The Wild Impossibility
Page 1
Contents
Advance Praise for The Wild Impossibility
The Wild Impossibility
Copyright © 2019 Cheryl A. Ossola
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved.
In memory of my mother,
who I’m certain is reading this book somewhere,
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Acknowledgements
Advance Praise for The Wild Impossibility
“Cheryl A. Ossola delivers an intriguing tale that opens in a modern neonatal intensive care unit in Berkeley, then reaches back through space and time to a most unlikely setting: the bleak World War II era prison camp at Manzanar in the California high desert. History has largely forgotten what little it bothered to learn about Manzanar in the first place, so Ossola starts with a blank page and fills it beautifully with fragmented flashbacks, contemporary marital drama and dogged pursuit of family history and heartbreak that spans generations.
Ossola’s storytelling takes on some of the flavor of a Japanese kaidan, or ghost story. She portrays history with an accuracy that speaks well of her journalistic background, but she also understands the kaidan approach that a ghost story need not equate to a horror story. What better way to relive the disappeared past.”
—Richard Imamura, screenwriter of The Manzanar Fishing Club
“Ossola walks a wonderful wire here, sculpting a story that’s readable and timely. The novel honors its history with austere accuracy, and Ossola captures her characters’ complex emotional trajectories in gusts of poetry.”
—Joshua Mohr, author of the novel All This Life
“In lyric prose Cheryl Ossola takes us on an exhilarating journey, as Kira Esposito becomes a relentless detective of her dreams in a search for origins. Readers will time-travel on switchback trails, from Kira’s 21st-century life with her husband to a Japanese interment camp in the 1940s—and back again. Ossola’s stunning descriptions of the landscape ground us in a vivid a sense of place and the porous boundaries between time-realms create engrossing tensions in Kira’s marriage. Ossola is masterful at showing the connection between dreams, quantum labyrinths, and daily life.”
—Thaisa Frank, author of Enchantment and Heidegger’s Glasses
The Wild Impossibility
Cheryl A. Ossola
Regal House Publishing
Copyright © 2019 Cheryl A. Ossola
All rights reserved.
Published by
Regal House Publishing, LLC
Raleigh, NC 27612
All rights reserved.
ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781947548626
ISBN -13 (epub): 9781947548701
ISBN -13 (mobi): 9781947548695
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930300
All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any cirmstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.
Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene
lafayetteandgreene.com
Cover image © by Shutterstock/Senya and Ksusha
Regal House Publishing, LLC
https://regalhousepublishing.com
The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of Regal House Publishing.
Printed in the United States of America
In memory of my mother,
who I’m certain is reading this book somewhere,
and
for all mothers everywhere
One
February 27, 2011
Kira gripped the wheel, focusing on the road ahead. Berkeley awoke in the cool grasp of water—fog unraveling in treetops and blossoming from the asphalt, rain plummeting earthward in ecstatic downpours and gray-blurring the creeping cars and huddled storefronts. California, a place of rain-fueled excess in winter, of choked aridity in summer. You could flee the San Francisco Bay Area, fog-chilled on a summer morning, and end the day watching the sunset in the high desert with sweat beaded on your brow. Wherever you were, the other existence—fogbound or sunburned—would seem like a dream state, a fantasy you’d only imagined.
At the hospital, Kira parked in the employees’ lot and killed the car engine. Six forty-five in the morning and the day already seemed long. She yanked her keys out of the ignition. Time to go to work. In some odd twist of logic, the neonatal intensive care unit was the one place where she could block out the unrelenting memories of her own baby, Aimi—the ceaseless thinking, the nagging what-ifs. It was the pace, she supposed, the mental intensity of tending to the critically ill. If the staffing office had allowed it, she’d have worked seven days a week.
After changing into scrubs, Kira went to the nurses’ station to check the assignment board. She had Baby Bowen, a thirty-four-weeker, stable and on minimal meds. Not a busy assignment, and because of that she was scheduled to get the first transport, if there was one. Good. The more distractions, the better.
“Hey, Teresa,” Kira greeted the charge nurse. “Any transports on the horizon?”
“Twins coming from Travis. You’ve got Twin A. You’ll be busy.”
Kira checked the board again. “We lost Baby Taylor?”
“Last night, poor little guy.”
No surprise. He’d been hanging on by a thread, one of those babies who seemed likely to make it, then had one complication after another. The mother hadn’t been involved and maybe that was just as well. At least she didn’t have to hear a doctor tell her that her child was dead.
