Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  Gary sat by Molly’s bedside, holding her hand. Her eyes stayed shut, her chest rose and fell in awkward rhythm. Her hair was greasy and tangled and there were new white threads spun through it. Molly’s lips were chapped.

  “Molly.”

  He sat with Molly, bringing the bread to her nose. “Smell,” he ordered, but she was still, her face turned from him. He told himself it didn’t matter that she didn’t show a reaction. Who knew what was going on in her mind? The night before he had looked up stories on the Internet about coma, although he knew it was not the same thing as being anesthetized. An endless sleep. What did you know, what did you feel? Did Molly rise up as if from deep water and hear his voice? Was she dreaming?

  There was nothing on the Internet about anesthetized states, so he operated as if she were in coma. Kids had been brought out by their pet dog, smuggled into a hospital in a backpack, licking their bowners’ faces. Husbands had been brought out by a vial of their wife’s perfume set by the bed. People showed no sign of motion and then suddenly, abruptly, sat bolt upright and asked a question as if it were an ordinary day. Did you put an extra quarter in the washer? Did you start dinner yet?

  He came home to find Gerta watching TV, the baby asleep. “All is fine,” Gerta told him.

  He went to Otis’s room. “He’s sleeping,” Gerta warned, but suddenly Gary didn’t care. He wanted to see his son. He opened the door to the room and as soon as he did, Otis stirred and blinked up at him.

  He came downstairs with Otis dressed in a jacket and hat. Gerta’s mouth formed a line. “We’re going to the park,” he said. “Alone.”

  He told himself he didn’t need Gerta with him, but it was astonishing to him the things he was unsure about, the things he didn’t know how to do. When Otis cried, Gerta usually could stop him in seconds, with a bottle or a diaper. He fumbled with a pacifier and Otis spat it out. He tried to stroke his son’s head and Otis screamed louder.

  There were only a few other people there: an elderly woman in a blue coat reading a newspaper and eating a muffin, and a young woman with cropped black hair, a Walkman clamped to her head. She was in sweats, stretching, getting ready to run.

  He tried to reposition Otis on his lap, but the baby screamed more, so loudly the woman in sweats suddenly looked over at him. She unplugged her Walkman and walked over to him. “Burp him,” she said. Her hands flapped. “Pat his back. Bounce him a bit on your knee,” Gary bounced Otis, who erupted into a burp, and then yawned. “Told you,” the woman said. She smiled. She brushed at her hair. And then she looked down at his hand. “Oh, sorry, wedding band,” she said. “Thought you were a single dad. Just my luck, the nice, nurturing ones are married.”

  He stayed out until dinner and then he took Otis to the Tastee, where he had first met and fallen in love with Molly. The waitresses made a fuss and he stayed for an hour, Otis on the leatherette seat beside him.

  Gerta was furious when he came home. She plucked the baby from his arms, as if she were inspecting him for damage. She whispered to Otis. She cocked her head. “He’s telling me he was tired, that he didn’t want to go out, but you insisted, and he had no choice,” Gerta said. She whispered to Otis again. “He said he is worried now about you, and it is too much for a baby to worry about his father and his mother both.” She held up her head, as if she were listening to Otis. “Yes,” she said. “I understand completely.”

  Gary was coming home from the hospital the next day, when, to his surprise, he saw Gerta sitting on the front porch with Otis, talking with Theresa and Emma. It was the first time he had seen the neighbors, but more amazingly, it was the first time he had seen Gerta so animated. Her eyes lit like sparklers. Her free hand fluttered as she chattered, and she was relaxed. She seemed as if she was old friends with the neighbors.

  As soon as Gary approached the porch, his hands awkwardly at his side, the talk stopped. The women all looked at him, expectant, and then Emma suddenly got up and came over to Gary. She wavered. Her mouth moved as if she wanted to tell him something and then she took two steps toward him and hugged him. “A million times I wanted to come over, ask what I could do, but I didn’t want you thinking I was interfering.” She nodded at Gerta, who sat there, placidly rocking Otis. “Gerta’s been keeping us all posted on how Molly’s doing.”

