by Harry Kraus
I think I want to strangle you. Jack is in love with me! At least, he said he prayed my husband would die. I looked at my father. He’d sat next to me opposite Steve.
“It’s obvious we all care very much about Jack. I believe God cares for him as well. Would it be alright if I led us in prayer for Jack?”
Dad the pastor. Why can’t you just be a regular guy and let these people believe what they want?
I studied their faces for a moment. Tears brimmed the edges of Miriam’s eyes. “That would be nice,” she said.
Not the hands, Dad. Not the hands!
My father held open his hands, extending one to me and one to Mr. Renner. To my surprise, Steve Renner gripped my father’s hand with a slap. Yolanda sniffed, extended her hand to me, then returned a tissue to her lap and extended her hand again. I looked at it, fresh from dropping her tissue. Wondering if I had my hand-sanitizer, I hesitated, then opened my palm.
Dad prayed with his usual heartfelt fervency. For healing. For peace. For God’s will.
I felt too guilty to pray. What was I going to pray? Heal Jack so I can run away with him and destroy flaky Yolanda’s life?
After the amen, I glanced around. Dad, the Renners, and Yolanda dabbed their eyes. Was it only me who was too cold to be touched by my father’s sincerity?
Yolanda sniffed. “Jack prays like that. You can tell he means what he said. It’s the oddest thing, really. The thing that makes me feel closest to Jack isn’t when we kiss. You might think that I’d feel closest to him then, and I do feel close, but it’s when we pray. That really brings us close.”
I wanted to call her unchristian names and tell her to shut up, that Jack had his right turn signal on when he was blindsided, and that when he wakes up you have another surprise coming: Jack is in love with me! I looked away towards the doors leading from the operating rooms and tried not to think of Jack kissing this girl. She’s not your type, Jack. She may be cute, but she’ ll talk you into a coma within a week.
Before Jack’s cutie could go on about honeymoons, kissing, prayer, or Jack’s piano-playing, Henry J. Stratford, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.S., F.R.C.S., pushed through the double doors. My father tilted his head towards the approaching surgeon. “That’s Dr. Stratford now.”
We stood and gathered around Henry.
Henry smiled, the air around him calm. I’d grown to merely tolerate his proud demeanor, but at that moment, I found myself reassured by his cool confidence. “We’ve finished the operation,” he said. He gestured towards the chairs we’d just left. “Let’s sit and chat a bit.”
Henry sat next to me and John, opposite Steve, Miriam, and Yolanda.
My father made introductions.
Henry nodded. “I’m sure glad to meet you.” He leaned forward and began to speak in even tones, talking of the surgery and the possible tough road ahead.
I hung on every word.
“The neurosurgery team worked on him first. He had a fracture here,” he said, pointing to his left temple. “An artery was cut by the bone, bleeding into his brain.”
Miriam and Yolanda gasped.
Henry paused. “The surgeons were able to stop the bleeding and remove the blood that was pressing on the brain.”
Steve Renner verbalized the question we all wanted answered. “Will he be OK?”
“We’ll know more in a few days. We’ll keep him in a medication-induced coma until then.” He paused, meeting each of their faces with his gaze. He even looked at me, and without his saying so, I knew he’d forgiven me for my outrageous behavior in the ER. He was pure compassion and confidence. “We’ll take him back to the operating room tomorrow and remove the packing over his liver. There is a good chance for a full recovery.”
I looked down and realized he’d slipped his left hand into my lap and I’d been gripping it with the tenacity of a drowning sailor holding a life rope. I lessened my purchase on his thumb and hoped it would pink up again soon. “Sorry,” I whispered.
He gave me an I-love-you triple squeeze before letting me go. It was something we did at the end of every date during our engagement, but that had been lost in the weariness of subsequent years.
I looked away. Not now, Henry. I’m leaving your perfect world. The renaissance boy is the one I want.
Yolanda leaned forward. “Can we see him?”
“In a few hours. Check in the ICU waiting room. The nurses will let you know when you can visit.” Henry stood. “But don’t expect too much. He’ll be on medications to keep him asleep and to keep him from fighting with the ventilator. Until we take the ventilator tube away from him, he won’t be able to speak.”
