A Gesture Life (32 page)

Everything is happening instantly and simultaneously; his hand seems to be a sign not only from Renny but Thomas, too, and the long knives of panic pierce my chest and belly. I want to have faith in the lifeguards but they’re so young, and not turning back to check Renny, I swim as fast as I can out to the line of red-and-white floats. It’s deep out here and I realize that this is where Thomas would be, this is where he would put himself, and when I dive I am absolutely sure I’ll see him. And I do: a stocky little figure, crouched as if sitting, his shape hardly discernible. I kick and swoop under him and then lift us upward. When we surface, two lifeguards take him and swim him quickly to shore. I let them because I think I wish to have faith, because there is really nothing but that for someone like me, and because of Renny, because I can’t stand yet another abandonment in my life, even if it’s for a brief moment.

Just as I reach him, Renny’s mouth dips beneath the water. I brace him and he coughs weakly. His rich brown skin is muddy, grayish about the neck and face and hands; his breathing is labored. His eyes are glassy. On the beach Liv is bleating something in a tiny voice, shuffling back in half-steps. It is in fact a natural reaction, one of the many that people can have. Against my back I can almost feel the thrum of Renny’s heart racing, then arresting, then racing again. I shout ahead to an onlooker to call for an ambulance. Some steps away the lifeguards are working on Thomas, and I hear his gasp and hack and he instinctively sits up and looks about. I nod, and he begins to cry. The presumed missing boy is walking up the
shoreline with a hot dog in his hand; he’s not been in the water for some time. But Renny spasms then, as if he’s hugged me, a broad, low electric shudder, and somehow I carry his big frame right up onto the shore.

“Oh my God, he’s dying,” Liv says, collapsing to her knees. “He’s dying.”

I do not answer, not from fear that she is right but that I am so certain she is wrong, for there will be no dying for him today, I think, I cannot allow it—in the way a doctor, perhaps once or twice in his career, might not simply abide—and if I have to reach inside his chest I shall, reach inside and roughly clasp his heart and will it back alive.

WHY MUST ALL MY PATHS
lead to the forlorn, unpolished wards of some hospital? Sitting here in Renny’s cramped but tidy office, I fear I am afflicted. Or even worse. For how can one slight, shrinking-in-the-bones fellow be such a lingering pall of sickness and mortality, casting darkly upon his associates and friends and recently discovered loved ones, who (almost) to the last profess their happiness for having known him, and for knowing him still? They phone him and say grace for him and invite him to their rooms, and then they even send flowers to his house when he should be bearing flowers tenfold back to them, a veritable nursery of grateful tidings.

Renny, thank goodness, will survive. Indeed, as I suspected, it was a first heart attack, and had not the paramedic unit arrived so quickly (having stopped for lunch, by chance, a few streets away at the time of the call), the damage to his heart muscle would have been dangerously severe, perhaps forever debilitating. He was napping this morning when I visited him, still propped up in the tilted
bed, the lines to the various monitors and saline drip and his oxygen crisscrossing his wide, bared chest. The fluorescent light fixture above his bed had been left on, and beneath its cool, icy cast, he appeared as if he were alive but being preserved in a kind of science-fictional stasis, his hair unevenly matted from sleep, his skin dull of sheen, the beeps and hums of the machines standing in for the sounds of his living.

Thomas, whom I brought along with me, was initially frightened by the congealed, webbish sight of him, as was I. The boy wouldn’t step immediately into the room; he needed a moment or two to gather his courage. When I finally led him in he wouldn’t go past the foot of the bed, standing there as quiet and unmoving as a stone, as quiet as I have ever seen him until last week, when he was curled up in his own hospital bed after the jarring, frightening events at the pool. His mother, to my surprise, had been the picture of calm when she arrived in the ward. Thomas was by all accounts fine, solely in for a night’s observation and monitoring, and she had listened studiously to young Dr. Weil, nodding and even taking notes in a black leather organizer. She asked him questions about what to expect, what signs of complication might appear, infections and fevers and whatnot. She inquired earnestly after Renny, whom she didn’t know. I stood by and listened, not saying a word, though not avoiding her eyes, either, which weren’t accusatory or angry but rather relieved and a little frazzled, with the depth of that life-worn knowing, that hushing stare of all loving mothers and fathers. I would have gladly endured a fit of rage, or a frosty harangue of disappointment, and yet it seemed she was making efforts to assure the clearness of my conscience, despite the unavoidable fact of my momentary carelessness and lack of vigilance, which I didn’t attempt to diminish when I first phoned with the
news. Why she should be so gentle with me I couldn’t figure, except for my obvious tender feeling for the boy, which I suppose anyone would see. But I heard something else, too, or so I wished I’d heard it, the willing sufferance of me in her tone, the first hint of a generous, filial allowing that I probably ought never to deserve.

