“Plus, I think he thought your friend kind of threatened him.”
“My friend would never do that.”
“Well, there was something peculiar in the air. We both felt it. He’s not an ex-convict, is he?”
“Yes, he is, actually,” I said, “but he has a good heart.”
I turned the conversation away from Gerard’s warm heart and imaginary prison time, and rambled on, telling her to thank Doctor Vaskis again, that he was a genius, a good man, that I’d never forget him until the moment I died. When we said goodbye, I called the ex-convict and he answered the phone this way: “Your call is important to us. You’ll never know how important. All our customer service associates are temporarily busy at the moment right now servicing other customers, but your call is so important to us that-”
“Vaskis said yes.”
“Outstanding work!” Gerard yelled into the phone. And then: “How much time do we have to find donor number two? Behind donor number two, is-”
“Probably a day. To allow time enough for the testing.”
“Donor number two likes sports, pretty women, and hospital beds!”
“Right.”
“We’ll cast a wide net,” he said, and hung up. Which made me realize he’d had a woman there with him the whole time.
7
THE ENORMOUS DOSES of ceftazidime and gentamicin did not clear up the trouble in Janet’s right lung, and overnight she had begun a slow, steady slide the doctors could not stop. That morning, when I went in to bring her the good news, she was lying on her back, propped up at a forty-five-degree angle, able to keep her eyes open for only a few seconds at a time. The oxygen machine was humming and bubbling. Antibiotics were dripping into her right arm, and some kind of liquid nourishment-she could no longer eat-into her left. The hospital gown hung from her shoulders and over her breasts as if it had been draped across sharp stones to dry, and her face, so gaunt just the day before, had started to swell. The nurses had washed her hair and tied it on top of her head in a bun, but there was no life left to it. When I came through the door, her eyes, half-closed, went to me immediately and clung to me, and I could see everything there-the pain and unbroken discomfort, the fear, the resignation, the love. She smiled with just the corners of her lips, but the pain cut her smile off almost immediately.
I leaned over the bed and rested my hand gently on her chest-she liked me to do that-and kissed her on the forehead and both closed eyes. Her mother had spent the night, and was asleep on a cot against one wall, quietly snoring. For a little while I sat with them. I’d rub Janet’s arm, adjust her pillow, put water on the tip of my finger and touch it to her lips. What I’d liked was that, after the first few dates, we hadn’t had to talk about certain things and could just rest in some deep agreement about the way to be in the world. We thought it was right to leave lavish tips at restaurants, to let people cut in line in traffic, to make fun of arrogance and of ourselves, to be goofy and affectionate with children, to do our work well, to be unembarrassed about our bodies, to take what we really needed and then give and give, to fight honestly and without waiting and without being ugly about it. That was a sort of foundation we hadn’t even had to try to set in place, and it was solid and level, which would have made building something nice and longer-lasting on top of it just a matter of keeping mistakes small and catching them quickly.
So, after a while, there were whole areas we didn’t have to talk about-Valvoline, Giselle, why I painted and banged nails instead of going back to med school, why she wanted to keep working, even though, at the end, it drained away strength she could have used to fight her illness. We did not need to say how we felt about each other. We did not think we needed to.
But that morning, sitting with her, watching the last fibers of her spirit stretch and break one by one, I was sick with the understanding that I should have put certain things into words. I could stay close and rub her arm and wipe her mouth, but I had left something important undone, I knew that. Sometimes there has to be something concrete to anchor the unspoken feelings. Two nurses came in and helped her pee into a bedpan, changed her underwear, checked the monitor. They could barely look at me.
When they were gone I leaned my mouth down to Janet’s ear and I said, “I know you want to just go. It’s alright. But there’s one more thing we can try if you want to try it.”
She turned her head half an inch.
Doctor Ouajiballah came through the door then, stopped when he saw us, and went back out.
“If two people give you a section of their lung, a lobe each, then you can get a transplant that way.”
