The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  “I must apologize to you for the long wait,” Dr. Elsdon said, his alert face scanning us. “Of course we did not intend for your first day of emergency medicine to begin this way. I’d like to introduce you to Dr. X—one of the fifth-year surgery residents and our current trauma chief—and this is Reverend Ania, our hospital chaplain. I apologize again because I haven’t learned your names yet. Normally, I take care to get to know you all well during my month with you.”

  “Of course, it’s fine,” said James. “I’m James DeMarco.”

  “Zadie Fletcher,” I said.

  “Then you must be Emma Bingham,” said Dr. Elsdon, addressing her. She nodded.

  “James, Zadie, Emma. Thank you for your patience. This is difficult. Ah. I don’t think we’ve ever before . . . Well, anyway. There is no easy way to say this so I’ll just come out with it: one of your classmates has died.”

  Why Dr. Elsdon felt it necessary to insert a dramatic pause here was beyond me. We waited in agony for him to get on with it. He looked at Nick, but Nick threw the ball back to him, gazing at him impassively. A fleeting expression of something—distaste? resignation? sadness?—crossed his face. Dr. Elsdon cleared his throat and said:

  “Graham O’Kane.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  THE FAMILY BED

  Emma, Present Day

  Although I should have been rehearsing what in the world I’d say to Boyd and Betsy Packard to explain the death of their child on my watch, it wasn’t them on my mind as I crunched through the golden leaves on my way home from the basketball game. It was Graham.

  This time of year was always bittersweet. In the Carolinas, nature gifts us with perfect fall weather: the languid, sticky days of summer give way to bright, invigorating air, showered with crimson and orange and gold, doused in crisp sunshine. Ordinarily, it’s hard not to feel happy.

  But all the beauty also accentuates the imperviousness of nature, because to me, the heralds of autumn are also searing reminders of shame. Graham, the first man who ever loved me, died in the fall, on a perfect day like this one.

  I often thought about what would have happened if he had lived. Would he have forgiven me? Would we still be together? By the time I met Wyatt, most of my fertile years were behind me. Of course, I can’t imagine life without Wyatt and my son. But would I have had other children, more children, if I had married Graham?

  “Do you want kids?” I’d asked him once, leaning against him on a bench in the quad, where we were taking a break from a marathon cram for some examination or other.

  “Of course,” he answered promptly, his face relaxing into unguarded happiness. “I love kids. I want a little girl like you and a little boy like . . . you.”

  “Me?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Like their mom. You’re perfect.”

  I sat up in alarm. “I don’t even want kids, Graham. How can you see me as a mother? I’m clearly not mother material.”

  “I have a perfect visual image of you as a mom, Em.” He turned to me, serious. “I can see you kneeling by some little girl, showing her the stars, or holding her on your lap as you explain how gravity works, and I can see the wonder on her face. You’ll just . . . re-create your genius in a smaller form. Another tiny, brilliant, beautiful Emma. Or two.”

  I almost choked, thinking back on it now. That conversation had taken place a few months before a gunshot blast to the chest ended his life, and I could hardly stand to think of the juxtaposition between his happy confidence that someday he’d have kids and the immutable reality of his death. He’d been so comfortable, so sure he’d one day be a father. While he had envisioned his children as clones of me, I hadn’t envisioned children at all. I didn’t know any small children at that point in my life, and I didn’t feel any strong pull toward acquiring one. But if you’d forced me to picture it, I guess I’d have described someone like him. Sturdy. Contemplative. Quietly sunny.

  What would Graham have thought of me as a mother if he’d lived?

  The reality of motherhood had been a huge shock to me. I got pregnant almost as soon as Wyatt and I were married. Someone told me about a popular advice book for the parents of infants, which advocated tidy blocks of scheduled sleeping and feeding. This appealed to me immediately. Despite the chaos of my profession, I love schedules, love order and predictability, and have an inverse dislike of entropy. My baby, I felt sure, would thrive with a set routine. Naturally, I would have to be somewhat flexible; sometimes there would be small shifts in the feeding start time, or naps, or cuddle time, or whatever, because babies are . . . babies. I would adjust.

