Lisey's Story(144)
FLOUR printed across it. There's no such thing, of course, and by the time she reaches the third-floor landing she's sweating and sticky and her heart is pounding hard. But the door does indeed say BGCH INTENSIVE CARE, and that sense of being in a waking dream where past and present have joined in an endless loop grows even stronger. He's in room 319, Lisey thinks. She's sure of it even though she can see there have been a great many changes since the last time she came to her husband lying hurt in a hospital. The most obvious one is the television monitors outside each room; they show all sorts of red and green readouts. The only ones Lisey is completely sure of are pulse and blood-pressure. Oh, and the names, she can read those. COLVETTE-JOHN, DUMBARTON-ADRIAN, TOWSON-RICHARD, VANDERVEAUX-ELIZABETH
( Lizzie Vanderveaux, now there's a mouthful, she thinks), DRAYTON-FRANKLIN. She's approaching 319 now, and thinks The nurse is going to come out with Scott's tray in her hands and her back to me; I won't mean to startle her but of course I will. She'll drop the tray. The plates and the coffee cup will be all right, they're tough old cafeteria birds, but that juice glass is going to break into a million pieces. But it's the middle of the night instead of morning, there are no fans paddling the air overhead, and the name on the monitor above the door of room 319 is YANEZTHOMAS. Yet still her sense of dejà vu is enough to make her peek in and see a huge beached whale of a man - Thomas Yanez - in the single bed. Then there's a sense of awakening such as sleepwalkers may experience; she looks around with growing fright and bewilderment, thinking What am I doing here? I'm apt to catch hell for being up here on my own. Then she thinks, THORACOTOMY. She thinks AS SOON AS YOU
GIVE PERMISSION FOR THE SURGERY, and she can almost see the word SURGERY pulsing in drippy blood-red letters, and instead of leaving she continues quickly down to the brighter light at the center of the corridor, where the nurses' station must be. A terrible thought begins to surface in her mind ( what if he's already) and she shoves it away, shoves it back down.
At the central station, a nurse dressed in a uniform upon which Warner Bros. cartoon characters caper crazily is making notes on a number of charts spread out before her. Another is speaking sotto voce into a tiny mike pinned to the lapel of her more traditional white rayon top, apparently reading numbers off a monitor. Behind them, a lanky redhead sprawls in a folding chair with his chin on the chest of his white dress shirt. Hanging over the back of his chair is a dark suit-coat that matches his pants. His shoes are off and so is his tie - Lisey can see the end of it peeking from one pocket of his jacket. His hands are clasped loosely in his lap. She may have had a premonition that Scott won't be leaving Bowling Green Community Hospital alive, but she doesn't have the slightest inkling that she's looking at the doctor who operated on him, prolonging his life enough so they can say goodbye after their twenty-five mostly good - hell, mostly fine - years together; she puts the age of the sleeping male at about seventeen, and thinks he might be the son of one of the ICU nurses.
"Pardon me," Lisey says. Both nurses jump in their chairs. This time Lisey has managed to startle two nurses instead of just one. The nurse with the little mike will have an "Oh!" on her tape. Lisey couldn't care less. "My name is Lisa Landon, and I understand that my husband, Scott - "
"Mrs. Landon, yes. Of course." It's the nurse with Bugs Bunny on one breast and Elmer Fudd pointing a shotgun at him from the other while Daffy Duck looks up from the valley below. "Dr. Jantzen has been waiting to talk to you. He administered first aid at the reception."
Lisey still can't get the sense of this, perhaps in part because there was no time to look up thoracotomy in the PDR. "Scott...what, he fainted? Passed out?"
"Dr. Jantzen can give you the details, I'm sure. You know he performed a parietal pleurectomy as well as a thoracotomy?"
Pleuro- what? It seems easier to just say yes. Meanwhile, the nurse who was dictating puts out a hand and shakes the sleeping redhead. When his eyes flutter open, Lisey can see she was wrong about his age, he's probably old enough to buy a drink in a bar, but surely no one's going to tell her he was the one who cut into her husband's chest. Are they?
"The operation," Lisey says, with no idea which one of the trio she's speaking to. She has a clear note of desperation in her voice, doesn't like it, can do nothing about it. "Was it a success?"
The Warner Bros. nurse hesitates for just a moment, and Lisey reads everything she fears in the eyes that suddenly slip away from hers. Then they come back and the nurse says, "This is Dr. Jantzen. He's been waiting for you."
3
After that initial blank flutter, Jantzen comes around fast. Lisey thinks it must be a doctor thing - probably also a policeman and fireman thing. It was certainly never a writer thing. You couldn't even talk to him until he'd had his second cup of coffee. She realizes she's just thought of her husband in the past tense, and a wave of coldness stiffens the hair at the nape of her neck and puts goosebumps on her arms. It's followed by a sense of lightness that is both marvelous and horrible. It's as if at any moment she'll float away like a balloon with a cut string. Float away to ( hush now little Lisey hush about that) some other place. The moon, maybe. Lisey has to dig her fingernails deep into her palms to remain steady on her feet.
Meanwhile, Jantzen is murmuring to the Warner Bros. nurse. She listens and nods.