The Beginner's Goodbye (4 page)

When I opened the front door, I found more tree outside. I had somehow expected that once I left the house I would be free and clear. I batted away branches, spat out gnats and grit. The siren was so loud that it felt like a knife in my ears. Then it stopped, and I saw the fire truck as I stepped out from the last of the tree: a beautiful, shiny red, with an ambulance pulling up behind it. A man in full firefighting regalia—but why?—jumped down from the truck and shouted, “Don’t move! Stay there! They’ll bring a stretcher!”

I kept walking, because how would they know where to bring it if I didn’t show them? “Stop!” he shouted, and an ambulance man—
not
with a stretcher; no sign of a stretcher—ran up and wrapped his arms around me like a straitjacket. “Wait here. Don’t try to walk,” he said. His breath smelled of chili.

“I can walk fine,” I told him.

“J.B.! Bring the stretcher!”

They thought I was the one who was injured, I guess. I mean, recently injured. I fought him off. I said, “My wife! Around—around—around—”

“All right, buddy. Calm down.”

“Where is she?” a fireman asked.

“Around the—”

I waved my arm. Then I turned toward where I was waving—the north side of the house—and found that it no longer existed. All I saw was tree and more tree.

The fireman said, “
Oh
, man.”

I knew that tree. It was a white oak. It had stood in our backyard forever, probably since long before our house was built, and it was enormous, a good foot and a half in diameter at the base, with such a pronounced tilt in the direction of our roof that I had it inspected every September, when the tree men came to prune. But they always assured me it was healthy. Old, yes, and perhaps not putting out quite as many leaves as it used to, but healthy. “And besides,” the foreman had told me, “if it ever
was
to fall, it’s standing so close to the house that it wouldn’t do much damage. It would only, more like,
lean onto
the house. It doesn’t have enough room to gather any speed.”

But he had been wrong. First of all, the tree had obviously not been healthy. It had fallen on a day without a breath of wind, without so much as a breeze. And second, it had done a
lot
of damage. It had leaned at the start, granted (that must have been the first creak I heard), but then it went on to buckle the roof from the center all the way to one end. And it had smashed the sunporch absolutely flat.

I said, “Get her out! Get her out! Get her out!”

The man who was holding me said, “Okay, brother, hang on.” By now he was holding me
up
, really. Somehow my knees had given way. He backed me toward a wrought-iron lawn chair that we never sat in and helped me sit. “Any pain?” he asked me, and I said, “No! Get her out!”

I wished I did have pain. I
hated
my body. I hated sitting there like a dummy while stronger, abler men fought to rescue my wife.

They called for work crews and chain saws and axes, and police cars to block off the street and a crane to raise the largest section of the tree trunk. They shouted over their radios and they crackled through the branches. This all must have taken some time, but I can’t tell you how much. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered, our neighbors and stray passersby. Old Mimi King from across the alley brought me a glass of iced tea. (I took a token sip, to be nice.) Jim Rust laid a pink knit crib blanket over my shoulders. It must have been eighty-some degrees and I was streaming sweat, but I thanked him. “She’s going to be
just fine
,” I told him, because he hadn’t said it himself, and I thought somebody ought to.

He said, “I certainly hope so, Aaron.”

It bothered me that he spoke my name like that. I was the only person listening. He didn’t need to specify whom he was addressing, for God’s sake.

Two men staggered out of the branches with a big heavy pile of old clothes. They laid the pile on a stretcher and my heart lurched. I said, “What—?” I struggled up from my chair and nearly crumpled to the ground. I grabbed on to Jim for support. He called out to them, “Is she alive?” and I thought,
He has no business! That’s MY question to ask!
But a fireman said, “She’s got a pulse,” and then I felt so grateful to Jim that tears came to my eyes. I clutched his arm tighter and said, “Take me—take—” and he understood and led me closer.

Her face was the same moon shape, round-cheeked and smooth, eyes closed, but she was filthy dirty. And the mound of
her bosom was more of a … cave. But that was understandable! She was lying on her back! You know how a woman’s breasts go flat when she’s lying on her …

“At least there’s no blood,” I told Jim. “I don’t see a bit of blood.”

