The Fourth Hand (20 page)

More likely, he would be expected to find improbable dignity in and sympathy for the victims of frankly stupid accidents, like his. If there was what could be cal ed a thought behind this watered-down version of the news, the thought was as smal as this: that even in what was gruesome, there was (or should be) something
uplifting,
provided that what was gruesome was idiotic enough.

So what if the al -news network would never send Patrick Wal ingford to Yugoslavia? What was it the confused doorman’s brother had said to Vlad or Vlade or Lewis?

(“Look—you have a job, don’t you?”) Wel , Wal ingford had a job, didn’t he?

And most Sundays he was free to fly to Green Bay. When the footbal season started, Mrs. Clausen was eight months pregnant; it was the first time in recent memory that she wouldn’t see a single Packer home game at Lambeau Field. Doris joked that she didn’t want to go into labor on the forty-yard line—not if it was a good game. (What she meant was that no one would have paid any attention to her.) Therefore, she and Wal ingford watched the Packers on television. Absurdly, he flew to Green Bay just to watch TV.

But a Packer game, even on television, provided the longest sustained period of time that Mrs. Clausen would stroke the hand or permit the hand to touch her; and while she stared transfixed at the footbal game, Patrick could look at her the same way. He was conscious of memorizing her profile, or the way she bit her lower lip when it was third and long. (Doris had to explain to him that third and long was when Brett Favre, the Green Bay quarterback, had the greatest potential for getting sacked or throwing an interception.)

Occasional y she hurt Wal ingford without meaning to.

When Favre got sacked, or when he was intercepted—

worse, whenever the other team scored—Mrs. Clausen would sharply squeeze her late husband’s hand.

“Aaahhh!”
Wal ingford would cry out, shamelessly exaggerating his agony. There would be kisses for the hand, even tears. It was worth the pain, which was quite different from those twinges caused by the kicking of the unborn child; those pins and needles were from another world.

Thus, bravely, Wal ingford flew almost every week to Green Bay. He never found a hotel he liked, but Doris wouldn’t al ow him to stay in the house she’d shared with Otto.

During these trips, Patrick met other Clausens—Otto had a huge, supportive family. Most of them weren’t shy about demonstrating their affection for Otto’s hand. While Otto’s father and brothers had choked back sobs, Otto’s mother, who was memorably large, had wept openly; and the only unmarried sister had clutched the hand to her breast, just before fainting. Wal ingford had looked away, thereby failing to catch her when she fel . Patrick blamed himself that she’d chipped a tooth on a coffee table, and she was not a woman with the best of smiles to begin with.

While the Clausens were a clan whose outdoorsy good cheer contrasted sharply with Wal ingford’s reserve, he found himself strangely drawn to them. They had the loyal exuberance of season-ticket holders, and they’d al married people who looked like Clausens. You couldn’t tel the in-laws from the blood relatives, except for Doris, who stood apart.

Patrick could see how kind the Clausens were to her, and how protective. They’d accepted her, although she was clearly different; they loved her as one of their own. On television, those families who resembled the Clausens were nauseating, but the Clausens were not.

Wal ingford had also traveled to Appleton to meet Doris’s mother and father, who wanted to visit with the hand, too. It was from Mrs. Clausen’s father that Wal ingford learned more about Doris’s job; he hadn’t known that she’d had the job ever since her graduation from high school. For longer than Patrick Wal ingford had been a journalist, Doris Clausen had worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers. The Packers’ organization had been very supportive of Mrs. Clausen—they’d even put her through col ege.

“Doris can get you tickets, you know,” Mrs. Clausen’s father told Patrick. “And tickets are wicked hard to come by around here.”

Green Bay would have a rough season fol owing their loss to Denver in Super Bowl XXXI . As Doris had said so movingly to Otto, the last day the unlucky man was alive,

“There’s no guarantee of returning to the Super Bowl.”

