by Carys Bray
WHEN THE DOOR opens her stomach pitches. She gets to her feet and leans against the chair, startled by the slackness of her knees.
“Hiya, I’m Julie. I’m Isabel’s nurse. You can see her now.” More following, more corridors—she is lost in the maze of a sickening dream. Finally, Julie opens a door to a pristine room, brimming with beeps. Issy, at last. Lying on her back, dark hair spread over the pillow, eyes shut, a tube snaking out of her mouth and threading into a disc where more tubes grow, some clear, others blue. No nightie, just a diaper—I’m a big girl, I don’t need a diaper—legs and trunk freckled by purple spatters, toes and fingers dark. Worse, the rash is worse. She is so small in the hospital bed, its sides up like a giant cot.
A woman in bottle-green scrubs waits beside the bed.
“Hello,” she says. “I’m Dr. Sabzwari. Pop your bag down and give your hands a wash.”
Claire steps to the sink. She washes her hands, rubs them with sanitizer, and waits for Dr. Sabzwari to speak.
“I know it’s upsetting to see Isabel like this, but I’m going to explain what we’re doing and I hope that’ll make it less frightening. I’m sure you thought of meningitis when you saw the rash, and that’s what we’re looking at—it’s our working diagnosis. We’ve done a lumbar puncture and we’ll get the results soon.”
Dr. Sabzwari pauses and nods her head several times. When Claire finally nods back, she continues.
“Isabel was in shock when she arrived, her veins had collapsed, so we had to put a central line in—we made a cut near her collarbone and threaded a line into a big vein near her heart so she can get fluids. We’re also giving her an intravenous steroid and we’re taking lots of measurements. See all the numbers on the screen? We’re monitoring her heart and pulse rate, her blood pressure, her central venous pressure—that’s the pressure in her veins—her temperature, and the amount of oxygen in her blood. I know it’s noisy and there might be occasional alarms, but don’t worry.
“Isabel’s intubated, which means we’ve put a tube down her throat, and she’s ventilated—this machine here is breathing for her by blowing gas into her lungs—and although the medication we’re giving her is making her drowsy, you can talk to her; she may well be able to hear you and recognize your voice. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
“Her fingers and toes …”
“That’s something we’ll worry about later.”
“What … what’s the prognosis?”
Dr. Sabzwari frowns and Claire is hit by another eruption of knowing.
“She’s poorly and we’re hoping to see a response to treatment soon. If there’s no response … it’s serious. Is there someone you’d like to be here with you? What about Isabel’s father? Does he know?”
“His phone’s switched off,” she says. “My older daughter will keep trying.”
“I’ll be in and out, but if I’m not here when he arrives someone will come and get me and I’ll talk to both of you together. Please sit down.”
Dr. Sabzwari points to the plastic-coated chair next to the bed and Claire sits. She looks at Issy’s closed eyes and taped-up mouth. The machines chime and bleep and the ventilator pistons air into Issy’s chest.
“Why don’t you talk to her?” Julie says. “Tell her a story. I bet she’d like that.”
“Can I touch her?”
“It should be fine to stroke her head. I’ll let you know if she isn’t tolerating it.”
Claire edges the chair closer, slides her arm between the bars, and touches Issy with her fingertips. Tiny fair hairs fluff the verge of Issy’s forehead, bleached by hours spent outside playing in the garden and walking on the beach during the recent summer. Claire smooths them into the darker hair behind. She doesn’t want to tell stories, she wants to memorize Issy: map every freckle, drink in each distinguishing feature—the curve of her bottom lip, the faint scar where her temple caught the corner of a table—learn her off by heart before her figuration is irretrievable.
She begins with Issy’s favorite fairy tale, “The Frog Princess.” She feels silly at first because Julie is looking at the machines, opening drawers, and unfastening little white boxes and plastic packets, but she recounts the tale anyway, and when the frog has turned into a handsome prince, she says, “They all lived happily ever after,” and the words taste sour and improbable.
