Breakable You (10 page)

Samir and Leila kept questioning the decision. Zahra was a frail child, small and light and delicate, tired much of the time, but she was also a beautiful girl—a comedian, a philosopher, and an explorer. They loved her as she was, and most of the time she was happy as she was, and it was hard to comprehend how it could be wise to put her through a procedure that carried such risks. But the doctors painted frightening pictures of the life that was in store for her if she wasn't cured. They kept reminding Leila and Samir that she couldn't just go on like this: if she didn't get better, she would get steadily worse. And they painted beguiling pictures of the life she could have after they cured her. If they performed the transplant now, while she was still a toddler, the chances were good that when she grew older she wouldn't even remember that she'd ever had the disease. She could live the life she was meant to live.

So they took the risk.

He had never been able to describe what the first few weeks were like—not to his family, not anyone else. There is no way to describe what it's like to see your child, your curious laughing mischievous strong-willed daughter, transformed by weeks of chemotherapy into something hairless and white-lipped and dull-eyed and brittle and dim. No way to describe what it's like to see her transformed into a listless thing, lying inertly in bed, her face and belly bloated and covered with rashes, not even looking up when you enter the room.

After three weeks, she seemed to be getting better. One afternoon she used her toy cell phone to talk to Cloud Dancer, and she told him that as soon as she got out of the hospital, she was going to ride him.

But two nights later she had a dream that frightened her deeply and that frightened Samir even more. She woke up trembling and wanting to be held. "The floor was breaking, and there were tigers, and I tried to roar back at them, but I couldn't scare them away."

He didn't hear her recount this dream: he had already left for work by the time she woke. But when Leila told him about it over the phone, he closed the door of his office and cried. He hated the thought of her having a dream in which she tried to use her strength but it still wasn't enough. He hated the thought that she couldn't scare the tigers away.

The medical news continued to be good. Her body was accepting the new marrow cells. She didn't develop graft-versus-host disease, in which the new cells go to war against the body. She was getting better, and then she died.

Somehow, despite the fact that she was living in pristine and vigilantly guarded isolation, a cold virus made its way into the room and invaded her body, and she wasn't strong enough to fight it off. If this same virus had infected her six weeks earlier or six weeks later, it would have caused nothing more severe than a runny nose, but coming when it did, despite massive doses of intravenous gamma globulin to protect her lungs and her heart, despite hourly infusions of purified white blood cells to fortify her immune system, it led swiftly to pneumonia, to the shutting down of her lungs, and to her death.

She caught a cold and died. A simple sentence that recorded the destruction of a world.

Zahra was dead. We were trying to save her, but we killed her.

Leila and Samir spent the first night after her death in the funeral home, sitting beside her where she lay in an open coffin. She looked hard and oddly shiny, as if she had been coated with plastic. She didn't look as if she were resting; she didn't look as if she were sleeping. Death is death.

She was buried in her favorite dress, a bright purple jumper, and her Dora the Explorer shoes. Next to her they placed her Halloween purse, into which they had put a small packet of Hershey's Kisses and her favorite plastic pony.

There is no way to explain what it's like to sit through the night next to the open coffin of your three-year-old daughter. Your daughter, who, a week before her death, had told you that she knew she was going to get well again because "if they can't bring ponies in the hospital, I have to get out of the hospital to ride the ponies." Your daughter, who, for your birthday present, had given you "birthday jumps," leaping off the couch onto a pile of pillows, delighted by her own fearlessness. No way to explain what it's like to sit beside her all night when she is nothing.

On the second night after her death, Leila and Samir made love, coming together in a crazy hunger of sorrow and disbelief. On the night after that, they couldn't bring themselves to touch. Each of them took up a thin wedge at the edge of the bed, sleeping as far away from each other as possible. On the next night, after lying in bed for hours, unable to sleep, Samir got up and went into the living room. The things they had brought back from the hospital were still in a suitcase in the closet. He opened it and found
Cloud Dancer: Stallion of the Southwest
. Within a minute or two came the scene where the herd of mustangs storms over a hill and into a lake, and he could hear Zahra's voice clearly in his mind. He could see her standing delightedly on the couch, pointing to the screen and crying out: "Mommy! Daddy! They chase!"

Leila came into the room while Samir was watching the scene in which Cloud Dancer, still a colt, makes friends with a herd of buffalo. Samir was weeping. She went back into the bedroom without saying a word.

Although they didn't separate until months later, it was at that moment that their marriage came to an end. At the same time as Leila was so wild with grief that she felt as if she knew what it would be like to go insane, she knew that she would need to get over it someday—not soon, but someday. And when she came out into the living room and saw Samir watching
Cloud Dancer
, she instantly understood that he had no such commitment, no such wish; she understood that he was not going to be her partner in building a new life.

This, at any rate, was what she told him when they had coffee one afternoon a year later.

She was right. He
had
given up. He had no interest in a new life. The world had ended for him.

Unrecoverable brightness.

He couldn't remember the last words he'd heard Zahra speak. It tormented him, the fact that he couldn't remember them, and he sometimes thought of going to a hypnotist to retrieve them. But he didn't.

Two days before she died, he came to the hospital from work and entered her room just behind a nurse, who was there to give her one of the sixteen horrible oral medications she had to take every day. Zahra, lying miserably on the bed, tried to push the nurse away and said, "You don't touch me! My daddy won't let you!" The nurse retreated for a few minutes, but then returned and held Zahra down and inserted the syringe between her lips and forced the medicine into her mouth.

"My daddy won't let you." Those weren't the last words he heard her speak. But they
seemed
like the last words he'd heard her speak. Sometimes they seemed to be the last words he had heard anyone speak. There was a slight delay in everything that had been said to him since, as if he were watching a film where the picture and the sound were poorly synchronized. You saw people's lips move, and the meaning came later. Nothing he had heard since then could reach him.

