by James, Ella
“You’ve got a CT scan in thirty minutes.”
He shakes his head, his grip on my shoulder surprisingly strong. “I need it. I need you.”
I wrap my arms around him. “You have me.”
His hands rub mine. “I love you. You remember what I said last night?”
I shake my head.
“I love you more than anything.”
I nod and cry and stroke his cheek.
“I love you, too. I love you so much.”
A ventilator... fuck.
We cling to each other.
“Cleo baby?”
“Yeah?”
“During the CT...go get me... I want another robe. One with a better tie...in case...the ICU.” His eyes roll slightly, and the oxygen monitor sounds its alarm.
Arethea comes running. They take him straight back to CT. I veer the other way, like Kellan said.
TWENTY-FOUR
Cleo
“I’m sorry, ma’am but you’re not listed as a visitor.”
I thrust my arm out across the desk. “I have an armband. I’m with Kellan Drake. He had a bone marrow transplant.”
The woman scans the bar code on my arm band, and I hear a low, discordant thrum. “Your band expired, honey. If you want to get into the ward again, you’ll need to have your relative notify us.”
“I can’t! He’s going on a ventilator.” I burst into tears. “Please let me in, I have to see him now. I don’t have time to wait!”
“Sit down over there.” I fidget in a plastic chair as the woman makes calls. Then she beckons me to the desk. “Someone’s coming to talk to you.”
A moment later, Arethea comes through the doors... pushing a cart. My belongings are heaped on it.
I clamp my hand over my mouth and have to struggle not to pass out.
“He’s okay.” She nods, and tears start dripping from her eyes.
“Arethea, what the fuck?” My heart is pounding wildly.
“He’s okay. Come here...” She steers me around a corner to a more private nook, and sits beside me on a leather couch, wrapping an arm around my back.
“Cleo—” her eyes widen— “he doesn’t want to let you back in.”
“What?”
“He’s worried about this. This ventilator,” she explains.
“Are you kidding me?” I feel a swell of panic, followed by a sharp ache in my chest. “Can’t you help me? Go get Willard!”
She shakes her head. “Yesterday, the going out. We all knew about the CMV. He planned this. I think he will change his mind. Kellan is strong. You might have to give him time.”
“Just give him time?” I start to sob. “I want to talk to him. I need to see him, please!”
“I am so sorry.”
“You can’t do this! You can’t just... throw me out!”
Arethea wraps her arms around me. I hop up and pace and try to reason with her. Cut a deal.
“He doesn’t want you in there. Not right now,” she says softly.
“Talk to Willard. He could let me in!”
She shakes her head. “Kellan is the patient. Cleo, we are with you...in spirit, but I can’t let you in against his wishes. You want me to text you?”
“No!” I hold my head and sob so loudly, someone peeks into the little room to see what’s going on.
Arethea sits with me until she’s paged. She says she’ll try to text me. I nod, even though inside I hate her. I hate all of them.
He’s mine. Kellan is mine. I won’t stop until I get back in.
* * *
I don’t leave the transplant unit’s waiting room for three days. Arethea said she’d try to text, but I don’t see a message from her. I play on my phone and do sit-ups and change my clothes in a nearby bathroom, never leaving the area outside the locked doors for too long, in case he calls for me.
As for me, I call the ward incessantly. I talk to every nurse I know and beg them all. When someone walks through my waiting room, I try to talk to them. I call Kellan’s dad, his brother, leaving messages. I call Manning, Whitney. Nothing.
At the end of the third day, the woman at the desk appears in front of me with a short, red-haired woman, who explains that I can’t live here, as they put it.
I give her the Carlyle Hotel’s address, and before I leave, she passes me a big, tan envelope.
“Arethea left it for you that first day,” she tells me, dashing all my hopes.
I rush to the Carlyle, get a room, and open the envelope in the privacy of my room: a new notebook from Kellan. When did he find the time to write in this? I flip through the pages. Love notes. There’s an envelope as well.
Afterward, it says. Fuck that.
