Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  He suddenly thought of Pearl. She’d hate to hear him thinking about the future, thinking ahead even five minutes was a sin to her. “Don’t you dare waste the life you have now thinking about a future you know nothing about,” she had always told him.

  He finished the last balloon and went outside. It was the middle of the night. He tied the balloons onto the railing. Soft washed blue, they floated and bobbed. At this time, the neighbors had wanted them to put up some decorations, and now he had. Then he got the camera and took a picture of the front of the house. He didn’t want Molly to miss anything.

  He couldn’t wait to get to the hospital the next morning, to see Molly and his son. He couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t stop the wild exhilaration tearing through him. His son! He loved the sound of it in his throat. His son! He wanted to pepper his conversation with it, to tell everyone at every chance he had. He dropped off the film from the night before. “Pictures of my son,” he said. He went to the florist and bought wildflowers in a green paper cone for Molly. “My wife just had a son,” he told the cashier, who looked at him, bored.

  When he got to the hospital, Molly was calmly walking around her room. She was attached to her IV pole, rolling it noisily across the floor. Her ankles were puffy, and her nightgown, new and pale green and sprigged with pink flowers, didn’t fit quite right. “You look beautiful,” he said, and kissed her. There was a sudden sound, like the mewling of a cat, and Gary froze.

  Molly laughed. “It’s Otis. Go say hello.” She pointed to the other side of her bed.

  Otis, in a tiny white cap with a blue pompom, was lying in a bassinet, half swaddled in a striped blanket, lifting his fists. Gary stared at his son in fresh astonishment. The baby looked mischievous to him. His eyes were dancing with light. Gary touched Otis’s apricot skin, his tiny fingernails, his blush of hair with a kind of reverence.

  “What, are you hungry again?” She bent, gently lifting the baby up, sitting with him in one of the chairs. She raised up her shirt. “Welcome to the Milk Bar. We’re always open and your credit is always good.” She settled Otis against her breast. “This feels so completely weird.”

  A nurse strode in, bright-faced and very blond, carrying a thermometer. She motioned to Molly and popped it under Molly’s tongue. She shook her head at Molly. “Will you look at her?” she said to Gary. “When I had my C-section, I couldn’t sit up for two weeks, and this one is doing laps around the halls.” The thermometer blinked and she took it from Molly, scanning it. “Vital signs all great. Let’s just check this C-section.” She lifted the sheet. “I have never in my life seen a cut so low. You could wear a microkini and not give anything away.” She stood up. “I wish the other day nurse were here. She’d get a kick out of that scar.” She gave Molly a pat on her head. “You, my girl, are putting us all to shame.”

  Molly laughed. “This really wasn’t too bad,” she said. She looked suddenly mischievous to Gary, the way he thought she must have looked at six or seven, when she had snuck a frog into the house or cut her doll’s hair. “I could see myself doing this again. Maybe two more times again.”

  He grinned back. “Two more times?”

  “A baby brother for Otis. A little sister he can spoil rotten and fix up with all his friends.”

  He bent and kissed her. “Well, then we ought to start practicing. As soon as you get home and are able.”

  Molly was fine, itchy to go home, complaining that every time she turned around, a nurse was coming in, hounding her, asking her if she had peed, if she had passed gas, if she had eaten the rubbery Jell-O or drunk enough juice, and her answer was always no, no, no. She wanted to start doing some simple exercises to get back in shape, to feel more energized, but she said the only thing they would let her do was to stride around the halls, her IV racing behind her.

  By four, when Gary was going to go home for a bit, a new nurse came in. “I’m unhooking you from the IV.”

  “Thank the Lord.” Molly lay on the bed, watching. She rubbed absently at her stomach. “You know, I don’t feel like this is going down very much.”

  The nurse closed up the IV on Molly’s wrist. “Takes time.”

  Molly frowned. “It looks like it’s getting bigger.”

  “Doubtful.” The nurse started out of the room, taking the IV pole with her.

  “Fat and tired, that’s me,” Molly told Gary.

