The Half-Life of Everything

by Deborah Carol Gang

  David felt a moment of panic. What could he possibly be investigated for? Then he heard her elaborate: “the primary investigator for the new drug trial your wife has been on”—and he remembered Dylan using the short form, “P.I.” and his heart calmed a bit. Now they were shaking hands and Dr. Tsang said, “Please call me John, Dr. Sanders.”

  “What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

  “There have been some changes in your wife’s condition. She began showing some small improvements, and she hasn’t regressed as people tend to do. We think it’s because of the trial medication. There are three groups, and it’s too early to break the code, so we don’t know yet which of the two drug combinations she’s on. I’m reasonably confident that she wasn’t placed in the third group, the placebo.” He looked as if he expected David to say something here, but David couldn’t form any words, and the young doctor continued. “We wanted you to know that if you decide to see her today, you will notice some changes.”

  David stared, dumbfounded.

  “I can’t stress enough that these improvements may not last, and all of this could be very painful for you. You certainly have the option of waiting to see her until we know more.”

  David wasn’t sure he had ever been astonished before. He heard himself say, as if from a great distance, “What do you mean by ‘improvements’?”

  “We see more signs of alertness, more responsiveness. Please understand that we have no way of knowing how your presence will affect her or how temporary these changes could be.”

  “Of course I want to see her! Can I see her now? I don’t see any reason to wait.”

  Mrs. Nowicki stood and said, “I’ll take you to her. She’s in the library.”

  “I hope it goes well,” Dr. Tsang said, “and please stop in the consulting room before you’re ready to leave. I’d like to hear your impressions.”

  Mrs. Nowicki said nothing as they walked in silence to the library. She left him at the door with, “I’ll be close by.”

  Kate was sitting in a love seat, the Trout Quintet playing on a nearby radio. One cat was on her lap while another perched on the chair back, looking jealous. David approached and, without looking up, Kate said, “David, why did we stop keeping cats?”

  David froze. He struggled to sound calm as he answered, “I don’t know. The last cat died and Dylan arrived. We just never got back to cats, I guess.”

  “I love these cats,” she said emphatically, looking up at him.

  There was a crispness here, faint and missing for so long, but detectable. He didn’t trust his legs and wanted to sit but couldn’t imagine navigating his body even a few inches.

  “But I could probably learn to love a new one.”

  He realized she had spoken as if it were a question for him to answer.

  “Oh, Katie,” he said. “I’m sure you could.”

  He looked at the ceiling, hoping for control. Kate held out her arms and after he covered the short distance to sit beside her, he began to cry and then sob. She held him and, after a long while, she tried to dry his face with tissues. Then he reached for the box so he could dry where he’d drenched her.

  They both blew their noses, the pile of wet tissues growing in their laps. Kate studied him and said, “Poor David.”

  He said, “Well, you haven’t exactly been at your best either, you know,” and they smiled at each other and then laughed, or perhaps he was crying again, he couldn’t tell.

  An aide brought two dinners into the library for them. Neither was hungry, though they urged each other to eat, and she did eat a few bites.

  “You need energy,” he said. “This must all be exhausting.”

  “The food here isn’t really very good.”

  “I know.” He didn’t really mind the food and often paid extra to share a meal with Kate. Mostly, he had liked someone cooking a meal for him.

  “I mean, it’s not truly terrible, just not very inspiring.”

  “I’ll bring you lunch and dinner tomorrow if it’s not against the rules. Think about what you’d like.”

  She laid her fork down with a dreamy expression.

  “You don’t have to decide now. Take your time.”

  A quick thought of Jane flitted across his mind, but when he tried to picture her, it was like trying to think of a forgotten word—that elusive tickle—and he stopped trying.

  “David,” Kate said. “These last few nights, I’ve stopped feeling so…temporary. I really think I’ll still be here tomorrow—maybe not next week necessarily, but tomorrow seems likely. But, still, I want to stay on here for a bit. I don’t trust any of this.”

  He didn’t think she meant him.

  “Here’s what you can do: tell me three good things about each boy,” she said, and he did, even though it made her cry again. Then he told her about the dented cars and drowned cell phones, none of which was funny at the time, but it made her laugh. Finally, and only because she made him, he left to walk towards the exit. After six paces, he returned to the library to look at her and hold her one more time. The second time he left, he made it to the next hallway, where Dr. Tsang was on the lookout for him.

  They sat, leaning forward almost knee to knee and talked for thirty minutes. No, the researcher couldn’t guarantee how long the improvements would last, though he was hopeful. Yes, David could bring Kate nutritious food. And no, he wasn’t to tell anyone except their sons, and not over the phone.

  “This is what’s called a Phase I clinical trial—the first group of people to ever be given this treatment—and there are only 63. Usually we never even get to Phase II, where we can test 100 to 300 people, but I’m hopeful—very hopeful.”

