Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  Which is to say, my empathy for Aaron has a source in memory, not just in theory. He closes his eyes and holds on to the railing of the bed, bracing himself, against his headache or the cool gel on his belly or the indignity of the procedure or his fear of medical buildings. Over his shoulder, I watch the gray images bloom on the screen, a Rorschach galaxy, a Loch Ness gallery, a crystal ball. Everyone knows you can’t see anything on those screens, but if you look the right way, you can see everything: a hawk, a butter knife, a howling mouth, a flaming fish. The tech does not joke that she sees a baby, but I see it: the third baby we tried for, half-heartedly, wondering if we should, if our sick house family could hold another life, if the briar patch of my womb could. I see the tomatoes that didn’t grow in the garden, the stillborn jobs, the dinners gone cold, the ashes of our parents, the malformed pillow of each morning. I see the things that were and things that weren’t, the things that might have been.

  * * *

  The results of the ultrasound and the liver bloodwork come back fast, the next day. We get calls from the rheumatologist’s office and the neurologist’s office, nervous nurses reading his chart. For once, the results are not normal. They can’t tell us much, though. Follow up with your GP right away, they urge him.

  By the time we see the doctor that evening, the world has shifted a few inches. Our thumbs try to keep up with the news. Harvey Weinstein is sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. The World Health Organization declares COVID-19 a pandemic. In the exam room, we make small talk about the virus with the doctor. He wears the same half-laugh expression as when he told us he found a V8 in his in-law’s pantry that had expired in the year 2000—and drank it. The local health department isn’t ready, he says. But from what he’s hearing, it might not be that serious. “Children get it, and it’s like a cold,” he says, showing us his palms.

  Aaron’s liver is enlarged. Dr. McLovin squints to decode the chart on his tiny laptop. Spleen also mildly enlarged. Elevated enzyme levels.

  “How enlarged?”

  Normally, he says, a liver is 8 to 10 centimeters wide and 10 to 12 centimeters long. When the liver grows, it grows vertically, never horizontally. Aaron’s liver is 23 centimeters long. “So, basically, it’s twice its normal size.” Dr. McLovin says this as though it’s unsurprising, natural, even, like a sourdough rising. He continues to translate the chart. It’s non-cirrhotic: not scarred. Increased echogenecity: not necessarily fatty, but sort of grainy. He holds up an imaginary sack. “Imagine if you had a bag of different grains, and you can see the individual grains inside. That’s what your liver looks like now.” I picture the sack, millet and oat and amaranth, bloated with whiskey.

  “Are we super concerned?” Dr. McLovin asks. “Not yet.”

  “Good,” Aaron says. “I’m not concerned, either.”

  I raise my hand. “Can I be concerned?” It’s not Aaron’s behavior that concerns me. In a lineup of sober people, no one would be able to pick him out as the drunk one. No slurring, no stumbling, no aggravation. It’s clear to me that even his blackouts aren’t typical alcoholic blackouts. “It’s these new symptoms that concern me.” I remind them both what’s been happening: the passing out, hallucinations, memory loss, nosebleeds. Yesterday, he vomited blood. “I read about hepatic encephalopathy.” Brain damage brought on by liver disease.

  The doctor nods. “Always activated through ammonia levels. His ammonia levels are fine.”

  Aaron nods, too, as though he knew this, and can take credit.

  “Okay, your liver is twice its normal size. I mean, how much bigger can it get?”

  “Oh, it can get quite a bit bigger,” says the doc.

  “But once it’s damaged, once it’s … fatty, the damage is done, right?”

  “Actually, the liver can repair itself. It’s quite resilient.”

  Aaron raises his eyebrows, satisfied.

  Dr. McLovin refers us to a new gastroenterologist, since the liver is a digestive organ—who knew? The gastro will run some more tests to determine the source of the enlarged liver. They can even do a liver biopsy. The source! I don’t know whether to be grateful for the circumspection, or insulted, or just amused. I can tell you the source of the enlarged liver, I think but do not say. I’ll save you some time.

