A Three Dog Life (2 page)

My son called last night. "Are you worried about the operation?" he asked. "I don't think so," I answered. It is what I have heard one of the surgeons call "meat and potatoes" surgery. What terrifies me is seeing Rich in the recovery room. This doesn't make any sense, but I keep remembering his face just after his accident, ruined beyond recognition, blood pooling in the corners of his swollen eyes. Those first days his daughter, Sally, and I took twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, sitting in a chair next to his bed, listening to the beeping of monitors in the ICU. We were afraid to leave him. It was as if we were trying to hatch an egg, keeping him warm with our presence, and we didn't want him to wake without a familiar face nearby.
"¿Qué pasa?"
were the first words he spoke when the doctors removed his breathing tube. I put my ear close to his mouth.
"¿Quépasa?"
This man who failed Spanish. It is a funny miracle.

I am sitting on my bench; behind me three dogs are digging a hole to China. The odd woman who wears a Band-Aid across her nose and white gloves, who often stands at the gate excoriating dogs and their owners with tales of being trailed by the FBI, has just sat down next to me. She has a whippet. Whippets, she tells me, were dogs that hunted rats in the mines. "Wales, or Scotland or Ireland," she goes on. There being no room to break their necks in the small spaces, they twirled and twirled, snapping the rat's necks that way. "That's interesting," I say cautiously. Talk moves on and about, like a dog looking for a good place to lie down. Somehow we speak of the old radio shows. Clyde Beatty,
Sky King, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.
She asks do I remember the real-estate offering they made? I shake my head. "You could buy one inch in Alaska," she says. All day I can't get the idea of owning an inch of the Alaskan wilderness out of my head. I am searching for meaning in everything.

In the first weeks after his accident, Rich spoke in mysteries. It was as if he were now connected to some vast reservoir of wisdom, available only to those whose brains have been altered, a reservoir unencumbered by personality, quirks, history, habits. "It is interesting to think that one could run farther and longer and perhaps find the answer," he said one evening, drifting in and out of delirious talk. "What would you get to?" I asked, eager for the answer. "The allure of distance" was what he said, a dreamy phrase.

Last week, as he struggled to make sense of the world, unable to find words, my youngest daughter, Catherine, came to visit. "Do you know who I am?" she asked, and he peered at her intently. "Do you eat field mice?" he asked, a strange question we thought, until I realized the first three letters of her name spell "cat." Perhaps this was a glimpse of how the mind pieces things together after an assault, trying to rewire itself. " The goat's mouth is full of stones," he said one day, and I leave that as it is, a mystery. During the days when it is impossible to communicate in words, I get into his bed and we hold hands. Nap therapy. This is a familiar posture, something we can do without speech, without thinking.

How are you managing? friends ask. How are you doing this? They leave me food and flowers, they send me letters and messages. They pray. I love these people, I love my family. Doing what? I wonder. This is the path our lives have taken. A month ago I would have thought this life impossible. Sometimes I feel as if I'm trying to rescue a drowning man, and I only have time to rise to the surface for one gasp of air before I go back down again. There is an exhilaration to it, a high born only partly of exhaustion, and I find myself almost frighteningly alive. There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment. Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles. Now there is an intensity to the humblest things—buying paper towels, laundry detergent, dog food, keeping the household running in Rich's absence. One morning I buy myself a necklace made of sea glass, and it becomes a talisman. Shopping contains the future. As my daughter Jennifer says, shopping is hope.

On the day of Rich's surgery, his daughter, Sally, and I are there at six thirty in the morning to accompany him to the operating room. We walk beside the stretcher and try to calm him, but he is disoriented and very agitated, until the anesthesiologist gives him an injection of Versed. "Can we get some of that to go?" asks Sally. When they wheel him into the operating theater we go to have breakfast in the hospital cafeteria. Sally has two boiled eggs, Cream of Wheat, corned beef hash, and coffee; she's a nurse and she knows what she's doing, it's going to be a long day. I have a banana. The waiting room is a large place with high ceilings, and through a sliver of window I can see the brightly colored clothes of pint-sized campers out on Fifth Avenue with their nannies, the green of Central Park behind them. Outside the weather is cool and clear, and Sally and I settle down for the long wait. The surgery is expected to take all day. I am not worried about Rich, but my dog has gotten sick, his ears were hot and he didn't eat, his stool was bloody. My sister Judy has agreed to take him to the vet. Suddenly panicky, I begin calling my sister every fifteen minutes. Patiently her son tells me his mother is still at the vet. I can't think straight, what would I do without Harry? Finally in my desperation I call the vet himself. It turns out Harry has colitis and all I need to do is feed him lots of rice and give him medicine for five days. This is such a huge relief that I wonder for a second why I was so worried and then it hits me that I comfort Rich, but Harry comforts me.

