My friend, el macho.
Before they slid the gurney into the back of the blinking ambulance, with half the neighborhood out on their front steps, watching, I put my hand on Janet’s thigh. She flapped her fingers around, caught my hand and squeezed. She boomed out a cough, the mask jumped, and the vein in the side of her neck bulged. Her mother climbed in, the doors closed, the siren startled us.
With my mother belted securely into the pickup’s passenger seat, puzzled still, mute, pondering, I sped along the holiday-empty streets, and back over the bridge into Boston. At the hospital I parked with two wheels up on a curb not far from the emergency-room entrance.
By the time they let me in to see Janet, she had already been given a breathing treatment and was coughing less violently, exhausted and asleep. She lay on a stretcher in the emergency room, pale and gaunt and alive, the pulse monitor reading 121, antibiotics dripping into her arm, a hemoglobin saturation monitor there, too. Nurses, doctors, and phlebotomists walked calmly here and there, checking digital readouts, unwrapping sterile needles, their running shoes squeaking on worn linoleum. And that was the horror of it: this was routine to them-people choking their way back and forth across the border between life and death, people with their stomachs blown open by gunshots and their necks broken in car crashes and their babies’ faces burned with hot oil. Routine as could be. And for everyone else it was a hideous nightmare.
I have always believed that, conscious or not, people know if someone they care about is beside their bed. So I stood there for a long while with both hands on Janet’s left arm, watching her face and her chest as it moved up and down in quick flexes. Her mother-drugged a bit herself-stood at her other shoulder. My mother was behind Janet’s mother, swinging her eyes right and left. The scene was vaguely familiar to her, a face from the distant past, a painting that hints at something you’re sure you recognize, just hints at it, just suggests it, but leaves you to puzzle it clear.
11
AFTER AN HOUR and a half, Janet was moved upstairs to a semiprivate room. There was no one in the other bed. Her aunt Lucy arrived, a small, dark-haired woman with the same kindly toughness that radiated from Janet’s mother, and from Janet, too.
We all slipped into hospital time, that strange, slow wash of quarter-hours where you feel cut off from the rhythm of the rest of the world, trapped in a sterile, off-white room with the faces of the nurses changing at three o’clock. We took turns standing next to Janet’s bed. We touched her on the arm or leg, adjusted the blanket, looked at the machines, and then walked away past the empty bed to the window and stared down at the gray city. My mother sat in an orange armchair and watched a college football game on the TV, looking up at me from time to time with a cloud of daftness over her eyes.
At some point late in the afternoon, after we’d been standing there for several hours watching Janet sleep, Lucy persuaded Janet’s mother to go home. Janet was going to be alright for now, there was nothing we could do to help. I told Amelia I’d stay and talk to the doctors, and call to give her the report, and she squeezed me and kissed me again, and cried against my chest and went reluctantly out the door, clutching her sister’s arm.
Not long after they left-half an hour, an hour and a half- a tall, slightly stooped man with an unfriendly mouth-Doctor Wilbraham-came in and introduced himself. We had spoken more than once during Janet’s last hospital visit, her “tune-up,” but he did not remember me. Janet said he was a big supporter of the governor, a yachtsman and a perfectly competent pulmonologist, with the bedside manner of a tuna fish. “She’s in no immediate danger,” Doctor Wilbraham said, in a rumbling, Charlton Hestonesque voice.
“We thought she was going to die.”
“Yes,” he said, meeting my eyes briefly.
My mother had gotten up out of her chair and sidled over and was listening in.
“What about the transplant?” I asked.
“She’s on the list.”
“I know she’s on the list.”
He looked at me with the smallest wrinkle of irritation on his lips. His face was almost a perfect rectangle, straight gray eyebrows, straight brown and gray hair brushed straight back. His eyes traveled down to my work boots and back up to my face, as if what I was wearing would dictate the type of answer he ought to give. As if he spoke several languages and was trying to choose one I might actually be able to understand.
“Will she live long enough to make it to the top of the list?”
“We can never say. There is a continual ratio of approximately five potential recipients to each available pair of lungs.”
“How much longer is she going to live?”
“We can’t possibly say.”
“A month? A year? When you see people like this, with her lung function numbers, how much longer do they usually live?”
“It varies.”
“Between what and what?”
He took a breath and sighed. “Between a day or a few days and perhaps a few months, depending.”
“On what?”
“Many factors.”
“Can we change any of those factors?”
“We’re giving her powerful drugs,” he said, in a tone you might use to describe the Dewey decimal system to a four-year-old. “Drugs called ceftazidime and gentamicin.” I thought for a minute that he was going to spell them out very slowly. G-E-N-T…Beside me, my mother was nodding. “We had to take an arterial blood gas reading, which is quite uncomfortable. If that reading is not too bad and if she gets no new infections-”
“So you’ll want her to stay in the hospital.”
“Probably, yes.”
“Until when?”
“Until compatible lungs become available.” He reached out and patted me on the shoulder, already leaning toward the door. “You can call us with more questions if you think of them.”