Samir and Maud had walked in silence all the way to the reservoir. The late-afternoon sunlight was spread out across the water.

"I don't know," Samir said. "I think that's all I can say about it right now."

Eleanor opened the door of her office and welcomed her last client of the day. It was a woman named Jenny, whom she'd been treating for almost six months now. It was a good working relationship. Eleanor respected Jenny—respected her honesty, the rigor of her self-investigations.

For a few minutes, Jenny talked about trivial matters: a movie she'd seen that week, an encounter on the bus that morning. It was a way of warming up. Then she turned to the subject that had been preoccupying her lately: her husband.

"Every time I feel myself starting to trust him, I pull back. And I never know whether I'm pulling back for a good reason. He comes home late from work three days in a row. Is that a good reason? I think I catch him looking at women on the street when we're walking together. Is that a good reason? I keep trying to figure out whether he's an untrustworthy person or whether he's just a person."

Eleanor listened closely, even though Jenny had said these things before. It was interesting to her precisely
because
Jenny had said these things before. The things a person repeats contain more hidden material than the things a person tries to conceal.

Eleanor felt locked in. When she was listening to her clients, her mind rarely wandered.

The dirty little secret of the world of psychotherapy is that therapists, like the rest of us, space out. Therapists talk about the problem among themselves, try to find ways to account for it and work with it (they generate theories, for example, according to which one's lapses of attention can help one reach a fuller understanding of one's clients). But underneath all the theories, the raw rude fact remains: the shrink isn't always listening. As one of Eleanor's more candid teachers once put it, if a therapist's session with a client can be compared to a stroll, a walk two people take together without quite knowing where they'll end up, then the patches of inattention on the therapist's part are like piles of dog shit in the path.

Jenny was struggling with herself over whether to leave her husband. A year ago, just after their wedding, she had become pregnant, and although she and her husband had planned the pregnancy, he had promptly launched into an affair with one of his co-workers, and within a week of finding out about the affair, Jenny had had a miscarriage. Her husband had been genuinely sorrowful, had stopped seeing the other woman, and Jenny had remained with him, but she found it impossible to trust him.

"I don't know how much longer I can keep going like this. I have to find a way to forgive him or else I have to leave."

Jenny was on the verge of tears, and Eleanor wanted to cross the room and embrace her, but this was not the kind of thing she would ever do. The days of hugging therapy were over, except in California.

"I keep having these dreams about Andrew," Jenny said. An old boyfriend. "And in every dream, he's my true love. Not Nick. Are the dreams trying to tell me that Andrew really
is
my true love? Or are they just trying to tell me that I don't really want to be with Nick?"

Jenny knew Eleanor too well to expect an answer. Eleanor hardly ever answered her clients' questions. She had long ago reached the conclusion that the answers that matter come from the clients themselves.

What Eleanor tried to offer her clients was the presence of someone who listened. Sometimes she thought it was the only thing she offered them.

Listening well was her passion, her Holy Grail, the name of her desire. Sometimes she thought that the effort to listen well occupied precisely the space in her soul that the struggle for clarity of language and suppleness of form would have occupied if she had followed her youthful plan of becoming a writer. Listening was her art, as challenging and beautiful and impossible to master as any art worthy of the name.

If you're a therapist, and if you're conscientious about listening, you soon come to realize that you can never listen well enough. Because it involves impossible combinations. You must clear your mind of everything except the words that your client is speaking; when random thoughts stray across your mind, you must not let them distract you. Yet at the same time, you need to pay attention to the random thoughts, because sometimes they aren't random: sometimes they can give you the key to a deeper understanding of the person you're listening to. At the same time as you need to "be here now," you need to remember everything your client has told you in the past; and you need to remember as much as you can about comparable situations that other clients and other people you know have been in; and you need to remember everything you learned in your training. You need to forget the world and you need to have the world in the room with you.

She was like an acolyte of listening; it was a passion that she pursued with a religious intensity. She hadn't written anything, hadn't added anything to the literature of psychology; she hadn't come up with any groundbreaking theories, or any theories at all. She had been an ordinary working therapist, nothing more. But though her professional life had been smaller than she had expected it to be, she sometimes thought that she had fulfilled herself to the limits of her gifts, and that that was enough.

One reason she had never made much of a living at her trade was that she simply couldn't work with too many clients in a single day. She could handle four clients in an eight-hour day, perhaps five. After that, she was too tired. She kept several blouses in the closet of her office because sometimes the sheer effort of listening would leave her soaked with sweat.

"The thought of staying with him scares me. But the thought of leaving him doesn't make me happy either. We have so much together. And the thought of starting off again with another man… the thought of trying to learn to
trust
another man… I talked to my brother on the phone the other day and he said I should come out to New Jersey and stay with him for a while. He's just about the only man I
do
trust. But I don't think I trust his girlfriend."

In the six months they'd been working together, Jenny had avoided the subject of her own past. She had told Eleanor about the years she had spent in some sort of religious community in Oregon, but she'd never gone back much further than that. She referred to her father only with dismissive jokes, and when she talked about her mother, she talked in such an exaggerated way about how much she loved her that it was clear there was trouble there.

Eleanor believed that Jenny would eventually wish to explore her own past. She worked her questions through very slowly, but she seemed to be committed to working them through.

"And meanwhile," Jenny said, "I don't know if Nick has any idea what's going on inside me. The one-year anniversary is coming up, and I don't know if he's been thinking about it or if he just senses it, but he's being sweeter to me than he's ever been before. And I start to think, 'He behaved horribly, but he's a good man, and I've got to get over this.' And then we'll be walking down Broadway and I'll catch him staring at some bimbo, and I think I should just walk away from him on the spot."