“No, Aaron,” he said.

I wished he’d stop saying my name.

I wanted to ride with her in the ambulance, but too many people were working on her. They told me to meet them at the hospital instead. By that time we had been joined by Jim’s wife, Mary-Clyde, and she said she and Jim would drive me. Mary-Clyde was a schoolteacher, full of crisp authority. When I told her I could drive myself, she said, “Of course you can, but then you’d have to park and such, so we’ll just do it this way, shall we.” I said, meekly, “Okay.” Then she asked where she could find my shoes. Jim said, “Oh, Mary-Clyde, he doesn’t care about his shoes at a time like this.” But in fact I did care; I’m sorry, but I did; and I told her where they were and asked her to bring my brace as well.

They took Dorothy to Johns Hopkins. Hopkins was the very highest-tech, the most advanced and cutting-edge, so that was good. But on the other hand, it was the place that any Baltimorean with a grain of sense knew to avoid except in the direst circumstances—a gigantic, unfeeling, Dickensian labyrinth where patients could languish forgotten for hours in peeling basement corridors, and so that was very bad. Oh, welcome to the world of the Next of Kin: good news, bad news, up, down,
up, and down again, over days that lasted forever. The surgery was successful but then it was not, and she had to be rushed back to the operating room. She was “stabilized,” whatever that meant, but then all her machines went crazy. It got so, every time a doctor peeked into the waiting room, I would ostentatiously look in the other direction, like a prisoner trying to pretend that my torturer couldn’t faze me. Other people—the strangers camped in their own cozy groups all around me—glanced up eagerly, but not me.

I was allowed to see her just briefly, at wide intervals. I don’t know that you could really call it
seeing
her, though. Her face was completely obscured by tubes and cords and hoses. One hand lay outside the sheet, one of her chubby tan hands with the darker knuckles, but it was punctured by another tube and thickly adhesive-taped, so that I couldn’t hold it. And her fingers were flaccid, like clay. It was obvious that she wouldn’t have been aware of my touch, in any event.

“Guess what, Dorothy,” I said to her motionless form. “You know that oak tree I used to worry about?”

There was so much I wanted to tell her. Not just about the oak tree; forget the oak tree. I don’t know why I even mentioned the oak tree. I wanted to say, “Dorothy, if I could press
Rewind
right now and send us back to our little house, I would never shut myself away in a separate room. I would follow you into the sunporch. I would come up behind where you were sitting at your desk and lay my cheek on top of your warm head till you turned around.”

She would have given one of her snorts if she had heard that.

I would have snorted myself, once upon a time.

Here is something funny: I’d lost my cold. I don’t mean I got over it; I mean it just disappeared, at some point between when I drank that tea and when I walked into the waiting room. I’m guessing it was while they were trying to rescue Dorothy. I remember sitting under Jim Rust’s pink blanket, and I wasn’t sneezing then or blowing my nose. Maybe a cold could be shaken out of a person by the slam of a tree trunk, or by psychic trauma. Or a combination of the two.

They kept urging me to go home for a spell and get some rest. Go to Nandina’s, was what they meant, since everybody felt my own house was uninhabitable. Jim and Mary-Clyde urged it, and all the people from work, and various stray acquaintances. (My oak tree had been mentioned in the paper, evidently.) They came with their wrapped sandwiches and their covered containers of salad that I couldn’t bear to look at, let alone eat; even Irene arrived with a box of gourmet chocolates; and they promised to hold down the fort while I grabbed a little break. But I refused to leave. I suspect I may have thought I was keeping Dorothy alive somehow. (Don’t laugh.) I didn’t even go home to change. I stayed in my same dingy clothes, and my face grew stubbled and itchy.

After Mary-Clyde located my cane, though, I did start taking brief walks up and down the corridor. This was not because I wanted to, but because my leg had started seizing up from lack of use. I fell down once, when I was heading toward the restroom. So I would choose a time just after my allotted few minutes with Dorothy, and I would let the staff know exactly where I would be and when I was coming back. “Fine,” they would say, hardly listening. I would go into a flurry of parting instructions—“You
might want to check if she’s warm enough; I’ve been thinking she’s not quite—”

“Yes, we’ll see to it; run along.”

