Kill Me (36 page)

SEVENTY

Did I know right then?

Not in any complete sense. Not really. I couldn’t have explained it. I couldn’t have choreographed the next few steps. But I had a premonition about what was coming and I could have predicted what the set, absent a few props, would look like when the curtain finally came down.

I thought I knew the “if” even if I didn’t know the when.

Or maybe I knew the when, but I didn’t know the if.

Everything was backward.

My son was dying.

That was never part of the plan. That was never part of the deal with the Death Angels.

Not at all.

But I was suddenly serene. For the first time in a long time, I was serene.

Adam listened, or he didn’t, as I told him everything I could squeeze into the three or four minutes I had alone with him in that hospital room. I told him about the Death Angels and about intimacy and about cowardice — mine — and about love and Thea and Cal and Haven, and about Lizzie and about me and how I thought I’d changed and how he was a big part of how I’d changed, and why I’d changed, and I tried to explain why I’d been able to change.

I told him I was sorry and I asked him for forgiveness.

I told him that there was a psychologist in Boulder named Alan Gregory who would fill in all the details I would never get a chance to tell him.

I told him I loved him.

“You have to live,” I implored him. “None of it makes any difference if you don’t live.”

“We should go.”

Lizzie was behind me. Her voice was at once firm, and soft. I hadn’t heard her come back into the room. “It’s too risky to stay here any longer. As soon as shift change is over or one of his docs shows up, we’re screwed. We have to go.”

“Can I kiss him?”

“No.”

“Shield me,” I said to her.

She stepped forward. I leaned down, pulled the mask from my face, and kissed my son on his yellow cheek and then once, dodging tubes, on his chapped lips.

His lips tasted of glycerin.

“Good-bye, Adam,” I said.

Lizzie was in tears as we left the room.

Me? I was a wreck. I was the man I thought I would be had I hit one of those two trees at the bottom of that chute in the Bugaboos. Lizzie could’ve transported me back out of the ICU in a thermos.

I felt pain unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life.

But I was serene.

SEVENTY-ONE

We took the stairs down to the lobby.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

She said it more than once. How many times? I was crying too much to notice.

I wiped away some more tears and nodded.

“I want to find Felix,” I said. “Maybe he can tell me something. You know, what happened.”

“Sure,” she said. We were almost down to the first floor. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”

It was all so banal. It was just conversation. We both knew that Felix had no answers that would make any difference.

I turned toward the main exit, the one we’d used to enter the building. She tugged me in another direction. “No, this way,” she said.

I followed her down some corridors to the Emergency Department. “Let’s go out this way instead,” she said. “Just in case.”

In case the Death Angels are waiting. Watching.

Aiming.

I felt no fear at the thought. None.

Outside, the morning air was chilly. Not Ridgway chilly. Connecticut chilly, with a biting wind off the Sound, which was Ridgway chilly to the
n
th. Twenty yards or so down from the ER door, but still under the long overhang that protected the entrance, Lizzie hopped ahead of me and sat on the wide rear bumper of an ambulance that had backed up earlier to deliver a patient. She patted the space next to her on the bumper. I sat, too. Instantly, I could feel the cold steel through my trousers.

“They may not get him a liver in time,” she said. “You have to know that. He’s very sick, and it’s hard to get organs on short notice. He could get too sick, too fast. Acute liver failure can be a runaway train.”

I tried to use logic as a salve. “He’ll be a priority, right? He’s young, healthy. That’s how it works? He’ll be a priority, won’t he?”

She pulled out a cell phone and punched in a number. Seconds later she said, “ICU ward clerk, please.”

A moment later I heard the sound of the clerk’s bored voice. She said, “ICU.”

“I’m about to give you the identity and contact information on Adam Doe, the teenager with liver failure. Ready?” Lizzie stated Adam’s name, Bella’s name, address, and phone number, and then my name, address, and phone number. She provided his student information from Brown and dictated his health insurance coverage information. She surprised me most by then reciting a concise version of my son’s medical history. She knew his vaccination status and knew he’d had pneumonia when he was eight. She knew he was allergic to sulfa. I didn’t know any of that. “You get everything? Good. No questions? Now you need to call everyone stat, starting with his docs, and then his parents, and let them know what’s going on. Get someone else to alert the New England Organ Bank, and the United Network, and make sure that they’re up to speed on all this. Give the transplant team a heads-up, too. Get an OR ready. Do you understand what I’m saying? This kid needs a liver. Go get him one. He’s out of time.”

She hung up.

To me, she said, “He was already a priority. Maybe he’s more of one now. But there are no guarantees. None. A lot depends on how fast he gets sicker.”

“The hospital will call Thea and Bella?”

“Yes.”

Thea would call LaBelle. LaBelle would call Mary. Mary and Trace would fly Thea to New Haven. They’d pick up Bella in Cincinnati on the way east.

Lizzie hugged me. I held her.

We both cried.

But the tears didn’t chill my flesh.

I was feeling the if.

It was warming me like a hot wind blowing from the south.

PART II

His Story

SEVENTY-TWO

Did either of them — my patient, or the woman he called Lizzie — know they were being recorded on a surveillance camera as they sat side by side on the back bumper of that ambulance outside the Emergency Department of the Yale-New Haven Hospital?

I’ve wondered a lot about that. Maybe she knew. Lizzie.

