The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  He had spent the day in his den, refusing her offer of a bowl of tomato soup and a few saltines at lunchtime. His throat felt odd, he claimed, but she wrote it off to his simmering grudge about the guns. Still, he’d been coughing ever since trying to eat the BLT a few days before. Hattie thought at first that his coughing and his indictment of the bacon were merely a more elaborate way to make her feel guilty, but as she listened to the sounds he made it became clear to her that this wasn’t a performance. The bout or spasm or whatever it amounted to wasn’t the usual kind of coughing, but a strangling, wheezing, deep-rooted struggle for air. She hurried to his room, where she almost tripped over the towers and piles of books he’d pulled off the bookshelves. He sat in his recliner, gasping.

  “What on earth?” she asked, surveying the mess.

  Between coughs he tried to speak but his voice was weak and wispy. He could only mutter, his voice seemed oddly muffled. His mouth wouldn’t work right and his tongue lolled. He could scarcely hold up his head. In his distress he’d knocked over the wooden TV tray where he kept the remote control and the telephone and his notepads and they’d fallen among the books.

  From the clutter she snatched the telephone and hit the ClairBell button. For a wonder, her daughter picked up on the first ring. She appeared to be on Whip. “What up, Mom?”

  Hattie tried to explain, but she could only get out, “Your father. It’s your father. He can’t talk. He can’t stop coughing.”

  Excitement surged in ClairBell. Her energy went from zero to sixty in a second flat. This was the moment she had waited for, her time to shine. When her parents needed her. Her pulse racing, she shouted into the receiver, “Have you called anyone else?”

  “Only you,” Hattie said. “Hurry, ClairBell, he needs help.”

  “I’m on my way,” ClairBell shouted. “Call nine-one-one!”

  While Abel hacked and gasped, Hattie tried to think, but she was at a loss. Vaguely she remembered the talk she and Abel had had about extreme measures. They had agreed. No heroics. They had filled out advance directives and signed them. But was calling an ambulance an extreme measure? What seemed so matter-of-fact when they’d discussed it now seemed impossible to figure out. Panic rising, she asked, “ClairBell, ClairBell, don’t hang up! I don’t know the number!”

  “Never mind. I’ll do it from the road. Does he have an inhaler?”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind!” She hung up.

  Hattie ran for a glass of water and took it to Abel. When he batted it away water sloshed onto his chin and chest. Next she tried to get him to a seated position, but the recliner wouldn’t work right and the footrest kept coming up even as she tried to push it down. Piles of books hindered her. He had a fever, she could tell, and his coughing went on and on. Finally, in the distance a siren wailed, growing loud, then louder. A clatter at the front door and then footsteps thudded in the hall. A man’s voice called out, “Where are you?”

  Suddenly ClairBell was there, too. She pulled Hattie up—somehow she’d gotten herself down onto the floor beside the recliner—and walked her into the kitchen. “Let them do their jobs.”

  ClairBell returned to the scene. She asked the EMTs a few questions about blood gases and rales and pulse ox and Cheyne-Stokes breathing and such, but they responded only with quizzical looks and so she went back to the kitchen. She collected Hattie’s pocketbook and stood holding it clasped to her chest. “Mom,” she ordered, “we’re going to the hospital with him. I’ll drive. You need to go to the bathroom before we leave.”

  Hattie obeyed. It was good not to be in charge. Good to have someone take over. When she came out of the bathroom she met the EMTs on their way out, Abel on a rolling bed, a green oxygen mask over his face, struggling against the restraint belt. He lifted a hand toward her and she tried to clasp it but the bed rolled on. ClairBell put an arm around her shoulder and brought her around to face her. “Now get your nitroglycerine. Where is it?”

  Hattie had to think. “In there,” she said finally, pointing to the pocketbook in ClairBell’s hand.

  “Do you have Daddy’s VA card?”

  Hattie brushed off her worry. “He knows his own number.”

  “But do you?”

  Hattie thought. “No.”

  “Then get his wallet.”

