Aftershock & Others (28 page)

A week later we
were sitting in the uppermost part of Kim’s Princeton home waiting for an approaching storm to hit.

She had to have been earning
big
bucks as an investment banker to afford this place. A two-story Victorian—she said it was Second Empire style—with an octagonal tower set in the center of its mansard roof. One look at that tower and I knew it could be put to good use.

I found a Home Depot and bought four eight-foot sections of one-inch steel pipe, threaded at both ends, and three compatible couplers. I drilled a hole near the center of the tower roof and ran a length through; I coupled the second length to its lower end, and ran that through, and so on until Kim had a steel lightning target jutting twenty-odd feet above her tower.

The tower loft was unfurnished, so I’d carried up a couple of cushions from one of her sofas. We huddled side by side on those. The lower end of the steel pipe sat in a large galvanized bucket of water a few feet in front of us—the bucket was to catch the rain that would certainly leak through my amateur caulking job at the roof line, the water to reduce the risk of fire.

I heard the first distant mutter of thunder and rubbed my hands together. Despite the intense dry heat up here, they felt cold and damp.

“Scared?” Kim said

“Terrified.”

My first brush with lightning had been an accident. I hadn’t known what was coming. Now I did. I was shaking inside.

Kim smiled and gave my arm a reassuring squeeze. “So was I, at first. Knowing I’m going to see Timmy helps, but still…it’s the uncertainty that does it:
Is
it or
isn’t
it going to hit?”

“How about I just say I don’t believe in lightning? That’ll make me feel better.”

She laughed. “Hey, whatever works.” She sidled closer. “But I think I know a better way to take your mind off your worries.”

She began kissing me, on my eyes, my cheeks, my neck, my lips. And I began undoing the buttons on her blouse. We made love on the cushions in that hot stuffy tower, and were glazed with sweat when we finished.

A flash lit one of the eight slim windows that surrounded us, followed by a deep rumble.

“Almost here,” I whispered.

Kim nodded absently. She seemed distant. I knew our lovemaking had once again ended too quickly for her, and I felt bad. Over the past week I’d tried everything I knew to bring her through, but kept running into a wall I could not breach.

“I wish—” I began but she placed a finger against my lips.

“I have to tell you something. About Timmy. About the day he died.”

I knew it had been tough on her coming back here. I’d seen his room—it lay directly below this little tower. Like so many parents who’ve lost a child, she’d kept it just as he’d left it, with toys on the counters and drawings on the wall. I would have done that with Beth’s room, but my marriage fell apart soon after her death and the house was sold. Another child occupied Beth’s room now.

“You don’t—”

“Shush. Let me speak. I’ve got to tell you this. I’ve got to tell
someone
before…”

“Before what?”

“Before I explode. I brought Timmy home from the hospital to a room that was set up like the finest ICU. All his vital signs were monitored by telemetry, he had round-the-clock skilled nursing to give him his chemotherapy, monitor his IVs, draw blood for tests, adjust his respirator.”

“Why the respirator?” I couldn’t help it—the doctor in me wanted to know.

“The tumor had spread to his lungs—he couldn’t breathe without it. It’d also spread to many of his bones, even his skull. He was in terrible pain all the time. They radiated him, filled him with poisons that made him sicker, loaded him with dope to ease the pain, and kept telling me he had a fighting chance. He
didn’t
have a chance. I knew it, and that was why I’d brought him home, so he could be in his own room, and so I could have every minute with him. But worse, Timmy knew it too. I could see it in his eyes when they weren’t glazed with opiates. He was hanging by a thread but no one would let it break. He wanted to go.”

I closed my eyes, thinking, Oh, no. Don’t tell me this…I don’t want to hear this…

“It was the hardest decision of my life. More than anything else in the universe, I wanted my little boy to live, because every second of his life seemed a precious gift to me. But why was I delaying the inevitable? For him, or for me? Certainly not for him, because he was simply existing. He couldn’t read, couldn’t even watch TV, because if he wasn’t in agony, he was in the Demerol zone. That meant I was prolonging his agony for
me
, because I couldn’t let him go. I
had
to let him go. As his mother, I had to do what was right for him, not for me.”

