by Nina George
“I don’t believe in anything at all, Mrs. Tomlin. Not in statistics, not in experts, and incidentally, in case it reassures you, I don’t believe for a second that I know all there is to know.”
“That really is hugely reassuring.”
He shrugs. “What do you want to hear? Near-death experiences? Angels, God, rebirth? Or whether people in a coma leave their bodies and travel through time and space? What can I tell you? I’m a neurosurgeon! We simply don’t know if Henri Skinner can see anything or not, where he is at the moment, or what he feels. All we have is our scans, and they don’t even show us if he can hear, see, feel, or smell.”
Sam gulps audibly. Glancing at him, I see that his eyes are wet with tears, which he is straining to hold back. I lay my hand, palm up, on the armrest of his chair. I would love to hug him with all my strength.
“But I can feel him,” he whispers hoarsely.
“You may wish you could, Sam, but that’s impossible,” says Dr. Saul, and his voice is full of sympathy.
Henri’s son’s tears are now running down his cheeks, and his voice breaks as he says more loudly, “I can!”
“Sam, kidding yourself won’t help.”
The boy claps his hands to his face, and now my blood is boiling at the fact that Dr. Saul isn’t even tactful enough to spare the boy such torment.
“You’re a horrible little bastard, Dr. Saul,” I remark.
“That is possible, Mrs. Tomlin. My wife said the same, shortly before she asked me for a divorce. By email, so she wouldn’t have to speak to me even one more time.” He tidies the papers spread out on the beige table, but I can see he’s affected by Sam’s silent sobbing. The boy’s shoulders are shaking. There isn’t another sound or movement. It’s a moment of shared solitude. Dr. Saul’s only love is his work, Sam’s missing his father, and as for me…I hadn’t realized how hardened I’d become over these two and a half years without Henri.
I get to my feet, kneel down in front of Sam, and take this little bundle of misery in my arms. He weeps and clings to me, and at that moment I know that, whatever happens, I’m going to have to deal with it.
After a while Sam stops crying and whispers, “It’s okay. I’m all right.” I sit down again.
Dr. Saul pushes the living will Henri signed over two years ago across the table. I look at the date. Shortly after I declared my love for him and he turned it down. And he still put my name on his living will? What the hell did the imbecile think he was doing?
But there’s another problem with the directive: my signature is missing.
“If Mr. Skinner continues to live in a coma, he will need rehabilitation but above all he will need emotional continuity. Not just for a few days, but for weeks, months, maybe for the rest of his life—however long or short that might be.”
The doctor leans forward, and his different-colored eyes are piercing now. “Sam, you’re thirteen years old. I like you and you’re more intelligent than most people I know. That’s why I shall always refuse to lie to you or to treat you like an idiot by telling you about angels or Jesus at the end of the tunnel.” Now he turns to me. “But I’m not going to impose on Sam what I’m willing to impose on you, Mrs. Tomlin.” He taps on the living will. “When someone’s on the brink of death, it always unleashes an endless series of humiliating bureaucratic procedures. If you sign this, you’ll be taking on responsibility for Sam’s father. Can you do that, Mrs. Tomlin? Can you take responsibility for a life, or for a death?”
Dr. Saul leans back. His leather chair creaks.
For hell’s sake! I feel like screaming at Henri. I’m sitting here and I have to answer an asshole’s question about whether I’m willing to take responsibility for your life! Why did you do it, Henri?
“Consider very carefully whether you want to do this and whether you’re capable of doing it. Think about whether you’ll be there for Henri Skinner, to talk to him, move him, stand by him wherever he may be, live with him—if you wish to put it that way—more intensively than you’ve ever lived with anyone before. Every day for an absolutely indefinite length of time.”
Forever, that means. Forever, in this and every other life.
