The Promise of Stardust (38 page)

I went inside to wake Elle for her shot, but she wasn't there. I assumed she woke up and went upstairs to bed.

“Matt!” she called out through what sounded like gritted teeth.

I rounded the corner and found her lying on the kitchen floor, wrapped in the granny-square afghan. Doubled over, she was pale as our white cupboards.

I knelt beside her. “Did you fall?”

“My water broke—just a minute ago,” she said, gasping.

I pulled back the cover. Dressed only in a nightgown, and her legs were saturated with amniotic fluid and blood.

The baby was premature, and he might be in trouble if he was born so soon, but that wasn't my only concern. Elle was supposed to stop taking the blood thinner before a planned delivery. If she delivered tonight, she could hemorrhage to death.

I dialed 911. “Breathe, Peep. It will be fine.” But it wasn't.

Miracles don't always happen.

   39   

Elle needed a miracle if she was going to survive this pneumonia. Jake said he'd make an excuse to the judge for my absence in court, downplaying Elle's current medical crisis. However, today was the day my partner, Phil, would be testifying, and he'd probably tell the judge Elle was dying. Her body was dying. She was already gone.

But inside her, the baby was still doing somersaults. I was holding on to that glimmer of life, replaying it over and over in my head while the nurse was doing Elle's trach care.

I heard a sputter and looked up. Elle was coughing. I jumped up.

The nurse eyed me. “What's wrong?”

“She can't cough. She lost that reflex,” I said.

The nurse adjusted Elle's oxygen upward. “The cerebral edema is down. She has some spontaneous respirations, too,” she said. “Not enough to sustain her, but some. Maybe once we get the pneumonia under control, we'll be able to wean her off the vent.”

Jesus
. I reached into my pocket. “You have a penlight?” I asked the nurse.

“Sure.” She pulled one from her scrubs and passed it to me.

I flicked the light across Elle's eyes. Nothing. Her pupils remained fixed and dilated. I checked her corneal reflexes and her deep tendon reflexes. She did not respond to painful stimuli.
Jesus
. With just the smallest hint of hope, a cough, I flew into denial again. I needed to talk to Phil. I needed to talk to Blythe about the safety of doing an MRI on a pregnant woman. But cognitively I knew Elle's brain damage was irreparable—and global.

Was she in there somewhere? I wanted her to live long enough for the baby to be born. Hell, I wanted her to wake up, but that wouldn't happen. If she did, she'd be profoundly disabled. She wouldn't want to live—for years—in a vegetative state—not after the baby was born.

The baby inside her was flipping around—our baby.

I could still see Elle in her family's driveway, telling me she would want to die if she were ever in her mother's condition.

“I'm going to try to catch a little sleep in the on-call room.” I grabbed my duffel bag and walked out of Elle's room, grasping the implications of what I was doing to her. But—the baby.

The on-call room was smaller than a freshman dorm. A set of bunk beds and one small desk outfitted with a computer for charting. I fell back on the bed and stared at the springs of the mattress above me. Instead of hearing my heart pound
lub dub
,
lub dub
, it was pounding
calm down, calm down
. As I lay awake in a frantic haze, I reached into the duffel bag for Elle's journals and somehow pulled out one of Alice's diaries instead. For a moment I flipped through it, fanning the pages. The writing almost looked like Elle's, but Elle wrote letters and in composition books. I snapped the book shut and dropped it on the top of the pile. On the back cover, enclosed in a heart, Elle had scribbled the words:

Elle loves Matt

I whipped the book back up. The first date inside was December 25, 1988.

Dear Matt
,

Mom did her Christmas shopping before she got so sick she couldn't. Can you believe it? She knew I'd been writing these letters as a sort of journal, and so she bought a hokey-pink version, as though I'm a little girl. I'm not. I don't know if I've ever been like that. I'm certainly not now
.

Daddy hit me last night. It was an accident. He didn't even see me there. When you saw the bruise, you went after him. Fortunately, your dad pulled you back. Then in the scuffle, Dennis got a little better look at my expanding waistline and figured things out. It's Christmas, but I'm not Mary, and you're not Joseph. And now your dad knows I'm pregnant
.

Merry Christmas. It's more like a Christ-mess
.

Peep

January 20

Celina

January 21

Celina

January 22

Celina

Every day for weeks after the miscarriage, that's all Elle wrote, Celina's name. You could see where she'd left the pen point pressed into the paper at the end of the
a
, like she'd paused and considered writing more. The name looked so lonely there, and it occurred to me, I'd never seen the name written down. It occurred to me that it could have been spelled with an
S
instead of a
C
. It occurred to me that I, too, had always pictured it with the letter
C
.