  “Obviously, in the meantime, you want to cut back on alcohol.”

  Aaron and I exchange tight little looks.

  “It’s complicated,” I say.

  Aaron admits it: he’s been drinking heavily for nine, ten months. He doesn’t say how heavily. I don’t even really know, or want to know, myself. But he also hasn’t broken out in five months.

  “I understand,” the doctor says, and for once I think he does. I am grateful for his lack of judgment, and also furious. Usually I’m angry because the doctors assume drug use; now I’m angry because this one doesn’t. But if he’s not going to tell my husband that his drinking is going to kill him, who will?

  We check out, sanitize. It is hard not to confuse the world health crisis with my husband’s rapidly expanding liver. We are all grains in a yeasty sponge of our own poisoning. How much worse can it get? Oh, a lot worse.

  “See?” Aaron says in the car. “Not so serious.”

  I give him a look. “He doesn’t think the coronavirus is serious, either!”

  I remember Dr. McLovin’s happy chatter with my father a week before he was dead.

  * * *

  Aaron is not concerned about his liver, but he is following COVID-19 with a disciple’s devotion. He texts me updates from across the globe: infection rates and death rates, school closings and restaurant closings, each store shuttering in our little town, one by one, the world drawing down its metal doors. When he reads about the old people dying in Seattle, in Italy, he begins to cry, cradling his phone as though it, too, has lost life in his palm.

  It is both abstract and concrete, the pandemic: you can’t see it, and you can. Its terror is its invisibility, the way it transforms strangers, even loved ones, into carriers, everyone unsafe, everyone a threat. Yet we have all seen the images of the virus, sometimes a blood-colored planet with its gold crown, sometimes a gray foam ball with little pigtails of red yarn, something out of a cartoon about ocean life. It looks three-dimensional enough to touch, real as a Kooosh ball. The coronavirus has no cure, no vaccine, but by the time we heard about it, it already had a name, an origin, a history, a test. I imagine what this pandemic would feel like if it didn’t, if we were still trying to trap it in the microscope.

  We are attracted, Aaron and I, maybe all of us, to the chronicle of the pandemic, even as it frightens us, throws our days into disarray. The story is shaped by our newsfeeds. We wait for the next chapter. We cannot look away. There is something equalizing about this virus: anyone with lungs can catch it. Some are more vulnerable, of course. But the reality of the disease is experienced, in a way, by all of us—each of us susceptible, each of us a player, actors or athletes ready to be called. As Susan Sontag said, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.” Odd, to watch Aaron participate in the democracy of disease, when isolated with an illness so private it seems invented by the circumstances of his own body. His illness, whatever it is, is the opposite of a pandemic.

  How neat, a virus: it is in you, or it’s not.

  For now, it’s not in us. At least we don’t think so.

  It is out there. We can stay in here. Aaron wants us to stay in here.

  He does not want to follow up with the gastroenterologist. He does not want to step foot in another doctor’s office, not with sick people coming and going.

  He does, however, want to stop at the liquor store.

  We stock the pantry, swab our phones with alcohol wipes, install Zoom. We Zoom into the Recovering Couples meeting, where we haven’t made an appearance in months. Aaron’s been too sick to go most Sunday nights, and too uncomfortable showing up when he’s been drinking—he feels like a hypocrit
e. But the pandemic has created the technical conditions that allow us to attend. We watch our friends’ faces appear on the screen, listen to the rasp of their fingers trying to find the mute button. We have all found each other. We are here.

  One friend, the chemist, thinks he might have the virus. He is quarantined in his basement. His wife leaves soup outside his door. They Zoom in from different rooms in the same house, take walks together on the opposite side of the road. Aaron’s eyes fill with tears.

  When it’s our turn to share, he doesn’t say that he’s spent the last three seasons drinking his way toward liver disease.

  “I’ve been in quarantine for the last year,” he jokes. “Need any tips? Let me know.”

