Sherry removed the IV from Katt’s arm first, a simple uncoupling and hanging up and rolling aside. Then she put slippers on Katt’s feet and offered her arm. She wondered about the heart monitor, the transmitter, how sensitive it was to motion, how observant the attendant nurses might be as they lound the door and ventured into the corridor.
“Hurry,” Katt whispered.
Her roommate snored on.
The world was one great surge. Daddy shouted at him. Nighttime, the years ripping backward. Daddy was big and angry and ugly, gripping his arms and shoving him backward into his bedroom. The door slammed forever, air buffeting him with a soft harsh blow. Dark light. This light.
Loneliness in an empty nighttime room. '
He wanted Mommy. Or the blank-faced lady, the friend of the family. She’d be a comfort too.
He shouted for Mommy, or imagined he did: Things did and didn’t happen. The room swirled with a sweep of light and then it closed up into darkness again. His dny space refused to hold steady. Out of it came peeling the peach-faced nurse, saying something, moving in shadow, her mouth in flow, her face dissolving, returning, as she went about her business. Sticking metal into him. Putting her hands on him, cool, clammy, not wandng to be with him. Ripples of hair, stabbed by a starched cap—and under it, no eyes, no nose, no lips, just peach skin with pretend stuff stuck on it to seem like features. She was somewhere else. Her words, sweeps of nonsense, slurred and lied.
And then she was gone, the roomswirl again swallowing her and bringing back loneliness.
Daddy shouted at him, shoved him into his room. Door slam. Dark light. This light.
Alone.
Night gnarled in to torment him, digging at his pores like blunt barbs, hurting his head. Daddy sat in darkness, out of reach; he was shouted-out, except for the shouts in his head. They could hear each other’s shouts; they could feel each other’s hurts. A whip-snap of thread, like tin-can phones, connected them, head to head, hurt to hurt.
The radiator dcked; it plucked diy rubber bands that snapped as they broke. The darkness jittered with dryness and razor lines, like drizzle defying gravity.
The roomswirl came again, a wider sweep of light this time, feelings that made moist the dryness, that shattered the drizzle-lines and filled the room with sniffs of rose.
Bobbles of shapes and whispers followed the return of darkness. Delight approached him. A double woman in soft whispers came staggering out of the dark. The blank-faced lady had recovered her face, where volcanoes of burst fire burned. And Mommy, things not right with her, melted down onto his bed, Mommy-smells heavy on her, hands filling the air, taking the rhythms of the surging room and working to slow them, tame them, offering warmth and comfort.
The walk down the long corridor took an eternity. If Sherry hadn’t come back, and Katt had tried it on her own, she’d never have made it. The corridor stretched too long and her legs were too unsteady. She would have collapsed, been found by interns or nurses, returned to her bed. But Sherry steadied her and, without being too obvious, helped her forward, a normal stroll to passing eyes.
As they approached Conner’s room, Katt saw two nurses down a T’d hallway, distant but walking their way. A face registered. Nurse Brenda. Katt looked away as Sherry put a hand on Conner’s door and pushed on it. The eye contact had been fleeting. Katt hoped, merging with the darkness, that the woman’s mind had been elsewhere, or that her eyes were none too sharp, or that Sherry had provided the cover she needed.
Equipment lights against the wall helped her adapt to the dimness. Sherry guided her. “Take it easy,” said her friend. “Don’t bump anything. He’s not going anywhere.”
“I know.” Excitement. The air impeded her. His bed grew bigger, but so slowly, and Katt could see, or thought she did, his body there under the covers, his head turning to acknowledge her. She was so weak. She dreaded finding herself powerless when at last her hands found his head, a fear that the best she’d manage was to feel his dying take him away, able only to detect his sickness and not to stop it. That would devastate her.
Sherry brought her around to the window side, lowered her to the bed, where she lay down and found her son’s head with her hands. It felt so good to lie down. The air was cool on her legs, but that didn’t matter. She could smell the sweat of her exertion, feel the beaded sweat on Conner where she touched him. He made a sound. Incomprehensible but welcoming. She wanted to cry, but damped it down, her focus now upon his scalp, probing swifdy, deep inside his brain. She touched it, felt the extent of the ravage, its spread so rapid these last three days. Guilt almost froze her but she forced it away.
