Into a Star, page 2
I placed one hand on my stomach. The baby always seemed to wake up whenever I sat or lay down, and did so now, kicking himself unapologetically around.
The door opened. I hoped it was the doctor returning with good news, but it was my parents, brother and sister, their faces askew. They bent over the chair to hug me.
My dad spoke to the nurse in hushed tones and my mum pulled up a chair next to mine. Emma and Asbjørn sat with their heads bowed, little droplets of water hitting the floor below them.
It felt wrong to be sitting with my feet up like I was in a spa. I must have said as much, because a bed was wheeled in for me.
I asked for the shoulder bag I’d hung over a chair earlier. Inside was my phone and the lunch Lasse had prepared for Elmer that morning. Rye bread and pâté.
There was a message from my friend Pernille, a photo of Elmer sitting in a sandpit digging with a plastic spade. He was doing fine, she wrote, and could stay with them as long as needed.
I’d thrown Elmer into her arms with the taxi idling next to us. He hadn’t made a sound since I’d picked him up out of his cot.
I lay down with my back to my family. My mum whispered something to my dad.
I was surprised to find my hands meeting in front of my chest, and my own voice, a whisper:
Dead God, I hope you can hear me now. We haven’t spoken before, because I don’t believe in you, but this isn’t about me, it’s about Lasse. This is your chance to show me you exist. Lasse is going to be a dad for the second time, he still has so much to live for, we need him. Please, have mercy.
Minutes went by and nothing. Hours, then something.
Lasse’s mum, brothers and sisters-in-law arrived. I’d been outside with my mum getting some air in a car park behind the hospital when, without warning, there they were in front of us.
We stood in the space between two cars, hugging each other in turn. They cried and cried, and I told them I’d been shocked at first too, but I knew now that Lasse would be all right.
The words came out of my mouth with such conviction I believed them myself. I even smiled.
If anyone can get through this, it’s Lasse!
Was that laughter? It was. I’d laughed.
We’d be able to go into him soon. That must mean he’d stabilized. If he was going to die of this, it would have happened already. Now we were just waiting for him to wake up from his coma. Why else would they have moved him to intensive care?
We sat together in the waiting room. I got a plate with a mound of rice surrounded by a reddish-brown lake of meat. The rice was hard in the middle and I spooned the sauce over in an attempt to soften it. My sister-in-law Ina sat watching me with tears in her eyes. When I declared for the umpteenth time that I knew Lasse was going to make it, bits of reddish-brown rice flew out of my mouth and on to the table in front of me.
At some point in the afternoon, the doctor came to get me. Lasse’s family stayed in the waiting room, but I wanted my mum with me. Out in the corridor the doctor asked me to stop for a second.
Was I sure I wanted to do this? Some people couldn’t handle seeing their loved ones in such a state.
I assured him that I did, referred to myself as a tough nut. I’d worked at a nursing home when I was younger, I’d seen sick people before.
The doctor led us up a staircase and into a linoleum labyrinth with coloured lines painted along the floors, pulling cord after cord, causing the doors to spring open for us. We were heading towards the epicentre of the hospital, where beeps were tantamount to life.
I kept a brisk pace, carried the weight of my stomach in my arms.
I would speak to Lasse and he’d hear me, he’d hear me and decide to wake up. The adrenaline was pumping through my nervous system: Bring it on!
Then we were at the door. I went in first and my legs turned at once to jelly.
There he was. Lying motionless on a bed, a sheet covering him up to his shoulders, his naked body just about visible through the material. Various instruments were affixed to his temples and chest with suction cups. Cables connected him to other instruments displaying numbers I didn’t know the meaning of. A nurse was standing next to the bed. She gave us a friendly nod but kept working, moving instruments around. His chest hair stuck to them. There were tubes that coiled around his head and disappeared under the sheet, reappearing at his feet. His lips were stretched around a thick, ribbed resuscitator that had been taped to his cheeks to hold it in place. It made his mouth large and lopsided. A garbled swallowing sound came from his throat.
