And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  “How is the pressure now?” Darius asked.

  “To be honest with you, it’s high. Much higher than I would like.”

  “But she’s breathing?”

  “Oh, yes!” Dr. Marjani responded, trying to sound optimistic. “We intubate right away. Breathing is the most primary goal at all times.”

  “But she’s not conscious?” Darius asked.

  “No, she is not conscious. She won’t be conscious for a long time.” The doctor debated adding the truth, that she may well never regain consciousness, but decided to wait.

  “What are the chances that she will recover?” Miranda asked. He was surprised that the hard question came from the girl. She was tougher than she looked.

  “It is too early to say.” Dr. Marjani squeezed the gelatinous brain and put it in his pocket. “We are, unfortunately, still very much in the dark ages when it comes to brain injuries. The biggest danger right now is a stroke. Ninety percent of coma patients die of a stroke.”

  “She’s in a coma?” Sophia asked.

  The doctor mentally kicked himself. The word was an old habit. “We don’t really like to use that word anymore. It’s very imprecise.” That and too many TV shows had given people the wrong idea about them.

  “Okay,” Miranda said slowly, “if this were ten years ago, would she be in a coma?”

  “Well, yes,” he answered. “Ten years ago, she would be in a coma.”

  “Is she brain dead?” Miranda asked.

  Again, the girl asking the hard questions! “I don’t know what it means to be brain dead. No one really does,” the doctor answered. “So, no, I could not say your sister is brain dead. Not yet. But she is sick. Very sick. The best we can do is hope.” He wanted to say “hope and pray,” but the hospital ethics committee had already issued several warnings to him about mentioning God to his patients or their families.

  “About her friend…” the doctor said.

  “We don’t know him,” Sophia interrupted. “He was just a…a passing thing.”

  “Ah.” The doctor nodded. “The police may want to speak with you about him. It seems that alcohol was involved.”

  “Helen was drinking?” Darius asked.

  “Her blood-alcohol level was zero, but the man was, ah, well over the legal limit.”

  Sophia felt like she was going to throw up. “Can we see her?” she asked.

  “Of course,” the doctor answered. “But one at a time. Please.”

  Darius and Sophia looked at each other. She could tell from her husband’s eyes that he wanted to go first. “You go,” Sophia said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, already standing.

  Sophia nodded. She wasn’t being generous. The truth was, she didn’t want to go into that room. Seeing Helen unconscious, hooked up to machines, a hole in her head, would make the nightmare real. For just a few more minutes, she wanted to hold on to her old world. The world before the end.

  When Sophia saw Helen lying in the hospital bed, her head encased in a metal cagelike contraption, she felt dizzy, as if the blood in her body were suddenly flowing in the wrong direction, the way the ocean is said to recede before a tsunami. Helen’s face was pale and expressionless, as if she were waiting to be born and given a personality. Neat black stitches formed a paisley pattern on her scalp. Like a baseball. Sophia wanted to gather her body in her arms and hold her but there were half a dozen tubes attached to her mouth, nose, arm, and up the inside of her leg, taking fluids away or putting them back. Sophia couldn’t be certain which. Instead, she lowered her own cheek to her daughter’s hand and held it there. A nurse entered the room.

  “Can she hear me?” Sophia sat up.

  “We don’t really know,” the nurse answered with an empty smile, “but it can’t hurt.”

  Sophia tried to think of something to say. When she was pregnant, it had been fashionable to play classical music next to the uterus and read aloud. She’d gone along with it, reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a phony, theatrical voice, but she felt as silly then as she did now. It was the same problem she’d always had with prayer—how do you talk to someone who can’t answer?

  “Helen?” she said, finally. “It’s your mother.” She wished the nurse would leave so that she would feel less self-conscious.

  “Honey”—she cleared her throat—“I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but you’re going to be out of here soon.” She stopped, hating how false she sounded. Sophia had no idea whether her daughter was going to get better. Already, her mind was swimming with a newly learned vocabulary of disaster: hematoma, ischemia, axonal, neuronal. When Dr. Marjani was talking, she had tried to let her mind open, to take in the bigger picture and interpret what the doctor was saying, not from his words, but his tone. She had been encouraged by the fleeting smile with which he had greeted them. If Dr. Marjani thought Helen was going to die, he wouldn’t have smiled, would he? But then she realized her error. Of course he would. The worse the news, the more he would want to comfort them.

  Sophia decided to be honest. She had always resented the lies parents were forced to tell their kids. From an early age, her kids knew Santa didn’t come down a chimney, storks didn’t bring babies, and fairies didn’t take the bloody tooth under their pillows. Maybe after death, you did go to a place where every body dressed in white, lived on a cloud, and drank the morning dew, but if life on earth was anything to go by, she doubted it. But when she tried to say something true, the only word that came to her lips was Sorry. Again and again, it pushed itself to the surface like a beach ball that wouldn’t sink. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Once she had her children, the only thing that really mattered to her was protecting them from harm. So where had she been when Helen got on a motorcycle with a drunk? Having lunch with a sick twist of an old woman. I am so motherfucking sorry. Useless word. But it was all that seemed to fit.

