Beauty in the Broken Places Page 4

  I fancied that I had learned how to cut through all that and had succeeded in surrounding myself with only genuine and down-to-earth friends. One of my best friends in college later confessed that she had gone weeks in the early part of freshman year thinking my roommate was the governor’s daughter. I loved that. In fact, whenever possible, I tried to go as long as I could with some new acquaintance without mentioning my last name. As a kid I had loved the anonymity of summer camp—a place where no one knew my last name and I could relish a few weeks of being just like everyone else. In fact I had lived in fear each summer of people learning my full name or asking what my father did.

  But now this girl had raised this question. And she knew that I was dating Dave Levy. Did she know something about him that I did not? Was she implying something, trying to gently warn me? Dave was affable and romantic and sensitive and he got me and we laughed at the same jokes—but was it all just a really great act?

  I decided to investigate. My friend Peter was, like me, an English major, and we had taken several classes together. Peter and Dave had pledged Delta Kappa Epsilon the previous year and had quickly become fast friends with their similar senses of humor and shared Chicago upbringing. Peter knew I had been seeing Dave. He was in the art history class with us. I asked Peter, point-blank, what he could tell me about Dave, and whether he thought it was a good idea that I date him.

  I will never forget Peter’s response. “I’ve never known someone who so consistently strives for excellence in every area of his life. Whether it’s his academics, his athletics, his friendships, or anything else, Dave works really hard to do everything well. I have no doubt that that is how he would approach your relationship.”

  I came to see that this was a defining feature of Dave’s; he worked hard—really hard—at everything he did. A large part of this, I soon learned, had been instilled in him as a young boy. Dave lost his hearing when he was a year old due to an ear infection. Doctors believed Dave would be deaf for life, but his parents decided to have him undergo an operation. The medical procedure worked and Dave recovered his hearing, but he had lost nearly a year—a critical portion of early childhood development—and had fallen far behind the level of his peers.

  To compensate for this lost time, Dave had been enrolled in intensive special education as a young boy. He went to a public kindergarten in the morning and then in the afternoon rode another bus to a school for children with learning disabilities.

  When Dave was older and his former school bus driver heard from Dave’s brother that Dave would be attending Yale after his high school graduation, this bus driver believed that Dave’s brother was mocking Dave. But it was the truth—the same Dave he had known as a little boy so far behind his peers had gone on to captain his sports teams, earn the title of valedictorian of his high school, and be accepted to the college of his dreams.

  To overcome these odds and achieve these accolades in spite of the many factors working against him, Dave had had to work his little tail off. He’d had to harness the ability to be singularly focused, hard-charging, unrelenting—and he’d never grown out of these characteristics.

  * * *

  —

  “I love…” Dave paused, “going out to dinner with you.”

  It was several months after we began dating. Dave and I spent every moment together that we could. I was in love with him; I’d started falling the moment I saw him cartwheeling across the grass at midnight. I’d fallen fast and hard, which was actually very unlike me. I suspected—I hoped—that perhaps Dave loved me, too, but he had not said as much.

  Instead, every time we did something together, Dave would say “I love…” and then trail off.

  “I love…watching movies with you.”

  “I love…studying with you.”

  “I love…talking on the phone with you.”

  At first I found it adorable. After a few weeks, I was beginning to find it frustrating. But what about me? I wondered. Do you love me? Or am I alone over here?

  Finally, my patience expired, I brought it up. We were out at a bar one Saturday night with friends in early February. Dave said his usual thing: “I love being out with you.”

  “But what about me?” I asked.

  Dave looked at me for a moment, taken aback. “What?”

  The bar was loud. I leaned closer so he could hear me: “You keep saying how much you love doing these things with me. But do you love me?”

  Dave took my hand and steered me away from the crowd, toward a quieter section. We sat down next to each other in a stairwell. “Alli,” he said, still holding my hand. “I love you so much that I didn’t even know how to tell you. I’ve never been in love before; I don’t know what I’m doing. I didn’t know if you felt the same way. I’ve been saying these things, I love…going out to dinner with you…trying to gauge your reaction. Trying to see if you felt the same way.”

