Chapter 16
Jake
F
rom the outside, their house looked like most of the others on the block—two-story colonial skirted by leggy evergreens and framed by mature oak trees and the lilac bushes Anna loved so much and the ash sapling he planted last year. Terracotta red bricks faced the lower level in the front—an awkward attempt to lend a sense of strength to the structure—and, above, the wooden siding was painted the color of vanilla ice cream.
He pulled into the driveway and parked his van beside a shiny new Taurus. Must be his in-laws’ rental car. He set the gear shift in park and pulled the keys from the ignition. The shingles on the corner of the garage were curled. The whole roof would need replacing in a year or two, an expensive fact he tried to ignore. At least the grass was healthy and the garden easy to maintain.
While the outside looked like the neighbors’ houses, the inside was very different. Not in appearance—they all had similar floor plans, with living room, dining room, family room, and half bath down, three bedrooms and two baths up—but in attitude. The darkness that now hovered over his house seemed to suffocate Jake. Slowly he walked from the driveway to the back door, stopping to kick a dead oak twig that had fallen on the concrete. The stick flew into the nearest forsythia bush, zigzagged through the yellow blossoms, and finally landed on the dirt. None of the children in the other houses were critically ill.
He stepped into the back entry and briefly studied his face—its exaggerated creases, its swollen eyes—in the mirror. He shook his head, took a deep breath, and called, “Hi, everyone, I’m home.”
Chris rocketed around the corner from the kitchen and leaped into his arms. “Daddy,” he screamed.
“Whoa, tiger,” Jake moaned, hobbling backward to keep from falling. “You’re sure full of vinegar.” He tried to sound upbeat, to hide his misery from Chris, but the lilting swing in his voice rang hollow and insincere to even his own ears. He set his son on the floor.
“Grandma and Grandpa are here, but Mommy’s not,” Chris said.
“Yeah, I know. Mommy’s still at the hospital with Eddie. She misses you a lot.” They walked into the kitchen. “We’ll call her in a few minutes.”
“Hi, Jake. This is all so terrible.” Anna’s mother stood at the stove, one of her daughter’s aprons tied around her waist. She looked ten years older than when Jake last saw her, just a week ago.
“We’re so glad you could come, Eleanor,” he said and brushed her cheek with a kiss. She bore the same scent as his wife, something like gardenias with a touch of cinnamon.
“Hi, Jim,” Jake said, walking to the kitchen table.
His father-in-law lowered his newspaper and held out his hand. “So sorry. I wish our visit were under more pleasant circumstances.”
Jake told them what had happened, explained meningitis, described how Eddie needed a ventilator to breathe. He was vague about the future.
Chris tugged at his father’s arm. “Come on,” he whined, pulling him toward the family room.
“You two rest for a while. We’ll call you when dinner’s ready. About a half hour,” Eleanor said.
He settled into the La-Z-Boy. Chris clambered into his lap. Along with the smell of simmering onions and garlic, tomatoes and chicken, his mother-in-law’s voice, a lower and slower version of his wife’s, drifted from the kitchen. It carried the same clipped rhythm, the same practical message, the same reverberant tone. For a fleeting moment, he thought it was Anna cooking dinner. Then he remembered.
Ordinarily, he would have been ravenous after a long day at work, would have savored a good meal. Tonight, however, the odors, the clanging pans, the din of the television, even his mother-in-law’s efficient helpfulness, seemed intrusive and wildly irritating. They battered his senses and yanked him from where he wanted to be.
He shrugged off the unwelcome interruptions—they were yet more of today’s many annoyances—and called toward the kitchen, “Smells great.”
His father-in-law leaned against the door frame between the kitchen and family room. “Chris and I spent the late afternoon in the garden, pulling weeds. I tried to teach him the difference between dandelions and daisies. Poor little guy got bored . . .” The clatter of dishes and the
ding-ding-ding-ding
from the microwave oven hid the last of Jim’s words as he returned to the kitchen.