“You’re good at that.” Julie pauses to write something down. “Plenty of practice?”
“I like stories. And the children, I’ve got three other children, they like them too.”
“I’m sure she’d like to hear another,” Julie says, busy, not really listening.
Claire wonders whether Issy’s ears are still capable of piping sounds to her brain. She knows she must do something and talking is something, but she doesn’t think she can tell any more happily-ever-after stories. They don’t fit; their neat endings grate. There must be other things she can say, and then she remembers Jacob’s earlier plea, uttered in the daybreak kitchen, Tell me the story of when I was born. The children like true stories, they sometimes prefer them to fairy tales, and so she begins again.
“Once upon a time, I met Daddy for the first time,” she says. “Daddy had just got back from his mission. I didn’t even know what a mission was, but I could tell there was something different about him—he was serious and neat and I watched him sit by himself in the university cafeteria, not just once, a few times, and I felt sorry for him because he didn’t seem to have any friends. My mum, your other nana, had died at the beginning of the summer. I didn’t have a dad at home like you do and I felt sad and lonely, even though I had lots of people to sit with. One day I carried my tray over to Daddy’s table and sat down next to him.”
She remembers the way Ian stood up when she put her tray down. For a moment she thought he was leaving. Then she realized he was doing that standing-up-for-a-woman thing she’d only ever seen on repeats of Happy Days, and something happened as she watched him wait for her to sit down. It wasn’t love at first sight, or anything like that, but she knew she liked him before he’d said a word. It was in the way his smile tilted and his ears didn’t quite sit flat against his head, the way he’d combed his hair into a side part and buttoned his polo shirt right to the top. He was happy to talk, but he didn’t seem the slightest bit grateful for her company and she quickly realized that she’d mistaken his self-containment for loneliness.
“I’ve been wondering if you’d like to go to a movie with me,” he said, several lunches later. He said he hadn’t seen a movie for more than two years, and when he explained where he’d been and what he’d been doing she was intrigued. She believed in the nebulous, Our-Father-who-art-in-heaven God of school assemblies and post-bereavement platitudes, a bearded Santa Claus–like figure who lived up there somewhere, surrounded by harp-playing angels on cumulonimbus clouds—but she’d never met anyone really religious before.
They watched Sleepless in Seattle because it was the only PG-rated movie showing at the Odeon. When Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks finally met at the top of the Empire State Building, Ian reached for her hand with gentle fingers and she sat in the darkness, liking him.
Afterward he took her to a café, where she asked for a coffee and he said he’d prefer it if she had a hot chocolate. They talked for ages. He didn’t kiss her when he dropped her off at the house she shared, but he did ask a favor.
“I’ve got some friends who need help. They’ve got to practice giving presentations to people. Do you think you could come along and listen?”
She met his friends at his mother and father’s house. They gave her a lesson about God and Jesus and Joseph Smith. They even had a little flip chart with pictures to match the stories they told.
“I don’t think you need any more practice,” she assured them when they’d finished. “You’re good—fluent and confident; well done!”
The friends, who were in fact missionaries, looked at her. Ian looked at her. And then she realized she’d been set up
. It had seemed funny at the time. “You want me to come to your church, don’t you? Why didn’t you just ask?”
In the beginning there were so many things she didn’t know and couldn’t comprehend. The rules about tea, coffee, alcohol, and premarital sex were a cinch, but she frequently got other things wrong. The first time she went to church she wore trousers and the next time she wore a skirt that showed her knees. Once, she blasphemed as she stumbled through a recitation of a verse of scripture during a Relief Society meeting, and on another occasion she organized an unfortunate surprise by reserving a table at a restaurant on a Sunday evening. Ian’s mother always let her know when she’d transgressed a boundary—“We don’t do that,” or “We do it like this,” she’d say. Claire gradually altered her behavior and ideas so she could exchange her “I” for their “we.” And, after a while, she began to belong, which made it altogether easier to believe.
“We were so worried when Ian started dating a nonmember,” his mother said one day. “But you’ve taken to it like a duck to water.”
