Seventeen. The Highway
I will tell what I can of the next hour, and where I can’t, I’ll tell what he did, because I have the accounts now, Ruthie’s, the paramedics’, his own, given later in pieces, and they agree, and their agreement is the whole last argument of this book.
He did not carry me to the car. He wanted to; I saw the want arrive in his shoulders; the old apparatus said seize, transport, fix.
What he did instead was the renovated thing, the harder thing: he got flat on the floor beside me so his face was level with mine, told the instructor, who was already dialing, to say the words possible ovarian torsion, thirty-five weeks, and Dr. Brandwein’s name and Albany Med, and then he took my hand and put his other palm on the side of my face and did the job, the whole job, the only job, which was: he stayed in the hallway.
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Look at me, Marisol.
Second ring. I’m the one who answers, remember.
Both phones are answered now, forever, I’ve got you, I’ve got both of you, breathe with me, they’re four minutes out. ”
Four minutes. I spent them where I’d once spent eleven, on the far side of pain, doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic this time was not his schedule.
It was: thirty-five weeks. Lungs at thirty-five weeks.
The odds Brandwein had priced in a warm office in January, torsion means surgery under the worst conditions instead of the best, at whatever week the wheel stops on, and the wheel had stopped, and underneath all of it, on a loop, in Ruthie’s voice, in mine, in something older than either: it’s so often nothing, it’s so often nothing, except that I had been the woman in aisle three and the woman on the bathroom floor, and I knew. This was not nothing.
He rode in the ambulance. They let him; I learned later they let him because he asked, asked, the paramedic’s account specifically includes the word please and includes it with a kind of wonder, a man in a nine-hundred- dollar sweater saying please in a church basement doorway with his coat left behind on a folding chair.
In the ambulance he kept his face where I could find it and kept talking, and this is the part of the record I hold hardest, because it was not soothing, it was not there-there, it was itinerary, it was the only sacred language he has: “Brandwein’s been called, he’s in the building, he’s meeting us at the bay.
Osei’s been called. Ruthie’s twelve minutes behind us, Biscuit’s with the neighbor, your mother’s photograph is in your go-bag and the go-bag is in my car and my car is being driven to Albany right now by the bookshop owner, whose name is Gil, and I will owe Gil forever, everyone in Hudson is currently driving somewhere for you, Marisol, the whole county is deployed, all you have to do is this next breath. Just the next one. I’ll count.”
At Albany they took me from him at the double doors, the way they do, the way they must, but first there was the beat at the doors themselves, and it belongs in the record because it is the exact negative of November, the corridor run in reverse, and both of us knew it while it was happening, which almost never occurs in a life; usually the rhymes are visible only from the far bank.
The gurney paused for the intake formalities, seconds only, and he leaned over me in the bright triage light, and I looked up at my husband from the far side of pain for the second time in our marriage, and I said, because the falls were coming and I wanted the flare sent while my hands still worked: “Last time, I went through these doors watching you hold a phone.”
“I know.”
“Tell me what you’re holding now.”
And he took my hand and pressed it, palm flat, over his breast pocket, over the ticket, number 47, soft as cloth, riding where it had ridden since the mill, and he said, “Coat check’s open.
I’m holding your ticket, and I’m standing right here until you come claim it.
Both phones are off, Marisol. Everyone who needs calling has been called, and now they are off, and they stay off.
” Which was, from him, from the man built out of second rings and flare protocols, the single largest sentence in his vocabulary, the apparatus voluntarily dark for the only hour that had ever mattered, and the doors took me, and the last thing I saw, this time, was my husband with his empty hands open at his sides, holding, visibly, deliberately, nothing but the vigil.
Here the accounts pass to witnesses. Ruthie, arriving eleven minutes later, found him not in the waiting room but standing at the exact seam of the corridor where the public floor ends, at the line itself, toes to it, like a man at a border he’d been deported across once and would not risk again, and she stood next to him, and neither of them said anything, and then, she reports, Cormac Merrick, chairman of the Merrick Group, said, to the doors, in a voice she had to lean in to hear: “The last time, I had a coat on before the second text. She was in imaging and I already had my coat on.” And Ruthie, who had carried her verdict all winter like a stone in her apron, looked at the coatless man at the border and retired it, and took his arm, and said, “Well. Look at you now. No coat,” and stood with him, on the line, for the length of whatever came next.
What came next, inside, was Brandwein, gowned, unhurried even now, a man for whom the highway was also a workplace, telling me what the imaging showed while the anesthesiologist worked and the room organized itself around my body with the specific choreography that means soon: the cyst had torqued.
Full torsion, blood supply compromised, the ovary in the balance, surgery now, and, in the same breath, because at thirty-five weeks the two systems were now one system, the obstetric call: baby’s heart rate showing stress with each wave.
“So here’s the plan, and it’s a good plan,” Brandwein said, hand briefly on my shoulder, the model-of- a-uterus hand, steady as his desk.
“We’re going to do both. Section first, she comes out, she’s thirty-five weeks and she’s been measuring like a linebacker, then I fix the torsion while you’re still under, one theater, one anesthetic, and you wake up done. Both problems, one door.”
“The November follow-up,” I said, because the falls were close now and I wanted it asked while I could still ask, “if I’d had the November follow- up, if that fortnight hadn’t fallen in the gap. Would we be here?”
And Brandwein, who I will love to my last day for this, did not do the kindness.
He did the plainness, which was the kindness.
“Maybe not tonight. Maybe in January, on my schedule, in the calm window, laparoscopic, boring. Or maybe here anyway; these things keep their own counsel. What I can tell you is the gap was real and the gap had causes and the causes weren’t yours, and either way,” the doors were opening now, the theater bright beyond them, “either way, Mrs. Merrick, you got yourself here in nineteen minutes with the right man counting your breathing, and in my business we don’t relitigate Novembers at the door of an OR.
We deliver in May. Count backward from ten for me. ”
Ten. The lights, and the bright cold, and the last thing, and I want it recorded exactly, because it is the hinge of my whole life: somewhere at nine, or eight, a nurse at the edge of my vision said to another, is the father here, and the other said, he’s at the line, he hasn’t moved from the line, and I went under with that, he hasn’t moved from the line, down through eight and seven, carrying it like a lamp into the dark, and the dark, for once, in this account, in this family, in this life, was not a hallway, and I was not alone in it, and at some floor below seven the counting stopped being mine and became, very faint, very fast, headlong, sure of itself, hers.