I Thought You Were Dead (3 page)

“Don't worry about it — I lost that battle a long time ago,” he said. “That's one thing you and I have in common. You don't remember, but you were the shiest pup in the litter when I got you. Your siblings used to knock you all over the place.”

“In that case,” she said, “you might want to bring some sort of offering …” But he was asleep before she got the words out.

She sniffed the air, then cocked her head to listen a moment. She heard the furnace in the basement kick on. A truck, somewhere far off. The pilot light in the gas stove hissing. A mouse scratching, somewhere behind the mopboard in the kitchen, and of course, her master's breathing, his heart beating, his teeth grinding slightly, something he did when he was stressed. Other than that, all seemed to be in order.

How difficult it was now to remember her siblings. She could remember running wild through the weeds, usually last in the order, but it never bothered her to be last, as long as she had someone to run with. She remembered a farm and, vaguely, a fat man playing the banjo in the twilight, singing:

“Good night, Paul,” she said. He was snoring, but that never bothered her either.

H
is sister's given name was Elizabeth, but everyone called her Bits. She was two years older than Paul, fair haired but not blond by Minnesota standards. She was waiting at the gate, alone, and gave him a big hug. She'd left the kids at home with her husband, Eugene. “They wanted to come meet you,” she said, “but I was afraid with the snow they might cancel your flight.”

Bits was his favorite sibling, despite the fact that when they were young, she'd occasionally tortured Paul, the baby in the family, as older siblings do. He had to admire the inventiveness with which she had tormented him. For example, she used to pin him to the ground, with his older brother Carl's help, and sit on him and pull his shirt up and press a tennis racket against his belly and then rake the extruded skin with a hairbrush, so that when she took the tennis racket away, he had what she called a waffle belly. She was even tempered, the fixer, the go-between middle child and the anxious one, fretting over details on a bad day but levelheaded on a good one. Her house was only a mile and a half from their parents' house, so she'd always been the one to drop by and check in on Harrold and Beverly to see if they needed anything.

“How is he?” he asked his sister.

“He's stable. He's not good, but he's not getting any worse. You'll see. How was your flight?”

He made a so-so gesture with his hand. “I don't think I've ever had a good conversation on an airplane.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Did they feed you?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“I think the coffee shop at the hospital is still open. The food'll make you ill, but if you get sick, you're already in a hospital.”

He'd also had four vodkas on the plane and needed to pee. Airport bathrooms annoyed him, guys bellying up to the urinals with their bags over their shoulders, knocking into you with their luggage and making you tinkle on your shoes. He contemplated draining one of the nip bottles he'd stashed in his suitcase but decided to wait until later. People were waiting for him.

As they drove, she filled Paul in as best she could. Their father had had about as bad an ischemic stroke as you could have, she said. The only fortunate aspect was that he hadn't had a hemorrhagic stroke, since burst blood vessels were harder to treat than clots. The damage was primarily to the right hemisphere of Harrold's brain and to the motor cortex. He would need to relearn how to do virtually everything, she said. He could move his right hand and lightly grip with it but was otherwise paralyzed. He had some spasticity in his left foot and leg, indicating live nerve action, and he seemed to be aware of his circumstances, but he had had two severe seizures in the first twenty-four hours. He was being closely monitored. She warned her brother that he might be shocked when he saw their father, with so many tubes and wires and machines hooked up.

Bits maneuvered her minivan past familiar landmarks, a Rexall drugstore, a sporting goods store, the Sears Building. When he got to the hospital, Paul found a men's room near the gift shop, drained another nip, popped a Life Saver, ran his fingers through his hair in the mirror, and then went to face the music.

“I hate this place,” he said as they walked down the hall, following a blue stripe painted on the floor. Paul had been to Mercy
Hospital three times before, the first time for stitches when a kid in sixth grade hit him in the eye with a snowball, and the second time after he'd broken his arm playing high school football. The last time was when he'd visited his namesake, Grandpa Paul, who'd lain in his bed after cancer surgery, shriveling up like a mushroom on a windowsill.

“I was in labor for thirty-seven hours the last time I was here,” his sister said. “Oh, the memories.”

“They should bill you by the hour,” Paul said. “They'd move people out faster.”

“I did feel guilty for malingering,” Bits said, “but I was having such a good time.”

Paul stopped her in the hallway.

“I have to ask,” he said. “Are you mad at me?”

“For what?”

“I was supposed to be pricing snowblowers,” Paul said. “If he hadn't been shoveling, this might not have happened.”

“I was mad at you for maybe five seconds,” she told him. “You're not why a blood clot stuck in his head. And if it wasn't shoveling, it would just have been something else. He could have had a stroke lying in bed. I said the same thing to Mom. She was blaming herself because she thought if she'd been watching out the window, she would have seen him when he fell. You can't watch somebody all the time. If you could, my kids wouldn't have so many stitches in their heads.”

The door to his father's hospital room, just down the hall from intensive care, was slightly ajar, so he opened it slowly. Paul's mother, Beverly, was off on an errand, a nurse said. Bits went to look for her. Before she left, she gave Paul's arm a squeeze and said, “Don't worry — he won't bite you.”