  David wasn’t sure he was following all this and was suddenly too tired to pursue it. They stood and shook hands and then segued into a brief hug. One of them seemed to be quivering, or maybe it was both of them. He left and drove home, hoping some sleeping pills could still be found in the bowels of the medicine cabinet. He couldn’t imagine quieting his mind any other way.

  Jane drove to work mulling over the fact that it was Wednesday and she hadn’t heard from David since Sunday. On Sunday, they had talked a little more about living together, and she thought the conversation had gone well. She didn’t think she had betrayed how frightening she found his suggestion. She understood that David had found married life safe and trustworthy, the opposite of her experience, and he was offering her at least some version of what he had known with Kate. Was she willing to join lives with someone she couldn’t be married to? She was in a kind of Catch-22: if David divorced Kate to marry her, he wouldn’t be quite the person she thought he was. She could only completely admire him if she couldn’t completely have him.

  If the time came, she would tell him they could live in his house if he wanted. It would be better for Dylan and Jack. “Sometimes young adults need a familiar place to come home to as much as younger kids do,” she would tell him and he would tease her. “Sometimes I think you like those boys better than you like me.” But she hadn’t had a chance to make this hypothetical, sometime-in-the-future offer because her only text to him had gone unanswered, though he didn’t always notice the alerts reaching his phone.

  She arrived at the staff meeting a little early and, like many of her co-workers, also a little annoyed. The regular Tuesday meeting had been rescheduled on short notice because the primary investigator for the drug studies they were involved with couldn’t make it that day. Everyone wondered why he couldn’t just come to the next scheduled meeting, but instead they had been summoned on a Wednesday.

  Dr. Tsang was first on the agenda, and he introduced himself again, looking young and nervous. People listened politely as he reminded them of the clinical studies in place. Then without any fanfare, he announced that it appeared that three of the local subjects were showing a positive response to one or more of the drug combinations being studied. Jane stopped breathing.

  A young psychologist, Ethan, joked, “Yeah, so what el
se is new?” and everyone laughed.

  “Yes, I know,” Tsang said. “I know what you’re saying. The effects could be gone tomorrow. But today it looks interesting. So we’re going to talk about how to answer relatives’ questions. The staff has been reminded of every rule in HIPPA, including not discussing patients even when omitting names.” He took the time to make eye contact with everyone. “People will lose their jobs if they talk.”

  Jane was breathing again, but barely.

  “We’ve also asked the relatives not to discuss this with anyone, and I think they understand why. If privacy is breached beyond a certain point, we cannot guarantee that their loved one will continue to be included in the trials. However, you may be asked questions either by a subject’s family, or patients without dementia, and their relatives, or possibly by staff. I’ve printed out some sample questions and how we’d like you to answer them, but I need your help with things I may have overlooked. And I want to know if the answers are worded in a way that seems natural, and believable. I know I sound like a robot sometimes. At least that’s what my friends tell me.” A few people laughed, surprised at his informality.

  “It is possible,” he said cautiously, “that at some point, members of the media will arrive. No one may speak with them. Refer them to me, and ask that they email me. They will try to trick you. Assume everyone who isn’t your relative or best friend is media. If we do our jobs right, they won’t arrive. We don’t want them. Hopefully, my warnings will prove unnecessary, but please, I beg of you, don’t grab your fifteen seconds of fame on the backs of the subjects and their families. Did I get that saying right?”

  “We get your meaning,” Ethan said.

  Then Tsang handed out pages of scripted answers for them to use if needed. On the third page, in large, bolded letters were his name and email address.

  Jane sat motionless, staring at the papers. One of the three had to be Kate. There was no other reason David had stopped calling. Everything that had seemed right, or right enough, now seemed wrong—wrong and dangerous. She should have stayed clear. She should have treated it as a secret fling. Maybe she should have waited for him to divorce.

  But how would that have changed anything? A divorce wouldn’t have stopped what was about to happen. And even though she knew that whatever miraculous remission had occurred might be fragile and short-lived, she couldn’t even begin to bring herself to root against Kate.

  As the meeting wound down, she pretended to get a message on her phone and left the room murmuring apologies. She cancelled her next two appointments and drove home, shaken and lightheaded. Hardly anyone she knew had died, and yet this feeling was so familiar. She felt desperate to reach the safety of her house, but when she entered through the kitchen door and went to get a glass of chilled water—her throat felt dry and feverish—she was greeted by a photo of David, laughing, and another of the boys arm-wrestling in her kitchen.

  She hung her coat next to the jackets he kept at her house, which hung above the extra work shoes he wore when, over her protests, he helped her with outdoor chores. She paced through the house, which felt dulled, as if a film had settled across everything.

  His love for Jane was somewhere. It was as if there was now a folder—he could picture it on his cluttered screen—marked “Jane” that he couldn’t open right now. He would call her tomorrow. He would call her house while she was at work and leave a vague message. He would text her, “Miss you. Things are crazy,” with no abbreviations. Jane teased him about his text etiquette—“so proper, so refined.” He would defend himself: “Do you really want to hear from someone who doesn’t think he has time to spell ‘you’?”

