We had Thanksgiving dinner at our house in 2000 and invited a mixed group of friends and family, including Bill’s brother, Clint, and cousin Jeff and his wife Patti. Their daughter, Amber, had gone to her boyfriend’s family for dinner and planned to join us for dessert.
“I can’t wait for you to see her,” Patti said to me. “She’s so happy.” That past June, Bill and Clint and I had sat next to Jeff and Patti in the audience as Amber walked the stage at her high school graduation. Her thick dark hair swung as she turned and looked toward the audience, trying find us in the crowd. We all waved.
Bill and I were proud to have been on the small invite list to be there that day with Jeff and Patti. Even though Amber wasn’t more than five foot three, she looked tall in that flat board cap. “There’s your girl,” I’d said to Patti. She and Jeff had big grins and teary eyes. Proud and letting go at the same time.
Amber was nineteen now and had begun her first year of college. She was their only child.
Patti looked at her watch. “Maybe their dinner went late.”
Bill took the pumpkin pies out of the oven. We finished washing up the dishes. Patti pulled back the cuff of her sweater and touched her watch again. She went to the kitchen window. It was getting dark. Rain came down steadily and the street was littered with leaves. After another watch check, Patti looked at her husband and said, “She should be here by now.”
I wanted Amber and her boyfriend to hurry up and get here so we could start in on the pumpkin pies while they were still warm.
“She’ll be here,” I said. I thought Patti worried too much about Amber. “Let’s play.”
We started a game of charades, and pretty soon everyone was into the loud shouts and arm waving that went with it. I forgot the time and the pies and that we were waiting for more guests.
The phone rang, and Bill stepped out of the room to get it. We kept yelling and laughing and shouting out wrong answers.
I didn’t even notice when Bill came back in and gave the phone to Jeff. Bill yelled out, “Quiet,” to the rest of us. Shushed us again when we didn’t all stop. His eyes had turned to the glassy look he gets when something is wrong.
I went to him. “What?” I said.
He shook his head once.
Jeff listened. He said, “Okay. Okay.” He hung up. “Amber was in an accident.” His whole body still. “It’s bad.” Like giving a report. “Head injury.” Holding himself back from the facts so they couldn’t sink any deeper than his mouth.
Patti went down to floor, slow. Knees, hands, butt, like bones pulled down two by two. “No. No. No.” Her voice rose up with each no.
I went to her, went down on my knees. Put my arms around her. “We don’t know,” I said. “We don’t know anything yet.” I helped her get her boots on.
Amber’s boyfriend was driving his dad’s Mustang that stormy night. The lightweight car slid and spun into the oncoming lane, right in front of a full-size van. Amber’s side of the car was hit straight on. T-boned, I heard Bill tell someone later, another firefighter who knew what that meant.
Bill drove Jeff and Patti to the hospital. I helped the rest of our guests get their coats and said yes to each one when they said, “Call us when you know anything.” Then Clint and I went to the hospital too. A nurse directed us to a private waiting area, a small room with two couches and two chairs and a door that shut, which meant it was serious. Patti’s sister was on the way with her husband. I sat down next to Bill and across from Jeff. Bill’s eyes still had that drawn-back glaze; his face was pale. I took his hand. The couches were so close that my knees brushed against Jeff’s knees.
The news was bad from the start, and it didn’t get any better. Pretty much the same news delivered over the hours by a nurse, a doctor, a social worker, a nurse again. Brain injury, internal bleeding. Trying to stop the bleeding inside her long enough to get her in for a brain scan to see if her brain was still alive.
After the nurse left the first time, Patti said, “If she’s going to die, I want her organs donated.” Preparing herself for the worst. Hours went by.
When the emergency team stopped the bleeding, they let Jeff and Patti go see Amber before they took her for the brain scan. “Do you want to come too?” Patti asked. Bill said no. I said no. It was too private. A thing only for a parent.
While they were gone, Bill and I walked out of the room, circled the bigger waiting area. People reading magazines, a big man asleep on a sofa, his hands pressed together and folded under his cheek. We didn’t talk, we made that circle a few times and went back in to our little room.
When they came back, Patti said, “I don’t care if she’s paralyzed, I don’t care if she’s in a coma for the rest of her life. I want her to come home. We’ll take care of her.” Bargaining for better news.
The social worker said it would be hours before they knew anything. Jeff and Patti pushed us to go home. “We’ll need you later,” Patti said.
Bill and I hardly said a word as we drove on the wet streets, empty except for their white stripes, stoplights: yellow, red, green. It was a few hours past midnight. The rain had stopped. Tiny bits of hope, like shiny stars, drew me. That something would change in the night. The light went out of them quick. Knowing it wouldn’t. The social worker, the nurse and doctors, they’d cleared the way, hour by hour taking away that hope. I asked Bill, “Is it possible she could come through this?”
“No.” He came to a full stop at the corner. Only our car, the red light, the dark streets. “I talked to one of the paramedics who was on the scene.” He used the turn signal. Click. Click. “Said she was brain dead.” Click. Click. “The hospital has to do all this testing. So there’re no questions later.”
He turned onto the next street. Amber was a girl we loved, but seeing children badly injured, parents facing the first moments of grief, this wasn’t new to Bill. In his job, most of the calls were medical emergencies.
He took his hand off the steering wheel and put it on my knee. These were things I relied on him for. To stay calm. To tell me the truth.
At home, we undressed and got in bed. We lay on our backs. I thought maybe I should be crying, sick to my stomach, barely able to breathe. But my breath still came.
We held hands under the covers, in and out of a haze of sleep and remembering. Each time one of us rose up from that haze, we tightened our grip.
There was this in me: It wasn’t us. We didn’t have to go through this. We were a step back. In the same way a woman says, “You can’t know what it’s like to have a child,” she can say, “You can’t know what it is like to lose one.” I didn’t want to know.
I turned on my side and looked at the outline of Bill’s face. Here was the relief that we were not parents. I curled myself around it. That night, the final wanting for a child took its last steps out of me. In its absence was a hollow.
The phone rang at seven. Jeff saying to come back. They were going to take her off life support. Come say goodbye.
Amber’s hospital room was full of white. White walls, white floor, white sheets, silver bed rails and heart-monitor stand. Green jagged line of her heartbeat on the black screen.
We gathered around the bed: Jeff and Patti, Patti’s sister and her husband, Jeff’s sister and her daughter, Bill and me, and Clint.
They’d cleaned Amber up, but flecks of dried blood were on her arm, her shoulder. She didn’t look like herself. The swelling. But her dark hair, her long fingers, her mouth. These I knew. When it was my turn to say goodbye, I moved closer. I touched her hand. I wanted to say the right thing. Not for her. For Patti. For Jeff.
“I love you, Amber,” I said. “Everyone’s here with you.” Nothing seemed right to say.
Bill was next to me. “We’ll take care of your mom and dad.” He cupped his hand on Amber’s arm, his skin becoming the skin of an older man, hers pale and perfect.
This ending didn’t seem real. Even when the nurse showed Jeff where to turn off the switch. Even when Patti nodded. Even when Amber’s heart took so long to stop. That jagged line of her heart beating, beating, beating. And then slower and slower, the flat lines and long pauses between. The last one that we didn’t know was the last until none came after.
The room was quiet. Jeff and Patti held each other. They were losing their only child. They were losing their family. “She’s all we have,” Jeff said.
A child is what makes a family. Bill and I, we were a couple. That morning, in that hospital room, with that ending, this was all I wanted us to be.