Jake laid his head against the back of the La-Z-Boy and let the familiarity of the room glide over him. The overflowing toy box. The LEGOs scattered on the floor. The coffee table heaped with Chris’s books, Anna’s decorating magazines, and his orthopedic surgery journals, the flotsam of their family life. Against the back wall stood the piano that Anna played when she was moody. “Beethoven Sonata number five,” she would sing out right before her fingers hit the keys. He never understood who the announcement was for. Certainly not for him.
An old cotton diaper, wrinkled and tinted ivory with dried milk stains, hung over the arm of the rocking chair. It seemed like a memorial to his wife and their baby. Anna used that cloth to mop up when she fed and burped Eddie. Spitting up milk may have been the last normal thing Eddie had done. He adjusted the back of the La-Z-Boy to the recline position and arranged Chris on his chest.
Although it seemed like two and a half decades, it had been only two and a half days since Eddie had gotten sick. That night, Anna would have been here in the family room. She would have used the phone just around the corner in the kitchen when she called him. He closed his eyes. Imprinted against the black, he saw a shadowy image of Anna with Eddie in her arms, speaking on the phone.
He leaned his cheek against the top of Chris’s head. If only he could rewind time to three days ago, he’d play that evening over again with a different script, one in which Anna would recognize how sick Eddie really was. He’d ask Anna more questions about Eddie, would try to get a better sense for how he was acting. Is he nursing okay? he would ask. Does he seem to hurt anywhere? Is he playful? Can you make him laugh?
Maybe he shouldn’t have reassured her that Eddie was okay. But, based on what she’d told him, he sounded fine. And, there was the issue of Anna’s never-ending anxiety about the boys. There was no way he could have known what was really going on. If only he’d been home. If only he’d asked more questions. If only Anna had communicated more accurately how Eddie was acting. If only. If only.
He looked down at Chris, now sprawled across his belly like a rag doll, a limp arm here, a languid leg there. Tiny blood vessels branched like winter dogwood over his closed eyelids. The words “University of Michigan” emblazoned on his T-shirt moved with his breathing. Chris was sucking his thumb.
“Tell me what you and Grandpa did today,” Jake whispered.
Chris slowly shook his head, his eyes still clamped shut, his thumb still hooked inside his mouth.
The poor guy, he thought. The poor, poor, poor little guy. Chris had stopped sucking his thumb almost two years ago. Last night he’d even wet the bed and had woken up shrieking.
He felt the tickle of Chris’s hair against his arm. Too much change. Mom gone. Baby brother gone. Dad a wreck. Grandparents, nearly strangers, here. He hadn’t even been to Rose Marie’s house on his usual schedule.
He wished Anna would come home. Chris needs her so much, he thought. More than Eddie, right now. First she failed to see Eddie’s illness and now she has abandoned Chris. He clinched his jaw. Anna abandon one of her children? No, she would never do that. Everything was just so screwed up.
They sat around the kitchen table, his mother-in-law in Anna’s seat, his father-in-law across from Chris. The serving dishes were passed in silence. Even Chris was quiet.
The room seemed hollow, the emptiness enormous. He felt as if he were deep inside a cave and its walls wavered around him.
“Tell Grandma how much you liked the chicken,” Jake said.
Chris said nothing.
“Didn’t you like your dinner?” Jim asked, leaning toward his grandson.
Eleanor laid down her fork. “Look, the poor little fellow doesn’t want to talk right now. I think that’s just fine.”
Jake agreed.
While Anna’s parents loaded the dinnerware into the dishwasher, Jake called to Chris, “Let’s phone Mom.”
He dialed the number to the visitors’ lounge and waited for someone to find Anna.
“Hello?” Her voice was wooden.
“Hi. Chris wants to talk to you.” He held the phone to Chris’s ear. His son wiggled in his lap and then suddenly quieted.
“Mommy?” he whispered.
