Esperanza (21 page)

Ian blinked.

“I’m getting the doctor. A nurse. Someone.” Then Louise ran from the room, shouting,
“Nurse, nurse . . . He’s awake, please get the doctor in here, my husband’s awake . . .”

“My God, Dad.” Luke choked up. “I thought I’d lost you for good.”

Ian turned his head again, muscles creaking like rusted hinges, his skull feeling as though it were being pierced by pitchforks. His eyes opened. A blur of gray. Noises. Beeps, pulses, his son’s voice. His vision stabilized and Luke’s face swam into view—shoulder length, curly hair pulled back in a ponytail, colorful hippie beads tight against his throat, T-shirt with the glaring peace symbol and the words
PEACE NOW
. Luke, who had his mother’s mouth and skin, Ian’s nose and dark eyes. Where did that dimple in the corner of his mouth come from? And his blond hair? Some recessive gene way back?

Ian squeezed Luke’s hand, then pushed the oxygen mask off his face, a small act that took tremendous effort. “Not. A. Chance,” he rasped. “Water.” Cold water would make it easier to speak. He needed to tell Luke what had really happened, to explain, to describe. He needed to say all this before the memories slipped away.

Luke raised Ian’s head and guided a straw between his parched lips. Ian sucked slowly and nearly wept as the cool liquid ran down his raw throat.
He sipped again, nodded, and Luke set the cup down. Ian’s head sank into the pillow again. “How long?” he asked. “How long was I gone?”

“Three weeks, six days . . .” Luke glanced at the clock on the wall. “Nine hours and twelve minutes.”

Ian couldn’t help smiling. Since the time Luke was old enough to walk and talk, this sort of precision had marked him as surely as the color of his hair, that dimple at the corner of his mouth. “I died,” Ian said.

Luke pulled a chair up next to the bed, sat down, and leaned in close to Ian. “You had a heart attack in your office, Dad. And right after you got to the hospital, you had a second heart attack and died for . . . I don’t know . . . minutes, then slipped into a coma. I was on my way to the hospital when it happened. They thought there might be brain damage. For a while, you were on life support. You finally stabilized, but have been in a coma for the last several weeks.”

“I . . . went somewhere.” Ian closed his eyes, struggling to recapture Esperanza, his journey, Tess, everything he’d experienced. But already it seemed like a dream, some fictional world he’d built in his head, fading like an old photo. He talked fast, stumbling with words, desperate to communicate whatever he could.

But Luke interrupted him. “Dad, the doc will be in here in a minute. Just relax and . . .”

Ian’s eyes opened, he grasped Luke’s hand and held on so tightly that his son winced. “Remember these things. Cell phone. Internet. Google. Something called an iPod. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy will be assassinated. Something about My Lai. A space station. DVDs. Laptops . . .”

Luke’s expression of love, concern, and relief collapsed into incredulity and something darker, terror that his father had suffered brain damage.

“I’m not crazy, Luke.”
I hope.
His voice: hoarse, uncertain. “Esperanza, Ecuador. That’s where I was.”

“Professor Ritter,” boomed a voice from the doorway. “Back with us at last.”

The man who entered the room, Louise hurrying alongside him, stood well over six feet and had a quick, engaging smile that could put anyone at ease. His stooped shoulders were testament to an adolescence locked in a self-conscious angst about his height. Early forties, Ian guessed, handsome in the way that most doctors seemed to be, a Dr. Kildare with black hair.

“I’m Dr. Andros, your cardiologist. How do you feel?”

“Better than I did fifteen minutes ago.”

“Do you recall what happened?”

“An intense pain in my chest, while I was sitting at my desk. When it was happening . . . I think I knew what it was.”

“Your secretary found you. You had a second coronary here at the hospital and—”

“It killed me.”

“We, uh, had to revive you.”

Andros looked down at the clipboard in his hands and Ian’s gaze slipped to his ex-wife, who stood next to the doctor, as still and perfect as a brunette Barbie doll, her roiling blue eyes filled with utter fury at the inconvenience he’d caused her. His physical hiatus had taken her away from more important things—her charities, her new husband and extended family.

