“Let’s call it a five,” the nurse said.
She felt something warm prickle into her hand. After that, she felt nothing at all.
SHE WOKE UP again, an unfamiliar doctor hovering over her. “Good morning, we are going to take your tube out now,” he said.
Her bed was tilted up and before she knew what was happening she was being ordered to exhale sharply. She tried to but it was as if she’d forgotten how to breathe.
“On three,” the doctor said. “One, two . . .”
The sensation was like throwing up in slow motion. When the tube came out, she simultaneously gulped in air and retched. She cupped her hands around her mouth, to catch the vomit that didn’t come.
“Nothing in your stomach, thanks to this,” the doctor said. He fingered another tube, one going down her nose.
Maribeth slumped back. Nurses were bustling about. One gave her a sip of water through a straw while the doctor read her charts.
“Where’s? My? Doctor?” Maribeth croaked.
“I am your doctor. Dr. Gupta,” he answered. He went on to explain that he was her thoracic surgeon. He had been called in to perform her emergency bypass after the angioplasty punctured her artery. “It is very rare. Only the second case I’ve ever seen, and the other lady was much older than you. You are quite exceptional,” he said, as if this were a good thing.
“My husband?” she gasped.
“No idea.” He carried on, telling her about the surgery, a double bypass. “In addition to the punctured vessel, you had a second artery with a significant lesion so as long as we were inside, we grafted that, too. It’s a better long-term fix in the end than the stent so you came out well.”
Huzzah.
He went on to explain what to expect—some discomfort from the leg where they’d harvested an artery and from the sternum, which they’d sawed though to reach her heart. Also some cognitive symptoms, so-called pump head, from the heart-lung bypass machine.
“The what?”
“The bypass machine. What we routed your blood through to oxygenate it and pump it while your heart was stopped.”
He said it so casually. While your heart was stopped. And suddenly, she was yanked from the fog.
She placed her wired-up hand across her taped-up chest. She felt her heart beating there, as it had been since she was a baby, no a fetus even, nestled inside the womb of a mother she had never known. But it had stopped beating. She wasn’t sure why, but this felt like a threshold she had crossed, leaving everyone and everything she had ever known on the other side.
4
A week later, Maribeth was discharged. She didn’t feel remotely ready. It had been that way the last time she’d gotten out of a hospital, but back then, at least it had felt like she and Jason were in cahoots. “They’re leaving us alone with them,” Jason had joked about the twins. “I had more practice with my dad’s Skylark.” Now she was all alone.
“I have something to tell you,” Jason said as Maribeth sat in a wheelchair, waiting for a cab. There was something to his tone. If she wasn’t getting out of the hospital after open-heart surgery, Maribeth might’ve thought he was about to cop to an affair.
“What?” Maribeth asked warily.
“You know how I promised to keep you in the bubble when you were in the hospital, so you didn’t have to worry about anything?”
“Yes.”
“So, I did some things. While you were in the bubble.”
It took a moment for Maribeth to understand what he meant. She was pretty sure she’d have preferred the affair. She shook her head. “No.”
“I kept her out of the hospital,” Jason said. “I even kept you from knowing about it.”
“You took the easy way out. Again.”
“Easy way out? I asked for help.”
“How is my mother help?”
“She’s another set of hands. And the twins love her.”
“Great. The twins get quality time with Grandma and I get a third person to take care of.” A fourth person, she wanted to say, but didn’t.
As the cab sped downtown, Maribeth wanted to turn around, go back to the hospital. On a good day, it took all of her mental reserves to deal with her mother. And this was not a good day.
Jason tentatively touched her on the shoulder. “You okay?”
“You know how you always ask why I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop?” she asked.
He nodded.
“This is why.”
WELCOME HOME MOMMY! GET WELL SOON! read the butcher-paper sign taped to the front door.
She was about to see her children. She had not seen them in a week except for the proof-of-life videos Jason made on his phone to show her each day. She missed them, in an aching, primal, animal way. But standing in front of the door now, she felt paralyzed by dread. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked Jason to keep them home from school today.
Jason opened the door.
On the entry table was a vase of lilies next to a huge stack of mail. The dread deepened.
“Maribeth, is that you?” she heard her mother call.
And deepened again.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Liv, Oscar, did you hear that? Mommy’s home!”
Her mother appeared, dressed up in Chico’s autumnal Palette for Women of a Certain Age. She gingerly embraced Maribeth, then stood back to look at her, her hand over her own heart. “My poor girl.”
Just then Oscar came running. He leaped toward her, yelling, “Mommy!”
She didn’t mean to wince. But her chest was so very tender and Oscar so very puppylike. Keeping him only a little bit at bay, she buried her face in his hair, inhaling that boyish sweaty scent that never fully went away, even after a bath.