Proof of Heaven (3 page)

O
nce through the automated doors of the hospital, Colm pulled away from Cathleen. He knew once he was indoors and off the sidewalk Cathleen would permit him to let go of her hand. As soon as he was able, he broke free and ran ahead. Cathleen chased after him.

“Slow down, Colm. This is a new hospital. We don't even know where we are going yet.”

Colm stopped in front of a long row of elevators.

“Found the elevators, Mama! Can I press the buttons?”

“Yes, babe,” Cathleen said, digging into her purse for her notepad with the new doctor's information on it. “Stand still for one minute, while I figure out where we need to go. I just don't want to jump on an elevator and not know where we are headed. We have plenty of time. We're early. There's no need to rush.”

In the time it took Cathleen to find her pad and look up, Colm had jumped through the doors of an open elevator. Just as the doors were about to slide shut, Cathleen slipped through.

“Colm, don't ever do that again! You scared me half to death.”

Colm smiled at her apologetically.

“I didn't mean to scare you, Mama. It's just that the doors opened, and I was ready.”

“Well, I wasn't. What if I lost you? Then what would I do?”

Though Cathleen had begun preparing herself to lose Colm after that first incident in the bathtub, a part of her had always felt, from the moment he was born, that she didn't deserve a child as beautiful and perfect as Colm. She knew at any moment that her
thy just punishment
would certainly take him away from her. At one point she also believed it was this thought that was creating the entire drama.
Maybe I am the reason,
she often speculated, but then quickly she would dismiss that thought. Still she hoped for a miracle that would let her keep him. Every night, she prayed and laid hands on his head while bargaining and pleading with God to heal her son. She even looked into going on pilgrimages, like to Lourdes to bathe Colm in the healing waters of St. Bernadette's unnatural spring or Assisi to bless him in the healing quarters of San Damiano, but she didn't have enough money to make such trips. So instead she prayed and prayed.
Please God, don't take my son from me. I'll do anything. Anything.

“Colm, we have a few minutes. We're a bit early. Why don't we go find the chapel and pray a bit.”

“Aw, come on, Mama. Do I have to?”

“God gives you seven days and nights, and you can't give him a few minutes?”

Colm had heard it all before and dropped his head and rolled his eyes. There would be no arguing with her now. It was done. He had to go.

“All right, Mama. Just a few minutes,” he said in a resigned voice.

Cathleen smiled at him. She knew how he felt. Raised Catholic, she and her brother were dragged to Sunday Mass by their own devout mother and forced to attend all the requisite holy days of obligation and to pray in every available chapel too. As children they were taught how to be devout, but Cathleen never
felt
devout, especially as a child. She never truly believed all she was supposed to and as superstitious as she seemed to those around her now, even her own brother and son, who watched her dip her hands in the holy water, light daily candles, and genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament, Cathleen had a rather complex understanding of God and how prayer operated. Life had taught her some things, and she suspected that most of what one wanted in life was left largely to chance. Her prayer was motivated more by her belief in something C. S. Lewis had once said:
Prayer doesn't change God, it changes me
. Cathleen seemed pious to others, but she actually found solace in the fact that everything in life was random. God was not responsible for all the chaos in the world. God simply stood by and watched. No matter how much one prayed, it wasn't up to God. Praying was an end in itself because it gave her respite in an otherwise chaotic world. All she could do was endure and make herself stronger through it all.

She came to this realization in college after years of reading Nietzsche, Camus, Wiesel, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, and the Stoics. There had been times over the years that she'd tried to embrace a more or less godless, but nevertheless contemplative existence. She often weighed one great thinker against the other and then against her own beliefs—the beliefs she had carried her entire life. She asked herself if she believed as Nietzsche did. Was God dead? Or was she, more like Camus, doomed to endure all of life's sufferings without hope of an afterlife? Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Wiesel forced her to look at her own suffering as the path to her ultimate redemption, and to reassert her belief in God. But then she read the Stoics and thought, perhaps the best way to survive it all was to let the natural world take its course and to react dispassionately to all that life presented—both its joy and pain. She had even gone and spoken to a close family friend, Monsignor Benedicto, at St. Patrick's. She grilled him for hours on all sorts of matters of philosophy and theology. Patiently, the monsignor listened, nodded, and, whenever he could, assured her that her doubts were all part of her belief. Finally, he asked her a simple question, “What would bring you comfort, Cathleen? What would ease your mind?”

