A Small Indiscretion Read online

  I refused to leave the hospital while we were waiting for you to emerge from the coma, and a room was found, a closet, really, into which a hospital bed was rolled for your father and me. We slept in the bed together the first night, the only night I can remember that autumn that our limbs were entangled the way they had been the rest of our married life.

  At the end of your second day tapering off propofol, Mitch came to check on you and ushered me out of your room by the elbow. “Go get something to eat,” he said. “We can’t have you fading.”

  So I walked to the cafeteria, but the smell of food made my stomach turn. I returned to the waiting room outside Trauma. I hadn’t minded the space before. The sea-foam-green carpet. The gold pendant lights over the receptionist’s desk. The chairs patterned in silver and teal. But during those days we waited for you to regain consciousness, the heavy quiet of that waiting room made me feel like I was going mad.

  On the third day, the trauma-center doctor’s brisk reassurances began to lose some of their briskness, and I felt panic rise in my gut.

  We paged Mitch. He grilled the trauma-center doctor, whom he himself had hand-picked. He moved around your bed, studying your chart, checking your vital signs, touching your body—your head and eyelids and ears and chest and neck and belly and knees and feet and toes. He moved like an athlete, or a dancer—the steps he took so practiced as to take on a stylized grace—but his hands were an artist’s hands, imprinted with a vision of a healthy human body, and gifted with the power to bring that vision to life.

  When Mitch finally spoke, it was to your father, not the trauma doctor. “I would recommend putting him back in a coma.”

  “Why?” your father asked.

  “I’ve never seen that done before,” the trauma doctor interjected.

  “Well, now you have,” Mitch replied.

  Mitch took us aside. He explained to us that he suspected the doctor had been too ambitious in bringing you back. He was of the opinion you had experienced a kind of cognitive overload, and your body, as a defense, had clung to its unconscious state. His view was that sedating you again would actually allow you to recover consciousness more quickly than if you remained on the path you were on, which he was afraid was going to cause seizures, or even a stroke.

  A memory came to me of Mitch sitting in my store, years ago, after his wife left him, fat tears falling down his face. How could a man with such powerful intuition in the matter of human health have so badly miscalculated in the matter of human love? Could a man like that be trusted now to be infallible?

  I could not stand my own doubt, and I could not stand the certainty in Mitch’s face or the uncertainty in your father’s. So I turned away and let them decide.

  If a mother is only as happy as her least happy child, that day began a series of the most unhappy days of my life.

  Twelve

  IN LONDON, I began to stay on in the pub after Malcolm left for home each night.

  “You’d better go,” I’d say to him, at seven.

  “I hate to leave you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  His voice would become throaty and tender. “Are you certain you won’t allow me to give you a lift?”

  “I’ll stay for one more beer.”

  “Let me give you money for a taxi home.”

  “I can take the tube.”

  Then as soon as he was gone, I was bereft. I told myself there was no sense staying on drinking alone and waiting for something to happen. I told myself, each time, I would finish just the one pint. But when I finished, it was difficult to leave the comfort of the pub, the guarantee that the hours of the evening would pass without any conscious effort on my part to fill them. I’d order the pint, and drink it, and the by-now-familiar curtain would drop, cutting me off from worry and fear and pain. The matter of why I was so far from home. The situation with Malcolm. The question of college. All that was swept behind the curtain, and the present moment became what mattered. I grew confident in my own intelligence, and wit, and beauty, and I often simply stood up and took a stool at the bar and talked to whoever was next to me, and the night went on from there.

  Sometimes, the curtain failed to drop, and the drinking backfired, sharpening my awareness of being alone instead of softening it, and making me hungry for human contact—for just one man, or a woman, even, to sit down beside me. But that hunger crippled me, and on those evenings I did not have the courage to speak to anybody at all.

  One night, still feeling the effects of a hangover from the night before, I vowed to myself I would not drink after Malcolm left. My father was an alcoholic, after all. I, more than most people, needed to watch myself. I told myself I would let the unfinished pint of beer sit on the table in front of me, and if I could do that, I would have won, and there would be no need for further vigilance. I made a little game of it. I watched the minutes passing. I made it four minutes without taking a drink, then five, six, seven. I gained strength with each full rotation of the minute hand on my watch. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. The foam began to flatten. The pub filled up. I began to feel silly taking up a whole booth alone, so I moved with the untouched beer to a stool at the bar. The foam in my glass was thinning but the bubbles were still rising, propelled by some mysterious private force, like waves beating the shore.

  The man sitting on the next stool spoke to me. He began to tell me about a problem he was having with his tooth, which was crumbling, causing him pain when he drank something too cold or too hot. He went so far as to hook his finger in his mouth and pull his lip back to show me the damage.

  “Do you need a filling?” I said. “Or a root canal?”

  “Dunno,” he said. “Haven’t been to a dentist.”

  “Why not?”

  “Dunno,” he said, laughing wildly.

