Parachutes and Kisses (36 page)

Isadora watched Bruce Harvey make small talk with Errol Dickinson. Never had two men less in common. And more! Bruce was a venture-capitalist-and Errol Dickinson was a cocksman, disc jockey, and doper. Bruce knew everything about Silicon Valley—and Errol knew everything about Bruce's wife's valley. What on earth could they be talking about?

Isadora wandered over to them.

“Hello, lovely lady,” Errol said.

“Hello, gorgeous,” said Bruce.

“We were just saying this is the best Christmas ever,” Errol said.

Well, that just went to show how little Isadora knew about anything. Errol was thrilled to be invited to Isadora's house at normal hours (rather than sneaked in and out in the dead of night). He didn't even notice that two of her other boyfriends were present. Also, he had adored Mandy from afar and was thrilled to be able to finally meet her.

Isadora tried to perk herself up and catch some of the good mood.

“I'm glad you're having fun, Errol,” she said to him.

“It's a
blast,”
he said, pinwheel-eyed.

She waved to Kevin, who sat on the couch sipping a martini and staring off into space. Kevin was a party observer, a life observer. He liked to watch the passing scene. He was one of history's spectators, rather than one of its participants. He would have watched at Waterloo, at Bull Run, at the Bay of Pigs. He would have watched while Rome fell, while London was blitzed, while the Bomb was detonated at Hiroshima. Kevin was comforting to have around, like a teddy bear, yet he didn't seem entirely alive.

Mandy was the opposite—a pistol. She seemed to have been born (as Isadora's mother had also said of her) with an extra shot of adrenaline. She was running around like a maniac, gathering up the presents people had brought, stuffing herself on all the goodies from the buffet, grabbing at candy canes, jelly beans, and chocolates. There was a sort of frenzied quality to her running, more than just the usual three-year-old-at-Christmastime frenzy. Isadora had the feeling that her daughter spent too much time around adults, that she was too much the showpiece, the clever child, the little adult. Somehow she felt it not fair to Mandy. She had been forced to grow up too soon. Isadora herself had grown up as the second of four sisters, wedged in among siblings, always having to fight for her bit of attention, but she had never been lonely. Mandy, for all the adults paying her court, seemed lonely and Isadora didn't quite know what to do about it. Ever since she and Josh had separated, she had longed for another baby, longed for it all the more since her time to have babies was growing short. But who would be the father of her fantasy baby? Pinwheel-eyed Errol? Calm, semicatatonic Kevin? Angry, passive-aggressive Josh, who was in Vegas with Ms. Emanon? Well—why not just have a baby and the father be damned? She was likely to wind up raising it alone anyway. Maybe she
would
have another baby when things settled down a bit, when she calmed down, when she got back to work. Maybe she would even write the Papa novel and have a baby at the same time—have a little boy that she could name after her grandfather. There was a thought: write the baby and have the book at the same time.

Suddenly, there was a bloodcurdling scream from the dining room.

It was Mandy. Isadora's heart turned over. Her stomach went all gooey with terror. She ran into the dining room to see her screaming three-year-old sprawled out on the floor over a broken plate which had just a little while ago been full of ice cream. Now it was full of blood.

Mandy's face was red and contorted with pain.

“She ran into the dining room carrying the plate of ice cream and she tripped and cut her finger on the plate,” said Roland.

“Let's look at it,” he said.

Mandy resisted, but he and Isadora were able to look at her right hand, which spurted blood like a diminutive geyser. The little finger had been sliced open below the first joint and was gaping right down to the bone. The little white and tender place that gleamed inside the wound found a responsive gleam inside Isadora's heart.

“Oh god,” Isadora said, gathering up the screaming child. “Dear, dear god.”

“Can we borrow the Cherokee?” she yelled to Lola and Bruce.

“Of course,” they yelled back. “What happened?” Everyone rushed over to see.

Not answering, she wrapped the screaming Mandy in a blanket, grabbed her coat, and headed out the door.