  * * *

  The next day, our house is supposed to go on the market. The Realtor has already hammered the For Sale sign into the rocky earth by the road. I’ve cleaned every inch of the house, patched and spackled the holes in the doors. I have hung a new door in our bedroom closet, the hole—the size of my own fist—too big to patch.

  But it’s also the first day of lockdown, the first day my classes are cancelled, and the kids are home. Stores are closed. We are not to be within six feet of another human unless completely necessary. Is it completely necessary? Is it insane to try to sell a house in a pandemic?

  We call the Realtor. We take the sign down. We do not want strangers coming in and out, we realize, not when the world is sick. Our sick house has become our safe house, something precious, worth preserving. The lockbox remains hanging from the doorknob, a reminder that one day this will be over.

  Strange, to feel the sick out there, beyond. We have not eradicated illness from Aaron’s body, but it has been eradicated, I realize, from the body of our house. It is not lost on me that this is because it has been trapped, like a bad spirit, in Aaron’s body. He has helped make our house healthier by keeping his sickness inside. This is called a sacrifice, like the one we are all asked to make now, for public health.

  “Of course we’ll stay inside,” Aaron says. He wants to protect the health of our family—Henry has asthma, and who knows what kind of shape Aaron’s immune system is in?—but he also wants to participate in the greater good. It is a side effect of chronic illness, the practiced, selfless art of taking one for the team.

  * * *

  Before the pandemic reached us, we requested a referral to a local endocrinologist. We wanted to pursue more advanced testing, after the GP’s preliminary tests came back negative. Aaron still smells like a maple syrup bottling plant.

  Now Aaron gets a call from the GP’s office, from a receptionist working from home. I hear Aaron’s voice on the phone. When he hangs up, he tells me the endocrinologist denied our request. After reviewing Aaron’s file, he recommended that he see a dermatologist.

  * * *

  Odd to live in a world where doctors have let down my husband again and again, and where doctors are saving lives every day. Some of them give their own lives. They are heroes, walking into hospitals as though into battle, poorly armored with masks and gloves. They are made for this, although they perhaps never meant to enlist in this war.

  Every evening, in neighborhoods across the world, people are stepping out onto their porches, their balconies, to sing the praises of doctors and nurses; to sing, literally, their voices whooping and reaching. On my phone, I listen. It makes my eyes water. I do not live in a neighborhood. Our houses are too far apart to make any kind of music. But if I did, I would sing, and my voice would catch, joining the chorus of thanks and grief. Maybe I would just bang some pots and pans, beat them gently with a baseball bat.

  * * *

  One of our favorite Seinfeld episodes is the one where George pretends to be a marine biologist to impress a woman. When a beached whale is discovered as they stroll along the shore, someone shouts, Is anyone here a marine biologist?!

  Now Aaron and I put on that voice, walking around the kitchen, acting out an emergency. Is anyone here a dermatologist?!

  * * *

  You think you’ve heard every story about your husband. Maybe you have; maybe you’ve forgotten some of them. Then they come back around, one night during quarantine when you’re all sitting around the dinner table, and you hear them.

  Once, in a Long Island pizza shop, Aaron choked on a mouthful of mozzarella cheese. His father stood up, threw him over a chair, and gave him the Heimlich.

  “He saved your life,” I say. It’s almost a question: how can it be? I look at my two children, who wouldn’t be here if my husband had died, a child himself, their age.

  “What did it feel like?” the kids want to know. “Did you think you were going to die?”

  “It happened so fast,” he says. He didn’t have time to think about anything. He just remembers not breathing, and then the feeling of the mass flying out of his throat.

  It happened in the same mall, he says, where he first saw a Michael Jackson jacket. He really wanted that jacket.

  It was the same mall where, once, Aaron and his father were separated. Aaron didn’t panic. He knew what to do. He went to the info desk and reported that his dad was lost.

  The woman behind the desk smiled. “You mean you’re lost?”

  “No,” he said. “My dad is lost.”

  “I wasn’t just being cute,” he tells us now. “It was like, even then, I knew my dad was the one who needed help.”

  * * *

  “What am I supposed to do?” he says. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I tell him.

