Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

  I gave it ten minutes. And when my phone did not ring, I turned it off, and returned to Meghan’s room, where I simply shook my head at Cal’s inquiring glance and settled in for the day.

  THE doctors continued their wait-and-see diagnosis. They discussed scheduling of more MRI and CAT scans, talked about Ran-cho and Glasgow scales, fumbled with the intricacies of the brain that they really knew nothing about, gave us tentative time limits, and threw terms like minimally conscious and persistent vegetative state around as if we were capable of processing any of it.

  I made notes that Cal and I referred to, but I was unwilling to discuss anything except her swift awakening and recovery. It left little to talk about, and our silences were long and filled with nothingness. Late that afternoon, the need for real food finally overrode Cal’s refusal to leave Meghan. I could go for weeks longer, months if need be. My body could sustain itself on the water the nurses brought and the dry crackers and flavorless soup from the food tray.

  Cal cleared his throat. “I’m going to pick up some food.”

  “Okay.”

  “You want anything?”

  “I’ll take whatever you get.”

  “All right.”

  We fell silent again, and Cal did not move or appear as if he were planning to anytime soon. Our marriage had, in many ways, evolved, perhaps devolved, into daily, silent competitions. Who did more housework, who brought in a larger paycheck, who was better at money management, who got a more desirable result from our children. And now we were down to this: Who was more devoted to our comatose daughter?

  The only card we had to play here was time. Who stayed awake longest, who stayed in the room longest. It was about Meghan, but on another level it was also about us. Ada and Marshall had not just placed Meghan in danger, they had forced our marital hand.

  So right now my body was holding out longer than Cal’s. But my mind was degenerating. Time spent in a hospital room is a void, a time warp, a suspension, and a weight at once. Time moves in great chunks at points, and slows alarmingly at others. During the slow hours there is time to see every age and shape of your child evolve under the sheets of the hospital bed. There is time to see recent memories—Meghan turning on the radio in the kitchen, twisting around on the stairs to get a glimpse of Ada, lying on the roof of the car with her beloved brother and her new friend—framed by the tubes and wires and electronic rhythm of artificial life.

  The fast times were the times I saw her on the boat, the times I saw blood—blood I knew now was not my child’s but from someone else’s child, the child responsible for this—the times I felt the sway of the ambulance. Those times flew, and I was grateful for that.

  When Cal finally pulled himself from the chair, I was in slow time, and I was relieved that he was leaving.

  “So, do you want anything from home?”

  “You’re going home too?”

  He nodded, looking at Meghan, not me. “One of us has to. Might as well do it while I’m out. I need to cancel my trips. I’ll drop my book off with Kevin, have him take over what he can, call the others. Boat needs to be taken care of. You want some clothes?”

  “Why don’t you just pack us both a bag?”

  “All right.”

  “What about Marshall?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Will you bring him back with you?”

  “You want him here you’d better go get him yourself. I don’t want him anywhere near my daughter, or me right now, and I can’t believe you would.”

  We were staring directly at each other now.

  “This was a horrible mistake, Cal.”

  “No. No, it wasn’t. And don’t you forget it, or next time he brings home some fruitcake they’re going to kill her. Or us. For all we know they were making her some kind of sacrifice or something. Still think this is some kind of fun hobby, Chloe, a growing stage? We did this. You did this, and I allowed it because I didn’t want to fight with you. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it happen again.”

  “You’re the one who convinced me that this was the first normal thing he’d done since he was ten. Remember that, Cal? Marshall is our son, and he made a horrible, horrible mistake, but he loves Meghan, and he must be going through hell right now.”

  Cal’s face darkened. “If he’s not now, he’s going to.”

  “Do we have to do this . . . now?” I asked, inclining my head toward Meghan.

  I knew it was a risk. But it worked. His face softened and his shoulders slumped. “No. Of course not. I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” I said. And I was, I really was. I made an effort to soften it and said: “Thank you for going.”

  He nodded, took one last look at Meghan, and turned toward the door, but hesitated with his hand on the long, silver handle before turning around and approaching me. He bent to kiss the top of my head, but his lips did not land, they merely stirred the air slightly and a shiver ran across the back of my scalp, tingling to a fine point when the door clicked shut behind him. I should have felt bereft, but I did not.

  There was already a divided time line, already the old, painful joke of Before and After, and in this After I was just as pleased to have time alone with my daughter as I had been Before. I got up and stretched, then started to bustle around, talking to Meghan as if we were both about to start our day at home.

  “So, I was thinking about pulling your bunk beds apart,” I said, adjusting the blinds, allowing more light in, but not too much, not so much that I could see every detail. I didn’t want to see the grime, from who knows what, in the seams of the putty-colored, plastic baseboard, the dust in the ceiling vent. I didn’t want to see how Meghan’s skin wrinkled under the transparent tape holding tubes in their correct alignment. I opened them just enough to offer the illusion of allowing sunlight in.

