Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  Gerta might have had her routines, but so did Gary. His days had a kind of rhythm, a sameness he found himself clutching at. He knew what nurse would be on duty when he got to the hospital. He knew when he went to the cafeteria to get a sandwich he couldn’t eat, there would be the same three kinds of cheese, the same yogurts, the same chicken wings. And he began to notice a kind of sameness in the visitors, as well.

  While Molly was having tests, he sat in the waiting room. The waiting room at Intensive Care had regulars, and Gary started to know them all. There was a tall thin blond woman who Gary guessed must be in her early forties. She always wore high-powered dark suits and heels so high and sharp they could be used as weapons. She made Gary, who barely raked his hands through his hair, let alone a comb, who sometimes put on the same faded jeans and sweatshirt he had been wearing all week, feel like a cast-out. How did she have time to do laundry? There was a young couple who held hands, who nodded apologetically at Gary, as if his being there was somehow their fault. “My brother got in a skiing accident,” the woman blurted. “It was so stupid. Parachute skiing. Who does such a thing? Who in their right mind?” She waved one hand.

  “He’s going to be fine,” the man said. He tapped a finger to his forehead. “I know these things.” His voice was so sincere that Gary felt like asking him if he knew anything about Molly.

  An elderly man came in every day at five. He always dressed carefully in a suit and fresh shirt and tie. He told Gary he came to see his wife, who had just had triple bypass and wasn’t doing very well. He leaned toward Gary and showed him photographs every time he came in. They were always of his wife when she was young, posing in white floppy shorts and a T-shirt, one hand angled behind her head, her dark curly hair ruffling about her. There was one of her rising from the sea, in a snow-white shirred bathing suit, her hair slick against her shoulders, her teeth flashing. “Ain’t she a beaut?” he said.

  “She’s lovely,” Gary said.

  There was a kind of etiquette in the room. No one dared to ask anyone why they were there, who they were waiting for, but if people volunteered information, then you could have a conversation. You could swap symptoms and prognosis and even make a joke or two about the doctors, though that was considered dangerous, like tempting fate. Gary listened to a man named Aaron telling the couple that he himself had had many skiing accidents and had emerged better than before. “I won my first ski race after I healed from breaking both legs,” he told them. Gary knew the rules. You didn’t have to believe what anyone told you, you only had to believe the feeling infused in the words, to try to hang on to it yourself. Anything could be hope. The way a doctor held his stethoscope. A change in hospital menu.

  Gary was still. “Who is here?” the old man asked. He was breaking the rules.

  “My wife,” he said finally. “She got sick after she gave birth.” The old man’s gaze was steady and serious. “They—the doctors—don’t know,” Gary admitted.

  “I consider that a positive. When they don’t know, there is room for hope. My brother Abe had cancer five years ago and beat it,” the old man said emphatically. “None of the doctors thought he would make it. Every day they told me to give up, but I never did. Now he has a relapse. And you know what? He’ll beat that, too.”

  When Gary went back to see Molly, there was a bag of thick cheesylooking material hanging from her IV. He stared at it in confusion. Her electronic monitors flashed numbers he didn’t understand. He didn’t know what to do with himself, what to do for her. “I’m here.” His voice cracked. “I’m right here.”

  “Good. I wanted to talk with you.”

  Gary started. Dr. Price, his white lab coat thrown open over a blue T-shirt and scrub pants, strode toward him. He never made eye contact with Gary anymore, which bothered Gary in some deep, undeniable way. Instead, Dr. Price looked at the IV. “We know what she has.”

  Gary waited.

  “In postpartum, the immune system can go a little haywire. Things for the mother are always compromised to protect the baby. In her case, she formed a protein, an inhibitor against a factor in her blood that clots it—Factor VIII. We can perhaps transfuse human Factor VIII into her to start things working again, to tip the balance against the inhibitor.” Dr. Price put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “I would like chemo.”

