by Nina George
“No, I’m just a poor, stupid woman, doctor.”
Dr. Saul scrutinizes me. I stare back at him. I want Henri to come back as I know him. As the man who morning, night, or in the middle of the day would appear in my kitchen, upstairs from my publishing house, and softly say, “Hi, Eddie. I’m tired. Do you mind if I lay down?” At my place he was able to sleep. Sometimes for three days in a row. Even asleep, he was the pivot and fulcrum around which my weeks and days and emotions revolved, powered by his presence alone.
I’m crazy to still love Henri, even if now the flame is low, as low as it goes, just big enough to hurt but not burn me.
The beeping of the heart-rate monitor accelerates.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Dr. Foss, who frowns. “Is that normal?”
No answer.
His heart is racing, it’s speeding…no, those aren’t the tripping steps of Henri’s treacherous heart, they’re…
The blue curtain parts to reveal a boy’s face with a sprinkling of freckles and wide-open eyes, followed by a lanky body in a navy-blue school blazer, matching trousers, and a light-blue polo shirt under a turquoise visitor’s smock.
The boy rushes over to the bed. I feel my heart tighten at the sight of his eyes above the mask and the way his face ages from one heartbeat to the next. A despairing moan escapes his lips. “Dad?”
Wait a second. Dad? Henri Skinner has a son?
Sam
There are about a thousand people clustered around my father. He looks as if he’s sleeping so deeply that his heart beats only once per hour. They’ve removed the thin blue sheet from his body. My father seems to be wearing a vest of skin the color of baking powder; only his arms are tanned. He has electrodes stuck to his chest—strange eyes with long blue lashes that connect him to machines.
I think of Scott and Michael Schumacher and the fact that someone can simply go missing in the middle of his life without dying.
“Dad?” My voice sounds like a yellow four, feeble and small, and I hate it.
“Sam. There you are. Your father’ll be glad,” says Dr. Foss.
I reach instinctively for my father’s hand, as I’ve done every day for the past two weeks. But his arm shoots up before I can touch him, and I shrink back, bumping into Fozzie Bear. My father groans and his arm thrashes the air, then drops to one side. His body twists and rears up. It reminds me of a garden hose.
Dr. Foss pushes me aside. Backs close ranks in front of me to form a wall. Beyond them I can sense my father, as if he were breaking through the zones, racing through the disc world and the rings of life—coma, unconsciousness, sleep/dreaming, numbness—and heading straight for the center—waking—and at the same time it’s as if the darkness were pursuing him, so dense and close that it’s already embracing him and pulling him back. I can feel my father’s presence more distinctly than ever.
“Dad!”
“EEG. Ventricular tachycardia. No pulse,” someone says.
Hands pass each other syringes, needles, probes, and tubes.
“Defib, three sixty.”
A red eye joins the blue electrodes on my father’s chest.
“Dr. Saul? Ventricular fibrillation?”
“Stay calm, kids. Keep calm. Glucose level?”
“Three, two, one.” A buzz and then a bang like two car bumpers colliding. The darkness dissolves like black smoke. Now my father is with us. He’s fully here!
Lighthouse, bombs, milk churn: those are the images that race through my mind. I have no idea where they come from. No, that isn’t true. I do know, but I don’t understand. I see shadows on my father, and bravery and despair. And the images inside him.
“Cardiac massage thirty, two.” Fist on fist, pressing down on my father’s chest. A sound like spaghetti shattering.
“Cardiac arrest.”
There, a gap between the smocks. My father’s eyes are open. He can see me. He’s looking at me!
“Dad!” I whisper.
It must cost him an immense effort. My father’s gaze steadies. Yes, it seems as if he’s waking up. He’s coming back. He stares at me, his face a question mark.
“Keep calm. Gently does it. Mild hypothermia. Time, please.”
“Five seconds, Dr. Saul.”
An ear-splitting noise, high and shrill.
“Adrenaline.”
“Seven.”
“Get the boy out of here!”
“Eight, nine…”
It’s quiet. So quiet, apart from the screaming. Dad gazes at me, but his presence is fading, dissolving, and he’s so sad, so infinitely sad and…
“Prepare antiarrhythmic amiodarone, and be quick. We’re at eleven. Critical now. I don’t want him to die after bringing him back, you hear me? And please get the boy out of here. He won’t stop screaming!”
“Outcome!”
A hand reaching for mine and a voice that sounds calm, deep, and safe like a dark-green eight says, “He isn’t dying, Sam. He can’t. He forgot how to many years ago. Sam? Come on. Come with me!”
The shrill noise condenses into my own screaming and fragments into words. “No! No! No!” It turns into rage—rage at my father and hatred for all doctors because they do everything wrong. Then the sensation of falling and falling and falling.
And suddenly this stranger is there, this woman with incredible gray-green eyes like a wolf. She’s there and she catches me before I come apart.
Henri
I’m falling. And then I see my own shadow rising at breakneck speed from the asphalt to meet me and hear a noise like eggshells breaking on the rim of a china cup.
I’m falling for the umpteenth time, and something is watching me fall. It seems to be watching me closely, opening for me. A mouth. A huge open mouth. Now the bottom of the lake opens up for me and sucks me toward it. But then I’m hurled upward again. I rush up through the black funnel, as if an angler has caught me on his line, his hook driving deep into my heart, and is now reeling me in. I rise up hard and high from the lake into dazzling light…
“Adrenaline.”
“Seven.”
“Get the boy out of here!”
I lose my balance. I throw up my arms, but it feels as if I don’t have any. I want to break my fall and then I see the boy, looking at me, and he cradles me in his gaze.
“Eight, nine, ten,” counts a voice, but then screaming drowns it out.
I see the neon tubes beyond the flashing lamps. I see the smocks and tubes, hear the machines, and I feel the hardness of the bed.
I’m here! Please, I want to say, I’m here! Nobody notices me. Apart from my son.
Somebody holds my hand, and I recognize the shape of the fingers, the texture of the skin, and the firmness of the muscles underneath. I know this hand. It belongs to…Eddie.
Hold me, Eddie…I don’t want to die. Hold me, I beg you!
Then I see myself. I see myself reflected in a metal pole with two drips dangling from it. I see my face. It’s lopsided, my head battered. I see my eyes glass over and turn smooth and hard, and beyond them I see myself disappearing into myself, into the depths.
Eddie! Hold me!
She holds me tight, and I try to drag myself back into the room by her hand, back to life, but I don’t have the strength.
And then something inexplicable happens: her hand lets go of mine. I fall into a bottomless pit, and above me, far above me, something closes. A huge glass barrier, like a tinted shop window, closes, as I sink and vanish into myself. It shuts, and the lake freezes over. A hard, dark, impenetrable layer of ice or glass cuts me off from the world. The glass appears to be rising while I slide deeper and deeper, and the colors fade, as do all sounds and smells. There’s a silent absence of life in this…nonworld.
Eddie no longer loves me, cries my heart, which has stopped beating.
&nb
sp; Eddie
Dr. Saul kicked us out.
“Take her to the chapel!” he said, and that’s where we are sitting now, in the quietest room in the hospital. It’s as quiet as on the bottom of the ocean.
The boy has curled up in my arms with his eyes closed and is scraping his thumbs against his index fingers. He rubs them incessantly, whispering the whole time. I hug him, and it’s as if his head and the crook of my arm are made for each other. I’d like him to know that his father squeezed my hand before I had to let go to catch him. I’ll tell him in a minute. In a minute.
His name’s Sam. He’s Henri’s son.
Henri has a son.
I hold him tight—Henri’s son from a life I know nothing about. In awe, the same way I’ve held every one of my friends’ or employees’ newborn babies. In awe that such small, energetic life exists. It always feels as if life, however tiny, comes into the world fully formed.
