Mother Daughter Me (21 page)

Once we were back together, I relaxed as I had never done before, with Matt or anyone. Our lovemaking took on a new tenderness and vulnerability that surprised both of us. “Where did all the passion come from?” Matt asked me one night. “It’s always been there,” I said, my face pressed against his. “Ever since we were kids.” And he nodded.

We were a happy pair, perhaps happier than we had ever been. In what seemed a quiet celebration, for only the second time that either of us could remember, Matt stopped biting his fingernails. They grew from ravaged little stubs into healthy arcs that reached just beyond his fingertips.

In the end, it was Denny’s simple wisdom that kept me there with this man who knew love, really
knew
it. Both Matt and Denny offered me a different story line for family than the one I grew up with, one I was beginning to see was possible. And that story line was, more than anything, about stability—not only for Matt and me but for Zoë. I was now determined to give my child a solid base, a constancy I had never known. Indeed, Zoë was the biggest beneficiary of her parents’ renewed happiness, as struggles over how to discipline her, struggles that had once seemed vitally important, began to diminish.

ONE NIGHT IN EARLY
2002, Matt had a nightmare. I hadn’t known him to remember his dreams. I was the one with the graphic dreams, the one whose nights were spent spinning complex narratives punctuated by menacing figures, missed flights, unmet deadlines, jealousy, and upset. But Matt’s dream was so frightening, it woke both of us up. He was thrashing around in the sheets, then he called out a loud and terrified “No!” I put my hand on his chest to see if I could gently shake him awake. He was trembling when he opened his eyes, and he told me what happened in the dream: He was at a maximum-security prison. He wasn’t there as a guard, but he wasn’t a visitor either. He was just there. Without warning, mayhem broke out—a riot among the prisoners—and a prisoner confined on the other side of a solid wall began heaving himself
against the door. Matt knew that whoever was on the other side of that barrier intended to kill him. The “No!” had come tearing out of him just as the prisoner broke through.

I asked him what the prisoner had looked like.

“He was huge,” he said. “And angry. And white.”

The dream trailed after both of us the next day, and when Matt came home that night, he told me he couldn’t get it out of his head.

A week later, on the day before Valentine’s Day, his favorite holiday, he left on a business trip. Zoë and I had slipped a large heart-shaped gingerbread cookie into his bag. The cookie was in a cellophane bag tied with a red ribbon. He drove Zoë to school and called me a couple of hours later to check in. Before we hung up, he chuckled and told me that in the car Zoë had seemed overly curious about when he planned to unpack his bag. I confessed that there was something inside from his girls. The next day, he sent me three dozen tulips, and the same to Denny. And for the first time, he sent Zoë her own bouquet. Zoë and I each got notes telling us how much he loved us. I missed his call on my cellphone and he left a tender Valentine’s message.

As Zoë and I were driving home from school that afternoon, she said, “I wish my dad would come home.”

“I do too,” I said.

“I’m worried he’s going to die,” she said. I had noticed that she was developing a worry streak, but this was a first. In the past, she hadn’t noted his absence much except to hope he would return with a gift. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “He’ll be fine.”

Before he left town, he was tired. It’s only in retrospect, of course, that I now think he seemed
unusually
tired. The day before he was to return, he called from Pike Place Market in Seattle to ask me if I wanted anything. I could picture him standing there in the covered marketplace, appreciating the hubbub of that latter-day agora, with its smells of fish and produce and spiced tea. But he also sounded agitated, so much so that after we hung up I called him back.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Everything’s fine,” he said, perking up.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said. We hung up.

Zoë had her friend Jenna over for the night. The next morning, the girls watched cartoons while I cleaned the house. I was in a good mood. Matt was coming home that night, and we were planning to send Zoë off to sleep at Jenna’s house so that we could have the night to ourselves. I was struggling with the vacuum cleaner, attempting to pry loose one of the attachments, when the phone rang. It was Don, Matt’s boss at UC Berkeley. Was he looking for Matt? Was there a university emergency? I was just wondering why Don wouldn’t have called Matt on his cellphone when he said, “It’s Matt. He collapsed on the treadmill at the hotel. But the paramedics are with him.”

