by Dick Cluster
This time the security guard said hello to Yvonne and waved the two of them past. Alex looked around for Jay but didn’t see him. He asked Yvonne who else could give him permission to visit Kevin Royce. She said it could be Dr. Jennings, the fellow, or else Dr. Kramer, the senior resident, but Kramer was out of town and Jennings was probably busy in the lab. Jennings was always in the lab working on Harrison’s research projects. She said the best thing would be to call Dr. Harrison’s secretary and get her to beep him. In a few minutes Jay called back with permission. Yvonne showed Alex to the scrub room and told him what to do. Alex changed into the faded green outfit, feeling like he was getting into somebody else’s old, often-washed pajamas, and as he did so he realized all of sudden how tired he was. He’d stayed up all of one night and slept on airplanes the next. It had been fifty-some hours, he calculated, since he last got any solid comfortable sleep. This was what it must be like to be a resident on duty, from what he had heard. Doctors put their successors through an initiation rite so the successors could thereafter feel they’d earned their privileges and their fees. Did that system contribute to mistakes being made?
Once he’d changed into the scrub suit, Alex opened the sterile washup packet Yvonne had given him. Inside was a kind of bristly sponge impregnated with soap, a sort of Brillo pad for human skin. Alex washed his hands carefully and then his arms up beyond his elbows as he’d been told to do. Then he took the wrapping off the sterile yellow gown and booties and cap. He felt disguised, playing dress-up doctor. Yvonne, waiting at the anteroom door, laughed.
“He’s expecting you,” she said. “Don’t touch your mouth, your hair, your beard. If you can remember, don’t touch anything in the room with your hands. Kevin’s doing fine, but his polys are just around two hundred still.”
Alex remembered polys: polymorphonuclear cells— a type of white blood cells— key to fighting off infection. Even during his own milder, ambulatory chemotherapy, he had gotten his polys counted all the time. With a count below 200, you would guard your isolation as your life.
Once they were in the anteroom Yvonne pointed toward the proper doorway, but Alex stopped in front of the curtain he’d looked through the previous time. Through the forest of IV stands and tubes and machinery, Linda Dumars was barely more real than she had been in the sterile stretcher cart. He could see a shape under a blanket, a shoulder clad in a hospital johnny, and a head like a baby’s, sallow and bald.
Experimentally, he put his arms into the long plastic glove things built into the curtain. They were like robot hands for manipulating radioactive materials, only here the danger ran the other way. “Hey!” Yvonne said behind him, suddenly alarmed, but Alex didn’t try to touch anything or anybody. He just raised his right hand and gave Linda Dumars a wave. Then he took his hands back out and headed for the room next door, where he belonged. The whole process made him remember looking at Maria through the nursery window, Maria sleeping not long after she’d first been born. He remembered his awkwardness trying to hold her the first time.
Kevin Royce did not seem newborn. He had wide shoulders, muscled forearms, and a head like a wooden block, nearly that rectangular, with piercing blue eyes. Instead of a johnny he was wearing a regular shirt and pants. He was entirely bald, his arms and cheeks and chin as well as the top of his head. One IV line emerged from the V neck of his shirt, carrying a liquid that was nearly clear. He slid off the bed and stepped toward Alex. The IV tube was long enough to let him reach most parts of the room, Alex realized. It made the patient seem like an astronaut maneuvering on the shell of his craft.
“Kevin Royce,” he said, in a shaking-hands tone of voice, although he didn’t extend his hand. “What was your name?”
“Alex. Alex Glauberman.” Alex said loudly enough to be heard over the blower sound. He hoped he wasn’t shouting. He stood awkwardly, with his hands in the pockets of the yellow gown. He saw that Kevin had a typewriter on a table, and a desk chair, and also some dumbbells and ankle weights in a shiny metal tray on the floor. The tray looked like something for sterilizing instruments or dissecting livers in. “You seem good. What day are you on, here?”
“I’m day twelve, knock on wood.” He sounded confident, the confidence of a man who knew for sure the marrow was regrowing inside his bones. “The nurse said you’re working on Linda’s marrow. You making any progress or what?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “Is it okay to sit in the chair?”
