11
Good Nightings for Christmas
I would like to step out of my heart & go walking beneath the enormous sky.
—RAINIER MARIA RILKE
ON Christmas morning, it was snowing again. Each flake struck terror into Isadora’s heart, because the snow, in Rocky Ridge, meant isolation. Isadora had invited an ill-assorted group of lonely friends and acquaintances to spend Christmas with her and Kevin and Mandy, but they were not due to come until three o‘clock, and by then the roads might be impassible.
It was seven when Mandy pounded on Isadora’s door, waking her and Kevin and summoning them out of bed to confront the presents beneath the tree.
Kevin groaned and rolled over in the waterbed. It was not his child who summoned, after all, and Isadora thought it just as well to let him sleep while she opened Mandy’s presents alone with her.
“Go back to sleep, darling,” she said to Kevin. “I’ll wake you at a more civilized hour.”
He seemed happy enough to do this, so she put on a warm bathrobe and followed Mandy out to the tree, where a cornucopia of gifts awaited her. (Oh, how we indulge our children that first Christmas after a separation, hoping to make up with material possessions for the one gift that they desire most and that we cannot give them—two parents to open presents with.) Of the many things one takes for granted in a marriage, a partner to share the present-ritual with seems fairly trifling—until it is taken away.
Isadora and Mandy sat beneath the tree and began searching for boxes bearing Mandy’s name. Mandy was happy enough to tear off the paper and embrace each new stuffed animal, each toy, each game—but Isadora was totally desolate. All she could do was remember back to Christmases past. She seemed incapable of centering herself in the present moment and enjoying what was going on. She could not stop thinking that Mandy was only three and already half fatherless. A man the little one could barely tolerate was sleeping in the waterbed, not even getting up to see her glowing face as she pillaged her presents.
Isadora put on a record of Christmas carols, as if that would infuse cheer into the cheerless scene. She put it on low so that Kevin would not be awakened. She and Mandy sang along erratically as they searched through the presents, and Isadora was charmed by Mandy’s interpretations of the lyrics. “Good nightings we bring to you and your friends,” she sang tunelessly, “good nightings for Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
At least I have Mandy, Isadora thought—that should be a great comfort to me. And of course it was. If Mandy were to be taken from her, she would have nothing to live for. But still, something precious had been lost: the ability to share Mandy with the one person in the world whose investment in her was as great as her own. It was an immense loss and Isadora did not yet know what gains would come to replace it, if any.
The party that afternoon was a sad affair. Lola Birk Harvey turned up in her red Cherokee, with husband, Bruce, and lover Errol Dickinson, the Rhinestone Cowboy. What a curious—if unwitting—ménage à trois they made. Sylvia Sydenheim-Rabinowitz came escorted by son Roland. Isadora’s parents also turned up, as did her sister Chloe, with kids in tow. Other than that there were a variety of lost souls: one eccentric woman writer who lived in Ridgefield with seventeen stray dogs and twelve cats (the dogs were in a kennel; the cats roamed the house); an elderly gentleman writer who did books on lexicography and was definitely a little weird; a lesbian couple in their seventies who bred borzois; the widow of a famous playwright; the widow of a famous actor; the widow of a famous producer; the widow of a famous poet. Oh, Connecticut was a great state for widows. Isadora felt a little like one herself. This odd assortment of people embraced, unwrapped presents, and got roaring drunk at once—as if to block out the possibility that they’d all be snowed in together as if in some venerable Agatha Christie melodrama. Were they due to be murdered one by one? The afternoon had that feel about it. Several of the people there had slept with other people there—though Isadora was the only one who knew it (save for Lola Harvey, who knew nearly as much as Isadora and was hugely titillated by it). Lola was glowing, animated, turned on. She loved the fact that she and Isadora shared Errol and that she was there with her husband while Isadora was there with her old school friend. But Errol, what did Errol think? Errol was so stoned .his unmatched eyes were glazed, and Roland was equally stoned. All of these people—who were connected only by Isadora—milled around in her living room and made merry. They simulated family feeling. They did a pantomime of yuletide joy—or did Isadora only feel that way because she was so depressed? Perhaps the others were having a splendid time.
