The Promise of Stardust (48 page)

The courtroom. Testifying. Elle's face on the screen. God. Elle. She had fallen, and I'd had a heart attack. My father. My dead father. Dad. And again, I was afraid. I wanted my wife, even though I knew she was lying in a hospital bed with a severe brain injury, wasting away. Even though I knew all of that, I still asked, “Where's Elle?” I batted at Blythe and at the burly EMT. Elle was here. I'd seen her.

The ambulance came to a halt just as an elephant landed on my chest again. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't.

For a few minutes or a few hours I lay on a gurney in the ER or in the Cardiac ICU. I don't know which or what, just that I was someplace. Narcotics eased more chest pain but muted my vision beneath a frosted blur. The heaviness in my chest bound me to life. And then it didn't. The code cart ground closer to my bedside, and I heard the frantic undertone in a familiar voice say, “Let's tube him.”

And as the world around me fogged up, I realized I needed to tell someone that Elle would still want the baby to live. I needed the baby to live even if we both died.

Aside from the time I broke my leg when I was seventeen, I'd never been on the sick end of a hospital bed, and even then the hairline fracture didn't keep me in the hospital for more than a few hours. During my professional career, I had spent a lifetime of nights wandering hospital corridors, examining sick people, cutting into other people's flesh. As a family member, I'd watched my wife dying in a hospital bed for what felt like aeons.

But this view was different … confusing, narrow in its scope, and out of focus.

“Easy there, Matt. I'm going to remove that tube from your throat. On three, I want you to cough,” some guy in a white lab coat said. “One … two … three.” He yanked the endotracheal tube from my airway as I gagged, and horrible burning in my throat and the ongoing ache in my chest competed for top billing in my litany of discomforts.

I sputtered and wheezed. “What happened?”

He slipped a nasal cannula into my nose. “I'm Randall Zane, your friendly cardiothoracic surgeon. I don't believe we've met before. Here's the long and short of it: you collapsed, then you went into V-fib—or maybe the other way around. It looks like you had an anterior wall infarct, so you're hooked up to all the usual suspects: lidocaine drip, fentanyl, nitroglycerin, the works. You've been a little out of it, probably because of the fentanyl. We had to restrain you.” He released the belts from my wrists. “With your family history, you should have been keeping an eye on your cholesterol. It's sky-high.”

“How bad is the MI?” My voice sounded weak and tight, raspy like someone with laryngitis.

“Bad enough, but it looks like a small infarct. Your cardiac cath, though, that showed you've got a ninety-five percent blockage of your right coronary artery. You need a cabbage.”

“Eat more cabbage, right.” In my drug-induced stupor, I thought he was referring to how my diet affected my cholesterol.

“No, Matt, a C-A-B-G. It's pronounced ‘cabbage,' but that's an acronym for ‘coronary artery bypass graft.'”

“Oh, shit. I know. I went to med school. I'm groggy as hell. What are you giving me through this IV?”

“Again, it's the fentanyl. You've been a little out of it.” He chuckled. “I promise I won't tell your colleagues you've forgotten the basics.” Then he was suddenly more serious. “We're taking you to the OR in a couple of hours, and I'll fix you right up.”

“Where's Elle? Does she know I'm here?”

There's a kind of silence in the pity that falls over the face of a doctor when he knows something his patient does not. I know; I've worn that expression.

“What is it?” Fear coursed through my veins again. “Elle? Where is she?”

A long pause preceded his answer. “I don't know your wife's condition. You're in CICU. Cardiac ICU.”

And then it hit me again. Elle. She couldn't come to me. God, she was in the ICU, in another area of the hospital. But the part of Elle that counted, the part that was my friend, the part that made me feel whole and human and male, that part of her no longer existed, and my aloneness nearly swallowed me. I needed her more than I ever had, and she was gone.

“I need her,” I said aloud. Like a boy crying for something he could never have. And I wept, all my inhibitions pounded into submission.

From the corner of the room, I heard my mother's voice. “Oh, Matty, honey.” Then she was by my side and cradling my IV-bearing hand. “I know you want Elle; I know, but you have to rest.”

“It's bad,” I said. “Elle. Oh. I can't. Maybe we were supposed to die together. Maybe—”

“Don't you dare give up.” She set her jaw firm, although I noticed she was trembling.

My mother seemed no more real to me than Elle did when I saw her in the ambulance—It was as if my mother, too, might disappear, or at the very least step out of my line of vision. As powerless as I felt, it would take no more than that for everyone I knew to slip away.

“I need to see Elle,” I said.

“I'll check on her.”

“No, don't you go—near her.” My voice cracked as I tried to get out of bed. The baby. Mom couldn't be the only one speaking for Elle now.

“Matt, honey, listen to me. I understand how much you love her. If she could be here, she would.”

“Alice, the diary about Alice.” I began gasping for air.

Mom cupped my chin so I would close my mouth and get the oxygen flowing into my nose. “Breathe, honey. Deep breaths. It's all right. I understand. No one will take Elle off life support. No one. That's what I wanted to talk about with you—at the courthouse—after Blythe testified. I think I understand what you've been trying to tell me. How Elle was with Dylan. But right now, come on, just breathe through the cannula; you have to get better. Then we can talk it through. Together. We'll figure out what Elle would want, and we'll work it out together.”

I pushed away Mom's hand because my air hunger was growing fierce.

“You'd better leave, Mrs. Beaulieu. I don't want him agitated,” Zane said.

