Читать книгу A Fragile Hope - Cynthia Ruchti - Страница 8

No matter how high your problems mount, remember the One who scales mountains with the same elegance as when He walks on water.

~ Seedlings & Sentiments

from the “Challenges” collection

Severe internal injuries. Brain swelling. Intensive care unit. Critical. Ventilator. Intubation. Next forty-eight hours.

The words came to him in fragments, not complete sentences, though Josiah noted the doctor’s lips moving among the dark shards. When the professional lips stopped, Josiah dumped the words accumulating in his own mouth. “I had no idea I’d be so worthless in an emergency.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re going to have to repeat everything you just said. I can’t process . . .”

The lips twisted into a much warmer plastic. “Mr. Chamberlain, I assure you I’m prepared to do that. Right now, I have another critical patient to attend to.”

Critical.

“One of the ICU nurses will come get you when they have her settled enough to allow you a brief visit. They’ll explain our intensive care family visitation policies. A strict ten minutes per hour. I know how much you want to be by her side, know how worried you must have been about both Karin and the baby, but it’s important that the staff have the freedom to give her all the attention she needs to battle through these fragile hours.”

Battle through this. Attention. Yes, let’s give her attention. Both of them. Don’t forget about the baby.

So, the driver wasn’t a good Samaritan. He was—unlike Josiah—a sperm factory. And they were coupled. A couple.

No. Karin would never do that to him. Inconceiva—

Find a different word that doesn’t have the word conceive in it.

Josiah swallowed a vile thought about a devil-child growing inside Karin, a fetus draining blood and oxygen and life from a woman who needed all of that and more to “battle through this.”

She’d been unfaithful to him? Like, seriously unfaithful? How was that possible? Mistake. All of this—a mistake. Somehow.

He picked at the tissue he’d snatched from a lonely looking box on the lamp table. I love her. I love her not. I love her. I love her not.

A day earlier, not loving hadn’t been an option. Now?

Even immutable truths had derailed. If he hadn’t been exhausted, maybe it wouldn’t feel as if he were watching that freight train plunge from a bridge into the water below, trying to tug it back onto the tracks with a frayed length of string.

The room—her ICU room—did nothing to reassure him. Built for service, not aesthetics, it blinked and buzzed and clicked its equipment as if only the things with electrical cords deserved to be there. But a woman lay within the circle of wheezing machines.

If asked to identify the body lying on the bed before him, Josiah would have to say no. No, that’s not my wife. Karin bought foundation in a color called “Flawless” and lipstick named “Perpetually Pink.” Good husband that he was, he’d been with her on the color hunt too many times. Not enough times.

The pseudo person lying on the bed with a distorted, bloated face would—if called to match skin tones—have to tell the cosmetics counter lady she needed foundation and lipstick in “Napa Valley Purple.”

But her hospital identification bracelet said her name was indeed Karin Alecia Chamberlain and he was her NOK—next of kin. The nurses hovering like dragonflies called her Karin. Repeatedly. As if she suffered from Alzheimer’s.

“Karin, I’m going to check your vitals now.”

“Karin, let’s see if we can’t adjust your pillow a little better.”

“Karin, your husband is here.”

Josiah half expected that the machine beeping her heartbeat—for all the world to hear—would have registered some reaction to that. Your husband’s here, beep-beep-beepbeepbeepbeep. Code blue.

Nothing.

The ventilator sounded as if it had asthma. Wheeze in, two, three, four. Wheeze out, two, three, four. With a little hitch at the top and bottom of the rotation.

The rhythms. The seamless, flawless, inhuman, rhythmic patterns. No wonder Karin’s pulse rate didn’t subconsciously register a reaction to him. It wasn’t her heartbeat but the machine’s. Technology had no trouble remaining steady. It hadn’t betrayed him.

“Mr. Chamberlain, would you step over here, please?”

Josiah turned his attention to one of an army of nurses in the room.

“You can get closer to her on this side. Fewer machines and stands and cords to tangle your feet.”

Closer. That’s what husbands do. He stepped farther into the glass-walled room, the cubed bubble. “Where?”

The high-chested Latina indicated a lone twelve-inch square of floor space not occupied by something that truly mattered. He stepped onto the tile as if finding his mark on a stage. “Can I—?”

“Touch her? Certainly. Just be careful not to jostle or startle her, and watch that IV line. She doesn’t have the best veins.”

