So Lucky

by Nicola Griffith

  My sister died from a heroin overdose. I watched her, many times, take the used needle from a friend, laugh, and squirt the bloody remnants at the wall. Watched, and reminded her to clean the works, wipe her skin with alcohol. Watched her tie off her arm, jack up the vein, dimple then puncture it with the needle. I had nightmares about steel sliding into blue veins, bloody hieroglyphs on the walls.

  “Looks bruised,” Liang said.

  She shone a light in my eyes, made me follow her fingers. “Your eyesight seems fine.” She scraped the bottom of my left foot: the toes curled and a visceral memory of my belly on Aiyana’s caught my breath. She scraped my right foot. The toes did not curl. “How does that leg feel?”

  “Cold. Numb.” The words were still difficult, but at least I could now speak, and swallow, and breathe. I tried not to look at the respirator and oxygen tubes dangling like gutted snakes by the bed.

  She banged on my knees and ankles and wrists, made a note on my chart. “At the doses of corticosteroid we’ve got you on, you may have some difficulty sleeping. I can give you something for that.”

  “When do I get out?”

  “You’re rehydrating nicely. Your vertigo has passed and your vital functions are more or less normal. But I’m concerned about the possibility of a recurrence of respiratory difficulties. You’ll need to be on the IV another two days—”

  “I can have that done at home.” Just talking about it made me feel queasy.

  “—but I would prefer to keep an eye on you for another day or two here. To make sure you rest.” Perhaps I imagined the emphasis. “And there are … arrangements you’ll have to make. A wheelchair. Someone to do the shopping and cleaning.”

  Who? “For how long?”

  “I don’t know.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “You could be better in a week. You could get worse. Frankly, a setback of this severity is not typical with relapsing-remitting MS.” She looked at her watch. “The sooner you get started on drug therapies the better. Read that literature I gave you.”

  I had already read it. Glossy sales brochures full of pictures of clean-cut, unstressed, middle-class people with white teeth posed with clean and shiny mobility aids, or standing on top of a mountain, or riding a bike. Scaremongering text that boiled down to, Take this or you’ll be a total cripple. The medical equivalent of Go to Mass or you’ll burn in Hell. Mostly injectable drugs—subQ, IM, IV—some oral. The published research looked suspiciously cherry-picked. Even so, there were lots of black-box warnings that said, essentially, This could ruin your immune system, destroy your liver, and might not work. But if you don’t take it, you will never climb a mountain again. They reminded me of old tampon adverts my mother used to sing a song about: buy this and magically be able to ride a white horse bareback through a field, dive from a high board, or play competitive tennis. And the drugs were insanely expensive, starting around $5,000 a month—which was the annual deductible on the healthcare plan I had chosen for GAP, when I was still invulnerable and immortal, without a pre-existing condition.

  Another slick pamphlet was from the American Multiple Sclerosis Society; they used the same model as one of the drug adverts, this time on a bike on top of a mountain. I followed their URL and found that their website, like all selling sites, was designed to get your contact info. I wasn’t ready for that yet, wasn’t ready to belong to the society of victims and sufferers.

  At the bottom of the pile were sign-up sheets for yoga, and support groups for depression and mindfulness—as though talking about it would help with holes in your brain. I tossed them all in the recycling bin, then frowned, and fished them out again. I’d gone through them more carefully. All the groups were run by hospital counselors, not peers. Not a single one by people with MS for people with MS.

  * * *

  ROSE PUT THE BAG ON THE FLOOR and scooted the chair closer. “What did Aiyana say?”

  I said nothing.

  “You haven’t told her? But she’s your closest—” Her face seemed to thicken and swell, like a pan of milk coming to the boil. She sat back. “Well, that didn’t take long.” Her laugh was short and hard. “But who am I to judge? The pot calling the—” She closed her eyes briefly. “Sorry. Forget it. It’s—never mind.” She took a breath. “I’m glad for you. Really. But you should tell her.”

