I TRIED COUNTING the tables for ten, which were round, but I lost track at close to fifty, and there were also long rectangular tables set up against the walls. Maroon-and-gold napkins. The room was cavernous, and I hoped the sound system was adequate. My escort Tabitha and I, both an hour early, had spotted each other in the lobby and waited together in the security line. Tabitha was friendly but nervous, especially before we got into the darker banquet hall and sat down. “Karn knows me,” Tabitha said. “The kids know me. I used to babysit over there back when I was a teenager. We’ll just sit here and blend in.” I was wearing my maroon top with the front snaps and a black skirt and high-heeled black shoes, and even with no underwear I was feeling fairly blended, but Tabitha had on a top that exposed her upper breasts, and a hat with feathers. “If she looks this way when she comes in,” Tabitha said, “I’ll wave and you bend over like you dropped your napkin.”
Tabitha actually had a map. A map and a walkie-talkie and a watch, timed to match Marcus’s, propped up at the top of her place setting. “Don’t worry, we’ve got this planned better than D-Day,” she told me. No one else was seated yet at our table. “I’m going to go get us drinks,” Tabitha said. “Can’t you do with a drink?”
I never believed I’d make it to this day, to this place. Marcus’s call finally came through. He reached me at home late one evening. His voice was deep and thrilling, a boyfriend’s voice. “Mick wants you at his tribute,” he said. It would be in three weeks, Thursday the 27th, at the Turkman Convention Center. “They were going to have it on campus but they’ve gotten too many reservations,” Marcus said. “I have your ticket.”
“Karn doesn’t want me there,” I said. “She phoned me not to come.”
“We’re hiding you. I’ve got you at a table out in East Jesus with my cousin, and at some point we’ll make sure you and Mick can get together by yourselves. I take him to the bathroom, so this’ll work out just fine.”
Mick needed help to use the bathroom? I felt sick. I pictured a potty chair set up in the center of a room, Karn bustling around Mick with a roll of toilet paper in her hand. The indignity. The intimacy.
“He’s in bed pretty much all the time,” Marcus said. “He can’t get up stairs. They’ve got a nice family room with a lot of windows—it’s private, sticks out the back of the house—and Karn’s got a hospital bed set up there in front of the TV. A lot of people’d like to see him, but Karn’s not big on visitors. Kind of wants to keep him for herself. She lets me in. I get over there about every other day.”
Marcus’s call came during the first week of September, and then came September 11. I was in the cath lab. Helen heard what was going on but she kept it from me, between my second and third caths hustling me to the reading room and bringing me coffee and charts to sign and even the family of my patient, whom she coun seled not to let me know. Helen managed to make my morning and my caths, two of which involved angioplasties and stenting, seem perfectly routine. I’m not sure, even now, why she did it. Something I’d said or done during our summer trip must have made me seem fragile. I don’t know what it was.
Later that week, I was involved in a code in the CCU. It was a good code—that is, we wanted the patient to survive—and we got her back. The thing involved two doctors and three nurses and at least thirty minutes during which I doubt any one of us thought about the Twin Towers or the broken Pentagon or the plane crashed into the field in Pennsylvania. When it was done we stood around the nurses’ station in a giddy communion, eyeing the monitors as if we hoped for someone else to work on, because that week it was a pleasure, truly, to lose ourselves together in something useful.
I hoped Mick was okay. I hoped Mick understood that his coaching really mattered.
It was a terrible time to be dying. People imagined war, straf ings, forced conscription, poison gases overtaking grocery stores, men with rifles on top of buildings. People thought of grayness and soot and the smell of burning bodies. Sex at such a time would be resistance; dying had to feel like giving in. At home I never watched the news. I did my running and lifting and stretching and took long showers and fed Ginger and tried not to think about what Mick must be making of the situation. What does my death matter next to these deaths? What will happen in my grandson’s world? Who’ll look after Karn and Genie if we’re attacked? It would be so easy—Mick’s life now limited to one room—to put on videos, even the Three Stooges, instead of news. But this would require a willfulness and strength of character I doubted Karn had.
