The Two-Knock Ghost Page 5

  CHAPTER 6

  SLIGHTLY AFTER MY thirtieth birthday, Christine and I had our first son. We named him Robert Phillip after my father and grandfather. Initially, I felt that his presence on this planet helped fill the void that was still in my heart.

  He was adorable. He was almost born a gentleman. He rarely cried and when he wanted or needed something he sort of cooed for it, making discernable faces as to what it was that he needed. A scrunched face meant that he needed a diaper change. An open mouth, glistening eyes meant he needed a bottle, and before he was old enough for a bottle, it meant that he needed a breast. He had manners before he knew what manners were, and it seemed as if we were always teaching him something. He was consistently teaching us something as well. He was the greatest joy that we had felt in six years beside our love for each other. We agreed because Robert Phillip was undoubtedly intelligent, that we would not speak baby talk around him. Instead, we used complete sentences and even large words, as if we were speaking to a little man. There were plenty of toys and baby playing, but from the beginning of his life he was dictating to us the rules for how we should play with him.

  Like me, he liked to throw baseballs and was good at it. I hadn’t played much baseball since I finished college, but playing catch with him, even when he was two made me miss not only playing baseball, but watching the Cubs and White Sox like I used to. It also made me miss collecting baseball cards when they were the greatest thing in the world that a little boy could buy for a nickel.

  Robert Phillip filled my heart and soul so much that I stopped drinking rum and Coke at restaurants. I was feeling more fulfilled, more purposeful in my life. I had a son to raise and a wife to love. I had a multitude of clients that constantly needed my encouragement. At times I thought I was the luckiest man in the world.

  Things got better still. Slightly after my thirty-second birthday and four days after the date my son was born, Christine had another baby. This time it was a girl.

  She was gorgeous and even quieter than Robert Phillip, the little gentleman. We named her Lena Kathleen in honor of my grandmother and mother.

  But two nights after the overwhelming joy Christine and I had felt over the birth of our daughter, her breathing became shallow. Christine was sound asleep in her hospital room at St. Joe’s and I was asleep in my bed in Bridgeport. The doctors’ initially agreed that it was not prudent to wake Christine while they were working on Lena. What could she do to help? Nothing. The doctors decided my wife would be better served sleeping through the night, unless things grew more serious. Why wake her at 2:30 in the morning and cause her undue worry? They didn’t call me either, same logic. After three and a half hours of hypothesizing, testing and x-raying, seven doctors—five men and two women—concluded that my daughter had a hole in her heart. Imagine that. I’d had a medi-physical hole in my own heart that I finally thought was healing because of my rediscovered joy, due to the births of my children.

  When the call came to my office the next morning, it was as if an unknown medi-physical phantom shot me in my very real physical stomach once again. The emotional pain which had been abating for two years as I was beginning to build my family, exploded back with horrendous ferocity.

  “How did you figure out it’s a hole?” I asked the doctor who was also going to be her surgeon. He explained that he figured it out pretty traditionally. They found a murmur when they listened to her heart. When they took the x-ray, they found that it was located in the atria. The condition is called an atrial septal defect. He continued to explain that the left and right blood filling chambers of the heart are separated by a thin shared wall, called the arterial system. Lena had a hole there in the wall between the atria—those are the upper two filling chambers of the heart. Because of the hole, some oxygenated blood from the left atrium was flowing through the hole in the septum into the right atrium where it was mixing with oxygen poor blood and multiplying the total amount of blood that was flowing into the lungs. This more powerful blood flow was creating a swishing sound. That’s what a heart murmur is. And that’s what they heard in Lena.

  “In cases where there is a small hole, the problem usually resolves itself as the child grows. But in Lena’s case, there was concern because we rated the hole as large. We’re going to have to be vigilant because Lena’s heart is having to work harder because of the hole and the contributing factor that Lena has a tiny heart to go along with her tiny body,” the doctor explained.