Matt had collapsed once as a child while playing a sport—was it football? I couldn’t remember—and after blacking out he woke up in the emergency room feeling fine. I said this to Don and told him I was sure Matt would be fine. Don said to call the hotel front desk, because they would know which hospital he was being taken to. The man who answered the phone at the front desk stammered, “Ma’am, there’s nothing wrong with our exercise equipment.” That opaque reference to danger stopped me in my tracks. I must have panicked, because Zoë, who was sitting two feet from me, sensed that something was off. She began to cry, her wails filling the room. In her hand she held a sock of Matt’s, clutching it tightly to her as she sobbed, over and over, “I want my daddy.” She must have been terrified.

I had the presence of mind to call Jenna’s mother, Noreen, who was blasé and assured me that her elderly parents had made multiple trips to the emergency room over the past year and were now in perfect health. She was so reassuring that I was able to shift my attention to logistics, to dealing with the infrastructure of this health emergency. I hoped if it was something more than a concussion or fainting spell, Noreen would be able to take Zoë for a few days while I went to Seattle. Noreen said she’d be right over to pick up both the girls. I called Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and was connected to the emergency room. I said I believed my husband had just arrived and gave his name. The person on the other end moved the phone away from his mouth, and I heard him say, “It’s the wife.”

A woman’s voice came on the phone—a nurse, I presumed—and asked for Matt’s Social Security number.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Again, she asked for his Social Security number.

My composure vanished. “You’re asking me for his Social Security number and you can’t tell me what’s wrong with him? Can you please tell me what’s wrong with him!?”

I wasn’t aware of it, but I must have been screaming at her.

Her voice rose too. “Don’t scream at me,” she shot back. “Your husband is very ill. And my time would be better spent with him than on the phone with you.”

I said nothing.

“Do you want to speak to a social worker?”

“No!” I knew I had raised my voice, but I was unable to do anything else. “I don’t want to speak to a social worker. I want to speak to a doctor.”

It could have been seconds, it could have been minutes, but a doctor then came on the phone and I asked him if he could please tell me what was wrong with my husband. He said he didn’t know, but he thought it could be his heart or a blood clot. He didn’t bother with the “We’re doing all we can” line. He asked me if I knew of any sudden deaths in Matt’s family. Yes, I said. His grandfather, Dick’s father, died suddenly when he was in his fifties, out mowing the lawn one day in Austin. The doctors decided it was probably a blood clot to the lungs that followed a surgical procedure he had gone through several weeks earlier. But now, as I sat there, I thought maybe it was his heart. And, of course, I knew that what was at issue here was Matt’s heart.

Where the nurse had been gruff and impatient, this physician, whose name I instantly forgot, was gentle, his words like a soft pillow. I felt like I was falling into his voice. The doctor told me he was going to go back to Matt, while I remained on the line. I cupped the handset and put my mouth straight on the receiver. This random chunk of plastic, buttons, and wire became a conduit to Matt, an avatar for Matt himself. I began to speak directly to him. I said his name over and over again. Mattie Mattie Mattie Mattie. I told him to be okay, that he had no choice.

I heard Noreen at the door and, while still cradling the phone, I let her in. She gathered Jenna and Zoë, who now seemed calmer. She had Zoë pack some overnight clothes in case I had to leave for Seattle. Just
as they were leaving, the doctor came back on the phone. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Your husband has passed away.” He asked me if I wanted to speak to the social worker. I said yes. Noreen was looking in my direction, and I caught her eye. I made certain Zoë wasn’t looking at me when I mouthed the words “He’s gone.” Noreen gave me a quick look, then turned to the girls, trying to usher them out the door. But Zoë didn’t want to leave my side. “Is my dad going to be okay?” This wasn’t a question. It was a demand. I was sitting on the couch, the phone still in my hand. My eyes settled on Noreen, who looked me straight in the eye. “Tell her everything is going to be fine,” she mouthed. I must have hesitated, because she made the same signals again. “Tell her everything is going to be fine.”

“Sweetie, everything is going to be fine,” I said. And they left.

I heard a female voice come on the line. It was the social worker. She wanted to know if there was anyone with me. I have no recollection of how I responded or how we ended the conversation. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor in the downstairs hallway, and Matt’s boss, Don, was there. I don’t know how he got in. I must have opened the door for him, but I have no memory of doing so. And there he was, on the floor with me, holding me.