  “I will.” When the time was right.

  She pushed the oxygen paraphernalia away and lifted the bag from the floor. She pulled items from it, one by one, and set them on the side table.

  “Salad. Because I know the pap they serve here might kill you, even if nothing else does. And some of that disgusting vegetarian chili you like. Beer, because as your grandmother used to say, a bit of what you fancy does you good. Some books. Ah, these aren’t for you.”

  Her tarot cards, wrapped in purple silk. When we first moved in together she used to read her cards every week. I would never let her read them for me. Pretty-colored cardboard, I’d said. I don’t believe in that shit. After a childhood of charismatic Catholicism, I was allergic to anything I could not touch or quantify.

  “I picked them up from the house this morning.” The house. “I didn’t think you’d mind.” She stuffed them back in her bag. “You didn’t tell me Josh had planted more of those weird vine things. Ah, here we go. Decent tea bags. Clean pajamas. And three chocolate truffles.” It was an eight-mile drive to get those truffles, and the deli where she got the chili was four miles in the other direction. She even had my favorite dressing for the salad.

  I blinked hard. I couldn’t reach the tissues with my arm skewered by the IV. I let the tears leak into my ears and the corners of my mouth.

  * * *

  MY HAND WAS FINE, and my right leg, though noticeably weaker than my left, recovered enough so that I didn’t limp until I’d walked more than a hundred yards. But I was deathly tired, and the prednisolone made me restless.

  Overnight, temperatures fell and the air turned hard.

  Eventually I picked up the phone. My mother was easy: I called and left a message—she never picked up; sometimes she did not bother to check messages for days. And mothers were mothers; they had to love you. But every time I brought up Aiyana’s number I saw her stern-faced icon—When you fight to be taken seriously you don’t smile in photos—and could not make the call.

  * * *

  AT WYNDE HOUSE I REREAD THE SUMMARY email from the Budget Committee. A muscle under my left eye tightened. I rubbed at it, then messaged Anton, the board chair.

 

  He was. “What’s up?”

  “The response to the budget. Specifically line item 91, the ramp.”

  “A new ramp is not a budget priority at this time.”

  “It should be.”

  “The Executive Committee feels that sidewalk remediation would cost too much.”

  “I’ll find a way to raise the money.”

  “We need our ED focused on strategic issues, not details.”

  The muscle under my eye twitched. I flexed my face hideously to make it stop. “People with disabilities are not details.”

  “The current ramp is ADA compliant.”

  “It’s round the back. Like a service entrance. It sends the message that the disabled are second-class citizens.”

  “That’s a little extreme.”

  “Separate but equal is extreme? Perhaps you should talk to our disabled constituents.”

  He sighed. “Do we have data, a survey?”

  “We do.” I’d found the numbers two hours ago. “Seventeen point four percent of our users self-identify as disabled.” Less than the general population.

  “I meant of our disabled customers’ satisfaction.”

  “We have never thought to ask our disabled customers anything as a group.” That would have to change. “Meanwhile, we do have a satisfaction survey of one. Me.”

  Silence. Densely populated. “Perhaps you’d better tell me.”

  In the corner, where the wa
lls met the ceiling, a fly walked in circles.

  “Mara?”

  “I have MS.” Sufferer. Victim.

  “Multiple sclerosis?”

  No, you prick, I’m the new owner of Microsoft. Another silence. He was probably mentally running through our conversation, checking he hadn’t said anything actionable.

  “You’re sure?”

  “The doctors are. Lesions in my spine and brain.”

  “Mara, I’m so sorry.” And I could hear it in his voice already: I was now on the other side of the divide, no longer one of Us but one of Them. “Do you need time off? Anything we can do to help—”

  “Anything except the ramp.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth I wanted to snatch them back. The way to persuade Anton was to encourage him to feel wise and magnanimous, not slam him up against his own bias.

  “Perhaps we should pick up this conversation when you’re feeling a little calmer.”

