Page 8 of What You Wish For

For my part, all I could do was stare.

Babette was standing next to me, and at some point, our hands found each other’s, and we wound up squeezing so tight that I’d have a bruise for a week.

The paramedics worked on Max for what seemed like a million years—but was maybe only five minutes: intensely, bent over him, performing the same insistent, forceful movements over his chest. When they couldn’t get him back, I heard one of them say, “We need to transport him. This isn’t working.”

Transport him to the hospital, I guessed.

They stopped to check for a rhythm, but as they pulled back a little, my breath caught in my throat, and Babette made a noise that was half-gasp, half-scream.

Max, lying there on the floor, was blue.

“Oh, shit,” Kenny said. “It’s a PE.”

I glanced at Babette.What was a PE?

“Oh, God,” Josh said, “look at that demarcation line.”

Sure enough, there was a straight line across Max’s rib cage, where the color of his skin changed from healthy and pink to blue. “Get the gurney,” Kenny barked, but as he did his voice cracked.

That’s when I saw there were tears on Kenny’s face.

Then I looked over at Josh: his, too.

And then I just knew exactly what they knew. They would wipe their faces on their sleeves, and keep doing compressions on Max, and keep working him, and transport him to the hospital, but it wouldn’t do any good. Even though he was Max—our principal, our hero, our living legend.

All the love in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep him with us.

And as wrong as it was, eventually it would become the only true thing left: We would never get him back.

A PE turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. He’d developed a blood clot sometime during the flight home from Italy, apparently—and it had made its way to his lungs and blocked an artery. Deep vein thrombosis.

“He didn’t walk around during the flight?” I asked Babette. “Doesn’t everybody know to do that?”

“I thought he did,” Babette said, dazed. “But I guess he didn’t.”

It didn’t matter what he had or hadn’t done, of course. There would be no do-over. No chance to try again and get it right.

It just was what it was.

But what was it? An accident? A fluke? A bad set of circumstances? I found myself Googling “deep vein thrombosis” in the middle of the night, scrolling and reading in bed in the blue light of my laptop, trying to understand what had happened. The sites I found listed risk factors for getting it, and there were plenty, including recent surgery, birth control pills, smoking, cancer, heart failure—none of which applied to Max. And then, last on the list, on every site I went to, was the weirdest possible one: “sitting for long periods of time, such as when driving or flying.” And that was it. That was Max’s risk factor. He’d sat still for too long. He’d forgotten to get up and walk around during the flight—and that one totally innocuous thing had killed him.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

An entire lifetime of growing up, learning to crawl, and then to toddle, and then to walk, and then run. Years of learning table manners, and multiplication tables, and how to shave, and how to tie a bow tie. Striving and going to college and grad school and marrying Babette and raising a daughter—and a son, too, who had joined the Marines and then died in Afghanistan—and this was how it all ended.

Sitting too long on a plane.

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t acceptable.

But it didn’t matter if I accepted it or not.

People talk about shock all the time, but you don’t know how physical it is until you’re in it. For days after it happened, my chest felt tight, like my lungs had shrunk and I couldn’t get enough oxygen into them. I’d find myself panting, even when I was just making a pot of coffee. I’d surface from deep sleep gasping for breath like I was suffocating. It left me feeling panicked, like I was in danger, even though the person who had been in danger wasn’t me.

It was physical for Babette, too.

When the two of us got home from the hospital, she lay down on the sofa in the living room and slept for twelve hours. When she was awake, she had migraines and nausea. But she was almost never awake. We closed the curtains in the living room. I brought in blankets, and a bottle of water, and a box of tissues for the coffee table. I fetched her pillow off the bed upstairs, and some soft pajamas and her chenille robe.

She would sleep downstairs on that sofa for months.

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