Ten Days

by Janet Gilsdorf

  How old would Monica be now? He calculated in his head: She was almost twenty-four when they first met. That was eight years ago. The effects of age would have changed her, deepened the lines along her nose, drawn delicate crow’s feet beside her eyes, nudged the flesh beneath her chin southward. Her skin had been soft as velvet. It would be even softer now.

  “Where’d you say you’re from?” he asked. It was a dumb question, but maybe she was related to Monica.

  “I didn’t say,” Betsy answered. “I’m from Oregon—graduated from med school in Portland, grew up in Pendleton.”

  “Well, you remind me of a person I knew from the Thumb. Thought maybe you’re a cousin, or something.”

  “Nope, no relatives in the Thumb or anywhere near Michigan, for that matter.”

  He shrugged, raising only his right shoulder. How could two unrelated people be so similar?

  He reached for the salt, she for a napkin. His hand, gripping the shaker, brushed against her wrist. The warmth of her skin lingered on his knuckles.

  The other doctors at the table excused themselves. The second-year surgery resident gathered his empty food containers and then paused for a moment beside him.

  “How’re things with your son? Off the ventilator yet?”

  “Not yet, but he’s making progress in that direction.” Jake shoveled another forkful of lasagna into his mouth.

  “Your son is ill?” Betsy Bloom asked. Her eyebrows were knit into her question just as Monica’s had been when she was wondering. “He’s on a ventilator?”

  He stared at her, trying to anticipate her reaction to the story of Eddie and his illness. She wasn’t Monica. This was a woman he didn’t know at all, even though she seemed like a clone of Monica.

  “Yeah, he has meningitis.” His fingers twirled a paper clip inside his pants pocket. She isn’t Monica, he told himself, again.

  When he finished his dinner, he shoved his chair away from the table. “We’d better get back to work.”

  Later that evening, he lay on the call room bed in his scrubs and stared at the slit of light from beneath the bathroom door. Soon the on-call OR crew would arrive and he would have to do an internal fixation on a man with a broken hip.

  He wondered where Monica was, now. Last he heard, she was working for an HMO in Maine. At this very moment, somewhere out there, she might be wondering about him. The telepathy between them had been eerie. At times it seemed as if they were wired through the same fuse box. Maybe that connection, long idle, was still operating. Maybe she, too, yearned for the old days. Regrets about him might haunt her, cloud her reason, overwhelm her in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep.

  He could try to find her. What was her name now? Was she still Monica Daley? Maybe she had a married name. He hadn’t tried to find her before—had decided the Book of Monica was closed forever, never to be opened again. But, things had changed. Eddie was desperately sick. Anna was going crazy. Monica could, as she had at one time, soothe every one of his raw nerves, could rub away the pain.

  He shook his head against the pillow and turned onto his side. His knees nearly met his chest. Keeping the Book of Monica closed seemed a good idea. He was married, was a father. He had made a commitment to Anna and to the boys and he intended to keep it. Now, he needed to get whatever sleep he could before the OR crew arrived. He turned to his other side.

  And yet, the touch of Betsy’s wrist still seared his hand. If only, somehow and somewhere safe, he could see Monica again, could bury his face in the willowy scent of her hair, could fold himself into the warm softness of her body.

  They had been classmates in medical school, anatomy lab partners during their freshman year. He had first spoken to her as they pulled the waxy canvas off the stiff, naked body of their cadaver.

  “I’ll take that,” he had said, referring to the smelly, heavy canvas she held in her hands.

  For a long time, they had joked about those words. Monica had thought he meant something quite different, something more personal to her that he would take. “You’re right,” he had said many times, “I didn’t mean that stinky, formaldehyde-soaked tarp at all.”

  Compared to the girlfriends he had had in college, Monica was completely different. The other girls were goals—rings on the merry-go-round of college life that he might successfully snatch if he was lucky enough, fast enough, tried hard enough, leaned over far enough.

