Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  I take my mother for a walk to the café downstairs. We are both restless souls, my mother and I, and we need some relief. I order a steam-flattened egg-and-cheese croissant and a cup of weak, bitter coffee with a red plastic stirrer. I place the croissant in the middle of the unfolded wrapper and pick the melted corners of the cheese off the edges. I wonder aloud what I will do after she is truly gone, once her body has been opened up, once we are out of the hospital without her.

  There were days when I would drop off Greta at daycare and feel myself glance longingly down the little hallway into the playroom; some part of me wanted to squat on the floor with her little friends all day, to abscond from the world of adults. Maybe I can volunteer at a co-op preschool for a while. Something to help fill the hole. I sip my coffee and feel the hollow of my stomach contract as it hits bottom.

  My mother goes back upstairs without me, and I venture outside to the courtyard, gazing up at a stale grey sky. It’s May, but there are clouds and a damp chill in the air that hasn’t burned off yet. I call my dear friend Anna, a dancer who left the city for Ohio. She recounts to me later that I tell her, “We are going to have to find friends with dead children.” I have no recollection of uttering those words, but hearing them again months later it strikes me: even then, some small part of me was making long-term plans for survival.

  I call my therapist, a grave and serious woman with whom I had only recently begun sessions. She is suddenly in the deep end, I think. I tell her what has happened, and she tells me calmly to check in with her every half an hour or hour, to keep moving. She tells me how deeply sorry she is, but her voice is emotionless, toneless. I sense her flattening her reaction, transforming herself into an inanimate object I can lean against. I sag gratefully into her weight.

  When I return to Greta’s bedside, the atmosphere in the room is tense: Stacy’s blood vials, drawn more than an hour ago, are still sitting neglected on a nearby table. Which means they are not en route to Philadelphia, which means Greta has been stranded in twilight for hours for nothing. As I look at the vials, rage boils in me. Little failures of bureaucracy are intolerable; one of them has just crushed my daughter’s skull. I go striding through the PICU, looking to hook the gaze of the first person who will meet my eyes. As it often does in hospitals, my agitation spends itself on a nurse with no control over our situation.

  “I promise I’ll see what I can do,” she says.

  A few minutes later, James reappears, nurses flanking him and hastily gathering up the vials.

  “Why didn’t anyone come in to take these?” Stacy demands. “This is a long process already, and we’re all waiting. Greta’s waiting. This is the only thing we’re waiting on!”

  James seems slightly bumbling and agitated, the sort of person who has been told by his superiors he needs to be more tactful with patients. His voice rises unnaturally, his eyes darting away from ours: “Look, she was going to come in,” he says suddenly, “but the nurse was just really afraid that you were going to back out.”

  We stare at him, certain he will realize this was probably the wrong thing to say. He turns and shuffles out without apologizing. Stacy looks at me in disbelief as the door closes, and we both laugh weakly. Nonetheless, the vials have been taken. I relax slightly. I check my phone again to see an email from a reporter has arrived.

  “I want to offer our most heartfelt condolences from everyone here,” the man writes. “Greta looked like a magical little child. We are working on a story about her passing, and if you had anything you wanted to share, I just wanted to let you know we are here for you.”

  I scroll down my inbox; emails with the subject “Greta” are coming in from strangers, Inside Edition, WABC.

  A senior administrator from the hospital comes in shortly afterward. “First off, no one knows you are here,” she assures us. “But the hospital is getting blanketed with calls from reporters. Many of them are not identifying themselves or are trying to pass themselves off as family. They’re calling every hospital in the city. When you are ready to leave, we will escort you out and make sure you have a discreet exit. There might be media lurking outside, and we will be watching for television trucks.”

  I think of news trucks crawling beetle-like up and down the city and parking outside of hospitals, hoping to get lucky with a shot of the grief-stricken parents. I am briefly overwhelmed by nausea.

  The family holds a brief conference in the empty bed next to Greta’s.

