Man in the Empty Boat

by Mark Salzman

  Oh, yes. The dog. “Yes, girls, I am excited.”

  The couple from North Carolina who run the kennel showed up in a large van on Friday with their school-age son and four or five dogs to deliver in California, including ours. I made a silent promise to be open-minded about it, but the moment the couple released their snuffling, darting, urinating cargo into our front yard, I knew that this was not going to work for me. Ours was shaggy, white, weighed at least fifty pounds, and looked as dumb as a doorpost. She had one blue eye and one brown one, leading Jessica and the girls to name her “Bowie,” after David Bowie, the rock star, who also has different-colored eyes—and whose music I’ve never liked.

  I slunk back into the house, lay down on my bed, put a pillow over my face, and screamed. I could see my fate as clearly as if it were appearing in a crystal ball: I would feel uncomfortable in my own house for the next dozen years. I could have said no to this, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be the kind of dad who wouldn’t let his kids have a dog. Now I would be the kind of dad who wished his kids’ dog would hurry up and croak.

  The van full of dogs disappeared after a couple of hours. To my relief, they took Bowie with them—they like to give the animals a chance to get used to their new homes gradually. The whole traveling kennel stayed at a nearby motel for the night. I took the girls with me to go grocery shopping, but all they could talk about was the dog. The traffic in the parking lot seemed worse than usual, and the shoppers in the store all seemed to be in a rush, jostling for position in the aisles as if we were all in some sort of Roman chariot race. Half of them were talking on their cell phones, and my girls kept asking me if I loved Bowie, because I didn’t seem that excited about it. Why wasn’t I more excited? Didn’t I love Bowie?

  “Yes, I love Bowie.”

  Meanwhile, I had to decide what to cook for dinner, and I couldn’t think of a thing. The choice of foods was overwhelming, yet nothing appealed to me, and for a moment I considered walking out of the store without anything and just going home. But the thought of having to get in the car again an hour or two later to have dinner at a restaurant didn’t appeal to me, so I grabbed some frozen pot stickers and a bunch of broccoli, let the girls buy some gum, and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

  I went to bed right after dinner, at around seven o’clock. I woke up at midnight and couldn’t fall asleep again for the rest of the night.

  The dog people returned on Saturday for a second meet and greet. They showed us the commands and gave us all sorts of advice about how to care for the dog. I couldn’t keep track of any of this; it was all just noise to me. Then they left Bowie with us—the transfer was complete. She was our dog now. We offered her food but she refused to eat, and she wouldn’t poop in her “potty spot.” She crapped in the girls’ sandbox instead, and she had diarrhea. Jessica explained that the stress of travel and of being in unfamiliar surroundings affects dogs strongly. That night, we put her into her crate—she was supposedly crate-trained—and she howled and whined and barked miserably and scratched at the metal bars so desperately that I thought she would tear her nails right out of her paws. The trainers had given us a plastic milk jug with some BBs in it and told us to shake it if she made too much noise. We tried that, but it didn’t work.

  Then, on Sunday, the trainers came back again with four other dogs to do some filming. Jessica had made a barter arrangement with them—we got a discount on the fee for training the dog, and in return, Jessica promised to shoot some footage showing what they do. The owners of two other dogs that this couple had delivered on previous visits to L.A. came to our house with their dogs so that Jessica could show them interacting with their pets and interview them. So we had dogs and dog people and cameras around the house all day. I stayed indoors the whole time; it was just too much. Dog this, dog that, dog dog dog. Daddy could have used some of that attention after the two weeks he’d just had, but Daddy didn’t have fur or a tail, so he was going to have to wait his turn.

  After the filming was done and the crowd cleared out, having only one snuffling quadruped in the house didn’t seem so bad, but then we went through the nighttime ordeal of the howling and the whining and the barking and the scratching again, and having just one seemed plenty bad enough.