She held her eyes half open. I could see her balancing between two worlds. I could see that she could decide then to turn her back on the beast of hope once and for all and close her eyes and die. And I would never have blamed her for that, because she had had a weight put on her shoulders when she came out of her mother’s body, and she had been made to walk with that weight on her for almost thirty years, and she was just tired of carrying it then, at that moment, tired to the root of her soul.
Her mother stirred and sat up on the edge of the cot.
“I can do it,” I said, talking quietly into Janet’s ear. “Gerard has the wrong blood type or he’d do it. My brother smokes or he’d do it. We have the surgeon. Il dottore will recommend it to the insurance company and the surgeon is so good he thinks they’ll go for it. If you say okay, I’ll find another person somehow. You’d have to stay alive until Monday morning. It’s Friday today. If you want to try it squeeze my hand once, alright?”
I could barely look at her. She did not move or try to speak.
“Squeeze if you want to try,” I repeated after a few seconds.
Though the clear plastic tube from the oxygen machine was in the way, I lay my face in the pillow, against her neck, the way I’d done sometimes when we were making love. I held her fingers loosely. I heard her mother get up and shuffle along the linoleum, then the sound of the hinges on the bathroom door. I could feel Janet breathing-five breaths to my one. I wanted then to let her be completely, absolutely free. I did not want to hold her on this earth. I did not want her to suffer one second more because of what I wanted, or what her mother wanted, or what the doctors or nurses thought was right.
When the toilet flushed and we heard her mother wrestling with the door handle, Janet tightened her grip on my fingers.
I kissed her so hard on the side of her face that the oxygen tube came loose. When Amelia shuffled up to the bed, Janet was crying, so she started crying, too, in solidarity. Janet moved my hand this way and that, and I bent down so that my ear was near her mouth and, in a whisper, she said, “Valvoline.” Then Ouajiballah came into the room, our white-coated pal with a pen in his pocket. And I was, as Gerard would say, all over that.
8
IN THE HALL, out of range of Mrs. Rossi’s hearing, Doctor Ouajiballah told me Janet might not live until Monday morning, but that he was going to recommend her for the living lobar transplant in any case, as soon as he could get a certain person from the insurance company to return his call. Doctor Vaskis had already contacted him. Ouajiballah thought that, when the certain person at the insurance company heard the name Vaskis, they would agree to pay for the operation, and would hold to their agreement as long as Janet was alive and not on life support. If she went on life support she would never come off it, and the insurance company would back away. “So then, sir, you and your friend can start the donor testing tomorrow at seven a.m. It will take as long as two full days. You should find at least one backup donor if you possibly can, because even people in good health have been known to fail these tests. They are quite rigorous.”
I had to look away from him then, as I thanked him.
I called Gerard from the pay phone in the lobby and told him to call every man and woman he knew over five-foot ten inches tall and get as many O-positive nonsmokers as he could to show up at the hospital on Saturday morning at seven, people willing t
o spend two days being tested, then have themselves cut open, lose three or four weeks of sick time, and twenty percent of their lung capacity for life.
“We’ll need a bus to get them all there,” Gerard said. “We’ll need a motor scooter.”
“Try anyway.”
“All over it, Colonel,” he said.
My mind, when I hung up, went shooting off in eleven directions. I was holding the black plastic receiver in my left hand, with two fingers pressing down on the metal tongue that killed the dial tone, while the right hand fished around in my pocket for another couple of quarters, and I was trying to remember a phone number, cursing myself for getting rid of my cell phone, starting to imagine what would happen if we didn’t find a second donor, knowing that, at some point very soon, I would have to tell il dottore the truth. And I was worried about Janet right then at that moment, and I ended up fishing out a quarter, then a dime, then another dime, and placing them carefully on the top of the black metal phone box, and then switching hands and trying the left pocket, where there were three pennies and some sawdust.
