“Pretty much,” Reiner said.
“Must not have paid my electricity bill.”
“More like a storm came and knocked out your service, which was then restored,” Reiner said.
They were tossing about these metaphors in such a jocular way, like all the dire potential diagnoses had been a big joke, like the uncertainty and ambiguity left behind were not at all troubling.
I was trying not to let it infuriate me.
“Doesn’t it all strike you as,” I started, groped around for a way to conclude my sentence, then concluded with a meek, “a little strange?”
“Disorders of consciousness are a strange thing,” Reiner said. “If you’re having trouble walking, we look at your legs. If you’re having trouble breathing, we look at your lungs. But where do we look when you’re having trouble with your consciousness? Where is consciousness located? Can we stick a needle in it? What causes someone to go unconscious? What makes them wake back up? We’re not really sure.
“As just one example, we don’t actually understand why anesthesia works. We know certain drugs bind to certain receptors, sure, but that doesn’t explain the totality of what happens when someone zonks out for surgery. Nor does it explain why some people can later recount things that were said in the operating theater while they were supposedly under. The mechanism behind general anesthesia simply isn’t understood all that well. I’m afraid what happened to your husband yesterday falls into the same category. Something caused his brain to check out for a while. And then it recovered. Call it a medical mystery or a medical miracle. Either term works for me.”
Matt smiled. “Doctor, we have a saying where I come from: You can put wings on a pig, but that don’t make it an eagle.”
Reiner grinned back. “I’m not sure I—”
“Mysteries are for novelists and miracles are for preachers,” Matt said. “I’m a scientist. I believe the causes for things are natural, not supernatural. Something happened to me, even if it didn’t show up in all those tests you gave me. You must have a hypothesis that doesn’t involve divine intervention. One scientist to another, just give me your best guess as to what’s going on here.”
“Okay,” Reiner said, taking in a deep breath and then letting it go. “My best guess—and this is really only a guess—is that we could be looking at some kind of conversion disorder.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s neurosis where corporal symptoms appear without any apparent somatic or physical basis, so we say the mental condition is ‘converting’ itself into physical form. It’s possible this could result in this kind of fugue state, where you’re able to shuffle around but not interact meaningfully with the outside world. We’ve seen instances where a conversion disorder can cause blindness, paralysis, all kinds of things.”
“In other words, you think I’m crazy,” Matt said, still smiling.
“Crazy or just incredibly stressed by something,” Reiner said. “Think of it like when someone gets some truly terrible news—the death of a loved one, something traumatic. They hear the news and they faint. That’s a conversion disorder. The brain doesn’t know what to do with a mental shock, and so it shuts things down for a little while, just to give itself a chance to work things out. Have you been under a lot of stress?”
Matt and I exchanged a quick, meaningful glance. He hadn’t published a paper in a year and a half, nor did he have anything in the pipeline. And, yes, that was stressful. Matt felt like he had reached a go-big-or-go-home juncture in his research, where he couldn’t just pump out another article about the gradual progress he was making. Until he got a major result, no one really wanted to hear from him.
He kept saying he was close. But in some ways there was no more fraught place than finding yourself on the brink of a greatness that continued to elude you.
“No more or less so than usual,” Matt said.
“A certain amount of stress is unavoidable,” I said.
“Well, yes. But he still has to take care of himself,” Reiner said to me, then turned to Matt. “Make sure you’re eating well and getting good sleep. If you start to feel overwhelmed by something, give yourself permission to take a break and perform some self-care—go on a walk or do whatever you do that rejuvenates you.”
“Take two spoonfuls of slacking off and call me in the morning,” Matt said.
“That’s right. Just take it easy.”
Then Reiner added the words that my superstitious side wished he hadn’t:
“And hope whatever this was doesn’t come back.”
CHAPTER 5
The most painful seven days of Emmett Webster’s life—168 hours he wished he could bury somewhere near the center of the earth—were finally coming to an end.
He couldn’t believe it had only been a week. It felt like so much longer.
Wanda had died on Sunday morning. The three days that followed were a numbing blur of grief and logistics. The viewing had been Thursday evening, the memorial service Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, the love of Emmett Webster’s life had been committed to the ground forever.
Wanda Elaine Webster. Cherished wife, mother, and grandmother. Friend to all. May she rest in peace.
Emmett’s friends and colleagues in the New Hampshire State Police had come out in force for the whole thing. Cops were great when it came to funerals. There was something about the occasion—the air of crisis, the fellow officer in need, the rigid formality of the event—that appealed to a cop’s nature and training.
They were around death a lot. They knew what to do.
Maybe that explained how Emmett was able to get through that initial phase of mourning with such stoicism. He simply went into cop mode.
For the eulogy, he had told the story of their first date. They went bowling. They were so pumped just to be with each other she rolled a 167 and he rolled a 212. Neither one of them had bowled that well before—or since.
They were married six months later. Three kids followed in five years. The next quarter century went by in a cheerful churn of seasons.
She had been the feisty one, the one who wore every feeling she had directly on her face. He was the plodding, steady type, the kind of cop who solved cases with stoic persistence. Clashing styles, to be sure. But they were always better together than apart. Fact was, you needed sunshine and clouds to make a rainbow.
At the viewing, he must have had the same conversation, or slightly different variations thereof, no less than a hundred times. He’d tell the person how Wanda had recently been diagnosed with what had been called “mild” sleep apnea. They were still figuring out what to do about it—whether she needed the mask or whatnot. She had decided to sleep on the couch in the den because she worried her snoring would wake up Emmett.
That’s where he found her the next morning. In the den. Sudden cardiac death, triggered by sleep apnea.
At least she didn’t suffer, the person would reply.
Yes, it was a blessing.
But really? Seriously?
There was plenty of suffering.
His.
And she was dead, the woman who was at the geographic middle of fifty-four-year-old Emmett’s happiness for more than half his life. How was that any kind of blessing?