  Early the next morning, as I packed my suitcase for my return to Connecticut, Erich called with unexpected news. The doctor overseeing Rachel’s case had sat down with him and Daniel and spent a full hour answering their questions, and he actually sounded optimistic. At the end of their meeting, he said, “She will walk out of here on her own two feet.”

  When I hung up the phone, I immediately pictured the scene in my mind: Rachel appearing in the doorway to her house, her daughters rushing to greet her. I went to tell Jessica the good news, and on the way through the living room I stepped in something wet. Our pretrained adult dog had pissed on the floor. I mopped it up and resumed packing.

  Seventeen

  THE FLIGHT BACK TO CONNECTICUT seemed to take forever. My connection to White Plains was delayed four hours, so I got on a plane to Hartford instead. Erich and Dad came to pick me up there. Erich’s car window was broken; it wouldn’t close all the way, so we could barely hear each other over the sound of the wind rushing into the car. None of us felt like talking anyway. By the time Erich and Dad dropped me off at Daniel’s house, the girls were already asleep. Daniel thanked me for coming, then he drove immediately to the hospital, and I didn’t hear when he came back.

  The next day, Rachel’s condition worsened, and the doctors decided they had to open her up again to remove her infected lung or she wouldn’t survive the night. It was very tense. I stayed at the house with the girls, playing board games with them in the living room, while Erich called me every hour from outside the operating room. Neither of us thought Rachel would make it. Somehow, she did. They got the lung out, but after the operation, the doctor who guaranteed Rachel would walk out of the hospital on her own two feet was nowhere to be seen. A different doctor advised Daniel and Erich that the amount of oxygen getting to Rachel’s brain had dropped so low during the procedure that there was a chance that if Rachel did survive, she might not be the same person we knew. They posted a full-time nurse in Rachel’s room in the ICU after that, because her condition was so bad.

  I went to see Rachel the next morning, and what I saw broke my heart. One of her eyes was open, and I looked into it. It was like staring into a fish’s eye at the market.

  Lisa, Rachel’s neighbor, offered to watch Isabela and Livia all afternoon, so Erich and I took a long walk in the woods. We were of one mind—the worst-case scenario was no longer that Rachel might die, it was that she would be kept alive as a vegetable, thanks to the miracle of modern fucking medicine, in a nursing home. And her husband and daughters would be expected to feel grateful for this miracle. They would be obliged to visit her living corpse on weekends and holidays, and this “miracle” would ruin them. They would lose their home and who knows what else. That, we agreed, would be a fate worse than death.

  We got this talk out of our system and went back to Rachel’s house to have dinner. Daniel was there, and he fired up his big outdoor oven. He got that oven so hot it could have melted lead. He and Erich roasted a rack of lamb, short ribs, a duck, and a huge platter of vegetables in olive oil. I don’t even know how many bottles of wine we drank. Then I remembered that I’d promised to do a shift at the hospital that night so that Daniel could stay home with the girls. The thought of how bad it would be if I got in an accident definitely got my adrenaline going, and man, did I drive carefully! I sat my ass down in the chair next to Rachel’s bed, and then I got dizzy. To stay awake, I decided to write a letter to Rachel, in case she recovered, so she would have some idea of what a night in the ICU had been like for her unconscious body.

  Hi Rachel. It’s seven at night and I’m in your room in the ICU. I told Daniel and Erich that I would stay here tonight, and I promised to call them in an emergency, but I’m determined no
t to do that unless I have to.

  I thought I might try putting together a little record of what’s going on so that if you somehow make it through this ordeal, you can get a picture of it from this side of the ventilator tube.

  Right now, a pair of nurses are sticking you with a needle to take a blood sample. Two minutes ago another nurse was in here to take a blood sample and she got it through your arterial shunt, which doesn’t require a new needle. But now they are using a needle. So I asked why and they said they need to take a sample “peripherally,” whatever that means. Every few minutes, someone is poking you with a new hole. Fortunately, you don’t seem to be feeling any pain.

