The old guys, Bob and Joe, were talking about ice fishing and the Packers, the only topics worthy of discussion in January besides the weather. I was shaving in the YMCA shower after swimming and Bob and Joe were carrying on beneath the spray directly across from mine. According to Bob, a brand-spanking-new Aaron Rodgers Edition Ford F-150, the pickup endorsed by Green Bay’s star quarterback, had gone through the ice somewhere up north; Bob was convinced this meant the Packers’ playoff chances against the 49ers that weekend were doomed. He was in his nineties, as skinny as a broomstick, and had only one nipple. The other one had been shot off during World War II. He’d started swimming during rehab, and seventy-some years later he was still at it, four days a week.
“This is our year,” Joe said, refusing to heed the prophecy. “We were ten and six heading into the 2010 postseason and went all the way that year. And that was before Eddie Lacy.” Twenty years Bob’s junior, Joe was built like a gun safe: maybe five-feet tall and equally wide. His drumstick calves were inked with tattooed portraits of every dog he’d ever owned, his back and shoulders with every trophy-worthy buck he’d ever shot. If you asked (or if you didn’t), he could tell you where and when each buck had been “bagged” and how much venison it had yielded. He had a lump beneath the skin in his abdomen the size of a bar of soap. He caught me staring at it and told me it was his pain pump. Instead of him taking a fistful of pills every day, the pump delivered his medications automatically. He crossed the wet tiles between his shower and mine until we stood beneath my one stream of water. “Feel it,” he said.
“I can see it pretty well,” I said.
“Go on, touch it. It won’t bite.”
I slowly extended my index finger. A firm island among the pillows of wet flesh, the pump was oblong and hard, neither of which did anything to abate the creepiness factor.
Joe seized my wrist. “Don’t be such a baby,” he said. He pulled my arm close, and my palm had nowhere to go except over the loaf in his stomach. “Can you feel it in there?”
“I sure can,” I said.
“Modern medicine,” he said.
In the weeks since the pain pump went in, I hadn’t once seen him in a sour mood.
Safely back on his side of the shower room, Joe said to Bob, “Ever since I got Lacy’s jersey, we’ve been winning. I wear it every game now, and we haven’t lost yet.”
“I’ve been watching the Packers since before you were born,” Bob said. He shook his head. “Jersey or no, trust me. A truck like that going through the ice is a bad sign.”
I shut off the water and padded to my locker. I towel-dried my hair and began to dress when my duffel bag began to ring. It was 7:15 on a Tuesday morning, temps were in the twenties with snow expected later in the day, and Katherine and the boys had been asleep when I left the house. My phone ringing now was odd. I fished inside my bag to retrieve it but missed the call before I could answer. It turned out I’d missed seven other calls in the last hour, all from home.
The phone rang again before I could call back. “Are you there?” Katherine said. “Can you hear me?”
“What’s going on?”
Her breathing was short and shallow; I could hear the clench in her jaw. “My stomach,” she said. “I think my appendix might have ruptured.”
My first appalling thought was: That’s no big deal. The appendix doesn’t really do anything. Except, of course, get infected and burst and kill us in the predawn dark.
“I’m coming,” I said.
I played the messages I’d missed as I weaved through traffic. The first was from Katherine, her voice calm and informative, like she was calling to remind me not to forget my lunch. “You remember that pain I felt last night?” she said. “I think it’s getting worse.”
The others were from Hayden: “Dad, Mom doesn’t feel good. Can you come home?”
“Dad, are you done swimming yet? Mom’s sick.”
“Dad, Mom throwed up in the bathroom.”
“Dad, Mom throwed up again, and now she can’t get up. Should I call 911?”
Katherine lay naked on the bathroom floor, her knees curled to her chin and her forehead pressed to the tiles. Hayden had covered her with a towel. He sat on the toilet lid with his thumb in his mouth, keeping her company. There was vomit everywhere.
“It hit me as I was getting in the shower,” she said. “I haven’t been able to move.”
“I wanted to call an ambulance, but Mom wouldn’t let me,” Hayden said.
