Effi
Recap from previous weeks: Lieba has been pronounced medically stable for the time being, although the status of her brain injury is yet to be determined. Her family leaves the hospital, with only Hennie remaining at her sister’s bedside.
Effi left the hospital an hour after the others departed, just in case there was more news. “Just stay overnight by me,” Ralph offered when he called to check in. “It’s late to drive back to Brooklyn, and you must be zonked.”
“I think I might take you up on it,” Effi said. He felt tired to the bone. “I want to be here in the morning to check on Lieba.”
Ralph’s house turned out to be a modest but comfortable home on a suburban-style block of Long Branch, and he pulled in to find Ralph and Rena waiting up for him with an offer of tea and cinnamon buns. He took one to be polite, but was still too overwrought to have much of an appetite.
“Have you been dating that girl for long?” Ralph asked delicately.
“Not at all!” Effi said. “It was just a first date. My brother-in-law pushed the shidduch, but I had a feeling it wasn’t for me. She’s a nice girl, but she’s really too young. I mean, case in point: she thought it would be cute and playful to jump off a staircase in high heels. But if she’s done permanent damage to herself, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Don’t go there,” Rena advised. “I’m a nurse—listen to me! If her vital signs are good, she’ll probably be okay. She’s young and healthy, and even if it takes time, chances are she’ll be okay.”
“She did fall from five steps, not a ten-story building,” Ralph said, practically.
“It’s just really scary,” Effi said, resisting the urge to put his head in his hands and weep. He took a sip of tea to steady himself.
“Yiyeh tov,” Ralph said, passing the plate of cake to his wife and standing up. “Let’s get you to bed, buddy. G-d willing, things will look better in the morning.”
* * * * *
Effi was supposed to be resting. He was in one of the children’s rooms, after Ralph doubled up his boys in one bed. But sleep evaded him.
He felt wracked by guilt. Okay, he had discouraged Lieba from jumping. No one had pushed her off those steps, although no one could have foreseen her heel getting caught in them. He knew it was irrational. But it had happened on his watch, and he still somehow felt responsible. He was responsible for agreeing to this whole stupid date, and because he’d allowed himself to be persuaded, this whole deplorable incident had come about. Why had he listened to his brother-in-law?
A little voice seemed to chirp in his ear: “You were upset with Chani for letting her family persuade her to break off your shidduch. Now you let Avraham persuade you to date a young, immature woman, and the result was disastrous. Why didn’t you follow your gut instincts?”
Why hadn’t Chani followed her gut instincts eight years ago? “Chani was even younger than Lieba back then!” the little voice said. “She was completely dependent on her family. What’s your excuse?”
I have no excuse, he thought.
How life could turn on a dime! He had set out in the morning in good spirits, figuring that even if the date didn’t work out—which, from the get-go, he suspected it wouldn’t—at least he’d enjoy a nice outing and be able to check out Ralph’s town. It should have been just a simple, ordinary excursion.
Until it wasn’t. “I guess that’s how Ralph and Ezra felt when Frieda got hit by that car,” he reflected. Do we ever know when the axe is going to fall? Do we ever say thank-you enough for regular, boring, everyday life? We think we have all our ducks lined up neatly in a row, and then Hashem shows us Who’s in charge.
Would Lieba recover? He shuddered with fear, the blanket suddenly too thin for the air conditioning. The doctor said she seemed stable, but they didn’t know much more than that. What if Lieba had sustained brain damage? What if she ended up in the hospital for weeks, or chas v’shalom, had a brain bleed, or lost movement in her limbs? The possibilities were too awful to contemplate. He was helpless, paralyzed, until they had better news.
Yes, everything was clearly in the hands of HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Even if he knew intellectually that none of this was his fault—and that even if it had been his fault, he would only have been the shaliach for an event divinely willed to happen—he still felt horribly guilty. Torturously guilty.
He tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable, ill at ease in a pair of Ralph’s too-short sweat pants and a tee shirt. His dress shirt and pants hung on a chair across the room, illuminated by the children’s Sesame Street night light, mocking him. “And you thought you were going to have so much fuunnn,” Elmo and Big Bird seemed to say.
He finally got up and crept downstairs to the living room. The rest of the house slumbered. Effi pulled a sefer Tehillim out of Ralph’s bookshelf and started to read. “Out of the depths, Hashem…” Words he had once recited automatically now spoke to him with deep, plaintive meaning, as if a formerly black and white film had suddenly become saturated with color. From time to time he stopped, paralyzed by fresh waves of fear.
By 5:00 a.m. he was exhausted, but he still couldn’t sleep. He got dressed, left a note for Ralph and drove through the hushed, slowly lightening streets to the hospital.
He found Hennie sleeping in a chair next to Lieba’s bedside, her hair disheveled. She stirred when he came in and muttered something, but didn’t wake. Hearing the squeak of rubber shoes on the tiled hallway, he went out to find a middle-aged nurse who told him Lieba had been stable all night, except for a moment or two when her blood pressure spiked. “But that’s normal after a trauma,” she said reassuringly.
“No news on her brain scans?” he asked.
“You’d have to ask the doctor,” the nurse said. She appraised him. “Are you family?”
“No,” he said woodenly. “Just a friend.”
“Those scans don’t tell the whole picture,” the nurse said with a friendly shrug. “I’ve been working with head injuries for 25 years, and we see patients we expect to do well who don’t, and patients we think won’t have good outcomes who do really well. Brains are just too complex and tricky!”
He wasn’t sure if that was reassuring or terrifying. He paced the halls for a few minutes, not sure what to do with himself. The hallway was preternaturally quiet at 5:30 a.m. and smelled faintly of ammonia. He wasn’t serving much purpose hanging around, that was for sure—although he felt he had at least done his duty by showing up to check on Lieba.
Effi finally decided to leave a note for Hennie and her family. “I came at 5:00 a.m. because I was so worried,” he wrote. “They’re telling me Lieba was stable all night and there’s no other news yet. I’m going to drive back to Brooklyn to get clean clothes and daven, and I’ll be in touch later to check on her.”
At the first rest stop on the Garden State Parkway, he went to the Starbucks and got himself the biggest expresso they had. Then he zoomed ahead on the still-empty highway till the skyline of the city told him he had left Lieba and her trauma far, far behind for now.
To be continued.