The Only Best Place

by Carolyne Aarsen

  “I'm tired.” I wanted him to hold me and let his strength wash over me, but I didn't know how to behave, what to say. Before this emergency we had been walking carefully around each other, my actions with Dr. John, the words I had spilled out filling a space between us that kept us apart.

  Dan touched my shoulder lightly, then withdrew. He pressed his hands against his knees and got up. Paced the room. Turned to me, his truck keys in his hand. He wasn't going to go already, was he?

  “Dan, what's—”

  “Leslie, I need—”

  I waved my hand at him the same time he told me to go ahead. An uncomfortable pause followed. He spun his truck keys around his hand.

  “I'm trying to find the right way to say this.” He stopped, his keys still jangling in his hands, a nervous habit of his I hadn't seen in a long time.

  He sighed, then dropped the keys into his pocket. “You know, sorry isn't a big enough word for this,” he said softly. “But I don't know what other one to use.” He stopped, giving me a careful smile.

  I needed him now. The past thirty-six hours had revealed my rant against his mother for the petty thing it was. With Dr. John, I had stumbled into the very trap that had ensnared Dan back in Seattle. Down the hall our son clung to life. Everything else was swept away as inconsequential.

  “I'm going to use it,” I said quietly. “I'm sorry for what I did. I want you to know that that thing with Dr. Brouwer never went any farther than what Gloria saw, but I was wrong to even encourage that.” I rubbed my forehead, wishing I could ease away the pain tentacled around my head. I needed him now.

  Dan slipped his arm around me, then pulled me gently close. “Leslie, don't, please. I did the same thing. We've never talked about it. I didn't want to, and I know you didn't want details. But I finally understand exactly what I put you through.” He sighed, and laid his head on mine. “I'm sorry for what I said about your mother. That wasn't right.”

  A knot of unbearable pain that had pressed on my heart slowly released its hold as Dan spoke, as he touched me. And with the release came the reality of what I had said.

  “Well, we may as well keep going,” I said, leaning into him. “I was wrong about your family. Wrong to resent their involvement.” I thought of Wilma praying earnestly for Nicholas. She loved him, too.

  Dan laid his finger against my lips. “I don't want us to fight. I don't want us to be strangers. Our boy is sick, and I want us to be together. Supporting each other. In spite of what I did, I love you. I always will.” He stopped, his voice breaking. “I love Anneke and Nicholas. And you all need to be the most important people in my life. Not my mother or my sisters or the farm or the rest of my family.”

  My throat thickened, and I couldn't stop the quiver of my lip. But as I reached for him, he held up his hand. He had more to say. “I asked my family to stay away. To give us some space. And I want you to know that when this is over… when Nicholas is better, we're going to sit down and talk about what is going to happen in our lives, in our future. Whatever we decide, I'll stick with it. If we go back to Seattle, I'll try the garage thing again. The farm, well, it was really just a dream, wasn't it?”

  I could read nothing in his eyes, but the muted yearning in his voice cut me like a knife. I knew how much he loved it here, how much of himself he put into the farm. For the first time since we got married, I saw my husband smile every morning. I saw him enjoying his work, playing with his kids. Home every night and sometimes during the day—a rarity even during his down times with the business.

  “Moving to the farm wasn't so much a dream as a plan,” I said carefully.

  Dan gave a short laugh. “A plan that isn't turning out too great. Keith is entitled to some money. Not as much as he thought, thanks to the assessment we had done, but some nonetheless. I've used up the line of credit to put the crop in, and he doesn't want to wait. So, we'll have to look at selling something. Of course, if we move back to Seattle, that will have to happen anyway.”

  My mind flashed back to the auction we had attended. I imagined people digging through stuff from the farm. Bidding on Dan's equipment. His cows. Maybe his horse. I thought of Mrs. Harris in the hospital and how futile her life seemed now that she didn't have the farm. I never realized how connected you could become not only to a home but to the land itself and how it fit in with community and life beyond the farm. I had lived in a large city, but here, my world had expanded far beyond the confines of my own home. People here knew me, my kids, my husband, and cared about our family. For better or worse, they watched out for us.

