“How can I help?” I say. I put a hand on Lisa’s waist.
“Don’t touch me,” she says. A bandage conceals the gash on her leg. There’s a red dot at the center of the bandage where the blood has seeped through.
“Let me do this.”
“Richard,” she says.
At the bottom of the sink, a tampon has bloomed with pond water and burst from its plastic tube. Beneath it is Lisa’s wallet. Tucked inside, no doubt, are pictures of June. Not big pictures. Not even good pictures. Little Olan Mills two-inch-by-three-inch cheapies, of which there are another dozen in a dresser drawer. Already, though, I can foresee the day when Lisa will hold this against me, the destruction of these pictures from her wallet, these photographs from June’s last afternoon.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Lisa says nothing.
“The ducks were just hungry,” I say. “Michael’s fine. He was never in danger. I wouldn’t have let it get to that point.”
“You wouldn’t,” Lisa says. “Say it again.”
“Lisa.”
“No, say it. I want to hear you say it.”
“All right, fine. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have let it get to that point.”
“Good,” Lisa says. “Now say it to my leg.”
. . .
Once Michael’s down for the night, I join Lisa in bed. She hasn’t said more than ten words to me all evening.
“It was an accident,” I say. “You can’t make me feel like this is my fault.”
“I’m not making you,” she says. “If you feel that way, maybe there’s a reason.”
“Jesus,” I say. “Goodnight.”
A minute later, Lisa is crying. Don’t touch me, she’d said, and I don’t.
But then she turns to me, and I can’t help wrapping my arms around her.
“I can’t sleep,” she says.
“You just lay down,” I say.
“No. I mean, I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t stand them anymore.”
“The dreams will go away.”
“In three years they haven’t gone away.”
We lie like that for a while, Lisa’s body against mine, her head in the hollow of my shoulder and chin. Her breathing settles. Her heartbeat slows.
“Richard?” she says. “Would you have called her Junie?”
“I would have called her whatever you liked best,” I say.
Soon, she is sleeping. I’m almost asleep when Lisa snaps awake and jumps up.
“No,” I say.
“I just want to check,” she says.
“He’s fine. You’ll wake him.”
“I’ll stand at the door.”
“You say that. And then you’re just at the crib. And then you’re just feeling for breath. And then you’re just checking for fever. And then and then and then, and he never sleeps. He’s a baby. You have to let him sleep.”
“Richard, move.”
But I don’t leave the doorway.
“Richard,” Lisa says, “I swear to God.”
She reaches for the doorknob. I hold it tight in my hand.
“Let me see my baby!”
She slaps my hand. I hold tight. And then she is kicking me, screaming, yelling, “Move!” But I’m twice her size. I will not be moved. I sink to the floor. I feel her kicks in my stomach, my ribs, my groin. I cover my face with my hands.
She doesn’t stop until Michael’s crying can be heard from the other room. She backs away from me then. She sits on the edge of the bed, breathing heavy.
I hurt all over.
She says, “If you do that again, I’ll leave you.”
But we both know I won’t have to.
Because now, somehow, we are even.
How to Help Your Husband Die
The morning your husband, the chef, stays in bed, bleary-eyed, sweating, and says for the past six months he’s been coughing up blood, turn hysterical. Demand he drive you both to the emergency room at once.
Ask why he didn’t see a doctor six months ago. Ask why he’s such a man when it comes to his health. Ask what he thought would happen if he kept smoking. Explain how much better it would be, should this turn out to be something serious, had you both caught it at its outset. If you scold and scold, when the bad news comes, it won’t be your fault. When the bad news comes, you can say, I told you so.
When the bad news comes, cry and regret what you meant to say. He will not cry. He will not say anything at all. You will ride home in silence. Tell him not to worry, that it could be a thousand things, that the hospital only said possibly, that no good doctor diagnoses something like that on a first visit. At home, when you think of the way you spoke to him that morning, run to the toilet and throw up. When he asks what made you sick, blame the week-old pizza you reheated for lunch. Blame your time of the month. Blame anything but him.
