Stir (14 page)

My fever rose and fell as the offending antibiotic made its way out of my system. I was afraid to be alone anymore in the hospital. Eli had come down with a cold and had to stay away for a while, so my mom and dad took turns spending the night in the reclining chair by my bed. On its way to breaking, the fever reached its peak. My vision blurred and I started to shake, and my mother called the nurse, who came with ice to cool me down. I was shivering so hard that my arms and legs were practically flailing. Without any sense of what I was doing, I writhed away from the ice. I didn't mean to. I didn't not.

The nurse was cross. “Are you refusing treatment?”

“That's not what's going on,” I heard my mother say.

And then everything went white.
I need this to be over
,
I thought.
I'm okay now to be dead. Be not awake now. Please. I can't. It's fine. I'm done.

I
came home in mid-October. There was no relief in it this time. No peeking into rooms or fumbled cups of tea. I don't even remember walking through the door. I needed to be lying down and went straight to bed.

It wasn't only that I was sicker than I'd been before the infection. This time, I was afraid. Without the round-the-clock monitoring and a surgeon on call I felt a constant tickle of panic. Bad things kept happening. Doctors had told me I was fine when I wasn't, again and again and again. Eli knew me better than anyone and even he hadn't seen that I wasn't okay. He'd said there would be no more surgery. He'd said we were done. When we weren't, the best doctors in the world had struggled to find out what was wrong, and then to treat it.

I'd try to talk myself down:
They sent me home from the hospital. That means I'm improving, right? That I'm going to be okay?
But I'd ended up right back there the last time. I'd heard what my infectious disease doctor had said right before I checked out: “You're not out of the woods yet.”

On and on my thoughts unspooled. What was I to believe now, and whom?
No one,
my anxious brain answered. It was my job, then, and mine alone, to make sure that I stayed alive. I put myself on high alert. Everything was a symptom that pointed to a recurrence of infection, a stroke, a heart attack, the rupture of my residual aneurysm. I was a helmet-clad sentinel, half blind, unable to smell, with a busted-up skull and an itchy trigger finger. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I was ready to shoot at anything that moved.

I felt dizzy and nauseated. My vision blurred. A swimmy ache in my shoulders and chest would come and go along with a low-grade fever. I'd break out into a sweat while sitting perfectly still, sip at the air, trying and failing to top off my lungs enough to feel full. I took the sedatives the doctor had prescribed, but adrenaline fought back and won. I lay awake, pummeled by a sympathetic nervous system stuck in simultaneous fight and flight, and traced the indigo block-print flowers on the quilt with my thumbs.

The trips to the ER and back during the days that followed didn't help matters. There was a scare over my PICC line, the catheter for the antibiotic that ran through a vein in my arm to my heart; an intestinal infection (the dreaded
C. diff
); and a new, higher fever that we feared was something, but wasn't.

Pseudomonas
, the bacteria that had exploded in the tissue surrounding my brain and taken out that chunk of skull, is insidious. It knows how to hide, get very quiet, make itself invisible, then flare back up in a flash. That was why I would have to wait a year for the reconstructive surgery, to be sure that the infection was truly gone and not lurking, undetected, in my healthy tissue and bone. It was why, three times a day, Eli plugged me into an antibiotic that, even as it drove out the infection, made me feel sicker. I lost more weight. My tongue turned black. My joints ached, and when I touched my head, strands of hair came off in my hand.

Two months earlier, mine had been the body of a healthy twenty-eight-year-old, fitter than ever before. It wasn't supposed to be capable of this kind of collapse. But it was, of course. A body always is. I was furious with myself for not seeing that, for ever thinking that health was something I could count on. I'd always had excellent luck and my genes were enviable. No broken bones, maybe one cold a year, great-grandmothers and great-great aunts who lived into their nineties. I took care of myself. I ate oatmeal and kale. I flossed. I followed the rules that were supposed to keep me safe.

Don't get me wrong—I'd imagined illness. Critical, devastating, out-of-nowhere illness. I was right there in the imagined hospital rooms of my worst nightmares, alongside Eli or a parent or a friend. Only I was never the one in the bed. I was the big-hearted helper, the devoted cheerleader. I brought the cookies.

