Eleven Hours (15 page)

“I do, I do. But I love the bad ones the best.”

“Michael and Mickey?” Barbara says, when Franckline returns. “They've been here for three weeks. No one has come to see them. Not once.”

And now an alarm sounds, a rapid beeping that rises above Mickey's wails. Barbara looks up calmly, confirming that it comes from a machine in another bay, and another nurse moves unhurriedly to adjust a lead. The
NICU
seems to be stirring for the new shift. A mother and father arrive to visit their child. The neonatologist on duty begins his rounds a few minutes later, along with his resident and the cardiologist and the respiratory therapist. It's time for Franckline to go. She spends a quiet minute gazing at Baby T, trying to fix all the details in her memory: the color of her skin, the shape of her head, the way her ID bracelet hangs on her tiny wrist. There must be something too vivid in her own eyes, because when she takes her leave, Barbara gives her an appraising look.
Don't get attached
, she's warning.
Don't let it matter too much one way or the other
.

On the way to post-op, Franckline checks her watch. Bernard will be putting dinner on the table soon, expecting her.

Glenda, a younger nurse, greets Franckline at Lore's bedside. “She's hanging in,” Glenda says. “She has a fever, but her vitals are pretty good. She's on a Dilaudid drip.”

Franckline pulls up a chair. She takes Lore's hot hand and holds it in her own, pressing it gently. Lore's hair splays in damp sections against her pillow. Her skin is pale and her eyes move rapidly under the lids.

“Dr. Elspeth-Chang was just here, and a woman named Diana is on her way over,” says the nurse. “She's Ms. Tannenbaum's health proxy. Someone who works with her, I think.”

“May I?” Franckline asks the nurse. She goes to the door for Lore's chart. She holds the folder on her knee and removes Lore's birth plan.

IN THE EVENT THAT THE BABY DIES
, I seek the following:

•
to be able to see and hold the baby for as long as I wish

•
not to be given tranquilizers or drugs that blunt feeling

•
to arrange the funeral myself

She turns back one page:

IN THE EVENT THAT THE BABY IS ILL OR HANDICAPPED
, I seek the following:

•
I would like all procedures and any medications given to the baby to be explained to me
.

•
I would like to touch, hold, and breastfeed the baby if possible, and as often as possible
.

•
If my baby has a severe handicap, I would like a full discussion with the pediatrician before any treatment is embarked upon, so that I can explore all of the options
.

Franckline moves back to the bed and again takes Lore's hand. The nurse moves discreetly to the corner of the room, folds a stack of towels.

The sedated and the comatose hear what one says to them.

“Have they told you about your child, Lore?” Franckline asks. She leans in very close. “It's a girl. She's doing all right. She's in the intensive care unit, and she's breathing and her lungs are strong. Her skin is a beautiful pink, and she has the prettiest little ears. She should be off the ventilator by tomorrow. They are going to test her brain, Lore, to see if everything is all right. I know you've thought of everything. I know that you will know how to take care of this child no matter what. So, you must get strong again, fight off this fever, so that you can hold the baby in your arms and give it what it needs. The hospital will know what to do until then. Be easy, Lore. Be easy.” Lore's head moves restlessly from side to side on her pillow, indicating either that she hears Franckline or else that the sounds of speech are disturbing her slumber.

At the charge desk in Maternity, Franckline speaks in low tones to Marina. Will Marina help her—again? Marina, sympathetic but hesitant, replies that there's only Dr. Merchant right now; the others are occupied. “Someone else, please,” says Franckline. Not Dr. Merchant, no, not just after watching him loose a river of Lore's blood, not after standing next to him as he moved and cut amid Lore's organs. Marina peers at her assignment chart more closely. Dr. Phillips just signed out and went to change; perhaps she will be willing. Marina walks off in search of the doctor, who returns a few minutes later, looking drawn and annoyed, but gestures for Franckline to follow her into a small room down the hall. She smooths fresh paper over an examining table, and as Franckline shucks her elastic-waisted scrub pants and lies down, she becomes someone else: not a worker, not a caretaker, but another body to be opened up and peered inside of.
Relax
, she tells herself, as she has told so many others. The doctor squirts warm gel over Franckline's belly and pushes it around with the ultrasound wand. She watches the screen, stubbornly silent, making neither upbeat nor worried sounds, stops, clicks to take a few images, then pushes the wand around some more. More wanding—does the child, Franckline wonders, somersault playfully away? Does it feel disruption, distress? Does its heart still beat at all? Finally the doctor tells Franckline to slide down and put her feet in the stirrups. “Sorry,” she says briskly, as she guides the probe inside. Click-click on the console.