  “We don't need to talk about anything now, Dan.” I gently shifted our conversation away from a decision I was unsure of at the moment. But I was thankful for the gift of freedom he had given me. “Right now our focus is Nicholas.”

  He gave me a careful smile, and then, thankfully, he came and sat beside me and pulled me close. I sank into his embrace, letting his warmth and strength hold me up.

  And then, for the first time since Nicholas had been diagnosed, I started to cry.

  “Is Mommy sad because of Nicholas?” Anneke's fluty voice slipped over my sorrow, making her presence known.

  Dan kept one arm around me and held out his other for our daughter. “A little bit,” Dan said as she insinuated herself between us. But Dan slipped her to one side so that he sat between Anneke and me, holding us both. He gently kissed my temple, his breath warm against my hair.

  My sniffles subsided. I heard a nurse paging a doctor and I straightened, listening. Thank the Lord, it wasn't Nicholas's doctor.

  “We should go,” I said quietly.

  Dan nodded, kissed me again, and together we got up and walked back to our son's room.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A faint snuffle from the bed pulled me out of the dull sleepiness that dragged at my eyes. Nicholas lay on the bed beside me, the oxygen mask still covering his face. His IV dripped slowly into a tiny body that lay unnaturally still, the only movement the rise and fall of his chest. Two days without change.

  On those days when his relentless busyness wore me out, did I think I would ever wish I could be back home vacuuming sugar out of the dog's hair? That I would yearn to be cleaning up food coloring, sponging pen marks off the linoleum, wiping out dirt from the inside of his mouth and hands?

  Helplessness clawed at me.

  I wasn't used to being a medical bystander. Emergency work was all about doing. Fixing. Immediacy. Results. The day-to-day maintenance and slow recuperation took place out of our sight, here, in the ward.

  It was wearying beyond anything I had ever undergone before.

  I stretched, trying to push the fatigue out of my body, trying to corral my stampeding thoughts. Silly pictures resonated through my head. Anneke's horrid clothes. The faint musky scent of old clothes from when Dan hugged me. I didn't know if I still had a job after my confrontation with Dr. John. Keith was pressuring Wilma for a settlement. I couldn't fix, plan, or work around the events of the past few weeks.

  Beyond that welled a fear of what my house looked like even though I could do nothing about it. Once in a while, when I was alone, it would loom in my mind like a dark cloud, but I couldn't allow it to take over. I had the next hour with Nicholas to think about.

  A movement beside me caught my eye and I spun around.

  Dan stood at the foot of the bed.

  “How is he?”

  The deeply familiar voice pulled me toward him. He laid his hands, warm and strong, on my shoulders, his health and vitality pushing away sickness and fear.

  He dropped a quick kiss on my cheek, then pulled me tight against him. I clung to him.

  Sniffed.

  The gown he wore masked but did not eradicate the fresh scent of clean clothes. In spite of his declaration that things were going to change, I knew it would take aliens and a body swap to get Dan to do laundry. And then I smiled, guessing that it was either Wilma or Gloria. Interfering in-laws. Thank goodness.

  “Is the
re any progress?” Dan's voice rumbled under my cheek. I burrowed deeper, resisting the pull back to the lynchpin of our lives.

  “Tomorrow they want to do an MRI to see if his brain—” I faltered, took a breath, and tried again. “To see if there's been any brain damage.”

  Dan held me tighter and I stopped talking. For now I wanted to enjoy the warmth of my husband's body, the strength of someone stronger than me holding me up. Supporting me. The nurses were wonderful. The counselor suitably concerned.

  But they didn't care as intensely about the tiny body in the bed behind us as the man holding me did.

  We had made this child together. Dan had clipped his umbilical cord. Dan had been the one to hold him beside me and announce his name. Nicholas.

  He caught my face in his hands. “And how are you doing?”

  I carefully probed my emotions, trying to pull out the ones I could describe. “I'm okay. Tired. Scared.” That last word wasn't supposed to have slipped out. I was a nurse. Trained. I knew exactly what was happening with Nicholas's blood counts, his oxygen saturation, his intracranial pressure. Fear wasn't supposed to enter into the equation.