I stayed as long as I felt my mother could stand it, going down to the cafeteria once with her, for sandwiches and coffee, and then coming back up. Darkness had fallen long ago. My mother had given up on the football and on the TV, and had taken to walking back and forth along the length of the room, talking to herself in a quiet voice. I knew her well, of course, every wrinkle around her eyes, every spot on her hands, every lilt and dip of her high, warbling voice. But I had never spent that much time with her in a hospital, and I could see another woman stirring and rising up. I waited for her to click back into her doctor-self, but that did not happen.
At eight o’clock I kissed Janet twice on the ear, and whispered something there, then I walked with my mother down to the elevator and out through the quiet lobby. She hooked one arm inside my elbow.
“A ticket,” my mother said, when we were close enough to the truck to see. Cold gusts were whistling off the river in the darkness, twirling up eddies of grit and brittle leaves.
I stood next to the truck in the cold with the parking ticket in my hand and my back to the hospital and my mother. Cars and trucks bunched up on Storrow Drive, then the light changed and the lines of traffic moved forward, a holiday pulse of steel, smoke, and glass. I looked out over the lanes of cars, at the arc of lights on the bridge that ran past the science museum and into Cambridge. It seemed to me then that there certainly had to be a God. But that He or She or It was a mean-hearted trickster God, a God of impossible coincidences and patterns, a God who let you walk along the levee for a while on a sunny winter day and then shoved you off into the icy water. God of men and women leaning out of a broken window on the 103rd floor with a thousand-degree jet fuel fire below them and their kids in elementary school; God of the screaming businesswoman going through the sky in an upside-down aluminum tube, and the man she shouldn’t have been sleeping with beside her; God of the choking and the suffocating and of their mothers and aunts and lovers. How could Ellory believe the way he believed? How had my own mother lived with seeing so much suffering all those years and not thrown herself off a bridge?
I tore the ticket in half and then in
half again and then in twenty bright orange pieces and tossed the pieces up into the wind and turned so as to have the satisfaction of watching them scatter. Some of the pieces caught in my mother’s golden-dyed hair. She was watching my little performance without blinking-sadly, it seemed to me-as if she had expected more from her son the doctor. She hadn’t said two audible words in two hours. I could see that she was working hard at something: the muscles near her eyes were pinched and she would periodically run the side of her right index finger across the corner of her eyebrow. Everything was a puzzle, and the puzzle had a billion scattered pieces, and she was searching through them to find just two that fit, just two, a starting place, a handhold.
I picked the orange scraps out of her hair, helped her into the cab of the truck, and drove her back to Apple Meadow. Ellory had told me once that the wise monks of the third century had come up with the idea that suffering was grace. It was absurd. The hot desert sun had done them in. “Suffering is grace, Mum,” I said bitterly. She said nothing.
At the Meadow, I walked her up the path through the cold wind, and then past the receptionist and down the salmon-walled hallway to her neat, too-warm room. While I was helping her off with her winter coat she became agitated, moving her head quickly from side to side and twisting around, something I had never seen her do. When the coat was finally off her shoulders she blurted out three words with a strange note of triumph in her voice. I hung the coat in her closet, straightened out the dresses and blouses there, closed the door. I turned back to look at her, to say good-bye, and she said the words again the same way: “Living low bar.” She was looking happily and expectantly at me, waiting for us to have one of our medical conversations, to make contact in that place again. But I was worn down by the day, and the words meant nothing. I only nodded and told her I loved her, and that my brother Jake loved her, and Lizbeth loved her, too, as I always did just before I left.
12
NEXT MORNING I drove to the hospital and parked in the pay garage. Janet was sitting up against the raised back of the mattress. The nurses had brushed her hair, and it lay smooth and black and without luster on the pillowcase and on her thin shoulders. The skin beneath her eyes was as dark as if she’d been punched. The oxygen machine hummed. The ceftazidime and gentamicin dripped into both arms. Really, the only parts of her face that looked right were the almost-black irises, which she turned on me the second I stepped through the door.
“I’m the orgasm counter from the Guinness Book of World Records,” I said, because the room smelled like death to me, and I did not want that to show on my face. “We understand you’ve made a claim.”
She gave me a frail smile and turned her eyes to a little half-hidden alcove where the door to the bathroom was, and where her mother was standing.
I said, “Good morning, world’s greatest cook,” and drew a second flimsy smile before Amelia went through the door and we heard the lock’s loud click.
“Nice going,” Janet said. Her voice was very hoarse.
“I love the taste of shoe leather in the morning. How are you?”
She shrugged and turned away. Her eyes filled up.
I stood next to the bed, took hold of her fingers, and looked at her hair on the creases in the pillow, then swung my eyes around the room-at the plastic bag that had been put into the wastebasket as a lining, at the empty second bed with its yellowish curtain, at the clear plastic box on the wall for used needles. Everything in the room was perfectly clean but slightly worn and plain, all ready for the next person who would come through, the next routine catastrophe.
“Mom and I have been having a little spat,” Janet said, without turning her head back to me. Her lips were dry and cracked.
We heard the toilet flush, and then her mother struggling momentarily with the door latch.
“About what?”
Janet didn’t answer. Before her mother came out of the bathroom she said, still not looking at me, “What would I have to pay you to get me out of here?”
