Separate Kingdoms by Valerie Laken

Author:Valerie Laken [Laken, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780060840945
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

By morning I’ve made friends in the waiting room. It’s a big open space, with room for twenty or thirty devastated people. The chairs—aqua-blue vinyl recliners—are clustered in small groups and rows to give the illusion of privacy, but the room is crowded today so I am forced to sit with strangers. To my left is Neil Hartman, a grandfatherly sort, who is on his forty-first day here watching his wife, Nancy, die of cancer. He is tall and gray haired, slender with worry; he walks as if he’s just finished a marathon. They’ve been in and out of this hospital for several years now, and Neil knows which buttons to push on the phone to get an outside line. On the other side of me is John LaPointte, whose wife, Lorrie, is paralyzed from the waist down after enduring the same kind of accident, as he puts it, “Princess Di died from.” I’m too afraid to ask what he means by this. He’s goateed and portly, thirty or so, and tells me he teaches gym class to high schoolers for a living, mainly so that he can keep on coaching football. We sit in a row, with our chairs kicked back, facing a television hung from the ceiling.

Neil says, “So you’re the triple-A miracle everyone’s talking about? That’s your dad?”

“I guess so,” I say, and since they keep looking at me I do my best to explain my father’s surgery. I tell them how his aorta dilated to eight centimeters from the aneurysm yesterday and then burst, spilling pint after pint into his abdominal cavity. “It’s right along here,” I say, running my fingers down the center of my stomach. “I always thought the aorta was in the heart, but it’s more than that, apparently.” Neil and John nod as if they’ve been learning anatomy too. “It’s like the main river of your body.”

“And they fixed it?” John shakes his head. “Son of a gun.”

“Like an inner tube,” I say. Then we return our silent attention to the TV, where the constant flow of news reassures us that horrible things happen to everyone, all the time, all over the globe. Behind us, the coffee maker spurts and hisses, and a can of pop bounces down the chute of a Coke machine. I don’t tell them we’re waiting for my father’s kidneys to fail, or that his lungs are filling up and he’s hot with infection. I don’t tell them there are blood clots shooting around his body, that they have gone to his leg, that they could still go to his brain.

On CNN, golf legend Payne Stewart’s private jet has gotten a mind of its own for some reason and flies ever northward, upward, into the cold, dry atmosphere above South Dakota. Two Air Force planes follow behind at a distance, ready to shoot it down if necessary. The announcer says it must be on autopilot, that the bodies inside are surely frozen by now. I picture their oxygen masks dangling from the ceiling, just out of reach.

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