The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
’Til death do us part
Bestselling author Zoe Fishman navigates an uncertain future as a newly widowed mom.
It was a Friday, the end of the first full week of summer. In two days, our youngest son Lev would turn 2. Our oldest, Ari, was 5 1/2. Kindergarten awaited him in the fall, but it seemed light years away.
We sat around the kitchen table, finishing breakfast. My parents were in town from Alabama to celebrate Lev, and my mom, too, as they share the same birthday. The kids shrieked at each other the way brothers do, and the house smelled of waffles. Birds sang outside, ushering in the day.
My husband Ronen, their Aba (the Hebrew word for father), grabbed his bag from the chair closest to the door, ready to leave for work.
“Bye Abbaaaaa,” Lev and Ari called, as he circled around them for a peanut buttery kiss and sticky hug.
“Bye guys,” he replied. “Bye honey,” he said to me, kissing me on the lips. He tasted like coffee.
“Bye,” I said. “See you later at your mom’s. 4 o’clock?” “Yep.”
And he walked out the door. Blue and white polka dot shirt, hunter green pants, his blue bag slung over his shoulder, his wedding ring glinting in the early morning sunlight streaming through the blinds, his deliberately tousled hair pointing every which way.
I never saw him alive again.
The story of us is the kind of story that people loved to hear. Tell me again, how you met, they would always ask, first at loud bars in New York, then at clumsily but earnestly crafted dinners in our tiny Brooklyn apartment, again at the wedding and then at just about any dinner party we attended. It’s a good one, I never blamed them. And boy, was it fun to either tell or hear, sitting next to Ronen, smiles in our eyes. We couldn’t believe our good fortune either. And it was hard-won good fortune, too, which made it even better.
I officially met Ronen when I was 30. I say officially because I had met him at a party at least six years before that, when he was dating a coworker of mine. His handsomeness made my breath short, my heart pump pump pumping as I uttered an awkward hello and then watched him ascend the stairs to the roof, a gaggle of girls behind him.
His face. It was perfect to me. And more than that, much more than that, I felt like I had seen it before. He was just so familiar — his strong, dark eyebrows; inquisitive big, brown eyes; the slight swell of olive skin underneath each of them intriguing. Like he had seen some things. A dark beard hugging his jaw. A Sephardic man of mystery with a name I’d never heard before: Ronen. A name that evoked deserts and beaches, sun and sweat. Exotic.
Years passed. He and my coworker broke things off and she began seeing his best friend. The job at which we worked, an Internet startup selling luxury goods out of a crappy office in Manhattan’s Fur District, folded. Everyone went their separate ways, scurrying into the next phases of their lives, staying somewhat in touch via email but not really. We were in our 20s in New York. Unencumbered.
I moved to Brooklyn. I moved back to Manhattan briefly. I considered leaving entirely. I could not find my groove. I worked in book publishing, but what I really wanted to do, as the cliché goes,
was write. With one foot out the door, my friend offered me her affordable, one bedroom apartment in Carroll Gardens. She was moving in with her fiancé. My extended foot was pulled back to join its mate and I ran — you always run for once-in-a-lifetime rental opportunities in Brooklyn — to make myself a home. And I did. I began to write, small gigs at first, but paying ones. Nothing previously in my life had felt more fulfilling to me.
One morning, taking the F train to work, guess who? Ronen, the Sephardic mystery man, waiting on the same platform. My heart pounded just as quickly as it had those four years before.
Should I say hello to him? I wondered. What if he’s a jerk? Then I’d have to switch subway cars. No. Forget it.
I was juggling enough “maybe” guys in the background to forego the hello. I had learned at that stage in my dating career that it was always nice to have at least one guy on a pedestal, even if the pedestal was completely unwarranted. Because then you at least had some hope.
Some weekdays I would see him. Not every morning, but some. And I would always toy again with the idea of saying hello, but inevitably back down, instead trying my best to look approachable and fun loving. To smile. This is not an easy task when your face is pressed into someone’s armpit during the always-packed commute, but I tried. Nothing.
Ronen became my subway crush.
“You see Subway Crush this morning?” my friends would text me. “Just say hi Zoe, what’s the problem?” they would chide me over drinks. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Thinking of those words now — what’s the worst that could happen? — a lump the size of an apple forms in my throat because how could I have known, how could we have known, that the worst would indeed happen? But then, 12 years ago, the worst that could happen in my world was that I would have to choose a different subway car.
One snowy winter morning I scribbled “you’re my subway crush” and my phone number on a tiny piece of notebook paper as the train jostled along underneath the city. He was standing right beside the door, reading a book, his back to me. All I had to do was slip him the note as I exited the train at 23rd Street. That’s all I had to do. The train stopped, I walked past him and chickened out, the note damp in my fist as I clomped up the stairs to the street above.
We drove to Ronen’s mother’s house in Roswell for dinner that afternoon — the kids, my parents and I. I hadn’t heard from Ronen all day, which was strange for him but not so strange as to cause alarm. I pulled into her driveway and his car was not there. Strange again.
It was 4 p.m. and then 5 p.m. and no one had heard from him. I couldn’t let my brain shift to a catastrophic place, I don’t think any of us could. And when you have two little kids running around, telling you they’re hungry, making the demands that kids make, there’s little time for anything but them.
But then it was 6 o’clock. We had texted him. His mother had called him. No answer. And that was truly unheard of. His mother and I huddled by the kitchen, trying him again. But he didn’t pick up. The emergency room did.
“This is the Kennestone Hospital Emergency Room,” a woman said. “Get here immediately.”
