Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [3]
Rocky wondered why she hadn’t known this. When was the last time she had taken a review class in CPR? Would it have mattered to her if she had known this?
“This is where I tell you to take him off the ventilator, isn’t it?”
The doctor nodded.
A hospital chaplain slipped quietly into a chair on the other side of Rocky. She asked Rocky if she wanted to call anyone. She did not.
“But there is something that I want you to do. Will you just stay outside the door so that no one else comes in? I want to be alone with him.” She stayed with Bob while the ventilator was shut down and for half an hour later, standing by him as his skin began to cool. She wanted to get on the gurney with Bob and press her body against his. But all she could do was awkwardly get one leg up and balance the other leg on tiptoe; Bob was exactly in the middle and there was not enough room for her entire body.
The cop, who had waited in the hallway, attempted to comfort her by saying, “You did a good job with the CPR; that’s not why he died. I’m zero for five.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve done CPR five times and no one has lived to tell about it,” he said with great seriousness. Under other circumstances, his attempt at consoling her would have been funny, but now she just felt tricked.
“I thought this always worked,” she said in a dazed, dry-mouthed sort of way.
She walked out of the hospital, into brilliant sunlight that made her shade her eyes. This day had started so unconsciously, so automatically and now Rocky felt the stab of every pebble beneath her feet, every twitch in the leaf of the parking lot azalea bush, as if the day had torn apart and left her bleeding. When she found her car, she got in the back seat and locked the door. She pulled into a fetal position, covered her head with the road atlas, and cried with a violence that shook the car.
Their friends and his office staff rallied around Rocky and planned the memorial service. She followed his wishes and had his body cremated.
“I just don’t want him to be afraid or sad. I’m afraid he’s alone. What if he doesn’t know where he is?” Rocky whispered to her mother at the service. Her mother had flown in from California and she put her hands on either side of Rocky’s face. “He knows where he is, sweetheart. It’s the rest of us who are confused.”
The container of ashes sat on the kitchen counter for several weeks until she worked up the energy to carry out the final disposal of his remains. She discovered that she didn’t particularly like having his remains in the house. It did not comfort her to have Bob reduced to ashes. The stuff in the metal urn was nothing like Bob. She walked a wide path around his remains, eyeing them warily.
He had been forty-two, getting soft in all the right places, a few hairs sprouting from his ears, and a countable number of white hairs scattered on his chest. Rocky would have been content to watch these glacial changes for another thirty or forty years. She was positive that they had that much time. The doctor told her that her husband’s heart was etched with a poor combination of defective genetics and the aftermath of a shotgun approach to radiation treatment when he was in his teens, long before Rocky had met him. He had gotten cancer and was blasted from here to Albany with radiation. But he was the miracle, cured from the worst thing they could think of, and all the rest of his time was supposed to be easier. He always said, “I’ve already done the hard part, the rest is easy.”
When she finally dreamt of him, when she slept long enough to actually have a dream, she was neither sad nor afraid. In the dream, Bob was asleep in a field and Rocky was so close to him that she could see a sleepy crease along the edge of his nose. He looked like he was in a recovery place, a special death rehab unit, slowly recuperating into