  She hurried to the back room and rummaged in Abel’s drawers and at last she found the wallet. Convinced the housekeeper was pilfering, he’d hidden it between folded T-shirts.

  Outside, the ambulance was pulling out of the driveway, lights flashing. The Cadillac was running. “Get in,” ClairBell ordered, “buckle up.”

  After they arrived at the hospital and got Abel through triage, ClairBell made calls. To Jesse, telling him to inform Gideon, and to Doro, telling her to let Billy know. Hattie marveled that her daughter could keep her head as she explained what was happening. Calmly she told her siblings that their father had been taken by ambulance to the VA, that he couldn’t get his breath and that she suspected either pneumonia or a stroke. “It’s all under control,” she said to each of them. “Don’t worry. I’ll call you when we know something.” Her manner was businesslike and patient as she fielded their questions, and Hattie was impressed. When ClairBell hung up, Hattie said, “I’m so glad I called you.”

  ClairBell’s heart swelled and warmth seemed to pour over her body. “I got you, Mom.” She reached over to pat her mother’s hand, thinking that if anyone had asked her to name the best moment in the last, say, twenty years, she’d jump right over meeting Randy online and even their wedding day. She would point to this moment.

  Abel was diagnosed with pneumonia and admitted for possible stroke. The doctors said he’d probably aspirated some food. “That bacon,” Hattie said, remembering the day after the night of the guns. “He choked on it.”

  Once he was taken to a room and settled in bed, Hattie and ClairBell sat with him for a long time. He had calmed down and was dozing, but beneath his placid expression Hattie imagined she could see the dangerous glint of the look he wore when he felt betrayed.

  “He looks kind of angry,” ClairBell said, confirming her fears. “It’s that face he makes when somebody’s done something wrong but he’s not ready to tell you what it is yet. He’s still holding it in.”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Hattie. “He’s probably a million miles away.”

  For a time she studied her husband, trying to comprehend the changes that had taken place in the almost seven decades of their marriage. Always when she thought of him she pictured him as he’d been in their early years—black hair thinning a little at the temples, sharp green eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, the strong, square chin, the sly grin, the chest with its hereditary concavity just under the breastbone, pectus excavatum, he’d called it, his broad, capable hands. She thought of his voice, strong and quick, its tenor register, his wild laugh, a laugh she loved. His face had fallen, his ears had grown bigger and tufted with gray. The skin under his eyes was mud-colored. He was wattled and sunken and spotted. She put out her hand and stroked his forearm. At some point when she hadn’t been looking, the skin on his arm had lost all its silken black hair.

  It was around midnight when the women left the hospital and went home to Amicus, and almost one a.m. when ClairBell pulled out of the driveway for her trip home to the Flint Hills. After she straightened the den and put the disordered books back on the shelves, Hattie slipped into bed. For a long time her mind raced and she couldn’t sleep. The feeling she’d had earlier in the day that she’d forgotten something important returned to her.

  She got up and walked quietly through the house. The first time she’d been alone in it since … oh, heavens … ever. She’d never been alone in the house all night. Well, Abel’s fishing and hunting trips, but that was all, and somehow this was different. The children had been there then and they weren’t now. She thought of her early motherhood, how suffocated she’d felt in the puppy nest of infants and toddlers, when even her skin
wasn’t her own. And now this vast feeling of emptiness stretching out ahead of her. She walked through the house, the waning gibbous moon shedding enough light to see by, trying on solitude, trying on quiet. Her ears fairly buzzed with the silence. She touched things as if they belonged to someone else, some other woman, some other mother—the children’s portraits, a lampshade, the mantel, the philodendron in its pot on the hearth ledge, the books on the shelves. She found her way to the piano and pulled out the bench and sat down, letting her fingers seek out the keys. Quietly at first and then louder as she realized there was no one to hear the surge and halt of her attempts to recover the music, she played by ear, the easy hymns of her girlhood, pieces she was too self-conscious to play when the others were around but which she loved—“O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go,” “For the Beauty of the Earth,” “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” As she worked her way through the hymns she knew by heart, she found, when a warm drop struck her arm, that she was weeping, but not in loss or sorrow, but, oh, in joy, in the song of her spirit returned. She felt a dampish smile stretch her mouth, and the notion came to her that the way she felt just now might be a foretaste of what was to come, in heaven. She played for a while longer, singing along in a voice that she thought would sound small in the big empty house but instead sounded surprisingly full and rich.