Withdrawing the probe, Dr. Phillips announces that Franckline looks just fine; the baby is a normal size, the amniotic sac is normal, the heart is normal. The bifurcation in the uterus does not seem to be having any effect on the fetus's development (she points to the uterus's left-hand chamber). She hands Franckline a towel with which to wipe herself off. “I don't see any reasons for concern here. I can't tell you what the pains are. Might just be stress, Franckline.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Take your time. Close the door behind you when you go.”

Franckline wipes and wipes until she feels dry, then pulls up her pants, fishes for the key to the locker that contains her street clothes. So things are all right for another day, another two days. Tonight, with Bernard, she will decide—again—whether to speak the news.

Lore walks down corridors searching for her child's room. Left, right, left, right: the doors are open but there are no babies here, just grown men and women turning in their sleep, or being comforted by their families, or calling out for help. She can't help them, not right now, her child needs her, her Soleil. At the end of a corridor, after many rooms, a stout woman in a police uniform waits expectantly to hear Lore's business. Lore tries to explain but her tongue will not make any
L
's or
R
's, any
S
's or
Th
's. She tries to enact the exercises she knows so well. Click the tongue ten times just behind the top teeth. Relax the lips. But the
L
will not sound. The
R
will not come.
R
is the most difficult sound of all. Children rarely master it before age seven. She places the sides of her tongue between her back molars and presses against her upper teeth. A hissing silence.

“I am here!” cries Lore to the policewoman. “I am here!” But she cannot explain what she is here
for
. She pushes the tip of her tongue between her front teeth. She holds a tongue depressor crosswise between her lips. She sucks on a great straw.
S
is
S
as in
Sock
.
Sh
is
Sh
as in
Shoe
.

The drugs toss her, float her on dreams of paralysis. She is trussed up in ropes. She spins in a black atmosphere. She sees Soleil, bound in strong nylon wires to a white crib: she must rescue her. Soleil! Soleil! Lore's lips move rapidly, she calls out, and the nurse by her side pats her hand and strokes her arm until she settles again. Even sunk as she is, she grasps at the notion that there is some
outside
to the universe in which she now tumbles, that she must struggle up and pierce the shroud to meet it. She sinks back down, into darker dreams of horned shadows passing along a wall, of a heartbeat loud enough to rock her trapped body like a rowboat in a squall.

The nurse strokes her arm, adjusts the Dilaudid drip, notes in the log Lore Tannenbaum's pulse.

Down the hall two doctors eat dinner in the conference room. Dr. Lee: a vegetable soup and chicken stir-fry made by his wife, also a doctor. Dr. Glendinning: supermarket lasagna. They often take their dinner together, methodical eaters who like having a companion to whom they need not speak. For hours they have torn flesh open and sealed it up again; they have inflicted pain and quieted it; they have upheld life and prolonged dying. They are gods at the feast after the Games, but instead of the homage of slaughtered and fragrantly roasted animals, here is ground beef layered between ribbons of precooked semolina; instead of great bowls of wine, there is Dr. Lee's astringent green tea. There are no crowds, no toasts, no dances stepped to their honor. They ask for so much less—a few moments of quiet, a small heap of calories to enable them to continue. They do not need to figure in the songs of poets.

Dr. Glendinning gets up to find some salt. Dr. Lee pours the remains of his warm tea down the sink.

