Chapter 25 Victoria
THREE WEEKS OLD
Victoria stared at Ace. Tubes and wires spiderwebbed from his body, connecting him to monitors and IVs and the ghastly breathing tube that plunged down his throat, supplying oxygen to his lungs.
Victoria couldn’t make sense of the fact that the person in front of her was her husband.
Ace looked like the Madame Tussauds wax figure version of himself, or the fake food in the display case of a Starbucks—it almost resembled the real thing, but upon closer inspection, it was cardboard and plastic. This couldn’t be real.
“We need you,” Victoria said. “You have a wife and two kids and a grandson who need you. You might think I would be fine—and yes, I would take care of Miles, I would make sure Liz was okay—but I wouldn’t be, Ace. I would be destroyed without you.” Victoria’s body was racked by sobs.
“You’re everything to me,” she said between tears.
“And I can’t do this. You told me you didn’t want to live without me.
Now I’m telling you the same. You told me you’d fight for me.
You said you’d do whatever it took to get me back.
You’d spend your entire life fighting…I need you to fight.
Fight, damn it, fight and come back to me. ”
Victoria let her head fall into her hands and expelled angry, violent tears that came in torrents.
“Please, Ace. Please,” she begged.
The only response Victoria received was the sound of her own stomach gurgling with a buildup of acid.
It was as if every organ were furious about its futility.
The doctors couldn’t even give Victoria the odds of Ace’s survival with any kind of reliable accuracy.
The unbearable truth was that the human body remained largely a mystery and the medical field was peppered with question marks and trial and error.
Victoria was indebted to the paramedics and the doctors and the surgeons who had worked valiantly to save her husband, but she could not look to them for any more aid or answers. No one knew what would happen next.
Her stomach made its loudest, angriest noise yet.
Victoria’s body was rebelling against her own neglect: Her head was pounding and her breasts were aching because she hadn’t fed Miles in hours.
There was plenty of milk that she had pumped in the fridge at home, and she knew that Miles was being well cared for by Magda, but Victoria craved the sight and touch of her baby in a cellular way.
Despite being leveled by grief to a degree that should preclude the ability to function, the world was still spinning madly on its axis and it was demanding things of her—namely, that Victoria express her milk or suffer the consequences.
She forced herself to her feet and walked on spindly legs to the nurse’s station, which was located on the other side of the cluster of three curtained-off areas—they couldn’t really be called rooms—one of which Ace was occupying.
“How are we doing?” the nurse asked kindly, looking up from her computer.
She had strawberry-blonde hair and a no-nonsense but upbeat demeanor, admirable given the bleak setting where she spent her working hours.
Victoria checked her name tag even though the nurse had introduced herself several times.
Victoria’s mind was like a sieve and facts were grains of sand slipping through.
“Janine,” the nurse said, seeing Victoria searching for her name tag.
“I’m sorry,” Victoria said. “I knew that.”
“That’s the last thing you should be worrying about,” Janine said. “Do you need anything? Water? Something to eat? More blankets?”
“I ran out without my breast pump. I don’t want to leave my husband to go home and get it…”
“I’ll find one for you,” Janine said.
“Thank you so much.”
“Of course,” Janine said, picking up the phone. “But, Victoria, if I may—sometimes being in the ICU is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to take care of yourself too.”
Victoria nodded.
“Maybe you can take a break and go see your son?” Janine suggested.
“Maybe,” Victoria said, but as much as she was tempted, and wanted so badly to feel the smooth velvet of Miles’s skin underneath her fingertips and kiss the soft, downy fur of the baby hair coating his head, she knew she wouldn’t.
She couldn’t imagine leaving Ace. If he woke up or worse—the alternative—and Victoria wasn’t there, she would never forgive herself.
Victoria went back to Ace’s bedside and sat vigil.
She tried not to let her mind go to the scary places, but Victoria couldn’t help but plummet into the depths of her despair.
What would she do if Ace didn’t survive this?
Was she about to become a single mother?
Did she and Ace come back together only to have him cruelly snatched away?
Why had this happened to him? To her? Why?
Victoria knew that was a preposterous question, and one that didn’t have an answer, but she couldn’t help asking it anyway.