No time for that now. If she allowed herself the awful luxury of guilt, he might expire during that indulgence.
She shut her eyes, willed the healing into her hands. Nothing but enfeeblement there. Come on, come on, but she again calmed her breath, trying not to push the river, and it began at last, the healing power, to rise in her hands. Rich and gleaming, it rose like gold.
Voices behind her. A hand slapped the wall and light bled through her eyelids. She opened her eyes, turned her head, saw the nurse and the tattooed muscled intern ignore Sherry’s attempts to put them off, spouting stock cautious catch-phrases as they moved toward her—there there, we’re going to take you back now, Mrs. Galloway, you can see him tomorrow, you can’t go wandering off like this, it’s not a good thing for you or for him. But all the while, beneath all that talk, there was fear and firmness and a readiness to grapple her down, force her to their will.
The intern touched her, a tight grip on her arm.
She shook him off, stunned at her strength. “Get out of here!” she said, vicious, protective. He drew back his hand as from a hot stove, then came on more forcefully, an ache in his face but a determination there too. In sudden light, Conner’s face was slack, his eyes fixed but jittery upon her. The intern’s hands gripped her arms high up and began pulling her off the bed. She struggled, her legs in motion, her hands ineffectually reaching for her son. “No please, you can’t do this,” she pleaded, but his right arm curled about her waist and his left
shot across her, below the neck, grappling firmly her right shoulder, drawing her back against his chest, up from the bed, away from Conner.
“Let her go,” a male voice commanded sharply.
The intern stopped, holding her. Katt swung her head about, saw Doctor Bein in the doorway. Sherry was looking at him. Nurse Brenda seemed stunned.
“Should I?” The intern held on.
“She’s resisting,” the nurse protested.
“Her son is dying,” the doctor said, looking straight into Katt’s eyes. “I’ll take full responsibility. I want her to have thirty minutes alone with him.” He glanced at the clock. “At eight forty-five, no sooner, you can wheel Mrs. Galloway back to her room. Make that nine.”
The intern relaxed his grip, helping her back down to the bed and releasing her. Her hands found Conner’s scalp again. Elsewhere in the room, voices whispered, there was movement and the snapping off of the light and then a void where before had been disturbance. But already, all of it was fading from her awareness, as she felt the heat of her son’s head and ventured inside it, praying for her healing gift to return more completely than ever, bringing to bear upon his illness all the love and undoing she could muster from her healed heart.
Bein invited Sherry to the physician’s lounge for coffee and she demurred at first, wondering if she shouldn’t stay outside Conner’s door, but he coaxed again and she agreed. The place was furnished like an old classy living room, an Oriental rug, lamps, couches with pillows and dark-stained curved arms.
He set a steaming mug of filtered coffee—in paisleyshaped swirls at its rim as he moved—on the table before her. Honey, a silver pitcher of cream, and packets of unprocessed sugar waited on an ornate tray.
“Thanks,” she said, smacking a tan packet on the edge of the coffee table and tearing it open.
“My pleasure.” Yes,
and his lust.
“So why’d you do it?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Rules are made to be broken. Life’s a bore if you don’t take risks. I like to shake up my staff every now and then. It was a private room. She wanted so fiercely to be there. Who knows?” He paused, lifdng his mug to his lips, momentarily indrawn. Then he set the mug down. “But the real reason, I guess, is that they kept me from seeing my mother die. Eight years old. Protect him, they thought. Good thoughts, but misguided. I’ve seen my share of deaths since then—but I didn’t see that one.”
“Conner . . . he’s dying?” It was hard to say.
“Yes.” He took another slow sip. “I’ve never seen a more thorough disintegration of the brain than his. If he lasts the night, I’ll be surprised. In fact— please don’t tell her this—”
“I won’t.”
“—my guess is that her being there, holding him, may well allow him to give up whatever resistance he’s feeling and slip away in peace. He’s probably 'dying as we speak.”
“Sad,” she said. It wasn’t right. Conner was such a sweet kid, so easy to talk to. He’d helped her as much as she had helped him. And now all of those basement tete-a-tetes, open, frank, loving, would become mere memory, gone forever.
