Jonathan Tropper

by Everything Changes (v5)

  “Yes,” Tamara says. “Zap has a big boo-boo.”

  “I kiss it.”

  I hate the thought of my ragged hand, now deformed with purple swelling and caked with dried blood around the stitches, coming into contact with Sophie’s perfect pink, embryonic mouth, but Tamara’s grin urges me on, so I extend my hand, angling it to keep the most ravaged sections away from her. Sophie takes my hand in both of her little wet ones, and peers intently at the damage. “Oh,” she says with admiration. “Zap have big boo-boo.” I’m sitting on the wet floor, knee to knee with Tamara, and when Sophie leans over and starts purposefully kissing my hand, it’s all I can do to keep from bursting into tears. There’s a wholeness here, a perfection, in Tamara’s face and posture, in Sophie’s dimpled flesh and innocent eyes. Their entire universe is contained in this little bathroom, and I want more than anything to join it, to be a part of the uncomplicated solitude of their life here. I can love Tamara and raise Sophie with her, move in with them and leave my old, middling life behind. At this moment, it seems so eminently possible, so within my grasp, and I feel like if I could just stay here indefinitely and never leave, everything else would sort itself out.

  “Zack?”

  Tamara is looking concernedly at me, and I realize that my face might be revealing more than I thought. I attempt a smile that I know comes out looking like an attempted smile, and retrieve my hand from Sophie. I lean back against the wall, and into Tamara, who wraps her arm around me. “I’m having a rough day,” I say.

  “Mommy kiss it,” Sophie says.

  Tamara smiles as she lifts my hand to her mouth. “There,” she whispers, pressing her lips against my knuckles. “All better.”

  Sophie stands in the crib in the corner of her blue room, directing me in all the proper protocols for putting her to bed. When Tamara was pregnant, she didn’t want to know if it was a boy or a girl. She was very superstitious about exposing the baby to the evil eye of fate. She adamantly refused to shop for supplies or to outfit the nursery until the baby had been safely delivered, feeling that any premature acknowledgment was opening the door to certain doom. But Rael couldn’t be contained. The sonogram seemed to indicate a boy, and so Rael, in typical fashion, had the bedroom carpeted in a deep blue, with matching shades and baseball-themed crib bumpers. When Sophie was born, Tamara shrugged and said it served him right, hoping that his errant decorating would be appeasement enough to the evil eye. Consequently, Sophie’s bedroom is missing the softer, pink hues of a little girl’s room, which Tamara has ameliorated with pastel crib linens and quilted balloons on the walls.

  “Sippy cup,” Sophie demands, sticking her hand out. I hand her the cup, and she takes a pro forma drink before placing it carefully against the bumper of her crib. “My peppy,” she says, and I hand her the pacifier, which she pops into her mouth before dropping easily onto her pillow. “Pooh banket.” I pull the Winnie-the-Pooh quilt over her and tuck her into it. She rolls onto her side, her tiny, plump arm stretched out in a proprietary fashion across her pillow. “Zap rub my back?” she says. I rub concentric circles on the back of her terry pajamas and she closes her eyes. Sophie’s face in repose is a study in circles; her round cheek, her closed eye, her puckered mouth. Effortless, rounded perfection, unmarred by a single worry or impure thought. Looking down at her, I can feel the violence in my belly start to abate, and I’m overwhelmed by a rush of love that causes me to brush her cheek softly with my fingers. “I love you, kiddo,” I say softly. Her breathing has changed already, slowing down as she drifts into warm, liquid sleep. I get down on my knees to listen to her breathe, and I can feel my own breath catch in my throat as the surprised tears well up in my eyes, the overflow running down my cheeks and landing in little dark spots on the blue carpet. “What am I going to do?” I whisper to her in the dim silence of the bedroom. I watch her sleep through the vertical slats of the crib, like a prisoner staring through a tiny cell window for his only glimpse of the sun. She’s the only perfect thing in my life, and she’s not even mine.