Like a drawbridge slowly cranked into position, Josiah reached his hand toward Karin’s as it lay unmoving and pale against the white sheet. The hand closest to him. Her left. Her rings were gone. She’d probably flung them out the car window just before the crash.

He slipped his hand under hers as if not wanting to disturb its sleep. With his thumb, he traced the indentation from her missing-in-action wedding ring set. The thin divot wrapped around her fourth finger like a scar, not a memory.

“If you’re wondering about her rings,” a nurse said, punctuating the public nature of the private moment, “we had to cut them off. Swollen fingers. Someone at the nurses’ station can get them for you later. Standard practice. She won’t need them here.”

Karin insisted the set was perfect when they found it sitting among far more opulent engagement rings in the jewelry store display window at the mall. Perfect. She didn’t need anything more than that plus Josiah’s undying love, she’d said.

They were young then. What did they know?

When he slipped it on her finger a month later, a week before his graduation from college and her junior finals, she’d breathed that word again, “Perfect.” Then she’d insisted on driving the two and a half hours from Madison to her folks’ house to show them. Karin’s mother spent a disposable camera on pictures of Karin’s hand and the two lovebirds locking lips.

Karin’s mom and dad. He hadn’t called them back. Couldn’t right now. What kind of slug would cheat a ten-minute visit by leaving at the eight-minute mark?

The nurse on the other side of the bed pulled back the thin sheet covering Karin’s bloated, bruised, and, for all intents and purposes, naked body. A modest woman like Karin would be mortified if she were conscious. Leaning in, the nurse laid a stethoscope below the line of Karin’s ribs. Listening for breath sounds? Pneumonia? Josiah knew that much about medicine—that pneumonia is always a risk. The nurse flipped her thick braid over her shoulder with her free hand and moved the stethoscope to a spot a few inches lower than the line of dark bruises arching across Karin’s abdomen. Probably from the seatbelt. She repositioned three or four times, then removed the earpieces and held them out to Josiah. “Would you like to hear your baby’s heartbeat?”

Three years ago, yes. When we’d been trying. Before we discovered most of my swimmers chose the sink option in sink-or-swim. Yes, I would have liked to hear my baby’s heartbeat. I refuse to listen to his child’s, the man who stole Karin from me.

That had to have been it. She wouldn’t have left Josiah willingly. Sure, Josiah had been a little disengaged, distant. Okay, maybe Karin’s word for it fit: self-absorbed. That’s no reason to bail on a marriage. Or start a family with someone else.

Josiah palmed the lower half of his face like a seven-footer might palm a basketball. No, the shake of his head begged. No, please no. I can’t listen to that beating heart.

He couldn’t read the message the nurse’s eyes communicated. Empathy, most likely. The poor, traumatized father. Overcome with grief. Afraid that while listening to his son’s or daughter’s heartbeat, the strange pulsing thumps would stop. Forever. Poor man.

Let her think that.

A child. Oh, Karin! What have you done? And where is the louse who did it with you? Had he walked away from the accident? The sheriff’s department told him nothing. Was the guy in a room down the hall? Josiah leaned his elbows on the bed and propped his forehead on his fingertips.

How was it possible he could hear his blood cells clunking against one another in their rush? They banged against the interior walls of his veins and arteries, played bumper car, leaking oxygen with every collision. If he remembered correctly, breathing was supposed to be involuntary. Somewhere deep in the folds of his brain, the switch had been flipped. Off. You’re on your own, man. Breathing takes such effort. Too much effort.

“We don’t have her complete medical records yet. What were you given as a due date?” the woman’s matter-of-fact voice asked. “I guessed late August. Am I right? Thin thing like your wife, you’d think she’d be showing more. Ultrasound had her measuring at twelve weeks. But there’s always leeway there. With my second baby, I measured forty-four weeks by the time that child was born. Forty-four weeks, if you can imagine. I expected my son would make the Guinness Book of World Records. What would you think, fourteen or fifteen pounds? He surprised us all. Eight pounds. Eight pounds! Just goes to show you.”

Josiah coughed. And again. “I need a drink of water. Excuse me.” The hall—antiseptic and clinical—welcomed him into its conversationless haven. He leaned against the wall outside Karin’s glassy cell. A young woman looked up from the center nurses’ station around which the ICU rooms circled like sterile covered wagons.

“It never seems enough, does it?” she asked him.

Enough?