“Some families, some people, live for years without a hitch. Then a series of blows fall. Most of the time the only support is institudonal and that too often is little more, can be little more, than impersonal. From what your unfortunate friend has said, your staying power has been a godsend, per,haps their only comfort in weeks.”
She was going to brush aside his compliment, downplay or deny it. But it was true, and they weren’t playing any games here. “Thanks,” she said. “I love them both. It’s been the right thing to do, something I needed to do.”
The intercom, subdued here but clear as a bell, spoke like a close friend in the air: “Doctor Bein to the third floor nurses’ station, please.” And again.
He rose and sighed, patting his pockets, taking a pad from one and a pen. “Listen, I like you lots. If I don’t ask you for your number, I’m gonna kick myself later.”
He had that easy brashness of the professional man, a turn-on when modulated with humility. And he was cute, if a bit older than she preferred. She was tempted.
“I don’t hear anything,” he said, pen poised, a humor in his voice that she liked.
“I’m sorry,” Sherry said. “I’m involved with someone else. Pretty seriously.” She put a soft edge of kindness to it, hoping to let him down easily. No matter how old a person got, from her experience, rejection always hurt.
He covered his disappointment well. Pocketed the pad as he said: “He’s one lucky guy, whoever he is. You tell him that, next time you see him, okay?” A warm right hand rested on her neck momentarily, his thumb against her jaw, then away, its perfect touch lingering there.
“I will,” she said, and watched him leave.
Mommy breathing, ragged but normal, her lungs a bolt of cloth scored by fingernails. Smell of her sweat, eyes closed and hands wrapping his head in skull-warmth. Felt soothing. Trickles of light seeping in.
Hurt to move his eyes. Did so anyway, following the wires bending out of her body and back into a pocket on her chest. She was saying nothing. No matter. Being there. Being here was enough. That and her perfect hands. Surrendering to them. She sat close. Warm weight beside him.
Beyond her, Daddy shouting at him. The blankfaced, no she had a face, the pretty lady (had she just left the room?) murmuring something. Wavy lips losing waver. The sounds a babble, no longer breaking up.
Streams of light from Mommy’s hands. Like taut skin on his face at a beach, diamond wetness lifted by the sun and light penetrating to diy and tighten. Beach? Flight to Florida, staying with Gramma, relieved to fly home.
Roomswirl slowing. Carousel turned off and drifting unhurriedly to a stop. The red light yonder, circles and smears against an unsteady dark, growing hard, unmelting, steadying. Something out of his mouth, almost meaning to it. Shhh, she said, not
opening her eyes, inslipping the light to his brain, scour of a vacuum cleaner as she made her scan and sweep. More something out of his mouth, but she ignored it and it went away.
He closed his eyes.
Mommy aroma. Comfort. Daddy by his bed, reading or weeping, head bent. He reached out to him, to his daddy. Reached a hand. Nothing. He touched his mom. Gave soft pats to her shoulderblade. Shhh, she said, though he had said nothing. She meant don’t break her concentration is all.
He patted her.
She gave him light.
When he opened his eyes, the pretty lady was holding off in the darkness, invisible. But when he closed them, there she was in his head. Her red lips made their sound and in his imagining it unrolled into I love you. Throat rumbles. He was saying it also, same shape, same sounds.
Shhh, his mother said.
He patted her.
She gave him light.
At first what Katt found daunted her. How could she hope to undo it? She thought of dried fruit, shrivel and pucker and unplump, small ugly gaps where before had been ripe brain. The book she’d examined in Iowa came back to her, the cumulative horror of the drawings and photos she saw—healthy brains, ravaged brains, like so much decayed cauliflower. Now here it lay before her, an outrage Katt had set free, the advancing ruin at the core of her son’s mind.
She felt paralyzed. Her emotions threatened to stop her, to choke off all action. Shock at what she found, a renewed assault of guilt, fear that she’d be unable to do anything to heal him—these conspired to cripple her.
But she acknowledged them, honored them, and invited them in another time. Not now. Weak though she was, she had healed her heart. Now, if she could only stay in the moment, focus on Conner, focus on her hands and on moving over his wounds, mending, soothing, meeting the onslaught of decay with the counter-energy that intuition dictated, she had a chance to rescue him.
