Daybreak

  “This is a tough day for you. I’m really sorry, Tom,” Mackenzie said gently.

  “Thank you.”

  Suddenly Tom began to talk. “Three years ago, you heard, they didn’t think he would live. He was choking … God, if you’ve ever seen anybody trying to get air … He turns dark blue. All his life … He goes a few years, and we think it’s over … No, we don’t really think it, we know better.”

  The terse words came rapidly as of their own volition, as if Tom couldn’t stop talking if he wanted to, Mackenzie thought.

  “He’s such a good kid, they think he doesn’t know he’ll die young, but he does know … Sometimes I think, it’s funny, if he were a healthy kid, he’d have been a pest. What seventh-grader wants a kindergarten brother to be in his way all the time? But he’s been so sick, I’ve worried as far back as I can remember.”

  This hardly seemed to be the same person who had so callously dismissed those other people only a few hours ago.

  “My parents,” Tom said. “If Timmy dies this time—”

  “It will be terrible,” Mackenzie said quietly, adding as they arrived at the hospital, “If there is any way I can help, Tom, please let me know. And I mean that.”

  Tom dashed up the steps. Halfway to the entrance, he turned around to call, “Thank you for the ride. Thank you.”

  Mackenzie drove slowly down the street, not quite sure where he was going. The entire drama was unrolling before his eyes, a repeat of that other boy’s life and death. Once more he saw a mother grieving and the despairing father walking up and down the room, up and down. This time, though, his picture was not of Margaret’s round cheeks wet with tears, but of Laura’s bowed, fair head. And he was intensely moved.

  His desk at the office must be piled with correspondence after this whole day away, and to be prudent, he should really go back to it. On the other hand, the local campaign headquarters was only a five-minute drive away. It would be prudent also to find out what was going on there. Yet he knew he had another reason, for had she not said something about helping with the campaign? Fool, he said aloud. So Mrs. Rice attracts you. Mrs. Rice is not one of the married women—what’s the percentage?—who play around. That, of course, is one of the reasons she is so alluring. Fool, he repeated, and stopped the car under the banner MACKENZIE FOR THE SENATE.

  The front room was lively. Computers, telephones, and volunteers were working at full capacity. He walked about, questioning and greeting, while his eyes roved, seeking. Then, quite casually, he strolled toward the back room, the mail room, and pausing in the doorway, recognized her by her slender back and her hair, held this day by a loose, dark red silk bow.

  Hearing him, she turned and smiled, saying gaily, “I’m as good as my word, you see. I’ve sent a thousand flyers out today.” Then, as if she had this moment recalled the occasion, anxiety wiped out the smile.

  “How did it go?”

  One calamity at a time is enough for her, he told himself. And so, evading the question, he replied, “Not too badly. But—” And again, as once before, there came to him that image of the deer raising its trustful gaze toward the place where the gun waited. “But they’re looking for you. Timmy isn’t feeling well. I drove Tom to the hospital. Your husband’s there. I really don’t know any more,” he said, while his heart sank.

  At once, she swept up her purse and car keys, saying, “Thank you for taking Tom. How kind you are!”

  “Are you sure you can drive?”

  “Yes. You see, we always know this will come again. We’ve learned to plan how we’ll behave.” She spoke steadily.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind about your behavior.”

  “But I have to think of Bud and, especially of Tom. He’s had so much …” And now her voice did trail away.

  Ralph followed her to the door and watched her out of sight. And he recalled the night, not long ago, when lying awake and allowing his mind to wander without aim, he had counted the times and estimated the minutes he had spent with her. They were very few, perhaps three hours’ worth all told. It was strange that they seemed like so many more.

  You entered the hospital at the side where ambulances came and went. You rushed through the bustle of the waiting room, crowded with white uniforms, bloody bandages, stretchers, and haggard relatives. As always, you felt a shock of surprise that all this commotion should produce so little noise. An ominous quiet, that was it. Waiting. Waiting. Afraid to make a sound. Half whispering, you inquire and are directed, as you knew you would be, to the curtained cubicle where the patient lies.

  Bud and Tom and two youthful doctors were standing over Timmy. Laura grasped Timmy’s hand.

