The next day is April 1. A tornado passes through the town where the clinic is. Shingles come off roofs, wild branches whirl in streets. All of the operating rooms are in the basement, so the surgery continues. This time, the surgeon and his assistants cut open a different section of Louise’s skull, a bit higher, but still in the suboccipital part, and there they see the cavernous angioma, oozing. They remove the dark ball of tangled veins and save it to show to the family, as if for proof. They sew and staple her skull back together and wrap it tight. They unscrew her head from the vise that held her head straight, face down, like a metal massage chair.
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When Louise is brought to a recovery room, Janet spends most of her time sitting by Louise’s bed, watching the nurses. They think they are so great, being loud with their fast walking and personalized scrubs with prints of soccer balls or lipstick kisses. But the nurses don’t seem to be around when Janet has a question—when Janet sticks her head out of Louise’s recovery room and looks down the hallway, they are nowhere in sight. Janet wants to ask them:
When will my daughter feel like eating?
When will she feel like keeping her eyes open?
When will she want to talk on the phone again to that imbecile, Claude?
When will she look like herself again, a cute girl with friends, a job, a nice-sized life, instead of this bandaged person who just lies there?
Louise’s surgeon enters the room. Janet stands up and grins. So handsome, she thinks. She likes his trimmed brown beard and short curly hair. She knows all his outfits by now: his white doctor’s coat over khakis; his blue wool suit with a pocket square; his blue-green operating outfit, a mask hanging around his neck.
The surgeon sits close to Louise and holds her hand. She cannot speak yet. Only one of her eyes is open. He tells Louise how well she did, how brave she was. A perfect patient, he says.
Janet’s main job is to change the ice packs behind Louise’s lower skull. It is time to change them again. She hurries down the hall to the ice machine and fills her shirtfront with more cubes. She empties the old ice in the bathroom sink and seals the new cubes in the plastic. The surgeon looks at her over his mask and smiles.
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Tom has arranged that he and Michael will alternate meals with the parents. He will eat with Warner and Elizabeth one day, and Michael will eat with Janet. No one should ever have to eat alone.
Tom runs errands for everyone. He goes to the grocery store and brings back pretzels and fruit. He takes Janet to shops that sell lilac hand lotion and pretty notebooks, which she buys for Louise. He drives Warner to the drugstore to get sleeping pills, and then back to the same store to return them. Tom will give anyone a lift anywhere. Once, he gives a night nurse a ride home because her car won’t start. Often, Tom sits with Louise, rubbing her cold feet for hours.