Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [273]
I walked slowly down the hall to our Quiet Room, a euphemism for the place we chose to give bad news, a place with chairs, a table, a sofa, a big picture window, a cross on the wall, but no TV, no magazines, only a solid and soundproof door. How many times had I made this walk as a trauma surgeon? So often I had lingered outside the door, conscious of the devastation my news would be bringing. Had I honored the feelings and the dignity of those who waited in that room, the parents, siblings, spouses, and children, even if what I had to say dashed all their prayers? I could remember every such encounter; I could recall each face as it turned in hope and apprehension when the door opened.
I FOUND HEMA, hands crossed in front of her, gazing out of the window at the lights of the Battleship housing project that abutted our house-staff quarters, and the distant outline of the bridge beyond. Her back was to me. She saw my reflection in the glass before she saw me, but unlike every single person I had ever come to see in this room, she did not spin around. Instead, she stood like a statue, staring at my reflection in the window. I stopped where I was, holding the door open. I saw in that glass her eyes widen, the eyebrows rise. She held my gaze for the longest time. Her face showed surprise … as if who she saw wasn't the person she had expected to see.
“Here we are, Ma,” I said.
She cocked her head at my voice. She brought one hand up to her chin, her fingers aligned and locked together and resting contemplatively along her cheek, her movements exaggerated. She studied my face, my reflection, just like a village girl who is surprised in the act of drawing water at the well, and who must now read the intentions of the tall, smiling avatar whom she sees standing behind her.
Then, in slow motion, as if this were a dance, and both of us dancers, she turned and faced me.
I moved to her. “Here we are,” I said again, my arms extending toward her. “We can go home now, Ma.”
It must have seemed to her a very strange thing, even the wrong thing, to say. To live purely in the here and now, to look forward but never to the past—that was vintage Shiva. “Here we are,” I said.
She came into my arms.
We held her tight.
CHAPTER 53
She Is Coming
ON A BEAUTIFUL MORNING, just three weeks after Shiva's transference, Hema and I took leave of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. Thomas Stone insisted on being our escort. We stepped outside into air so crisp I felt a cough or a sneeze would shatter it like glass. The brick façade of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour glistened with dew as we said our good-byes. The hospital's recent turn in the limelight had brought in special city funds and sparked emergency repairs; as a result, the monsignor in the fountain was no longer tilting, his swizzle stick was gone, as was his crusting of bird droppings. Polished and sanguine, he looked emasculated and alien to the place where I had spent the last seven years of my life.
Our yellow cab sped across the Whitestone Bridge to Kennedy Airport. The sun had barely come up, and yet the freeway was thick with cars, the solitary drivers insulated from one another in wafer-thin metal, which at these speeds offered only the illusion of protection. We merged like wingmen rejoining the formation. Hema looked out meditatively just as I had when I arrived seven years before. I wondered if she could hear the hum of the überconsciousness, the superorganism who kept this from descending into