Prognosis

by Vallance, Sarah

  I left the vet surgery and drove straight to work. Inside my office, I closed the door and hoped no one would disturb me. I was trying to distract myself with something or another when the door opened slightly and Grant, the most senior union rep at the paper, appeared in the doorway. Our relationship hitherto had been somewhat frosty, but I invited him in and he sat down in my visitor’s chair.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, looking at my bloodshot eyes.

  “Yes, thanks. Fine,” I said.

  “You don’t look fine,” he said.

  “I just had my dog put down,” I said, and burst into tears.

  “Oh, that’s terrible. Is that him there?” he asked, pointing to a framed photo of George on my desk.

  “Yes,” I said between sobs. “George.”

  “I’m so sorry. We have a rescue dog at home. Pax. He looks very similar to your George. He’s part of the family.”

  I looked at him and smiled.

  “I can’t imagine what will happen when we lose him,” he said, spotting at his eye with his sleeve. “I really feel for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s kind. So what can I do for you?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. Silly stuff. We can do it another time. When you’re feeling better. Rescue dogs take priority over everything else.”

  And in that brief interaction, Grant—an unlikely ally—had done what Laura was unable to do: he understood how it felt to lose a much-loved dog. And a friendship was formed, the closest friendship I ended up making at the paper. A friendship that made both our lives a bit easier.

  “He was a dog, Sarah. Dogs die,” Laura said when we sat down for dinner that evening.

  “I know,” I said feebly before I started to sob again. I fell into a deep hole of depression, and the only way to climb out of it was to rescue another dog. Sick of my moping, Laura eventually gave in.

  A fortnight after George died, we drove across town to the largest animal shelter in Sydney, and I asked to see the oldest, saddest dog they had—the dog nobody wanted. We waited our turn before a skinny middle-aged woman with blue streaks through her blonde hair led us to a cage. Standing in the corner and staring at the ground was a dog with vacant-looking eyes, a mix of kelpie and rottweiler. Her back was missing all its fur.

  “Some kids poured petrol over her and set her alight,” the woman said. “We wanted to put her down—thought it would be the kindest thing to do—but the lady who found her is paying to keep her here. Maybe someone will take her, but I doubt it.”

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “The vet thinks ten or eleven, but it’s hard to say for sure.”

  We coaxed her out of her cage, and I held out my hand for her to sniff. She had no interest. She had given up.

  “What do you think?” I asked Laura.

  Laura looked down and nodded.

  “We’ll take her,” I said.

  We named her Jessica, after Jessica Lange—my favorite actress, the most beautiful woman in the world, and my first real crush. Jessica took nearly a week before she made eye contact with either of us. Then one evening while we were watching TV, she got out of her bed, wandered toward us, and sat at our feet. She looked at us for the first time, and I started to cry. We sat down beside her and hugged her. She responded by licking my face and Laura’s hand. From that night on, she slept on our bed. Laura was fonder of Jessica than she had been of George or Bess. It may have been because Jessica was our dog, not my dog. Whatever the reason, we were both in agreement that we would do whatever we could to make her remaining years as happy as possible. Perhaps we both wanted something that could bind us back together.

  I was standing in the elevator well at work one morning on my way out to buy coffee, when an attractive woman with red shoulder-length hair got out of the elevator and smiled at me.

  A couple of days later, we ended up sitting opposite one another in a meeting about performance appraisal. Her name was Anna.

  That afternoon she called me and asked whether I would like to meet her for lunch. She wanted to learn more about performance appraisal.

  At lunch there was an unmistakable attraction between us. I told Anna about Laura, and Anna told me about her partner. The next day we met again, and ended up going back to my place. I had never cheated on anyone before, and I was so conflicted about whether or not I was cheating that I refused to allow Anna inside our house. So we had sex in the backyard, up against the back door, watched by an elderly neighbor wearing a fedora hat, from the bathroom window of the house next door—whom I spotted lingering around waiting for an encore.

  A couple of days later, Anna and I had another encounter, this time in the changing room of the Versace section on the top floor of a luxury department store. I found the tackiest, shiniest gold-lamé thing I could and asked to try it on. The shopgirl ushered us into a small room. It was the perfect spot for sex, and frankly, I was surprised more people didn’t make use of its facilities for precisely that purpose. There was a velour-covered sofa, plush shag pile carpet, and a door with a lock. The only problem was, having visited there once, I was not sure we would be able to go back. We stayed inside a bit too long, and I’m pretty sure the shopgirl realized that something was up.

  One night the publisher decided to take a small group of his direct reports to dinner in Chinatown. I, for some reason I cannot fathom, asked if Anna could come along. It was a strange request, to say nothing of stupid on my part, but the publisher agreed. I was so desperate for sex at that point I seemed to have lost all my sense. We left the office, Anna and I trailing along behind the rest of the group, and as we passed a back alley off Sussex Street, Anna shoved me up against a wall and started kissing me. That was a bad idea. The brain-damaged me didn’t enjoy kissing as an end in itself. Kissing was a precursor to sex. To distract myself I tried to think about Bess, George, my father, my grandmother—about any grief and loss I could conjure. When that didn’t work, I tried to think of the most off-putting thing I could, which happened to be vomit. That did the trick. I peeled myself away from Anna, and we caught up with the rest of the group.

