All through the ride to the hospital the sky is a scrubbed-clean, holiday blue, echoing the Niles lilies that fill the neighboring gardens. She allows her mind the luxury of wandering. Panic comes at her in waves, but she makes her body loose, the way a sea swimmer might, and feels it pass beneath her. How is it she’s never noticed all these roses, red and white and a golden yellow the same shade as the baby outfit that lies folded in tissue at the bottom of her hospital bag? She chose green sourballs, lime flavor. They make her mouth pucker in pleasant anticipation. The air is soft against her face, like a baby’s cheek.
Later she would wonder, was it better that way, not knowing when death looked over your shoulder? Was it better to confound its breath with the scent of roses? To take that perfect moment and squander it because you were sure you had a thousand more?
THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT stocks, she can hear them quite clearly, although they’ve draped a curtain of sorts between her and them. Her gynecologist prefers the blue chip kind. IBM, he says as he starts cutting. The anesthesiologist, a young man with a jolly mustache who shook her hand before inserting the needle into her spine, disagrees. The thing is to invest in a good start-up before it goes public. “There’s a bunch of them right here in the Valley, right under our noses,” he says, and rattles off names.
“I hope you’re taking notes,” Aparna whispers with mock-seriousness to Umesh. “It’ll put the kid through college.” Then she shudders as the doctor slices into a particularly stubborn piece of tissue.
Umesh’s hands on her arm are slick with sweat. She can see the thin red traceries of veins in his eyes. He has been biting his lips ever since they said they’d have to operate, the baby’s heartbeats didn’t sound so good. She feels an illogical need to comfort him.
“Are you hurting?” he leans forward to ask. “Shall I ask them to do something about it?”
She shakes her head. Through all the pulling and cutting, her flesh being rent apart and then stitched together like old leather, there’s an amazing absence of pain. But the body knows, she thinks. You can’t fool the body. It knows what’s being done to it. At the right time, it will take revenge.
Now they’re laying the baby on her chest, the compact solidness of him, the face red and worried, like his father’s. But beautiful, not discolored and cone-shaped from being pushed out of the birth-tunnel as in the Lamaze videos, so that she feels a bit better about having the C-section. She thinks of the name she chose for him. Aashish. Blessing. Even though the spinal is wearing off and pain begins to flex its muscles, she holds on to that word.
Unlike the squalling infants in the birth videos she’s watched, her baby gazes at her with self-possession. She’s been told that newborns can’t focus, but she knows better. Her baby sees her, and likes what he sees. If only they would leave the two of them alone to get to know each other. But a uniformed somebody swoops him up out of her arms with foolish, clucking sounds. Umesh is saying something equally foolish about bringing him back when she’s rested. Can’t they see she’s quite rested and wants him now? She hates hospitals, she thinks with a sudden starburst of energy, always has. She can’t wait to get out of this one and never come back.
* * *
THE NIGHT SHE returns home, Aparna wakes in the dark, early hours with a sentence running through her head. I think of pain as the most faithful of my friends. It takes her a while to place it. It’s from a diary, a woman writer she read in a long-ago class in early American literature. She didn’t trust that woman, forgot her name as soon as she could.
But now Aparna must admit she knows what the writer had meant. Pain is with Aparna constantly, lurking beneath the lavender-scented sheets of the king-size bed she and Aashish have taken over. Different from the ache she felt in the hospital, it gnaws at her like a giant rat.
“How lovely!” the visitors say. “Look at the roses in her cheeks! It’s wonderful to see someone so happy!”
She snaps at Umesh when he feels her hot, dry forehead and asks if he can get her something. When he calls, the doctor says pain is normal—just as normal as new fathers worrying too much.
She will conquer pain by ignoring it, Aparna resolves. For three shimmery days of learning to breast-feed Aashish, she focuses on the shape of him in the crook of her arm, the blunt tug of his gums on her swollen nipples. But one morning when she climbs out of bed to try to use the toilet, which is becoming increasingly difficult, she falls and cannot get up.
