There is a saying about hospitals, except, of course, among hypochondriacs, that the longer you stay, the more things can go wrong.
As someone who had never been in a hospital before in his life, I had already been in far too long, and when the doctor told me I could head home the following morning, I prevailed on him to endorse my departure for that very night.
The press corps treated me as well as I could have hoped, given that a few of the network stars were a bit miffed about being on the sidelines while an ink-stained wretch from an out-of-town paper basked in the limelight. I spent half an hour before the cameras, concentrating on good eye contact-never look down, make pleasant facial expressions, and never stammer um or ah-and was on my way home with my good friend and former college roommate Harry Putnam.
"Now what do you do?" he asked as his Audi rolled down Wisconsin Avenue, past the fast food restaurants and specialty shops all lit up on this breezy autumn night.
What indeed? For starters, there was the matter of my interview with this somewhat obstinate FBI agent, probably in the morning. More important, there was an anonymous call coming my way in the afternoon.
Hutchins had been discharged from the hospital a few hours before me, telling reporters on the way out that danger be damned, he was heading back out on the campaign trail. I very much wanted to get back to work, despite these tight bandages wrapped around my aching ribs.
There was much to do on this story, and I was in a prime position to do it. Most important of all, it was time to come to terms with my new reality of being home. It was time to stop running.
"Where do I begin?" I said. "I deal with it. No, I try to get ahead of it, all of it."
I fell silent, watching the Roy Rogers slide past, the Cineplex Odeon-Ten Screens, Free Validated Parking-the Chesapeake Bagelry.
Harry, who knows me about as well as I know myself, sensed through my quiet that I was of no mind to have a deep, philosophical discussion about where I was in my life and where I might be heading.
"You want to stop for a beer, maybe something to eat?" he asked.
I did and I didn't. Mostly, I felt like being alone, to start to sort some things out, to prepare for what I thought would be an onslaught in the days ahead. "I'm going to take a pass on this one," I said, and he nodded his understanding.
"I'm around all weekend," he said.
We pulled up to the curb in front of my red brick townhouse in the heart of the East Village of Georgetown. Katherine and I had bought it two years earlier. I was enchanted by the enormous bowfront window with the small panes, and even though we first saw it in the dead of a humid Washington August, I pictured how it would look with a towering, lighted Christmas tree. She was smitten with the condition of the place, which was atrocious, so we could gut it and start anew, creating an interior in our own image-or, I should say, her image, with a few peripheral touches by me like, say, the doorbell.
Harry and I bade farewell, and I ambled up the stairs. This should have been a pleasant homecoming. I was a sudden celebrity, and even under the most trying of circumstances, I had re-proved myself to the newspaper, perhaps unnecessarily so, but in my business it was something that was always good to do. Besides that, I was suddenly on very good terms with the president-terms so good he wanted me to be his next press secretary. And beyond even that, I had days ahead of the terrific story of an assassination attempt a dozen days before a presidential election.
Still, maybe it was the lingering effects of the painkillers the doctors had put in my intravenous tubes. Maybe it was my complete physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. But as I stepped inside my dark, empty house, I felt a sense of helplessness, of melancholy, and I craved a sleep that I knew I wouldn't get.
More than anything else, I missed Katherine, and thought to myself that this was no time to be alone. In a few days, it would be one year that she had been gone. We had been married three years and, like everyone else, had our ups and downs. We were far from a perfect couple, but for my money, we were more perfect than most. A friend of mine, wrestling with his own decision whether to get married, asked me once how I knew Katherine was the right person and that the marriage was happening at the right time. I said you never really know for sure.
Look at the divorce rate. And I'm too independent to ever say, "I have to have this woman for the rest of my life." What I came to understand, though, was that I couldn't picture my life without her.
So in a defensive gesture, we married, and it was the smartest thing I ever did.
We bought the house and renovated it top to bottom, inside and out. We bought a golden retriever and named him Baker. We had sex in spurts.
There were weeks when we couldn't keep our hands off each other, when we would call each other at work and talk tawdry, as if we were having an affair, then steal off in the late afternoon, feigning meetings, and have sex in the waning sunlight of our second-floor bedroom.
Afterward, exhausted, we would lie in bed, leaning on our elbows, and look silently out into our back garden, breaking the quiet to tell each other of our day. We would slowly dress in the descending dark and walk down the street to our favorite restaurant, La Chaumiere, still smelling of sex, our private secret. Of course, other times we were more physically aloof. One or the other of us was tired, or preoccupied, or just not around, and then we would enjoy our friendship, actually test the limits of our friendship, to eventually wake up one morning and feel the need to have sex. More than anything else, she was my friend, and trite as it is to say, she could make me laugh, knowing exactly which buttons to push at exactly the right times.
