out of the refrigerator, pour a glass of wine and sit in my study watching the last light give up the day. Downtown city windows scatter just enough glow to cast everything in the room gray or black, familiar in shape instead of detail. My father stares at me from his picture frame, ghostly in the low light, nailed square in the center of a wall of books—a suitable setting for him. Maybe this is how the world looks to him right now as he loses his sight.
After twenty-two years of sharing only the most neutral and essential information with him, of studiously living without his advice, I suddenly wish I could repeat to him the perfect summary of Jolene’s anesthetic, memorized after days and days of telling it to lawyers. Maybe we are far enough away from each other by now that he could listen and reassure me, convince me that I missed nothing, overlooked nothing, did nothing that might have precipitated her death. There was a time in my early life when he would have done that for me. But the woman I am today is too remote from the favored child I once was, and if forgiveness is what I need, he taught me well not to look to him.
For the tenth time in a month I pull my pediatric anesthesia textbook off the shelf and read about anaphylaxis and cardiac resuscitation, convincing myself once more that nothing could have made a difference, hoping I find enough peace to sleep.
9
I’m sitting on a beach, and a breeze combs the fronds of three coconut palms rising into the cloudless canopy of sky; they ruffle like frayed emerald sheets. I hear the rattling crescendo before my hair lifts in the cool wash of air. The ocean stretches taut against the world’s curve, bright and blue, striped light and dark above hidden hills and valleys. The clean sweep of the horizon is notched by a dark scratch, a bobbing boat filled with three or four children. They are singing. Words ripple to me on gusts of air:
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
I walk into the blue, and cold creeps up to my ankles, my knees, my thighs. My abdomen contracts and then relaxes as my skin shunts blood back to my core, warming my heart, my lungs, my gut, my womb. A wave lifts me, buoys me up to swim across the sea to the boat. The children’s voices beckon, their flushed faces shaded by sun hats; light and shadow cleave their bodies as the boat rocks and they stretch over the gunwales to splash the sea. I reach up to the polished wooden railing, the shadow of my hand splayed across it like a glimpse into the future, ready to grasp hold.
I push my torso up and over the edge, poised, when a sucking tug in my pelvis, a vortex of gravity, pulls me, drags me below the water, beneath the boat. Salt washes into my nose and stings my open eyes. I hear the swallowed sound of the children’s singing over the humming pressure of the ocean, see the barnacled bottom of the boat above me, swaying on the water in the sunlight, marking the sharp break between air and ocean.
The sea is so beautiful I don’t struggle at all, even as the water gets colder, heavier around my skull. Only at the last minute do I think of breathing, only just before the burning in my chest reminds me. Miles of ocean stretch over me and I am still swirling down, down until the evolutionary root of my brain, planted long before the higher fluff of my frontal lobes—site of all the judgments that make me unique among humans—forces my diaphragm down, gasps in whatever substance surrounds me, reflexively inhaling any possible source of oxygen.
The breath wakes me up. In the disoriented space of near dreams I’m only aware of my heart pounding, rocking inside my skull, racing with the panic of impending catastrophe. My heart—the central organ of immediate survival that links all organs together through the oxygen-rich bath of circulating blood. It is as sensitive as a precision-tuned Ferrari—contracting and accelerating, throttling blood and oxygen and
After twenty-two years of sharing only the most neutral and essential information with him, of studiously living without his advice, I suddenly wish I could repeat to him the perfect summary of Jolene’s anesthetic, memorized after days and days of telling it to lawyers. Maybe we are far enough away from each other by now that he could listen and reassure me, convince me that I missed nothing, overlooked nothing, did nothing that might have precipitated her death. There was a time in my early life when he would have done that for me. But the woman I am today is too remote from the favored child I once was, and if forgiveness is what I need, he taught me well not to look to him.
For the tenth time in a month I pull my pediatric anesthesia textbook off the shelf and read about anaphylaxis and cardiac resuscitation, convincing myself once more that nothing could have made a difference, hoping I find enough peace to sleep.
9
I’m sitting on a beach, and a breeze combs the fronds of three coconut palms rising into the cloudless canopy of sky; they ruffle like frayed emerald sheets. I hear the rattling crescendo before my hair lifts in the cool wash of air. The ocean stretches taut against the world’s curve, bright and blue, striped light and dark above hidden hills and valleys. The clean sweep of the horizon is notched by a dark scratch, a bobbing boat filled with three or four children. They are singing. Words ripple to me on gusts of air:
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
I walk into the blue, and cold creeps up to my ankles, my knees, my thighs. My abdomen contracts and then relaxes as my skin shunts blood back to my core, warming my heart, my lungs, my gut, my womb. A wave lifts me, buoys me up to swim across the sea to the boat. The children’s voices beckon, their flushed faces shaded by sun hats; light and shadow cleave their bodies as the boat rocks and they stretch over the gunwales to splash the sea. I reach up to the polished wooden railing, the shadow of my hand splayed across it like a glimpse into the future, ready to grasp hold.
I push my torso up and over the edge, poised, when a sucking tug in my pelvis, a vortex of gravity, pulls me, drags me below the water, beneath the boat. Salt washes into my nose and stings my open eyes. I hear the swallowed sound of the children’s singing over the humming pressure of the ocean, see the barnacled bottom of the boat above me, swaying on the water in the sunlight, marking the sharp break between air and ocean.
The sea is so beautiful I don’t struggle at all, even as the water gets colder, heavier around my skull. Only at the last minute do I think of breathing, only just before the burning in my chest reminds me. Miles of ocean stretch over me and I am still swirling down, down until the evolutionary root of my brain, planted long before the higher fluff of my frontal lobes—site of all the judgments that make me unique among humans—forces my diaphragm down, gasps in whatever substance surrounds me, reflexively inhaling any possible source of oxygen.
The breath wakes me up. In the disoriented space of near dreams I’m only aware of my heart pounding, rocking inside my skull, racing with the panic of impending catastrophe. My heart—the central organ of immediate survival that links all organs together through the oxygen-rich bath of circulating blood. It is as sensitive as a precision-tuned Ferrari—contracting and accelerating, throttling blood and oxygen and
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