* * *
SHE WILL ALWAYS remember the moment when she swims up out of delirium, which spreads around her like a bottomless lake, shining like mercury. It’s hard to focus her eyes, but driven by an unnamed fear she forces herself to do so. It’s evening. She’s in the hospital. In the very same room where she was before. Has all this in-between time been a dream, then? But the space next to her bed where the bassinet stood, against the cheerful peach wall, is empty. Where’s my baby, she screams, what did you do with my baby? The words come out as gurgles through the tubes in her nose and mouth. The nurse bends over her, so cow-faced in her ignorance that Aparna must shake some sense into her—until they tie down her hands and give her a shot.
Then Umesh is there, explaining that she was too ill to take care of Aashish, so he’s at a friend’s house while the doctors try to figure out what’s wrong with her. He understands her meaningless grunts and sobs. “Please don’t worry, we’ll all be fine,” he says, stroking the insides of her elbows, the thin ache of needles plunged in and taped over, until she stops trembling and her eyes don’t dart around as much. “Calm down, sweetheart, I’ll hold you till you sleep.” He tells her how well Aashish is doing, gaining weight every day, how he turns his head at sounds, how hard he can kick. She even smiles a little as she falls asleep in the middle of a question she wants to ask, When can I go home? In sleep she thinks she hears his murmured answer. Soon, darling. His voice is cool and breathable, like night mist. But when she wakes, she’s in the middle of the mercury lake. She flails her way up, there’s that gaping space by her bed again, and she screams.
APARNA HAS NEVER been an angry person. It amazes her, therefore, when in the brief moments of clarity between panic and the dull cottony stupor of medication, she feels fury swelling her organs, as tangible as all the fluids her body has forgotten how to get rid of. She’s been here for two weeks now, with test after inconclusive test being run on her. Everything in this hospital enrages her. The gluey odor of the walls. The chalky liquid she has to choke down so machines can take a clearer picture of her insides. The pretty, polished faces of the young nurses who chose the obstetrics ward so they would have happy patients. Her gynecologist’s smile as he says they’ll soon have her good as new. Aparna wants to punch his teeth in. She wants a lawyer who’ll sue him for every stock he owns. She wants a hit man who’ll wipe that smile off the face of the earth.
When they tell her she has to have a second surgery, she cries in great, gulping sobs, letting the snot and tears mingle on her face. She’s too tired to wipe them away, and, besides, what’s the point? She’s ugly, she knows it, with her hair matted and smelly around her face. Ugly as sin, having to wear that hospital gown which exposes her backside. Having them hold her head when, periodically, she throws up bowlfuls of greenish scum. Having them clean her up afterward. That’s the worst, somehow, the dispassionate way in which a stranger’s hand moves over her body, doing its job. She’s defeated by pain, she finally admits it. That evening when Umesh comes to visit, she turns her head away and won’t look at the Polaroid photos he’s taken of Aashish being given his bath.
ALTHOUGH THE SURGERY has been successful, and the intestinal adhesions that had caused all the problems have been removed, Aparna’s recovery is not going well. They’re worried about it. She knows this from the flurries of whispers when the doctors come to see her each day. There’s a whole team of them, her gynecologist, the surgeon who performed the second surgery, an immunologist, and even a social worker, a gnatlike woman who has informed Aparna
that she is one of her cases now. They poke and prod, examine her stitches and her charts, ask questions which she doesn’t answer. Until they walk away, she keeps her eyes tightly closed against them. This way, if she ever gets better and meets them, say, in a shopping mall, she won’t know who they are. She’ll walk right past them with the polite, powerful unconcern only a stranger is capable of.