I want to say something, but he won’t let me speak. He lifts his hand—the calloused hand of a carpenter—and immediately continues, “No, please! You don’t have to give me your answer now, Mrs. Tomlin. Not today. I wouldn’t take it seriously if you did. You’re in a minor state of shock, high on emotion and adrenaline. You really want to stick it to me and prove yourself. And you know what? That’s good! It shows you’re a real trouper, not easily shaken. Difficult and annoying maybe, but reliable.”
He gives me a copy of the contract I, as Henri’s representative, would sign with the hospital. My eyes devour the figures. A bed in the Wellington Hospital’s rehabilitation department costs half a million pounds per year. Henri’s health care, paid for by his press insurance plan, will cover two years of treatment. So two years is the average time the British state grants a person to recover from death. I feel like breaking something—for example, Dr. Saul’s collection of delicate jade crabs, turtles, and seahorses, which he has lined up on his shelves in front of his hundreds and hundreds of books.
I read the passage that states, “The patient’s legally appointed caregiver is entitled…,” and then read it again, more slowly this time. I’d have the power to decide all treatment and medication. I’d have the power to have the life-support machine turned off. I’d have the power to let Henri die.
“Give yourself twenty-four hours or, better, three days. Talk to someone who can tell you if you’re biting off more than you can chew. Do you know anyone like that?”
“Yes, I do,” I say. “Do you?”
He chuckles. “Not many. By the way, do you love him?”
“Sorry?”
“Do you love Henri Skinner?” Dr. Saul repeats.
“Is that a precondition?”
He slowly shakes his head. “No. It makes things harder actually.”
I’d be crazy if I still loved him. Henri may not have wanted me in his life, but I’m fine for managing his death. Love him? No, I’m not that crazy. I could do with a whiskey.
“Taking care of a person in a coma is like marrying somebody who’ll never say they love you,” he says more calmly. “And yet you must give him all the affection and strength you have. All your love too, if you feel any for him, that is. With no prospect of a happy ending. You’d spend a large part of your life with someone who isn’t there.”
Really? That’s nothing special. I’m used to that with Henri.
Dr. Saul leans back in his chair. I roll up the living will and the contract into a tight bundle.
So here I am, and all my plans from three weeks ago have turned to dust. Henri has come roaring back into my life like a comet. There’s no way out. Sam looks at me, and his eyes are overflowing with hope, fear, trust, and deep determination. As if his gaze could force me to decide.
But I can’t. I’m not going to get hooked on that drug again. I was addicted to Henri. A total junkie.
My feelings turn into a wild beast. I’ve starved myself to keep it under control, but now it’s stirring again. Come on, it growls, let’s do it!
All those hundreds of nights! All those hundreds of thousands of tears! All those times I avoided men with a physique or gait like Henri’s, guys who used his cologne, bore his name, or loved Zaz, Amy Winehouse, and Bob Marley. All those times I thought of him in spite of myself. All the memories I shunned.
My love beast tells me those torments are irrelevant. Come on, it growls, let’s love.
No. NO.
Sam
“I’m going to see your father. Want to come along?” Eddie asks me. Her voice is oscillating between red fury and greedy longing, as a bright silvery tear trickles from her eye. She wipes it away impatientl
y with the back of her hand, leaving a black smudge on her fingers and cheek. A second tear trickles from the other eye. Two twinkling eyes, from which the wintry sea is now streaming. The sound of her singing lingers in my ears. I imagine her singing to my father too. My father and her together.
It strikes me that she knows everything and I know nothing. I want to ask her a thousand things, but one question is at the forefront of my mind. Did he ever mention me?
He looked at me as he died, and for one never-ending instant I knew who he was. I could see the shadow years, the warmth and benevolence draining out of him, and I sensed that he knew me. It was a reunion.
Maybe I’m only imagining all of this, just as, long ago, I used to have imaginary friends. What do I mean, long ago? “Rational thought isn’t one of your brain’s strong suits, mon ami,” Scott would say.
“No, I’m not coming because…” I search for an excuse. Everything’s all muddled up. My entire being is sore and hot, but simultaneously numb and cool, as if it was snowing and scorching in Dr. Saul’s office at the same time.