  I laughed—a nervous, giddy, bracing laugh.

  He continued. “I didn’t know how to make it special enough, to show you how much I love you. Next week is Valentine’s Day—I thought maybe I could tell you then?”

  I squeezed his hand. “You mean to tell me you’ve been sitting on a secret this good for this long, just to wait for Valentine’s Day?”

  “I just thought…I thought it should be some grand gesture…” he said. “I don’t know, I’ve never done this before.”

  “I’d rather you not wait for Valentine’s Day,” I said.

  “I guess now the cat’s out of the bag,” he said. “I love you. I never knew I could love someone the way I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  And so we fell. We fell hard. We were young, and we were drenched in the chemical flood of endorphins that comes from a new love and a new relationship. Dave’s parents have since confessed to me that they worried about how in love we were because they were certain that our relationship could never last through the travails of college and growing up and medical school, and that that would spell disaster for Dave. “You met too early,” they believed.

  But they need not have worried. I had never known anyone like Dave. I had never seen so eye-to-eye with someone. He made me playlists on my clunky old iPod, and they were songs I already knew and loved mixed with songs I had not already known but quickly came to love. He shared my love for Elton John and Journey and Led Zeppelin, and he introduced me to the Eagles and Tim McGraw and Pink Floyd. “Great taste in music!” I exclaimed. Another notch in the plus column.

  I hadn’t expected it, but I was really excited about Dave, about seeing where things could go between us. I explained to my girlfriends that it was like living on a hill; I had enjoyed a fine view, but now I realized that it was possible to climb to an even higher foothold, where the view was even better. Previous boyfriends had been good guys and we had had good relationships, some better than others. But Dave was different—more complex, more of a challenge, a partner who truly made me want to be a better version of myself. Now that I knew that this view existed, I could not imagine going back down.

  Salad days. It’s an expression coined by Shakespeare. Cleopatra speaks the phrase in the play Antony and Cleopatra, commenting on her young love with Julius Caesar: “My salad days, when I was green.” The rosy period of one’s youth—the time when a person is green, raw, fresh. A time of innocence and exuberance and carelessness and, yes, naïveté. Naïveté made possible in large part because life has not yet been too long or too hard and the luck has not yet run out.

  “You’re lucky,” a friend said to me that first year that Dave and I were dating. I knew it was true. I was lucky to have found Dave.

  Chapter 5

  An ambulance awaited us on the Fargo runway, lights and siren on. A full team of paramedics joined Dave in the back, and the driver asked me to join her up front in the passenger seat. Her face was taut with what looked like con
cern for Dave and compassion for me as she gripped the steering wheel. “We’re just a few minutes from the hospital, and there shouldn’t be any traffic,” she told me, “but we’ll keep the lights and siren on so we can get there as quickly as possible.”

  Once inside the ambulance and seated for the drive, I called Dave’s parents. My mother-in-law picked up. “Hello?”

  “Louisa?”

  “Yeah, Alli? Why aren’t you in the air?” she asked.

  “We’re in Fargo, North Dakota. We made an emergency landing.” I could hear how unnaturally calm my voice was, quiet and toneless, even as my entire body trembled. We never know how we will respond to a crisis until one actually lands on us. I would have suspected myself to be shrill and hysterical, or at the very least crying. But there I was, my voice faint, eyes dry, my mannerisms blunted by shock and confusion. “Dave lost consciousness on the plane.”

  Silence on the other end of the phone line…a mother’s mind racing to make sense of an unexpected and wholly unwelcome statement. “Is he awake now?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She put me on speaker. “Nelson is here. What…what happened?”

  “We don’t know,” I said. “His right pupil was dilated, he couldn’t see out of it, and then he just passed out.”

