Page Utilities
Alix Kates Shulman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (page 2 of 6) Page 2 of 6
By the time we got home, it was dark. Instead of unpacking, we decided to go to bed immediately. We left the house and walked down the path past the outhouse, with its one hole privy, to the east-facing studio, where we often prefer to sleep in order to wake up to the exhilarating sight of sunrise and surf crashing on the rocks below. As is our habit, I preceded him up the ladderlike stairs to the sleeping loft to light a gas lamp to illuminate his way up. When I had it lit, Scott locked the doors, turned off the downstairs lamp, and followed me up. We got into bed and talked a while before turning off the light. This was always our pleasure, talking over the highlights of the day, and tonight, having just arrived, admiring the studio Scott designed and built for me sixteen years before, with its steeply pitched roof forming the high ceiling of the single room, its asymmetrical fenestration, its lush mahogany floorboards of irregular width, the gift of a boatbuilder friend, which we laid and varnished together, and then our special game, identifying animals and faces, as varied as the patterns in passing clouds, in the knots of the pine boards that form the walls and ceiling.
Sixth mistake: knowing how tired he was, I should have turned off the light at once and let him sleep.
When I finally closed my eyes, I fell instantly into a deep sleep. Too deep to notice Scott leaving the bed or remember his crying out, though I must have heard him, because —
Suddenly I’m sitting bolt upright in bed, flooded with adrenaline. In that black night it’s almost too dark to see the empty place beside me, but I sense his absence. “Scott?” No answer. Louder: “Scott?” The studio where we sleep is a single room topped by the sleeping loft. If he doesn’t answer, where can he be? “Scott? Scott!” Maybe he’s gone off to the outhouse and can’t hear me call. But inside me I know the catastrophe has come.
On top of a bluff that protrudes into the ocean from the edge of the rocky coast like a small peninsula — a shore formation called a nubble — the studio of pine and glass usually gets more than enough moonlight and starlight to see by; in a lightning storm the entire nubble is lit in every direction. But by this hour of the night the moon has set, and whatever ambient light might normally glow is obscured by a dense fog. Gas lamps take time to light — to find a match, strike it, then, with one hand hold it an exact distance beneath the lamp’s delicate fiberglass mantle (any closer and the mantle would break), and with the other hand turn a difficult valve to allow the propane to flow into the lamp. Frantic for light, I instead grab the flashlight I keep next to the bed and shine it down over the low wall of the loft onto the floor below.
There he is, lying on the floor, curled up like a fetus. Naked and deathly still.
I dash down the steep stairs, shouting his name, then repeat it directly into his ear.
No response.
This can’t be happening. I can’t believe it’s happening. Maybe it’s not? All at once I recall the day, many years before, as the studio was being built, when I came inside to see Scott with hammer and nails high up on a tall ladder that leaned against the loft. Seconds later he and the ladder fell backward in a great arc to the floor, he landing on his back with the ladder on top of him. Although that fall was from almost the same height as tonight’s fall, after a moment he got up and brushed himself off, with only a fright, a few bruises, and the next day a sore back.
This time he is silent and immobile.
More light! I set down the flashlight and light the nearest gas lamp, then crouch down beside him. “Scott!” I repeat, moving his shoulder — gently at first, then less gently. No response, nothing. Is he breathing? I hold my own breath to listen. I can’t tell. I remember the mirror test, but there’s no mirror.
His body isn’t cold or gray or spurting blood — not that I can see, anyway — all good signs. But he doesn’t respond. I refuse to believe — or even imagine the possibility — that he is dead.
My fault, my fault, my fault! For not waking up when he woke up. For not keeping a closer eye on him. For not nagging him to put a higher railing in the loft. For failing to insist that we spend the night at Heather and Norm’s. For taking a bus from New York instead of a plane. For not seeing this coming. How could I have let this happen?
Somehow I manage to find my cell phone and call 911.
Eerily, over dinner that evening our neighbors had told us amusing gossip about infighting among the island’s emergency rescue team, part of the Long Island Volunteer Fire Department. After the stories, it occurred to me to ask what number to call in an emergency. I was surprised to learn that it was now 911, rather than some ordinary island number, as it used to be.
Another eerie coincidence: in bed that night before we turned out the light, we talked about broken bones. I asked Scott, once a star athlete who in his youth had suffered his share of broken limbs, if there were nerves in bones to make them hurt. He speculated that what hurts is the adjacent tissue but not the bones themselves. The next day, recalling these coincidences under the terror of my guilt, irrationally I wonder if they might not be used as evidence to suggest that I pushed him over.
After I’ve described the accident to the 911 operator, he asks if Scott is unconscious.
“I don’t know. He hasn’t moved or spoken.”
“Is he breathing?”
“I don’t know,” I admit again, feeling stupid.
Then suddenly Scott makes a sound — a senseless babble, like garbled underwater speech, stroke talk. The first miracle: he’s alive!
As I’m reporting this miraculous news, I hear him say, weakly, “Turn me on my back.”
Not only alive but speaking!
Jubilantly I repeat his words into the phone and my worst fears vanish in the fog.
“Do not move him,” orders the operator. “It will be dangerous to move him until a medic gets there and assesses him.”
No sooner does one fear disappear than another one rushes in to fill the vacuum. Alive, coherent, but in what condition? And how will he be saved?
From To Love What Is by Alix Kates Shulman, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2008 by Alix Kates Shulman. All rights reserved. To view or the book, go to www.amazon.com. For more information about author Alix Kates Shulman, go to www.alixkshulman.com.