  “Darling, Mom’s here.”

  His eyes recognized her. She knew that the pain in his chest was too sharp to permit speech, that he was struggling for breath, that he was terrified. His wheeze was frightful; you could imagine that his lungs were being torn like a piece of cloth and, like cloth, were shrieking.

  “Darling, you’re going to be fine. You’ve been through this before, so you know. And you’ve been so brave each time.”

  To this his eyes did not respond, but closed instead. His poor damp, sweating head rolled to the side. He was turning blue.

  She saw the two young men glance at each other. It seemed to her that the glances were deeply meaningful. She saw by a change on Bud’s face that he had caught the glances, too; his eyebrows rose in a question that he must know she was not able to answer. They two, the parents, were in a strange country whose language they did not begin to comprehend.

  The white coats moved quickly now, speaking in curt phrases.

  “Oxygen.”

  A nurse came running. Oxygen gushed from the wall above Timmy’s head. Then a white-coated woman, authoritative, came running.

  “Blood gases, now. Right now. Hurry up, Vanderbeck, will you?” She turned to the nurse. “Then rush the sample upstairs. And I mean rush.”

  They took blood from Timmy’s arm, arterial blood, that much Laura knew, as it spurted forcibly into the tube. The boy shuddered. Feeling his pain, she winced. More people came into the cubicle, shouldering Bud and Laura to the side. Tom left; perhaps he knew that he, like his parents, was superfluous here, or perhaps the sight of the blood had been too much for him. Numbly, only half comprehending, Bud and Laura watched.

  “Look at the color,” said the one called Vanderbeck, as he held up the tube. “The lungs aren’t getting enough oxygen.”

  Another man pushed the curtain aside and entered, panting like someone who is running late, and immediately demanded, “What’s the white blood cell count? Have you done the venipuncture?”

  A strap was bound around Timmy’s other arm. Now there were four doctors and two nurses crowded around him. Next came a technician, wheeling an X-ray machine.

  “Do you mind?” somebody asked Bud and Laura. “We need the space.”

  When they stepped out, the curtain fell behind them. Their boy was in the hands of strangers who didn’t even know his name. And yet these strangers, tense, competent, and anxious, were trying to save him.

  Tom hovered with them in the corridor. They were all three in this situation, but not of it. What, after all, did they really understand of the bewildering bustle behind those curtains?

  Somebody came out with the X-ray plate and raced away with it.

  A young man holding a paper cup embedded in crushed ice called over his shoulder, “Be right back. Just running this blood down to the lab.”

  Mingled voices seemed to mumble and rise. Laura strained to hear.

  “Carbon dioxide is up.”

  “Just as I thought.”

  “Get the IV. Water and sodium chloride to rehydrate. Hurry.”

  Now appeared the familiar face of Dr. Sprague, summoned from a crowded office—it was always crowded—to this emergency.

  “Doctor,” Bud began, but Sprague, barely nodding, brushed past him.

  “What’s the evaluation?” They could he
ar Sprague’s brisk demand, then other voices, and then Sprague’s again. “We have a real problem here. I assume you’ve examined the sputum?”

  “Yes, it’s bloody. He came in totally dehydrated, heart racing, fever one hundred two.”

  “Get another sputum up to the lab. And I need a pulmonary man. No delay. Whoever can get here fastest, say in sixty seconds. O’Toole, if he’s in town, or young Alan Cohen.”

  Dr. Sprague’s peremptory orders were comforting. He was familiar, and he was in charge. But his words, when he came to Laura and Bud, were not comforting.

  “Frankly, I’m worried about an infection. The pain is all over his chest, so it’s probably an abscess. Pneumonia and/or an abscess. Well, you people have been here before, so I guess I don’t have to say much.”

  Neither Bud nor Laura replied. And Sprague paused, as if he were weighing the need to explain against the pain that explanation would bring with it.

  “We’ll have to load him up with antibiotics. Where’s that resident with the reports? I phoned my orders in—oh, there you are.” Impatiently, he waited as the young man came to report.

  “It’s definitely a streptococcus infection, Doctor. Lots of polyps and gram-positive cocci.”

