Every Little Thing Page 31

  It was Sunday. He was being released that Friday.

  He had five days left in that place, and that could be dangerous. He’d seen men act out on others about to be released, but rumours had spread—from nosey listeners in the visitation room—that Cohen had a sick child. His son is dying, and Cohen never corrected what might be true. He’d seen the hardest men in there go soft for their children in the visitation room. And he’d caught their sympathetic nods—in the cafeteria, in the resource room—since the word had gotten around about Zack.

  Cohen had five days left, four if Sunday didn’t count because it was Sunday, and maybe Friday didn’t count because it was the day he’d get out. And he’d be getting out early too: seven weeks shy of his six month sentence.

  WEIGHTING

  FRIDAY CAME, HIS official release from prison, and his mother and father picked him up. Other than his mother’s bear hug in the parking lot—her tears cold against his neck—there was nothing ceremonious about it. It was about getting out of that place and getting to the hospital. He’d asked them to take a change of clothes, a fresh one, so he wouldn’t have to wear what the prison had given him back. He changed in a Tim Horton’s washroom and threw the old clothes in the garbage—the garbage can was there and the old jeans were in his hand and he threw them in the garbage. Stared at them. One leg hanging out the side.

  Before throwing his old clothes in the trash, he’d taken out the paternity test results. He had the envelope in his hand now, still folded in half, and he thought about opening it there and then, in a bathroom stall. But he pictured it saying: No. Saying: Negative, not yours, and that would affect how he looked at the boy, in ten minutes time, at the hospital. It would affect how he felt about the kid, and Zack deserved someone there now, anyone, immediately. It was that, and it was because he was afraid of the answer either way. He was too close to seeing the kid, and he had too many questions, and opening the envelope would only cause more, Do I really want this child? More panic and anxiety,more, Can I adopt him anyway? A man in a trench coat walked in. A heavy breather, and he’d said hello. He was distracting in every way, slurping his iced cappuccino through a seemingly faulty straw, before setting it down to hum as he stood in front of the urinal. Cohen put the results back in his pocket.

  At a red light his father said, “You should’ve gotten the paternity results by now?”and Cohen said, “Do you know if they’ve put Zack on dialysis?”

  “I can’t keep the machines straight anymore,” he confessed. “Or what tube does what. Why?”

  “Because dialysis wouldn’t be good.”

  “We were there Wednesday night, Cohen, and you should prepare yourself. He’s in and out of consciousness now. He’s not a pretty sight. It’s hard to look at.”

  His mother said, “Keith came by our house last night.

  Looking for Allie again. Have you spoken to her?” and Cohen said nothing, and his father shot a look at his mother, Don’t meddle.

  Zack was in the pediatric intensive care unit. His bed surrounded by machines instead of people. A dialysis machine meant his kidneys were failing, and the thick, rippled tubing jammed down his throat meant his lungs were wilted. The RVAD machine, the source of Zack’s infection, was still hooked up because his heart wouldn’t pump without it. All those tubes, like a den of snakes, latched on.

  Cohen walked into the room, and his mother grabbed his father’s wrist; they both stayed in the doorway, so Cohen could be alone with Zack. He sat at the chair with a book he’d bought in the gift shop just in case,The Mesozoic: Age of the Dinosaurs. But Zack wasn’t awake. There was a purple Tupperware container on the table beside Zack’s bed, the lid off, exposing a half-eaten bran muffin, and Cohen wondered who’d owned it. He turned to his mother, tapping the Tupperware, “Is this yours?”

  “There’s a nurse here,”she said, “And God love that woman’s big red heart. Sits with him whenever she’s not busy. Bends the rules for visitor hours.” Cohen saw a pamphlet under the Tupperware container, pulled it out. When Your Loved One is in a Coma: Frequently Asked Questions. Someone had laid it there because there hadn’t been a loved one by Zack’s side to hand it to. He held the pamphlet up to his mother, and her knees bent low. His father put an arm around her and guided her down the hallway, saying, “We’ll find out what’s happening here. We’ll find out what’s happening.”

