140006838X (49 page)

Oliver declined the offer of lunch, even as the request made him aware of his hunger. Waiting for the hospital elevator, he stood beside a well-groomed man in a perfectly tailored camel-hair coat—Alice would have recognized its design. The man held a briefcase in front of him, below his waist, with two hands. Oliver figured him for some sort of heavy hitter, a hospital exec most likely. He had a small pin on the lapel of his coat—it looked like one of the AIDS ribbons, only this one was green instead of pink.

When the elevator arrived they both got on, and were alone in the box. Oliver pressed for the sixth floor; the guy asked for eight. Brief eye contact. “How are you today?” asked the man.

“Hanging in, you?”

“The same.”

“What’s the pin for?”

“Organ donation.”

Oliver stared at the guy. His hunger gnawed. The elevator hummed and the two rode in silence. At the sixth floor a bell chimed and Oliver couldn’t step out quickly enough.

“Good luck to you,” said the man.

As the doors closed, Oliver answered, “God bless you, too.”

He started into the familiar hallway, with its cellophaned lunch trays stacked on rolling carts, its orderlies in a small group shooting the shit, middle-afternoon languor, its everyday plainness. At this point, doctors were prepping him for the endgame; when Alice’s mother updated him on the baby’s nightly activities and health (
Today we picked apples and played in the leaves
), he was trying to figure out whether he should tell her to come back down. His head felt as if it could split open at any moment. He felt coils inside him tightening, ready to spring at anyone who so much as looked in his direction.

He thought about what that whore had said:
Her suffering is biblical.
People wanted suffering to be biblical because they wanted it to make sense, wanted it to have a purpose—just like they wanted to believe in guardian angels, spirits with a purpose after death, some kind of cosmic system that let the dead stay close to what they’d lost. But if you had to lose this much, wouldn’t it be better to forget? To be allowed to let go?

That’s what you ended up with, no matter what: The brick wall. The void.

—

He washed up and put on all the gear while the nursing assistant snored. He didn’t care if anyone else was in the room, and immediately homed in on his wife: laid out, neatly tucked in, her thin body causing only the slightest raised outline beneath the covers. Alice’s face was pale as a bone, her eyes shut, her mouth just a bit open, as if words were poised, ready to escape. So smooth, this sight, so minimal. Its horrid beauty made him shiver. Oliver’s weight collapsed onto the little chair. He leaned into the bed and stretched his arms toward her, laying his head down, his cheek pressing on the scratchy sheet. From this vantage point he could see the slight movements of her throat. She was breathing. Barely. He gulped, and watched those slight, almost imperceptible breaths. “If you have to go,” he managed, “you go. It’s fine. No matter what,
tu esta mi favorito
. So if you have to leave us all, leave. Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about any of us. It’s going to be good. You do what you have to.”

—

On the sixth day after the transplant, she was down to one pad a day. Blasco guessed it was simply time. Her body was ready. She no longer needed platelet transplants. For the first time in a while, they took a bag off the Christmas tree. The heparin drip remained, of course, and the saline, and the liquid nutrition, and more than a few antibiotics. All of her hair was gone, and her skull was smooth in the manner of clichés (cue balls, eggs), and when there was a wrinkle in her brow from a bad dream or inner tremor, it made a line that ran all the way back into her scalp. She had no eyebrows. They still had the patch behind her ear to deal with nausea, and were still putting the suction stick into her mouth to get rid of buildup—and Oliver still couldn’t get a straight answer whether it was mucus they were sucking out of her mouth or strips of her flesh. But her liver counts had dropped, which was encouraging as well. Best of all was her white blood cell count: .4. Hospital staffers were impressed and reticent, as if they were scared of getting too hopeful. But the bounce had arrived one or two days before the best-case scenario time lines, and that was exciting. Alice celebrated by sleeping through the day.

The next day her white blood cells had jumped to 37, and her platelets were at an astonishing 8,000. The swelling in her feet had receded; now bones in her feet were actually visible, for the first time in who knew how long. When Alice managed to get her eyes open, they remained unfocused, or vacant; she stared at a person but really seemed to be looking into some faraway universe. Oliver said her name, received no response. Tilda did the same, and got something more: a glint. A smile imbued with a hint of crazy. The resident on rounds found it unsurprising. “She’s on a lot of different painkillers.”

