140006838X (18 page)

A glare in return:
What do you think?

“Could someone go to the trouble of bringing me more blankets, please?” Alice asked. “It’s chilly in here.”

“Well, we have to get this line started.” Bhakti tossed her hair behind her ear and was apparently oblivious to how such a maneuver might be taken by a bald chemo patient. Recrossing her arms, she lifted a pen to her mouth. “You’ve got a blood transfusion scheduled, then nutrition.” She bit, gnawing at the pen’s end, an action incongruous with everything Alice had assumed about her. Now Bhakti’s voice sounded like someone consulting with a waitress about unfamiliar menu items. “The thing about the IV team, if we call, we’re committed. Then add two hours to whatever time they estimate for arrival.”

When Alice had been in New Hampshire, and it was time to remove the catheter from her clavicle area, the doctor had told her to hum. As soon as she started, he’d yanked. There had been a sting and it had been over, like that. “I had a central line the last time,” Alice said. “I’m sure you both know that.” She sought out Tilda, explaining. “First they tried to go into my wrist. This monstrous harpoon of a needle. I was horrified, but I don’t think I even had the energy to start shaking, that’s what kind of shape I was in. Oliver told me some stupid joke he loves—it doesn’t matter what, trust me, it isn’t funny.”

“Shocker there,” Tilda said.

“It makes him laugh,” Alice continued, “and that always makes me laugh, and so I love the joke. He brought it up because he knew I enjoyed his pleasure. And at that moment, it was so ridiculous, I couldn’t help be surprised. That helped me calm.”

Tilda’s eyes rolled upward; Alice recognized her skepticism. “I know you and he butt heads, Tilapia. But he’s always showing me new forms of love. It’s how we survived that horrid month.”

The overhead lights kept humming.

“Let’s just put in a central line and hook everything to that,” Bhakti said, shrugging at Alice. “I mean, you’re already scheduled for a port.”

—

She was rising, propelling herself upward from the bottom of the ocean, kicking against gravity’s pull, pressure on her face, her lungs burning, ascending through pockets of warmth, layers of freezing cold. Breaking out of the depths, into consciousness, awakening, gulping, taking deep breaths. Overhead light panels were graceless and harsh. Running across her clavicle, aftershocks were like electricity through thin aluminum bars.

It took some time, but, muddling through the thickest parts of her Percocet haze, she realized that the clear plastic tube was new, and this catheter was different, a new device had been placed in her body, but in the exact location as the one in New Hampshire.

“This one hurts more,” Alice mumbled. “Lots more.”

—

She still wasn’t coherent when the familiar voice nagged, through her fugue, coming from some outpost:
They think they might not have used enough morphine.
Tilda, bless her. Wearing one of those infernal masks and a pair of gloves that would be de rigueur for as long as Alice was stuck here. Only something didn’t make sense: Alice was accustomed to seeing the minty green accoutrements of New Hampshire. Tilda’s mask was the soft yellow of light filtered through a picture window on a lazy morning—
aeons
more pleasing. Alice did not understand how Tilda had gotten to the hospital so fast—somehow she’d made it up to the Granite State before they’d even gotten off the phone, Alice terrified, sharing the news in a blubbering, hysterical conversation.

The deep part of another evening: Oliver had been snuggled next to her in the bed, on a break from watching whatever movie he’d rented from some video place near campus. He’d wanted to know if they’d get to watch the little scrap of mask go brown on Tilda’s face.

Alice had smiled, blown a parched kiss.

More of her surroundings were recognizably mundane: intravenous glass bottles and plastic expanding fluid bags hanging above her, all of them connected to a large aluminum tree and a robotic battery pack; that orange plastic bin by the room’s entrance, specifically there for needles and radioactive trash; Alice’s patient folder open on a tan linoleum counter. Tilda sat in a cushioned seat beside her. Directly across from them, a wall of windows ran the length of the room. What was unexpected: about five yards away on Alice’s right side, a mud-green curtain acted as a separating wall. From behind the curtain came the spreading applause of a studio audience, loud enough to shatter eardrums.

