The Hardest Part Is Letting Go of Your Dreams

There are a lot of things wrong with me.

Apparently, I have a collapsed lung. A ruptured spleen. Internal bleeding of unknown origin. And most serious, the contusions on my brain. I've also got broken ribs. Abrasions on my legs, which will require skin grafts; and on my face, which will require cosmetic surgery—but, as the doctors note, that is only if I am lucky.
Right now, in surgery, the doctors have to remove my spleen, insert a new tube to drain my collapsed lung, and stanch whatever else might be causing the internal bleeding. There isn’t a lot they can do for my brain.
“ We’ll just wait and see, ” One of the surgeons says, looking at the CAT scan of my head. “ In the meantime, call down to the blood bank. I need two units of O neg and keep two units ahead. ”

O negative. My blood type. I had no idea. It’s not like it’s something I’ve ever had to think about before. I’ve never been in the hospital unless you count the time I went to the emergency room after I cut my ankle on some broken glass. I didn’t even need stitches then, just a tetanus shot.

In the operating room, the doctors are debating what music to play, just like we were in the car this morning. One guy wants jazz. Another wants
rock. The anesthesiologist, who stands near my head, requests classical. I root for her, and I feel like that must help because someone pops on a Wagner CD. I had hope for something a little light.

The operating room is small and crowded, full of blindingly bright lights, which highlight how grubby this place is. It’s nothing like on TV, where operating rooms are like pristine theaters that could accommodate an opera singer, and an audience. The floor, though buffed shiny, is dingy with scuff marks and rust streaks, which I take to be old bloodstains.
Blood. It is everywhere. It does not faze the doctors one bit. They slice and sew and suction through a river of it, like they are washing dishes in soapy water. Meanwhile, they pump an ever-replenishing stock into my veins.
The surgeon who wanted to listen to rock sweats a lot. One of the nurses has to periodically dab him with gauze that she holds in tongs. At one point, he sweats through his mask and has to replace it.
The anesthesiologist has gentle fingers. She sits at my head, keeping an eye on all my vitals, adjusting the amounts of the fluids and gases and drugs they’re giving me. She must be doing a good job because I don’t appear to feel anything, even though they are yanking at my body. It’s rough and messy work, nothing like that game Operation we used to play as kids where you had to be careful not touch the sides as you removed a bone, or the buzzer would go off.
The anesthesiologist absentmindedly strokes my temples through her latex gloves. This is what Mom used to do when I came down with the flu or got one of those headaches that hurt so bad I used to imagine cutting open a vein in my temple just to relieve the pressure.

The Wagner CD has repeated twice now. The doctors decide it’s time for a new genre. Jazz wins. I’m not into Jazz. Dad is. He loves it, especially the wild, latter-day Coltrane stuff. He says that jazz is punk for old people.
The operation goes on and on. I’m exhausted by it. I don’t know how the doctors have the stamina to keep up. They’re standing still, but it seems harder than running a marathon.

I start to zone out. And then I start to wonder about this state I’m in. If I’m not dead—and the heart monitor is bleeping along, so I assume I’m not—but I’m not in my body, either, can I go anywhere? Am I a ghost? Could I transport myself to a beach in Hawaii? Can I pop over to Carnegie Hall in New York City? Can I go to Mikey?
Just for the sake of experiment, I wiggle my nose like Samantha on Bewitched. Nothing happens. I snap my fingers. Click my heels. I’m still here.
I decide to try a simpler maneuver. I walk into the wall, imagining that I’ll float through it and come out the other side. Except that what happens when I walk into the wall is that I hit a wall.

A nurse bustles in with a bag of blood, and before the door shuts behind her, I slip through it. Now I’m in the hospital corridor. There are lots of doctors and nurses in blue and green scrubs hustling around. A woman on a gurney, her hair in a gauzy blue shower cap, an IV in her arm, calls out, “ William, William. ”

I walk a little farther. There are rows of operating rooms, all full of sleeping people. If the patients inside these rooms are like me, why then can’t I see the people outside the people? Is everyone else loitering about like I seem to be? I’d really like to meet someone in my
condition. I have some questions, like, what is this state I’m in exactly and how do I get out of it? How do I get back to my body? Do I have to wait for the doctors to wake me up? But there’s no one else like me around. Maybe the rest of them figured out how to get to Hawaii.
I follow a nurse through a set of automatic double doors. I’m in a small waiting room now.

My grandparents are here.
Gran is chattering away to Gramps, or maybe just to the air. It’s her way of not letting emotion get the best of her. I’ve seen her do it before, when Gramps had a heart attack. She is wearing her gardening smock, which is smudged with mud. She must have been working in her greenhouse when she heard about us. Gran’s hair is short and curly and gray; she’s been wearing it in a permanent wave, Dad says, since the 1970s.
“ It’s easy, ” Gran says. “ No muss, no fuss. ” This is so typical of her. No nonsense. She’s so quintessentially practical that most people would never guess she has a thing for angels. She keeps a collection of ceramic angels, yarn-doll angels, blown-glass angels, you-name-it angels, in a special china hutch in her sewing room. And she doesn’t just collect angels; she believes in them. She thinks that they’re everywhere. Once, a pair of birds nested in the pond in the woods behind their house. Gran was convinced that it was her long-dead parents, come to watch over her.

Another time, we were sitting outside on her porch and I saw a red bird. “ Is that a red crossbill? ” I’d asked Gran.

