We take a ferry from Fajardo to Vieques, to the decommissioned U.S. Navy bomb test site that is home to the world’s best bio-bay. The lower level of the ferry smells like fried food from the snack bar. None of us can take the smell, so we gather our things and head to the upper deck, where guys in guayaberas and panama hats are playing dominoes.
The waters on the eastern side of the island have an entirely different character than the white-capped, choppy waters of the west. This feels like a real tropical escape, as in piña coladas and long naps in hammocks. We pass tiny, storybook islands with nothing on them but palm trees. I half-expect to see a laughing skeleton propped up against a dome-top treasure chest; or maybe a bandaged Wile E. Coyote waving for rescue. Suddenly, I’m in the mood for fun and adventure. I’m reminded, once again, that nothing is more life-affirming than the simple, child-like joy of exploring the world.
In Vieques, our tour guide explains that Mosquito Bay has an opening to the sea that is so narrow that it’s practically a lagoon. Mangrove leaves fall into this contained aquatic environment and create a unique, protein-rich, brackish soup. This special ecosystem contains a kind of bioluminescent marine plankton called dinoflagellates. We set off into the water as part of a caravan of kayaks, just after sunset, in dimming light. At first we don’t see anything unusual. Then, we notice an eerie blue glow each time we dip an oar into the water. Adrian was right, there is zero light pollution, and the stars sparkle with a clean, bright fiery light from the heavens. As the darkness deepens, anything that moves provokes a release of light in the water, including the waves themselves, which glow eerily as they pass by. By the time we bungee our kayaks to each other in the middle of the bay, we are floating in an otherworldly field of curling, sparkling light. Never before have I heard adults giggle and squeal and carry on the way we do tonight. We don’t know what to do with ourselves; we can’t believe what we’re seeing. Adrian and Ray are hee-hawing like a pair donkeys, so I swim over to find out what’s going on. Ray has discovered that you can fart in the water and that the bubbles glow and rise like champagne in a glass. We have ourselves a hearty juvenile moment, while Holly, Taina, and Julia protest and paddle away from us. Then Ray shouts, “Hey, Holly, is that a shark fin behind you?”
Holly starts thrashing and screaming and hurls herself into the kayak, which immediately tips over. The annoyed tour guide assures everyone that there are no sharks in Mosquito Bay because the entrance is too shallow, even at high tide. We get back into our kayaks and our guide leads us along the edge of a mangrove. He shows us how we can disturb shrimp by banging our oars against the side of our boats to see a hundred squiggle marks of light moving though the water. I drift away on my own for a bit. Suddenly, I see a pair of winged creatures speeding through the darkness, below my kayak. “Rays!” I shout. They pass underneath me in a radiant formation of blue, and then they’re gone. The glow lingers for a few seconds, then fades to dark, and disappears.
Back at Blue Caribe Kayaks in Esperanza, the tour guide gives us vinegar to pour over our jellyfish stings, a small hazard they failed to mention before the tour. Only two people in the kayak party of twelve escaped the jellyfish stings (one of them being Holly, who never got out of her kayak again after the shark scare). They hurt a lot less than you would think, no more than a paper cut. Then, while we’re rinsing off the sand and salt at the outdoor showers behind the tour shack, Adrian and Ray, still excited by what they had experienced, talk of future trips together. I don’t know if they’re even aware that “we” might not include me. I feel the weight of my spirit swing hard toward sadness. But I force myself to stay in the moment, and to remember that I’m on vacation, after all, about to go out for drinks and dinner with people I love. I stay focused on the fact that I’ve seen something today that most people will never see in their whole life, something strange and wonderful.
As we gather our things, we’re discussing the mechanical aspects of bioluminescence when Adrian absently poses the question that would reverberate in my soul for the rest of the night: “What good does it do for light to follow prey as they move away from their predators? To be of use, light should lead, rather than follow.” The tour guide knows the science well, and he explains that bioluminescence is simply a defense mechanism for the plankton. The flash of light is a kind of alarm, meant to make its predator jump and worry, and also to attract a secondary predator that will be more likely to attack the initial predator. Pretty darn clever.