  Dave’s father joined the line beside his wife. Nelson Levy is a brilliant medical doctor and PhD, a neurologist who has spent the past forty years conducting medical research and developing pharmaceuticals. I was glad to have him on the phone.

  “Alli? It’s Andy.” By the grace of God, Dave’s brother Andy also happened to be at his parents’ home that night. He, too, is a doctor. At the time, Andy was wrapping up his third and final year of residency at the University of Chicago before he and his wife, Erin, were to move with their two small children to Denver, where Andy would begin his three-year fellowship in cardiology. Andy and Erin had probably gone out to the Levys’ home in the suburbs eager for a relaxing weekend with family. Familiar as I was with the nightly rhythms of the Levy household, I could see the scene perfectly; I could imagine them all gathered in the kitchen. They had wrapped dinner, had just gotten the kids down to sleep, and were probably about to settle in to watch a movie in the family room. Well, sorry guys, I thought. All of that mundane stuff, that ordinary stuff, that lovely lovely normal nighttime stuff…that has just been blown up by what I have to tell you.

  But immediately I had a neurologist and a cardiologist on the line and on our team, and that was no small comfort. I shivered as I clung to my cellphone in the front seat of the ambulance, lights on and siren blaring, tearing across the quiet, starry landscape of the Fargo night.

  I didn’t really know much at that point—I had no idea why Dave was unconscious or how they intended to treat him in the emergency room—so I promised that I would call back as soon as I knew more.

  “Alli?” Andy kept me on the line another minute, the concern evident in his voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “Obviously none of us knows why Dave is unconscious right now. If this is a stroke, then every single second matters; we could be talking about the difference between Dave living or dying. When you get to the hospital, they’ve got to move, they’ve got to get him an MRI immediately. You insist on that, and you do not take no for an answer. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “OK. Good luck. We all love you, and we’re here for you.” Andy is the fifth of the six Levy brothers, the brother closest in age to Dave, the baby. Andy and Dave, two years apart, grew up together—played on the same sports teams, had been the closest of friends through high school and then at college. I’d known Andy, probably one of the most soft-hearted and sensitive men I’ve ever met, from our days in college, too. I could hear the raw emotion in Andy’s voice now as he choked back fear and anguish, as he juggled the dual demands of a brother’s breaking heart with his medical mind suddenly kicking into overdrive, working hard to sift through the minimal data we had in order to search for answers. “OK. Call us back, ’K?”

  “I will.” We hung up.

  A few short minutes later we arrived at the hospital. I noted, with no small amount of relief, that Fargo’s Sanford Medical Center was about four minutes from the airport, as opposed to forty, which, in a state as large as North Dakota, would not have been a surprise.

  Dave’s stretcher was lifted from the ambulance and wheeled into the hospital. As I staggered behind, entering the front of the ER, stunned by the blindingly white lights, I turned to see one of the EMT team members standing beside me. Before I understood what was happening, the man pressed a wad of twenties into my hand and said, “We collect a fund for the family members…for moments like this.”

  Moments like this. I considered his words. What was this moment? What was happening?

  He continued: “For a hotel, or food, or whatever you need.” I looked down at his hand, and then back into his face, speechless. My mind had not even gotten there yet, to the fact that I would be here in Fargo, and I would need to make arrangements for myself somehow. Food and a hotel? What is going on? I thought once more. What is happening?

  “We’ll be praying for you, miss,” the EMT said. This overpowering act of kindness brought me closer to the brink of tears, as I mumbled, barely audibly, “Thank you. Thank you so much. Please pray. Please do.” But I had not cried yet; I could not. In that moment, I needed answers, and I needed to be ready and available to provide answers to the medical professionals who would surely be asking me questions.