The idea of Eddie’s leaving hurts. The idea that she perhaps loves my father also hurts. As does the idea that she might not love him, but that’s a different kind of hurt.
Her tears have cleansed her eyes. “Okay, never mind. They won’t have any use for us in the intensive care unit anyway. Is your mother picking you up?”
“Of course,” I lie.
“Good,” Eddie says. “I wouldn’t want to leave you alone right now. I really wouldn’t, Samuel.”
She looks at me, and it’s hard to meet her eyes and deceive her.
“Otherwise, you could come to my publishing house and I’ll drop you home later. Do you read fantastic novels?”
“Fantasy?” I shake my head.
“Not fantasy—fantastic. In the sense of augmented reality. Fantasy, on the other hand, involves stories about elves, vampires and orcs, Gandalf, gargoyles, and witches. Fantastic novels, or speculative fiction, are closer to reality.” Her voice is greener now, less red than before. “Speculative fiction focuses on ideas that are theoretically possible: tears in the space-time continuum, time travel. Back to the future, sort of. Speculative fiction is a reality crash—and that’s the name of my publishing house. So, do you read fantastic novels?”
I nod and let those words resonate in my mind. Publishing house, home, fantastic, reality crash. They describe a completely different world from mine, but they’re close, as if we were two books that happen to be next to each other on a bookshelf when a fire breaks out, and the covers melt and our letters get mixed up. I’ve no idea what Scott would make of this. He’d probably make a comment like: “Marty McFly meets Elizabeth Bennet?”
The big hospital lift arrives, and the door slides open. Eddie blocks it with one foot and waits. If I go down with her, she’ll insist on keeping me company until my mother arrives. But my mother isn’t coming to pick me up because she doesn’t know I’m here. She mustn’t find out either. Not yet anyway.
The door begins to close, but Eddie forces it open again with her elbow.
“Why didn’t your mother come with you today, Sam?”
“She had to take my brother, Malcolm, to the dentist.” My voice is white, lit up by this barefaced lie. “He gets scared on his own, and I—”
“You don’t.”
I nod. How I wish the ground would open up and swallow me! “I need to go and wash my hands,” I mumble.
Eddie shoots me a quizzical look, then steps into the lift at last. She raises her hand as the door slides shut and parts her fingers between the ring and middle fingers. Mr. Spock’s Vulcan salute. I instinctively return the greeting. I stand there as the lift travels downward, still holding up my hand as if I’m the last Trekkie, forgotten in the galactic mists—and only after what feels like a thousand years do I press the button to call the other lift.
* * *
—
She’s sitting down, hunched over a book in which she’s calmly making notes with a pen. She hasn’t spotted me yet, and I could slip past her. That would probably be the best thing to do, but as Scott le Brainman would say, “You can’t ignore the fact that there are many other lives you could be living. And they’re only thirty seconds and one expulsion away.”
She glances up as I knock gently on the window of the nurses’ common room.
“Oh, hello there, young stranger!”
“Hello, Mrs….” Quickly I read the name embroidered on the breast pocket of her nurse’s uniform. “Hello, Nurse Marion.”
She puts a bookmark in the book she’s reading and shuts it. The words Madelyn Zeidler are written on the page marker. “And who might you be?”
“Samuel Valentiner, Nurse Marion.”
“Valentiner, eh? I don’t believe that we have a Valentiner up here for you to visit, do we?”
I shake my head.
“So what can I do for you, Samuel?”
“I wanted to ask how Maddie is.” It happens just as I pronounce her name: a completely unfamiliar heat shoots into my cheeks. “And to apologize for eavesdropping recently. I’m sorry about that.”
The heat is now spreading in all directions—into my cheeks, across my scalp, down my neck, and I think I can even feel it on the soles of my feet. What is it Scott calls puberty? “Probably the most embarrassing time of a man’s life. And it lasts until you’re about seventy.”