  “Chemo. But this isn’t cancer, is it?”

  “No, but chemo works on many things. And we are talking about mild chemo.”

  “Excuse me. Mild chemo?”

  “Cytoxan. Not any sort of compelling dose.”

  Gary shook his head. “What kind of a drug has toxin in the name?” “Tox-an. Very short-term. We could do steroids very long-term, but with the doses we’d need, we’d see all sorts of problems we might not like. And there is the factor of time.” He stared at Gary. “Chemo works fast.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I recommend we start immediately.” He smiled at Gary, suddenly friendly, as if things had been settled. “I have your okay?”

  Gary felt numb. It works, he told himself. It works fast. A little mild chemo.

  “I feel it is best,” said Dr. Price. “Works in no time. With a minimum of side effects.”

  Gary shut his eyes. In no time. No time. He nodded. “Do it,” he said finally.

  That night, on the computer, at three in the morning, Gary did a search for Cytoxan. It popped up, filling two screens, and he scrolled down to read. Chemotherapeutic. Can cause massive bleeding. He stopped. Why would they give a drug that could cause bleeding to a woman who was already hemorrhaging? He printed the page out and then clicked the computer off, sick.

  Frantic, Gary tried to call Dr. Price. He got the answering service and left a message. He paged him every five minutes. He didn’t care. He got to the hospital in the morning, the printouts in his hand about Cytoxan, and then he paged Dr. Price again. He used the pay phones and then a phone at the nurse’s station. He paged and paged until he saw one of the nurses picking up the phone, nodding at him, lifting one finger, trying to get a word in edgewise. Five minutes later, Dr. Price was striding down the floor. “What?” he said, furious.

  “What were you thinking? Why would you give a drug that can cause bleeding to someone who can’t stop bleeding?” Gary flapped the printouts in his hands. He gave them to Dr. Price, who glanced at them and then sighed, exasperated.

  “Look, this drug does good things. But it’s complicated. It doesn’t know not to do bad things in order to get the job done. This was a good thing. The chemo seems to be helping.”

  He folded up the paper and handed it back to Gary. “You don’t have to bring me a paper. I’m well aware of what each and every drug we give Molly does.”

  Gary stood in Molly’s room. She didn’t look any different, any better. But, he told himself, she didn’t look any worse.

  Three days later, Molly was hemorrhaging. The Cytoxan was stopped. She was rushed into surgery for an angiogram, a catheter threaded through her artery, glue on her veins because they couldn’t risk cutting her open, couldn’t risk more blood.

  For five hours, he waited in the solarium, afraid to move. It was empty except for the woman with a cell phone, and for the first time that he could remember, she was speaking into it. “No one knows,” she said.

  He was staring at a newspaper he had already read three times when Dr. Price and a new doctor he didn’t know came into the room. “Dr. Swen. I did the operation,” he said. “She’s stable now. What we do now is watch her, and wait.” Dr. Price looked right at Gary, his face smooth and impassive and blameless. “We’ll go with the steroids after this.”

  Gary couldn’t move. “And we’re putting Molly on memory blockers.” He nodded at Gary, pleased.

  Gary looked at Dr. Price, astonished. He had never heard of such a thing. “But she’s anesthetized,” he said finally. “Karen told me she was in a deep-sleep state. Why would you need to make her forget?”

  Dr. Price was silent for a moment.
“People rouse up from sleep. They rouse up from anesthesia. We’re trying to minimize trauma. Would you want to take the chance of her remembering?”

  “They rouse from anesthesia?”

  Dr. Price was silent, waiting. “Think of it as a precaution.” Gary felt glued to the floor. He watched Dr. Price stride down the corridor. Good, he thought, then good. She wouldn’t remember the tubes shimmying through her. She wouldn’t remember the drainage or the pain. Sleeping Beauty. And then it hit him, with a force so terrible, his legs buckled under him and he had to sit down. She wouldn’t remember him, either, the way he was there beside her, holding her hand as if he might never let go. She wouldn’t remember that she wasn’t alone in all this, not traveling by herself down dangerous unmapped land, full of minefelds. He felt consumed with guilt and grief, furious at himself. And he wanted to kill Dr. Price.