Isadora watched Bruce Harvey make small talk with Errol Dickinson. Never had two men less in common. And more! Bruce was a venture-capitalist-and Errol Dickinson was a cocksman, disc jockey, and doper. Bruce knew everything about Silicon Valley—and Errol knew everything about Bruce’s wife’s valley. What on earth could they be talking about?
Isadora wandered over to them.
“Hello, lovely lady,” Errol said.
“Hello, gorgeous,” said Bruce.
“We were just saying this is the best Christmas ever,” Errol said.
Well, that just went to show how little Isadora knew about anything. Errol was thrilled to be invited to Isadora’s house at normal hours (rather than sneaked in and out in the dead of night). He didn’t even notice that two of her other boyfriends were present. Also, he had adored Mandy from afar and was thrilled to be able to finally meet her.
Isadora tried to perk herself up and catch some of the good mood.
“I’m glad you’re having fun, Errol,” she said to him.
“It’s a blast,” he said, pinwheel-eyed.
She waved to Kevin, who sat on the couch sipping a martini and staring off into space. Kevin was a party observer, a life observer. He liked to watch the passing scene. He was one of history’s spectators, rather than one of its participants. He would have watched at Waterloo, at Bull Run, at the Bay of Pigs. He would have watched while Rome fell, while London was blitzed, while the Bomb was detonated at Hiroshima. Kevin was comforting to have around, like a teddy bear, yet he didn’t seem entirely alive.
Mandy was the opposite—a pistol. She seemed to have been born (as Isadora’s mother had also said of her) with an extra shot of adrenaline. She was running around like a maniac, gathering up the presents people had brought, stuffing herself on all the goodies from the buffet, grabbing at candy canes, jelly beans, and chocolates. There was a sort of frenzied quality to her running, more than just the usual three-year-old-at-Christmastime frenzy. Isadora had the feeling that her daughter spent too much time around adults, that she was too much the showpiece, the clever child, the little adult. Somehow she felt it not fair to Mandy. She had been forced to grow up too soon. Isadora herself had grown up as the second of four sisters, wedged in among siblings, always having to fight for her bit of attention, but she had never been lonely. Mandy, for all the adults paying her court, seemed lonely and Isadora didn’t quite know what to do about it. Ever since she and Josh had separated, she had longed for another baby, longed for it all the more since her time to have babies was growing short. But who would be the father of her fantasy baby? Pinwheel-eyed Errol? Calm, semicatatonic Kevin? Angry, passive-aggressive Josh, who was in Vegas with Ms. Emanon? Well—why not just have a baby and the father be damned? She was likely to wind up raising it alone anyway. Maybe she would have another baby when things settled down a bit, when she calmed down, when she got back to work. Maybe she would even write the Papa novel and have a baby at the same time—have a little boy that she could name after her grandfather. There was a thought: write the baby and have the book at the same time.
Suddenly, there was a bloodcurdling scream from the dining room.
It was Mandy. Isadora’s heart turned over. Her stomach went all gooey with terror. She ran into the dining room to see her screaming three-year-old sprawled out on the floor over a broken plate which had just a little while ago been full of ice cream. Now it was full of blood.
Mandy’s face was red and contorted with pain.
“She ran into the dining room carrying the plate of ice cream and she tripped and cut her finger on the plate,” said Roland.
“Let’s look at it,” he said.
Mandy resisted, but he and Isadora were able to look at her right hand, which spurted blood like a diminutive geyser. The little finger had been sliced open below the first joint and was gaping right down to the bone. The little white and tender place that gleamed inside the wound found a responsive gleam inside Isadora’s heart.
“Oh god,” Isadora said, gathering up the screaming child. “Dear, dear god.”
