Traps (19 page)

The room is small, suffused with light from a south-facing window, and so full of cords and tubes and monitors with blinking lights that it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust and narrow her focus to the center of the room and see that her father is sleeping. Overweight beneath the sheet, his jaw slack, his skin powdery pale, his orangey-brown dyed hair
looking brittle against the pillowcase and revealing its silvered roots. Two little circles of buff-colored tape on his collarbone and two on his forehead, both with wires coming out and hooking him up to a machine. The open neckline of a peach-colored cotton dressing gown he must hate. The window behind him shows a broad swath of blue sky. She looks at him breathing shallowly, his big belly rising and falling beneath the sheet, and feels a strange sense of anticlimax. She had been bracing herself for his attack, armoring herself, talking herself up. Now she has to wait. She looks at her watch. She thinks about touching him and shaking him, and then she sees the chart at the end of his bed.

She takes it off its hook and examines it:

At first she imagines it is within his power to fake this too. She puts a hand on his powdery white arm with its pale gray hairs, and nothing inside him stirs. Not even a twitch behind his eyelids. She shakes him, gently at first, and then enough to make his big belly move. She reaches up finally and opens one wrinkled eyelid with her fingertip, and the ice blue iris stares up at the ceiling like the eye of a fish.

She jerks back her hand, and the lid slides shut slowly. You could say it sinks.

Jessica shakes her head. She wrinkles her forehead, and her lip trembles. She puts her mittened hand on her hip, scowling, watching his belly rise and fall. Then her eyes grow glassy. She looks back out the window, at the empty blue sky. She looks at him again. There are tiny spots on his skin, larger and more misshapen than freckles, from age. The skin on his jaw and beneath his nose shows a peppering of gray stubble, and the skin at his neck is so slack that it pools a bit to either side on the pillow, like the neck skin of certain lizards. She opens his eye again with her fingertips and looks at the cold blue iris. She notices that there is a thin
limn of color at the border, almost green, like weathered copper. Tears stream down her cheeks. She looks at his mouth and sees that there is a rim of pearly pink inside, and that the lips themselves are so dry they are cracked, flaked with spittle at both corners. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out her chapstick. She uncaps it, her own lip trembling, and with her big bandaged hand reaches out and puts it on him, his mouth collapsing a bit, the lips crumpling and slipping off to the side as she pulls, but she doesn’t withdraw. She does both lips, coating them thickly with the waxy balm, and then she recaps it.

There is a knock at the door then, and Jessica starts and slips the chapstick in her pocket, as if she has been caught at something illicit. The door opens, and Velasquez admits a man not much younger than her father. His hair is white and his tan hands, sticking out from the sleeves of his lab coat and gripping a clipboard, are wrinkled and corded like the root of a tree. “Excuse me,” he says, and Velasquez lets the door close behind him. Jessica braces herself, although she is not sure for what kind of blow, or from what point of view she expects him to deliver it. As a doctor, a reprimand for applying chapstick? As a tabloid reader, brusque treatment for being so spoiled and cold? As an old man, a tone of disappointment for being less attentive than the daughter he’d want at his own deathbed? He is fit and wiry, like Akhil’s father, so perhaps she is merely bracing herself for some of Akhil’s father’s oblivious frankness; he stumbles over people so frequently with his observations and advice that his wife and children have developed deep stores of eye-rolling good humor and skins the enviable thickness of bark. The doctor starts to raise a hand to shake Jessica’s, but when he sees her enormous bandage, he lowers his hand and smiles. “I’m Dr. Stern,” he says. “I’ve been treating your dad for the last week.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jessica blurts.

The man’s brow knits sympathetically. “What for?”

So many things. But what she says is: “I was probably supposed to ask before coming in here.”

Dr. Stern shrugs. “It’s not that uncommon. It’s not a moment in life
when people think about asking permission. I’d probably do the same myself,” he says. “Even without your complications.”