  “Don’t you hate it here?”

  Kate reached for her hairbrush and worked it through her already tidy hair.

  As he waited, she set the brush down and made eye contact.

  “The first few times I went outside, it was so intense, sort of like LSD, but different and not fun. I felt assaulted by the birds, squirrels, flowers, noises, my thoughts—there was so much life. Everything was too much. It’s safe and quiet here. My mind is racing all the time. I go through test after test with them, trying to remember what I remember and where it stops. I think I remember arguing about driving. I thought you were jealous and wanted to imprison me.”

  Yes, he had been relentless in criticizing her driving, determined to prevent whatever accident was on its way as she drove around lost and disoriented.

  She gave him an apologetic smile that broke his heart. “After a series of days of consistently having my brain back, I felt ready—enough to see you—but I can’t run right home. See it all again. Lose it all again.”

  Her voice got small and she said, “I’d be lost—what with all the changes. There must be new countries I know nothing about.”

  “Actually, there were a lot of old countries you knew nothing about.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him.

  “We can catch up. We’ll start with what you remember, and you can read one news magazine a week online. Or one a day—whatever you want.”

  “The doctors might not like it.”

  “I don’t know. We’ll listen to them, but you get to decide things. I’m just your medical power of attorney for when you’re incapacitated. Like you are for me.”

  She stared at him, “Wait, am I still your medical power of attorney?”

  It took him a moment to get her point. “It never occurred to me,” he said, and he laughed and then laughed louder.

  Kate was laughing so hard she struggled to spit out the words, “You may want to update that document sometime.”

  An aide walked by and peeked in, “Everything okay here?” They became quiet and he moved to sit closer. He raised his arm for Kate to slide under, fitting against him, as she had for most of her adult life.

  Dylan left work as soon as he arranged for someone to cover his shift and walked the short block to Starbucks to wait for Lily. He and Jack had been summoned home: Their mother was improving on some experimental drug. Dylan couldn’t imagine it. For the first few years, he would regularly delude himself that she was getting better and not worse, but nobody, including him, made that mistake anymore.

  Lily found him at the out-of-the-way table he’d been lucky to grab. She’d slipped away from work to have coffee with him before he went to get Jack. Unusual for her, she tried to get him to talk about what it was like to go home. His family was a topic she had learned to avoid.

  “There’s no reason to describe it,” he said now. “There’s no reason for even one more person to experience this.”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works. You don’t get to have this huge thing that I can only guess at.” She gave him a sad smile he’d never seen before.

  He grabbed her hand, swallowed his coffee in two gulps, and suggested they walk to a nearby park. Then he told her everything he could remember.

  “One time, she asked me where my camp counselor was. This smart woman—this person who had helped me with my college admissions essay—thought I was at summer camp.”

  When he started to cry, he didn’t stop talking. He talked on and she rummaged in her purse for tattered tissues that he quickly saturated.

  “ ‘Somewhere, she misses you.’ My dad would say that sometimes.” His eyes were sore and he was exhausted in that way peculiar to crying, but he didn’t regret telling her. Maybe it would make him feel better someday.

  “Is this why you ignored me for so long? My friends thought I was nuts to keep hoping.”

  “Do you remember that stand-up comic we were watching, the guy with the initials instead of a last name—Louie CK? ‘You’ll meet the perfect person who you’ll love infinitely and with whom you’ll grow old together. And then she’s going to die. That’s the best outcome. The best thing that can happen is—she’ll die.’ ” She moved closer to him on the bench and he opened his jacket to fit around her. “It’s dangerous. It just seems dangerous. That’s why I go back to my p
lace sometimes. When I start to feel married.”

  She held onto his jacket as she turned to face him, then whispered, “Thank you.”

  Kate’s door was ajar, and David hung back as the boys knocked once before entering. Kate stood next to the small couch, watching both boys, who walked towards her. “Hi, boys,” she said. She looked a little afraid. “I feel a lot better now.”

  She drew them into a tight circle and they hugged for a long time. Someone—probably both of them (David couldn’t tell their voices apart)—said, “Mom,” three or four times, but after that it was quiet. They broke apart and squeezed onto the love seat. It seemed to him that they hadn’t settled in like this since elementary school. No one talked, and oddly, no one cried. The three of them had their eyes closed and almost seemed asleep.

  When David got to the kitchen early the next morning, both boys were up, wet hair combed and dressed marginally better than usual.

  “You’re up early.”

  “We’re going to see Mom now. Where’s that little video camera we got you?” Dylan asked, looking through some drawers.

  David found it in a drawer Dylan had just rifled and handed it over with a fresh battery. “There’s a small tripod for it in the corner of the coat closet. You’re going to record your mom?”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  ‘“Tell her I’ll bring lunch… unless she’s too tired.”

  Jack found the tripod and headed out the door, then turned and, not quite meeting David’s eye, said, “You know, don’t you, that we won’t tell her anything? You do what you need to do.”