Christmas, Present (2 page)

told him that, in defiance of all logic, all dancers and gymnasts of merit smoked in order to try to stay slim and small.

“I feel better,” his wife told him. “It’s as if it’s just pressure now, not so much pain . . . let’s get home so I can lie down.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” he told her, as they entered the Sumner Tunnel, thick with Saturday-night hordes. He felt himself drifting with the pause and accelerate, pause and lurch, until Laura, in real panic, woke him.

“Elliott,” she said, “the oil light is on!” “S’nothing,” he told her, “electrical glitch.”

“The battery light is on now,” Laura said sharply, sounding like her mother. “Is that nothing also?”

“No, that’s shit,” Elliott told her, abruptly sober and dry-mouthed, sitting up in disgust as the car softly drifted to a complete stop, and the lights dimmed, dimmed and disappeared. Laura dived to depress the triangular red emergency flashers; but they, logically, were also dead. Rolling across her, Elliott flipped the hood switch to signal distress, but the horns of cars behind them still burst into a cacophony of frustra-

tion. Elliott inched along the damp tunnel wall to peer under the hood.

What he saw signified as much to him as it would have had he been asked to perform surgery on a brain. Since he was a boy, gathered with his friends peering into their cars’ entrails, he could never decipher the engine’s mystery even when it was pointed out to him—alternator connection or brake cable, they were all the same to him. He could fill the window-washer tank and add oil, never quite sure he’d read the mes- sage of the dipstick as confidently as other men did. To start a car by crossing critical wires was a fantasy Elliott nurtured the way other men dreamed of playing rhythm guitar for Van Halen.

In moments, a K-9 police unit passed them, and the officer promised in passing to send a wrecker. Astoundingly, shortly thereafter, they were linked to some kind of shoving vehicle driven by a swarthy man Laura described as resembling the troll under the bridge, and shoved the quarter mile onto a verge of flat earth next to one of the elevators that ferried workers

down into the Big Dig, the tunnel project that had made Boston a hell of dust and snarled traffic for what was promised to be three years and was now seven and counting. Despite cute, hopeful posters about the interesting things the excavations had turned up (prehistoric fish spines, colonial founda- tions), every single Bostonian except the fellow who owned the cranes was sick to the teeth of the project: Politicians had been threatened with recall, lawsuits filed, tourists headed for Cape Cod diverted to air- ports in Rhode Island.

Frantically, Laura phoned home and then, squinting, punched in their AAA road service and membership numbers, as Elliott inspected the brightly lit con- struction shaft and chatted with the young police officer whose tiresome duty was to guard the shaft overnight against prankish teenagers and curious drunks who tended to take dives or demonstrate their ability to balance on railings.

“The girls are fine,” she reported wistfully. “The tow truck is about half an hour away. I think we’ll

freeze to death by then, don’t you? I should have worn my long coat.”

Elliott noticed scythes of slate-colored flesh under each of her eyes, as if she had applied her eye shadow upside down. One of her eyes was alarmingly blood- shot. She worked too hard, with her small design business, trifold brochures and the occasional state- sponsored pamphlet, never failing to booster every school activity and extracurricular interest the girls lit upon—enthusiasms new each year, fragile as the life span of mayflies. “But I’m not fine. I’m knocked out. I’m going to lie down in the back until the tow truck comes. I feel bad, Ell, I feel bad. My head feels funny, beyond pain.. .”

She worked too hard, Elliott told the young cop, whose name was, of course, Tony. His wife as well, Tony agreed with a sigh, offering Elliott an illicit Marlboro, which he accepted, the companiable and manly thing to do, though he’d quit smoking seven years before.

Tony’s wife was a nurse at Mercy, on
P
.
M
.’s for five years. “We got two boys, four and two. We couldn’t

make it without my mom and my sisters,” Tony told Elliott, shaking his head in gratitude.

Elliott nodded, as if Miranda, or his father in far-off Boca Raton, ever had been any help to him and Laura. He thought, but would never have confided, that his father’s twice-yearly visits, accompanied by Donna, the woman from his condo complex he described as “my lady friend,” were tense affairs, not because of any lack of geniality on the part of Elliott Banner Senior, or even Donna, who brought extravagantly flowered bikinis for Laura and the girls; it was because Elliott could see plainly around Donna’s neck his mother’s wedding diamond reset in a pendant.