“I don’t need an ambulance,” Katherine said. “Help me get dressed. We’ll take the boys to school and then you can drop me off at the hospital.”
“I’m not going to drop you off,” I said. “Give me a break.”
“You have class today.”
“I’ll cancel,” I said. “And it’s not until noon. Maybe you’ll feel better by then.”
She lifted her face and managed a weak smile. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
I’d been gone for barely two hours, but the house looked like the boys had thrown a weeklong toga party. They’d tried to make breakfast for themselves, and the kitchen counters were plastered with crumbs and maple syrup. Dog food was scattered across the linoleum. Dirty clothes, socks turned inside out, and twisted cartoon underwear lay in heaps in the living room. With Mom out of commission, the entire enterprise of eating and dressing had descended into absolute bedlam.
I hustled the boys into the back of the car and guided Katherine to the passenger seat. She pulled the lever to lean the seat back as close to horizontal as she could get it. Her head was almost in Hayden’s lap. She clutched her stomach. “Holy God,” she whispered. “Jesus.”
The boys rode in silence for the seven blocks to the school, but when I pulled alongside the curb, Hayden asked, “Is she going to be okay?”
Of course she would be. She was in pain, but it wasn’t like she was dying. Right? Then the day Hayden was born came rushing back—a winter day not unlike this one, the sky flat and gray with snow moving in, the hospital hardly two blocks from where we were parked. The pregnancy had been complicated, with multiple trips to the doctor and expensive testing to rule out a genetic disorder that, had the results come back positive, would have meant a death sentence for Hayden. We’d spent our first Wisconsin New Year’s Eve in the hospital trying to stop a bout of bleeding that threatened to send Katherine into labor eight weeks early. Katherine and Hayden had come through it all, and the doctor insisted that the baby was big and healthy and that he didn’t anticipate any problems during the delivery. I drove to the hospital nervous but not overly so. Everything would be fine; the doctor had said so. Hayden came through okay, but within an hour of his birth he began to get sick and his chest turned purple. After a long night pricking his heel to draw and test his blood, an oxygen cannula pronged into his nostrils, he was rushed by ambulance to a neonatal intensive care unit a half hour south, a slender tube inserted down his trachea to feed air directly into his lungs. Even when the neonatologist told us dying wasn’t likely, he did so in a subdued voice and reiterated that he wasn’t only concerned about Hayden’s lungs but also about his heart. I remembered the doctor telling us it was important to approach the situation one step at a time.
“The doctor will give her medicine,” I told Hayden. “That will help her feel better.” I waved him out the door. Part goodbye, part scram. Galen had hopped out of the car before I came to a complete stop, and now Hayden, backpack straps over both shoulders, followed his brother like a paratrooper from an airplane. I considered, for a moment, turning back to reassure them. Katherine’s face tightened, and she called out in agony, louder now that the boys were out of the car, and I took the next corner fast enough to feel the tires slide on the icy road.
Most parents know that the moment your child is born, a switch flips and you become instantly aware of every lurking danger. You become a connoisseur of dread, pondering the chemicals beneath the kitchen sink, the weight of the television on its stand, the malicious intentions of every cockeyed stranger. And that’s not even including the car, the deadliest of all.
I’d long loved Katherine’s stories from the hospital, but the fascination really cranked up after Hayden was born. Katherine during this time vacillated between vexingly calm and, even more vexingly, calmly distraught. The cacophonies of the hospital—the buzzes and beeps and overhead pages prompting nurses and doctors alike to take off down the corridor at full sprint—didn’t faze her in the slightest, but during the moments when we sat together beside Hayden’s Isolette she’d slip into a dark cave, her hidden warehouse of years’ worth of gore and freak accidents. Kids run over by their own parents in the driveway; kids who pushed too hard on window screens and tumbled from upper-story windows; kids with strange bruises revealed through a series of tests to be malignant. All rare, yet she’d seen each and every one.
