Requiem for the Bone Man

by R. A. Comunale

  The old African-American unit secretary let out a laugh.

  “Sisters, we got us a forest fire in here!”

  ...

  He sat a long time in the darkened room after her funeral. He had turned over his work to colleagues. He wasn’t sure he could go back or that he even wanted to.

  They had made so many plans, testing each other’s feelings to be sure that each detail would work for both. He hadn’t wanted to leave anything to chance. He remembered that disastrous past proposal.

  They had picked out a nice townhouse apartment near the hospital. His old place was just a bachelor pad more reminiscent of medical school digs than appropriate for someone rising in his field. He had tried to straighten and clear out the place, getting rid of accumulated grunge and airing out the rooms, even though the winter weather was brutally cold.

  He went over the words a third time and then called her.

  “It’s me.”

  “Hi, me,” she giggled.

  Even on the other end of the phone, he felt the heat of embarrassment.

  “I … uh … would you like to have dinner tonight?”

  “Sure! Your place or mine?”

  Oh, geez, this is moving too fast for me!

  He couldn’t think of a way to backpedal out of the corner he had painted himself into.

  “Uh … well …”

  Damn! Why was he so tongue-tied? He wasn’t a kid anymore.

  “Well, how about I pick you up and we try that little Chinese restaurant near the hospital. You like Chinese? I mean, if you don’t we can go somewhere else, if that’s not okay.”

  “That’s fine. See you at seven.”

  She hung up and looked in the mirror. She felt shivery. She stared at the pictures of her parents and brother stuck in the upper corner of the vanity mirror. She was the only one to survive the auto accident ten years ago and had lived alone throughout her schooling.

  Mama, Papa, Glen, I think I love him. I hope that’s all right with you.

  The old saying was true: An hour after you eat Chinese food, you feel hungry again. But this wasn’t the hunger of an empty belly. She had invited him back to her place, another efficiency like his—but much better kept. They sat on her small lilac-colored couch and awkwardly talked about their families and their past lives. He called her Leni and she, demanding equal time, wanted a name for him.

  “Not Bob,” she said. “We need something special, just for us. What’s your middle name?”

  “Anthony,” he replied, a little embarrassed.

  “No,” she said, “it’s Tony.” And she leaned over kissed him. His left arm, already around her shoulder, tightened its hold. The evening was still young, and so were they.

  They moved into their new home the same day they went to the courthouse for their marriage license. Neither one was big on ceremony. There was no family left to eat rubber chicken reception dinners, and they hadn’t told their friends. He bought her a ring. He didn’t want to jinx things by using the one he already had. No, that was for memory, to remind him not to be such an uptight asshole.

  Their hospital associates didn’t know either, though they noticed the difference in the two, especially when they were on the same floor.

  “Elena, I thought you hated green. Where’d you get that sweater?”

  The nursing supervisor had worked there thirty years and knew all of her girls. She guessed what was going on when the young woman just smiled back.

  “Dr. G., we’re having a going-away party for Mary and we’re taking up a collection.”

  Normally he would just have pitched in a dollar, so he flabbergasted her when he took out a ten-dollar bill and stuffed it into the box she held.

  That early spring morning she felt queasy but didn’t tell him. She went to the hospital lab with a urine sample and asked her friend to run an HCG level—human chorionic gonadatropin—the gold standard for pregnancy.

  The rest of the day she floated through her rounds, trying to think of a fun way of telling him. She signed out and headed down the stairs, exiting at the waiting room area. She walked over to the little gift shop and peered in the window looking for inspiration. Staring back at her was the stuffed toy beagle dog, its overlong nose and ears and sad-sack eyes calling out to her, Take me home with you.

  She sat in her car and carefully wrote out what she wanted to say on the little gift card hanging from the toy dog’s neck.

  Oh, my, he’s going to be in shock!

  And this was going to be the happiest night of her life.

  Over and over he played it: Pavane pour une infante défunte.

  Ravel had it right, he thought, as he stared at the wall. He got up to replay it when the voice echoed in his head.

  Tony, you have to go back. I’ll always be with you.

  He turned off the record player and started to clean up the room.

  Philosophers have said that time heals all wounds. But wounds don’t heal as normal tissue. They form scars. You don’t bleed anymore, but the tissue is no longer the same.

  He returned to his schedule, putting in more time than ever before. He needed to work. He had to work. Time alone meant thinking, ruminating. But, inexorably, time did pass.

  He grew older, got involved in the medical side of government as well as his practice. He worked thirty hours a day, eight days a week—patients in the office, patients at the free clinic, and rounds at the hospital, at nursing homes, and at certain unnamed government facilities.

  And he grew older alone.

  ...

  He found himself walking the ninth floor corridor.

  Finished! No more tonight.

  He turned the corner quickly heading to the stairway and collided with someone. He looked down and saw one of the floor nurses lying flat on her back. He was so tired he almost laughed at the wordplay: floor nurse floored.

