Man in the Empty Boat

by Mark Salzman

  Rachel was alert and sitting up in bed when I got to the hospital. She had to wear an oxygen mask but didn’t seem to be in any pain. She couldn’t talk but she could write on a little pad of paper. She gave me the thumbs-up when I told her that I’d cooked pancakes for the girls for breakfast, and she rolled her eyes when I said that Isabela had performed the Hannah Montana routine for me.

  How was Livia? she wrote.

  “She helped me cook breakfast,” I said, and Rachel looked pleased. I promised her that I’d keep the girls busy and make sure they ate their vegetables, brushed their teeth, washed behind their ears, and observed strict disciplinary protocols. Rachel wrote, Good luck.

  After our visit, I stepped outside with Erich, and we agreed that she looked pretty good. The doctors were being vague about the condition of her lungs, but she didn’t have a fever, and her blood oxygen levels were close to normal. “It’s looking better today than it did yesterday,” Erich said. “I hope I didn’t call you out here for nothing.”

  A nurse passed by, gave us a smile, and said, “You’re sister’s looking good today.” At that point, I felt inclined to agree with Daniel—the worst seemed over. I called Jessica and told her what I’d seen and heard, and when she asked me how long I thought it would be before Rachel could go home, I guessed another week.

  I went back to Rachel’s house, cooked lunch for Dad and me, and decided to do some cleaning. By the time the girls came home from school, I was only half done, so I sent them next door to play with their friends, whose mother, Lisa, said she’d be happy to watch the girls for the afternoon. I got the house straightened up and went out to get some supplies. I came back with a bunch of stuff that I know my girls like to eat, and then I cooked dinner. Daniel came home from work at around six—he looked exhausted—wolfed down some food, and left for the hospital. I read some books aloud to the girls before putting them to bed, but when I tried to turn off the light, Livia howled in protest.

  “Livia won’t sleep if you don’t lie here with us,” Isabela explained, so I lay down in the bed between the two of them and stayed there until they had fallen asleep.

  Daniel came in at one o’clock. He told me that Rachel had spiked a fever earlier that night, and her oxygen levels had suddenly dropped—either that or her blood pressure, Daniel wasn’t exactly sure; it was all so goddamned confusing. Alarms had gone off, and the nurses had had to page a resident to deal with it, but after they’d given Rachel some special drugs, things had calmed down, and the nurses told Daniel to go home and get some sleep.

  The next day was Sunday—Mother’s Day. Our plan was for Daniel to take the girls over to the hospital to visit Rachel at eleven, when visiting hours started in the ICU, and for them all to have lunch in the room together. The girls had only seen Rachel once since she’d been admitted to the hospital, and that was when she had been in a regular room. I made chocolate chip pancakes for the girls and drove myself over to Erich’s place so he and I could take a walk in the hills behind his house. We followed a path that took us up to a high spot in Tarrywile Park, where we sat on a boulder and admired the view. We could even see the hospital from there.

  Erich had already visited Rachel that morning, and he said that in spite of her crisis the previous evening, she had slept well. She was still on the ventilator, her heart rate was still up at around 150, and her breathing was shallow and rapid, but the doctors said she was getting stable. He said, “I have a good feeling about today.”

  Erich showed me some pictures of his son William, who was just six months old, and we shared parental sleep-deprivation stories until it was time to start back down the hill. Erich had made plans to take his wife, Tamiko, their baby, William, and Tamiko’s older son, John, out for Mother’s Day brunch. I was going to pick up our father from Rachel’s house and have lunch with him, then we were all planning to meet at Erich’s that evening for a barbecue.

  Erich had come a long way since his ill-fated first day at the accounting firm. He’d stuck with that job for a year but never adjusted to it. A series of other accounting-related jobs followed that one, ranging from comptroller at a gravel pit to accounts manager at an equipment rental company. He even managed the books for a nonprofit juvenile boot camp for a while. With each job, he felt challenged at the beginning and hopeful that he’d found his proper vocation rather than just another paycheck, but always, within a year or so, he lost interest. And for him, the feeling of being on a treadmill was unbearable; he had to move on and search elsewhere.

  Starting the tile business with Rachel challenged him more than any of his previous jobs had. During their first few years working together, he was having to learn something new almost every day. With number crunching, he could never point to something at the end of the day and say, “I made that,” but now he could. Each installation was unique and existed in the physical world. He could look at the kitchens and bathrooms he’d built, admire their appearance, and know that his customers actually used them every day. But after Rachel and Daniel married, Erich began to feel restless again. He could sense that the tile store was evolving into a mom-and pop-venture, and Erich didn’t want to be the brother that came with the building, so he sold them his portion of the business and continued his search.

  Eventually, he figured it out. He learned how to use an accounting software program that had been designed for use by huge multinational corporations but that hardly anyone could operate properly. He became a freelance consultant, teaching companies how to use the program and apply it to their unique circumstances. He loved the problem-solving aspect of this work, and he loved the fact that each job lasted just long enough to hold his interest. Between assignments, he satisfied his longing to make things by buying old houses, renovating them himself from top to bottom, and then turning them into rental properties. At last, he found himself in the right place at the right time.

