After some time, Gaspar closed the chart and returned to his sandwich. He sat staring out the window at the night sky, noticing only a few small stars overhead that were powerful enough to outshine the city lights. He remembered his life in India, something he allowed himself to do only when everyone was gone for the day. If he closed his eyes, he could almost hear the sounds of young children running and shouting in the streets along with the fury of the carts and animals. He thought of the fateful river that carried with it his entire past. A world away, it still flowed under the same stars that shone above him all the way here in New York City. If he sat long enough in his office, he would see the sky turn to night, the blackness and eerie quiet of a city asleep. He still relished seeing the stars—all two or three of them that made their way through the reflective light and smog of the city. He thought of their electricity, their form, and their matter and how parts of humanity had been a part of the stars at one point, a vast interconnection and exchange of energy. There was such beauty in nature and science, an answer to every riddle in the universe and an explanation for everything. All of it went back to the stars, and in his cardiological mind, the heart.
He finished his sandwich, swiped the crumbs into his hand, and stuffed them in his pocket as he headed out of the office.
Out on the sidewalk, Gaspar dropped the crumbs for a group of pigeons pecking around a fenced ginkgo tree. In that moment, he was reminded how all of it—the stars, the earth, and the rivers that flowed through it and the ginkgoes that grew out of it—had been here so much longer than he, and that they would be there after he and everyone on the planet had ceased to be. And that constancy, that firmness, that rootedness in all of eternity, and his small part in all of it, made it all the more bearable for him to continue his journey home alone.
Chapter 4
I don’t know why we have to go to another doctor. I’m fine,” Colm protested. He sat defiantly with his arms crossed as he tried to inch as far away from his mother as he could on the bus bench. It was the last place on earth he wanted to be. Actually, it was the second-to-last place. The last place he wanted to be was where they were headed.
Cathleen knew he was right. There was absolutely no point in shelling out more money for another doctor who wanted to put them through more pointless testing for another vague diagnosis. But since Colm’s first collapse, she had had a singular mission in life: to save her son. Any hopes of improving her stalemated career as an interior designer, rekindling romantic prospects with his father, or even finding another man to take his place fell off her list of priorities as soon as the possibility that she might lose her son had presented itself in her bathroom that evening five years earlier. When she had come home later that week with baby Colm laughing in her arms, she had privately vowed to do anything, pay any amount, go anywhere, pray to any saint—any God—whether she believed in him or not, if it meant she could keep her son with her always.
But experience had taught her that this doctor would most likely be like all the others she had met before. He would breeze into the examining room after she had read the whole of a two-year-old Newsweek, while listening to him describe yesterday’s golf game in a phone conversation that reverberated through the paper-thin walls of the cheerless office. Colm would have climbed up and down the examining table so many times that he would have exhausted himself and might be lying sideways off it—his head hanging midair and upside down while his legs spread out in a V up against the wall. She would hear the rustle of a chart being opened just a second before the doctor came in and introduced himself with a well, well, well, what do we have here? And she would have to explain it all over again. And then he would say, Hmmmm, I’ll have to order some tests. And after a quick listen to Colm’s heart, a few brief questions about what Colm felt like before and after he collapsed, she would be at the front desk pulling out her checkbook and scheduling the next appointment. In spite of all this, she knew she couldn’t show any doubt in front of her increasingly obstinate son.
“This time it could be different, Colm. This guy is supposed to be the best.” Cathleen tried to sound encouraging, despite her own misgivings.
“So why’s he seeing someone like me?”
“Because you’re special.”
“Uncle Sean doesn’t say I am special.”
“Now I am sure your uncle Sean has said you’re special.”
“No, I am pretty sure he’s never called me special. He calls me a little shit though.”
Cathleen gasped, shocked by her son’s language, but not by her brother’s. She knew him too well.
“Colm, watch your mouth! You know he’s kidding, right?”
“Yes. I know.” Colm smiled, thinking of his wild uncle Sean.
