Hope and Other Luxuries (22 page)

I dropped into a chair beside Elena and once again set down my purse and the packet of paperwork. My first impulse was to burst into tears. What lay here was only the outer shell of the person called Elena, the part that didn't matter so much. The other part was her lively eyes, her ever-changing expression, and the millions of shades of emotion in her voice as she jumped from topic to topic: “Guess
what
!”

But that part was gone.

“Don't worry,” the ICU nurse told us. “Your daughter was sitting up a while ago. She was talking to me.” But she didn't sit up and talk to us, even though Joe and I sat by her bedside all evening.

Periodically, Elena would stir, like a dreamer disturbed (all the colored loops and blips clustering together and becoming uneven), and whisper something that might or might not make sense. I couldn't tell if she had any idea where she was or how she had come to be there.

Elena's pediatrician came by to see her. He could offer no insight into what had happened. But I knew. In my heart, I knew.

First, there had been the week in the hospital—the week of the hunger strike. Elena had refused food so steadily during this enforced period of “refeeding” that it must have stressed her body severely.

Then, after this week of stress, there had been the all-out attack. There were the threats, and there was the yelling: “You won't have that senior year! You won't ever see your friends again!”

As I sat by my daughter's still, frail form, those harsh sentences echoed in my mind, and I knew—I just
knew
: This had happened the very second those threats began to come true. After all the pain and grief she had gone through with Valerie and after her hesitation to try a new school, she had finally begun to take risks again. She had found a new group of friends and had made a new home for herself by volunteering at the hospital. Then, out of the blue, came this imprisonment and forced exile, and Elena couldn't bear it. She couldn't bear to go through any more grief.

So they had put her on the plane, and Elena had fought back. She had fought back the only way she could.

And me? I had let that man lock up and threaten my daughter. After all those years of swearing I would be an extraordinary mother, I had stood there and listened to that dangerously unbalanced quack as he had practiced his shady power plays on my child.

There were no words for the misery I felt.

After an hour or so, two nurses came in with a tall blue pump stand and told us that Elena would be receiving a balanced, nutrient-rich liquid diet. This mysterious medical formula turned out to be strawberry- flavored Ensure.

That made me feel a little better. It was a relief to think that Elena would be taking in nourishment at last.

The nurses filled up the clear bag connected to the pump and started it grinding away. First, the bag was soft pink. Then the tube was soft pink. Then soft pink fluid flowed out of Elena's mouth and puddled on her pillow, and she choked and gagged, and the nurses ended up having to stop the pump. They couldn't figure out what was wrong, but they thought that maybe the tube had a wrong bend.

That was the end of Elena's nutrient-rich diet.

When nighttime came, Joe went home. He had to face another long workday in the morning. But I couldn't bear to leave my daughter alone again. I already regretted so very painfully the nights I had left her here.

As a child, Elena had been afraid of many things. Her vivid imagination had brought to life all sorts of monsters. Now, she might wake up and not know where she was. I didn't want her to feel frightened.

Or maybe I was the one who was afraid.

So I stayed behind when Joe left. The ICU nurse found me a recliner chair and moved it next to Elena's bed. I settled in to watch my daughter sleep. But I didn't sleep.

When we had brought Valerie to the ER after her overdose, one floor below and one year before, I had felt angry, helpless, and afraid. Now, sitting beside the silent wreck of my second daughter, I felt far beyond those things. I felt so much that it seemed as if I felt nothing at all.

My sharp, scheming brain couldn't offer up a plan. It couldn't reach abstract thought. It couldn't seem to progress beyond its immediate surroundings. It fumbled in a dreary round over the lighted monitors, the electronic beeps, the chilly air, the still form on the bed, the unfamiliar feel of the recliner chair, and back to the monitors again. The few images my imagination served up were dreary memories of these same things: hospital walls, electronic beeps, lighted monitors, chilly air.

It was as if the entire universe had narrowed down to just this slender fragment of experience.

