“What happened to preacher man?” he said.
“Excuse me,” Doc said.
“The pastor, the Bible-thumper, what happened to him?”
“Can’t help you there.”
Then they left him alone with the hard throb of the pain, or the remains of the pain, because that’s how it was, like a swish of chalk on a board or an imprint or something — a feeling all the way up his leg and into his empty chest, now without the little nesting bird, nothing but frickin’ air and his own heart bobbing away in there — a feeling of the pain of that thing being yanked down the inside of his leg by the moron doctor. A soft, faint beep from the machine indicating his pulse and him alone and the noise in the hall kind of getting louder with the babble and all that, more voices, the soft squeak of tennis sneakers on the waxed floor; another set of steps, more, and more.
In the hall, before he came out and placed his ghostly visage before them, hanging with tubes and in his flimsy gown, gasping for air, the family was bunched up to the side, praying, talking, crying — two little kids allowed on the unit only because it was the last few hours, if not minutes, of Tara’s life. A few days ago the doctors put her chances at slim to none — or they laid it out in some numbers, most likely, trying to keep it mathematical, the odds, because whenever you were talking about lost youth — death at an early age — you had to couch things as much as you could in figures. Tara’s father was wearing, and had been for two days, a dark brown tweed sports coat, penny loafers, a pair of Docker khakis, and had his head buried in his hands. He was slouched down against the wall, talking to himself, jouncing his heels against the floor. Next to him, seated on the floor listening, was Stanley, his brother, who, upon getting the news, had flown in directly from Israel; he was jet lagged and exhausted and felt himself floating in a bedazzling clean space of the hallway; he’d been there all afternoon, trying to soothe the soul of his poor brother, from whom he’d been estranged. All because of what? A bad shipment of goods he’d sent over, or lined up; nothing really his fault at all — he’d been nothing but the usual middleman, but the deal somehow wedged in between the men and, after a while, except for enough small pleasantries meant to keep at least an outward semblance of civility (mainly, it had to be admitted, for the women), the two rarely spoke; the bad deal became large over time — the sum of money lost debated — until everything else that had happened before that, all the way back to petty squabbles over marble games on the dirt tarmac outside their apartment in Israel, each tense moment, seemed prophetic. Flying out, for Stanley, who was fearful of elevators and tall buildings, had been a grand gesture, a great flourishing of his arms outward over the skies of Tel Aviv (as he saw it); a token of his true, deep love, a love that went beyond that bad deal (five thousand pipe wrenches; all of them forged with a wobbling claw); but of course what did one expect from a deeply grieving brother except this — this wagging of the body to the song of sorrow? this sniffing and depleted man at a loss as to what might, what can, what should be done? So all Stanley did was sit with his brother, listen, nod, murmur agreements, add a few comments now and then in Hebrew (presuming — perhaps wrongly — that it would help Howard just to hear the mother tongue). Behind them, in the room with Tara, the women were around the bed, resting the tips of their fingers on the bedding, brushing the hair back from her forehead. A car had gone through a stop sign in Hackensack — a Saturday afternoon, light traffic for that corner, an elderly man driving a pale green Buick Skylark with his blood level four times above the legal limit sped right through and broadsided her Toyota at seventy-five miles an hour.
When she got close to the end — and they could tell, or rather the nurses indicated it silently by nods of the head and slight eye movements — there was a quieting. Calls went out from the pay phone in the lounge, where people limp in their anxiety lay sprawled over huge, square-cut maroon chairs. To speak the words that he had to speak — not that she was dead but that she was, as they said (although he thought it was kind of a phony phrase) near death (as if death were an island, a vacation resort), Stanley found himself listening to his own voice: he was a dummy; some other guy was holding him, composed and serene and bearing terrible news, the ventriloquist, as he spoke he heard his own voice quiver — dry and husky from the long flight — beneath the weight of the news he had to offer up; at the same time, he was thinking of the old radio show routines he and Howard had loved so much as a kid.
With the pump removed from his chest, everything out in the hall became amplified by the silence. He didn’t know it, but the prayers were in Hebrew, mainly, although some were in English, and some of what he heard was just talking, and crying, and emotive phrases such as how can it be? and why why why and if only and oh God. And a rocking motion verbalized in a kind of cantorial singsong — and even a little actual singing from one of the really little kids who didn’t know what was going on, a rapturous little tune with senseless lyrics about a goat and a shoe and the Fourth of July.
Just before he dragged himself up, decided to shut them up out there, he remembered there had been a night right after that night upstate, with the wonderful breeze through the screen, when he and Angela had sat on the end of the dock drinking beers and watching the stars clarify and listening to the fish rise, splashing, mostly bluegills but some pretty good largemouth bass he was sure. (He’d spent that afternoon casting a huge spoon, loaded up with worms, to no avail.) Up and down the shore the fish were leaping like mad while behind Angela, in the thick darkness under the trees, firefly light was being exchanged in frantic waves up and down the beach.
“What’cha thinking?” he asked her.
“I’m just thinking, you know, about all we’re gonna do and how good it’s gonna be and all that,” she said. It was a song she was singing, her own little hymn to the portents the future held.
“Hummm,” he said, taking a huge slug of his beer, a sizzle down his throat.
“And what’cha thinkin’ yourself?”
“About nothing, nothing at all except being here and how good it is here, with you, now.” And he meant it. His middle brother Gary had died a year before working a roofing job, and shaking the grief of that loss, the recurrent image of the idiot slipping on a loose slate and falling two stories, breaking his neck, had until that very moment seemed impossible; now something was lifting, or at least that’s what he felt, recalling that night on the dock with Angela while he, in turn, lay flat on his back in the hospital with his blood pumped full of morphine; the same bright lifting, like he was flying up over the lake. Some kind of grace, a moment of it, on the end of the dock with the shore webbed in the light of fireflies.
One might hope for some kind of divine justice. An amazing feat how he got himself up and dragged himself into the hall to scream at them, considering the odds, the wires and tubes and warning beeps, the very low flow pressure his heart offered. He spoke his mind out there in the hall, shouting at them. If God had been just, he would’ve slammed him with an occlusion; a major, major infarct that locked his heart into a knot, a clench of fibers so tight, a fist in the center of his rib cage, a burst of blinding pain that sent him stumbling, gasping for the last. Instead he had a minor event — one he hardly felt at the time.