Nurse Marion takes her time. She leans back in the blue office chair on wheels, crosses her arms, studies me, and at the end of this long lead-in, asks, “And why do you want to know how Maddie is?”
Why? Why have I thought for two days solid about my father and Madelyn, even dreaming about them, I’m sure? I have pictured her name in my mind and breathed it.
“Because I can’t help it,” I finally say.
Nurse Marion looks at me strangely again, and in her eyes I see two women—a young one and an aging version—and it almost sounds as if it’s the elder questioning the younger when she says with a smile, “Life’s an uphill struggle, eh?”
I don’t really know so I keep quiet. Quite abruptly the nurse pushes herself out of her chair and says, “Come on, let’s go and see if Maddie would like to tell us how she’s feeling today.”
The nurse is barely taller than I am, and her ginger locks bounce back and forth before me as she strides along the corridor toward the last room. “By the way, I’m the ward sister here. If I’m not here, I’m either on night duty or checking on patients down in the intensive care unit.”
There’s no time to get anxious: Nurse Marion is already knocking on the last door. She pushes it open and announces softly, “Hi, Maddie, we’ve got a visitor. The young man who dropped by two days ago is here again. His name’s Samuel. May we come in?”
Maddie answers, “Of course, we’re just warming up.”
It isn’t Maddie who says this, obviously, but a woman in a pair of white trousers and a blue blouse with her name embroidered on it—“Liz.” She’s in the process of doing something very strange with Madelyn, while the latter lies on her side on a quilted mat on the floor, gazing up at me. The woman has taken one of the girl’s feet in her hands and is massaging it gently, twisting it this way and that. Classical music is playing in the background.
“More Tchaikovsky today, Maddie?” Nurse Marion asks.
“Hi, I’m Liz, Maddie’s physiotherapist,” says the woman, stretching out a little finger in greeting, as she turns the girl’s foot in all directions and then begins to bend her knee.
I want to say, “Hello, Madelyn,” but it suddenly feels as if I have a gigantic, invisible cookie caught in my throat, preventing me from speaking. My tongue, mouth, and voice all desert me as I run my eyes over her face, her cheeks, her wrists, all dainty and beautiful.
A catheter is hidden under Maddie’s nightie and track
suit bottoms, and two tubes are connected to her index finger. There is a vial of eye drops on the table next to her. Further dropper bottles on the table by the door contain other medicines. There are machines by her bed, monitoring the oxygen in her blood and her heartbeat on a constant basis. She is obviously fed through a tube that vanishes into the skin next to her collarbone. Another tube protrudes from her neck; it’s hooked up to the ventilator.
All the same, I can sense as little of Maddie as any non-synes-creep would. I cannot see who she is. There’s nothing but frozen ice on a silent river. She is completely enveloped in something that feels like an electrically charged, icy air bubble. She’s staring at me, but she cannot see me. We have that much in common, at least.
“Liz, this is Samuel. He’d like to ask Maddie how she’s feeling today.”
No, what I’d really like to do is crumple to the floor.
“We’re dancing, but we’re just coming to the end of the first act. After that, she has a speech lesson and ergotherapy. It’s a pretty busy day.”
Liz proceeds very carefully and cautiously, yet I’m concerned that Maddie is in pain. Her features are impassive, though, and her eyes stare off into the distance, far beyond the walls of this room. I try to concentrate even harder on her.
Nurse Marion picks up a clipboard from a small table over by the window. The tulips in the vase are orange today.
Maddie’s face shows no emotion as Liz manipulates her feet and legs. The red-haired nurse kneels on the floor, gently touches the girl’s fingers, puts a soft ball in one of her hands and then the other, and, after each test, makes some notes on her pad.
Not so fast, I think. You’ll scare her. But now Nurse Marion runs a feather along Maddie’s bare lower arms. I get the tickles just from watching.
Her hands, I think. She needs to be taken by the hand. And no sooner have I had this thought than something stirs inside her, deep below the surface.
