Beauty in the Broken Places

by Allison Pataki

  I really hate having blood drawn and I pretty much hyperventilate whenever I see needles, but these themes are something I’ve always found interesting in literature and history. It’s why Anne Boleyn was murdered—she couldn’t produce a male heir to carry on her husband’s bloodline. It’s why wars are started and why relatives kill one another and why families and kingdoms so often rip apart. It’s something that comes up in literature and history all the time.

  That morning in the hospital room in Fargo, seated beside Dave’s mother and staring at the stains of blood on Dave’s body, I thought about this. I thought about how blood, like so much else, is passed from one generation to another. Dave had already imbued my baby with half of her genetics; that was a done deal. Regardless of what happened with Dave, if the rest of the pregnancy went smoothly, there would be a baby born four months after the stroke who would have Dave’s blood pumping in her veins, and that was something in which I did take comfort. But there was so much more that I wanted Dave to give to our baby. I wanted her to know him and love him. I wanted him to help me raise her and love her and teach her. Dave needed to wake up, to be Dave, so that our daughter could have more than just the blood and genes that he had already given to her.

  I turned to my mother-in-law, both of us staring at the bloodstains, and I said, “That is the same blood that my daughter will have.”

  Louisa nodded. Perhaps she found the comment a bit odd, as well she should have, but she did not say so.

  I asked: “Can we pray together?” She nodded. We took hands and prayed aloud, taking it in turn. Afterward, I played some hymns on my iPhone and we sang to Dave.

  I believe I won the parental lottery not once but twice. My mother-in-law is the kindest, strongest person I know. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Louisa is equal parts Southern belle and rock-solid steel magnolia. Louisa never does anything but the right thing—she is literally always thinking about the other person, sometimes to the detriment of her own interests. I’ve never known anyone who loves as self-sacrificially as she does.

  My father-in-law is a man of science. His nickname is “Nitro Nelly” because, at the age of ten, Nelson brewed himself a batch of homemade nitroglycerine—TNT—from a child’s do-it-yourself chemistry kit and proudly brought it into school for show-and-tell. Nelson is a frank and rational man of honesty and character, a black-or-white realist. My mother-in-law is a woman who sees and loves and understands everybody’s shades of gray. They are a case of opposites attracting in the best way possible. The pragmatist and the optimist. Louisa is the rock of her family, and her greatest joys in life are her children and her grandchildren. I realized something right then: I was Dave’s wife, I was the one for whom people were worried, but his mother was hurting just as much as I was, perhaps even more. This was her baby. This was her blood. I could not have asked for anyone better to be by my side and, more important, to be by Dave’s side. After all, Dave had joined me in creating the life that grew within my own belly at that very moment, but thirty years earlier, Louisa had been the one to give Dave his life and his blood. She and Nelson were in this with me and for Dave in a way that nobody, probably not even I, could understand.

  Chapter 10

  By our third day in the ICU, though Dave was still intubated and mostly unconscious and hooked up to more wires than a computer, the medical team determined that he was stable enough to be transferred by air ambulance from Fargo to Chicago, where Dave’s colleagues at Rush were chomping at the bit to treat him. Two people could fit in the plane with Dave and the EMT team, so we decided that his father and Andy would fly with him; these two would be on hand in case something went wrong medically during the flight. I would fly with Dave’s mom and my parents on a commercial flight at the same time.

  As we packed up the hospital room, I remembered a story Dave had told me about getting reamed out by a senior surgeon because he had not removed a patient’s wedding ring in the ER. If the patient had experienced swelling while still wearing the ring, that ring would have caused loss of blood flow and eventually necessitated amputation of the finger. What if there was an emergency while Dave was on the plane? “Andy, do you think we should remove his wedding ring?”

  “Probably not a bad idea,” Andy agreed.

  But what would we do with the ring? How would we ensure that it got safely from Fargo to Chicago? I didn’t have a chain to wear it around my neck, and none of my fingers were the right size. “Would…would you just wear it?” I asked Andy, somewhat embarrassed to have to ask such a thing.

  Andy nodded and slid it on his right hand, and we made some cheesy joke about how others might perhaps assume he was polygamous.

  My father had been scheduled to be in New Hampshire that day for several campaign events. Evidently, since he was in Fargo with me, that was not happening. The press had already begun to speculate as to why he had canceled his New Hampshire events, and the rumor mill was churning at full throttle: was Pataki dropping out? Ever the sensitive and thoughtful papa bear, my dad cleared it with me before issuing a statement suspending his presidential campaign and explaining why. Within a matter of minutes, the national news outlets picked up the story and the news spread. Reactions began pouring in from an ever wider circle. One of my dad’s rivals on the trail, Jeb Bush, called to let us know that he and his family were praying for us. My Twitter feed exploded. Prayers and well wishes began lighting up our cellphones. My sister had them saying mass at the Vatican, our good friend Herman Friedman had them dedicating prayer services in Jerusalem. Friends in California had an entire nunnery devoted to our cause; family members in Texas had organized a prayer chain to go around the clock.

