Authors: Betsy Graziani Fasbinder
Even the Sufi mystic was conspiring with my family, urging me to understand and forgive.
Body Art
After that morning at Dr. Schwartz’s house, I began to take Ryan back to the pub. She seemed relieved to be out of the oppressive darkness of our house with Jake’s shadow hovering silently from behind the closed bedroom door.
One night Ryan asked if she could stay at Nana Alice’s. I couldn’t think of a reason to say no. After that, Tully started picking her up each day after kindergarten. They shared grilled cheese sandwiches at the pub and she spent afternoons in the park with my dad or cooking with Alice. Their kindness cracked through my frosty facade.
With Ryan at the pub, I was spared her questions about Jake’s continued seclusion. I called her each afternoon from the hospital. “Granddad is taking me to Chinatown,” Ryan would chirp over the phone. “We’ll go to the fortune cookie factory and then for dim sum. And tomorrow we’re going to a puppet theater…”
As she spoke, I noticed that Ryan had stopped asking about Jake.
The home-health nurse stayed with Jake during the days and into the evenings. Consuelo, a sixty-year-old grandmother from El Salvador, was competent enough for the job, and her limited English let her be a presence without requiring me to communicate much. She served as a glorified babysitter and assuager of guilt for my ever-elongating hospital hours. I managed to see Jake for only a few minutes a day, an arrangement that brought me a salty cocktail of relief and guilt.
Burt called every day or two, but I found it hard to confess to him how much I avoided spending time at home. I talked mostly of Ryan, and Burt talked of his days in his studio in New York.
“I owe it all to you, Kate. I hadn’t picked up a brush in years, and now I can’t remember why I ever stopped. And you won’t believe this, but I ran into an old friend who owns a gallery. He wants me to have a show of my new work.”
It was the first light news I’d had in a long time. “That’s so great! I’d love to see it. Give me the date and I’ll be on the first plane to New York.”
“No need,” he said. The tone of his voice hinted at the huge smile I knew he must be wearing. “The bloke I ran into is from San Francisco. His gallery is on Chestnut Street. Tell Jake to get his bony arse out of bed. I expect him to give a rousing toast at my opening.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
* * *
It’s easy to hide at a teaching hospital. Everyone in the corridors looks ragged and wears bags under their eyes. Everybody works crazy hours. I appeared normal there.
Allison Bennett had been transferred to the pediatric floor after being in the ICU for nearly a week. No infections, no complications. She was pink and perfect, her incision a precise line I hoped would hide under a bikini some day. My paperwork was more caught up than any physician’s in the history of UCSF, and my excuses for sixteen-hour shifts were fading.
“On your way home, Dr. Murphy? I think you’ve checked that baby a thousand times today.” Dahlia de la Rosa asked. She was my favorite nurse on the pediatric floor.
“Like you haven’t cuddled her every chance you got.”
Dahlia smiled coyly. “Can I help it if I like them best when they’re preverbal?”
“When do you get off?”
“Don’t you know I live here?” she said with a sassy smirk. “This is the only place I can hide from my husband and kids. I’d come here even if they didn’t pay me.”
I grinned, pretending we were sharing the same joke, and slid Allison’s chart back into the rack. “I’m sure the chief administrator would be willing to take that arrangement.”
“Enjoy things while you only have one. You and Jake might even still have a shot at a romantic evening now and then, not that I remember what that is.”
I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands. “Romance is about the last thing on my mind right now, Dahlia.”
“Don’t let this place take you over, Kate. It will, you know.”
I closed my eyes. As if it were a movie being shown on the inside of my own eyelids, I saw Jake hurling the stone vase. Then the scene shifted to the terror on Ryan’s face.
Fear clutched my heart. What if the spark in Ryan was born of the inferno of her father’s mania? Was she destined, imprisoned by her genetic code, to suffer the same creativity and the same madness? She was a fiery child, crazy smart, imaginative, and obstinate.
“Kate?” Dahlia said, touching my shoulder with her hand. “Are you all right?”