I dress in something clean and go back to the hospital. I shower in the day and sleep in the main lobby at night.
The receptionist who sent me packing can’t help noticing I’m back. I tell her our story. She seems sympathetic but she never gives me any news.
Five days pass. I forget to eat, forget to sleep. My mother calls. My phone rings and rings.
Six days.
A week. Unfathomable.
I go wandering the city blocks. I call his phone, and call and call. I buy myself a neck pillow so I can sleep out in the waiting room. The receptionist is my friend now. She says she is praying for me.
Manning shows up on the eighth day, and Whitney on the ninth. Something Whitney says turns my friend the receptionist against me. I’m asked to leave the waiting room and not come back.
I wander the hospital halls. I wonder if I do this long enough, if I can catch his cancer. They would let me in, then.
I ask every day about him. Sometimes janitors I recognize, a few times nurses. No one tells me he’s dead. So I assume he is alive. I write him letters. I send them. I start a list of quotes I wrote on the sparrows and one day, in a fit of delirious exhaustion, I walk a few blocks down and get one tattooed on my ribs.
“Unless you love someone,
nothing else makes any sense.”
–e.e. cummings
My clothes hang loose. I find a pair of Kellan’s narrow-waisted lounge pants in my bag and vow to never take them off. One afternoon—day twelve, I think—I take the subway to the Carlyle and shave my head. My mother comes and tries to make me go. She threatens me, like Kellan’s dad did him.
I call his dad’s office. I call Manning, begging. Whitney comes again, this time with a plane ticket home. I refuse it. She claims she doesn’t know how Kellan is. He made it through the first night on the ventilator, but no one is being updated.
He’s on a ventilator. Kellan is.
“So he’s in a coma?” My voice sounds dead and dry.
“Cleo... I don’t know.” She holds my hands. We’re in my suite at the hotel. “You need to eat.”
“I eat chili dogs. Did you know it’s my blood?” Tears leak from my eyes. “I made Kellan sick.”
“No you didn’t. CMV is common. Very common. He got it at the most likely time for transplant patients to get it.”
Whitney pulls me into her arms, and I sleep a little while. She takes me downstairs to the hotel restaurant. I push some eggs around and ask her to go with me to the hospital.
When we get there, she cries. “Cleo—I’m worried. You’re so much like I was. After Ly.”
“Is he dead? Are you telling me that Kellan’s dead? I’m not like you! Lyon is dead!”
I run away and don’t come back to Memorial Sloan-Kettering for two days. One of them, I drink in central park. I call Kellan’s father’s office. I call and leave another message for his brother, Barrett.
Manning calls me, asking how I am.
“How’s Kellan?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Liar. Fuck you, Manning. I want to see Truman.”
Manning arrives with the dog the next day. Truman is wearing service dog clothes. “He’s a PTSD dog. Kellan’s service dog.”
PTSD from what? But I know the answer: The first transplant.
He was alone. I hug the dog. I fall asleep in the waiting room while Manning talks about...something.
I wake up in my hotel room. Manning wants me to eat soup.
I laugh. “I need a feeding tube, or TPN. An IV. I think I have cancer too.”
Manning’s freckled face goes serious and frowny. “Cleo, you have to stop. He wouldn’t like this.”
“Wouldn’t? Or doesn’t? Is he dead? Manning, tell me please.” I start to sob. He shakes his head, like it’s a shame, what’s happened to me. I shove him. “Go away! If you know nothing, go away!”
That night, when Manning flies back home to man the grow house, I hatch a plan. I wait for my ex-friend the receptionist to leave her desk, and then I hit the “open” button on her desk and dash right through the doors barring the hall.
I run straight to Kellan’s room—our room. I throw the door open and nearly pass out from the rush of seeing—
Nothing.
Holy fuck. Our room is fucking gone. The bed is stripped.
Kellan is dead.
I scream and wail. The noises are so strange. They don’t sound like me. A second later, nurses burst into the room. I don’t even look at them, just throw myself on our bed, clutching the railing as I curl into a ball. “I want to sleep here! One more night...please, one more night!”