I hung up the phone and hurried across the lobby toward the gift shop, forgetting my neatly lined-up change (which Gerard’s daughter Alicia used to call “monies”). Halfway to the gift shop in search of more monies I had a moment when my mind cleared and I understood something I should have understood before: Janet had been hired and promoted partly because she had some kind of intuitive understanding of how people behaved under particular circumstances, what motivated them, what drove them, where their fears and needs overlapped. That was her special talent, that was the way her mind worked…even two steps away from death. I changed course in mid-stride, headed for the stairwell, and sprinted up the four floors. Janet had not moved. Her mother sat by the bed, sleepily pushing the beads through her fingers. A nurse was there, switching the IV bag.
“Amelia, I need Janet’s purse,” I said, and I was breathing pretty hard and might have said it too loudly. “Where’d she leave it?”
Janet’s mother pointed to the peach-colored metal cabinet next to her and shifted her chair over so I could open the drawer. “I have money if you want it,” she said. The nurse gave me a look.
I rifled the purse, found the phone, and went out of the room without saying anything. I went down the hall to the bathroom and closed the door. It seemed to take about thirteen minutes for the phone to power up, and then another ten minutes for me to scroll down through her saved numbers until I reached the one I wanted. I went past it twice because I was looking for GOVERNOR.
When I finally figured things out, I highlighted CHARLIE, punched the call button, and sat on the toilet. Five rings and the man himself answered. “Nettie?” he said, and there was such a chord of boyish vulnerability in his voice that I winced. I closed my eyes, and leaned my head down so that my palm was wrapped around my forehead and I could focus on getting the words exactly right and not on anything else. “Janet has three or four days to live,” I said, as calmly as I could.
“Who is this?”
“This is John Entwhistle, the guy who wrestled with you in Janet’s office a couple months ago. Don’t hang up. She’s just about ready to die. A few minutes ago she asked me to come and see you and give you a message. I need two minutes of your time. It has to be today and it has to be face-to-face…I don’t even want it, Janet wants it.”
“Let her call me herself, then.”
“She’s the next thing to comatose, Charlie. I’m at the Mass General right now. I can be in your office in six minutes. I’ll give you her message and I’ll leave.”
“I have an appointment with the head of Ways and Means in sixty seconds, and I’m solidly booked for the rest of the day. Say what you have to say.”
“I have to say it to you in person, that’s what she asked me to do.”
He put his hand over the receiver. I kept my eyes closed and focused on him, on his heart, on his insides. I pretended to myself that I had some control over what went on there, though at that moment I understood very clearly that I had control over nothing. It was a hunch, that’s all, an intuition that I should talk to him face-to-face. My legs were trembling from the kneecaps down, which was something that used to happen to me right before big crew races.
“I’ll give you two minutes at ten past five,” the governor said. “And if this is some sort of a trick, I’ll have you arrested.”
“Fine. Ten past five. I’ll be-”
He hung up. I put the phone in my shirt pocket and splashed cold water on my face at the sink. I went and spent the rest of the day in Janet’s room, but she did not wake up except when the nurses came and moved her around, or when she coughed so hard she had to spit. I tried to take Amelia down to the cafeteria for lunch, but she wouldn’t move from her daughter’s bedside, and wouldn’t stop praying, so I stayed there, too, pacing the room, rubbing Janet’s feet, watching her breathe, going into the hall every little while to get away from it.
In late afternoon I kissed Amelia on the forehead, and Janet on the eyes, and I put on my coat and went out and crossed Storrow Drive on the pedestrian bridge and walked to the river. Four o’clock on one of the shortest days of the year, and the sun had already gone behind the low hills to the west of the city. To the left of where I stood, the sky was colored in winter pastels-robin’s-egg blue, a smoky scarlet, streaks of willowy yellow-all of it swinging and splashing in a broken-up reflection in the deep river basin just in front of me. Every few seconds a little more of the color would leak out of the sky, and the water would take on more purple, blue, and black. The wind was dying-as it did sometimes at that time of year-just as the sun went down. It would gust up and then calm a bit, then gust up again and calm entirely. In the quiet between gusts you could feel the steady cold night coming on, then there would be another, weaker gust, as if darkness were blowing in over the city in diminishing pulses.
