The Promise of Stardust (2 page)

I splashed water on my face and returned to the trauma room. The nurse was setting up the portable ventilator so they could move Elle to the OR. “Can you give me one minute alone with her?” I asked.

The nurse sidled around the equipment and then touched my elbow like a visitor at a funeral home does a mourner. “We need to get her to the OR.”

I put my hand on Elle's. The frigging IV was in the way. I bent down and kissed her cheek. I couldn't kiss her mouth because of the endotracheal tube that was sticking out of it like an elephant trunk. “I love you, Peep. I've always loved you. Understand, I can't live without you in this world. Come back to me. Please.”

Orderlies, a respiratory tech, and two nurses came through the door. They unlocked the gurney's wheels and pushed Elle and the shitload of life-support equipment.

Left behind at the elevator, I walked around in circles. I had to tell our family, her father and my mother, and I had no idea how. I removed my cell phone from my pocket and stared at the screen alerting me that I had a voice mail from Elle. I held the phone to my ear.

“Hey, it's me.” She sighed softly. “Can we do something tonight? Maybe we could take a walk on the beach? Listen, I know we made up afterward, but I am
so sorry
we argued yesterday. Let's spend a little quiet time together this evening, talking and holding hands and … I love you
so much
.” She paused for a moment and then sounded like she was smiling when she continued. “Give me a call when you get this, and we'll make plans for later, okay? I can't wait to see you! Bye.”

I couldn't breathe. Elle. Jesus. She had to be all right. Phil would get in there and the damage wouldn't be as bad as the CAT scan indicated. I started muttering out loud. Elle was brilliant. If anyone could recover from a brain injury, she could. I'd work with her. She was resilient. Maybe I was misreading everything. I held the phone to my ear, listening to her voice again as I followed a current of people back to the ER. Carl was staring at me as I approached. I wanted to look at the CAT scan again. This was insane.
Please, tell me. Tell me it's not as bad as I think
.

“I—I'm not sure what you said before. I guess I'm in shock. What exactly happened?” I asked.

Carl rubbed his forehead. “According to the rescue squad, they picked her up at her brother's house. He's out in the waiting room, by the way. Evidently, she hit her head on a rock after she fell about ten feet off a ladder. Your brother-in-law can probably tell you more about what happened. She had a long seizure on the way in, maybe ten minutes. She was in respiratory arrest when the EMTs got her here. They bagged her. We had trouble tubing her, and she went into a cardiac arrest, but we got her back fairly quickly.”

“How long was she here before you called me?”

“Twenty minutes. We were busy, trying to save her,” he said.

I swallowed while I tried to gather my thoughts. He wasn't saying anything encouraging, and the mirage of my denial evaporated. “Where's her CT scan?”

“Phil took it with him.”

Right. I'm not thinking clearly
. “I have to talk to Elle's brother,” I said.

As I turned toward the waiting room, the hospital CEO approached me and stretched out his hand. “Dr. Beaulieu. I heard that your wife is on her way to the OR. I hope it goes well.” He hesitated a bit before adding, “I don't know if you're up to it right now, but the press wants a statement.”

“The press?”

“The accident was on the police scanners,” Carl said. “If Elle McClure is rushed to the hospital, it's news. She's a local celebrity. Maine's like a small town. They remember her from NASA.”

For a moment I was still at a loss, then I realized Carl was talking about the Space Shuttle. Elle was an astrophysicist, a college professor now. But four years ago she had actually flown in space and been part of a NASA mission, one which had garnered worldwide attention.

Carl fiddled with his stethoscope and nodded toward the CEO. “Listen, we can't tell them anything, HIPAA laws and all that, but when you're ready—”

“I can't right now. Excuse me.” I had to talk to Elle's brother. I pushed my way into the waiting room, a twenty-by-twenty-foot square with plastic benches and a flat screen mounted on the wall. Christopher stood with his back to me, studying the contents of a vending machine. I tugged on his shoulder, and he spun around.

“Matt, finally.” Christopher's gaze frantically darted between me and the double doors of the ER. “No one will tell me anything.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Is she all right?”

“Not really. What the hell was she doing on a ladder?”

His mouth hung open for a moment. “Elle dropped by, and Arianne and I were washing windows, and the baby was hungry, so Arianne went inside to nurse her, and Elle said she'd help out, and she took over for Ari on the ladder, and I went back inside, you know, to work on the same window, make sure there were no streaks—and then Elle fainted. But she's going to be okay, right?”

Fainted?
The word registered on some back shelf in my mind. I tried to steady my voice and focused on the “Triage” sign hanging above the door. I couldn't look Christopher in the eye as I pictured the CAT scan again. She'd arrested. Given her appearance and the decerebrate posturing, she had significant brain damage. I admitted the unfathomable to Chris and to myself. “No. I don't think she's going to be okay.” The room's temperature felt like it dropped forty degrees. “Where's your father?”