TWENTY-FIVE
Cleo
“No! No, no! Cleo! Look at Arethea!” Tight hands grab my wrists. “Kellan is not here.”
“I know,” I sob.
“No! He is discharged! He is discharged!”
“What?” I sit up slowly. My chest is heaving. “What did you say?”
“He is discharged,” she says more quietly.
I note the nurses’ faces. Sad and sympathetic. They file out. The room goes still. I’m tired, so I lie down on our bed. No more sheets. Arethea reads my mind. She grabs a blanket from the closet. She lies on the bed with me and holds me while I cry.
“He doesn’t love me.” I sob violently. “He didn’t want me.”
“It’s not true. I held him while he cried for you. It happened many times.”
* * *
Kellan
November 14, 2014
The apartment I’m renting is on the twenty-first floor of a new high-rise overlooking Central Park.
It’s strangely designed, with just three rooms, all made of mostly glass. The bed is just your basic queen, pushed into the corner of two glass walls, at the corner of the corner unit on the twenty-first floor.
I sit on the bed and look out over the city. The park is a dark splotch, with gold freckles: twinkling lights. All around it, buildings gleam. Between sky-scrapers, the sun rises and falls, tossing streaks of color at my windows.
Tonight I watched the sunset sitting cross-legged on the bed, and since then, haven’t really gotten up. I watch the world move out my window and am glad I’m up so high; no one can see me.
I found a shirt of Cleo’s in my bags—a t-shirt that says GREEK SING—and I’m wearing it, even though it’s a small and I’ve already gained enough weight back to need a medium.
The t-shirt pushes my central line against my chest, and that’s uncomfortable. But I don’t care. If I had her pants, I’d wear them too. As it is, I wear the pants she bought me. Lounge pants in green and black and blue. I never noticed what she did until I got packed up to leave the unit. How there are three pairs of each pant, two pairs of three waist sizes: 34, 32, and 30. I thought about why, and the only thing I could come up with was that she wanted it to be easy on me, wasting away. When I started dropping weight, she would just rotate the pants out and I wouldn’t even notice when my clothes hung loose.
I drop my chin down to my chest and inhale. Do I smell her? She never wore her Green Tea perfume in the hospital, but she still had a scent. I tell myself I’m inhaling it right now. I rub my thumb and forefinger over the seam of my left sleeve and picture her arm in the shirt.
When I had Cleo removed from my visit list, I sent her stuffed sloth and most of the pink fleece blankets with her. I kept one, and Cleo’s pillow. Selfish. No surprise there.
I sleep on the pillow every night, and wrap myself in pink blankets. The apartment has a living/area kitchen, too, as well as a large bathroom, but I mostly spend my time in bed. Maybe it’s a side-effect of being confined to my hospital room for so many weeks.
I sigh. I stretch my legs beneath the covers, and in the process, I knock over a bowl half-filled with rice, ground beef, and gravy—all of which I made myself.
“Fuck.”
I scoop the food into the bowl and set it on the night-stand. Then I hang my legs off the bed’s side and take my breathing mask from atop another pillow. Twice a day I have to do this. Attach a cylinder of chemicals onto the bottom of the mask, strap the thing around my head, and breathe as deeply and as slowly as I can.
My lungs are still healing. Willard thinks they’ll recover over time, but no one knows for sure.
I was intubated, on a ventilator, for six days, with only moderate sedation, meaning I remember every bit of how it felt to have the tube down in my throat. Sometimes at night, I wake up clutching my mouth, trying to pull it out. Funny, because my nightmares from the first transplant weren’t very different really—focused on the mouth sores that, at that time, were the worst thing I’d endured. Before my relapse, I would often wake up with a phantom aching throat.
I chose the moderate sedation as opposed to deeper sleep because I could still move my arms and legs a little. Several times a day, a PT came and made me exercise, which cut down on the muscle loss. I dropped twenty-seven pounds my twelve days in the ICU, and since then, have tried hard to gain them back.
