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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONWhen They Get To The Corner
ON SATURDAY NIGHT our cat Nimbus comes home limping. My wife, Norma, and I check for a sprain, a fracture; nothing appears to be broken. But the next morning she’s still limping.
At the vet’s office, the waiting room is jammed with cats, dogs, and the humans who own them, or maybe it’s the other way around. Norma and I sit next to a young woman who’s quietly weeping. I ask what’s wrong. She says her kitten fell from a tree this morning and landed on his back. I want to comfort her, but don’t know what to say.
After two hours the vet finally examines Nimbus and shows us what we missed: a tiny bite mark on the inside of her leg. Nimbus, he says, was in a fight with another cat. He cleans the wound, gives her an antibiotic, and tells us not to worry. Before we leave I ask him about the young woman’s kitten. The vet shakes his head: there was nothing he could do but put the animal out of his misery.
On the drive home I imagine Nimbus or our other cat, Cirrus, having to be put down, and my mind lurches like a car suddenly thrown into reverse. Ever since we brought them home a few years ago — tiny gray kittens from the same litter — I’ve been fervently devoted to their well-being. Norma finds this amusing, since it took her more than a year to talk me into getting cats. My daughters, for their part, have been surprised, and maybe a little jealous. When they visited me in North Carolina last Christmas — Mara lives in California, Sara in Massachusetts — I saw them exchange looks over how patient I was with Nimbus and Cirrus, never raising my voice or losing my temper: a model dad at last.
Back home Nimbus curls up beside Cirrus on the sofa. Norma heads out to the garden to do some weeding. I put on a fresh pot of coffee and open the Sunday newspaper. I’m still on page one when the phone rings. It’s my daughter Sara. There's something she needs to tell me, she says, her voice a little unsteady. She pauses. It's about Mara.
I can already tell that this is something I don’t want to hear. I know that only bad news travels this way, that Sara isn’t calling to tell me her older sister has just fallen in love or landed a great new job. I know, too, that I’d give anything right now to be able to utter some spell, part the veil between worlds, and step into an altogether different world — one in which the phone hasn’t just rung; one in which I'm not about to learn that my twenty-five-year-old daughter was in a car crash this morning, that her pelvis is fractured and she’s bleeding internally and her spinal cord might be injured. But I can’t find the curtain.
I TELL THE TICKET AGENT why I need to be on the next flight to Los Angeles and ask if I qualify for a reduced fare. Of course, she says sympathetically. But the “compassion fare” turns out to be nearly nine hundred dollars. “That's the compassion fare?” I blurt out. “Compassion for whom? American Airlines?”
Lowering her voice, she says, “I know what you mean.” She says she hopes my daughter will be all right. Her compassion, at least, sounds genuine.
I don’t like to fly: the usual reasons. But as the plane slowly taxis toward the runway, I’m impatient for the engines to roar to life. When Mara moved to LA two years ago, I consoled myself that, in an age of jet travel, she really wasn’t that far away. Right now, however, with my hastily packed suitcase jammed into the overhead bin, and the suddenly irrelevant Sunday newspaper lying unread on my kitchen counter, twenty-five hundred miles feels like the vast distance it actually is.
Sara will fly in from Massachusetts tomorrow. So far, no one’s been able to reach my ex-wife Priscilla. Before leaving for the airport, I talked with one of the emergency-room doctors who’d treated Mara — a conversation that revealed less about Mara’s injuries than about my ignorance of basic human anatomy. Listening to the doctor, I felt like a man who’d lived all his life in the same small town but didn't even know where the post office was. Fortunately, Norma went to medical school, so I handed her the phone. I studied her face as they talked, but Norma’s features have always been hard to read — even before she became a psychiatrist. After she hung up, I asked how serious this was. “Serious,” she said. She asked if I wanted her to come with me. “No, I can handle it,” I told her, unsure which one of us I was trying to convince.