  “OK, we need to be ready for the possibility that we will run into a reporter outside,” I say. “What are we going to do?”

  “If anyone asks me anything, I will give him the old Sean Penn,” my brother mutters.

  I wheel on him, suddenly in control of something I understand. “No, you will not. If they ask you anything, I am telling you exactly what you are going to do: you are going to say ‘no comment’ to them, and then you are going to walk away. The only thing they want is a story, and the first thing you do or say that isn’t ‘no comment’ hands it to them. Do you understand?”

  My brother shifts; he is the alpha, unaccustomed to being yelled at in front of others. He mutters assent. Energized, I move on to my parents to make sure they understand. I have been handed a solvable problem. Greta will not wake up, but I can keep the press at bay.

  At noon, doctors arrive to administer brain death testing. I watch them crowd around her, bustling. They disconnect the ventilator, monitoring Greta’s chest for independent movement. Stacy and I watch her rib cage with a terrible silent focus. She lies still, stiller than I have ever seen her. As the endless minute stretches, I become aware of burning in my chest; I am holding my own breath. Finally, they plug her back in. Her chest swells; I exhale. I do not care what is making her lungs move anymore, I simply need to see them moving.

  They circle to the head of the bed to shine a light in her pupils. We stand in front of the bed and watch; we need to see those eyes again. Her lids have swollen shut, and the team has to pry them open with some effort. When the pin light hits her cornea, nothing happens—it is like light hitting a marble. My daughter’s deep, soft eyes are eyeballs now; there is nothing in them.

  The whole merciless process takes about fifteen minutes. I can sense the finality before the doctors actually step back and begin wrapping things up. Greta’s death is legal now, clinical. She is dead in the eyes of the state.

  After they leave, Stacy crawls back into bed next to Greta. We know for sure that whatever is inside Greta will never come back, and deep inside our foxhole, there is something so ghastly that it could never be called “relief”—but we experience a small letting go, a tether we can let slip into the water. We will never be asked to choose for her, never be forced to make infernal calculations about her “quality of life.” She is firmly on the other side, the control wrenched from our hands.

  Stepping into the hallway, I confess quietly to my brother that I am deeply worried I will lose Stacy, too. This is the sort of blow, after all, that dissolves the strongest marriages.

  When I walk back in, Stacy looks up from the bedside and smiles at me. “There you are,” she says, and she stands up to give me a hug and a kiss. I go for another cafeteria run, getting coffee and snack orders for everyone gathered around. As I leave the room again, she says, “I love you.”

  As I take the elevator down to the bottom floor, I have an impossible thought: We are going to be OK. We will survive this. We are about to enter the unimaginable, but we are also going to pass through. The thought lasts seconds; it is like a fish in a murky river. But I hold on to it: that kiss and that smile and that casual “I love you” saved me.

  * * *

  When I first saw that smile, eight years earlier, I had felt a tinge of something: something in its openness and generosity, its clarity, like the world was a country highway that needed lighting.

  This is exactly the sort of revisioni
st tall tale that parents love to regale their children with: “The first time I saw your mother, I knew.” Occasionally I would roll my eyes at my uncle Ricky, earnestly proclaiming for the hundredth time that his wife of fifty years, Thea, was his bashert, or his destined soul mate.

  My own parents had no such yarn: their courtship was refreshingly flawed. On their first date, my father unwittingly brought my mother to a gay bar. (“Everyone in here is staring at you, aren’t they?” he asked her, to which my mother, fighting back a smile, replied, “No, I think they’re staring at you.”) When he proposed to her fifteen months later, my mother accepted, and then my father turned whitish green and didn’t speak for days. My mother, laughing, told him they didn’t need to get married—she’d already done that. It wasn’t until she heard him accept a job across the state on the phone a week later that he stuck his head through the doorway: “You’ll still marry me, right?”