Tilda flipped open a notebook. While Alice was unconscious, she’d taken notes. Not much, she said. Then she let Alice get acclimated to the land of the living, poured and handed her some water, gave her some ice chips. And only then, not wanting to leave out any last detail, did Tilda unpack her list, anything that might be moderately worthwhile: that Dr. Eisenstatt apparently had been detained by some emergency, but was still hoping to visit this afternoon; that the sheets and pillowcases were indeed hypoallergenic, the nurse had double-checked. Also, Alice was scheduled for tests today—“an EKG, an echocardiogram to make sure your heart’s okay, um, a CAT scan.” Oh, pills. Alice was supposed to take her pills: the little red one, that was an antifungal, and the white one, right, ay-psych-lo-veer, that was an antiviral, which meant no STDs, which meant Tilda probably needed “to grab a few for myself.”

They enjoyed one another’s laughter, a nice break, before Tilda continued. The pills: Alice was overdue to take the bunch on the counter in a plastic cup. Alice recognized the third one—a yellow horse-looking number of thickly packed potassium. In New Hampshire she’d been assured it would help with digestion. “Only my diarrhea hit, and every time, that huge pill passed right out of the other end.”

Tilda called it a koan worthy of the Buddha:
How does one digest a pill for diarrhea if the diarrhea forces the pill through you before it can be digested?
Alice was still enjoying the quandary when Tilda chugged forward again, this time to the little old woman on the other side of the curtain. Mrs. Woo. “She’s pretty much trapped in bed. They’ve got a tube in her throat,” Tilda said. Whenever any of the nurses came to talk to Mrs. Woo, they talked slowly and loudly, Tilda could not believe how bad, patronizing beyond words. Mrs. Woo had two full-grown grandchildren, and they came and went from the room at will, according to Tilda, apparently unable to speak English, but nevertheless possessing quite an endearing game show fetish, along with a preternatural aversion to turning off their television set.

“I asked about a private room. The nurse told me you could contact your insurance and see if they want to pay the extra fee. Five hundred and fifty more a night.” Tilda snorted. “I can call if you want?”

Glowing appreciation in the direction of her friend, Alice wished she was clever enough, that her mind was working well enough, for a proper counter. She wished she could keep this banter going. Then she recognized a sound—that beeping. She’d hoped she was done with it.

Congruent red light flashed from the top of the battery apparatus. Feeling around for the intercom system, Alice told the floor operator, “My IV’s beeping.”

In the window on the opposite wall, blankets of snow were coming down with speed and violence, falling so fast and hard that it was difficult to see the building just outside the window—a structure from some other century, stone and bricks worn down by time and the elements. She could barely recognize decorative flourishes on the marble window molding, a dancing cherub, its carved, curving belly. Fresh snow had accumulated into a thick pile on the ledge. It all looked close enough that if a person had a ladder, she might finagle it out the window, fight through the blizzard, and reach that other floor. She just might make her escape.

The Best of What Life’s Supposed to Be About

H
IS COUSIN’S WIFE
had sworn she would be at the apartment by eleven,
at the absolute latest.
Reliable, for the most part. Her fervor to help sure was genuine. Yet the absolute latest had come and gone, and still there was no word. Most likely she was stuck: in transit, on a subway, in a cab jammed in traffic. Jonathan also had stopped answering his phone, meaning he hadn’t heard anything, either, or was in a meeting, or had nothing new to say, just didn’t feel like answering.

Oliver lay in bed, feeding the kid a bottle, rocking her lightly, singing to her just a bit. Doe was overtired, wanting Mommy, not happy but responding anyway, moving less, getting quieter, one more stage closer to sleep. Oliver slowed his rocking. Being with the baby was fascinating. It was involving, necessary, rewarding, all the good shit that Alice—and every other woman he knew—had promised when she was pregnant and he’d been freaking out. Only there came that point; you reached a ceiling to all the Suzy Creamcheese homemaker blessing bullshit. Oliver could be making calls, like maybe to figure out how to save his goddamn wife’s life. Just where the
fuck
his cousin’s wife was, Oliver wanted to know.

