The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  Mom came to a halt. “She passed out in her father’s driveway once.”

  I stopped abruptly and turned toward Mom. “When was this?”

  “She was pregnant, before one of the miscarriages, early on. She made me swear not to tell you because she didn’t want you to worry. She’s not pregnant again, is she?”

  I hesitated for a moment before I answered. “No. She isn’t.” While I resumed pacing, I considered how my mind had yet to assimilate the situation, how for one instant my heart raced again at the possibility of having a child—at the thought of a family—but Elle wasn’t pregnant. I wouldn’t let her risk her health after the last time. But we’d argued about trying—yesterday—just yesterday.

  I’d dismissed the idea with a single syllable. “No.” I was good at no. But I could still see Elle standing on the widow’s walk. The sun shining on the river backlit her like a halo, making her hair look as white-blond as it did when she was a little girl. Over the years her hair had darkened to the shade of honey, but her eyes were the same green they’d always been, a color that could be as warm as sex or as paralyzing as anger. And she was angry.

  I leaned up against the jamb of the attic’s doorway, watching her, the sole of her instep, the curve of her bare calf, the way her hip turned slightly toward me, the narrowing of her waist. Even angry she was beautiful, maybe more beautiful. She didn’t look much different than she had as a girl, determined and certain of her convictions.

  “Life is all about taking chances, or you may as well curl up in a cave.” She sighed, then came to me and reached up to touch my face with her fingertips. “I’m sorry. I know that losing the baby devastated you. And me. But we should try. I’m thirty-five, Matt. I don’t have forever. I want to try one last time.”

  Time.

  Less than twenty-four hours ago, she wanted me to take a chance. Now time was lost. Elle was lost. I was lost.

  After they brought Elle back from the OR, I knew from the expression on Phil’s face as he led me into the intensive care unit’s on-call room what he was about to tell me. “Matt,” he said, steepling his fingers almost as if he were praying for my forgiveness. “I couldn’t do much. She had subarachnoid bleeding and shearing.” He stopped for a moment to take a breath. “It’s a mess. With all the cerebral edema, her brain stem should have herniated. I removed part of her skull, stopped the bleeding, evacuated what hematomas I could get to, but everything from her frontal lobes to her parietal lobes is shot …” He rambled on with the details.

  I didn’t respond. I couldn’t.

  “After the anesthesia wears off, we should verify brain death,” he said. Then he stammered a bit before adding, “I—I can’t believe I’m asking you this. But do you … well, would she want to be an organ donor?”

  I nodded. She’d signed the form on her driver’s license; however, it occurred to me Elle’s autoimmune issues might disqualify her.

  “I’ll take care of talking to the New England Organ Donor Bank,” he said.

  I tried to compose myself as I yanked open the on-call room door. I needed to see Elle. Even though I understood the traumatic damage, my wife was not like any other patient to me. I couldn’t see this as a clinical situation. Phil could lay out the most wretched scenario, but they were only words. Hell, I’d reported the same ones to families more times than I cared to recall.

  I was collapsing inward, like one of those black holes Elle spent so much time studying. Had studied. Her existence, in the most pragmatic of ways, had ceased. The proof: Phil’s surgical report, a CAT scan, and my wife’s flaccid form stretched out in the intensive care bed in front of me. I stared from the doorway as nurses adjusted her monitor wires, set her IV pumps, and cleaned away the antiseptic from her shaven head.

  I gathered a breath, bracing myself against the inevitable. There is no definitive test for brain death. Doppler flows, corneal reflexes, apnea testing, a series of criteria, physical responses—or her lack thereof—are what we use to establish it. I stood, a little wobbly, but somehow I stood, barely drawing air. I needed time before I could accept this. Elle had no other significant injuries. Why hadn’t she smashed an arm or a leg? Even if she’d broken her back or her neck. Why did it have to be her head that hit the rock?

  Phil’s hand on my shoulder startled me. “Do you want me to talk to your family?”

  “No. I’ll go to them in a minute.” What was another minute or another year? At least for now, they had hope. Hearing his report would end everything. I slipped in and took Elle’s hand. It was so cold. They hadn’t bothered to take off her wedding band down in the OR. At least that much of me was with her while Phil operated.

