I heard Eric take a deep breath on the other end of the phone. “I’m looking at Gabe’s personnel file, and you’re listed as his emergency contact and his medical proxy. It says you’re a good friend of his? We’re going to need you to make some decisions.”
“Decisions?” I repeated. “About what? What happened?”
“I’m sorry,” Eric said, “let me start over.”
Then he told me the story. You were in Gaza City. There was fighting in Shuja’iyya. There was an explosion, and you were too close. It happened too quickly for you to run. An Israeli medic took care of you in the field and the AP got you to a hospital in Jerusalem, but you hadn’t been responding to any stimuli and you couldn’t breathe on your own. He told me he didn’t think you’d recover. You had signed a DNR, but no one knew until you were already hooked up to machines, and now they needed my permission to take you off them.
“No,” I kept saying into the phone. “No, no, no, no, no.”
“Ma’am?” the cabdriver asked me. “Is everything all right?”
“Please turn around,” I whispered to him. “I need to go home.”
I went back to the apartment, climbed back into bed, and cried. For hours. Then I called Kate, giving her the broad strokes of what had happened to you.
“I think I have to go to Jerusalem,” I told her. “I can’t tell them to take Gabe off those machines before I see him again. I can’t let him die with no one there but strangers—or wake up, confused and hurting, all alone.”
“There’s a war there,” Kate said, as if the thoughts were unspooling in her mind as she was verbalizing them. “But I work with a corporation that’s headquartered in Tel Aviv, and they seem to be business as usual. So I don’t think it’s as dangerous as it sounds. At least not on the Israeli side.”
“And I’m pregnant,” I said, talking over her.
“You’re pregnant?” she sounded disconcerted, jumping from one train of conversation to the next. “When did . . . I didn’t think you wanted any more children. Hold on. Let me just—”
I heard the door to her office shut.
“Okay, so what’s going on?”
“It might be Gabe’s baby,” I said, quietly. “I don’t know.” I still hadn’t told her anything about us or about what had happened at the Warwick, which was why I hadn’t told her I was pregnant either. I was too ashamed, too worried about what she would think of me. But I’d reached a point where I didn’t care. I needed her. I needed someone to lean on.
“Oh, Lucy,” she said. “Lucy.” She paused for a moment. Then she said, “Why didn’t you tell me? Never mind, we can talk more later. For now: do you want me to come to Jerusalem with you?”
I made a sound that married a sob with a sigh of relief. “I love you,” I told her. “I’m sorry I didn’t . . . You’re the best best friend in the world.”
“Don’t you forget it,” she said.
“But even though I’m pregnant, even though there’s a war, I think I need to go to Jerusalem by myself.”
• • •
I KNEW EXPLAINING the situation to Darren—especially without explaining what had happened at the Warwick—wasn’t going to be easy. And probably I shouldn’t have tried. If I’d been serious about focusing on my marriage, I would’ve signed what I needed to sign from New York and told Eric Weiss that the doctors should do whatever they felt was best. But even though I knew that was what I should do, I couldn’t. Especially not if the baby I was carrying was ours. How could I explain to that child that I’d abandoned its father when he needed me most?
“Are you kidding?” Darren asked, his face incredulous, when I pulled him into our bedroom right after he got home from work. “You want me to let my pregnant wife fly into a war zone so she can sit at her ex-lover’s bedside?”
The way he said it made me more resolute. “It’s not as dangerous as it sounds,” I said. “And, Darren, I’m not asking you to let me do anything.”
“So you’re telling me you’re going? I have no say?” He was pacing in front of our bed. “Why the fuck did that asshole make you his medical proxy?”
I felt my eyes widen in shock. Darren almost never swore, and his voice was laced with such vitriol.
“I’m telling you I want to do this,” I said. “I’m telling you I need to do this, or I’ll regret it forever.” My voice choked up, and as I was saying those words, I was wondering: Would I break up my marriage over this? I’d asked you not to come back to New York for me, not to make me choose, but when it came down to it, I wondered if I’d choose you.
“Do you understand there’s a war there? Are planes even flying?”
I’d checked before he came home. “El Al is,” I said, stopping the trembling in my voice. “And they have the Iron Dome. It’s not like I’m going to Gaza. I’ll be safe.”
“What if something goes wrong with the baby?”
“Their emergency medicine is even better than ours,” I said. “I read about it online.” It was not the time to tell him that the baby might be yours. I wondered if it would ever be the time to tell him.
I could see Darren was calming down. I could see he was playing out the scenarios in his head and realizing this was an argument he wasn’t easily going to win.
“Please trust me,” I said. “This is something I need to do.”
He massaged his forehead for a moment.
“So help me God, Lucy,” he said finally. “I don’t know what it is about you and that man, how he keeps pulling you back into his orbit. He left you ten years ago. I’d think you wouldn’t forget something like that. If you have to go, go. But I want you back as soon as possible. By Sunday at the latest. It’s not safe there.”
“Fine,” I said. If I left tomorrow, that would give me three days in Jerusalem. I’d have liked more time, but if I wanted to come back to a marriage that wasn’t going to disintegrate upon reentry, I knew I had to compromise. And Darren really is a good man—even as upset as he was, he still agreed. That’s why all of this is so hard. It would be easier if he were a jerk.
So I booked my flight, and a return trip for Sunday morning. I packed my bag. I called Kate and told her my plan.
After everything that had happened between you and me, I couldn’t believe that this was where life had led us.
lxxv
I boarded with the rest of the first-class cabin and found myself seated next to an older Orthodox woman. Her head was covered with a patterned silk kerchief, tied behind her neck. She smiled at me when I sat down.
I smiled back but was already concentrating on breathing slowly, trying to will away the nausea, trying to ignore the briny taste in the back of my throat. It didn’t matter, though. While the rest of the plane was boarding, I knelt down in the airplane bathroom and vomited. “Please don’t let this happen the entire flight,” I said out loud as I flushed and wiped my mouth.
“Okay?” the woman asked me in heavily accented English, when I sat down again. My face must’ve been pale.
“Pregnant,” I told her, placing my hand low on my stomach. Then added, “A baby.” I wasn’t sure how much English she knew.
She nodded and rummaged around in her purse. Then she handed me a bag of candy with Hebrew writing on it. “This helps,” she said. “I eat it on the airplane.”
I held one up to my nose and sniffed it. “It’s ginger?” I asked.
She shrugged. She hadn’t understood the word. “It helps.”
I figured I didn’t have much to lose, so I unwrapped the candy and popped it into my mouth. I sucked on it and actually did start to feel a bit better. “Thank you,” I told her.
“I have five,” she said, pointing to my stomach. “I was sick always.”
“This is my third,” I told her.
“You are Jewish?” she asked, I guess trying to figure out why I was pregnant and on my way to Israel in the middle of a war.
“No,” I said.
“Your . . .”—she searched for a word and then settled on one—“man is in Yisroel?”
I embraced her use of the word man instead of husband.
“He is,” I said. “He’s a journalist. And he’s in the hospital. He was hurt badly in Gaza.”
As I said it, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. Other than Kate and Darren, I hadn’t talked about you, about what happened to you, with anyone.
The next thing I knew, the woman had her arms around me and was murmuring words in Hebrew or Yiddish—a language I didn’t understand but found comforting just the same. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I cried on her shoulder, let her stroke my hair. When I finally pulled myself together, she held my hand. And then after our food came, she kept patting my arm, as if to say without words, It’s going to be okay.
When I woke up, having fallen asleep for a few hours, I found myself covered with an airline blanket.
“Thank you,” I said to her.