  I cannot really explain the odd tangle of feelings I carried with me in those first few days. I was so scared—scared that Dave would not be OK. Scared that whatever had caused this the first time might happen again, and that then he might not ever wake up. Scared that life as we knew it was suddenly gone. I was so sad. There were a few times when I just folded into my mother’s or father’s or Louisa’s or Nelson’s arms and wept. At one point I asked my mother if I was going to be a widow, if my baby would grow up without ever knowing her father, without knowing how excited he had been to meet her. The scene from Gone With the Wind flashed across my mind, an overwrought Scarlett O’Hara dressed in black, weeping to her mother, “I’m too young to be a widow.”

  But for much of the time I was in this odd state of calm. Maybe it was denial; maybe it was shock. Probably a sizable dose of each. But I also just had this conviction in my gut that we had so many good people on our side. We were making our case to God with as much gusto as was possible. Our prayers were being heard. And, with Nelson and Andy at the helm, we were tackling everything on the medical side as best we could. Our friends in medicine from Columbia and Rush and around the country were researching and working on Dave’s behalf. I knew that Dave was enveloped in this unbelievable cocoon of love and support and advocacy and positivity. I was scared and sad and distressed, yes, but as bizarre as this may sound, I also felt confident and grateful and at peace; I believed that, somehow, Dave would get through it—that we would all get through it.

  As we made our way through security at the Fargo airport, stopping at Subway to grab lunch, I remember thinking how odd it was: we never forgot for a second where we were or why we were there, and yet we were talking about normal things. We were talking about the taste difference between regular and low-calorie baked potato chips. My mom was explaining to us why she liked her brand of suitcase more than the others she had owned. A casual observer would never have known that we were flying alongside our family member who was barely clinging to life.

  I looked out the window for the entire two-hour flight, my eyes searching the clouded skies for the companion plane that I knew was carrying Dave in the same direction. When we landed, I got a text message from Andy that Dave had been awake for much of their flight. Andy had exp
lained to him where he was and what had happened and why we were heading to Rush. He had asked Dave if he understood, and Dave had nodded.

  In the car from the airport to Rush, I was agitated. It was rush hour, and we were moving very slowly. “He’s awake and I’m missing it! What if this is his first memory and I’m not there? I’m not there to comfort him.”

  “Alli,” my dad said, his tone gentle, “if Dave is alert enough to be wondering where you are, believe me, that is a good thing. That’s not a reason for you to be upset; that’s a moment we all hope for.”

  We arrived at Rush and joined Dave in his room. How odd it was that our circumstances had led us back to that place where Dave had spent so much time, only now he was there not as a doctor but as a patient.

  We met up with Dave’s brother Mike and other members of the immediate family in a large room that the hospital had reserved for us so that we’d have a place to congregate. My niece and nephews bounced around that large family room, delighted at being all together in this new place, at the prospect of so much adult attention. Three little ones whose giggles and innocence now filled the room with an almost festive, family-reunion type of feel.

  One of the toddlers was jumping on the couch while the other one darted around the furniture. I was distracted and sad and exhausted and able to focus only on the questions surrounding Dave. The congenial, baby-filled family-reunion vibe felt all wrong to me. I could not play and laugh with those little ones as I had done the previous time I had seen them, just a week earlier. I could not carry myself upright and answer people’s well-meaning questions of how I was doing or make small talk as if things were all right. Things were not all right; my entire life had just been blown apart, and I had no idea how or if I would ever be able to put it back together. I excused myself and returned to Dave’s empty hospital room, where I would wait for him to be rolled back in from his latest battery of tests and scans.

  Standing alone in that room, looking out over the city as I awaited Dave, I remember thinking: We’re home, we’re back in Chicago, now what? This was not some temporary thing that, like the hotel room in Fargo, could eventually be checked out of. This was reality—a new, grim, entirely unwelcome reality. A reality we had not expected or wanted any part of, and yet we could not escape.

  Chapter 11

  New York

  2009

  Dave first raised the topic of getting engaged in the summertime, just as I was about to move out of my crowded, girlfriend-filled apartment on the Lower East Side and into a place of my own.

  We were out to brunch at our favorite spot, a hole in the wall on the Lower East Side called Mud, loved by New Yorkers for its strong coffee and heaping servings of eggs. Since I was moving in by myself, I think the conversation naturally turned toward when we could see ourselves living together, taking our relationship past the realm of simply dating and into more serious, more grown-up waters. Dave floated the topic of engagement gently across the brunch table, just barely dipping his toe in the water. I remember gulping in a big breath, the alarm probably apparent on my face, as I tried to redirect the conversation.

  “You realize you are going to have to let me talk about it at some point?” he said, his eyebrows lifted. “Getting engaged…getting married.” When Dave knows what he wants, he knows. Left up to him, he would have the same meal day after day for lunch—he has never wavered in his loyalty to that turkey sandwich. I am not comparing myself to a turkey sandwich; I am simply making the point that the man knows what he wants and that is that. If I were allowed only one word to describe Dave Levy, it might very well be the word “steadfast.” He had never wavered in his steadfast love for me.