I doubt that he’d given it a thought. By then he had too many other things on his mind.

But the surveillance camera was there, capturing all the events of the next few minutes.

I saw an edited version of the clip for the first time that same evening on CNN. I didn’t see the entire footage for another couple of days. Not because it wasn’t available. It was available everywhere, had been downloaded a gazillion times on the Web.

I didn’t see the entire footage for another couple of days because I couldn’t bring myself to watch it.

Their embrace on the bumper of the ambulance lasted for a long time. It was hard to tell who was more thirsty for comfort, but the poignancy of them holding each other, their bodies occasionally shaking from swallowed tears, was so intimate that it was painful to watch.

It was as though a camera had surreptitiously caught lovers coupling, and the footage was being played for all to watch on the evening news.

When they pulled apart — she let go first, not him — she reached up and held his face in both her hands and pulled him within inches of her. She spoke to him for most of a minute. As she spoke her right hand caressed his face, her fingertips edging up into his hair. Her left hand stayed perfectly still on his cheek, holding him.

At one point, she said, I think, “Now … is when.”

He didn’t say a word in reply. He nodded, though.

I’ve watched this part of the video at least twenty times, most of those times in slow motion, trying desperately to read the words her lips were forming. Dozens of Web sites blossomed with translations of her subtle lip movements. Each interpretation was a little different.

Talking heads argued about her mouthed words on cable news. Hearing-impaired specialists debated the esoteric art and science of lipreading.

I’m still not sure exactly what it was she said to him after she said, “Now … is when.” But whatever else it was that she was saying, he was nodding in reply.

Agreeing.

I’m certain, a hundred percent certain, that he was agreeing.

Enthusiastically agreeing.

When she was done speaking, and he had nodded one last time, I think she asked him, “Are you sure?”

And I think he said, “Yes.”

She sighed then. It’s easy to tell that she sighed. You can watch her fill her lungs with air — her mouth opens, her chest expands, her shoulders rise — and then she expelled all the spent gases out of her body at once.

She smiled just the slightest bit before she reached into her shoulder bag and lifted out an envelope, a legal-size envelope. She removed one sheet of paper from it — it’s apparent there were others that she had left behind — and handed it to him. He took the pen she was offering and he began to sign it without reading it.

“No, read it,” she said.

I hope I’ve made it clear that lipreading isn’t a reliable skill of mine, but I’m confident that’s what she told him. For what it’s worth, most of the bloggers agreed with my assessment. The “no, read it” translation wasn’t controversial.

He did what he was told. He read the page, signed it, and handed it back to her. She signed it, too, and returned the paper to the envelope, which she handed to him.

He stuck the envelope in his jacket pocket without even a glance at the rest of its contents.

I could read his lips — everyone could — as he said, “Thank you. Thank you.”

They stood up then, holding hands. Left to right, right to left. Their lips were so close together that the steam from their exhales fused into one little cloud.

This part of the tape is charged, almost erotic.

Okay, not almost erotic. Definitely erotic.

She’s the one who made the next move. She opened the back doors of the ambulance, but he climbed up inside the vehicle first. She stepped up right after him.

Behind them, she left the door open about three inches.

I think it was intentional. Leaving the door ajar.

A hospital resident, a husky young black woman wearing baggy green scrubs with her hands stuffed deep into the pockets of a quilted down jacket, walked into view at the bottom of the screen as Lizzie was climbing up into the ambulance. The young doctor turned her head and opened her mouth as though she was going to say something. I imagined her saying, “Hey, you can’t go in there.”

But she didn’t say anything. Her shift was over; she was heading home. She probably didn’t want the hassle. She probably wanted to forget the last twenty-four hours of her life. She wanted a bed. She wanted a dream. The resident didn’t even break stride. She put her head down.

She kept on walking.

The surveillance video has no sound.

No sound.

The way that the camera was positioned, most of the action I’ve described took place on the upper part of the screen, in the right corner. The geometry of the boxy ambulance was slightly distorted by the angle, as though it had been drawn for use in a cartoon that exaggerates perspective.

“Keep on Truckin’.”

Like that.

Once the young resident passed by the ambulance and exited the frame, the camera lens captured no movement at the top of the screen, nothing, not a bird flying through the sky, not a squirrel in a tree, not a stray cat darting below the vehicle chassis.

Nothing, for a full ninety seconds.

On the bottom of the screen, where the ER door was visible, there was some motion. A little over halfway through the time that they were together inside the ambulance, a nurse rushed out the ER door, appearing startled. She looked around, left, right, then back to her left.

She saw what we saw on the video.

She saw nothing. A parked ambulance. That was it.

Did she notice that the back door of the ambulance was slightly open? She didn’t appear to. If she did notice, she didn’t care.

On the video we can’t tell what had startled her, what drew her outside, what caused her to look around. Whatever it was, though, she didn’t see any more evidence of it.

She stepped back into the hospital and, we suppose, returned to her post in the ER.

The next motion we see on the video is the woman he called Lizzie as she pushed open the doors and climbed down from the ambulance. She straightened her jacket, tugged at the cuffs of her sleeves, and pulled off the floppy hat she was wearing, revealing a surprising, glossy bald head. She tossed the hat on a concrete bench that sits against a wall, below a window. She began to stride, purposefully it seems, her hands swinging by her sides, toward the emergency room doors.

She was heading back inside.