Toby was talking about quitting his job and moving to a remote cabin and living off the land. He told Claudia they should stop payment on their health insurance and put their extra cash into precious metals. He was researching weather patterns and average frost dates on the Internet, trying to find the best locations to grow food. In the middle of the night, he and Claudia clung together waiting for the dawn.
“Is the tribute still on?” I asked Marcus when he phoned the following week.
“Now more than ever,” he said.
“Does Mick even know what’s going on?”
Marcus made a despairing chuckle. “Karn has CNN on all the time.”
The bitch. The idiot. The weakling. I pictured myself bursting into her house, grabbing her out of the family room, strangling her in her own foyer with my bare hands.
The people who eventually appeared at Tabitha’s and my table, six men and two women, were all from the Turkman State English Department. I was dismayed to recognize, taking the seat next to me, the professor I’d seen on the TV news protesting Mick’s salary. How dare a critic of Mick’s come to a dinner in Mick’s honor.
“We’re not going to talk about anything serious,” an older woman who sat directly across from me said. “Is that a deal, Preston?”
Preston, to Tabitha’s left and a good twenty years younger than any of the other professors, nodded.
“What brings you here?” I asked the professor I’d seen on TV. Actually, the professor said, clearing his throat, their new department chair, a most interesting woman, had asked them to attend. Of course, she was seated nearer the front, at a table with the other department chairs. Still, it was good to get out, really. It was good to think about something other than tragedy.
I swallowed and said, “Your last chair went to Iowa, right?”
The man nodded.
“Lucky for us,” said Preston, from the other side of Tabitha.
The older woman across the table gave a small gasp. I followed my gaze past her shoulder and turned to see Mickey twenty feet away from us in a wheelchair, being pushed by Eluard toward the raised head table. Mick was in his sports banquet best—a Turkman striped tie and a suit that now looked several sizes too big for him—and hanging from each side arm of his wheelchair was an American flag. I can’t tell you how much those flags bothered me. As if Mick were no longer quite human but a thing to be used and festooned. As if Mick’s goodness were something American, not his own. As if his death were communal, not personal. That’s it, I thought, I’m doing it.
“What brings you here?” the professor next to me asked, his face turning from the sight of Mick, and I was glad to see the tactlessness of his “other than tragedy” comment belatedly hit him.
Tabitha answered for me. “She’s a friend of mine. My cousin Marcus Masters is Coach Crabbe’s best friend.”
“Really,” the professor said, and to someone’s “Excuse me?” Tabitha repeated the information, and everyone around the table seemed to make a mental adjustment to the news that Mick’s best friend must be a black man.
“Righteous!” Preston said, and the women across from me shot him an exasperated glance.
The emcee was a sports broadcaster who’d flown in from Florida. Tabitha said he was a real character, but that night he read an introductory speech I doubted he’d written (“. . . an honor and a consolation to come together at a time of national mourning, to celebrate the achievements of . . .”) and ended by saying, “God bless America, and God bless Mick Crabbe.”
A priest gave the invocation, a rather belligerent prayer.
“My cousin and Mickey were roommates at college,” Tabitha said when the prayer ended, and that launched an onslaught of questions and comments, until the table was swapping roommate anecdotes, Preston presenting himself, not surprisingly, as his roommate’s worst nightmare, even describing what sounded like a bomb hoax before he caught himself and trailed off.
At some point during the salad course a waiter dropped a tray full of dishes and the vast room became suddenly silent, until a ripple of relief and understanding swept through the crowd.
We were halfway through the chicken when Tabitha’s walkie-talkie squawked. “What’s that?” Preston snapped, and as Tabitha turned her back to the table and spoke into the receiver the woman across the table smiled in a superior way.
“He’s having chest pain,” Tabitha said.
For an instant I thought he really was. “Excuse us,” Tabitha said, leaning into the table, “but my friend here is a cardiologist, and Coach is right now having chest pain, and we want to get him through this celebration, so I’m going to have to take her with me to see him.”
We left the table in a flurry of concern, and then I was following Tabitha through a side door and down a maze of halls, the map open in Tabitha’s hand. In the distance a man of mighty size was beckoning, and when we reached him he opened a door.
“Dr. Toledo, I presume,” Marcus said in his lovely voice, his round face glowing with concern. He looked like a man who couldn’t possibly keep a secret, a secret-keeper’s best disguise. He touched my shoulder, hurrying me along. “You go on in there. I’ll try to give you two a full five minutes.”