Nnguh. Nnguh. Nnguh.
Why is he making that noise? I asked my mum.
The doctor answered, said it was a good sign, it meant he was trying to breathe by himself. I wanted to cover my ears, refuse to hear more.
Blood flowed from his nostrils and all the places where the needles pierced his skin.
The nurse pushed open one of his eyelids to see if his pupil would react to the light. I averted my eyes. She wrote down the result on a little pad of paper.
I looked at the pad, then at her.
Lasse uses contact lenses, I said, maybe you could take them out for him. It can’t feel very nice with them drying up in there.
She opened his eyelids again and carefully removed the lenses. The way she spoke to him reminded me of the nursing home, the distant way I’d cared for people I didn’t really know.
All right, Lasse, I’m just going to open your eyes and take out your contact lenses now. That should feel better. And the other. There we go, Lasse. That wasn’t so bad, was it.
I hesitated, then reached out to touch him, stroked his forehead gently. It was freezing. It was all I could do not to snap my hand right back.
The doctor was telling my mum about the instruments and their various functions. He pulled the sheet aside to show her how they were attached. My husband lay stark naked before us, his penis limp and pulled to one side by a tube that ran from his urinary tract into a bag of urine hanging from the bed frame. There was a rectangular incontinence pad under his bum.
Mu-um! I exclaimed.
She couldn’t just stand there looking at his dick! Up until now, his nakedness had belonged to him and me alone.
The doctor put the sheet back.
Someone wheeled a stool in and over to the bed, then saw me and came back with a chair I could actually sit on.
A steady stream of nurses and doctors bustled about, turning dials, writing things down and inspecting the drip feeds. There was an open door between Lasse’s room and another room filled with screens and graphs and blinking lights and phones with muffled ringtones.
This was the moment I was supposed to open my mouth, but I felt suddenly embarrassed at the prospect of speaking intimately to him in the presence of so many people. I knew I had to say something so beautiful it would work better than all their medicine and machines.
His forehead was one of the few places free from tubes and blood, and I stroked it with the edge of my index finger as tears dripped from the tip of my nose. I stared at the blood trickling out of his ears.
I whispered that I was here now.
The rest of my words got stuck to the walls of my throat.
I had to press my fingers between his to hold his hand. He was beginning to swell up from all the liquid being pumped into him, his tongue took up more space and poked out between chapped lips, his neck was wider than usual. I was on high alert, watching for the slightest movement, the slightest sign of life.
My mouth was still open, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Time was against us, he had to hear me.
The cold fingers, the swollen body, the blood running out of his nostrils, over his cheeks and down past his earlobes. It was my husband, lying there.
My husband, who, that very morning, had sung birthday songs to Elmer and insisted on porridge for breakfast because he’d read somewhere that porridge was the best thing to eat before a marathon. My husband, who, only a few days ago, had been discussing baby names with me. My husband, who’d hold me in his arms every night until I fell asleep.
But the words about life and love and us wouldn’t come.
I tried.
I begged him to fight. Called him my wounded warrior, because I did that whenever he was sick and he loved it. I spoke in imperatives: Wake up! He had to, he had to be there for the birth of our second child. But when I heard myself thanking him for our children, I fell silent again. It sounded too much like goodbye. At a loss, I turned to face my mum and the nurse behind me.
I don’t know what else to say, I said, I didn’t come prepared with a speech or anything.
My mum laid a hand on my shoulder. I felt so inadequate.
That evening, the doctor called a family meeting out in the corridor. He took pains to look each of us in the eye in turn. It was something about Lasse’s legs. They were stiff and they couldn’t be stiff. Some specialists were on their way to assess the situation.
It didn’t sound so bad. If they were spending time worrying about his legs, surely that meant there wasn’t anything left to worry about with his head or his heart.
