Paths

by David DeSimone

  “Thank you.”

  7

  In the breezeway, Eva caught the faint scent of sickness that she could only describe as medicine, body odor with a mix of cleaning chemicals. The smell was so slight that for a moment she wondered if it wasn’t just her imagination because of her intense dislike for hospitals.

  Was she overreacting? She didn’t think so.

  It brought back too many memories.

  They passed an empty gurney. The pale green cushions retained the indentations of a recent patient who was either convalescing in one of the general wards, or lying in the morgue.

  During her grandfather’s brief stay in the hospital, he had gone from cheerful, gruff, and sometimes vulgar, to listless and pale. It started when he complained of pains in his stomach. He let it go for a while, expecting it to go away like so many other mysterious aches and pains had done before. Except this time it hadn’t. And when the pain had gotten so bad that he couldn’t walk anymore, something had to be done.

  Grandma drove him to the hospital, but by that time the cancer had metastasized. It had spread from his liver to his stomach, and was working its way up into his lungs. He had lost fifteen pounds in the week since being admitted. He had already been a thin man before his illness, but now he looked skeletal.

  When Eva finally saw this change, not just in weight but in his overall appearance, she was shocked and it proved too much for her to deal with.

  From that point on she spent most of her visiting time in the family room waiting for her mother to let Eva know when ‘it was time’.

  She dreaded that moment. It meant she had to see Grandpa again.

  He looked worse than before, much worse. The man who bounced her on his shoulders and whinnied playfully was now becoming a thing, a slack-jawed, horrible looking thing, with eyes sunken deep in shadowy sockets, rolled so far back that only the whites showed. As his life seeped out of his body, Grandpa sank deeper into the mattress - or so it appeared to Eva. She remembered thinking ‘we sink first before we die’. He had been in the hospital for only three weeks.

  That was the first time Eva was touched by death, a few years before her father’s unexpected death in the emergency room. She would have a similar experience with her grandmother, though Grandpa’s death was much worse.

  Eva suffered insomnia for a year. It got so bad that her mother asked the doctor to prescribe Valium for her daughter. They worked well enough except when the dreams got very bad. Eva could not get Grandpa’s open-mouthed, sunken face out of her head.

  In these dreams she would see him in Logan Park. It was her favorite place as a child and sometimes where Grandpa gave her his famous bouncy shoulder rides. He would sit on a bench facing her but unable to speak, because his mouth was locked in that ugly, open position - a perpetual moan. He did not try to walk, because his permanently upturned eyes made him blind. In these dreams she tries to move but can’t. She tries to scream but only manages a sigh. She is held frozen by an unseen force, maybe that force is somehow coming from Grandpa himself, and is made to stare at him.

  8

  After the breezeway, they kept walking in search of the elevator banks. They went through a doorway and it seemed like they stepped into a top-secret government research facility, like the kind you’d see in a sci-fi movie about an apocalyptic virus that somehow gets out and decimates humanity.

  To the right was a nursing station where nurses were busy checking patient records, manning the phones, or moving to and fro caring for patients on the floor.

  Though clean, the place was cluttered. Whatever space wasn’t filled by either furniture or people was occupied by monitoring equipment, medical pushcarts, electronic displays and intravenous stands.

  They walked a little more down the hallway and made a left, and found themselves in another room. To their left was yet another room, this one with a large glass window. It was a room within a room.

  The glow from the fluorescent lights emanating from the inner room was such a stark contrast from the outer room that it somehow gave off an aura of mystery thus contributing to the sci-fi disaster-movie-of-the week feeling.

  Eva caught only a glimpse of the inside of the inner room and saw tops of clear box-like containers. Attached to each container were wires and tubes that led to monitoring equipment.

  You didn’t have to be a doctor to know those were the tops of incubators. If she had any doubt about that, the sign above the entryway made it clear. NEONATAL ICU.

  Eva went over to a window next to the door, peered inside, and was struck by a yearning. She gazed upon rows of tiny, blanketed forms. They were beautiful.

  Each and every one of them.

  She wondered how her little sister Candace would feel now, seeing all those tiny newborns clinging to life.

  Drew looked at his wife and saw something in her eyes that reminded him of how much she longed for a child. They tried numerous times to get pregnant. He’d even rush home in the middle of the day from the office to make love, but it still didn’t work.

  Drew had mentioned adoption more than once. And why not? They were the perfect candidates: they had solid jobs, a good marriage, a good home, they were young and, most importantly, had a strong determination to have a family.

  He spoke with a colleague who had adopted a child, Howard Lindstrom. Howard said it was the best decision he and his wife ever made.

  “We could,” Eva would reply. “But can we just try a little longer?” Or she would say, “Can we talk about this later?”

  Drew had not pressed her.

  Once she realizes their time to adopt is even more limited than the time left to get pregnant, she will have to consider this option.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Nothing. Just thinking how cute they are.”

  A smile rose from the corners of her mouth.

  “Look how tiny they are,” she said. “So vulnerable.”

