Wait Until Tomorrow Part 13

"She should have come back by now. She's not breathing."

Then I hear Hank's voice. I don't know what he's saying. I am utterly at peace until suddenly I am not at peace. Instead a violent upheaval wracks my belly. Pain sears my abdomen. Now the voices are explaining something to me: "We had to give you Narcan. You were under too long. You had a bad reaction to the Dilaudid. Your respiration . . ."

"Stop!" I scream at the blurry faces now sharply coming into focus. "Stop giving it to me. It's making me puke."

I would not normally say the word "puke" to people I don't know or any vulgarity for that matter, but after I relentlessly vomit the thimbleful of fluid in my stomach into a small plastic pan, I collapse against the plastic side of the hospital bed and whimper, "f.u.c.k."

"That doesn't look comfortable," Hank says. "Should we move her?"

"No," I croak. I equate the least movement with staggering pain.

The irony is not lost on me even in this crumpled state. Dilaudid had been my drug of choice in my early twenties, when I had helped my boyfriend break into drugstores to get pills. I had done time for the love of this synthetic narcotic. Then I met Hank, who, for whatever reason, was the first person to be more important to me than a drug. He was an engineer who could fix anything, including me. He was my anchor.

Because of my reaction to the Dilaudid, the doctor switches me to morphine and the nurse hands me a b.u.t.ton to click whenever I need more. At first I don't click it all, but the pain after three and a half hours of abdominal surgery feels like the knife is still stuck inside me, so I start clicking and the pain eases and then almost disappears.

That night Hank sleeps in the chair by my bed with his sleep apnea machine quietly chugging fresh air through his mask. A small plastic tube pumps oxygen to my nose, and I doze off into a drugged sleep. Hank's presence soothes me, and I imagine our dreams blending together like blood with blood. Here we are at the end of our relationship, and Hank and I are finally sleeping in the same room. I have never loved or needed him more.

After a while I notice I am forgetting to breathe. I let go of the b.u.t.ton and force myself to stay awake until the morphine wears off a bit. These drugs that I loved so much as a teenager-I hate them now. How could I ever have enjoyed that feeling, I wonder. Of course, back then I had a death wish. Now, I'd rather live with the pain. Now I want to be awake. Now I want life.

Not only do I hate the drugs, I hate the hospital. I hate the hard, plastic bed; the stiff, uncomfortable chair; the catheter that makes me feel as if I constantly have to pee; the tasteless food. The thing I hate the most is the chemical stench that emanates from my body. I reek. When they finally take out the catheter, the disgusting odor of my own urine makes me wilt. The blessed bowel movement that signals I am ready to leave the hospital is a toxic tar.

As the days pa.s.s, Hank, who is generally fairly antisocial, makes friends with the nurses. He learns about their families, where they went to school, all sorts of things that hold no interest for me. He chats pleasantly with my friends when they come to visit. He examines my scar and helps me get out of bed and walk around. He monitors what I eat and how much. He tells the nurse when my Foley bag is full.

He does not, however, speak to Emmy once during the whole ordeal. He manages to leave for a long enough time each day for her to visit me. The truce he and I have achieved does not include her.

Four days after entering the hospital, I am able to go home. We still haven't learned whether or not the tumor was cancerous.

At home I spend my days on the couch or in the recliner. Once when I can't make the recliner work I wind up screaming at it and crying until Emmy rushes in to help me. When my brain finally starts functioning again, I spend my time reading magazines several years old. Emmy stays nearby, and Hank locks himself in his room. He still refuses to speak to her. He thinks he can "win" if he takes a hard line. He is willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to get her to do what he thinks is right. But he is going to lose us both.

At night Emmy and I watch movies. Our favorite comfort movie is 101 Dalmatians. She huddles next to me on the couch.

"I miss him," she tells me. "He doesn't love me anymore."

"He loves you," I reply, an answer I know to be true. I am sure, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that he does love her. "He just doesn't know how to let you go."

"Are you going to be okay?" she asks.

"Yes," I answer, but of this I am not so sure.

Pongo and Purdy dash through the snow to find their puppies.

The next week Hank and I go back to see the surgeon. By now I am eating and s.h.i.tting regularly, and I realize that all the things I thought were more important than those two vital functions are practically meaningless. Otherwise, I'm still not feeling great. I walk slowly, a little hunched over, skinnier than I've been in decades.

Hank has studied appendix cancer on the Internet. If I have cancer, then my survival chances are fifty/fifty, according to the data. Having lost his sister and father to cancer in the past six months, Hank looks at me with wary eyes.

Before the surgeon comes into the small white examination room, Hank asks, "Am I going to have to carry you out of here?"

Sitting on the table, I smirk at him and then pretend to get hysterical over my impending death. We both laugh. We can't help it. We may be in battle, but I am grateful for his presence in these cold, boring little rooms with their walls decorated by pictures of wormy intestines.

The surgeon enters. He's a handsome, matter-of-fact fellow.

"The tumor was cancerous," he tells us. Hank inhales sharply. "But we got twenty-four lymph nodes when we took out the portion of the colon, and none of them showed any signs of cancer."

I sit and listen. Hank asks the questions. The surgeon believes they got all the cancer in the surgery.

"But is it possible that a few microscopic cells escaped?" Hank asks.

"It's possible," the surgeon says. Then he turns to me. "I'm sending you to an oncologist. You may need to get some chemo as a precautionary measure."

I am already resigned to the idea.

After our visit to the surgeon, Hank and I stop for lunch at an Indian restaurant. I load up my plate with palak paneer, dal, and naan. We eat quietly, comfortably. I know that while my chances of survival are only fifty/fifty, my marriage's chances are much worse. And yet today there is no one else I want to be with.

My mother called constantly while I was in the hospital. But I didn't want to talk to her. I couldn't even muster the energy to be around Emmy for very long when she came to see me after the surgery. Even now, Hank is the only person in the world that I can be with in my utterly joyless condition. He is simply a part of me, and we are dreamers, sleepwalking toward the end of our life together.

FOUR.

LATE SUMMER 2008.

With our differences irreconcilable, Hank and I decide to sell the house. Aside from repainting the bedrooms, the house hasn't been updated once since we moved into it ten years earlier, and in upscale Charlotte no one is going to buy a house with linoleum kitchen counters. It needs so much work-new flooring, new bathrooms, and new paint, at the very least-before we can expect to sell it.

Fortunately, my mother has grown accustomed to her new surroundings, and I am freer than I have been in years. Which is a good thing because my life is divided now between helping Hank repair the house and escaping that house with Emmy.

Emmy leaves to visit a friend. She'll be gone for a couple of days, which means Hank will venture out of his room and we might get some work done on the house. We're going to repaint the living room and he wants to order a new bathtub for his bathroom.

At Home Depot, I follow Hank around listlessly and watch as he loads the flat cart with varnish, paint, two-by-fours, and two-by-tens. There's some rotted wood on the front of the house that needs to be replaced. So much work to be done. We've neglected the house the way we neglected our marriage.

Hank grabs a strange ladder contraption that can transform from a regular stepladder to an extension ladder like those weird toys that kids love so much. I don't help load a single thing. I can't because of the operation. The nurse told me no heavy lifting for six weeks or I'd regret it. No exercise. No house cleaning. All I can do is read and watch movies. I even stop my yoga practices that I had been doing faithfully since last September.

I feel guilty for not helping Hank load the stuff onto the cart and then into the car, but I also realize he doesn't have to be doing this by himself. He could have asked Emmy to help with all of this, but the few times she offered, he simply shook his head and pointed for her to get out.

We haven't discussed the future; our only goal is to get the house in shape in order to sell it. Then we'll have another bridge to cross. But today we aren't talking about that.

Later I drive over to see my mother. I've just arrived when Mom tells me she needs to go to the bathroom.

"I don't know if I can do it with my shoes on," she says.

"Your shoes?" I ask, grabbing the walker and bringing it over to her wheelchair. She can still walk a little. She can take a few steps from the wheelchair to the toilet. "I don't think your shoes will be a problem."

"Well, they're up."

She means, I think, that her feet are on the footrests of the wheelchair and they need to be moved. She knows at some level that she's not making sense, but we pretend that this is a normal conversation. In some ways, it is.

After her trip to the bathroom, she looks at me and says, "I love that dress. It's so pleasing to look at."

Then we go downstairs, she in her hand-pushed wheelchair, and I walking beside her. I'm not allowed to push her yet.

When we get to the dining room, she takes my hand and brings it to her cheek.

"You can do no wrong," she says.

"I'm glad you think so," I answer dryly and bend down to kiss her cheek.

Emmy and I decide to take our annual trip to Florida. This year it is especially important for us to get away. Before we leave I stand in my bedroom and look down at my finger. My diamond shines as brightly as ever. How often have I gazed at this ring, happy to have it on my finger? Happy to be married. But Hank has not kissed me since Emmy's birthday. I feel more like a younger brother than a wife. I don't see the point in wearing it anymore. I put it in a small cloth bag, and stash it in a drawer.

"It's the divorce tour," I tell Emmy as we drive out of town, Emmy's iPod playing through the radio. Our hearts weigh as much as bags of bricks, but we will manage to have fun anyway. We will sing along to our music at the tops of our lungs. We will drink champagne with friends in Tallaha.s.see. We will drive to St. Pete and stay with my dear old friend, who did time with me back before I ever thought of being a mom. We will meet Sadhguru in person. I've got a new green notebook, ready for work.

I'm scheduled to have an interview with Sadhguru at Cheryl's house. Cheryl is the author of the book that I edited, and we both think that an interview will help get the word out.

On the drive down, Emmy seems so sad and lost.

"Maybe I should just give in," she says. "I don't want Dad to hate me anymore."

