Moonface (10 page)

Chapter Nine
The Celebrated and Adored Royal Filipino Mind Reader

I
n walks this attractive blonde wearing a shiny navy and red sweatsuit. She's not sweating, though, and I think she has wandered into the wrong room when she takes a seat on my bed and looks me square in the eyes. I'm ready to press the call button and tell the nurse that a nutcase has gotten past security and is now threatening my safety. She sounds authentic, but doctors are never this pretty or this stylish, and they certainly never have time to work out. I take my hand off the call button, and when I reach out to shake her hand, it is surprisingly warm.

“Pardon the outfit,” she says. “I just got a page about you when I was coming back from an aerobics class.” She doesn't smell like sweat. She smells like raspberries. I'll state right now that she was the best-smelling doctor I've ever met. Warm hands, fruit-scented. Again suspicious.

She introduces herself as an infectious-disease doctor, and I say, “I'm infected?”

“We're just covering our bases,” she says, not committing to any diagnoses at first. She briefly reviews my medical history. “But what's been going on lately?”

“Well, a couple weeks ago, I had a pretty bad headache. I thought it was my sinuses. This weekend, I had a terrible back pain.” I lean forward and point to the back of my hips where my native kidneys still are. I tell her about the fever this morning and the cold sweats of the last few weeks. I tell her everything. I want to know if I get to keep Charlie's kidney. So I don't leave anything out. I tell her about how I've been forgetting things, how I can't keep my head straight. I don't leave out the night sweats. Or the shivers. Or my fears. “I can't lose this kidney.”

“We don't know that yet,” she says. In my highest hopes, I don't think you call in an infectious-disease doctor if it's a problem with your transplanted kidney. Right? “We'll figure out what's going on,” she says, with the raspberry smell trailing behind her as she leaves the room.

If it's not parental instinct, then it's my mother's Filipino superpowers, or maybe God speaking through the GPS system in my father's car. Whatever it is, my parents have found a way to detect when I am sick and how they can find me. It's their own little honing device. Sometimes it takes only an unanswered phone call, or a crack in my voice, or a cough, but the minute they sense something is wrong, they get in their SUV and they start driving toward me, wherever I am.

Once, in college, my father called my roommate on a random Tuesday night and she told him an ambulance had just left and taken me to the emergency room with stomach cramps. I was planning on calling them when I knew what was happening, if it was indeed something serious, but there my father went, my mother in the car with him, in his Acura down Interstate 70, ninety miles an hour from Pittsburgh to Baltimore.

“My baby!” my mother must've yelled from the passenger seat, as they raced at breakneck speeds toward me.

When a cop pulled my father over somewhere in Hancock, Maryland, my father looked squarely at the cop and gave it to him straight: “My baby's in the emergency room. You can call the hospital yourself if you'd like.” My father is neither an annoying nor intimidating man, but when he is serious about something, he will most likely get it. He handed the cop his big chunky cell phone with his finger ready to dial the number, but the officer, seeing that there was no stopping this man from getting to Baltimore as quickly as he could, said, “It's okay, sir, but you'll have to drive more carefully than that. I'm sure she wants to see you, but she'll probably prefer to see you alive.”

“Yes. Thank you, officer,” was all my gracious father said, before pushing his foot back down on the pedal.

It is no surprise when my parents walk into my hospital room one night out of breath. I can smell my mother's perfume from down the hall. When they walk into the room, my mother is the one who seems exhausted, even though I know it was my father who was driving, pulling through the night traffic all by himself while she slept in the passenger seat.

I complain when they arrive because I don't want to feel like I need them. When I see them storming through the door, I feel once again like that scared eighteen-year-old who is uncertain about what's happening to her.

“Could you please leave?” I ask them.

“You shouldn't talk to us like that,” my mother says.

The phone rings and my mother answers; it's my brother calling from New York. I'm too tired to lift the receiver or to talk. I push away everything she puts near my pillow—her rosary, the phone—all in dramatic fashion.