The day's weary are leaving—on subways, in cabs, by foot—and the fresh healers are coming in. The nurses arrive at their charge desks, orderlies check in with supervisors. Natalie Komlosky, age two, is curled up asleep at the bottom of her mother's bed, having briefly met her new baby brother and been told her mother cannot hold her because of her stitches. She dreams of strawberries and a basket of soft leaves, and of a pink ball she lost last week that now rolls to her from a hidden corner. In the morning she will know: no matter what losses are visited upon us in the waking day, our nights will always comfort and recompense us. Natalie will always love the night now: its inventions, its richness, its sympathy. There are creatures of the day (alert, energetic, strict, practiced in loss) and there are creatures of the night (rebellious, vague, imaginative, greedy), and Natalie moves to join the night creatures, receives their hot, loyal embrace.

Arthur Niccoli, seventy-seven, dozes in his bed. They took out the tumor in his right lung, the size of a walnut; a very clean operation, the surgeon said. Arthur supposes it is good to be still alive; he supposes it is worth it even though Maria is gone, her gentle snoring next to him in bed, the swell of her ample hip. She would have been seventy-five this May. She is gone and so is the past they had together. How he once ran up steep streets simply to feel his body pitch against the wind; how strong his hands were with a hammer or spade. Great too was the alchemy of children, the making and shaping of them, watching them grow tall and free. He supposes there remain, still, sunlight across the carpet in the morning and the comfort of good socks at night when you are reading about Churchill or Khrushchev (reading about Churchill in bed is no small pleasure), and the grandchildren who remind you of what it was like once, when you had sap and the world seemed to tumble out of the sky anew each morning. He slides an eye over to George, sprawled in an armchair, his long legs halfway to the bed. His son is frowning at his laptop and pecking at the keys. He might be writing an office memo or he might be playing one of those crazy games even the grown-ups waste their time on now. Arthur Niccoli smoked for fifty-two of his seventy-seven years; surely in a couple more the doctors will have to go inside him again, and it will be worse next time, the growths elongated and bound more tightly to the organs. At first he'd refused even this operation. Let the tumor take its chances with me, he said. But George and Mimi had coaxed and begged, how they coaxed and begged! It was enough to make you wish you were dying all the time, to see how much your children wanted to keep you around. I did it for you, he thinks wearily, you selfish children, you grandchildren. I did it for you, Dr. Canberra, so as not to injure your pride. He recalls the woman he saw this morning as he was wheeled to surgery: a great madonna in blue scrubs, her hand on her enormous belly. She'd wandered with her nurse into Pulmonary like a visitation from another planet. Why, he'd wondered as the young nurse pushed his wheelchair by—why keep me, when what I am passing now is the real thing, the true event: this swollen belly with the hand powerless to hold the great force in. In a matter of hours someone new would be alive in the world. When he was coming out of sedation, Arthur saw the blue-scrubs madonna again. Her belly was split open to reveal a spinning globe. There were dark blue seas and green lands. He thought: I will be gone soon, but she will carry things on for me. Why can't they understand, the children and grandchildren and the doctors, that she will carry things on for me?

Dr. Merchant, on a double shift tonight, examines a new admit to the ward. His hands tremble as he pulls on his gloves. Why shouldn't they? The flesh is weak and the mind troubled until one has seen much more of disaster and death. Dr. Mankowitz asked him a number of questions. What had occurred just before the hemorrhage? How deeply did he probe when he broke the patient's water? As Dr. Mankowitz took down his answers, Dr. Merchant could see that the older man judged the thing to have been inevitable, that he pursued his points merely for the sake of the weekly meeting in which the surgeons and residents would review the problem cases, the near-misses and the disasters. Dr. Mankowitz will have to speak to what happened with Lore Tannenbaum, and Dr. Merchant may also be asked to respond. But if Dr. Mankowitz doesn't fault him, if he does not fault himself, why does he feel such dread? He puts two fingers inside the woman on the table, as gently as possible. It is terrible to be here inside another woman. It is somehow not right. He should have gone for a cup of coffee. He should be home watching television with his wife. Adrenaline churns, propping him upright, making his fingers and hands crackle with painful electricity. (“Four centimeters,” he tells the patient.) There are eleven hours and twenty minutes until the morning.