How cruel it was for Marsha to wave those Tiffany receipts with her signature on them at her and to look so young and great when her father was in the hospital and her mother was falling apart. Cassie was so hurt, she didn't say a single word all the way to the hospital. In the parking lot, she switched her attention to Mitch so sick in intensive care and composed herself for him. She went into the hospital lobby, determined to become the family hero. She'd bring Mitch back from the dead. He'd be so grateful for her help and support that his character would change completely. He'd give her his money to manage, and they'd all live happily ever after. With this strategy all planned out, she marched down the glass corridor into the wing that housed the Neurological Intensive Care unit.
"How is Mitchell Sales?" she asked the tough-looking nurse guarding the nine glass rooms reserved for head traumas.
"He's doing just fine," Nurse Helen Gurnsey said smoothly without looking at her. "His doctor has been on rounds already. Don't stay too long, honey. We have a five-minute rule here."
Five minutes! Cassie's breath caught. What could she accomplish in five minutes?
"You okay, honey?" Now the nurse looked up at her with just a hint of concern.
"Yes, fine," Cassie said. She didn't want any more sympathy for the car crash she hadn't had.
Two picture-windowed rooms down, she slipped into Mitch's cubicle, which was packed with expensive computerized monitoring devices and the spiderweb of plastic tubes that kept those oh-so-important fluids moving from plastic bags to Mitch's inert body and out of his body into more plastic bags. They still looked obscene. The respirator pumped air into his lungs, and the sound was enough to unnerve anyone. "Doing just fine" seemed to mean unchanged. The space was still too cramped to accommodate a visitor's chair, so Cassie stood by the bed and looked at the pathetic creature her husband had become.
"Mitch?" she whispered. "Can you hear me?" She saw him lying there and was actually, truly touched by his vulnerability. It was the first she'd ever seen in him. In recent years, with his great success, he had developed a slightly sarcastic, even sneering way about him that always made her nervous in his presence. Whenever he came in the door, she could feel her body begin its dance of anticipatory agitation. It was as if he came home looking for something wrong, which made him find something wrong. It was always some omission on her part that she could never guess in advance. Right now there was nothing critical about him except his condition.
Like yesterday, his eyes were half open. The young Dr. Wellfleet had told her that if the pupils were enlarged, maybe a blood vessel had exploded. Or something. Now that Mitch was stabilized, though, Mark Cohen, whom Cassie trusted, seemed to be afraid that more clots would form and move around-to his brain, his heart, his lungs. Maybe a whole freight train of them. Cassie thought of those blood clots traveling through Mitch's arteries that had to be badly clogged with foie gras and hollandaise. Maybe they wouldn't make it through.
As she studied him, immobilized and helpless, a quartet of thoughts played in counterpoint in her mind: IhatethismanIlovethismanIhopehelivesIhopehedies. And then the fugue played more slowly. What will I do without him? Where will I go? Who will I be with? How can I manage my children, who think I'm the enemy? Oh God, help me please!
Yesterday she'd been so stunned by Mitch's great fall that she hadn't been able to listen to all the things Mark had to say about those pupils and clots and vessels. But now she leaned over to see for herself what state Mitch's pupils were in. His eyes were not open wide enough for her to get a good look. She didn't want to pry them open with that picture window exposing them so clearly to view from anyone passing in the hall, so she gave him a tight little smile.
"Honey, it's Cassie. The nurse says you're doing just fine," she said brightly, figuring that she'd just used up about four of her five minutes. Those fake signatures of hers burned in her gut and hampered her breathing. The I-hate-this-man theme came up loudly, drowning out the others.
"Mitch, honey. I don't have a charge account at Tiffany's, or Bergdorf Goodman. I don't have a Chase MasterCard. In fact, I don't have a single account with only my name on it. There's been some kind of mix-up." She said this very sweetly. He was in intensive care, after all.
His eyes remained at half-mast.
"You're doing fine," she said stoically. "Can you hear me? We have a few things to talk about."
Fugue: Why would he talk now if he never has before?
"Sweetheart, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand. We're going to get you out of this. Is it Marsha? She's certainly had her behaviors over the years. But steal in my name? Mitch, tell me who it is. Marsha, or Teddy? Teddy wouldn't… would he?"
She stroked his left hand with two fingers, trying to feel some tenderness for a man who'd kept a big secret like this. Maybe this was the reason he'd been so hard on Marsha. Cassie's heart beat like a jungle drum. But why would he cover up for her to her own mother? Mitch's nails were manicured. Hers were not. She'd never been that interested. But his hand was bloated. His face was empty, slack. His color was scary. The machine breathed noisily. Tentatively, she curled his fingers around hers. "Squeeze my fingers if you can hear me," she said. "Come on, honey. Help me out."
Nothing.
"Mitch, you're going to be okay. I know you are. We have to establish some kind of communication here. I want you to know I'm here for you all the way. I can't stay with you. They won't let me. But I'm with you. Show me you know I'm with you."
Nothing.
Tears filled her eyes because he was so out of it. She told herself that people sicker than this survived every day. They had total recoveries all the time. The miracle of modern medicine. Total.
Cassie blundered on. "Honey, can you wink? How about this. Wink once if you can hear me, and twice if you can't."
He didn't wink. He didn't move. Nothing. Maybe a little gurgle. But then again maybe not. His torso was thick. His stomach protruded even when he was lying down. He'd gotten so fat. He had a forest of black hair on his bare arms. A tube in one nostril drew out his stomach's gastric fluids. A tube in his other nostril suctioned mucus from his respiratory system. This was disgusting to observe. Cassie tried to assign some tenderness to the lump that was her husband. She searched her memory for loving moments when they'd been happy together, when he'd held her hand or kissed her or told her she was a good woman, after all. But those memories were curiously absent in recent history. She scoured her mind for them frantically the way she scoured for her wallet throughout the house when she knew it was mislaid but present there somewhere. She was sure the absence of recent happy memories was due to her present frame of mind and that down the road when she returned to look for them, they would be there in plenty.
Instead, the memories to which she had easy access were old scars, the two occasions she returned home from the hospital after giving birth to their two children when Mitch had looked at her with a perfectly straight face and asked her what she planned to serve him for lunch. She remembered his looks of disdain at gifts she gave him that weren't good enough, and the way he abruptly changed the subject when she asked where he'd been and what he'd done when they were apart. Recent inflicted injuries that had seemed like thoughtless slights, but not intentional hurts. She thought he'd become insensitive with success, not mean.