Louise said, “It’s wonderful to have you back, Ian. We’ve been so worried.”

“It’s good to
be
back.”

“If we could have some privacy, Mrs. Ritter?” the doctor asked.

“Of course,” Louise said, moving away from the bed.

“Bell, Mrs. Bell,” Luke said. “She remarried after the divorce.”

Louise threw Luke a dirty look. Dr. Andros didn’t seem to know how to respond to this, so he repeated his original request. Luke and Louise left the room, arguing in hushed voices, and Andros pulled the curtain shut. “I’d like to check you over, Professor. My goal is to get you out of here as quickly as possible.”

“We definitely want the same thing.”

Andros was personable throughout, chatting about this and that as he removed the heart monitor, catheter, IV, and turned off the oxygen. Ian tried to remain silent, to keep his experiences to himself. But he considered the possibility that he was mentally deranged, had hallucinated everything, that the anesthesia or whatever measures they had taken, whatever drugs they’d given him, had created a fantasy.

“How long was I dead?” Ian finally asked.

“Fortunately, you were in ER when your heart stopped the second time. I’m not sure how long you were actually dead.”

“How long can the brain be deprived of oxygen before it’s irreparably damaged?”

“Much longer than you were deprived,” Andros reassured him.

“And what happened to me during that time?”

“I’m not sure I understand the question.”

Ian pushed up straighter in the bed, sipped from a cup of water, and remembered how grateful he had been at the Bodega del Cielo when he’d tasted his first cup of hot coffee, bitten into that steaming empanada. “What happened to me while I was dead?”

Andros now stood at the sink, washing his hands, his back to Ian. “I don’t have any idea, Mr. Ritter.”

“You’ve never thought about it?”

“Of course I’ve thought about it.” He snatched paper towels from the dispenser and turned, drying his hands. His handsome Dr. Kildare face revealed that he had given this very question a lot of thought over the years but had yet to arrive at any satisfying conclusion. “I spent two years in Nam as a medic. I lost a number of patients. But I also had patients who died and came back. Some of them asked me what you just did. I don’t have an answer, just have a theory. Perhaps you can help me with that.” He tossed the towels in the garbage can and approached the bed. “What did
you
experience?”

In 2008, Andros was either in his early eighties or dead. Ian knew if he had access to Google, he could type in Andros’s name and something would come up, some starting point, some baseline. Ian wanted to tell him everything, to confess, confide, whisper,
I found my real life, my genuine self, I fell in love.
But if he did, he might be deemed a nutcase and find himself in a straitjacket. But maybe he deserved that straitjacket, maybe he
was
nuts. So he said, “Nothing. I don’t remember anything at all.”

Minutes after Andros left, Luke returned to the room. “He told Mom and me that we need to let you rest. I’ll be back tomorrow, Dad.”

“Wait. Luke.” Ian grabbed his son’s hand. “I need to get out of here. To Ecuador, to . . .”
I need to move forward forty years.
Oh, really? Forty years? Christ, he didn’t know what the hell he needed.

“Dad, we’ll talk later.” Luke squeezed his hand. “I promise. And I’ll tell Casey she can stop by now.” He hugged Ian gently, as though he were afraid his father might break. “Every day I sat here, talking to you, begging you to come back. Now you’re back.” He straightened, but didn’t release Ian’s hand. “Mom’s a problem. We need to talk about her, about you removing her as your power of attorney.”

Louise had power of attorney? How had he let that slip since the divorce? “How’s she a problem? She means well.”

“Does she?”

Ian didn’t want to go there. The hostility between Luke and his mother was
their
business. “I’ll talk to the university attorney when I get out of here.”

“I already got in touch with his office. He’s out of town, but will be back next week.”

“That’s fine. Next week is soon enough.”

“See you tomorrow, Dad.”

Ian sat in a chair by the window in his hospital room, a Remington typewriter set up in front of him, and wished he had a computer like the one in the Incan Café.
If it exists.