Order more tests: MRIs, CAT scans, lung scans, X-rays, blood tests. Schedule appointments, consultations, what the cheery receptionists call visits. Plan to get second opinions, thirds, however many it takes to find a doctor who will say, This is not what it looks like.
Accompany him to every appointment. When he tells you how much it embarrasses him, stop crying in front of the doctors. Stop crying before he asks you to stop coming along.
Learn tricks to keep yourself from crying. When a doctor talks, cross your arms. Rub your thumb along the smooth crease at the inner hinge of your elbow. Imagine the skin is an eyeball, your eyeball, and you are massaging back the tears. When the doctor leaves the room, press your thumbs to your eyes and suck in air. Before your husband can ask, say, I’m okay.
. . .
Wait. By the time this is all over, you will know patience in a whole new way. Wait for the nurses. Wait for the doctors. Wait for his name to be called, the last name always mispronounced. Keep track of time. On average, find you spend five to six hours a week sitting in rooms waiting for people to see you. Compare this to the thirty minutes a week you spend in the company of the person who earned the framed piece of paper hanging at a five-degree angle on the wall.
Wait. When he gets bored, entertain him. Play Twenty Questions. Play I Spy. Keep him from playing with the plastic models of organs on physicians’ desks.
Learn new ways to wait. Bring books. Bring bills. Bring board games. In waiting rooms and offices, play cards. Hearts, Spades, Crazy Eights. Quit Slapjack after you miss the pile and leave a bruise on his hand that lingers for weeks.
. . .
After a month of meetings, catalog the manifold possibilities, the differing opinions of the two dozen doctors you’ve met. You will think, Perhaps it’s the diabetes. No matter what the doctors say, decide that it is only the diabetes, just as it has always been the diabetes whenever he’s been sick, that he will be fine. Tell yourself that you are tired of doctors, that tomorrow’s X-rays will be the last. Smile when you imagine the wait is almost over.
Hold the thin transparency in your hands. Run a fingertip over the two gray pork chops, the pockets of light in each lung. The doctor will insist that the masses are not benign. Just shake your head and say well.
The doctor will tell your husband that he has several options, but only one, really, if he wants to live. Listen and smile as you would at a man telling a joke that’s not funny, a joke secretly meant to hurt your feelings. Smile the way you do at a person you wish would just, for God’s sake, please stop talking.
Discuss the odds of survival as though they are not odds but suggestions should one choose to die.
What the doctor won’t tell you is that, in tandem, the two diseases will tear your husband apart. That so many of the medicines needed to treat his diabetes will interfere with the chemotherapy and radiation, with the antibiotics for the pneumonia that will fill up his lungs. That he will be sicker than he has ever been. That, in the end, it will be the cure that kills him.
But you will glimpse this. Will, somehow, in the flicker of an instant, see what lies ahead. Will know it as surely as you
have always understood that it is cancer and that your husband won’t see another summer. And, quick as it comes, put away this little revelation, tuck it beneath the blanket of your brain, and ask the man in the white coat what comes next.
. . .
He will begin treatments in a week. You both hate attention, pity, curiosity masquerading as concern. You’ve never liked flowers or casseroles, never cared for sympathy cards printed in pastels with loopy script and passages from Proverbs. Make a pact to tell no one. Immediately, tell your sister. He will tell his brother. You will both wish your parents were still alive.
Remind him, as the doctors have, that it’s not too late to quit smoking. Watch him laugh, slide another cigarette from the pack, and step outside. Stand at the back door while he smokes. Glare at him with your arms crossed. When he smiles and waves, stamp a foot, turn, and walk away.
Find new ways, each day, to express your displeasure with his habit. Refuse to wash his clothes with yours. Though it has never been a problem before, tell him they smell, that his smoky shirts stink up your clothes. Leave clippings under his pillow, magazine articles on the dangers of cigarettes. Fold them into pants pockets and ball them up in his socks. Stop after he comes to you with a stack of crumpled papers, saying, Darling, I know. I could do the PSAs is how much I know.
