by Andre Dubus
I looked down. Dark liquid flowed from under her engine and formed a pool on the highway, and I imagined a motorcycle under there and a man dead and crushed between the motorcycle and the engine and I knew I would have to look at him. Then, for the first time, I saw Luis Santiago. He came from the passenger’s side, circling the rear of the car, and walked up to me and Luz, standing beside the driver’s door and the pool of what I believed was blood on the pavement. Later I learned that it was oil from the crankcase and the abandoned motorcycle Luz had run over was no longer under her car. Luis was Luz’s brother and he was young and I believe his chest and shoulders were broad. He stopped short of Luz, so that she stood between us. That is when he spoke to me, mostly in his native tongue, learned in Puerto Rico.
I do not remember what I said to him, or to Luz. But I know what I was feeling, thinking: first I had to get Luz off the highway and lie her down and raise her legs and cover her with my jacket, for I believed she was in danger of shock. Then I would leave Luis with Luz and return to her car and look under its engine at the crushed man. We left her car and walked across the speed lane to the left side of the highway. We did not have to hurry. No cars were coming. We walked in column: I was in front, Luz was behind me, and Luis was in the rear. At the side of the road we stopped. I saw headlights coming north, toward us. We were not in danger then. If we had known the car was going to swerve toward us, we could have stepped over the guard rail. I waved at the headlights, the driver, my raised arms crossing in front of my face. I wanted the driver to stop and help us. I wanted the driver to be with me when I looked under Luz’s car. We were standing abreast, looking at the car. I was on the right, near the guard rail; Luz was in the middle, and Luis stood on her left. I was still waving at the car when it came too fast to Luz’s car and the driver swerved left, into the speed lane, toward my Subaru’s blinking emergency lights, and toward us. Then I was lying on the car’s trunk and asking someone: What happened?
Only Luis Santiago knows. While I was in Massachusetts General Hospital my wife told me that Luz Santiago told our lawyer I had pushed her away from the car. I knew it was true. Maybe because my left thigh was the only part of my two legs that did not break, and because the car broke my right hip. When the car hit us, Luis was facing its passenger side, Luz was between its headlights, and I was facing the driver. In the hospital I assumed that I had grabbed Luz with my left hand and jerked and threw her behind me and to my right, onto the side of the highway. That motion would have turned my body enough to the left to protect my left thigh, and expose my right hip to the car. But I do not think the patterns of my wounds told me I had pushed Luz. I knew, from the first moments in the stationary ambulance, that a car struck me because I was standing where I should have been; and, some time later, in the hospital, I knew I had chosen to stand there, rather than leap toward the guard rail.
On 17 September 1986 I left the hospital and came home. In December, Dr. Wayne Sharaf talked to me on the phone. He is young, and he told me I was the first person whose life he had saved, when he worked on me at the clinic in Wilmington. Then he said that, after working on me, he worked on Luz Santiago, and she told him I had pushed her away from the car. I thanked him for saving my life and telling me what Luz had told him. I said: Now I can never be angry at myself for stopping that night. He said: Don’t ever be. You saved that woman’s life. Perhaps not. She may have survived, as I have. I am forever a cripple, but I am alive, and I am a father and a husband, and in 1987 I am sitting in the sunlight of June and writing this.
1987
SKETCHES AT HOME
10 December 1986
SO MANY OF the nurses did this so frequently that I believe they are taught to do it. You ask for something: a pitcher of iced water, a cup of juice. The nurse is friendly, even affectionate: Sure, Andre; can I get you anything else? She leaves. Her return is usually not quick. She has other patients. Then she comes into the room, and to your bed. I always thought of it as the room, and only sometimes my bed. She places the pitcher or the cup of juice on the wheeled table beside the bed. There is another affectionate exchange: she announces your beverage or apologizes for taking so long and you thank her, and you mean it too. She is friendly and competent and you could not get through the hours without her — you could survive, but it would be terrible — and you are more thirsty than you ever were outside the hospital, save after a long workout in hot weather. She leaves. You reach for the pitcher or cup and do not touch it. You roll toward the table and extend your arm; if you are in traction you cannot truly roll; you just turn a bit. You still cannot touch the plastic pitcher or paper cup. With one hand you hold the table and pull it toward you, then turn it this way or that until its angle brings your drink closer. Finally you can touch the side of the vessel, carefully turn it in a series of partial circles until it is within range. Then you hold it and pour from it or bring it to your lips. This is also true of the small paper container that holds your pills. The nurses place them, too, just out of reach. Not every time, but enough of the time, enough. Hospital challenge.
