Fine, I thought. Knock yourself out. Break every lung record known to man, as long as you don’t back away from this.
At the end of that day I went up and sat with Janet and her mother for a little while, and talked with her aunt in the hallway for a little while, and talked with Doctor Ouajiballah, who seemed to have forgiven me. Then I drove-tired by then-to the fancy mall in Chestnut Hill and found the jewelry store just before it closed, and bought a simple gold ring with little pairs of triangular notches at its edges from a salesman whose name was Dimitrios Cassas.
On Sunday, it was more of the same. Only, in the afternoon the fun was capped off with two hours in a room talking to a mustachioed psychiatrist, who worked, I guessed, not for the hospital but for the insurance company. “You are aware that you are putting your life at risk,” he said.
I said that I was.
“You understand that, even if the surgery goes perfectly, you’ll have a period of painful recovery.”
“Yes.”
“And you understand that, even if the recipient survives the surgery, she may live only a day or a month or a few months if her body should reject the new tissue.”
“I understand that very well.”
He went along like that for a while, giving me horror stories about transplant operations gone bad, infections, collapsed lungs, bleeding, suffocation, rejection. He showed me pictures of men and women with drainage tubes sticking out of their chests and frightened expressions on their faces, and when that was over, and I’d responded calmly and rationally to every question, he made good aggressive eye contact and he said, “Why are you doing this, Jake, really?”
And I could not help myself. I was tired from the testing, and worried because Janet had looked like a skin-draped skeleton in the bed that morning, and because more blood had come out of her overnight, and we hadn’t been able to talk at all the day before. I was pretty sure the governor wasn’t being grilled this way. He had, in fact, made the front page of the Herald that Sunday morning: GOV GIVES TILL IT HURTS superimposed over a full-page photo of his face. There was a glowing article inside, complete with a quote from John Entwhistle, who said the governor had agreed “without a moment’s hesitation.” And I didn’t care about that. I was a little bit nervous about the operation and the recovery, but not afraid. I didn’t care about the drainage tubes, or about not being able to run as hard as I liked to run, and I didn’t care about whether or not Doctor Ouajiballah liked me, or Amelia thought I was a decent boyfriend for her daughter. All of that had somehow boiled away. I was just tired then, and worried we were too late. The whole thing was taking on a cold realness that seemed to echo off every square inch of the plain walls and the chipped linoleum and the lab machines.
Against that realness, I heard the psychiatrist say, “Why are you doing this, Jake?”
And so I looked back at him very calmly, and I said, “Because I’m hoping to be president one day.” And he blinked and closed his notebook and went off to tell whoever he had to tell that we were a go for Monday morning.
10
I WENT UPSTAIRS after the testing, and walked through the doors of the ward, and Ouajiballah was right there in front of me, talking quietly to one of the nurses. When he saw me he said good-bye to the nurse, put the palm of his hand against my shoulder blade, and steered me to a two-chair waiting room at the end of the hall.
“She is sitting up and talking, sir,” he said. “She is quite energetic. But this is not necessarily the best of signs. With cystic fibrosis patients, shortly before the end of their lives, we can sometimes see an unnatural burst of activity like this. We are not sure what causes it. The lungs have very little capacity remaining and are working very hard. When the body works that hard, certain other chemical processes are triggered. Perhaps that is the reason. We don’t know. I did not want you to be falsely encouraged.”
“Her mother is falsely encouraged, though, I bet.”
“Yes.”
“The governor passed?”
“Yes, both of you are extraordinarily fit. He visited with Janet briefly.”
“Will she live until the operation?”
“Most likely.”
I thanked him for everything he had done, then I went into Janet’s room, and saw her sitting up in the bed. Her eyes were flashing. She was thin as a stick, and her face was as swollen as if someone had been pumping air into it all afternoon, but even under the oxygen mask, she was smiling.
“The governor was here!” Amelia said, and if Janet was happy, then there is no word for what Amelia was. “He passed! He passed! You passed, too! Look at Janet, look at her!”
Janet pulled the mask down off her face. When she lifted her arm, the hospital bracelet slipped all the way to her elbow. She smiled and pushed at her hair with the fingers of one hand, as if, for the first time in weeks, she cared what she looked like. She and her mother asked me some questions about the testing, and I tried to make little jokes when I answered, exaggerating things. I told them the psychiatrist looked exactly like Geraldo Rivera. I told them the doctors had made me do calculus problems to be sure Janet was getting an intelligent lobe. As a comedian, that night, I wasn’t at my best.
After a while, Janet took the mask off completely and said, “Ma, I feel like a chocolate milk shake now, all of a sudden. Would you mind going downstairs and getting me one?”
“A chocolate milk shake?” Mrs. Rossi said. “I’ll get you five chocolate milk shakes!”
“Just one, Ma. Or two, if Jake wants one.”
Amelia came over, took my face in both hands and gave me a hard kiss straight on the lips, then marched happily out the door on her milk shake run.
