Digging Out by Katherine Leiner Read Free Book Online Page A

Daddy,” she says.
    The outline of her small body shows against the night-light in the hall. She is trembling.
    “Get in, sweetie.”
    She comes into my arms and I pull her close. “I miss my daddy,” she says again. “I’m the only one of my whole class who doesn’t have a daddy.” She moves closer and I rock her. “Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I see him. He is in the hallway outside my room. He is trying to get up, like he did that day, and I can’t help him.”
    I want to tell her that everything is okay. But everything is not. I rock her until she falls back to sleep.
    I begin to see a psychiatrist. I do it to get Dafydd off my back. The only other time I’d seen one was at Gram’s insistence.
    Dr. Jacobs is tall and thin, all angles. He has dark hair and a huge white toothy smile that spreads ear to ear. His round tortoiseshell glasses make him look even more nerdy than I’ve already decided he is.
    “Of course you’re depressed,” he says. “Why should you be anything other than depressed? Your husband just died. He was your best friend, the father of your daughter, the man who helped you raise your first child. You’re all alone in that now. You’re going to have to figure out a new way to live your life. You’re going to have to figure out how to swim. Of course you should be depressed.”
    Does Dr. Jacobs think this is making me feel any better? When I ask him, he tells me his job is not to make me feel better. His job is to help me identify the truth and begin to live with it. I wonder if it ever occurs to him that I am not ready just now to live side by side with this hard, cold truth. Perhaps I need a little more time in the denial stage. I get up and walk out, pulling the door behind me shut tight with decision. I am not going back. There are other ways to get through this.
    At home I put together a spicy lamb stew with green olives, thinly sliced summer squash, a cucumber and yogurt salad. After pouring my third glass of cold Australian chardonnay, I sit at the dining room table with Hannah and Dafydd. I’ve cut some dahlias for the table and I have ironed the lace and linen serviettes. I’ve showered, washed my hair and put on a clean white blouse, black trousers and red lipstick. Dafydd and Hannah smile at each other and then at me, confident that their plan for getting me help has worked. I smile back at them and chew slowly, fifteen times per bite, still thinking about all the ways I can die.
    The minutiae of Marc’s death seem to keep me alive. I become completely pathological about these details. Something, somewhere has gone wrong. If he had the heart of a twenty-five year old, why did it suddenly fail him? It has to be someone’s fault.
    I work my way backward, studying all the paperwork from the hospital. I meet the ER doctor who worked on Marc. I meet the nurses. I ask them to tell me point by point, drug by drug, what they did for him, how they worked on him. I want to know how many times they used the “clapper.”
    I drive down to the fire station and interview the EMTs who were with Marc in our house and in the ambulance. What condition was Marc in when they found him at home? Was he conscious? Did he speak? Were there any last words? If I had been home, could I havesaved him with CPR? How many minutes did it take them to get to our house? Could he have been saved if they had arrived sooner? Was there pain? Was there fear? Why did he die?
    I call the pathologist who did the autopsy. He tells me eighty percent of Marc’s left artery was blocked and thirty percent of the right artery, but the third artery and other vital organs had taken up functioning in their place. The pathologist can’t tell me exactly what killed Marc. Nobody can. Twenty-five-year-old heart, my ass.
    I call the cardiologist who gave him the thallium stress test. He reminds me that Marc had failed the first treadmill.
    At first I don’t believe him. “Marc said he passed that