Cathleen didn't even have to think about the answer. “I want it all to make sense.” She continued: “If there were someplace, somewhere far away from here where we could all go, that would help me. When I was a child I thought there was a heaven, full of angels and people I loved—for everyone in the whole world who did not have it easy.”

The monsignor smiled at her. “What if you just decided there was such a place and stopped looking for proof? What if you just made up your mind there was a heaven and a God? Would that help you?”

“I guess.”

“Just try then. Try to believe.”

“But it's so hard. My head is telling me something completely different.”

“Do you know where the word
believe
comes from, Cathleen?”

“No.”

“It's from the ancient Latin word
credo,
which literally means ‘I give my heart.' What does your heart tell you, Cathleen?” The monsignor knew it was a bit of a loose interpretation, but many priests before him had used this old standby on unassuming doubters, so he went with it, hoping Cathleen wouldn't know better.

By the time Colm had arrived in her arms when she was fresh out of college, she had had plenty of time to think, and plenty more experiences—and heart-to-hearts with the monsignor—that made her absolutely certain of two facts: there was a heaven and she would go there someday, and everything on this earth must be endured to get there. Life was as chaotic and random as Madison Avenue on Christmas Eve, but heaven would surely make sense of it all. Because, in her mind, there was no reason that a child such as hers should be born into such screwed-up circumstances, and another child born into better ones. She wasn't naive, though. As dark as some of her days seemed, she knew she was one of the lucky ones. She counted her blessings, and at some point, she followed her heart and began to pray again. It steadied her like whiskey steadied a drunk's nerves. She knew it was no panacea, and in the end, too much of it might even delude her, but it was a quick fix nonetheless, and it got her through the day.

When she had become pregnant, she needed prayer more than ever. She had lain awake one night rubbing her swollen abdomen and feeling the taut flesh that covered the small bumps that were Colm's feet kicking madly, forcefully. He wanted out, and she very much wanted him out too. She put the rosary on her belly and counted her Hail Marys and Our Fathers and occasionally looked over her shoulder to the clock and then the phone. If she prayed one more, she convinced herself,
he
would call. If she prayed two more,
he
would show up. She had already spent the better part of nine months moving the beads through her fingers, but Pierce had still not changed his mind.

There were times, wonderful times, she thought, when he would call and say he was ready for the responsibility, that he wanted to be a dad. She would spend an hour in the bathroom, showering, shaving, blow-drying, tweezing, all of it to prove once again how much more beautiful she was than the other girl he had left her for months after she told him a baby was on the way.

But the nights always ended the same. She would find herself alone, crumpled on the floor of her bathroom moaning over how stupid she was. There seemed to be no reason for his change of heart. He had told her he loved her. They were happy, and then one day, he wasn't anymore. At first she blamed herself. She wasn't pretty enough. Skinny enough. She hadn't complimented him enough or been a good enough listener. But hadn't she? She tried over and over to figure out how it had all changed, how it had all come undone. And there seemed to be no singular reason. Love was as random as God or life itself. If love came quickly and easily, she assumed it could disappear in just the same way. She never deserved it in the first place. It was then that a persistent, overwhelming fear lodged itself deep in her stomach. Colm came so easily. Loving him took no time at all. And like his father before him, he too, Cathleen believed, at any moment would leave her . . . all alone.

In the hospital chapel, Colm stared at his mother in annoyance while she kneeled and leaned over the pew in front of her praying the Our Father. He couldn't possibly imagine what his mother had ever done that was so wrong that she had to spend so much time praying to God to
forgive her trespasses.

“Mama! Mama! Can we go now? How long do we have to sit here and pray?”

“We still have a few minutes.”

“Please, Mama. Can we just go? I really, really have to go to the bathroom,” Colm whispered loudly.

Cathleen knew he was lying. And he knew she knew. Cathleen grabbed her purse and took Colm's hand. “OK. We'll go. How about we go find the gift shop and kill some time?”

“Sure! Can I get something?”

“We'll see.”