Again not pushing the river, but acquainting herself with the terrain, finding the edges at which the sickness advanced, and directing energy in and about them, she saw at last, after innumerable passes, evidence of healing—a halt, a moving backward, a replacement of collapsed cells with healthy ones. Or rather, the dying matter must have revived, found again its function, resumed living as Katt passed by, drawing strength from her and inspiration from its neighbors newly revived. Go easy, she thought. Baby steps, one by one, her goal clear but unhurried. There’d be time enough. She shooed away worries that there might not be. For now— everything shut out but this moment and this bed— there was only giving, the sure giving that had come to her hands, that had taught itself how to give and that gave now in abundance.
Conner murmured something, a blurred “I love you.”
Shhh, she said. No time to process that, or what 193
it said about his progress. It was sufficient to feel it as a reflection of her giving, itself love, and to cycle new strength from it back into the task at hand.
How would she explain this? A future worry, a drain on her present doing. She let it fall away, keeping only the clear image of Conner’s brain-scan before her. Heels in the hall. Some imperious nurse going by. She relaxed and widened the scope of her energy, picking up the sense of healthy areas, neurons and dendrites properly working, and sharing that sense with the areas in need of healing. To Katt’s joy, they responded. The pace of their revival quickened.
She felt a touch on her shoulder. His hand, patting her. Shhh, she said, but it pleased her. It fed back an abundance of energy to her heart, and the strength in her hands increased as well. In some ways, it felt like what went on about the massage table, the body taking on tone, natural sighs telling her what soothed a client—but much deeper with Conner, more intimate, more loving. Just his presence completed some loop in her, and sensing his slow rise to health, her fingers kneading his scalp, made this moment the closest she’d felt to him since delivering him into the world and caring for him
in infancy.
Guilt battered at her again but she refused to yield to it. She had to end this, had to let the healing energy have its moment, complete and unhampered.
Like a potter bent over clay, she worked him, under her hands, coaxing out a perfection little by little with all the patience she could summon. The spread of disease reversed itself, desiccadon en-moistured, drawing back to the caudate center, tiny there, shrinking until, like the last dark patch of night under the onslaught of sunlight, it winked out and was gone.
When at last she opened her eyes, he was beaming at her, his gaze steady, fatigue there but whole joy and the sense that she’d rescued him from a lion’s den. His eyes glowed as if he were in the presence of an angel.
Katt grimaced. She didn’t feel at all angelic.
“Hi,” she said, tousling his hair sis she lifted her hands from his head. Something rumbled in her, something preparing to pounce.
“Hi back.” A weak smile. “I love you, Mom.”
Katt leaned forward in a rush, scooping him up into her arms. “I love you too,” she said, and then—the door opening to the soft ratchet of a wheelchair being wheeled in—the guilt Katt had managed to hold off began to sweep through her, coming on full force.
8
A Healing and a Forgiveness
The doctors had been amazed. They’d kept Conner for a few more days but fewer than they preferred, giving his body time to recuperate and, not coincidentally, allowing them to run their tests again. Katt had acquiesced, only interested for a time in regaining her own strength where she lay, a minor hospital celebrity, and in being wheeled to her son’s room. But by the time she insisted on their discharge and Sherry drove them home, the pressing weight of what she’d done to him had darkened her mind, had hung depression on her soul. Where before, Conner had avoided her, she now avoided him.
He’d hug her in the morning, they’d exchange I-love-yous, and then he’d bike away as she drove to work. Busy in her cube, she stopped typing every so often to examine her hands. Tears welled up, but the parddons were high and she sdfled her sobs. Someday, she thought, he’ll be staring at me, and he’ll ask me the quesdon—the one I’m thinking of or, worse, one that catches me offguard. And I’ll lie to him, spot on, as I’ve lied to him already, an incessant litany of this-is-the-Jruf/i circling in my head as long as I’m looking at him. I’ll dig myself deeper, a pocket of deception that will come between us for as long as we live. I’ll love him and lie to him, and I’ll be as distant from him—though I’ll pretend otherwise, and that quite convincingly—as I was from Marcus.
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