  Raised at a dinner table at which these stories were laughingly retold over the years, I never had much patience for the soul mate, for the bashert. As far as I could tell, people found others whose lives fit with theirs, for one reason or another, and they decided to strap in to face it all together, or they didn’t. Lots of reasons played into the decision, some practical, some not, and if you decided years later that the person you chose was your soul mate? Great. Just because you landed when you jumped didn’t mean you knew where you were going.

  And yet. As Stacy’s hand clasped mine in introduction, a new coworker standing over me at my desk, I can still remember the feeling of the information coursing from that point of contact to my brain, sending a distinct message: This is important; pay attention. I would dismiss it as retroactive nostalgia if the sensation didn’t remain so palpable to me, the quicksilver flutter that felt eerily like recognition. Maybe this is the punishment for people who fancy themselves skeptics: they are strong-armed into believing.

  We learned more about each other a month later, the first two in line for cheese cubes at our desperately bad office party, hoping food would smother our discomfort. Both of us were drifting through the latter half of our twenties: Stacy was a cellist who had fallen out of love with her instrument after graduating from conservatory, and she had arrived at this sleepy classical-music nonprofit still searching for a new purpose. I had aspirations to be a music journalist, nursing vague visions of scribbling notes over spilled beer at rock shows, and instead I found myself among silver-haired Upper West Siders at Mahler and Stravinsky concerts. Together, we carried about thirty extra pounds, and we both had bad haircuts. We leaned into each other like we were sharing a private joke.

  Later we drifted toward two colleagues, who were talking about the composer Jean Sibelius (that is how bad the party was). “To me, his music is like meaningless sex,” Stacy said thoughtfully, prefacing the joke with “We’re at the office party, so I think this is OK.” The man next to me suddenly belly-laughed, his grip on his plastic cup loosening and his shoulders softening. Everyone in the immediate vicinity became more relaxed, though they didn’t notice why. I noticed.

  “You have a very open personality,” Stacy told me on our fourth date, a compliment I had never received, or at least one I’d never received quite like this. She said it warmly, gazing straight into my eyes. She left the rest unsaid, but I heard it clearly in her face: And I think I love you for it.

  Everything else—the first time we spent the night together, the first trip to my parents’ house for Christmas (we were busted smoking pot in the basement, for the first and only time in my life), the first dinner cooked together, my proposal eighteen months later—felt like an unfurling I saw clearly from that moment.

  * * *

  We are facing an implacable deadline. Greta’s blood pressure, currently stable, will remain so only for a finite amount of time. The team at LiveOnNY occupies a closet-sized office, manning phones and working quickly down the list of potential recipients. The hours tick by as they zero in on candidates, one by one.

  Late that evening, Cynthia, a black woman with close-cropped hair, comes in to announce the results to us. There is a three-year-old boy in Philadelphia who needs a heart. There is a six-year-old girl who needs a liver. There are two grown men who are in need of a kidney.

  But first Greta has to stay stable. She has now been on life support for twenty-four hours; she will need to make it another eighteen. Looking at her little body, so profoundly compromised, I feel a sense that we are holding her here; she has someplace else to be, and she is just waiting. Like the recipients at LiveOnNY, like the families on that list: we all just have to wait.

  In the middle of that night, Greta’s monitor starts beeping in a new register: incessant, ominous. Her blood pressure is spiking. Nurses come in and adjust the medications in her drip, and we watch the number: down, then up, then up, up, up, past the level where her organs will remain viable for long. The ship is capsizing; we are all going down. I pace the tiny room, fall to my knees, ball my fists against the floor, and scream.

  “Stay calm, Jay,” my mother says.

  “What more do you want from me?” I cry out, still prostrate.

  Stacy strokes Greta’s head as the machine beeps, whispering, “Just a little longer, monkey.”

  Unable to take it, I wheel out of the room and pound on the door where the LiveOnNY members are working. I open the door and regard the bleary-eyed assemblage: four people in scrubs working the world’s bleakest all-night telethon. It is three in the morning.