Instead of the phone, he heard a muted clacking. Carrying from the loft’s work area: terminal keyboards, that itch that he could not reach. His programmers, for sure, were keeping it down as much as they could, they were trying to be respectful, but Oliver could still hear them. And there you had it: his family, his old life, his company, the camaraderie of friends, and the mental involvement of a challenge, all of it was yards away, on the other side of a plasterboard wall. And whenever it seemed like he could join them, when the kid seemed ready to drop, or had passed into slumber, just when Oliver started disentangling himself, Doe. What looked like a tremor. A spasm. Rousing. Again reattaching her little arms around Oliver’s neck. Clinging that much tighter.

Those first fleeting moments: his newly born daughter had been resting on his chest. Oliver told himself that, in the years ahead, he’d be looking back at
these
moments, trying to remember the soft warm exhalations of Doe’s little lungs on his face right now, the way her little fingernails were digging into his jugular.

—

Finally he emerged onto Whitman’s fourth floor, Alice’s backpack dragging on his shoulders and smacking against the middle of his back, shitloads heavier than he would have guessed, especially considering the way she gallivanted all over the city with that thing. Oliver also was pulling her travel suitcase behind him. He was worrying about how pissed she’d be. The hallways perennial in their brightness, that constant tart, antiseptic smell of cleaning fluid. Rolling shelves were abandoned at random junctures, their uncovered trays of half-eaten lunches stacked in sloppy piles. Oliver passed blood vials left on some sort of lab rack. He flashed back to New Hampshire: he couldn’t use the john in Alice’s room because they were measuring her urine output, and it wasn’t worth the risk to disturb the plastic pot that had been placed over the toilet’s opening. One night, like always when he had late-night soda, Oliver’s bladder had acted up. In the bathroom at the end of the hall, he’d heard the night security guard; locked behind a stall door he was quietly moaning and making sounds of quick friction, noises any man recognizes from his own fist-pumping episodes.

Oliver focused about two-thirds of the way down the hall, about where Alice’s room number would be. The stylish Indian doctor stood, addressing an Asian man and woman as if directness would ensure understanding. “You really should talk to Eisenstatt about this,” Bhakti said. “And we do need a decision on the DNR order.” The Asian woman turned from the doctor and started speaking in some Asian language to the man, who was maybe ten years older. He answered, and the two began trading phrases. Oliver clearly heard the word
resuscitate.
He moved beyond them as quickly as possible.

Warning signs on the door served as yet another reminder of what they were dealing with, but Oliver didn’t need their printed proscriptions. He’d donned the protective masks and gloves for fourteen hours a day, was well accustomed to that layer of sweat bubbling inside the glove latex so his finger pads were always squishy, his breath ricocheting off the insides of his paper masks, rising into steam.

The small rectangular window peering into the room was covered with black construction paper, he noticed. A trademark Alice maneuver—she hated people looking in on her, wouldn’t want excess light if she was napping. Had to be a decent sign. He also knew she’d have the room like a sauna, and he removed his coat, followed by his sweater. Turning to the side vestibule, Oliver blopped pink fluid into his hands, which he washed and dried at the sink. Since it was easier to put on the mask before the gloves, he reached into the cardboard box and brought one of the little yellow guys to his face, its chemical smell immediately pungent. His last name was being called,
“Mr. Culvert. Good to see you.”

Coming toward him, Bhakti showed a controlled irritation. She was a handsome woman nonetheless, striking for her dark hair and skin, her long lashes and slim figure. She asked how he was doing, though he knew it was a formality.

“Well, we got to this point,” Oliver answered. “Day fifty-one, that’s pretty good.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The first hundred days after diagnosis? They’re key, right? We’re on day fifty-one.”

Bhakti softened, eyes widening enough that she looked embarrassed for him. “I’m not sure what you were told or read.” Her mind was active, calibrating. “Those first hundred days after a diagnosis
are
key. Getting through these first six months
is
key.” Lashes batted, emerald-green irises focusing on him. “Your wife will go through a number of risk periods. That’s what happens. She gets past one marker, we look to the next. The first hundred days after the transplant. The first year.”

Down the hallway the Asian brother and sister’s discussion had turned heated. An orderly had stopped next to a nurse, and both were watching. Dr. Bhakti, meanwhile, had a shapely upper lip, one ripe with possibility. She told him that Dr. Eisenstatt was going to be in shortly. If Oliver needed to talk to him more…