I do what I’m supposed to do, since I got discharged last week. Eat, sleep, lift weights, run on the treadmill in the living room. I have doctor’s appointments almost every day. I have a personal shopper, because I can’t really leave this space without risking an illness. Sometime in the next six months, that should get better.
After my breathing treatment, I lay down on my back and read a few unfolded sparrows. Even though they’re worn and ragged now, I still think of the sheets of paper as sparrows.
I read through them all two times before I curl on my side and lift out the one I’m reading most often right now. It’s a poem called “Longing” by Matthew Arnold. The words make tears fall from my eyes. It’s nothing new. I cry a fucking lot since I moved out of the unit.
My “outpatient life” counselor keeps pushing me to do a screening for depression, but I know I don’t need that shit. I don’t need a pill, or some kind of therapy where I talk about my shit with someone who doesn’t know shit about me or my life. It’s fucking simple really. I like crying over Cleo.
No, it’s nothing physiological. They all that shit, all the time. I’m healthy, in those ways at least. I’m A-okay. So what if I never use my dick? I still wake up with wood. My balls ache, telling me to let them blow sometimes, but I don’t care. One time I ignored them for six days and woke up in a pool of my own cum.
Pathetic.
Just like last time after discharge, I avoid the mirror, though this time, the reasoning is different. My hair’s growing back in—thick, soft gold—and I’m filling out from all the lifting, but I just... don’t want to see my face. I think it will make me think of her face. Of her hands in my hair.
I scoot to the bed’s edge and press my hand against the glass wall. The cool is soothing. I scoot closer and let my forehead touch as well. It almost feels like a cool hand. Her hand.
I look at the clock: 1:46 AM. I have a blood draw at 8 AM tomorrow morning. I need to go the fuck to sleep. I tug the blankets up to my neck and curl onto my side. Then I push a pillow behind me.
“Goodnight, Cleo. I love you.”
Tonight, the darkness seems to leak into my heart. I ache for her. I hold her pillow to my chest and start to cry, so hard and fast it’s sobbing.
She’s not coming back.
I clench my hands an
d look at them, and see her hands around them. I need her. I can’t fucking breathe without her.
Why am I here?
Without her... I pick up her stack of sparrows and I hug them to my chest. I get my breathing back under control. I swallow an Ativan. Maybe I’m wrong, about the crying feeling good. Right now, I just want to go to sleep.
I wake at 3:11 with a nightmare. I summon her voice. “You’re okay. Don’t be scared... I’m here. I’ll be with you.”
I’m lying on my side, holding my chest, when someone knocks on my door. Bangs. It sounds so frenzied, my heart starts to race.
Sometimes I think of fires…
I glance at my shirt as I stride into the living room. I look out all the windows, but I don’t see flame or smoke. I am the end unit. Sometimes people get lost.
I look out the peep hole imagining her face—so when I see it, I blink once, twice, three times. Then my body goes white hot.
That is Cleo. Hairless Cleo, swaying on my mat. I’m so alarmed by how pale and thin and nearly bald she is, I jerk the door open without another thought.
The second that she sees my face, she starts to sob.
“Fuck…” I reach for her, heart beating so hard my head buzzes.
I’m surprised when her thin arms bat me away. “What did I do? You don’t want me?” she shrieks.
“Cleo... Christ, what’s wrong?” She sobs so hard she pretty much collapses. She’s so fucking skinny I can pick her up. I haul her into my kitchen and sink down to the floor with her in my arms. “Cleo…are you sick?” My voice is shaky with a well of tears.
She folds her arms around herself and shakes her head. “You,” she weeps. “You made me…sick.” I smell a bite of alcohol and look down at her hands. They’re marked with thick, black Xs.
I feel cold inside. Her hair…her face. Even her green eyes are duller. I swallow back my tears and open my mouth.
“What? Just say it!” she cries.
I heave a breath out. “Fuck. The ventilator is a sign. It predicts death. Read any research on transplants. Goddamnit, Cleo—I didn’t want you to see me die.”