The first thing she was able to eat was an orange Tic Tac. Hours later she felt game and managed two sips of tea, though her throat almost closed up during the second sip. She gagged. Her face went open with panic, but Oliver remained calm. “Close your mouth. Hold it in your cheeks. Okay. Tip your head back. On three, ready?” Her shock gave way to agreement; her focus narrowed into a grave understanding. Oliver was ready to take her and physically tilt her back, but there was no need: the tea went down. Later that evening she managed two sips of water. She followed this up by nibbling from the corner of a cracker. The next morning, three sips of Ensure.

She was still sleeping a great deal, working her way toward sitting up without the mechanical bed, but also greeted friends with lucid eyes, managing short sentences of thanks and affection: “It’s great to see you.” “I’m so blessed you stuck with me.” Blasco wanted to start switching some of her medicines to pill form, wean her off so many intravenous drips. The second pill she tried came back up, meaning the antinausea drip would take its place back on the Christmas tree. Throughout her days, her hand was often in Oliver’s. “Eating is very important for you now,” Blasco said. “High protein. High calories. Lots of liquids and fluids. We want a thousand calories a day.” Alice nodded, a vigorous up and down.

As if it were her turn in a script, Nurse Hwan stepped in and took over. “We had a patient who had to get his weight up; we told him if he eats a thousand calories a day, he gets out of here. This man had his wife get him boxes of Oreos and some milk. A box a day, he dipped them Oreos in milk and ate. After five days, they let him out.”

Alice squeezed Oliver’s hand. This marked the first mention, the first raised possibility of release. The words were electrifying, and their hope spread. Friends now had license, a directed purpose, their love arrived as food: visitors donning the hazmat and presenting Tupperware dishes, at once nervous and eager, as if they were supplicants from the outer provinces and Alice were the fickle empress: her beloved key lime pie, homemade and still warm from the oven; chocolate babka from Zabar’s; layered lemon cakes; fluffy almond croissants. Tilda schlepped over a blender, set it up in the pantry, and mixed protein shakes with 200 calories a pop. One of Alice’s notebooks got appropriated as a daily calorie ledger. A Xerox with a list of different items and their counts was pasted in. Blasco was supportive, he wanted to get her off liquid nutrition as soon as possible, it would be the best thing for her. But the 450 calories in a single slice of key lime pie remained a fantasy. Same for a Krispy Kreme glazed donut (210 calories). Even half of a single serving of Rice Krispies (child’s box = 130 calories) was impossible. Three sips of apple juice (one glass = 120 calories) was an accomplishment. Just eating toast brought back the runs. “It’s expected,” explained Nurse Hwan. “Your body has to adjust to eating food again. You will get lots of stomach cramps.”

With generous scoring, rounding up, she managed 150 calories that day. The next, her total shot up another hundred.

Two more bags came off the Christmas tree; the first battery pack was detached, unplugged, and taken away, along with the chaired assistant, removed from deathwatch in front of the room. She just stopped being there at some point. Also apparent: the rest of the nursing staff was taking longer to respond, checking in more sporadically. Oliver realized this was because other patients were in the critical stages of
their
transplants. Alice, by contrast, was getting better.

—

I look like a molting lizard. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked for a mirror. But I wanted to see myself, after all this time.

I wish I could provide a window about where I was. But I have no insights, could not tell you if I left: so there is nothing, really, to report. I am choosing to view a good sign in the scabs that have formed over the sores at the corners of my mouth, a better one that these scabs have started peeling. I am hoping that the burn of red will fade from my face and even out with my ivory scalp—for now, however, I am two-toned. I am concentrating on performing the tasks asked of me: standing for minutes at a time, doing my little arm rotations, raising one leg at a time in sets of ten. Nurses come by to motivate me, passing along what sounds like both a rumor and a challenge: if I am strong and eating enough by the end of the week, I can go home. They want me to stuff myself, urge me onward. My whole life I’ve wished for this: being told I’m
supposed
to binge on desserts. Now I have a parade of beloved friends delivering them up, and of course, I can’t eat more than a few bites. That will change, I am sure. I couldn’t be more motivated. I even have my own soundtrack. Whenever Merv comes in, he starts his playlist off with a ludicrous rap that includes these words:
I’m hungry, I’m in the mood, plain and simple, I need food.