  Gary soothed her shoulders. “Come on, you look beautiful. And you want tired? Wait until it’s just us and no nurses with the baby at home.”

  “Can we go home now?”

  When he left that day, he kept thinking how much he actually liked the maternity ward, that if you had to visit someone in the hospital, this was the place to be. Everything so brand-new: babies and parents both. He wasn’t stupid enough to not realize that even here, things could go wrong. He had passed one room where a young woman was weeping, a man helplessly stroking her back. He had seen stunned disbelief on the face of a man talking to a nurse. But the odds were in your favor here. And the atmosphere was giddy with anticipation.

  There were all these young happy women striding down the halls in pretty robes, their hair held back with colored ribbons. Women were kissing their husbands with loud smacking sounds, laughing out loud. There were balloons and stuffed toys and the floor felt electrically charged. One of the nurses had told Gary that there was a three-year waiting period to be an obstetrical nurse, and watching the nurses, he believed it. They moved with a kind of grace and calm and undeniable sunniness here. Maybe it was just because he was a brand-new father, but he swore there was a kind of music here, an audible kind of joy you might never tire of listening to.

  She was supposed to come home her third day in the hospital, but when Gary arrived, Molly was glumly lying in bed, one hand rocking Otis in the bassinet beside her. “Guess what. I have a blood clot.”

  He stood, stunned, but she waved her hand. “No, don’t look like that, it’s nothing. Karen told me it’s common with sections. The way they have to move everything around. It happens. They just need to go in and clean it up. I’m just depressed because it means I have to be here two or three more days.” She pulled her nightgown over her belly. “See how huge? How hard? That’s the clot. It got bigger.” Gary tentatively rested one hand on her stomach. It was a hard, moving swell under his palm. “It hurts, but I won’t take a painkiller because I’m breast-feeding.”

  Molly lifted her arms and then let them flop back on the bed. “I’m tired and depressed. All the other mothers who delivered when I did are going home.”

  “You’ll be going home soon.” He stroked back her hair, then he bent and picked up Otis. His son’s head wobbled against his palm. His body felt nearly weightless. He carefully sat on the empty bed beside Molly and then spread out, resting Otis on his belly. Molly yawned and turned her head. “He’s something, isn’t he?” She smiled and yawned again.

  Gary couldn’t take his eyes off his son. Otis flexed his hands and frowned and drooled and then fell asleep on his stomach. “Molly, look—” he whispered, but when he turned to her, she was sleeping, too, her eyelids fluttering in dreams.

  He couldn’t sleep. He kept imagining Otis rolling off his belly and onto the hard floor. Instead, he gently hinged up. He carried Otis, still sleeping, back into his bassinet and gently lowered him in, tucking the layette blanket about him. “Pleasant dreams, everybody,” he said. He walked outside and went to find Karen, who was standing at the nurse’s station, laughing. He touched her elbow. “So. Should I be worried?”

  “It’s nothing,” Karen said. “Pure routine.”

  He was late to the hospital the next day. He had already spoken to Molly, who told him triumphantly that she had changed Otis’s diaper that morning, that she swore he had winked at her. They were going to operate at ten and she had begun to hurt more, enough so she’d reconsidered her no-painkiller rule. “Get here before they knock me out,” she told him. “I want a good-luck kiss.”

  He had left
early, stopping only to pick up the photographs, leafing through them hurriedly in the car. Molly. There she was, beautiful and exhausted in her blue johnny. There was Otis, lying in the bassinet, half swaddled, one arm reaching out as if to greet them. And there he was, too, a brand-new father with a glad, goofy smile, his hair too long, the edges of it poking out of his scrub mask. He laughed out loud. He put the photos on the seat beside him.