Today is the tenth of December, nineteen eighty-six. Exactly twenty-five years ago I finished the first draft of a novella called One Face in the Morning; I was a first lieutenant, executive officer of the Marine Detachment aboard the carrier USS Ranger. Today at home in a hospital bed I phoned the Phoenix Bookstore in Haverhill and spoke to my friend, Jack Herlihy, who is the store’s co-owner. I asked him to order Thomas McGuane’s book of stories; he already had it at the store. We bantered for a while, then he said someone had just come in and was fondling one of my books and wanted to tell me hello. It was the doctor who treated me at the hospital in Wilmington, north of Boston and a short distance south of the place on Route 93 where, on 23 July, the car hit me and Mr. Santiago, who died soon afterward, that night. They worked on me at Wilmington and that is where my wife, Peggy, and my son, Jeb, first saw me. On the phone, the doctor told me they saved my life at Wilmington, then sent me to Massachusetts General. So in my December bed at home I asked him what I was like: Was I bleeding a lot? Screaming? I was not bleeding so much, he said, but I was in shock and they put inflatable pants on me. I said I remembered the sound of them, but nothing else. He said they were to bring up my blood pressure; it was the shock I was in. And no, I wasn’t screaming. I was talking. I told them a lot about the accident. (Shock kept me for a while from pain; I do not remember when the one left, and the other moved in.) The doctor said on the phone: The other fellow passed on, as you know. But you saved the woman’s life. I asked him if I told him that in the clinic at Wilmington. No, he said, it came out in the wash later on. She told me. I was with her all night. (It was her brother the car killed. He was visiting her from Puerto Rico. On the highway, standing beside their car that had struck an abandoned motorcycle, he said to me: Señor, por favor, please help, no hablo Ingles. That is all he said to me.) I told the doctor the woman had told my lawyer someone pulled her out of the way; she could not remember who. I had suspected and hoped I had done it: she stood between her brother and me and he was in line with the passenger side of the car that hit us, so he was near the center of the road; I was in front of the driver’s side and near the edge of the road; when the car hit us, she was on the ground beside the road. No, the doctor said, that night she said you pulled her out of the way. So you saved a life that night. I said: So did you. Yes, he said. I told him I would like to buy him a drink. I had never, I said, bought a drink for anyone who had saved my life. I told him at Massachusetts General a male nurse and a doctor had saved my life one night when an artery burst in my lower left leg, before it was amputated, but I was in the hospital for a long time after that and could not buy them a drink. Then I told him why I had wanted to be the one who had saved the woman: because now that I was certain, I could never be angry at myself for stopping and going out on the highway to them, and their car. Yes, the doctor said, I know.
12 December 1986
Yesterday, 11 December, Cade
nce became four years and six months old. A week ago she came home from play school after dark, as she often does these short December days. I lay in my hospital bed in the small library at the west end of the house. At the other end I could hear Peggy and Cadence talking. Nearly always Cadence comes into the house talking. She said: “I’m going to watch Disaney.”
There was something not childish about the way she said it. I imagined her taking off her coat as she spoke. She came down the hall to talk to me. At home we only let her watch Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, VCR cartoons. That night we had no cartoon for her because the woman who runs play school had told her about Disney. At six o’clock she climbed onto my bed and I turned on the television with remote control, and with another control switch raised the head of the bed so Cadence could see the screen above my right foot in its cast; the entire leg was in a cast, and covered by a green camouflage-covered poncho liner a Marine major gave me. First Mickey Mouse was on the screen. Cadence lay touching my side, her head on my shoulder; my arm was around her.
But they were showing Davy Crockett with Fess Parker. Cadence said: This isn’t Disaney. I explained to her why it was Disney, and told her I did not understand why they were showing it at six o’clock, when kids would be watching. Often Cadence cries suddenly when she is disappointed but she did not. Crockett was boring, but we watched it anyway, and soon she was restless and talking. Now and then she voiced her objection to Davy Crockett in general. But she was calm and when Crockett ended she climbed down from the raised head of the bed, which she likes to do, then went to talk to Peggy in the kitchen.
I was not calm. It has been a week now, almost to the hour, but I still recall it with sorrow. This is not a sad memory for me because Cadence did not enjoy something on television. No: it is because in her voice that day I heard something for the first time. When she said in the kitchen across the house from me I’m going to watch Disaney, her tone was different. It was not one of those common to her: excitement, delight, happy anticipation. It was an announcement, and its tone, though high-pitched, was that of an adult at the end of a day saying: I’m going to take a long shower or I’m going to have a martini or We’re going out to dinner. So remembering, I am sad, thinking of all the disappointments and betrayals and horrors waiting for her out there, after her happy instincts and announcements as a grown woman.
One night in the hospital I was lying with the light off, and I needed something. Maybe morphine or juice or water. I was about to press the button for a nurse when down the hall an old woman began to scream. She did not stop and the screams did not diminish in volume; they had the energy of her pain. I did not press the button. I thought: you cannot ask for something when someone else is in pain. Then I thought: But there is always someone suffering, so I should never ask for anything. And at once I knew a saint would take that idea and run with it, would live that way. I waited until the nurse cared for the woman and she stopped screaming, then I pressed the button.