During the next seven hours, I have plenty of time to consider every worst-case scenario and plenty of time to pray. Worry and prayer: they’re like an old married couple who argue about nearly everything and each insist on having the last word. But where would they be without each other? I worry that Mara will be crippled, and I pray she’ll soon be on her feet again. I worry that I won’t be strong enough to handle this, and I pray for my heart to stay open no matter what lies ahead. I pray, Thy will, not my will, because it’s the purest prayer I know. Then, because I’m not that pure, I pray to a slightly more personal, slightly more approachable God, who might be willing to bend the laws of the universe just a little, just for me.
I remember a summer afternoon when Mara was two. Priscilla called me at the office to say that Mara had wandered out of sight for a few minutes and eaten a handful of reddish purple pokeberries growing near our house; hadn’t someone warned us that pokeberries were poisonous? I drove home as fast as I could, not knowing whether my daughter’s life was in danger or (as it turned out) she was merely in for a bad stomachache. I remember racing through the door and lifting Mara in my arms. I remember the crimson juice smeared on her cheeks.
IT’S NEARLY MIDNIGHT when my flight lands. At the hospital, the lobby is dark, and visiting hours are long over, but a security guard lets me in. As the elevator carries me to the seventh floor, I realize that this is the first night Mara has ever spent in a hospital. Born at home, raised a vegetarian, home-schooled until the fifth grade, Mara was a healthy child, either because of the way she was brought up or in spite of it. But all the tofu and brown rice in the world couldn't have protected her from this.
I’m surprised to see a young man standing in the corridor outside Mara’s room smoking a cigarette — just a few feet from a no smoking sign. When he sees me, he stubs the cigarette out, extends his hand, and introduces himself. I recognize the name: he’s the boyfriend — the ex-boyfriend — who broke Mara’s heart last year. He heard I was coming, he says, and didn’t want to leave until I got here; he didn’t think Mara should be alone. I thank him for sticking around. Who knows: maybe his heart was broken, too.
Before I step inside Mara’s room, I pause and take a deep breath. I ask myself if I’m ready for this. I don’t wait for an answer.
Mara is lying on her back with her eyes closed. She has iv lines in her hand and a breathing tube in her nose. A catheter snakes out from under the bedsheet to a plastic bag clipped to the side of the bed. A foam collar is wrapped around her neck to keep her head immobilized. On her legs are bulky compression stockings that expand and contract rhythmically to keep blood clots from forming.
I walk to the bed, bend down, and whisper her name. Her eyes open slowly, and, for a moment, she seems to have difficulty focusing. Then she sees me, and her eyes fill with tears. I kiss her forehead, stroke her hair. “Everything is going to be all right,” I tell her, hoping it isn’t a lie.
She’s sorry, she says, reaching for my hand. Sorry to make me drop everything and come all this way. Sorry I have to see her like this. I tell her there’s nothing to apologize for. Besides, I say, she looks beautiful: amazingly, there's not a scratch on her face. “Thanks for the compliment,” she says. A friend who stopped by earlier joked that she looked like a soap-opera heroine who survives a car wreck with makeup intact and not a hair out of place.
I ask what happened. She tells me she wishes she knew. She remembers driving to the grocery store Sunday morning. She remembers stopping at an intersection on the way home. The next thing she remembers is being pulled from her mangled car, barely conscious and in excruciating pain. She remembers the warbling siren of the ambulance carrying her to the hospital. She remembers being wheeled into the emergency room, someone asking her questions, someone else cutting her clothes off. And she remembers the pain — more pain than she thought it was possible to feel. But no matter how much she tries, she can’t remember the accident itself. She keeps rummaging around in her mind, as if trying to find a file that’s been misplaced. For now, at least, it’s gone: the memory of the most violent moment of her life.
