May We Be Forgiven

I looking for someone else to blame? I ask myself, Did you ever think you should stop yourself, but in the moment you couldn’t or didn’t? Now I understand the meaning of “It just happened.” An accident.
    The doctor tells me that if Jane survives she will never be the same. “Even in the short time she’s been with us, there has been a decline. She is retreating, folding into herself. We cleaned the wound and drilled holes to accommodate the swelling. The prognosis is poor. Does her family know? The children?”
    “No,” I say. “They’re away at boarding school.”
    “Let them know,” the doctor says, leaving me.

    D o I call the children directly or do I call their schools first? Do I phone their respective headmasters and explain, Their mother is in a coma and their father is in shackles and perhaps you could interrupt study hall and suggest they pack a bag? And do I come right out and tell them how awful it really is—do I interrupt the children in the middle of their day to let them know that life as they know it is over?
    I reach the girl first. “Ashley,” I say.
    “Is it Tessie?” she asks before I can say more.
    “Your parents,” I say stumbling.
    “A divorce?” She collapses into tears before I say more, and another girl calmly takes the phone.
    “Ashley is not available right now.”
    To the boy I say, “Your father has gone insane. Maybe you should come home, or maybe you don’t want to come home, maybe you never want to come home again. I remember when your parents bought the house, I remember picking out things.”
    “I’m not sure I understand.”
    “Your mother has had an accident,” I say, wondering if I should tell him how bad it really is.
    “Was it Dad?” he asks.
    I’m caught off guard by the directness of his question. “Yes,” I say. “Your father struck your mother with a lamp. I tried to tell your sister, but I didn’t get very far.”
    “I’ll call her,” he says. I am grateful for not having to go through that again.
    I am standing in an empty hallway washed with stale fluorescent light. A man in a white coat comes towards me; he smiles. I imagine him like a wicked wizard whipping off his white coat, revealing a judge’s robe. Is it possible that your brother knew you were shtupping his wife and so he got up out of his sickbed and got himself home?
    “I am going to limit my comments for now. I feel bad enough about the whole thing,” I say aloud in the hallway though no one is listening.
    I move to the Family Waiting Room. Again, I dial. “George hit Jane with a lamp,” I say to Jane’s mother.
    “That’s awful,” she says, not realizing the gravity of what I’ve told her. “When did that happen?”
    “Last night. Is your husband home?”
    “Sure,” she says, sounding a little vague.
    In the background I hear him ask, “Who is it?”
    “It’s your daughter’s husband’s brother,” she says. “Something happened to Jane.”
    “What happened to Jane?” he asks, taking the phone.
    “George hit her on the head with a lamp.”
    “Is she going to press charges?”
    “Most likely she is going to die.”
    “That’s not the kind of thing you say to be funny.”
    “I’m not joking.”
    “Son of a bitch,” he says.

    I want to go home. I want my life back. I had a life of my own. I was in the middle of something when all of this happened, wasn’t I? What was happening? I don’t have my date book, but there had to be something, a dentist appointment, dinner with friends, faculty meeting. What day is it? I check my watch. In five minutes I am teaching a class. Twenty-five undergraduates will file into a classroom and sit nervously in their chairs, knowing they have not prepared, knowing they have not done the reading. The course, Nixon: The Ghost in the Machine, a close examination of the unexamined. They sit like idiots waiting for me to tell them what everything means, to spoon-feed them an education. And while they numbly perch, they compose letters to the Dean; one complained that he was being asked to write in class, another calculated the cost per session of each of the twenty-two sessions in the semester and made a list of things he could have bought for the same or less money.
    I have yet to put a dollar cost on the stress of having them stare blankly at me for ninety minutes two times a week and showing up during my office hours, asking me, “What’s new?” like we’re old friends and then sitting down as though they