On the day Elena was born, I almost died. I couldn't stop bleeding. Not even in horror movies have I seen that much blood. The flowing red tide took everything away with it as the hours passed: my joy and my
worry, my awareness of what people were doing, and my attentiveness to what they said. Color itself seemed to flow out of the world, and I lost track of the reason I was in the hospital. The next morning, we would learn that half my blood was gone.

As that fuzzy gray day of Elena's birth faded into shadowy night, one single solitary needle-sharp thought pierced the cotton-wool fog of my brain:

If you fall asleep, you will never wake up again
.

That thought grew and grew until, as weak as I was, it forced me out of bed. That thought forced me to walk, barely able to see, hanging onto the handrail that stretched along the corridors.

I staggered through the hospital halls that night after my daughter's birth, drunk on severe blood loss. Only the handrail kept me on my feet. When I had to cross a hall, I paused to make long and dubious calculations. Would my legs hold me up while I took that many steps alone? Would the floor be cold if I fell?

Only one image from that night is clear: I am looking through the picture window of the newborn nursery at the babies in their bassinets. Only one baby is awake: Elena stares out at the world with a look of fierce determination. It seems ominous that my new baby does not cry.

I am standing and thinking:
Does she know about me? Can she tell that her brand-new life has already gone wrong? If I die, what will happen to Elena? Who will cuddle my baby?

In that very second, for the very first time, I felt love for this new human being. But that love was cut through with fear. My first memories of my daughter are full of pain.

Now, as I sat beside Elena's bed in the ICU, I remembered that night. Like fumbling fingers rubbing a worry stone, my mind kept reaching out and touching it. It was the only other time Elena and I had been in the hospital at night. In the seventeen years between these two complete disasters, she hadn't been sick enough to need a hospital stay.

Beeping monitors. Chilly air. Dim hospital walls. Worry and pain. My mind couldn't process thoughts about these things. It could only stumble past them again and again, on an endless, monotonous round.

In some dim way, I sensed that I had become impaired. Whenever the nurse came by and spoke to me, I had to think carefully before I could answer. My tongue tripped over itself as if I were drunk.

A pediatric nurse came down from Elena's old ward with a stack of her favorite VHS tapes. Then—and I am not quite sure how anymore, whether a nurse asked me or whether I managed to do this on my own—a movie started playing on the television monitor in the corner of the room. I don't think Elena had any idea that the movie was on. I don't think she stirred once. But I watched that movie. I watched it over and over.

The movie was
Peter Pan
, by director P. J. Hogan. I had never seen it before, but it was as familiar to me as the contents of my purse. This was the world as I had known it in the days of my earliest childhood.

Some of my oldest memories involve my mother and her friends talking about strange myths. To sophisticated professors, these tales were about comparative anthropology and the history of civilization itself. But to the preschool me, it was the concrete details that mattered: a gigantic warrior, towering over the battlefield, with one enormous red eye; a young girl, fleeing in terror, frozen in seconds inside a skin of bark and leaves.

I was too young to know that these mythic events couldn't happen. My mother and her friends discussed them as seriously as if they had. So demigods and demons and ghosts became as real to me as my own family history. To me, they were as real as the disasters on the evening news.

When my mother's friends disappeared from my young life, they left these strange mythical monsters behind them. I couldn't go to those friends' houses anymore, but I could still get to Asgard and Olympus. I played there among the warriors and gods, and they taught me their secrets. In third grade, I couldn't have told you the rules of baseball, but I could have told you how to escape from an angry Cyclops.

If we dream about what is oldest and closest to us in our lives, then it makes sense that I write fantasy. The people in my dreamworlds walk through mirrors and hide themselves in mist. They shape-shift and work strange spells. They are what those mythic childhood companions were: colorful and misshapen.

Monsters and I are very old friends.

