4

Because our house was considered a crime scene the hotel was our home for several more nights. For Sarah this was a treat. On Monday morning she went swimming in the Olympic sized indoor swimming pool with its warm water which looked as though it had been dyed with a mixture of blue and green food coloring. The building that housed the pool was actually an enormous greenhouse, attached to the hotel structure as it was, with clear glass panels from floor to gabled ceiling and humid tropical air, with potted palm trees, beautiful blooming white Bamboo Orchids, green and red Ti plants and colorful Bird of Paradise. I sat and watched Sarah do what she considered dives but were actually belly-flops and half summersaults. The weather was unusually sunny, if not warm, so inside the faux tropic we lost ourselves for a few hours.

After Sarah’s morning swim we returned to our room by way of the stainless steel walls and the low hum of the creaky lobby elevator. I sat on the edge of the bed and I lifted the receiver of the lime-green push- button telephone which rested on the night- stand and I spent my day phoning: phoning Sarah’s school to let her teachers know the reason for her absence (The principle, Mrs. Tercek, who had of course watched the news and was already aware of Catherine’s death, was too polite and too understanding, her nasally voice pryingly); phoning my employer to keep abreast of my work and to keep my supervisor informed of my status; phoning a lawyer named Jack Nicholson—no joke…Jack Nicholson—who my boss insisted was “the best criminal lawyer in Ohio”; phoning the coroner to find out when Catherine’s body would be released for the funeral arrangements (no clear answer was given, of course); phoning the funeral parlor to inquire as to the costs involved and the payment arrangements available to me for the whole funeral process from pick-up to interment; phoning Amber (temporarily out of service); and finally, phoning the police station to find out if they had determined the cause of Catherine’s death, inquiring as to whether or not we could return to our abode (we could not), and whether or not they planned to incarcerate me any time soon (the answer was deliberately vague). All the while Sarah quietly but cheerfully watched cartoons and colored the pages of a coloring book almost the thickness of a phone book and paid no attention to my labors.

Sarah’s youth and innocence, I supposed, had spared her from the constant quotient of the pain of our loss. I, on the other hand, was fatigued to the point that I yawned long open-mouthed yawps on a continuous basis, sometimes in mid-sentence, and my body felt like a bag of sand my mind was condemned to drag from chair to bedside to bathroom and back again in a solemn attempt to maintain my focus on my various tasks. The only benefit I derived from my day, aside from the little fruit of my labor, was that I was so distracted that I hardly thought about how much I missed Catherine.

To be honest, though, I was a bit disturbed by the fact that Sarah was so easily able to remove herself from Catherine’s departure; but I was also relieved that she was not burdened as I was with the crushing weight of our rapidly collapsing universe. Besides, I thought, who was I to judge her? She would grieve in her own way and time, and if God saw fit to soften the blow to this beautiful flower of mine, who was I to scrutinize?

Sarah was a unique child. At home she was in her comfort zone. She would talk as though she were a little adult about the strangest things. But at school her teachers complained that Sarah was shy and reluctant to be called upon to answer questions in class. Sarah was so afraid to draw any attention to herself that she once peed in her pants while squirming at her desk hoping for the bell to ring so that she could rush to the bathroom. A boy sitting next to her stood up and laughed at her and yelled out to the teacher that Sarah had peed on the floor. Sarah cried in embarrassment as her classmates chuckled and jeered. The teacher did her best to comfort Sarah and she telephoned me on my cell phone to bring Sarah a change of clothes. Later that day, despite her shy demeanor, Sarah walked up to that boy in the playground and kneed him in the testicles and asked him, while he was wreathing in pain on the pavement, if he still felt like laughing. Sarah’s teacher called me again and asked me to come pick Sarah up at school for the obvious disciplinary purpose.

And when I say that Sarah needed me, you must understand the bond we’d shared since her harrowed birth to truly understand how much she needed me and I her. She was born blue, with a broken heart. Her heart was underdeveloped. The lower two chambers of her heart were undersized and the natural opening between the chambers that should have allowed blood to flow did not exist in her heart. When the doctor lifted her from between

Catherine’s parted legs Sarah was the color of a blueberry. The doctor didn’t say a word. She didn’t say “It’s a girl!” or “Congratulations!”

She just went to work on Sarah to get her breathing. She held her up in the air by her ankles and smacked her little bare bottom, then she walked over to a side table and laid Sarah down on a blanket and she started to gently pump Sarah’s chest with her palm. She blew breaths into her tiny mouth while she pinched her nose. A nuclear war could have occurred in the time it took for Sarah to howl her first cry and I wouldn’t have known about it. Everything happened in slow motion. The delivery room went silent, as if someone had hit the mute button on the remote. I mean I couldn’t hear a sound until Sarah began to wail.

The last time I had had that feeling was during the first of Sarah’s surgeries to repair her damaged heart. Just as the doctor held the mask over her face to put her under Sarah screamed “No!” and then begged me “Please daddy, no, please daddy no.”

“It’ll be alright honey. I’ll be right here with you.” I said as they forced the anesthetic mask over her face and her eyes opened wide in sincere terror. Sarah was four years old at the time. If she had died during surgery I would have died along with her.

Catherine often complained because I would let Sarah fall asleep in our bed. I would, of course, carry her to her own bed soon after she had drifted off to sleep, but Sarah would slip back into our bed in the morning. You can imagine how this affected our love-life, and I knew that it wasn’t the healthiest thing for Sarah’s emotional growth either, for Sarah to spend so much time with me, but I had come so close to losing her at birth and during the ensuing surgeries that I just wanted to hold her whenever I had the chance. Catherine’s rants only served to make Sarah jealous.

Okay, so my marriage wasn’t perfect, but whose marriage is? That was the only real problem Catherine and I had ever had.

* * *

Time passed amazingly fast during my phone-fest and before I could begin to relax it was dark outside.

Sarah and I could have gone out and eaten fast food, but by that time it was, after all, dark outside, and I wasn’t sure if Sarah’s companionship would stave off the demons; and besides I had more credit at my disposal than cash, so we ordered room service: a simple feast of grilled American cheese on white toasted bread and chicken soup. A stainless steel serving cart was wheeled into our room by a lanky pimple faced teenage boy in a hunter- green uniform, including a dink, with orange- red hair and a rash of freckles sprinkled over his arms, neck and cheeks. He waited impatiently, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, removing his cap and running his fingers through his spiked hair, while I surveyed our meal, signed the receipt and applied a reasonable tip to the bill. Sarah cowered shyly behind me while the boy bellman playfully peeked around me and smiled.