His visits aren’t every day. Not anymore. “Just keeping you honest,” he tells me. “Thought I’d do something nutty. Actually, you know, follow the schedule they set for me.”

“I see.”

“Honestly?” I see the romance of what could have been. “Classes,” he says.

Perhaps Oliver said something about him to the higher-ups in Social Services; perhaps more happened between them. I’m not willing to find out. The two seem comfortable enough that Oliver doesn’t mind walloping him at cards. That’s plenty.

“Of course,” I say.

The rules: I cannot be in crowds; I cannot take public transportation; I cannot be in places with dust; I should not be around a construction site. What about a newly renovated apartment? “No newly renovated apartments,” Blasco responds. “Nothing with dust still settling.” I know my husband enough to see him processing the answer.

Then I realize: “We need to call my mother.” I address Oliver, rousing him from whatever he’d been mulling. “I want Doe home as soon as I am.”

Oliver takes his time. “Are you sure we can take care of her?” He asks me to hear him out, tells me he misses the baby, too. He wonders if it would be wise to wait a week or so. “Just until you get stronger?”

He wonders if my mother can come for a little while, whether she can take off any more days from work.

“I’m recovering early,” I protest. “I’m already ahead of schedule.”

“Everyone is pleased with how you are progressing.” Blasco smiles, patient as always. “What we don’t want, is for your baby to come back and give you a cold. Then, four days, you are right back here with me.”

“This whole thing bites us right in the ass,” Oliver says.

They are nervous Nellies, says my mother. She’ll get everything packed. She can load it into the car and drive down in an afternoon. Just give her the word. And so we continue riding on so much goodwill and radiant love. It’s humbling, how many people continue to go out of their way for me, how much effort has been lavished upon me. Oliver agrees. Blasco nods and seems a bit choked up and tells me again how impressed he is, but that we have to be very careful. When the doctor and nurses are gone, Oliver and I are alone, and I tell him that I know he’s taken good care of me. I know it hasn’t been easy on him. I have a lot of feelings about him right now, I say, but I would be wrong to not thank him for this. His eyes are wide, his face half-contorted.

“I was thinking. Williamsburg has those big lofts. What if we buy another rattrap and fix it up? I liked doing that. We could wait until you are good to go and it’s safe to move. It’s one of those hoods your übercool friends love, right? We find a building with an elevator. Stay there long enough for you to figure out what’s next. Let Doe get a little bigger. See if the neighborhood develops.”

He’s aged so much. Through his brow and tired, baggy eyes, here is a boy, pleading.

“I just want to get out of here,” I answer.

“Yeah,” he says.

“We’ll figure the rest.”

“Yeah?” he asks.

“We will,” I say. “We’ll try.”

This is as much as I can give right now, and he must understand, because his hand grips mine. Soon he will be cleaning the room, carefully removing the pictures and cards from the wall, then removing the tape, then folding the posters, and putting them away, placing them in a shoulder bag I long ago received for working some show. He stacks the cards. He starts folding my clothes. Soon he will go downstairs and pick up my many prescriptions from the pharmacy.

One thing I am going to have to learn to do for myself is change the dressings that surround my central line. It needs to stay in for a while after I am discharged, insurance against something going wrong, so I must be responsible for it staying clean. Nurse Hwan puts the sealed plastic kit in front of me and gives me instructions: put on gloves, put down a sterile tarp, put on a mask. Always have a box of extra gloves nearby. When the kit is open, put on a new pair. Wipe with the sponge to help the tape come off. Cap your dressings in the same order every time: red, white, blue.

I watch. I try to learn. I am going to have to learn so much again.

The physical therapist—younger than me, tall and dark-haired, hatefully skinny—knocks and peeks her masked head inside. Justine asks if I feel like getting out of the room. “One time around the floor. Let’s get you walking.” I am stunned, a bit worried, but at the same time, the possibility is exciting, and Justine makes it easy to get swept up, her positive attitude contagious. I am stronger, but it still takes me time to rise, don the proper garb. Justine is patient and competent and grounded, and between us we figure out that this is the first time I will be out of a hospital room in twenty-five days. This time I am not doing the rounds with Oliver. I am not walking with Merv. It’s me and the therapist. I am learning to do it by myself.