As luck would have it, barely a week after Hayden came home from the hospital with a clean bill of health, Katherine was hired as the social worker for maternity, pediatrics, and neonatal intensive care at the local Catholic hospital. Her hospital was different from the one where Hayden was treated, but the scenery in the NICU was the same: Plexiglas boxes crowded with wires and accordion tubing and surrounded by space-age equipment and frightened parents doing their best to keep their hearts in one piece. The stories she told about work drew me in more than ever, the way a car accident on the side of the highway exerts an irresistible magnetism once you have been in an accident yourself. I loved them because they reminded me that our experiences weren’t unique (sooner or later, everyone gets something), but also that Katherine—pretty and petite and taciturn in most public settings—was strong in a crisis. For going on ten years, she’d jumped into the worst emergencies and found a way to help. She made sure the grieving or the merely scared weren’t left alone. She’d carried in her own arms the babies who could not be saved.
Such was the problem I now faced as I sat beside her in the emergency room: my own utter uselessness. There was nothing for me to do. Every time I left the little room where Katherine had been parked, the nurses eyed me warily and seemed a breath shy of ordering me to go away. Nor could I provide much in the way of comfort. Katherine had been given a steady drip of Dilaudid and lay dozing and grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
If I’d inherited any particularly masculine trait from my forebears, it was the need to identify and solve problems and, more importantly, not wait for someone to solve them on my behalf. If I heard a strange noise coming from my car, I’d pop the hood to stare down at the engine, even though I didn’t know the first thing about auto repair. I hovered over plumbers, electricians, appliance repairmen, ostensibly because I wanted to make sure they were doing good work but in actuality because I was too embarrassed to read or watch TV while another man worked on my house. My impatience, along with my occasional Irish temper, were my worst qualities. They conjoined me at the hip to a masculinity I otherwise kept at arm’s length: the loudmouth chest-pounder who always needed to be in charge.
Even worse: I tended to believe the world was better under my direct control. On a cross-country road trip with friends, I drove all night even after we’d agreed to switch off every few hours because I couldn’t stomach the feeling of trying to sleep in the back seat while someone else took the wheel. Another reason I loved Katherine’s hospital stories was that they allowed me to vicariously master the things that most scared me: my family in peril, sick or injured or gone forever. I wasn’t much different from Bob and Joe and their voodoo shower logic about the Packers. We all want control, a say in the outcome, especially when we can’t have it.
The morning passed, then lunch. The shift changed, and at last, seven hours after Katherine hobbled through the ER doors, the tests revealed that her appendix was okay and that the pain she felt was caused by an ovarian cyst. The gynecologist who came down to consult explained that the cyst was in the process of rupturing but hadn’t yet. Katherine was young, but she’d had several endometrial issues in the last few years. The best course of action would a hysterectomy, especially given the history of ovarian cancer that ran in her family. A hysterectomy would put her out of commission for several weeks; it was a surgery she’d want to schedule. In the meantime, he’d drain the cyst and remove it. Barring a major emergency on the delivery floor, he’d do the procedure that night.
“Should I call someone to pick up the boys?” I asked after the doctor left.
“You should get them,” Katherine said softly. “They’ll be calmer seeing you.”
“Should we come back?”
“Go home for a while. Keep things normal.”
“I don’t want to leave you here.”
“I’m fine here,” she said. “I’m here every day. Besides, your fidgeting is driving me nuts.”
“You’ve been asleep. How’d you know what I was doing?”
“I’ve been doped up, not dead.” She weakly raised her arm and lowered it back to the sheets. “I could feel you squirming around in my dreams. Except when you were riding on the back of a unicorn and your hair was white.”
A foot of snow had come down. While digging out the tires and scraping the windshield, it occurred to me that Katherine had sent me to fetch the boys in order to give me the thing I most desired: a job to do, a series of tasks to complete. I couldn’t contribute to the surgery in any meaningful way, but I could set the house right and keep the boys calm, which would help her because the thought of the boys upset was worse for her than the prospect of going under the knife. At least, that’s what I told myself as I made my way through the unplowed streets across town. A doctor cutting into the organ that had produced her children, with the intent to remove the core of her biological womanhood a few weeks down the road, was less frightening for her than two kids crying for their mom.