  Tamara calls over a neighbor’s kid to babysit so she can drive me home. I sit in the passenger seat, watching the animated shadows from passing highway lights play across the delicate features of her face.

  “What?” she says, self-consciously running her fingers through her hair.

  “What?”

  “What are you looking at?”

  If I could tell her the truth, I would say I’m looking for flaws. Because that’s what you do when you’re in love with someone you don’t want to be in love with. You look for imperfections in their skin, oddities in their features. You picture how they will age, where time will tarnish them. You try to catch them at harsh angles, discern some measure of awkwardness where their limbs connect to their trunks. You search for these deficiencies with an air of desperation, ready to lay claim to whatever you find, to inflate it grotesquely in your mind, and in doing so set yourself free.

  I would say that I’m paralyzed, that I see things I can’t reach for, have itches I can’t scratch. And then there are the parts of me that I can’t feel anymore at all. That my days are filled with a quiet dread that has as much to do with her, or at least the potential of her, as it does with that foreign mass trespassing in my bladder. That I’m so in love with her that I can’t breathe, and that it’s become the only color in my universe, a deep blood-red, rendering everything and everyone else in black-and-white, and that I don’t want to live in black-and-white, but I’m terrified that it’s where I’ll end up anyway.

  I would tell her that I love her from the core of my being, that she answers yearnings in me I never knew I had.

  I would insist that none of this can be trusted. Because she’s a mess and I’m a mess and she’s alone and shaken and I might be sick, and after all she’s been through, how could I do that to her, and there are so many ways for this to be a disaster, for it to be all wrong and make no sense. That it may be nothing more than a colossal accident of convenience and transference, a subtle transposition of fears and wants, the random synthesis of a savior complex and desperate grief, wrapped up in loneliness and tied with a thick red bow of unmitigated lust.

  And I would tell her that even though it can’t be trusted, I do anyway.

  I want to tell her. Because she already knows. If she had any doubts, that insane kiss yesterday should have put them to bed. So if she knows, why the hell can’t I say it? Probably, I think, because raw acknowledgment would compel us to address it, and doing so would hurl us headlong back into our separate realities. I can’t be hers, and even if I could, she’s not ready to be mine, and what if she was and I went ahead and got married anyway, or I could be hers and she wasn’t up for it. Somehow, discussing it would turn it into a promise, broken before it was even made, and after a disappointment like that we could never go back to the sweet, untouchable love that now courses through our collective veins.

  So I say nothing. And she takes her hand off the gearshift and places it on my arm, just like that, and we ride the rest of the way in a complex but uncomplicated silence, the atmosphere in her Volvo thick with forbidden thoughts. She double-parks in front of the brownstone and we sit together for a moment, looking out our respective windows at the night.

  “I’m scared,” I tell her.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she says.

  “Not just about the biopsy.”

  “What, then?”

  I look straight into her lily pad eyes. “Everything.”

  She looks right back at me and smiles. “Everything will be okay too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It has no choice,” she says.

  “Sometimes it feels like I can’t even breathe,” I say.

  “I get that too.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I call you,” she says. “You’re my oxygen.”

  When I get out of the car, she climbs out too, to give me one of our borderline illegal hugs in the xenon glow of the Volvo’s low
beams. The cold has developed an edge, winter taking an early first bite out of autumn, and I shiver involuntarily in Tamara’s embrace. “You’re mine,” I say.

  She looks up at me, confused. “What?”

  “Oxygen.”

  “Oh.”

  She kisses my cheek. We stand there, foreheads pressed together, looking at each other with weary smiles. Her lips float tantalizing inches away from mine, but I know it would be a mistake. After a moment, she kisses my jaw and climbs back into her car, and I wonder if she was waiting for me to kiss her. “Call me tomorrow,” she says. I tell her I will and step back and watch her drive off. When I turn around to walk up the brownstone stairs, I’m startled to find Jed, standing bare chested in the living room window, staring down at me in dark, angry judgment.

  “Was that Tamara?” he asks me when I come through the door. He’s back on the couch, watching CSI, looking vexed.