Steve Renner nodded and extended his hand. “Thank you so much.”
“Sure.” Henry glanced at me. “I’ll be home late.”
Of course. Stay as long as Jack needs you. I recognized the irony in my thoughts. I’d resented his late hours until he was staying for someone I loved.
Two hours later, we were allowed to see Jack, or at least a body they claimed was Jack. ICU rules mandated no more than two visitors at a time, so his parents were ushered in first. Two minutes later, Steve practically carried out his wife, whose face seemed pale under the fluorescent lights. The visit aged her. She slumped in a vinyl chair with her shoulders thrown forward and hid her nose behind a facial tissue.
Chatty Yolanda and I were next, as my father had gone on to visit other church members. Jack’s nurse met us at the double doors leading to the unit. Her name was Brenda Lee, and she’d helped take care of me during my stay in that very unit.
She greeted me with a hug. “Wendi!”
I gripped her tightly. “Oh, I’m so glad it’s you.”
She took me by the hand. ICU grads often become fast friends with their nurses. We paused at a sliding glass door leading into Jack’s cubicle. There she turned. “Jack isn’t going to look much like himself, OK?” She looked at Yolanda. “Are you his wife?”
“Fiancée,” she said timidly.
“Jack’s head has been shaved for surgery. He’s on a breathing machine, so he has a tube going through his mouth into his windpipe,” she said, pointing to the front of her neck. “There are other tubes, one in his nose draining his stomach fluid, one in his bladder draining his urine, and one in his chest draining some blood and air.” She paused, talking slowly, making sure we were listening. “It’s often quite traumatic seeing loved ones this way. His face is quite swollen, and I doubt he looks anything like himself at all.”
Yolanda nodded, already paling.
“Ready?”
“Sure,” I whispered.
Yolanda gripped my arm. Brenda slid open the door and a curtain to allow us into his room.
I was prepared for him to look different, but this man was not Jack. This man’s eyelids bulged with fluid, swollen purple slits pushing out of white cheeks. Instead of hair, he had a curving row of staples and what appeared to be another drain exiting from the center of his head. Brenda hadn’t mentioned that. His chest rose and fell in a mechanical cycle, unnatural and accompanied by the whispery bellowing of the ventilator.
Yolanda sniffed. “Jack?” She moved to his side and started to reach for him and pulled back, holding her hand to her chest.
“You can touch him,” Brenda coached. “But he cannot respond to you or speak. He’s on medicine to keep him in deep coma.”
I resented Yolanda’s tears and her presence. I wanted time alone to mourn the man I loved. Jack? I searched his face. He had a small mole on his left cheek, shaped like a miniature map of Africa. I used to look at it when he sat next to me on my piano bench. The mole was untouched, an island of normality in a sea of bruised flesh. This is Jack.
I moved to the other side of the bed and took his hand. I cared little if it mattered to Yolanda. Jack was turning right. Tonight Jack and I were supposed to walk on white sand and drink mango daiquiris while the sun melted into the Caribbean. I let tears flow. Don’t leave me, Jack.
My next thought was cl
assic Wendi. This is all my fault.
Yolanda gripped his right hand and I his left. Jack hung comatose between us, a warm shell of a body we hoped he would inhabit again. Yolanda cried loudly and stumbled out of the room.
I traded glances with Brenda, who moved to my side. I felt her searching my face. “Who is he?” she whispered to me.
I sniffed. “My piano teacher.”
She shook her head. She knew students didn’t usually cry when their piano teachers were comatose. I felt her arm around my shoulders.
“He’d just left my house when the accident occurred.”
“Look at me,” she said.
I obeyed.
My friend stared past my tears. “Does Henry know?”
I covered my mouth with my hand and shook my head. What am I doing? I’m being honest. I’ve stopped covering up. I immediately cleared my throat. “We’ve never — ”
“Shhh,” Brenda said.
“Henry’s a wonderful surgeon,” I said.
She nodded her head. “Of course.”