A good portion of Katherine’s job involved lessening the fear factor of bad news. She was the one to explain to parents that the tube in their newborn’s chest was a good thing and would help their baby heal, or at least not die while they went to the cafeteria for lunch. One of her calming techniques involved assigning little tasks to the most panicked person in the room—to go get coffee or food, to make sure the Kleenexes were close at hand. None of the things Katherine told parents in the course of her job were lies, but they did serve utilitarian purposes. The doctors and nurses couldn’t do their jobs if a mom or dad was freaking out at the bedside. Even the tiniest premature infants, Katherine maintained, had the uncanny ability to absorb their parents’ emotions, especially fear. Staying calm was in everyone’s best interest.
Parking against the curb outside the boys’ school, I wondered if I’d been so handled. I sat with the radio off and the heater running, my breath fogging the windshield while I waited for the dismissal bell to ring.
My favorite thing about school pickup was watching the kids come out. Their colored parkas burst forth against the pall of the ugly sky. The smallest kids ran with their arms outstretched, reuniting with their parents as though they’d been in a submarine for months. It cheered me a little to see it, though the joy was quickly eclipsed by a fresh wave of guilt for having left Katherine behind.
I pulled out of line and eased along the row of waiting cars, searching for the boys among the throngs of kids. A car near the front of the line pulled away, and I nosed in before the minivan behind could pull forward. The woman driving that van, a small blonde I’d seen on warmer days pushing a baby in a stroller, laid on her horn and jabbed her middle finger into the windshield. The moms standing together on the sidewalk whipped around and glared. I waved and shrugged. One advantage of being a dad in a land ruled by moms is you’re not expected to know shit about kids and their routines. On a day like this, low expectations came in handy.
The boys stood together in their hats and parkas. They sprinted for the car when they saw me, threw open both side doors, and demanded to know whether Mom was okay. “She’s going to have surgery soon,” I said. Surgery was a word Katherine, in the process of recapping a workday, used often; I figured the boys knew what it meant. “When the doctor calls, we’ll go back and see her.”
“When will that be?” Hayden wanted to know.
“I don’t know yet. A few hours. Hop in, you’re letting out all the heat.”
Hayden stood leaning over the front seat. Galen peered in from the back. Hayden sensed the moment was propitious. “Can I ride up front?” he asked.
“Just hop in,” I said.
He made a big show of sliding the seat forward and of pulling the seatbelt across his shoulders. Galen slumped against the back door with his arms crossed. “Doing okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “I’m fine.”
At home I set about accomplishing the list of tasks I’d assigned myself. Job number one: clean up the puke in the bathroom, dried and hardened after sitting all day beneath the furnace vent. I scrubbed the tiles on my hands and knees, my nose and mouth masked by my shirt, then moved on to the breakfast disaster in the kitchen. I carried the mound of soiled rags to the laundry room and started a load. I’d told the boys to keep the TV down so I could hear the phone when it rang, and to my surprise they not only obliged, they sat together without fighting. I couldn’t recall the last time they’d been within touching distance without one trying to assault the other. It felt oddly absent, their brawling, as if a preemptive somberness had settled over the house. I called the hospital. The nurse told me Katherine had gone down to the spa. The surgery should get underway before too much longer.
“The spa?” I didn’t understand.
“SPA means surgical procedure area,” she said. “Pre-op. It sounds better as an acronym.”
“Can she get a facial while she’s down there?”
The nurse didn’t laugh. “I’ll have the doctor call you.”
When I turned around, Hayden was standing in the hallway outside the kitchen, beneath the red light of the smoke detector. His eyes narrowed. “Where is Mom?” he asked. His face said he wasn’t inclined to believe anything I said.
“She’s at the hospital.”
“No. Where is she right now?”
“She’s getting ready for surgery.”
“What is surgery?” Hayden asked.
How do you explain the failures of the body and our remedies for dealing with them to a person who didn’t yet know what all the body parts were or what function they performed? Especially to a six-year-old boy about his mother’s body? Under ordinary circumstances, at both home and work, such questions were Mom’s domain.