  “Excuse me,” one of the nurses said. “I have to check her IV.”

  I backed into the corner of the room by the wash sink. I slipped off my own ring and read the inscription. My love, my life, Peep. I placed it back on my finger and stumbled down the corridor to the ICU’s waiting room.

  I paused before entering. Our families were inside—correction: our family. The plural had changed to the singular when Elle and I married. Not that there had ever been much differentiation between the Beaulieus and the McClures. Elle and I grew up in side-by-side Victorian houses, and both families passed easily from one kitchen into the other. At either place we were home.

  And now our family was sitting in the ICU waiting room. Elle’s father, Hank; her brother, Christopher, and his wife, Arianne. And my mother. I had to tell them we had lost Elle. One by one, their eyes found me standing in the doorway. Her father drew his fist to his mouth. Christopher jumped up. And my mother drew a hesitant breath then fell forward, folding onto her own lap, and she wept silently. My mother loved Elle; she had always loved Elle.

  I sat beside Mom and rubbed her back. Emotionally, I was in a sensory deprivation chamber or in a tunnel with no light, and I didn’t believe I’d ever see light again.

  Words dribbled out of me, slowly at first, mechanical words, rehearsed words, a mere substitution of Elle’s name for some other poor schmuck’s. “Elle suffered a devastating and irreparable brain injury. It damaged her center for consciousness. She won’t wake up. She signed the organ-donor box on her driver’s license.” I watched their faces, grappling with the news. “After the anesthesia wears off, two doctors will determine if she meets brain-death criteria; the odds are she will, and if her autoimmune issues don’t disqualify her as a donor, well, she’d want to donate her organs. The donor team will probably come within the next twenty-four hours.”

  Christopher shook his head, whimpering, “No. No. It has to be a mistake.”

  My father-in-law stared at me, disbelief leaking from his every pore. “You’re not going to do anything about it, to save her?”

  “I can’t. No one can.” I stammered inside my own denial of the evidence.

  “People come out of comas,” Hank stated with such assurance it sounded like a truth.

  “She won’t. It’s not exactly a coma. Comas usually stem from more localized injuries. Not that they aren’t serious, but Elle suffered a massive head injury.” My voice faltered. My mother took my hand in hers as I continued. “Elle wouldn’t want to live like that anyway. There’s profound damage to almost every part of her brain.”

  “You’re going to give up? I won’t allow it.” Hank pounded the arm of his chair.

  I stared at a corner of the ceiling. “This isn’t giving up. And it isn’t something we allow or disallow. I wish it were. I’m going to sit with her. If anyone else wants to come in—to say good-bye—give the nurses a half hour to settle her first.”

  “Oh my God.” Christopher was shaking like he was going to collapse, and his wife put her arm around him.

  Hank bolted over and blocked the doorway as I stood to leave. “There’s no way you’re going to let my daughter die. I’ll get a court order.”

  When I tried to sidestep him, he slammed me up against the wall. His breath smelled of whiskey. How the hell had he gotten liquor at the hospi
tal? More to the point, when had he fallen off the wagon? As far as I knew, he’d been sober for the last twenty years. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t know when he’d started drinking again, and I didn’t really give a shit.

  I grabbed his wrists and yanked them away from my shoulders. “I’m not letting her do anything. If there was anything I could do, I would. I love her, but the second she fell, it was too late. And she didn’t want to die the way her mother did, and you know it.”

  My mother pushed her way between us like a referee in a contentious prizefight. “Come on, Hank, sit down. Matt’s right. Elle made a living will—years ago. After Alice passed away. As soon as Elle turned eighteen.”

  Mom always thought fast on her feet, and this sounded like something Elle would have done, but Mom was lying. Elle let everyone know she believed her father had mishandled her mother’s illness, but she would have told me if she’d made an advanced health care directive. Still, I was grateful for my mother’s fabrication.

  My mother sniffed. “God, have you been drinking?” she asked Hank, her voice rife with frustration.