  He didn’t recognize her. Must be new, he thought, as he reached down to pull her upright. She brushed off her uniform and glared at him. Not bad-looking, probably in her late thirties or, like him, early forties. Her face relaxed into a smile as he stared at her. He started to apologize and looked into her eyes, those same lavender eyes. He looked at her name tag: CATHY. He stood there dumbfounded as she stared back.

  In his mind he heard the voice saying, Yes, Tony.

  He looked at her. She hadn’t said anything.

  “Do … you need any help?” he stuttered.

  Cathy Welton had no family. She had been orphaned at age five and her foster parents were long gone. She had put herself through nursing school by work and scholarship and found that her true forte was oncology. She had the rare ability to combine compassion and competence in a field where emotional burnouts were common.

  Optimism can carry you only so far when you are surrounded by inevitability, but she had cared for her patients tirelessly for more than sixteen years, dealing with the classic Kübler-Ross confrontational stages against the Fates no matter how they presented. Her colleagues often said she did her patients and their families more good than any preacher. And for each one, she was there when the thread of life was severed.

  Each saw in the other the same theme of intertwining grief and loss, and they were drawn together because of it. No need for soul searching. They both knew the signs. It wasn’t long before she asked him what he wanted her to call him. She also wanted something other than Bob, something close and personal. He was reluctant to tell her, maybe for fear of the same outcome, but in the end he relented.

  “Call me Tony.”

  It was déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra used to say. They planned, and planned together. He couldn’t bear living in the apartment with its crushing memories, so he bought two homes side by side. He lived and worked in the one house while he fixed up the other for the two of them. She decided to quit her hospital job and work with him full time in the office.

  “Tony, did that dinner bother you in any way?”

  It had been a hectic day for the bot
h of them and they had ordered takeout to give themselves more time to rest. They also wanted to go over their dream of adopting needy children.

  “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “My stomach hurts, I feel nauseated, and I want to throw up. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was pregnant.”

  She had undergone a hysterectomy for severely bleeding fibroids five years before. But pregnancy didn’t cause penetrating, drilling pain from front to back anyway, and other conditions such as an ulcer also didn’t fit.

  Galen called a friend in the radiology department and they headed over to the unit that evening for magnetic resonance imaging. The hammering noise of the rotating MRI unit vibrated through him as he and the radiologist stared at the screen. The computer program was piecing together cross sections into composite images as it electronically sectioned off portions of Cathy’s abdomen. The micro-universe of proton spins painted its picture of inevitability.

  “There, Bob.”

  The radiologist pointed to a swelling in the C-shaped pancreatic head. He looked at Galen, who had gone pale. The shadow doctor remembered his friend’s past experience.

  Galen turned without speaking and went to help Cathy out of the scanner.

  He took Cathy to the best oncologists he knew. The answer was the same: pancreatic cancer already metastasized. They both knew what that meant. They also knew the treatment protocols were devastating by themselves.

  “Tony, I just don’t want to prolong it. I know what happens. I worked the oncology wing for sixteen years. Promise me you won’t let me suffer.”

  He couldn’t say anything. He held her and nodded his head.

  He couldn’t control her vomiting. He had tried decadron IVs to reduce the swelling in her brain. She wore a wig now. They had tried an experimental drug that seemed to give some respite, but the effect was only temporary. The morphine oral suspension controlled the pain, but it made her act confused as well.

  He sat by her bed and stroked her hand. Her face was drawn, pale. Her weight was less than it had been in her early teens. Sunken eyes looked up at him.

  “Tony, you look so serious.”

  She was drifting in and out of consciousness. The skull was upon her.

  “Let me worry about that, Cathy. You just rest up. I’m going to try something different for the nausea. There’s some new experimental anti-nausea stuff I’ve gotten for you.”

  “No one could ask for a better doctor than you, Tony.”

  She tried to sit up, but he held her back.

  “Let me raise the bed for you.”

  He kissed her forehead.

  “No, Tony, don’t stop me. Leni wants me to come with her.”

  ...

  He sat in the darkened room.

  Ravel’s “Pavane” played over and over.

  He got up, turned it off, and walked outside.

  They both loved flowers, Leni and Cathy.

  This would be their memorial, the flowers he would plant year after year.

  It was late spring now, the season of resurrection. It was time for him to get ready for the summer flowers. He walked through his garden, planning where each floral pattern would go.

  Two butterflies, lavender-hued, flew side by side with him.

  CHAPTER 9

  What If?

  “Come on, Bob, be serious!”

  “So what’s wrong with Murgatroyd or Theofilos if it’s a boy?”

  She had felt the nausea and first thought it was the flu. Then the early-morning vomiting began. Her cycle was two weeks past due. Her mother smiled when she complained about the queasiness, then she placed her hands on Nancy’s abdomen and floored her when she spoke in her heavy German accent.

  “Meine Tochter, sie tragen neues leben.”

  My daughter, you are carrying new life.