In Renny’s case, I have deep regrets. He believes I saved his life, when in fact I likely endangered it by not going to him right away. But nothing I say will convince him; I’m his hero, his savior, his lifelong guardian angel. He sleeps much now, so I can’t educate him with what really happened. And then Liv, too, must be misremembering the scene, for she’s been equally grateful and then nervous, no doubt abraded by this rough brush with mortality.

“I still feel jittery, Doc,” she said to me this afternoon, in the corridor outside his room. I had taken Thomas back to Sunny and had returned to resume my vigil. Liv had arrived from her office in the interval, and she was not looking like herself; she was disheveled and not wearing makeup and drinking a non-diet Coke.

“I’m weak,” she moaned. “Terribly weak. I can hardly drive. God, I can hardly dial a number on my car phone. It’s all hitting me. Tell me it’ll soon go away.”

“I can’t truly say, Liv. But I wish I could.”

“Well, please just say something helpful.”

I asked what that might be.

“Something reassuring and wise.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I told her, “Then I am certain your strength will return. So will Renny’s. Completely for you both. And you will live together in contentment and happiness. You will grow very old together.”

“Please don’t say
that,
Doc!”

“Your strength is increasing already.”

“Ha!” she cried, squeezing my hand. “You’re a good doctor, Franklin Hata.”

“You know as well as anyone, Liv, that I’m not.”

“I know, I know,” she said, brushing lint from my shoulder. She sounded a bit arch again, though still tensed up, wound tightly with everything. “But you are, aren’t you? I mean inside, you
are
a doctor, whatever you actually know. I can tell. It doesn’t matter if you have a degree or not. You have the spirit of one in you. The essence.”

“I don’t know, Liv. I don’t know what that is.”

“Well, I do,” she said firmly. “And you have it. It’s not empathy, exactly. It’s just that you know what people are feeling, and what they want. You sense their pulses, I guess.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“You bet, Doc.” She hugged me and, to my surprise, kissed me on the cheek. I told her I would stay at the hospital and keep Renny company, so that she might go home and shower and change her clothes. She hugged me again, and on leaving she cried out, as if for the whole ward to hear, “I know the truth, Doc, and so does everybody else.”

But the truth, I am beginning to think, is not something that can be so clear. Not in even the best circumstances. My friend, Mrs. Anne Hickey, wherever her good spirit may be, would have been among the first in line to testify to the “truth” about me. And yet what have I ever done for her, then or now? For another passing hour her boy, Patrick, lies in his solitary ship of a bed with the clear vinyl curtains drawn down around him, unvisited by me since that first night I stole into his room. It’s not the chance of seeing his father I dread, but the hard posture of Patrick’s stillness, the limpid quality of his skin, the clocklike winding-down. His is an old man’s
demise, a chilly lessening, which is not right for a child (if any end is), who in the terrible waiting matures with a bittersweet swiftness, a quickened growing up in order to die.

And how further depleted might he appear with his mother now gone? I wonder if he even knows. If I were Mr. Hickey, I wouldn’t tell him, I couldn’t tell him, I’d say his mother had to take a trip, that her old friend across the ocean had died. I’d keep up a lie for as long as he could bear. I’d tell him whatever story he would hope for and believe. I would pool about him a whole history of her absence, too wide to cross and too deep to plumb: a dusky, flooding water in which he might forever gently tread.

I watched yesterday, as she was interred in one of the two small cemeteries in town. I waited outside the chapel in my car and then followed the procession along Church Street and then up past Boling Street and McKinley, to the large memorial grounds where many years ago I purchased my own plot, and one for Sunny as well. It was a day when one suddenly thinks one should prepare for such a thing, automatically and immediately. And it was an unusual decision as well, I realize, to buy one for such a little girl, but I wasn’t married or expecting to be—the other plot one buys being normally for a spouse—and I thought that it would be something like insurance, that we would always have a place for ourselves in the end, which no one could encroach or buy back or take away. But I never told her about it, feeling it was morbid; and then later, when we were having so many difficulties in our relationship, it seemed inappropriate to mention, too easy for her to misinterpret or misunderstand.

Once there I parked just inside the entrance and let the hearse and the long line of cars wend their way to the burial plot; I didn’t want Mr. Hickey to have to see me or acknowledge me or have to
consider my presence in any way, and so I walked slowly toward the site, keeping an eye on him so that I might turn or step away whenever he looked up from the ground. Of course he would have noticed me immediately, had he gazed about. But he didn’t. In the warm, slanting light of the autumn morning he appeared still quite pale, moon-faced, his dark suit rumpled at the armpits and shoulders, one collar point lifting. His son was not there, of course, and so Mr. Hickey appeared that much more alone, standing as he was some steps away from the other family mourners, upright in an almost military style, his feet set apart, his hands clasped behind him. He wasn’t angry-looking, as I selfishly expected; he was bewildered, as everyone there was, though his body seemed not to wish to know it, not bent over and miserable but unmoving, completely still.