It was hard, but in a good way, like one of those difficult diets—perhaps it wouldn’t have been so appealing if it had been easy. Claire squeezed herself into the narrow tracks of her new life because she wanted Ian: reliable, dependable, family-oriented Ian. A man who would never pretend he was going on a business trip and disappear from his wife’s and daughter’s lives forever. It was clear that he was trustworthy, and he was also good and kind, compulsively kind: She had seen him engage in acts of kindness with the sort of last-ditch fervor she’d observed in bars at closing time.
He proposed to her outside the Temple, the place where they could be married for Eternity. They couldn’t go inside because she hadn’t been a member of the church for a year, so they sat on the edge of a fountain and just looked at the building. She was admiring her engagement ring when he asked how many men she’d slept with.
“Only three,” she replied. And although he’d asked nicely and didn’t flinch when she answered, she was soaked by a big wave of shame.
“Right,” he said, and she could tell he was working hard not to mind because he swallowed a couple of times before asking, “Did you love them?”
She tried to find a way to explain it that would allow him to understand, but as she thought about it and watched his expectant face, she realized sex without love would disgust him, that it was probably beyond his imagination.
“Of course I did,” she said.
“That’s good.” He picked up her hand and kissed it. “I forgive you. We won’t talk about this again, ever. Neither you, nor I, let’s promise.”
His willingness to forget her sins had seemed beautiful and magnanimous, but all these years later it sometimes feels as if he has made her into someone else by drawing a ring of silence around a part of her he didn’t like. And as a result she doesn’t know how to talk to Zipporah about sex, how to even mention it without risking her promised silence.
The machine next to the bed beeps loudly several times in quick succession, breaking Claire’s reverie. Julie leans over and presses something, and the beeps return to their previous rhythm.
“Ah, it’s so romantic,” Julie says. “It’s like something from a film. You talked to him because he looked lonely and you ended up getting married. What were you doing at university?”
“International Studies. I thought—I had ideas about working abroad, helping people. He was doing teacher training. Mathematics; he’s a math teacher. I didn’t—I’ve never worked, I was pregnant with our oldest by the time I finished my degree.”
She strokes the inside of Issy’s arm, gently running her fingers up and down, up and down, like she does when they sit on the sofa together watching children’s television and when Issy gets fidgety in church.
“I bet she can hear you. Go on, carry on.”
“So Mummy and Daddy fell in love and we went to Prague on our honeymoon,” she continues. “You’d like it there, Issy. Lots of the buildings are like fairy-tale houses, all different colors and shapes, with little turrets and castley bits, and red tile roofs. When you get better we could all go,” she lies. “We’d have to go on an airplane, that’d be exciting, wouldn’t it? They’ve got these twisty cobbled streets and little shops selling puppets. All sorts of puppets, whatever you can think of—Pinocchio, the three little pigs, footballers, princesses … You’d love a puppet, wouldn’t you? I wanted to buy one when I was there.”
She doesn’t tell Issy about the beggars. About the way they knelt on the ground, foreheads resting on the cobbles, their raised, supplicating hands proffering empty tins at passersby. She remembers wanting to crouch next to them, wanting to help them to their feet, lift their faces, and make them human.
“Why are they hiding like that?” she’d asked Ian.
“Maybe they’re ashamed,” he’d said.
She hadn’t thought so. Their groveling position spoke more of desperation than embarrassment. She stood near one of them for a while and watched. It was the tourists who gave money; the Czech people didn’t seem to see him. He twitched when the coins clinked into his tin, but he didn’t look up to see what he’d been given, he just muttered, “Dˇekuji.”
Ian said he hadn’t come on honeymoon to look at beggars—he hadn’t wanted to leave the hotel room at all; it had been all she could do to make him supplement his soppy grin with clothes and venture outside. She allowed him to hurry her away, but they came back from their honeymoon empty-handed because he let her give every penny of their spending money to the beggars. And in the years since, she has thought about them. When she prays she sometimes feels like them: desperate and cringing, unable to meet the eyes of the being whose help she is soliciting, obliged to be grateful long before she has any idea of what has landed in her tin.
