Happiness--A Memoir

by Heather Harpham

  As we swooshed upward, the kids watched the feather mobiles on the ceiling twist and spin. Gracie asked Brian, “How does it move if no one is touching it?”

  “Magic,” said Brian.

  Gracie looked at him, a little disappointed, a little censorious. “Dad, there is no magic.”

  Oh no, I thought, oh no no no.

  We settled into the waiting area. The blond girl was on her father’s lap, breathing with visible effort. The mom sat beside them with a baby boy over her shoulder, maybe fourteen months old. I hadn’t noticed the baby in the elevator; I’d only seen the girl, the way her mother gathered her in. The baby, for all his adorableness, was an extra on set.

  The mom was short and sinewy, with red-gold hair. The father was her match in the physical lottery, fit, handsome. When he stood up and carried the girl to the nurses’ station, he moved with a fluid urgency, an athlete determined to make something happen.

  When the mom spoke, she had a brogue. “Irish?” I asked a nurse. “I think so,” she answered. Maybe Irish mom. I wanted to ask her questions; know their story. But the etiquette was simply to appear friendly and wait. I gave a little wave—a mom-with-a-sick-daughter-and-a-boy-on-my-hip wave. And she, mom-with-a-sick-daughter-and-a-boy-on-her-hip, gave a wave back.

  The nurse quickly showed them back to a room and a while later came back for us. I noticed their curtain was pulled. They wanted privacy.

  We waited. That was the majority of what you did in the clinic: wait. When Dr. K arrived, Gracie was watching the tail end of Spirit, in which the Mustang and his mate run through tall grasses. Dr. K said something about how strong they were, and did Gracie like—She stopped midsentence. An alarm had sounded. She looked up and took off in the direction of the Irish family’s room. Nurses and doctors from all corners of the clinic streamed toward their room.

  The curtain had been thrown open, and I could see the little girl, slack, on her mom’s lap. It was hard to tell if she was breathing. The baby brother was passed hand to hand, out of the room. The little girl had, at some point, coughed up blood; it was across the mother’s shirt. The doctors huddled, trying to stabilize the little girl.

  The baby boy, who’d ended up in the arms of the art therapist, was flapping and struggling. I asked if I could take him. She gave him to me, and I walked with him up and down the hall, reading quotes from The Little Prince posters. He escaped, read one, with the aid of wild, migrating birds. I pointed at the flock of purple songbirds, trailing strings, lifting the compact, golden prince off his compact, golden planet. Chatting as I would chat with Gabriel. After a few minutes the baby quieted. I strained to hear what was happening in his sister’s room.

  Eventually, the dad came to look for his son. He thanked me, took him back, and said, “Our girl gave us a bad scare, but she’s stable now.” In their room the shallow arc of the little girl’s ribcage rose and fell beneath a thin white blanket in time with her breath. Tiny sail of a boat on its side, capturing and losing the wind, over and over again.

  The mom was talking with the doctors, frowning and listening, nodding her head. I imagined some part of her must be shaking, the way an animal who has escaped a predator continues to shake long beyond the immediate threat. I was about to excuse myself when the dad said, “We lost a son before we came here. We cannot lose another child.”

  I said nothing, just waited.

  “He was a toddler, our son. It was sudden, from pneumonia, mishandled. Should have admitted him to hospital, and they didn’t. A few months after he died our little girl is diagnosed with leukemia. Incurable, they say. ‘Sorry, nothing more we can do.’ Which was bullshit. Bullshit socialized medicine. They just wouldn’t spend the money to send her here, where they can do more. We were in the papers; we raised over a million dollars. All of Ireland sent this girl to America to get her transplant. And it worked. She’s cured. The leukemia’s gone. But her lungs aren’t quite right. Her breathing gives her a bit of trouble. She holds on to fluid; I think her kidneys need a wee squeeze. Then she’ll be right again.”

  Though all this he’d been holding his boy, who continued to look around the room, calm and curious. I thought Gabe was operating with a handicap, but this sweet little guy …

  I was terrified I might begin to cry, to usurp the father’s grief.