  “I am perfectly fucking calm.”

  “Yes, well. Tomorrow, Mara.”

  I flicked the phone off viciously. Calmer my ass. Then he pinged me again.

 

  “Asshole,” I said to the screen.

  A minute later, another message:

 

  Oh, he was not going to win that easily. “Christopher!” I needed a list of the Executive Committee’s personal numbers.

  He stuck his head through the door.

  “Get me … What?”

  “Your face. It’s wet.”

  A tear dripped on my desk. I stared at it.

  “I’ll bring you tissues.”

  I touched my face. Definitely wet. I never cried. Except for the two months after my little sister died, when I’d find myself huddled and weeping with no warning. But this time no one had died.

  I had forgotten to ask him for those numbers. Fuck it, I’d just hide the ask in other budget items. I pulled up the spreadsheet all my direct reports had already argued over, corrected, and signed off on and began moving things around, recalculating, relabeling line items, faster and faster, lungs working, arteries wide. Budget martial arts.

  Christopher brought tea with the tissues and set both down without comment. I did not look up as he closed the door quietly on the way out. I was too busy stabbing at the keys and cursing the screen. Fuck you. Sum. Fuck you. Average. And the horse you rode in on. Total. My heart throbbed like the engine of a freighter battling a storm.

  When the numbers said what I wanted them to say, I imported the web sheet into Excel for the digitally illiterate on the Executive Committee, which was most of them, attached it as a PDF, which they could all read, and hit send. Eat that. Compliant my ass.

  After two minutes of deep breathing my heart began to slow. I picked up my tea. Then, beyond the closed door, I heard “Shit.” Christopher never cursed. A moment later he knocked on the door—he never knocked, either—and came in. He looked uncertain.

  I put the cup down. He shut the door behind him. “Are you quitting?”

  “Quitting?”

  “I just read what you said.”

  “What I said?”

  “Mara…” He came forward, gestured at my screen. “May I?”

  I nodded. He turned it to face him, typed, brought up the spreadsheet I’d just sent, turned it back again. “It’s the budget,” I said. I had no idea what he was trying to get at.

  He leaned over and highlighted two line items. Stood back.

  Where it should have been labeled Maintenance/Improvements and Miscellaneous it read FUCK YOU and AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON.

  * * *

  AIYANA CALLED FROM THE AIRPORT: her return from Greensboro was early; she was just waiting for her car. I told her I wasn’t feeling great—but nothing contagious, not to worry. She said she’d pick up something from the Flying Biscuit on the way. When she arrived, her hair glistened with rain and she smelled of herself, and travel, and soup and still-warm biscuits. “I nearly tripped and died on your weird-ass neighbor’s rake.”

  She kissed me gently, like it was the first time. Like we were shy. Maybe we were.

  She held out the bags. “I got soup. Chicken and pumpkin.” Her favorite. “I didn’t know what you like when you’re sick so I got biscuits and gravy, comfort food.”

  We kissed again, slowly. Dread and desire was a horrible combination.

  “You look tired.” When I didn’t say anything, she said, “How about I shower while you heat things?”

  While the water hissed in the background I focused on laying the table, pouring the soup into a pan, putting the biscuits in the warming drawer. I could say it was just bad cramps. Napkins. Maybe migraine. Spoons on the napkins. I should cut some lime; she liked lime in spicy soup.

  When she emerged from the shower in my robe her hair still glistened, but now she smelled of my shampoo, my body lotion, my deodorant. The way Rose had after a shower, only then it had been our shampoo, our … Too confusing.

  While we ate she talked about Nana. “I’ve told her ten thousand times I’m coming back but she doesn’t believe me.”

  I nodded and cut my biscuit open. Normally I would slather it with butter before it got cold and stuff the dripping biscuit in my mouth, but today I just let it steam gently to itself.

