The Winner's Game(2)
I look at my watch. It’s nine forty. Emily just peeked out through the front window. She knows I’m here, so there’s no sense in delaying any longer. Besides, the kids deserve to know what’s going on before they go to bed.
“Have a seat, guys,” I say soberly while hanging my coat in the closet.
“Ann didn’t come home with you either?” asks Bree. “I thought maybe she was coming in your car.”
Emily sniffles and wipes her nose. “Not tonight, Breezy.”
I lock eyes with Emily. “Did you tell them anything yet?”
She shakes her head.
“What’s wrong with her now?” Cade is eleven and is just wrapping up fifth grade. He tends to say what he thinks, so I’m seldom surprised by his bluntness.
“Have a seat,” I say again.
Bree is the first to plop down on the couch. She’s only a little more than three years younger than Ann, but sooo different. Where Ann has always been fairly mature, Bree sometimes teeters on the childish side. Ann is average height for her age, but Bree has always been several inches taller than her peers. Ann likes long hair, Bree prefers short. Ann is quiet, and Bree…isn’t. Ann likes to think things through before proceeding, whereas Bree is perfectly fine leaping on a whim and accepting the consequences.
Cade doesn’t prefer one sister over the other, but he definitely knows whom he can count on for what—Ann for assistance, Bree for trouble. Ann’s just always had those mother-hen, protective instincts, not that Cade necessarily always wants her help. I recall once when he was in kindergarten, when Emily and I were away, he jumped from our second-story window with a Hefty garbage bag as a parachute. Who came running out the back door of the house at just the right moment to break his fall? Ann. And who stepped in to save him in first grade when he picked a fight with a fourth-grade bully named Rick “The Brick”? Ann. And later that year, when Cade thought it would be fun to play Dodge-Car on the busy road near our house, who was there to drag him by the collar to safety, narrowly missing the delivery truck that nearly ran both of them over? Who else but Ann?
It’s always Ann to the rescue, just as it’s almost always Bree who comes up with those harebrained ideas that get Cade into trouble.
“Dell, you OK?”
Emily’s comment alerts me to the fact that I’m staring blankly at Bree and Cade without saying a word. I nod, take a deep breath, and then carefully explain how the doctors are seeing increased fibrosis in both of Ann’s ventricles, while the functionality of her myocardium has continued to deteriorate to the point where cardiac death is becoming a constant threat. “They’re keeping her overnight to run some more tests,” I finish solemnly, “mostly because the irregular rhythm is back.”
“Which means what, exactly?” asks Bree. “In simple words…so Dimwit can understand.”
“Yeah,” remarks Cade, pointing back at her, “so me and Dimwit can understand.”
Emily shakes her head and sighs, then cuts to the chase as tears fill her eyes, causing them to look glassy. “It means her heart isn’t healing…nor is it likely to. She needs a transplant. The sooner the better.”
We’ve had enough family talks for the kids to know what a transplant means, and it isn’t good. “Only as a last resort,” we’ve told them from time to time when the subject came up. “The risks are high, and the outcome not always optimal.”
As a wave of dread washes over me, I lean forward in my seat. “I want you guys to know, above all else, that things are going to be OK. In the long run, this will be the best thing for Ann, so we should be happy. And they do transplants like this all the time, so no worries there.” Easy words to say…I just hope they’re true. “But what it means is that we’re going to need something from you guys for the next several months. Two things, actually.” I pause to make sure they are listening. “Peace…and quiet. School gets out in a few weeks, and we can’t have you running around like mad March Hares all the time. It’s going to be more important than ever that Ann have a stress-free environment until she can have the surgery. Her heart literally might not be able to handle having to deal with some of your…well, your occasional shenanigans.”
I hate to admit it, but I’m hardly one to talk about having peace and quiet at home. Or shenanigans, for that matter. Before Ann’s medical problems, I like to think that I was a pretty decent husband and father—calm, caring, fun to be around, that sort of thing. But nearly eighteen months of dealing with the uncertainty of the situation has taken its toll. Sometimes I blow up at the kids for the littlest things, such as accidentally spilling water on the floor or forgetting to flush the toilet. Once or twice I’ve heard Emily trying to cover for me, telling them I’m just overly stressed from work, but we both know that’s not the only thing eating at me. This chasm between Emily and me, it just has me constantly on edge. Her too. Sometimes I feel like so much of our focus is on Ann that there’s not much left for each other. Emotionally, we’re tapped out. We’re both still going through the motions of being parents, but somehow we’ve forgotten to be a couple. The result has been an increasingly dysfunctional relationship, including more and more frequent outbursts—snapping, fighting, arguing, complaining—from one or the other of us.