Her pregnancy brought on a real potpourri of emotions. She was constantly sick at first, dry-heaving at the very mention of food one moment and starving the next. I, meanwhile, was coming to terms with the thought of fatherhood. For most of my adult life I had taken pride in my dearth of worldly possessions, which were so limited that for years, when it came time to move, I was able to wrap the cord around the alarm clock and pack everything I owned into the back of my hatchback. Initially, the thought of the responsibility petrified me, sometimes making me as sick to my stomach as she was. By the sixth month or so, I had arrived at an inner peace and understood and openly appreciated the length of a woman's pregnancy, this nine-month readjustment period. By then, she was a glowing mother-to-be, all her new weight centered in her stomach. I couldn't wait to greet my newborn into our house, and privately I hoped for a daughter. I had a recurring fantasy of stealing home from work early one day, coming around the corner on foot, and running into my wife, pushing a carriage, Baker padding patiently and proudly beside them. I never actually figured out where that fantasy went from there, or if it even involved sex. I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a sexless fantasy, so perhaps I should reclassify it.
Anyways, it was all for naught. Katherine was due in mid October. By the second, I was a basket case, nervous to the point of being unable to work. So I stayed home that day and played with the dog and puttered around the house. Katherine, meanwhile, continued to make calls to her public relations clients from our upstairs office, sending out faxes and approving advertising strategies as if she didn't have a worry in the world. She did this right up to the time when she came walking out the French doors onto our back patio and announced to me that the time had come to head to Georgetown Hospital. She told me I was making her so nervous, I probably induced the delivery. I was wiping down our wrought iron outdoor furniture. Baker was sprawled on the cool bricks, in a patch of shade.
In the delivery room, as we began to run through all the breathing exercises we had learned in eight weeks of birthing classes, her pain seemed almost unbearable. She pushed and counted, counted and pushed, when suddenly a nurse monitoring her vital signs snapped up a telephone and had the receptionist page our obstetrician. The doctor came rushing in less than two minutes later, took measure of the situation, and told me in no uncertain terms to leave the room and have a seat in the waiting lounge. Worried sick, profoundly confused, I did as I was told, trying to meet my wife's eyes as I left, watching her face, covered in sweat, watch mine as I backed out of the room. She mouthed the words "Don't go." The doctor overrode her, yelling, "Please leave." In the waiting area, I sat staring at my feet for the next two hours.
Dr. Joyce was an attractive, late fiftyish woman with the look of competence you would never think to question and a reputation that placed her among the top obstgyns in the city of Washington. As I sat there, lost in my fears, she came up so quietly I never saw her, took me by the hand, and began walking back toward the delivery room.
For a fleeting moment, all my dreadful thoughts gave way to the sparkling optimism that we were heading back to see my wife and newborn baby. I expected Katherine to be sound asleep, the effect of painkillers taking their toll. And I thought that our baby, boy or girl, would be kicking and screaming in a nearby crib. Already, I thought, I'm going to be pressed into service as a father. But before we arrived at the swinging doors that led into the maternity ward Dr.
Joyce pulled me into a small conference room, bare except for a circular table, a few swivel chairs, and some institutional art-a covered bridge in what looked like Vermont is the one I best remember.
She directed me into a seat, then leaned against a wall, looked me in the eye, and spoke, exhausted.
"There's no good way to say this, Jack. Katherine died during delivery. She had what is called a placental tear, and she died from internal bleeding. We did everything we could, and for a while, I thought we were going to be able to revive her, but the bleeding was too much."
A wave that began in the pit of my stomach worked its way up my chest and into my head. I had never felt so alone, so detached from everything and everyone I had ever known, in all of my life. I was physically devastated and emotionally incapacitated. I remember supporting myself on the table with my elbows as my head bowed in a storm of salty, silent tears. The doctor continued to speak.
"Jack, I can't imagine how tough this is, but I also have to explain to you, your daughter was stillborn. Once the internal hemorrhaging began, she never really had a chance."