  A team of medical professionals in scrubs had assembled around Dave’s unmoving body, stripping him of his clothing, hooking him up to an endless jumble of wires and cords and machines. I remember them tearing his shirt—a shirt we had gotten the previous October during a road trip to Dave’s childhood summer camp in Mentone, Alabama. I recalled how excited the camp director had been to see Dave reappear after so many years, how he remembered Dave so vividly, recalled how Dave had been named “Honor Camper” and had won the camp’s big athletic competition for his team at the end of one summer. How he had insisted Dave take a “Camp Laney” T-shirt with him when we departed. How he had told Dave to come back with his own son someday, to volunteer as the camp doctor. How, when we had driven back down from Lookout Mountain, Dave had told me that winning that end-of-camp athletic tournament had been possibly the proudest moment of his entire childhood. Now they tore his Camp Laney shirt down the middle, rending it in half to get at Dave’s inanimate body, a strong, muscular, two-hundred-pound form that belied the shadow of death that was closing in around it.

  Dave remained unconscious throughout all of this, his facial expression one of bizarrely sublime peace. I wondered what was going on inside that head. It was so strange, seeing him as if he had simply slipped into a deep slumber. How many times over the years had I seen him asleep? It had looked just like that. Couldn’t he just wake up? In a testament to just how shocked and disoriented I was, the following completely irrational thought skidded across my mind: OK, so we clearly aren’t going to make it to Seattle, but maybe he’ll wake up in time for us to make it to Hawaii. Maybe we will still be able to have that awesome trip, with our plans for the bonfire luau and the snorkeling and reading on the beach.

  The head ER doctor, a young man in green scrubs and with a close-cropped haircut, greeted me with a flurry of questions. What had happened on the plane? Was Dave a smoker? He had heard from the doctor on board (who had told the team of EMTs) that Dave had had a seizure on the plane—did he suffer seizures regularly? Had Dave ever had a seizure before? Had Dave complained of any pain recently? Any numbness?

  I wanted to launch a rapid-fire volley of questions back at him: What was going on? Would Dave be OK? Would he wake up? But the guy was clearly stumped and clearly flustered. What was a young guy, a doctor, doing passing out on a plane? This was not exactly a typical situation for this ER doc, or a low-pre
ssure one at that, what with the guy’s pregnant wife sitting there. He did not know any more than I did in that moment, and I did not want to get in the way of him doing his work, so I did not ask the question that was heaviest on my heart.

  Is my husband going to die?

  Dave was wheeled out of the room for a series of tests while I hung back, curled up in a chair, my body trembling. I was so cold.

  “Miss?” A nurse peeked her head in, found me sitting there alone. “How are you doing?”

  I shrugged, the tears pooling in my eyes for the first time, even as the words evaded me. How could I answer that question? How was I doing? How was Dave doing?—that was what I needed to know in order to answer this nurse’s question.

  “Miss, you need to do your best to stay calm and take care of yourself.” The nurse gestured toward my belly. “Would you like me to do a Doppler, to make sure everything is…well, so you can hear the baby’s heartbeat? Wouldn’t that make you feel better?”

  To make sure everything is OK with the baby, she had wanted to say, but she had caught herself just in time. What must all of this be doing to the baby, I wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time. Surely my womb was not exactly the most pleasant and peaceful of environments at the moment. I could feel the stress and adrenaline churning through me—I could sense it in the uncontrollable shivering and the quivering of my hands. And so I did my best yoga breathing, trying to keep my body as calm as I could, trying to provide as habitable an environment as I could manage for my baby, given the hell in which we had both suddenly found ourselves.

  I shut my eyes, and the silent tears streamed down my face. “No,” I said, shaking my head. I could not do the Doppler right then. The sound of our baby’s heartbeat made me weepy and emotional under the happiest of circumstances—in the obstetrician’s office, with Dave standing beside me holding my hand. I could not handle that tsunami of emotions in the present moment. And, to be honest, a part of me was petrified. Why had this nurse suggested that I listen for the baby’s heartbeat? Was there some risk that all was not OK with the baby? Would I lose my husband and my baby in one night? What on earth would I do? I could not handle it, not right then. I needed all my focus to be on Dave. The baby was OK; she had to be. We needed her to be.