Family Matters

by Deborah Bedford

  He could list a page full of reasons their marriage had broken up. His hours as an intern at Parkland Hospital. The incredible debt he’d racked up completing med school. Jennie’s constant trips to the state capital to search for material for her work. Her low journalist’s pay and their arguments about money.

  Together, they’d decided to end their marriage four years ago. Neither of them could live a life based on blame. And now, the only thing they shared was Cody.

  “Oh, Michael.” He could tell she was fighting tears. It seemed a lifetime since he had seen her cry. He didn’t think she had even wept during the divorce. Every time he’d seen her in the lawyer’s office, her expression had been firm and unyielding, etched as hard as stone.

  He cleared his throat before he said, “This’ll be rough, Jen.” His voice sounded to him like it was coming out of someone else’s throat. “Possible blindness. Possible brain damage. We have to wait to see him through it and then count the losses.” She sat down hard in the waiting-room chair. “And, if we’re lucky, the losses won’t include his life.”

  Just then, the nurse appeared in the doorway. “Are you Cody’s mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can see him. He’s been asking for you.”

  That was how they spent the next few hours, the two of them taking turns visiting Cody for ten minutes each time a nurse would let them in. It was 3:00 a.m. when Michael went in and Cody clutched his arm. “I’m here, son,” Michael whispered over and over again. “I’ll always be here for you. Remember that.”

  “I know, Dad,” the little boy whispered. He looked so pale and so small in the starched white bed. Michael felt as if his heart would break, just watching his son, with his eyes, so wide, so innocent, trusting him. Michael’s helplessness engulfed him, swallowed him, drowned him. He could do nothing except wait while the deadly bacteria assaulted his son. Oh Father, he whispered after Cody had slipped back into unconsciousness. He sank into the chair beside his son’s bed and raked both hands through his hair, buried his face in his palms. Help me to trust You the way my son trusts me.

  Outside, traffic roared past on the highway.

  Please, God. I may not have the right to ask for anything. But Cody’s so young…he’s got his whole life ahead of him.

  The monitor beside Cody’s bed kept up its steady pace, the peaks and troughs measuring his vital signs.

  When he returned to the waiting area, he found Jen waiting for him, sitting in the center of the couch, the tears sparkling like jewels in her eyes.

  He touched her arm. “You’re exhausted,” he told her. “You should sleep.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.” She raised her head. Then she shifted on the edge of the sofa, one delicate hand planted on each knee, looking at him. Even though they kept up the facade of friendship for Cody’s sake, he knew she was always uncomfortable with him.

  “You should try.” There were plenty of places to stretch out and rest. But Michael knew Jen well, knew how keyed-up and frantic she could get. “I think you should lie down,” he commanded in the same voice he always used. “You’re going to need your strength for tomorrow.”

  At that moment it didn’t matter to Michael that they had once caused each other pain…didn’t matter that they had loved a lifetime ago and that now it was over. What mattered was that she was woven into the fabric of his life tonight…Jennie…the mother of his son, the son who might not live through the next hours.

  During the divorce, they had done everything they knew to make it easier for Cody. But there was nothing they could do to ease what he was facing now.

  Chapter Two

  By seven the next morning, Cody’s condition had stabilized enough that he could be moved by ambulance to Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. Jennie and Michael followed the vehicle through the already heavy, early-morning Dallas traffic. Jennie drove her ancient Beemer, weaving it in and out among the cars to keep up. She glanced sideways at Michael when she heard him yawn. He’d taken his glasses off and was rubbing his eyes with his fingers.

  “Your turn comes next,” she told him. She hesitated, just briefly. “Thanks for the rest, Michael. I needed it.”

  “Well—” he said “—one of us needed to be lucid today. I figured it might as well be you.” The smile faded. “We may have to make decisions.”

  She stared grimly out through the windshield. “I know that.”

  When the ambulance pulled up at Children’s, Michael and Jennie followed Cody into the building. The waiting rooms were all beginning to look the same. As the morning wore on, Cody’s high temperature held and eventually, despite all that the interns did, despite all Michael’s prayers, the little boy slipped into a coma. The next time Michael visited him, he could see Cody’s hands and legs turning purple and cold from lack of circulation.

  He stormed down the hallway to the nurses’ station, hoping he was out of Jen’s earshot. He might be a high-maintenance father, but he knew too much. He couldn’t believe that no one was watching his boy for this. “Get one of the interns,” he demanded. It seemed as if hundreds of interns had examined Cody, in groups and individually, every hour. “My son’s circulation is stopping. You’ve got to do something for him.”

  “We’re already on it,” the young woman reassured him. “We have a drug we want to try. Something new that might allow circulation.”

  Michael knew of it. “That could be too strong for him.”

  “Which is why we’re waiting until the treatment is absolutely necessary. We wanted to talk to you and your wife first.”

  “Not my wife,” Michael corrected her. “My ex-wife. We’re divorced.”

  “Does she have custody of the child then?” she asked. “We’ll need her consent.”

  “We have joint custody.”

