by Michael Nava
Hurt, she replied, “You asked for me. Just after your heart stopped.”
“My heart stopped.”
“For a few seconds, and then they resuscitated you. You don’t remember?”
The boy with the seashell. That incandescent light. My sister dragging me away. “Why didn’t you let me go?”
“What do you mean, Henry? Let you go where?”
I wanted to explain, but my head was a jumble of thoughts and images. A red-headed male nurse had materialized at the nurse’s station, and I thought I was hallucinating again because I recognized him. “Which hospital is this?”
“I think it’s called Westside,” she said.
“The AIDS ward is one floor down. This is where I brought Josh the last time he was hospitalized.” I roused myself as best I could and stared at her. “He’s dead. So many people, friends, also dead. Why not me, too? I’m not afraid and there’s nothing…nothing left to do. More of the same. I don’t want it. Why didn’t you let me go?”
She grasped my hand. “It’s not your time yet.”
And then it was morning, that day or the next. A doctor—a cardiologist named Hayward—came to examine me. Elena excused herself. Hayward perched at the edge of my bed. He was a small man who wore round tortoiseshell glasses beneath which were quick, bright eyes that beamed rays of ironic intelligence. Despite his thinning hair and slight potbelly, he retained the air of a precocious child but he had the beleaguered smile of a man with too many demands on his attention.
“How do you feel today, Henry?”
“Forget the soothing bedside manner,” I replied. “Just tell me what happened to me.”
“You had a heart attack—actually we call them myocardial infarctions, now, or M.I.’s—and you lost about twenty percent of your heart.”
“Lost?”
“It died,” he said. “That’s what M.I.’s do. They kill a portion of the heart muscle. The quality of life depends on what the remaining capacity can handle.”
“How can I even be alive if twenty percent of my heart died?”
“Well, fortunately,” Hayward said, grinning, “the body is rather overengineered with excess capacity.”
“What, like an SUV?”
He laughed. “Something like that.”
“Am I going to require some kind of surgery?”
“Not necessarily,” he replied. “If there’s arterial blockage, we can often open it up with angioplasty, and there are also preventive treatments. Surgery is a last resort.”
“My sister said my heart stopped.”
He nodded. “Yes, you died for almost a minute. When you came back, you were asking for her. In Spanish. I speak enough to understand what you wanted, so we tracked her down. That took some doing. She wasn’t in your medical power of attorney. I had to call your lawyer to find her.”
“I know. My sister and I aren’t close.”
He looked at me quizzically. “It seemed urgent to you that she come.”
“Thank you,” I said, declining his implicit invitation to explain.
“Sure,” he said. He hopped off the bed and patted my head. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
For most of our lives, we had been brother and sister in name only. My father’s drinking and violence had made for an unpredictable and terrifying childhood. My mother retreated into religion, leaving Elena and me to fend for ourselves. We each survived in our own way; I, simply, began to disappear, spending more and more time away from home, at school, at the houses of friends, at the city library, at the track field, anywhere I could find a refuge from my father’s rage and my mother’s sadness.
While I found ways to escape my family, Elena stayed behind but learned how to occupy space without calling any more attention to herself than a chair did. She was obedient, dutiful and quiet; I could only look bad by comparison. But children reveal themselves to each other in ways that are not apparent to grown-ups, and there were moments when I understood she was not quite the girl she pretended to be at home.
My most striking memory of this was when I saw her with her friends one afternoon while I was taking the long way home from school to eat up time. I passed a hamburger joint where a group of teenage girls—I was nine or ten—were sitting at a picnic table drinking Cokes and smoking cigarettes. I noticed them because they were wearing the blue-and-white uniforms of the parochial high school Elena attended. One of the girls was sitting with her back to me, having her hair brushed by a girlfriend. When the first girl turned slightly to address the second, I saw it was Elena. Her hair, which at home she wore in a long braid, spilled down her back and across her blue-sweatered shoulders. I was as startled as if one of the nuns who taught at my elementary school had suddenly removed her wimple. Even more shocking, she lifted a cigarette to her lips and inhaled with perfect aplomb. After a moment, I continued on my way without her having seen me and wondered what to do with this information. In the end, I could see no way of using it to my advantage, so I kept it to myself, but I looked at her differently after that. When she sat quietly at dinner as my father raged at my mother or me, delicately cutting her food into small bits that she pushed around her plate without eating, I knew she was also silently plotting her exit. A week after she graduated from high’ school, she entered the convent of the Sisters of the Holy Cross. I would not see her again for five years, and by then we were strangers to each other. We had remained strangers for many years, until she asked my help in a legal matter that forced us to reveal parts of ourselves to each other that we had kept hidden. Elena, who had by then left her religious order, came out to me as a lesbian; I told her about my own struggles with my homosexuality and alcohol. She met my lover, Josh, who eventually died from AIDS, but while he was alive, he badgered me to keep in touch with her and we had formed the fragile bond of two people who had survived a catastrophe—the cataclysm of our childhood. After Josh’s death four years ago, Elena had tried to keep the connection alive, but I had only sporadically responded to her calls and e-mail. I had been startled by her appearance in the hallucination I had had in the emergency room, and I was still puzzled by why I had called for her and why she had come.