  “Hold on.” She got up, went to her travel bag and rummaged for a minute, then came back with a sun-faded gray velvet bag. The scent of biscuit, pumpkin, and lime was joined by dusty lavender. I imagined the bag sitting in a drawer with a sachet of dried herbs, untouched, for a generation. She untied the silk rope at the top, tipped a shiny object onto her palm, and held it out.

  An old-fashioned ring engraved with vines and flowers. “A wedding ring?”

  “It was her mother’s. I think it’s her way of reminding me I’m married to the family, no matter what.”

  “Her way of reminding you to come back.”

  She hefted it. “I don’t think so. I’d say she gave it to me so that every day, walking around in a new life she can’t even imagine, I can keep her in my thoughts.”

  Should I buy her a ring? Was that what she was trying to say?

  She looked at her right hand, as though considering which finger would work, then slipped it back in the bag, retied the rope, and put it in her pocket. She nodded at my unbuttered biscuit and barely touched soup. “Not hungry?”

  “Tired. It’s been a hard day.” She put her ringless hand on mine, then held it, stroking the wrist bone with her thumb, waiting.

  I gave her an edited version of what happened at work: the argument with the board chair about the ramp’s importance, the slipup with the spreadsheet, Christopher pointing it out. She did not interrupt. “And I couldn’t even delete it. It was an actual attached file. But I was just so angry. The angriest I’ve been in a long time.” She waited some more. “Because of what Anton, the board chair, said. About the ramp. I was angry because—because I’m sick.”

  Though she did not draw back I could feel her bracing against the news. Her mother had died of uterine cancer just months after we met.

  “Not like your mom. It’s not cancer. It’s not anything that will kill me. Not soon.” I took a breath, then said it clinically, as though talking about someone else. “I have multiple sclerosis. The relapsing-remitting kind. There are treatments. I should be fine for years.”

  It’s a strange thing to feel a body you know change inside without moving, a kind of shrinking away, like the sides of a cooling cake.

  “I’m guessing that’s how Anton looked, too.”

  She frowned. “You told him?”

  I stared at her. “Of course I told him. I’ve been out all my life. I’m not going back in, not about anything.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’ll be fine. They’ve already accepted my apology. I’m taking tomorrow and Friday off, and we’ll get back to the budget on Monday. They need me.” I was
the best ED they had ever had. I had the connections they needed.

  “So, the MS. How long have you known?”

  “Since Wednesday.”

  She sat back. A whole week.

  An explanation would take all night. “Come to bed.”

  She was beautiful, she was fine, but when we got naked in bed together I started to weep and could not stop. I wanted to say, Don’t leave me, but, like Rose, she would go anyway. I would not ask. But I could not stop thinking it, and I kept weeping. And so we spent our last night together as chaste as when we first met.

  * * *

  ON FRIDAY, Anton knocked on my door. I saw immediately how it was but asked him in anyway because it would make no difference.

  He sat down and put his leather folder on the table. “The board is concerned,” he said. “We believe it’s time to focus on your own health rather than helping others. You can’t guarantee that this, this emotional lability will never happen again.”

  I should never have told him about the brain lesions.

  “There are lives at stake here. Vulnerable people who rely on our help and protection. Are you up to the weight of that responsibility when your own health is fragile?”

  All those lives relying on a failing body and a slippery brain full of holes. And it would only get worse.

  He saw the answer on my face and opened his folder. “The board offers a commitment to pay sixty-five percent of your salary for six months, as gratitude for your service.”

  Service: a faithful hound ready to be euthanized.

  “This is a draft agreement—”

  “And if I don’t agree?”

  “The offer might not hold next month, as we have not yet ratified the budget.”

  My budget. But Percentage still working after five years: 45. There had to be a reason for that. And Georgia was an at-will employment state; they could fire me at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all. I could not afford to be fired.

  “Add health insurance.” There would be no COBRA. As a responsible ED I had held insurance costs down by keeping head count under the threshold—and opting for the high deductible. “Eighteen months.”