I stood in the room facing Mick ten feet away in his wheelchair as the door clicked shut behind me. A medium-sized windowless room, probably an ancillary banquet room, with blue-gray industrial carpeting and chairs and tables pushed against the walls. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
I might not have recognized him, had he been hurried past me in a crowded mall. Astonishing how completely disease could change a person. His thick head of hair was exactly the same, but atop his wasted body it looked like a wig. “Thanks for asking me,” I said.
“My only chance,” he said. “I’m kind of a prisoner.”
Now, I thought, and I swear it was those dreadful flags that gave me courage. “You’re not a prisoner to me,” I said, and I popped my snaps and unzipped and dropped my skirt and stood before him naked.
“That’s pretty brazen,” Mick said.
“I hope I’m not offending you.”
“I don’t know. Come closer and I’ll decide.” Mick’s eyes flicked to my feet. “Nice shoes,” he said, and I kicked one off and caught it in the air.
“Come here,” he said, a goofy smile overtaking his face, and I had to drop my gaze to his outstretched arms, because his face was too excruciating to look at. If the room had been bigger, you could have said I ran to him. I put my hand on his shoulder and lowered myself onto his lap. It was scary, in a way, because for the first time in my life I seemed too big for him, and I knew he had disease in his bones. But I did sit, delicately at first and then letting myself relax onto him, and it was wonderful to feel his body, even if it was shockingly bony in places and caved-in and soft in its middle. When I got fully seated I adjusted my head on Mick’s left shoulder, as close as we could get to our usual position. His buckle poked into my hip. “You’re just the right size,” Mick said. For a while he ran his hands over me, and neither of us spoke.
“It goes like that,” he said, running a finger down my backbone. “I never knew.”
“No one does.” My eyes were closed and I was listening to his heartbeat. “So,” I said, “I finally met Marcus.”
Mick dropped his head and nuzzled me like a horse. “He’s a great friend. He’ll look after you when I’m gone.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Of course I am. Claudia happy being married?”
“She’s fine. We’re all doing fine.” I lifted my head and looked into his eyes, as blue and as aching as ever. “I love my car,” I said. “I’ll always keep my car.”
“Don’t take it out when there’s salt on the roads,” Mick said. “Get the oil changed every two thousand miles.”
I nodded. “I will. I have.”
“Karn says she’s called you.”
“A few times.”
“She’s a good woman, Genie. I hope you two can work things out.”
“We can do that.” What else could I say?
“Good.” Mick poked at my upper arm. “You feel like Eluard. You’ve lost your softness.”
“I’ve been lifting weights.”
“I thought your shoulders looked bigger.” Mick cupped them in his hands. “You’re becoming an Amazon. I’m glad. You can change a tire without me.”
As if he’d ever been around to change my tires. I said, “Remember that accident I had with the pineapple?”
“Oh, gee.” We both started giggling.
“I’m a basketball coach!” I said. “I know when a vagina needs stitches!”
“They called me Mr. Toledo in the emergency room, remember?”
A timid noise came from the door.
“We lived like kings,” Mick said. “Kings. And we didn’t even know it.”
“Kings in the Marietta Marriott.”
“You can have that kingdom anywhere. You can have that kingdom in the back seat of a car.”
There was definitely someone knocking, and I felt a surge of fury at the interruption. I knew that part of me would always be, regarding Mick, ferocious and unrepentant, would understand that an illicit love affair could be the defining relationship of a life, would shout: I want that! even if that was imperfect, was selfish, was morally wrong.
“I’ve got to open it,” said Marcus’s muffled voice, and then there was the creaking of a door. I didn’t care. That Marcus should see me naked seemed like the most trivial thing on earth. Mick and I were in the middle of a kiss. We didn’t kiss enough, I was thinking, and neither of us wanted to stop, because a kiss was always beckoning the future, a kiss held the promise of something more. Still, Mick’s lips were newly thin, uncushioned, and through them I could feel the divisions between his teeth. There isn’t any time for us!