 • • • 

Eli was in charge of the medical stuff. He kept track of my medications, and when it came time for my middle-of-the-night antibiotics, he would shut off his alarm and creep around to my side of the bed. By the time I would open my eyes, he'd be standing over me in his underwear, hooking up the plastic tubing to the port in my arm. I was quiet sometimes, and sometimes I'd cry. I remember him brushing the hair away from the missing part of my face and smiling down at me with crinkly eyes. He moved quickly, carefully. Then he'd shut out the lights and I'd float off into a foggy half sleep while the bag emptied into my body.

My mother stayed with us, on an air mattress in the living room, during my first few weeks home. It was important, she said, that Eli and I remain husband and wife through this, and not just caregiver and patient. She helped me with the most basic, private tasks, rubbing my feet with lotion, holding me upright on the toilet when my legs would start to shake. Sometimes, she would bathe me, wash and fold our laundry, prepare lunch, and then quietly slip out for an hour or so, leaving us to act out, as best we could, something resembling our normal life. Full garbage bags disappeared to the basement bins, beds got stripped and remade, dishes washed, counters wiped clean. My nightstand, a jumble of medicine bottles, hand sanitizer, tissues, juice glasses, and a thing I'd breathe into to exercise my lungs, got straightened and cleared. She didn't ask; she did.

When I was a little girl, my mother was everything to me. All the more so after my parents separated. I was seven, and they divorced a few years later. I thought the intervening time meant that in the end they might stay together, but it was actually just how these things sometimes go. In the years after my father left, my mother was finishing up her master's degree and working full-time as a management consultant, yet I never remember her not being around. She drove me to play rehearsals, talked me through all of my childhood stresses and woes, taught me how to visualize success the night before big tests, and read every word of every school paper I wrote until I went off to college. She was the most capable human being I could imagine.

So it scared me to sometimes find her in the middle of the night, weeping on her bathroom floor. She'd have her knees up under her nightgown and a roll of toilet paper in one hand. She'd tear off a few squares at a time to blow her nose. I'd do my seven- or eight- or nine-year-old best to comfort her, sink down beside her, wish that I could gather her up into my small body and keep her safe. When I would start to cry, she would gather
me
up, and I'd press my cheek into her chest wet with both of our tears. In the morning she'd be back to it, writing cheery notes in the pages of my notebook for me to find in the middle of my school day, flashing me a sign language “I love you” as I climbed onto the bus.

Most nights, we had dinner together the three of us, my mom, my sister Kasey, and me. While my mother mourned the loss of her marriage, she also mourned the loss of her family—of a certain
idea
of family that meant a mother and a father under one roof and forever-and-ever love. Family dinner was a way of shoring up what was left, of making our family feel like three out of three instead of a remainder. It was a sign that all had not been lost.

My mother wasn't the type to cook up a storm at the start of the week, planning and freezing and making lists. We had leftovers sometimes, sure, but most of the time she came home after work and started from scratch. She'd snap on the small television she kept on the kitchen counter and cook through the six o'clock news,
Wheel of Fortune
, and halfway through
Jeopardy
, at least. Then the TV would go off and we would sit down to eat, my mother at the head of the long antique table that she and my father had bought together years before, Kasey and I across from each other on either side.

Dinner was never a little of this, a little of that, but something hot that had a name. Baked Salmon (with lemon pepper and dill); Stir-Fry (with water chestnuts and baby corn). There was a casserole with elbow noodles, frozen vegetables, and ground meat that you spooned from a glass bowl; and—an exception to the hot rule—the “mondo salad,” with iceberg lettuce, chickpeas, cucumbers, black olives, cherry tomatoes, sliced carrots, hard-boiled eggs, and bean sprouts, topped with Thousand Island dressing for my mother and Wishbone Italian for my sister and me.

My mother does not hurry in the kitchen. She is, shall we say, thorough. She cubes butter with a dinner knife a single pat at a time. The way she eyes and levels cups of flour, you would think she were transferring gold dust. Her drawn-out manner of doing things had sometimes been a tension point between us, but that October, her pace was perfect. Maybe because it allowed my own slowness to feel not so far off from the way of the world; maybe because her tremendous care was more important than any efficiency. My mom moved at my speed without comment—a kindness I hadn't always extended to her—and when she took twice as long as necessary to wrap my PICC line in plastic before my bath to keep moisture and infection out, I was grateful. When she smoothed and tucked and smoothed and tucked the bedsheets I'd be crawling right back into, I was glad.