Once she hears the night nurse talking to Umesh about her. This nurse is an older woman, not foolishly chirpy like the others. In her pre-hospital days, when she had energy for such things, Aparna would have equipped her with a complete, imagined life: She had lost her family, husband and all four children, in the Los Angeles earthquake, and moved to the Bay Area, where she now worked nights because she couldn’t stand to be home alone. Or perhaps she’d been in Vietnam and seen things the young nurses couldn’t even imagine. That’s why she watched them with that slightly sardonic expression as they cooed over their patients, bringing cranberry juice and tucking down comforters. But the present, eroded Aparna only knows that the night nurse is comfortable with death. She knows it from the way the nurse sometimes comes in after lights-out and massages Aparna’s feet, leaning there in a dark that smells thick and sticky, like hospital lotion, without speaking a single word.
But now, outside the door, the nurse is speaking to Umesh. “She’s lost the will to live,” she says in her dour, gravelly way.
“But why?” asks Umesh. His voice is high and bewildered, like a child’s. “How can she, when she has so much to live for?”
“It happens.”
“I won’t let it,” Umesh says angrily. “I won’t. There must be something I can do.”
Aparna listens with faint curiosity, the way one might to a TV soap playing in the next room. Does the wise nurse have a solution which will revitalize the dispirited young mother and unite her once more with her caring husband and helpless infant?
“You must—” says the nurse. But what he must do is drowned in the excited exclamations of a family who arrive just then in the room next to Aparna’s to view their newest member.
SHE SHOULD HAVE known what they were planning. But the medication has turned her mind soft, like butter left out overnight, so that the things she wants to hold on to—questions and suspicions—sink into it and disappear. Still, she shouldn’t have been so utterly shocked when her friend walked in carrying Aashish.
A few times before this, Umesh had tried to get her to see Aashish. But each time he suggested it, she wept so vehemently that her temperature went up and the nurse had to give her a shot. Afterward, he would stroke the ragged ends of her hair with distressed hands and say, “Please, please, Aparna. Don’t act this way. Be reasonable.” She did not want to be reasonable. He had no right to ask her to be. An enormous, thwarted emotion ballooned inside her chest whenever she thought of her lost baby—lost, yes, that was the right word. She felt it pushing into her lungs, displacing air, long after Umesh gave up and left.
She watches them now, her friend who looks anxious as she sets the car seat down and picks up Aashish. Aashish in a little red two-piece outfit that Aparna didn’t buy for him. Aashish looking so grown and cheerful that Aparna can hardly believe he’s hers. But that’s it, he isn’t her baby. Something terrible happened to her own baby because she was in the hospital and couldn’t take care of him, and they’re afraid to tell her. So they’ve brought in this . . . this little impostor. Where’s my baby? she wants to ask. What did you do with my baby? Instead she says, in a gray, toneless voice, “Take him away.”
“At least hold him once,” her friend says, and she bends over Aparna to move the tubes out of the way so she can lay the baby beside her. Her eyelashes are spiky with tears. Aparna can smell, in her friend’s hair, the woodsy fragrance of Clairol Herbal Essence. It’s the same shampoo Aparna used when she was pregnant. Suddenly she longs for the slow, steady green of it pooling in her palm, the relaxing steam of the shower, her fingers—her own fingers—on her scalp, knowing just where to rub deep and where to lighten up.
But here against her side is this baby, kicking his legs, batting at her with his small, fat arms. When she offers him a finger, he grabs it and gives an unexpected, gurgly laugh. Her friend has stepped outside, leaving a bottle of baby formula on the nightstand. “Baby,” she whispers—she isn’t ready, yet, to speak the name that will claim him as hers—and he laughs again. The sound tugs at the corners of her stiff, unaccustomed mouth until she’s laughing, too. His gums are the color of the pink oleanders she planted in her backyard.
Then he’s hungry, suddenly and absolutely, the way babies are. He’s starting to fuss, in a minute he’ll begin crying, she can tell from the way he’s squinching up his face. She reaches, hurriedly, for the bottle, then stops, struck by an idea so compelling she can hardly breathe. She glances guiltily at the doorway, but it’s empty, so she pulls at her hospital gown until she uncovers a breast and holds it to Aashish’s mouth.