“I'll drive,” Errol insisted, throwing on his cowboy hat and long silk scarf.

“You're too stoned,” Isadora protested.

“I'm
fine,
lady,” said Errol, bounding out through the snow and taking the wheel.

Roland followed, insisting that he, as a medical student, knew what was to be done. The stoned leading the stoned, Isadora thought. But there was not a moment to spare and Errol was already helping Isadora into the Cherokee with the screaming Mandy.

Roland had brought a clean white dish towel to wrap loosely around Mandy's finger.

“What about a tourniquet?” Isadora asked in a panic.

“A tourniquet can damage tissue,” Roland said. “Just hold this towel on loosely.”

“Can you drive?” Isadora demanded of Errol.

“Absolutely,” he insisted. Had he risen to the occasion and overcome his dope-stupor for Mandy? He adored the little girl, and being allowed to be near her had made his Christmas. Isadora trusted to the gods that they knew what they were doing in sending her these couriers.

Her parents and Kevin had just gotten wind of the accident and came running out in the snow to see what was the matter.

“We're off to the emergency room at Norwalk Hospital,” Isadora said. “Meet us there. We haven't a second to lose.”

It was still snowing; large crystalline flakes were fluttering down from a pinkish sky. The driveway was thick with snow and icy underneath. Mandy was screaming in terror. Blood flowed everywhere.

Isadora sat between Errol and Roland with the shrieking child on her lap.

“Don't worry,” Roland said. “They have great microsurgery techniques nowadays. If we can only get there in time, I'm sure we can save the finger.”

But Isadora was not to be so easily comforted. She prayed until she thought her brains would break with the effort of concentration. She prayed for passable roads and time to get Mandy's finger back together. She could not help remembering a similar ride with Chekarf and how it had come out. She prayed. She prayed.

Errol started up the driveway, got to the icy curve, and spun his wheels uselessly in the snow. Then he backed up, started again, and spun his wheels again. Then, on the third try, he gained some momentum and roared up the driveway, skidding on the icy patches under the snow.

They reached the top of Serpentine Hill Road, made a very skiddy turn, went slowly down the hill (skidding all the way). Then they plowed through deep snow all the way to I-95.

The child was still shaking with fear and the dish towel was absolutely soaked with blood by the time they got to the highway. Isadora's pale-pink silk shirt was soaked with blood; so were her pink satin sandals. The blood was sticky between her toes, and the feel of it made her think of Jacqueline Kennedy in Dallas wearing pink and covered with her husband's blood. Except that Isadora was covered with her child's blood—which was rather like being covered with blood from her own body. Better to have severed her own finger than to see Mandy's almost severed. It was as if she herself were bleeding and screaming in that car.

Despite the deep snow, Errol ran all the tolls on I-95, hoping to pick up a police escort to get them to the hospital. Isadora remembered Josh having done the same when Mandy was about to be born, but this time, too, there was not a single policeman to be seen.

The emergency room on Christmas night was no pretty sight. There was a young black man lying on a litter moaning. He seemed to have been knifed in several places, and he was bleeding profusely. Children wandered about forlornly as if they had lost their parents. The benches were full of the bruised, the beaten, the wounded. From the look of the emergency room, you would not think that Christ's birthday was being celebrated. The Prince of Peace seemed to celebrate his coming into the mortal coil with blood, gore, and human dissension. But Isadora didn't give a damn about all these other people. She only cared about her daughter and her daughter's finger. Usually accustomed to being very laid back and leery of asking for special favors, she strode into the emergency room, announced her name to the head nurse, and asked for a plastic surgeon to see her daughter.

The child was still shaking and sobbing. She held the wounded hand under its bloody towel as if it were an alien object with which she could not identify.

“My name is Isadora Wing,” Isadora said, “and this is my daughter, Mandy. She has sliced open her little finger on her right hand.”

The head emergency-room nurse, a pretty, curly-haired fortyish woman, said firmly but nicely, “I know who you are. I read all your books. Have a seat and we'll send a pediatric medic.”