Marcus cleared his throat. “Dr. Toledo, you may want to put your clothes on. They’re starting to ask about you, coach. Bobby says Karn’s getting up to come searching.” Bobby? Mick’s son must be a coconspirator.
“Holy cow,” Mick said, pushing at my legs, and Marcus slipped away out the door.
“Holy cow?” I chided. “Holy cow?”
Mick smiled, a gleam in his eye. “Thank you for coming.”
“Oh, my pleasure.”
“Come on, come on.” The door was opened and closed again, and this time Marcus stayed inside. He bent over to pick up my shirt and skirt, one hand shading his eyes. “We don’t want a scene. Dr. Toledo, you want to go back to your seat or go on home?”
I understood that in this building I’d need steering. “I’ll go home.”
“You’ll miss the accolades,” Mick said. “You’ll miss how great I am.”
“I can imagine.” I zipped up my skirt, snapped my top, slipped my feet into my shoes. I bent over him, put my hands on each side of his face, gave him another kiss. Marcus held the door open as I walked to it, and when I turned to wave goodbye Mick was leaning forward the way he did during a game. He grinned, gave me his minimalist thumbs-up.
I followed Marcus through the twisting corridors, not recognizing a single thing from my trip in except for Tabitha, who stood in an alcove waving and grinning, bobbing her befeathered head. We reached the building lobby, and it startled me to see it was still daylight, and confused me when, holding open the door to outside, another woman was smiling and nodding, a woman I recognized from somewhere—a nurse? an old patient?—but, no, it was Elaine Johnson, the woman from ESPN, and in that moment I was propelled into the parking lot and let go. “Thank you, Marcus,” I said, turning, and Marcus gave me a quick salute. I bobbed through the sea of cars, the flags attached to the window frames looking bizarrely festive, and I felt like a singer borne across a mosh pit, uplifted by arms of collusion and goodwill. My God, I realized, people know. People wish us well. This thought was a consolation, this thought got me all the way home. It was two or three evenings later that I collapsed, rolling and sobbing, onto the cold tiles of my bathroom floor. Ginger stood watching me from the door. She ended up licking the tears off my face and arms, and that was the night we spent curled up on my bath mat, covered by one of my towels.
A MONG THE THOUSANDS of people who died on September 11, there had to have been some who left behind people like me. The nonwidows and nonwidowers, survivors who were not quoted in the paper, who might be whispered about and pointed to, against whom brothers might be posted at funeral home doors. People whose mere existence served to complicate the rightful mourners’ mourning. People who, despite this, had to mourn too. People toward whom the dead indeed had had feelings. I’m not saying we secret lovers were always right. But we were human, and we had our reasons.
“The tribute was fabulous,” Karn said over the phone. “Even Leon Chiswick gave a speech, and Mick says he hardly talks. They had a bunch of Mick’s old players, and all these coaches who talked about how much they respected him, and I wouldn’t have expected this, the best speaker of all was Eluard’s brother, what’s his name? Evander. He used to be a druggie, but he’s straightened out now.”
I said the proper things. I was gracious.
“It was special,” Karn said, her voice dropping, and I pictured her in her kitchen, or maybe the bedroom upstairs, somewhere Mick couldn’t hear her, “and that’s why I wanted to call you, because I should have let you come.”
What answer could I have for this? Part of me was touched by Karn’s kindness, part of me thought, “Good, she finally gets it,” part of me, remembering Mick’s hand on my naked back in the wheelchair, felt guilty, and part of me still wanted to strangle her. “Thank you for saying that,” I managed, and Karn said, “Well, I meant it,” and asked, almost beseechingly, if I minded if she called me again. “If something medical comes up,” she said. “If there’s something I don’t understand.”
OURMONTHLY GROUP BUSI NESS MEETING was held in Howard’s office the first Tuesday in October after office hours. “Oh, good!” Howard said when I walked in that day. “Our monitor nihilist.”
I sat down in the chair nearest the door. Howard distributed the September financial report and started talking. September had been a slow month—not, strictly speaking, our fault, but it showed the importance of maximizing each patient encounter.
JOHN BAREN: COUGHING UP YELLOW STUFF
I pulled my cellphone from my handbag and talked to Mr. Baren, then called in an antibiotic.