Elena had gone to call her partner, Joanne Stole, a painter who taught in the art department at the same school where Elena taught in the English department. I knew almost nothing about Joanne except that she seemed to disapprove of me.
When she returned to the room, I said, “How is Joanne?”
“She’s fine, Henry,” Elena said. “She sends her best wishes.” She picked up her book.
“I’m sorry I caused all this trouble for you.”
“You’re my brother.”
“Joanne’s your real family.”
She put the book down and studied me for a moment. “The first time the hospital phoned, they told me you were dead,” she said. “Two minutes later, they phoned again and explained they’d made a mistake, but the sadness I felt after that first call was indescribable.”
“It’s not like you to be sentimental.”
“I’m not sentimental,” she said. “But I trust my feelings. I felt that terrible grief because we have never resolved the things that have estranged us all these years.”
“What things?”
“To begin with, you could forgive me.”
“For what?”
“For not protecting you from Dad when we were children.”
“That wasn’t your job.”
“I know that now but at the time I thought it was, and so did you. You looked to me for protection.”
“I don’t remember anything like that.”
She reached into her purse and handed me an old snapshot. A little girl in pigtails happily held a laughing toddler in her lap. With astonishment, I recognized them as the children in my emergency-room hallucination. Elena and me. In the picture, her skinny arm encircled my waist possessively, as if to keep me from squirming away. I remembered how, in the hallucination, she had dragged me back from the light. The
sensations came back with such clarity and force that it seemed like a real memory, not a dream.
“When you were first born, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight,” she said. “I cried when they made me go to school because I didn’t want to be separated from you, and Mom said you fussed until I came home. She called me your little mother.” She took the picture from me and studied it. “We may not consciously remember the first loves we form, but they stay inside of us. I have always loved you, Henry. You called for me when you thought you were dying. What was that except your way of remembering how much we loved each other? I couldn’t be there for you then. I can now, if you’ll let me.”
I replied with the sobs of a little boy and buried myself against her.
2.
DR. HAYWARD RETURNED to perch leprechaunlike at the edge of my bed, his feet not quite reaching the ground. After the standard Q-and-A about the state of my physical well-being, he cleared his throat sententiously and said, “You know, it’s not uncommon for survivors of heart attacks to have pretty wild emotional swings.”
I was too tired to be anything other than irritable. “Duh.”
Undaunted, he went on. “Your body failed you. In fact, you died for almost a minute. That’s one of the most traumatic experiences anyone can have. Your recovery may be slow and difficult and you’ll be having a lot of feelings. If you were already depressed before the heart attack—”
I had been slowly sliding beneath the blankets, struggling to stay awake. Now I sat up and demanded, “Who said I was depressed?”
He glanced at my sister, who had been quietly reading, or pretending to read, a biography of the poet Elizabeth Bishop. She lowered the book to reveal a guilty expression.
“I never told you I was depressed,” I said to her.
“The first night I was here, you talked about dying, Henry,” she said. “About wanting to die.”
“I had just had a heart attack, Elena. I felt like roadkill, plus I was pumped up with pharmaceuticals. I was out of my head.”
Her nostrils quivered, which I remembered from childhood was a sign of anger, but she restrained herself and replied mildly, “This wasn’t pain or the drugs. You mentioned Josh and other friends who had died from AIDS. You said, ‘Why not me, too.’ You said you had nothing left to do.”
“I don’t remember saying anything like that, and if I did, it was babble.”
Hayward, who had been watching our back-and-forth like a spectator at a tennis match, said, “I could prescribe Zoloft.”
“I’m not depressed by anything but this conversation,” I said. “And I won’t take happy pills.”
He eased himself off the bed. “Have you been up yet?”
I tugged at my IV line. “What do you think?”
“I think you should try walking down the hall.”
“I can’t even walk to the bathroom to take a leak.”
Hayward answered with a smile of great kindness. “I know it’s frightening to feel so weak, but that’s why you’ve got to get out of bed. Rejoin the land of the living. It’s that or the Zoloft. Your choice.”
After he left, Elena helped me out of bed and into my bathrobe and we went for a walk to the window at the end of the corridor, a distance of maybe fifty feet. After four days in bed, viewing the world vertically was shockingly disorienting. I tottered against my sister, pulling my IV behind me, taking tiny steps.
Elena said, “This reminds me of when you were first learning how to walk.”
“You can’t possibly remember that,” I huffed.
“I was five years old when you were born, Henry. I remember most of your childhood.”
Further conversation was impossible as I concentrated on reaching the smear of light at the end of the hall. I tried to keep my gaze straight ahead but sometimes my glance fell into one of the rooms, where figures lay huddled beneath thin hospital blankets as TVs flickered soundlessly overhead.
“We made it,” Elena said, a little breathless from shouldering my weight.