  “We’ll need both of you to sign the papers. Then explain to her that it’s risky but it may be the only chance we have to save your son’s legs.”

  “I’ll speak with her,” Michael said.

  He went back to Jennie and, taking her hand, explained what the doctors wanted to try.

  “The medical profession hasn’t been able to offer him anything so far that has helped him,” he said. And, he thought, neither have I.

  “That doesn’t mean we have to stop hoping.”

  He looked at her then, his eyes full of anguish, surprised she placed faith in medicine when he didn’t think he could anymore. Then, drawing on her strength, he nodded. “Okay. We’ll give them our consent.”

  Michael and Jennie stood together, watching, while the doctor administered the first treatment. After that, they had nothing to do but wait. Michael sank back onto the sofa and buried his head in his hands again. Jennie sat beside him, just near enough that he knew she was with him, supporting him. When he finally looked up at her, all of his authority, his mastery, had been swept away. “That’s my own son lying there. And I can’t do anything.”

  Jennie knew all too well that marriage didn’t always turn out the way it was supposed to. Love didn’t overcome every obstacle the way it did in paperback novels. Somewhere along the line, the real world rushed in and took precedence over romance. After a while, romance burned out. Burned out just the same way she and Michael had burned out. Everything…gone. Except, she reminded herself, for Cody.

  She listened to Michael’s steady breathing beside her and knew that, at least for the moment, he was getting some rest. She sat perfectly still, not wanting to wake him. It had been four years since she’d seen him like this, so vulnerable and exhausted.

  For some unknown reason, her mind traveled to the day she had met him in college. How happy she’d been when he walked over to the huge live-oak tree where she’d been sitting. How happy she’d been when he asked to see her drawings.

  He walked by her tree every day with a group of med students going to lab. She remembered glancing up and meeting his eyes. He was tall, with a boyish grin and a headful of thick curls under his baseball cap…broad shoulder
s…long legs. In fact, she decided he was very nice looking. But what he said next made her think he was cocky, too.

  “I know this is nosy but my friends and I have placed a little wager and we would like to know what you do over here under this tree every day.”

  What a pick-up line, she’d thought.

  “These guys think you study every day. But I’ve bet ten bucks that you’re drawing something. Now, if you’d just let me borrow your picture so I can collect my winnings.”

  “You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you? Thinking I’ll hand my work over to you just like that?”

  “Work? That doesn’t seem like work to me.”

  She handed him her sketch pad. “Have a look.”

  He held it with two hands and looked at it. “Hey! I see these cartoons in the university paper. This is yours?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s great,” he said, obviously impressed. “I mean, you’re almost famous.”

  “Almost,” she said, laughing. “People don’t mob me for autographs yet.”

  “You’re the one who drew all those cartoons last year about the college president taking college funds and going to Cancún?”

  “That was me.”

  “You got him into a lot of trouble.”

  “I’m good at getting people into trouble,” she said.

  And that had been invitation enough, it seemed. Just like that, he’d asked her out. He was making a few bucks off of her so she might as well let him spend it on her. They could hang out and have coffee, go to a movie or something.

  “You really expect me to fall for that?” she asked him, laughing.

  “Well—” he shrugged and then gazed down at her endearingly, like a disappointed little boy “—I thought it was worth a try.”

  She let him borrow next Monday’s cartoon so he could show it to his waiting classmates. She heard them groaning and then she watched as they all walked away except for him. He brought her sketch back and waggled ten wadded dollar bills in front of her face. “What do you say?”

  She couldn’t help herself. She’d just kept laughing at him.

  “Well, maybe.”

  “That’s a committed answer.”

  “Is that what you’re looking for?” she asked. “Commitment?”

  But that had been a long time ago.

  Jen looked down at him now, down at the huge hand on her knee, the hand had helped heal many. She knew that. This was the very same hand that had taught her so much about being a wife. But being a wife and counting on having a man beside her were two very different things. She knew that, too.

  How many times had she longed for Michael when she’d been pregnant when, instead, he’d answered his beeper and been gone for what seemed like days? How many times had she ached for him to say, “You’re the most important part of my life, Jen, no matter what other choices I have to make”?

  But he hadn’t told her that. What’s more, she hadn’t asked him to. During the six years of their marriage, when he’d been so busy building his practice and his relationship with his patients, she’d been deathly afraid of what he might answer.

  It was three the next morning when an intern at Children’s Medical Center walked into the waiting room and told Michael and Jen their son was going to make it. Cody’s fever had inched down and, without the help of drugs this time, the blood had started easing back into his arms and legs.

  At four that morning, the nurse led them into ICU and, with special permission from the doctors, they visited Cody together for the first time. As Jen stooped on one side of the bed and Michael stood behind her, she talked to her son the way she had talked to him when he was an infant and she had held him and offered him the world in her arms. Cody slept through it all. They were both afraid he might still be comatose from the fever. But she said anything that came to mind…crazy things…about Mason and what the stuffed bunny had eaten for breakfast…about the swings in the park he used to play on when he was little…about the snow fort he and his daddy had built during their winter vacation to Steamboat in Colorado.

