Hope and Other Luxuries (23 page)

A bunch of golfers were playing a tournament in Liverpool: gray skies and a brown golf course. I watched them wander through that rough, tawny seascape in stupefied amazement. It hadn't occurred to me before that golf courses came in brown.

As the hours wore away, the television screen developed a hazy glow around it, until the sober-faced golfers and the tall sea grasses and wind-driven coastal clouds all blended together into a bright smear. The night began to feel like a long transatlantic flight: lights were dim throughout the quiet ICU, like an airline cabin over the ocean, and nurses slipped in and out with drinks and blankets.

I leaned my head on the metal bars that lined Elena's bed and counted the steady beats of the monitor.
We'll get there
, I found myself thinking over and over.
Even the longest flight ends
.

Morning brought a gurney into the room, and the bustle and noise of transport. But I went through it this second time on autopilot. Not until I walked onto the plane did I really register where I was. My thoughts started there because so did my fear.

Elena was in a different place on this flight. She was on the top bunk this time. A bulky heart monitor squatted on a shelf at her feet. This time, I wasn't surprised that she was unconscious.

During takeoff and the initial ascent, Elena didn't move or open her eyes, but I watched her heart monitor with obsessive dread. First, her pulse was eighty. Then it was a hundred. Then it was a hundred and twenty.

I could feel my own heart pounding.

What if the cardiomyopathy put Elena into some sort of crisis? What if she started howling and wailing again? Would Dave be able
to handle her? Would I have to watch him try to hold her down while her eyes rolled again under half-closed lids?

When I was in first grade, I got stung by a wasp. It was my first bewildered impression of attack and severe pain. For several years after that, I watched for wasps in the landscape with single-minded dread. A wasp in the room with me, bumping lazily along the ceiling, would absorb my attention entirely. I would see nothing else. I would hear nothing else. For hours.

Now, I feared the hideous apparition of my flailing, mindless daughter with just that same childlike sense of alarm. Up until two days ago, it had never even crossed my mind as a possibility. Now, it was the most terrifying thing I knew.

But as soon as the plane leveled off, Dave came to stand by Elena's stretcher and watch over her like her own personal, faithful wolf. He was so clearly in charge of the situation that my fears rapidly dissipated. Once again, optimism flickered like a match flame in my heart.

As bad as things have been, I'll bet we've finally hit bottom
, I thought.
Things will get better from here
.

As my worries eased, I began to take an interest in the unusual situation I was in. Contact with Air Force bases had accustomed me to properly pressed uniforms and neatly kept beige buildings, and life on a NATO base had presented me with a fascinating assortment of camouflage patterns. But that was all very different from the sight of an actual transport of wartime wounded.

Every new experience feeds a writer's imagination. After two days of static, dreary awfulness, I could once again feel my writer's mind begin to stretch itself as it explored and catalogued the scene in front of me.

No wonder they called this the belly of the plane, I thought. It really was just a big tube. Rows of strong steel rings lay embedded in the metal floor panels, and arrays of canvas tie-down straps lay in neat coils in alcoves in the walls. Every color in the hollowed-out body of the plane seemed to have been chosen for maximum ugliness. Mustard-yellow wires snaked down the curved walls next to pale gray-white paint, and bright crimson ductwork ran next to foil-wrapped insulation panels.

Despite the interior's odd shape and bizarre appearance, it felt more like a room in a community center than it felt like anywhere else I'd been: like an anonymous space quickly adapted for a temporary use. The nursing staff didn't look like nurses, either, to my untrained eye: they looked like soldiers because they were wearing their camouflage uniforms.

The patients, young men and women from the war zones, lay on their stretchers, tucked up under dark green blankets in their upper and lower bunks. Many of them had one or more white casts sticking out from under the blanket. A couple of critical-care patients had all but disappeared under what looked like small mountains of old PC monitors.

Despite the loud engine noise, or maybe because of it, the flying ward felt quiet. No one cried out. Nobody appeared to be complaining.

