t want to be having this conversation.
“Your father is an extremely complicated medical case,” he says. “We’re trying to get to the bottom of it.”
I feel like telling him that my father is not a medical case, that he is a stockbroker, an observant Jew, a philanthropist, that he likes the Yankees and once had aspirations to play professional baseball. That he is loved by the woman with eighty broken bones, by the divorced shrink on her way here from New York City, and by the fucked-up girl with a face rash standing in front of him. But I say nothing of the kind. Instead, I ask him how I can help.
“We need to know what medication your father has been taking,” he says. “Your—half sister, is it?—suggested that perhaps there might be”—here he pauses delicately—“quite a few possibilities.”
“I can go to their house and empty out his medicine cabinet,” I say. “I’ll go tomorrow.”
“Ms. Shapiro?”
“Yes?”
“Go today.”
When I was thirteen, my mother discovered a lump—a swollen gland—on the right side of my neck. She rushed me to my pediatrician (I did not stop seeing a pediatrician until I went to college), and he fingered the gland, frowning.
“I think we should get this checked out further,” he said.
I don’t know exactly how it came to be that my mother, Roz, and I traveled from New Jersey to Boston Children’s Hospital, where I went through three days of tests in an effort to get to the bottom of what caused the swollen gland. I’m not certain why no voice of reason spoke up and suggested that perhaps we should wait a few days just to see if the the gland settled down by itself. After all, maybe it was something simple, something less than lethal—like an allergy to shampoo.
In Boston, I had blood drawn; everything looked normal. I had X rays, and the side of my neck was poked and prodded by a team of residents. I had a spinal tap. Still, nothing. I waited in white hallways next to other children, emaciated children with yellow eyes and skin, while my mother conferred with the doctors.
Finally, they told my mother that the only way to be absolutely certain that nothing was wrong with me would be to remove the gland. The following morning, my head was wrapped in a turban (they had wanted to shave my hair but I threatened to run away) and I was put under while they surgically excised the gland from the side of my neck.
The following week, back in Hillside, I was doing my homework at the kitchen table when the telephone rang. We had two telephones side by side in the kitchen, a white phone and a black phone. The black phone number was given out only in cases of emergency. It was the black phone ringing. My mother leaped to answer it.
“Hello?”
A pause.
I looked up from my homework. Her face was trembling.
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed.
She listened for another moment, nodding.
I fingered the thick bandage on the side of my neck.
She hung up and turned to me, her eyes huge and wet.
“I was so frightened, darling,” she said. “But everything’s all right now.”
Until that time, I had not allowed myself to think that something could really be wrong with me. I was thirteen, and I had a child’s sense of invincibility that amounts to a kind of faith. With each needle stuck in my arm, each doctor kneading the lump, I saw my mother’s eyes sharpen with terror and that faith slipped away. By the time I returned home from that Boston hospital, I had absorbed my parents’ fears and made them my own. We skulked like ghosts inside the safe, thick walls of the house in New Jersey, protected by emergency phones and alarm systems, tranquilizers and special air filters. Three of us, waiting for death.
The driver slows to a stop in front of my parents’ new home and I stare at it through the car window. They moved here only a few months ago, and though I had meant to visit, this is the first time I’m actually seeing it. It’s blander than I had imagined, and seems larger than the house in Hillside. Large and empty. No one has been here since the snowfall, and the driveway is un-negotiable, a smooth, untrammeled slope of white.
I am soaked from toe to midcalf by the time I get to the front door. Grasping a ring of keys—my mother’s—I try to keep in mind a complicated set of instructions having to do with alarm systems and double locks.
The house I grew up in was protected by three different kinds of alarm systems: A steady red light outside the front and back doors switched on by a small circular key. A motion detector in specific, supposedly crime-prone rooms, activated by currents in the air. And carefully placed “panic buttons”—one in my parents’ bedroom and another in the kitchen. When pushed, they set off an earsplitting siren in the house to alert the local police to a crime in progress.
Now, grappling with secret codes and keys makes me feel at home. I remember my mother’s drugged, mumbled suggestion that it might be easiest to enter through the garage d
oor, so I make my way around the side of the house, my feet numb in my boots. I turn the key on the side of the door and it rises with a groan. Inside, there is one car, my father’s Subaru. His tweed cap is hanging on a hook by the inside door, and his galoshes are on the floor.
It is Saturday. My parents have not been home since sometime on Thursday, and the kitchen—the first room I walk through—still has life in it: a half-empty coffee cup next to the sink, Thursday’s New York Times folded open to the national news, a blinking light on the answering machine, a shopping list written in my mother’s pointy script. Eggs, Special K, 2% milk, tomatoes, salad stuff, boneless chicken breasts. Catalogs and bills are piled on the kitchen table, and at the center of the table, just where it’s always been, is the lazy Susan with my father’s drugs.
I’m a woman with a mission. I am so far beyond my saturation point that my mind has actually become sharp, methodical. I look under the kitchen sink, where I find my mother’s stash of paper bags. They range from Food Emporium to Giorgio Armani. My mother keeps everything, and I keep nothing. I pull out the largest bag—lavender, from Bergdorf Goodman, as it happens—and begin to fill it with the prescription medication and vitamin bottles from the lazy Susan. Valium, codeine, Percodan, Percocet, Empirin, phenobarbital, papaya tablets, garlic pills, bee pollen. It all goes in the bag.
I climb the stairs of my parents’ new house, feeling like an intruder. The art and furniture I grew up with are all reshuffled, and look familiar but slightly off, like seeing the next exposure of a well-known photograph. I hope I haven’t forgotten to turn off any of the alarms. If I trip off a siren, if the police come, what will I say? That my parents are in intensive care, and I’m here to retrieve my father’s drugs? There are pictures of me all over this house: baby pictures, one or two from high school, and a recent eight-by-ten that I use for commercial auditions. Will that be enough to prove that I belong here?
Inside my parents’ medicine cabinet there are more amber prescription bottles. I begin trying to sort them out, but end up just dumping the whole mess into the shopping bag. They are almost all painkillers. I’m tempted to reach in and grab a few, but I’ve never been one for pills. Give me scotch or cocaine anytime, but pills make me feel out of control.