  I turned away. I did not want to become involved with him, and I was intent on not drinking my beer, which required all my concentration. I waited in silence until I had been sitting not drinking for exactly an hour, and I told myself now I could go. Now I would take the tube home and walk the blocks from the station to Victoria House alone. But what sort of reward was that for having won?

  I took a deep drink from my glass and turned again to the man next to me. A few of his friends arrived, and they all took an interest in me. There were three or four of them and they made sure there was always a beer in front of me. Eventually I found they could make me laugh, and a breezy camaraderie rose among us. When the pub closed, we went on to a “club,” which seemed to be only a name for a pub licensed to stay open when the rest shut at eleven.

  Hours later, when the club closed, we all stood outside in a taxi queue, the idea being that I would come along with them to wherever it was they were headed, a flat where we could continue to drink. But when we reached the top of the queue, I found myself alone with the man with the crumbling tooth. He was holding my hand as he climbed into the cab, trying to pull me in after him.

  I resisted. If I got into that taxi with him I would be entering a new life, a cheapened one, where gums swelled, where teeth rotted, where bones and muscles and skin grew thin, where books and houses and cars and furniture and all the objects of order in the world were allowed to corrode and decay.

  “I’m not sure I will come,” I said, pulling my hand out of his. “I’m tired.”

  “Come on now, love. We’ll put you straight to bed,” he said. He got out of the taxi and tried to take my hand again. But I’d crossed my arms over my chest.

  “Come on now, love,” he said again. “Taxi’s waiting. Taxi won’t wait forever.” He was slurring his words and his face had grown hard. “Get in now.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t, after all.”

  We stood eye to eye. He was a small man, which I hadn’t noticed before, small and fierce.

  “You frigid cunt,” he said venomously.

  I was stunned. I’m not sure I’d ever heard the word spoken out loud.

  He tried to get his arms around m
y waist, but I slipped out of his grasp and jumped in and locked the door before he could come in after me. The taxi sped away, and my head began to spin. I vowed, in the morning, that from then on I would keep my drinking in check. But I found I couldn’t, or wouldn’t. I carried on drinking excessively as long as I could—right up to the moment I decided to become a mother.

  It was not so difficult, then, to stop. The stakes changed, and you grew inside me, and the muscles of restraint I hadn’t known were there became strong.

  Thirteen

  DECAY. CORROSION. NEGLECT. Things we found readily enough last fall at the Salvaged Light, which I’d mostly abandoned after the night of your accident, when the claw-foot tub in the loft fell through the floor and smashed the lights below. Repairs could not begin until negotiations with the insurance company were complete. And I really did not have the energy to address the problem, anyway, given my preoccupation with you.

  We also found neglect at the Mermaid Inn, where your father and I alternated nights, each of us taking a shift to be close to you, then a shift at home, to be with Clara and Polly. But we didn’t find neglect in the places we might have expected to—inside the hospital, with its expensively framed art and butter-colored paint, or in our own house, which was kept clean and orderly by my mother last fall, and animated by my father, who’d effectively moved in, too. The evenings I was home from a shift attending to you, my mother and father attended to me. I imagine they did the same for your father the nights he was home, at least when he let them. They took care of me as perhaps they wished they had when I was a child. I’d come home long after dinner and they’d sit me down at the table. My mother would put a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup before me. My father would cut me a piece of some concoction he’d invented and baked with the girls—caramel chocolate pie or peanut-butter-and-banana cake or his famous bread pudding. My mother whisked around, cleaning and straightening and doing laundry. My father played with the girls, and played the piano, and sometimes sat with me on the front porch while your sisters worked on perfecting their cartwheels on the lawn. He never took a drink that fall, as far as I know. He settled in. He made it clear he would stay as long as we needed him. He’d stay out the year, if we’d have him.

  It was as if two decades had not passed, and there had been no estrangement. I was unable to keep myself at a distance from him. I needed to confide in someone, and as soon as he was there, I knew he was that person. So I talked, and he listened. Sometimes, when I spoke about your condition, and the accident, and the summer that preceded it, I laid my head on his shoulder and wept. I ended up telling him everything, and it was as if the burdens of the story were absorbed into him, and lifted from me, at least while we sat together that way.

  My mother and father were often in the kitchen together, deliberating over the question of dinner. My father did the grocery shopping, always bringing back something extra, Life Savers or licorice or, most often, a double package of Oreo cookies he opened in the store and shared with the girls as soon as he returned home, even if it was right before dinner. He was not so different sober from how he’d been drunk, which is to say the best of him survived both conditions. He told me the addiction to drink had simply lifted a year earlier, the day he’d found out he had hepatitis and a barely functioning liver, and that if he continued to drink, he was going to die. Just like that, he knew he wanted to live, and that want canceled out the wanting of alcohol he’d been trying to fight his entire adult life.

  On weekends, when the girls were home from school, my father involved them in elaborate projects like those from my childhood. When your father was home, he helped them. They built model rockets and shot them off at Crissy Field. They installed a zip line in the backyard. They sketched plans for a tree house and purchased supplies, then the rain came and the project was set aside. When my father left in January, he promised to finish it next time he came to visit. The wood is still stacked against the fence. I keep forgetting to put a tarp over it to protect it from the weather.