In my bed that night, I sit up. I look at the clock: 4 a.m. Adrian and I refused to bunk up with Ray during the trip because he snores like an elephant with a chest full of phlegm. In fact, I can hear him now, two doors down. I sit on the edge of Adrian’s bed. I feel bad waking him but I can’t help it, I need to talk. He stirs and so I go right ahead and tell him that I have just figured out the parable of the bio-bay. “The what of the who?” he says, and flips over, turning his back to me.
“It’s only in absolute darkness that dinoflagellates fully release their light. They charge up in the daylight. Until darkness falls, it’s like they don’t exist.”
“So?”
“Think of it. Finding Kathy. Finding Sister Juana. Seeing the Passage. Going back to Casa Azul. It released a kind of light into our lives. The bioluminescence we saw last night represents a physical or literal release of light. I think our brain and our immune system conspire to do what the plankton do. We release every bit of love, energy, and intelligence we have in the hopes of scaring away the predator. Look at me. The last year has been this huge burst of life and energy.”
He rolls over again, facing me this time. He rubs his eyes and sits up but doesn’t say anything. What the heck, I think, and I hop into bed next to him. “Move over,” I say.
“Okay, but just don’t try to spoon me,” he says, and I lie down next to him. He asks me to repeat what I just said, and I do, for both of us, and we sit with it for a moment. “Jesus. You ought to write that down,” he says. “I think you’re on to something.”
“Maybe I can outsmart cancer,” I continue. “I guess that that’s what I’ve been trying to do.” I tap a finger to my lips. “Back at the kayak shack, you asked something like, ‘what good does it do for the light to follow rather than lead?’ As in, why must experience follow rather than precede?”
He clutches a pillow to his bare chest. “Exactly. That makes no sense. What’s the point of being wiser after the experience, after the risk, after the mistake,” he says. “Take Erick, for example. He’s wise about child safety because his little brother drowned in a lake when he was a kid. Why couldn’t that knowledge have come before the event, so that they might have saved the child? That’s why Erick is so protective of his kids. The other plankton in the bio-bay see the light as a kind of warning to change their course. Are we that smart? I don’t know.”
An hour passes and we’re still talking. He tells me that he had predicted, last summer, that I would find comfort and meaning in experiencing the luminescence of Mosquito Bay.
“A slam dunk,” I say. I hold up a hand and he high-fives me.
“Oye Flaco,” he says, placing a hand over his heart. “Going to Casa Azul has given me peace. You’re not the only one who’s ‘releasing light’ and all that shit.” He looks away.
“So what are you gonna to do with all that Zen, bro?”
He sighs. “I have to figure out a way for those thirty kids at Casa to get some kind of formal education or training beyond elementary school. That’s my mission in life.”
“Anything else?” I fold my arms in front of me.
His eyes roll up. “Uh . . .” his expression reminds me of a little kid trying to make something up to satisfy an adult. “. . . keep my eyes on the plankton.”
“Spend your life being worthy of the sacrifices those women made for us. We could’ve been shark meat, Adrian. But Sister Juana didn’t let that happen. We might have lived in poverty, but we didn’t, because she saw an opportunity to help us and she took it.
Do something with that, okay? Do something with that, Adrian, now that you know the whole story.”
“What about you?”
“I’m already living my life differently. I appreciate everything I used to take for granted.” I tap him on the shoulder and point to my eyes with two fingers. “Eyes on the plankton, man. Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made.” Then I hold up a hand to let him know the discussion is over. “That’s all.”
Chapter 46
Julia and David were in the Muñoz Airport, waiting at the gate for a flight to Hartford. They had already said good-bye to Raymond, who was flying home to Phoenix. Adrian and Holly were together on a flight to Miami, and Taina was headed to LaGuardia. Suddenly, David turned to Julia and said, “Who’s that girl?” He pointed to the empty runway. Julia looked up and saw only the flawless blue sky and the green hills beyond. He cocked his head to the side. “She kind of looks like me.”