Now, he strolled back to their minivan, expecting to find Laura asleep in her customary shrimp curl. What he saw instead shocked him. Laura was not given to dramatic displays, except in dire extremes. She
did
have a low tolerance for certain kinds of pain, often coming to him repeatedly during a given evening to show him her paper cut, as if she were one of the chil- dren. Now, she was braced with her spine arched against the rear seat, rocking, holding her temples with

the flat of her hands. “Elliott,” she whispered, “I have to go to the hospital. I don’t think this is a migraine. Or if it is, I’ve never had one before.”

“Triple-A will be here soon,” he soothed her, more out of fear than any disbelief in her agony. “They can give us a jump, unless it’s the alternator . . .” Elliott regarded Laura’s stretched, strained face, which before his eyes seemed to fade, like the watercolor Santas and pumpkins the girls used to paint on the windows, draining from the glass in the rain. “You really are in a bad way, aren’t you?” he asked, reaching for his wife’s neck, hoping to cradle her. “Let me rub you down a little. Let me get in there and hold you.”

“I need to go to the hospital now, Elliott,” Laura moaned. Cringing, Elliott recalled how during Rory’s breech birth, Laura roared at him that she wished he were dead. How did a woman who could do back- bends and cartwheels with the girls, and jump up from a fall on a friend’s horse with a giggle instead of a limp, be so undone by a headache? That was Laura, though, contradictions all over the map, fitting sweetly into an amiable, slightly off-center jigsaw.

“Wait a few minutes and see,” he suggested, “and then I promise I’ll call for an ambulance.” If he could, in fact, he would have run with Laura in his arms to the hospital. He would later realize he’d been too frightened to act, too leery of making this very real thing more so. Or had he only been embarrassed? he cursed himself.

“Officer!” Laura then screamed, and Elliott, unpre- pared, jumped and nearly shed a layer of skin. “Officer!” Tony came trotting, his cigarette dangling from one corner of his lower lip. “My husband won’t let me go

to the hospital and I’m sick, I’m very sick!”

“I’m . . . I just said . . . ,” Elliot stammered. “Laura!

I’ll get you to the hospital!”

“What’s wrong with her?” Tony asked. Elliott shrugged helplessly.

“What’s wrong with you, miss?” Laura rocked faster, faster, then suddenly stopped, dropping both hands limp at her sides.

“It stopped,” she said. “My headache.”

“See?” Elliott told her, baffled, trying to sound assured.

“But something is wrong, Elliott! Something is still wrong! There’s a rushing in my head! I don’t want to sit in this dirty hole anymore! I want to go to the hos- pital, where it’s bright and clean . . .”

“The tow truck will be here any minute . . .”

“I need an ambulance! Elliott, now! Do you
hear
me?” She turned to Tony. “Can you cuff him? Or shoot him?” Laura asked. “I have to go to the hospi- tal!” Tony’s eyes widened, and he whirled and quick- stepped back to his radio.

“She’s ordinarily a very docile person,” Elliott said, as he trotted after Tony.

“Sure, I have no doubt. Who knows about this stuff? I could drive her,” Tony told him, “but it’s my ass if I leave here. I’m going to radio for an ambulance. Mercy is only six, eight blocks . . .”

“That’s probably the best idea,” he agreed. “She’s way over the top. This isn’t Laura. She may have food poisoning or something.”

“Nothing they can do for that.” Tony shrugged, cupping his lighter. “Except wait. It’s gotta work itself out of her system.”

“Still,” Elliott persisted.

With Laura whimpering against his chest for what seemed interminable moments, her shoulders shrunken in a queerly boneless huddle, he finally heard the dim whoop of the ambulance, distant, then closer; then Tony went rushing to block the tunnel traffic with sawhorses as the vehicle backed onto the construction site. Elliott watched as Laura’s hand was repeatedly jabbed for a saline IV—Laura’s veins were tiny, buried, and tended to roll away. She had fainted on occasion during the most routine blood draw. When, now, she did not react nor even grimace, Elliott’s stomach roiled with dazzling concern. Something
was
wrong, very wrong. The paramedics pressed ice packs to Laura’s head, as waiting firefighters who had rum- bled up in full gear, for no reason Elliott could discern, looked on. The smallest of the team, a woman no taller than Elliott’s seventh-grader, asked if he would like to ride with his wife or follow in their car. “It’s inopera- tive,” Elliott told her. “That’s how this all started.”