  AFTER A NIGHT at the Mermaid Inn and a long day at the hospital, it was a relief to come home, but in a little while, I wanted to be back at your bedside, speaking with Mitch or another doctor, or wandering the halls of the hospital or sitting in the waiting room reading. I fought off panic by immersing myself in research. I reread The Art of Kidney Transplant, the second book your father acquired when he started a publishing house focused on specialized medical topics. He had changed careers after his mother, your Grandmother Catherine, died of heart disease; he had become disillusioned with the practice of modern medicine. He believed he could make more of an impact publishing health books that were accessible to the general population than trying to treat that population one by one.

  I had read your father’s books over the years, but other than that, I had left the unseemly insides of things mostly to him. He was the one who had cleaned the dogs’ ears and pulled ticks and foxtails from their skin. He was the one who had poked at your belly when as an infant you had colic. He was the one to apply antiseptic and Band-Aids to your cuts and scrapes and to wrap your wrists and ankles when they were sprained. He nursed you and the girls while I nursed my squeamishness—until last fall, when the insides of you became a landscape it was necessary to investigate and master.

  The first book Jonathan ever published was Mitch’s book on Huntington’s disease. The book sold well enough to enable your father to move from practicing medicine to publishing full-time. Mitch had been one of Jonathan’s instructors at Chapel Hill. He moved to the West Coast to accept an appointment at the University of California, San Francisco, not long after you were born. A friendship developed. Mitch took a shine to you right away, and as you grew, he mentored you in your study of science.

  When we’d known him just a little while, he got married quite suddenly to a twenty-six-year-old medical student named Jessica. We invited them to dinner, and I bought a glossy cooking magazine. I made pork kebabs and corn custard, and for dessert, a lemon tart. At dinner, I remember, Jessica nibbled at the pineapple and peppers on her kebabs, but the bits of pork I’d marinated overnight were left in a forlorn little pile at the side of her plate.

  I have to admit to disliking her right away. I suppose I thought she was exactly wrong for Mitch—too fussy and thin and shallow and made-up, and possibly exhausted by the strain of being not quite as intelligent as she pretended to be, and not quite as pretty, either.

  After dinner, in the kitchen, Mitch told me she was a vegetarian. “I should have warned you beforehand,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  I held her plate in my hand over the garbage can, fighting the urge to rescue the meat by shoveling it into my own mouth.

  Most people have two kidneys, one on each side of the spinal column in the back, just below the rib cage. We never knew you had only the one. I dreamt of rescuing it—that fist-size, bean-shaped mass of cells that filtered waste and balanced minerals and maintained your blood pressure and kept your bones and blood healthy—but since I couldn’t, I prepared to give you one of mine in case yours did not recover.

  Three years after that dinner, Jessica left Mitch for another man. There was a year of despair, during which Mitch was more often at our house than in the apartment he’d rented in Pacific Heights. At the end of that year, he moved out of the city to become the head of neurology at Stanford and a noted researcher at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource facility, where you spent the summer after high school in an internship Mitch arranged.

  He never remarried. He came to dinner when his work allowed. He always arrived with an excellent bottle of wine and told me I looked ravishing. He was a fixture in our house at holidays. He always insisted on doing the dishes. For years, he put money into 529 accounts for you and Clara and Polly that we didn’t find out about until you were on your way to Northwestern. He said to me once that your father and I were the people who’d held him up after the divorce, and that he’d always be in our debt. But it tur
ned out it was not with us his loyalties finally lay.

  THE DAYS AT the Mermaid Inn merge together in memory, but I do vividly recall waking the first morning after your accident beneath the scratchy white sheets. I remember staring at the stains on the ceiling and listening to the roar of traffic on El Camino Real, a sound that seemed to lay the fact of your accident on my chest like a stone.

  I got up and dressed quietly, letting your father sleep. I walked in the already-warm morning to the Starbucks. There was a woman standing at the counter barking out one of those ridiculously precise and long-winded orders, a nonfat decaf triple-shot mocha, extra hot, no whip, or some such thing. While her “coffee” was being prepared, she went outside to check on her dog. By the time I’d ordered my coffee, she was back. She took a sip of her drink and made a face. It didn’t taste at all like it normally did, she told the barista. It tasted all chocolate and no coffee, and was the barista certain it was decaf, because usually they do such-and-such to the decaf, and usually it doesn’t look like this, and, by the way, could she have some water for her dog?

  The barista apologized to me for the long wait, and handed the woman a cup of water. She stuck her finger in it, and made another face. “It’s really not like me to be fussy,” she said, “but this is awfully warm. Do you think you could get me some cold water for my dog?”

  It occurred to me that not so long ago, my concerns had been like hers—trivial enough. But I had been set straight about what could go wrong in a life, and you were lying in a hospital bed with a compromised kidney, and I couldn’t waste another minute. So I pushed my way through the glass door, leaving the coffee I’d paid for behind.