  “Helen,” Sophia said finally, “I am so sorry. I wish we could trade places. When you have a child, you’ll understand.” There it was again. That false note of optimism. When you have a child. The nurse poked her head in and pointed to her watch.

  Back in the waiting room, she sat next to Darius. He tried to smile but the expression on his face was ghastly. Sophia took his hand and they sat in silence, which is how the pretty woman with the clipboard found them.

  “Hi,” the woman said too brightly, “my name is Marta. I am in charge of public affairs for the hospital.” She smoothed the back of an already tight skirt and took a seat across from them. “You can’t see it from here, but our parking lot is filled with reporters who want to know how your daughter is doing.” The way she said it, as if they should be flattered, caused Sophia to develop an instant and unrecoverable dislike for her.

  “Why?” Darius asked.

  “Ah”—the girl licked her lips nervously—“because the driver was a celebrity?”

  Sophia was confused. Helen’s boyfriend was a celebrity?

  “From what I have heard,” the girl continued in a rush, “it wasn’t his fault. He was driving his car and the motorcycle hit him from behind. But he is involved, and that means the media are going to care.” She shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “What can you do?”

  “Who was it?” Miranda asked.

  “Harry Harlow.”

  “Harry who?” Sophia asked.

  “The host of that stupid show,” Miranda said with a shudder. “The one where you have to humiliate yourself in order to win a prize.”

  “I don’t think we want to say anything,” Sophia answered coldly.

  “I completely understand,” Marta answered. Her hands began to play nervously with the clipboard while she spoke. “It’s just, in my experience, sometimes these things go away more quickly if you do issue a short statement.” The girl shrugged her shoulders helplessly. Sophia recognized something of her younger self in the girl’s assumption that things would go her way if she asked nicely and looked pretty. She also remembered bitter older women with hair-trigg
er bad moods.

  “Have you written something?” she asked, trying to soften her voice.

  The girl handed over the clipboard. It was a generic statement from the family, thanking all the people who had showed concern, summarizing the wait-and-see position of the doctors, and requesting privacy. Sophia handed it to her husband. He took the clipboard and fumbled for his reading glasses. Ten years he had been wearing them, yet he had never managed to devise a constant resting place. Sometimes they were on his head, sometimes in his left breast pocket; other times, his right. Normally, watching him dither like a forgetful old man irritated Sophia, but in that setting, the familiarity of the gesture comforted her.

  “You’ve misused ‘its.’” Darius said when he finished reading.

  “I’m sorry?” Marta asked.

  “It’s a common mistake,” Darius said. “My students do it all the time.” He read the offending sentence aloud. “‘The family requests privacy in it’s time of grief.’ There’s no apostrophe in ‘its.’ It’s like ‘his’ or ‘hers.’”

  “Oh.” Marta reddened.

  “Actually,” Miranda said, looking at her father for backup, “I think their would be a better choice. ‘The family requests privacy in their time of grief.’”

  “She’s right, I think.” Darius smiled at her. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it.”

  Sophia could imagine how they must appear to the woman. Dry-eyed, rational, debating the niceties of grammatical correctness in a press release. How many times had she watched her husband pause mid-argument to compose the right sentence or correct her grammar? It made him feel in control, but she often thought the self-conscious act of composition kept him from feeling anything too keenly. Now, sitting under the fluorescent lighting in the peach-colored family waiting room, she was grateful for her family’s control.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Sophia said. “The family requests privacy in their time of grief.”

  “Of course.” The girl lowered her head and made the change.

  8

  driving home from the accident, Harry found himself gripped by a sudden, intense yearning for his mother. Monica Odell (Harry’s real last name) had been a terrible parent by every conventional mea sure. Half the year they had no phone service. Electricity was iffy. Sometimes she forgot to pick him up at school and she was forever bringing home different men. Harry’s earliest memory was being woken one night by her voice whispering, “Ssshhh, you’ll wake the baby.” At first, Harry thought she had brought a baby home with her. When he realized she was referring to him, all he could feel was indignation. He was not a baby! He was almost six years old! But for all her faults, she had done her son the great favor of liking him. He could feel it every time they spoke.

  “Harry!” she’d sing, whenever he called, “tell me every thing, tell me now and start at the beginning.” He would, too. Work problems, money problems, girlfriends, sex. He held nothing back from Monica. Because she’d never treated him like a child, it wasn’t hard for him to treat her like an older, benign friend. It seemed a common thing, a parent who liked you, but the older Harry got, the more he realized how rare it was. Catherine’s parents might have given her every thing she wanted, but Harry could never escape the feeling that they didn’t much like the child they had created.

  In return for her affection, Harry had forgiven Monica every thing. When he was very young, he used to watch while she slept off her hangovers, just to make sure she wasn’t dead.

  “What are you doing?” she’d ask, when she woke to find him staring at her.

  “Nothing,” Harry would mutter, going back to the television, convinced he’d saved his mother’s life.

  It was Harry’s biggest regret that his mother died at fifty-eight, five years before his success. When the county hospital diagnosed stage-four lung cancer, Monica seemed almost happy, as if she had been waiting for it.

