Everything and More (44 page)

She touched the damp gray hair. “Joshua, we have enough trouble without going into the past to borrow more.”

Releasing her, he sat on his heels, flinging out both arms. “Behold and enjoy. Joshua Fernauld, the Great I Am, getting his comeuppance.” It was theatrical yet sincere.

“Mr. Fernauld? Mrs. Fernauld?” said a dry masculine voice.

They jerked around. A tall, narrow figure was outlined in the doorway of the chapel.

“I’m Dr. Rehnquist,” he said, coming toward them.

Marylin was freezing in her Arctic dread, yet even so she felt a whisper of surprise. She had figured that Joshua must be well acquainted with the renowned neurosurgeon to lure him from his office—but obviously this assumption was false. With what domination of character had her husband, over the telephone, compelled a total stranger to leave his busy practice and come to the aid of their small son?

Joshua, standing, clasped her hand so tightly that the huge rhinestone ring—part of her costume—cut into her flesh.

“I’ve been examining Billy,” the doctor said.

“Well?” Joshua growled. “No sugar-coated crap, no bullshit. I want the truth.”

“There’s a depressed fracture of the skull and, I believe, subarachnoid hemorrhaging—that means one of the veins on the surface of the brain has been torn. I’m on my way to scrub.”

“Must Billy have brain surgery?” Marylin’s whisper shook.

“It’s the only chance,” Rehnquist said.

Joshua was sweating heavily, and those deep-gouged lines of his jaw appeared yet more like polished wood.

It was Marylin who asked, “If the operation is successful, will Billy . . . will he be all right?”

The neurosurgeon looked at her intently, recognition dawning in his eyes. “I don’t know the answer to that, Mrs. Fernauld, I’m sorry.” The dry voice was gentle.

When they got back to the waiting room a party of sorts was straggling into being. NolaBee, Roy, BJ, and Maury were there. One of Joshua’s friends lugged in a silver ice bucket, two bottles of Johnnie Walker, and some Dixie cups while his wife followed with a covered chafing dish that held hot garlic-and-cheese-scented hors d’oeuvres. More friends and family arrived. The purposefully
bon vivant
chatter skirted the subject of the emergency operation as well as the Fernaulds’ separation.

Joshua sat next to her, grasping her hand and pressing it against his thick thigh. This is the man who raped me, she thought. Who defamed me to my four-year-old and returned my gifts with unseasonal cruelty, this the man who has done everything in his power to tear me from Linc. Do I hate him, pity him, what? She had no answer, but she did not pull her hand from the thick, familiar warmth.

“I can’t take much more of this waiting crap,” he rumbled to her.

“What can they be doing for so long? He’s got such a little head.”

“Why the hell don’t they send out some word? They’re a pack of sadists, surgeons, they have to be, it goes with the territory.”

After three long hours, Dr. Rehnquist came to the noisy waiting room. He wore a blood-spattered green surgical suit, and a mask dangled from his fingers. His eyes were weary, his face gray and drained of expression. “Mr. and Mrs. Fernauld,” he said in that calm, dry voice. “Let’s go someplace we can talk.”

The dinky office was crowded by a gurney. The doctor offered Marylin the one chair. As she sank into it, she thought: I am in this closet with two men wearing clothes splattered with Billy’s blood. How much blood can a four-year-old lose and still live?

“We removed a splinter of bone and repaired the damage to the vein,” he said.

“Then he’ll be all right?” Joshua growled.

“We’ll know in time.”

“How long?” Marylin asked.

“Again, we can’t say. Hopefully only days. But it could be weeks, months even.”

“What are the odds he’ll pull out intact?” Joshua asked in a strangled voice.

“I don’t like holding out false hope, any more than you want me to,” said Dr. Rehnquist. “The sooner he regains consciousness, the better the prognosis.”

“When can we see him?” Marylin asked.

“He’s still in recovery. Tomorrow morning.”

*   *   *

At her mother’s house, Marylin telephoned Linc to let him know what had happened. She would always draw a blank when it came to remembering his words, but she would never forget the comfort his voice brought her.

  
41
  

Billy was not in the children’s wing but on the surgical floor. In the center of the large, bright room, tended by a private nurse, amid a miraculous trellis of tubes and monitors, his body formed a flat, pathetically truncated line down the center of the full-size hospital bed. Against the turban of white bandages, his face showed a jaundiced pinky-yellow. His respiration was slow and machine regular, his thick brown lashes never quivered. Even in sleep, Billy was a restless child, turning erratically and mumbling small, incoherent sounds.

Marylin stepped into the room while Joshua hung back in the doorway. She bent over the bed, her mouth dry, nausea caught in a hard spasm at the base of her throat. This was her first glimpse of her son in more than three months, and if it weren’t for that slow rise and fall of his chest, he could be a wax effigy.

To reassure herself, she touched his cheek: below warm, petalsmooth epidermal surface, the flesh had a loose, vanquished plasticity.

“It’s all right, Miss Fairburn, nothing will disturb our little patient.”
The nurse fiddled with the bleached mercilessly taut blanket cover, her narrow wedge of a face fixed avidly on Marylin—Rain Fairburn.

Joshua muttered, “He’d be better off dead than like this.”

“Never . . .” Marylin replied.

“When my mother finally died, the priest called death her final healing.” Joshua spoke in a low, angered rumble. He backed toward the door. “If you need me, I’ll be in the waiting room.”