She’d shaken her head. “ My sister Gloria is a crossbill, ” Gran had said, referring to my recently deceased great-aunt Glo, with whom Gran had never gotten along. “ She wouldn’t be coming around here. ”

Gramps is staring into the dregs of his Styrofoam cup, peeling away the top of it so that little white balls collect in his lap. I can tell it’s the worst kind of coffee, the kind that looks like it was brewed in 1997 and has been sitting on a burner ever since. Even so, I wouldn’t mind a cup.
You can draw a straight line from Gramps to Dad to Mikey, although Gramps’s wavy hair has gone from blond to gray and he is stockier than Mikey, who is a stick, and Dad, who is wiry and muscular. But they all have the same watery grayblue eyes, the color of the ocean on a cloudy day.
Maybe this is why I now find it hard to look at Gramps.

Juilliard was Gran’s idea. She’s from Massachusetts originally, but she moved to New Jersey in 1955, on her own. Now that would be no big deal, but I guess fifty-two years ago it was kind of scandalous for a twenty-two-year-old unmarried woman to do that kind of thing. Gran claimed she was drawn to wild open wilderness and it didn’t get more wild than the endless forests and craggy beaches of Oregon. She got a job as a secretary working for the Forest Service. Gramps was working there as a biologist.

We go back to Massachusetts sometimes in the summers, to a lodge in the western part of the state that for one week is taken over by Gran’s extended family. That’s when I see the second cousins and great aunts and uncles whose names I barely recognize. I have lots of family in Massachusetts, but they’re all from Gramps’s side.
Last summer at the Massachusetts retreat, I brought my microphone's so I could keep up my practicing for an upcoming school. The flight wasn’t full, so the stewardesses let it travel in a bag on seat next to me.
Mikey thought this was hilarious and zipped open the bag a tiny bit and kept trying to feed it
pretzels.

At the lodge, I gave a little concert one night, in the main room, with my relatives and the dead game animals mounted on the wall as my audience. It was after that that someone mentioned Juilliard, and Gran ran off with the idea.
At first, it seemed far-fetched. There was a perfectly good music program at the university near us. And, if I wanted to stretch, there was a conservatory in Seattle. Juilliard was expensive. Mom and Dad were intrigued with the idea of it, but I could tell neither one of them really wanted to relinquish me to New York City or go into hock so that I could maybe become a soloist with some second-rate small-town acoustic player . They had no idea whether I was good enough. In fact, neither did I. Professor Christie told me that I was
one of the most promising students she’d ever taught, but she’d never mentioned Juilliard to me. Juilliard was for virtuoso musicians, and it seemed arrogant to even think that they’d give me a second glance.
But after the retreat, when someone else, someone impartial and from the East Coast, deemed me Juilliard-worthy, the idea burrowed into Gran’s brain. She took it upon herself to speak to Professor Christie about it, and my teacher took hold of the idea like a terrier to a bone. Gran had taught me some methods about singing.
So, I filled out my application, collected my letters of recommendation, and sent in a recording of my singing. I didn’t tell Frank about any of this. I had told myself that it was because there was no point advertising it when even getting an audition was such a long shot. But even then I’d recognized that for the lie that it was. A small part of me felt like even applying was some kind of betrayal. Juilliard was in New York. Frank was here.

But not at high school anymore. He was a year ahead of me, and this past year, my senior year, he’d started at the university in town. He only went to school part-time now because Shooting Star was starting to get popular. There was a record deal with a Jersey-based label, and a lot of traveling to gigs. So only after I got the creamy envelope embossed with The Juilliard School and a letter inviting me to audition did I tell Frank that I’d applied. I explained how many people didn’t get that far. At first he looked a little awestruck, like he couldn’t quite believe it.

Then he gave a sad little smile. “ Yo Mama better watch their back, ” he said.

The auditions were held in San Francisco. Dad had some big conference at the school that week and couldn’t get away, and Mom had just started a new job at the travel agency, so Gran volunteered to accompany me. “ We’ll make a girls’ weekend of it. Take high tea at the Fairmont. Go window-shopping in Union Square. Ride the ferry to Alcatraz. We’ll be tourists. ”

But a week before we were due to leave, Gran tripped over a tree root and sprained her ankle. She had to wear one of those clunky boots and wasn’t supposed to walk. Minor panic ensued. I said I could just go by myself—drive, or take the train, and come right back.
It was Gramps who insisted on taking me. We drove down together in his pickup truck. We didn’t talk much, which was fine by me because I was so nervous. I kept fingering the Popsicle-stick good-luck talisman Mikey had presented me with before we left.
“ Break an arm, ” he’d told me.

Gramps and I listened to classical music and farm reports on the radio when we could pick up a station. Otherwise, we sat in silence. But it was such a calming silence; it made me relax and feel closer to him than any heart-to-heart would have.
Gran had booked us in a really frilly inn, and it was funny to see Gramps in his work boots and plaid flannel amid all the lacy doilies.
But he took it all in stride.

The audition was grueling. I had to sing five different songs.
I walked out with my legs wobbly and my underarms wet with sweat. But my endorphin's were surging and that, combined with the huge sense of relief, left me totally giddy.

“ Shall we see the town? ” Gramps asked, his lips twitching into a smile.

“ Definitely! ”
We did all the things Gran had promised we would do. Gramps took me to high tea and shopping, although for dinner, we skipped out on the reservations Gran had made at some fancy place on Fisherman’s Wharf and instead wandered into Chinatown, looking for the restaurant with the longest line of people waiting outside, and ate there.

When we got back home, Gramps dropped me off and enveloped me in a hug. Normally, he was a hand-shaker, maybe a back-patter on really special occasions. His hug was strong and tight, and I knew it was his way of telling me that he’d had a wonderful time.

“ Me, too, Gramps, ” I whispered.