  Monica, on the other hand, wasn’t a distant target; she had been a part of him. In biochemistry class as they learned about DNA—two threads of nucleotides twisted together, building the scaffold upon which all manner of life emerged—he had thought, That’s us. The two of them seemed to be strings of organic mutuality, growing and swaying and turning, the dance of living. He considered them to be useless apart, capable of wonderful, amazing results together.

  He rolled onto his back, straightened his knees. If Monica were here now, he could tell her about Eddie. She would understand. He wouldn’t have to explain the lab results or the medical lingo the doctors and nurses used. Unlike talking to Anna, he could talk to Monica about Eddie’s illness without being an interpreter.

  That fall, on sunny Sundays, he and Monica took study breaks in Gallup Park. Hand in hand they wandered the paths along the Huron River, stopping on the footbridges to watch the water—it was the color of gunmetal—pitch and swirl and glide as it flowed relentlessly toward Lake Erie.

  He told her about the toboggan slide he and his brothers rode during winter afternoons, about his love of rabbit hunting as a kid. She told him about her parents’ house in Bad Axe, about the Pointe aux Barques lighthouse near the tip of the Thumb. They imagined themselves as the doctors they would become, possessing the skills to heal people.

  They imitated the squawks of the Canada geese that lived in the park, watched a gaggle of the smoke-colored, arrogant birds waddle away indignantly.

  “What do you suppose we said to them?” he asked, slipping an arm around her shoulders.

  “I think . . .” She leaned her body into his. “I think we said, ‘You’re losers.’ ”

  For the first time in his life, he noticed wildflowers as she pointed to the yellow-as-an-egg-yolk goldenrod, the periwinkle chicory blossoms, the white umbrellas of Queen Anne’s lace. Together they watched the hawthorn leaves turn from kelly green to straw to brown before dropping to the ground. They saw the crimson fruit that dangled like Christmas tree ornaments from the leafless branches of the high bush cranberry trees. When he was with her, the crows suddenly seemed blacker than black and the egrets whiter than white.

  Although at the time he didn’t think consciously about permanence, he had assumed in an abstract way that the sense of wholeness between them would go on forever. It was like the developmental milestones of childhood. When kids have gained the neural and motor connections to walk, they walk and never stop walking. Same thing with talking. He figured loving worked the same way and he had finally gotten there.

  Then it began to unravel. He wasn’t sure what happened. In looking back, he thought it might have started when Monica failed the final exam in gross anatomy. He had scored the third-highest grade in the class. She refused to discuss the test, but he learned about her failure from another classmate. Gradually, in little ebbs and swells, she turned away from him. When her father’s colon cancer relapsed, she didn’t want to talk about it. She said he’d surely respond to the chemotherapy, so there was no point in saying anything more.

  On a Wednesday shortly after the beginning of the second semester, she didn’t come to class. Same on Thursday. That night he took a six-pack of 7Up and a bag of popcorn to her apartment, assuming she was sick.

  He knocked on her door, using the syncopated rap they had invented. From behind the door he heard movement and then the click of the dead bolt sliding back. The door opened a crack, enough for him to see the pink patches on her face and her red, swollen eyes.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Her
voice was a whisper.

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’? You look awful.” He pushed against the door, tried to open it wider. It didn’t budge. “Are you sick?”

  Silence. She tried to shut the door, but he had wedged his boot against the frame.

  “Can I come in?” On top of his confusion, he was now becoming frightened.

  “No.”

  He set the 7Up on the porch rail to free up one hand. “Monica, something is very wrong. Tell me.”

  She pulled a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose. “I need a break from school. Need to figure a few things out. Please go away.”

  He pulled his boot from the doorway and the heavy wooden door slammed shut. He sat on the porch steps, his head in both hands. She was on the other side of the door but seemed light-years beyond his reach. What was going on?

  Later, she didn’t answer his phone calls, nor the doorbell, nor his impassioned letters. She had vanished like a shadow into the fog. Finally he called her parents. “Monica’s fine,” her mother said, “please don’t call her again.”