  “It’s God’s will,” she told Harry over the phone. Harry got on a Greyhound bus to Searchlight, Nevada, that night. Three weeks later, she died in a county hospice, a morphine drip dangling over her head like an exclamation point in a cartoon conversation bubble. When he tried to pack up the trailer, Spartacus, her little black poodle, growled and snapped at Harry whenever he went near it, as if it blamed him for her death. Harry gave it to the animal shelter with the understanding that it would be “put to sleep” within forty-eight hours if nobody adopted it.

  “What are the chances somebody will take her?” he asked the man who did the paperwork.

  “Zero,” the man answered, “nobody wants an old dog.”

  When Harry tried to sell her mobile home he discovered that Monica had been living for the last five years on a complex scheme of revolving credit-card debt. Each time she maxed out on one credit card, she’d apply for another, paying the minimum possible until the principal ballooned to two, three times the original balance. It was a precarious pyramid scheme on the verge of collapse. No wonder she’d sounded happy at the prospect of an early exit out of her troubles.

  Rounding the corner of his block, Harry was surprised to see television vans lining the street in front of his house. “Harry! Harry!” Beauty-pageant blondes turned entertainment reporters crowded around his car, phallic microphones in hand. Behind them, their cameramen silently recorded every thing. Harry shook his head as if he were sorry to let them down but even without Fields’s advice, it would have been easy to say no.

  Through a back window, Harry could see his wife in the kitchen, her hair tied up in a red bandanna and a line of worry bisecting the area between her eyebrows. He knew he ought to go inside and talk to her but instead he circled the house to the pool, where the gardener, José, was pruning the jacaranda blossoms. Earlier in the week, Harry had complained that too many were falling into the pool. Already, José had cut back half of the tree. Seeing the tree shorn, Harry realized he’d made a mistake. He missed the purple roof of flowers.

  “José,” Harry said, “you can stop cutting now.”

  José looked at the lopsided tree and frowned. “It’s no even,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” Harry told him.

  José shrugged unhappily and began gathering the cut limbs. Harry had noticed this before. José hated leaving anything half done.

  In the pool house, a dank two-room structure that smelled vaguely of mildew, Harry began to undress. Halfway through taking off his pants, he heard his wife’s voice.

  “Harry? Is that you?”

  He recognized certain aspects of her tone—wounded irritation mixed with something he’d never heard before. Was it fear? Reluctantly, Harry began to dress again. Catherine opened the door and threw herself against him. Harry felt an unfamiliar vibration in her body, as if she were freezing and burning up at the same time.

  “Harry!” she wailed. “How awful.” He thought he smelled bananas.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. It embarrassed him to talk to his wife in front of José. Unlike Catherine, who’d been raised by professionals, Harry had never gotten used to having employees around the house. He couldn’t get over the idea that they were watching him, taking note of his weaknesses, laughing about him behind his back. He imagined how he and Catherine must look to them—pampered, childless adults who couldn’t or wouldn’t clean their own clothes.

  The house smelled of banana bread. “It’s what we do in our family when something goes wrong,” Catherine explained.

  “Good idea. Maybe the reporters will want some.”

  “Harry, don’t be flip. Not now.”

  “If not now, when?”

  “We need to come up with a plan.”

  “What kind of a plan?” he asked.

  “Something to protect our interests in this matter.”

  From the little moonstones in her ear to her chamomile hair and goose-berry eyes, people met Catherine and thought pushover, but Harry had lived with her long enough to know better. She craved success and material comfort no less than any other woman he had k
nown. Maybe more. The difference was subtlety. Catherine had it.

  “I don’t know what you mean by my ‘interests,’” he answered. “It was an accident. Nobody thinks it was my fault.”

  “Exactly,” Catherine answered, her breath coming a little quicker now, “and if something terrible should happen, you shouldn’t have to suffer.”

  “What do you mean?” Harry asked.

  “You know,” she answered, “sometimes people get spooked when something bad happens. Like when there’s been a murder in a house—nobody wants to live there—even if it’s great in every other way.”

  “A man is dead and a girl is lying in the hospital fighting for her life.” There were moments in Harry’s life when the words that came out of his mouth sounded suspiciously similar to the lines he’d spoken when he worked on the soap opera.

  “It’s terrible, yes, but there’s nothing we can do about it. There is, however, something we can do about our future.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Goddamn it.” Catherine opened the oven door. The smell of burned sugar filled the room.

  9

  by eleven that night, Sophia’s exhaustion was like the physical ache of too vigorous exercise. Darius was leaning his head against the wall, his eyes closed, breath slow and steady. She had always been jealous of his ability to nap anywhere. Once, on a trip to Costa Rica, she had found him snoring on the lip of an extinct volcano, oblivious to the jagged black rock under his head. A nurse sat across from Sophia. Peggy was older than the day nurses, with thick ankles, a turquoise cardigan of cheap acrylic that did not become her, and a head of tight silver curls. Still, Sophia recognized the unmistakable gleam of intelligence in her eye and gently shook her husband awake.