Now, during that lonely vigil by my daughter's silent body, Peter Pan came flying in through the window like my very own guardian angel. With him came all things magical—and to me, that meant all things familiar: mermaids and fairies, skeletons, lost children, deformed pirates, mythic warriors, and a ticking crocodile with a taste for human flesh. It was as if all the monsters in all the stories I'd ever loved had come to my rescue.

God bless P. J. Hogan. I'll never be able to repay him.

The next morning, Joe showed up very early and took me for a walk outside. By then, I had recovered enough to become aware on some level that it was a beautiful day. But as the hours passed, our stricken daughter stayed out of reach. She did almost nothing but sleep, and she communicated in the vaguest of whispers. Occasionally, she opened her eyes just a crack, as if she were lying in very bright sunlight.

Then the cardiologist stopped by to check Elena's heart monitor, and she brought with her a sense of brisk, healthy purpose that blew into the ICU room like a strong, fresh breeze. Elena still needed to get to the hospital in the States, she said, and this episode only demonstrated that the sooner she could get to the experts, the better. Our orders had been updated to put Elena on a flight the following morning, and an ICU nurse would accompany her this time. If this problem happened again, he would know what to do.

So it turned out that there was still a plan in place, and it seemed to be a good one. It required nothing of Joe or me, which was good because we had very little to give. The cardiologist left, but the sense of purpose that she had brought with her stayed behind and continued to blow fresh thoughts into our traumatized brains.

Getting out of this hospital—that felt like a very welcome idea.

Dave, the ICU transport nurse, came by to meet Elena shortly afterward. He had white hair but a youthful face and the dark golden eyes and cagey, confident expression of an alpha wolf. He talked to me for a while about his battlefield experience, about medevac flights of the past, and about the two children he didn't get to see more often than a couple of times a year. He had been through a lot, and he loved what he did. He was glad to be able to help.

The pediatrician came by to ask if we had met Dave. He checked on Elena, and she opened her eyes a tiny slit and gave him a half-asleep smile.

“Is she still getting drugs through her IV line?” I asked. “She seems so out of it!”

“No,” he said. “She's had no medication since yesterday afternoon.”

He didn't volunteer a reason why Elena might seem so incapacitated, and I didn't have the strength to ask. But his manner was cheerful and encouraging, and I took that gift with gratitude.

During the two long days that Elena stayed in that ICU bed, Dr. Petras didn't come to check on her once.

By that evening, the nurses and I found that we had settled into a routine. It seemed as if Elena had been in the ICU for weeks instead of only a day, and what had seemed strange and ominous the previous night now felt normal and safe. Maybe tonight I could finally close my eyes and get some rest.

But just when I was ready to nod off, a problem came up to rumple my routine. A young soldier with serious injuries needed the recliner. Did I mind trading it for a regular waiting room chair?

Of course not! Anything to help the wounded.

But now—how was I going to sleep?

The waiting room chair didn't offer much in the way of support. It was a modern chrome-and-fabric type with no arms and only a low sling-style rectangle of cloth across the back. I couldn't rest my upper body in it at all, so I decided to borrow part of Elena's ICU bed. The bed had bars down both sides to keep its patient from rolling out, but there wasn't a bar near the bottom. So I pulled my chair forward, crossed my arms on the blanket by Elena's feet, and put my head down on them, just like I remembered doing during rest time in grade school.

My body was so tired that I immediately drifted off.

For about five minutes.

The ICU bed had a “smart” mattress. It was forever inflating and deflating parts of itself with purposeful breaths and long sighs, rearranging itself so that a critically ill patient wouldn't get bedsores. And this smart mattress quickly outsmarted me. It knew that nothing heavy should
be lying across its very end, below where a pair of feet should be, so it emptied all the air out of the part of the mattress I was resting on. Before long, my arms and cheek were flat against its hard metal platform, and the metal edge of its framework was digging into my stomach.

I gave up. I couldn't sleep sitting up in the waiting room chair, and that meant I couldn't sleep at all. So I turned on the television, but with no sound, and I stared at whatever showed up on the screen.