Beg him to quit his job. He will say he’s not giving up that easy. Yes, he knows your health insurance could cover him. Yes, he knows he needs rest, that the kitchen of a four-star restaurant is no place for a chemo patient. No, he won’t quit his job.
Quit your job. You never liked it anyway. Who grows up saying, I want to be a dental hygienist? Kids want to be artists, veterinarians, firefighters.
When it hits you that you may not, now, have children, fast as you can, put the thought out of your head. If you consider this for too long, it might come true.
. . .
When you find you have too much time on your hands, decide to learn everything there is to know about cancer. Decide you want to know exactly how your husband is going to die. The moment you do, believe that you can save him.
Study the disease. Go to the public library. Read every book they own on cancer. File for interlibrary loans until the research librarians know you by name. Give up and drive across town to the college campus.
See the university library for the first time. Strain your neck searching the dome, the dark sky, constellations painted on in white lines, as though all of your answers are there in that dome, those lines, in the silver of fake stars. Once you’ve stared long enough, check your watch and get to work.
Search for the card catalog. Ask a lean boy in a black shirt and glasses—the one who hasn’t shaved in a few days but doesn’t seem to be trying to grow a beard either—to point you in the direction of the card catalog. Watch him raise a single eyebrow over one wire-rimmed lens. Yes, he will seem to say, you have a lot of learning to do.
Learn the Dewey decimal system. Learn to use microfiche. Learn to search the library database online. Watch your productivity soar.
Visit the university library every other day. Throw yourself at books, magazines, scholarly journals. If you learn enough about the cancer, you can conquer it. If you search long enough—comb every essay, read every study, explore each article—you will find a treatment. If he dies, it will be your fault, the cure right under your nose if only you’d picked up last winter’s copy of Acupuncture in Medicine, circulation 4,000.
Spend fifty dollars a week in dimes. Learn that, once the light on the photocopier blinks red to yellow, you can lift the lid to turn a page, even while the machine is still whirring and clicking, still rocking on its stumpy steel feet. This will save you valuable seconds per copy. Press page after page to the platen glass. Watch the paper leave the photocopier’s side like ticker tape.
Take breaks to rest your brain. Run your fingers through the water fountain’s stream. Massage your temples. Trade the silence of the library for the silence of the library restrooms. For weeks, think of the library as one big bathroom. Before you leave each evening, wash your hands.
. . .
Become a regular at the library. Make this your day job, five days a week. Bring the librarians coffee from Starbucks. Learn the major of each student worker. After a month, you will never pay late fees again.
To battle fatigue, work harder. Don’t stop. Read five hundred pages a day. Read everything. Read the notes on the type at the back of each book. Learn to spot different fonts. Decide you like Garamond best and look for volumes with this typeface. Value their opinions more highly than books printed in lesser fonts. Don’t consider this behavior unusual until you mention it to your sister and take her stunned silence for good sense.
Stay at the library all day, every day. Don’t leave until your fingertips are gray with ink, until your tailbone aches from the curve of the library’s stylishly modern chairs, until the letters of words run together, taunting you in a jumble of tiny black serifs. When you can’t take any more, are ready to give up, you will know guilt.
. . .
Don’t mention his meals, the salty meat, the too-sweet desserts.
Sure enough, one evening, he’ll return from work, sit at the kitchen table, and, for a long time, watch the wall. Join him. Touch his shoulder. Ask what’s wrong, and he’ll say only, “I can’t taste anything.”
. . .
Give up. Sit in your favorite chair at home and watch daytime TV. Watch all of the hospital soap operas and wish it were that easy: the lifesaving operation, the miracle cure. Let your thoughts drift back to cancer. Dream of lung transplants.
Recall a piece in The New York Times, the cancer-ridden chimps tested at Johns Hopkins and the experimental drug that saved their lives. Try to remember why a drug getting such extraordinary results was not approved for public use, what side effects rendered it too risky. Wonder whether the drug will be sold soon. Know that it will be ten, twenty years.