I steadied my voice. “This was my room, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. “Spend a minute here. I need to record his vital signs in a moment.” She squeezed my shoulder and disappeared into the ICU beyond the curtain.
I watched the dancing of the cardiac monitor on the screen above Jack’s head and remembered waking up in an ICU just like this. I was fourteen years old, pregnant, and scared. I lifted my eyes to the light above the bed and the thousands of dimples in the ceiling tiles. I used to stare at the ceiling and let my eyes blur, transforming the dots into faces. I remembered.
Pain. There is something in my throat. Where am I? I opened my eyes. My stomach ached. I listened to a rhythmic electronic beeping noise. My heart.
A face appeared in front of me. A floating face, a smiling man. Handsome with short wiry hair. “Well, hello to you,” he said.
My mouth was sand. I closed my lips around a tube.
“You’re in the hospital, Wendi,” the man said.
I liked his voice. Strong, reassuring.
“You were in an accident. You’ve had surgery and you’re just waking up. Don’t try to speak.” He touched my forehead gently as his eyes fixed on my face. “Can you lift your head?”
I strained. My stomach hurt. Did my head move?
“Good, good,” he said. “Let’s get rid of that tube.”
An accident? What about my baby?
What happened? We were on our way to the clinic.
Is my mother OK?
Brenda touched my shoulder. “I need to get back to caring for Jack. Would you like to visit again tonight?”
I shook my head. “I’d better get home for Henry,” I whispered.
I laid Jack’s hand back onto his bed, but not before I’d given it a triple squeeze, willing his subconscious to feel the message I was sending.
When I looked up, Henry was there. He ignored me. Here in his kingdom, patients were priority number one. His eyes scanned the monitors, taking in everything in seconds. “How’s his urine output?”
“One hundred last hour,” Brenda responded.
Henry slid back the sheet to inspect his abdominal dressing. He outlined a sanguine stain on the bandage with his pen. “Let me know if this gets bigger.” He laid his stethoscope on Jack’s chest and closed his eyes to listen.
Then he touched Jack’s shoulder and brushed the back of his fingers against his patient’s chin. “Fight, Jack, fight,” he said.
Here, Henry was pure compassion. He lifted his eyes from Jack, looking towards me, but I couldn’t meet his gaze. Instead, I slipped out, comforted that Jack was in Henry’s care.
CHAPTER 7
At home, I tried to lose myself in preparing dinner. I had no appetite, but I wanted Henry to eat. I simmered a clove of garlic, salt, and a sprinkling of oregano in olive oil, and poured it in a roaster over a half chicken. I set the oven to 400 degrees and retreated to my laptop.
I downloaded my pictures of the accident and stared at the screen. I looked up the weight of the Accord, checked data from side-impact crash tests, and measured the amount of side-door deformation. The distance the car traveled after impact was dependent on multiple variables, including whether it had slid on its roof or its wheels, as well as the speed and mass of the truck. From my examination of the highway, the Accord hadn’t flipped until it hit the grassy shoulder. There was no paint on the highway to suggest the roof impacted the road.
The energy transferred from the truck to the Accord was dependent on only two factors: speed and mass of the truck. I decided to give the trucking company the benefit of the doubt and assumed the truck was at or under legal weight. But even if I assumed a maximum legal weight, the amount of deformation of the Accord and the distance traveled after impact made the speed of the truck come out in excess of eighty miles per hour. If the truck wasn’t maximally loaded, the speed was even faster.
I looked at my calculator and tried to comprehend the number. I hadn’t even added in a fudge factor that accounted for the complete reversal of the Accord’s forward progress before it was flipped up and off the road.
I closed my fist and decided I would help the law nail the driver. This trucker needed to pay. If he got off with reckless homicide after I was through with a jury, he was lucky.
I picked up the phone and called the desk of Charlottesville detective Chris Black. He picked up after the fifth ring and sounded tired. Come to think of it, he always sounded tired.
“Detective Black.”
“Chris,” I said, “Wendi Stratford.”
I listened as his chair squeaked. “Wendi, my favorite blonde consultant.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.