  He shook his head. “Just one.”

  Mom’s eyes filled with pity or anger, hard to tell which, and she spun away from him.

  “Dad!” Christopher said. “What are you doing? Jesus Christ. Call your sponsor. We’ll go find you a meeting.”

  For a second I saw Elle in Christopher’s eyes—the way she always tried to keep her father under control—and then it was gone. Hank swooped up his suit jacket and stormed past his son. Christopher retreated and became a man-child again, sitting next to his wife. I wondered how he would ever survive without Elle to take care of him.

  I wondered how I would.

  Even when the nursing staff was not in Elle’s room, they could see inside because instead of Sheetrock there was a glass wall between Elle and the nurses’ station. In the past, and from the detached perspective of a physician, I’d thought of ICU rooms as fishbowls, but now the fishbowl metaphor seemed more darkly apt than I’d ever considered. Somehow, I pictured Elle floating to the top, belly-up and lost, or maybe it was me there, disembodied and displaced. I couldn’t focus or make sense of anything. Cognitive dissonance had taken over. I kept whispering to Elle and begging her to wake up. I knew what was happening. I could not accept it even though every prop tethered me to this unreality. One minute I was looking at Elle’s intracranial pressure monitor, and the next my mind shot into fantastical asides like—fishbowls.

  Supposedly, right before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. I wondered what Elle was thinking about, the best way to keep the streaks off the windows? Should she spray Windex directly on the storm window or on the paper towel? Her legacy: the streakless window.

  Or was she thinking about us?

  Grief has stages, five if you buy into the Kübler-Ross worldview: denial, bargaining, depression, anger, and acceptance. For me, the first four were superimposed upon one another, but I wasn’t close to accepting anything. Currently, anger took top billing, anger at her, anger at her brother. I couldn’t even begin to tell anyone how angry I was at Hank. Fury. Blind raging fury. I would have put my fist through the wall, a fucking glass wall, but some level of reason persisted. They would have made me leave the intensive care unit—leave Elle. They would have had to kill me to do it, of course, but that had its appeal; I’d be dead then, too.

  On the exterior wall, the ICU’s double-paned window overlooked the ER’s ambulance bay and it didn’t open, which was a good thing since I was considering the best way to kill myself. Shake it off, Matt. The window’s not high enough to jump out of anyway.

  The sun vacated the sky, and the full moon was making a stealthy appearance up high. Come on, Matt, find a loophole. Some miracle surgery, some drug regimen no one has ever considered. Find a frigging innovation, and save Elle. I’d put in twenty years of education and seven more of indentured servitude to the medical community. For that, I needed restitution. I was desperate for a stroke of genius that would bring Elle back to me.

  A deep void was beginning to replace my anger, and deflated, I paced the ICU cubical, occasionally glancing out through the glass walls to the nurses’ station. I didn’t know what I expected to see. Elle, maybe. The body lying on the bed wasn’t really my brilliant wife. Her clever mind. Her compassionate heart. I took her hand in mine and sat in the tangerine leatherette chair at her bedside. Please, wake up.

  After a while I flipped the little television onto CNN. Another story about the debacle in Iraq followed a story about an earthquake in Peru. Just when I reached to shut it off, Elle’s picture popped onto the screen. One from a NASA celebration. She was dressed to the nines in a spaghetti-strapped peach dress that fit her like she was born in it. Her hair was longer then, down to her midback, and she looked more like a Hollywood ingenue than the hard-core scientist she was. Was? I’d used the past tense.

  I upped the volume.

  “Former astronaut Elle McClure is in a Maine hospital this evening after an accident. A spokesman for the family released the following statement: ‘Elle McClure Beaulieu is in intensive care pending the results of tests. Her family requests prayers on her behalf.’ ”

  I had not requested anything. I’d made no statement nor authorized anyone to do so. Video of her EVA, or space walk in layman’s terms, popped up on the screen.

