Free A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison Page B

kissed her on the forehead. “Good,” I managed to say. And I almost meant it. I’m happy she’s independent. I’m happy Polly is, too. You weren’t when you were their age. Sleepovers, school trips, me going away to work in the store: You used to throw your arms around my neck and hang on until I detached you limb by limb.
    O N THE FIFTEENTH day of your stay in the hospital last September, you were taken off propofol. The trauma-center doctor expected you to emerge from the coma within a matter of hours, or a few days at the very most. It was a week shy of your twenty-first birthday, and I was already imagining my mother and father bringing the girls to the hospital to see you on the big day. I was anticipating the joy on your face, and theirs, when they presented you with a birthday cake you would not be able to eat, but that you would know had been baked in your honor.
    I refused to leave the hospital while we were waiting for you to emerge from the coma, and a room was found, a closet, really, into which a hospital bed was rolled for your father and me. We slept in the bed together the first night, the only night I can remember that autumn that our limbs were entangled the way they had been the rest of our married life.
    At the end of your second day tapering off propofol, Mitch cameto check on you and ushered me out of your room by the elbow. “Go get something to eat,” he said. “We can’t have you fading.”
    So I walked to the cafeteria, but the smell of food made my stomach turn. I returned to the waiting room outside Trauma. I hadn’t minded the space before. The sea-foam-green carpet. The gold pendant lights over the receptionist’s desk. The chairs patterned in silver and teal. But during those days we waited for you to regain consciousness, the heavy quiet of that waiting room made me feel like I was going mad.
    On the third day, the trauma-center doctor’s brisk reassurances began to lose some of their briskness, and I felt panic rise in my gut.
    We paged Mitch. He grilled the trauma-center doctor, whom he himself had hand-picked. He moved around your bed, studying your chart, checking your vital signs, touching your body—your head and eyelids and ears and chest and neck and belly and knees and feet and toes. He moved like an athlete, or a dancer—the steps he took so practiced as to take on a stylized grace—but his hands were an artist’s hands, imprinted with a vision of a healthy human body, and gifted with the power to bring that vision to life.
    When Mitch finally spoke, it was to your father, not the trauma doctor. “I would recommend putting him back in a coma.”
    “Why?” your father asked.
    “I’ve never seen that done before,” the trauma doctor interjected.
    “Well, now you have,” Mitch replied.
    Mitch took us aside. He explained to us that he suspected the doctor had been too ambitious in bringing you back. He was of the opinion you had experienced a kind of cognitive overload, and your body, as a defense, had clung to its unconscious state. His view was that sedating you again would actually allow you to recover consciousness more quickly than if you remained on the path you were on, which he was afraid was going to cause seizures, or even a stroke.
    A memory came to me of Mitch sitting in my store, years ago, after his wife left him, fat tears falling down his face. How could a man with such powerful intuition in the matter of human health have so badly miscalculated in the matter of human love? Could a man like that be trusted now to be infallible?
    I could not stand my own doubt, and I could not stand the certainty in Mitch’s face or the uncertainty in your father’s. So I turned away and let them decide.
    If a mother is only as happy as her least happy child, that day began a series of the most unhappy days of my life.

Twelve

    I N L ONDON , I began to stay on in the pub after Malcolm left for home each night.
    “You’d better go,” I’d say to him, at