Once there, some well-meaning and fast-talking woman wound us through fluorescent hallways and corridors. Ronen’s phone, she said, could not be unlocked. She had no way of contacting us. We kept asking her what had happened to him. She couldn’t tell us, she was sorry, but the doctors would.
And then my mother-in-law and I were deposited in a tiny room, the kind you see on television doctor shows, and she shut the door. This was not a room that had ever heard good news, I knew that much. Darkness fell like a curtain. We held hands. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I recited the Shema in my head. Please God, I thought. Please.
Two blonde women in pale green scrubs entered, their eyes scared and sad.
“He’s had a brain aneurysm,” one of them explained. “What?”
“An AVM brain aneurysm. His brain is filled with blood.” “What?”
“On a scale of one to five, this is a five.”
“This is bad? How bad?” “He’s in a coma,” one of them said. “You can come see him now, if you like.”
“Is he going to die?” I asked. “You can come see him now,” she repeated.
Had it not been for one fateful Saturday, when I was running late to meet friends in the city, I’m not sure if Ronen and I would ever have connected. At that time, you could wait outside to see the F train coming before descending down into the abyss of Brooklyn to catch it. There he was. On a Saturday. Today is the day, I told myself. On the platform, I waited for him. The train pulled in. He did not come flying down the stairs as I had hoped. I had to get on, I was already late. I collapsed into my seat as the train idled, cursing my luck. The doors began to close and then — a hand wedged in between them. Ronen. And not only Ronen. Ronen with my former coworker and her husband. She had married Ronen’s best friend.
She walked up to me as the train click-clacked through the underworld.
“Zoe!” We hugged, my legs shaking. Ronen approached behind her.
“I see you on the subway all the time!” I blurted out.
“I see you too,” he replied, in a voice that was not at all the voice I had imagined him having. An American voice.
He asked me to join them for the dance party they were attending, but I couldn’t. As he spoke to me, with unabashed enthusiasm and zero self-consciousness, I thought he is not the man I thought he was at all. I was wrong. But I was also right. Our exchange was so immediate, so fluid, that I knew I had indeed known him, somewhere, somehow, before.
We parted ways and I continued on uptown a bit, to my friends. Outside above the sidewalk, sun peeked through the gray clouds. My heart, it had wings. It was him. It would be him. I knew. I had always known.
In the hospital room, Ronen was his same old beautiful self. He was tan; his beard black with threads of gray; his arms and legs peeking out of his hospital gown strong. A nurse came in and handed me his wedding ring; his watch; his wallet. I closed one hand around these items that were as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror and one hand around his elegant, tapered fingers. My mother-in-law took his other hand.
“The doctor will be by in the morning,” the nurse said. We sat.
Ronen’s sister and her wife arrived, backlit by the hallway in the dim room. We cried and we cried. A tube carried blood out of Ronen’s brain into a bag.
This was the healthiest, most affable life force I had ever met. I thought he would live forever. It never even occurred to me, even on my darkest day, that he could die. That I would be a widow. A single mother of two boys.
Everything I thought I knew was turned upside down; my belief system a flimsy rucksack emptied onto a cold, dirt floor.
Ronen was the only person I ever dated who truly wanted me to be me. Once, during a particularly uncomfortable talk about “us,” I interrupted him. We were walking in Brooklyn, right outside a bar.
“Let’s get a drink,” I said. “Why do you need a drink to talk about this?” he asked. That was Ronen.
Within a year, we were engaged. That next May, we were married in Orange Beach, in front of my parents’ condo, the same beach I had grown up driving to as soon as the air turned warm. We went up in chairs. We danced a hora that lasted an eternity. To feel such love from people we loved, to feel their joy about our joy: that was an unbelievable gift.
Walking down the aisle as a guitarist strummed “Heavenly Day” by Patty Griffin, Ronen beaming at me from under the chupa, was the most grateful I had ever been.
The next morning, I told the boys that Aba was sick, but the doctors were doing everything they could to make him better. Everything had been an out of body experience since the emergency room had picked up Ronen’s phone, and this was no different. It felt like watching a sad movie about somebody else’s life except it was my own.
I settled the kids. I thanked my parents. Before I got back in the car to return to the hospital, I called my best friend in New Jersey. Something horrible has happened, I told her. Something really bad.
Two days passed in a blur. Family arrived and we all held each other and cried. Ronen lay in his bed, the same. Still beautiful, still hooked into machines that were keeping him alive.
I held his hand. I watched the blood being slowly sucked from his flooded brain. I put balm on his cracked lips. Lips like pillows. I cleaned his beard as best I could. I massaged his feet. I cried and I cried and I hid from the endless stream of concerned friends, all bringing more and more food that I had no interest in consuming.
Every night I kissed Ronen goodbye and went home to the boys, to tuck them into bed. Aba is still sick, I told them. They are still trying to help him.
OK, they said.
We spoke to the doctors. They all told us that Ronen’s prognosis was grave. Even if he did come out of his coma, the likelihood of him being a virtual vegetable was very high. He would never come home again, they told us.
But no doctor could tell us yes, 100 percent, this will be the case — 98 percent, but not 100 — 2 percent left over for a miracle, if you believed in those.
I had believed once, when I had somehow had the intuition to know that Ronen would be the love of my life, the father of my children. I did not believe any more.
I knew, in my heart, that he was gone. The morning after we found him at the hospital, when I had gone back to gather our kids at my mother-in-law’s house, I walked into the bathroom and closed the door. And when I did, the lights flickered. They had never flickered before.