Miracle and Other Christmas Stories

by Connie Willis

  “When it goes off, it distracts the interview subjects,” Joanna said defensively. “There aren’t supposed to be any outside influences.”

  “You should get the kind that vibrates,” Tish said.

  But then I couldn’t use it to escape from the Mrs. Davenports, Joanna thought, but she said, “That’s a good idea.” she glanced at her watch. The cafeteria would still be open, just barely. “I’m going to lunch,” she said. “If Dr. Wright shows up again, tell him it’s Mr. Mandrake he wants.”

  She took the stairs, so she wouldn’t run into either of them in the elevator. Halfway to the cafeteria, she decided she’d better check to make sure it wasn’t Vielle who’d tried to page her, and went on down to the emergency room.

  It was jammed, as usual, gurneys everywhere, a boy with a hand wrapped in a red-soaked dish towel sitting on an examining table, two women talking rapidly and angrily in Spanish to the admissions nurse, someone in one of the examining rooms screaming obscenities in English at the top of her lungs.

  Joanna worked her way through the tangle of gurneys and IV poles and bloodwork charts, looking for Vielle’s black, worried-looking face. She always looked worried, whether she was responding to a code or removing a splinter, on-duty or off-, and Joanna often wondered what effect it had on her patients.

  There she was, over by the copy machine in dark blue scrubs with a blue surgical cap over her black hair, looking worried. Joanna maneuvered past a wheelchair and a stack of blankets to get to her. “Did you try to page me?” she asked.

  Vielle shook her blue-capped head. “It’s like a tomb down here.” she pulled a sheet out of the copy machine and opened the top to remove the original. “Literally. A gunshot, two overdoses, one AIDS-related pneumonia. All DOA except one of the overdoses, who tried to shoot one of the paramedics bringing him in before he died. He was on the new variety of PCP that’s making the rounds. He thought the paramedic was a Martian.” She pointed to a window that an attendant in pink scrubs was taping a piece of cardboard over. “It’s getting like a battle zone down here.”

  “You’ve got to put in a request to transfer to Peds.”

  Vielle shuddered. “Kids are even worse than overdoses. Besides, if I transferred, who’d notify you of NDEs before Mandrake got ahold of them?”

  Joanna smiled. “You’re right. You’re my only hope. By the way, do you happen to know a Dr. Wright?”

  “I’ve been looking for him for years,” Vielle said.

  “Well, I don’t think this is the one,” Joanna said. “He wouldn’t be one of the interns or residents in the ER, would he?”

  “I don’t know,” Vielle said. “We get so many through here, I don’t even bother to learn their names. I just call all of them ‘Stop that,’ or ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I’ll check.” She went over to the desk, grabbed a clipboard, and drew her finger down a list. “Nope. Does he work here?”

  “I don’t know,” Joanna said. “But if he comes looking for me, I’m up on seven-west.”

  “And what about if an NDE shows up?”

  Joanna grinned. “I’m in the cafeteria. You can page me.”

  “Things should pick up this afternoon,” Vielle said.

  “Why?”

  “Heart attack weather,” she said, and at Joanna’s blank look, pointed toward the emergency room entrance. “It’s been snowing since nine this morning.”

  Joanna looked wonderingly in the direction Vielle was pointing, though she couldn’t see the windows from here. “I’ve been in curtained rooms all morning,” she said. And in window-less offices and corridors and elevators.

  “Slipping on the ice, shovelling snow, car accidents,” Vielle said. “We should have lots of business. Do you have your pager turned on?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Joanna said, grinning. “And I’m wearing clean underwear.” She waved goodbye to Vielle, “I’ll be in the cafeteria,” and went up to first.

  She was late enough that there wasn’t any line. She picked up a tray and started over toward the salads. And stopped short. Maurice Mandrake was over by the drinks machine, getting a cup of coffee. Nope, thought Joanna, not right now. I’m liable to kill him.

  She turned on her heel and walked swiftly down the hall. She dived in the elevator, pushed CLOSE DOOR, and then hesitated. She couldn’t leave the hospital, she’d promised Vielle she’d be within reach, and there was no restaurant for five blocks. They need to open a coffee shop across the street, she thought for the hundredth time. Maybe she should open one instead of talking to the just-back-from-the-dead and dying. It would at least be doing something useful.