  Yet right from the moment of his birth, Henry was hell-bent on avoiding a schedule. Under his thatch of wispy hair, his tiny face was permanently red from the strain of yelling so much. He did not sleep more than an hour at a time, and he seemed angry every time he nursed, as if he were being simultaneously starved and choked. This dragged out the process of feeding him because as soon as he finished, it was time to feed him again.

  If you’d asked me before Henry was born, I’d have sworn I’d be the last person on earth ever to allow a child to sleep in my bed. Cosleeping was a good example of the mushy, lenient, laissez-faire-type parenting springing up among a certain subset of Gen X parents, the kind who didn’t believe in negative reinforcement and stopped breastfeeding only when their kids were old enough to drive. You’d think most of these people would be kind of crunchy, but attachment parenting has infiltrated all ideologies: conservative, liberal, hippies, tea-partiers, everybody.

  Everyone said the first three months would be rough. In fact, they were brutal beyond anything I had imagined. It was worse than my residency. I became a drooling, irritable zombie with zero regard for hygiene. In desperation, I read all the baby sleep books: Secrets of the Baby Whisperer; The Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood; What to Expect the First Year; Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. They didn’t help. Henry was completely resistant to sleep.

  At four months, the pediatrician gave me the okay to let Henry “cry it out.” I was warned it would be heartrending, that I should resist the urge to rush in and comfort him, in the interest of teaching him he could, in fact, fall asleep on his own. It might take a half hour or more, but no baby can cry forever. Right?

  Henry didn’t get the memo. He bellowed in outrage for five solid hours before he succumbed for forty-five minutes. Then he woke up and commenced his usual roaring. Wyatt resisted the urge to comfort Henry during the marathon screaming session, but only because he comforted himself by downing a bottle of Maker’s Mark while staring in horror at the blaring red lights on the baby monitor.

  “The hell with this, muffin,” he said finally. “Can we see if he’ll sleep in our bed?”

  Babies are helpless but brilliant parasites who have survived the millennia by enslaving adults. They accomplish this by (a) making people think they’re cute and (b) producing a noxious noise until you do their bidding. Henry was excellent at both. He didn’t sleep long stretches in our bed either, but any attempt to remove him resulted in torrential screeching. If allowed to remain, he would drift off more pleasantly and could be silenced upon reawakening by nursing, all without anyone having to pace the floor.

  Now that Henry was nearly three, he was finally weaned. I had taken to breastfeeding with less-than-total enthusiasm, unable to shake an unpleasant bovine sensation. Everybody breastfed, though. It was better for babies, and people who didn’t want to do it were regarded with politely masked disdain. It was not even enough just to do it. You were supposed to love it. Most mothers—like Zadie, for example—waxed poetic about the bonding, the sweetness, the comfort of holding a milk-scented lump of warmth, the flood of endorphins when a baby locked its little gaze on theirs. I mainly felt a raging impatience as I was trapped in a chair, and frustration with Henry, who cried so much he would intermittently stop drinking in order to loo
k up and holler at me. I knew better than to bring this up with Zadie, though. Every time Zadie held a baby, her own or not, she began to emit authentic waves of maternal warmth and love.

  But I kept on breastfeeding at night, even after I went back to work, because at least that way we all got a little sleep. On the nights I was at the hospital, Wyatt had to resort to pacifiers and bottles, which Henry would tolerate only in my absence.

  He was finally cut off now, though. That was a tremendous ordeal, but nothing compared to our attempts to get him into his own bed. He systemically destroyed us every time we tried. It was genius, really. He’d even managed to ensure there was no sibling competition for his parents’ affection, since our sex life was decimated.