“She's got a high fever. She's delirious!” my mother vents to my brother. I roll my eyes and hold my tongue. “No, I don't think she's crazy . . . but we're just trying to find out what's wrong with her.”

I am still shivering. My fever has yet to be controlled, and it still makes me tremble, making the bed rock, all its little parts—the rails, the up-and-down mechanisms, the frame underneath. They all shake. I press the call button for the nurse, and when over the small speaker they ask me what I need, I tell them that I'm shivering. It sounds like this: “I'm sh-sh-sh-hivering. My fever.”

“We'll call the doctor to see what you can do,” the nurse says. “How do you feel?”

“Like I'm in a scene from The Exorcist,” I say. “I'm trying to keep my head from spinning off.”

But when she puts the needle into the IV, I can feel my body suddenly relax and I can feel all my muscles slowly ease. My body loosens and the shaking miraculously stops.

Days pass. Seven, to be exact. Longer than when I was in the hospital with the surgery. The tests are unending, as is the parade of student doctors who duck in at all hours of the day and ask me questions I have definitely answered before.

There are days that feel normal. There has been a revolving door of guests all wearing the smocks that are provided for the isolation room. My mother and father cover the days when Charlie is busy at work, then Charlie comes in the evenings after work and, sometimes, stays long after visiting hours are over. The nurses, who find him charming and sweet, pretend not to see him once the intercom asks all the guests to leave.

“I don't want you to ever feel alone,” he says, in all seriousness. And he sits on the vinyl chair beside me and we watch an old rerun of M*A*S*H on the TV hanging from the wall. He stays as long as he can before he starts nodding off to sleep and I have to send him home.

Someone is usually with me, but sometimes there are gaps, like when my parents have to go to church, as they have been going daily, and when Charlie is still at work. He's made new friends at his new job, and I tell him to go out with them once in a while to get to know them.

“I don't want them to think that you spend all your free time in a hospital caring for your sick girlfriend,” I tell him.

“But I do,” he says.

“If only you knew what you were getting into,” I say. “If only . . .” he says with false regret. Or regret.

During one of those gap moments, a radiology technician comes up to my room to take yet another chest x-ray. I don't ask what for anymore. I just assume they like sending radiation through my body, that there's a collection of my entire skeletal structure in a file somewhere and they need just one more photo to complete it. There have been so many tests in the past few days that I just assume they are still collecting data. I just want them to tell me that it is definitely not my kidney, and they don't do that. They don't say anything about that.

The tech has a thick mustache and a brown mullet, and he rolls in a giant machine. His muscles bulge through his lab coat.

“Ugh,” I grunt.

“I know, sorry,” he says, in a high voice that is incongruent with his build.

I am too weak these days to make it down to the radiology department myself. They've been coming to me. Charlie says I should feel special by the room service, but I don't. The tech uses his big muscles to lift me to the side of the bed so my scrawny, dry legs hang off the edge of the railing. He lines up the bulky side of the machine against my chest and asks me to breathe in and hold it. When I do, my lungs fill with air and my bladder suddenly feels heavy.

“Just one more time,” he yells from behind the curtain. And when I inhale again, my bladder feels heavier. I think I can make it to the bathroom, but I'll have to drag the long IV pole that's attached to my arm. I'll have to unplug the IV machine from the wall, sling it around the other side of the bed, and take a few steps to the bathroom. In my head, I'm mapping out the steps and the time it will take me to accomplish them.
Come on, man
.

“Okay, that's all we need,” he says.

“Good.” I say that I've got to use the restroom. The bladder presses down heavier.

“Uh, hold on there, dear.” He pushes his x-ray machine, but its cord gets caught under my bed. The IV pole is trapped back in the corner. I'm up, and I try to tug the pole loose.

“Wait,” the tech says, as he dislodges his machine. But I can't. My bladder feels huge and I try to see if I can reach over to the bathroom with my IV arm sticking out of the door because I'm gonna go soon. But it won't reach. I put my hand between my legs, thinking that will stop the pee, but it doesn't, and I feel the warm stream filling my pajama pants and hissing its way onto the floor.