“You okay?” Janet said when we were alone. She had taken hold of my right hand and was gripping and regripping it. Her eyes shone out from the puffy skin around them. She was breathing in short gulps.
“Sure. Other than the bruised lips.”
“Are you okay about Charlie? Be honest.”
“Honestly?”
She frowned.
“He has my vote for all eternity. I don’t care what he runs for, or how many times he says he loves you.”
“He does love me.”
“I figured that out.”
“But that street only runs one way.”
“Good. We’ll fix him up with somebody. We’ll start a fund to keep him in escort-service babes and fried clams for life.”
She started to laugh, but the laugh caught in her throat and became a cough, and she spit up a bloody mess into the pan. I took the pan to the sink and washed it clean.
“Didn’t we start with this?” she said, when she’d caught her breath and wiped her face twice. “Me spitting into a bucket.”
“You spit into a bucket only after an evening of gourmet sex.”
“Right. I remember now. A swim in the river and gourmet sex. Under a drop cloth, wasn’t it?”
“And we started with you smashing my truck, is how we started.”
“My insurance company compensated you fairly.”
“Blessed are the insurance companies,” I said.
She stopped and looked at me long enough so that the little joking air we’d been puffing out floated away. That fast-two blinks-and we were right in the middle of the bright warm room where we never went with words. I thought, for a second, that she was going to thank me, which is not what I wanted. She was holding my fingers. “We had some fun anyway, Jakie,” she said. “No matter what happens.”
“Sure,” I said, but I was starting to have a little trouble talking. Janet was squeezing my hand in sad, excited pulses. Her eyes were like hot black coals in a face as pale and gray as ash. I could see that she was sinking, the little burst of energy already leaking out of her. After all those years of wrestling with it, she knew her body from the inside out, and I knew she could feel the end of her life close by-or at least the end of the life those lungs had given her. It seemed to me then that she was trying to tell me she knew the transplant wasn’t goi
ng to work.
I started shaking my head against that. My throat wouldn’t let anything through, and I would have been afraid to say those things anyway, but what I was thinking was that there are times when you have to push back hard against what happens to you. There are times to yield, and times to push back hard, and this time I wasn’t yielding, and I wasn’t going to let even the smallest wisp of doubt into the warm, bright room with us. It was very strange, because I wasn’t thinking that way for my own benefit, or even for hers. I was having a vision of her, healthy again, pushing two little children on swings in a park. It wasn’t a sentimental feeling but a calling almost. A certainty. A vision. We were there in our little puddle of light, speckled and mottled-we were human-but there were parts of the connection between us that were as pure and perfect as threads of virgin silk. I would be thirty-one in eight more days, old enough to know how rare those threads were. Janet knew it, too. She put the mask up to her face for a few seconds, then took it away.
She was holding my left hand. I had my right hand in my pants pocket, poking just the tip of my middle finger through the ring. I wanted to do what I was going to do in a way that was movie-star cool, just taking the ring out with one hand and slipping it onto her finger without saying anything, without pulling my other hand away. I tried it. And I got the ring most of the way out of my pocket pretty well, without her noticing anything, but then, somehow, it got snagged up on the edge of the pocket, on the little double line of thread there. Snagged up pretty bad. But I still wanted to do it one-handed, so I tilted my wrist down an inch, and turned it sideways, and then somehow the ring came unsnagged all at once and as I was turning my hand palm-up, it popped out into the air. It flew up only a few inches, but it seemed to stay there for an impossibly long time, wobbling in the light. We were both looking at it. I pulled my hand out of hers and cupped my hands together and caught it, but all hope of being cool was ruined. Before she could say anything, I reached out and slid it onto her finger. She’d lost so much weight that it was like sliding a hula hoop onto a pencil. I took my hands away and the ring almost slid right off. Janet was staring at it.
I waited a few seconds, then I said, “The salesman promised it will shrink after you wash it a few times.”
She looked at the ring and looked at it and then looked up at me finally, with such a gleam of joy and love on her face that it almost didn’t matter to me what happened after that, whether she lived, or I lived, or whether we would ever be able to adopt children, and pour the feeling we had for each other all over them, minute by minute, year after year. The world was speckled and mottled and full of pain and evil, but during those few months we had stumbled into this little bright room together, and stayed there for a while. That was almost enough.
I said, “It doesn’t matter if those old lungs get infected now, does it?”
She shook her head. She was squeezing her left hand to keep the ring on, and her eyes were full of silvery wet light, and she was the one who couldn’t talk now, and we had one quick, over-the-side-of-the-bed kiss, one little breakdown of borders. Then she held me against her with one thin weak arm around the back of my neck, no words coming out but her spirit all wide open against me, yes to yes.