  Frowning, Sprague shook his head. “Okay. Let’s get him up to ICU. I want him in isolation, of course. Keep the oxygen going. Keep checking. I’ll wait until O’Toole gets here. Vanderbeck,” he called, parting the curtain. “Who called O’Toole? What? Oh, thanks.” And turning back to Bud and Laura, he reported, “Dr. O’Toole’s out of town until tomorrow afternoon. He left Alan Cohen to cover for him, and Cohen’s on his way here now. We’ll have Timmy upstairs by the time he gets here.”

  Sprague must have read something in Bud’s eyes, or perhaps, Laura thought, in the curl of Bud’s lip, because his answer was a reprimand.

  “If O’Toole lets anyone cover for him, you can bet that man’s the best. Cohen is from Harvard Medical School, with a fellowship in chest diseases at Cornell, and on top of that, he’s got heart. What else do you want?”

  The curtain parted, and a moment later, Timmy was brought out on a gurney. His eyes were shut; he lay so still as he trundled away past his parents, that Laura was overcome by the certain presence of death.

  Dr. Sprague’s tone changed. Very gently, he said, “I’ll be working with the chest expert, I’ll be in touch with you anytime around the clock. You know that. We’ve got to see your Timmy through this thing.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Laura said.

  And Bud repeated thickly, “Thank you, Doctor.” But he knew as well as she did that their boy was dying.

  Days and nights moved through a time split into four-hour segments. Every fourth hour they were admitted to the isolation cubicle where Timmy fought for life. Silently, scarcely whispering—for what was there to say?—they stood looking down at the small face, the pale eyelids delicate as shells, the pale lips around which, as light fell, the faintest down was visible. And the hands, the sight of those helpless hands, was unbearable for Laura. Long ago, a hundred years ago it seemed now, when Timmy was three years old, they had shown her the slight curving, “clubbing,” of his fingers, the first, almost invisible signs of oxygen deficiency, and she could never look at his hands without remembering.

  Through the silence came a steady beep from the wall monitor, the heartbeat transmitted through the wires attached to Timmy’s chest. All the machines! At regular intervals a pulmonary therapist brought another one to force air and medications through the mouth into the lungs. Laura’s eyes and ears were alert to the rhythms of machines.

  The fever stayed high. New X rays showed that a part of one lung had collapsed. In the waiting room where Bud and Laura, and often Tom as well, sat holding unread magazines, Dr. O’Toole came once or twice each day to report.

  “It’s a large abscess, and pneumonia has developed, as of course—” He broke off. “What can I tell you? It’s a repeat, only somewhat—”

  “Somewhat worse.” Bud and Laura spoke together.

  “Yes. But we’re pouring in the antibiotics, monitoring the blood gases, watching the white blood cell count, doing everything—” And he broke off again.

  When he had gone, the three just looked at each other. Then it came to Laura that there was something else, something that, because of this agony, had actually been forgotten. But now it came flooding back, that other agony, and she put her arms around Tom.

  “Go home and rest,” she told him. “Take the car. We’ll get a taxi when we’re ready.”

  “No. I want to be here near my brother.”

  “You have to go home. Earl’s been locked up all day. And if anything’s happened to that dog when—when Timmy comes home—so go now, Tom. Please go.”

  He lay outside on his father’s steamer chair with Earl lying beside his feet on the footrest. He had fed the dog, and, too mentally tired to care about preparing any food for himself, had eaten an orange, a banana, and a roll, then had come out here and lain down to wait for the first stars. No doubt he was only one of countless millions who, from the beginning of time, had drawn from the constellations, the circling fires in the night, a sense of calm. No doubt it was a cliché for man to reflect on his own insignificance before such grand mysteries. But it’s true, Tom thought, and that’s why it’s a cliché.

  “So look,” he said aloud, causing Earl to look up into his face, “I came here, I didn’t ask to come, I’ll be here a little while, I’ll leave, and what will it have mattered? So I don’t even know who I really am or where I belong, so Timmy will probably die, so my heart’s breaking and who the hell cares? Why should I care? I don’t care. I don’t give a damn whether I wake tomorrow morning or not.”