“Sure. Long as you don’t drool on it.” Kevin sat himself on the side of the bed facing the big window. The window looked out on another hospital tower across the street. Alex sat and turned his back to the view. On the typing table was a studio-type portrait of a boy, ten or eleven. Kevin sounded energetic, and he did look good, but compared to the ruddy-cheeked boy he looked pale and tired still. The picture was sealed in plastic, like a drivers’ license, and taped to the table, instead of standing upright in a frame. It had been removed from its old frame and sealed up here in the hospital, inside some sterile field, no doubt.
“We’re hoping it shows up tomorrow,” Alex went on, as if discussing a lost dog. “I’m following up some leads as insurance. Just in case.”
“Insurance,” Kevin repeated. “For when the ransom turns out to be a con job. This place runs on insurance. That’s Linda’s job, did you find that out? She works for a goddamn insurance company, figuring their odds. I wish to hell there was something I could do for her, besides listen. I’d give her the rest of my marrow that’s still frozen, if it would do her any good.” As he talked his eyes shifted from Alex to another sealed photo, a small snapshot taped to the pedestal that held most of the equipment, near the head of his bed.
When he saw Alex noticing, he plucked the photo off the post and held it out. “Don’t touch,” he said. A woman was standing in front of a tree. She was spreading her arms as if in celebration— of an occasion, the weather, it was hard to say. She wore shorts and a sleeveless shirt. “That’s Linda, last summer. How did they know whose marrow to take, that’s what I want to know. How did they know she was day zero coming up? Either they knew because they knew her, or they had a way to get at hospital records. I don’t see any other way it could be. Do you?
“Don’t worry,” he added as he saw Alex hesitate. “She’s already told me all about it. As much as she’s been told, which probably isn’t the whole thing. If they knew her, it’s as likely they’d be trying to kill her as just going for the money, right?”
He said this without flinching, but with the quiet ferocity of somebody used to saying things that nobody seemed to be listening to. Drunks often sounded like that, and so did very clear thinkers. The speech could be followed either by shutting up or by acting out, verbally and physically throwing things around.
“There must be a lot easier and less detectable ways to kill somebody,” Alex said.
“I know that,” Kevin snapped. “If he’s trying to kill her, he wants her to know it. She says her husband has had to watch kids die. It could unhinge you. He could blame her. You know how guys blame their wives for their own mistakes?”
There wasn’t any wife picture in here. Alex guessed Kevin Royce was speaking from experience, gained somewhat too late.
“My mistake was probably who I married,” Alex said mildly. Agreeing for the sake of agreement wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Kevin obviously had grabbed onto Linda’s charge against her husband. Alex needed to know whether Linda had given him more grounds for doing so than she’d given Yvonne. “But I’ve done my share of blaming like that, wife, girlfriend, yeah.”
Did he blame Laura, his ex-wife, for the fact that he couldn’t just pack up himself and Maria and move to Missoula or Albany or Seattle if Meredith got a job offer in a place like that? Did he blame Meredith for trying to find a job? Just insurance, Meredith said.
“Is that your kid over there?” Alex asked.
“Kevin Junior. He’s marking off my days on the calendar. I promised him a trip to Canobie Lake to ride
the roller coaster when I get out.”
“Linda’s husband,” Alex said. “Is there any reason to think he had access to the blood bank, where the marrow was?”
“He’s a doctor. He could put on an ID and waltz in like he owned the place. I don’t know. I’ve never even seen the blood bank. Have you?”
“Yeah. Not exactly Fort Knox.” Kevin was sticking the snapshot back onto the post. “Were you, did you and Linda know each other before you ended up— I mean, both found yourselves in here?”
“Nope. I’m Malden, she’s Topsfield. She wrestles with numbers on a computer, I weld cars and other broken things together. Probably what I do is more likely to give you cancer, though that’s not how I got mine. Anyway, I asked her for a picture. She told him, Tom, to bring some in. ‘For the others in the unit,’ she said. He doesn’t tell her about who he runs around with, anymore. She didn’t tell him about me.”
“How did you get your cancer?” Alex asked. He asked partly because he didn’t have any clear or fixed idea how he’d gotten his own. Lymphomas tended to be classified as “environmental” rather than “life-style” cancers, which was only to say you didn’t acquire them, as far as statistical correlations went, by smoking or eating or not eating any identifiable thing. You didn’t get them, they got you. The marrow transplant unit here specialized in lymphomas and leukemias, but Yvonne had referred to breast cancers, and Alex’s doctor had said the treatment was increasingly being used in such “solid-tumor” cases too.