  “On how you’re doing, too,” Theresa blurted.

  Gary looked at Gerta, but she was adjusting a button on Otis’s blue striped shirt.

  “We’re all so concerned,” Emma said.

  Theresa nodded. “I’ve been praying for her. For all of you. Saint Jude. Saint Ann. Every day, I light a candle.”

  “You tell us what you need,” Emma said. “Don’t hesitate.”

  Gary looked from one face to the other. “The casseroles were so delicious.”

  Theresa flushed, pleased.

  “Thank you for the cards.”

  Theresa nodded. “Wasn’t it a cute card?”

  “Please stop. You don’t thank neighbors,” Emma said quietly.

  Seeing the neighbors together like that seemed to unlock something. Where before they were hidden, they now seemed to be everywhere. He ran into Emma at the greengrocer’s. And although Theresa still didn’t speak to him when she was with Carl (and as soon as Carl saw Gary he burst into a determined, tuneless whistling that didn’t stop until he was a block away), when Gary saw her alone, as if to make up for her husband, Theresa was effusive. She always hugged him. She always kissed Otis. “How’s our baby?” she said, “how’s our Molly?” and he felt such a ridiculous flush of gratitude for the “our” that he could have wept.

  At the grocer’s, he saw Emma’s husband Bill, squeezing grapefruits. He nodded at Gary. He didn’t ask how Molly was. He didn’t bend and admire Otis, but he held up a grapefruit. “This one is ripe. Why don’t you take it?”

  Gary didn’t know how to repay any of the neighbors for their concern. He tried once to invite Emma and Bill to dinner, but Emma looked uncomfortable. “That’s my night to play cards,” she said, but that night, around the same time he had invited her to dinner, he saw her later in her backyard, taking wash from her line.

  The next day at the hospital, Dr. Price came into the room. He had a suit on under his white lab coat, which startled Gary a little because he couldn’t imagine what it meant. Dr. Price nodded at Gary. He lifted the sheet from Molly and probed at her stomach. He whisked the sheet back over her and then frowned up at the bag of blood hanging from the IV pole.

  “I don’t like her numbers.”

  “Is she worse?”

  “We’re going to try something else,” Dr. Price said. “Porcine Factor VIII. Sometimes it works when the human factor doesn’t. The problem is that each vial has to be separately checked, code numbers matched up. And we need so many vials, it could take a few hours for each transfusion.” He frowned again. He looked so disturbed it made Gary uneasy.

  “There’s not time?” Gary finally said, and Dr. Price shook his head. “Oh, no, there’s time. The problem is there’s no nurses. They can’t spare staff, especially two nurses, to take two hours to double-check the vials, but they’ll have to spare one. You’ll have to hire another nurse, a private one. It can be pricey, especially if we need to transfuse for any length of time, but I’ll talk to the insurance company, see if we can get them to pay for it.”

  “Anything she needs,” he said.

  “Good. I’ll get a nurse in here for you. We need to start the transfusions right away.”

  The private nurse they sent in was a tall, silent black woman. She wore a long blue scrub belted like a dress, and tiny red glass earrings and white running sneakers. She ignored Gary completely, bending to study Molly. “Okay, honey, I’m here.” Her voice was soft and smooth. Most of the time, she simply sat by Molly’s bed, reading from a stack of magazines she brought, sometimes leaning forward and looking intently at Molly. Four times a day, she got the porcine transfusion ready.

  It took her and another nurse an hou
r and a half to start the transfusion. They set out vials, they read off code numbers and doublechecked them, and then Gary left for the evening.

  The next morning, Dr. Price came by with a team of two other doctors. They talked outside the door, their voices threaded together, tightening, and no matter how Gary strained, he couldn’t hear a thing. They came into the room and looked at Molly and then Dr. Price took Gary aside and told him there was a problem with the insurance. “I’d fight them on this,” Dr. Price told Gary. “They don’t like to pay for what they consider beyond the normal range of things. I spoke with them myself. I told them this was hardly a normal situation.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “I’ll be willing to bet they’ll pay for at least eighty percent.”