  She had just lain back down in bed when headlights glanced across the wall, sweeping the room in slow, kaleidoscopic movement as a car turned around in the driveway. She heard loud voices, a low, rough one raised in anger and another, higher, thick with distress. Billy’s voice. By the time she made it to the front door the car was speeding off, its taillights a red glow at the end of the drive. And then it hit her, what she’d forgotten.

  Billy had called earlier. In the hubbub of her dealings with Abel she’d forgotten she was supposed to fetch him from the bus stop at four o’clock. He had wanted to get away from his apartment because his landlord was acting mean. The power had been cut off because Billy had spent the bill money—there had been a tortuous explanation of his reasons but Hattie couldn’t follow it.

  She went outside and down the driveway, where she found him on the verge of the macadam, sitting on the stump of a cottonwood, his head in his hands. As she drew nearer she saw that he wore only his undershorts. In the moonlight the nubs of his backbone and his ribs stood out in relief. “Billy,” she called out softly.

  He turned toward her, his face gaunt, and finally she was able to make out that he was distressed because his glasses had slid off his face when he was pushed from the car and he couldn’t find them.

  She knelt to feel around him on the asphalt, on the grass, and finally she located them. An earpiece had broken off.

  “Did Haskell do this to you?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Who, then?”

  He buried his face in his hands. “I don’t know.”

  She helped him up and they started for the house.

  “There should be clothes,” he said. Though it was a warm night, he was shivering. His teeth chattered. “My clothes.”

  She didn’t understand. “Clothes?”

  “He threw them, too.”

  “Never mind that now,” she said.

  As they passed through the living room she snatched the plaid throw from the Eliot chair and wrapped it around his shoulders. She led him into the big bathroom off the kitchen, and with a warm washcloth she dabbed at his face until she was satisfied there weren’t any deep cuts. “Can you drop the blanket and let me see if you’re hurt anywhere else?” she asked.

  He obliged, letting the throw fall to the floor while she looked him over. At first he appeared not to be hurt, but then she saw on his thin backside a long smear of dried blood.

  Two feelings rose in her, both so powerful she thought she might either combust with anger or swoon with heartbreak. Someone had used him sorely. Someone had thrown him out like garbage. It might well have been her forgetfulness that led to this. If only she hadn’t forgotten him. If only she had remembered the first time the hovering notion of having forgotten had come to her. All she could do now was continue to apply the warm cloth, rinsing it until the water ran clear.

  The guest room bed was covered with fabric from a quilt she was piecing together and so she decided to put him on the empty bed in Abel’s den. Hands on his shoulders, she walked him back, found him some of Abel’s pajamas, and tucked him into bed. He tried to explain what had happened but he was making no sense. She shushed him. “It will be all right, honey,” she said. “Just sleep now.”

  * * *

  In the hours before dawn, at about the same time Hattie drifted into an exhausted sleep, Abel awakened in Room 309 of the VA’s MICU more lucid than he’d been for several days, clear-minded, and ready to fight. Not only had his guns been seized by the goon squad, someone had called an ambulance, captured him, and delivered him into bondage.

  In the past years he and Hattie had talked at length of their decision to allow no heroic measures. They had agreed to submit to whatever fates their bodies had in store for them, no matter how uncomfortable, how wrenching, how fatal. They would go the way their parents had before them. Death was part of life, and both of them, reared on farms, had practical natures. For different reasons both looked forward to the end of their days. Hattie because of her faith in an afterlife where she would meet loved ones of old and come face-to-face with the Christ of her deepest yearning, and Abel because he hoped to glimpse the mysteries of creation, to have answers, finally, for his lifelong wondering.