“Can we borrow the Cherokee?” she yelled to Lola and Bruce.
“Of course,” they yelled back. “What happened?” Everyone rushed over to see.
Not answering, she wrapped the screaming Mandy in a blanket, grabbed her coat, and headed out the door.
“I’ll drive,” Errol insisted, throwing on his cowboy hat and long silk scarf.
“You’re too stoned,” Isadora protested.
“I’m fine, lady,” said Errol, bounding out through the snow and taking the wheel.
Roland followed, insisting that he, as a medical student, knew what was to be done. The stoned leading the stoned, Isadora thought. But there was not a moment to spare and Errol was already helping Isadora into the Cherokee with the screaming Mandy.
Roland had brought a clean white dish towel to wrap loosely around Mandy’s finger.
“What about a tourniquet?” Isadora asked in a panic.
“A tourniquet can damage tissue,” Roland said. “Just hold this towel on loosely.”
“Can you drive?” Isadora demanded of Errol.
“Absolutely,” he insisted. Had he risen to the occasion and overcome his dope-stupor for Mandy? He adored the little girl, and being allowed to be near her had made his Christmas. Isadora trusted to the gods that they knew what they were doing in sending her these couriers.
Her parents and Kevin had just gotten wind of the accident and came running out in the snow to see what was the matter.
“We’re off to the emergency room at Norwalk Hospital,” Isadora said. “Meet us there. We haven’t a second to lose.”
It was still snowing; large crystalline flakes were fluttering down from a pinkish sky. The driveway was thick with snow and icy underneath. Mandy was screaming in terror. Blood flowed everywhere.
Isadora sat between Errol and Roland with the shrieking child on her lap.
“Don’t worry,” Roland said. “They have great microsurgery techniques nowadays. If we can only get there in time, I’m sure we can save the finger.”
But Isadora was not to be so easily comforted. She prayed until she thought her brains would break with the effort of concentration. She prayed for passable roads and time to get Mandy’s finger back together. She could not help remembering a similar ride with Chekarf and how it had come out. She prayed. She prayed.
Errol started up the driveway, got to the icy curve, and spun his wheels uselessly in the snow. Then he backed up, started again, and spun his wheels again. Then, on the third try, he gained some momentum and roared up the driveway, skidding on the icy patches under the snow.
They reached the top of Serpentine Hill Road, made a very skiddy turn, went slowly down the hill (skidding all the way). Then they plowed through deep snow all the way to I-95.
The child was still shaking with fear and the dish towel was absolutely soaked with blood by the time they got to the highway. Isadora’s pale-pink silk shirt was soaked with blood; so were her pink satin sandals. The blood was sticky between her toes, and the feel of it made her think of Jacqueline Kennedy in Dallas wearing pink and covered with her husband’s blood. Except that Isadora was covered with her child’s blood—which was rather like being covered with blood from her own body. Better to have severed her own finger than to see Mandy’s almost severed. It was as if she herself were bleeding and screaming in that car.
Despite the deep snow, Errol ran all the tolls on I-95, hoping to pick up a police escort to get them to the hospital. Isadora remembered Josh having done the same when Mandy was about to be born, but this time, too, there was not a single policeman to be seen.
The emergency room on Christmas night was no pretty sight. There was a young black man lying on a litter moaning. He seemed to have been knifed in several places, and he was bleeding profusely. Children wandered about forlornly as if they had lost their parents. The benches were full of the bruised, the beaten, the wounded. From the look of the emergency room, you would not think that Christ’s birthday was being celebrated. The Prince of Peace seemed to celebrate his coming into the mortal coil with blood, gore, and human dissension. But Isadora didn’t give a damn about all these other people. She only cared about her daughter and her daughter’s finger. Usually accustomed to being very laid back and leery of asking for special favors, she strode into the emergency room, announced her name to the head nurse, and asked for a plastic surgeon to see her daughter.