Julia stared at him. Coldness spread across the pit of her stomach. David waved at the invisible girl. Julia remembered that he had skipped his last MRI because he had a cold, and wanted to save up his energy for the trip. She calmed herself by ticking off all of the crazy things that happened as a result of the interaction of his medicines. It didn’t necessarily mean that the cancer was back. Regardless, she was terrified of being the only one responsible for him during the flight. This was supposed to have been the very last time that she would be in charge. But the siblings each had their jobs and their lives elsewhere. No one, not even Adrian—who was eager to take the reins—knew exactly how they could complete the transition.
During the flight, David paced the center isle until everyone was unnerved and the flight staff asked him to sit down and he refused. Julia told them that David was in treatment for brain cancer. The bewildered staff handed Julia three free nippers of vodka and some soda, which she mixed and gave to him immediately. He finally settled down and fell asleep. Julia thought she would have a heart attack from the stress and worry that was rising inside her. By the time they began the descent, David couldn’t be roused. At the insistence of the airline, there was a stretcher brought to the gate. They took him directly to Sloan-Kettering, and they called Dr. Levine at home. The doctor on duty began to run tests.
The MRI showed that David had two small but fast-growing tumors. One of them was in his parietal lobe, so this time, he was hallucinating. One was embedded deep at the center of his brain, nested right on top of his hypothalamus. That one was inoperable.
A month later, having exhausted the boundaries of conventional medicine, David began experimental drug treatments as a last resort. They ceased chemotherapy. His hair grew back, curly this time.
Julia phoned Adrian, who was in a hotel in Chicago. She informed him that she would be spending her nights in the O’Farrells’ guest room from then on. Her gift to David would be to stay by his side for the rest of his life.
“Thank you,” Adrian said, relief in his voice. In the background, someone called his name. “I’m on in five minutes,” he said. “I have to go.” They said their good-byes and just as Julia was about to hang up Adrian said, “Wait.” Silence. “Julia? I love you,” he said simply. “I miss you, and I want to get on a plane right now and be with you and my brother.” He paused, took a deep breath. “Oh God, Julia, I’m so scared.”
By day, Marcia was the caretaker. At night, Julia watched over David. That was the worst time. The situation became asphyxiating in the dark, as if it were being gassed into the room as daylight disappeared. In his bed, David looked like a mound of dirt beneath the blankets, and every night that mound looked smaller. He snored softly, while the evil twins grew safe and warm inside his head. Julia lay with him sometimes, so that each night’s routine was the same as it had always been. She eventually came to understand that siblings could only come in so close. That Julia and David were no longer lovers didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was that they had been. Having someone in your room at night is profoundly intimate, and David relished his privacy. Even his parents could only come in so close. He had even used the old “What if I’m having sex?” threat on them again, after his dad came into his room without knocking first.
She glided her hand along the runway of his arm, which rested at his side. She wished that she could strap him down and anchor him to this world. Other times, she was like a child in thinking that she could just plain refuse to let it happen. No, you’re not taking him, and that’s it. And that’s it, and that’s it. After he fell asleep, she got up, closed the door softly behind her, gulping huge gasps of air in the hallway. She went downstairs, grabbed a blanket, and lied down on the couch. She immediately felt guilty that he was alone in his room. What if he woke up? She got up, fell back, sat up, fell back. She stared up at the ceiling and wondered why and how this came to be. When had those glial cells staged their vicious coup?
Spring was on its way again, and Julia made it a priority to make sure David got outside. Some days he walked, some days he had to sit in a wheelchair, covered in rain gear. He had begun to lose mobility on his left side. On a particularly good day, when David was feeling “well” (he was able to walk down the driveway and back, holding on to her arm), he asked Julia what she planned to wear to his service. He knew her well enough to assume that she was ready, and he was right. Julia asked if he was sure he wanted to know, and when he said yes, she brought the dress to show him. She put it on and modeled it for him. When she put on the diamond earring studs he had bought her for her birthday, he started to cry. She apologized, but he stopped her. “No, no, no. It’s just that you look so beautiful,” he said, wiping his eyes.