  Lena hadn’t been premature, but her birth weight had only been six pounds two ounces. We hadn’t worried about the weight because in every other way she appeared to be healthy as well as beautiful.

  “What will you do now, Doctor?” I asked, my own heart fluttering.

  “We monitor closely in intensive care, get some more weight on her and repair the hole as soon as we feel she’s strong enough to undergo the surgery.”

  “Mr. McKenzie, I can almost 100 percent assure you that Lena will be fine and that not only will there be no complications, but she will grow up to be a healthy normal child. I’ve performed similar procedures scores of times.”

  That is exactly what he said. They were the kind professional words of a brilliant competent doctor. But did I hear that? No. I heard the word “almost” before “100 percent assure you.” I heard “multiplies the total amount of blood that flows to the lungs.” I heard “heart murmur and Lena’s heart is having to work harder and Lena has a tiny heart to go along with her tiny body.” That is what I heard and that is what my weakened emotional being clung to.

  “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll be there as soon as I finish work.”

  Thud, thud, thud—the second hand banged to a sole penetrating crawl. Worry, the depth of which I had never experienced, assaulted me like a blitz to a quarterback. Instantly, a god-awful loneliness permeated my being. I had to talk to Christine right away. I buzzed my secretary and told her to tell my next client I might be a few minutes late. Christine and I talked for forty-three minutes. We both cried; she first, then I. Then the ebb of pain hit her again then me again. And this happened again many times. We were on a teeter-totter of pain. First one of us hit the ground with a bang then the other one.

  My poor wife, I thought, she could have never imagined that by becoming a part of my life, she would experience so much pain. The word pain, the feeling of pain, were becoming sad refrains in our lives.

  I had not had a drink in over a year. But now I wanted one terribly. I felt like a coward, dependent on the emotional relief a few chemicals from a bottle of alcohol could give me. I felt myself becoming afraid, afraid for my daughter and any physical pain she might endure, afraid for Christine and the emotional and resulting physical pain she would undoubtedly feel—and I was afraid for myself. I was this big six foot two, 190-pound man, thirty-two years old, in great shape, and I suddenly felt afraid to be alone at the end of the night.

  When I finished with my last client about 5:30, on my way to the hospital to see Christine and Lena, I did something I had never done before. I stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of rum and a six pack of Coke. I threw them onto the backseat when I returned to the car, thankful they were there, almost like friends who would later provide me with comfort and assistance with sleep.

  At the hospital, I went to see Christine first. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying. I went immediately to her bed, bent over, and hugged her tightly for nearly a minute. I felt a single one of her teardrops hit my neck while we hugged. Even though a large, wise part of me knew that I shouldn’t, I somehow began to feel responsible for what was happening with Lena. After a few moments of talking with each other, Christine and I went to see Lena. She was already in intensive care. She appeared tinier than the other times I had seen her. Perhaps it was because I knew she was markedly more vulnerable now than when I had, only forty-eight hours earlier, felt unbridled joy when I welcomed her to the outside world.

  Christine and
I stood there holding hands and not speaking a word. We simply looked at Lena, wondering what, if anything, there was to say. Somehow our locked fingers expressed a pact of solidarity that together we would do whatever it took to see our infant daughter through this first crisis of her life. I can only speak for myself, but I was also thinking selfishly about what I would feel if Lena didn’t survive her operation. I can surmise that Christine might have been thinking similar thoughts, but she had drifted into a profound silence. Though our hands were clasped and we were standing side by side, it was as if she were absent from the scene in the way that really mattered—her mind. She was inhabiting another dimension, probably similar to the one I had lived in for most of the last eight years. It’s a dimension where the chaos of loss and pain battle with your ability to focus on present moment happiness. It’s a dimension where worry is a cruel king and all of your other thoughts are lowly subjects he is abusing.

