Moonface (9 page)

“Charlie!” I gasped.

“I'm fine. Go back to sleep.”

The next morning, as we lay in bed reading, Charlie tore a piece of notebook paper out and gave it to me. On it was a cartoon of a skinny man with blue curly hair and a bloated stomach, and in that stomach, there was a TV, a telephone, a piece of furniture, a tree, an apple, a refrigerator, a bicycle, and some small birds. “That's how I feel right now,” he said, before standing up slowly and trying one more time for the bathroom. We knew that one of the hardest parts of the surgery was getting his intestines back on task. Coupled with the painkillers, which slowed his system even more, he was in agony.

Though I felt like I could walk all over Iowa City, I tried to stay close to Charlie. But, that evening, our parents left, and I was putting things on the shelf, arranging books by author from A to Z, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and plays. All night Charlie had paced up and down the long hall. When I was done with my redecorating, I found Charlie curled up on the floor, his knees almost to his chin, crying over the cramped feeling inside him.

“Let's talk about the pain,” she says. Joan is not a sado-masochist. She just really wants to know. She might be a hypochondriac, but I'm not sure. Maybe she just complains a lot. But I think she just really wants to understand.

There's a bookstore with a coffee shop that Charlie and I frequent. Steam's always rising from people's coffee mugs as they type away on their laptops. Charlie and I come for tea and to browse the aisles, and there is always someone there we know. A woman I know greets me as I stand in line. She has a no-nonsense haircut kept high and tight. Sometimes, questions come out of her mouth before she considers what she's asking.

For example: the last time I saw her, I was in the middle of kidney failure, with all the symptoms emerging all over my body. Canker sores had taken over my mouth and I was trying to speak without them showing. I thought I was being discreet by putting a hand over my lips, but as I answered Joan's greeting, she had twisted her face and asked, “What's wrong with your mouth? Did you have dental work or something?”

Another time, Charlie saw her walking up the side of a country road and pulled up beside her and asked if she wanted a ride. She looked inside the window at his exposed arm on the steering wheel, and the first words that came out of her mouth were, “Is that a rash?”

When we see her in line for her coffee, Charlie quickly ducks into the graphic-novel section deep in the store's interior. Sly fox. When we sit down at a table, she looks me straight in the eyes through her thick lenses, and I think I will try to squirm my way out of this. I try to be clear without lying.

“What were you feeling?” she asked.

“Well, obviously, the incision was sore.”

“How about before then? Did your kidneys—or your kidney—hurt? Did it feel like your kidney was trying to leap out of your body?” She grabs at the skin around her waist and squeezes. She scrunches her face; she furrows her brow. She looks like she's taking a poo.

“No, the kidney didn't hurt. I couldn't really feel that.”

“Dialysis?”

“Yes, getting the dialysis catheter.”

“Yes,” she says, “tell me about that.” I go through details with her, the slow insertion of the tube in my neck, how I felt like I was not human, but a robot with interchanging parts out for repair. I go on and on, making the stitches, the cuts, and blood-letting, skin-tearing details more scenes from a horror film than a medical procedure.

Her rapid-fire questions shoot holes in my brain. Little holes that open up spots I'm afraid will leak. I don't tell her about seeing Charlie writhing in pain, curled up like a child on the bedroom floor. I leave out the part about the tears I caused him, how those moments are ingrained in my memory like scars, and how I replay those scenes and look for ways to call them back and change them. No, I don't tell her about that pain.

After the transplant, Charlie went to his own clinic appointments, where the doctors checked to see if he was healing up nicely. He wasn't. An infection on his incision kept getting worse even though we thought it was getting better, and at one point they had to open him up again and let him heal from the inside out. So for several days, Charlie walked around with an open wound under his sterile gauze dressing, and if you looked under the dressing and closely enough, you could see straight into his gut. I thought he would be thrilled by the repulsiveness of this, by its resemblance to science fiction. He seemed embarrassed by it.

This particular week, we arrive on his usual day, but it's not the taciturn Taiwanese surgeon who operated on him. Instead, it's another transplant surgeon who is white, stocky, and balding prematurely.