Then she asked David something she had been curious about for more than a year. “What did you wish for that night at Tre Scalini, David, when you blew out the candles of my chocolate lava cake? It wasn’t to marry me, because you turned me down the next day. So what did you wish for?” He looked off in the distance for a moment, and then his eyes turned down to the left. She would never know if he truly remembered the moment, or was making something up. His lips pulled up on one side and he said, “I wished that you would always feel loved.”
Within a week of their conversation, David’s Spanish almost eclipsed his English. Julia wrote his words in her pink notepad: Pelota, mesa, vaso, calsetines, arroz, leche, perro, pájaro, camiseta, and tengo hambre . . . sed . . . sueño. She translated them for Dr. Levine, who pointed out that it was the vocabulary of a child, and that each referred to household items, toys, animals, or a physical need. He explained that language is stored in layers that deepen as we grow older, so that as more recent data was lost, the more primitive vocabulary remains intact. Where he lost an English word, his brain dug deeper, and so retrieved a Spanish version instead. “This is how aphasia can manifest itself in the bilingual brain,” he said. “It’s very curious, I know.”
Chapter 47
April 2009
When there was no more they could do at the hospital, they moved David to the Connecticut Hospice in Branford, just a short distance down the shore from the Thimble Islands. He had begun to have seizures and had become aggressive. To control him, they gave him anticonvulsants and tied his wrists to the rails of the bed. Julia couldn’t stand to see him like that so when the nurse on duty wasn’t looking, she untied him. The tumor on the hypothalamus had thrown his internal thermostat out of whack, and he sweated profusely despite the cool temperature. When his wrists were free, he immediately stripped naked and tried to get out of the bed. Julia ended up with a fractured wrist, so they tied him down again. She thought, this is it, he’s strapped in for the ride. He was already somewhere they couldn’t reach him, in a delirious, agitated state of mumblings. But she was sure that something or someone was helping him through the churning waters of this passage, because he often said things that implied the hustle of moving with a crowd: “Better hurry!” and “You’ve got to be kidding!” and “Come on!”
Everyone came, even Kathy, who stayed for a whole day at David�
��s bedside, speaking quietly and singing to him. “So what ever happened to Jared?” Adrian asked Kathy one day.
“I have him in the same nursing home as my dad,” Kathy said. “Now that his parents are both dead, I’m it. One of my daughters visits him twice a week, and I’m there every Saturday afternoon.” She looked down at her hands. “I had to run away from him in order to find my way back. It took years.”
Adrian began to carry a notebook, monitoring and recording every detail of David’s care from doses to times of catheter changes. Everything Julia used to do, but no longer did, because she finally understood that it wasn’t going to be of any use. Adrian’s state of denial lasted a bit longer, and so he persisted in recording David’s mumblings, because, “You never know, this could be useful.” It wasn’t, Julia knew, but she didn’t discourage him because Sue Lorens, the wife of the ten-year survivor, had been right. One has to find ways to pass the time and feel useful. The second thing Adrian did to try to keep himself busy was to volunteer as an entertainer at the hospice. He brought his guitar and wandered around the halls, asking patients and their relatives if they were in the mood for a song. Julia was with him when an old man in a wheelchair pulled on the hem of his shirt.
“Excuse me.” The old man put his hand out like he was begging. “Can you please tell me who I am?” Adrian and Julia looked around. They couldn’t find a nurse.
“Hmm. Well, let’s figure it out,” Adrian answered, sitting on a nearby chair and setting his guitar on his knee. “What kind of music do you like?”
Five minutes later they were all singing “When Johnnie Comes Marching Home” at the top of their lungs. At last the old man raised his chin, high and proud, and cried out, “Edward! First Sergeant Edward McGuiness. A Company, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division!” His watery blue eyes sparkled with pride. The janitor, who had been emptying the garbage in the hall, saluted him, and Julia and Adrian did the same. First Sergeant McGuiness put his face in his arthritic hands and wept with relief and gratitude at having remembered himself.
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