  Thank goodness his personality improved. He was not very verbal, but he was clearly smart; he could efficiently disassemble any electronic device to its component parts in less than three minutes, and he had learned how to operate the complicated TV remote without instruction. And now that he’d escaped whatever demons had possessed his baby phase, he was fun. He adored Wyatt and erupted into helpless, snorty giggles whenever they played. With me, he was calmer; he loved burrowing into my lap and rubbing his soft little cheeks against me. And now I felt it: the helpless, searing wash of love for my baby that meant I’d do anything for him. I was relieved to finally have the sense that I must have been a normal mother.

  I turned up the sidewalk in front of our huge house, surveying its gables and its beautiful old slate roof. Following a pebbled path along the side of the house, I arrived at the back door, calling “I’m back!” as I tucked my running shoes away in their cubby. From overhead a pattering sound struck my ears, which gave way to the steady thump of small feet on the stairs. Henry came into view, making the excited grunting sounds he always reserved for welcoming me home. I knelt down and opened my arms, and he careened into me, his solid little body wriggling with wordless joy.

  I drank it in: his baby softness, the invisible tether between us, the undeserved adoration he always showered on me. I thought about whether I’d give him up if I could bring back Eleanor Packard, and the thought of losing him was so terrible tears came to my eyes. This is what I’d say to Boyd and Betsy, if I could: I understand what you lost.

  I understand what I took from you.

  And somewhere, somehow, in the vast universe above me, I felt Graham’s presence. And for the first time since he died, I was able to set aside my self-loathing long enough to remember him with more clarity. He’d have been the most wonderful father.

  I’d like to think if he could have seen me and Henry, he’d be smiling.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  A LITERAL WINDOW TO A BROKEN HEART

  Autumn, 1999: Louisville, Kentucky

  Zadie

  James and I froze, but there was not even a second’s reprieve for Emma. She clapped her hands over her mouth, a high, thin sound escaping around the edges of her fingers. She stood, then stumbled over to the corner of the room, her cheeks glazed with two crimson patches, as she still tried to hold in sound with her hands.

  I started to rise, but the chaplain was already there. She was saying something to Emma in a low voice. “What happened? What happened?” James was asking, but my vision went swimmy for a moment, and by the time I could focus again, Emma and the chaplain were gone.

  Dr. Elsdon wordlessly conferred with Nick, one emotive eyebrow locked in question mode. Nick nodded. “Her friend,” he confirmed. Dr. Elsdon manually pushed his inquisitive eyebrow down with one abstracted finger and surveyed me and James.

  We were crying. We both stared out straight in front of us, bewildered by our tears, especially in the presence of the powerful and unfamiliar chair of the ER department, but we were as helpless as babies to control ourselves. James ineffectually swiped at his streaming face with one gangly arm, which prompted Dr. Elsdon into action; he sprang out of the room on a mission to find tissues.

  As soon as he was gone, Nick sank to his knees in front of us, his handsome face anguished. He bowed his golden head and took my hand, saying, “We did everything, Z. We tried for more than an hour. He was still alive when he came in, but barely. I swear they had to force me to stop. Please tell her I’m sorry.”

  I cried some more.

  Graham. Last week: the last time I’d seen him. Mingled sounds drifting down the hallway of our apartment: a booming baritone, with an exaggerated crescendoing gargle at the end of each line, mixed with the splattering noise of water. Elvis, he was singing Elvis in our shower. The water cut off, and I’d listened, amused, as Elvis forgot for the twentieth time that he was too tall to exit through the flimsy shower door without banging his head on the horizontal support bar.

  “Ow! Motherf—” The twinging sound of the support bar vibrating from the impact. Muffled curses, then more singing, softer now that he was no longer competing with the shower.

  I cried more. I could see him clearly, emerging from the bathroom clad in a too-small towel. He’d startled as he caught sight of me, his warbling Elvis cutting off midword, but then he recovered. His face changed to that patient, focused expression he often had. He looked happy.

  “What happened?” James asked again, his voice thick.

  I realized I knew what Nick was going to say a beat before he said it, but I couldn’t imagine why.