“The ten minutes. A measly ten minutes every hour. Have you found the family waiting room yet? Someone left a plate of homemade cinnamon rolls in there. Make sure you try one before they’re gone.”

There are others like me? Other people with no clue what happened to ordinary life?

Josiah entertained a mental picture of all the king’s horsemen on their knees, pawing through rubble, using giant tweezers to pick up pieces of eggshell and attempting to reassemble the bits. With duct tape and superglue.

Some people should not sit on walls. Period.

He told his legs to carry him out the building to his car. Home. Instead he found himself walking through the open door of a room marked Intensive Care Family Waiting. A foreigner, he crossed the border into unknown territory. The familiar scent of cinnamon grounded him, oddly enough, like finding a sign written in English in the heart of Darfur. Or Kosovo. Or some other desolate, ravaged place.

He picked one of several identical plum couches, the one facing the wall clock, and planted himself. Less than fifty minutes and he’d be expected to go back in there again. To sit with Karin Alecia “Gomer” Chamberlain—the Gomer of biblical Hosea and unfaithful Gomer fame—and the thing that grew inside her.

The plaintive cry of an unborn child woke him. A child who called him by name.

“Josiah?”

Karin’s mother stood over him with her warm, satiny hand on his forearm. “We hate to wake you, dear, but—”

Eyes wider than necessary, Josiah shot upright, sharp slivers of pain tracing the pattern of nerve endings in his neck. “Catherine. Stan. I’m so glad you’re here.”

It seemed the right thing to say.

His mother-in-law sank onto the couch beside him. Stan stood, jingling change in his pants pocket, the lines in his face contorted into a topographical map Josiah hadn’t seen before.

“How were the roads?”

“Good,” Stan answered. “Almost clear now.”

“Josiah, how is she?” Catherine’s words cut through small talk with the efficiency and bloodlessness of a cauterizing scalpel.

He glanced at the clock. He’d slept through his opportunity. And theirs. He’d been asleep an hour and fifteen minutes. What kind of husband gambles away his chance to see his dying wife for the sake of a little sleep?

Dying? The word tasted like paint thinner.

He forced calmness he didn’t feel. These people deserved hope. He didn’t have any to spare but could fake it in brief spurts. He softened words like internal injuries and critical and fragile as if editing one of his lectures for an ultrasensitive audience. In their eyes, he read their efforts to translate what he said to what he really meant.

“You can see her in a little while. Top of the hour. For ten minutes.”

Catherine’s eyes glistened. “Will she recognize us?”

“She’s not conscious.”

For a moment, Josiah hated what his wife had done to her mother. The older woman’s frame collapsed on itself, bone turned to limp pasta. He caught her from one side, Stan from the other.

“I’m okay,” she insisted, lifting her chin and blinking back tears. “We have to be strong. For Karin.”

Yes, let’s all rally around the fallen woman. Let’s whisper how sorry we are she had to go through all that misery. Married to Josiah Chamberlain. What a horrible tragedy. Good thing she found an escape route.

No one had asked the “What happened?” question more often than Josiah. He owed it to these innocent parents to listen while they wondered aloud.

“I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have taken her to Paxton, Josiah.” Stan hung his coat and Catherine’s in a narrow locker designated for the purpose. “Perfectly good hospital there, isn’t it?”

“For its size.” Josiah moved a coffee table out of the way so his in-laws could navigate to the couch.

“Then . . . ?”

Catherine patted her husband’s arm in a gesture Josiah had seen many times over the years. Correcting or calming, it always came across as loving. “Stan, we’re asking the wrong person. I’m sure Josiah was as surprised as we were that the ambulance brought her here. Right?”

About that and a few dozen other things about your daughter. “Right. We’ll get answers eventually. Right now the primary concern is—” His wife’s name caught—unvoiced—in his throat.

“No sense worrying about that, I guess,” Stan said. “The choice of hospitals, I mean. I found it curious, though. Maybe had something to do with insurance.”

He’d heard of that before. Ambulances taking a longer route to the hospital with which it had a contract.

Would Karin rally enough to explain any of the curiosities? Josiah had written a family crisis manual that not only made the best-seller list but had become a staple at airport bookstores and bookstands. At the moment, he couldn’t remember any of its sterling points.

Something, something, something, you’ll get through this.

And readers bought that? Could his life’s work be as meaningless as it sounded in an ICU family waiting room?