The Wonder Garden

Carol did not respond. There was a happy buzz in the restaurant, the whirl of the dancer, the aching, adamant guitars propelling everything forward.

 

The rest of the evening unraveled. He told her the details—she questioning and he answering calmly. He apologized with what was, he thought, inviolable sincerity. The tears came, predictably, and spoiled her face. They finished their meal, or left it, and concluded the rest of the trip in a kind of muffled, vacuumed atmosphere, as if a giant bowl in the sky had descended upon them. In the days after the trip, he wanted to take the words back. He lay beside her in bed and stroked her hair. It had been nothing, he told her, which was true; it had been only a kink in his sanity. They would go back to being the same. She nodded and smiled blandly and said she believed him.

 

Before leaving for the hospital, Carol puts on makeup. Harold waits, feeling a slight burn of impatience as she spreads foundation over her face, brushes her cheeks with powder, and applies bronze eye shadow. The color she dabs onto her lips is a shade of red more suited to a Hollywood premiere than the operating table. She even puts hot rollers in her hair, the way she used to do when they were first married.

 

Harold goes out to the living room to wait on an upholstered chair. When Carol emerges from the bedroom, she looks younger, almost pretty. She smiles shyly, and he notices that she is wearing the necklace he gave her for their twentieth wedding anniversary, diamonds in the shape of a heart.

 

“I don’t think they’ll let you wear that, honey,” Harold says, coming close. “They’ll probably take it from you.”

 

“Well, it’s not going to get in the way of my brain, is it?”

 

“No, but I’m sure it’s hospital policy. You don’t usually see patients wearing diamonds with their hospital gowns, do you?”

 

She is silent, but keeps the necklace on. She is still wearing it when he hugs her in the hospital corridor and they lead her away to the neurosurgery wing.

 

Harold feels a twinge as he watches her go. It is natural to be worried, he reasons, and ultimately maybe a positive thing. The concern on his face might help him blend in with the other husbands in the waiting room. He imagines that he looks generic, forgettable enough. Just another gray-haired gentleman.

 

He sits patiently for several long minutes before Dr. Warren appears and signals to him from the corridor. With a friendly nod to his neighbors, he rises and follows.

 

He doesn’t know how the doctor has managed to circumvent security protocol, but with a swipe of an identification card, they are in the surgical suite. Dr. Warren leads him through the fastidious stages of “scrubbing in,” and Harold is frustrated by the exaggerated and time-consuming insistence on sterility. At the scrub sink, Dr. Warren uses his elbows to pump the soap. They are to spend no fewer than ten minutes, each, washing. Harold watches the clock above the sink and feels like a schoolboy again, his eyes fixed on a motionless minute hand. When they are finished, the doctor uses his elbow to turn off the tap. In the sterile prep room, he prepares the surgical gown and mask for Harold and directs him in putting them on. Donning surgical gloves requires a further set of calisthenics. Harold must not touch any unsterile object—even his own face—the doctor warns him, or he will have to rescrub, regown, reglove.

 

Harold realizes too late that he will not be able to consult the decidedly unsterile piece of paper he’s brought with him—a map of the brain’s specialized areas: vision, memory, emotion, motion. He isn’t entirely sure exactly where Carol’s tumor is located. It had been hard to tell from the MRI scan.

 

Dr. Warren and Harold enter the operating room together. The rest of the surgery team is already there, waiting. The doctor introduces Harold as Dr. Kaminski, a visiting neurosurgeon from Poland, here to observe the procedure. His English, Dr. Warren explains to the team, is extremely limited.

 

Harold concentrates on keeping his face muscles loose, relaxed. Skeptical eyes gaze back at him.

 

“Poland?” a nurse asks.

 

There is a faint murmur amid the surgery staff.

 

“All right, everyone, let’s go,” Dr. Warren interjects, moving toward the operating table. Harold follows.

 

All at once, he sees what must be his wife’s body in the room, hidden beneath a blue canopy like a pup tent. It reminds Harold of war, of the makeshift shelters used by medics in battle zones, or what he’s seen of them in movies.