  He should have made it to the hospital in a half hour, but there was an accident in the Holland Tunnel and traffic was backed up for over an hour. He stared at his watch. Beside him, in the other lane, a woman was putting on mascara, staring critically at herself in the rearview mirror. Behind him, every once in a while, a man in a white Cadillac beeped his horn. Gary glanced at his watch again. He’d never make it to Molly in time. She’d wonder where he was, she’d worry, she’d probably call the house. Now, she wouldn’t be out for another few hours. He thought of Emma telling him they should have had a doctor in New Jersey and then he settled back, turning on the radio. The Rolling Stones sang about Brown Sugar, and he tapped the beat out on the steering wheel.

  He didn’t get into the city until nearly eleven. He’d wait for Molly in the waiting room. He’d stop and buy a magazine or two downstairs in the gift shop. They had a great selection.

  Later, he strode down the halls, half hidden by a giant bouquet of yellow jonquils. Her room was empty, her bed carefully made. Blinking in the bed next to Molly’s was a woman with brassy hair, a set of twins in her arms. “You don’t look like my husband,” she chimed.

  Gary backed out of the room, excusing himself. He set off to the nurse’s station and suddenly spotted Karen, a stubby yellow pencil tucked behind one ear, her hands folded across her white coat. “Karen!” he called, but Karen, when she turned to him, didn’t smile. He fanned the photos and her face looked pale and distant to him, waning.

  “Have you seen this woman?” He held up the best picture: Molly sitting up, sucking on a lemon swab. Karen suddenly averted her face. She swiped a finger across her eyes, and he suddenly felt a pulse of uneasiness.

  Karen turned back to him. Her eyes looked damp. She put one hand on his sleeve. “We’ve been trying to reach you.”

  Gary sat in an empty waiting room, unable to move. Karen was leaning forward, hands flat on her knees.

  “I don’t understand—” he said, and Karen shook her head.

  “Either do we,” she said. It was a bleed, she told him, not a clot. They had opened Molly up and there had been so much blood. No one could remember having seen that much blood before. And it wouldn’t stop. They had scooped out what they could. They had sewn her back up. With that kind of bleeding, and the kind of pain that went along with it, they were keeping her anesthetized.

  “What are you telling me?” Gary stared. “Is she going to be all right?”

  Karen looked away from him. “She’s critical.”

  “Is she going to make it?”

  “Gary, I don’t know.”

  The room swam around him. Karen was speaking, saying something, but he couldn’t grab on to it, he couldn’t hear. “Wait—” he said. “Wait just a minute.”

  She stopped. “Gary,” she said, and then she began speaking, and this time he could hear her. She had already called in a critical care specialist, a hematologist, and they needed Gary to sign a paper authorizing more surgery. Molly was filling up with blood too fast. They had to open her up again, drain some of it out, try to take another look and see what was happening.

  “When?”

  Karen handed him the paper and a pen, “Tomorrow. We really can’t wait.”

  He signed his name, he handed the paper back and then stood up. “Can I see her?”

  The hospital had moved Molly from the maternity ward to the surgical intensive care unit, two floors down. Karen rode the elevator with him and as soon as they got off the floor, as soon as he started to follow her, to move deeper onto the floor, he noticed a difference.

  He was used to crowded hallways, but here there were fewer patients walking around, and the ones he saw looked as wrung-out as damp washcloths. A man on crutches winced as he passed Gary. A woman, face drawn tight as a change purse, held on to her husband, who was intently whispering something to her. In maternity there had been a doctor here and there, but on this floor, there seemed to be teams. One doctor leading an entourage, a bundling of white coats and green scrubs and rapid-fire talking. In maternity, the doctors strolled, but here, they strode, covering ground, veering suddenly into rooms.

  Karen stopped in front of a room. SICU. Surgical Intensive Care. “You can go in, but only for a moment, now,” Karen said. He peered inside. Three nurses were sitting at a station, scrolling down on a computer. One of them, small and wiry and frowning, looked up at Gary. Karen placed a hand on Gary’s sleeve. “You should prepare yourself a little.”

  “For what?”

  “She’s going to look different. It’s all the blood pooling up inside of her. And there’s some tubing. To help her breathe. She’s anesthetized. In a deep-sleep state.”