“
Hola
!” he says, before the exam room door is fully open, before he even looks up from the chart he's reading. “Charlie O”Doyle? You Charlie O”Doyle? Age twenty-nine?”

“That's me,” Charlie says, half-naked and supine on the exam table.

“How's it going?” The doctor's words come out of his mouth in short, quick bursts. He is so clearly not from Iowa—
New York
, I think,
definitely New York
—and he is so clearly a surgeon. Even though he is short and only a little thick, his movements take up so much space in the room. And not in that clumsy way, but in the exacting, confident way of a man who is used to wielding a scalpel. This guy was born to be a surgeon.

I'm observing him from a chair in the corner, and for the first five minutes, I'm pretty sure he has no idea I'm here.

“You're the hero?” he asks Charlie.

“Pardon?” Charlie says.

“The hero. That's what I call the donors, because if you think about it, that's what you are. You've saved a life. You know, heroes.”

I can tell by Charlie's half-smile that he is more amused than impressed by this guy's schtick. Charlie's eyes follow the doctor as he moves back and forth across the room with caffeinated energy. His blue scrubs swish between his legs when he walks.

The surgeon, who does not even introduce himself, looks down at Charlie's open wound and says, “Hay-oh! What do we have here? Got infected, eh?”

“Yeah,” Charlie says.

“Ouch,” the doctor says, leaning in for a closer look. He sucks in air through his teeth. “How's the recipient look?”

“Well, you can ask her yourself. She's right there.” Charlie nods to me, and the surgeon finally turns around to find me there.

“You?” he says. He looks me up and down, his eyes cutting down my body like a knife.

I nod.

He jumps back around to Charlie and doesn't even ask me who I am or how Charlie and I are connected. Nothing.

“How did you get roped into that?” the doctor says.

“I thought the drugs would be better,” Charlie says, quite honestly. And it's true. He listened carefully about the morphine pump through the whole evaluation process, but when it came to pass, he was disappointed. The drugs just dulled his pain and put him to sleep. They didn't give him any of the hallucinations he was hoping for.

“Perks! Ha!” The surgeon snorts and looks like he's going to give Charlie a frat boy high-five or something. “Sweet.” He presses on the flesh around Charlie's wound with his gloved hands, asking Charlie if it hurts. Every once in a while, Charlie's leg jerks up off the table like he's being electrocuted.

“Yow-za!” Charlie yells once.

“Let's seal this puppy up.” I don't listen as he tends to Charlie and gives him the horrendous details of what he's about to do. “You might want to look away when I do this. It's not going to feel good,” he says as he dabs a metallic liquid on the wound.

“Curses!” Charlie yells, like an old angry man, tightening his face, gripping the sides of the table with his fists. I don't know if I should run to him or stay where I am. I angle my head from behind the surgeon's body so I can see if Charlie needs me, but I can't get past the white lab coat. As he keeps electrocuting Charlie, he tries to talk, like the way dentists try to talk to you as they drill in your mouth.

“So, I always ask heroes this. I just want to know. Would you do it again?”

Now I listen. This guy is upfront. He's got the audacity to ask this in front of me the recipient, in front of Charlie's one true love. I want to clarify things for him. Charlie wasn't recruited for this. I didn't ask him for anything. No, this was an act of love.

Charlie lets out a weighty sigh and turns his face to the wall. “No. No, I don't think I would.”

He keeps facing the pale pink wall while the doctor puts his hands all over him. Meanwhile, I'm frozen in the chair. I have a supportive smile across my face, but I feel it slowly sliding downward, though I try to keep it up. Charlie is trying to hold his grunts in now, pushing those sounds deep down in a place where they won't emerge. I lean over to see if I can see Charlie from the side of the doctor's coat. But an explanation doesn't follow. The paper on the table underneath Charlie crinkles every time he moves. The fluorescent lights are stark, buzzing.

The surgeon puts another dab of the painful solution on his skin, and when he does, I am the one who winces.