  “She gave me a ride,” I say.

  “That was nice of her.”

  “What’s with you?” I say.

  “Nothing.”

  “She just gave me a lift home.”

  He raises his hand to silence me, his eyes resolutely glued to the screen. “Not my business, man,” he says.

  Chapter 26

  By ten thirty Friday morning, I’m bouncing off the walls. I’m supposed to hear from Dr. Sanderson today with my biopsy results. So why the hell hasn’t he called? If it were good news, I would think he’d have called already, only too happy to release me from the purgatory of my suspense. Bad news, though, he might wait to tell me, wait until he had a chunk of free time so as to answer my questions and discuss treatment. No one likes to deliver bad news. Maybe over the years he’s developed a routine wherein he makes all his happy calls immediately and leaves the tough ones for the end of the day, after he’s seen all his patients. Only then does he plop down into the rich leather chair behind his mahogany desk, take a measured shot from the bottle of single malt discreetly stored in a file drawer to bolster his resolve, and begin making the bad calls. He’s a middleman too, all that stands between the lab results and the patient, and even though it’s not his fault, it’s still his problem. We’re always quick to make the good calls, to tell a client his goods have shipped ahead of schedule, or that we were able to work out a production issue. But when it comes to bad news, we’ll procrastinate as long as possible and then hope like hell to get their voice mail. I am Sanderson’s Craig Hodges, my cancerous cells the wrong-colored swooshes, and even though it’s not his fault, he still knows it won’t be a pleasant conversation.

  Fuck. I have cancer. I know it.

  I’ve already dialed the doctor’s office a half dozen times, only to hang up before the first ring. I am terrified of upsetting some delicate cosmic balance, as if the act of calling itself might somehow influence the outcome. No. The thing to do is to wait here, all Zen-like, remain calm, and wait for the call to come. But my sweaty back, my clammy hands, and my shaking legs are the antithesis of Zen, so I get out of bed and head for the shower. Under the insulating spray, I run the scenarios, scripting conversations with Hope and Tamara in which I reveal my illness to them. Hope cries and hugs me, and then gets on the phone with her family, pausing for a brief, heartfelt cry with her mother before getting down to business, insisting that her father locate the top specialists in the field and use his connections to get us seen immediately, her chin bravely set as she takes charge. Tamara fights back tears and then throws herself into my arms, releasing all of her pent-up passion in an endless kiss, and then wordlessly leads me to her bedroom with no greater agenda than to consummate our unspoken emotions in the face of my impending life-and-death struggle. And then, only after an hour or two of sweetly urgent lovemaking, does she let the tears come, burying her face in my chest as we lie hopelessly entangled in a damp, naked embrace.

  And the thought of it arouses me in a way that no subsequent thoughts can diminish, and what the hell, I do have to kill time, right? Either way, I say to myself as I step out of the shower a few minutes later, you are one sick fuck.

  At eleven thirty, I cave and call the doctor’s office from the kitchen. Jed and Norm are in the living room, watching CNN. “Hello,” I say pleasantly to the receptionist, as if her goodwill might help my case. “Can I speak with Dr. Sanderson?”

  “Who is this calling, please?” She speaks in a deep voice with a Russian accent, her words formed with the careful precision of a neophyte.

  “This is Zachary King. I was in earlier this week for a cystoscopy.”

  “The doctor is not available now,” she says.

  “Can you tell me when he will be?”

  “Monday.”

  “Monday?” I say. “I’m supposed to speak to him today.”

  “He is not in today.”

  “Well, is he at the hospital or something? Can we page him?”

  “The doctor is off for the weekend,” she says. “Dr. Post is on call. Would you like I should page Dr. Post?”

  I can feel the seeds of panic germinating in my belly. “Listen,” I say. “What’s your name?”

  The receptionist is taken aback. “Irina,” she says.

  “Irina,” I say. “The results of my biopsy are supposed to be in today. I don’t know if I was supposed to call him or he was supposed to call me, but I’m supposed to hear today. Will those results be sent to Dr. Post?”