  She couldn’t go back to her office, either. Dr. Wright, if he was still looking for her, would definitely check there. And the vending-machine snack bar was over in the north wing. She could starve before she got there. They had popsicles up in Peds, but they were nothing but flavored ice. She wanted food.

  Paula up on five-east usually had M&M’s. They were only marginally more substantial than popsicles, but they were something. She pressed the button for five.

  Besides, she could use the excuse of checking on Coma Carl. That was what the nurses called him, even though he hadn’t ever been in a true coma except for the first two days after he’d been admitted with spinal meningitis. He was instead in a semi-drug-, semi-fever-induced state of unconsciousness, drifting in and out of the depths, dreaming sometimes, his eyes and arms twitching like a sleeping dog’s, and sometimes murmuring incomprehensibly. And sometimes speaking clearly.

  “But he’s not having a near-death experience,” Guadalupe, one of his nurses, had said when Joanna had asked them to write down everything he said. “I mean, he’s never coded or anything. He’s always had vitals, even when he was in the coma.”

  “The circumstances are similar,” Joanna had said, without specifying how. And he’s one subject Maurice Mandrake can’t get to, she thought.

  Nothing could get to him, even though the nurses pretended he could hear them, being careful not to use the name Coma Carl or discuss his condition when they were in the room, encouraging Joanna to talk to him. “There have been studies that show coma patients can hear what’s said in their presence,” Paula had told her, offering her some M&M’s.

  But I don’t believe it, she thought, waiting for the elevator door to open on Four. He doesn’t hear anything. He’s somewhere else altogether, beyond our reach.

  The elevator door opened, and she went down the corridor to the nurses’ station. Paula wasn’t there. A strange nurse with blond hair and no hips was at the computer.

  “Where’s Paula?” Joanna asked.

  “Out sick,” the pencil-thin nurse said, looking curiously at her. “Can I help you, Doctor …” She looked at Joanna’s ID. “Lander?”

  It was no use asking her for food. She looked like she’d never eaten an M&M in her life, and from the way she was staring at Joanna’s body, like she didn’t approve of Joanna’s having done so.

  “No. Thanks,” Joanna said coolly, and realized she was still carrying the tray from the cafeteria. She must have had it the whole time in the elevator and never been aware of it, and no wonder the nurse was looking at her strangely.

  “This needs to go back down to the kitchen,” she said briskly, and handed it to the nurse. “I’m here to see Com—Mr. Aspinall,” she said and started down the hall to Carl’s room.

  The door was open, and Guadalupe was on the far side of the bed, hanging up an IV bag.

  “How’s he doing today?” Joanna whispered, approaching the bed.

  “Much better,” Guadalupe said cheerfully, and then in a whisper, “His fever’s back up.” She unhooked the empty IV bag and carried it over to the window. “It’s dark in here,” she said. “Would you like some light, Carl?” She pulled the curtains open.

  Vielle had been right. It was snowing. Big flakes out of a leaden gray sky.

  “It’s snowing, did you know that, Carl?” Guadalupe said.

  No, Joanna thought,
looking down at the man on the bed. His slack face under the oxygen tubes was pale and expressionless in the gray light from the window, his eyes not quite closed, a slit of white showing beneath the heavy lids, his mouth half-open.

  “It looks cold out there,” Guadalupe said, going over to the computer. “Is it building up on the streets yet?”

  It took Joanna a moment to realize Guadalupe was talking to her and not Carl. “I don’t know,” she said, fighting the impulse to whisper so as not to disturb him. “I came to work before it started.”

  Guadalupe poked at icons on the screen, entering Carl’s temperature and the starting of the new IV bag, and then came over to the bed.

  “Has he said anything this morning?” Joanna asked.

  “Not a word,” Guadalupe said. “I think he’s boating on the lake again.” She transferred the IV bag to her left hand and with her right hand straightened the covers on the bed. “He was humming earlier.”

  “Humming?” Joanna said. “Can you describe it?”