  His personal life followed a similar course. His first two marriages had ended in divorce; both times, the relationships seemed to stop growing after only a few years and then go stagnant. Both separations were amicable, and fortunately, no children were involved. Then, not long after Erich began his consulting work, he met another person who had been waiting for a long time to feel truly at home in her own life. Tamiko was a single mother who worked for one of the companies Erich was helping. They kept in touch after Erich had finished the job, started dating, and when they married in 2005 Erich became both a husband and the stepfather to a six-year-old boy named John. Four years later, William was born. With plenty of novelty and challenge at work to keep him satisfied, the stability of domestic life became a welcome piece of the puzzle for Erich. It came at the right time.

  The Viking child who once scoffed at art and music now has a house filled with paintings, and he listens to the classical station on the radio when he’s driving or putting up drywall. And he has a colicky baby; William is a screamer, just like Erich was. “It must be payback,” Erich said, as we made our way back down the hill. “Mom would have enjoyed this.”

  Just as we got back to the house, Erich’s cell phone rang. It was Daniel calling from the hospital. I could hear his voice, and he sounded frantic. He said that something was very wrong; we had to get the girls out of there right away. Erich and I rushed to the hospital, where we found Isabela and Livia, looking frozen with fear, in the waiting room outside the ICU. Erich went in to join Daniel, and I stayed in the waiting room with the girls to keep them company. I gave them some change so they could buy some snacks from a vending machine, but other than that, there wasn’t much to distract us. A television bolted to the wall ran continuous advertisements for prescription medicines, mostly for age-related problems. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, and I thought it would only make matters worse if I started hugging them or offering to hold their hands. Thankfully, Tamiko arrived only a few minutes later, holding baby William. The girls perked up as soon as they saw their little cousin. Erich eventually came out from the ICU, took me aside, and t
old me that Rachel was having congestive heart failure. She had nearly gone into cardiac arrest just as Daniel and the girls arrived. He asked if Tamiko and I could take the girls home.

  I told Isabela and Livia that the doctors wanted their mommy to rest and that their daddy wanted to keep her company, so the best thing for us to do would be to go out for lunch with Aunt Tamiko and the baby. We all piled into my rental car and drove to Bethel to the girls’ favorite restaurant. When we got there it was closed. We kept driving and tried several other restaurants, but all of them were completely booked, with people lined up outside the doors to wait for their tables. It was Sunday brunch on Mother’s Day. I should have known.

  We drove around for over an hour. The girls were hungry and upset, and who could blame them? They gradually got quiet, and somehow that was worse than when they were arguing. At last we found a pizza place at a mall that could seat us, and I told our server that we needed to order right away. “Happy Mother’s Day!” he chirped. I wanted to stuff a breadstick in his mouth.

  Tamiko and I struggled to make conversation with the girls while we waited for the pizza. We got them to solve the puzzles on their children’s place settings; that kept them busy for a while. I’ve never felt so grateful to see a box of fucking crayons. We asked them about school, their friends, their hobbies, their favorite animals, their favorite colors, anything we could think of. The food took forty minutes to come.

  After lunch, we drove home and watched television all afternoon. Erich called toward the end of the day to report that Rachel was stable for the time being but in bad shape. Dad came in and offered to watch the girls for a while so I could go to the hospital, where Rachel was unconscious and intubated. Daniel sat next to the bed, holding her hand. After an hour or so, I convinced Daniel to come out to the waiting room, where I had some food for him. He couldn’t eat. A resident came out to talk to us and, by coincidence, he had immigrated from Romania just like Daniel. The two of them had a brief conversation in Romanian, then the resident asked Daniel to sign a paper giving them permission to insert an arterial blood pressure meter into Rachel’s body so they could keep closer track of Rachel’s condition. He warned Daniel that this device was risky to use, but he recommended it anyway. “Why?” Daniel asked. “Because your wife’s condition is grave,” the resident answered. Daniel asked him what he meant by grave—what did that mean?

  “Your wife is very, very sick,” the resident said. He explained that the infection in Rachel’s lungs had already destroyed a significant amount of tissue that could never be recovered.

  “What does that mean?” Daniel asked.

  “It means one of her lungs is already dead.”

  That lung would have to be removed surgically to prevent the infection from spreading, but Rachel was too weak for surgery at that point. We could only wait and hope that her immune system and the antibiotics could buy her some time. In the meantime, they were sending out samples to labs all over the country to see if they could identify the virus.

  I think that up until that moment, Daniel assumed that Rachel would need a lot of medicine and time to rest, but that she would recover completely. The news that one of her lungs was already lost and that she might not survive the procedure to remove it hit him hard, and the resident’s questions about their vacation in Central America—“Did you visit any caves? Was your wife bitten by any animals?”—planted the seed in his mind that all of this was his fault for having organized the trip. When the resident left the room, Daniel started apologizing to me, and his grief was excruciating to witness. I took his hand and told him that this was not his fault and that none of us blamed him for it, but I don’t think it brought him any comfort.

