“I just had to do that,” I said, and she nodded, putting the garlic bulb she was holding on the kitchen counter and wrapping her fingers behind my neck and kissing me back. We kissed there in the kitchen, then on the couch in the living room in the dim light from the bulbs on the Christmas tree, and then on the floor before it. Before we’d opened a bottle of wine or I’d given her the book I had bought about dreams, while the Brie on the table near the woodstove melted untouched, we undressed and I pulled the pillows from the couch and laid her upon them in the midst of the presents and the lowest branches of the white spruce. I insisted she keep on her panties—a ritual red, she murmured, to celebrate the season—so I could lick her through the silk and feel the material get wetter and wetter from my tongue and her lips. Sometimes when I’d pull away the elastic for brief moments, I’d hear in my head the sound of a click as I washed my tongue over her as fast as I could. Then I’d pull her panties back across her vagina and lap at the silk until I thought I’d explode if I didn’t taste her—all of her, my tongue probing deeply inside her, along the thin strip of skin buffering vulva and anus, then between those cheeks that smelled slightly of bubble bath.
When she came, her thighs tightening in my arms as I held her, my chin and my neck wondrously—bountifully, beneficently—drenched, I looked up and saw a star. There it was, hanging from a branch by her face. Hanging beside the very branch on which her eyeglasses dangled like tortoiseshell tinsel. A modeling clay star. It was no longer bright, because my daughter had painted it in Sunday school a year earlier and the colors had begun to fade, but it still had a trace of its original canary luster. I hadn’t really noticed it or thought about it when Abby and I had trimmed the tree, but there it was. An ornament, the first one my little girl had ever made. And it was right there beside Carissa’s eyes, opening slowly now as she took a deep breath and sighed.
I am blessed, I thought. Really and truly blessed.
It had practically killed me to wash Carissa off my face as we showered together before I left to get Abby alone, but when I hugged little Chloe’s mom, I was glad that I had. The evening, after all, was a celebration of a pretty darn clean conception.
Carissa was waiting for us back at the house. If it seemed to me that Abby had consumed enough sugar to get through the eight-thirty service, then the three of us would go to church together, and from there we would drive Carissa home.
“A friend of mine dropped by,” I told my daughter as I buckled her into the truck, hoping the remark sounded offhand. “Would you like to meet her?”
“Nah. I think I just want to go to church.” She had a plate of the cookies she’d made balanced in her lap. Her plan was to leave out the gingerbread ones for Santa because she hated gingerbread, but Santa, apparently, loved it. She also had carrots and celery sticks for the reindeer.
“We will. But my friend’s waiting at home. She wants to say hi. It’ll just take a minute.”
“It’s a lady?”
“Oh, yes.”
She looked straight ahead and I could tell she was mad. A year ago, when she was three and a half, she might have had a tantrum. Now, I imagined, she’d just grow silent. Make Carissa work extra hard.
Yet when we got home and I introduced her to that friend who just happened to be a lady, she rallied. For a moment she did what I called her “coquette thing,” hiding half her face behind my hip, but showing the stranger a single eye and what might have been half a smile. She didn’t ask any questions of Daddy’s new friend, but she answered in reasonably polite little grunts all of the questions that were put to her, and even corrected Carissa on some of the finer points of cookie decorating.
“Who are those cookies for?” Carissa asked.
“Santa.”
“They sure look good. And the carrots. Are they for his reindeer?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I love the sparkles you put on that star.”
“Those aren’t sparkles. That’s colored sugar. You can’t eat sparkles, because sparkles are just for projects.”
“Projects?”
“Arts and crafts,” I said.
When the three of us went to church, I downplayed the idea that we would all sit together. I tried to present it as, more or less, a coincidence that Abby might happen to sit on my right and Carissa on my left.
But I knew my joy in the fact that Carissa was with us was evident when I introduced her to Paul Woodson in the narthex. Woodson was the church’s ageless pastor, a fellow my parents’ age whom I had come to view as a godfather of sorts ever since Elizabeth had died.
“We have a guest tonight,” Paul said, speaking more to Abby and Carissa than me. “A minister from Korea.”
“Terrific,” I said.
Paul leaned over so he was closer to Abby. “I wanted you to know ahead of time, because he’s going to teach you a little song with your name in it.”
“My name?”
“Yup. You’ll see.”
Briefly, I tried to come up with a hymn with the word Abby or Abigail in it, but I realized quickly it was a lost cause, and found myself focusing instead on the lobe of Carissa’s ear, and the channel I’d licked just beneath it along the back of her jaw.
Soon into the service, however, after the children had placed the doll-sized figures of donkeys and wise men and a virgin in the crèche by the tree, Paul had them surround him in a half-circle at the front of the church. There an elderly Korean joined the group, squatting before the children and telling them that he wanted to teach them a song that youngsters sang in his own land. The moment he said it was inspired by a verse in the 124th Psalm, I knew instantly where Abby’s name would fit in:
“Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord…”
I hadn’t thought of the psalm in years, but I’d certainly become aware of it soon after moving to Bartlett. Paul had told me about the verse the first time Elizabeth and I had come to his church, and shown it to me in the Bible.
