Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

“I have this great natural healing book at home,” Ada said. “I’m going to look Molly’s symptoms up and get back to you.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Bob kept repeating.

  “I can be up there in two hours,” Allan told him. “Stay for a fourday weekend.”

  “Come here?” Gary felt baffled. “I’m at the hospital all day. I just wanted to talk.”

  “No, no, you’re in no state to know what you need. You need someone to take over. I’ll help out. I’ll clean the house. I’ll be there to talk to when you get home.”

  He felt exhausted talking to Allan. “No, no, please don’t come up. I’m fine.” He tried to sound reassuring.

  “You sure? You’ll be okay?”

  He was drowning. There was no oxygen, no light. “I’m fine,” Gary insisted.

  “You keep me posted, then,” Allan told him. “She won’t die, I know it. She won’t—”

  Gary cut him off, hanging up the phone. He felt grateful for the silence of the house. He left the phone and went into the bedroom. He’d sleep, he’d forget. He’d get up in the morning and maybe things would be different. Maybe it would all be a bad dream, like one of those stupid cliff-hanger TV shows where the hero suddenly wakes, and the fact that the hero could even imagine himself in some sort of terrible situation or tragedy is all a big huge joke everyone can laugh over.

  He bunched up Molly’s pillow against him, trying to form it into Molly’s slender weight, but as soon as he smelled her fragrance on the case—ocean and rose—he felt himself unraveling again. He jolted up from bed. He went upstairs to his computer. Work, he could lose himself in work. But as soon as he logged on, he ignored all the files for the environmental series, for the new Reading Rider series, and instead he got on the Internet. He searched for medical forums, for the names of doctors, experts, anyone who might know something. He found the name of a hematologist. Dr. Steven Ribor. He buried his head in his hands. He looked up and typed in a query, a message in a bottle, a plea for rescue. My wife gave birth and is suddenly seriously ill. The bleeding won’t stop. He looked at the words. He kept typing. He started out slow and full of purpose and within minutes he was begging shamelessly for papers, for information, for help, pleas flung out across the wires. He wrote down his phone number, his address, his name. Call anytime, day or night, he begged. Please, Gary typed out. Respond. This is an emergency. Please.

  He fell asleep at the computer, deep and dreamless, and in the morning, he woke with a start, his head on the computer table, his back coiling with cramps, his neck stiff. He hinged himself slowly upright and blinked at the computer. He had two pieces of E-mail. Turn your washer into a cash cow! and Answer to your question. He deleted the cash cow mail and clicked open the other. It was from a doctor in Los Angeles. “Hemorrhage after childbirth could be from the uterus failing to contract,” the doctor wrote. “Sometimes removal is necessary. I need more information to be more specific. Please keep me posted. This sounds like an interesting case.”

  An interesting case. Gary felt a flicker of rage. The doctor wanted more information. Well, maybe that was the problem, because Gary didn’t have any. Gary got up and reached for the phone to call the hospital, thought better of it, and instead went to get dressed to go and see Molly himself.

  Gary paced the halls, trying to steady himself, and every time he passed the SICU, he grabbed for a glimpse of Molly, making sure she was still there, making sure the nurses were watching her. He walked and walked, wired, too terrified to sit down for a minute. He would have kept walking except a doctor, a lean, bony man in a long white lab coat who looked as if he were sucking on a piece of slightly rotted fruit, stopped him. “Are you Molly’s husband?”

  Gary nodded.

  “I’m Dr. Price, your wife’s hematologist.”

  “What’s wrong with my wife?”

  “We’re running some new tests right now.”

  “But what do you think it is? You must have some ideas—”

  Dr. Price gave him a hard stare. “I will tell you my ideas when I see the test. It would be foolish to be premature.” He strode out of the room, as if it were somehow Gary’s fault, as if Gary were to blame.

  On the way out, Gary stopped at a bank of pay phones. A woman next to him was laughing into the phone. “An itty-bitty cyst!” she cried happily. A man on the other side of Gary was nodding glumly. Gary dialed Brian, his boss. The machine picked up on the second ring.