“You don’t have to go on,” I said as she paused. “I can guess the rest.”

Kim showed me a small, bitter smile. “No, I don’t think you can.” She let out a deep shuddering sigh and bit her upper lip. “So one day, as a thunderstorm came through, I dosed a glass of orange juice with some ipecac and gave it to Timmy’s nurse. Ten minutes later, while she was in the bathroom heaving up her lunch, I sneaked down to the basement and threw the main breaker for the house. Then I rushed back up to the second floor to be with Timmy as he slipped away. But he wasn’t slipping away. He was writhing in the bed, spasming, fighting for air. I…I was horrified, I felt as if my blood had turned to ice. I thought he’d go gently. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. I couldn’t bear it.”

Tears began to stream down her face. The storm was growing around us but I was barely aware. I was focused on Kim.

“I remember screaming and running back down to the basement, almost killing myself on the way, and resetting the breaker. Then I raced back upstairs. But when I reached him, it was too late. My Timmy was gone, and I hadn’t been there. He died alone.
Alone!
Because of me! I killed him!”

And now she was sobbing, deep wracking sounds from the pit of her soul. I took her in my arms and held her tight against me. She virtually radiated pain. At last I understood what was fueling the engine of this mad compulsion. What an appalling burden to carry.

“It’s all right, Kim,” I whispered. “What you saw were muscle spasms, all involuntary. You did the right thing, a brave thing.”

“
Was
it right?” she blurted through her sobs. “I know it wasn’t brave—I mean, I lost my nerve and changed my mind—but was it
right
? Did Timmy really want to go, or was it me just thinking he did? Was his suffering too much for him to bear, or too much for me? That’s what I’ve got to know. That’s why I have to see him close up and hear what he’s trying to say. If I can do that, just once, I swear I’ll stop all this and run for a basement every time I hear a storm coming.”

As if on cue, a blast of thunder shook the little tower and I became aware again of the storm. Rain slashed the windows and the darkened sky was alive with flashes. I stared at the steel pole a few feet before me and wanted to run. I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs. This was insane, truly insane. But I forced myself to sit tight and think about something else.

“It all makes sense now,” I said.

“What?”

“Why we’re seeing Beth and Timmy…they didn’t give up their lives—life was taken from them.”

Kim bunched a fist against her mouth. She closed her eyes and moaned softly.

“Through love in Timmy’s case,” I said quickly. I cupped my hand behind her neck and kissed her forehead. “But not in Beth’s.”

Kim opened her eyes. “Can’t you tell me about it? Please?”

She’d shared her darkest secret with me, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. I was about to refuse her when a deafening blast of thunder stopped me. I was dancing with death in this tower. What if I didn’t survive? Kim should know. Suddenly I wanted her to know.

I closed my eyes and opened the gates, allowing the pent-up past to flow free. A melange of sights, smells, sounds eddied around me, carrying me back five years…

I steeled myself and began: “It was the first time in years I’d allowed myself more than a week away from my practice. Twelve whole days in Italy. We were all so excited…”

Angela was first generation
Italian-American and the three of us trooped to the Old Country to visit her grandparents—Beth’s great-grandparents. While Angela stayed in Positano, yakking in Italian to all her relatives, Beth and I dashed off for a quick, two-day jaunt to Venice. Yes, it’s an overpriced tourist trap. Yes, it’s the Italian equivalent of Disney World. But there’s not another place in the world like it, and since the city is supposedly sinking at the rate of two and a half inches per decade, I wanted Beth to experience it without a snorkel.