Kira scrubbed in, trying to quell the kicked-in-the-throat feeling the word “mother” gave her. Six weeks since her own mother had died, and Kira still caught herself picking up the phone to send her cat videos or pictures of baby otters, or to set a lunch date at their favorite Sicilian place. Two deaths in less than a year, deaths of the most intimate kind, of people whose tissue she had shared—one
whose body she had come from, another she had created. Kira marveled at it sometimes, the malignancy of fate, God, whatever force or power could deliver that kind of cruelty. These days, she turned away when she saw women her age out with their mothers. But young mothers and their babies, she cornered them and asked, “How old is she? What’s her name?” or “Does she sleep through the night yet?” If the mother allowed it, Kira would touch the warm, sweet-scented head, close her eyes and pretend the child was Aimi.
Shift report on Baby Bowen revealed a typical preemie scenario: born at twenty-nine weeks, now stable on fifty percent oxygen and moderate ventilator settings, the usual fare of steroids and diuretics around the clock, sedatives and morphine as needed. Lab work was due at eleven; if his next blood gas was good they’d wean the ventilator settings.
“Has he needed much sedation?” Kira asked.
“I gave lorazepam around three; he was a wild man,” the night nurse said. “Oh, and the IV in his foot is out; I couldn’t get a new one. Sorry. I left you a scalp vein that looks decent. Good thing you’re a better stick than I am.”
The night nurse left and Kira tested the bedside alarms, adding to the orchestra-gone-haywire beeps and chirps from seventeen bedsides. As usual, the Unit was noisy and crowded, an amorphous, pulsating hive of nurses and attendings, haggard interns and residents, X-ray techs and respiratory therapists, social workers and anxious parents. West Coast Children’s, with the biggest NICU this side of the Rockies, was not a place for people who liked things calm and quiet. It got the sickest of the sick, the high-risk babies, and it always had, even before the crack-baby boom in the ’80s. The transport teams never stopped.
Baby Bowen looked good. Too tiny and too young, but he might make it.
Kira was taping a new IV in place when Teresa zipped past. “Transport’s twenty minutes out,” she called to Kira. “The parents are on their way.”
The team rolled in five minutes early. Twin A was a micro-preemie, barely bigger than Kira’s hand, on a hundred percent oxygen and maxed-out ventilator settings, paralyzed with Pavulon so she wouldn’t fight the machine. Eyelids still fused, skin like tissue, body limp as a waterlogged leaf.
“Twenty-two-weeker?” Kira said.
“Yeah, with a head bleed,” the transport nurse said. “Two transfusions so far, and nada.” She gestured to the other transport incubator, six feet away. “Twin B’s not much better.”
“What about the mom? Drugs?”
“Nope, she’s clean. Primipara, bed rest most of the pregnancy.”
The transport nurse grabbed her gear and headed out, and Kira began her intake assessment of the baby. She was brittle as hell, her oxygen saturation nosediving, lungs wheezing like an underwater accordion. The blood Kira drew for an arterial gas was so dark she’d have sworn it was venous.
The on-call resident came by, a sleepless second-year. “Uh-oh,” she said, looking at the ventilator. “Have you sent a gas yet?”
“Just now,” Kira said. “It’s going to suck.”
The attending swooped in and scanned the chart. “Let’s transfuse and do an EEG asap,” he said. “She’s probably not viable. Let me know when the parents get here.”
Packed red blood cells, an exercise in futility. The baby wasn’t going to make it and she probably shouldn’t. The NICU could work some impressive miracles, but this was one tiny girl with shit for lungs and a vascular system with the substance of a cobweb. As high-risk as they got. Cardiac problems, neuro, metabolic, cognitive, GI—all were more likely than not. If this baby lived, she’d be blind from months of oxygen therapy, probably end up with cerebral palsy. Her only chance would have been ECMO, medical science’s best effort to replicate the process of oxygenation, but her gestational age ruled that out. So would a head bleed.
Kira called the blood bank, then the charge desk. “Somebody’s going to have to cover Bowen.”
Thirty minutes later, Twin A was going downhill. The gas was abysmal. The docs would probably suggest discontinuing support for both babies, if they lived long enough for the parents to get there. And they might. Some of the babies you’d swear were going to die any second managed to wait for their mothers to arrive, and Kira had seen it happen too often to think it could be chance. But most of the babies who did cling to life for those minutes or hours had been out of the womb for a few weeks. Some had known their mother’s warmth, held skin to skin against her breast despite ventilators and tubing, the mother’s heartbeat going half time in a counterpoint to their own. These moments were all the comfort the babies would get in their brief lives, and they seemed to know it. And waited, hoping to feel that warmth one more time.
Twin A’s heart rate spiraled down. “Hang on, baby girl, your mama’s coming.” Kira stroked the baby’s head and the heart rate struggled upward. Placing the bell of the pediatric stethoscope on the tiny chest—it covered the baby from neck to navel—Kira listened. Pitiful breath sounds. Too young, too goddamn tiny. Not viable.