Out of nowhere, or so it seemed, my closest friends materialized: Candace, Steven, Amy. They took over. Candace made the phone calls. She called Sarah, and she called my editor at the
Times
. She called my mother, who, Candace reported, was incredulous, but not the way others were incredulous. Her reaction was to doubt the facts of what Candace had told her. Of course that was her reaction: She viewed the world through the prism of her own airtight existence. “Norm’s had a bad heart for years and he’s fine,” she said. Ergo, a forty-five-year-old man in perfect shape with no history of heart disease couldn’t possibly die from a sudden, massive heart attack. “How bizarre,” Candace said after relating the conversation.

I called Denny myself. The chancellor of the university, a close friend of Dick and Denny’s, had just called her. All she could say to me after this, the death of yet another son, was, “Katie, I don’t believe in anything anymore.”

By sending Zoë off to Noreen’s, I had bought myself several hours to
figure out a way to break the news to my eight-year-old. The task overwhelmed me. I needed help. The university put me in touch with Judith Wallerstein, a prominent expert in childhood loss. I recognized the name. Looking for something to write in, I picked up the first thing I found—a skinny brown steno pad with
Reporter’s Notebook
printed on the cover—and flipped it to the first blank page. As Wallerstein spoke, I took notes quickly, in my reporter’s scrawl, as if I was interviewing someone for a story. I took her words down precisely:

I told her Zoë was at a friend’s house. Should I go pick her up myself? No, Noreen should bring her home. How was Zoë likely to react? She couldn’t say for certain, but her bottom line was that when I told her, we should be alone in the room, with another adult close by.

When Noreen brought Zoë home, Amy and I were the only ones home. As instructed, Amy was upstairs and I stayed downstairs. “Is my dad okay?” Zoë asked as soon as she walked in the door.

I sat her next to me on the couch and began my speech.

“Sweetie, you know your dad was on the treadmill in the hotel—”

She interrupted me. “He didn’t make it, did he?” she asked, trying out a phrase she must have picked up from television. She asked me this already knowing the answer. If anything, her tone was resigned, as if she had already prepared herself for what she had been fearing all day.

I shook my head. “No, he didn’t.”

She was silent for a few seconds, then asked something that took me by complete surprise. “Are you going to get remarried?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “But I do know I’m going to focus on raising you.”

Again she was quiet, then said, “I know you’ll do a wonderful job,” acting for all the world as if it were her role to comfort
me
. Amy suggested she take Zoë out to the grocery store and buy a few things for
dinner. Zoë went to put on a jacket, and when she reappeared she was wearing one of Matt’s navy blazers. It reached below her knees. When Amy took her shopping, she kept the jacket on.

The autopsy showed a near-total occlusion in the left anterior descending artery, a major supplier of blood to the heart and a conduit so vital that physicians often refer to such a blockage as “the widow-maker.” It was unclear how long his heart had been diseased, but I blamed myself. I blamed myself for causing him stress during our bad patch. I blamed myself for not picking up on his fatigue or any other small symptoms he might have shown. I blamed myself for not probing a little more on the day before he died, when he called and sounded agitated. I would blame myself for years to come.

A few days later, Don brought Matt’s suitcase over. Matt had tied the red ribbon from the gingerbread heart onto the handle. This meant he had found the cookie, and the thought consoled me.

A week or so after Matt died, Zoë told me that on the day he left for the business trip, they had had a fight. Matt drove our third-grader to her elementary school, up in the Berkeley hills, which had a steep set of stairs from the drop-off area to the school entrance. The way Matt and I dealt with those stairs illustrated our different parenting styles. Every time I drove, Zoë asked me to carry her heavy backpack up the stairs for her and, classic pushover that I am, I did. When Matt drove, she would make the same request. Sometimes, when circumstances warranted (rain, say, or extra items to lug), he would do it, but usually he would refuse, and when he did, these two stubborn souls got into a fight. As Zoë recounted it to me, that’s exactly what happened the morning her father left for Seattle: He refused to carry the backpack up the stairs; she protested while he held his ground; she got out of the car, slammed the door behind her, then started up the stairs. But something made her turn around and look back. When she did, he was driving away.