  “Hi,” a voice whispered. Eva and Drew turned and saw a nurse. She had brown hair and dark blue eyes with dark circles under them. She might have been pretty had she not looked so tired. Because of this, it was hard to tell her age - somewhere in the mid-30s. Her nametag read MARY.

  “Are you visiting with family?” she asked politely.

  “No,” Eva said, embarrassed. “We were just trying to find the MRI Department.”

  “I think you passed it,” the nurse said. She turned and pointed back to the doorway where they came from. “See that doorway?”

  Eva nodded.

  “Go through there, and then down about fifty feet, and hang a left. The elevators will be right there.”

  “That’s not what the Security lady said.”

  The nurse smiled. “Oh, there are so many hallways in this place it can get confusing.”

  “Trust me,” Mary said. “I’ve worked here for nine years.”

  They then stepped aside to allow another nurse to pass. The nurse took out her ID badge and swiped it across a card reader located on the inner door. The door clicked, a green LED light flashed and she went inside.

  9

  “I can’t wait till this is over,” Eva said as they entered the elevator car.

  “Don’t worry. Everything’ll be fine.” He gave her a quick kiss on her temple.

  After a brief ride to C-Level 1, the doors opened “We should have just taken the stairs,” Eva said rubbing the back of her neck.

  She rolled her head in circles trying to get a good stretch. It helped.

  “Neck acting up?” Drew asked.

  “I don’t think it ever stopped.”

  She let out a heavy sigh, which also helped. The pain seemed to downgrade to an ache.

  Stepping out of the elevator, they followed signs, which took them down two short hallways, each with a sharp turn at the end.

  Exposed pipes and electrical conduits ran the length of the ceiling, meeting intermittently with other pipes that rose from floor to ceiling. The single ro
w of fluorescent lights following the centers of the hallways cast a pale bluish glow.

  Here was a space that Freddy Krueger might want to call home. Maybe Freddy Krueger did call it home. Maybe right at this moment he was waiting for her in the MRI room, bladed fingers poised to turn a POWER dial full throttle.

  She might have laughed at this thought, if it had not been her going into the basement for an MRI.

  They stopped in front of a pair of automatic sliding glass doors. The sign above the doors read RADIOLOGY. In addition to that were these words:

  COMPUTERIZED TOMOGRAPHY

  ULTRASOUND RADIOGRAPHY

  POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY

  MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING.

  They had arrived.

  10

  The sliding glass doors parted to let them through. Eva thought if those doors had faces they’d be grinning and there would be malice in those grins.

  On the other side of the sliding doors, the lighting was better, brighter and more cheerful, at least about as cheerful as a basement corridor can get. The ceiling was covered up with tiles, so you didn’t have to see any exposed, Freddy Krueger-inspired conduits or water pipes.

  A woman approached the Fairwoods and asked if they needed help. She was young, had dark hair and wore a white lab coat. She beamed with youthful promise and vitality.

  “We’re trying to find the MRI room,” Drew said.

  “It’s this way,” she said and led them down to the end of the corridor, stopped, turned, and gestured toward last room on the left.

  “In there,” she said.

  The waiting room was as bright and sterile-looking as the halls of the Radiology Department from which they came.

  Metal chairs with powdery-blue vinyl cushions were arranged in five rows of five. Others were arranged along the opposite wall. On the far end of the room to the right a receptionist sat behind a large glass window.

  The Fairwoods approached the receptionist, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, who was on the phone in deep in conversation.

  She wasn’t aware of the couple standing over her.

  “Hi,” Eva said.

  No response.

  “Excuse me?”

  The receptionist looked up, held up a finger for Eva to wait a second.

  Eva sighed and looked at Drew.

  “Okay,” the receptionist said, waggling a pen as she listened. “Yes...That’s correct. We accept Blue Cross HMO...I have you down for May 19th, 10 AM, that’s correct...’

  She waggled the pen faster. “Correct,” the receptionist replied to the caller, bobbing her head.

  “Correct…

  “That’s correct…

  “Uh-huh, correct…

  “Correct…

  “Yes, correct…

  “Okay, let me just tell you one more time. Your appointment is at 10 AM on May 19th…Yes... yes… yes we accept Blue Cross HMO…

  No, you have a deductible of five hundred dollars…

  That’s something you’re going to have to take up with your insurance company, okay?

  Okay, then...You’re welcome. Bye.”

  She hung up the phone, took a moment to recover, looked up. “How may I help you?”

  Forcing a smile, Eva said, “Yes, we spoke earlier on the phone. I have a two o'clock appointment for an MRI.”

  “May I have your name please?”

  She gave her name, Eva Fairwood.

  The receptionist punched in her name and searched.

  “Take your time,” Eva said with a little impatience.

  “Eva Fairwood?” The receptionist said finally.

  “Yes.”

  She pulled out a clipboard on which paper forms were attached.

  “Please complete and sign these forms and someone will be with you shortly,” she said robotically like someone who had said this a million times before.

  Drew and Eva found a pair of seats in the middle of the room. Eva wished she had taken Valium earlier. This was not turning out to be a good day.