Sam whispers something over and over again, and eventually I manage to make out the words of his prayer. “Come back!”
I join in, silently at first before whispering those words too. “Come back!” we whisper until our words are in step, and together we pray to our fathers: “Come back! Come back!”
Eddie
I shut my eyes and draw the boy a little closer to me.
Dad, help me! I think. This time I don’t shrug off the touch of his hands on my shoulders, the same touch he gave me on the night he passed over to the other side.
When he died…Oh, tell it the way it is, Edwina. Dying is the proper word! It’s got nothing to do with going away. Going away means the person is going to come back, and that’s not going to happen. He’s gone. For good. For the rest of your life. And whatever you might have felt, assume that it can’t have been real! He’s gone forever.
In a flash I feel the anguish of knowing that I’ll never again hear my father outside my body, only inside me. My memories of my father—his voice, his smell, and the rhythm of his footsteps on asphalt—are like gently fading stars.
Sobs shake Sam’s body.
I feel Dad’s hands on my shoulders and hear his voice in the darkness. “Shush, Eddie, shush, my little Winnie. Come here! Come here and listen to me. Are you listening?”
That’s what he would always say to me when I woke up in the middle of the night, gasping in fear. My dad would sing to me. He sang whatever came to mind. Sometimes he put to music a poem he had recently read in one of the forgotten books in the lighthouses he oversaw. Or he would sing straight from the gut, composing one-off melodies without lyrics.
He would cradle me as softly as one would a petrified bird in a warm hand, while I, resting against his chest, listened to the sounds, which next to his beating heart were released into the world.
“You mustn’t think,” he told me once when I asked him how he managed to sing wordless lullabies that were never written down and never would be. “Don’t think. Follow the image you see inside you and slowly re-create it with your voice. Don’t search for words to capture your pain and your consolation. Seek out a place and sing it.”
Henri
“We’re nearly there,” my father says reassuringly. He’s sitting behind me, the way we always sit, and he’s rowing. There are lobster pots between my feet.
The often raging Iroise Sea is smooth and has taken on the metallic-blue, almost translucent glitter that the Atlantic usually only gives off shortly before sundown. I feel the warm rays of the sun on my back. As warm and bright as just now in that room…
Just now? How come? What room?
A bridge. A whiff of tar. A falling sensation, down and down, and a glass lid closing over me. A hand letting go of me as I drown. These frightening memories dissipate and disperse like smoke. I must have dozed off and been dreaming. That sometimes happens when we go out in the small blue rowboat, which is usually propped on its side against the garden wall of Ty Kerk, Malo’s house near Melon, and which Grandpa Malo and my father, Yvan, caulk on windless winter days. It spends the rest of the year in the water.
I can feel the warm light on my hands and legs, all over my skin, making me drowsy but also filling me with an enormous sense of well-being. It’s as if a shadow slides off me into the water with a sigh and quietly floats away into the distance. The whole scene is relaxed and peaceful, like the first day of the holidays when two months without school lie before you, as infinite as the great blue sky.
I half turn. My father smiles at me. I look ahead again. It’s so quiet. Where’s the wind? Where’s the grating of the waves on the sand and rocks? Why is the sky so still? Everything’s wrong.
Then I notice what’s missing: the familiar outline of the coast and islands. The lighthouses have also vanished. This isn’t real. No sea in the world has as many lighthouses, surrounded by waves and islands and huge blocks of granite, as the raging Iroise Sea at the western tip of Brittany, where the waves of the English Channel and the swell of the Celtic Sea and the Atlantic meet with a crash.
But where are the lighthouses of La Jument, Pierres Noires, and Le Four? Where is the Molène archipelago and the island of Ouessant, beyond which, as ancient legend has it, infinity begins?
“We’re nearly there,” my father repeats.