  At the restaurant, an elderly Chinese woman seated us at a large round table with the publisher on one side of me and Anna on my other side. After drinks were served, Anna slid her hand across my lap. I reached for my napkin to cover her hand, but the napkin slipped off onto the floor, and I noticed the publisher glancing down to see Anna’s hand stroking my thigh.

  I tapped her foot with mine to stop her, but it made no difference, so I tried stamping on her foot. When that didn’t work, I got up and went to the bathroom. She got up and followed me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked in disbelief.

  “I want sex,” she said.

  “We aren’t having it here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you insane?”

  “Who cares!” she said.

  “I could lose my job over this!”

  Luckily for me, there was a rich tradition at the paper of people having sex with one another, and the publisher was polite enough never to mention the evening again.

  Three weeks after we had met, Anna told me she was falling in love with me.

  “I like you too!” I said. “But this can’t go anywhere. You have a partner and I have Laura. I’m not going to leave her.”

  She was hurt. I vowed never again to have sex with anyone other than myself.

  As the HR manager, sex with another employee turned out to be a grave mistake. The email system at the paper wasn’t secure, and apparently anyone’s email, including the CEO’s, could be accessed by typing in the person’s name and the word “password.” That explained why the paper leaked like an origami boat. A journalist had been reading the emails between Anna and me. Although I had written very few emails to Anna, her emails to me told a fairly racy story. Racy, anyway, if you’re a man in his forties who takes pleasure reading an exchange between two women who enjoy having sex. Eventually, the excitement grew
too much, and he forwarded a couple of choice ones to his closest mates, and they forwarded them to a few of theirs. By three o’clock that afternoon, the whole paper knew.

  Sex will be my undoing, I thought. I will end up scorned and humiliated like a fat old politician with a face like a walnut and a fondness for hookers.

  Anna and I weren’t the first people at the paper to have their sex lives brought to light by someone who had cracked the email system. But we were the first lesbians. And I was in a senior HR position and should have known better. I had acted irresponsibly. Unprofessionally. I admitted my foolishness. The union threatened to intervene. “What HR manager fucks the staff?” the head of the union asked me in a meeting. Luckily for me, my friend Grant, my rescue-dog-owning ally, helped hose things down. If not for his intervention on my behalf, I would probably have lost my job. I experienced a couple of weeks of hell until it all died down.

  And then there was Laura. Laura may have given me her blessing to sleep with other people, but no one else knew that. Word traveled fast, and people who knew us as a couple looked at me with disgust. No one knew about my head injury, but it wasn’t hard to tell that I was the difficult one in our relationship. Among friends, Laura had acquired the status of a saint for putting up with me. And now I had, in their eyes at least, cheated on her. The only person who didn’t seem to know of the affair was Laura. Or if she did know, she had chosen to bury it forever. I had sunk as low as a person could sink. I felt I was loathsome and totally undeserving of Laura’s love.

  After three years, I left the paper. I had just turned forty and felt tired and old, and I needed a rest. I used the time between jobs to find a neurologist. My memory had been troubling me for the past six months. Little things had started to happen more frequently. I would reach the front of the line for the ATM and forget my PIN. I would make a reservation at a restaurant and forget my phone number. These things were happening at least a couple of times each week. Why would my memory get better after the injury and then worse? I worried I had a brain tumor. What else could it be?

  A doctor friend of a friend recommended a neurologist. A family friend who was a specialist recommended the same person. He was said to be one of the best neurologists in the country.

  I told my new doctor about my problems with my memory. He listened attentively and asked intelligent questions, and I did my best to answer them. After the consultation he sent me to a small, ancient radiology center above the supermarket at a shopping center. There was not much he could tell me without a brain MRI.

  I went to the radiology center on my own. A weary-looking nurse in her fifties led me into a small room with a locker, handed me a gown, and instructed me to change. I did as I was told, then followed her out into a room where a huge coffin-like machine awaited me.

  “Lie down,” she said. “It’s going to be noisy. And you need to keep still for twenty minutes.”

  I lay down and she clamped a brace around my skull to hold it in place.

  “If you really can’t stand it,” the woman said, “just press the buzzer and I’ll come in. That hardly ever happens. Close your eyes. That makes it easier.”

  The brace was tight and my head ached.

  “Ready?” Her voice inquired over a loudspeaker. “We’re going to start.”

  She pressed a button, and I slid up inside a large cone. The machine whirred, and a wheel around my head started to rotate, slowly at first until it built up momentum. The noise was deafening, and the inside of the cone was a fluorescent orange. My whole body felt like it was rotating. I closed my eyes, but that made it feel like I had the worst hangover imaginable, one of those hangovers where you spin around and around and can’t stop. Actually, it felt like having that hangover, being tied to a rope behind a car, and taken into a field where the driver did donuts. My head throbbed. I lasted a couple of minutes before I pressed the buzzer.

  The woman walked in the room and sighed. “Yes?” she asked, one hand resting on her hip.

  “I can’t do it. I’m claustrophobic.”