We handful of family members who were accompanying the wounded sat bolt upright in our line of seats set into the wall of the aircraft. The seat on my left-hand side was empty. A Middle Eastern woman sat on my right. The flight crew, wearing their jumpsuits, came by to issue us sack lunches, also a green blanket of our own because the aircraft was cold.

Somehow, despite its kinship with baby onesies and toddler rompers, the military flight suit manages to be the most macho uniform.

Elena's hands and feet began to dip and circle occasionally, even though Dave had loaded her up with sedatives. He was still standing beside her, watching her carefully. He had a little notepad with him, and he was taking notes.

“What makes her do that?” I asked. “It's what she was doing before, when they had to take her off the plane. It's like some kind of slow-motion seizure.”

“I don't know,” Dave admitted. “I've never seen a patient do that.”

For a while, her lazy movements held my attention and raised my apprehension again the way wasps had done in my childhood. But I was older now. I could be reasonable. Dave was on duty.

Once again, I took an interest in what was going on around me.

The young wounded woman who had the bunk underneath Elena's was tanned and muscular, with very short blond hair—almost fuzz. The side of her neck had a hole in it—not a scab or a cut but a straw-size,
dried-out hole bored straight through the skin, deep into what appeared to be beef jerky. This was the site of a battlefield IV, and it wasn't hard to see why she had needed it: an enormous cast buried her leg from hip to toes in thick white plaster.

She told me that she was Army and that a roadside bomb had rolled her transport and shattered her leg. She knew she wouldn't be able to return downrange, and that was a real grief to her: the members of her unit were like brothers and sisters, her constant companions for over a year, and she hated the thought of leaving them to face hardship without her help. She was upbeat and cheerful, but over and over, she worried about her friends downrange. She had left them in the lurch, she said—as if the powdering of her leg bones was a humiliating character flaw rather than a physical injury.

The Middle Eastern woman sitting next to me looked very pretty and girlish, even though she was older than I was. According to Western culture, she was overweight, but it wasn't that simple: her ample frame was somehow abundant and healthy, and it only added to her charm. Her husband was lying very still under one of those mountains of monitors. Only the sine waves and flickering numbers showed that he was alive. But still, the woman could smile, although her black eyes were worried. Her smile was an act of will and a beautiful thing.

We were heavily involved then in the war in Iraq, but the woman told me she wasn't Iraqi. I think she may have been from Jordan. Her husband had worked as a translator for the Americans for many years, and when the war came, he had felt that he should help. So he had uprooted his wife, now a grandmother, and had moved her away from her family into troubled Iraq. She was frightened from the first, but he had considered it a point of honor, she said: he had always been proud to work for the United States, and he felt sure that the Americans would look after them.

The enemy had lain in wait for him and caught him. Whatever they had done to him had been very bad. Fortunately, his American commander had lived up to that good man's trust and code of honor. He had made this flight happen by sheer force of will, and the medical care in the States, too, when bureaucrats in Washington had tried to prevent it.

While the woman was telling me this, Elena stirred and mumbled. Dave leaned over to listen but then looked at me with a shrug. So I stood up and leaned my ear close to my daughter's lips to try to make out the words.

“Makeup bag,” she was whispering. And her emaciated, birdlike fingers were plucking at the blanket, searching.

This bag and her glasses were the two things Elena had kept by her pillow during the whole stay in the hospital. Her black makeup bag seemed to have become some kind of security blanket: she spent long hours with it clutched in her hand. Now I found it for her, a few inches away from her fumbling fingers, and instantly, her uneasiness subsided.

Very, very slowly and mechanically, she unzipped the zipper and felt through it. She didn't even open her eyes. Then, very, very slowly, she pulled out her powder compact and began patting its little round sponge across her face.

She never once looked up at us. She didn't seem to be awake. But she thoroughly, painstakingly powdered her face, replaced the sponge, put the compact away, and zipped the bag shut. Then she unzipped it again, felt around, found the compact, took out the sponge, and powdered her face again.

