Chapter Thirty-Seven
Trey
My daughter is six hours old and nameless.
The nurses in labor and delivery would probably tease me if we were simply that couple who hadn’t picked a name yet. But the nurses don’t tease me. They call her Baby Westin, and Baby Westin has had her second feeding already, and her diaper changed, and she’s sleeping again.
She’s doing everything she’s supposed to be doing: opening her eyes, squeezing my hand, crying, sighing, eating, living.
She’s living.
And Harley is only breathing.
It’s midnight now, and the watch continues, and nothing changes except the ICU doctor. Doctor Strickland is gone, and now Doctor Whitney enters the room, introduces himself, and says he’s on rotation now.
I launch into questions. “Why doesn’t she open her eyes? Why doesn’t she move? Why is she only breathing?”
“Let me examine her,” he says calmly, and then asks me to leave for a moment, so I do, waiting in the hallway.
Pacing again.
So much pacing.
Robert and Debbie are parked in chairs outside the room. He yawns, and Debbie does the same, but no one goes, no one leaves, no one sleeps. Debbie takes another sip of her coffee, and Robert offers to get me one.
I shake my head.
“Diet Coke then?”
“No thanks.”
Doctor Whitney pokes his head out, and invites us back in.
“We thought she’d be awake by now,” he says. “And her tests are fine, her vitals are fine, everything suggests she should have woken up, but she has slipped into a comatose state.”
And I break.
I f*cking break.
I shatter into a million angry pieces.
“What?”
The doctor nods, and shifts his hand back and forth like a seesaw. “She’s been teetering between unconsciousness and coma, and she remains unresponsive to stimuli, like light.”
“What the f*ck does that mean?” I shout, pushing my hands through my hair, fire exploding in my brain, torching my f*cking heart.
He holds up his hands, maybe in admission, maybe for protection from me. I don’t know. I don’t care. I want to kill him for telling me this.
“It means that we’re baffled as to what’s going on.”
“Baffled?” I repeat, fuming. “How can you be baffled? You’re a f*cking doctor. You’re not supposed to be baffled.”
“We will continue to monitor her. We will continue to look for answers.”
“Yeah, because a coma’s not a f*cking answer,” I shout. I push my fingers hard against my temple, pushing, hurting, something, anything to make this stop. I take a step closer. “Make her wake up.” Another step and he steps back, and I beg harder, grabbing for his white lab coat. “Make her wake up. Make her wake up. Make her wake up.”
“I would appreciate it if you could leave right now,” Doctor Whitney says in a wobbly voice, as he struggles to step away from me.
“Make her f*cking wake up,” I say, trying to reach for him again, pleading.
Then I feel strong arms hold me back, drag me away from the doctor I want to throttle. I’m pulled out of the room, into the hall, inside the elevator, down to the lobby.
Outside. Where it’s dark and starless, and Robert has wrapped his arms around me, and my face is buried in his shirt, and the splinter in my heart hurts so much, jagged as it expands, hollowing out my insides, until all I am is this empty ache.
“I don’t know what to do,” I sob in a voice I don’t recognize anymore, a voice I never wanted to hear coming from me. “I don’t know what to do without her.”
He’s crying too. I can hear the hitch in his throat as he speaks. “All we can do is hope. That’s all we can do. Hope.”
* * *
I imagine her words. Her laughter. Her singing Bonfire Heart. I feel her hands, her hips, and her body.
But it’s all in my mind, because I wake up quickly, snapping out of a restless few minutes of sleep here on the edge of her mattress.
I wake up because there’s noise in the room. The same nurse with the long braid is back, doing her thing, checking on my wife.
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s the same, honey. Harley’s the same.”
At least she calls her by her name.
When my first brother died at birth, too young to live, my parents hadn’t named him. I was only thirteen years old, and I insisted we name him. I named him Jake.
Then came Drew. Then came Will.
They came and they went, touching down on this earth for seconds in some cases, for a few days in others. But they were named. I made sure they were named.
By all accounts, my daughter is staying. Her heart is strong, and she’s healthy, and there’s not a thing about her that baffles any doctor. But no one knows what is happening to my wife, and so no one can help her, no one can save her. She exists in the in-between. I long for her voice with every cell of my body; I’d give anything to hear a snippet of a word from her lips.
I flash back to our days and nights together, to the little moments, like playing Frogger and making her a cheesy miracle, then the bigger ones, like bringing her to the tree in New York, telling her I loved her for the first time, marrying her in the sky.
They were all amazing in their own way. All precious.
“Can I be alone with Harley?” I ask the nurse when she’s done.
