A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [22]
“What I mean,” he whispered, “is what if nothing happens?”
I had told Emma and Claire over the telephone that I was staying at the hospital to help Lizzy get well. Howard was looking at me without flinching and I could see plainly in his eyes, Dan and Theresa moving the tubes and machines home, Lizzy forever suspended between life and death. She would lie in the living room; the girls would think of her as someone on the order of Snow White when they visited. She would grow and they would roll her from side to side every day, so that she would wear evenly. She would be ugly and ungainly as a preteen and beautiful again at sixteen. She would menstruate and never be bothered. Years would pass and the family might gather in the living room without even thinking about Lizzy’s presence, taking the sleeping child for granted. Every now and then they might think she had heard; on Christmas Day Dan would say grace in the dining room and he would mention how much they loved Lizzy, and out of the corner of her eye Theresa would see the girl move her head and look at them, and then turn back to sleep.
I clutched Howard’s forearm as if he too had seen. “I’ll visit her every day,” I brayed. “I’ll stay with her while Theresa goes to the grocery store, the library, the therapist, I swear I’ll—” Theresa and I, at seventy-five, our husbands long dead, would sit and wait by the side of the gray-haired woman who had never woken.
Time went on, unbroken by usual mealtimes and sunsets and ablutions. It was Howard who finally wondered if all the novenas and Hail Marys weren’t serving to usher Lizzy into the next world. I shook my head and told him, No. It could not be true that there was nothing behind her eyelids. The doctor had put her through a series of tests to evaluate brain activity in relation to eye responses. At the first, apparently, she did not have even the most primitive reflexes. Lizzy’s pupils did not react to light. She didn’t sneeze when her nostrils were tickled, up inside, with a Kleenex. It could not be true that she was like an egg that has been blown out. I wasn’t always sure there was any such thing as a soul to begin with, if there was an essence that was independent of our bodies, and that doubt made it all the more difficult to think of a little soul. Was Lizzy’s soul like a bird with its wings clipped, inside that bloated body, growing quiet and still, and then closing its eyes? Or had it flown out, up and up, days before, when she began to sink in the pond?
Dr. Hildebrand dispensed his diagnoses gradually, until the final decision seemed to be a mutual one made by him and Reverend Nabor and Dan and Theresa. They were going to let her go. The family filed into the lounge late the third night. The nurse took a wooden rocking chair into Lizzy’s room, with braided circles tied to the seat and the back. In the lounge we all sat trying not to look into the unit, at the window with the curtain drawn, and the closed door, where, somehow, impossibly, a life was coming to an end. Mrs. Clark, the prayer leader, swished her behind in her seat, her preamble to rising, but her daughter reached for her hand and kept her down.
In room 309 the nurse took the I.V. out of Lizzy’s arm, the tube from her nose, switched off the respirator, the heart monitor, removed the blood pressure band, and the catheter. Dan lifted Lizzy out of the bed and took her to the rocking chair. His shoulders were at his ears. He rocked her a little. Theresa kneeled on the floor and put her head on Lizzy’s lap. They could touch her anywhere they wanted now. They talked to her, and believed that her reason had returned, that she could now hear and understand. Dan counted to himself while Lizzy took breaths first twelve seconds apart, and fourteen, and eighteen, and twenty. They waited, bent over her, but no next breath came.
Chapter Four
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HOWARD’S MOTHER NELLIE HAD not only occupied Emma and Claire for three days, but she also had baked bread and pies and cookies, made two pans of chicken and broccoli casserole, as well as miscellaneous foodstuffs: