“The surgery was a success, yes,” Michael tells Bill Gregory. “She’ll need plenty of therapy to regain the use of the left side of her body, but will otherwise be like any other child.”
Gregory puts a hand out, pumps Michael’s. “Well. It’s an honor.” He smiles. A trim blonde appears at his side. “Excuse me, my wife.” Gregory winks, claiming her. As they retreat, Michael allows his imagination to swoop into their bedroom, then back out, to what he presumes are Gregory’s extracurricular pursuits.
Michael stands in place, training his gaze over the heads of party guests. Between the pool house and Tudor mansion a swatch of the Long Island Sound is visible. From here, it is a fragment, an ornamental splash of color. Still, its presence agitates him in some primal way. Just the suggestion of sea, the undertone of its faraway thunder.
There is one woman who keeps looking over. Bottle blond, in a dress with a complicated green-and-navy print. Despite the wrap design that creates a deep plunge at the chest, Michael distinctly dislikes the dress. Its pattern, he realizes, is like a crude illustration of the sea. The woman’s chest is so smoothly rounded beneath the fabric that there must be some sort of padding in her bra, or beneath the skin. The over-bleached hair lies flat against the sides of her head like paper. Still, he returns her glances. The woman disengages herself from her conversation and approaches.
“You’re the brain surgeon, am I right?”
“I’m Michael Warren, yes.”
She touches his arm. “The Christensens have told me about you. And I read the story of the little girl you saved.”
Her hand remains on his arm, the fingers impressing themselves through his shirtsleeve. She holds his gaze, and he feels the usual stirrings. Despite the unappealing sleekness of hair, the toned upper arms, the terrible dress; despite the lurking presence of the husband in blocky eyeglasses—or maybe because of it—he does not look away. He feels the woman’s fingers against the flesh of his arm like a reassurance: the old passages will always remain open to him.
She talks in an undulating voice about the little girl and her audience with angels. “So amazing, don’t you think?”
Michael finds himself pulling his arm away in punishment, bringing the Scotch glass to his lips. He has nothing to say about the attractions of heaven.
He had pushed for the surgery. It was a long-thwarted ambition of his to perform a hemispherectomy. Most patients opted to travel to Johns Hopkins, but he was determined to persuade someone to stay at St. Joseph’s. At age eight, the girl was somewhat old for a surgery best suited for infants whose brains have not yet calcified into task centers. But Rasmussen’s encephalitis was causing debilitating seizures, and the parents did not want to travel. The girl resembled his youngest daughter, with the same shade of maple wood hair. During the surgery, with the patient’s head concealed by blue sterile drape, he kept lapsing into the thought that it was Hannah’s cerebrum beneath his knife.
It was after the frontal and parietal lobes had been disconnected and he was cutting the corpus callosum that intraventricular hemorrhaging began. The team’s first attempts to cauterize were insufficient. They went into silent focus. For just a fleeting moment, Michael slipped. He allowed himself to think of the child, of the little memories tucked into the folds of her brain tissue, and his fingers went stiff. Standing over the open skull, he imagined having to tell the family. If he lost her, he would have to be the one to tell them. He had lost only one patient before, but there had been no relatives to inform. Meeting the grave eyes of the attending surgeon at his side, he felt a crater open inside him.
The hemorrhaging finally, magically, ceased, and the girl’s heartbeat returned to normal. After they fastidiously replaced the section of bone and sutured the skin of the scalp, Michael left the OR without a word. The attending surgeon called after him, but he kept walking, exiting through the radiology wing to avoid the family in the waiting room.
It was after eight in the evening. He raced his BMW over the roads that led to his own family. He felt a vertiginous impatience to see them, to wrap them in an iron embrace that would never weaken. When he got home, he would pull them close and talk to them. He would say and do what a husband, a father, might say and do. Coming through the door and standing in the entryway, he could hear the voices of his wife and children, the younger ones getting ready for bed. He stood for a long time in the foyer, listening. At last, Rosalie came down the stairs and glanced at him. He stood, mesmerized. Her gaze lingered for a moment, as if reading something, then slid away.