2 January 1987
I call them the terrors but they are not bad. I returned home from the hospital on 17 September and a few days later they began, and they have stayed. Every day at sundown I become afraid. Now on 2 January 1987 I have been afraid throughout the day, and this has been going on for over a week. The road that night comes back to me, the lights of the car, the hospital. I see Luz Santiago sitting beside the road while the car hits her brother and me. I of course did not see her; I threw her there; witnesses say that is where she was.
But I am afraid of more than memory: I am afraid of death, my own and that of everyone I love: and injury, to me and everyone I love. I am most afraid for the physically weakest, Cadence, and today when Peggy wheeled me from my bed to the dining room for lunch, I saw one of Cadence’s music boxes on the table and at once thought of seeing it with her gone, with her dead, and then tears were on my cheeks and I took a Xanax, a tranquilizer.
I think often of soldiers, especially those from Vietnam because it is more recent. I wonder if my fear is like theirs, with the same causes, and I know their experience was worse, because I was not in a war but struck in an instant during a peaceful summer, then was in a hospital near home, and my family and friends were with me. Some veterans have told me of their fear long after their wars.
From my bed now the world is a frightful place of death and pain and sorrow. We must love soldiers who have fought. Their nationality does not matter; their very characters do not. We must love them because of what they suffered, the terrible things done to them and to their comrades; and some of them have done terrible things too. I was a Marine officer in peacetime. Today, reading James Kennaway’s wonderful Tunes of Glory, I remembered how deeply I loved my troops. I thought of landmines in Vietnam. I thought of watching my troops being killed or injured. And I believed it possible that I could force Vietnamese peasants to walk through an area we were afraid was mined; and that if it were possible for me to do such a thing, it would be out of love for my men, and that I would know I was committing terrible and unforgivable murder, because war is terrible and unforgivable.
23 May 1988
Twenty-two months to the day since the car hit me. A year ago, in May, with much prayer, I forgave its driver. I have read a lot about Vietnam since January of 1987, and I have talked with two close friends who were Marines there. I am still in a wheelchair, but I have very little physical pain now, and the fear is gone. So my soul is not as fragile and I know now that even war is forgivable, as all human actions can be, ought to be. After the dead are buried, and the maimed have left the hospitals and started their new lives, after the physical pain of grief has become, with time, a permanent wound in the soul, a sorrow that will last as long as the body does, after the horrors become nightmares and sudden daylight memories, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love, even for the men who in suits and ties start and end wars, but most of all for the soldiers, whether at Borodino or Gettysburg or Hue, who fought and died and lost arms and legs and sight and hearing and kinetic muscles and functioning brains and remained physically whole but were never again able to love with wholeness another human being: those young soldiers who fought not for ideas but because they loved one another with a greater love than nearly all we civilians ever witness, ever give.
1986/1988
A WOMAN IN APRIL
IN NEW YORK CITY, the twenty-fifth of April 1988 was a warm and blue day, and daylight savings time held the sun in the sky after dinner and all the way from the restaurant to Lincoln Center, where we were supposed to be at eight o’clock. The way from the restaurant to Lincoln Center was sidewalks, nearly all of them with curbs and no curb cuts, and streets with traffic; and we were with my friend David Novak, and my friend and agent, Philip Spitzer, pushing my wheelchair and pulling it up curbs and easing it down them while I watched the grills and windshields of cars. I call David the Skipper because he was a Marine lieutenant then captain in Vietnam and led troops in combat, so I defer to his rank, although I was a peacetime captain while he was still a civilian. Philip is the brother I never had by blood.
Philip of course lives in New York. I happily do not. Neither does the Skipper. He lives here in Massachusetts, and he and his wife drove to New York that day, a Monday, and my daughter Suzanne and son Andre and friends and I came in two more cars, because Andre and I were reading that night at Lincoln Center with Mary Morris and Diana Davenport. In Massachusetts we had very little sun and warmth during the spring, and that afternoon, somewhere in Connecticut, we drove into sunlight, and soon the trees along the road were green with leaves. We had not seen those either at home, only the promise of buds.
At close to eight o’clock the sky was still blue and the Skipper pushed me across the final street, then turned my chair and leaned it backward and pulled it up steps to the Plaza outside the Center. We began crossing the greyish white concrete floor and, as Philip spoke and pointed up, I looked at the tall build
ings flanking the Plaza, angles of grey-white, of city color, against the sky, deepening now, but not much, still the bright blue of spring after such a long winter of short days, lived in bed, in the wheelchair, in physical therapy, in the courthouse losing my wife and two little girls. Philip told us of a Frenchman last year tightrope walking across the space between these buildings, without a net.
Then I looked at the people walking on the Plaza. My only good memories of New York are watching people walk on the streets, and watching people in bars and restaurants, and some meals or drinks with friends, and being with Philip. But one summer I spent five days with him and for the first time truly saw the homeless day after day and night after night, and from then on, whenever I went there, I knew the New York I was in, the penthouses and apartments and cabs and restaurants, were not New York, anymore than the Czar’s Russia was the Russia of Chekhov’s freed serfs, with their hopes destroyed long before they were born. Still on that spring Monday I loved watching the faces on the Plaza.