How guilty was I feeling?
With Grace in my arms, I cranked up the heat in the master bathroom and began running a bath for Lauren. Then I took Grace into her room, and got her dry and clean and into fresh warm clothes. My daughter, sometimes a tough kid to put down for a nap, found the sanctuary of sleep moments after her head hit the mattress in her crib. I promised her, silently, that because of her compliance during this crucial moment in our lives, I would overlook at least one moderate-to-severe teenage indiscretion that was certain to occur in her future. She seemed to smile back at me from her sleep, as though she were already planning whatever it was I would need to forgive her for.
I shuddered at the thought.
When I got back to the bathroom with a steaming mug of tea, I found Lauren in the tub.
“No caffeine?” she asked.
“Mint. No caffeine. I’m sorry, I screwed up today.”
“I know you’re sorry.”
“Sam-”
She shook her head, just a little, and asked, “He’s okay?”
I nodded. She forced a smile in reply.
“You didn’t look too good when you came in,” I said.
She lowered herself farther into the soapy water. She was covered all the way to her chin. Her toes and colored toenails, painted a shade of coral that I was sure Grace had selected, popped out of the water at the far end of the tub. “Something’s cooking, Alan. I have brain mud. I’m more tired than Bill Gates is rich, and in case you haven’t noticed, my eyelids aren’t blinking at the same time.”
I tried hard to look her in the eyes but not stare at her eyelids. “So what can I do?”
“Let’s give it a few hours, see what develops. The pin is definitely out of the grenade. We’ll see what’s going to blow up.”
“Maybe it’s a dud. Can I get you something to eat?”
“No, I’m not hungry. Some quiet, okay? Take the dogs, and don’t let me sleep past five. I love you.”
Multiple sclerosis roughly translates as “many scars.”
When a new wound forms on the protective covering of a nerve in the brain or spinal column-apparently caused by the body mistaking its own neural insulation for a gremlin of some kind-symptoms develop. What symptoms? It depends on what nerve is involved. As the wound heals and scar tissue grows to replace nature’s myelin, the symptoms either disappear totally, or they don’t diminish at all, or-and this is most likely-something happens in between.
It’s a total crapshoot.
Lauren and I didn’t often use the word “exacerbation.” To use it had the ugliness of a profanity. But as I left her toweling off after her quick bath-I stayed until then because I feared sleep would take her right there in the bathtub-we both knew that an exacerbation, a fresh wound on some previously unaffected nerve, was what we feared was happening.
If we were right? I didn’t want to think about it. But I knew the list of potential consequences was as long as the list of the body’s miraculous capabilities. Numbness, blindness, paralysis, weakness, bladder problems, GI problems-I stopped myself before the list grew any longer. And it could have grown much longer.
But repeating the litany of potential disabilities wasn’t helpful.
Did I cause Lauren to have an exacerbation by not taking my daughter to her friend’s birthday party?
No. Of course not.
I didn’t. Really.
Really.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Sunday was full of surprises. None of them good.
Lauren never really woke up from her Saturday “nap.” She opened her eyes for a while, but whatever was going on with her neurologically and immunologically was consuming enough of her energy that she didn’t venture farther from the bed than the bathroom.
She declined dinner. Grace and I ate alone.
As was typical, I was the first in the family out of bed on Sunday morning. Instead of pulling on Lycra and Gore-Tex and heading to my bicycle-the pre-Thanksgiving snowstorm made my typical weekend morning ride impractical-I tugged on some fleece sweats and thick socks and carried the local paper and a cup of coffee to the living room.
The sky above the Front Range of the Rockies was the color of deep tropical water, the soaring granite slabs of the Flatirons were bearded with snow, and the earth was carpeted white as far as my eyes could see.
It was absolutely enchanting. I hoped Carmen Reynoso was someplace she could enjoy this view.
I listened for the sound of Adrienne mangling Christmas carols or the rumble of her John Deere. Nothing. Lauren had left some Debussy in the CD changer. I flicked it on, turned down the volume, and lifted the hefty Sunday paper to my lap, fearing that the tale of Sterling and Gibbs Storey might have finally made it from the police files to the newspaper.
Below the fold, bottom right, some bold type caught my eye. But it wasn’t an exposé about the Storeys. The headline read,JUDGE’S SPOUSE ARRESTED FOR POSSESSION OF COCAINE.
Huh,I thought,I know about that.
Jim Zebid had told me about it. I hadn’t given his revelations about Jara Heller’s husband’s criminal activities a moment’s thought since I’d heard them during Jim’s regular session the previous Tuesday.
What was Judge Heller’s husband’s name?
I started to read the article. Jara Heller’s husband’s name, it turned out, was Penn Heller. I allowed myself to be distracted for a moment trying to figure out how someone ended up with the name Penn. Pennington? Pennsylvania? Penncroft? Couldn’t. Nor did I recall any legal cocktail party chatter with a male spouse named Penn.
The article didn’t have much information. Police, acting on a tip, arrested Mr. Heller, an investment banker with some firm I’d never heard of, early Saturday evening in a brewpub downtown, and they’d confiscated a “significant quantity” of white powder and an unspecified quantity of cash. The reporter apparently attempted to reach Judge Heller for a comment, but his calls were not returned by press time.
Huh.
I felt a pang of sympathy for Jara Heller. She had a decent reputation on the bench and was known as a hard worker who knew the law and played fair. I’d always thought she was personable and that she couched her ambition better than many of her colleagues did. Whatever her husband was involved in wasn’t going to do much for her reputation. I wasn’t smart enough to know what it would do to her future on the bench. I’d ask Lauren when she got up.
A distant humming sound intruded on my reverie about the Hellers. Within seconds the hum became an insistent rumble. Adrienne wasn’t singing, but she had indeed fired up the Deere and was preparing to plow the lane. Sunday or not, she loved the damn tractor too much to allow a decent snowfall to melt of its own volition.
Solar energy was her sworn enemy.
The roar of the Deere awakened Grace, and within a minute I was called to my daughter’s room by her surprisingly mature lungs.
Diaper change for Grace. Take the dogs out, feed them. Waffles. Sunday almost always meant waffles-from-scratch waffles-and lots of chatter. Debussy ended, and the next disk in the changer fired up. Tony Bennett and k.d. lang doing Louis Armstrong. Perfect.
The weekend morning routine was soothing but surreal. After breakfast Grace played in her high chair. I tried to focus on the paper. But below the surface calm lurked, I knew, the monster that lived in the depths: the closed bedroom door and the precarious state of my wife’s health. I waited for the sound of the toilet flushing, or water pinging against the tile in the shower, anything to indicate that Lauren’s day had started in a fashion that resembled normal. But eight o’clock came and went without a hint of her condition.