  “It’s me,” Gary said. He cleared his throat. The laughing woman beside him giggled and tapped the phone.

  The line buzzed and crackled. Something beeped. “Hold on,” Brian said. “Let me get rid of this other call.” Gary waited and then Brian came back on. “Emily in Accounting. She never gets the hint not to leave a message, to just call me until she gets me. I never return calls to subordinates. It puts me on their level.” Brian took a breath. “Hey, Gary, so how does it feel to be a dad?”

  “Ada didn’t tell you?”

  “Ada? Ada’s a secretary.”

  Brian said nothing the whole time Gary was talking. He was so silent that for one moment Gary thought he might have hung up or been disconnected. “Are you there?”

  “Of course I’m here. You take all the time you need,” Brian said. “I can get you more unpaid leave if you need it. Don’t you worry about anything.”

  Gary hung up the phone the same time the laughing woman did. She gave him a big smile, but he couldn’t manage to return it. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t really seeing him anyway.

  Molly came back from the operation, four clear plastic drains attached to her stomach, a new tube tracked down her nose. He couldn’t bear to look at her. He couldn’t bear to look away. He wanted to get up on the bed and lie against her, nest among the tubes. I’m right here. I’m with you. You breathe. I breathe.

  Dr. Price strode by with another doctor he didn’t know, a small, round man with a Band-Aid on his nose who introduced himself as Dr. Kane. “The surgeon.”

  Gary waited. Dr. Kane looked uncomfortable and then cleared his throat. “We cleaned up a lot of the bleed. But she’s still bleeding.”

  “The blood work is still not good,” said Dr. Price. “Normal hematocrits, the red blood counts for a woman her age, are thirty-five to sixty. Hers are nineteen. Not good at all. I want to start a transfusion.”

  “What does she have?”

  “We’re doing more tests,” said Dr. Price. “CAT scans. MRls. Nuclear medicine. We can perhaps track the bleeding with isotopes, find the source. If need be, we can glue the veins closed.”

  “What?” Gary felt as if he were dreaming.

  “I like it because it’s nonsurgical. You go in with catheters.”

  “But what does she have? Why can’t you tell me anything?” Gary felt a knot of anger forming. A headache took on speed behind his eyes.

  “Because,” Dr. Price said, “we don’t know yet.”

  The days took on an eerie kind of rhythm. He had his routine. He checked in with Molly first, sitting by her bed as long as the nurses would let him. He never knew what to do, what might be the magic thing that could unlock her to him. Sometimes he held her hand. Sometimes he talked to her, trying to act normal, as if that might force things back to normal themselves. “It’s freezing cold outside,” he told her. He told her jokes and riddles that he had once thought were funny. “I love you,” he said. Her eyelids flickered and opened, making him bolt to his feet, but all that happened was her eyes rolled upward and then her lids shut again. “I love you,” he tried again, but her lids stayed shut this time.

  Sometimes he brought in the newspapers and loudly read her horoscope to her. Stand up to your boss and you’ll see great results.

  “See?” he said to her. “Tell those doctors you’re fine. Stand up from the bed.” He urged her upward, he made his voice rich with enthusiasm, fluid with love, and when she didn’t stir, he began to read the baby’s horoscope. “Get active now. Go for a ride in the country.” He laughed
, despite himself. He never read his own fortune. He was too terrified to find out.

  He read aloud to her from a novel he had picked up. He turned on the boom box. “Sing along with me!” he ordered. He sang along to the Monkees, to the Beatles, he hummed to Vivaldi. She never moved. A nurse glided by, her hair tied in a small bun on top of her head. She stood in the doorway watching Gary. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it,” she said, nudging her chin toward a monitor that kept flashing a series of numbers. “I like her numbers.”

  Gary glanced at the numbers. “Those are good?”

  “Uh-huh.” She gave him a smile.

  Gary watched Molly’s numbers, making sure they stayed at those levels for at least an hour before he got up to see his son in Maternity.