  I wonder how much of this you will remember. Not much, I hope. Hopefully, and I haven’t lost hope, you will pull through. If you are reading this, then you did pull through and it will surely seem odd to be reading this. Erich and I were saying today that, for the last eight days, whenever a fork in the road came where you could either begin to improve or get worse, your condition took the turn for the worse. And each day it seemed that you had reached a point so catastrophic that the only way it could get worse was for you to die. But no—it always turned out that you could get worse and still be alive. I don’t understand how your body has tolerated what it has been through. Last night’s botched operation was only—

  Sorry. The nurses asked me to step out while they rubbed you with lotion. Your temperature is up to 103—they say if it doesn’t go down soon, I may have to call Daniel, because it may be the sign of a final crisis. I’m not going to do it yet. Forgive me Rachel, but those girls need him, for a few hours at least.

  The nurses are giving you lots of Tylenol intravenously and are using plenty of cooling blankets to try to control the fever. The one looking after you at the moment has three young children. Her husband is a stay-at-home dad like me. She just told me that the nurses here love you because you’ve been so sweet, so uncomplaining. You even apologized to one of them for having to ask for help when your period started. They are all praying for you.

  Every few minutes an alarm goes off in your room, one of the five or six machines keeping you alive. Very loud alarms, I suppose to get the nurses’ attention. But it must be disturbing to you even if you’re unconscious. How can your body rest through all this?

  Now two nurses are here to check on something else. One crisis after another. It’s only 8:30. In ninety minutes, you’ve nearly died several times. Your blood pressure is dropping right now. The nurse said I might start thinking about calling Daniel. I asked if I could hold off for just fifteen minutes more and they said yes.

  They’ve asked me to leave while they deal with the crisis. Please hang in there. The thing about these crises is that they—

  I forgot what I was going to write. I suppose it was something about how those crises get my adrenaline going and then my thinking gets very confused.

  I’m in the waiting room only a few yards away from you. So many alarms are going off. Are they all for you?

  It’s 9:05, and every minute that passes without someone telling me I have to call Daniel is another minute that he’s at home. The girls will be asleep soon. Earlier today I was thinking that tonight would be a long night, but now I hope it is a long night, I hope it seems an endless night, as long as no one tells me I have to make that phone call. But every time someone walks near this room, each footstep makes a little explosion go off in my chest.

  Tonight one of the nurses told me she gets panic attacks! Small world. She said to the other nurse, “It makes you feel that you are dying.” That’s pretty accurate.

  Sweet Rachel, you’re doing all the work in there.

  9:50

  They called me back in and your blood pressure is back up and your temperature is down. There’s a machine cooling you off now. There sure are a lot of machines working on you—I can’t even count them because I don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

  Erich called while I was out in the waiting room, and I gave him a full report and we agreed that I should call him back only if there was an “issue” once the nurses had called me back in. The nurses seem calm, and your numbers look good. But the night isn’t over yet.

  I’m looking at you now, and I’m imagining you getting up, taking that tube out of your mouth, and saying, “OK, time for a gin and tonic.” For some reason, today I’ve had several waves of feeling, a sense that you will recover.

  Another alarm. Now what? What is really going on in your body?

  The nurses were saying tonight that every year they get a few cases of extremely severe pneumonia in young women, and one said, “I don’t know why it’s always young women,” and the other said, “I do. It’s because women are trying to do so much, juggling work and taking care of their kids, and housework. They feel like they have to do it all, and they don’t give themselves any break.”

  Tamiko was saying this about you the other day. She said you work yourself way too hard, and Erich agreed. They both said that you seem tired all the time. I don’t see you often enough to have an opinion on this.

  10:04

  No one came in after the alarm, so I guess it wasn’t bad. It’s really hard to concentrate in here.

  Right now I’m thinking about a dish I want to make for dinner tomorrow. I think even Livia will eat it. I suppose that this is my coping strategy. I’m occupying myself with thoughts about things I can do, like the idea for tonight’s dinner. Did I describe it for you? I got this brainstorm that I could convince Daniel to come home at a regular dinnertime, eat with the girls, watch a movie with them, and then go to sleep with them. To my surprise, he agreed. The agreement was that I would stay here and call if anything went wrong. So I cooked beef Stroganoff, broccoli, egg noodles, and had it all ready by the time Daniel made it home. The girls were so excited. When they saw his car in the driveway they ran out squealing with delight, and Daniel looked just as happy.