Ace was the fittest sixty-year-old imaginable.
He ran more than ten miles a week, he never smoked, and he had received a squeaky-clean bill of health at his last physical. Why?
Victoria listened to the whirring of the breathing tube—the rhythmic intake of air being pushed through Ace’s lungs and then expelled.
She took his great big hand in hers and almost expected it to be cold because it was so lifeless.
But it was warm and like holding a brick.
Thinking back to all the times she had slipped her hand in his and they had walked together, hand in hand—whether it was through the farmers market or a neighborhood in a new city they were exploring together—Victoria was hit with another wave of sorrow.
Would Ace ever hold her hand again? Would Ace witness his son’s first steps?
Would he meet his grandson? Would he see Miles and Charlie grow up?
The questions were so harrowing that Victoria bent over in the chair, keening.
She felt milk leak through her nursing bra, blooming in wet spots on her shirt.
She kept staring at her husband, but nothing changed.
Ace was somewhere else, a place unknowable to those who walked the land of the well, the land of the living.
He was traversing that liminal space between life and death and only time would decide the destination.
Janine pulled the curtain aside and stepped in. “I found a pump for you,” she told Victoria, and handed her a hospital-grade model like the one Victoria had at home. “And I brought you something to eat and drink. Please try?”
“Thank you,” Victoria whispered. “I will.”
“If you need anything else, just press the call button.”
Janine gave Victoria an encouraging squeeze on the arm and slipped out through the curtain.
Victoria hooked herself up to the pump and tried to nibble at a turkey sandwich but gave up after a few bites.
When the curtain opened again, she assumed it was Janine coming back to check on her.
But it was Liz’s grief-stricken face that poked through instead.
“Victoria,” Liz said, her voice heavy with emotion.
Liz rushed in and Victoria stood up, still connected to the breast pump. Wordlessly, they dove into each other’s arms, a crush of plastic between them. When Victoria finally pulled away, she saw that Liz’s face was slick with tears.
Janine discreetly snuck in with another chair, positioned it next to Victoria’s, and left just as quickly.
Liz and Victoria sat down next to each other, their chairs screeching against the cold linoleum floor.
If Liz had appeared frightened coming into the ICU, now that she had caught a glimpse of Ace, she was a shell of herself.
Victoria knew the feeling; it was like looking into a casket, or at a man trapped in amber, on his way to becoming fossilized. It was staring down death.
“Oh God. I’m so sorry, Victoria,” Liz said, averting her eyes from the tube taped to Ace’s throat and the bits of dried spittle that kept forming in the corners of his mouth.
Victoria reached out and took Liz’s hand. It was warm and full of life. She hadn’t noticed until now that Liz had the same hands as her father—broad and large but still elegant, with slender fingers.
“How bad is it?” Liz asked. “I mean, is it as bad as it looks? Because it looks…” Her voice broke. Liz stole a quick glance over at Ace, then thought better of it and turned away.
“He made it through the surgery,” Victoria said. “But the doctors don’t know. We have to wait and see if he wakes up.”
Liz took this in and briefly shuttered her eyes. She said, her voice breaking again, “This is so fucked. We can’t lose him.”
Victoria shook her head and felt dizzy. The breast pump made its whirring sound.
“I just got him back in my life again,” Liz said.
“Me too,” Victoria said. She watched Liz’s face pang with recognition and sympathy—a pulse of her features that conveyed how much Liz could relate to Victoria’s pain, how they were possibly the only two people alive who could truly understand each other in this situation.
“God, that was insensitive. I’m sorry. Obviously, this is way worse for you.”
“It’s not a contest,” Victoria said with the faintest of sad smiles. “We’re in it together.”
“I’m sorry, Victoria—about everything,” Liz said. “Not just this, but how I reacted in the hospital.”
“It’s not necessary,” Victoria said, shaking her head to disabuse Liz of the notion that she wanted or expected an apology; Ace’s heart attack had wiped the slate clean. They were in new territory and any past grievances seemed irrelevant—almost quaint.
“I wasn’t ready to admit the truth about me and Preston. I didn’t want to hear it and I took it out on you.”
“It wasn’t my place to force my opinion on you,” Victoria said.
“Then whose?” Liz said.