The child was still shaking and sobbing. She held the wounded hand under its bloody towel as if it were an alien object with which she could not identify.
“My name is Isadora Wing,” Isadora said, “and this is my daughter, Mandy. She has sliced open her little finger on her right hand.”
The head emergency-room nurse, a pretty, curly-haired fortyish woman, said firmly but nicely, “I know who you are. I read all your books. Have a seat and we’ll send a pediatric medic.”
“I think we should send for a plastic surgeon right away,” Isadora said, feeling like the Jewish mother of the Western world.
“I’ll see if Dr. Settecampo is in the house,” the nurse said. “But please, go into that room and wait for the medic. And try not to worry so.” She put her hand on Isadora’s comfortingly. Then she indicated a small consulting room where Isadora could take her shaking child.
Errol was out parking the car, and Roland had taken command of the paperwork and was busily filling out forms. He came into the consulting room to get Isadora’s health-insurance card. Isadora was utterly amazed to see him functioning with such alacrity under the circumstances. Either he was immune to all the dope he smoked or he had suddenly snapped into clarity because of the gravity of the circumstances.
“Can she bend her finger?” Roland asked.
“She won’t let me near it.” said Isadora, who couldn’t bear the sight of her child’s rended flesh.
“Make her try to bend it,” Roland said. “They’re going to ask you if she has any mobility in the joint.”
“I’ll try,” Isadora said. “Listen, could you try to reach Josh after you make out the forms? Call his parents or his sister for it—they’re in the book. I don’t have a number for him.”
“Right,” said Roland, “though the shit doesn’t deserve it.” He walked out of the room.
Isadora turned to her terrified child.
“Mandy, honey,” she said, taking off the blood-soaked towel, and holding back a shudder at the sight of the finger, “try to bend your finger.”
“I can‘t! I can’t,” Mandy screamed. She couldn’t bear to look at the finger either. She turned her face away.
“You must,” Isadora said, “you must.”
“I can‘t, Mama!”
A thousand thoughts raced through Isadora’s head. Her daughter was going to lose a finger to the divorce—or even her life, as Chekarf had. Josh would have a change of heart when he realized what had happened in his absence and come back so that never again would Mandy’s flesh be jeopardized. Mandy was going to refuse to cooperate with the doctors and lose not only her finger but the whole hand because of her stubbornness and lack of discipline. Isadora thought of the scene in Sophie’s Choice where Sophie sacrifices her daughter. She thought of Iphigenia sacrificed by Agamemnon for a fair wind. She thought of all the little girls, maidens, young mothers, sacrificed, raped, and maimed throughout history because of the vanity of fathers—fathers who did not bear them, did not nurse them, but who presumed to decide their fates—even in absentia. She thought of the long line of bleeding women, of which her daughter was merely the latest. And then she bid herself shut up. She willed all the gloomy, pessimistic thoughts in her head to stop, and she attended to the business of trying to get Mandy to bend her finger—and of trying to get herself to look at the process. Never had she prayed so ceaselessly in her life.
The pediatric medic arrived. He was a sweet young man named Bruce with a jet-black handlebar mustache and very gentle manners.
“What happened to you?” he asked Mandy.
“Don’t touch!” she yelled.
“I’m not going to touch your hand,” he said. “I just want to look at it.”
“No!” screamed Mandy.
“Honey—bend your finger for me, will you?”
“No!” screamed Mandy.
He presented a tongue depressor to the screaming child and forced her fingers around it as the wound bled still more profusely.
“Now, are you going to bend that hand?”
Mandy cooperated at last. Isadora looked away, wishing she could undo this whole chain of events. If only it were not Christmas, not snowing, not the worst year of her life. Stop it, she said to herself. Grow up. Think of all the worse things people have had to endure. And then an amazing thing happened. As she took command of herself, grew if not calm, then at least calmer, her mood was communicated to her child—as if they were still connected. Mandy was allowing the medic to look at her finger. She had almost stopped crying. The little mouth still blubbered, the little eyes were still red and bleary, but Mandy, frightened as she was, was cooperating.