“She has a pouch of fluid inside her body that’s not supposed to be there,” I said. “That’s what made her sick this morning. The doctor is going to cut it out.”
“The doctor uses a knife?” His eyes grew wide.
“It’s a special kind of knife. A doctor’s knife. It’s very clean and very sharp.”
“You mean,” Hayden said, eyes narrowing again, “the doctor is going to stab Mom and cut out her organs?”
“Not quite like that,” I said. I could imagine Katherine rolling her eyes. I gave you one job. The kid had a point, though: The sterility of the hospital, the doctors and nurses in their white coats and blue scrubs, their arcane vocabularies, the big locked doors between the units, all worked to sanitize the fact that surgery involved blades piercing flesh. The boys had been taught that all sharp objects, from kitchen scissors to popsicle sticks, were dangerous. The instruments of harm, the makings of mortality.
“I don’t like this one bit,” Hayden said.
“Me neither.”
Hours went by, and the phone didn’t ring. I packed lunches for the next day, fed the boys dinner, stood in the bathroom while they brushed their teeth. I didn’t have the heart to barricade Hayden in his room with the shower rod. I promised to leave it out and to come wake him up when the doctor called as long as he promised to get some sleep while he could. We shook on the deal, and I tucked the blankets around his chin, kissed his forehead, and backed out of the room, desperate for an hour of trashy television. I lay on the couch and pointed the remote at the TV, and then Hayden was standing over me. “I can’t sleep,” he said.
“It’s been less than five minutes,” I said. “You should try a little harder.”
“I know myself,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”
“Okay,” I said, sitting up. “Have a seat.” A few minutes later, Galen came downstairs and sat with us. I think we watched Nova, but mostly we watched the phone.
Our pot refused to boil until after nine thirty. The boys had by that point sunk lower on the couch, their eyelids drooping, but at the sound of the phone they sprang back to attention. The surgeon apologized for the delay; he’d been called to a delivery right before he took Katherine in, and that had set him back an hour. He’d been able to resect the cyst and take a better look at the situation. The hysterectomy needed to happen sooner rather than later. The next six months, at the latest. She was in good shape for now, though. “When can she come home?” I asked.
“I wanted her to stay, but she’s insisting she leave tonight.”
“Is that a good idea?” The boys’ faces were grim. If Mom didn’t come home, no one would sleep.
“It’s a toss-up,” the doctor said. “There’s no medical reason for her to stay, other than to rest. She can rest at home, but she has to actually rest. She says her boys are waiting for her.”
“She keeps us all calm,” I said too hastily, our happiness suddenly a fragile and fleeting thing.
“I’ve worked with her for years,” the doctor said. “I get it.”
He said the nurse would need half an hour to prepare her discharge papers. I willed myself to wait a full forty-five before bundling the boys into their coats and boots and herding them to the car. I hoped that by the time we arrived at the hospital Katherine would be seated on the edge of the bed, back in her jeans and shoes, ready to walk out. Instead we found her still lying in bed, still in her gown, her hair a mess around her face. The boys moved carefully inside, attuned to the peculiarities of the room that must seem commonplace, even cliché, to most adults. The sliding curtain between the door and bed, the outlets and oxygen canister on the wall, the television suspended from the ceiling. Hayden fingered the cannulas taped to the back of Mom’s hand and fiddled with the controls that moved her mattress up and down. After a cursory glance around, during which he barely looked Katherine in the eye, Galen asked to see my phone. He slumped into a chair in the corner, pulled up Bejeweled, and stared vacantly at the screen.
The nurse folded back the blankets, helped Katherine to stand, and guided her into the bathroom. Hayden watched the nurse’s hand at her back cinching closed the gown to keep her backside covered. When the bathroom door clicked into place, he dropped his eyes to the rumpled sheets, the square disposable pads laid over the linens. They were full of blood.
He went not to me, but to his brother. “Galen,” he whispered. “Look.” Galen came over, and together they studied the bright stain.
“It’s from the surgery,” I said. I tried to think of another word for discharge but came up blank. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
Hayden whispered again, “The doctor stabbed her with a knife.”