“I’ve got a lymph cancer, same as Linda,” Kevin said. “The rate for men my age is fifty percent higher if they served in Vietnam. It’s from Agent Orange, and it’s about the only Agent Orange damage the VA will admit. They’re paying for me, at least. I’m lucky, compared to guys that have to deal with the sterility and the birth defects the government won’t admit to at all.” He explained this in that same quietly angry way Alex had noticed before. This time he apparently had exhaustive and damning data to back him up. “They’re the POWs the country’s turning its back on, as much as those guys who might or might not be out in the jungle somewhere.”
“Jay Harrison once worked with some kind of underground railroad for Vietnam-era deserters,” Alex said. “It crossed my mind that somebody, the ones not ready to admit the war’s over, might be taking that out on him now. That he undermined the war effort. Sold out the ones doing the fighting.” He didn’t need to keep finding ways of saying it. Obviously Kevin would know what he meant.
“Crazy Vietnam vet sucks marrow from woman’s bones?” Kevin shot back. “That’s not the right style. It’s too sneaky. The guy you’re talking about would bust down Harrison’s door with an M-16 and say hey, Doc, kiss your ass good-bye.”
“Uh-huh. So you think it was the husband. Convince me. Tell me why.”
“Huh? Look, you’re gonna tell me I never even met the lady, and I’m a guy lying here scared of dying, grabbing at reeds. That’s what my brother said yesterday. I didn’t tell him about her marrow getting ripped off. He asked why I seemed so down, and I just said I was worried about the woman next door. He said, ‘She married?’ and I said sort of, and he said ‘You see, I know my brother. As long as she’s married, he thinks he’s in love.’ What do you mean, convince you? You’re supposed to be the investigator, according to the nurse there. All I can do is tell you what Linda told me.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Sorry. That’s what I meant. If you can give me anything to go on, I’ll try to follow it up. If the marrow doesn’t come back, I’ll give anything I find out to the police as soon as Harrison or whoever decides to call them in.” He hesitated. He knew that everybody knew the last person to trust was the one who rushed to explain how close they came to standing in your shoes. Nevertheless he said, “If it matters, I got treated for lymphoma two and half years ago. If it matters, I wasn’t in Vietnam.”
Kevin watched him for a minute, expressionless, then put up his hand for Alex to high five. Alex forgot about not touching, but Kevin took his own hand away before their palms actually met. Kevin said, “Did you graduate from alcohol, or did you slip past that one, too?”
“Slipped past,” Alex told him.
“Well, batting three-thirty-three ain’t too bad. I’m six years sober now, and trying to stay alive. You see that machine over there?” He nodded at the typewriter. “I thought I was getting to the point where I’m going to try and write some of this shit down for my kid. Only it’s not my story, it’s Linda’s story busting out of my veins right now. Now, you want to hear it or not?”
“I want to hear it.”
“Uh-huh. She put him through medical school, okay, while she typed and filed and her company paid for her to build up her credits in math. Then she did the diapers and the dishes, and finally her degree, and once they started coming into the cash, she found out he was spending his time and energy and motel and traveling money on some babe. They were going to get divorced and then, bang, she felt these bumps in her armpit and all. They patched it back together while she got better. Lately she knew it was falling apart again between them, only a matter of time. Bang, relapse.” He pointed at the wall full of air vents. On the other side of the ducts was a solid wall, on the other side of that was her room. “Now here she is.”
“Does she blame her husband for the disease?” Alex asked. If she did, he was ready to toss the husband-kidnapper-murderer hypothesis right out, and Kevin’s infatuation along with it too. It made sense to blame your disease on a government that dropped carcinogenic chemicals on a populated countryside and then dropped you in there to inhale and ingest them alongside the natives you were supposed to round up. It didn’t make sense to blame your disease on an individual that didn’t love and honor you the way he should. That smacked too much of self-pity to suit Alex. He didn’t like to jump at reasons and causes that weren’t really there.