I used every muscle in my face to torture it into a smile. “I guess you’re right, Dahlia. I’ve been in this place too long. You can stick a fork in me, ’cause I am done.”
“Go home, Dr. Murphy. You’re no good to anybody here.”
* * *
My head throbbed as I unlocked the front door of my house. It was almost noon. When I opened the door and walked toward the stairs, I expected Consuelo’s usual “
The Meester, he is esleeping
.” Instead, the gentle ping of metal against glass drew me to the kitchen. Jake sat at the kitchen table, a half-eaten bowl of cereal and a gallon of milk in front of him. His face was thin but shaven, and he wore his glasses for the first time since he’d taken to his bed.
Lazarus, arisen from his tomb.
This was what I’d been waiting for. The veil had lifted, just as Gupta had said it would, and the light had returned to his eyes; I could see it. He was back. But excitement only flickered and then faded.
I should have been kissing him, thanking divine forces for bringing him back to life. I should feel something. Elation? Rage? Anything. Instead, I felt only deadness—the same deadness I’d witnessed in Jake for weeks. I opened my mouth to tell him that it was all over, that I had to leave him and take Ryan with me for our own survival. I didn’t want apologies or remorse. I didn’t want explanations or promises. Not this time.
He stood. He wrapped his arms around me, his fingers combing through my hair. I leaned on him, more out of exhaustion than affection. “I thought for a minute that you’d left for good,” he said, his voice catching. “You’d have every right.” He rocked me as we stood there. “Please don’t hate me,” he whispered.
My molars could have broken under the pressure of my bite. “I don’t hate you, Jake.” And I didn’t. I’d missed him too—
this
him.
I pulled myself away from him and looked into his mossy eyes, made greener by their reddened edges. He was so fragile, so filled with remorse. His wan appearance and the desperation in his eyes were like those of patients in the oncology wards.
Thoughts formed and melted and formed again in my pounding head. Words withered. “Ryan and I can’t go through this again. You need to know how much this hurt us.”
Jake hung his head. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He stepped close to me and rested his head on my shoulder. Part of me wanted to step away, while another wanted to enfold him in my arms. He’d missed so much: Ryan losing her first tooth and then her second; Burt getting his gallery show; my reunion with my family.
“I know,” I sighed. “You have to stay on your meds. And not just until the dark mood passes. Forever.”
He sniffed and wiped his nose with the edge of his sweatshirt sleeve. “I know, Kat. I know. I started taking them again two weeks ago. I’ll take them every day. I think that’s what helped me get enough energy to get out of bed.”
“Where’s Consuelo?” I asked, suddenly aware of her absence.
“I paid her and let her go.”
“Let her go? You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I don’t need a babysitter. All she did was drive me nuts with the Spanish soap operas.” He shrugged. “Maybe those damned
novelas
actually got me up.”
I searched his face for any hint of the feral cat or surly hermit. Instead I saw the tender expression, his kind, loving eyes. “Where’s Ryan?”
“School right now. Then my dad will pick her up and keep her at the pub until I pick her up tonight. She’s kind of the bridge right now between us all.” Jake gave a half-smile.
The shrill tone of my pager sliced the air between us. I recognized the number as the nurse’s station in pediatrics. I stepped to the phone in the kitchen and Jake slumped back into his chair, drained of all of the energy he’d had a moment ago.
“Dr. Murphy returning a page.”
Dahlia’s voice was controlled alarm. “Kate. I’m glad I’ve found you. It’s Allison. She spiked a temp of 105 and she’s been seizing.”
“I’m there.”
I turned to Jake. “You’ll be all right here?”
“I’m fine. Go, your patient needs you.”
* * *
“She’s still febrile, Dr. Murphy. She’s having no urinary output. Toxicology came back gram positive. Her breathing is labored.” Nora Martin, a pediatric ICU nurse, wore a sleek ponytail and scrubs covered in multi-colored kittens. Nora checked the tubing to Allison’s IV. She stroked her sweaty forehead with her fingers. The baby’s face was swollen with edema and her fingers fattened with fluid retention. Her tiny arm was strapped down, keeping her from pulling out the IV that pierced her dimpled hand.