What I really wanted to say was, “This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some
patient
. I want to make sure you realize that.”

“Mmhmm,” they’d have murmured.

I walked up and down the corridors with a sense of something stretching thin, fragile elastic threads stretching between me and Dorothy, and I saw sights I tried to forget. I saw huge-eyed children without any hair, and skeletal men struggling for breath, and old people lying on gurneys with so many bags and tubes attached that they’d stopped being human beings. I looked away. I couldn’t look. I turned and went back to my torturers.

The shoes arrived in front of me on a Wednesday afternoon. I knew it was a Wednesday because the newspaper on the chair beside mine had a color photo of a disgusting seafood lasagna. (Wednesday always seems to be food day, for newspapers.) The shoes were clogs. Black leather clogs. That’s what the hospital staff tended to wear, I’d observed. Very unprofessional-looking. I raised my eyes. It was a male nurse; I knew him. Or recognized him, I mean. From other occasions. He’d been one of the kind ones. He said, “Mr. Woolcott?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you come with me.”

I stood up and reached for my cane. I followed him through the door and into the ICU. It wasn’t time for a visit yet. I had
just had my visit, not half an hour before. I felt singled out and privileged, but then also a little, I don’t know, apprehensive.

The cords and hoses had been removed and she lay uncannily still. I had thought she was still before, but I had had no idea. I had been so ignorant.

3

T
here used to be a dairy outlet over on Reisterstown Road, with a lighted white glass sign outside reading
FIRST WITH THE CARRIAGE TRADE
. It showed the silhouette of a woman wheeling a baby carriage—a witticism, I guess—and she was just
galloping
along, taking huge confident strides in a dress that flared below her knees although we were in the era of miniskirts. Whenever my family drove past that sign, I thought of my sister. This was before my sister had reached her teens, even, but still I thought of her, for Nandina seemed to have been born lanky, and ungainly, and lacking in all fashion sense. I’m not saying she was unattractive. She had clear gray eyes, and excellent skin, and shiny brown hair that she wore pulled straight back from her forehead with a single silver barrette. But the barrette tells you everything: she wore it still, although she would be forty on her next birthday. An aging girl, was what she was, and had been from earliest childhood. Her shoes were Mary Janes, as flat as scows in order to minimize her height. Her elbows jutted like coat hangers, and her legs descended as straight as reeds to her Ping-Pong-ball anklebones.

She drove me home from the hospital the afternoon that Dorothy died, and I sat beside her envying her imperviousness. She kept both hands on the steering wheel at the ten and two o’clock positions, just as our father had taught her all those years ago. Her posture was impeccable. (She had never been one of those women who imagine that slouching makes them look shorter.) At first she attempted some small talk—hot day, no rain in the forecast, pity the poor farmers—but when she saw that I wasn’t up to it, she stopped. That was one good thing about Nandina. She wasn’t bothered by silence.

We were traveling through the blasted wasteland surrounding Hopkins, with its boarded-up row houses and trash-littered sidewalks, but what struck me was how healthy everyone was. That woman yanking her toddler by the wrist, those teenagers shoving each other off the curb, that man peering stealthily into a parked car: there was nothing physically wrong with them. A boy standing at an intersection had so much excess energy that he bounced from foot to foot as he waited for us to pass. People looked so robust, so indestructible.

I pivoted to peer out the rear window at Hopkins, its antique dome and lofty pedestrian bridges and flanks of tall buildings—an entire complex city rising in the distance like some kind of Camelot. Then I faced forward again.

Nandina wanted to take me to her house. She thought mine wasn’t fit to live in. But I was clinging to the notion of being on my own, finally, free from all those pitying looks and sympathetic murmurs, and I insisted on her driving me home. It should have tipped me off that she gave in so readily. Turns out she was figuring I would change my mind once I got there. As soon as we reached my block she slowed down, the better to let me absorb
the effect of the twigs and small branches carpeting the whole street—
my
twigs and small branches. She drew to a stop in front of my house and switched off the ignition. “Why don’t I just wait,” she said, “till you make sure you’re going to feel comfortable here.”