The tears stream down almost as quickly. “I didn't make it,” I say, in barely a whisper. The man is uncomfortable and shocked. He's pushing his x-ray machine out the door, and he tries to look away but suddenly gets nervous, and says, “I'll tell your nurse.” I know he just wants to get the hell out of that room, and away from me, and I don't blame him.

I am helpless. This is what I have become now—a soggy mess on the floor, a woman who can't control her body.

My father drops off my mother and leaves to grab some dinner. I can hear her voice from far away, and when she rounds the corner into my room, she is smiling. But the corners of her mouth drop when she sees me crying.

“What, what is it?” she says.

“Oh, it's just too much. I need Charlie.”

“Where is Charlie?”

“I don't know. At work?” The room still smells like piss, which makes it worse.

“So, what's wrong?” she asks, throwing her purse on the chair.

“Oh, I don't know.” I collapse into bed in new pajamas, my head in her arms like a child. I lie there like this even after an orderly has mopped the floor, even after my father has come up from the parking lot with armfuls of take-out boxes and my mother has shooed him away. I imagine he is in a waiting room somewhere, giving us space.

When I finally come up for air, she says, “What,
anak
?”

“The kidney,” I tell her.

“You're not losing Charlie's kidney,” she reassures me.

“We don't know that.”

“Well, is it that? Is that what you're afraid of?” she asks. “Yes,” I say, “maybe this was a mistake. Maybe this transplant shouldn't have happened.”

My mother takes a box of tissues from a drawer in the bedside table.

“If I lose this kidney ...” I start.

“What's going to happen to you and Charlie?” she finishes.

The roots of my mother's black hair are turning gray. You can't really tell from afar, but I am so close to her now, I can see them. She hasn't been home for weeks, so she hasn't had them done. And now her eyes are thick with tears. I am making her look old.

“Ay!” she sighs. “I knew this would happen.”

“Mom!” I don't want to hear an I-told-you-so moment from her right now.

“No,” she says, continuing to rub my head. “I knew it would be hard.” She seems annoyed by the situation now, making tsk sounds under her breath. “You think you have to feel everything he feels, huh?

“Look,” she says, taking off her glasses and folding them into her hands. “You were twenty-eight when you and Charlie were transplanted, right? When you committed to help one another.” She pauses. “When I was twenty-eight, I married your father in a church in Manila.”

This I know. I'm afraid that she's going to tell me the story of their meeting. It's strange when you find out your parents have a Romeo and Juliet past. A skinny kid from Manila with a nice smile, my father was always sweet. When he laughed, no sounds came out, just a warm subtle grin. My mother was so different then, coming from a wealthy family in Manila, the daughter of a prominent lawyer, who was in the inner circles of President Ferdinand Marcos. President Aquino, too. Filipino royalty. My mother was the second of four sisters, and as she describes, “I was the funny one.” I can almost imagine her and her insult comedy. She tells me over and over again the story of how she and my father met. They were in the same class in medical school before my mother dropped out. It's a good story, but it's not exactly what I want to hear now.

Nor do I want to hear about how my father made it to the States. He came to New York City in 1969 and worked in a blood bank on Bleecker Street. When he finally saved up enough money to get an apartment in Massachusetts and airfare from the Philippines, he flew my mother over. In our old photo albums, there are black-and-white pictures of her deplaning a TWA bird, with her bouffant of a hairdo and a very American-looking suit. She was going to be a doctor's wife. In America.

“I know, Mom!” I say. I don't need an encore.

“I know you know. But what you didn't know was this. When I came here I was so alone. I didn't know anybody. I wanted to go home. I cried in the apartment all day while your dad was at work. It was hard,
anak
. But I had to come here because your father was here, and he was doing what he always wanted to do. He was sad for me, but he had to keep working. And he needed me to be here with him.

“Sometimes love is sacrifice, babe. And sometimes, you just have to live with that, whether you are the one sacrificing or not.”