  * * * * *

  Later that night I went home and carried my bottle of rum and my six pack of Coke into the house for the first time. Many hundreds of times would follow. I did not turn the TV on, I did not eat. I walked to my bedroom and closed the door after fixing my drink on the counter near the fridge. I was not thinking that I was a moral coward or that maybe I had been for the last several years. I was thinking that I was sad, that I was just doing what I had to do, that I had every right to do this. I was a grown man. I had a busy day tomorrow, and I needed to sleep without worry, if that was possible. What happened was that the pain of the loss of my parents and my dad’s parents slammed into my mind like an emotional tsunami. The impact of the wave washed away every good thought that might have been in my mind a moment before the impact. I could not think of Christine, or my beloved Cubs, the White Sox, or Pizzeria Uno, or how much I loved my career. I could only think of the actual loss of my family and the possible loss of Lena. I drank while under the covers, leaning against two propped up pillows. The sheets and blankets were pulled to my chin. I was suddenly desperate for some feeling of security. How foolish I was to think rum and Coke and sheets and a blanket could provide me with any degree of what I was desperately seeking.

  When I fell asleep that night, I dreamed of the devil for the first time. I was in the hospital, and Christine and I were looking at Lena, who was in a glass isolation room. There was a doctor bending over her, listening to her heart with a stethoscope. When he finished listening, he stood and turned around. It was the devil—no horns, but the unmistakable sneering red face looking at the two of us and wordlessly saying, “I’ve got the situation in my hands now and there is nothing either of you can do about it.”

  I woke up wildly frightened and angry. I was angry because I had stopped going to mass and confession years ago. I didn’t even believe in the devil, thinking deeply on a conscious level that he was a ridiculous concept created to control people’s behavior through scare tactics. But my dream of him had scared the crap out of me. I was angry because I didn’t know why something I didn’t even believe in would have the power to frighten me. I woke thinking, “What if there really was a devil and he had control over Lena’s fate?” I also didn’t believe in Jesus, but in a good, compulsively creative God who could hear me if I prayed and might conceivably intercede on my behalf with this devil SOB if I asked him.

  So that night I prayed in my bed, as I once again pulled the covers to my chin. I said, “Dear God, please don’t let that demon hurt my baby. She is so innocent. Why would he want her, anyway? There’re so many other people out there who are better candidates for his tormenting. Christine and I don’t deserve this. We’re good people. Please help us.”

  I was still quivering with fear. I thought I was a stronger man than this. But being an incessant ponderer, I fell asleep again that night knowing that part of my problem was that I didn’t know for sure what the truth about God or the devil was. Every thought I ever had as a grown man about God and the devil and even life and all of its shoulds and shouldn’ts was conjecture. I didn’t believe in anything specific. Everything I concluded about the great spiritual unknown was theory. Nothing was a true conclusion. I really couldn’t ever tell any of my clients that what I was telling them about life was absolute truth because I was not at all certain what absolute truth was. I believed in it because I was certain it was out there somewhere, but what I truly believed was that the absolute truths of the great unknowns were something that man’s small brains would never be privy to. When I gave my clients advice, I felt that primarily I would be giving them suggestions about how they could function better as citizens of their own communities, their states, the culture of the United States. Did I know who God truly was? Most certainly, I did not. But I theorized that I was part of nature, something so profound that I did not create. And if God had created this, He would definitely allow me access to him and on this night of my first devil terror, I hoped like an innocent child that God would hear my prayer and spare Lena from significant pain or death.

  I fell back asleep and sometime during that fitful night, I heard two innocuous knocks at what sounded like my front door, but I was too exhausted to wake up and answer them.

  CHAPTER 7

  CHRISTINE GRADUATED SEVENTEENTH in her class at Northwestern. She was smart—big ten cum laude smart. She graduated seventeenth in her class out of hundreds. She loved to study all kinds of things. When she put her mind to it, she could achieve anything.