  Permanent gloom enveloped him as if he’d been dunked in a pool of dirty oil. He couldn’t sleep, lay awake night after night and wondered where she was, what she was doing, what he could have done to help her, why she refused to talk to him. He felt like half a person, as if someone had torn off one leg and one arm, leaving him bleeding and unbalanced and alone. He wandered the paths of Gallup Park and secretly hoped she’d step out of the bushes. He no longer saw the birds or the flowers or the leaves. He saw only gray. The ripples in the Huron River no longer danced along the surface, but now seemed to drill downward, ever deeper into the murky water. Away. Always moving away.

  He mentioned her to his brother.

  “She’s pretty special, huh?” Luke had said.

  “She is. And she’s pretty gone right now.”

  Luke must have told their grandmother, because she sent him a flowery card, with a note in her wobbly script that read: Jakey, girls are like streetcars . . . if you miss one, keep waiting at the corner, because another one will be coming down the tracks in just a little while.

  He turned over on the call room bed. The plastic mattress cover crunched as if he had rolled on a mound of foam pellets. He looked at his watch. What was taking the OR crew so long to get things set up?

  And where was Monica now? Several years after she left, he learned she had returned to medical school in Ohio, had completed her studies, and entered a pediatric residency in Boston. Was she still in Massachusetts?

  His pager rang. Its jangle jolted him awake, the sound first lurching forward, then tumbling backward. Maybe it would go away. He rolled over. The pager rang again. He sat up in bed, pressed the answer button, pressed the light button, read the message. “READY IN THE OR IN TEN MINUTES. IS THE PERMIT SIGNED?”

  He leaned back against the pillow, his mind aching for more sleep.

  His pager rang yet again. Again, he fumbled to read the screen. This time it said, “YOUR SON HAD A SEIZURE. YOUR WIFE NEEDS TO SPEAK WITH YOU.”

  He shoved the pager back into its holster. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, he clutched his head and then rubbed his ears. He didn’t want to talk to her. She’d be a basket case, wouldn’t listen to what he said, wouldn’t believe him if she did. He trudged out the call room door. First he’d stop in the pediatric ICU to check on Eddie, then he’d head to the OR.

  “And, yes,” he called into the empty hallway. “Yes, the goddamned permit has been signed.”

  Chapter 19

  Rose Marie

  An island of sanity in a sea of craziness. That was how each weekend was for her, uninterrupted quiet, just right for letting her thoughts tumble against each other as they sorted themselves into some kind of sense. Today was a good day to be Friday. She would be ready for a break tomorrow.

  Only three kids came today, an easygoing transition to the weekend. Poor little Eddie was still in the hospital. Even after talking with Anna, she couldn’t imagine what he looked like, too sick to eat, needed a machine to breathe. Chris was at home with Anna’s parents; he’d soon drive them nuts with a hundred questions and a million schemes.

  And, now, Amanda was sick.

  Last night, after she returned home from a run to the grocery store for peanut butter and Swiss cheese, the message light on the answering machine was blinking.

  “She has a fever and vomited her dinner.” Amanda’s mother had sounded tired, or exasperated, on the recording. “I’ll stay home from work in the morning to take her to the doctor.” Rose Marie replayed the answering machine message twice to be sure she heard it right, that Amanda had been vomiting.

  Food poisoning? Had she fed something bad to Amanda? She reviewed the menu from yesterday. Chili. It didn’t fizz when the can opener broke through the lid. Had she sliced hot dogs into the chili? No. The Oreo cookies were from a freshly opened package and the apple juice was pasteurized and only two days old. She herself had drunk a glassful and it was fine. Even the milk had been from a new carton. The other kids weren’t ill, so whatever made Amanda sick must not have come from her house.

  The idea hit her like a splash of ice water. What about meningitis? Could Amanda have that? Jake told her meningitis wasn’t catching. At least, he thought it wasn’t. She checked Roger’s dictionary again and the description of “meningitis” was as she remembered. Nothing about vomiting. It talked about fever and headache and stiff neck, but not vomiting. She decided Amanda must have some kind of stomach flu.

