he says, “There’s been an accident, ma’am.”
He wears a black woven shirt, a pair of black woven pants. On his shirt there are patches, a badge. The car parked in my drive reads Serve & Protect.
“Ma’am?” asks the man when I don’t reply. Felix lies in my arms like a sack of potatoes. His body slumps, inert, still sleeping and growing heavier with time. Harriet sits at my feet, glaring at this strange man.
Though my ears hear the words, my brain can’t process them. Sleep deprivation I blame, or maybe it’s denial. I stare at the man before me and wonder: What does he want with me? What is he trying to sell?
“Can it wait?” I ask, pressing Felix to my chest so he can’t see the moist patches of milk that stain my shirt. My insides feel heavy; the lining of my legs burns. I limp, an effect of giving birth. “My husband will be home soon,” I say, promising, “any second now,” and I see the fabricated pity that settles upon the man’s desensitized face. He’s done this before, many times. I tell him about Maisie’s ballet class, how Nick is driving home as we speak, how he will be here any minute. I tell him how he was stopping only to pick up dinner, and then he will be home. I don’t know why I say so much. I open the door wider. I invite him inside.
“Would you like to wait inside?” I say, and I tell him again how Nick will be home soon.
Outside it is nearly eighty-five degrees. It’s the twenty-third of June.
There’s a hand on my elbow; his hat is in his hands. He steps inside my home, sure to cling to me so that he can brace Felix’s soft spot should I fall.
“There’s been an accident, ma’am,” he says again.
* * *
The Chinese food we usually eat comes from a small take-out restaurant in the town next to ours. Nick has a thing for their pot stickers, me for the egg drop soup. The restaurant isn’t more than five miles away, but between here and there lies a rural road that Nick likes to take because he prefers to avoid the heavy traffic of the highway, especially during rush hour. Harvey Road is a flat, level plane; there are no hills. It’s narrow, two lanes that hardly seem suitable for two cars, especially along the bend, a sharp ninety-degree angle that resembles an L, the double yellow line that dissects it met with disregard as cars drift blindly across it to make the hairpin turn. A chain of horse properties run the length of Harvey Road: large, modern houses surrounded by picket fences, harboring Thoroughbreds and American quarter horses. It’s the high-end version of rural, tucked in a nook between two thriving suburbs that snowball with droves of department stores, convenience stores, gas stations and dentists.
The day is sunny, the kind of glorious day that gives way to a magnificent sunset, turning the world to gold at the hands of King Midas. The sun hovers in the belly of the sky like a Chinese lantern, golden and bright, glaring into the eyes of commuters. It sidles its way into cars’ rearview mirrors, reminding us of its dominion in this world as it blinds drivers moving into and away from its glare. But the sun is only one cause of the accident. There’s also the sharp turn and Nick’s rapid speed, I’m soon to learn, three things that don’t mix well, like bleach and vinegar.
That’s what he tells me, the man in the woven shirt and pants, who stands before me, bracing me by the elbow, waiting for me to fall. I see the sunlight slope through the open front door and gain entry into my home, airbrushing the staircase, the distressed hickory floors, the hairs on Felix’s vulnerable head in a golden hue.
There are words and phrases equally as elusive as accident had been: too fast and collide and tree. “Was anyone hurt?” I ask, knowing Nick has a tendency of driving too fast, and I see him in my mind’s eye force some other car off the road and headlong into a tree.
There’s the hand again at my elbow, a sturdy hand that keeps me upright. “Ma’am,” he says again. “Mrs. Solberg.” He tells me that there was no one there. No witnesses to the scene, Nick taking that turn at over fifty miles per hour, the car being propelled into the air by the sheer physics of it, speed and velocity and Newton’s first law of motion that an object in motion stays in motion until it collides with a white oak tree.
I tell myself this: if I had asked for Mexican for dinner, Nick would be home by now.
* * *
The fluorescent lights line the ceiling like a row of stalled cars at a stoplight, one in front of the other in front of the other. The light reflects off the corridor’s linoleum floors, coming at me from both directions as everything in that one, single moment comes at me from both directions: Felix with a sudden, single-minded need to eat; men and women in hospital scrubs; gurneys ferrying by; a hand on my arm; a solicitous smile; a glass of ice water set in my shaking hand; a cold, hard chair; Maisie.
Felix disappears from my arms, and for one split second I feel lost. Now my father is there, standing before me, and in his arms sits Felix as I fold myself into him, and my father holds me, too. He is thin but sturdy, my father. His hair is nothing more than a few faint traces of gray on an otherwise smooth scalp, the skin darkened with age spots. “Oh, Daddy,” I say, and it’s only there, in my father’s arms, that I let the truth settle in, the fact that my husband, Nick, lies lifeless on an operating table, brain dead but being kept alive on life support while a list of organ recipients is procured: Who will take my husband’s eyes, his kidneys, his skin? A ventilator now breathes for him because Nick’s brain no longer has the ability to tell his lungs to breathe. There is no activity in the brain, and there is an absence of blood flow. This is what the doctor tells me as he stands before me, my father behind me, like a pair of bookends holding me upright.
“I don’t understand,” I tell the physician, more because I refuse to believe it than I don’t understand, and he leads me to a chair and suggests that I sit. It’s there, as I stare into his brown, disciplined eyes, that he explains again.
“Your husband has suffered from a traumatic brain injury. This caused swelling and bleeding in the brain,” he says, knotting his arms before his thin frame. “A brain hemorrhage. The blood has spread over the surface of the brain,” and it’s sometime there that he loses me, for all I can picture is an ocean of red blood spilling onto a sandy beach, staining the sand a fuchsia pink. I can no longer follow his words, though he tries hard to explain it to me, to choose smaller and more rudimentary words as the expression on my face becomes muddled and confused. A woman stops by, asking me to sign a donor authorization form, explaining to me what it is that I’m signing as I scrawl my name sloppily on a line.
I’m allowed into the trauma center to watch as a second physician, a woman this time, performs the very same tests the male doctor has just done, examining Nick’s pupils for dilation, checking his reflexes. Nick’s head is shifted to the left and the right, while the physician watches the movement of his steel-blue eyes. The doctor’s eyes are stern, her expression growing grim. The CT scan is reviewed again and again, and I hear these words slip into the room: brain shift and intracranial hemorrhaging, and I wish that they would put a Band-Aid on it so that we could all go home. I will Nick’s eyes, his throat, to do whatever it is they need for them to do. I beg for Nick to cough, for his eyes to dilate, for him to sit up on the gurney and speak. Chinese or Mexican? he’d say, and this time I would say Mexican.
I will never eat Chinese food again.
* * *
I say my goodbyes. I stand before Nick’s still-alive but already-dead body and say goodbye. But I don’t say anything else. I lay my hand on a hand that once held mine, that only days ago stroked my damp hair as I pushed an infant from my body. A hand that only hours ago cradled Maisie’s tiny one as they skipped through the door—she