From the day she was born, Beth and I shared something special. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone or anything more than that little baby. When I was home, I’d feed her; when I wasn’t on call, I’d get up with her at night. Most parents love their kids, but Beth and I
bonded
. We were soul mates. She was only eight, but I felt as if I’d known her all my life.

I wanted her to be rich in spirit and experience, so I never passed up a chance to show her the wonders of the world, the natural and the manmade. Venice was a little of both. We did all the touristy stuff—a gondola ride past Marco Polo’s and Casanova’s houses, shopping on the Rialto Bridge, eating gelato, crossing the Bridge of Sighs from the Doge’s palace into the prison; we took boats to see the glassblowers on Murano and the lace makers on Burano, snagged a table at Harry’s Bar where I treated her to a Shirley Temple while I tried a Bellini. But no matter where we went or what we did, Beth kept dragging me back to Piazza San Marco so she could feed the pigeons. She was bonkers for those pigeons.

Vendors wheel little carts through the piazza, selling packets of birdseed, two thousand lire a pop. Beth must have gone through a dozen packets during our two-day stay. Pigeons have been called rats with feathers, and that may not be far off, but these have got to be the fattest, tamest feathered rats in the world. Sprinkle a little seed into your palm, hold it out, and they’ll flutter up to perch on your hand and arm to eat it. Beth loved to stand with handfuls stretched out to both sides. The birds would bunch at her feet, engulf her arms, and even perch on her head, transforming her into a giggling mass of feathers.

I wasn’t crazy about her being that close to so many birds—thoughts of the avian-born diseases like psittacosis that I’d studied in med school kept darting through my head—so I tried to limit her contact. But she got such a kick out of them, how many times could I say no? I even went so far as to let her talk me into doing her two-handed feeding trick. Soon, holding my breath within a sea of fluttering wings, I was inundated with feathers. I couldn’t see Beth but I could hear her distinctive belly laugh. When I finally shook off the pigeons, I found her red-faced and doubled over with laughter.

What can be better than making a child laugh? The pigeons grossed me out, but so what? I grabbed more seed and did it again.

Finally it was time to leave Venice. The only flight we could book to Naples left Marco Polo at six thirty the next morning, and the first public waterbus of the day would make a number of stops along the way and get us to the airport with only a few minutes to spare. Since I didn’t want to risk missing the flight, I had the hotel concierge arrange for a private water taxi. It would pick us up at five a.m. at a little dock just a hundred feet from our hotel.

At ten of five, Beth and I were standing by our luggage at the end of Calle Larga San Marco. The tide was out and the canal smelled pretty rank. Even at this hour it was warm enough for short sleeves. I was taken with the silence of the city, the haunted emptiness of the dark streets: Venice on the cusp of a new day, when the last revelers had called it quits, and the earliest risers were just starting their morning coffee.

Beth was her usual bossy little self. As soon as she’d learned to string words together, she began giving directions like a sergeant major. She had no qualms about telling us what to wear, or what to buy in the supermarket or a department store, or setting up seating arrangements—“You sit there, Mommy, and Daddy, you sit there, and I’ll sit right here in the middle.” We called her “the Boss.” And here in Venice, without her mother around, Boss Beth took charge of me. I loved to humor her.

“Put the suitcases right there, Daddy. Yours on the inside and mine on the outside so that when the boat gets here we can put them right on. Now you stand right over here by me.”

I did exactly as she told me. She wanted me close and I was glad to comply. Her voice trailed off after that and I could see her glancing around uneasily. I wasn’t fully comfortable myself, but I talked about seeing Mommy in a few hours to take her mind off our isolation.

And then finally we heard it—the sputtering gurgle of an approaching
taxi acquei
. The driver, painfully thin, a cigarette drooping from his lips, pulled into the dock—little more than a concrete step-down—and asked in bad English if we were the ones going to the airport. We were, and as I handed him our two suitcases, I noticed the heavy droop of his left eyelid. My first thought was Bell’s palsy, but then I noticed the scar that parted his eyebrow and ridged the lid below it.