  Gary didn’t know what to expect when he entered the room. It was one big room with four beds in it, each one positioned like an island, connected up with blinking monitors and IVs and tubes and a nurse’s station with three nurses whisking around. There were four patients, and none of them moving. It was a mistake. He didn’t see Molly, and then Karen gently touched him. She pointed. “Over there.”

  For a moment, he didn’t believe it was Molly in the bed. At first all he saw were the tubes and the IVs, and then he saw her, swollen and thickened, her long thin neck the size of a football player’s, her eyes shut, her skin red, as if she had rusted. One of the machines she was hooked up to made a noisy, rattling sound. It flashed a series of fluorescent green numbers and none of them made any sense to him. There was an orange leatherette chair by her bed and he pulled it closer to her, he sat down. “Molly.” His voice sounded funny to him. “Molly,” he said again. He took her hand. It was warm. It didn’t move.

  Gary felt as if he were sleepwalking. He didn’t know what to do, where to go, except that he couldn’t go home, couldn’t leave Molly here. He sat beside her bed, watching her, staring, marking time by the nurses who came to check her pulse, to adjust a tube, to tell him to go home and get a thing as simple and as impossible as some rest.

  He was keeping his vigil when Molly’s machine suddenly whirred and buzzed, so loudly he sprang to his feet, terrified and sick. “Nurse!” he shouted. Instantly, a nurse appeared. “Something’s happening—” he said, but the nurse seemed calm. She looked at the machine, tapped it on the side, pressed a button, and the buzzing stopped. “It happens all the time,” she told him.

  He felt himself snapping, like a rubber band. He got up to walk the halls, to calm himself, and he stopped at the nursery. There was one other man there, older, with a full white beard, a shock of hair. Someone’s grandfather, he guessed, tapping at the glass. Gary stared in at his son, who was sleeping, swaddled in a blanket, unaware of him or Molly or the sudden new danger crackling and glinting.

  Two hours later, he finally left the hospital. As soon as he got to the house, the balloons bobbing on the railing made him sad and helpless. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t think he could bear to see them inside the house, floating toward the ceiling. He didn’t want to see them deflating and he couldn’t bring himself to puncture them, so instead, he untied them, he jerked them free. He opened his hand and let them sweep across the sky.

  Inside the house, he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sit still. He called the hospital. “Critical,” a voice said, and he told himself that at least that meant she was the same, she was no worse, things could change for the better at any moment. He went into Otis’s room and looked around. He wished he had family. He wished he still had Pearl. When he was growing up, all she had to do was look at him and know that he was sad or lonely or feeling unsure, and she had always seemed to know just what to do abo
ut it. She used to pluck him up and take him places, the roller rink, the theater. She helped him get his mind off his troubles.

  Well, he didn’t have Pearl anymore. He didn’t have brothers or sisters or anyone but Molly, and he couldn’t reach her. So he did the next best thing he could think of. He called a few friends of Molly’s: Cinda, a second-grade teacher she liked; Jack, who taught kindergarten. He called Ada at work and Allan in Ithaca and Bob in Boston.

  He didn’t know what to say, and every time he opened his mouth, he felt as if he were standing outside of himself watching, listening to this poor awkward man stumbling over his own words. The people he called were always shocked, horrified, numb. No one knew what to do or what to say. “I’ll have my class make cards,” Jack offered, and Gary didn’t want to tell him that Molly wouldn’t know if they sent cards or not. Cinda cried on the phone, so long and hard Gary ended up comforting her. “I’ll visit every day,” she wept. “We’ll cry on each other’s shoulders.”

  “Molly can’t have visitors,” he blurted.

  Ada told him he was under stress. “Let me cook you dinner,” she said. “Tempeh, pickled plum—all excellent for stress.”

  “I can’t eat,” he told her. “But thank you.”

  Three seconds into each call Gary made, he was immediately sorry he had picked up the phone at all because the more people tried to help, the worse he felt, the more panicked, more unraveled. His terror became more real, more immediate, just by saying what was happening out loud, and by involving another person in it.