  That same morning, at home, while Otis napped, he called all the hospitals he knew. The Mayo Clinic. Johns Hopkins. He asked for the names of the heads of their Hematology Departments, for the phone numbers. He always got secretaries, nurses. “You’re not a patient?” they said. They didn’t want to put Gary through. They didn’t want to even take a message, not until he pleaded, not until he told them what it was Molly had, and then there was silence. “Hold on,” the voices said. “Hold on.”

  He spoke to five different doctors, and all of them told him something different about treatment. They all had particular likes and dislikes and the more they talked to Gary, the happier they seemed. Two liked chemo and said Molly probably hadn’t been given enough. One liked interferon. Another liked steroids. All of them seemed to Gary to be clamoring to take Molly’s case, to see her, to consult, to take a look. They offered appointments, they gave out their beeper numbers. “Dr. Price,” the doctor from the Mayo Clinic sniffed. “I know Dr. Price. I’ve met him. Kind of a sledgehammer of a guy, isn’t he? Intractable. No sense of humor.” But Gary, listening to the Mayo Clinic doctor talk about longer, stronger doses of chemo, didn’t feel comforted. “This is a really interesting case,” the doctors all said. But none of them said a single word about cure.

  It was afternoon. Gerta had taken Otis to the park. He wanted company. He wanted a calm presence telling him everything would be all right. It was Sunday. Maybe someone would be home. He dialed a few people he knew but he kept getting answering machines. Finally, in desperation, he called Brian.

  “Brian.”

  “Gary. What’s up?” Brian’s voice was sleepy. What’s up, Gary thought, baffled. What’s up?

  “Molly just had another operation.”

  Brian was silent. “You feel like grabbing a bite with me?” Gary said, trying not to make his voice a plea. “I could use the company.” He knew as soon as he said it, it was probably ridiculous. Brian didn’t socialize with the people he worked with. He held court. He organized company picnics no one wanted to go to, and the one time Gary hadn’t gone, Brian had called him into the office the next day to reprimand him. “So where were you?” Brian demanded. “Do you know how bad it looked that you weren’t there?” When morale was particularly awful, Brian made everyone go to lunchtime pizza parties, all of them herded into an overheated conference room when all anyone wanted to do was get away from work for a while, maybe have a nice quiet lunch. Gary included. But now, all Gary wanted was company. Even Brian’s. “So what do you think?” Gary said.

  There was silence again. He could hear the TV blaring in the background. Sports, it sounded like. Brian must be watching the game.

  “Sure, what about tomorrow?”

  Tomorrow might be too late. Tomorrow might be busy. He couldn’t think that far ahead, but he was glad and grateful that at least Brian hadn’t mentioned work. “I was thinking now.”

  There was a brief swell of sound from the TV. Brian sighed into the phone. “Okey dokey. You come here. We can watch the game.”

  Brian lived in Montclair, in a big, roomy house surrounded by trees. Gary had been to Brian’s only once before, for an office Christmas party, before he had met Molly. Brian had money and the area was wealthy, but Brian’s house had an unfinished feel to it. It was filled with plasterboard furniture, pull-out sofas, ready-framed prints.

  Brian answered the door in navy-blue sweats, a mug of beer in his hands. As soon as he stepped inside the house, Gary wanted to leave. “Sit,” Brian said. “Green Bay Packers. They’re creaming the Dolphins.” Gary didn’t tell Brian he had never much cared for sports, but he sat down on the scratchy plaid couch. Brian nudged a bowl of chips and dip in front of him. “It’s good,” he said, but Gary shook his head. In the corner of the room were two boxes. CompUSA. “New equipment?” Gary pointed.