After Cathleen bought Colm a Matchbox car from the gift shop, they found the elevators again. When they arrived on the seventh floor, Colm tried to make a run for it, but Cathleen gripped Colm's hand tightly before he could and they walked together down a wide, brightly lit hall, following signs to the Electrophysiology and Cardiology Department.

A
s expected, Dr. Basu's waiting room brought few surprises to Cathleen. While she signed in and handed over her insurance card to the unfriendly receptionist, Colm climbed up on the only available vinyl chair. On either side of him was an elderly gentleman. The man to his right had a tube running from his nose to a large oxygen tank on wheels sitting between his legs. He rested his hands on the tank as if it supported his entire upper body. To the left, the other elderly man grumbled to himself as he read aloud from the form he was filling out:
high cholesterol, yes; high blood pressure, yes; short of breath, yes
. Cathleen looked over her shoulder and saw her son, sitting between the two old men, and flashed a goofy look his way. She thought immediately of the
Sesame Street
song and asked herself:
One of these things is not like the other ones, which one doesn't belong?

When Cathleen began to walk toward the chairs, the older gentleman with the oxygen tank feigned movement and asked her if she would like his seat.

“Oh, that's quite all right. I'll just sit in my son's chair. He can sit on my lap. Right, Bud?”

Colm didn't say a word, but he turned his back to her and lifted his arms so his mother could sit down and scoop him up as he slid effortlessly onto her lap the way all children do.

“It won't be long before you'll be too big for this,” Cathleen whispered into Colm's ear.

“I'm already too big for this,” Colm grumbled, surprising himself—and his mother—with his honesty.

The man without the oxygen tank, now finished with his forms, looked over at Cathleen and sat up a little straighter. Cathleen felt his gaze and ignored him. But Colm caught the old man looking, and he knew why. His mother was beautiful. When he was very small, he thought he was the only one who thought his mother was the prettiest woman in the world. He had loved to hold her face in his hands and stare at her green eyes. And he often ran his dimpled hands through her long black hair and wrapped his small arms around her neck, his fingertips barely touching because his arms were so small. He could stay there forever, smelling the faint perfume of her shampoo. It had been a while since he had hugged her in that way, but now with the old man ogling her, he snuggled into her and glared, as he often did, at her adoring fans.

He wanted desperately for the nurse to call his name, to take his mother away from these men. The old man with the oxygen tank made his move and touched Cathleen's thigh. Colm swung his leg and knocked the man's hand with so much force that the man pulled back and gasped.

Cathleen quickly wrapped her arms around Colm, while apologizing to the old man. “Oh, I am so sorry. His leg must have just slipped.”

Colm glared at the man, while clinging tightly to Cathleen.

“You're too young and pretty to be here. You seeing Dr. Basu too?” the old man asked.

Cathleen smiled and said a quiet yes. She kept her eyes downcast, focusing on the boy's kneecaps, so she didn't have to share any more information.

“COAL-M Magee,” the nurse called, mispronouncing his name.

Cathleen let out a sigh of relief. “That's us, Bud.”

The old men looked at each other as Cathleen scooted Colm off her lap, and he ran through the door. She corrected the nurse's pronouncement of his name as she passed her.

“It's Col-um. Pronounced like a newspaper column.”

“Sorry 'bout that.”

“No problem. It happens all the time.”

Again, exasperated, Cathleen and Colm waited for another half hour in the examining room. Colm climbed up on the doctor's chair and looked out the window, staring down at the small cars and people below. He leaned his lips against the glass and blew air through his cheeks, making puffing sounds and laughing.

Cathleen, just as bored as Colm, watched the clock. She had missed another day of work. There would be no explaining another day off to her boss. She had been hired just out of college as an office assistant to the head interior designer with the promise of advancement. At the time she was pregnant already, though still not showing. It was a miracle she got the job at all and that they didn't fire her the minute they found out. She knew legally they couldn't do that, but firing someone in design, pregnant or not, was never hard to do in New York City.