  “You may recall that Dr. McClure rescued fellow astronaut Andre Jabert on the 2004 mission to upgrade the Hubble Telescope. A micrometeorite penetrated Jabert’s space suit, and McClure pulled him into the shuttle before his suit fully depressurized. His injury forced Atlantis to make an emergency landing, but Jabert survived and has flown on a subsequent NASA flight. McClure left NASA four months later and returned to her hometown to marry neurosurgeon Matthew Beaulieu. She currently teaches at Bowdoin College and consults at both MIT and NASA.”

  The press kept obituaries prepared for all people of note. They’d pulled hers and read it.

  “She did teach. Get it right. It’s all past tense now,” I mumbled, switching off the TV.

  I spotted Elle’s OB/GYN standing beside the nurses’ station, talking to Phil. I nodded in acknowledgment.

  I couldn’t concentrate, and I resumed thinking about death by carbon-monoxide poisoning, death by Vicodin overdose, or death by blowing my brains out—one of which would occur after I buried Elle. I was also considering ways to make my suicide look like an accident, considering whether that might be easier on our family.

  The thing was, I could almost hear Elle sneering at me. “It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.” She’d been fond of quoting Nietzsche; at least she often cited his less misogynistic lines. She picked and chose. Come to think of it, she didn’t like his atheism either. Those lines were mine to banter around, particularly on the rare occasion she headed off to church early on a Sunday morning and I wanted to sleep in.

  Where was God now?

  Equipment rolled up to the doorway, but I didn’t glance up again until I heard my name.

  “Matt? Can I come in?” Blythe Clarke, Elle’s high-risk OB, stood before me, shrugging into her lab coat. As always, Blythe wore a pink ribbon in her otherwise stark white hair.

  I would have preferred to endure torture than make small talk. I was afraid the next time anyone said he was sorry I’d punch him—or her—in the nose. Still, I murmured, “Sure.”

  To my surprise, she pushed a portable ultrasound machine to Elle’s bedside.

  I narrowed my eyes, wondering what the hell Blythe was doing. Elle had not sustained any other significant injuries. Phil stood at the doorway as Blythe set Elle’s chart on top of the machine then pulled up a stool next to my chair. “You know we run pregnancy tests on all female trauma patients.”

  “She isn’t.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. Aside from that moment or two with my mother, I’d held myself together. I couldn’t waste these last hours with Elle crying. There would be time
later.

  “Actually, the pregnancy test in the ER was positive,” Blythe said. “And the beta hCG indicates she’s close to eight weeks along.”

  Phil cleared his throat. “Somehow we overlooked it before we took her to the OR. I don’t know how that happened.”

  “No. She can’t be,” I said, remembering the pregnancy test beneath the bathroom sink, the one she bought last month, the one she didn’t take because her period started on her way home from the store. That was only a couple of weeks ago. Besides, we’d been careful.

  “Has she been taking the baby aspirin?” Blythe asked.

  “Yes.” After Elle’s third miscarriage, Blythe figured out that Elle kept losing babies because she had an autoimmune disorder. Aspirin really is a miracle drug; it even treated Elle’s APS.

  Blythe passed me the lab printout.

  I gripped the paper. Elle was pregnant. “Seriously? She had a period a couple of weeks ago. This isn’t a mix-up?” I asked.

  “Maybe she had breakthrough bleeding, and that’s why you didn’t know. I want to do an ultrasound to see if there’s a fetal heartbeat. After what’s transpired today, there’s a good chance she may have miscarried.”

  I raked my hair, still flummoxed.

  Blythe beckoned a nurse, who closed the drapes and bedside curtains, darkening the room. Then Blythe took a wandlike ultrasound probe and covered it with a sterile cot and transducer gel. “Matt, I need to do an internal exam. Do you want to leave?”

  “No, but, Phil, do you mind?”

  He ducked away.

  The nurse, barely out of college, raised Elle’s right thigh and draped her perineum. Blythe inserted the probe into Elle’s vagina.

  Anxiety jacked up my heart rate. How many X-rays were done that day? How many teratogenic drugs did the emergency room pump into Elle? What might that have done to a developing fetus? At the same time I remembered reading a journal article about one brain-dead woman who carried a baby to a good outcome and I wondered if it was possible.