Home Again

Lina squeezed her eyes shut. “I hurt him.”

“He told me he’d let you down. He wanted to come to Juvenile Hall to pick you up….” Grief tightened around her chest until she could barely breathe. “He … he was afraid you wouldn’t forgive him.’”

“I did,” Lina whispered. “I did.”

Madelaine pushed away the weight of her guilt and tried desperately to give her daughter a smile. “You tell him that when you see him.”

Madelaine had been in hospital waiting rooms a thousand times in her career, and she’d never truly noticed what they were like. How the neutral walls closed in on you, how the Naugahyde chairs made your back ache. How magazines were useless. Insulting, even. What was she supposed to do now, read about some celebrity’s valiant battle with cocaine?

She paced back and forth in front of the small window that overlooked the parking lot.

Lina sat stiffly in a chair by the pay phone. Neither one of them had spoken in the thirty minutes since they’d arrived. They’d been told that Francis was in surgery and that a Dr. Nusbaum would speak to them when the operation was over.

Madelaine had wanted to push her way into the OR, but she knew she wouldn’t be of any use. The best help she could offer was to hold his hand when it was over.

She turned, glanced again at the big black schoolroom clock on the wall. Another sixty seconds of eternity clicked past.

Finally a tall, white-haired man in green surgical scrubs pushed into the tiny room, his mask hung loosely around his neck. Blood splattered his clothing in red-black splotches. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to think of Francis’s blood.

The man shoved a hand through his thinning hair and sighed heavily, glancing from Madelaine to Lina and back to Madelaine. “You’re Mrs. DeMarco?”

It was strange how the question hurt. She shook her head, wringing her hands together and moving toward him, her gaze riveted on his face, searching for answers, pleading silently for hope. “No, I’m Dr. Madelaine Hillyard—cardiologist, St. Joe’s,” she added uselessly, wondering why she’d said it. “This is my daughter, Lina. We are Francis’s … family.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Hillyard….”

She didn’t hear anything else. Blood roared in her ears, and she couldn’t breathe. For a horrifying second she thought she was going to vomit, right there on the waiting room floor.

“The injury was too extensive….”

She took a long, shaking breath and balled her hands into fists. She felt her nails digging into her flesh, tearing her skin as she fought for composure. She welcomed the pain—it gave her something to think about, however briefly. Finally, what emerged from the rubble of her mind were questions, objective, informed, practical questions that were like slipping on her protective white coat. “I need to see his charts. What happened?”

“Brain stem injury,” he said gently, as if a softened voice could make a difference when the words were so cold and ugly. “He went through the windshield of his car and hit a tree with his head. Massive intracranial hemorrhage. We’ve got him on life support right now, but—”

“What?” Lina shouted. “You mean he’s alive?” She looked at Madelaine in obvious confusion, then at the surgeon. “You said you were sorry—”

Nusbaum took a moment to choose his words. “Physically, he’s functioning—with maximum intervention.”

“Maximum intervention?” Lina said, her voice shrill. “What the hell is that?”

Nusbaum looked pointedly at Madelaine. “I’ve run three EEGs. They’re completely flat….” He let the sentence trail off, but Madelaine knew the procedure. Three flat EEGs and a patient was declared legally brain-dead.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

She stared at him blankly, thinking of all the times she’d said the same useless sentence to people—I’m sorry, Mr. So-and-So—best efforts… injuries were too extensive. She’d never realized how stark and un-forgiving the words were, how they twisted through your insides and pulled your guts out until you had no strength.

A terrifyingly familiar picture shot through her mind. She saw Francis, her Francis, lying in a bed somewhere in this cavernous building, his body hooked up to a dozen machines, his eyes—his warm, loving eyes—staring blankly at the ceiling. She felt a scream start deep inside her, building, gathering force until it choked her.

“What is he saying, Mom?” Lina asked.

Madelaine looked at her daughter and saw a six-year-old girl standing there, pigtails askew, tears staining her bright pink cheeks. For a split second her own grief faded, and all she could think about was her baby girl, and what this news was doing to her, what it would do every moment for the rest of her life. She wanted to handle this just right, to explain the difference between a coma and brain death. To make Lina truly understand that the machines were keeping Francis’s body alive, but his soul was gone, and soon the body would shut itself down with or without the machines. The body knew when its brain was gone….

But she couldn’t find the perfect words, or any words at all.

The sense of failure threaded through her pain and weighed her down. Slowly she crossed the room and slipped an arm around Lina’s thin shoulders. “He’s saying that Francis is gone, baby.”

Lina jerked away from her and spun around, staring blankly out the window. Then, slowly, she sank onto the nearest chair and buried her face in her hands.

Tears scalded Madelaine’s eyes. She wanted to give in to them as Lina had, allow herself the relief of crying, but she couldn’t. She looked up at Dr. Nusbaum. “Can we see him?”