The Packers wouldn’t get past the wild-card game, losing what Mrs. Clausen cal ed a heartbreaker in the first round of the playoffs to San Francisco. “Otto thought we had the 49ers’ number,” Doris said. But by then she had a new baby to take care of. She was more philosophical now about Green Bay’s losses than she and Otto had ever been before.

It was a big baby, a boy—nine pounds, eight ounces—and he was so long overdue that they’d wanted to induce labor.

Mrs. Clausen wouldn’t hear of it; she was one to let nature take its course. Wal ingford missed the delivery. The baby was almost a month old before Patrick could get away from Boston. He should never have flown on Thanksgiving Day—

his flight was late getting into Green Bay. Even so, he arrived in time to watch the fourth quarter of the Minnesota Vikings’ game with the Dal as Cowboys, which Minnesota won. (A good omen, Doris declared—Otto had hated the Cowboys.) Perhaps because her mother was staying with her, to help with Otto junior, Mrs. Clausen was relaxed about inviting Wal ingford to visit her and the new baby at home.

Patrick did his best to forget the details of that house—al the pictures of Otto senior, for example. It was no surprise to see photographic evidence that Otto senior and Doris had been sweethearts—she’d already told Wal ingford about that—but the photos of the Clausens’ marriage were more than Patrick could bear. There was in their photographs not only their obvious pleasure, which was always of the moment, but also their anticipated happiness

—their unwavering expectations of a future together, and of a baby in that future. And what was the setting of the pictures that so seized Wal ingford’s attention? It was neither Appleton nor Green Bay. It was the cottage on the lake, of course! The weathered dock; the lonely, dark water; the dark, abiding pines. There was also a photo of the boathouse apartment under construction, and there were Otto’s and Doris’s wet bathing suits, drying in the sunlight on the dock. Surely the water had lapped against the rocking boats, and—especial y before a storm—it must have slapped against the dock. Patrick had heard it many times. Wal ingford recognized in the photographs the source of the recurrent dream that wasn’t quite his. And always underlying that dream was the
other
one, the one the prescience pil had inspired—that wettest of al wet dreams brought on by the unnamed Indian painkil er, now banned.

Looking at the photographs, Wal ingford began to realize that it was not the

“unmanly” loss of his hand that had conclusively turned his ex-wife against him; instead, in refusing to have children, he’d already lost her. Patrick could see how the paternity suit, even though it proved to be false, had been the bitterest pil for Marilyn to swal ow. She’d wanted children.

How had he underestimated the urgency of that?

Now, as he held Otto junior, Wal ingford wondered how he could not have wanted one of these. His own baby in his arms!

He cried. Doris and her mother cried with him. Then they shut off the tears because the twenty-four-hour international news team was there. Although he was not the reporter assigned to this story, Wal ingford could have predicted al the shots.

“Get a close-up of the hand, maybe the baby with the hand,”

Patrick heard one of his col eagues say. “Get the mother and the hand and the baby together.” And later, in a sharply spoken aside to the cameraman: “I don’t care if Pat’s
head
is in the frame, just so his
hand
is there!”

On the plane back to Boston, Wal ingford remembered how happy Doris had looked; although he rarely prayed, he prayed for the health of Otto junior. He hadn’t realized that a hand transplant would make him so emotional, but he knew it wasn’t just the hand.

Dr. Zajac had warned him that any decline in his slowly acquired dexterity could be a sign of a rejection reaction.

Also, rejection reactions could occur in the skin. Patrick had been surprised to hear this. He’d always known that his own immune system could destroy the new hand, but why
skin
? There seemed to be so many more important, internal functions that could go wrong. “Skin is a bugger,”

Dr. Zajac had said.

No doubt “bugger” was an Irma-ism. She and Zajac, whom she cal ed Nicky, were in the habit of renting videos and watching them in bed at night. But being in bed led to other things—Irma was pregnant, for example—and in the last video they’d watched, many of the characters had cal ed one another
buggers.
That skin could be a bugger would be imparted to Patrick soon enough. On the first Monday in January, the day after the Packers dropped that wild-card game in San Francisco, Wal ingford flew to Green Bay. The town was in mourning; the lobby of his hotel was like a funeral home. He checked into his room, he showered, he shaved. When he cal ed Doris, her mother answered the phone. Both the baby and Doris were napping; she’d have Doris cal him at his hotel when she woke up. Patrick was considerate enough to ask her to pass along his condolences to Doris’s father. “About the 49ers, I mean.”