  Cohen stayed in the chair, and he tried to piece it all together. What the machines were doing. The clear fluids in IV bags would be antibiotics. A few drops per second would have to find and kill the million invisible bacteria poisoning every inch of the kid, and all it took was a few resistant bacteria, or a few well-hidden ones, and they’d spread and conquer again. There was something like a vertical accordion inside one of the machines, and Cohen watched it. Up and down. A sucking noise, a demon breathing, and it lulled Cohen’s lungs into breathing in sync with it.

  None of these machines were getting at the root cause. They weren’t curing anything. Dialysis, because his kidneys were failing. Intubation, and a mainline of oxygen, because his lungs were compromised. It was putting up cardboard as a storm broke windows and punched holes in a roof. It was hoping the storm wouldn’t be so bad. All we can do now is assist each compromised organ, and they did until Zack himself was a machine. If Cohen unplugged any one of those cords,Zack would be dead in hours.

  He heard his mother watching him. Looked back at the doorway. His father closed his eyes, nodded his head. Comatose. His mother, “Five a. m., on Thursday.”He looked at her hands, and she had that same When Your Loved One is in a Coma pamphlet buckled up in her grip.

  He looked back to Zack. His chest up and down in an unnaturally perfect rhythm. A thin plastic tube in each nostril. Oxygen. Even that, his body couldn’t get enough of, and yet the room was full of it. His blood was a polluted river, crashing off banks of bone and splashing over every organ, soaking them with infected blood. His lungs were taking it the hardest, so they had him ventilated. His mouth taped open to accommodate the thick, ribbed tubing. It was hard to look at and then it wasn’t.

  He’d sat there for hours, talking with his parents about everything: the job at the university he’d applied for, the ginger nurse who kept a steady supply of baked goods at Zack’s bedside table for visitors. A new show on HBO that Cohen’s father thought Cohen would love. For thirty minutes, they talked about the funny new things their crazy neighbour had been up to because they’d had the same neighbour since Cohen was nine or ten, and that neighbour was unpredictable and off the wall. He’d take up anything, but only for a month or two: ice sculpting, a backyard bread oven. One week, he’d put fliers in everyone’s mailbox about a croquet tournament he was hosting in his backyard.

  “...His latest venture is going around to yard sales on Saturdays, buying anything he deems a good deal, and selling it all, for a buck more than he bought it for, at his own yard sales on Sundays.”

  His mother laughed, “Yes, and your poor father. Jim insists, every Saturday around supper, that your father come over and see the day’s best deals.”

  It’d been nice, catching up, laughing, talking about something other than how everything had gone wrong. His mother ran across the street and picked up a pizza; snuck wine in, in a thermos. They left him there just after nine o’clock, and shortly after they left, he went and got a tea. He hadn’t been in a hospital cafeteria since Halifax: Allie in her room, not wanting to see him. Him pouring cashews into yogurt for Keith to bring to her.

  His tea was too hot to sip. He sat at a table, alone,watching steam rise up and out of his cup, dangling there, until there was no more steam to watch. He took the envelope out of his pocket, unfolded it. Took out the slip of paper. He laid it print-side down on the table and threw the envelope into a recycling bin behind him. He folded the slip of paper, three times, took out his wallet, and tucked the test result into the clear plastic picture frame, where most men kept a photo of their child.

  MONDAY NIGHT HE sat beside Zack,
and Zack hadn’t woken yet. Not for a minute. The wind and rain were drumming on the window, and the window was huge, thin—he thought back to the thick, boxy window in his cell. The one he’d perched at and peered through for months. And the duck pond in the far right corner. He thought about Curt, howling, as Truck pressed his face into that table, twisting his arm. The desperate look that Curt had on his face, the day they were both checked into prison, had always stayed with Cohen, in a haunting sort of way. It had been a look that said, But life can just change.

  He’d been sitting at Zack’s bedside for ten hours and only ate one meal that day, breakfast, and he planned to sit there another ten. He’d comb Zack’s hair with his fingers whenever Zack looked too hopeless or defeated or dishevelled. A year ago the kid had been a wound-up, animated, fact-filled toy, tugging on his pants, Do you know what I know about snowy owls?