At six o'clock we find out that Rich's surgery has gone well. We can go up and see him in the recovery room, the SICU. He is asleep, bandages around his head, beneath them are the staples that cross his head from ear to ear. The doctors have done what they set out to do. There being no bone left unsplintered in his forehead (shattered like an eggshell, they tell us), they have built him a new one, made of titanium. They have rebuilt the floor of his brain, they have removed the dead tissue. The brain fluid that had been building up is relieved. His right frontal lobe is gone, and the left damaged. They tell us again that there will be differences in Rich's personality, only time will tell the nature of the changes. I have never processed this information. Changes? Just give him back to me and everything will be all right. We begin the round of phone calls to friends and family.

But in the days immediately following the surgery Rich enters the stage known as "Inappropriate Behavior." This is euphemistic for the anger and irrationality that is part of the process of recovery. Rich is angry and confused. He doesn't mention going home; there is no destination except "out of here." I betray him all the time, he says, by not saving him. He thought he could trust me, he thought we loved each other, but now our love seems very thin to him, he says. Roughly he pushes my hand away as I reach for his. My feelings are hurt, I can't help it, although I try to reason them away. Sitting with him hour after hour, his face glowering, makes me think of the stories I've heard of people who after traumatic brain injury bore no resemblance to their former selves. I am terrified that a change like this will undo me. This man is not the man I married. None of this is his doing, he didn't choose this, but neither did I.

One day I look out the hospital window high above Central Park, and I feel as if there's a tightrope connecting Rich's hospital room to our apartment, and all I do is walk back and forth on it, the city far below. I can almost see it shivering like a high-tension wire above the trees. This is when I learn that I have to take care of myself, even if my leaving makes him angry, or worse, sad. I need to eat and sleep. I need to do something mindless, go to a movie, fritter away an afternoon. And I realize something even more startling: I can't make everything all right. It's his body that is hurt, not mine. I can't fix it, I can't make it never have happened.

Rich still refuses food and medicine, everything has been poisoned. "Why are you so fatuous?" he asks angrily as I try to say something cheery about the potassium in a banana. Remarks like this sting me, especially because I sound like Pollyanna even to myself. When we wheel him down a hospital hall for a CAT scan, he says, "You always know you're in for it when you're going down a long hall with nobody else in it."

Afterward he tells me, "I felt I was at a casual execution." When he's lost almost thirty pounds they put a peg in his stomach. Through this tube, which resembles a monkey's tail as it curls out from under the covers to the IV pole, they give him nourishment and medicine. The shape of the tube may be what gives rise to Rich's belief that there is literally a monkey in the bed. "There's no monkey," I tell him. "Don't be so sure," he says, lifting the sheet to peer beneath it.

How do I separate the old Rich from this new Rich, what allowances do I make for his injury, when do I draw the line? How do I draw the line? The nurses say this is just a stage but I am not comforted. I miss my old husband. I miss the old me. When I run across something from before the accident, a snapshot of Rich smiling his beautiful smile, I feel such staggering loss. What happened? Where did my husband go? I clean the closet and find a tiny portable fan Rich bought me for trips because I can't sleep without white noise, and it makes me cry.

"I don't know who I am," Rich says over and over. "There are too many thoughts inside my head. I am not myself." Yesterday he said, "Pretend you are walking up the street with your friend. You are looking in windows. But right behind you is a man with a huge roller filled with white paint and he is painting over everywhere you've been, erasing everything. He erases your friend. You don't even remember his name." The image makes me shiver, but he seems exultant in his description. There are days when he is grounded in the here and now and days when his brain is boiling over with confusion. When he is angry I go home after only a short visit. Staying does neither of us any good. Where do I put these bad days? Part of me is still hanging on to the couple we were. Where do I put my anger? What right have I to be angry? My husband is hurt. Part of him is destroyed. I don't even feel my anger most of the time, but it's there, and I only acknowledge it when I find myself doing something self-destructive, going for a day or two without eating, drinking too much coffee, allowing myself to get lonely, tired.