Why does Aparna do this? She’s aware that she has no milk, although exactly how that occurred is obscured by the cottony fog which hangs over the first few days of her readmission to the hospital. Perhaps this is a test, offering her breast to the baby: If he’s my true, true son, he’ll take it. Perhaps it’s the hope of a miracle. She remembers, vaguely, old Indian tales where milk spurts from a mother’s breasts when she is reunited with her long-lost children. But mostly it’s her body crying out to feel, once more, the hard, focused clamp of those gums.
Aashish will have none of it. He howls, face splotched with red, his body gone rigid. He refuses to be consoled by pats or clucking sounds, so Aparna must reach for the bottle with shaking fingers, afraid that someone will rush in and demand to know just what she’s done to the poor child and take him away. In her haste she knocks over the bottle, which rolls under the bed, beyond the reach of her tube-restricted arms. And she must lie there next to her son’s crying, a sound that jabs at her like a burning needle, until her friend does, indeed, rush in and take him from her.
LATER, WHEN ALL this is over and Aparna has settled back into the familiar rhythms of her life—but, no, her life, bisected by almost-death into Before and After, will never be familiar again. She will find it subtly altered, like a known melody into which a new instrument has been inserted. Anyhow, when she has settled back, people will ask her, But what finally made you better? She will give them different answers. “It was the new antibiotic,” she might say, “the Cipro.” Or, with a shrug, “I was lucky.” Only once will she say, to a friend—not the one who had taken care of her baby; somehow they drifted apart after Aparna got better—she will say, looking out the window and blushing a little, “Love saved me.”
“Of course,” the friend will reply, nodding her sympathy. “I understand!” But Aparna herself will not be sure if she has been referring to her husband and son, as the friend has surmised, or to something quite different.
A FEW DAYS after the disastrous baby episode, Aparna opens her eyes to find a man in her room. He startles her in his clean-shaven, blond boyishness, this stranger in a T-shirt and jeans. “I’m Dr. Byron Michaels,” he says, extending a hand which she ignores. It takes her several minutes to recognize him as the man who performed her second surgery. In his street clothes, he looks so different from the times when he visited her with the rest of the squad that she doesn’t close her eyes and turn away, as she originally intended. And though she doesn’t return his smile, when he pulls up a chair and settles himself next to her, she watches him with a certain interest.
“I want to tell you,” he says, “about your surgery. I think you need to know.”
Before she can say, No, thank you very much, he has started.
“The other surgeons,” he says, talking in the clipped tones of a man who’s grown used to being always busy, “didn’t want to operate on you. They thought you’d die on the table. But I took it as a challenge. Maybe it was foolish. When I opened you up and saw everything stuck together, I thought, I can’t do it.
The guy working with me wanted me to stitch you up again. But I was damned if I was going to leave you there to die.”
Dr. Michaels’s voice slows down. He’s looking at her, but Aparna feels he’s seeing something else. As he speaks, his hands make small, plucking movements in the air. “I started cleaning the organs, wiping the gunk off them, cutting away the cocoon that covered your intestines. It took hours. I was sweating like crazy. The nurse had to keep wiping my face. Afterward, she had to help me off with my gloves. My legs were shaking so much I had to sit down. But I’d done it.”
Through the window, sunlight catches the golden hairs of the surgeon’s forearm. His biceps are smooth and convex, like a high school athlete’s. Aparna wonders if she is one of his first serious cases.
“And now,” he says bitterly, “you’re just throwing it all away.”
The sunlight is on his cheek now, glowing and insistent. It strikes her that in all her life she’s never touched a man’s face except for her husband’s. She would like to know, before she dies, how this pink, American skin feels. She puts out her hand—she has so little to lose that she isn’t embarrassed—and touches his face. It’s unexpectedly hot. She thinks she senses a pricking in her fingertips, the slight, tingly pain of circulation returning to a limb. A blush springs up under his skin, but perhaps Byron—through the rest of her hospital stay, that’s how she’ll think of him, a Romantic poet resurrected in surgical greens—understands, for he sits very still and allows her finger to circle the hollow between his jaw and cheekbone.