  There were only three other people in the waiting room: an elderly couple, and a middle-aged man who wore a puffy-gray jacket and denim trousers. Looked muscular under the jacket, a bit scruffy around the jawline. Blue-collar guy.

  The man nodded hello to Drew.

  Drew nodded back feeling a little intimidated. It wasn’t that Drew was out of shape. Just a little on the thin side. He didn’t have the muscles you get from working on a construction site, like the man had. He could run a mile without breaking a sweat and had no problem moving furniture around when asked, but when it came to real heavy lifting, or anything that required the use of a hammer and nail, Drew was a little, well, out of practice.

  Eva spent the next ten minutes filling out the medical forms and returned the clipboard and paperwork to the receptionist. She went back to her chair.

  They waited.

  She yawned. “I’m tired.”

  “I hear you.”

  “I could use a bed with soft cool sheets in an air-conditioned room and a glass of iced tea.”

  He shifted in his chair, ass starting to hurt.

  She checked her watch, groaned. “It’s already past two-thirty. How much longer do we have to wait?”

  “Relax.”

  “I can’t. I want to get this over with. I feel like I’m being punished for something I didn’t do.”

  “It’s just an examination.”

  “Yeah, in Darth Vader’s cryo-chamber.”

  He laughed at that.

  “I think it’s Han Solo you’re thinking of. Darth Vader had him frozen in Carbonite,” he said.

  “No, I’m thinking of the scene where Darth Vader is having his helmet put on. He’s sitting in the middle of some pod-like thing and we only see the back of his head - it’s all misshapen and stuff - and there’s a bunch of smoke blowing all around him.”

  He looked away from her, remembered. “Oh, okay. I think I know what you’re talking about now.”

  “So that smoke, what do you think it was? Frozen nitrogen or something?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s liquid nitrogen. And if it was liquid nitrogen he wouldn’t be Darth Vader anymore, he’d be Darth Wafer.”

  She gave him a wry look. “What are you talking about?”

  “Liquid nitrogen would disintegrate every cell in our boy Darth’s body and he would be as brittle as a wafer. The slightest touch would cause him to crumble.”

  “Well, what do you think it was then?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Cool special effects stuff, I don’t know.”

  The small talk helped Eva to relax.

  “I wish my MRI was only a cool special effect,” she said. “I wish the whole day was just a cool special effect. ‘Cut!’ And then I’d walk off the set back into my normal, boring life. Just the way I like it.”

  11

  “Eva Fairwood?”

  Eva looked up, saw a woman appear in the doorway.

  Eva and Drew got up and followed after the woman.

  “My name’s Rita. Let me know if you have any questions.” Rita wore a white tunic and matching white slacks. Her nametag read RITA MILES/RADIOGRAPHY TECHNOLOGIST.

  They strode down a short corridor, passing a few examination rooms and offices, until finally they arrived and entered the MRI room.

  There, stretching into the room like some hi-tech pagan altar was the beast, a looming structure protruding out of the wall and hovering closely, very closely, over a sterile-looking bed. The bed had black vinyl cushions with the texture and sheen of a body bag.

  The outside appearance of the MRI machine wasn’t actually very impressive, just an eggshell-like form made of molded plastic. But underneath its simple exterior was a marvel of mechanical and electronic ingenuity, disparate systems somehow working together under to the control of an even more elaborate network of computer and telecommunications systems.

  “Please make sure you do not have any jewelry or metallic items on you.” Rita said as sh
e led the Fairwoods toward the bed.

  Eva did as instructed, removing her sweat jacket, sneakers, and wedding ring, all consisting of some amount of metal, and handed them to Drew.

  She was left wearing gray sweatpants and a black sports bra.

  From a touch-sensitive display that might as well have been in Cantonese as far as Drew was concerned, Rita punched in some commands and the bed slowly rolled out from under the technological behemoth.

  “Okay, now if you could just make yourself comfortable,” Rita said.

  To Drew she said, ”Please have a seat.”

  Drew turned to where Rita was pointing. “Is it okay that I sit closer to my wife?” he asked.

  “That’s fine,” Rita said.

  Drew pulled the chair closer to Eva.

  Eva climbed up and laid back on the bed, saw something round and bulky in Rita’s hand. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s just an MRI coil to put around your head,” Rita said, casually trying not to alarm her patient.

  “A what?”

  “An MRI coil. It’s just used to help improve the image quality.”

  Eva turned to Drew, worried. “I really don’t want you to put that torture device on my head.”

  “Okay,” Rita said cautiously. “But if the image comes out blurry you would have to come back and do this all over again.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! Really? You’d make me come back again?” Heavy sigh.

  Rita laughed.

  “Then if I have to do this,” Eva said, “do you have a blindfold or something so I don’t have to see anything?”

  “Oh, sure,” Rita said. “We have blindfolds here.”

  “And Valium? Do you guys have Valium?” She turned to Drew. “Do we have Valium?”

  “No,’ he said. “I’m afraid not.”

  Eva felt like an idiot not getting it from Dr. Mills before the test. What a mistake. “Oh, God.”

  Eva continued, “Okay. How about some soothing music for me? Any Mamas and Papas, or something like that?”