  Dan looked surprised. “I didn't think you were scared of anything,” he said quietly, touching my cheek. “You would talk about things that happened at work so easily…” He let his sentence fade away, and I filled in the blanks.

  “I care; it's just that I can't care too much.” I stopped, my throat thickening as my gaze cut to Nicholas, a small body with tubes and leads snaking out from him. Oxygen hissing, monitors bleeping, IV slowly metering out exact dosages, catheter draining. All so familiar, but so wrong. “Whenever emotions get engaged, I can't do my job.”

  “But watching you in the hospital, working on Nicholas—I've never had a chance to see what you do.” He touched my cheek lightly. “I never realized how critical your job is. I tended to treat it like my job. Fix and walk away. It's not the same at all.” His embarrassed smile showed me the revelation had been more than his guy self would admit.

  He pulled me close in another hug. “Anneke is outside,” he murmured into my hair.

  I nodded, not wanting to say anything, not wanting to dispel this moment.

  “Is she allowed to come in?” Dan asked.

  Each time Dan and Anneke had come in the past couple of days, we had visited in the family lounge. I didn't want to take any risk of her contracting meningitis as well.

  I looked sideways and caught a glimpse of my daughter standing in the hallway, clutching a brand-new teddy bear in one hand, leaning toward me, an expectant look on her face. She was being restrained by Wilma.

  Over the past few months, a barrage of emotions and changes had bombarded our family from every direction, bringing us to new and different places.

  Now our family's world had narrowed down to this small place. Dan, me, and our children moving carefully through the days, hardly knowing what we could expect. But we were still together. That had to count for something.

  And, added to that, a family who was working in the background. Supporting. Helping where they could. I knew that Wilma or Gloria or Judy was feeding Dan. Taking care of Anneke. Probably cleaning the Day-Glo floor, as well. We didn't do this alone, and the thought gave me comfort I had never felt before.

  “Mommy, where's Nicholas?”

  Anneke's plaintive voice was my undoing. What could it hurt? She'd already been exposed to him. Already been dosed with antibiotics and sterilized and checked over until I was sure the only thing wrong with her was probably earwax buildup.

  “She'll have to gown up,” I said, pulling away from my momentary haven. “And when she leaves she'll have to wash her hands. She can't touch him, only look at him.”

  “That's all she wants,” Dan whispered. He motioned to Wilma, who drew Anneke away to gown her up. It was then I noticed Anneke's corduroy jumper, the clean ruffled shirt, and the smooth braids in her hair. She looked like my little girl, not a waif, and one of the tight coils inside of me loosened. Wilma was taking care of her, keeping her looking the same as I had.

  I walked to the doorway and motioned to Wilma. “You have to gown up, too,” I said.

  She looked from me to Anneke, then gave a brisk nod. I knew this wasn't going to be a Hallmark moment. Wilma was still Wilma.

  But she had prayed for my son and was probably still praying for my son. He wasn't just mine and Dan's. Nicholas belonged to a larger group. Family. Community. It might not take a village to raise a child, but it sure helped.

  As Wilma and my daughter entered the room, Anneke ran to me smiling, her arms held out. “Mommy, I miss you,” she said as she clutched me around my neck.

  She planted a wet kiss on my cheek, then grinned at me, then Nicholas, her world complete. How bare-bones children's lives can be. All she needed was her mom and dad and little brother and her contentment quotient was filled.

  “Why does Nicholas have wires on him?” she asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “You remember what Daddy told you,” Dan said. “Nicholas is sick, and the doctors need to do all these things to him to make him better.”

  Her gaze ticked over each item and she nodded as if granting her approval. “Can I give Nicholas his teddy bear?”

  “Sure you can, honey,” I said. We kept our voices quiet. Anneke didn't know how tenuous our grip on normal was. We were all together, and that was enough for her. I glanced at Wilma in time to see her press her lips together tightly. Holding back even as she adjusted the mask on Nicholas's face and rearranged his sheets. I wanted to tell her it was okay to cry, but thought I would be overstepping a boundary that had shifted but still lay between us.

