A lot of the other families on the oncology ward could only have one parent there at a time, while the other was forced to spend the day working and visiting for a few hours before bedtime and on weekends. By this time, though, Charlie’s art shows (the reason we moved to England in the first place) had made so much money that neither of us had to work.
First grade, and Haim being gone most of the day for the first time, had been hard on both of us. We took Haim for little adventures after school, catching a train and getting as far out from the city as we could without coming back too late. Once, we went to a Zen garden way out in the country and walked around for hours, Haim pointing things out and naming them quietly, insisting that his made-up name for each tree or stone was correct, and we tried not to disturb the few other tourists with our laughter. On the ride back in, Haim fell asleep on Charlie, who fell asleep on me, and I stayed up to watch the dark farmland give way to the concrete and brick of London. The train was empty except for us and I remember even its hum of speed sounded pleased, contented.
So in some way during that first era of Haim’s sickness the days felt almost OK, like we’d gotten our little boy back somehow, like he might never get any older, might never outgrow us or this trusting age. We started out in the hospital the way that all the families on the terminal end of the oncology ward start out: the diagnosis is bad but your child is alive, is right now alive, and though in a vague, abstract way you understand the fear, here is your little boy, begging you to play futsal on the hospital’s miniature enclosed court, and how bad could any world be when he is running toward the goal, his head (no matter what grows inside it) tilted back to watch the ball arc through the air toward him, his tawny hair, half stuck to his forehead with sweat, catching the long golden sunlight of late afternoon. This is, of course, before his eyes begin to drift independently, before his left-side weakness becomes so great he cannot make a fist, before his speech so often dips into a slurring, coughing Hebraic stammer that when he does manage to get a clear sentence out it rings in the air as if someone else has said it. Before his body, bloated and ravaged and drained and filled with medicine, is so weak that he cannot stand to kick a ball, even if he ever showed enough interest in the world again to want to. This was before all that, when he was still recognizable, only a boy, a miniature bodily vessel brimming with the discovery of each day.
The sepsis emergency was the end of all that. It came on so quickly and completely that the doctor in the PICU said that he’d thought they’d sent Haim there to expire, and was confused when he found no Do Not Resuscitate order.
I wasn’t there when the crisis started, because it was Charlie’s night to stay in the room. She’d paced the room all night as Haim deteriorated, torn over whether or not to wake the doctor who was overseeing treatment, or to bother the nurse, who was overworked at the end of a double shift, and worrying about being a “problem parent,” trying to decide if it was all in her head or if this was really happening. This is what I imagine. What I know is that Charlie was alone with him through the night and there when he coded, and there in the PICU when he coded again. What I know is that I got a phone call at four a.m. from Charlie saying that I needed to get to the hospital right away, that Haim was dying. I don’t know if she waited somewhere to make sure I got there in time before leaving. I don’t know where she was calling from. The last time any of the doctors or nurses saw her, a Patient Care Liaison was putting the DNR form in her hands. When the doctor came to talk it over, she was gone.
And so the holiday began, though we didn’t call it that until a few months in, when Haim wanted us to watch that movie, and I didn’t really understand until a few days after Haim recovered, until I sent for the mothers (both of whom had, since we first moved to England, been clamoring to be allowed to visit together) and went to the police station to report Charlie missing. The report took a long time and the officer seemed to grow increasingly confused. He left and came back nearly an hour later with his supervisor, an older, red-faced man who patiently explained to me that their passport records showed that Charlie had left the country. He seemed sorry to have to tell me this, to have to reveal to the clueless husband his loss, and we sat there for a minute in silence. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” the man said sadly, in a way that seemed full of his disappointment at what this life had turned out to be.
We got the first video a month later. To be honest, I was not all that surprised that Charlie had fled. Some part of me knew it when I came in that morning and saw Haim in the PICU, alone, unconscious. Seeing him like that, almost comically undersized amidst all the machines and screens and even the scaled-down hospital bed, was like getting punched in the stomach. Nothing could have pulled her away from him when he was like that — no abduction, no accident — except volition. I was told at one point a nurse was on top of Haim, straddling him; she did a compression too hard and one of his ribs broke, and I often wonder if it was this single muffled snap of sound that brought Charlie out of it, that propelled her out of the building in shock, against what should have been all her instincts, and down the streets (perhaps even passing me, without either of us knowing it?) and eventually to her suitcases and the airport. I have seen the gaping maw of the world, I remember her once reciting to me when we were still in college, and am fit no longer for heaven or hell. And so I wasn’t terribly surprised when we got the video either.
The video was a short clip, about twenty seconds long. It arrived on my phone from Charlie’s email address, and I stared at it for a long time before opening it. The body of the message was blank. The attached clip was taken from a handheld video camera and shook slightly. There was the glossy square of a picture, a postcard being held up to the lens. It showed a photograph of the palace at Versailles. The camera then panned up from the postcard to the actual building itself in the distance, roughly in the same scale as the picture. There was the distant sound of someone’s laughter. When the camera panned back down, the postcard had been flipped over. On it there was writing in thick black marker. DO YOU KNOW, it said, THAT I LOVE YOU SO MUCH?
For the first few days she was gone, before I’d made the police report, I’d refused to look at our credit card charges. I believed that if I didn’t, she would come back. That the act of not looking would make it impossible, in some Schrödinger’s cat kind of way, for there to be charges from the airport, from foreign ATMs. When the police captain eventually told me the truth, that she was gone, not even in the same country, I felt that kind of magical thinking disappear from me forever. The same day the video arrived, I got a call from our bank inquiring about some suspicious charges and asking if I happened to be on a trip — I could have stopped it all right then, explained that I needed to freeze our accounts for legal reasons, settled something between us then, but I didn’t. I didn’t say anything, except to tell the man that my wife was traveling, and I wanted to be sure she had everything she needed.
Do you know, I thought, that I love you so much. What does that even mean.
Charlie would have been aware of the pithy irony of it, would have known the mixture of insult and hollow sentimentalism any man in my position would be forced to take it as, would have known all this, and sent it anyway.