Jake tipped the receiver toward his own ear so they could both hear.
“Yes, honey.” Anna was crying. “Chrisy, I love you very much,” she said. “I’ll be home soon.”
His son’s head nodded as if someone had offered him a Popsicle. He chased Chris’s ear with the receiver to keep it in listening range.
Finally, Jake said, “We should let Mommy rest now. Tell her good-bye.”
“Bye.”
Jake set Chris on the floor. “Honey,” he said to Anna, “I hope you have a good night. Maybe tomorrow night you can sleep here.”
It was a long time before Anna spoke. “Not if Eddie’s still in the ICU. He’s too sick. I can’t leave him.” He heard the rumblings of the lounge in the background. Finally, she whispered, “Good-bye, Jake.”
“Do you have any decaf?” Anna’s mother called from the kitchen after they had finally gotten Chris to bed.
“Yes, in the cupboard above the microwave,” Jake answered.
“Want some?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Some evenings Anna would slip off to the living room, where he would find her, seated here on the sofa, her legs folded under her bottom, a book resting on her lap, her eyes staring into the wallpaper.
“What’re you thinking about?” he would ask when he found her like that.
“Nothing,” she would say with a sigh.
The living room was Anna’s place, free from the clutter of the family room. The lamp with the gold braid on the shade was a wedding gift from his medical school roommate; the clay pot was a souvenir—more expensive than he thought was reasonable—from their trip to Mexico; the sofa, with its puke green floral upholstery, had belonged to Anna’s parents. He built the bookshelves last summer to her specifications and painted them Navaho white to match the walls. To him this room wasn’t comfortable. Its stiff formality reminded him of rose bushes.
Anna’s mother set a cup of coffee in his hands. “Here you go. Now that Chris isn’t around, tell us more about Eddie.” Her face was grim, echoing that of Anna’s dad.
How could he explain it to them? He sipped his decaf and answered their questions as best he could. “He needs the ventilator because he doesn’t take breaths on his own. The machine pushes air into his lungs.
“No, we don’t know how long he’ll be in the ICU.
“Yes, there’s still hope.” He wasn’t sure what they meant by hope. Anna’s mother sobbed into a handkerchief. Her father dabbed at his eyes with his fingertips. Jake didn’t tell them that, if he survived, Eddie stood a good chance of having neurologic residua. Now wasn’t a good time for them to learn that Eddie might end up blind or deaf or mentally retarded.
Later, his eyes half closed, his brain half asleep, he leaned over the bathroom sink and scraped his toothbrush over his teeth. Why did this have to happen? He yearned for the time when their lives were comfortably on an even keel.
Robotically he stepped into the faded aqua scrub pants he used as pajama bottoms and crawled into bed. Until two nights ago, he had never slept in this room alone, except the night after Anna delivered Eddie. Anna often slept here alone—every third or fourth night, while he was on call. He nuzzled his face into her pillow and caught the faint spicy scent that usually lay buried deep in her hair.
The room seemed to throb with her presence, which only heightened her absence. She had sewn the bedspread, choosing fabric to match the painting she bought at the art fair. She had found the four handmade felt dolls at a yard sale and mounted them in the shadow boxes that hung over their dresser. She had rescued the oak chair from a secondhand store and refinished it. So much of her was here, yet the important part—the real part—was missing, more than the furniture she chose to decorate the place, more than the pictures and bed linens. Her spirit was missing, the way she laughed at the jokes he brought home from the operating room, the way her fingers stroked his bare back, her gentle, knowing smile.
Light from the hallway filtered into the bedroom and splayed over the table beside her pillow, dimly illuminating the book she was currently reading. A sheet of Kleenex, folded in half, protruded from between the pages. Her slippers lay, one crossed on top of the other in an X, under the desk where she would have kicked them. Her white satin robe, limp and ghostly, was draped over the door to the bathroom. If only she would walk into the room right now, would sit on the bed beside him, would set her hand on his cheek. If only. If only.