The window was double-paned to minimize the shriek of traffic from the street below, but I could still feel the heat of the sun when I pressed my hand against the glass.
“Why did you have to rat me out to the doc?” I asked my sister. “Now he thinks I’m mental.”
“The way you were talking worried me. I know you don’t remember what you said, but—”
“I remember,” I said, resting my forehead against the window. The April wind rattled the palm trees that lined the boulevard. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I turned my face to Elena, resting my cheek on the glass. “If I explain, will you promise not to tell him?”
She struggled with that for a moment. “I promise, Henry”
“I didn’t feel depressed before the heart attack, not in the usual way people feel depressed. What I felt was—I don’t know. AIDS, Elena. How I can explain it to someone who hasn’t crossed off half the names in their address book as one friend after another died?”
“There are treatments now,” she said quietly. “Effective treatments.”
“I know and no one talks about AIDS anymore. For most people, it’s as if it never happened. But it did happen, it’s still happening. While it was going on for me, so many friends were dying before their time, I think I subconsciously assumed that I would also die before I got old.”
“You’re not HIV positive,” she said.
“So? For fifteen years, being gay has been like sitting in a trench on a battlefield, watching people get picked off right and left. Who got the virus and who didn’t, who died and who lived, all began to seem completely arbitrary, and as you staggered from hospital room to memorial service, it started to look like it would never end and there wouldn’t be anyone left.” I rolled my back against the window and stared down the hall of the hospital where I had sat the death watch for half a dozen friends. “And then one day I woke up and people I knew weren’t dying anymore and I was looking at the rest of my life, a life I had not expected to have. A life I was completely unprepared to have. Does any of this make sense?”
“When I left the convent, I think I felt something similar,” she said. “My experience as a religious wasn’t tragic, though. It didn’t leave me half-dead.”
“Yes, that’s how I felt. Half-dead. Readier to go the rest of the way than step back into the world.” I looked at her and smiled. “I didn’t try to commit suicide by inducing a heart attack. Honest. I wasn’t suicidal at all, but I was finding it hard to come up with reasons to be alive. I didn’t feel needed.”
“Your friends need you. So do your clients.”
“My friends love me, they don’t need me. As for my clients, well, lawyers are fungible. There is no one to whom I am irreplaceable. They’ve all died.”
“You don’t know that there won’t be others,” she said.
I looked away from the ghost-filled corridor to my sister’s kind, worn face and said, “I wish I could believe that.”
After two days of walking the hall, we graduated to the hospital’s small interior garden. I was liberated from my IV lines and rode down in the elevator in a wheelchair but discarded it once we got outside. Our course was a circular flagstone path that ringed a dozen rose bushes now in florid bloom, their scent mingling with banks of rosemary and lavender. But after only two laps, I began to tire and said, “Look, there’s a bench. Can we sit for a minute?”
The bench was of snowy marble carved with clawed lion’s feet. Embedded in the stone was a small brass plaque that read, IN MEMORIAM, CHRISTOPHER GRAYE, 1963-1992.”
“God,” I said. “I knew Chris Graye.”
“AIDS?”
I nodded and then didn’t want to talk about it anymore. For a moment we listened to the buzzing of bees and the distant thrum of traffic. I closed my eyes. The sun on my face and neck was like the warm breath of a lover. I was ruefully surprised that I could remember that sensation, given how long it had been since I had actually experienced it. Even before the heart atta
ck, I concluded there was not much chance I would meet someone; and while my reflex was to regret it, when I actually thought it through, I felt relief. Love is very strenuous; only the young really enjoy it and I was not young. Now, my damaged heart seemed the perfect metaphor, and I was ready to let go of that part of life.
“This reminds me of the garden in the convent,” Elena said.
I waited for her to continue, because she rarely spoke of her years as a religious. Elena had been an honor student in high school, but because she was a girl, our father decreed it was unnecessary for her to attend college. One day, I came home from track practice and found three nuns in full habit sipping tea with my parents in the living room. They belonged to a teaching order called Sisters of the Holy Cross that was affiliated with a number of small Jesuit colleges. The sisters had come to ask my father’s permission for Elena to join their order. Though they were white women, they addressed him in fluent Spanish in firm, almost lecturing tones, while he sullenly shrugged and nodded. Elena knew that no one else could have persuaded our father to let her leave home and attend college except the representatives of a religion that, though he did not observe it, still exercised a primeval influence over the Mexican campesino who lived beneath his thin Americanized veneer.
Yet, she had once told me, after she joined the order she discovered a vocation, or at least enough of one for her to have spent six years as Sister Mary Joseph. The few times I had seen her during this period, she had radiated a calm, purposeful energy and seemed very happy. I assumed she would remain a nun for the rest of her life and was surprised to receive a brief letter from her announcing that she had left the order and could be reached through the English department at Berkeley, where she had been accepted to graduate school. I lost track of her altogether during most of the Berkeley years. Her remark a couple of days earlier about her disorientation at returning to the secular world came back to me now.