  Zack opened his eyes at one point, but didn’t move his head. His pupils tumbling around like clothes in a dryer. Cohen stood up, smiling, but Zack couldn’t talk with the tubes down his throat. And he looked confused anyway. He took Zack’s hand, rubbing a thumb up and down Zack’s dry, red knuckles. “Can you hear me, buddy? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me?” But Zack’s eyes closed again. As fast as that.

  Cohen started reading aloud from the dinosaur book. Just in case. Or to amuse himself. Twelve hours in that room. Ten at night. A book of crossword puzzles half-filled out on the table next to him. A magazine that couldn’t hold his interest.

  A nurse strolled in on her final rounds, surprised to find someone there. A look of sympathy on her face. She had a red tin can in her hands and popped the lid off. “Double chocolate with cream cheese filling,” she’d said. “Unless you’re lactose-intolerant, you’re going to enjoy these immensely.”

  “Thanks,”he said, and he liked that the bottom of the muffin hadn’t been wrapped in a muffin wrapper he’d have to contend with, discard. “You must be the wonderful ginger nurse I’ve been hearing about, who’s been looking in on Zack?”

  “Oh, just doing my job.”

  “Really?” he said, chewing the muffin she’d baked. “Baking and distributing these tasty muffins to everyone in your wing is part of your job?”

  She’d smiled as he’d said tasty. “You’re Anne’s boy, then? Corey or Conan or something?”

  “Cohen.”

  “Oh, good,” she laughed. “Conan’s not a good name for anyone.”

  “Unless you’re a barbarian.” She looked at him like she’d never seen the Schwarzenegger film. “It’s a movie, never mind. A bad one, too.”

  She rubbed Zack’s toes, through the white blanket draped over him, in a way that implied familiarity with the boy. “Visitation hours are over,” she started pulling the curtain around them, “so I’m going to have to ask you to be super quiet for me and hide out behind this curtain?”

  He nodded with appreciation and told her that Zack had opened his eyes for a while. “Not too long ago, actually. That’s a good thing, right?”

  “Well, it’s certainly not a bad thing, is it? I can tell you what though. You being here for this little slugger. That’s a good thing.” She patted his toes again. “I’ve been with him, looking in on him, since day one. Stole my heart over a glass of apple juice, he did. A charmer. Knows more about owls than anyone could possibly need to.”She smiled, and Cohen didn’t want her to leave the room. She had a textbook under her arm, and he asked her about it. “Med School,” she said. “I’m studying to be a doctor.”

  “What, and working as a nurse?”

  “I haven’t had a life in three point five years. When I get a chance, a break, or after a shift, I slip in here, with this little slugger, and study a while.”

  “Feel free,” he said, “to sit down. I was just about to leave, actually. I don’t want to displace you, or steal away your study spot, and be personally responsible for your failing out of med school.”

  “You really don’t mind?”

  “No. And certainly not if you’re going to bring muffins when you come.”

  She’d laughed that night, a lot. She was easy to figure out, and talk with, and want around. She’d laugh into a closed fist, as if coughing, and there was something about the gesture Cohen liked. Something about her tiny hands, her face, the copper mess of curls she never did much to restrain.

  Two or three times a week, for two weeks, they’d crossed paths in Zack’s room. He’d take her textbook and ask her questions about differential diagnosis and vaccinations, and one night, she’d asked him to help her recite the proper ways to tell a person their loved one had died. There was a checklist. It seemed callous until she’d explained the way hope—when not deflated by short, clear, declarative sentences—will soar into denial. “Hope and denial can be harder on a person than anything,” she’d said, like she knew it for a fact.

  Every time she slipped away for the night, she’d step to the other side of the curtain she’d drawn and poke her head back in. “I need you to really keep it down in here.”Finger to her lips. Shh. “It’s after visiting hours.”He’d nod, smiling, and she’d cast one more sympathetic look at Zack and bow out.

