Abraham Verghese: Cutting for Stone

THEY WERE ASSEMBLED outside, a ghoulish receiving line was what I thought at first. But they couldn't know what had just transpired, and so I didn't blame them. Their hearts were in the right place. Thomas Stone, Deepak, Vinu, and so many of my nurses and nursing assistants— my friends, my Our Lady family before they became my caregivers. I shook each hand, and thanked them for the two of us. I believe they will tell you my manner was composed, far different from what they expected. I left Thomas Stone for last. After I shook his hand, I followed an irrational instinct—Shiva's, I believe, certainly not mine—which told me to hug him, not to get but to give. To let him know that as a father it turns out hed done what he was meant to do; he lived on in us and we lived because of his skills. The way he clung to me, held me as if he were drowning, told me Id made the right choice, or Shiva had, awkward as it was.

I walked slowly down the hall to our Quiet Room, a euphemism for the place we chose to give bad news, a place with chairs, a table, a sofa, a big picture window, a cross on the wall, but no TV, no magazines, only a solid and soundproof door. How many times had I made this walk as a trauma surgeon? So often I had lingered outside the door, conscious of the devastation my news would be bringing. Had I honored the feelings and the dignity of those who waited in that room, the parents, siblings, spouses, and children, even if what I had to say dashed all their prayers? I could remember every such encounter; I could recall each face as it turned in hope and apprehension when the door opened.

I FOUND HEMA, hands crossed in front of her, gazing out of the window at the lights of the Battleship housing project that abutted our house-staff quarters, and the distant outline of the bridge beyond. Her back was to me. She saw my reflection in the glass before she saw me, but unlike every single person I had ever come to see in this room, she did not spin around. Instead, she stood like a statue, staring at my reflection in the window. I stopped where I was, holding the door open. I saw in that glass her eyes widen, the eyebrows rise. She held my gaze for the longest time. Her face showed surprise … as if who she saw wasn't the person she had expected to see.

“Here we are, Ma,” I said.

She cocked her head at my voice. She brought one hand up to her chin, her fingers aligned and locked together and resting contemplatively along her cheek, her movements exaggerated. She studied my face, my reflection, just like a village girl who is surprised in the act of drawing water at the well, and who must now read the intentions of the tall, smiling avatar whom she sees standing behind her.

Then, in slow motion, as if this were a dance, and both of us dancers, she turned and faced me.

I moved to her. “Here we are,” I said again, my arms extending toward her. “We can go home now, Ma.”

It must have seemed to her a very strange thing, even the wrong thing, to say. To live purely in the here and now, to look forward but never to the past—that was vintage Shiva. “Here we are,” I said.

She came into my arms.

We held her tight.

ON A BEAUTIFUL MORNING, just three weeks after Shiva's transference, Hema and I took leave of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. Thomas Stone insisted on being our escort. We stepped outside into air so crisp I felt a cough or a sneeze would shatter it like glass. The brick façade of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour glistened with dew as we said our good-byes. The hospital's recent turn in the limelight had brought in special city funds and sparked emergency repairs; as a result, the monsignor in the fountain was no longer tilting, his swizzle stick was gone, as was his crusting of bird droppings. Polished and sanguine, he looked emasculated and alien to the place where I had spent the last seven years of my life.

Our yellow cab sped across the Whitestone Bridge to Kennedy Airport. The sun had barely come up, and yet the freeway was thick with cars, the solitary drivers insulated from one another in wafer-thin metal, which at these speeds offered only the illusion of protection. We merged like wingmen rejoining the formation. Hema looked out meditatively just as I had when I arrived seven years before. I wondered if she could hear the hum of the überconsciousness, the superorganism who kept this from descending into chaos.

The year 1986 was a disaster for our family. Hema believed that it had something to do with the number, because it had birth in the 1 and destiny in the 8. Nineteen eighty-six had started off terribly with the Challenger spacecraft exploding on January 28 (which was month 1, and there was the number 8 again). Then the Chernobyl tragedy was exactly eighty-eight days after the Challenger disaster. On that scale, the death of one twin—on the eighteenth of the month—hardly registered.

There was yet another death eight days later that had bearing on us: my neighbor Holmes came with Appleby of the detective agency to let me know that Genet had passed away in a prison hospital in Galveston just as I was regaining my strength. Genet's son had been adopted by a family in Texas, and she had gone in search of him. Shed been living hand-to-mouth in a cardboard lean-to a few blocks from the seawall when she was picked up. She was a mere skeleton and survived just two days in the prison infirmary. She had supposedly died of adrenal failure caused by tuberculosis. I knew better. She had died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it. I'm ashamed to say I felt relief when the word came; only her death could ensure that we didn't keep tearing each other apart for what remained of our lives.

IN THE INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURE HALL, I heard snatches of Bengali, Arabic, and Tagalog. A man bound for Lagos protested in screeching pidgin about the unfairness of British Airways, because there was no way he was four pounds over. In this setting, Thomas Stone, without his white coat or scrubs, looked like the newly arrived foreigner.

“Will you be back, Marion?” he asked when it was time for saying good-bye.

All I knew was that I wanted to be with Hema when she interred Shiva's ashes between Ghosh and Sister Mary Joseph Praise. The grotto by Missing's back wall and in earshot of the little creek was rapidly becoming the family burial plot. I was going back also to see Matron, Almaz, and Gebrew. I knew that my presence would help console them. Beyond that, I hadn't given great thought to my future.

“Of course I'll be back,” I said. “I still have my house, the car, my job …”

“Be careful what you eat, drink …,” he said. It was his way of telling me to protect his handiwork.

I felt better than well. Other transplant patients had to fight to keep their bodies from rejecting the lifesaving organ. The cortisone they took led to cataracts, diabetes, hip fractures, and other side effects. I was blessed not to have to swallow a single pill. I felt no pain if you didn't count the twinges under my ribs, which I considered promising and not painful; they were the sign of Shiva's half liver growing to fully occupy its new home.

“How about you?” I had yet to find a comfortable way to address my father; it was “Dr. Stone” in the hospital and nothing at times like this. “Will you have a job to go back to?” I teased. He hadn't seen Boston since I fell ill.

His slow smile only exaggerated the sadness in his face. He took Shiva's death personally, as if fate had never forgotten that he'd once attempted to destroy Shiva, and so when he had operated to save Shiva, his original intent had betrayed him.

My father made no attempt to shake my hand. Our one hug after Shiva's passing was good for a lifetime. We parted with a nod.