The whole ritual had to be repeated, of course, when the plastic surgeon arrived. And then there were tough decisions to be made.
Dr. Settecampo was the plastic surgeon she had called for. He was brusque, businesslike, but not unsympathetic. He informed Isadora that he could sew the hand right up—not knowing whether the tendons and nerves had been severed—or he could perform exploratory surgery. To do that he would have to put Mandy out and take her to the O.R.
“When did she last eat?” he asked.
“All day long,” Isadora said.
“Then we’ll have to wait at least six hours for her digestive tract to clear—or she might throw up and aspirate the vomit.”
“Is it safe?” Isadora asked.
“Anything requiring anesthesia involves risk,” the doctor said.
“And if we don’t do the exploratory surgery?”
“Then the finger may regenerate—but if the tendons are cut, she’ll probably never have mobility in the joint again.”
“Never? Even though she’s so young?”
“Even in a very young child, tendons don’t always regenerate. Look—do you want to talk to the anesthesiologist before you make a decision?”
“I guess so,” Isadora said.
The anesthesiologist was brought and he duly outlined the risks of anesthesia for a young child. They would have to wait until Mandy had digested her food. They would have to hope that she wasn’t allergic to anesthesia—a terrifying prospect for the mother of an only daughter, of any daughter, any child.
Isadora wished with all her heart that Josh were there. She was furious at him. She felt abandoned, adrift, betrayed—but he was, after all, Mandy’s father and he should have had a part in the decision. Since she didn’t know where to reach him, she bit the bullet and took the decision herself.
“We’ll do the surgery,” she told both doctors. “I want Mandy to have the use of her right hand.”
In the back of her head were fears of all sorts—death by anesthesia, death by vomit, death by medical negligence. Isadora feared hospitals as much as the next sane person. She knew a hospital could kill you by mistake and then just say, “Sorry—we goofed.” But she wasn’t going to let her fears deprive Mandy of a functioning right hand. Life is risk, she thought. Motherhood is risk too. And since Mandy isn’t yet old enough to take responsibility for the risk, I have to—whatever the consequences for us both.
The decision having been made, the doctors departed. Mandy was transferred to the pediatric ward and provided with a temporary bandage and an angelic white gown. (The very thought of it as angelic made Isadora shiver. Engelhemd, they call this sort of hospital shirt in German, and the term never fails to evoke images of death and transfiguration). The little girl was somewhat calmer now, but still basically terrified. Roland and Errol appeared with books and toys from the playroom and did their best to amuse her. Errol even offered to go back to the house and call for Mandy’s own toys, but by then Isadora’s parents and Kevin had arrived, bringing armloads of Mandy’s familiar things, so it wasn’t really necessary.
As they waited for the hours to drag by and for Mandy to digest her food, Isadora tried to explain to her daughter what was going to happen to her. She was going to be put to sleep and her finger was going to be sewn up. Did she understand?
“Will you be with me, Mama?”
This was the hardest question of all.
“No,” Isadora said. “Mommies aren’t allowed in the operating room.”
Mandy’s lip trembled. Her eyes looked fearful enough to break your heart.
“You’ll be asleep, darling,” Isadora said. “You won’t feel a thing —and when you wake up, Mommy will be right there.”
“And Daddy?” Mandy asked. “Will Daddy be there?”
“I know he’d like to be here and if I can reach him, he’ll come right away.”
“Daddy will be here?”
“I don’t know, darling,” Isadora said. “I can’t make promises for Daddy—but I know he wants to be here. And I know he loves you very much.”
“Oh,” said Mandy, her lip trembling.
Six hours later, Isadora stood and watched as her little girl was strapped to a litter, given sedation, gowned, capped, and wheeled down the long hospital corridors, and finally taken through the double doors of the operating room.