She could just kill Sean sometimes. But he was the only father figure she could provide for Colm, so she put up with some of the crazy things he said and did because Colm loved him, and he loved her boy.
“Well, you’re special-special,” Cathleen repeated aloud.
“To you maybe.”
“Yes to me. But to this doctor, too. And to lots of other people.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Colm laid his head on the bus window and considered the possibility that his mother might be right. Maybe there was someone out there who might think he was special enough to be worth fixing. Still, Colm had his doubts because surely if there had been something remarkable about him, his father would have come to find him by now. Colm didn’t know anything about him, but he knew how sad his mother’s eyes looked whenever she answered Colm’s questions about why his father and his mother weren’t together and why his father was not around.
I thought I could do a better job raising you on my own, that’s all. He loved you like crazy. He did. He’d be here if he could. I just do a better job on my own. It’s how I do things. You know that, Colm.
Even his five-and-a-half-year-old self could tell there was something she wasn’t saying. It made him wonder if his father had taken one look at him and decided he wasn’t cute enough or strong enough. He imagined various scenarios in which his father had looked at him or even held him, and then Colm wondered at what point it was that his father had rejected him. Was it after he collapsed the first time? Was it because he was sick? Colm thought of every possibility. He combed through the scrapbooks his mother made for him every year for his birthday. He scrutinized every old picture looking for his father’s face, anywhere. Is it this guy, Mama? Is this him? Is he my father? No, Colm, that’s your uncle’s friend. No, Colm, that’s just a cousin. Colm didn’t stop there; he went through her jewelry box and scoured the hidden nooks he found throughout the apartment. Surely, he thought, there had to be some evidence of his father. He had to have met him at some point. At least once, he thought. His mother always explained that his father had been long gone before he was even born, but Colm didn’t believe that. If she lied about why he left, he thought, she probably was lying about when, too. Besides, Colm knew it was his fault because what man would ever leave Mama?
All he wanted to do was become better, stronger, more wonderful in every way, because surely if he got better, if he was as good as he could possibly be, surely his father would come for him and his mother. And if he couldn’t get better, if there was no way to fix him, he knew he had to find his father more than ever. Somebody has to take care of Mama when I’m gone, he thought to himself.
When the bus stopped in front of Good Samaritan Hospital, Cathleen grabbed her purse and nudged Colm, who she thought had fallen asleep. Without speaking, he took her hand and followed her down the aisle. As the bus pulled away, they stood on the curb and waved good-bye. When Colm was no more than two, he used to jump, shout, and clap every time the bus arrived and sob when his mother told him it was time to get off. The bus, like the subway, was a magical thing, a home on wheels—large, rumbling, and filled with strangers and so much awkward silence that a hiccup was an event worthy of a stomach-grabbing giggle. For three years, they
had kept up their routine, but at five, Colm was much more interested in cars. Cathleen, on the other hand, believed Colm still wanted to and needed to wave good-bye. She had no idea her son had long since stopped crying over the loss of his large steel-framed friend.
“I promise this won’t be a long visit,” Cathleen assured him.
“You always say that.”
“When we’re done, I’ll go home and make you shepherd’s pie—and we can build something together with your Legos.”
“You’re not very good at it.”
“What? Cooking shepherd’s pie? I thought you loved Nana’s recipe, and the way I make it with extra whipped potatoes for you?”
“No. The pie is good. You’re just not good at Legos, Mama.”
“Well, I can try.”
“No, thanks. I’ll just do it by myself.”
Cathleen bristled a little, but she didn’t want to push him. She knew this was as boring and tiring for him as it was for her, and she knew he had every right to be cranky.
“OK, suit yourself. But I make a mean moat.”