  Dave had once referred to me, in a moment of enamored and doting infatuation (sigh, those are the days, aren’t they?), as his “bride,” and I had told him it freaked me out. I felt so young. I felt so immature. I felt hardly ready to be somebody’s bride, let alone wife.

  A huge part of my hesitation came from the fact that I felt that we both had a lot of growing up still to do. We had only been out of college a few years. Most of our peers and friends were nowhere near thinking about marriage—most were still very much single. I worried that we were so young, so immature. So unsettled in that massive city and the indeterminate period of our mid-twenties.

  To complicate matters further, both Dave and I were unhappy in our day jobs, and that could not help but bleed over into our relationship. Medical school was proving to be the greatest challenge of Dave’s academic life, and he was regularly stressed or exhausted, usually both. Gone were the days of carefree college life, when his biggest stress was an upcoming lacrosse game or a tough organic chemistry test. Now, a few years away from applying to medical residency programs, the stakes were as high as they could be—people’s lives literally hung in the balance—and Dave felt an intense pressure to do well so as to afford himself options in the next step of his training and his career.

  I continued to be unhappy in my job in news. It was not the right fit for me, and the longer I stayed, the unhappier I grew. I knew I wanted to quit my job and write novels. I also still clung to a dream I’d long nurtured: at some point, I wanted to live in Paris. But could I make those things happen if I was married to Dave? As a wife, I would have to consider someone else’s interests as equally important to—perhaps sometimes even more important than—my own. Was I ready to do that? Was I ready to be done with “my” turn, to shift gears from self-interest to our interest?

  Before I was ready to think about knitting my life with someone else’s, I knew that I had to get myself on firmer ground. For starters, I had to sort out my job situation. I had worked in news for only a few years, but it was long enough for me to determine that journalism was not for me. After several years of writing fiction in my free time, I was more excited about that than ever. I had two completed manuscripts, and I was speaking with several literary agents about representation. I wanted to quit news and give fiction writing a real shot.

  I began seriously considering the idea of quitting my job and moving to Paris. I had been invited to France for a cousin’s summer wedding. My aunt Tessa told my mom about an upcoming move she was planning for her family from Geneva to Paris—they had an apartment in Paris that they would not be occupying until the fall. It was available, then, for the spring and summer! The stars seemed to be aligning too perfectly. What about leaving my job in the spring and relocating to Paris for a few months before the summer wedding? I had been saving for such a possible job shift, and, between Aunt Tessa’s generous hosting plus my savings and what I could earn by subletting my New York apartment, I could make it until the fall, when I would need to return to New York and find another way to support myself.

  A well-meaning girlfriend reacted to this plan over dinner one night, asking: “Don’t you worry about what would happen to your relationship if you moved to Paris?”

  It had not even occurred to me to worry about my relationship. Dave had lived in Guatemala the previous summer as part of a medical internship, and it had been difficult to be apart for months, to be sure (I remember how I would cross the days off the calendar each night, thinking that I was one day closer to having him back), but the distance had never posed any sort of existential threat to our relationship. And this separation would not, either. Dave was my roots. Dave grounded me even as I fantasized about flying far away. I would come back in the fall and Dave would be there; his love was what was allowing me to dream about these dramatic changes.

  I realized then that it wasn’t in spite of Dave that I wanted to do these things; it was because of Dave that I could even imagine doing these things. Because of Dave, I felt confident enough to quit my stable job and move to Paris. To try to make my vague and indeterminate career dreams a reality. To risk so much and somehow believe that it would be OK. Dave was the stability that allowed me to feel safe, even as I embraced complete upheaval.


  I realized then that although I still had a lot of growing up to do, in everything worthwhile I imagined doing in my life, there wasn’t a single bit of it that did not involve Dave. The thought of Dave not being there was absurd, preposterous. Like not having air. There was no version of life that I wanted to live that did not have Dave in it, right beside me.

  Chapter 12

  Dear Dave,

  I have been so non-responsive to the thousands of people who are reaching out. Prayers flooding in. So today I wrote a long email. I sat down at eight A.M. to write one email. But then the day happened. You surprised everyone. Nine hours later, when I sat back down to write the same email, it was a completely different note than the one I had thought I’d be writing this morning.

  Friday marked our first full day in Chicago in the Rush ICU. Thinking that when I got into the hospital early that morning I would find Dave asleep, I planned to write a mass email to friends and family to let them know that he had been moved from Fargo back to Chicago and we were settling in with our team of excellent doctors. I had not so much as answered an email or phone call or text message since Dave’s stroke on Tuesday, and I knew that there were people around the world eager to hear how he was doing.

  That morning before going into the hospital, I prayed that the day ahead would see Dave opening his eyes and displaying some acknowledgment of his loved ones. I wondered, in the taxi en route to Rush, if that might just be a way of setting myself up for disappointment. So far, he had been able to keep his eyes open for only very brief periods; he was still unconscious the vast majority of the time. No one knew when he would be really “awake,” when he would begin to show recognition of his loved ones or glimmers of his former self. Just remember, I told myself, stepping out of the taxi, I can hope for it, but it might not happen. Be prepared for that.