She promised them that she would work harder than anyone after the baby was born. But once Colm had actually arrived, she could never keep up with the interns and junior designers, who were more able to put in extra time to prove their worth and whose ideas seemed fresher. She was always so tired and usually distracted by some crisis at home, whether with Colm or her brother, to ever contribute. Sometimes, when she was overtired, she took five minutes to feel sorry for herself, bemoan her sacrificed career, her wasted youth. She knew she wasn't the first woman to give up her career for her child, or for someone else's needs. She reminded herself that a paycheck was a paycheck, whether she was designing or booking conference calls. She reminded herself that the sole purpose of work was to provide for her son, and it didn't matter what she did as long as she kept doing it. But she knew if she kept this up much longer, she might not have a job, let alone a career. This was the third doctor's visit this month, not counting the day and night she had already spent in the hospital this week after Colm's collapse on the subway platform.

She heard the faint sound of an Indian accent through the walls and could hear the predictable doctor-patient banter. She tried to reassure herself that she would be able to keep her promise to her son. This would be a different doctor. There was hope. There was always hope.

She heard the rustle of papers behind the door as Dr. Basu grabbed Colm's chart from the inbox that hung outside the door.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” He never looked up from the chart as he shook Cathleen's hand. Cathleen's heart sank as the usual scene began, but then she looked up at the tall man who stood before her. He looked surprisingly young to be a doctor. But she guessed that he was most likely in his mid to late thirties, perhaps early forties. He was handsome and fit for a doctor too, she thought. Dr. Basu was impeccably dressed and wore expensive cologne. She caught herself staring at him and quickly shifted her gaze to his hands, where she noticed the lack of a wedding ring on his left finger.

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Basu. I heard great things about you from Dr. Jakes,” Cathleen said as she smiled and held out her hand to shake his. But the doctor seemed to ignore her.

Cathleen noticed Dr. Basu look toward her son, who was still standing by the window. Colm turned around, smiling widely. As Cathleen continued speaking, she realized the doctor was not hearing what she was saying.

Staring at the boy, Dr. Basu felt a small, but violent rumble in his stomach. His hands began to sweat, and for a second he saw the face of another small boy, Dhruv, his own son. He looked at the chart for a moment, trying to regain his composure, but when he looked up again, instead of Colm's large green eyes, he saw Dhruv's. They had been Dhruv's mother's eyes before they were his. When Dr. Basu's parents told him that the woman they had arranged for him to marry was the jewel-eyed Niranjana, he could have run through the streets of his town shouting her name, forgoing all dignity, all pride, all composure. He had fallen in love with her before sunset on their wedding day. He knew few Indian men who could say the same. And the same thing happened when he held and saw Dhruv—he had loved the boy instantly.

“Dr. Basu, this is my son, Colm,” Cathleen introduced the boy.

The doctor gathered himself, smiling at Cathleen, whom he immediately noticed had the same green eyes as the boy, and as his own Niranjana. Struck by her beauty, he felt himself begin to blush, so he quickly turned away to give all his attention to the boy.

“Hello, Colm. That is a nice name. My name is Gaspar.” Dr. Basu said, holding out his hand to introduce himself to the boy. “Do you know the story of the Three Wise Men from the East?”

Colm nodded, eager to share what he knew: “Gaspar was one of the Wise Men and he brought gifts to the baby Jesus.”

Dr. Basu laughed. “Do you know what else Gaspar did?”

“No. What?”

“Why, he saved Jesus's life. Don't you know?”

“No, he didn't,” Colm said back defiantly. “No one did. He died, remember?”

Cathleen wondered aloud, “What are you talking about, Dr. Basu?”

Dr. Basu smiled at Cathleen and turned to the boy to finish telling him the story of Gaspar, the Wise Man.

“In my old country, my father worked for a prosperous En-glishman, Gaspar, and that is who he named me after. This man was a Christian, and my father often returned home at the end of the day with stories that he had heard from the man. My favorite was, of course, of Gaspar—the Wise Man from India. He told me that Gaspar and the two other Wise Men saved Jesus from death as a child. Legend says that King Herod, hearing of the birth of Jesus, sent the Wise Men after him. They were told that when they found him to return and tell Herod. The Wise Men followed the special star to Jesus, but when they got there and saw the baby and his mother, they knew he was a special sort of child, and they knew they would not tell Herod, who would have most certainly killed the baby Jesus. He and the other Wise Men protected the baby. So . . . if it weren't for Gaspar and the other Wise Men from the East,
who knows
. . .”