“I’ve never been to Prague,” Julie says. “I’ve heard the beer’s good.”
“Oh, I don’t know about the beer … Is it OK if I just …?”
“The restroom is just through the door on the left.”
The silence in the bathroom is strange. Her ears are pulsing and alert, primed for the repetitious beeps and steady hiss of ventilation. She turns on the taps and squeezes a handful of soap out of the grinning Mr. Soapy Soap dispenser, staring at herself in the mirror as she rubs her hands together. If there was ever a time to get on her knees and beg, this is it. There’s a verse in the Book of Mormon: “For behold, are we not all beggars?” If Ian were here, he would tell her to ask the Lord to exchange the horror of knowledge for the comfort of faith. “Don’t worry about knowing, work on believing”—that’s what he’d say, and then he’d remind her that God can’t perform miracles when people don’t have faith. She has never understood exactly how faith precipitates the type of healing Issy requires. Faith in the face of mountainous evidence to the contrary has always felt like a trick or a trap: If she persuades herself to believe, if she manufactures assurance and puts all her eggs in faith’s basket, how much worse off will she be if it breaks? Surely her shattered expectations will be harder to manage than the potentially lethal consequences of skepticism? She turns the taps off and watches as her wet hands drip into the sink. She should beg and plead, find the right words—words that will release the magic of healing and bind Issy to mortality before it’s too late—but all she can think of is “please.” Please, please, please … So feeble, she knows it won’t work. She needs more, a game-changing word, one she can shout through the hospital ceiling to the deity that is preparing to steal her daughter. A word like “Rumpelstiltskin,” a word that will overpower and break Him.
When she was a little girl and Dad went away, she used to ask where he was. Mum always told the truth and said she didn’t know, but the question Claire wanted to ask next, “Will he come back?,” remained unasked. She knew the answer and was afraid to hear it. She is similarly paralyzed now. She pulls a paper towel out of the dispenser and dries her hands and cheeks as the anesthetizing effects of shock wear off and tears finally fall
. When the children were little they’d cry in the night and she would magically appear. She has allowed herself to believe that God would do the same if she ever really needed Him. She has wrapped her family in the armor of obedience, protected them with a shield of countless covenants, made and maintained like incantations, and it’s all been for nothing. She wipes her cheeks again and throws the paper in the trash.
She waits outside the door to Issy’s room for a moment. Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe she lacks faith, maybe she’s wrong and there is hope; where there is life there is hope—people say that, don’t they? She pushes the door open, hears the song of the machines and she knows, as surely as if she has plucked the knowledge from a tree and eaten it. She can feel it in her throat, where it congregates in a lump she can hardly swallow around. She sits down and Julie hands her a tissue. She wipes her eyes with one hand and strokes Issy’s motionless head with the other. She brushes the tilt of Issy’s jaw, cups the curve of her cheek, follows the swirl of her ear, and she knows.
SHE KNOWS WHEN Ian finally arrives, smiling at everyone, wearing his I’m here now face, bustling past her grief like Superman in a Burton suit. He puts an arm around her and, aware Julie is watching, she stands very still and tries not to mind.
“What’s going on, then?” he asks, as if he’s about to be called upon to remove a splinter or apply a Band-Aid, absolutely confident of making everything better, eager to jump in and rescue Issy with his priesthood power. Julie starts to explain and he nods as if he is capable of changing things, as if he’s about to undo a curse like the good fairy at Aurora’s christening. But there’s nothing he can do, and his not knowing makes him ridiculous.
“Everything’s going to be all right.” He squeezes her shoulder and she wonders if he has heard a word that’s been said. “I’m going to give her a blessing.”
He straightens his tie, he means business: Let’s get this show on the road, let’s sort this problem out. Does he really think he can fix everything? Has he always been so unimaginative and stupid? He reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out Issy’s glasses and his car keys. He puts the glasses down on the bed.