  “Get dressed then,” she said, not doing much to hide her irritation. I did as she said and followed her to the reception desk. “You still have to pay.” I nodded and handed over my Visa card.

  I returned to the neurologist, who gave me a copy of the report, which didn’t say much at all.

  “Too noisy?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Yes, it’s an old machine, I’m afraid.”

  I skipped straight to the conclusion: Limited study only. Patient declined further series. No obvious hemosiderin deposit is seen. There could be some atrophy involving the parietal hemisphere on both sides. I glanced at it while he looked at the slides of my brain.

  “It’s a real shame we don’t have the initial scans taken after your injury. But from the look of these pictures I really wouldn’t worry,” he said. “You suffered a serious head trauma, so it’s not surprising you might be experiencing some aftereffects. There’s nothing here to show anything of real significance. In fact, there might be no change at all since the accident.”

  “Can we rule out a brain tumor?”

  “You do not have a brain tumor.”

  Relieved that I wouldn’t be requiring surgery, I thanked him and left. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I should have asked to be tested on a newer machine that was less noisy and uncomfortable. Nor did I think to ask about the longer-term prognosis for people who had suffered traumatic brain injuries.

  Reassured that my memory problems weren’t unusual given my accident, I started looking for a new job, and a headhunter approached me about a senior human resources job with a large Australian bank. During one of the interviews, my future boss asked me to explain what my PhD thesis was about. My mind went blank. I couldn’t remember. I made up something about it being complicated (it wasn’t) and dull (that was for sure) and managed to squirm out of an answer. The rest of the interview went well, and I ended up getting the job. The only problem was that the bank was in Melbourne, a city I had visited only twice in my life and didn’t particularly like on either occasion.

  Laura decided to move with me to Melbourne, even though the problems between us had started to snowball. She gave up her job as global account director for a large advertising agency in Sydney and took a part-time job with a smaller firm in Melbourne. My salary would support us both. Our year in America had fueled her desire to travel and to explore new places, and Laura had been desperate for a change of scenery. Melbourne was hardly top of her list, but at least it was new. We had been together for about seven years, and the prospect of being alone, even though our love had withered, was something neither of us wanted to contemplate. Perhaps we both hoped a new city would repair the fractures in our relationship and make things better.

  We missed Sydney immediately. Melbourne was ugly and wet and windy, and the weather became a metaphor for our relationship. Deprived of sunlight, it began to shrivel. Within the first two months of moving, our relationship broke down. One night, Laura was in the kitchen making dinner, and I was on the sofa watching TV. I was trying to concentrate on something when Laura called out to me. I strained to hear the TV, but she kept talking.

  “Shut up!” I shouted. “I’m trying to watch this!”

  She walked around the kitchen counter toward me and turned off the TV. “That is the very last time; do you understand?”

  I nodded. I didn’t say sorry. We had reached a point where my apologies enraged her.

  “The next time you speak to me like that I am leaving.”

  I went into the bedroom, closed the door, and slipped under the covers. I wished I could reach inside myself and tear out my rage, stomp on it until it died, or toss it into the sea and wait for it to drown. Laura needed a break from me. So did I.

  I tried to think rationally. Why did I keep behaving like this? What was wrong with me? I thought about my father. My mother had tolerated his temper for the eighteen years I lived at home. Then, by the time I
had moved out, his anger had left him. Disappeared. Perhaps my temper was worse than his. He was violent, but he never said hurtful things. I was rude and disrespectful. Perhaps anger was more acceptable in a man. In a woman it signaled madness. My thoughts scrambled around inside my head, and only one thing was clear to me: this was all my fault. I had slowly filed away the tether that had held us together.

  Our problems were compounded by the fact that Laura had sacrificed a good life with a good job and good friends in a beautiful city for a miserable life in a city she hated. I wasn’t worth the sacrifice, and she told me as much. “But you could have stayed in Sydney! You chose to come!” I reminded her.

  “Biggest mistake of my short fucking life,” she said.

  I urged her to do something she had always wanted to do: draw, restore furniture, or go to yoga every day. My salary paid our rent and our bills, so she could do anything she liked. She wasn’t interested. She needed time to decide how to fix her career. How to fix her life. She was tired of me, tired of my depression, and tired of my rage. I was the most negative person she had ever encountered. We had less and less to talk about, so we stopped even trying, and I found myself back inside my old familiar tunnel of gloom.

  Jessica didn’t like Melbourne much either. She resented being woken up in the dark and dragged out to a sodden park when there was frost on the ground.

  Then one Wednesday night, when we had been in Melbourne around three months, Laura didn’t come home. I waited up for her until three a.m. Her phone went straight to voice mail. Eventually the door unlocked and she appeared in the doorway.

  “Where have you been? I was worried. Your phone was off!”

  “It’s over.”

  “What’s over?”

  “Us. I’m moving out on Saturday. I don’t love you anymore.”

  I sat on the sofa staring into the black TV screen until it hit me. She took a shower and went to bed. I tried to talk to her, but she refused to speak. She didn’t say another word to me until a month after she had moved out, when she told me she had fallen in love with her boss and had left me for her.