  “No,” Irina says. “They come here.”

  “Do you know if they’ve come in yet?”

  “Only the doctor opens the lab results.”

  “Which is why I would really appreciate it if you would page Dr. Sanderson.”

  “He has no pager,” she says. “He is not on call this weekend.”

  “Surely, though, you must know how to get in touch with him.”

  “He is out until Monday,” she says firmly.

  “Let me be clear on this,” I say. “You’re telling me that I have to sit here all weekend and wonder if I have cancer because you won’t make a simple phone call?”

  “The doctor will call you the moment he has your test results.”

  “But the test results are there,” I practically shout at her. “Someone just needs to call the lab, or open the envelope, or something.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. King. There is nothing I can do.”

  I bang the phone down and let out a frustrated scream. “Zack?” Norm calls from the living room. “You okay?”

  I join him and Jed on the couch and tell them what’s going on. “That’s bullshit,” Norm says, instantly getting to his feet. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” I say.

  “To the doctor’s office.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m much more persuasive in person,” Norm says, tucking in his shirt.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What I always do,” he says. “Kick ass and take names.”

  I open my mouth to object, only to realize that I have no objection to offer. Norm’s blind obstinacy has proven to be highly effective over the last few days, and I can’t really see a downside to harnessing that energy to work on my behalf. I can sit back and let him take care of things. I’ve heard stories where fathers actually do that for their sons as a matter of course.

  We’re almost at the door when we hear the television go off. I turn around to find Jed climbing off the couch. He shrugs self-consciously, then grins at me, last night’s awkward encounter forgotten for the time being. “Just give me a minute to get dressed,” he says.

  The three of us walk into the grim, leaden silence indigenous to waiting rooms, not one silence but a collection of separate silences, the patients there to see other doctors in the practice peering discreetly over their Newsweeks and Peoples to charily mark our arrival before retreating back into their contrived oblivion. Irina turns out to be a large, middle-aged woman with sad Slavic eyes, a bearded mole on her leathery cheek, and a fierce expression etched into her features, maybe from years of squin
ting into the stinging wind of bitter Soviet winters. But nothing in Irina’s considerable experience has prepared her for the likes of Norm, who shatters the quiet of the reception area like a boulder dropped into a pond, spouting nonsensical legal jargon with a convincing ferocity.

  “The doctor is off until Monday,” Irina tells him, raising her unibrow menacingly. Her desk is festooned with photos and crayon tracings of little hands from grandchildren who are probably scared to death of her.

  “Listen to me carefully,” he says, leaning over the large desk to get in her face. “If you can’t get Dr. Sanderson on the phone in the next five minutes, there will be severe legal ramifications. Do you want to be responsible for that?”

  “Move back from the desk, please,” Irina says, standing up irately.

  Norm looks her right in the eye and lowers his voice. “Your personal space is not what’s important right now. Dr. Sanderson’s weekend is not what’s important right now. You see this man over here?” He points to me, and I nod a sheepish greeting, self-conscious about my role in what is certain to escalate into another Norm-produced freak show. “This man hasn’t slept in a week because he’s waiting for test results, results that he was promised today. If he has to spend one more night than necessary under this severe emotional distress because Dr. Sanderson dropped the ball, we will consider it to be gross negligence on the part of this office. Do you understand where I’m going with this?”

  “This is not for me!” Irina hisses back to him. “I cannot help you.”

  “Then pick up the phone and call someone who can,” Norm says sternly.

  “You must stop making this disturbance!”

  “Sweetheart, this is nothing,” Norm says in grave, confidential tones. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

  “I cannot to reach him,” Irina insists agitatedly.

  In the hallway behind the reception desk, a door opens and Camille, the PA who handled me on my last visit, emerges from one of the examination rooms. She peers out to see the cause of the ruckus and then, seeing Norm and Irina locked in battle, frowns slightly before heading back down the hall. “Hello,” says Jed quietly. “Who’s that?”