THE DOCTOR LOOKS A LITTLE BEDRAGGLED tonight in his wrinkled green scrubs. But he has kind eyes and a warm smile. My daughter is lucky, he tells me. He holds up an x-ray and points to a crack in one of the cervical vertebrae that protect Mara’s spinal cord. A half inch this way, he says, barely moving his finger, and she would have been paralyzed.
The doctor’s Middle Eastern accent is a little hard to follow, but I’m right on his heels. He wants to keep Mara’s neck immobilized tonight as a precautionary measure, but he doubts the spinal cord is injured. I feel a wave of relief. It doesn’t last long.
Mara’s fractured pelvis is another matter, the doctor says. For one thing, it’s an extremely painful injury that can take months to heal. For another, a broken pelvis is a lot more serious than a broken arm or leg. That’s because pelvic bones, rich in marrow, often bleed heavily when broken. Also, there are major organs inside the pelvic cavity. Even when people survive the initial trauma of such an accident, complications are common.
They’ll have to observe Mara closely for the next couple of days, he says. There’s blood pooling in her abdomen that could be coming from anywhere: the pelvis itself, a torn blood vessel, an injury to her intestine or bladder or spleen.
Actually, this isn’t exactly what he says. Twice he refers to Mara as “him” instead of “her.” I consider correcting him, then remind myself that if he’s going to make a mistake on a night when my daughter’s life is in his hands, I’d just as soon he mangle a couple of personal pronouns.
I ask how much danger Mara is in. “Let’s hope the bleeding stops soon,” he replies. “And if it doesn’t?” I press. He pauses, as if deliberating how much to tell me. Surgery might be necessary, he says, but abdominal surgery can be risky, so they want to wait and see. In the meantime, there’s no need to worry. “We’re watching him carefully,” the doctor says.
MARA ENCOURAGES ME to go to her apartment and get some rest, but I don’t want to leave. Despite regular doses of morphine and OxyContin, the slightest movement still makes her wince. She can’t sit up. She can’t move her legs. I’ve never seen her look so vulnerable.
I’m grateful when a nurse wheels a cot into the room for me, but I don’t get much sleep. I hold Mara’s hand I massage her feet. When she asks me to move her legs to a more comfortable position, I lift them gently. She gasps: not gentle enough. I apologize and start over, cradling one leg at a time, as carefully as if I were handling a newborn. Here we are, where we started.
When Mara finally drifts off to sleep, I lie down, put my hands behind my head, and stare at the ceiling. The room begins to fill with memories — tender memories, mostly, but also a few uninvited guests. I, too, was gorging on poisonous berries when Mara was growing up. In love with another woman, I was leading a double life. After the demise of my marriage, I surprised Priscilla, my ex, by being more devoted as a father than I’d been as a husband. I spent every weekend with Mara and Sara. After Priscilla moved out of town, I drove seven hundred miles every other weekend so I could read to them and play with them and cook for them and put them to bed at night and stand in the doorway studying their sleeping faces, one tired man drinking in the sight of them — and it was never enough: never enough to make up for the days and nights I couldn’t be with them; never enough to make up for the shameful infidelity that had brought us here, to my sad little apartment where every clock in every room told me how much quality time was left in the day.
The affair ended when my lover and I actually tried to live together. A few years later, I married Norma. When Mara was twelve, she asked to live with us. She said the public schools were better in our town. And then there was her increasingly contentious relationship with her mother. Regardless of the reasons, I was grateful for the opportunity to be a full-time father again.
I delighted in my dreamy, artistic, sensitive daughter — so sensitive that she often knew what I was feeling before I did. As Mara’s adolescence unfolded, I tried to be kind but firm. A father, I thought, needs to help his children understand not only what life freely offers, but also what it can rudely demand. Of course, it was easier to protect Mara from the dangers outside our door than from the tyrant who sometimes held sway within me: a petty tyrant with rigid edicts about neatness and manners and curfews, not the kind of asshole who raises a fist or hurls an insult, but a tyrant just the same. I’m sure I hurt her in innumerable thoughtless ways. Despite our difficult moments, though, I like to think that Mara never doubted my love for her. It helped me to remember that the only thing more challenging than raising a teenager is being one. Mara lived with us until she went off to college to study filmmaking. After graduation, she moved to LA.