She did this over and over.

As I watched her, the tiny flame of optimism in my heart guttered and went out. Who
was
this skinny young woman? I didn't know this person at all. My daughter—my ally—my friend!—where
was
she?

The Elena I knew didn't back away from a fight. She loved to go up against the mighty. Dark eyes dancing, wry smile on her face, she found humor in the most unexpected places. What had happened to that bright, witty girl? Was she ever going to come back?

I felt a rustle in the seat next to mine as the Middle Eastern grandmother leaned toward me. “What is wrong with your daughter?” she asked me kindly. “Such a pretty young girl!”

“Her heart,” I answered. “Something's wrong with her heart.”

As if it could really be that simple.

I
couldn't sleep on the medevac flight. Seats embedded in the walls of an airplane hull don't recline. By the time our plane landed in the States, I hadn't slept in about thirty-six hours.

But when they let down the big ramp at the back of the airplane, the sunshine revived me, and an ambulance waited on the concrete only a few steps away to take Elena and me to the children's hospital.

I had no idea where I would be sleeping that night. I had been in this city only once, at a conference downtown. It's on the East Coast, thousands of miles away from my home in Texas.

Normally, this would be worrying me. I would be asking questions and trying to put together a plan. But the stress of the last few days had slowed me down. I couldn't put together plans anymore. So I rode in the front seat with the ambulance driver through sunlit streets, and I gave no real thought to where we were going.

The golden light of late afternoon sparkled off the windshield and the stones in the roadway.
Everything will be all right
, those hypnotic sparkles seemed to say.
Don't worry. It's all taken care of
.

We pulled up to a special entrance and almost immediately stepped into a large elevator. I followed Elena's stretcher down wide bright hallways and into her room. After the stark, utilitarian ICU back in Germany, this hospital room seemed almost pretty. It had a big window partially covered by a dark blue curtain, and another curtain beside the bed, with pastel fish swimming across it. Accustomed to double-occupancy rooms in other hospitals, I was happy to discover that this room held only one bed.

While the techs settled Elena in and hooked her up to a new set of machines, I wandered over to the window. A small desk and office-style
chair were there, pushed up against the wall, and a low, comfortable- looking foam chair occupied the floor beside them. I sank down onto the foam chair with a feeling of relief, leaned my heavy head back into its softness, and watched the parade of nurses, doctors, students, and techs come by to check on my daughter.

The change of venue seemed to have been good for Elena. She was actually half awake now. She still kept her eyes slitted against the light, but she was talking in a low voice and even joking a little.

I felt myself sliding closer to sleep.
Life is good
, I thought.

Elena's parade of visitors comprised every ethnicity and skin tone, from rich, deep ebony to warm coffee brown and light olive tan.
This is America
, I thought as I drowsed on the foam chair.
This is one of the most wonderful things about America
. And, even though I was thousands of miles away from my own state, I thought,
This is home. I've come home
.

A nurse approached me. “Will you be staying with your daughter?” she asked.

I roused myself to answer. “I'd like to stay as long as I can. I don't know what your policy is on that. But I do need to get my hotel sorted out. Do you know where I can get a list of hotels nearby?”

“This is a children's hospital,” she said. “We expect a parent to stay in the room. You're welcome to stay if you like.”

“For the night?” I asked, feeling confused and a little stupid. “But how—where can I sleep?”

“For as long as your daughter is here,” she answered with characteristic patience. “That chair you're on folds out into a bed.”

A bed! All my remaining problems, solved in one friendly sentence. I found that I couldn't speak. I actually couldn't speak. My eyes were full of tears.

The nurse understood. She didn't wait for me to answer. She said, “I'll bring you sheets and a pillow.”

A bed! I washed my face, spread out the sheets, took off my shoes, and lay down. A bed. A horizontal surface! My exhausted body sagged into the cushions, and I lay there, happy beyond all expectation of happiness at being horizontal at last.