“A full body massage and eighteen percent of your next check,” I said, and then her mother was with us, asking me to tell her what the doctors had said. I had gone home from Apple Meadow and sulked and dabbed paint on a canvas in a lazy, useless way, and only remembered about calling her at around one-thirty in the morning. I had dreamt a repeating dream in which I was driving a tractor-trailer truck for the first time and having to navigate impossible corners on narrow streets, steer it indoors between a table and chairs, reach my foot down for a brake that wouldn’t work; I had eaten three eggs and sausages and a bran muffin at Flash’s with the early morning crowd; I had waltzed into her daughter’s hospital room making sex jokes. And all that time she had been waiting to hear some piece of news on which she could set down, for a few minutes, her impossible cargo of worry.
I said, “The doctor told me we’d have to wait and see how the medicine worked.”
Even that piece of non-news sparked little wildfires of hope on Amelia’s cheeks. She sat on a chair next to the IV pole and looked at her daughter with her eyebrows up and her lips compressed. It was a “see, I told you” look.
Janet was not in the mood for “see, I told you” looks. “Could we stop playing this game, Ma?” she said. “Please.”
“Don’t you dare give up,” her mother said. “It’s a sin to give up. And you know it is. Don’t you dare do that to me.” And so on.
From where I stood on the other side of the bed I thought I could see a line of history running between them, a string of mother-daughter quarreling that stretched back to how much Sesame Street her daughter was allowed to watch.
“Ma, I’m just tired of fighting.”
“You fight. I don’t care how tired you feel. You fight, Janet Rossi.”
“You didn’t have anything jammed down your throat before breakfast, Ma.”
“I don’t care!”
Ma Rossi had a string of pale blue glass rosary beads in her left hand, and as she shot these bursts of words at her daughter, she choked the beads between her thumb and the side of her index finger.
“You say you believe in the afterlife, Ma.”
“Afterlife, afterlife. This is the life you have now. Don’t you dare do to me what your father did.”
“I’ll go get us some coffee now,” I said.
“Jake, stay.” Janet stopped and coughed, breathed in some pure oxygen, coughed some more, then swung her eyes back to her mother’s face. “Ma, it’s not the same. I just can’t bear to have you pretend, that’s all. It’s a kind of lie. It makes it harder for me.”
“Who’s pretending?” her mother almost shouted. “You don’t think I know how sick you are? I’m not smart enough to know?”
As she said the last two words, Janet’s mother exploded into tears, just absolutely exploded. Doctor Wilbraham marched into the room as if on cue. He glanced for a tenth of a second at Mrs. Rossi, a hundredth of a second at me, then took up a confident position at the foot of the bed with his hands lightly resting on the metal rail there. I pictured him at the wheel of his boat.
“You should be breathing easier,” he said.
There was something machinelike about him. He gave you the feeling that only his brain was talking, and the words weren’t coming through any filter of personality or emotion. He walked in, opened up a little door in the side of his head, let information out, let a question in, let more information out, patted his patient twice on the nearest neutral body part, then turned on his heel.
“A little.”
“Bowels move?”
Janet shook her head.
“We’ll start on some GoLYTELY”
Janet twisted her lips down and looked away. “I can do that at home, can’t I?”
“We’d rather have you here.”
“I’d rather be home. Would it be so awful for me to leave when the IV comes out?”
“You’d increase the risk of relapse. We can’t have that now.”
“Why?”
&
nbsp; “So we can get you back on your feet, young lady.”
“Can we stop pretending, PLEASE!” Janet shouted, in the breaking, hoarse voice. The effort sent her into another long stretch of coughing and spitting. Her mother held a crescent-shaped aluminum basin up to her mouth, wiped her face carefully with tissue, and glared at Doctor Wilbraham. Doctor Wilbraham flipped through the pages of Janet’s chart. When Janet finished coughing and spitting, she fixed him with a look that could have drilled two holes in a fiberglass hull. “I’m dying,” she said. “Can we use that word? It doesn’t matter anymore if I have a goddamned relapse and you know that as well as I do. I want to go home to die. I want to go out in the air a few more times before I die. I want to see things other than the things in this room. Is that something you can understand?”
“Of course, of course,” Doctor Wilbraham said. “But what you may not understand is that we have the ability to make you comfortable here, and we don’t have that ability at your home.”
“Stop pretending,” Janet said, in a fierce whisper. “Stop avoiding the words!”
“I’m not pretending in the slightest,” he said. “You’re being melodramatic. This course of antibiotics can get you up on your feet again. You can move around the ward. You’ll be able to-”
“I want to leave the hospital!”
“You have the legal right to do that. But I’d prefer that you didn’t.”
“Why?”
“We can give you better care here.”
“Better care for what?”
“She’s giving up,” Mrs. Rossi said to the doctor, and he nodded at her, happy to have an ally.
“She wants to get out for a little while, that’s all,” I said. “That’s not hard to understand. That’s not going to-” I was looking at Doctor Wilbraham’s square head, and I was about to say, That’s not going to kill her, which is just an expression people use. But I caught myself and said, “That’s not going to make her any sicker than she already is, is it?”
A Little Love Story Page 15