  The dog crept up onto his lap and licked his arm. “Take it easy,” he murmured, half to himself and half to Earl. “Take it easy.” Tears stung, and he closed his eyes. Just drift. Just sleep. Maybe with luck you won’t wake up.

  He dreamed, and although the dream had all the power of reality, it also in some strange, unfathomable way flashed seconds in which he knew that he was dreaming.

  Timmy lies in a coffin under a blanket of red flowers. I planted those last year, Mom cries. Take them away, they’ll smother him! And Margaret Crawfield is weeping; she is approaching Tom, looming larger and larger, expanding like a balloon, so that her face becomes enormous, so close that he sees her dark, separated lashes, a small brown mole on the side of her nose, and a pearl in her earlobe under the glossy fall of her hair. Who are you to cry? Bud shouts to her. He’s not your son! Who isn’t her son? Timmy? Tom? And that man Arthur stands apart with a smile in his all-knowing eyes, an eerie smile. I see through everyone, it says. Tom shudders and takes the flowers that Mom is tearing from the coffin; his arms are filled and he can hold no more, so that they spill onto the ground. Mom, don’t, he begs. Mom, stop. And at the same time, he is a little boy in a big store among tall people, crowding. I’ll be right back in a second, Mom says. Stay here. Don’t go, he begs in his terror. Mom, don’t leave me, he begs.

  He awoke in a sweat, but was stiff and cold. It was quite dark. The telephone was ringing in the house. He sprang up and stumbled on the steps. If it was from the hospital … If it was Timmy …

  “Hello! Hello!” he shouted.

  “It’s me. It’s Robbie. Where have you been? I’ve tried day and night all week to get you.”

  “It’s Timmy. He’s in the hospital, and we’re there all the time.”

  “Oh, Tom. Is it very bad again?”

  “Yes, very. We don’t know—don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “Oh. How terrible for you all!”

  Sympathy was the worst. You wanted it, you needed it, and still it tore you up.

  “I’ll call you as soon as we know anything,” he said.

  “You won’t reach me. There’s no phone in my room. I’ll keep phoning you from downstairs. It’s absolutely marvelous here, I’m learning so much. But this is no time to talk ab
out that. Tom, Tom, I miss you.”

  A rush of yearning rose and clutched his throat so that he could hardly speak.

  “God, I wish you were here. I’m going upstairs to bed, a cold bed without you. And I’m so cold already that I’m shivering.”

  “Nerves do that. But honey, it won’t be long. Only the week after next. Until then—oh Tom, I’ll be praying with all my heart. I feel for Timmy as if he were my own brother, even though I’ve never even seen him. I feel for him because he’s yours. Don’t forget that he’s recovered every other time before this.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “I have to go now. Good night, honey. Get some sleep, if you can.”

  When he replaced the receiver, he stood a moment feeling the faintest smile start to shape itself on his lips. Neither one of his two gigantic burdens had been in the least alleviated, and yet, in these few minutes, his mood had changed; he no longer felt himself to be without significance under the stars, a piece of matter whose disintegration meant nothing.

  It was her spirit that had revived him, plain as day. Her warm, husky voice had done it alone, a reminder of her cheerful strength. Almost, it seemed, that Robbie’s will might force Timmy to live. And as for the—the Crawfield business—how she would scoff! He could see her throw her head back in scornful laughter. What gall! What a roaring, stupid joke! she would say. Who do they think they are to come up with a scurvy scheme like that?

  And he wished that the new semester were starting tomorrow. She would have her new room ready. There would be white curtains with ruffles and heaven only knew what other little knickknacks in the room, along with the usual pile of stuffed animals on the bed. It was funny, and part of his delight in her, that a girl who got honors in analytical chemistry could also fuss over ruffled pillows and black lace nightgowns.

  Suddenly he recalled having seen in the hospital’s gift shop a big white polar bear with an absurdly lovable face, furry and soft. Robbie would love it. Tomorrow, no matter what else happened, he would buy it for her.

  “We’ve got to keep cupping,” said Dr. O’Toole, curving his hands as he slapped Timmy’s back. “Let me turn you over, son, so I can do your front. We’ve got to break up that mucus in your lungs.”