Chapter Eight
The Illusive Sleep Stealer and his Dancing Cockatoos

S
leep is slowly being stolen from me. i try to hunt down the thief, but all I can come up with are the usual suspects: medications, the seasonal changes, the burrito for dinner. I blame it on these things, but when I lie in bed, I know what keeps me up. Charlie's frank admission has been on repeat in my head ever since we left the doctor's office that morning, like a song that you hate to hear but can't get out of your head. A week after that appointment, we still don't talk about what he said. Charlie and I walk around the tiny apartment, dodging each other in the hall; I squeeze my shoulders into my body as I pass.

During Charlie's long bout with post-surgery constipation and the pain from an infected incision, a large envelope came in the mail, and in it was a diploma-looking certificate that acknowledged Charles Kritvise O”Doyle for giving what they called “The Gift of Life.” A grand, formal thing, it was printed on thick ivory parchment paper and embossed with the hospital seal. I told Charlie we should frame it and hang it in the living room.

“Please, Moonface,” Charlie said, looking at me as if I had said something in poor taste.

“What do you want, Charlie? A medal?”

“Hardy-har,” he said, listlessly.

I knew the piece of paper was indeed ridiculous, trivializing not just what Charlie did but also what the transplant meant for us. But the document was inaccurate. It was not just my life he had saved, but also our lives together. He was committing to our partnership. To me, this was more like a marriage certificate.

To hear Charlie say that he wouldn't do it again was like hearing him change his mind about the whole procedure, like him taking back what he had already entrusted with me. And though that wasn't possible, it felt like something—something heavier, more substantial than a mere kidney—was being ripped from me.

Once, while sitting at dialysis in a center, i remember an old woman in the treatment chair next to me talking about another patient who used to come to dialysis regularly before she got a kidney from her daughter.

“I would never do that,” my neighbor said, running a hand through her thick afro. “Ask my daughter for a kidney.”

“Why not?” asked a nurse, who was hooking her up to the machine.

“I'd be too worried that she would need that kidney later. And it's just not fair to put someone through a surgery like that. What a waste it would be if it didn't work! I wouldn't be able to take it.”

At the time, I heard her words, but I couldn't look past what Charlie was willing to do for us. I couldn't look past what his offer meant to our relationship. But if I believed that something magical had happened that morning in August—not transplant but transcendence—then I had to believe that something could be undone when or if something went wrong, if I did reject him. That this was our bodies telling us that maybe we weren't meant for each other, or that this wasn't meant to be.

Charlie's words play in my head, and in the early morning hours, I still can't get to bed. Lying here, I silently vow to keep this kidney, whatever it takes, to show Charlie what it means to me, that “The Gift of Life” was not given in vain.

And just then . . .

My body begins to shiver. It's a crisp night in October, and I'm woken up from a vague dream in which I'm riding a rickety roller coaster and feeling the old wooden track tossing me around in the small metal car. I wake up to realize that my body is shaking outside this dream, too. Tensing up my arms and legs, I try to make the tremors stop. I pull up the wooly blankets from the foot of the bed and try to lie still.

“What's wrong with you, Moonface?” Charlie asks, squinting through the darkness to look at me.

“I'm co-o-o-ld.”

“You're always so cold. You don't wear enough layers.” In the haze of the dimly lit room, he gets up, his hair pointing in all directions, and brings me my pink bathrobe from the bathroom. I sit up in bed, and he pulls the robe over my arms and around my back, and almost all in a one-shot camera move, he glides over to the closet in the other room and pulls out our old, green, zero-degree sleeping bag, the one we camped out on in Big Sur and snuggled up in along the rim of the Grand Canyon. He puts the bag over me and pushes its edges under my legs and under my arms.

The shivering is not normal, but I don't tell him this. If something is wrong with the kidney, I want to take care of it first, before he can possibly know. I will call the doctor's office in the morning.

“You're that cold?” he asks, in disbelief.

“It's just the change in seasons, I guess.” I try to keep my teeth from chattering.

“Here,” he says, more annoyed than suspicious, and he holds the layers over me, so tight, until I can't shake anymore, until he is practically lying on top of me with all his weight, pushing down my body and suppressing all that's going wrong with it. He eventually falls asleep like this, and I lift one shoulder until he slides off the slick sleeping bag and back to his side of the bed.