Then Elle began to talk about her mother again. I flipped the page.

February 16, 1989

Dear Matt
,

I was talking to Linney and said I had a headache. She told me to get some Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. That's not the only thing in there. I found the leftover Percocet—from when you broke your leg. And I thought, I could give these to my mom. Only Linney walked in and yanked them out of my hand
.

I begged her. I begged her. She won't help. She said they were only for the person they were prescribed for
.

February 17, 1989

Dear Matt
,

I can't stand it anymore. Too much has gone wrong. They're going to put Christopher and me in foster care. We'll probably get split up. Linney said she'd try to get custody of us, and she got a temporary order tonight. She swore, at the very least, she'd manage to get Christopher. Me? Well, that's more tricky because of you. I guess she's right about that. I'm scared. And I want to be with you, too. Really with you. But we can't. What if I got pregnant again? I wanted to keep Celina. I loved her
.

And there's Mommy. I don't want to leave her to go to a foster home. I should be here. No one else fights for her
.

I begged Linney to help my mom
.

Peep

February 18, 1989

Mom is dead
.

I keep saying the words out loud, but they don't make sense
.

She's dead
.

Finally. After months, my mom is dead
.

I didn't want her to die, and I don't want her to be dead. But it's better, right? She isn't suffering anymore. God, how she suffered
.

I thought we should help her—ease her pain. I begged the nurses. I begged Daddy. I begged everyone to give her more pain medicine. No one would do it
.

Last night, after we came back from the social workers, Linney brought me back to my house. She doesn't want me to sleep at her house because she thinks you and I will have sex again. Maybe we would. I want you to hold me right now. I need you. But Linney brought me home. And Mom was moaning. It's worse at night. Linney could see that. The nurse had some problem with her husband and Linney said she'd stay until the nurse could take care of it. Linney gave Mom more pain medicine. Extra. Your medicine, Matt. She showed me how to crush the pills if I needed to give my mom another one later. And maybe it's sick, but I was grateful that you had broken your leg last summer. That's terrible, right?

But then the nurse came back. And Linney left. I stayed with Mommy all night. She got quiet, and it was like for the first time in forever she seemed comfortable. I drifted off to sleep with my head resting on Mommy's pillow. When I woke up, she'd stopped breathing. She just stopped breathing. It was my fault. Mine
.

I don't know anymore if it was the right thing. She's not suffering. But she's dead. And I'm never going to see her ever again. I miss her. So much. I need her. Christopher needs her. And Daddy. Oh God. Did the extra medicine kill my mom? Did I kill her?

Peep

I stared at the page. Holy shit. There were no more entries in the diary—only blank, yellowed pages.

I had to think this through, absorb it. Elle didn't kill her mother. Alice had been dying for months, long agonizing months. If giving an extra dose of pain meds hastened Alice's death, that probably made Elle more saint than murderer. Hell, if I'd remembered pills were left over from my broken leg, I would have dosed Alice myself. What bothered me was that my mother did it and left the house, left Elle alone, left Elle to blame herself.

I took the diary and returned to Elle's hospital room.

The nurse was suctioning Elle's trach. “She's doing okay. More secretions, but she's okay.”

Elle silently coughed again.

“I'm going to write for an EEG.” I went to the desk, stared at Elle's chart, and scribbled down the order. I stared into her room, and after some minutes of numbness I realized I still had the diary in my left hand.

In the morning I could lock it away in my safe-deposit box. I could tell my mother about it, and convince her I was desperate enough to stoop to blackmail.
God
. I stood up and wandered out to the parking garage. Had my mother participated in a mercy killing?

It was an act of mercy.

I found my car, popped open the trunk, and saw the dried-out sedum and hardy mums. I'd bought them at a nursery Elle liked in Yarmouth the day before the accident. I'd come home, planning to surprise her. She met me at the car with the mad idea of seduction and baby making, not knowing she was already pregnant.

We started arguing instead. She wanted a baby, and I was afraid of losing her. When Phil called me to come in and assist him with an emergency, I bolted. The last night we would ever share, and I left. No.
I bolted
. I didn't get home until after midnight, and then we watched the Perseids, putting the rest aside. I forgot about the flowers in the trunk of my car. Now the plants were deader than dust—like all my good intentions.

I dropped the diary into the trunk, opened the driver's door, and sat in the car. I was planning to blackmail my own mother. I was trying to keep Elle alive when this was the one thing—the only thing—that truly terrified her. Who the hell was I becoming? A father, I hoped.

After a while I returned to Elle's side. The nurse was right. Two, maybe three times a minute, Elle took spontaneous breaths. It wasn't enough to sustain her.

I repeated Elle's neuro exam. Nothing else had changed. No miracle was coming.