  “If we moved your desk under the window, we could put both beds against that wall with your nightstand in between them. Or maybe it’s time to just get a new bed? Maybe a double? Or a queen? I think there’s room to get a queen in there. We could repaint too,” I said, stuffing empty water bottles, an unread newspaper, notes written and crossed out on the pad supplied by the hospital into the trash.

  There was, of course, no answer. I stopped the busywork and turned around to look at my daughter from the foot of her bed, as if seeing her in it for the first time. This was coma. Life moving around you, conversations had for weeks, months, years, without your input, all the business of everyone else progressing in this one space, while you remained utterly still, the pre-Copernican, unwitting center of a one-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot universe.

  Suddenly I wanted Cal back here, with me, more than I wanted anything else, and I sank into the chair he’d been in for almost forty-eight hours and sobbed in great, ugly gasps. I wasn’t used to crying. I did not do it much after my parents disappeared. I had thought I’d been all cried out. Even when Meghan was in the hospital after that first episode I didn’t cry, except briefly in relief when it turned out she was okay.

  And when it became clear that there was a course of action we could take to keep her safe, I never shed another tear over it all. I wasn’t tough, I was simply too busy. But there was no course of action to take here. Nothing. I wrapped my arms around myself and stared at the side of Meghan’s face until my eyes finally closed and I slept. In that way at least, Meghan and I were together.

  When Cal spoke to me I struggled against waking.

  “Chloe, come on, honey,” he insisted.

  I wanted just another moment, just one more moment of oblivion, one more minute in which I could believe that I was about to wake up in our bedroom, and could start over, could fix whatever had come loose: in our marriage, in Marshall’s life, in my baby’s immune system. Somehow I had not paid enough attention. I thought I had, but I was clearly so very wrong. And I would change that.

  But I was not to have that, neither the chance, nor the dream of the chance, because Cal whispered in my ear: “Co
me on, Chloe. It’s Marshall. Marshall’s been arrested.”

  MARSHALL

  He used to watch COPS on television, excited by the chases, the way the police tried to trip up a person on their own lies, how at times they seemed incredibly caring and passionate about their job and at others just seemed like arrogant jerks.

  He and Ira used to talk about becoming cops themselves, how they would be tough, but would make sure things were okay with the people they arrested: the druggies would get to rehab, the abused would get safe, the children would get homes.

  But Ira always sided with the cops, while Marshall sometimes felt sorry for the bad guys. He often hoped they would get away when they ran. He hated it when the cops pulled up a turned-over kiddie pool to find the suspect curled under it or when the fleeing perp—a word he and Ira used with glee—tripped and went down painfully hard, cowering under a K-9.

  “They shouldn’t run,” Ira would say solemnly. “They never get away, and it just makes it worse.”

  Marshall would agree, but secretly he felt their desperation, felt the leap of adrenaline in his chest and the irresistible need for escape, the urge to struggle. He always thought that if he were ever in trouble, cops-chasing-him trouble, he would run as if his life depended on it.

  But he hadn’t known they were coming for him.

  He opened the door before the squad cars came to a full stop, he said hello, as if welcoming them to his home. He confirmed his identity. He stood next to Ada as she did the same. And then when they told him he was being arrested for aggravated child abuse he’d felt none of the adrenaline he’d expected.

  He couldn’t have run then if prodded with a nightstick. He was too stunned. And as one officer read him his rights and another officer informed Ada that she was being arrested too, he simply stared at them. And he simply stared at first while Ada, with her damaged knees, struggled with the female officer, and then the front hall turned into a real scene from COPS when he began struggling, too, when he began screaming at them to leave her alone, to take their hands off of her. But he was dragged away, out the door, across the porch, and down the steps, eventually wrestled to his knees in the sand, brittle shells cutting into his legs.

  They put him in the back of a squad car, putting a hand on his head just like he’d seen them do a thousand times before on television. It was all the same visually, his hands bound behind him so he had to find some way to keep from sitting on them, or against them, the dirty back windows, the split in the seat, the black grille separating the front and back.

  But on television you can’t smell anything, or feel anything, and the odor of urine was an assault on his senses, the feel of the ripped seat against the back of his calf was too real for it to be a dream, and when he banged his forehead against the grille in frustration, it hurt more than he would have imagined.

  The cops dragged Ada down the steps and across the yard. He couldn’t help but admire the fact that she was still struggling, still making it difficult to restrain her, all hundred and two pounds of her against three cops.

  They should have run. That was all he could think now. Last night, they should have just gone. Anywhere.

  When they started the car and took off, they didn’t turn the sirens or lights on, but they drove fast, faster than he’d ever driven down their road, stirring up such a cloud of dust and sand that when he twisted around to look out the back window, the car Ada was in was completely obscured.

  He’d never been to jail, never even had a speeding ticket, though he’d received a parking ticket when he’d stayed at the beach without feeding the meter. He’d paid it without ever telling his parents. He was shaking with fear when they took him from the car, took his things, got him fingerprinted and photographed, shuffled him through doors and doors and doors, and finally got him in a large holding cell with about twenty other men, where he wasn’t answered when he asked about his proverbial phone call.