I don’t know why I had wanted to go to the river, or why I was thinking so much about rowing then. Maybe it was because I’d had some times on that water when I had pushed myself so far into the precinct of pain and shortness of breath that it almost had no power over me anymore. A whole boatload of us had done that, day after day, year after year, for reasons we couldn’t really understand or explain. We’d be all lined up and ready to go at the starting line, a cool river wind blowing across the skin of our arms and legs, hearts going, hands sweaty. The coxswain would be telling the bow man or the number two man to just touch the water with his oar to keep us from drifting offline. The race was going to start in five seconds or ten seconds and then everything would be happening at such a rate of speed that it would not be possible to think, not be possible to do anything but react the way we had been trained to react. If the referee waited too long to yell out “Ready!” through his megaphone, my lower legs would start to shake, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. “Ready all!” he would say next. And then “Row!” and all hell would break loose, the oarlocks clacking and the seats ripping along their tracks, and the cold river water in your eyes and face. A minute and a half into the race your muscles would reach a point where you couldn’t get oxygen to them fast enough no matter how you breathed, no matter what kind of condition you were in, and from that point until the end it would be pure focus, pure willpower, pure pain.
Our friends were smoking dope and getting laid and taking naps, and we were making our bodies hurt. Crazy thing for a college kid to do. But sometimes, doing that, you felt as though you’d gone across some line into a territory where you could will yourself to do anything, anything at all. The spring races lasted only six minutes, but if it was a longer practice piece-ten minutes, thirty minutes-the pain would creep up slowly inside you and reach you on another level. The will and the force and the strength in you and all the hard conditioning scraped up against something impossibly large and brutal, and you would remember that feeling long after you were done rowing hard for the day and were climbing out onto the dock. You’d remember it afte
r you had showered and changed into street clothes and were walking across the BU Bridge to your supper. You’d be very small, but it was a magnificent smallness.
I sat beside the river for an hour, until my body started to shake from the cold, and then I walked back to my truck and drove to the State House with the heat on high. I couldn’t get warm. I parked in Janet’s spot. I went in past the first security check, and climbed the three flights of stairs to the governor’s suite of offices, where there was a state policeman I’d never had any trouble with.
When I was past him, too, and had entered the high-ceilinged suite of rooms that surround the governor’s office, the secretary saw me. She reached for the telephone. I put my hands up in a gesture of peace. I said, “Janet has a few days to live. She wants me to say one thing to the governor. I already called him, he already knows.” She took her hand off the phone and glared at me. While she was glaring, the door behind her opened and the president of the senate stepped out of the corner office and walked by me, winking as if he’d just done me a favor. Then the man himself appeared.
“I’m not afraid of you,” was the first thing out of his mouth.
“Good,” I said.
“Janet’s dying,” the secretary told him, and he looked away from her and away from me and stared, tight-lipped, through one of the tall windows that faced out over Boston Common. I could have been wrong, but it seemed to me then that there was the smallest glint of satisfaction in his eyes, as if Janet’s troubles were a kind of punishment that had come from not loving him, or not sleeping with him again. At that moment I hated him, there is no other word. He had done some good things from that office, but it seemed to me then that in order to run for an office like that, you had to have an ego, or a need, the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float. It had to be festooned with all sorts of fine ideas about public service, with good deeds, pretty phrases, clean suits. But it had to be there; it had to be the motor and the wheels. It had to want authority and praise, that great sweet surge that comes from knowing a million people had pulled the lever beside your name. I don’t know what creates an appetite like that in a person, but I saw it in him then, through the filter of my hatred, and I realized I was counting on it being there, under the neat hairdo and the clean cheeks and the excellent posture.
A Little Love Story Page 20