  That evening, when Edison had arrived home from his job in New York City, she waited until after dinner, sitting next to him as he sprawled on the couch to unwind.

  “Bob, let’s repaint the spare bedroom. We’re going to have a guest pretty soon.”

  “Great, just what I don’t need right now. Which side of the family is going to drive us nuts this time?”

  “Neither.”

  “Well, who is it?’

  “I don’t know the name yet.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t …?”

  He stopped.

  “Yes, Daddy,” she had said, smiling with a face as rosy as her shimmering hair.

  And she remembered him falling back on the couch, his mind obviously racing. Robert Edison, able to map out complex circuitry in his head and design unheard-of stuff from scratch, didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about a baby—his and Nancy’s baby.

  What do you feed it, cheese and crackers?

  Where do you go to get a crib?

  Nancy, like all women, possessed an ability exclusive to her sex: She could read his thoughts. At least that’s how it seemed to him, as she stroked the back of his neck and whispered:

  “Don’t worry, honey, we’ll work it all out.”

  They had been trying for five years and it finally had happened. They had talked many times about adoption, fertility studies—the works. But even on two salaries, and good ones at that, the costs were beyond their means. So they had kept on waiting for those telltale signs.

  She didn’t mind the extra weight—not yet—as she found herself staring daily at the window displays of the baby shop as she walked from her car to her job at the bank. She kept thinking: pink or blue? And she daydreamed about times when, as the baby grew, she would sit at home after work and bow on her violin the old German folk songs her mother had sung to her as a child.

  She was pleased but not surprised when Bob became ever more solicitous of her health, reminding her of what she should eat, drink, and do. But she had to draw the line when he suggested that he wanted her to stop working

  “Bob, I’m only three months along!”

  But quickly it became eight months, and she began to feel as conspicuous as she looked.

  “Bob, I think I need to see Dr. Ross today. I don’t feel right.”

  She grew lightheaded as she stood up and started to go into the kitchen. Then she felt the sudden wetness and panicked.

  It can’t be my water yet!

  She went into the bathroom and examined herself and saw the red liquid running down her thighs.

  “Bob!” she cried out as she found herself swaying and falling.

  “Mr. Edison, we have to operate on Nancy right away.”

  June Ross was a skilled obstetrician, and she knew she had to convey the urgency of the situation without panicking the young man standing in front of her. But even she felt panic, that haunting fear all doctors face when confronted by the possibility of inescapable loss.

  “The baby’s placenta is separating from where it attaches to Nancy’s womb. I’m sure you already know that the placenta is the blood, food, and oxygen connection for the baby. Normally it connects along a particular part of the uterine wall. But sometimes it’s too low, and as the baby grows it causes a pulling along the cord. When this happens it tears blood vessels and causes the bleeding your wife saw today. We have to get in there to help the baby. I know it’s early, but it’s imperative. We need to do an emergency Caesarean section to get the baby out.”

  She couldn’t tell him there was a high chance he would lose both his wife and child, and that if Nancy survived she wouldn’t be able to have any more children. Someday, if the research she had been following produced its intended results, doctors would be able to spot such problems much earlier. The new ultrasound techniques were just coming into use. For now, she could only give him hope.

  That was all she had as well.

  “Okay, Jack, go slow on the induction,” June told the anesthesiologist. “Her pressure is already low. Increase colloid fluid input. She’s already had two units of whole and four units of packed cells.”

  As the gowned and ma
sked and capped team stood over her, Nancy felt increasingly detached—almost floating. It was just like that one time she had taken a couple of drinks at college. And her mind drifted away as the room darkened around her.

  “She’s under,” the anesthesiologist said.

  June prayed as she made the first incision.

  ...

  “Nancy, I, uh, well, uh…”

  He’s going to do it. I was right! Mother didn’t think so, but I knew it!

  He was shaking like a tuning fork and his eyes were clouding up.

  Oh, please, don’t cry, Bob, don’t cry!

  “Nancy…”

  He paused to steady himself, putting his hands on those long red tresses of hers that always held him spellbound. He swallowed.

  “Nancy, will you marry me?”

  He stood there like an expectant puppy, too afraid to ask anything more for fear of being swatted. His mind raced.

  I’ll just jump in the lake and drown myself if she says no.

  “Well, yeah, I guess so, okay,” she heard herself saying, almost like an observer standing apart.

  She saw his eyes widen as he tried to take in her response.

  Dear God, tell me I didn’t say it that way!

  It hit her: She was just as flustered as he was.

  Think, girl! You can do better than that! Try again! He really loves you!

  She looked up at this almost six foot tall scrawny man/boy, put her arms around him and started over.

  “Yes, Bob Edison, I’ll marry you!”

  She had uttered those words nearly two years after their first apparently inauspicious meeting. She had planned a nice day on the lake canoeing with her old college roommate who had just arrived in town.

  She spotted the geeky kid, looking like a muscle-less Popeye, approaching the canoe she and Betty had planned to share. Slender, acne scars, glasses—just what she didn’t need today.