  “All right,” Gary looked down at Molly. “Is it working better, the porcine?”

  The other two doctors looked awkward. “It’s too early to tell,” Dr. Price said finally.

  That night, Gary sat in front of his computer and switched it on, waiting for the green blinking cursor, for the screen saver he had recently put on: Molly, nine months pregnant in a white dress she was stretching across her belly, her head thrown back, laughing. Her hair like a long flame about her.

  He was about to go onto the Internet, which he did every night, to look and see if he could find anything new about Molly’s condition, when the phone rang. He picked it up. No one would call this late except the hospital, who thought nothing of calling in the middle of the night. Sometimes they wanted him to sign papers for another procedure, another operation, sometimes they just told him what they were doing. Half the time he didn’t recognize the doctor calling him. “Gary Breyer.” His voice sounded strange in his own throat.

  “Gary! Did you get my messages?”

  Gary slumped back in his chair. “Brian. I didn’t see any messages.” The chair rolled on the floor, and he stopped it with his feet. He remembered the work he was supposed to do for Brian, work he hadn’t even thought of.

  “Oh, I left them on the machine, I thought. Maybe it didn’t pick up.” Brian’s breath moved like a slow tide. “Hey. It was good to see you last week.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “What a game, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s Molly?”

  “The same.”

  “Oh.” Brian was silent for a moment. “Well, listen, I really hate to do this over the phone. But maybe there’s no good way to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “There have been cutbacks. Downsizing.” The line popped and hummed. Brian cleared his throat. “I got to have people I can depend on here. I’m firing you, Gary.”

  Gary heard his breath moving in and out of the phone.

  “Look, if you want, you could think of it as a blessing. Now you have the time you need to tend to your wife.”

  “You really have to do this now?” Gary said.

  Brian cut him off. “Hey, don’t put this all on me,” he said, his voice taking on an edge. “I gave you a chance, Gary. I told you to get the layouts in. I told you what was going on here. Be reasonable.”

  Reasonable. Brian was still talking but Gary couldn’t hear what he was saying anymore. He lowered the phone, gently replacing it in the cradle.

  Math texts, he thought. Environmental series. He thought of the ocean. He thought of a fish, bright and silvery and ready to spawn, a gleaming hook caught in its throat, rushed into a hospital and saved by modern medicine, brought back to his family in their ocean home. He saw suffocating nets. He felt salt water choked into lungs that could no longer breathe air or water or earth.

  Survival rates are not optimistic. He clicked the computer off. He cupped both hands over his face.

  He went to the kitchen to make himself some tea. Strong and hot enough to burn the fear from him. He put the kettle on. In the other room, he could hear the Home Shopping Network. “Isn’t that lovely?” a woman’s voice throbbed. “Wouldn’t you want that in every color?” He clicked on the dishwasher, which whirred and fretted and whined and died. He opened the door. Water pooled along the dishes and sloshed onto the floor. He took the dishes out and did them in the sink, and shut the dishwasher. He mopped up the water with a dish towel. He couldn’t afford to fix the dishwasher. He didn’t know what he was going to do.

  He looked out the window. There wasn’t another light on in the whole neighborhood. There wasn’t a house he could go to and bang on the door. He couldn’t ask his friends for money. They had wives and families of their own, they had bills.

  Bills, he thought. The mail was on the table. He hadn’t even thought to look through it yet this week. He sat down and siphoned the mail into piles. Junk mail, bills, letters, glossy magazines. The bills were the largest stack. The mortgage. Gerta. The private nurse. The hospital.

  He found his bank statement in the pile and tore it open. They had saved ten thousand dollars for them both to take time off to be with Otis. Their mortgage was two thousand a month; the rest of the bills, credit cards, utilities, were another three thousand. They had thought with careful planning, with some freelance they both could do, they’d be fine. But now, there were other things. Gerta was a thousand a week. The private nurse was five hundred a day and the insurance company didn’t want to pay for her. And he had no money coming in except for unemployment, which would barely keep him afloat. He couldn’t go and get a full-time job when he had to spend most of his time at the hospital, with his son. Who would hire someone who could only work at odd hours in the middle of the night, who, even then, had to be on call to leave at a moment’s notice? Well, he wasn’t proud. He’d do anything if someone would only let him.

