The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (11 page)

A few times before this, Umesh had tried to get her to see Aashish. But each time he suggested it, she wept so vehemently that her temperature went up and the nurse had to give her a shot. Afterward, he would stroke the ragged ends of her hair with distressed hands and say, “Please, please, Aparna. Don’t act this way. Be reasonable.” She did not want to be reasonable. He had no right to ask her to be. An enormous, thwarted emotion ballooned inside her chest whenever she thought of her lost baby—
lost
, yes, that was the right word. She felt it pushing into her lungs, displacing air, long after Umesh gave up and left.

She watches them now, her friend who looks anxious as she sets the car seat down and picks up Aashish. Aashish in a little red two-piece outfit that Aparna didn’t buy for him. Aashish looking so grown and cheerful that Aparna can hardly believe he’s hers. But that’s it, he
isn’t
her baby. Something terrible happened to her own baby because she was in the hospital and couldn’t take care of him, and they’re afraid to tell her. So they’ve brought in this . . . this little impostor.
Where’s my baby?
she wants to ask.
What did you do with my baby?
Instead she says, in a gray, toneless voice, “Take him away.”

“At least hold him once,” her friend says, and she bends over Aparna to move the tubes out of the way so she can lay the baby beside her. Her eyelashes are spiky with tears. Aparna can smell, in her friend’s hair, the woodsy fragrance of Clairol Herbal Essence. It’s the same shampoo Aparna used when she was pregnant. Suddenly she longs for the slow, steady green of it pooling in her palm, the relaxing steam of the shower, her fingers—her own fingers—on her scalp, knowing just where to rub deep and where to lighten up.

But here against her side is this baby, kicking his legs, batting at her with his small, fat arms. When she offers him a finger, he grabs it and gives an unexpected, gurgly laugh. Her friend has stepped outside, leaving a bottle of baby formula on the nightstand. “Baby,” she whispers—she isn’t ready, yet, to speak the name that will claim him as hers—and he laughs again. The sound tugs at the corners of her stiff, unaccustomed mouth until she’s laughing, too. His gums are the color of the pink oleanders she planted in her backyard.

Then he’s hungry, suddenly and absolutely, the way babies are. He’s starting to fuss, in a minute he’ll begin crying, she can tell from the way he’s squinching up his face. She reaches, hurriedly, for the bottle, then stops, struck by an idea so compelling she can hardly breathe. She glances guiltily at the doorway, but it’s empty, so she pulls at her hospital gown until she uncovers a breast and holds it to Aashish’s mouth.

Why does Aparna do this? She’s aware that she has no milk, although exactly how that occurred is obscured by the cottony fog which hangs over the first few days of her readmission to the hospital. Perhaps this is a test, offering her breast to the baby:
If he’s my true, true son, he’ll take it
. Perhaps it’s the hope of a miracle. She remembers, vaguely, old Indian tales where milk spurts from a mother’s breasts when she is reunited with her long-lost children. But mostly it’s her body crying out to feel, once more, the hard, focused clamp of those gums.

Aashish will have none of it. He howls, face splotched with red, his body gone rigid. He refuses to be consoled by pats or clucking sounds, so Aparna must reach for the bottle with shaking fingers, afraid that someone will rush in and demand to know just what she’s done to the poor child and take him away. In her haste she knocks over the bottle, which rolls under the bed, beyond the reach of her tube-restricted arms. And she must lie there next to her son’s crying, a sound that jabs at her like a burning needle, until her friend does, indeed, rush in and take him from her.

LATER, WHEN ALL
this is over and Aparna has settled back into the familiar rhythms of her life—but, no, her life, bisected by almost-death into Before and After, will never be familiar again. She will find it subtly altered, like a known melody into which a new instrument has been inserted. Anyhow, when she has settled back, people will ask her,
But what finally made you better?
She will give them different answers. “It was the new antibiotic,” she might say, “the Cipro.” Or, with a shrug, “I was lucky.” Only once will she say, to a friend—not the one who had taken care of her baby; somehow they drifted apart after Aparna got better—she will say, looking out the window and blushing a little, “Love saved me.”

“Of course,” the friend will reply, nodding her sympathy. “I understand!” But Aparna herself will not be sure if she has been referring to her husband and son, as the friend has surmised, or to something quite different.