Colm knew he was hurting his mother’s feelings. He knew it as the words came out of his mouth. But these days when Colm played, he liked to imagine his father was right there with him building castles or robots. He pretended his father was everywhere, watching everything and telling him what to do, and he was immensely proud of everything Colm did. Colm would smile back at his father, nod, and say, Thanks, Dad, I couldn’t do it without you. But the most wonderful thing about his imaginary father, Colm thought, was that he was there at night, lying right beside him, telling him not to be afraid, and assuring him he would wake up in the morning, and when he did, his father would be there waiting for him, ready to look after his mother.
“What if this doctor sends us home and says nothing is wrong with me?”
“That’s not going to happen. I don’t want anything to be wrong with you. But you and I both know, what’s been happening to you isn’t exactly ordinary.”
“I know. What if I don’t wake up?”
“What do you mean?” Though Cathleen had spent hours fretting over the same question, she had never heard Colm himself express the same fear. She had no idea he even knew that was a possibility. “Of course, you’ll wake up. You always do.”
“But what will happen to you if I don’t?”
“That’s nonsense. You’ll always wake up. In fact, this doctor is going to make sure you never ever collapse again. We won’t leave his office until we get a straight answer.”
Colm didn’t say anything. He knew his mother was promising something she would never be able to deliver. But he knew a lot of things, things he couldn’t yet explain or tell her, because he knew it would hurt her. There were things, he believed, he just could not say to his mama. He couldn’t say he longed to be with his father or longed for his father to come and protect his mama so he didn’t have to anymore. He couldn’t say that he didn’t think his mama was strong enough to live without him. He couldn’t say that he needed to find his father to protect them both. And he couldn’t tell her his biggest secret of all. The biggest one he knew would break her heart. No, there were thoughts and feelings and deeds that mamas couldn’t see or hear or know, because it would break them both and tear them apart forever. Mamas always say they will love you no matter what, until someday the what is just too much for them, for anyone, to bear.
Chapter 5
Once through the automated doors of the hospital, Colm pulled away from Cathleen. He knew once he was indoors and off the sidewalk Cathleen would permit him to let go of her hand. As soon as he was able, he broke free and ran ahead. Cathleen chased after him.
“Slow down, Colm. This is a new hospital. We don’t even know where we are going yet.”
Colm stopped in front of a long row of elevators.
“Found the elevators, Mama! Can I press the buttons?”
“Yes, babe,” Cathleen said, digging into her purse for her notepad with the new doctor’s information on it. “Stand still for one minute, while I figure out where we need to go. I just don’t want to jump on an elevator and not know where we are headed. We have plenty of time. We’re early. There’s no need to rush.”
In the time it took Cathleen to find her pad and look up, Colm had jumped through the doors of an open elevator. Just as the doors were about to slide shut, Cathleen slipped through.
“Colm, don’t ever do that again! You scared me half to death.”
Colm smiled at her apologetically.
“I didn’t mean to scare you, Mama. It’s just that the doors opened, and I was ready.”
“Well, I wasn’t. What if I lost you? Then what would I do?”
Though Cathleen had begun preparing herself to lose Colm after that first incident in the bathtub, a part of her had always felt, from the moment he was born, that she didn’t deserve a child as beautiful and perfect as Colm. She knew at any moment that her thy just punishment would certainly take him away from her. At one point she also believed it was this thought that was creating the entire drama. Maybe I am the reason, she often speculated, but then quickly she would dismiss that thought. Still she hoped for a miracle that would let her keep him. Every night, she prayed and laid hands on his head while bargaining and pleading with God to heal her son. She even looked into going on pilgrimages, like to Lourdes to bathe Colm in the healing waters of St. Bernadette’s unnatural spring or Assisi to bless him in the healing quarters of San Damiano, but she didn’t have enough money to make such trips. So instead she prayed and prayed. Please God, don’t take my son from me. I’ll do anything. Anything.
“Colm, we have a few minutes. We’re a bit early. Why don’t we go find the chapel and pray a bit.”
“Aw, come on, Mama. Do I have to?”
“God gives you seven days and nights, and you can’t give him a few minutes?”