  She tried to call Amanda’s mother earlier this morning, but no one answered. Maybe they were at the doctor’s.

  Now Davey was working on a construction project in the sandbox. He liked to build sand cities, with towers and roads and little escape tunnels. Sawyer was running a toy dump truck up and down the sand hills Davey built. Meghan was tying leaves into Beefeater’s collar. She got the wet ones to stay under his chain but the dry ones crumbled in her hands. Soon enough the grass would be green as Ireland and Meghan could string a dandelion necklace for the dog. Maybe, later this summer, they could make hollyhock dolls, as her daughters had when they were little girls. She didn’t remember exactly how, except that she would need a fully opened flower and a bulging bud and then somehow would attach them together. It would come to her again when she had the flowers in her hands. In August.

  She was still bothered by Amanda. But the other kids, romping around her backyard, were healthy as could be. Should she call the mothers of the other children? What would she tell them? She had no idea what was wrong with Amanda. She’d try to call Amanda’s mother again in another hour or so to see how she was doing.

  Now Sawyer was driving the dump truck up the bark of the maple tree. The toes of his sneakers dug into the dirt and he held the truck as far above his head as his three-year-old arms would reach. He was murmuring, “Brrrr,” his version of motor noise.

  She picked at the loose webbing on the lawn chair and surveyed the sky. Giant clouds, almost pewter in the middle and fading to light gray on the edges, tracked from west to east. Looked like rain. The chimelike calls of the blue jays and the twitters of the house sparrows broke the muggy morning air. They seemed more urgent than usual, as if the birds were spreading bad news from treetop to treetop. What could they be nervous about? There were plenty of worms and seeds in the world, no mortgage payments on nests.

  Lunch was easy with only three kids. Today would be tuna sandwiches and, for color and vitamins, carrot sticks. For dessert, they’d have leftover Oreo cookies.

  While the kids ate, she called Amanda’s mother again. Still no answer. It couldn’t be too bad if she hadn’t heard anything yet.

  She set a plate of Oreos on the table. The kids scrambled for the cookies as if they hadn’t eaten in a month.

  “Hey, use your polite manners,” she said with a giggle.

  They were good children, safe in her care and yet free to explore her backyard, at least the area inside the fence. She still had
the playhouse Roger had built for Sarah and Julie. On the hot summer days to come, she’d drag the plastic wading pool out from the garage. In the fall, she’d have the kids rake the dead maple leaves into a big pile and then let them jump off a lawn chair into the crispy, tobacco-colored heap.

  She didn’t believe in propping children in front of the television set all day. That would lead to brain rot. She wanted the kids to play outside, to stretch their imaginations, to follow their curiosities, to figure out for themselves how to get along. Her grandmother had it right when, in rapid-fire Ukrainian, she had waved the hem of her apron at Rose Marie and her cousins, calling, “Shoo. Shoo. Go outside. Get the stink blown off you.”

  The phone rang. She hoped it was Amanda’s mother. Or, maybe Sarah. She needed more information about meningitis. The conversation the other night with Sarah’s friend—Barbara was her name—hadn’t completely settled her worries about the other children.

  She picked up the phone.

  Instead of Sarah’s businesswoman voice or Amanda’s mother’s high-pitched, pixy chirp, she heard words that soon became lost in the roar of the cement mixer rolling past her house. The sounds toppled together as if spoken by a chorus of mumblers.

  Then the voice—a man—said, clear as day, “I understand Edward Campbell and Amanda Goodman attend your day care center. Is that correct?”

  She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. “Who’s calling?” she finally asked.

  “As I said, Mrs. Lustov, I’m David Morris from the Detroit News. I’m writing a story about the cases of meningitis. These kids attend your day care center, right?”

  Detroit News. Why was he calling? Cases of meningitis? Plural? More than one? She perched against the edge of a kitchen chair. “Why do you want to know?” she said.

  “Well, since Edward and Amanda are both in the hospital with meningitis, we thought you could tell us a bit about them.”