She cooked for me, too, a strange task in those days since nothing tasted right. Any number of things were to blame: the brain injury from the initial hemorrhage, the aftereffects of the anesthesia, the infection, the antibiotics, my damaged sense of smell. The blandest cereal was sickeningly sweet, chocolate tasted like metal, and the mere sight of anything green—broccoli, spinach, even lettuce—made my skin crawl. My mother was on it, with batches of chicken soup and a palatably gray mushroom-beef-barley stew. I ate what I could, which wasn't much. Anyway, what I really wanted to do was cook.

One night, despite the fact that I could barely stand long enough to brush my teeth, I decided that I wanted—needed—to make dinner. I told my mom and she didn't hesitate. She picked up a pen, dug a scrap of paper from her purse, and transcribed the list of ingredients that I called out from the sofa. Mushrooms, cream, some frozen peas, though the thought turned my stomach. We had pasta and lemons already. When she got back from the market, she helped me into the kitchen. Eli was over by the sink, and he turned when I walked in. He looked happy to see me, but nervous, too, and very tired. It was great, he said, and weird, to see me back in there. The light felt bright, and I made it through three mushrooms, just washing, not even slicing them, before my legs grew heavy, my head light, and nausea flooded my chest. Eli helped me back to the sofa, and my mother finished preparing the meal. I think I might have slept. I wish I could say that those three mushrooms felt like a victory, but really what I felt was fear.
Three mushrooms
. I had to get back in there.

The dish I set out to make that night was inspired by some pasta with morel mushrooms and fresh peas that I ate on my twenty-seventh birthday. Eli and I were living in San Francisco at the time while I was a visiting graduate student at UC Berkeley. With the birthday, the semester coming to an end, and our return home to Cambridge approaching, we were feeling celebratory and up for a splurge. We made a reservation at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters's restaurant on Shattuck Avenue.

Morels are difficult to describe because of how singularly delicious they are. They're woodsy and wild, you might say, arboreal in the way of hazelnuts and pine, succulent like meat. I'd never tasted one until that night, and I was thrilled by how much there was to taste. I did my best to re-create the pasta dish at home and it became part of our permanent rotation. It's best in the spring with morels and fresh peas, but we make it year-round with cremini or shitake mushrooms and frozen peas. If you use cremini or shitake mushrooms, you'll need to cook them for a few extra minutes to get them brown and crisp around the edges.

½ pound morel mushrooms (or cremini or shitake mushrooms; see above)

1 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt

½ pound (227 grams) dry linguine

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Sea salt flakes, like Maldon, to taste

1 cup (150 grams) fresh or frozen peas

2 tablespoons fresh thyme, chopped

Zest from 1 lemon

¼ cup heavy cream

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Juice of ½ lemon, plus more to taste

Fill a large bowl with cool water and prepare the morels: Slice them in half lengthwise, swish them around in the water for a few seconds to loosen any grit—not too long; you want them to absorb as little water as possible—fish them out, pat them dry, and lay them out in a single layer on a dry towel. (If you're substituting cremini or shitake mushrooms, skip the bowl of water and wipe them clean with a damp paper towel instead. Then cut them into ¼-inch slices.)

Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add the kosher salt. Add the linguine to the boiling water and give it a stir to keep the strands from sticking. Cook until just shy of al dente. (The pasta will finish cooking in a hot pan later on.) Drain the pasta and set aside.

Meanwhile, melt the butter over medium-high heat in a 12-inch pan. When the butter foams, add the morels, taking care not to crowd them in the pan. If your pan is small, you may need to work in two batches. Sauté the morels for six minutes, stirring occasionally. Sprinkle with a pinch or two of sea salt flakes, and cook for another 1 to 2 minutes, until lightly brown, crisp around the edges, but still tender. Transfer them to a bowl and set aside.

Turn the heat down to medium, add the peas to the pan, and cook for 1 to 2 minutes (3 to 4 minutes if your peas are frozen), stirring once or twice. Return the mushrooms to the pan, stir in the thyme and lemon zest, and cook for 30 to 60 seconds. Add the boiled pasta and mix gently with the morels and peas, scraping up any brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Pour in the heavy cream, swirl it around the pan, and remove the pan from the heat. Add the olive oil, some sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper, to taste, and lemon juice, and mix gently. Taste, and add more lemon juice, if necessary. Serve immediately.

Makes enough for 3 to 4.