  He stared at the bank statement. There was only four thousand left. He couldn’t afford Gerta anymore. He couldn’t even afford this month’s expenses.

  The kettle whistled. He shut off the gas. He left the kettle on the burner. He took all the piles of bills and muddled them together. He put them back into the mail basket, and then, panicked, he stood in the center of the kitchen. He’d have to do something. And fast.

  He tried to think, but his mind seemed to be caught in a stopper. His friends. Which of his friends could he call? Allan was having some money problems himself. Ada worked. The neighbors all had family of their own. Who? Who? It was like a drumbeat in his head, growing louder and more insistent.

  Cinda, Molly’s teacher friend. She was single. She worked only three days a week teaching music. She always used to call Molly complaining how bored and lonely she was, how teaching wasn’t enough for her. Maybe she could help out, spell him here and there out of friendship. He cleared his throat. He hoped she wouldn’t weep on the phone the way she had the last time he had called to tell her about Molly, that she wouldn’t keep apologizing, as if Molly’s illness were her fault. “I need your help,” he told her.

  Cinda didn’t cry when she heard his voice, but her voice began to lose its lilt. She spoke in a hushed, reverential tone. “I’d love to help out. You know I’d do anything for Molly. But I work,” she said. “Maybe I can baby-sit a few hours after school—” she said doubtfully. Then she brightened. “I know some real good baby-sitters.”

  “But that’s the point. I can’t afford the nurse anymore. I can’t afford baby-sitters. I need friends.”

  “Maybe you just need to get a group of people together,” she said cheerfully. “Have a kind of round robin of free baby-sitters.”

  “Why, what a good idea,” he said flatly. He felt disgusted. He could kill Cinda. He hung up and tried to think what to do, but all he saw was his bank account dwindling, the baby needing food and diapers and Molly needing him. And then suddenly, a thought blurted into his head. He knew what he had to do. The only thing left.

  He went into the bedroom and crouched down to Molly’s dresser and yanked open the bottom drawer. He dragged out the blue box, tossed off the lid, and grabbed out the acrylic puzzle. There inside that small white strip of paper was Suzanne’s phone numb
er and address.

  She was Molly’s sister, no matter what Molly said, no matter what had gone on before. Surely that mattered. He’d scrounge up money to pay her airfare. If she was with some boyfriend, well, he could come, too. Anyone could come, her cats, her dog, anyone, as long as they got here to help him.

  He pivoted the acrylic puzzle cube in his hands, moving some of the pieces experimentally. The steel balls zinged to a corner and stayed there. Goddamn. He didn’t have time for this. He jerked at the cube. It was a kid’s puzzle. It shouldn’t be so difficult. He had figured out the Rubik in less than two weeks; surely he could figure this out. Gary studied the acrylic block. He moved the puzzle so one of the balls got into the hole. He felt so nervous, as if this were some great test he had to pass. He moved the cube, trying to roll another of the balls toward the hole, and then, just as he almost had it, the first ball spilled out again.

  He bolted up. No. He yanked at the cube, getting more and more frustrated. He was sweating, his hair prickled. He tried to roll the balls toward the hole again, and they all suddenly flew in different directions.

  He stared at the cube.

  He went into the kitchen and banged open one of the drawers and grabbed out the big utility hammer. He set the cube on the floor and then he lifted the hammer and smashed and smashed at the cube until it broke open, Suzanne’s number unfurling before him like a sail.

  The phone rang six times, and then just as he was about to give up, a woman’s voice, raspy, exhausted, sounding nothing like Molly’s, said, “Yeah?”

  Gary swallowed. “Suzanne?”

  “You got her. Is this for an appointment?”

  “This is Gary. Molly’s husband.”

  There was a clip of silence. “And—” she finally said.

  “I’m calling because—because Molly’s really sick. She’s in the hospital.”