I found myself fast-forwarding to the likely rehabilitation period, a wheelchair probably, nothing we couldn’t manage. But then I saw the looks on my in-laws’ faces: wide-eyed and hands covering their mouths. All of them worked in the health service. They understood something about stiff legs that I didn’t. In a tiny voice, Lasse’s mum, Helle, asked about some specific values, a percentage of something in something.
The doctor cleared his throat and answered. Helle let out a gasp and fell sideways into Lasse’s big brother, who just about managed to wrap his arm around her before she hit the floor.
But the tables could still turn, we had to keep the faith.
I kept the faith.
We were shown into another waiting area while the specialists examined Lasse. His two brothers sat curled up with their girlfriends.
My mum paced up and down the corridor, on the phone to my sisters in Copenhagen. Every so often she’d stop in her tracks and throw me a quick glance before covering her mouth and phone with her hand.
When is Dad coming? asked Lasse’s little brother, Esben.
Helle was wringing her hands, strands of grey curls had escaped from her hairslide, the look in her eyes was wild.
He was at the airbase in Holland when I called him, so he’s probably in Germany by now. One of his colleagues offered to drive him to Haderslev and drop him off at the house and then he’ll drive our car the rest of the way here, but I told him he might as well go down to the cellar and hang up the wash I put on this morning, it’s still sitting in the machine.
It looked as if something was fighting its way up the inside of her throat.
Why did I have to go and put that wash on? she whimpered.
We let her cry. My eyes met those of my sisters-in-law over the coffee table. We were thinking the same thing.
We spoke to each other in soft voices as the night slipped in through the window. My parents went to collect Elmer, taking him back to our apartment and leaving me outnumbered among Lasse’s family: the two couples holding hands opposite me, and Helle, who’d soon have Hans by her side.
My friend Kira arrived, her hair pulled into a messy knot, woollen socks poking out of her trainers. She sat down next to me and put a hand on my back. I could feel the sweat from her palm through my top.
Kira was how Lasse and I had met. In gymnasium they had art class together twice a week, standing side by side in front of their enormous sketchpads. She painted chubby tortoises and threw him occasional sidelong glances. He painted a ferry sailing out of a chessboard, waves breaking on either side of it.
I sat cross-legged on a table behind them, struggling to pay attention to what Kira was saying. Lasse painted with such confidence – each brushstroke as sure and steady as the way he kept turning around to look at me was awkward and clumsy.
I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I looked him up in the phonebook and found his parents’ address. Next to the address: the family surname and the initials of their first names, among them the tiny L for Lasse. I gazed at the letter, enchanted. Never before had I been so taken with another person.
A bed was rolled out for me in a dark, quiet part of the corridor, but I refused to lie down and sleep. The night seemed to stretch out into eternity; the thought of waking up on the other side of it was unbearable.
I imagined telling Lasse the story of this night. I pictured him waking up with me by his side, and he would say, The last thing I can remember is running, and I would tell him the rest.
Around midnight, the doctor returned. He said that I could go in to Lasse again. I got up, my body weighing a thousand kilograms.
With every hour that passed, Lasse morphed before my eyes into something other. The more he swelled up, the more his features spread out, grew apart. Under the waxlike skin, his veins shimmered like a web of red and blue tacking thread. He was a body, breaking itself down.
His throat grew as wide as his thigh and, eventually, the swelling pushed his head so far back that it pointed his chin directly up at the ceiling, the beard he’d always kept so trim now a caricature of spiky bristles sticking out in all directions, his moustache dark and congealed with blood. All that remained was an abandoned shell, from which his soul had already taken flight.
It left in its wake a smell of sweat, sugary medicine and the plastic vacuum bags of tubes and needles and gauges the nurses kept ripping open, the smell of him merging with the smell of the room. He smelled of the flashing clamp on his index finger, of the doctor’s green lab coat, of the computer in the corner.