  “He took his own life,” said Nick gently. “Shot himself in the chest.”

  “In the chest?” said James through a barrage of tears. Even a third-year med student knew that if you wanted to die immediately and painlessly, you had to take out the brain stem. Shooting yourself in the chest was in every way bad: messy, not always fatal, and there was no guarantee of instant loss of consciousness. To be sure, shooting yourself in the head had its chance of horrendous unintended consequence—perhaps it was this that had influenced Graham, since every trauma surgeon had gruesome stories of some would-be suicide who had only managed to blow off his face. They often failed to aim properly (or, even likelier, they flinched at the last second). But a bullet to the chest! It wasn’t a common means of suicide. Both James and I were stricken with the image of Graham surviving long enough to suffer agonizing regret.

  “Are you sure he did it to himself?” I said through my sobs. “Couldn’t it have been someone else?”

  “He was in the quad, Zadie. A dozen people saw it,” Nick said grimly.

  “Oh God,” said James. “Oh no.”

  Watching him now, it dawned on me that, next to Emma, he was probably Graham’s closest friend in our class. Along with sadness and horror, his honest face was emblazoned with guilt. I reached out to him and pulled him to me; we grasped each other in a weepy, shattered embrace. “James,” I choked. “James. It’s not your fault.”

  James pulled away. He seemed unaware he was making a weird, high keening sound. Even through my own pain—oh God, I had to get to Emma—it was wrenching to see a man trying so hard to stop crying, especially James, with his bearded face now resting on his skinny arms. Nick was blinking rapidly, his beautiful jaw set, turning away so as not to have to look at him.

  Dr. Elsdon skidded back into the room, laden with enough Kleenex to manage an army of flu victims. He took immediate measure of us and beckoned to Nick. “Help her find her friend,” he ordered.

  Although I had no memory of leaving the room, or entering the Catacombs, somehow we emerged into the lobby of Christ the Redeemer, where the light seemed insanely bright and the people were scurrying around with offensive normality. Nick, who had been babbling—wondering if Graham would have left a note, wondering if I had thought he’d seemed depressed—badged our way into the ED, in the hope we’d find Emma there, because I refused to do anything or even say anything else until we’d located her. Graham’s body was still in the trauma room. Nick steered me away from it, but after we checked the family room and the waiting room and even the chapel without success, I knew
Emma had to be there. As I got closer, I thought I heard Emma’s voice inside—distorted and raspy, but still recognizably Emma’s—and I flung aside the curtain and ran in.

  She held Graham’s hand. There was no sheet covering his face and no one had closed his eyes, so he gazed up sightlessly at her, his face a dusky blue. An endotracheal tube lilted up from his mouth. His chest was exposed and it had been opened on the left, with a rib spreader still in place: a literal window to his broken heart. Then, at some point in the frenzy to save him, someone, probably Nick, had decided to extend the incision to the right, so his sternum had been sawed in half. Emma was not looking at his mangled chest, however; she was focused on his hand.

  “Did you feed Baxter this morning?” she asked in a toneless voice without looking up at me. “I promised him we’d take care of Baxter.”

  “Emma,” I said, helpless.

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t know why he was asking me to take care of Baxter.”

  “Emma. Can I hold you?”

  “I didn’t know this would happen. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. We have to keep the dog, Zadie. He wants us to keep the dog.”

  She began stroking Graham’s large bloodless hand with her own pink ones, rocking back and forth. I was paralyzed. I stood rooted to the middle of the room, watching Emma rocking next to the ravaged immobile thing that was Graham.

  The curtain swished aside and Nick came in. Emma looked up at him, almost with a look of hatred. He went to her and, without hesitation, pulled her up and into him, burying her face in his big shoulder, one hand gently bolstering the back of her wobbly head. With the other, he reached into his pocket and threw me a set of keys. “Take these to Ken. He’s in the ER. He’s going to pull my car around and take you two home. I’ll bring Emma out front in ten minutes.”