“No, that’s me talking if it’s anybody. Not her. She only blames him if he decided to take God’s will into his own hands. Like he thinks, oh shit, here she’s done it to me again, if I don’t fight back I’m going to be saddled with this little sickie that’s going to wear out my life too.”
Kevin Royce cocked his head sideways at Alex and shut his mouth. Like Yvonne Price, he’d said what he had to say and now he wanted to see what Alex was going to do.
Alex nodded, and then they talked some shop about welding and keeping half-antique cars on the road. Kevin’s own marriage interested Alex, because that last bit had sounded a lot like the voice of sad experience again. Still, Kevin’s theory might be plausible, and if it was really Linda’s theory, then Alex felt morally bound to follow it up.
“Her nurse says Linda told her some of those suspicions, just once,” he said after a while. “Then she acted as if she never said it. Was it the same with you?”
“No. But she did say, let’s wait awhile and not tell anybody. Maybe the dog’ll come back like he’s supposed to, wagging his tail. Then we’ll be sorry we said Tom took him out in the woods with an axe. Once you make that kind of accusation, then you can’t ever take it back.”
“Those were her words, about the dog?”
“Those were her words. She had some kind of dream, about Tom killing the family dog because she, uh, looked at another guy. She called me and told me the dream when she woke up.” He let Alex have another shot of those piercing eyes. The eyes dared Alex to claim Linda wasn’t in love with Kevin the way Kevin was in love with her. Maybe she was, Alex thought. Maybe this was the beginning of a perfect match too.
Inwardly Alex stomped on the pun. If the marrow didn’t come back as it was supposed to, a perfect match was what Linda would need, a perfect blood match, and it wouldn’t be a matter for jokes. “Linda hasn’t got any siblings?” he asked, hoping Jay had been wrong that first night.
Kevin said, “Linda is a loner. An only. Like Kevin Junior.” He pointed at his son’s picture. Alex could only hope Jay would get lucky and hit the number with some cousin or some random blood d
onor whose data was close enough to Linda’s to warrant further tests. He was due downstairs to talk to Jay now.
Deborah McCarthy looked up from her desk and said, “I’m sorry, Alex, but Jay had to cancel. This was a bad week to start out with, even if none of this had happened, because the senior resident is away now, he’s got a job interview. Ms. Dumars’s nurse called earlier, by the way, to make sure it was okay to talk to you. And now you must be coming from the next-door-neighbor patient, is that right?”
“Uh-huh,” Alex said, wondering what lay behind this chatty efficiency. Was it anything more than the way she did her job? “I’m not hard to keep track of. I have a lot of theories but no data, as the boss would say. When can I see him?”
She looked at the calendar on her desk. At least, she made a show of looking at it. “What about noon tomorrow?”
“Noon tomorrow? I’ve hiked up and down the beach and been to California and back. Is he avoiding me all of a sudden, or what?”
Alex leaned against the wall and crossed one leg in front of the other. He stared at Deborah, watched her face color, saw a few spots in front of his eyes. That wasn’t misalignment, just exhaustion. He sat down in the spare chair as if he might stage a sit-in, though he knew he was really going home to bed.
“I don’t think he’s avoiding you,” Deborah said with a trained flak-catcher smile. “He had to cancel, that’s all. He did say he won’t get in your way if you want to ‘nose around here’ like you’re doing, but he doesn’t want to do that himself, not yet. If you hear from this Foster, or if Jay does, whoever hears should contact the other right away.”
“One question, then. Did he ever get a letter from somebody named Barbara Binder? Somebody else he knew from back then, from the Foster days? Another old friend that wrote after seeing his face in the magazine?”
She took a minute to think, and Alex took it to look her over in a new way. He studied the pencil line of her right eyebrow, the right side of her lipstick, the tight pink skin of her cheek, her squared-off jaw. She had nice coloring on a face a little more sharply chiseled than many Boston Irish faces. She was wearing a red V-neck sweater today, no sweatshirt. The neckline revealed a little cleavage, but whether that was display or fashion or comfort Alex couldn’t tell. If someone had asked him to describe her, he would have said a perky, reasonably attractive woman who seemed thoughtful and alert. So what? Did that tell him whether Jay Harrison couldn’t keep his hands off her, or vice versa? Did those things really have anything to do with looks?