After the pictures her father took of her children appeared in
People
magazine, there was an episode of
Hard Copy
where he pleaded on-screen for her to pick up the phone and call the studio so he could explain. After that even reviews of her films devoted at least a paragraph to the spectacle of her family life. Jessica feels a rush of gratitude toward this man. She thinks with relief of her sunglasses in Dr. Kim’s pocket, not just an acceptable loss now but a lucky accident, as if she has narrowly missed stumbling into a mosque in a tank top. She wants to thank him for all the ways in which he has just been kind (empathy, candor, tact …), but she is afraid if she tries to name them she’ll start to cry. She swallows. “Thanks,” she manages finally.

Dr. Stern says, “Do you have any questions?”

Her throat clots again with tears at the magnitude of this opening. He puts on a pair of reading glasses, just to prepare to look at her father’s chart, of course, but in the context of this moment it makes him look so like the magical wise old man from a fairy tale, her mind swims with inappropriate questions:
Why doesn’t my dad love me? How long before I ruin my daughters? What am I doing wrong?
She looks out the window to collect herself, and after a few seconds something small enough to ask occurs to her.

“How did it happen?”

“We’re not sure. A random person driving by his house called 911 from a cell phone. He was lying in his front yard. There was some trauma to his head. He may have tripped—I understand the yard was unfinished and full of holes.”

The room has surprisingly little in it. A white vinyl stool on chrome wheels. That machine hooked to her father. A sink with a square foot of formica counter to the side of it and a cabinet above. The two of them and him. Jessica looks out the window. An airplane is flying by in the distance. Closer there is a gray-and-white gull dipping and rising slightly, like a pulse, not moving forward at all, revealing that outside it is windy.

Jessica says, “What’s going to happen to him?”

“That’s the difficult thing about comas. He could stay like this for a day or for fifteen years.”

“There’s nothing to do?”

“Monitoring, of course.… Minor adjustments to his care.… Unless he had a health-care directive of some kind suggesting he wanted it otherwise. A withdrawal of care.… Less than extraordinary measures.…”

Jessica shakes her head. “Not that I know of.”

The doctor looks tactfully at the floor.

Jessica says, “Can I ask … Is he getting everything he needs? I mean, I don’t know what kind of insurance he has.…”

“For a condition like this there aren’t really any choices at this stage. We do the same for everyone.”

“So there isn’t anything I can do to help?”

The doctor’s eyelids flutter the way they do when people know more about you than they should. “In a few weeks if there’s been no change we’ll get ready to transfer him to a long-term-care facility, and those vary in quality. I could have our care coordinator call you about that. About where you want him to go.”

Jessica shakes her head miserably. She doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. She wipes under her eyes with the heels of both hands.

Dr. Stern pulls a trifolded pamphlet from his pocket, and Jessica accepts it. Blurred to black-and-gray in the background is a photograph of the face of a smiling elderly woman and over it in big bright yellow letters is the title: “Reaching Out for the Help You Need.”

Jessica blushes crimson, her heart beating wildly. She keeps her head bowed, studying it and waiting, certain that there is some kind of witchcraft at work; that Dr. Stern has seen inside her and that this offering is prelude to an oracular judgment and prophecy of the most grave and personal kind.

But instead he says gently, “There’s a phone number on the back. They can refer you to counseling groups for people in your situation.…”

And Jessica looks up finally—sunglassless, hatless, tearstained. The
confusion and incredulity she feels must be all over her face, because the doctor’s eyes flutter again. “Families of coma patients, I mean.”

Jessica flips over the pamphlet: “National Family Caregivers Association, Kensington, Maryland.”

The doctor brings his fist to his mouth and clears his throat. “We try to limit visit length in the ICU, but I’m going to extend yours.”

Jessica goes on staring down at the pamphlet.

He adds, “There’s quite a bit of research that indicates coma patients can hear and process language, recognize voices,” and when he slips out of the room he closes the door with almost no sound.