  “They’re not supposed to be here.”

  “No one’s here. Just you and me.”

  “I hear someone else’s voice.”

  “Who is it?”

  But my husband is some kind of asleep.

  * * *

  In his morphine dreams, the night before he died, my father talked all night. I’ve heard the same from others who have witnessed their loved ones cross over, holding conversations with the dead. What am I supposed to do? they seem to be asking, and then pause for a moment, awaiting instructions.

  * * *

  In the hospital, on ventilators, COVID patients are beginning to go mad.

  They become paranoid, agitated, reporting disturbing technicolor hallucinations. The doctors call it delirium. It happens because of a lack of oxygen to the brain, they say, because of sedatives, lack of sleep. But the virus itself may also cause changes in the brain. Blood clots. Neurological inflammation. After they recover from COVID and leave the hospital, delirium can have long-term, dementia-like effects.

  Alone in their beds, patients believe they are being burned alive, attacked by cats. One woman says she turned into an ice sculpture. One man says his doctors, armed with guns, were trying to kill him.

  * * *

  What are you supposed to do?

  There are moments, hours, when you cannot believe you have accepted this life as your own. When you try but can’t quite remember being a girl with a body and a mind bound only to a family of origin, quarantined from the woman you would become. You remember the restless questions that bannered your days. Where will I live? What job will I have? Who will my husband be? What will be my children’s names?

  Now there is the restlessness of aging beside another body, living the middle part, living the answers. Now the questions are What will we die of? When?

  * * *

  On our anniversary—not our wedding anniversary, but the twenty-third anniversary of our first date, which we still count—I put on Billie Holiday and we dance in the kitchen. Both of us are in our bathrobes, our quarantine uniforms. We just kind of sway. I’m kind of holding Aaron up. His head is heavy on my shoulder. His neck smells like syrup. “Everything I Have Is Yours” was maybe an extreme choice for our song, we recognize now. Everything that I possess, I offer to you! We laugh at the lyrics. “Kinda codependent, Billie,” Aaron says in my ear, though we know it’s not really her song, that it was written by
a man and recorded by men for twenty years before she ever sang it.

  Still, we love the song. It’s ours. We keep dancing.

  * * *

  “The rhyming is the part I like best,” Aaron says. If he has schizophrenia, even a touch of it—he believes he does—then he is glad for the rhyming. It keeps him, us, entertained.

  He and the boys change the lyrics to the White Stripes’ “Blue Orchid.”

  You’ve got an erection

  It points in many directions

  I think it’s got an infection!

  The boys laugh and laugh.

  Across the world, families are on lockdown, trapped in their houses with one another. But how many hours like this one have my kids already logged with their dad? “My dad wasn’t really around” is not something they’ll ever say.

  I roll my eyes. And laugh.

  * * *

  Aaron turns forty-eight. He is one hundred pounds heavier than he was on his last birthday. He says he thought he was forty-eight already. He says he’s daylight-savings’d himself.

  I bring home takeout for his birthday, and stop to get some groceries at the local co-op, and a few days later we learn that a worker at the store tested positive for the coronavirus. I go through our local drive-thru testing site, get my nostril swabbed, which feels like someone trying to aim a javelin at the back of my skull. It brings back, for ten seconds, the shock and discomfort of the ultrasound wand. While we wait for the results, I have to quarantine. “Quarantine” is from the Italian quarantina, a period of forty days. But everyone knows that COVID quarantine is two weeks. A fortnight. Aaron and I know exactly how long two weeks is.

  A couple days later, on the day I get the negative result, Aaron’s jaw begins to swell on each side. Is it just the weight he’s put on? He shaves his beard, his massive, Unabomber beard. The kids can’t stop staring at him. “You look so different!” His neck and jaw are huge. He looks like Robert DeNiro when he played Robert Mueller on SNL, with the prosthetic jowls. “I look like I’m storing nuts for winter,” he says. He says, “Jesus, I don’t want to Google this shit.” But then he does. The first result that comes up is mumps.