The vodka numbed him, but not enough. His first impression was that his father, with his dentures out and his glasses off, and his snow-white hair, and the tubes in his nose and in his veins,
looked a lot like Grandpa Paul, the difference being that Grandpa Paul had been semiconscious and cheerful right up to the last moment. Paul's father's eyes were closed, his breathing perceptible only at close range. A pink plastic apparatus resembling a handlebar mustache connected to clear plastic tubes brought oxygen to his nostrils. IV drips fed drugs and serums and nutrients into both arms. A half-f catheter bag hung at the foot of the bed, collecting urine. Other sensors taped to various parts of his father's body brought data to a multitiered monitor, reporting things like temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and Paul wasn't sure what else. An array of unused equipment had been pushed against the far wall. Somehow the first impression was that this was more of a science project than a human drama, or a scene from some doctor show on television, not quite real. He wondered what his father might be thinking. He was wearing a hospital johnny, white cotton with blue diamonds on it. On the bed stand next to him was a bouquet of flowers, an empty glass, a Diet Coke can, a half-consumed sleeve of Ritz crackers, a Bible, and his mother's reading glasses. The television mounted in the corner of the room was off, but Paul wanted to turn it on, in dire need of a distraction. How ineluctably strange, Paul thought, to be able to move, see, talk, hear, and comprehend, while his father couldn't. Harrold had been the source of whatever strength Paul possessed. If the old man had taught him anything, it was how to persevere.

“Where are you now?” he wanted to ask.

His father was only seventy-two but looked ninety in the fluorescent light, waxy and pale. In a sense he'd come full circle, for the odd thing was that Paul's earliest memory of his father, one of the earliest memories he had, was of Harrold lying in a hospital bed, a different hospital, in a different era, without a tenth of the technology surrounding him today. Paul had been just shy of three years old and had no memory of the accident itself, but
he remembered seeing his father with bandages around his head and tubes up his nose, after he'd driven off an icy road and into a bridge with the whole family in the car. They were coming home from a pre-Christmas reunion organized by some of Harrold's navy buddies, men he'd served with in the Pacific. Paul could remember holding Grandpa Paul's hand, walking down a long hospital corridor that smelled of disinfectant, hearing voices in the air, doctors' names coming over the public-address system. He remembered being told that if he was good he could buy anything he wanted in the gift shop, only to discover sadly that there was nothing there he wanted. He remembered being told to keep very quiet, until he came to believe any noise he made might accidentally kill somebody, so he kept
very
quiet.

They'd stopped first to see his mother, who'd been less seriously injured. Beverly had managed a weak smile and squeezed his hand. Then they'd gone to see Harrold, who looked at Paul but couldn't speak. Carl had broken his shoulder and had a bandage on his head for a while, and Bits had bumped her head and suffered cuts from flying glass. She still had a scar above her right eyebrow, which over the years had become a line that made her look permanently bemused. People who didn't know her sometimes thought she was being sarcastic or ironic when she wasn't. Paul had emerged from the accident more or less unscathed, a few cuts, a chest bruise where he hit the headrest, and a collapsed lung that was easily reinflated. The kids had stayed with Grandpa Paul and Grandma Lula while their parents recovered.

Paul remembered something else. He remembered meeting a man in his father's hospital room, a big, barrel-chested guy with a blond crew cut, in a military uniform, probably one of his father's navy pals. He remembered the uniform and in particular the military decorations the man had on his chest and sleeve. That was all. His father never talked about the time he spent in
the service or, for that matter, about the accident. Death had no meaning for Paul at the time, so he hadn't been worried, just impatient, waiting for his family life to resume its normalcy.

“You did it once, tough guy,” Paul whispered. “You can do it again.”

He was thinking of mortality and related issues (meaning, fulfillment, accomplishment and failure, final judgment, eternity, et cetera) when his sister rejoined him.

“Mom's down the hall. She said she'd be right back. We were going to order Chinese. They told us it was okay to eat in the lounge,” she said. “I haven't even had a chance to ask you about you. How are you doing? Do you ever see Karen?”

Paul wondered if Harrold could hear them. If he could, he gave no indication.

“It's hard not to in a small town,” Paul said. Nobody in the family had known what to say about the divorce, owing, in part, to the fact that against all odds, no one in his family had ever been divorced, but that was okay because he didn't want to talk about it either. “She's still with the arts council, so she's downtown a lot, but so far we've managed to avoid each other.”

“Would you say you're on good terms with her?” Bits asked.

“I wouldn't go that far,” he said. “We've moved on.”

They were interrupted when Paul's mother came in and gave him a long hug, and he hugged back, grateful for the kind of family that can't divorce you and go off and find somebody else to live with.

“It's so good to see you,” she said. “I'm sorry you had to fly home under these circumstances, but I'm glad you're here. I'm sure your father is glad too.” She moved to the bed and leaned over her husband. “See who's here, Harrold? It's Paul.”

Paul was hoping, for reasons selfish and otherwise, to observe a sudden spike or two on his father's heart monitor, but the beat was steady and unchanged. Beverly returned to Paul.

“My goodness,” she said. “Your hair has gotten so much darker.”

“Mom,” Paul said. “You've been saying that ever since I went away to college. My hair turned dark when I was five. It hasn't changed since then.”

“I know,” she said. “I just can't get over it.”

Paul kept his mother company while Bits went to pick up dinner. A nurse asked them to wait in the lounge while she calibrated and adjusted the technology surrounding and attached to Paul's father.

“How are you holding up?” Paul asked Beverly.

“Well, you know,” she said, “when you get to be our age, you have to be aware that this sort of thing can happen. Two of our friends from church have had strokes.”

Beverly was five foot two and shrinking. One day, he'd told her, she'd be the size of a raccoon, and then they could fly with her in a crate and take her to all the places she wanted to see. Her hair was gray but full. Today, she seemed thinner. She sat on the couch, moving aside a pile of out-of-date magazines. Paul sat next to her. She spoke of what the doctors had told her so far. She seemed oddly calm, self-assured in a way he'd never seen before. Paul always figured he'd inherited his insecurity from her and his intransigence from his father. She'd made notes on a small pad and referred to them to fill Paul in. The doctors had warned her that they couldn't predict how impaired Harrold would be, or for how long. It was once thought patients couldn't recover much beyond the progress made in the first six months, but newer therapies and medications had extended the recovery period by as much as four years.