Aimi would have been.
Stop. Kira swung her ponytail behind her shoulder as if the movement would silence the memory.
Ten minutes later the parents arrived, swollen eyes raw in oatmeal faces. Standing next to Twin A’s bed, they gripped the side rails with colorless fingers. This child, and her twin six feet away—nothing else in the room existed.
The attending pulled Kira aside. “They agreed to a no-code,” he said. The best option, he was probably thinking, but that didn’t make it a good one. “God, sometimes I hate this job.”
A no-code. Kira looked at the Clarksons, ordinary people now being asked to do the extraordinary. Choosing was worse than having the inevitable forced on you. Even now hope illuminated the Clarksons’ faces, diluting their despair. Couldn’t a miracle happen now, for them, for their babies?
“Would you like to hold her?” Kira asked Mrs. Clarkson. “Here, let me help you.” Baby to breast, if only for a moment. She turned off the monitors; even with the ventilator pumping that tiny chest, Mrs. Clarkson wouldn’t need a machine to tell her that her child was dead. And no parent should see the flat line announcing their child’s death.
“I’ll sit with Jessica,” the father said, and kissed his wife.
“I’m here, Jasmine,” Mrs. Clarkson whispered. “Mommy loves you.” She began to cry, a strangled sound; moments later the father’s sobbing echoed hers.
Everything else went quiet, or as quiet as a busy room could get. The parents wouldn’t notice. At times like this the world became small, uninhabited. Kira had sat like Mrs. Clarkson did now, holding her dead baby. This mother wouldn’t know anyone else was there. This mother was somewhere else, lost. Going on would seem incomprehensible, the future an impossible thought. Nothing mattered but the agonizing emptiness in her belly and the still body in her arms. A universe of two.
Four hours later, Kira sat in her car and cried. That poor woman would never get over the loss. You never did. Lose a baby and you lose yourself. Blood and tissue, yours and your child’s, commingled then ripped apart. Images flashed through her mind—Twin A, now a tiny bundle in the morgue; Aimi’s body, a rounded weight against her chest. The grief intensified, bloomed like a hot flash. Aimi in her arms, eyes like her father’s, hair that promised to curl like Kira’s and her mother’s—this six-pound proof of family, of bloodlines, gone.
Say the words: Your child did not live.
Kira pressed her hands to her eyes. Her fingers felt oddly warm; within seconds, her palms burned with a dry, fiery heat that reached for bone. Confused, she looked up, thought something had happened outside because everything was monochrome, the pinked orange of raw salmon. It must be late, already sunset—but no, the color was changing, now warm yellow, now cooler, an acid green. Cortisol rushed through her bloodstream, a junkie feeling, hands shaking, a staccato thrumming at her temples. She closed her eyes, opened them again. The green
was still there, a watercolor wash. Then it faded, leaving only shadows.
A girl’s voice. Kira jerked around, expecting to see someone behind her. The backseat was empty. The voice was in her head.
I hear them coming and pull his arms tighter around me. I can hardly breathe.
Fear like Kira has never known. She sees—or senses, because everything is gray, veiled, lines and shapes mere suggestions of three-dimensional objects—a small interior, rough metal walls, a wooden floor. She tries to open her eyes, but they’re already open. She’s awake, in the hospital parking lot, in her car. She’s not dreaming. Her body shakes. The voice again, compelling yet flat, a monotone so out of tune with the words spoken that Kira’s fear skyrockets.
They’re closer now; I can hear their voices, my brother’s harsh, my father’s softer, dangerous. The door opens and I plead with them, but they ignore me. They drag us outside.
A pink breath of air, sage-scented and cool. Kira has no bones, no muscles. No sound but her breath, the wash of blood in her ears. Fear inflames her.
My brother struts like a fighting cock. He’s come to right a wrong, of course he believes that. But there is no wrong but him, him and my father. I beg them to let him go. I might as well not open my mouth.
The gun rises and I scream.
In an instant, the scene disappeared. Daylight pierced the windshield, searchlight sharp. Kira sat shaking, fingers digging into her arms, hair glued to her neck. Breathe, she thought. Don’t panic. But no one had dreams at four o’clock in the afternoon, wide awake in a car. A hallucination then? No, impossible, she’d fallen asleep, it was a dream, a bizarre grief response. Nothing more.
Kira sat immobile in the driver’s seat, afraid that if she moved the world would again lose its color, the voice would invade her head. At last, bloodless with cold, still numbed with fear, she started the car. Key in ignition, spark of life, surge of power—all normal, thank God. As she shifted into first, the engine choked, then shuddered back to life.