I get some sleep in little sparks between my worry and the actual trembling, but in the morning I cannot control the chills at all despite how much I focus on a sight in the room—the lamp, the window blind. I get up and retch in the bathroom, over the toilet. I crawl through the apartment, clinging to the walls with my hands.

Charlie already left for work, leaving while I was still asleep. My heart is beating in my head, which is never a good sign. I look in the mirror, and there is sweat on my forehead and on my nose. I pull the thermometer from a cup in the bathroom and put it in my mouth. But before it goes in, I already know what the temperature will be. I sit on the couch and call the transplant clinic.

“Well, sweetie. You taking care of our patient? How's he doin”?” LuAnn, our nurse, answers. She loves Charlie. He charmed her the first day they met by looking at her beehive of a head and telling her she looked just like Tammy Wynette, but so much more independent! She blushed.

“He's fine. He started work today.” I hear my voice quivering.

“Oh, good. He's not lifting anything, is he? We don't need him lifting anything. He doesn't have to be a He-Man. But I think he knows that,” she laughs to herself. She speaks so brightly that for a minute, I think that this drain I'm falling into is a dream, that the reality is that things are as delightful as her voice sounds. But I tell her about the uncontrollable shaking and the sweats this morning.

“Back pain?” she asks, and though I think it is unrelated, last week, I remember asking Charlie to rub my back, which was sore from what I thought was hunching over my desk too long. I had asked him to go to the store and buy me heating pads.

“Uh, huh.” LuAnn thinks for a while. “Temp?”

“A hundred and one point eight,” I read from the digital thermometer.

She pauses. Her silence gives me more reason to worry.

“Yes, you should probably come into the clinic today, just so the doctors can take a look at you. Just come on down as soon as you can. You don't need an appointment. I'll be here.”

I tell myself to hold it together, that the fever could be nothing. Something they could treat with an aspirin.
Just get to the clinic. Just don't worry yet, just get to the clinic
. I'm in the bathroom pulling my hair up in a ponytail when the phone rings again. I pick it up in the bedroom, and on the line LuAnn says, “Okay, sweetie, you know what? Come to think of it, I know what the doctor's going to say. I might as well get you ready for it. With a temp like that, they're probably going to admit you. So you might as well bring a bag of clothes and come straight to Admissions.”

It's not LuAnn who meets me in the lobby of the hospital, but a nurse who whisks me upstairs back to the transplant ward where I have been before and tells me to get out of my clothes and into the standard hospital gear. She swings the door of a room wide open and shuffles me inside. There is one bed.

“A single?” I turn to her.

“Yes,” she says, a smile escaping her lips, because she knows a single is what you want in the hospital when you're not feeling your best. Another person with just a paper-thin curtain next to you is probably the least of your worries, but it's appreciated when you are crying, half-naked, out of frustration. I get myself up on the bed and put my head down on the pillow, and as I lie down, I see that the nurse puts an isolation sign on the front of the open door.

“I'm contagious?” I ask her.

“Maybe. I don't have any reports yet,” she says, before shutting the door and making me feel like she's locking me in a cage.

Contagious? Shivering? What can it be now?
They are just being cautious
, I think, with the isolation sign, worrying more about what can come into the room than what is going out. The anti-rejection drugs that suppress my immune system make me susceptible to more than the average folk, especially in a hospital. So maybe that sign is there to protect me, not to protect others from me. I don't know. I pull off my clothes quickly and try to settle into bed so as to distract myself from the myriad possibilities.

The room is small with a slim window in front of the bed. An off-white phone with a long cord hangs from a movable table. I hesitate calling Charlie. I don't want to tell him that I am back in the hospital for I don't know what or that his kidney could possibly be in trouble. A three-month-old transplant, already gone kaput.

Charlie's been working with special-ed students at the local high school, and when I call for him, the school secretary pulls him out of class so he can use the phone in the main office.

“Is this my mail-order bride?” he says when he picks up.

I don't tell him much, just that I have a fever and that the chills from the last few nights were probably something more that my just being cold.

“I knew it!” he says, practically spitting into the phone. “Damn it. I'll be right there.”