BEFORE HER MOTHER could come back with the milk shakes, I went out of the room to the sound of Janet coughing, and down the stairs, and outside into the damp, cold night. The surgery on Governor Valvelsais and on me had to be done at a different hospital, four miles away, because no hospital wants to tie up all its operating rooms and all its surgeons on one patient. As I drove across town, snow began to fall, cutting diagonally through the darkness. During the testing I had heard the nurses and technicians talking about a storm, and there it was: swirls of small, icy flakes above Boston Common, and a quick dusting of white on the cars and sidewalks of Tremont Street. By the time I’d parked in the lot of the other hospital, the wind was picking up, too. People were walking out the front door with their coats wrapped tight in front of them and their faces lowered.
I checked in and went upstairs. I changed into the hospital gown and lay down in the bed. After a while two nurses came in and talked to me, took my temperature and pulse, made sure I hadn’t eaten anything. They told me a little bit about what to expect and then left me alone in the darkness. I listened to the hospital sounds-nurses’ shoes, announcements in the hall, the clinking of a cart going past with its load of instruments or plates. I closed my eyes but could not fall asleep for a long while.
Sometime after midnight I heard footsteps in the room. I opened my eyes to see a priest’s plain black overcoat in the darkness next to the bed. I thought it was my brother Ellory. I looked up, past the collar, and saw Gerard’s smiling face.
“What do we need in the way of materials for tomorrow, Colonel?” he said.
“You have a thing about disturbing my sleep, you know that? I must have lived in the apartment next to you in a past life and played my electric guitar loud all night.”
“It was a violin,” he said. “You were very devoted.” His face was shadowed and tired, but fierce somehow. “I just came from the other hospital and I can report two things: one, members of the clergy are allowed into that ward at any hour. Two, the love of your life is coughing in her sleep.”
“Outstanding work.”
“I appreciate it, sir.”
“Those lungs have to last seven more hours.”
“It appears that they will. I will be there when she awakens from the surgery, Colonel, in my capacity as her spiritual counselor. And I shall come give you my report soon afterwards in person.”
“Excellent.”
“Anything to confess before you go under?”
“Impure thoughts and desires, Father.”
“Describe these thoughts and desires in detail,” he said. Then he shook my hand, told me he’d seen the ring on Janet’s finger, said, “Don’t screw it up like I did,” and was gone.
I lay awake for another little while, thinking about him and about his wife and the girls.
In the morning I woke up nervous, but not afraid. Snow was still falling outside the window. A nurse came in and gave me a Valium and two sips of water, but the Valium did nothing to make things less real. I knew the governor was already in surgery by then, and Janet, too. Doctor Vaskis would be making a looping incision from her right armpit, down beneath her breast, cutting the muscle between two ribs, then sawing through the sternum, and then making another looping cut on the other side. A lobe from the governor’s right lung, and a lobe from my left, would be pulled out between two of our pried-apart back ribs and sent across the city in special coolers, one by one. Time-release life gliding in ambulances through the snow. When everything was set, Vaskis would lift the top of Janet’s chest cavity as if it were the hood of a car, take out the ruined right lung while the blood that should have been going through her heart was detoured through a machine at the side of the table. He’d wash and clean the chest cavity. He’d set the governor’s lobe in, and then, if everything went well, he’d begin the slow process of sewing together the pulmonary vein and the pulmonary artery and the tube through which Janet’s breath would pass-the bronchus.
He’d run some blood through to check the first lobe, then start in on the left side of her body, and do the same thing there, with a part of me.
Two nurses and an orderly came in to the room. They asked if I was ready. I said that I was. I climbed out of the bed and onto a gurney and we rolled off down the hall beneath a parade of ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights. In the elevator, one of the nurses rubbed my arm. When they wheeled me into the operating room, a very young doctor with sandy, boyish hair greeted me, and after they’d wheeled me up beside some machinery I did not want to look at, he said, “Now, Mister Entwhistle, we are going to insert a needle into your vein.”
“The veins are the blue ones,” I said.
He didn’t smile. He put the needle in, and checked the tube attached to it. He said, “Now we are going t
o start a medicine called fentanyl, a narcotic, which will prepare you for the actual anesthesia.”
“Narcotic away,” I said.
In another moment the room began to spin and shift in a kaleidoscope of delight. I could feel the drug going through me, down into my arms and legs, pulsing warmly in the middle of me like a billion cells having orgasms. With the pain taken out of it, the world was a wonderful place, a perfect place, and I thought, for an instant, about my sister and brother and mother and dad. They seemed, then, like just four more drips of good matter in a singing, happy sea. I held a picture of Janet in my swirling mind.
“Now we are going to put you to sleep,” the doctor said, and from the deepest part of me, the soul of my will, I struggled and struggled and tried to push some words out into the air between us.
“Just give me another few seconds of this,” I wanted to say, but I could not manage it.
Conway, Massachusetts
May 3,2003-January 20, 2005
Roland Merullo
Roland Merullo is the critically acclaimed author of Revere Beach Elegy and In Revere, In Those Days. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and two children.
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A Little Love Story Page 22