I glance over my shoulder. He’s smoking a filterless cigarette, holding it between his thumb and forefinger as always, but the smoke smells strangely faint. He’s wearing his sea face—extremely calm, his eyes accustomed to staring into the distance and coping with the vast expanse of water, which is unlit and immense at night and a huge, fierce, foaming creature by day.
My father, Yvan, is wearing a blue-and-white-striped fisherman’s sweater with three buttons on the left shoulder, a pair of faded jeans, and no socks. Yvan Le Goff always goes without socks from April to October. He was wearing the same outfit on the day he died over thirty years ago.
I leap to my feet so quickly that the boat rocks. I jump away from my father to the other side of the bench.
My father died when I was thirteen, at the age of forty-two. He’s dead.
“You died,” I whisper. “I was there.”
My father doesn’t reply. He keeps on rowing. The blue boat glides silently over the unruffled surface.
I really was there.
* * *
—
We were rowing out to check the lobster pots by the buoys. It was in the middle of lobster season.
But then my father turned his back on the open sea, something he never normally did. It’s the Breton fisherman’s number one rule: “Never turn your back on her!”—“her” being the sea, the most unpredictable woman on earth. My father, however, was gazing at the land. I was trying to keep the boat on an even keel and thinking of the fib I was hatching for him and my grandfather later. I’d tell it casually so they believed it. I’d never lied to either of them before.
“This is a good spot, Henri. Keep the boat still!” my father called, grabbing hold of the slippery rope hooked onto the floating buoy, whose other end was fastened to the trap dragging along the sea bottom.
I planned to tell them that I was going to cycle to the fest-noz in Porspoder, whereas I was actually meeting up with Sionie, who’d promised me a kiss.
“What’s this?” my father asked, tugging on the rope. The boat rocked. He still had his back to the sea.
A gull cackled angrily as it flew overhead but then fell abruptly silent. It’s never a good omen when seabirds fall silent. I glanced up at the gull and just then I spotted the wave. It was big. Far too big.
“Dad!” I cried, but it was already upon us, a gray, raging wall of water, out of whose center a patch of blackness was exploding. The wave came crashing down on the boat like a hammer blow and next thing…
* * *
—
For a second my skull splits with the pain—stinging, white pain. I sink down
onto the bench and clutch my head in my hands. I hear a high-pitched wail like a saw, then the pain vanishes. I immediately pull my fingers away. This can’t be happening.
“Leave them!” my father says.
Them? Are they really here? Below the surface, silently floating, attached to invisible threads anchored to the sea bottom? Deeper than I know the Iroise to be? Of course, at some stage you’ll always touch the bottom, but what I just saw was floating over endless, impenetrable depths, with clouds scudding over the bottom.
“We’re here,” my father announces.
The boat has gently run aground on an island. It’s perhaps a hundred yards wide and two hundred yards long. It’s covered with hummocks and granite that glows gold in the sun, with a fine sandy beach running down to the water’s edge. On the shore stands a blue wooden door in a frame. The door is half-open. It’s identical to Ty Kerk’s front door.
Ty Kerk. Grandpa Malo’s pancakes, cooked over the open fire, then, straight from the hot griddle, spread with Breton sea-salt butter and sprinkled with sugar. Feeling pleasantly sleepy by the fireside on an autumn evening. Treading on crunchy snow and frosted pastures. Stars in a mauve sky.
Ty Kerk. The only place where everything was always fine.
Father’s death. My fault.
Eddie’s laugh. Her hand in mine on the table while we read. And me shattering my Eddie, setting a torch to her loving heart.
Sam’s thumb in his clenched hand. Seeing my child once and then never again.
My father jumps out of the boat and stows the oars in the bottom. “Come on!” he calls. “We’ve almost made it. You’re almost home.” He walks over to the door, then looks back and waits for me. Obediently I follow him. Is he going to give me a hug? Hug me again at long last?