Wal ingford was stil napping—dreaming of the cottage on the lake—when Mrs. Clausen came to his hotel room. She hadn’t cal ed first. Her mother was watching the baby.

She’d brought the car and would drive Patrick to her house to see Otto junior a little later.

Wal ingford didn’t know what this meant. Was she seeking a moment to be alone with him? Did she want some contact, if only with the hand, that she didn’t want her mother to see? But when Patrick touched her face with the palm of his hand—being careful to touch her with his
left
hand, of course—Mrs. Clausen abruptly turned her face away. And when he thought about touching her breasts, he could see that she’d read his mind and was repulsed.

Doris didn’t even take off her coat. She’d had no ulterior motive for coming to his hotel. She must have felt like taking a drive—that was al . This time, when Wal ingford saw the baby, little Otto appeared to recognize him. This was highly unlikely; nevertheless, it further broke Patrick’s heart. He got back on the plane to Boston with a disturbing premonition. Not only had Doris permitted no contact with the hand—she’d barely looked at it! Had Otto junior stolen al her affection and attention?

Wal ingford had a bad week or more in Boston, pondering the signals Mrs. Clausen might be sending him. She’d said something about how, when little Otto was older, he might like seeing and holding his father’s hand from time to time.

What did she mean by “older”—how much older? What had she meant, “from time to time”? Was Doris trying to tel Patrick that she intended to see him
less
? Her recent coldness to the hand caused Wal ingford his worst insomnia since the pain immediately fol owing his surgery.

Something was wrong. Now when Wal ingford dreamed of the lake, he felt cold—a wet-bathing-suit-afterthe-sun-has-gone-down kind of cold. While this had been one of several sensations he’d experienced in the Indian painkil er dream, in this new version his wet bathing suit never led to sex. It led nowhere. Al Patrick felt was cold, a kind of upnorth cold. Then, not long after his Green Bay visit, he woke up unusual y early one morning with a fever—he thought it was the flu. He had a good look at his left hand in the bathroom mirror. (He’d been training the hand to brush his teeth; it was an excel ent exercise, his physical therapist had told him.) The hand was green. The new color began about two inches above his wrist and darkened at his fingertips and the tip of his thumb. It was the mossy-green color of a wel -

shaded lake under a cloudy sky. It was the color of firs from a distance, or in the mist; it was the blackening dark green of pine trees reflected in water. Wal ingford’s temperature was 104.

He thought of cal ing Mrs. Clausen before he cal ed Dr.

Zajac, but there was an hour’s time difference between Boston and Green Bay and he didn’t want to wake up the new mother or her baby. When he phoned Zajac, the doctor said he’d meet him at the hospital—adding, “I told you skin was a bugger.”

“But it’s been a
year
!” Wal ingford cried. “I can tie my shoes! I can drive! I can
almost
pick up a quarter. I’ve come close to picking up a
dime
!”

“You’re in uncharted water,” Zajac replied. The doctor and Irma had seen a video with that lamentable title,
Uncharted
Water,
the night before. “Al we know is, you’re stil in the fifty-percent-probability range.”

“Fifty percent probability of
what
?” Patrick asked.

“Of rejection
or
acceptance, pal,” Zajac said. “Pal” was Irma’s new name for Medea.

They had to remove the hand before Mrs. Clausen could get to Boston, bringing her baby and her mother with her.

There would be no last looks, Dr. Zajac had to tel Mrs.

Clausen—the hand was too ugly.

Wal ingford was resting fairly comfortably when Doris came to his bedside in the hospital. He was in some pain, but there was nothing comparable to what he’d felt after the attachment. Nor was Wal ingford mourning the loss of his hand, again—it was losing Mrs. Clausen that he feared.