Little miss evil, p.20
Little Miss Evil, page 20
part #4 of Nick Hoffman Series
“It’s like home remodeling,” I said early into the afternoon when we were starting to panic. “The estimates are always wrong.”
“Nick, dear,” Sharon’s mother said under her breath. “I know you’re trying to help. Please shut up.”
So I did. We read, did crossword puzzles, stretched, retrieved tasteless plastic-wrapped food from the cafeteria, while I studied the elderly, round-faced, chubby little couple who had always seemed such unlikely parents for a daughter who would become a model. They’d marveled quietly themselves at the disparity for years, eyeing her with constant appreciation the way a short father admires his tall, basketball-
playing son. “I did good,” he might think, as proud as an artist, a sculptor, an architect, for what he’s put into the world, his legacy, his gift.
I watched other families and friends, some dazed, some hopeless, some with faces clawed by the pain of not knowing —or of knowing too much.
Stefan read student manuscripts. I graded papers. Or tried. I drank gallons of bad coffee and for each cup tried to drink as much bottled water, so that I was constantly heading to and from the nearby men’s room, which had far too many mirrors in which you could see what grief looked like.
Everything about the hospital repelled me, from the smell to the busy staff to the weak patients, some being wheeled around corners and some in robes taking halting hallway walks with their IV bottles on rolling stands. I had not been prepared for this assault, this memento mori clamor. Or the occasional code-blue alerts that sent staffers pounding off like frantic troops.
I remembered Sharon’s drowsy last words: “I’ll see you on the other side.” She was right to think of the surgery as a dividing line, a marker. Unless she meant something more permanent. Like many desperate and frightened people, I made crazy bargains with whomever or whatever force out there might agree to take me up on them.
I had to swat away lines from books that kept pestering me, because they were all so grim, like Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove intoning, “We shall never again be as we were.”
I slept on and off. I cried, quietly, sitting on a closed toilet, the stall locked.
While the neurosurgeon was chipping away at her
seventh nerve to get every bit of the tumor, we received periodic updates from gentle-voiced nurses. The surgery was proving more difficult than expected because there were some anomalies in Sharon’s cranial structure, and one artery wasn’t exactly in the right place. Stefan and her parents discussed all the technical aspects of the surgery with the avidity of antique car collectors at a road rally. I tuned them out, disgusted to think of someone, something, inside Sharon’s head, to think of her as parts and not herself. The word microsurgery gave me no comfort.
I called my parents in New York to give them my own updates. And I cried some more, tentatively, as if trying to assess the depth of my sorrow and fear. I could have been someone walking around a crater, not comprehending at first its size and depth, but walking, measuring, surveying, growing slowly and painfully aware that it was enormous, frightened by its magnitude, its threat.
This felt like a disaster, not a rescue.
The blond, blue-eyed neurosurgeon emerged at the end, reeking, pale, and sweaty, but as triumphant as a SWAT team captain who’d gunned down a terrorist. “We got it all,” he said, and unlike her parents and even Stefan, I did not feel grateful. If anything, I wanted to scream at him for misjudging the length of the surgery and underestimating, for even doing it at all. Why couldn’t he have suggested an alternative? I hated him, I hated life.
They let her parents see her that evening.
Stefan and I drove down to the hospital the first thing in the morning after a drugged and ugly sleep that left me feeling leaden. I actually dreaded seeing Sharon, not having ever visited someone so ill, and leaving the elevator, heading down the bustling cold hallway, was painful.
The teddy-bearish black nurse Sharon’s parents had hired met us at the door, expecting us. After she said hello, Stefan asked, “Vous êtes Haitienne? ” Tuned into accents, even then.
“Vous pouvez entrer, monsieur,” she whispered to me, assuming her native language would comfort me, I suppose. I left them chatting quietly at the door about Sharon’s condition, and tiptoed into the small, barren private room, which seemed to gobble the color and fragrance of the flowers we had sent. I had a vague, nauseating sense of machines and tubes and heavy bandages smothering Sharon like the snakes enwrapping Laocoön. Why was everything so white, including her?
Sharon’s eyes seemed unfocused. And she looked so tiny, as if the whole hospital had her in its grip now. I sat by her bed and touched her free hand, brought it slowly to my lips.
“Sweetie, I feel like I’m underwater. I must look terrible,” she murmured, the woozy words drawn out and slow, just on the edge of clarity. I’d been warned by her parents that she would be hard to understand, but I had no trouble. She sounded as if her mouth and tongue were merely numb after a root canal.
I felt locked on her eyes as if I were an exhausted mariner lost at sea finally sighting land on the horizon: no longer beleaguered, but humbled by relief.
“I’ve never seen you looking more beautiful,” I said, and Sharon gave me a tiny, crooked smile from the unparalyzed, unbandaged side of her face, because she knew that I meant it.
About the Author
Lev Raphael escaped academia after more than a decade of teaching at the university level and never looked back—except for material. The author of twenty-one books in genres from memoir to mash-up, he's done hundreds of invited talks and readings about his books on three different continents. He's spoken at Oxford University, The Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Library of Congress and many points in-between.
Raphael's work has been analyzed in scholarly journals and books and discussed at conferences like MLA. Widely anthologized in the U.S. and England, his fiction and essays are on syllabi at many colleges and universities. Raphael has wanted to be an author for as long as he can remember, but he never expected to become homework. His literary papers were recently purchased for the archives of the Michigan State University Libraries, which means he's also earned a small share of dusty immortality.
Document Outline
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for...
Dedication
Epigraph
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2
3
4
5
6
7
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9
10
11
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14
Epilogue
About the Author
Lev Raphael, Little Miss Evil