  The nursery was at the far end. There were always fathers and grandparents and relatives pressed up against the glass waving at the babies, sometimes a new mother in a robe, her hair tied back with a ribbon, and the happiness felt so new and brilliant, Gary felt blinded by it. Today, there was only one other man there, about Gary’s age, a lean, horse-faced blond with a scrubby mustache. The nurse behind the glass noticed Gary and held Otis up. He had a white cap on with a bright green pom-pom. Across the side it said, I got my first hug at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Otis blinked gravely at him and for the first time, he saw Otis had Molly’s eyes. Stricken, confused, he stepped back from the glass, bumping into the man next to him.

  The man patted Gary good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Don’t even tell me about it. Lack of sleep. Me, too.”

  Gary looked at Otis again, at Molly’s eyes studying him in that small perfect face. The nurse grinned and lowered Otis back into his bassinet.

  The other man disappeared and there was Gary, alone in front of the glass, watching three nurses move among the babies, holding them up, nuzzling them, cradling those sweet, lovely faces, those perfect tiny bodies. The nurses clowned around. They made the babies wave their tiny hands, like small, brilliant star bursts. They combed the hair of the babies who had hair into tiny marcel waves, into parts in the middle, far on the side. One of the nurses looked up and noticed Gary. He waved weakly. She bent and picked up Otis again and then she motioned to Gary to come around the side. Puzzled, he walked over.

  “Listen,” she said in a low voice. “Mr. Goldman, I’m so sorry about your wife. Would you like to hold your son and feed him his bottle? There’s a private room back here.”

  He felt weak with gratitude. “Yes. Yes, please, I would.”

  He followed the nurse to a small sunny side room. He sat in a chair and she gently put Otis into his arms. “He’s the king of the road in there,” she said. “I swear all the other babies ask him for advice.” She held up one finger and whisked from the room, returning with a bottle. “There you go,” she said, handing the bottle to Gary.

  She bent over the two of them. She was young and lean and coffeecolored, with dreadlocks that bobbed whenever she moved. “Here’s Mr. Handsome,” she said, guiding the nipple into Otis’s mouth. “I told him I’d wait for him to grow up so I could marry him. He’s got great manners. He doesn’t fuss when the lights go out to sleep. Good personality. He doesn’t scream for his bottle, but waits politely, and he never, ever pees in my face when I go to change his diaper.” She waggled a finger at Otis. “Do you, honey?” She laughed. She gently repositioned Gary’s grip. “Hold him close,” she advised. “Later, I’ll give you a diaper-changing lesson, but for now I’ll just leave you two alone for a while. Let you get acquainted.”

  Gary felt as if the world were breathing, expanding and contracting around him, pulling him with it. He thought of Molly and he felt something breaking inside of him. He looked down at his son. Otis felt so sturdy. He smelled like powder and milk and a bottomless ocean. Gary buried his nose against Otis’s neck, making the baby squirm. Otis felt and dozed and fed again in his lap. Gary could look at his son forever, at his tiny nose, his hands, his perfect feet. He felt an astonished rush of love, and then a deep, wrenching hurt. What did babies know? Did Otis feel abandoned by Molly? Abandoned by a father far less jolly than the one who had told him bad jokes when Otis was still in the womb? “I’m so sorry, pal,” Gary said, tickling Otis’s chin. “I don’t know what else to do.” Otis sighed and stretched. Gary didn’t want to move, even when the muscle in his left leg began to cramp. No, he waited, as still as a crib bed until the nurse reappeared and took the baby from him, and as soon as she had, his hands felt empty, useless weights in his lap.

  Even when Gary left the hospital, he felt as if he were at the hospital. He went outside and he swore he smelled disinfectant. He got in his car and he heard the monitoring machines from Molly’s room whirring and clicking, an undertone to the sounds of the car engine. He turned on the radio, and a girl group sang about loving someone forever, about never letting go, and he switched it off again. The whole drive home, he kept staring at the people walking around, living their lives, in stupefaction. How can you? he thought. How can you?