“Of course, sweetie,” she says, patting me on the shoulder as she leaves.
I swallow, and the lump in my throat hurts so much, like a hard knot that will never leave. I take her right hand, and wrap my fingers around hers.
We always held hands. The night we met, I held her hand as we walked to the train station. When we were just friends, I held her hand as we walked throughout New York. Then the night I took her away from Mr. Stewart at the Parker Meridien, we practically flew out of that hotel, holding hands.
I’ve held her hands as I’ve made love to her.
I want to hold her hand for the rest of my life.
It’s such a small thing, such a simple act, but such a privilege; such a gift.
Like every single moment with her.
And I don’t know if I’ll have that luxury for much longer. So it has to matter. Every moment matters, because sometimes they are all we have.
“Harley,” I whisper, wishing this were a TV movie and she’d squeeze my fingers when she heard me say her name. But I’ve been saying her name for a long, long time tonight, and it hasn’t happened. “I don’t know if I’m going to see you again. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But you have to know that I love you more than I ever thought was possible. I have loved every second with you. You made me believe in love, you made me believe in myself, and you made me a new man. But I’m not here to talk about me, or even about you right now. Because there’s something else we need to talk about. We need to name our daughter. I can’t wait for you to meet her, Harley. She’s beautiful, and she’s so f*cking healthy,” I say, my voice breaking as a salty tear hits her hand.
“Her heart works perfectly, and when you place your hand gently against her chest, you can feel it beating under your palm, and it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever felt. She has blond hair already, and it’s soft, like a duck. But now that I think about it, I’ve never touched a duck. But I bet a baby duck has really soft hair, and so does our daughter. And she smells good too. Is that weird that I think that? But I do. She just smells sweet and powdery, and you’re going to fall madly in love with her too. You have to meet her, Harley. Just squeeze my hand, so I know you’re going to meet her, okay?”
I wait for a response, and for the briefest of seconds I’m convinced she moved, shifted a knee, an elbow, something. But the room remains still and quiet. “It’s okay if you can’t squeeze back. I know you hear me. I believe it. And I know what we need to name the baby. Her name is Hope. That’s our daughter’s name. Her name is Hope.”
Then the tears fall again relentlessly, and that hollow deepens so much more. I didn’t know there was more of my heart to carve away, but the pain tells me I was wrong. There is.
* * *
Later, I visit the baby in the nursery to feed her. After her bottle, I take a pen and add her name to the pink cardboard sign on her bassinet.
Hope Westin.
When I lay her down for her nap, I start the trek back to Harley’s room. On the way, I spot a sign I hadn’t noticed before.
I follow it, and as the sun rises I find myself in the hospital chapel. I’m not a religious person, I don’t even know if I believe in God, but I am consumed by this overwhelming need to make some sort of peace.
The chapel is a small room with wooden benches, a few plants, and pictures of serenity hanging on the wall. There are no signs of different faith in here. Only one faith, one wish—that the ones we love heal. Here, we all pray to the same god.
I walk past each picture. The first is an image of the woods in spring,with emerald green grass and mossy trees. Next, a cove on a beach, as the sun sets in a fiery orange glow. Then I stop hard in my tracks when I see a painting of a cherry blossom tree.
The design I’ve perfected over the last several months.
I touch it. I’m probably not supposed to, but nothing stops me as I trace my fingers along the trunk of the tree, then up to its branches, lush with pink blossoms, like the ones I drew on Harley that night in New York.
I marked her with a sign of what might come. I didn’t know it then. Who would have known it then? But there it was, in pink blossoms, red leaves, and brown branches on her body.
Because this tree may be a symbol of beauty, but it also signifies the fragility of life. In Japan, the cherry blossom trees bloom beautifully each year but for a short time, and their brief flurry is a reminder of how lovely, but terribly short life is.
Gone, before we know it. Before we can have all we want from it.
I want so much more from this life. I want so much more with her.
But even if she dies now, even if she leaves this earth and my arms for good, she will leave knowing love. Knowing that I loved her with every ounce of my heart, mind, body and soul. That I held nothing back. That I gave her all of myself, all of my love, all of my heart. That our love is unbreakable, that it’s for all time, and that even if it’s short, it was great. It is great. It is the greatest thing I have ever known.
She is my everything, and she will always be the love of my life, the love of my death, the love of my soul. I have loved her with no regrets, and I will continue to for the rest of my life, and even then some.
Even then some.
Because not loving her is like not existing, not breathing, not being. I don’t know how to live without loving her, and if that’s how I have to spend the rest of my days on this earth—loving a ghost—that’s how it will be.
* * *
When I walk past the nursery, Hope’s not there.