  “I am so sorry,” I said.

  “Every family goes through something, doesn’t it?” he said, and thanked me for watching out for his boy. He told me all this in the hall, under the Little Prince lifting away from his planet.

  This little girl. She’d ridden up on the elevator with us, and then, a couple of hours later, she’d almost died. The blood on her mother’s shirt. The blaring of the alarm. She’d had a brother once, whom she barely knew. Pneumonia. Fucking socialized medicine.

  This was how we told each other our stories, in the margins, in the kitchen, over Styrofoam cups, while washing our hands at the decontamination trough, at the snack machine, without ceremony. Without self-dramatization. Without even the faintest nod to the horror of what was described because the assumption was everyone had horror.

  The teller’s job was to get the facts right, to preserve every detail, especially the little ones: How the ambulance driver had smelled of clove cigarettes, as if he’d taken his time. How the blood on the mom’s shirt was shaped like a bird in upside-down flight. How their son, before he died, had greeted his parents each morning by saying, “Give me an eyelash kiss.”

  The listener’s job was to hear the story. To record the use of particular phrases, exact adjectives, adverbs, unusual clauses, idioms, or truncated turns of phrase. To note the time of day, the weather, what the teller was wearing. To learn the story, as it poured into the room, as if it were a religious text, which it was.

  Both teller and listener have one duty: to believe. No matter how bad. Believe. Believe and remember; remember and believe. Because remembering and believing were all we had to give.

  People often said, “I don’t know how you do it.” As if we’d been given a choice.

  When I returned to our room after talking with the father, Gracie was distraught. “Where were you?”

  “I was holding a baby.”

  “We needed you,” she said. “Gabey cried for you.” Gabey looked happy enough; he had Luna Bar all over his face and hands.

  “Here I am now,” I said.

  “We’re done,” Brian said. “Gracie got unhooked.” The slight breeze of recrimination. I looked at her IV and realized it was capped and detached; they’d been waiting a long time.

  “I’m sorry, it was important.”

  Brian gave me a questioning look.

  “I can tell you everything later,” I said.

  “Only if you want to.”

  Brian had heeded the no-friends advice. He would elect to not be heartbroken at the exact point in time when his daughter needed him most. Gracie was the sole recipient of his caring, and that made perfect sense. But I was lonely; I wanted to tell him about the Irish family. How far they’d come, how much they’d lost. How they could not lose any more.

  On the way home I sat in the back between the kids. I held one of their feet in each of my hands; I could feel a faint pulse at the ankles. The saphenous vein, that big wide conveyor of blood that had let us “get in” to Gracie many times as an infant. We were passing through a densely wooded area with tossing branches overhead.

  “Trees don’t yike me,” Gabe said. This was his new refrain; he’d endowed the natural world with an amorphous antagonism.

  “Those are trees growing, Gabe, not bad guys,” Gracie said.

  I wavered between wanting to assure Gabe that the trees adored him, would do him no harm, and agreeing. The trees don’t yike me either, I wanted to say, the trees scare me too.

  37

  “Paradoxical reaction to the sedatives,” the nurse said. “Try to keep her quiet till it wears off.”

  We were in a waiting room; Gracie had gone feral.

 
A few days before, Dr. K had scheduled an MRI to determine if Gracie’s liver was finally strong enough for her to proceed to transplant. Looking at the machine, Gracie had said, “Can we tell them I don’t want to go into the box?”

  Nobody does, darling girl.

  To calm her, they had given her a sedative, and she’d lain quiet, in a twilight state, as the metal tube whirled and clanged around her, peering into her liver. As soon as it was over, she sat up stiff, rigid; as if a switch had been thrown, as if she was possessed. She slid off the table and cross-stepped, a spooked horse dancing in erratic patterns, toward the waiting room. I ran after. But when I tried to pick her up, she writhed and kicked, twisted out of my arms. I managed to trap her body between my knees.

  “What is happening?” I’d shouted at the closest nurse.