  Anneke bent over and kissed Nicholas, her mask touching his cheek. Then she looked at him, as if waiting for a reaction from her little brother. When none came, she wriggled loose out of Dan's arms. “I want to go to the playroom.”

  Already? She had just gotten here. “Don't you want to sit with me for a little while?” I asked Anneke. I wanted to hold my healthy child and smell her and feel her wiggling on my lap—life and vitality and everything that I wanted Nicholas to be again.

  “I want to see the toys,” she said, her lip starting to droop in a pout.

  “I'll take her,” Wilma said.

  “I can go.” I looked back at Nicholas, momentarily torn.

  Noise and a sudden movement in the hallway caught my attention. Judy stood in the doorway, Allison,Tabitha, and a couple of Gloria's boys behind her.

  “Hi there. I know we can't all come in, but the kids wanted to see Nicholas.” Judy caught sight of her mom and her glance flicked from Wilma to me, her eyebrows lifted in a question. I nodded as I hurried to the door.

  Judy hugged me and murmured her sympathy. I felt a gentle connection, an opportunity to release my tension to someone else. She stroked my face, then smiled at me, her hands still holding my shoulders.

  “I'm glad you asked us to come,” she said. “We all wanted to come and see him, but we didn't want you to feel overwhelmed. Goodness knows, we've done enough of that to you since you came here.”

  “Thanks,” was all I could say through a throat thickening with grateful tears.

  “You're okay with Mom being here?” she asked. “She's not rearranging Nicholas's bed or bossing the nurses around?”

  “It's okay, Judy. She's his grandma… Oma, and… she does care.”

  “A lot.”

  My happy gaze touched on the kids gathered behind her looking solemn and concerned. So many of them here? It was a Friday night in a city a long ways from Harland, and they had foregone giddy teenage plans to see our son. Their cousin, I reminded myself.

  “How is he?” Tabitha asked, giving me a shy, self-conscious smile.

  “Thanks for asking, Tabitha.” I returned her smile and touched her arm to reassure her that I still loved her. “He's had a couple of rough days. We're taking things one day at a time.” I stopped there. I wanted so badly to assure them that everything was go
ing to be fine, but the lack of progress had milked dry my own optimism. I knew the guarded looks the doctors exchanged with the nurses. I had read the charts. I knew the odds.

  Douglas, one of Gloria's sons, flashed me a shy smile. “I'm sorry about Nicholas,Auntie Leslie. We've been praying for him.”

  “I got a card,” Tabitha said, handing me an envelope. “I know it's kind of lame. Mom and Dad told me to tell you they want to come tomorrow, if that's okay.”

  “The kids really wanted to come tonight,” Judy said. “The rest of the family would like to come, too, but we wanted to stagger it out. Kathy and Jimmy want to come. We had to tell other members of the congregation that, for now, it was family only.”

  The list of names, the group of faces looking at me with concern, slowly loosened another coil inside of me.

  Dan and I weren't alone.

  “Shotgun on going first,” Allison said with authority, grabbing a gown from the cart beside the door. The kids argued over who would go next as Douglas stationed himself by the cart with the sterile gowns and started tossing them out. I saw one of the nurses at the desk lean over, her frown shooting disapproval down the hallway. But I didn't want to dampen the ebullient spirits. Their actions gently pulled me back to normal. To ordinary.

  Judy tugged on my arm, then turned me around and untied the ribbons of my gown. “C'mon. You look like you could use a cup of tea.”

  “Anneke wants to go to the playroom,” I said, torn between talking to an adult from the outside world and taking care of my other child's needs.

  “I'll take her,” Tabitha said, reaching out for her. “I can see Nicholas later.”

  I relinquished Anneke's damp, sticky hand with some reluctance as Judy took my arm and ushered me down the hallway toward the stairs.

  A few moments later my hands cradled a paper cup filled with warm tea. We sat by a window. Still daylight. In Nicholas's room, time melted and turned into the shape of hands on a clock, the movement and routine of doctors' rounds and shift changes.

  Through a space in the buildings I could see the solid peaks of the mountains. He covers the sky with clouds, He supplies the earth with rain.