The End of Forever (13 page)

Erin almost unraveled on the spot. Ever since the organ-donor possiblity was mentioned, she’d regarded the medical staff as enemies. She didn’t trust them anymore. “I’ll be back,” she muttered, and fled out of the unit. In the hallway she collided with Shara.

“Whoa! Hey, Erin. I’ve been looking for you.” Shara eyed her narrowly. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.” Erin sniffed, clinging to Shara’s arm. The appearance of her friend, wearing her familiar trench coat, seemed magical, and Erin realized just how badly she needed an ally. “It’s been a rough night, that’s all.”

“Want to sit in the waiting room and tell me about it?”

They settled in the sunlit room, which was now
almost empty. Only emergency surgeries were performed on Saturday, so unless you were waiting for an extremely critical patient, there was no reason to hang around. Erin plucke’d at an armrest. “Th-they say Amy’s …” Erin couldn’t get the words out.

Shara touched her arm. “I know.”

“How?”

“Rank has its privileges. My dads on staff here, remember? He checks on Amy every day for me.”

Erin dropped her head wearily against the back of the chair. Knowing that Shara had been checking on Amy’s case all along comforted her. “So you know they want us to donate Amy’s organs.”

“Asking is SOP—standard operating procedure. There are plenty of people who need transplants, and not enough people donating their organs to go around.”

“I think it’s ghoulish. How can they ask such a thing? Especially when the tests might be wrong and Amy might suddenly start to improve. If they just give her enough time, I know she’ll wake up from her coma.”

Shara jammed her hands into the pockets of her trench coat and tugged it tighter. “You up for a little tour?” Shara asked.

“Tour of what?”

“Come with me. You’ll see.”

Curious, Erin tagged after Shara to the elevators, which they rode down to the fifth floor. When the doors opened, they stepped out into a corridor
painted pink and blue with nursery pictures stenciled on the walls. “This way,” Shara said.

They rounded a corner and faced long horizontal windows that looked into a room filled with row after row of Lucite bassinets of newborn babies. Nurses in gowns, gloves, and masks changed diapers, wrapped and rewrapped blankets, and juggled crying infants.

“Babies?” Erin asked, dumbfounded.

“Cute, huh? I used to come here a lot when I was growing up. Daddy seemed to always have to deliver a baby in the middle of the night, so Mom and I would come and have breakfast with him. He was always so busy that if we didn’t meet him here, whole weeks would go by without us having a single meal together.” Shara pressed her nose to the glass and pointed to one baby whose tiny face was puckered with a cry. In the next cart another slept, oblivious to the noise. “Anyway, while we waited for him, I’d stand here and watch the babies. They were like living dolls, and I always wished I could hold them.”

Erin watched the infants with their eyes scrunched shut and their mouths shaped like rosebuds and their hands balled into doll-sized fists, until she felt a softening sensation inside her. “Bet it’s loud in there.”

“You need earplugs.”

“Okay, you’re right, Shara, they’re cute. So what?”

“Let’s go around the corner.” Shara took her to another window, but the babies in this room were different from the others. They were wired to machines
and monitors, some so small that they could fit inside a grown mans hand. Ventilator tubes snaking out of their mouths were held fast by crisscrosses of white tape. The walls of their chests rose and fell rapidly, little stocking hats covered hairless heads, and their skin was so thin that Erin could see their veins and count their ribs. “Neonatal-ICU,” Shara explained.

“I–I’ve never seen anything so tiny,” Erin whispered, mesmerized by the scraps of human life attached to tubes and wires.

“They’re able to save more and more of the ones born prematurely,” Shara said matter-of-factly. “It’s a good thing,” she added, “but I wonder, is it the right thing?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Dad and I talk about it a lot. He’s delivered some babies who are so premature that there’s no way they can make it. And if by some miracle they do, they’re so physically or mentally damaged that their whole life is spent in an institution.”

“But they’re alive.”

“That’s true. Daddy says that a doctor takes an oath to heal and restore and to relieve suffering.” Shara looked Erin in the eye. “At the very least he’s to do no harm. But still, I wonder—just because medicine
can
do something,
should
it be done?”

Vaguely Erin caught on to what Shara was implying. “Medicine’s created a monster, right? We have the means to heal, but not the wisdom. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Something like that. What wisdom is there in
keeping a person alive above all other considerations? Why should doctors keep restarting someone’s heart if he’s never going to get well?”

Erin’s own heart thudded. “Or why not turn off the machines on a person who—according to all the tests—is brain dead?” She spoke caustically, raising her shield of anger to protect herself from her best friend’s words. “If this is a lesson in how I ought to okay the hospital’s game plan for Amy—”

Shara grabbed Erin’s arm. “No way. But I’ve seen my dad work and worry over babies like these when there’s no hope for them. But because he’s delivered them, he feels responsible for keeping them alive.” She stared hard at one baby in a corner of the room whose legs and arms were no bigger around than the width of two adult fingers.

“Dad says that God made us to live with dignity. Instead, medicine and science get all caught up in the technicalities … in the heroic measures. We put all our efforts into keeping a person alive at any cost. It’s as if winning the battle is more important than the person.”

Erin mulled over Shara’s words. She’d known Shara for years. They’d talked on the phone about a million silly things, but she’d never realized what her friend thought about things as serious as they were discussing now. She pressed her fingers into her eyelids and softly said, “Shara, I hear what you’re saying. But I can’t give up on my sister. I just can’t!”

Shara sighed. “No one’s saying you should give up as long as there’s hope.”

“But I can’t give up my hope just because of some stupid tests. You said yourself that they make advancements and breakthroughs in medicine every day. Maybe there’ll be one tomorrow that’ll help Amy. If they take her now and remove her organs, then what hope will she have?”

Very gently Shara told her, “Erin, it’s not going to work that way for Amy. There’s no cavalry coming in medical breakthroughs to save her.”

“Unexplained things happen every day. Something still could happen to bring her back.”

“They can’t keep her on machines much beyond tomorrow,” Shara said. “I’ve asked my dad to explain what happens. Once brain activity ceases …” She left her sentence unfinished.

Unable to respond, Erin studied the infants connected to the equipment. She understood the medical consequences of Amy’s condition: without brain activity, the body simply wasted away. She cleared her throat and pressed the palms of her hands against the glass. “Crazy, isn’t it?
Their
brains are working fine. It’s their bodies that are struggling.”

Erin stepped away from the window and turned toward Shara. “Thanks, Shara. Thanks for bringing me here and thanks for being my friend. I—I’ll think about everything you’ve said.”

They stood together in an intimate silence. Finally Shara broke it. “Look, I’ve got to be going. The dance is tonight.”

The dance. Travis dating Cindy.
Erin forced a smile. “You have a good time.” They started toward
the elevators. “I thought you were going to show me your dress.”

Shara glanced up and down the hall. “I’m wearing it under my coat.”

“Let me see.”

Shara opened the coat. She wore a cream-colored tuxedo, complete with ruffled white shirt, rhinestone buttons, and red satin cummerbund. “I told you it was different. Kenny’s wearing a black one just like it. What d’ya think?”

Erin nodded her approval. “Its terrific.”

“We’re both wearing high-top sneakers, and I’ve got a silk top hat too.”

Erin couldn’t help feeling envious. How she wished her life had not grown so complicated and so sad. “You have a ball, and call and tell me all about it,” she told Shara.

“I will.” Shara hugged her. “I’ll be home tomorrow if you need me to come up here.”

Minutes later Erin drove aimlessly through the streets crowded with Saturday afternoon shopping traffic. She passed a baseball field where a Little League game was being played, and a mall where a radio station was doing a remote broadcast. How was it that the world could be going on in such an ordinary way?