  Gracie pulled free and dove forward onto polished concrete. Dove into concrete. A huge goose egg, bluish at the center, began to form. Most terrifying yet: she didn’t cry.

  I looked at my mom, who’d flown out to be with us for Christmas.

  “You get her legs. I’ll get her body.”

  Captured, Gracie began to scream, “Let me do it! I can do it!”

  Exactly what the it was, was unclear.

  We carried Gracie across the main lobby and out to the parking lot strung between us like a live electrical wire. She was rolling her body to the left and right against our grasp and screaming, “I can do it!”

  I loved her faith in her own powers.

  On the drive home, she fell into a deep sleep, her head flopped to one side, rolling with the turns; a light sweat dampened the hair around her face.

  I called Brian to tell him what had happened, and he said he was already boarding an earlier flight back to Durham. I carried her into the house and laid her in bed. She was limp and warm and pliable, and her breath smelled of saltwater taffy. I pulled the covers over her. When Brian arrived home, just a few hours later, she was still asleep. He sat beside her, patting her back while she breathed and he read.

  Later, I lay down next to her to nap. We woke up at the same time, in a dark room. She put one of her hands on each side of my face and leaned close. Her eyes were two blurry, bright smudges in the dark. “I’m so happy you are back,” she said. “I’m so happy it is you,” and kissed me, very lightly, on the lips.

  I walked out into the living room, “That was scary,” I said. “She was like Jerry Lewis on cocaine and tranquilizers simultaneously.” He gave me a wan smile. He was worried about the goose egg, about head trauma. As we sat there, deciding whether to fight or to cozy up to each other, my cell phone rang. It was Dr. K.

  “MRI results are in. Her liver looks good,” she said. “Really good. We’ll admit you as planned, the day after Christmas.”

  When I got off the phone, Brian was mad. “Why didn’t you ask her about the head injury?” he said.

  “I was busy hearing the news that her liver is in good standing, and she can go to transplant. Sorry I forgot to ask about a bump on the head.”

  “Go look at her; she has a yellow, bruised lump the size of an enormous kumquat.”

  “Brian, you don’t know what a kumquat is,” I shouted. “You’ve never eaten one, and you never will. You couldn’t recognize the most commonplace kumquat, let alone an enormous one!” We laughed. But only a little.

  38

  Just before Christmas, The New York Post called and asked to do a follow-up story on Gracie. I wanted to be packing for the hospital, gift wrapping, or cooking. But the Post had been incredibly kind to us when we needed to raise money. We wanted to accommodate the request as best we could.

  The Post sent down a photographer, for whom Gracie was uncooperative in the extreme. Miserable in her purple velvety shift, she tugged at the neckline until it was so stretched out that she could easily climb out of the dress, which she did periodically during the photoshoot. The photographer laughed it off at first, but after about forty-five minutes of our shenanigans, with no passable photo, everyone’s frustration level was rising, especially Gracie’s. One last time I got her into position—the photographer wanted to capture her hanging an ornament that reflected her face. As she hung the ornament I said, “Okeydoke!” by which I meant, “For the love of God, take the fucking shot!”

  The photographer got the shot, thanked us, and went on his way with a few Santa cookies. On Christmas morning Gracie was on the cover of the Post, hanging a shiny green ornament in hundreds of thousands of papers around New York City. Friends and acquaintances called to tell us they were looking at Gracie’s face in their living room, on the subway, strolling down Seventh Avenue. Totally unbeknownst to her, she was having her fifteen minutes of fame. Kathy called, elated, and promised to buy a bundle of papers. My mom cried, saying that even though she couldn’t see the paper, she could feel the caring it was generating.

  Gracie meanwhile was oblivious. Her amazement was reserved for Santa.

  Christmas Eve we ate a quiet dinner. Gracie asked, “How is Santa going to get back up the chimney after he gets down?” She had a beautifully pragmatic streak. It wasn’t that he delivered presents to billions of homes in twenty-four hours; it was that he did it all without ringing a single doorbell.

  Earlier, when we’d reminded her that we were leaving for the hospital the next day, she’d said, “Eden is going to be so happy that my scratchies are gone.”