“A fowler’s a kind of hunter,” he’d said. “You must be a very good prosecutor.”
When the children sang the chorus—Our help is in the name of the Lord!—I saw the back of Abby’s head bobbing up and down to the strains of the song, and I felt the side of my hip pressing against Carissa’s. I wasn’t sure if I’d been that happy for a single moment since Elizabeth had died, and then I decided I hadn’t. No way. Not a prayer.
And when Paul had the deacons pass out the candles and dim the lights a few moments later, and when the choir members started passing the flame to the congregation in preparation for “Silent Night,” I thought I might cry.
“You okay?” Carissa whispered.
I nodded, unable to open my mouth. I felt her take my hand and squeeze it as we stood, and then give it back to me so I could help Abby with her candle. I listened to the congregation begin murmuring the words to the carol, singing each line a bit louder than the one before it. When Carissa sang, her voice was slightly higher than when she spoke, but it still radiated confidence and beauty and calm.
I watched the long rows of small candle flames slowly rise and fall, each pew packed as it was no other day or night of the year, and I saw my daughter gazing enrapt at her own teardrop-shaped bubble of incandescence. She was holding her candle with both hands.
When the hymn ended, Carissa and Abby blew out their candles almost as one. Abby looked up at me, smiling, and then I saw her face abruptly turn worried.
“Daddy? Are you crying?”
“I am,” I said, aware that my face was indeed growing wet. “But it’s because I’m happy.”
“Happy,” she repeated.
“Happy,” I said. This is happiness, I thought, desperately in love with the woman and the little girl who surrounded me. This is what it feels like to be happy. Complete. To see a family intact.
I couldn’t imagine a better present at Christmas.
Number 1
The physician’s highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy.
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,
Organon of Medicine, 1842
We are no longer a body with all that word means in the particulars of a unified whole. An indivisible system of organs and flesh, tissue and synapse and soul. We are parts. We are divisible.
Sometimes we say the brain is dead though the heart is alive: The heart is working, in other words, but no thanks to the brain. The brain is gone.
Well, not all of the brain. Even when someone is by all accounts brain-dead, there may still be an infinitesimal bit of cerebral matter continuing to signal the pituitary gland to create the hormones that help the kidneys produce urine.
But most of the brain has expired.
Somebody somewhere had to invent the concept of brain-dead. For millennia we based death on the heart. But then we discovered that hearts were more transferable than passports—they were recyclable cherry-shaped pumps that could be reconnected to a second set of hose lines—and so we broke the body into components. Take the heart though it’s beating: He’s brain-dead, that’s what counts.
Someday we’ll get to a point where we’ll only need a part of the brain to be dead to begin the harvest.
His brain stem is working—the section that controls his heart rate, his blood pressure, the ways his eyes might be moving beneath his lids. But those parts of the brain that allow him to think, that make him sapient and feeling and present? Gone. No electrical activity whatsoever. He’s as good as dead, I assure you. I mean, he’s still alive. Technically. But he’s no longer…there.
It was Jennifer’s sister, Bonnie, who had asked whether Richard Emmons was an organ donor. And it was Bonnie who told me she had handled the inquiry badly.
“They’ll want to know at some point, you know. I guess sometimes they learn these things from a driver’s license or something. But of course he didn’t have his wallet with him in the middle of the night,” she told me she’d stammered when she saw the anger and astonishment that had transformed her sister’s face after she had made the mistake of broaching the subject.
Jennifer had stared at her for a long time, her hand lingering on the spot on Richard’s leg where his shin met his ankle, a sheet resting upon him like a tent that’s collapsed.
Finally Jennifer had said, “He is.”
“Of course it won’t come to that,” Bonnie remembered adding, but she had known her lie was hollow.
“We know it will,” Jennifer had said, though she had responded in a whisper just in case Richard could hear.
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“I understand.”
“If they ask, should I tell them?”
“Tell them what?”
“Tell them he’s a donor,” Bonnie had said.
“Sure. But please remind them he’s alive.”
Bonnie had sighed and looked up toward Richard’s face. Anything to avoid her sister’s gaze. And though Richard had indeed looked alive at that moment, there was still that silver disk in his forehead, and it still disturbed her. Yes, it looked a bit like a watch battery, nothing more. But it nonetheless meant that someone had drilled a hole into her brother-in-law’s head, someone had bored a shaft into his skull.
“You know it’s the right thing to do,” she had said, her voice defensive.
“Without a doubt,” Jennifer had agreed. “But we haven’t come to that point yet. Now, have we?”
It is inevitable: Sometimes when I recall my happiness that Christmas Eve and that Christmas Day—my happiness, even, upon waking up the day after Christmas—I think of Jennifer Emmons. I think of Richard.
I wonder if Jennifer groups those days before Richard awoke in the night and fumbled with a little bag of cashews, and then those after. For a long time, I certainly grouped my life into the period prior to Elizabeth’s accident, and then the days since.
Now, it seems, I have three parts, with a car accident and a cashew forming the two great divides.