I picture Mara behind the wheel of the blue Toyota we bought for her last year. She was so thankful for that car. I picture shattered glass and crumpled steel. She could have been snapped in half, just another pile of bones on the bone heap.
It’s one thing to meditate on the nature of impermanence; it’s another to be reminded of it by life itself. Sara’s phone call was like a whack on the head from a stern Zen master: Wake up! Wake up from the lazy dream that tomorrow will be just like today. Wake up from the illusion that anything can be known about the future. Life is too mysterious for that. I can’t take for granted that I'll ever see any of my loved ones again, or that my house will be standing a week from now, or that I’ll be standing. The thunderstorm is always whipping up a tornado. The other driver is always getting into his car after an argument. The phone is always about to ring.
Mara wakes up and says she’s thirsty. I fill a glass with water and hold a straw to her lips.
We raise children and do what we can to protect them. Then one day we open the door and let them run down the street without us. When they get to the corner, will they look both ways? Of course, we assure ourselves. Of course they will.
BY MORNING, some color has returned to Mara’s cheeks. After a brief exam, the doctor says the cervical collar can come off. I ask whether the bleeding is still a cause for concern. They’re keeping an eye on it, he says. If all goes well, Mara will start physical therapy in a few days. A week after that, she’ll be able to leave the hospital on crutches. In two or three months, she’ll be walking on her own.
After he’s left, Mara looks me in the eye. She’ll be walking a lot sooner that that, she says. I've seen that look before. I believe her.
I finally talk with Priscilla, who was out of town yesterday. The earliest she can be here is the end of the week. In the manner of seasoned ex-spouses, we divide things up: I get the first week; she gets the second. I also talk with Sara, who will be arriving tonight. As it turns out, she arranged some time ago to spend this week with her sister. It will hardly be the vacation she planned, but she wants to be here just the same.
When one of Mara’s friends arrives for a visit, I decide to get some fresh air — or whatever passes for it in this congested city. Walking along a busy boulevard with palm trees overhead and hundreds of cars streaming by every minute, I recall that I didn't pretend to be thrilled when Mara told me she was moving here. She knew that for me LA was a symbol of nearly everything that was wrong with American cities. She knew I viewed Hollywood as a propaganda machine for the worst this culture has to offer. “Doesn’t New York offer plenty of opportunities for an aspiring filmmaker?” I asked. “LA offers more,” she said. And the only way to discover whether LA was the right place for her to be was to be in LA. How could I argue with that?
When Mara was growing up, I thought the best way to keep her from watching too much television was not to own one. I wanted to raise a girl who loved to read, a daughter who worshiped beside me at the altar of the written word. And now she’s living in LA and working as an assistant editor. On a cop show. On tv.
At least she’s working steadily, she’s reminded me. One day, she'll do something to make me proud. I’ve told her that I’m proud of her already; that it’s not her job or accomplishments that matter to me, but her aliveness, her intelligence, her compassion.
I still think the odds are against her creative spirit being nourished here, but hasn’t my own life taken some unlikely turns? My father didn’t understand why I left a promising career in newspaper work to hitchhike around the country. He didn’t understand why I started a magazine. Perhaps my difficulty in understanding the trajectory of Mara’s life has less to do with a failure of imagination on her part than on mine.
At least I’ve come to understand that the condescending attitude I once had toward LA is as disagreeable as the prejudices some people have against New York, where I grew up, or against the South, where I live now. Once Mara moved here, LA ceased being merely a symbol for me. Now it’s my daughter’s home: this is where she gets up in the morning; this is where she lies awake at night thinking about her future; this is where she closes her eyes and dreams.
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