The minister was speaking in a broad, calling tone, and though I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I felt sure from the waves of sound that his sermon was deeply and earnestly uttered and thus worthy of Anne Hickey, who was nothing but kind and straightforward and estimably ardent, the sort of woman I might wish for if ever I would enjoy the company of someone again, the sort of woman Mary Burns was to the core and that I’d always hoped Sunny would someday become, and perhaps is now.

The minister ended with a long prayer, and then he motioned to the undertaker and his assistants (they were no doubt his sons, from the facial resemblance) to lower the casket into the ground. He began speaking again, perhaps a final consecration, when Mr. Hickey broke from the rank and began walking away, down the hill, in my general direction.
This is not acceptable,
his body was saying,
This is not something for me.
Everyone turned to watch him, the minister and others feebly waving for him to come back. Then Mr.
Hickey began to jog, then run, almost coming in a sprint down the grassy incline, his suit jacket still buttoned. He passed by quickly, and he must have noticed me, for he glanced back over his shoulder, and it was then his footing slipped on the dry sod, causing him to fall in an awkward, tumbling heap. Several mourners had rushed down to him, and when I reached him I could see that his leg was traumatically fractured at mid-calf, the splintered tip of the bone poking out through the bloody material. He was sitting up and gripping his thigh, puffing furiously through his teeth, and I thought he would soon pass out. An older man, whom I recognized as a retired physician from the county hospital, was urging him to lie back, to hold still so he could make certain the main artery hadn’t been severed, but Mr. Hickey saw me then and tried to rise, reaching out toward me, moaning, “Don’t anyone touch me! Don’t touch me. I want him to help me….”

Then he lost consciousness, and everyone was staring, wondering if I had even been part of the gathering, or if Mr. Hickey had momentarily lost his mind. They seemed to pause, so that I might actually do something, but the retired doctor had been regarding me most skeptically and then purposefully set about his business, asking someone else to run and call for an ambulance.

Under sedation, Mr. Hickey was transported to this very hospital, and one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the area, a Dr. Peter Milhoos, set the leg. I had followed in my car and informed the nurse at the admitting desk that I would cover all the expenses of his stay, writing a large check as a deposit. She thought it suspicious, but on calling the billing office she mentioned my name and Ryka Murnow remembered me and it was approved. I waited until the procedure was finished, and instead of going home I felt I should stay close by. Sometime late in the night, with a key Liv had
given me, I came here to rest a moment and somehow fell asleep until morning in Renny’s wide, soft-seated leather chair.

I had dreams, many of them, all pressed upon one another like bits of photographs in a child’s scrapbook. And they were vivid to the extent that although I don’t remember their particular images or events—for I very rarely do—I still even now have the pulsing feeling in my head of near-exhaustion from the force of what must have been their great number and intensity. What is unsettling is that for so long a time my days and years flowed by with an estimable grace, the most apparent processionals of conduct and commerce, and yet in the last weeks the gradual downflow has loosed into a sheer cascade, an avalanching force that has caught me deep and sure.

And I think that like Mr. Hickey, I can hardly bear to be a witness anymore. I couldn’t watch for long as his wife’s casket was slowly cranked down into the earth, the ending-ness and rank finality brutally apparent, the nothing-more of that lowering. It wasn’t only poor Anne Hickey I felt going down into the ground, but her husband, and Patrick, and the mourners who stood there decently and stiffly over the fresh hole (if preternaturally leaning back), and then myself as well, who is afraid not of death but of the death of yet another living chance through whom I might reconsider, and duly reckon.

It seems in kind then that I am developing a quick nerve for whatever I happen to see, like the girl and her brother at the Ebbington Mall. It strikes me as almost pathological that I should be this low about Anne Hickey, whom in most every way I hardly knew, when in the past I could shed loss and leaving like any passing cloud of rain. I’m nearly afraid to leave this tiny office, for fear
of what else I might see, what else might ensue, like any boy who is sure his very observation and presence makes the world hitch and turn; but in my case those turns are real and have come too ponderously, bearing ever heavily on my minor realm. Too much now I’m at the vortex of bad happenings, and I am almost sure I ought to festoon the facade of my house and the bumpers of my car and then garland my shoulders with immense black flags of warning, to let every soul know they must steer clear of this man, not to wave greetings or small-talk with him or do anything to provoke the hand of his agreeable, gentle-faced hubris. Now I finally think how much sense it made years ago, when perhaps without exactly knowing it herself, Sunny was doing all she could do to escape my too-grateful, too-satisfied umbra, to get out from its steadily infecting shade and accept any difficult and even detrimental path so long as it led far from me.