  Somewhere along the way, she’d come to believe that the point of transplant was to alleviate the itchy rash she had from the chelating agent. It was true that after transplant she wouldn’t, if all went well, have the rash. But that was sort of like thinking the point of chemo was to stop having to fuss over your hair.

  Brian said, “Eden will be so happy for you.”

  Gracie didn’t ask, “How long will I be in there?” or “How can I get out?” She asked, “Can I bring my ponies?”

  I’d lit a pair of candles for the dinner table. Gabriel did his job and blew them out. I lit them again, and the game continued. The flame would erupt at the tip of the match, pass its orange-blue light to the wick, then instantly disappear. A beautiful, little ephemery.

  We had Bûche de Noël for dessert. I explained that it was made to look like a log used in the ancient fire-festivals celebrating winter solstice. “Is there chocolate on the inside too?” Gracie asked, picking up a soup spoon and preparing to lop off a branch. Gabriel started flapping his hands. We were going to eat a tree! At last the trees were at our mercy!

  When we put them both to bed, Gabriel flopped around in his crib, talking to himself, “Yacie loves me.”

  I lay beside Gracie. “Sweetie, we’re going to be in the hospital for a long time.” We’d told her this so many times, but I wasn’t sure she knew.

  “Why?”

  “So your body can get healthy.”

  “OK.”

  In bed Brian and I lay side by side, wired and anxious. Neither of us could sleep. Everything would change tomorrow. We were astride the nebulous line that divides before from after. I wanted to stay here forever.

  “Next year,” Brian said, “we’ll be back in Brooklyn with two healthy kids.”

  I tried to visualize us next Christmas, in Brooklyn, kids bickering beneath a lopsided tree. It was a faint, diaphanous vision. Not a mirage, I told myself, a vision.

  It is impossibly hard to take a child who looks more or less healthy and place her into the medical mill of transplant, but we did it. We held our breath and stepped off the edge of the known world. Whatever the odds were, they were ours. We had this boy, this girl, this bag of cells; one chance for a cure, and we took it.

  39

  Gracie packed every single My Little Pony she owned, and a few of Gabe’s. I packed her pajamas, her toothbrush, a hairbrush, her favorite snacks. Soon she would not be able to eat or brush her teeth. She would have no hair to comb. But we packed for the present.

  We’d woken up early. On the slope behind our house, dozens of wild geese waddled in agitated circle
s, a shifting gray carpet honking their anxieties into the morning air. I wanted to wade out and join them.

  Gracie had appeared in our bedroom, wearing her Dora pajamas. Gabe had trailed in after, in his T-shirt, diaper, and bee boots.

  “Can I go pet the geese?” Gracie asked.

  “Those are wild geese, love, not for petting,” Brian said. “When you come home from the hospital, we will go to a petting zoo and find some tame geese.”

  “How long will that be?” Gracie asked.

  We stared at her, searching for a number that would sound acceptable. “Some few weeks,” Brian said.

  Gracie never asked us What am I doing here? Or Why would you do this to me? She was not philosophical about her suffering. She didn’t want to know Why me? She only wanted to know how long it would last. She asked us, over and over, “When will I see my friends again?” and “Does Eden miss me?”

  The power of her feelings—for Eden, for Gabriel, for the boy we’d met on our first day, Jake, whom she hadn’t seen in weeks but still talked about with great animation—was startling. As we packed she sang to herself, “And I just love you, Eden. And I just miss you, Eden.”

  “Me,” Gabe cut in. “Miss me, Yacie.”

  “Gabriel, you are here. I can’t miss you.”

  “Miss me!” Gabe said again. Gabe, who was always missing at least one of us, wanted to be missed.

  Brian carried Gabe to the car; Gracie loped along beside us, trusting, willing. We had said she had to live in the hospital for “some weeks,” and she accepted it. She buckled herself into her car seat. As we backed down the driveway, Gracie said, “Bye, house, I won’t see you for a couple of days. I have to catch up to the Nemo bus.”