“Not any longer.”
“You’ll always be my favorite.”
“I’m not blonde anymore.”
“What?”
“Long story,” I said. “I need help.”
Chris sighed. I’d bent his arm for favors so many times. “Wendi, Wendi.”
“Hit-and-run on Route 29 this morning. A truck and a Honda Accord. Has the truck been located?”
“It’ll cost you. Two double mocha lattes at Starbucks.”
“One.”
“What’s your interest? Have the insurance attorneys enlisted you already? I know we haven’t.”
“The Honda’s driver was a friend of mine.”
“Was? Is he dead?”
“Not yet.” I felt my heart quicken.
“You’re asking for personal reasons. What makes you think I’d give you department information when you’re not consulting?” He paused. “Especially after the way you embarrassed my men — ”
He couldn’t forget our last court battle, when we ended up on opposite sides. My accident analysis had proven a pizza delivery boy was traveling in excess of sixty miles an hour on a country road. I’d saved an insurance company a three-million-dollar payout. “I was just doing my job.”
“So convince me to help you.”
I took a deep breath. I was going way out on a limb. “I’ll bet it was a drunk driver. Or an overworked driver fudging his logbook asleep at the wheel. Or maybe something more sinister.”
I heard cowboy boots thud onto the floor and another squeak of Black’s chair. He snorted. “What do you know?”
“The truck was traveling in excess of eighty miles an hour. No tire skids.”
“That hardly seems like something sinister.” He laughed. “You’re paranoid.”
I pulled my fingers through my hair, still amazed at the feel of my ears without a load of hair. I played with the bristles at the nape of my neck. “It’s my job to be paranoid.”
“I don’t know anything. They haven’t found the truck.”
I wanted to curse.
He continued. “Remember what happened the last time you dreamed of foul play?”
“It seems I managed to save an insurance company a huge payout.”
“And incur the wrath of a multi-kazillion-do
llar pizza delivery chain.”
“So I’ll eat DiGiorno.”
“I’m serious, girl. You’ve forgotten the death threats?”
“Unsubstantiated crap. We still don’t know who was responsible for that.”
“Exactly. We don’t know.” He sighed. “I just want you to be careful. I don’t want any more middle of the night rescue-me-I’m-being- threatened calls.”
“We’re not talking about me, remember? We’re talking about a Honda Accord being demolished by a hit-and-run trucker. No one is threatening me.”
“Just let me play detective. That’s what I’m paid to do.”
“My faithful protector.” I tapped my perfect nails against the Corian kitchen counter and groaned. Today wasn’t going according to plan. “I know you love me,” I teased. “Just do me a favor and let me know if you hear anything.”
“You’re not blonde anymore? Really?”
“Chris, you’re not listening.”
“I’m listening. I’ll call you if I hear anything. But listen, if you think dying your hair can stop me from telling blonde jokes about you, then you’ve — ”
“You don’t get it,” I interrupted. “My roots were never blonde.”
“You act blonde.”
“Shut up.”
He laughed. I could imagine him sitting in his chair with his thumb in his belt as his belly did a little chuckle dance above his pants. “I’ll call you, sweetheart.”
I hung up. Chris was so helpful. And so annoying.
I plodded to my bedroom and stared at the suitcase sitting by the door. I didn’t have the heart to unpack my dreams, but was too scared to leave it out for Henry to snoop through. So back into the closet went my revealing swimwear, the cocktail dresses, and my black teddy negligee, but not before I shed another tear for Jack.
Predictably, Henry wasn’t home when normal people ate supper, but I didn’t want to face him anyway. I fixed him a plate and withdrew to hide under the covers of our king-size bed.
There, I hugged my pillow and marveled at how horribly my day had departed from my plan. My heart longed for beauty and intimacy, yet here I was stuck with a Buick-size closet of designer clothes and a husband who approached our relationship like another item on his checklist of successes. Job. Check. Blonde, busty wife. Check. I wanted to be the beauty at the center of a romance. I wanted to be pursued, to be desired. So how had I ended up feeling like an actress in my own life?