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tantalizingly close, remains elusive. As I sit beside the machines and my husband in this insular glass room, it dawns on me that meaning might not have a place here. Maybe Simon and I having watched Jill’s TED talk two days ago means nothing. Maybe this room, where I sit now and where others have sat before me, is the perfect setting for an unavoidable and brutal collision course with the fact, hard as stone tile, of meaninglessness.
    Around five a.m., the neuro doctors arrive, a whole posse of them, for morning rounds, and they ask me to wait outside Simon’s room. After their huddled meeting around the bed, the doctor who is in charge approaches me. He smiles, shakes my hand, and explains that he was part of the team that operated on Simon’s brain. He has seen Simon’s brain. He has, at least for the moment, saved Simon’s brain. Suddenly alert, I catalog a series of irrelevant details: his lack of a doctor’s coat, his paisley cravat, and his worn leather Dockers. He is fair and young and pretty, and I think, distractedly, of Dorian Gray.
    “Simon’s family will be arriving in a few hours,” I explain. “Will we be able to ask you some questions?”
    “No.” His face clouds over momentarily. He only assisted; Dr. Haw, the lead surgeon, will answer our questions. He smiles again, courteous but distant, and says, “The underlying tissue beneath the bleed looked good. There is room to hope.”
    Several questions wing through my mind as he moves away. Hope for what? Hope that Simon will live, however altered or damaged? Or hope, real hope, for life, for Simon, for his beautiful mind? I want to call out in the otherworldly quiet of the ICU , call him back, ask him to clarify, but I am afraid even to voice the question out loud, let alone hear the answer. Room to hope. It’s enough right now, no questions asked, to get me through the rest of the long night.
    The nurses’ morning shift change is at 7:30, and they ask me to leave for an hour. I retrace my steps to the ground-floor hospital lobby. When I return with a cup of tea, the lights in the ICU waiting room are still dark and the young man and woman still asleep. In the doorway a middle-aged woman sways. She clutches for my arm as I pass and asks when she will be allowed into the ICU . She leans into me, her breath sour with vomit and alcohol; the heat of her grief is overwhelming.
    “In an hour,” I say, backing away. “After the nurses’ shift change.”
    She hangs on to my arm still, leaning in: a drowning woman. It is her son. He was beaten behind some bar on the Eastside. He is in a coma. She came in from Vancouver Island late last night, but she didn’t know where to go. Who to talk to. She has no money, so she slept in the bushes outside the hospital. Her son is in a coma, his face beaten so badly it is no longer a face. Her son. Her baby boy. What is she to do? She is incoherent, grieving, desperate. Toxic. I have no ability to filter out the rawness of her pain: her pain is my pain is a world of pain opening up beneath me.
    “The social worker,” I say, pointing to an office door down the hallway. “Maybe she can help?” It is all I can offer. I forcibly extract my arm and move away, knowing I cannot be anywhere near this woman. The strength of her pain will pull me under. I will drown. I retrace my steps back to Sassafras, the large cafeteria adjacent to the ICU wing and the area that will become a meeting place over the next eleven days.
Sassafras,
I write in the notebook I carry with me.
A long bank of windows, many tables filled with interns, nurses, and people that are not you.

{ 6 }
WILD THYME
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7:45 A.M., JULY 23, DAY 2
    I AM THINKING HARD about time. I would like to rewind it. Lines of a T. S. Eliot poem land in my thoughts like a whistling bomb:
    For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or