Wonder whether the drug is for sale on the black market. Commit yourself to several Internet searches. When nothing legitimate turns up, launch your keyboard across the room. On a piece of white stationery, scribble FUCK THE FDA in angry black ink. Tape the paper to the wall above your computer.
After a few days of this, go back to the library.
. . .
By winter, you will know more than the doctors. Surprise the physicians with your repertoire of medical terminology. Throw around cancer jargon, the consecrated slang of the disease. Recommend treatments. Exude condescension before the doctors get the chance. Inquire in regard to the latest studies. Question their methods.
Grow irritated when a doctor hasn’t heard of a specific drug or experiment or clinic in Southeast Asia. When the doctor apologizes, blow a short burst of air up into your bangs and look out the nearest window just to let him know you can’t be fooled.
. . .
When your husband comes home from the restaurant one night and falls to the floor, understand it’s time for him to stay home. Forget the library. Help him forget his work. Concentrate on chemotherapy. Concentrate on radiation. Concentrate on making it through each day.
Notice the hair in the bathroom. Strands in the sink and shower, tangles in drains. Dark hairs on white tile. Piles collected in corners as though swept there. When you find clumps in the bed, collect the hair. Save it in a Ziploc bag like a child’s first haircut keepsake. When he finds the bag and yells at you, throw it out.
Once he’s lost the last of his hair, tell him that he is beautiful. When you want to hear him laugh, stroke the dome of his head and purr like a kitten.
Discover that you both love to sing. At night, in bed, sing old standards, improvising your own lyrics. On Christmas Eve, when he sings Chestnuts roasting on a funeral pyre, follow it up with Gangrene nipping at your toes. He will laugh and laugh. Wait until he’s asleep to sob.
Try church. Have him recall his altar boy boyhood. Let him teach you the Doxology, the Lord’s Prayer. Learn how to take commun
ion. When the priest places the wafer on your tongue and says, “This is His body, broken for you,” think, This is his body. Spend the rest of the day whispering it to yourself: This is his body. This is his body.
. . .
There are certain things you should know.
There will be things you can’t make better. Don’t try to hold his hand when he coughs. Don’t try to trade Seinfeld reruns for hours of meaningful this-is-your-life conversation. (He’ll want nothing to do with such talk.) Don’t attempt to help him upstairs if he nods off watching the news, even when you think he’d sleep better in bed.
Be reminded that chemotherapy can cause sterility. Accept that he will never give you children. Wonder why you don’t have children already. Wonder why it is that you never want a thing until it’s no longer inevitable.
Know that no matter how many laps you walk to raise money for research, no matter how many free T-shirts you earn, in spite of remissions, life’s short revisions, your husband is still going to die.
. . .
The night his blood sugar level drops, when he has the first seizure, call 911. Ride in the ambulance with a paramedic who will try to make conversation. Her words will sound like a song sung through a tunnel a mile away. Ask her to stop talking. Ask her again. When you realize you’re screaming, bury your face in your husband’s shirt and cry.
Once he comes out of insulin shock, sit beside him on the thin hospital mattress. Watch him sleep. Stay awake, all night, running your hand down his arm, shoulder to elbow, elbow to wrist. Realize you spent so much time studying the disease that you forgot to prepare for what comes next.
Study the room and find you don’t know the name of a single piece of medical equipment or what each instrument does, aside from the IV bag and the heart monitor. Or, you will think you know which screen belongs to the heart monitor—the life of the man you love graphed in electric green—but there will be so many screens, your husband hardwired to a dozen machines.
Try to get comfortable in the recliner by the hospital bed. Tell yourself that you could sleep if only you knew the name of the mechanism hanging over his head, the black accordion pumping up and down in the glass tube, collapsing in on itself like a Slinky, then stretching, exposing its ribs as it inflates.
The Heaven of Animals: Stories Page 15