Jessica makes herself look at her father then, and she thinks about what the doctor said. His eyelids are wrinkled like crepe paper. The circlets of bandaid rise and fall with his breathing. She could say anything, deliver any rebuttal, and he would hear it and he would neither be able to respond nor to deliver a tape of her words to a tabloid to be cut and twisted in misleading ways. She can in fact declare anything—that he’s been wrong about her, and that the way he has profited from betraying her is also wrong. That she is a good daughter, a good wife and mother, a good person. That she is simply good. And she finds that although she can imagine the words she might use, without his skepticism to fight she is able to see for the first time that she herself does not believe them. It occurs to her finally in a rush of panic and discouragement that all these years she has been running from the wrong things. For here she is—her father can say nothing to confuse her and every single stranger she has encountered on this trip beyond the safety of her Beverly Hills gate has been unfailingly kind. She has no critics, and still she feels ashamed.

She pulls out her cell phone. She presses one button and raises it to her ear.

“How’s it going?” Akhil says.

“He’s in a coma.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t a setup. He’s been unconscious for two weeks.”

She’s crying again.

He lets her do this for thirty seconds or so. Then he says, “How do you feel about that?”

“At first I was pissed off, actually, because I didn’t get to do what I came for.”

“What was that again?”

“Seize the sword. Call his bullshit. Tell him I know I’m a good daughter no matter what he gets the tabloids to say. And then I—”

“What?”

“It’s so terrible.”

“What?”

“And then I thought—I really thought this, that’s how despicable I am—I thought, finally I can be in a room with him without worrying about him hurting me.”

“That’s not despicable, it’s compassionate.”

“I even put chapstick on him,” she says miserably. “I used his comatose body to play house: good daughter with sick father.”

“It’s compassionate that you want to visit him and take care of him after what he’s done.”

She shrugs, although he can’t see it. Then she says, “His dog bit me.”

“What? Where?”

“On the hand. Don’t worry, I got it treated. The doctor said to tell you she graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins.”

“Was the dog vaccinated?”

“By my dad? Who knows? But the doctor said the odds of rabies are extremely low anyway, and then with the way Grace is acting, almost nil. Does that sound right?”

“Were you offering her food?”

“Yes! That’s what she asked me. And Dana too. Since when is care-taking such a risk factor?! But yes, and she’s deaf and blind now she’s so old. She was just confused.”

“She’s right, then, you don’t need to worry. We should watch the dog for ten days here at home though.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t bring home a dog that gets confused when you give her treats and sometimes attacks. How would it even work?! We’d have her in a fenced area of some sort where the girls could see her but not touch her, and they’d build up some fantasy in their minds about what it would be like if they talked me out of it and I let us keep her at the end of the ten days, and then what? I disappoint them and pack her into the car and take her where? Who’s going to adopt a dog that bites people who feed her? A dog who’s about to die anyway?”

“You could euthanize her now.”

She laughs, a weird, bitter laugh with a bit of spittle.

“What?” he says.

“I seem to be killing off inconvenient loved ones right and left here. Euthanize my childhood puppy. Grateful for my father’s coma. What a discovery! Permanent unconsciousness for all my difficult charges!”

“Jess—”

“If only we could get the dog into a coma, then everything would be perfect! No worries about her hurting anyone and I wouldn’t have to make any decisions—”

“Sweetie—”

“Maybe when one of our girls goes through a rebellious teen stage we can put her in a coma, too.”

“Jessica, wait—”

“Watch out! Watch out! Don’t cheat on me or I might be hoping for a coma for you, too. So much easier to explain to the children than a divorce. So much less complicated.”

“You’re not being fair to yourself at all.”

She shakes her head and covers her mouth with her hand, crying silently.

He says, “And I could never in a million years cheat on you. Not even if you daydreamed about inducing my coma.”

She squeezes her eyes shut. She feels a flash of jealous anger. For him
this would all be so simple. Kill the dog. Forget the con-man father. Welcome home his sad, lost, crazy wife.
Can I be the first one to hug you?

“Sweetheart?”

She opens her eyes and looks at her dad. At his tubes and his brittle dyed hair.