  “My daughter’s blood pressure is spiking, and they are having trouble controlling it,” I say with grim calm. “I need you to tell me when the surgery is going to happen. What are you doing to expedite this? My daughter has been through too much already.”

  Cynthia gestures hopelessly toward her phone: “We are flying everyone into place. Right now, I am hoping the surgery will be at eight a.m., but there is a chance it could be at ten a.m. or somewhat later.”

  Somewhat later? Standing in the doorway, I think of my daughter’s ruined body, her chest rising and falling by the grace of equipment. I think about her soul, trapped in between stages like a fly hitting a glass window. Then I say something terrible. I look Cynthia in the eye and say, “If she doesn’t make it, the pointlessness of this will haunt me forever.”

  I watch this woman—who has spent the last twelve hours trying to save the lives of multiple families across the country, who has been juggling a number of gruesome and unimaginable factors in her head for hours—collapse. Her shoulders sag, and she moans involuntarily, “Don’t, please.” I turn and leave, the door closing just as her forehead touches the desk.

  When I return to the room, Greta’s blood pressure has dipped down a bit. It holds for a moment underneath the ceiling of alarm. My mother and Stacy and I hold ourselves and wait. It ticks down another notch.

  “There you go,” my mother whispers. “There you go.”

  Greta is inside somewhere; she is holding on.

  Stacy kisses the staples on her head. “You’re doing such a good job, monkey.”

  Huddled over my family, I look out the window to the glimmering buildings crowding out the sky. The thought flashes once like a pinprick on my consciousness: The city killed her. We did this. Stacy and I, alone in our families, were foolish enough to attempt to rear a baby in the heart of this crowded and clamorous place.

  * * *

  My mother lived in New York for years as a nurse in her early twenties. When I was a kid, I listened to her hero stories about dancing on Avenue C in the 1970s, walking down back alleys stagger-drunk in the middle of the night and surviving by the grace of God. But she left, and by the time she had children, she was hours north and light-years away from the city’s perpetual chaos. My father had grown up miserable and trapped on Long Island, seeing the city as a pocked, broken place that reflected the worst human nature had to offer. My brother and his wife had met i
n New York, lived through the then-hottest summer on record in a fourth-floor walk-up in pre-gentrification Williamsburg, and then abruptly quit their jobs and moved to Colorado, instantly shedding ten pounds and a constant sense of grievance in the process. Their first son was born four years later.

  But Stacy and I had embraced the hot city, set up our tent, and lit our hearth fire there. As a baby, Greta slept through the eruption of car alarms, through scattered shouts from open windows down the block, through the occasional yowling of stray cats. We treated the city’s dangers as a loud roaring noise that was always just around the corner. Our neighbor got mugged; we didn’t. Our car window was smashed; nothing was taken.

  We had been foolish and hubristic and reckless, and we had paid the ultimate price.

  * * *

  The sun is above us, announcing the day and everything it brings. We gather around Greta as a family: my brother, Danny and Elizabeth, my parents, Susan. Stacy’s brother, Jack, has just returned from an awful errand back to our apartment; he’d walked into her still-full bedroom, spilling over with the physical facts of her life, and grabbed Greta’s favorite stuffed animal, Daisy, a yellow dog named after my mother’s golden Lab, and her blanket, with ducks on it, that had been Stacy’s as a baby. He’s also brought Greta’s scarlet dress with polka dots, the one she would request by name as “my pretty dress.” She took visible pleasure in the way it fanned out over her legs when she walked in it, and once we caught her, in front of her little toy mirror, shyly swishing it with her hands.

  Along with all of this, Jack grabbed his guitar, and he sits now and begins playing. We lay Greta’s pretty dress over her body, tuck Daisy under her arm, and cover her with the duck blanket. We are in a moment of respite, and it feels momentarily like a family gathering.