Chapter Ten
He didn’t leave that night.
I want to say that clearly, because later people would get the order wrong. He stood in the hall in the dark, on the phone, for twenty minutes. Then he came back to bed and said, “Mara’s been admitted. They’ve stabilized her. I’m not going anywhere tonight.”
I pretended to be asleep.
He knew I wasn’t.
?
At 9:00 a.m., Dr. Anand took my blood pressure three times.
One forty-eight over ninety-six.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Seven a.m. Labor and delivery, third floor. No arguments.”
“Third floor,” I said.
“Is that a problem?”
“The transplant unit is on the fifth.”
She looked at me for a long time, and then she understood, and I watched her decide not to say anything.
?
I had a choice to make. So I made it.
I’m going to tell you exactly how, because it’s the part I’m proudest of and the part I regret most, and those are the same part.
?
I went home. I sat in the nursery, in the rocking chair Ruth had painted, and I put both hands on my stomach.
“Your dad,” I told the baby, “is about to do something good. And he’s doing it badly. And I don’t know how to stop the second thing without stopping the first.”
The baby kicked once. Hard. Right under my ribs.
“I know,” I said. “Me too.”
?
When Elias came home at noon, I was waiting at the kitchen table.
“Go,” I said.
He stopped in the doorway.
?
“Go tomorrow,” I said. “Save her. I mean it. I’m not handing you the blame, and I’m not taking it. I’m choosing this, the way you should have let me choose it in November.”
He didn’t move.
“Jess will be there. Your mother will be there. Dr. Anand has delivered two thousand babies. I’ll be fine.”
“Wren—”
“I have two conditions.”
?
“Name them.”
“One. The minute you’re awake, you come down to me. I don’t care if you have to crawl.”
“Done.”
“Two.” I held his eyes. “Tonight, you tell me everything. The accident. The part your mother won’t tell me. The reason you changed your passcode. All of it. Before you go under, there are no more rooms in you I haven’t seen.”
?
He was quiet for a long time.
“The passcode,” he said finally, “is the date I signed the consent form. I changed it so I’d have to remember every time I picked up the phone what I was keeping from you.”
That was so exactly like him that I almost laughed, and almost screamed, and did neither.
“Tonight,” I said.
“Tonight.”
?
We ate Ruth’s soup. We watched half of a movie neither of us could follow. At 9:30, we sat on the edge of our bed, the same bed from June, and he took my hand.
“Eight years ago,” he said, “I was coming off a thirty-one-hour shift, and Mara—”
His phone rang.
?
It was the hospital.
I watched his face while he listened. I watched it go from a husband’s face to a doctor’s face, like a door closing.
“Her rhythm is unstable,” he said, when he’d hung up. “They’re putting her on emergency dialysis. The team wants to move the surgery up to six. They want me in pre-op by four-thirty.”
“Four-thirty a.m.”
“They want me there tonight. To be sure.”
?
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
“Finish the sentence,” I said. “Eight years ago. You were coming off a thirty-one-hour shift. Finish it.”
His phone rang again.