“Dammit. I thought we’d avoided infection,” I said.
Nora continued to stroke the baby’s face. Allison’s puckered lips began to suck. “I’ve got cucumbers in my fridge older than her.”
“Remind me not to have a salad at your house.” We shared half-smiles and resumed examining Allison’s chart. “Her parents?”
“In the waiting room. Completely freaking out.”
My tiny patient lay in her crib, her rag doll body limp. “Hang in there, Allison.” Even as I spoke the words, my hope faded.
After sitting with the Bennetts and explaining the toxicology results, every intervention we could try, and the likelihood of their effects, I spent the rest of the afternoon watching Allison fighting her battle. None of the IV fluids, antibiotics, or analgesics reduced her fever. She did not respond to alcohol rubs or ice baths. By late in the day she was in respiratory distress.
Finally, cardiac arrest obliterated the last of our hope.
* * *
“Hi, Mommy,” Ryan’s voice was as cheerful as Minnie Mouse’s.
“Hi, honey,” I said into my office phone. I had to hear her voice. I could envision her tucked into the same nest of quilts I’d slept under a hundred times in Alice’s bed when I was little.
“Alice said we could paint our toenails tonight.”
I pushed aside a stack of research articles on pediatric infection control. I’d been searching for something I might have missed in Allison’s post-op medication regimen.
“We had the best day. I helped Grandpa put some new records in the jukebox and then Uncle Tully took me to stir paint for a real fancy house he’s painting and…”
Ryan’s story meandered as she rendered all of the details of her day. I uh-huhed enough to sound interested, but could think of little else but Allison as the nurses removed the last of the equipment, preparing her body for its transport to the morgue. Allison had never crawled, had never eaten solid food. I suddenly ached to touch Ryan’s curls and smell her sweet, powdered skin.
“How’s Daddy? Is he still sleeping?” Ryan asked.
“He got up and ate three bowls of cereal today.”
“Maybe he’ll make something new in the garden.”
“Maybe so, honey. He misses you.”
“I miss him too. Tell him I found some raven feathers today. Tell him we have to use them for our garden sculptures.”
“I’ll tell him. I love you, Noodle.”
“I love you more,” Ryan announced, then her giggle rang over the phone lines. The phone clicked in my ear, declaring her the winner of the game she and Jake so often played.
Watching the grief etched on the Bennetts’ faces shamed me. I couldn’t let myself imagine Ryan hooked up to IVs. Couldn’t let myself think of a scalpel slicing the smooth skin on her perfect tummy.
I walked over the waxed floors of the hospital corridor, into the sluggish elevator and out to the garage. All I wanted was to go home and hold Jake in my arms and tell him about the feathers our daughter would bring him. I missed my companion, my friend, my lover. I needed to tell him about Allison and have him comfort me.
Never again would I take Jake’s health for granted. I could no longer trust him to keep his medication regimen stable over time. Despite its hibernation, the sleeping lion of Jake’s mental illness had been awakened, and I could no longer deny its existence.
* * *
The porch light glowed. I carried freshly made wonton soup from The Pot and Pan on 7th Avenue, our favorite chicken soup substitute. Our version of penicillin, its rich broth had nursed our colds countless times. When I opened the door, dozens of white candles in the stucco niches of the living room made the place seem like midnight mass at St. Anne’s on Christmas Eve. James Taylor crooned softly in the background. I set the soup on the entryway table.
On the coffee table sat an open bottle of merlot, a vintage Jake and I had discovered on a romantic drive through the Napa Valley. A single ruby glass was poured. Next to it stood a vase filled with a bouquet of creamy white orchids, with rich purple veins through the petals—an intricate web of capillaries. The blossoms dangled, each one an origami bird. The color in the veins in each blossom matched the wine so precisely that it seemed the orchids had bled themselves into the glass.