Dr. Basu shrugged his shoulders when he said
who knows.
And Colm smiled at him, because Colm knew that if there was anyone, anyone in the world who was going to save him, it would be a man named
Gaspar.

“So, my boy, you know what my name means. Now, what does yours mean?”

“It's sort of silly. Not cool, like your name, Dr. Basu.”

“Go on, tell me. I'd love to hear it. I am sure it is cool, as you say.”

“Dove.”

“Ah, Dove. Why do you think you were named after a dove?”

“Dunno.”

Cathleen interjected. “I named him that because the name
Colm
is the Gaelic form of dove, which is the symbol of peace. I can't explain it, but from the moment I felt him swimming and leaping around in me, I felt nothing but peace.” Cathleen noticeably blushed, but Dr. Basu was moved by her confession.

“That's a tall order, my good boy. I hear you're causing some trouble, Dove, for your mother. Disturbing her peace, is that true?”

“Yes, I fall down sometimes. It scares everybody, especially my mama.”

“Do you know when this is going to happen to you?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I start to feel real sick, and the world gets fuzzy and I can't see or hear so well.”

“How do you feel when you wake up?”

“Pretty bad. Heavy, like someone is sitting on me and I can't get up.”

“It takes him a long time to speak, Doctor. He stares up at me for a long time, and it's like he doesn't really know me. He seems so far away.”

“Hmmm. I see,” Dr. Basu said, all the while using his stethoscope to listen to the boy's heart.

“I think he needs a pacemaker, Ms. Magee. That should do it,” he said, wrapping the stethoscope back around his neck.

“Excuse me?” Cathleen said, incredulous.

“A pacemaker. It's a minor operation really. I do them all the time. It will take no time, and we'll fix this once and for all. Everything will be A-OK,” Dr. Basu said as he made the OK sign with his fingers.

Cathleen couldn't believe what she was hearing. And she couldn't believe she was going to say what she was about to say. She thought she wanted to hear this. She wanted to hear something decisive. For years she had been ordered to take Colm to other hospitals for other tests, where she would then be told, if she was told anything at all, that the tests found nothing out of the ordinary and there was nothing anyone could do. All this time, she thought she wanted someone who would fix all this and make it all go away. But suddenly she had her doubts about this man. He seemed too relaxed, too sure of himself, too together. She felt the anger coming, the way she always could, like someone took a rope and tightened it around her throat. She tried to fight back the urge to explode, but she couldn't.

“Do you mean to tell me, you've been with my son for less than two minutes—you found out what his name means and what he feels like when he collapses—and you want to operate on him? Are you out of your . . . excuse me, Colm, don't ever say this word . . . your goddamn mind?”

Dr. Basu stared at her without speaking. Her response was not exactly what he had expected. He was used to gratitude from his patients. Yet here was a young woman, pretty, too, wearing a crucifix and swearing at him.

“Excuse me. You misunderstand what I am telling you. Your son needs a pacemaker. It will keep his heart from stopping arbitrarily.”

“And how do you know this, Dr. Basu? Have you ever seen anyone or treated anyone like my son? Tell me, Dr. Basu, how many of your patients flatline for several minutes at a clip and miraculously wake up? How many don't?”

“How much time do you have?” Dr. Basu said back to her smartly, trying to crack a joke, but he could tell she was in no mood for his humor, and he immediately tried to reassure her. “Ms. Magee, I have been at this a long time. I assure you pacemakers work and that with the right medicine, I can keep your boy vertical.”

Cathleen's face flushed hot. She couldn't tell if she wanted to smack him or hug him. She wanted Colm to stop collapsing, to live a normal life. But for some reason she couldn't quite explain, she didn't believe that the solution to her son's problem was such an easy fix. How could it be?
After all these years this doctor has been right here, under her nose, and she hadn't heard of him? There weren't other doctors who could have suggested this? Why now? Why him?
What was the difference between praying for a miracle and asking a doctor to perform one?
Her mind was raging, but she spoke slowly and deliberately. She couldn't put her finger on it. She was confused by her own anger, and then she suddenly remembered something her mother often said—
anger is nothing more than your fear screaming.
She stopped herself and recognized the cause of her anger—the fear rising inside her. But what was she so afraid of anyway? This was the answer. Finally, an answer to her prayers.
Maybe prayers did work after all?