Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [270]
IT WAS 2:00 P.M. when Thomas Stone appeared at my door. There were dark circles around his eyes. He sat self-consciously on the edge of the bed. He touched my hand. His lips parted.
“Wait,” I said. “Don't say anything yet.” I looked out of the window at the clouds, at distant smokestacks. The world was intact now, but I knew once he spoke it wouldn't be so.
“Okay,” I said. “What happened to Shiva?”
“He had a massive bleed in his brain,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It happened last night, about an hour after we left your room. Hema was with him. He suddenly clutched his head in pain … Then, in a matter of seconds, he was … unconscious.”
“Is he gone?”
Thomas Stone shook his head. “He bled from an arteriovenous malformation, a cavernous tangle of blood vessels in the cortex. He has probably had it all along … He was on anticoagulants for the blood clot in his arm … In a week we would have stopped.”
“Where is he?”
“Here. In the ICU. On a ventilator. Two neurosurgeons have seen him.” He shook his head. “It isn't feasible to evacuate the bleed. They think it's too late. And that he's brain-dead.”
I didn't register much of what he said after that. I remember he said that my CAT scan showed a similar but smaller spider knot of vessels, but mine wasn't bleeding, a miracle of sorts, I suppose, since I'd bled from everywhere till I got Shiva's liver.
A few minutes later, Hema, Deepak, and Vinu came into the room. I understood now that Stone had been delegated to break the news.
Poor Hema. I should have tried to comfort her, but I was too full of grief and guilt. I felt so very tired. They sat around my bed, Hema weeping, bent over, resting her head on my thigh. I wanted them to leave. I closed my eyes for a moment. I woke up when a nurse came in to silence one of the intravenous pumps. There was no one else in the room. I had her walk me to the bathroom and then I sat in the armchair. I wanted my strength back.
WHEN I AWOKE, Thomas Stone was by my chair. “He can't breathe on his own, and there are no pupillary or other reflexes,” he said in response to my silent query. “He's brain-dead now.”
I said I wanted to see him.
My father wheeled me down the hall where Shiva lay. Hema was with him, her eyes puffy and red, and when she turned to me, I felt ashamed to be alive, ashamed to be the cause of her sorrow.
Shiva looked asleep. It was his turn to sport the spike coming out of his skull—the intracranial pressure monitor. The endotracheal tube skewed his lips, angling his chin up unnaturally. The rise and fall of his chest from the ventilator offered a spot on which to rest my eyes, and my ifs were coming in that rhythm: If I hadn't come to America. If I hadn't seen Tsige. If I hadn't opened the door for Genet …
HEMA WHEELED ME BACK to my room, helped me back in bed.
I said to her, “It would have been better if you and Shiva had buried me. Youd be on your way to Missing now with your favorite son.”
It was a stupid, churlish thing to say, a primitive and subconscious urge to wound her so as to assuage my pain and guilt. But if I expected her to strike back, she didn't. There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed—she had reached that point.
“Marion, I know you think I favored Shiva … And maybe I did. What can I say but that I'm sorry. A mother loves her children equally … but sometimes one child needs more help, more attention, to get by in the world. Shiva needed that.
“Marion, I have to apologize to you for more than that. I thought you were responsible for Genet being mutilated, circumcised, and all that followed. I held that against you. When we came here, Shiva told me everything. My son, I hope you can forgive me.