Erin kept fighting back tears and wishing there was somebody she could go to. An image of her father floated into her memory. She saw herself as a small girl sitting with Amy on her dad’s lap while he read them a book of fairy tales. How safe she’d felt then,
intoxicated by the scent of his pipe tobacco and aftershave.

She glanced out the car window and got her bearings. She wasn’t too far from Briarwood, and more than anything she wanted to be with her daddy. She wanted him to tell her that everything was going to be all right. That like Sleeping Beauty, Amy would wake up if the right prince came along.

Erin walked the halls of Briarwood slowly, touching the rows of lockers as she passed. The smell of chalk dust and white paste and old books saturated the air, and her heels made a forlorn echoing sound as she went.

She passed the trophy cases and paused to read the plaques and ribbons and trophy inscriptions.
All City Champs—Soccer, 1978, 1980, 1983. Best in State—Debate Team, 1973, 1981, 1985, 1986.

So what? Erin thought. Where were those girls now who’d brought back the trophies? Did the winners ever think about the awards sitting preserved and polished behind a glass wall? Why did wood and brass endure while life evaporated into the wind? It didn’t seem right.

She sighed and shook her head. The thoughts were too heavy and the questions too complex. An ache had begun between her temples. She hoped her dad had some aspirin in his desk.

Erin moved quickly until she spotted her dad’s classroom, the eerie quiet unnerving her. She might have barreled headlong inside, but something made her stop short in the doorway. Maybe it was that
sound—a sound she knew but couldn’t quite place until she looked inside the room.

Her father was sitting at his desk, which was covered with papers, his arms resting on the wooden desktop and his face buried in the fabric of his jacket. He was weeping. Great, racking sobs were making his shoulders heave, and the sound he made was like that of a person whose soul was being torn away.

For a stunned moment Erin stood and watched.
“Real men don’t cry. Is that it?”
he’d asked her the day they’d looked through the photo albums together. And she’d answered,
“Real men stick by the people they care about.”
Her heart pounded.
Oh Daddy. Poor Daddy,
she thought.

For a brief, panic-stricken moment, she didn’t know what to do. She wanted to go to him and hold him, but she knew his tears were too private, too sacred for her to intrude upon. Erin flattened her back against the wall outside the door and shut her eyes, but the image of her father was burned into her mind forever.

Slowly she slid down the wall, biting her lip and resting her forehead on her knees. The tears came in quiet streams, and somehow she felt connected to her father by a cord of grief, as a spider’s web connects two tree branches by its shimmering threads.

Erin parked her car on a side street near Travis’s house and waited for him to return from the dance. She checked her watch. It was well past midnight.
“Cinderella’s coach should have turned into a pumpkin by now,” she said to herself.

While she waited, she carefully plotted her strategy. Travis lived in a fine old house on Bayshore Drive. When he pulled into his driveway, she’d call to him and make him cross to the bay side of the street, where she’d confront him. They’d be alone, and she’d say everything that was on her mind. He was a louse and a creep, and she’d make him pay for abandoning Amy.

When his headlights turned into the driveway, her mouth went dry, but the hard, cold knot of anger gave her the courage to call to him. Travis hesitated, so she called again, then watched as he jogged hesitantly across the deserted avenue.

“Erin?” he asked, coming closer. “What are you doing here?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Now? It’s one o’clock in the morning. How long you been waiting?”

“Never mind. Did you have a good time at the dance?” Her question was laced with acid.

“Yeah.” He drew the word out slowly. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Of course. I just
had
to know if you and Cindy had fun at the dance. If you had a few laughs about old times and old girlfriends.”

Erin knew that her barb had hit home. Travis glared at her. “Butt out, Erin. My life’s none of your business. Don’t you know? Life’s short. We have to grab all the gusto—go for the gold. Know what I
mean?” He turned, but she grabbed his arm. “Let go.”