My life was inextricably bound to his. We were one, or so I’d thought. But all I felt at the sight of this distorted body was disgust.
His hands were the only things I could bear to look at. And so I sat, staring at our interlaced fingers until they too grew so inflated I had to look away. I stared down at my shoes instead, willing myself to stay by his side but relieved when I was asked to leave the room.
I made one feeble attempt at protest, unwilling to accept my apparent willingness to give up so quickly, but the nurse said it would be best for the baby if I lay down for a bit. So I did. I left, the baby my excuse. And as soon as I did, I wished myself back again, couldn’t bear being apart from him, couldn’t bear the thought of him waking up right then, without me there.
Behind the white blinds, a jet-black night; beneath my eyelids, tiny grains of sand. I was ready to drop with fatigue, but still I felt undeserving of the luxury it was to climb out of my skirt and on to the bed, to prop my stomach up with a pillow and pull the blanket right up to my nose.
I dozed off into a choppy nightmare and, before I knew it, found myself tumbling back out of bed, the inside of my forehead prickling with vertigo, black spots obscuring my vision. I put a hand on the wall to steady myself, then staggered along the corridor in my leggings and pushed open the door to Lasse’s room.
A yellowish light hung over Helle and Hans, who sat with furrowed brows, holding hands. Hans must have arrived while I was asleep.
Their faces said it all.
I bent over Lasse, stroked his forehead. The skin around his eyes was thick, his eyelids reduced to two thin lines that nearly swallowed his eyelashes whole. His tongue was even more swollen than before, his salivary glands bright red and pronounced, now bearing the imprint of his molars. The swallowing sound was no more.
Helle made to pass me something and I opened my palm automatically. Lasse’s wedding ring.
Sorry, I’m sorry, I just had to take it off before, before he –
She sobbed.
I looked at it, then at her. Felt my mouth hanging open, tears and snot sliding down my face and my heart thumping away inside, everything going impossibly slow, impossibly fast. I closed my fingers around it and tried to look up at Hans, my pupils darting in all directions. I blinked and his face became a blur, but behind his glasses I could still make out the desperation in his eyes.
You’re somewhere else, where have you gone? he asked. I looked down at Lasse.
Helle implored me to try and sleep again. With laboured movements, I turned and left them, squeezing the ring in my hand. Maybe, somewhere deep in the tunnels of consciousness, Lasse could hear the echo of my steps, could hear I’d lost the faith, was leaving him. And maybe that was the moment he let himself get sucked down at last, down and out into eternity.
I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and when I woke, Helle was standing beside me. It was dark but I could tell by her breathing.
She was a mother who’d just lost a child.
Before going in to Lasse again, we were summoned to a meeting room. The light hurt my eyes. The doctor sat at the end of a conference table, the image of a blue pause button glowing on the wall behind him, cast by a projector someone had forgotten to turn off. No external input.
It wouldn’t be ethical to keep Lasse artificially alive any longer, said the doctor. His heart still hadn’t started beating by itself; there was no activity in his brain.
My arms lay limp on the table before me. I was crying with my mouth open, surrounded by others doing the same: Kira, my mum, Lasse’s family, all of them rocking in their chairs, hiding their faces in their hands.
I went in to see him first, dragging my feet in with me.
The nurses had retreated into the control room next door, the lights had been dimmed, he lay alone on the bed. A body that had long since given up, but now it had been said, words that couldn’t be taken back.
I screamed. I can’t without Lasse.
I don’t remember if I said anything else, all I remember is the same sentence, over and over. I drooled, wiped my mouth and nose on the shoulder of my T-shirt and made to scream again when one of the nurses placed a hand on my shoulder. Gently, she turned me around to face her, her expression sympathetic.
Stand still for a moment.
I was panting, gasping for air.
She reached up to my forehead and removed a piece of paper towel that must have been stuck there the whole time we’d been in the meeting room with the doctor.