  At her words, Michael’s throat constricted with emotion. Jen’s quiet, desperate stories reminded him of the family they’d been once, and of the life they’d given Cody. The vacation to Steamboat had been made to salvage their marriage, a last-ditch effort to bring the romance back again when neither of them could understand where it had gone. Actually, he remembered the trip as a disaster. But as he listened to Jen describe the jewel blue day when he and Cody had tunneled into the snow, he remembered other things he hadn’t thought of for years: the snowball fight when she’d egged Cody on and his son had walloped him right in the face; catching air with their skis on the moguls high atop Mt. Werner; Jen’s face when he’d caught her sneaking up to shove a handful of snow down his collar. To this day, he had to wonder if the vengeful glint in her eye had been from something deeper in her heart than just mischief. That whole trip, she’d seemed intent on paying him back for something.

  “Michael,” she whispered to him now as she grabbed his hand. “Michael. He’s awake.”

  Cody gazed up at both of them, his eyes narrow with confusion.

  “Son,” Michael said to him. “Cody. We’re here.”

  Jen stroked hair away from the boy’s face. “Yeah, little guy,” she whispered. “We’re here.”

  “Hey, Dad…” Then, when Cody saw them beside his bed together, his voice grew stronger. “Mom? What are you doing?”

  “Just talking to you.”

  “What’s going on?” Cody asked. He furrowed his brows and tried to raise his head, but couldn’t. “Where am I?”

  “At the hospital, honey,” Jen explained softly. “You’ve been very sick.”

  “Did Dad bring me here?” the little boy asked. “Did he take care of me?”

  “The ambulance brought you here,” Michael told him. “You have other doctors, doctors who knew what to do better than I did…”

  Cody gazed up at his father with a worshipful expression. “Nobody knows what to do better than you, Dad.”

  After Michael left the room to tell someone that Cody had come around, Jen stayed at her son’s side. “I brought Mason so he can hang out with you,” she said. “He’s sitting right over there.”

  “Where?” Cody tried to prop himself up to see. He couldn’t do it.

  As Jen watched Cody’s futile efforts, a sharp fear began to needle at her. “I’ll get him. Don’t try to move, Cody. Here.” She set the bunny beside his head where he could see it. She began to stroke his hair again as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “I feel really weird, Mom. I wanted to make myself sit up but I couldn’t do it.”

  Her palm hesitated, then continued to smooth his hair back off of his forehead. “Really?”

  “How come that’s happening? Do you know?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s probably just because I’m sick, huh?”

  “Probably,” she hedged.

  An intern came into the room just then, Michael right behind him. “Hello, young man,” the intern said happily. But that was the last thing Jennie heard. She raced out the door and doubled up against the wall, feeling the anger, the fear, the helplessness as intensely as if it were pounding physical pain.

  No…no…no…her mind screamed at her. No…Not my little boy! Not my healthy, perfect little boy…

  “Jen? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Michael stood beside her in the hallway. She hadn’t even heard him come out of the room. There were only two beings she could blame for her pain just then. Almighty God. And Dr. Michael Stratton.

  Michael was the one standing before her. Michael was the one made of flesh and blood. Michael was the one she had grown used to blaming during the years they’d been married.

  “Why couldn’t you have done something?” she shrieked at him.

  He took one step away from her. One step. “I did everything I could, Jennie. You know that
.”

  “I don’t know any such thing. I don’t know any such thing.”

  She was crying and he knew she wasn’t coherent. But, even so, it didn’t make it easier for him. “Don’t do this.”

  “This would never have happened if he’d been at home this week.”

  “He was at home. He was at home with me.”

  “Michael, he wasn’t with you,” she shouted. “You were at the hospital. You’re always at the hospital. Why couldn’t you have been with him? Why couldn’t you have seen it coming?”

  Michael clenched his fists, his voice steady. “Where would you have been, Jennie? If this had happened while he was at your house, what would you have been doing? You would have been at the newspaper office. You would have been drawing and having meetings and making plans to blow somebody else’s political career sky-high in Austin.” There. He’d said it. She ruined people sometimes by what she did, when all he’d been doing was trying to fix them. He’d questioned her motives the entire time they’d been married. He’d told her that, finally, when they were battling for custody of Cody in the Dallas County courtroom. “You wouldn’t have seen it coming. You would have been just as helpless as I was.”

  “I don’t know that, Michael,” she said coldly. “All I know is that you fought for joint custody and look what’s happened. This smacks of negligence. You could have done something if you’d been with him.”

  Here it came again, the same words she said so often. You could have saved everything if you’d been home. “Do you think I’m magic because I’m a doctor? Do you think I could have done any more because I have a medical degree and a license to practice?”

  “Yes!” she shouted. “Yes, Michael, yes!” It was true. She’d always felt Cody was safer when he was with Michael.

  “I’m tired of you holding me responsible for everything,” he said quietly as she turned to walk away. “Please don’t do this again. Not now.”