  He slept a lot in that room, but he could never spend the night, or the morning shift nurse would find him in violation of visitation hours and it would come back on Cassie. The more time he’d spend there, the more it felt like he had to spend time there. He’d invested so much time there, to be present when Zack woke up, that his conviction to be there when Zack woke up strengthened with every passing hour. Cassie would pop in and joke he was narcoleptic—You’re always asleep when I pop in! She’d read him the symptoms of narcolepsy from one of her textbooks the night she’d come in with red velvet cupcakes. He’d fall asleep in there to the beeps and pulls and hums of all that machinery, and when he’d wake up, Cassie would have a muffin laid in wait, on the table beside the little slugger. He helped her bathe Zack one night, and she’d taken her nurse gown off to do so. Handed it to him, to lay over a chair. It felt like the start of something.

  One night he’d gone to sleep there, and instead of waking to a muffin or cupcake, he’d woken up to a note beside him, pinned under Allie’s engagement ring, like a paperweight holding it down.

  Cohen,

  It’s not like I ever saw this day coming. Me walking into a hospital room, afraid to wake you. Afraid you’d yell at me and be right to yell. The boy I never told you about: I still believe it was Keith’s. And I wasn’t ready for a baby with Keith. And I couldn’t deal with what it meant to not want a baby with Keith. To want a child, but not with the man I was with.

  And if it was your son, that was wrong too. Because he should have been ours, not yours, not mine. We were going to have a little boy, and he was going to spill juice on our couch cushions and demand pets that pissed on our rugs and shat all over our yard, and he’d need our advice, and his fingernails clipped, and we were going to raise him. Together. The both of us. Vacations and parent-teacher interviews. Together. That’s how it was supposed to be. Not this. Not all this confusion and court-intervention. Not you, here, at this boy’s bedside anyway, because he might have been yours.

  This is not an apology for all I’ve put you through. This situation is beyond forgiveness. But not understanding, I hope. And I need you to understand one thing: the day I revoked my parental rights to a little boy, I never imagined you in a hospital room and me afraid to wake you.

  What I did was inexcusable. What I went along with in that courtroom even more so. But it took sitting in court six months ago, and turning on you, to realize how upside down my life’s become. I stared at my engagement ring the whole time I was on that stand, twisting it around and around my finger, until my finger was sore.

  Sorry I’m saying sorry in a note, like a high-school girl—but I don’t deserve the face time. Nor should you be put in a position of having to decide if you should grant me a dignified conversation. You’re here with this boy. For this boy. Not for me. Not right now. But I do wan
t to talk. This can’t be like Dad again, where we don’t address it, and drift apart. I want to talk with you, and you have my number, but you haven’t called. Just know that I want you to. And please do, when your head is clear and you think I deserve a minute.

  I bought you a muffin. It’s all they had left down there in the cafeteria.

  My deepest sincerities, Cohen.

  - Allie. Allie Crosbie. Remember her?

  HE READ HER note two or three times that morning, inspecting it, the way a cat bats at a mouse to try and understand it. Or to understand its own reaction to it.

  His mother showed up around noon. A bag of bagels. Some orange juice. “You have your interview at the university today, don’t you?”

  He threw Allie’s note in the garbage. “Yeah,” he said, looking in the garbage like the note didn’t belong there. “At three thirty.”

  “It’s twelve now. You should go on home, have a shower to clear your head. Think about some answers, to some questions they might ask you.”

  But he didn’t go straight home. He stopped in to visit Lee on his way home, like he did every time he left the hospital. Lee was a statue now, unresponsive, but Cohen liked that. He felt bad about liking it, but Lee had become the perfect confessional booth. He could be viscerally honest with an old friend, but free of judgment. He could say, I still love her. He could say, I fucking hate her, Lee, and Lee wouldn’t even look up.

  That day, he found himself telling Lee about how he didn’t want to teach university biology. And maybe he’d skip the interview. Move far away. A fresh start. A clean pair of eyes. In

  Iceland. Montreal. Somewhere in Italy where he didn’t know a goddamn thing, not even the language. Touching down in Italy and being forced to learn how to talk again, meet new people, find a career in something other than birds. There’d be a house there, and he’d have to get familiar with it: where the cutlery tray was, the AC dial, what the postal code was, the phone number. He’d have to find the delis, cafés, bookstores, and pick favourites. He liked not even knowing what the currency was.