M. L. HOPKINS: BACK IN TOWN
“Oh!” I said, “that’s good news!”—then looked up to see Jeremy and Howard eyeing me with irritation. “It’s a patient of mine I haven’t heard from since September eleventh,” I said, dialing my phone. “She sometimes goes to New York on business.” When M.L. answered I said three words: “Where were you?”
She’d been in Switzerland and she’d lost her passport.
“LeeAnn and I worried you could have been in the World Trade Center,” I said, “because no one knew when you were coming back, and . . .”
Howard’s voice was rising. “And Genie, particularly, is always forgetting to order them, so Lindy and I have devised a plan to . . .”
“Excuse me a sec,” I said to M.L. “Lindy’s a receptionist,” I said to Howard, cupping my hand over the receiver.
Howard smiled in a patient way. “And all Genie has to do is put her diagnosis codes on the billing sheet, because Lindy will have a list of the codes that pay for monitoring, and if she spots one on the . . .”
“Lindy’s going to order monitors on my patients?”
“Of course not. You’ll be ordering the tests, by listing a billable diagnosis code.”
“I’ll make an appointment for next week,” M.L. said. “It sounds like you’re busy.”
“I’m glad you’re back safe and sound, M.L.,” I said, and I hung up.
“M.L.?” Howard said. “Is she the one you asked me to unbill for her echo?”
That was back in July, before M.L. went overseas. “You weren’t supposed to read that echo.”
“It was a Wednesday echo,” Howard said. “I’m the Wednesday echo doc.”
“Yes, but that one was supposed to come to me.”
“What else aren’t you billing her for, Dr. Toledo? Are you seeing her out of the goodness of your heart? Do you and she have a ‘rela tionship’?” Howard knitted his eyebrows, tipped his head to one side. “Thursdays?” he said.
MELINDA ROTHMAN: HUSBAND TOM IS DEAD IN BED
Tom Rothman was my marathon-running patient with the used-pipe-cleaner coronary arteries. I reached for my phone.
“Couldn’t this one wait?”
“It’s a death.”
Howard and Jeremy exchanged glances.
“Really,” I said.
Jeremy said, “They’ll probably still be dead in five minutes.”
I called anyway. Mrs. Rothman picked up the phone. Her husband had said he felt tired and headed upstairs to lie down. An hour later when she went upstairs to get a sweater, he was gone.
“Lawyers charge for phone calls,” Howard said.
CLAUDIAHAD SET OUT a buffet in her and Toby’s kitchen, and Toby’s mother was the first one to dig in. It was a Sunday afternoon in early October. The tips of the leaves were turning orange and red and there was, that day, an almost turquoise sky. American flags were still up everywhere, but celebrity gossip and beauty tips were returning to newspapers and TV. Toby had stopped talking about water storage and precious metals and quitting his job.
“So this is fake meat?” Toby’s mother said, peering at the patty on the serving fork.
“Basically,” Toby said. “Don’t worry, it tastes real.”
Toby’s mother plunked the fake meat onto her plate. “What’s this green stuff ?”
“Cole slaw with broccoli,” Claudia said.
“Broccoli, I don’t do broccoli.” Toby’s mother’s hand fluttered above the dish. “Gas. What’s on these vegetables?” she asked, moving down the table. “I see white specks. That’s not garlic, is it?”
“For crying out loud, Kathy,” said Toby’s father.
Claudia said, “I spent a long time on this food. You should at least try it. It’s good food.”
I felt like clapping. The sensation was a surprise. I hadn’t thought I’d feel, even for a moment, happiness again.
“I guess it’s cardiologist food.” Toby’s mother glanced in my direction, spooning out a dab of cole slaw the size of a walnut. “We businesspeople aren’t this healthy.”
“This is food Toby likes,” Claudia said. “He’s a businessperson!” I saw Claudia look toward her husband, as Toby’s mother busied herself with condiments, her back turned elaborately away. Toby lifted two fingers and blew across them, winking at his wife.
KARN SAID,“Our biggest problem with the morphine is the constipation. My God, do we need a bomb?”
Karn said, “Doc Leslie said three to six months, and it’s been seven months!”
And: “You don’t think I’m selfish, do you? He gets worn out even watching a TV show. I can’t have every coach in Division One trooping in to see him!”