Colm had heard it all before and dropped his head and rolled his eyes. There would be no arguing with her now. It was done. He had to go.
“All right, Mama. Just a few minutes,” he said in a resigned voice.
Cathleen smiled at him. She knew how he felt. Raised Catholic, she and her brother were dragged to Sunday Mass by their own devout mother and forced to attend all the requisite holy days of obligation and to pray in every available chapel too. As children they were taught how to be devout, but Cathleen never felt devout, especially as a child. She never truly believed all she was supposed to and as superstitious as she seemed to those around her now, even her own brother and son, who watched her dip her hands in the holy water, light daily candles, and genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament, Cathleen had a rather complex understanding of God and how prayer operated. Life had taught her some things, and she suspected that most of what one wanted in life was left largely to chance. Her prayer was motivated more by her belief in something C. S. Lewis had once said: Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes me. Cathleen seemed pious to others, but she actually found solace in the fact that everything in life was random. God was not responsible for all the chaos in the world. God simply stood by and watched. No matter how much one prayed, it wasn’t up to God. Praying was an end in itself because it gave her respite in an otherwise chaotic world. All she could do was endure and make herself stronger through it all.
She came to this realization in college after years of reading Nietzsche, Camus, Wiesel, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, and the Stoics. There had been times over the years that she’d tried to embrace a more or less godless, but nevertheless contemplative existence. She often weighed one great thinker against the other and then against her own beliefs—the beliefs she had carried her entire life. She asked herself if she believed as Nietzsche did. Was God dead? Or was she, more like Camus, doomed to endure all of life’s sufferings without hope of an afterlife? Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Wiesel forced her to look at her own suffering as the path to her ultimate redemption, and to reassert her belief in God. But then she read the Stoics and thought, perhaps the
best way to survive it all was to let the natural world take its course and to react dispassionately to all that life presented—both its joy and pain. She had even gone and spoken to a close family friend, Monsignor Benedicto, at St. Patrick’s. She grilled him for hours on all sorts of matters of philosophy and theology. Patiently, the monsignor listened, nodded, and, whenever he could, assured her that her doubts were all part of her belief. Finally, he asked her a simple question, “What would bring you comfort, Cathleen? What would ease your mind?”
Cathleen didn’t even have to think about the answer. “I want it all to make sense.” She continued: “If there were someplace, somewhere far away from here where we could all go, that would help me. When I was a child I thought there was a heaven, full of angels and people I loved—for everyone in the whole world who did not have it easy.”
The monsignor smiled at her. “What if you just decided there was such a place and stopped looking for proof? What if you just made up your mind there was a heaven and a God? Would that help you?”
“I guess.”
“Just try then. Try to believe.”
“But it’s so hard. My head is telling me something completely different.”
“Do you know where the word believe comes from, Cathleen?”
“No.”
“It’s from the ancient Latin word credo, which literally means ‘I give my heart.’ What does your heart tell you, Cathleen?” The monsignor knew it was a bit of a loose interpretation, but many priests before him had used this old standby on unassuming doubters, so he went with it, hoping Cathleen wouldn’t know better.
By the time Colm had arrived in her arms when she was fresh out of college, she had had plenty of time to think, and plenty more experiences—and heart-to-hearts with the monsignor—that made her absolutely certain of two facts: there was a heaven and she would go there someday, and everything on this earth must be endured to get there. Life was as chaotic and random as Madison Avenue on Christmas Eve, but heaven would surely make sense of it all. Because, in her mind, there was no reason that a child such as hers should be born into such screwed-up circumstances, and another child born into better ones. She wasn’t naive, though. As dark as some of her days seemed, she knew she was one of the lucky ones. She counted her blessings, and at some point, she followed her heart and began to pray again. It steadied her like whiskey steadied a drunk’s nerves. She knew it was no panacea, and in the end, too much of it might even delude her, but it was a quick fix nonetheless, and it got her through the day.
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