I don't know if I passed out or if my mind just stopped functioning. I don't know if we were in that conference room for five minutes or five hours. At some point, I felt a weak sense of composure returning. I rubbed my palms repeatedly across my eyes and nose to soak up the tears and moisture. Dr. Joyce was still there. I vaguely remember her talking, but I have no idea what else she might have said. She was looking forlornly at me, waiting patiently until I was ready to do God only knows what.
"Do you want to say goodbye?" she asked me. I was in no position to decide anything, but shook my head yes. She led me back into the delivery room, now empty but for a lifeless form on a rolling hospital gurney, and pulled back the sheet from Katherine's face. Her hair was still wet around her forehead from the sweat of her pain. Her eyes had been pushed shut. She looked like a doll, not a person. I clutched her cold hand and I kissed her cheek, and then her forehead, and then let my lips linger on hers until a tear rolled off my nose and onto her face. And I walked out of the room, forever changed, always something less than I should have been.
These were the thoughts that filled my mind as I prepared to go to bed.
I poured some spring water into a cup and noticed that the plastic bottle was the only food I had in the refrigerator. I slumped down in my moss green couch and punched a code into the telephone to access my messages, and immediately a computerized female voice told me that my voice mail was full. There were thirty in all, from people I had never met, from my younger sister, from colleagues at the paper, from far-flung relatives, one from Gus, and the last message on the machine was from Agent Samantha Stevens of the FBI, who had a textured voice, almost a singer's voice. "I'd like to talk with you again as soon as you feel able," she said. "I'll call you again in the morning, or you can page me at this number-"
Without Baker trotting around, chewing on a rawhide bone or making his stuffed hedgehog squeal, the house seemed vacant, like a fishbowl without water. As I climbed the stairs to bed, there was an uncomfortable silence. Every step echoed off the walls. I thought about turning on the stereo, but there was really no music I wanted to hear. Arriving upstairs, I looked at all three doors. In the back, there was the bedroom, overlooking the patio and back garden. In the front, we had set up an office with a computer atop an antique library table and some nicely framed prints and old maps on the wall.
The middle room was the nursery. When I came home from the hospital after my wife's death, I pulled the door shut, and through some quirk of the human psyche, I hadn't been in there since. Friends, family members, have all offered, even pleaded, to clean the room out, to pack up the crib and the changing table and put the stuffed animals neatly in a box and carry them wherever it is that such things should go.
I've always said no. "What are you waiting for?" they asked, repeatedly. I've never known, but maybe it was this, the night I came home a national celebrity.
So inexplicably, rather than go into my bedroom or the bathroom, I pulled the door open to the nursery, flicked on the light, and walked inside. I felt like I had stepped into some strange universe, into a part of my life that had ended before it ever began. The walks were a pale blue with the stenciled letters of the alphabet dancing down from the ceiling in various shades of violet and pink. There was a light layer of dust on the windowsill and atop the small bureau. The little blankets were still spread in the crib, waiting for our baby to come home. Though shuttered for this many months, the room had the surprising aroma of newness in it-new woods on the crib and changing table, a new can of wet wipes that had been opened in anticipation of their use, new stuffed animals on the bureau. I stood there, not really frozen, just still, exhausted, then walked slowly around the room, peering into the crib, putting my finger on the play carousel above it, running my hand across the top of an elephant-shaped toy chest that was a gift from Katherine's mother. I thought about what would have-no, what should have-been: fatherhood, an ever-changing relationship with my wife, the adjustments and the laughs and the burdens and responsibilities. The meaningfulness of it all. I wondered if it would ever happen again. I couldn't picture it, starting from scratch in those first awkward days of dating, marriage to someone else, a new set of in-laws, another pregnancy. It struck me that even though she was gone, I still very much considered myself to be Katherine's husband. Fatherhood, that was different. It had ended before I knew what it was. And here I was, a visitor to a life I never had.
All these thoughts made me more tired. I only know I flicked the light out and sat down on the floor, on a Winnie-the-Pooh rug, all soft, never used. After sitting for a minute I spread out and lay down on my back, the sliver of light from the hall just missing my face, the furniture and toys just visible in the shadows. And I slept, fitfully, until the birds chirped outside and the sun hit me square in the eyes.
When I awoke, I felt as if my melancholy had lifted, like a morning fog from a Maine harbor.
I was oddly lighthearted, as if I had gotten rid of something I should have been rid of long ago. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was ignorance.
I'm not really sure. I pulled myself to my feet, my ribs throbbing from sleeping on the floor. I kind of lurched out the door toward the shower. A small part of me felt as if I had just conquered something, but most of me just felt an unfamiliar sense of peace.