Last Dance, Last Chance

time I’m ever going to look like this in a bathing suit…”
    Sandy and Paula went to the waiting room to join Dan and Barb, and saw that Dr. Pignataro and his wife, Debbie, were waiting there, too. Debbie Pignataro appeared to be in shock, but the doctor seemed calm.
    “He kept talking about how everything was going to be all right. I asked him what had happened, but he didn’t give me any specific answers,” Sandy Smith remembered.
    Pignataro turned to Dan. “I don’t know what happened,” he said plaintively. “Was she taking anything?”
    “No—no!” Dan said. “What happened?”
    “I don’t know what happened,” the doctor kept repeating, as if he had nothing to do with what was wrong with Sarah.
    Sandy thought that Debbie was trying to shelter her husband from the bleak outcome of Sarah’s condition. She appeared to be a gentle woman, and her skin was pale with concern as she scanned his face. Of the two of them, Debbie Pignataro was the one who seemed upset and aware of the tragedy that was taking place. The doctor only tried to make excuses for himself. Whatever had happened, he wanted everyone in the room to know that he was in no way responsible.
    Debbie told Sandy that she had been in the operating room during Sarah’s surgery. “She said she’d worked as a medical assistant in doctors’ offices—but I’d done that, too, and I knew she wasn’t certified to assist in operations because I wasn’t.”
    She knew that Sarah had been very impressed with Dr. Pignataro, but now Sandy found him too glib and calm, given the circumstances. “Maybe it’s because I’m older and I’ve got more experience, and it’s harder to fool me,” she said. “Sarah was only twenty-six, and she totally trusted him.”
    They all waited, forming a mostly silent tableau: Sarah’s family and the Pignataros. The waiting room was hushed as the clock ticked and there was no change at all in Sarah Smith’s condition.
    The days wore on, and Sarah didn’t wake up. As he had with Connie Vinetti, Anthony Pignataro came into Buffalo Mercy Hospital to check on Sarah Smith. The nurses there recognized him, and they moved to block his access to Sarah. Dan called the law firm where Sarah worked, and they quickly arranged to ban Pignataro from the hospital premises.
    Dan Smith could not bear to go back to the little house where they had been so happy. He and Nathan and Amanda moved in with Sandy and Tim Smith while they waited to see what would happen, but Dan spent all his time at the hospital, coming home only to shower and change clothes. Dan refused to even think that Sarah might be in a permanent coma.
    Sandy took care of the children while Dan and Barb, and later Sarah’s father, Russell, who had flown in from Iowa, waited at Buffalo Mercy. Nathan was 7, and he knew something was wrong when the family decided it would be best not to take him to see his mother. “My mom’s really sick,” he murmured, half as a statement of fact and half as a hopeful question.
    But they all thought he would be more frightened if he saw the silent bloated shell that Sarah had become. “It’s not a good idea for you to visit her right now,” they told him, and he answered sadly, “My mom’s not going to come home.” He knew it, but he didn’t want to talk about it.
    Amanda was too young to understand. She was getting a lot of attention from friends and family who had gathered to wait and pray, and she seemed to feel safe, hopping happily onto the laps of women who tried to comfort her.
    The doctors told Dan that there was no chance that Sarah was coming back to him. If she lived, she would “be a vegetable.” He couldn’t accept that. It simply wasn’t possible that she could have been healthy and happy and not even apprehensive the last time he saw her, and now have no brain waves or any sign at all that she was aware of him or their children.
    The doctors were cautiously advising him to let her go, but he couldn’t do that. Not yet.
    Gradually, gradually, Dan began to think that maybe he could let Sarah go free of the body that trapped her, but he still went back and forth in an agonizing inner dialogue. He had heard of people in comas who were oblivious to anything around them for months—years even—who suddenly woke up. What if that could happen to Sarah? If that should be true, it would be terrible for him to turn off her ventilator. But if she was suffering needlessly, if she had already gone on without