And: “Okay, you tell me. Do we really have to worry about anthrax?”
In the middle of October, Karn asked to meet me for coffee. Saturday would work, between two and three. The boys would be in and could look after Mick. Jessica alone with him didn’t work because she wouldn’t take him to the bathroom. Could I drive to Turkman and meet her? “It would mean a lot to me,” Karn said.
We sat at a painted wrought-iron table in a coffee shop tucked into the corner of an antique store. Karn’s face was lined and there were bags under her eyes; her hair was flat on the right side, as if it hadn’t yet recovered from being slept on.
“I’ve been dealing and dealing with this, I’m dealing every day, and when those planes hit I thought, this is it, I’m not going to let this thing fester.” Karn shook her head, not meeting my eyes. “I prayed about it. I asked the Lord what to do and He said Father DeMarco. And I talked to Father DeMarco and he said, Karn, you’ve got to forgive. Now, I’ve done that to Mickey, and he knows. So what I want now is to do it to you.” Her eyes, full of challenge, met mine.
I reached for my mug, blue with pink flowers. “Forgive me?” I envisaged a ritual of some sort, a priest in black and beads of water.
“It’s like Father DeMarco says, forgiveness is an act of . . .”
“Love,” I interrupted, wanting this over with. People sprayed that word around like room deodorizer, a spritz here, a spritz there, how can anyone object and doesn’t it smell nice?
Karn gave a tiny shake of her head.
“God,” I tried again—another word used for deodorizing purposes.
“Imagination,” Karn said, looking straight at me and raising her eyebrows. “Forgiveness is an act of imagination.” She smiled at my obvious surprise. “My friend’s a Jesuit, he doesn’t say what you expect.”
No, this was not what I expected. The high-end, brand-name priest, yes, but not the priest’s concept. I tried to take it in as Karn kept talking. “See? When I forgave Mick I had to imagine what he was thinking, that he had his needs I didn’t meet—we didn’t talk enough, we were never together—and then if I’m forgiving you I have to think about how you felt, and honestly, there you were all alone, this all-alone lonely woman, and he’s this powerful man who’s willing to take his time for you once a week, for a couple hours tops, and maybe you thought that was all you deserved, and . . .”
Thank God there was no one else around to hear her. A sex-starved man, a lonely woman—I gave a shiver at the paltriness of motivation Karn had cooked up for us. “But we were friends too”—were, how did that pop out of me?—“we communicated, we didn’t just . . .” But how could I force this issue, with Mick dying and his wife in front of me, insisting that she understood? “But he was a married man,” I admitted, “and I can see now that we did wrong to you.”
We did wrong to you. You couldn’t acknowledge blame more baldly than that. I could hear my words drop into Karn’s memory bank, plinking like golden coins.
Karn wasn’t the smartest woman. She wasn’t subtle. I thought of Mick’s face lighting up as I walked through the hotel room door. You can have that kingdom anywhere. You can have that kingdom in the . . . I could have run into a wife who could imagine such a thing, who could see the situation in all its glorious, painful ambiguity—but Karn was not that woman, and I had Karn.
Just as well. There were details a forgiver should never know.
“There’s something else I wanted to talk with you about,” Karn said. “I’ve got him in the family room and we have that big TV, but even now all that’s on is anthrax and the hunt for Osama bin Laden and it’s not good to watch that stuff all day, you know? It’s depressing.”
“It is,” I said, relieved.
“Didn’t you tape his games last year? Mick said you taped his games from your TV. I thought maybe you could tape your tapes, and I’ll play them for Mick.”
“I’d be happy to. I’d love to.”
Karn gave me a closed-mouth smile and nodded eagerly, and for a second—with her wayward hair, her lit-up eyes—I could see her as a little girl. She looked a bit like Claudia, that same sweetness. “I’m lucky you’re Mick’s wife,” I said, to my surprise. But that wasn’t enough. “Mick is lucky. You’re a good woman.”
“I try to be. Oh, honey,” Karn said, “I’m lucky you were Mick’s girlfriend.” Karn’s face knotted, as if she couldn’t believe she’d said this, but an instant later she was beaming.