Sometimes I find myself imagining how the Emmons family spent their last moments before their lives were changed forever. I see them wrapping a few remaining presents Christmas Eve, I envision Jennifer filling her children’s stockings. I line the four of them up together in a pew in the church for the last time, standing and singing at the seven o’clock service.
The service before the one Carissa and I would attend.
Then there they are once more, all of them, spending Christmas Day at the hospital ICU, while I am driving to and from central New Hampshire almost inconceivably happy.
I can remember thinking Christmas Day in the car that English muffins had never tasted so good. Abby and I had eaten Carissa’s English muffins for breakfast Christmas morning, and all the way to and from my sister’s in Hanover, their taste kept floating to the surface of my mind.
And then I’d conclude that while the muffins had been delicious, a little toasted bread dough and farina sure as hell couldn’t compete with anything I’d tasted the night before. My God, I thought once as I approached the interstate exit, even Carissa’s body lotion had tasted like heaven.
I would recall all the parts of her body I’d tongued, my mind making an inventory, and then quickly I’d stop myself: She isn’t a map; you’re not counting the number of states you’ve visited! But flashes would come back to me nevertheless, and the experience would grow real once again in my mouth and my nose. There was that aroma along her neck—just below her ear—that I associated with Elizabeth’s garden and she had murmured was freesia. There was the scent of an apple, her shampoo, as I ran my tongue from the tips of that fine mane down her spine—literally, my tongue never leaving her skin—and there was the taste of vanilla body lotion mixed with perspiration, offering me for the first time an understanding of why cake recipes often called for a pinch of salt. And there were the heavenly smells of soap and musk when I’d finally pulled off her panties near the Christmas tree, but more than that there had been the astonishing texture of thick, sweet cream on my tongue.
Still, it was the English muffins, in my mind, that had become a symbol for everything—and not just the sex, though that had indeed been amazing. They’d become a symbol for the dinner we’d made together, embellishing the pasta I’d planned with the garlic and cashews she’d brought. A memory of those muffins would instantly conjure for me the candlelight church service we’d attended with Abby, my wondrous little girl at that moment asleep in the booster seat beside me. Napping after all the excitement that had come with the presents. We’d both been awake since six.
It had been the English muffins, after all, that had given credence to my fantasy that Carissa might be interested in more than just dinner, and it had been the muffins that had become an icon for what had been the single best evening I’d had in well over two years.
I remember deciding to call her from the interstate while Abby was dozing, and reaching carefully for the phone by the radio. I knew she was with her brother’s family—with Whitney’s dad’s family—and so I knew I’d hear only her voice on the answering machine. No matter. I just wanted to leave her a message. I just wanted to tell her I was falling in love.
By the time Abby and I had returned to East Bartlett Christmas night, it was close to ten o’clock. Together we stared for a moment at the layer of crinkled wrapping paper that coated the living-room floor like mulch, and then Abby picked out the toys and books and trolls that she wanted upstairs beside her in bed.
I was disappointed when there was no message from Carissa on my answering machine, but not overly concerned. I wondered if the old Leland would have convinced himself he’d scared her away with the message he’d left on her answering machine. Probably, I decided. And while for a brief moment I feared that the fact that such a ridiculous notion had even crossed my mind meant the arsenic was wearing off—or whatever it was that arsenic did—I couldn’t imagine there was really any reason to worry. It was highly unlikely she liked me any l
ess because I’d told her I loved her.
Of the half-dozen messages on the machine, most of which were from friends and cousins calling to wish Abby and me a Merry Christmas, only one might even necessitate a call back in the morning. Rod Morrow. I had known Rod since high school, but it was clear Rod wasn’t calling solely in his capacity as an old acquaintance. It sounded like Rod was calling in his role as a detective sergeant with the state police.
A fellow named Richard Emmons had almost killed himself Christmas Eve. Or something like that. It was still pretty unclear what had happened. Rod had been on duty Christmas Day when Emmons’s wife had called, wanting them to arrest some witch doctor that very instant.
Rod said that based on the story the woman had told him, they weren’t about to arrest anybody. At least not right away. He’d told her he wasn’t even sure if a crime had been committed. But he had met her at the hospital that afternoon with the trooper who’d handled her call, and together they’d taken a formal statement.
“Anyway,” Rod babbled into the machine, “I figured you should know. She’s upset—not without cause—and I think she’s going to call you folks directly. Besides, the guy lives in Bartlett, so I figured there was a chance you two might even be friends.”
I was pretty sure I knew who Richard Emmons was—a businessman, I thought, who did something with advertising or marketing—but I wasn’t positive. We certainly weren’t friends.
Still, it was a terrible shame. The poor guy was up in Burlington in a coma.
Most years, most of the world seemed closed to me the day after Christmas. In my mind, only supermarkets and shopping malls were open on the twenty-sixth. Not that year, not with Christmas falling on a Monday. The courts were open, and so was my office.
Of course, Abby’s day care was closed—along with the public schools. It’s inevitable, it’s a law of nature: If something can happen to make a single parent’s life harder, it will. And so I’d arranged to drop her off with Mildred in the morning, and then—because Mildred had plans in the afternoon—made arrangements for Greta’s mom to pick Abby up at noon for a play date till dinner.