  I left the hospital, crossed the parking lot, and got into the car, knowing that I would have to drive back to Rachel’s house, cook dinner for the girls, and then put them to bed. I would have to do this knowing that their mother might not survive the night. It occurred to me that I didn’t know if I could pull it off. What if I started to panic when I was alone with the girls? What would I do then? I couldn’t bring myself to start the car. I thought of calling Jessica, but my hands were shaking too hard; I couldn’t press the little goddamn buttons on my cell phone, and my vision was blurry, so I couldn’t see the numbers anyway. Then I thought, There’s no way out of this, and that’s how I was able to start the car.

  I returned to the house and got through it. I made dinner and then shared the family bed with the girls until they fell asleep. I remained there until Daniel came in at around three in the morning with no news. We had some vodka in the kitchen and then Daniel went upstairs to get some sleep. Mother’s Day was over.

  Fifteen

  A RESIDENT FROM THE HOSPITAL called before six the next morning, and Daniel rushed out of the house before I could ask him what was going on. The girls slept through it, thank goodness. My father came into the kitchen looking a thousand years old. He hadn’t put his false teeth in yet, and after hearing Daniel’s car roar out of the driveway, he was prepared to hear the worst. When I told him that I had no idea what was going on, he turned without a word and went back up to his lonely apartment. I made breakfast for the girls again and got them ready for school. I offered to make pancakes, but they said they actually preferred cereal, so I poured them some Cheerios. Livia, unbeknownst to me, only eats plain Cheerios, and I had put Honey Nut Cheerios into her bowl. She lifted the bowl up and, without a word, tossed it backward, right over her head, against the wall. I didn’t feel annoyed at all. It was like watching a stack of books fall over because you’ve piled it too high. I asked her to help me clean it up and she did, then I gave her the plain Cheerios, and it was as if nothing had happened. She pulled out her homework from the day before and proudly showed me that her teacher had put a star sticker on it. To hell with the Cheerios, I thought. She can toss whatever she wants.

  The girls usually waited for the bus at the neighbor’s house with their friends, so I walked them over, and after the bus picked them up I called Erich. He was already at the hospital and said that Rachel had had another crisis but was stable again. I drove myself there, and a nurse who was helping out in the ICU that morning talked to Erich and Daniel and me for a while. He said that we mustn’t give up hope, that he’d once seen a marathon runner in the ICU with atypical pneumonia who was on a ventilator for a month, and that guy made a full recovery. He said that Rachel’s oxygen levels were higher that morning, and that was a good sign. As long as one of the lungs was getting oxygen into her blood, there was hope.

  Jessica called me to suggest that I take the girls to the Build-A-Bear store in the mall, since they’d mentioned wanting to go there. I did that after the girls came home from school, and then we had dinner at a restaurant in the food court. Over dinner, the girls had a brief, whispered conference with each other, after which they confided that, when asked to make wishes to put inside their stuffed bears, they had both wished for the same thing: that their mother would come home soon. They took this as a sign that the wish would surely come true.

  Daniel got home at around midnight. I woke up at about four to use the bathroom and found him out in the living room, lying on the couch watching television. His eyes were open but he didn’t see me. The hospital called before six, so he was out again before the girls woke up.

  That day, the doctors decided that they had to get the bad lung out of Rachel’s body in spite of the high risk. The infection was killing her. She was drifting in and out of consciousness at that point but was able to give her assent during one of her lucid moments. I stayed at the house with the girls all that day, so I didn’t get to see Rachel before she went into surgery. The doctors put together an emergency team and began the procedure late that afternoon. Erich and Daniel kept vigil at the hospital while I made dinner for the girls and watched television with them until bedtime. The waiting was awful. At around eight o’clock, Erich called, and his voice sounded thin. The doctors had opened Rachel’s chest cavity, but her blo
od oxygen levels suddenly dropped so low that she would have died within minutes if they hadn’t aborted the procedure. They closed her up and rushed her back to the ICU. Now, she had not only the infection to deal with but all the stress of having had her chest cut open and having gone for some time without sufficient oxygen. She was completely unconscious by then, in a coma.

  I put the girls to bed and read a few books to them. Once they’d fallen asleep on either side of me, I found myself thinking that this might be the last time they would be able to close their eyes in that bed and believe that they would see their mother again. I had to think about something else. What was happening to Rachel was awful, but the thought of two little girls losing their mother— that was unbearable.

  Sixteen

  WHEN I HAD BEEN IN Connecticut for two weeks, Daniel’s brother Liviu, who lives in Canada, received an emergency visa and flew down to help. Rachel was still unconscious after the aborted procedure to remove her lung, but her condition had been relatively stable for several days. None of the samples the doctors had sent to labs all over the country matched any known exotic viruses; the doctors said that we just had to hope that her own immune system would rally in time. Rachel was young and otherwise healthy; it wasn’t hopeless, the doctors said. With Liviu there, I decided it would be all right for me to fly home for a weekend to see my own girls. Saying good-bye to my nieces wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared, partly because they were excited to see Liviu and partly because I would be returning after only a few days. My homecoming wasn’t the restorative experience I was hoping it would be, however. The moment I stepped in the door, Ava and Esme delivered the exciting news: Our new dog would arrive the following day!