  He watched a couple sharing sips from a bottle of soda. He saw a man in a business suit link hands with a well-dressed woman. All those little moments. That timing. But then he thought of how when he had first met Molly, he had wanted to take it slow. To get it right. To prepare. And he hadn’t been able to stop himself from rushing ahead with her. Who knew what might be happening now if he had gone slower? If he hadn’t gone to Molly’s house that night and spent the night, if he had waited for the third date or the fourth to sleep with her? If he hadn’t been in such a hurry to make a family for himself, to be in the best possible place? What if the sum of all his choices had added up to this—Molly in the hospital, Molly dying?

  He found a parking spot near the house, and when he got out, when he saw the empty neighborhood, the empty house in front of him, he suddenly couldn’t go back inside there. Not alone.

  He climbed back into the car. He didn’t know where he was going. He kept driving and driving, getting on the Jersey Turnpike. He just kept going.

  He drove until it started to get dark and then, too exhausted to continue, he turned around and came home. He parked two blocks from the house. For a minute, he rested his head along the steering wheel. And then he pulled himself up. He got out of the car and he walked back. None of the neighbors came out of their houses.

  He got to his front porch. He was about to get his key, to jiggle it into the lock when he saw a small white card tucked into the front door, his name scribbled across the front of it in red ink. He stared at the card for a moment, and then slowly opened it.

  Hallmark. Or what he called a drugstore card, the kind Pearl had loved. A basket of violets was on the front, a white kitten, curled like a comma about the basket. He opened the card. Best wishes from the neighbors, it said. The handwriting loped across the page. He couldn’t tell whose it was. He folded the card shut, put it in his pocket, and went inside.

  He left early each morning and came home so late the streets were dark. Gifts began appearing, always with hopeful cards, some of them signed by people he couldn’t remember telling about Molly. Get well soon, they said. Some of them were from the neighbors. How could they know? Maybe they called the hospital and asked. Maybe they just assumed, with Molly not coming home, the balloons down. He opened the cards and presents to have something to do, pulling out tiny redstriped outfits, a glittering vest, books, and booties. There were usually nine or ten messages on the machine. Molly’s friends wanting to know how she was. Cinda, weeping on the phone, making him feel so shocked and frightened he deleted the message before it played itself out. Every time he heard a voice, rich with concern, dizzy with fear, he felt worse. He felt overwhelmed. He didn’t want to have to call them, to say any of what was happening out loud. Instead, he wrote out E-mail. Progress reports he sent out over the wires.

  He was numb. There was no respite, not even at sleep where he dreamed he was in blue scrubs entering a great dark operating room, calling out, “Hello? I can’t opera
te in the dark here. Hello?” He heard the soft sounds of a machine breathing for a patient he couldn’t see. “Hello?” he called again. No one answered and he began to get more and more agitated and the operating room loomed larger and larger and the machine seemed to sputter in panic and then he heard this great loud ringing in his head and he bolted awake, sweating. The phone was ringing. He glanced at the clock. Two in the morning. He stumbled for the receiver.

  “Hello, is this Gary?” A woman’s voice, soft and serious.

  “Yes.”

  “You doing okay?” There was a pause. “I read your request on-line for information. Is it okay that I’m calling so late? You did say it was all right to call.”

  He pulled up from bed, swinging his legs onto the floor. He turned on the light, looking for his pen, his pad of paper. “Please. Yes, it’s fine, it’s fine. Tell me what you have.”

  “I have steak.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Steak. You like steak dinner? Wouldn’t that make you feel better, help you to be stronger?” There was a rustling in the background. “I don’t live too far from where you are. And I’m blonde.” She paused. “All over. Collar and cuffs.”

  Gary put the paper down, he let the pen roll from his fingers onto the wood floor. “This is supposed to be about blood.”

  The woman laughed, deep and throaty. “I think I know how to make it boil,” she whispered and he hung up.

  He couldn’t move. He didn’t know what to do. If he wiped his name from the message, he might not get any more crank calls, but he might not get the one call from someone who did know something, who might have even gone through the same thing.

  The phone rang again, making him start. The blood boiler, he thought. Or maybe it was a psycho wanting to come over and rob him. I can’t do this, he thought, and then he picked up the phone, not speaking, waiting.