Mandy would have to do this one alone, just as Isadora had had to make her decision without Josh. Born alone, we die alone, and whatever companionship and love we get between those two events is pure luck, but not necessarily our birthright. Aloneness is our only birthright. With any determination we can turn aloneness into independence—but nobody guaranteed us love.
As Isadora watched the tiny figure of her child wheeled into the. huge, menacing operating room, she thought: Go, little girl, and Goddess bless. Motherhood is an endless process of letting go. So is life.
The operation took seemingly forever. Isadora, her mother, her father, Roland, Errol, and Kevin, waited in the playroom of the pediatric ward, making strained conversation. What could Errol and Roland and Kevin talk about, after all? The only thing they had in common was Isadora’s body. In the past, this would have embarrassed Isadora, but now it seemed utterly inconsequential. Sex seemed inconsequential. Everything seemed inconsequential except Mandy’s hand, Mandy’s destiny.
The men turned to talk of football; Isadora turned to her mother.
“Do you want to take a walk?” Isadora asked her mother.
“Yes, darling. Maybe we can get some coffee.”
Well, it was something to do to pass the time. And fortunately, the cafeteria was far enough away from the pediatric ward to make the procuring of coffee a major effort. Isadora and her mother had to walk down a long corridor, take an elevator to the basement, follow red lines on the floor which threaded their way from one wing to another, from old building into new building, from new building into an annex, and so on. When they got to the cafeteria, it was closed. Good. The quest would take even longer.
They walked and walked, retracing their steps, now seeking another cafeteria, an automated one promised by an orderly (who seemed in their state of heightened awareness to be a sort of messenger of the gods). The red line on the floor seemed to be Mandy’s destiny and Isadora and her mother seemed to be tracing it—almost as if they were the Fates, weaving the web of a mortal’s future. Isadora’s awareness was so sharp, so cosmic that she felt almost stoned.
“I remember the night you were born,” Isadora’s mother dreamily said, preparing to retell an oft-retold tale.
“Yes—what time was I born?” Isadora asked. (This was a sore point between them, since Isadora frequently received offers to have her astrological chart done by willing astrologers who read her books—but since her mother could not remember the hour of her birth, Isadora could never give them adequate information for a detailed horoscope).
“It was during the war,” Isadora’s mother said. “How should I remember the time?”
“What does the war have to do with it?”
Isadora’s mother looked cross—as if Isadora ought to know that the war had everything to do with it. (Oh, the gap between generations! Isadora would never quite know the feel of the Second World War the way her mother knew it, nor had her mother ever quite known the feel of the First World War the way her father, Isadora’s grandfather, had known it; nor would either of them ever truly know what Mandy knew of her moment in history—starting with now, her lonely experience in the O.R., her first major war.) .
“Well, of course the war had everything to do with it,” Isadora’s mother said. “In the first place, there were no doctors, only nurses —which was fine with me. I could have delivered you in a half-hour, I was that dilated—and you were a second child—but the nurse was afraid that I’d sue the doctor if I knew he wasn’t there for the delivery, so right after the baby slid out—after you slid out, she slapped an ether mask over my face to try to cover up for the doctor’s not being there. Well-I was livid. I was enraged! You were already born, of course, and I wanted to hold you. So I bit the nurse’s hand ... Too late. I heard her scream as I went out cold...”
They had found the automated cafeteria. It was brightly lit with bluish fluorescent lights which flickered as in some Technicolor nightmare. Pictures of crullers, donuts, cups of coffee, chicken soup, hot cocoa with marshmallows were displayed on the vending machines as in some Pop Art fantasy. The whole place was beautiful, Isadora thought—beautiful in a grotesque sort of way.
Isadora and her mother busied themselves with making change at the change machine, with pressing buttons for extra cream, extra strong, extra sweet. Going through this mechanized feeding ritual (always with the hovering awareness that Mandy’s fate hung in the balance upstairs), Isadora was reminded of some of the most visceral memories of her early childhood. They all dealt with food, of course. Patriotism, says Lin Yutang, is the memory of foods eaten in childhood. Food evokes our strongest loyalty.