“Wait. What do you mean?” Christopher asked.

“It's a bad head injury. Really bad. Where's your father? Does he know she's hurt?”

Christopher shook his head. “But she didn't even fall that far. She cut her head and everything but—you're a neurosurgeon. You can fix her, right? Did you see her? Did you talk to her?”

“She's not conscious,” I said, trying to stay composed. “I saw her. I—listen, Phil took her to surgery. Call your father. Tell him to come in.” I blinked a few times. “Chris—she probably won't make it.”

“What?”

“It's bad.” I turned around and walked away.

Maybe it was cold to leave him with the prognosis, but I had someone else to tell. My mother. This would kill her. Or me.

My mother was an obstetrical nurse—had been for almost forty years—but I didn't know if she was working that day. I took the elevator to Labor and Delivery, passed security, waving my hospital ID, and went to the nurses' station. A couple people recognized me, smiled hellos, and one said, “Hi, Matt. Linney's on break, but I think she's in the lounge.”

I turned and beat my way past a laboring mother pushing an IV pole down the hall. She paused, evidently in the grip of a contraction.

Galloping laughter emerged from the nurses' lounge as I pushed open the door. Mom sat at the table, holding a mug of hospital-grade sludge. She took one look at me and stopped short. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Elle. She had a fall.” And just like that, I was sobbing in my mother's strong arms. Thirty-seven years old and I might as well have been one of the newborns wailing his first sounds of life. Except this felt more like a death cry.

   2   

I paced the hospital corridors like a video Pac-Man, sweeping each cybersquare, counting the linoleum tiles, cornering and turning when I hit the wall.

My mother walked with me, asking me inane questions like “Why would Elle faint? Has she been sick?”

It didn't matter why—only the result of the fall mattered. “I doubt she fainted. It's more likely Christopher was supposed to be holding the ladder steady, and instead, he went to take a piss.”

“Matt, really.”

“You know what he's like. He's what, twenty-eight, and he still gets Elle to wash his windows because he's too afraid to climb his own goddamned ladder. Besides, you'd put it past him to walk away when she needed him?”

Mom grabbed my sleeve. “You're upset, and you want someone to blame.”

I tugged away as I turned into the next corridor. “The only time Elle's ever fainted was when she hemorrhaged—when we lost Dylan.” Even for someone like me, a doctor, it was astounding how much blood a woman could lose in childbirth when things went wrong. And things went very wrong. “She doesn't faint,” I said.

Mom came to a halt. “She passed out in her father's driveway once.”

I stopped abruptly and turned toward Mom. “When was this?”

“She was pregnant, before one of the miscarriages, early on. She made me swear not to tell you because she didn't want you to worry. She's not pregnant again, is she?”

I hesitated for a moment before I answered. “No. She isn't.” While I resumed pacing, I considered how my mind had yet to assimilate the situation, how for one instant my heart raced again at the possibility of having a child—at the thought of a family—but Elle wasn't pregnant. I wouldn't let her risk her health after the last time. But we'd argued about trying—yesterday—just yesterday.

I'd dismissed the idea with a single syllable. “No.” I was good at no. But I could still see Elle standing on the widow's walk. The sun shining on the river backlit her like a halo, making her hair look as white-blond as it did when she was a little girl. Over the years her hair had darkened to the shade of honey, but her eyes were the same green they'd always been, a color that could be as warm as sex or as paralyzing as anger. And she was angry.

I leaned up against the jamb of the attic's doorway, watching her, the sole of her instep, the curve of her bare calf, the way her hip turned slightly toward me, the narrowing of her waist. Even angry she was beautiful, maybe more beautiful. She didn't look much different than she had as a girl, determined and certain of her convictions.

“Life is all about taking chances, or you may as well curl up in a cave.” She sighed, then came to me and reached up to touch my face with her fingertips. “I'm sorry. I know that losing the baby devastated you. And me. But we should try. I'm thirty-five, Matt. I don't have forever. I want to try one last time.”

Time.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, she wanted me to take a chance. Now time was lost. Elle was lost. I was lost.

After they brought Elle back from the OR, I knew from the expression on Phil's face as he led me into the intensive care unit's on-call room what he was about to tell me. “Matt,” he said, steepling his fingers almost as if he were praying for my forgiveness. “I couldn't do much. She had subarachnoid bleeding and shearing.” He stopped for a moment to take a breath. “It's a mess. With all the cerebral edema, her brain stem should have herniated. I removed part of her skull, stopped the bleeding, evacuated what hematomas I could get to, but everything from her frontal lobes to her parietal lobes is shot …” He rambled on with the details.

I didn't respond. I couldn't.

“After the anesthesia wears off, we should verify brain death,” he said. Then he stammered a bit before adding, “I—I can't believe I'm asking you this. But do you … well, would she want to be an organ donor?”

I nodded. She'd signed the form on her driver's license; however, it occurred to me Elle's autoimmune issues might disqualify her.