  She had gained a reputation for being the go-to gal at work. if someone was sick in hers or almost any other hospital specialty. She was a fast learner and had more on-the-job training for different specialties than I could begin to express. She was beyond dependable. I will never understand how she pulled off doing all the things she did on the job and with our family. We did have a tremendous amount of help with Robert Phillip during his early life. Christine’s parents, Dan and Judy O’Reilly, lived in Hyde Park. Getting from there to Bridgeport only took a few minutes. They were almost always available for babysitting not because we asked them for their help but mainly because they asked us for the joy of spending as much time as possible with their grandson. They were keeping Robert Phillip for a few days while Christine delivered Lena.

  Christine’s father was an accountant. That’s where Christine received her acuity with numbers. Dan O’Reilly was smart, made a good living, and was incredible at investing and making money from those investments. He and Christine were very close. He spent hours with her from the time she was nine years old teaching her about the stock market and the value of saving money. On numerous occasions he would tell her, “‘Teenie,’ saved money never sleeps. It works for you around the clock.” He was still telling her that when she was in her early thirties and she was listening.

  Because of her love of and near wizardry with money, I gladly let Christine handle all of our financial affairs. She would talk to me about everything and I would listen, but handling the money was her thing. Because we lived modestly and had successful careers, our holdings grew rapidly. Most importantly, Dan O’Reilly was always there to answer questions that Christine might have. They were a playful tag team when it came to sharing options and ideas and solving financial equations. Christine’s father was always a good friend to us on monetary and many other levels.

  Christine’s mother was also a nurse. There was no doubt that Judy had taught her daughter how to take care of people tenderly. Judy was pretty like Christine. In her forties when I met her, she was in excellent physical condition, a byproduct of her enjoying running for exercise at every opportunity. She also liked to lift weights. So besides being an excellent example to Christine how to care for people tenderly, she was also an example for Christine how to eat healthy and stay strong. Judy was five feet two inches tall, the same height as Christine. And she was a little dynamo. In her fifties when our children were just born, Judy was in a position to work when she wanted—thanks in part to her husband, Dan, and his skills at making money. Their famil
y was the opposite of Christine and me. Dan was the financial guru, planner, and manager. Whereas in our family, Christine was the financial expert.

  I wondered how Judy did all the things she did. She was like three women in one. She especially starred at Thanksgiving and Christmas where year after year she was the gracious hostess for wonderful parties at her home in Hyde Park. Judy was a beautiful woman inside and out, and I often thought how lucky Dan was to have her love, as I was to have Christine’s. Put Judy and Christine side by side and they looked much more like sisters than mother and daughter. Though both women were independent thinkers and late twentieth century contemporary progressives, their religious beliefs were fairly simple and almost identical. Both women had been born Catholics and believed deeply in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and the pope as the leader of the spiritual world and all of the basic tenants their church espoused. Neither of them attended mass every Sunday but the reason for that for each woman was that their work schedules had often prevented them from doing so. But each woman was sure to fulfill the obligations required to be official practicing Catholics. They were two extremely benevolent women who were near real life saints. They gave constantly and profoundly of themselves to countless souls. The only difference between them and canonized saints was that they weren’t performing miracles, and they weren’t dead. What they were performing were endless acts of transformative love for their patients, friends, and families. Neither of them believed in ghosts, except the Holy Ghost.

  My wife came from good stock. She was a giving person. Her goodness most times seemed effortless. But right now, when Lena’s future was in question, I observed how difficult it was for her to hold it together. This generally playful woman was having a hard time controlling her weeping. Usually bubbly and effervescent, Christine had become remarkably quiet and instead of being a rock that I could lean on, I found myself often standing silently next to her, holding her hand and weeping along with her. I was still so damaged from the loss of my parents and grandparents that it seemed as though there was nothing of substance within myself to tap into for moral support or encouragement. Of course Judy and Dan O’Reilly were always nearby to help, but I was frustrated with myself for not having a spiritual fountain in reserve that I could drink from to fortify myself so I could be stronger for my wife at this time.