He’d started his adult life as a reporter back on that base in Stuttgart, when the military police had asked him to describe finding his father’s bloated body hanging in the shower. He had stuck to the facts, as he perceived them. That was what he had done the last few days, filling more than thirty pages with notes and memories. The more he wrote, the more he remembered. Sometimes it seemed that the memories might provide him with a conduit through which he could move back into that world. But most of the time, he doubted any of it had happened and what he’d written seemed, at best, like colorful fiction and, at worst, the rantings of a madman.

Ian glanced out into the barren wilderness of a Minnesota March snow. The flakes silently touched the glass, shapes preserved for a perfect instant before melting into slush. His routine these past days hadn’t varied much. He walked the halls incessantly, went down to the common room to watch television, ate solid foods, wrote, and hoped that the writing would prove he hadn’t lost his mind when he had died.

In between, he could feel the structure of his former life coalescing around him. Work beckoned. Ian Ritter, professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, winner of a Pulitzer when he was twenty-eight, had been on sick leave for four weeks and two days. Ian Ritter, columnist for the
Minneapolis Tribune,
hadn’t written squat for five weeks. He needed to get back to work soon, to take one step and then another toward ordinary life, so that he could make plans for traveling to Ecuador.

He kept seeing her in his head, Tess on that bus, in the posada, Tess in the Hummer, in front of the fire in cottage 13.
Tess, fantasy woman, conjured from the depths of my unconscious while I was in a coma.
What was it
about that number? He scribbled it on a sheet of paper, underlined it twice, then wrote: bus 13, cottage 13, 13 men, computer 13. Was he making it all up? And if not, what was the message with all those thirteens? Bad luck?

The PA suddenly burst with a woman’s voice. “Code blue in room thirteen. I repeat, a code blue in room thirteen.”

Goose bumps sped up his arms.
Thirteen.
It seized his attention. Ian didn’t have any idea what “code blue” meant, but orderlies and nurses raced by, pushing gurneys and equipment. He got up and went over to the door. Across the hall, hospital personnel crowded into room 13, tending to some apparent emergency. On the cardiology ward, that usually meant a patient had suffered a heart attack.

“Poor Bill,” said Gladys, the thin, elderly woman standing in the doorway of the next room. “He’d been complaining that he didn’t feel well, but the nurse kept insisting his cardiac readings were fine and that he probably just had heartburn.”

Ian had met her and Bill in the common room yesterday. Bill, a black man in his eighties, moved with a shuffle, his shoulders hunched over as if with an unbearable burden. “They’ll save him. This hospital has one of the best cardiac units in the country.”

The door to room 13 shut. Just as Ian was about to turn away, Bill stepped through the door—
the closed, wooden door
—and shuffled out into the hallway in his hospital gown and floppy slippers. He peered over the rims of his wire-framed glasses and scratched his nearly bald head, his expression troubled and confused.
Lock me up, throw away the key.
Ian glanced quickly at Gladys, but she gave no indication that she saw Bill.

But Bill saw her and hurried over. “Gladys, I’m really confused about something.”

Gladys didn’t hear him, couldn’t see him, and walked back into her room and shut the door. Ian’s instincts screamed at him to run up the hall and out the nearest exit. But his legs refused to move. When Bill’s dark, damp eyes met his, Bill said, “You can see me. But Gladys can’t. Why? What’s happened to me?”

Not only could Ian see and hear him clearly, he caught the plaintiveness in Bill’s voice, the confusion and fear. “I . . .”—
I’ve lost my mind, Bill—
“don’t know exactly what’s happened to you, Bill. But doctors and nurses poured into your room a few minutes ago, so I’m assuming you had a medical emergency.” The answer to his other question, about why Ian could see him and Gladys could not, was suddenly simple. It was because Ian had
been where Bill was now. Or because his mind had been left on the ER floor.

Bill looked at the closed door to his room, then back at Ian. “I think my heart gave out.” He pulled out the sides of his hospital gown and started to laugh. “I hate this damn thing, leaves your butt out there for all of them pretty nurses to see.”