A FEW DAYS
after the disastrous baby episode, Aparna opens her eyes to find a man in her room. He startles her in his clean-shaven, blond boyishness, this stranger in a T-shirt and jeans. “I’m Dr. Byron Michaels,” he says, extending a hand which she ignores. It takes her several minutes to recognize him as the man who performed her second surgery. In his street clothes, he looks so different from the times when he visited her with the rest of the squad that she doesn’t close her eyes and turn away, as she originally intended. And though she doesn’t return his smile, when he pulls up a chair and settles himself next to her, she watches him with a certain interest.

“I want to tell you,” he says, “about your surgery. I think you need to know.”

Before she can say,
No, thank you very much
, he has started.

“The other surgeons,” he says, talking in the clipped tones of a man who’s grown used to being always busy, “didn’t want to operate on you. They thought you’d die on the table. But I took it as a challenge. Maybe it was foolish. When I opened you up and saw everything stuck together, I thought, I can’t do it. The guy working with me wanted me to stitch you up again. But I was damned if I was going to leave you there to die.”

Dr. Michaels’s voice slows down. He’s looking at her, but Aparna feels he’s seeing something else. As he speaks, his hands make small, plucking movements in the air. “I started cleaning the organs, wiping the gunk off them, cutting away the cocoon that covered your intestines. It took hours. I was sweating like crazy. The nurse had to keep wiping my face. Afterward, she had to help me off with my gloves. My legs were shaking so much I had to sit down. But I’d done it.”

Through the window, sunlight catches the golden hairs of the surgeon’s forearm. His biceps are smooth and convex, like a high school athlete’s. Aparna wonders if she is one of his first serious cases.

“And now,” he says bitterly, “you’re just throwing it all away.”

The sunlight is on his cheek now, glowing and insistent. It strikes her that in all her life she’s never touched a man’s face except for her husband’s. She would like to know, before she dies, how this pink, American skin feels. She puts out her hand—she has so little to lose that she isn’t embarrassed—and touches his face. It’s unexpectedly hot. She thinks she senses a pricking in her fingertips, the slight, tingly pain of circulation returning to a limb. A blush springs up under his skin, but perhaps Byron—through the rest of her hospital stay, that’s how she’ll think of him, a Romantic poet resurrected in surgical greens—understands, for he sits very still and allows her finger to circle the hollow between his jaw and cheekbone.

SOMETHING HAS CHANGED.
Where before Aparna refused to step out of bed, she now goes for walks, shuffling in badly fitting foam hospital slippers alongside a nurse who pushes her IV machine. Where she barely endured with indifference the quick swipe of a washcloth, now she wants to be helped to the bathroom so she can wash her face properly. She asks a delighted Umesh to bring her makeup bag, and each morning with unsteady fingers she applies lipstick and eyeliner and rubs jasmine oil behind her earlobes. When Umesh holds her hands in his and tells her how beautiful she looks, how thankful he is that she’s taken such a turn for the better, she smiles distractedly. One night when he kisses her before leaving, murmuring how lonely it is in bed, she finds herself imagining that it is Byron who says this. And thus she is forced to admit to herself the motivation for her improvement.

Byron’s visits to her are brief and irregular, sandwiched between surgeries and other, sicker patients. She waits for him with an eagerness that she recognizes as excessive. She does not touch him again, but against her will she finds herself fantasizing about it—and worse. This is humiliating, particularly since he seems to feel nothing but professional interest toward her as he examines her stitches and compliments her on her recovery process.

Aparna tells herself she’s behaving stupidly. She’s degenerating into a stereotype, the female patient infatuated with her doctor. Surely she’s more intelligent than that? She thinks she catches an amused look, once or twice, in a nurse’s eye. Stop it! she commands herself. Yet there she is next morning, sitting up in bed lipsticked and ready, trying to comb the knots out of her hair, which she has made the nurse shampoo for her. When the curtain moves, she looks up with her sultriest smile. But it is only Umesh, who wanted to surprise her on his way to work with a bouquet of irises from their garden, and who is baffled by the sulky monosyllables with which she answers him.