“Don't—” I tried to yell,
Don't go, Mom
, but I was hoarse from the tube, and the only sound that came out was a pathetic squeak. I was a frightened little boy with my painful heart pounding ineffectually. I was cowering from what my powerful mother might do and for what she might now understand. I was crying for my mother to hold my hand while I died. “Help me. Elle. God, Elle.”

“Easy, Matt,” Zane said. “Let us take care of you, and we'll check on your wife. I'll see if someone from ICU can give you an update.” He looked up at a nurse. “Let's get him on a non-rebreather mask.”

The nurse slipped my cannula out and put an oxygen mask over my face.

Mom
, I thought,
come back
. I drew oxygen and stopped thrashing as my mother tiptoed out the door and past the nurses' station, glancing back at me. I lifted the mask. “Blythe Clarke. I need to talk to Elle's doctor.”

“I know Blythe. She's a good doctor,” Zane said. “I'm sure she's taking very good care of your wife.” Then he leaned down and spoke conspiratorially to me. “Listen. I've heard you have a one-track mind, that you're very focused, so I want you to focus on this: relax. Let me fix that heart of yours. Now use the oxygen mask or I'm going to have to reintubate you.”

I pulled up the mask. “I can't have surgery right now. I have to see Elle. She's pregnant.”

He put it back on me. “This can't wait. I'll see you in the OR.”

“Stop. Give me a second.” I tried to break through the fog of the drugs, shaking my head like a punch-drunk fighter. “I don't want the surgery.”

Zane's patronizing expression said,
Idiot
. “Given your reaction to the medication, you may not be capable of giving
informed
consent. I'll ask your mother to act on your behalf.”

“No. Not her. I want to see my attorney, Jake Sutter.”

“Attorney?” Zane said. Lawyers drive the fear of malpractice into the pocketbooks of doctors. Even in my dopey haze I knew that much.

“I need to write an advanced directive and make sure no one can challenge it. And I
have
to see my wife. Roll me down to ICU. Treat me in ICU. I have to see her.” I needed to make sure Elle was still alive, because if she wasn't alive, if the baby wasn't alive, I didn't have any reason to live.

His lips thinned in disapproval.

“If you don't take me down there, and I know you can do it, I'll check myself out against medical advice.”

“That would be stupid. Besides, you wouldn't make it to the door.”

“So humor me,” I said as I had trouble ordering my words into a cogent sentence. “I may be—dying, but I need to see her before—you cut my chest open.”

I floated in and out of sleep; my sense of time befuddled from the narcotics they'd given me for chest pain. A hand jostled my arm. “Matt? It's Blythe. Your doctor said you wanted to know about Elle before your surgery.”

My vision was not wholly focused, like looking through a block of ice, but the pink ribbon clung to the side of the white blur of Blythe's hair. “How is she?” I asked.

“The same. Fairly stable.”

“Her kidneys?”

“You need to stop worrying about her.”

“Is she worse, Blythe?”

“Not worse. If we can pull Elle through this, that baby is going to need
you
.”

I drew oxygen through the tubing in my nose. “You saved my life.”

“First time I've done CPR in years. You're lucky I keep my Advanced Life Support certification current. You're also lucky they had an AED in the courthouse. We had to shock you.”

“Thank you, but no matter what happens to me, please, please, save the baby.” The baby. Somersaulting in Elle's belly. Kicking, although she'd never feel it.

“Listen to me. You're the one who has to take care of the baby.”

After Blythe left, I fell into dreams about Elle on the widow's walk, staring up at the night sky. I dreamed about holding her. I dreamed about long ago when we were children swimming in the river by her grandfather's farm, and I had nightmares about her turning her back on me when I betrayed her. I kept pleading, “Come back.”

If Jake Sutter looked any paler, I'd have gotten off the bed so he could lie down in my stead. He had never even come in to see Elle, but there he was at the foot of my hospital bed.

“Ah, how is the, ah, chest pain?” Jake swiped his forehead.

The drugs tempered the ache. I drew a deep breath through my nasal cannula. “Tolerable. My mother said something about working this out with Elle. But I don't know if she's just saying that because—”

“Because you dropped dead in the courthouse.”

“I didn't die.”

Jake cocked his head. “Close enough for me. Until your, ah, crisis is over, we shouldn't assume anything, but you're right, she might stop the litigation.”

“You aren't convinced?”

He pressed his thin lips together. “No. She's your mother. She wants you to live.”

“I need to make certain she doesn't have any legal rights over my health care.”

“I don't think you have to worry that she'll pull the plug on you.”

I shook my head. “No, but she might try to have me declared incompetent or something. She's my next of kin under the circumstances.”

“That would take a judge, but all right. For the sake of your peace of mind, you'd prefer one of your brothers?”

“Things can go wrong in the OR. This is major surgery. I'll probably be walking out of here in a few days, but if I can't, my brothers won't stand up to her. I want to set up an advanced directive, and I want you to be the decision-making agent.”

“Me? You want
me
to make
medical
decisions for
you
?” Jake rubbed his temples. “In a hospital?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a family member?” He was shaking like a man about to be hanged.

“You can stop my mother from taking Elle off life support.”

“Designating me with your medical power of attorney won't give me the power to stop your mother from acting on Elle's living will. Or on the one Adam Cunningham produced. Good Lord.” He muttered something unintelligible. “Legally, that's a separate issue from an advanced directive.” His eyes grew a bit wider. “But you could give Elle's father your power of attorney. Then, God forbid, if something happened to you—he is her father, so he has standing and he could fight to keep Elle on life support until the baby is born.”

A baby I might never see. That Elle would never see. “Just until the baby is born. Afterward, you have to make sure Hank lets Elle go in peace.”

The Mass has ended. Go in peace
, flitted through my mind like a chanting chorus.