I don't say anything. I don't want to influence her one way or the other, but if she doesn't follow her dream, I know I will never forgive him.

At precisely ten o'clock, we enter Cheryl's well-appointed new house, overlooking a golf course. Instead of his usual robe, Sadhguru is dressed in jeans.

Still sitting, he bows to me as if he knows me quite well and then reaches for my hand, as I awkwardly drop my purse on her gla.s.s coffee table. I've never been starstruck. I wouldn't recognize most celebrities if they came up and kissed me on the cheek. But when he holds my hands for that brief moment I feel lightheaded.

"What have you got in there?" he asks with a laugh as my purse clunks on the table. "Sounds like something heavy."

"It's a present for you," I stammer. "Oh, and this is my daughter."

He smiles at Emmy. I feel completely ill at ease, like someone on a blind date. I hand him the jar of raw honey that I've brought and explain that I was inspired by the story he told in one of the programs, a story about some incredibly healthy beekeepers in India who live almost exclusively on honey. I have decided to start using it myself, because raw honey has antioxidants and (as he already knows) I've just had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on my appendix.

"The honey is my chemo," I tell him and sit down on the couch. My oncologist just a week earlier changed her mind about giving me chemo treatments. It seems that my cancer is so rare that they have no data proving that chemo actually helps. So they're going to monitor me and hope for the best. The truth is, I'm not too worried about it.

Sadhguru is intrigued with Emmy, who sits on the other couch. I'm glad I brought her along. For one thing, she exudes a purity of heart that I haven't had since I was four years old. I knew that he would see that. More importantly, I'm hoping he might say something that will help her gain some clarity.

Sadhguru asks Emmy what she does: is she a student?

"What?" she stammers.

"A student? Do you study?"

"I just graduated from high school," she says. "And I'm going to take a semester to go to Ma.s.sachusetts . . ."

"A semester?" he asks. He laughs heartily. "I don't think it takes a semester to get to Ma.s.sachusetts."

She laughs and blushes. "No, I mean I'm going to spend a semester in Ma.s.sachusetts, maybe, I'm not sure. But I'm going up there to work with a theater company. I'm very interested in social and political justice, and this company does a lot of plays that have been performed in prisons and battered women's shelters. I'm going to work with them for a while. Then I'm going to college and probably study history."

"Oh, that's good," Sadhguru says approvingly. "So many young people, you know, they are only interested in making money. My daughter is going to take four years of dance. Not because she wants to be a dancer but for the discipline."

Sadhguru hands her a book that he has been reading called The War of Wealth.

"You will find out a lot about justice in that book," he says.

Because I'm drawn to issues of social and political justice myself, I ask Sadhguru about his views on the United States. Sadhguru is careful not to publicly criticize this country or its government, and I can understand why. He is focused on one thing-offering a process to people who want to explore their spiritual potential.

This is not to say that Sadhguru doesn't speak his mind. He is quick to point out that the lives we are leading right now in the US are not sustainable.

"When you can't get what you need, then you have to go to war with someone," he says. "It's simply not a sustainable life."

"What about the planet? Are we doomed? Is it hopeless?" I want to know.

"No, the planet will be fine. People may be in trouble but the planet will take care of itself. Nature will correct our mistakes if we don't correct them first. That may become very painful."

"Do we have the will and the ability to do that?" I ask.

"The ability, yes. The will? Not yet, but when it becomes painful enough, we will have the will," he says.

No matter how dire his words, amus.e.m.e.nt plays on his face. His eyes shift from serious to mirthful in a moment. I've never met anyone so clearly authentic. He is the same man-in the book, on the dais, in videos, and sitting on a white sofa in Florida.

I ask him my interview questions. He answers them patiently.

Sadhguru's message is clear: "There is an endless longing to expand. At the same time there is an instinct for self-preservation which is constantly wanting to build walls of safety and comfort. These things seem to be a contradiction. This confusion has arisen in our minds because we are too identified with our physical bodies. The instinct for self-preservation and longing to expand are opposed to each other. They're not really opposed to each other. The boundaries of our body need to be preserved. Everything else within us longs to expand."

We continue to talk about a range of subjects; his humor and wisdom are playful. When Sadhguru has answered all the questions I have for him, he turns his attention once again to Emmy.

"I like this girl, Pat," he says, laughing.

"Her father disapproves of her plans. Mightily," I tell him. Emmy shrugs to indicate she doesn't know what to do about it.

"He's supposed to disapprove!" Sadhguru tells her. "How else will you know that you really want to do it?"

Emmy thinks about it for a moment. Then she smiles that bright, happy smile. Our visit ends and we're back on the road, heading to our next destination. We're listening to the stereo and singing, "Cruel, Cruel Summer." The Florida sky arches over us like a big blue tent. The highway unfurls like a decision made a lifetime ago.

A couple of weeks later I put Emmy on a plane for Ma.s.sachusetts.

FIVE.

AUTUMN 2008.