  “You know, humming,” Guadalupe said, pulling the covers up over Carl’s taped and tubed arm, over his chest. “Like a tune, only I couldn’t recognize it. There you are, all tucked in nice and warm,” she said and started for the door with her empty IV bag, “You’re lucky you’re in here and not out in that snow, Carl,” and went out.

  But he’s not in here, Joanna thought, looking at him lying there passively under the covers. He’s somewhere else, far beyond the reach of our voices and the gray light from the window. Where have you gone? she wondered, looking at the unseeing slits of his eyes. “Where are you, Carl?” she asked. “Are you boating on the lake?”

  Boating on the lake was one of the scenarios the nurses had invented out of his murmurings. He made motions with his arms sometimes that might have been rowing, and once he had said clearly, “the paddles,” and at those times he was never agitated or cried out, which was why they thought it was something idyllic.

  There were several scenarios: The Bataan Death March, during which he cried over and over, “Water!,” and Running for the Bus, and one each of the nurses had a different name for—Burned at the Stake and Viet Cong Ambush and The Torments of Hell—during which he flailed wildly at the tangled covers, yanked out his IV, blacked Guadalupe’s eye when she tried to restrain him. “Maylmuss,” he had screamed over and over, and once, in a tone of panicked dread, “Cut the knot.”

  “Maybe he thinks the IV lines are ropes,” Guadalupe, her eye swollen shut, had said helpfully, handing Joanna a transcript of the episode.

  “Maybe,” Joanna had said, but she didn’t think so. He doesn’t know the IV lines are there, she thought, or the snow or the nurses. He’s somewhere else, seeing something different altogether.

  Like Mrs. Davenport. And all the other heart attack and car accident and hemorrhage patients she’d interviewed over the last two years, wading through the angels and tunnels and relatives they’d been programmed to see, listening for the offhand comment, the seemingly irrelevant detail that might give a clue as to what they had really experienced.

  “The light didn’t hurt at all,” Lisa Andrews, whose heart had stopped during a C-section, had said, but she had put her hand above her eyes, as if to shield them, as she said it. And Jake Becker, who had fallen off a ladder putting up Christmas decorations, had said, trying to describe the tunnel, “Like a telephone cord, only straight.” Like a rope.

  Joanna went over to the window and looked out at the snow. It was coming down faster now, covering the cars in the visitors’ parking lot. An elderly woman in a gray coat and a plastic rain bonnet was laboriously scraping snow off her windshield. Heart attack weather, Vielle had said. Car accident weather. Dying weather.

  She pulled the curtains closed and went back over to the bed and sat down in the chair beside it. He was not going to speak, and the cafeteria would close in another ten minutes. She needed to go now if she ever wanted to eat, and Mr. Mandrake was probably gone by now.

  But she sat on, watching the monitors, with their shifting lines, shifting numbers, watching the almost imperceptible rise and fall of Carl’s sunken chest, looking at the closed curtains with the snow falling silently beyond them.

  She became aware of a faint sound. She looked at Carl, but he had not moved, his mouth was still half-open. She glanced at the monitors. But the sound was coming from the bed.

  Can you describe it? she thought automatically. A deep, even sound, like a foghorn, with long pauses between, and after each pause, a subtle change in pitch.

  He’s humming, she thought. Carl’s humming.

  She fumbled for her minirecorder and switched it on, holding it close to his mouth. “Nmnmnmnm,” he droned, and then slightly lower, shorter, “nmnm,” pause while he must be taking a breath, “nmnmnm,” lower still. Definitely a tune, though she couldn’t recognize it either. The spaces between the sounds were too long, the back-of-the-throat sounds too nasal. But he was definitely humming.

  In a rowboat on a summer lake somewhere, while a pretty girl played a ukulele? Or at the end of a tunnel in a warm light, listening to a heavenly choir? Or somewhere else altogether, out in the snow perhaps, or the jungles of Vietnam, or the dark, humming to himself to keep his fears at bay?

  Her pager began abruptly to beep. “Sorry,” she said, scrabbling to turn it off with her free hand. “Sorry.”

  But Carl hummed on undisturbed, long short short long, long short long. Oblivious. Unreachable.