  They had seen too many of their friends fighting against death, enduring surgeries and procedures and undergoing treatments that carried no hope, really, of making great age any better, and they didn’t want to find themselves among that number. To prove their seriousness, they had filled out and signed advance directives. And even if they hadn’t, Abel considered, Hattie was well aware of his desires, as he was aware of hers. Their children had been told more than once and in no uncertain terms. On the refrigerator in Amicus, secured with dancing chili pepper magnets, were two notes written on sheets from their doctors’ prescription pads that bore the words “Do Not Resuscitate.”

  And now this. Again, onto his forearm was taped an IV line. Again, wires and patches and leads tangled across his chest and ran into and out of the loose sleeves of his blue hospital gown. Beside his bed ticked a monitor that reminded him of a long-necked sandhill crane, its digital numbers glowing green in the half-light of the room. He remembered his plan to do away with himself before things got to this point, and he laughed ruefully. There hadn’t been time to do what he intended, and worse, in all the tug of life, he’d forgotten. Life was a stronger pull, but now he was going to war against it. He would have his way.

  He felt around for the call button. “Nurse!” he shouted, but no one came.

  He jabbed at the button. “Help! I’m in here!” Again he jabbed, and finally the door, which had been ajar, swept open, admitting a wedge of light from the hallway. A woman’s voice said, “Mr. Campbell?”

  “One and the same. Get me out of here.”

  She was young, in her twenties, he guessed. She could be one of his granddaughters, one of Doro’s or Gideon’s girls. She approached the bedside, hands in her pockets. From her lanyard dangled a badge with the name Jennifer Santiago, RN, followed by a train of other letters he squinted at but didn’t know the significance of. She wore a smock printed with some kind of woodland animal—chipmunks they appeared to be—and pants so loose they looked like pajama bottoms. He thought with nostalgia of the snappy nurses at Tripler on Oahu where he’d lain with a broken back in 1945, their crisply starched uniforms and brisk ways. This young woman, if she was indeed a nurse, seemed to have rolled out of a pup tent. Yes, the world was changing. He was glad to be leaving it. If only people would let him.

  “I’m Jenny, and I’ll be taking care of you tonight.” She laid a hand on his forehead. “How are we feeling? Fever’s down.
”

  The “we” irked him, but he resisted the urge to bat away her hand, held his temper, and said only, “Fine. I want to go home.”

  She smiled. “A rascal, are we?”

  This sent Abel over the edge. “We are indeed a rascal. And we’ll thank you not to patronize us. Now, if you please, Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, kindly release us!”

  She drew herself up. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Doctor’s orders. You’ve got a bad case of pneumonia.”

  “And you’ve got a mistaken diagnosis. I have myasthenia gravis. I recovered from pneumonia months ago.”

  “You have it again,” she said, “and you’ll keep getting it until you stop eating.”

  He gave a sharp laugh. “Quite a prescription, that. Stop eating.”

  “By mouth, I mean. You’re aspirating food particles and that’s causing the pneumonia. You’ll need to have a feeding tube put in. That will fix you up. The doctor explained all this last night but I’m happy to go over it again.”

  “I recall no such event.”

  “Your daughter wrote it all down. You’re going to have a swallow test first thing in the morning and then they’ll decide what to do.”

  Abel summoned his sternest look. “They? They will decide? What about me? I direct you to call my wife. At once. She knows I don’t belong here.”

  Her voice assumed a tone of reason. “But she’s the one who brought you in. And the ambulance, of course.”

  The mention of the ambulance set him off anew. He thought he had a memory of being driven through the night. So it was true. “I did not order an ambulance. I would not have done so.”

  “Would you like an ice chip, sir? I’ll bet your mouth is parched. When you came in you couldn’t even talk.”

  She had changed her tack, affecting concern, but he wasn’t fooled. “I’m talking now. And I’m prepared to walk. Let me out!”

  She sighed. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. It’s the middle of the night. We need a doctor to sign a release. Your team will make rounds about eight a.m. Now, how about a nice ice chip?”