Galen had pretended throughout the day that the ordeal was nothing to concern himself with; Mom was fine and he was nine and he didn’t need any comforting. Hayden had been the one to prod and question while Galen had remained aloof. But a bed full of blood was too visceral to ignore. Returning to his video game in the chair, he began to fidget and scratch at his arms. “Dad,” he said. “I’m hot.” He began pulling off his jacket and hat. “It’s so hot in here.”
“We’re leaving in one minute,” I said. “Soon as Mom’s ready.”
He mimed a cup at his mouth. “I need something to drink.”
“There’s a fountain down the hall,” I said. “You can get a drink on our way out.”
He laid his head on the arm of the chair. “Water,” he moaned. “I need water.”
It was past eleven when the nurse unfolded the wheelchair and helped Katherine settle into it. The boys were four hours past their usual bedtime, I’d been awake since four thirty that morning, and Katherine, though no longer in immediate danger, was still in pain. We were all exhausted.
“I can walk,” Katherine said. “You don’t have to take me all the way down.”
“You know better than that,” the nurse said.
Hayden insisted on walking with his hand on the arm of the wheelchair. I carried Katherine’s purse and discharge papers. Galen followed behind, his hands in his pockets, staring at the floor. We rode the elevator to the ground floor and moved our way through the long tunnel of corridors, half-lit and deserted except for a stray nurse carrying a massive travel mug. We rolled past a waiting room full of people sleeping with their mouths open and their arms crossed. I could recall the nights I’d slept in a waiting room while Hayden was in the NICU, the initial shock settling into a dull weight that could knock me out even while I sat upright in a chair. I reached out to touch Hayden’s head. He was six and big, his lungs free of fluid or illness. We’d gotten off so easy.
We’d gotten off easy tonight, too. Maybe it was good for the boys to see their mother as both delicate and resilient. Maybe it was good for them to understand that people get sick and, if they’re lucky, they get better, and that while I spent my days noodling with words, Mom spent hers here, helping people going through crises far worse than ours because she believed her efforts were worthwhile, people deserved care, and compassion was one of life’s greatest and rarest virtues. Thomas Aquinas said he’d rather experience compassion than understand the meaning of it, which meant, I think, that compassion wasn’t an attitude that could be theorized. No amount of talking could instill it in the boys. Compassion was rooted in empathy, and empathy was born of experience. Though none of that made the lesson any less difficult to learn—for them or for me.
We turned the corner toward the ER, where I’d parked the car. Galen’s shoe caught on the carpet and he fell, first to his knees and then to his face. He covered his head with his hands and wept. “I can’t go any farther,” he said.
Katherine lifted her eyes to the nurse. “Poor guy’s wiped out. It’s way past his bedtime.”
“We’re almost to the car,” I said.
“I can’t make it,” Galen said. “Just leave me here.”
“We leave no man behind,” I said. I hoisted him by the armpits. “Come on.”
I pulled the car beneath the overhang beside the ER, and the nurse wheeled Katherine outside. I helped her into the front seat and the boys into the back. “Thank God,” Galen said, as he clicked his belt into place. He leaned his head against the rest and fell asleep. Hayden’s eyes were closed before we crossed the river.
The snow had finished, the clouds had moved out, and the sky above the traffic lights, now blinking red and yellow, was full of stars. I paused before each intersection, as reticent as the day I’d driven Hayden home from the hospital after nine days in the NICU, all my energy focused on ferrying my family to safety, keeping us from harm, even if for only this night. My hands, when I finally let go of the steering wheel in the driveway, were slick with sweat. I left the engine running so the car would stay warm while I unlocked the door and guided Katherine into the house. I went back for the boys one at a time, first Hayden and then Galen, unbuckling their seatbelts, hauling them onto my shoulder, and carrying them inside. Galen’s long legs dangled nearly to the ground. He was heavy in my arms, and climbing the stairs I could feel every ounce of his limp weight in my back, but I’d found another task I could accomplish and I didn’t stop until I’d laid him, sleeping, in his bed.