  I had prepped Dad by saying that if I had to call Daniel, he should be ready to come over and sleep in the guest room so that someone was there with the girls.

  By the way, that’s what we had to do the night when the doctors tried the surgery to remove the infected lung. Erich and Daniel were with you all day, and then the surgery supposedly began at 7:30, but at 10:30 the doctors told Daniel and Erich that it had been unsuccessful. It was crushing to us all, and I sensed that Erich and Daniel would be unable to leave the hospital at all that night, so I decided I had to convince them it was OK to leave for a few hours. Daniel especially was almost delirious from exhaustion. So I called Dad, knowing he would think it was to say that you had not survived the operation. But he stayed calm and I explained what he needed to do, and he walked over with his teeth in a cup and went to bed in the downstairs room and off I went. I was able to convince Erich to leave at 1:30 and Daniel at 2:30. I went home just before dawn and Daniel was already up, warming some food in the microwave.

  It’s 10:30 now and nothing bad is happening. I wish I’d been smart enough to pack my reading glasses for this trip. My eyelids are getting heavy. I didn’t sleep at all last night. Dad and Erich and Daniel and I had lunch at a Portuguese restaurant called Atlantico today, after you’d had another crisis and then stabled out again. We left the hospital feeling grim, but after a few glasses of wine we were actually able to have a few laughs. The bottle of wine the waitress recommended to us was named “EA.” It was a Portuguese wine. We decided that “EA” must be the word that Portuguese people utter right before they die, and somehow, at the time, it seemed very funny.

  My concentration is flagging. I thought half an hour had passed but it’s only 10:40. Well, earlier I said I hoped the night would seem endless because of the anticipation of bad news that never came, so I’m trying to remind myself right now to be grateful.

  Now it’s 11:10. Feels like hours have passed, like being stuck on a long flight in an uncomfortable plane seat. Nothing bad is happening right now. I asked the nurse if she has gotten to the point where s
he no longer feels nervous when the alarms go off and she said, “Oh, no. I pray every day, all day, here at work.”

  I told the nurse that I was keeping a record of your journey for you, and she winced. “Do you really think she’d want to see that?” she asked. Now I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.

  In the meantime, they’re rubbing you down again and so I have to step out to the waiting room. Just a few minutes ago, a respiratory technician walked in and introduced herself and explained that she had taken you down here from your regular room last week. She took one look at you and was unable to disguise how shocked she felt. “I didn’t leave her like this,” she said.

  11:45

  Everything was going well; then the nurse injected you with something and an alarm went off. She started tipping the bed up and down, and then she yelled to another nurse, “Call the resident.” And then she told me I had to leave.

  I’m out here in the waiting room again. I’ll just brace and wait.

  12:15

  The nurse came out and told me things were calm again. I’m back in your room. Your heart rate and blood pressure had suddenly dropped. My vision is too blurry to keep writing, I’m sorry.

  4:45

  I must have dozed off in the chair for a few hours. The nurse said that you’d been stable the whole time. I’m going to leave. I gave the nurse my cell number and told her that if any crisis developed to please call my number first so I could go upstairs and wake Daniel up gently rather than have him and the girls get awakened by the phone ringing.

  Eighteen

  THAT SUNDAY, MAY 24, was Isabela’s ninth birthday—and my daughter Esme’s fifth. I called home to wish Esme a happy birthday. Meanwhile, Rachel had planned a birthday party for Isabela, but in order to schedule a visit from an animal group that entertains at parties with lizards and giant toads and all, the party had been set for the following weekend. For Isabela’s actual birthday, Erich offered to have us all over to his place for dinner. He planned to barbecue something for us if it stopped raining.