  The number showing on the pager was the ER. “Sorry,” Joanna said again and switched off the recorder. “I have to go.” She patted his hand, lying unmoving at his side. “But I’ll come see you again tomorrow,” and headed down to the ER.

  “Heart attack,” Vielle said when she got there. “Digging his car out of a ditch. Coded in the ambulance.”

  “Where is he?” Joanna said. “Over in the CICU?”

  “No,” Vielle said. “He’s right here.”

  “In the ER?” Joanna said, surprised. She never talked to patients in the ER, even though there were times she wished she could, to get to them before Mr. Mandrake could.

  “He refuses to be admitted till his doctor gets here,” Vielle said. “We’ve paged the cardiologist, but in the meantime he’s driving everyone crazy. He did not have a heart attack. He works out at the gym three times a week.” She led Joanna across the central area toward the examining rooms.

  “Are you sure he’s well enough to talk to me?” Joanna asked, following her.

  “He’s demanded to talk to everyone else, from Mrs. Brightman on down,” Vielle said, sidling expertly between a gurney and two orderlies.

  “Thanks,” Joanna said dryly, following her. “Are you sure he’s willing to talk to me? If he’s in denial—”

  “He can tell you why he couldn’t have had an NDE,” Vielle said. “He works out three times a week—”

  “—at his health club,” Joanna said, grinning. “Maybe you should have paged Mr. Mandrake for this one.”

  “I did,” Vielle said. “He didn’t answer. Listen, there’s your subject now.”

  “Why isn’t my doctor here yet?” a man’s baritone demanded from the end examining room. “And where’s Stephanie?”

  His voice sounded strong and steady for someone who’d just coded and been revived. Maybe he was right, and he hadn’t had a heart attack at all.

  “What do you mean, you haven’t gotten in touch with her yet?” the voice shouted. “Where’s a phone? I’ll call her myself.”

  “You’ll be doing me a big favor if you can keep him in bed till the cardiologist gets here,” Vielle whispered.

  She opened the door and led Joanna into the room. An intimidated-looking nurse’s aide was standing next to the bed.

  Joanna looked at the man propped up in the bed, his bare chest covered with EKG patches and wires, in surprise. She had been expecting a barrel-chested man in his fifties or sixties. This man couldn’t be more than thirty-five, and he was tan and well-muscled
. She could believe he worked out at the gym three times a week.

  “She has a cell phone!” he was saying to the nurse’s aide.

  “She isn’t answering,” the aide said, “I’ll try again,” and scooted out.

  “Mr. Menotti,” Vielle said. “I’d like you to meet Dr. Lander. I told you about her.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. He started to push himself to sitting.

  “Don’t try to sit up,” Joanna warned, glancing anxiously at the heart monitor.

  Vielle had already pushed him gently back against the bed. “You need to stay quiet. Your doctor will be here in a few minutes,” she said, looking at the monitor and then checking his pulse.

  “You need to try Stephanie again,” he said. “She’s probably left the cell phone in the car. She’s always doing that. I tell her, what good is a cell phone if you don’t carry it with you?”

  “I’ll find her,” Vielle said and went out.

  Joanna pulled a pen and a release form out of her sweater pocket and unfolded it. “This is a standard release form, Mr. Menotti—”

  “Call me Greg,” he said. “Mr. Menotti’s my father.”

  “Greg,” she said.

  “And what do I call you?” he asked and grinned. It was a very cute grin.

  And he’s fully aware of that fact, Joanna thought. “Dr. Lander,” she said dryly. She handed him the form. “The release form says that you give your permission for—”

  “If I sign it, will you give me your phone number?” he asked.

  “I thought your girlfriend was on her way here, Mr. Menotti,” she said, handing him the pen.

  “Greg,” he corrected her, trying to sit up. Joanna leaped forward to hold the form so he could sign it lying down.

  He did and handed her the pen back with a grin. “Dr. Lander. That means you’re a doctor, right?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not a medical doctor. I have a doctorate in cognitive psychology.”

  “But you work here, right?” he said insistently. “They keep saying I had a heart attack, but I couldn’t have. I work out at the gym three times a week. I thought maybe you could talk to them and convince them there’s some mistake. I’m thirty-six. Guys my age don’t have heart attacks.”