  “It’s a PC for Candy. I’m sending it out as a present.”

  Gary nodded. “Nice present.”

  “She needs it. Last time I called, she was a little depressed. She hadn’t gotten an acting job she thought she had. I’ll probably set it up myself when I get out there.”

  “You going out there soon?”

  Brian stretched and reached for another chip. He stared hard at the TV. “Nice move!” he shouted, and then turned back to Gary. “Soon.”

  For two hours, Gary sat on Brian’s couch, the game blaring about him. He couldn’t concentrate. Every few minutes Brian would slap his thigh or jump up or simply holler at the TV. “Isn’t that just the damnedest?”

  “Yes,” Gary said. “It is.”

  He had hoped to talk to Brian, but the only time Brian really spoke to him was during the commercials, and even then the look Brian gave him was so guarded and worried, it seemed like a warning to Gary. He had been there an hour and a half when Brian finally, reluctantly, turned to him. “So how’s Molly?” His voice deepened in concern. “How are you holding up? I don’t know how you do it. I’ve been calling Candy twice a day now because you’re on my mind so much. I keep thinking, what if it were me and Candy, and then my mind just slams shut.”

  “It does that for me, too.”

  “That’s why I have to get out there and see her,” Brian patted him on one knee. “Well, listen, I was thinking. Since you have your computer at home and all, think you might have a minute to do a mockup of a math textbook cover for us? Just the cover? Should be pretty easy. Just numbers. Something graphic. Right up your alley.”

  Gary couldn’t speak. “You want me to do work?” he said finally.

  “No, no, I just know that in my times of trouble, I personally always find work helps me keep my mind off things. Helps me stay focused. Gives me a purpose.”

  “I have a purpose. I go to the hospital, I see my son, I try to cope.”

  Brian turned away from the TV. He looked at Gary with new interest. “Gary—” Brian’s voice lowered confidentially. “I thought long and hard about bringing this up. I’ve decided that I would be highly remiss if I didn’t at least mention this to you. The word from up top is that layoffs might be coming. I know how awful that would be at a time like this, and I certainly would fight tooth and nail for you. I go to bat for you each and every day. I always say, ‘The best ideas are Gary’s.’ You know that.”

  Gary was silent.

  “It’s important to stay visible.” Brian cleared his throat. “Walk the halls, I always say, walk the halls, pop your head into every office, give them something personal to remember you by. I can say your name until I’m blue in the face, but sooner or later someone’s going to notice the body isn’t there—or the work.”

  Gary nodded, numbly. “So just get in some layouts,” Brian said, and then turned back to the television.

  Gary didn’t know why, but he stayed at Brian’s for two hours, lulled into a kind of stupor. Finally, when he knew Otis would be awake, he stood up. He jammed his hands into his pockets. Brian looked at him expectantly. “I’d better get going.”

  “Don’t you want to stay and see how the game ends up?” Brian looked surprised. “The Packers are winning.”

  Gary wound his scarf about his neck. �
�I’m beat.”

  Brian nodded. He kept his gaze fixated on the television as he walked Gary to the door, opening it. “You drive safe now—” he started to say and then whooped at the TV. “Go, go!” he cried.

  Gary stepped out into the cold. “See you, Brian,” he said, and walked to his car to go to his son.

  A week later, Gary hadn’t touched the layouts for Brian, and Molly was still critical. There were new doctors to talk to: Dr. Monroe, the critical-care specialist who was monitoring Molly for infections; Dr. Herm, another new surgeon. He began to see Dr. Price, the hematologist, more and more. Gary always felt like laughing when he heard the name, but he knew it was mostly nerves, anxiety flying up and crashing against his ribs.

  “We’re going to try transfusions,” Dr. Price told Gary. “We’ve had some good results in the past. If we can stabilize her, we can start to lessen her drug dosage.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Dr. Price half smiled. “It means we can stop the memory blockers. It means we can try to wake her.”