“She struck her head?” the tiny paramedic asked, motioning for an immobilizing collar.

“No, nothing like that,” Elliott told her. “The car just stopped in the tunnel, and it wasn’t until we were here, waiting to be towed, that she felt the pain. No, that’s wrong, it was back at Suffolk, in the parking lot.”

“Was she in a lot of pain?”

“She thought she was having a migraine headache . . .” “Does she often have them?”

“No, never. That’s why she thought she must be having one,” Elliott explained. “It hurt too badly for an ordinary headache.”

“Have you or your wife traveled in any foreign countries recently?”

“Not unless you count Lynn,” Elliott joked weakly, of the grubby neighborhood where he managed a paperback book warehouse that stocked discount chains.

“The doctor in the ER was speculating on the radio about the possibility of a virus,” the paramedic said, with no trace of a smile. “Will you be coming with us, then?”

“I’ve ruined it,” Laura whispered faintly, as he set-

tled on a hard bench beside her and the ambulance began its impossibly rattling, jolting progress—this, Elliot thought, is how they move the frail and danger- ously sick?—through the three
A
.
M
. streets. “I’ve ruined our anniversary. I didn’t even give you your present.”

“Just feel better.” Elliott patted his wife’s hand, noticing the odd, liverish cast of her fingernail beds. “That’s the best present you could give me.”

“It’s in the nightstand on my side, in a silver box,” Laura told him; she seemed unable to control a sag- ging at one side of her mouth. “There’s a card. Will you look for it?”

“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Elliott said, as Laura was swept out of the ambulance and into the phalanx of white trousers and blue shirts.

“Wait here,” a pleasant older woman instructed Elliott, “while I make a copy of your insurance card. Then we’ll take you back to see what’s going on with your wife.” Shamed and elated that Laura had been diverted past the noisy, filthy turbulence of the wait- ing room (like a photo from a Third World country,

head wounds seeping through gauze, mothers whose infants lie crouping, translucent green glazing their mouths and noses) Elliott scribbled what he knew of his wife’s health history, splendid except for hay fever, and followed the bustling woman through automated steel doors.

In a room deliberately darkened, a physician was peering into Laura’s eyes, instructing her to look up, left, right, right again. “And the pain, it started when?” he asked.

“Dinner,” Laura said. “At dinner.”

“You didn’t tell me that!” Elliott interrupted.

“I thought it was only a headache,” Laura pleaded. “Do you have an aura?” the doctor asked, as Laura made a motion of incomprehension, as if whisking away a fly. “Did you see lightning flashes or spots at

the corners of your vision?”

Laura said, “No. Just a pain that kept tightening and tightening . . . I can’t explain what I mean by that . . . until it was unbearable . . .”

“I want to check something, with someone, Missus Banner,” the doctor told Laura, and noticing Elliott,

he said, “Hi. I’ll be right back.” The young doctor returned more quickly than Elliott had ever seen any- one arrive in a hospital—including during Annie’s near-death joust with encephalitis—a senior colleague in tow.

The older man was perhaps just ten years Elliott’s senior, but his luxuriant hair was completely white. From his bearing alone, even before he spoke, Elliott could tell that English was not his first language.

“I am Doctor Campanile, and I think we need to take some pictures of this head of yours,” he told Laura, with amiable and absolute tenderness.

“Bell tower,” Laura whispered. “Do you speak Italian?”

“My choir went to Florence in high school. Flo- rence for two days, and Paris for three days.”

“Firenze.” The doctor smiled approvingly, nodding as a nurse swabbed Laura’s neck with a numbing solu- tion, then inserted a white probe that appeared to have the circumference of a meat thermometer. “My par- ents lived in Siena. I have not seen Florence since eighty-seven.”

“I went before then, in seventy-seven,” Laura told him, as the doctor murmured instructions to gently move Laura onto a rolling bed at the count of three.

Elliott sat on the floor outside the imaging lab as Laura was moved slowly through the cavernous space capsule of the scanner. Since the use of his cell phone was forbidden on the corridor, he roused himself finally and found an unoccupied office with a telephone. He called AAA and learned that his car had been delivered to the dealership three blocks from his house. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly four
A
.
M
. Reluctantly, he dialed the home of his mother-in-law, Miranda, who answered on the first ring, as if she had been waiting for his call. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but the girls may need you. Laura has taken ill; we’re at Mercy Hos- pital, and Annie is alone with Rory and Amelia . . .”