Chapter Seventeen
Dave has open-heart surgery the summer before Lauren starts the second grade. He needs three bypasses and an aortic valve replacement. Marcella is stupefied. They are so young! Not even forty! What has happened?
He has coronary artery disease. They discover this after an episode walking up the beach steps. Dave feels the sudden constriction, falls to his knees.
They are lucky they caught it when they did, the doctors say. Another few days and he’d be dead. Surgery will help for a long time—decades, perhaps—but it, like all human things, is not a permanent solve.
Marcella is woefully unprepared for this twist, this knot in the thread of her life.
She has a curious young daughter who spends most of her time in the water, and a mother who has just built herself a back house and has no plans on leaving.
They are trying to navigate three generations in the same household, and Dave, in many ways, is the lubricant that makes it all turn.
In the hospital Marcella is measured and stoic. Dave’s parents fly in from New York—big, lively, Upper West Siders who bring bagels into the waiting room and hug Marcella as if it’s her wedding, not this.
“Susan and Mitch are the best!” Sylvia says, raising a Styrofoam coffee cup next to a young mother sitting with a crying baby on her lap.
Marcella feels anger coil in her stomach.
Sylvia cannot understand because she’s never had a partner, never felt the weight and responsibility of joining your life with someone else’s.
The casualness with which Sylvia moves through life, the ease with which she encounters tragedy, leaves Marcella breathless.
She has no choice but to assume it just means her mother does not care.
In the prep room before surgery Marcella holds tightly to Dave’s hand.
“I’m more worried about your grip than this operation!” he jokes.
He is doing it for her, of course, because he sees the fear in her eyes and feels it in her hands.
That is who Dave is—her stabilizer. He sees her, in a way no one ever has—not her mother, not her daughter, not her friends, the few she has maintained.
He is her focus. If he goes, she fears in a way—in all the ones that matter—so will she.
She has never considered the possibility that this might end.
Motherhood did not make her confront mortality.
It’s here now, holding on to her husband’s hand, and she is met with the reality that no one lives forever.
The doctor comes in. His bedside manner leaves something to be desired, but Marcella appreciates his fact-driven preamble. He tells them how long it will last (six hours) and how complicated it will be (fairly). He is confident, and Marcella trusts him, because he does not smile.
“I love you,” she tells Dave. They have never held back in saying it. She is grateful for that now, all the easy love they have always allowed themselves to express.
“I love you, too, honey. Walk in the park.”
He kisses her hand, although it is a struggle with all the tubing, and they wheel him away. Susan and Mitch have left to look after Lauren, but Sylvia is there, in that waiting room, when Marcella returns.
“They took him,” Marcella says.
Sylvia nods.
“The doctor said a member of his team will keep us informed.”
Sylvia exhales. She holds up a sweater. “Put this on,” she says. “It’s cold in here.”
It is a level of maternal Marcella hasn’t felt in so long, and she plucks the soft wool out of Sylvia’s hands and threads her arms through the sleeves. It’s big on her—it’s Sylvia’s—and it smells like her. Marcella breathes in.
“He’s going to be all right,” Sylvia says. “You just have to believe it. OK?”
Marcella nods. “OK.”
Later, after the accident, in the same hospital on a different floor, Marcella will recall this moment with her mother.
She will battle between anger that Sylvia did not offer the ticket then, that she watched her daughter in agony and said nothing—and gratitude that Marcella hadn’t yet spent it.
That in that moment her mother was, in a way, looking out for her.
Dave’s recovery is challenging; it takes him a while to regain his appetite.
He gets a viral infection—something lung-related—and ends back up in the hospital.
But he is young—they both are—and while not linear, his recovery is expected.
By her, by the doctors, and by him. They walk steadily toward it the way you walk toward home, knowing it’s there.
And little by little, it is granted to them.
When Dave goes into the water for the first time—five months after the surgery—Marcella has to sit on her hands to not say anything. She doesn’t want to be a wife who nags—and the doctors say he is ready—but she is not.
She has, in a way, enjoyed this time even while longing for him to be better. She has enjoyed the way he has relied on her, how needed she has been. And now there her husband is, carrying his board down to the sand. Somewhere she can’t follow.
“Be careful!” she calls, but he doesn’t hear. It’s too windy outside.
Dave isn’t out long—maybe forty minutes—and when he comes inside, wet and smiling, she is ready with a towel. She dries him off and then makes him get directly into a hot shower.
“Your lungs,” she says, and he lumbers toward the stairs.
And that’s how it has stayed, more or less, for the duration of their marriage.
She knows it only takes three weeks to form a habit, but she never wonders if her concern is a habit—it never even enters her mind.
She just believes it is, like all things that are hidden.
True. She has saved his life—over and over again. This is the beginning of that story.