Isadora remembered running through the underground arcade at Rockefeller Center when she was just a tiny child, no bigger than Mandy—tall enough to see the world as a forest of legs, a forest of kneecaps, but too short to see the faces that belonged to these legs and knees. She is holding an adult hand and running as fast as her baby legs can go. She is afraid of losing that hand and being irretrievably lost in the bowels of the earth like some baby Persephone, erring irredeemably in letting go of Demeter’s hand. She is running, running, following an adult stride belonging, of course, to her mother (who would never willfully lose her—or would she?), when all at once a smell of halcyon sweetness overtakes her, overtakes her nostrils, her tonsils, even, it seems, her eyes—and then a large hand comes down from above and pops a piece of gooey chocolate fudge into her mouth: fresh-made fudge from some underground candy stand, and she receives the fudge sacramentally from her mother’s (the Mother Goddess‘) hand.
Now it is thirty-six years later and they are exactly the same height. Goddess and disciple grown into equals. They are buying coffee together to fill the time until they hear the fate of their little offspring—the mutal sprout on the tree of both their lives—Amanda.
Isadora gulps her coffee, burns her tongue, then puts down her cup on one of the tables. She embraces her mother tightly.
“Thank you,” she says, “for biting the nurse’s hand. Thank you for bearing me. Thank you for everything, everything.”
She has said the one thing most mothers never hear, most daughters never say—because blessings embarrass us, while curses always come readily to our lips.
Isadora’s mother is touched—yet she draws away, abashed by her own surfeit of emotion—and her daughter’s.
“Well—” she says huffily, “what did you expect me to do?”
Mission accomplished, they go back upstairs to the playroom in the pediatric ward and find the men still discussing football.
“Has the doctor come out yet?” Isadora asks.
“Not yet,” says her father.
“Not yet,” says Roland.
“No,” says Kevin.
“Soon,” says Errol.
They sit and wait.
Isadora thinks of Mandy, her little life so new, yet also so firmly rooted in her, in everyone around her. If Mandy were to be taken away, nothing would ever restore Isadora’s will to live. Art would not compensate. Religion would not compensate. Good works would not compensate. It was unthinkable, yet she thought of it. Josh had given her this child—yet now he was gone, leaving the decisions, the consequences, almost entirely to her.
“Did anyone reach Josh?” she asked.
“I reached his sister,” said Roland. “She promised to try to get him.”
“Poor Josh,” said Kevin, “he’ll be sick at heart when he realizes what happened in his absence.”
“Poor Josh!” said Roland. “Poor Josh? That pig! If Mandy were my. baby, I wouldn’t have left her and her mommy for the world. What a fool that man is! He deserves anything he gets.”
Just then the plastic surgeon appeared at the playroom door. Isadora’s heart seemed to miss two beats.
“Mrs. Ace?” he said. “Mr. Ace,” he said, addressing Roland.
“No—” said Roland, “unfortunately, I’m not Mr. Ace. Mr. Ace is not here.”
“Well,” said Isadora, “how is she?”
“She’s going to be fine,” said the surgeon, “just fine. And it’s a good thing we made the decision to operate because both tendons had been severed and both nerves, and even a little piece of bone had been sliced off. You made the right decision.”
“When can I see her?” Isadora asked.
“She’s in the recovery room now,” said the surgeon, “but she won’t wake up for a while. You can go up and wait there.”
Isadora embraced the surgeon in a great bear hug, and her father, Roland, Errol, and Kevin broke out in a spontaneous round of applause.
Later, when Isadora waited outside the recovery room for the sleeping Amanda to awaken, she thought: Well, I got through it without Josh. This is another milestone.
But she missed him; she still missed him. And when Mandy opened her eyes, her first words were:
“Where’s Daddy?”