IT’S BYRON’S IDEA
to bring the baby back. Aparna is reluctant and scared. She blurts out that the previous visit was a disaster, though she cannot bear to share its painful details even with him.

“Try it one more time,” he says. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Try it for me.”

This time it’s a lot better, once she gets over how big Aashish has grown. He looks nothing like the tiny, swaddled baby she’s held on to so tightly inside her head. He doesn’t recognize her at all. But that’s almost a relief, because now she doesn’t have to behave like a mother—she’s not sure she’d know how to, after all this time. It’s okay for her to be, instead, her awkward, prickly self.

But Aashish has a way of deprickling her. Maybe it’s his willingness to be amused by the finger games she invents. He likes it when she brings her face close to his and makes strange noises. When she runs out of noises to make, he watches her unblinkingly—“as though my face were the most interesting thing in the universe,” she says in laughing amazement to Umesh.

That intent, considering gaze, that looking out at the world with a pure and complete attention. She is delighted and humbled by it. She, too, wants to learn it. And if (as she fears) she’s too old for that, then she wants to be close to her son and learn it through him. So she practices over and over with the breath-blower the nurses have given her, the little balls inside plastic tubes which are supposed to strengthen her lungs. She forces herself to walk a little farther down the corridor each day. She even tries the visualization exercises in the book one of her friends brought, shutting her eyes and willing herself to feel her body glowing with disks of light. She still makes up her face every morning for Byron, still enjoys seeing him. But sometimes as they talk, she finds her mind straying. Those footsteps outside, could that be Umesh, bringing Aashish a little earlier today?

MIRACULOUSLY, THE DAY
of her discharge arrives. The nurses make a special occasion of it, chipping in to buy her a baby outfit and a pair of hand puppets. They blow on noisemakers and clap as they wheel her down the corridor for the last time. From the back of the car, she waves at them with one hand as she holds tight to Aashish’s car seat with the other. When the car turns the corner, she realizes that she is crying.

Byron came in that morning for a final checkup and pronounced her cured. This isn’t exactly true. She still finds it tiring to walk the length of the corridor and back. She has to lower herself into a chair with aggravating slowness. Though she longs for a nice chili curry, she has been placed on a strict diet: interminable wastelands of applesauce and white bread loom ahead of her. Still, her heart leaped like a fish that had been tossed back into the lake.

Byron held out his hand. She touched it lightly. It was the first time she was touching him since the afternoon he told her how he’d saved her life. She wanted to say something to him about that, about love. But he was telling her he hoped to see her in his office in a week’s time, telling her to call his secretary, telling her to watch that diet. He filled up the space between them with mundaneness. When he stopped, she didn’t have anything left to say.

QUICK AND SLIM
in a black T-shirt and shorts, Aparna moves through the children’s section of Macy’s, picking up items for Aashish’s first birthday. In her cart, in addition to goody-bag gifts for the children she has invited, is a large purple Barney, Aashish’s favorite TV character, and a red silk kite in the shape of a fish. She has worked hard to gain back her pre-pregnancy body and has, her friends claim enviously, even more energy than before. There’s a new impatience about her, too. At times it makes them uneasy.
Get to the point
, it seems to say.
You don’t have as much time as you think
.

Aparna has managed to forget most of what she wanted to forget about her illness. There are a few things. She’ll drive a mile out of her way so she doesn’t have to pass the squat gray building where she spent a month of her life. She can’t stand certain colors—cheery yellow, innocuous peach, cute pink. A particular hour of evening, when shadows the color of bruises cluster under windowsills, makes her stomach clench with anxiety. But she chalks these up as minor costs.

She flings a wave of dark hair over her shoulder and makes for the cash register, a beautiful woman with such confident eyes that people would never guess what she’s been through. At that moment she sees Dr. Michaels. He, too, is heading toward the cashier with something bunched up in his hand—a pullover, she thinks, but she is light-headed with an anguish she thought she had done with, and thus not sure.

She never did go back to see him. She told Umesh it was too painful, all those negative associations. Did he suspect other reasons? If so, he didn’t bring them up. There was a wary gentleness to how he handled her requests in those first days, as though she were a glass window. Any refusal would be a rock thrown into it. Thankfully, she thinks with a smile, recalling their energetic arguments about the birthday party, that didn’t last too long.