  Some of the men laughed, two men said something to him in Spanish, but he merely looked at them helplessly and they turned away from him in disgust. A thin, balding man in overalls, actual denim overalls like some bad Hee Haw joke, held a cigarette out to him, and he shook his head and turned away quickly.

  Throughout all of it he never saw Ada. He didn’t know if there was a separate entrance for women; he knew she certainly wouldn’t be in here. He didn’t think he belonged here. He fervently wished he were under eighteen and was being held somewhere without these men. No matter how tough juveniles were, he would have felt as though he could have faked his way in, he could talk to them, about music, or movies, or something teenagers had in common.

  But it was clear he had nothing in common with these men. They all seemed broken with their years, as if they breathed different air and walked in a different world, beyond a line he hadn’t crossed yet.

  Within thirty minutes another guard arrived to take him to the phone. Another set of doors, and then a small table in a cramped hallway and a phone. He stared at it, its filthy receiver, the numbers worn off the pad. Who did he call? His mother was the obvious choice. But he couldn’t bear to hear her voice, her bewildered, terrified voice. And where would she be? In Meghan’s room, of course.

  That only left his dad. Maybe his dad would leave him here. He hadn’t even been able to look at him, and Marshall had gotten the distinct impression that his father had wanted to do him violence, had barely been able to restrain himself. He stared at the phone and the phone book next to it.

  “You either do it or you don’t,” the guard said.

  “I don’t know who to call,” he admitted. He so badly wanted to call his mother.

  “You got a lawyer? That’s what I’d do. Girlfriend ain’t gonna want to hear from you in jail.”

  A lawyer. Why would he have a lawyer? Only criminals and millionaires had lawyers, and he was neither. Or perhaps he was now. Was this really it? Was this where he had been heading all his life? He wished again that he were younger. His finger itched to dial his mother’s cell phone.

  “Do I really only get one phone call?” he asked. “What if there’s no answer?”

  “I’d suggest you call someone you know’s gonna be there.”

  He stared at the phone and finally pulled the phone book toward him hastily when the guard made an impatient weight shift coupled with a practiced sigh.

  Lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. Laser vision correction, law schools, lawn service. No lawyers.

  The guard cleared his throat. “Attorneys,” he said, clearly bored with his charge.

  Marshall flipped to attorneys. The pages were well-thumbed. Why didn’t they just put a bookmark in it, or leave it open to the attorney page? He knew enough that he needed a criminal lawyer, and passed by the personal injury and malpractice full-page ads.

  There it was. “Most Legal Matters,” “Felonies and Misdemeanors,” “Aggressive Representation!” “Available 24 Hours.” That was his man. He made the call. True to his ad, Charles Mingus was there: He answered the phone himself, and told him to keep his mouth shut and he’d be down as soon as he could.

  And now Marshall was one of those people who had a lawyer.

  This time the guard, without explanation, led him to a different area of the jail, into an actual cellblock. As he walked past the cells, he was prepared to flinch, for when they threw things at him, jeered at him, told him of the terrifying ways they were going to humiliate him in the shower. But most of them didn’t pay any attention to him. The ones who looked at him at all did so balefully and without much interest.

  A small black man said, “Hey, little man,” softly to him as they passed, but it was without threat. When they walked by the cell in which a man was crying, the guard said, “Shut it, pendejo,” and the man, without ceasing his cries, replied, “Screw you, man.”

  Before the guard shut the cell door Marshall asked about Ada. The guard shrugged. “Not my department. Maybe your lawyer can find out.”

  He was alone, for now, in his cell, but
the men in the other cells made their presence known. It stank of men, and sounded of men, farting, snoring, and, of course, there was still the crying. He listened to the guard’s heavy steps recede down the hall.

  As he passed the crying man again, he said, “Shut it, pendejo.”

  “Screw you, man.”

  Eight

  I DIDN’T want to leave the room and Cal didn’t want to tell me while I was in it. We argued in harsh whispers and when two nurses arrived to do their usual vital checks, he left, standing out in the hall stubbornly while I stood just inside the door, anxious to get back to her bedside, to entreat her, once more, to open her eyes.

  “Nothing is going to happen if you step outside the door, Chloe. Now get out here so we can talk about this, unless, of course, you’d like to leave him in jail. That’d work for me. I debated even telling you.”

  That did it. With one last look I stepped into the hall and let the door shut softly behind me. It was the first time Meghan had been without either of us, and I felt nearly sick at the realization that eventually there would probably be more firsts. The first time I left to go home, the first time that maybe I didn’t stay all night. There could be years of firsts, just like a second childhood.

  Cal stood on the opposite side of the hallway, freshly showered, his hair in place, newly shaven. How long had he known, how long did he wait to tell me?

  “What are you talking about?” I was still whispering.

  “They’ve arrested Marshall and Ada for child abuse. Marshall’s lawyer called and left a message on my cell phone. He said he left a message on yours, too, and one at home.”