SWEETIE,”Karn said, smoothing the hair back from Mick’s forehead, “your friend Genie’s here.” A farewell visit to the hospice. The furniture was Danish modern. The sliding glass door opened onto a patio with a bird feeder. A pianist in the lobby was playing Broadway tunes. Karn waved me closer. “You can talk to him,” she said. “Doc Leslie says he can hear us.”
I felt like I was moving in a dream, that I was maneuvering from place to place without my feet or legs. Here I was, part of Mick’s forbidden world, and even though there were moments when Mick’s and my world seemed like the real one, in the end the social world reasserted itself, a great columned building gleaming in the sun. But at this moment, in this room, Mick’s worlds were being brought together, and it was amazing—staggering, really—that Karn should permit this, that she should bang her gavel and peer out to the distant, darker corner of the room. Simple human recognition. Something most women in Karn’s position would never have the guts to give. “Thank you,” I said, looking at Karn, but Karn’s eyes slid away, as if the very surface of my face were treacherous footing. She hadn’t called me in the two weeks since our meeting in the coffee shop. Instead Bobby had phoned on her behalf, summoning me here.
“Mick?” I said, and in my imagination his eyelids fluttered, then opened, and I sensed Karn beside me shrinking like someone hit with a movie raygun, but then Mick’s eyes were on me, and I forgot about Karn. “Mickey,” I said, laying my hands on both sides of his face—Winslow’s gesture with Eluard—“Mickey my love.” He said nothing, didn’t move his lips, but lifted up—laboriously, painfully—his right hand to touch mine. We looked at each other for maybe three seconds, the length of a held breath, and then Mick’s eyes lost their touch on my face and his hand loosened and his eyelids closed. Goodbye. That was the way I’d imagined it.
Instead at the word “Mick,” his eyes stayed closed. Instead I took his fingers, cool and mottled. “Mick? Mick?”
“He was awake last night,” Karn said. She looked around to her daughter and sons for confirmation. Eric and Jessica were huddled sullenly in the corner, but Bobby, beside his mother, was looking at me eagerly, as if I were a prize fish that he’d landed.
“He talked to us last night,” Bobby said. “We asked him if he wanted to see you and he nodded.”
Mick never responded. Other people might say he had, but I was a doctor and I didn’t imagine things. I didn’t stay long. “Thank you,” I said, hugging Karn at the door.
I suspect that, to people attending the funeral, the remarkable moment was when they first saw Karn and me together, when they looked out at the limousine or glanced up the aisle or craned their heads from their spot in the condolence line. For me, the surprise was at the door of Mick’s room at hospice, when Karn and I embraced.
Odd that Karn had asked me for the television tapes to Mickey’s games. The athletic director could have gotten her those tapes, or the Turkman TV station, or Frederick Flitt’s parents, or any number of local fans. She really didn’t need those tapes from me. Her request for them had been a sort of gift, a way she could involve me in Mick’s care.
People have a hard time describing their chest pain. It aches, it hurts, it’s heavy, it’s pressure, I can’t breathe right, it’s like indigestion, it’s like I’m scared about something, I can’t describe it but I know that it’s not right. So many descriptions converging on one cause, a lack of circulation to a section of the heart. You look at a cow’s heart (structurally almost identical to a human’s) and the arteries look like rivers seen from the air. You can take out your scalpel and cut into the cow heart and discover its grain and crossgrain; you recognize that a heart is nothing, in its essence, but a chambered hunk of meat. Yet it’s the motor of our existence, the thing that we can’t live without, and many of its aches are warnings that it’s dying.
I’ve never had chest pain, not a twinge. I often wonder, listening to my patients, what heart pain would feel like for me, if my warnings (if I ever get them) will be heavy or ones I barely feel. I don’t know. I do know that for months before I visited Mick at hospice I was constricted and tense, I couldn’t fill my lungs deeply, I felt like something deep in me was wrong.
There’s a cath lab moment, a gorgeous moment, when the dye squirts down a newly opened vessel and what has been a thread is now the fatness of a pencil. Such joy in that opening, a sense of cure, of hope. I felt—Karn’s arms around me, the tapes on my mind—as if I were experiencing that feeling in my own body, that Karn had opened something up for me.
I can’t say that everything after was easy, but nothing was terribly hard.