"Good things happen slowly," said a doctor in the ICU months ago, "and bad things happen fast." Those were comforting words, and they comfort me today. Recovery is a long, slow process. There are good days and bad days for both of us. I try to find an even keel but still I am upset on the bad days and hopeful on the good. Uncertainty is the hardest part. There is no prognosis, no one can tell me how much better Rich will get and how long it might take. The day before my birthday Rich imagines that we've gone to Coney Island and he bought me a shell necklace. This is my present, as real for me as it was for him. He held my hand. That was yesterday, a good day, but filled with sadness. The season is changing, I take Harry to the park and watch the leaves turning and falling, there is beauty overhead and underfoot. There is something else I don't know yet, something I'm straining to feel, as subtle as the change in humidity or temperature, or the shift in light as summer becomes fall, the most beautiful season, with its gift of beauty in loss, and the promise of something more to come.

I am on my way to Pago Pago but stop first in Rosita's for a plate of rice and beans and an egg over easy, a cup of café con leche. The toast here is good and I order some of that too. The restaurant is fragrant with bay leaf and coffee, the simple tables crowded with graduate students, young families, cabdrivers, a mix of Spanish and English in the air. It is a reassuring atmosphere, one of my homes away from home. I am on my way to Pago Pago, where my husband of thirteen years woke up this morning, at the start of a Sunday, getting ready to take part in the gorilla hunt. He is alarmed when I tell him I am coming to visit, it is too long a trip, it is dangerous. "You will need amulets," he tells me urgently. "You will need to talk to witch doctors." I tell him calmly I will be there in two hours. "How will you find me?" he asks. "I am taking the train," I tell him. My husband has been gone for almost a year.

Always when I ride out to Manhasset the train passes through Flushing, where my father grew up. I remember a clapboard house, hydrangea bushes. I remember his father's office to the left when you came in, a long leather couch, glass cases of medical instruments. I remember a mysterious interior, a room to the right, carpeting with a pattern of faded flowers, a carpet that turns up now and again in stories I never finish. I remember bathtubs with iron ball-and-claw feet, a gas fire, a kitchen with (I think) a cream and green enamel stove at which my grandma made three different kinds of meat for Thanksgiving. She also beat an egg into a small glass of sherry for my grandfather to drink every day, a ritual we children were fascinated to watch. In the backyard was an oak planted when my father was born, and over a cement wall in the way back was the Long Island Rail Road. I know the house disappeared years and years ago, but I want to find the bit of wall we peered over, and down what was probably not so steep and long an embankment as I recall, to watch the passing trains. I stare out the window every time we go through Flushing. Long gone the radiators that my grandma banged on every morning to wake her five children. Long gone the smell of baking bacon. Long gone and dispersed that family. But I remember the smell of the gas fire, the stairs that led to the second and third floors. The slate sidewalks we roller-skated on around and around the block. "Flushing, Main Street," the conductor calls out every time, but I can't find the place that matches my memory. Sometimes I imagine my father sitting next to me on the train. He doesn't say anything, what can anyone say? But his presence comforts me for a while.

By the time I have reached the hospital, Rich is waiting for lunch. There is no memory of Pago Pago. He is happy to see me and he wants toast. He stands in front of the large metal trays that usually contain food, holding his hands above them, checking to see if they are getting hot. He looks under the counter, touches a few things, holds his hands again over the trays. "This is where it comes from," he explains to me. I show him the toaster then, but he is stubborn. "It will come in a minute," he says. "This is where it comes from." Soon the techs who make lunch arrive and Rich sits down at the table. We eat our chicken cutlet sandwiches together in the community dining room. He eats well, two sandwiches, all the potato salad, seven or eight graham crackers. His beard is white, his head often bowed. He doesn't look like himself anymore, but I am growing used to the man he has become. He is tired so we take a nap together in his bedroom. "My narrow bed, narrower after lunch," he says, and we lie down together. After half an hour Rich gets up and I hear him repeatedly opening and closing the drawers in his small dresser. "I'm looking for a blanket to cover you with," he says.