Marylin nodded. She had learned from her craft that each character must react with a different obsessiveness to life-and-death anxieties. Just as it was unbearable for Joshua to look upon their insentient child, so she herself had been plunged into a superstitious dread that without her to stand watch, Billy might slip away.

She sat down in a chair by the window.

That morning the offerings began to flow in, creamy roses cunningly woven into a Pooh bear, a blue-and-yellow rocking horse formed of daisies, a chrysanthemum football, plush animals of various species.

Nurses adjusted Billy’s tubes and bottles, doctors prodded him for reflexes, drawing up his eyelids to blaze flashlights into his unresponsive blue-green irises.

Joshua ordered lunch and dinner sent in for her: constitutionally incapable of apology, he was using every means of making amends for his brutish behavior as well as having permitted this evil to befall their small son. Two shifts of private nurses relished meals from expensive restaurants.

That evening NolaBee, Roy, BJ, and Joshua joined forces in an attempt to lure Marylin from her vigil.

She remained in her chair all night.

The nurse on the third shift was a plain, thick-ankled war widow who explained that she worked graveyard in order to be near her small daughter during the day. With a sweetly mournful smile, she spoke to Marylin as another mother rather than a source of gossip. In the night nurse’s quietly undemanding presence, Marylin relaxed a little.

Around three in the morning, a light rain began to fall over the lit, somnolent hospital. Marylin, merged in that infinitesimal movement of Billy’s chest, did not drowse, but her thoughts moved in a random, spacious manner. She heard an old song:

Then she recalled a line of poetry: “The mills of the gods grind exceedingly slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.”

She herself did not need to search for a universal mechanism that meted out justice. An inexorable sequence of events had brought Billy to this hospital bed: she had left her child for her lover. (With vivid clarity Marylin remembered the pitch black Michigan cabin and its odor of sawed pinewood, the cries of a night hawk, and her rushing joy at wakening in Linc’s arms.) Billy had reacted to losing her with belligerent misery. He had become an uncontrollable brat and run into the Beverly Drive traffic.

She stared at the small, expressionless face.

My fault, she thought, my fault. She pressed two fingers against her throbbing temple.

In order for Billy to recover, she must relinquish her love.

There was, she knew, no logic to this decision. Surgical successes bore no connection to renunciation. Yet in her odd, half-hypnotized state of mind she also knew that in the small hours of the morning there prevails something beyond logic or sense, the reason known to the unarmored heart.

Give up Linc?

The thought of being banished once again to that drab, loveless land filled her lungs, and she could scarcely breathe.

*   *   *

The next four days, Billy remained unmolestable in his remote cocoon. On the fifth morning, Dr. Rehnquist ordered more X rays for his patient. A bad sign. The possibility of further surgery was being considered.

After that first night, Marylin had been returning to her mother’s house for a few hours of pill-induced sleep—in order to avoid the battalion of reporters, she had to sneak down to the basement loading dock, where Roy met her with the Waces’ used Chevy.

Just after twelve on that fifth night, the war-widow nurse, Marylin’s friend, telephoned. Maybe this was pure imagination, but when she changed Billy’s I.V. she thought that she had seen the corner of his mouth twitch. Dr. Rehnquist was on his way over.

Marylin called Joshua, who picked her up within ten minutes. They arrived in Billy’s room to find the surgeon, dressed in old slacks, aiming a medical flashlight at their child’s eyes.

For an interminable minute, Billy’s face remained still.

Then the lashes trembled.

Joshua’s large, damp hand engulfed Marylin’s.

The eyelids drew up.

Those first heartbeats, the sea-colored eyes were the terrifying blank blue of a newborn infant’s. Then another flicker. The green intensified.

“Billy?” Rehnquist’s arid voice rang in the night-still hospital. “Billy!”

The child blinked.

“You had an accident. I’m your doctor.”

“Billy . . .” Marylin whispered.

“Your—Mom—and—Dad—are—both—here,” Dr. Rehnquist was booming oratorically.

Billy’s pupils swelled. Doctor, nurse, parents, the dark and sleeping world beyond this room maintained a reverential stillness as the small face seemed to ripple.

Marylin could feel the shuddering of Joshua’s thick body.

Then Billy’s gaze turned to Marylin. His lips formed an infinitely faint smile.

With a soft cry, Marylin bent to embrace him.

*   *   *

After Joshua dropped her off, Marylin stood on the doorstep a few moments. Dawn pinkened the western sky, yet above the dark outline of the Santa Monicas the full moon still dangled like a pale, lost balloon. Her face set with mournful determination, she went inside. She’d had an extension installed in Roy’s room, and she called the long-distance operator.

Sunday, Linc was home.

In a hectic rush of words, she explained about Billy.

“Marylin, love, I’m crying.”

“So am I.”

“He’s a terrific little kid, my brother. Tough, too. Made of iron.”

She gripped the receiver tighter. How many of the crucial exchanges of their lives had been carried on through this unsatisfactory, unfleshed instrument? “Linc, darling, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the past few days.”

“Same here. This business, we have to settle it with the least hurt to Dad. Yesterday, when I talked to him, he sounded so old, drained.” The crises had cut through Linc’s outrage: he had called his father the last three evenings. “I’m pretty sure he’s given up fighting the divorce. The way I see it, we’ll live out there so he can see Billy as often as possible.”