“I think we should send for a plastic surgeon right away,” Isadora said, feeling like the Jewish mother of the Western world.

“I'll see if Dr. Settecampo is in the house,” the nurse said. “But please, go into that room and wait for the medic. And try not to worry so.” She put her hand on Isadora's comfortingly. Then she indicated a small consulting room where Isadora could take her shaking child.

Errol was out parking the car, and Roland had taken command of the paperwork and was busily filling out forms. He came into the consulting room to get Isadora's health-insurance card. Isadora was utterly amazed to see him functioning with such alacrity under the circumstances. Either he was immune to all the dope he smoked or he had suddenly snapped into clarity because of the gravity of the circumstances.

“Can she bend her finger?” Roland asked.

“She won't let me near it.” said Isadora, who couldn't bear the sight of her child's rended flesh.

“Make her try to bend it,” Roland said. “They're going to ask you if she has any mobility in the joint.”

“I'll try,” Isadora said. “Listen, could you try to reach Josh after you make out the forms? Call his parents or his sister for it—they're in the book. I don't have a number for him.”

“Right,” said Roland, “though the shit doesn't deserve it.” He walked out of the room.

Isadora turned to her terrified child.

“Mandy, honey,” she said, taking off the blood-soaked towel, and holding back a shudder at the sight of the finger, “try to bend your finger.”

“I can‘t! I can't,” Mandy screamed. She couldn't bear to look at the finger either. She turned her face away.

“You
must,”
Isadora said, “you must.”

“I can‘t, Mama!”

A thousand thoughts raced through Isadora's head. Her daughter was going to lose a finger to the divorce—or even her life, as Chekarf had. Josh would have a change of heart when he realized what had happened in his absence and come back so that never again would Mandy's flesh be jeopardized. Mandy was going to refuse to cooperate with the doctors and lose not only her finger but the whole hand because of her stubbornness and lack of discipline. Isadora thought of the scene in
Sophie's Choice
where Sophie sacrifices her daughter. She thought of Iphigenia sacrificed by Agamemnon for a fair wind. She thought of all the little girls, maidens, young mothers, sacrificed, raped, and maimed throughout history because of the vanity of fathers—fathers who did not bear them, did not nurse them, but who presumed to decide their fates—even in
absentia.
She thought of the long line of bleeding women, of which her daughter was merely the latest. And then she bid herself
shut up.
She willed all the gloomy, pessimistic thoughts in her head to stop, and she attended to the business of trying to get Mandy to bend her finger—and of trying to get herself to look at the process. Never had she prayed so ceaselessly in her life.

The pediatric medic arrived. He was a sweet young man named Bruce with a jet-black handlebar mustache and very gentle manners.

“What happened to you?” he asked Mandy.

“Don't touch!” she yelled.

“I'm not going to touch your hand,” he said. “I just want to look at it.”

“No!” screamed Mandy.

“Honey—bend your finger for me, will you?”

“No!” screamed Mandy.

He presented a tongue depressor to the screaming child and forced her fingers around it as the wound bled still more profusely.

“Now, are you going to bend that hand?”

Mandy cooperated at last. Isadora looked away, wishing she could undo this whole chain of events. If only it were not Christmas, not snowing, not the worst year of her life. Stop it, she said to herself.
Grow up. Think of all the worse things people have had to endure.
And then an amazing thing happened. As she took command of herself, grew if not calm, then at least calmer, her mood was communicated to her child—as if they were still connected. Mandy was allowing the medic to look at her finger. She had almost stopped crying. The little mouth still blubbered, the little eyes were still red and bleary, but Mandy, frightened as she was, was cooperating.

The whole ritual had to be repeated, of course, when the plastic surgeon arrived. And then there were tough decisions to be made.

Dr. Settecampo was the plastic surgeon she had called for. He was brusque, businesslike, but not unsympathetic. He informed Isadora that he could sew the hand right up—not knowing whether the tendons and nerves had been severed—or he could perform exploratory surgery. To do that he would have to put Mandy out and take her to the O.R.