The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac

by Kris D'Agostino

  “Okay,” the doctor says. “Very good.” He comes around to stand at my father’s bedside. “Can you sit up, please?” he asks. He takes the stethoscope from around his neck and checks the old man’s heartbeat. My father takes deep breaths, in and out. Nadoo nods some more and wrinkles his brow. He presses on various spots of my father’s torso, asking, “Does this hurt?” He takes a blood pressure reading. “Okay,” Nadoo says at last. “Everything looks fine. The nurse is going to come in and take blood. I want to check a few things. If everything is good on that end, we can start the chemo in maybe an hour. Are you ready?”

  My father does not look ready at all.

  “I guess,” he says. He looks down at the sheet covering his legs.

  “I’ll see you soon, then.”

  The doctor heads for the hallway.

  “Do I get dinner?” my father asks.

  Nadoo stops in the doorway and looks back.

  “I’m afraid not,” he says, and he leaves.

  In between jerk-off sessions last night on the Internet, I read up on the procedure my father is about to undergo. Autologous stem cell transplant. Which basically means that a week ago, doctors harvested stem cells from my father’s spine and froze them. Now his immune system must be brought down to zero and the stem cells reintroduced into his body. The chemo he will be dosed with tonight and tomorrow will severely cripple his white blood cell count, enabling a smooth acceptance of the stem cells. Then he’ll spend three weeks in isolation, building his body’s defenses back up.

  The John W. Manley School has been very understanding about my father’s illness. It’s Thursday night and I’ve taken tomorrow off so I can be here with him in the wake of the intense blast of chemotherapy he is about to experience.

  The same nurse from earlier returns and fills three vials with blood from my father’s left arm. He makes faces the whole time like a little boy afraid of needles. I have to admit I don’t enjoy looking either.

  When she’s finished, we wait some more. He turns up the volume on the TV and we watch Mario Batali make linguine with clam sauce.

  Dr. Nadoo comes back around eight thirty, this time with two interns in tow, a collection of nurses, and Dr. Schore, who is head of the stem cell team in charge of administering the transplant. A few minutes of introductions, and once again my mother, Chip, Elissa, and I hover about, trying not to get in anyone’s way.

  When it all began, on one of his first overnight stays at the hospital, a shunt was installed in my father’s chest. His portal vein was tapped permanently just below the collarbone. Through this passage, his stem cells were harvested to be cultured and grown. He claims that after a week or so, the skin healed over the place where the shunt had been sutured, and he now feels like he is partially robotic. When he undergoes the second half of the transplant process, the reintroduction of stem cells into his body, it will be conducted through this same entryway.

  We watch as the bags of chemo drugs are hooked into a tube protruding from the square of tape surrounding the port. Dr. Schore suggests the addition of antinausea medicine along with the chemo.

  “Most of the time it does nothing,” he says.

  It isn’t long before I can’t be in the room anymore and I excuse myself.

  “I have to eat, Mom,” I say. “I don’t feel well.”

  Chip and Elissa join me and the three of us walk in silence out of radiology and down the G elevators to the cafeteria on the basement level. The cafeteria itself is closed, but there is a bank of vending machines filled with everything from tuna salad sandwiches to cheesecake. I don’t eat anything.

  When I was thirteen, I played a year of Little League baseball. Mostly as an unspoken favor to my father. They stuck me in right field, the only position where I might possibly avoid all contact with the ball. I batted seventh in the order. Once, during a game toward the end of the season, a fastball hit me square in the nose, knocking the plastic helmet off my head and splaying me out in the dirt. When I came to, I could taste blood in my mouth. My father was squatting over me, along with Coach Ruggiero and half the team. He put his hand under my head, told me not to move. I didn’t want to get up. I would’ve stayed there forever. I have never felt as safe as I did lying there with a broken nose.

  I WANDER THE HALLS. I walk past rooms somewhere deep in cardiology. I examine charts. I stop and look into rooms. I poke my head inside quickly to catch a face. I try to make eye contact if I can, to better gauge the condition of the patients within. I guess what it is they suffer from. What sickness has put them here. I invent imaginary scenarios. Bedside family vigils. Estranged lovers appear in the middle of the night for one last sweaty entanglement. Wills are written. Cats are endowed with large sums of money. The patients are old, young, middle-aged, twentysomethings, thirtysomethings. They have barely begun their lives. They have accomplished everything. They leave legacies behind. They leave nothing behind.

  I walk past rooms, three beds deep, all filled with the somber, expressionless faces of people who barely even notice I’ve breached their privacy. A cute orderly eyes me suspiciously from behind a food cart.

  “Can I help you?” she asks. Her voice is soft.

  She tilts her head to the side, waiting for me to step out of the way so she can deliver dinner.

  “I think I’m lost,” I say.

  “It happens,” she says. She squeezes past, not bothering to deal with me any further. I continue my journey. I wind through what appears to be an MRI unit and then a pediatric wing. I pause outside an OT room to watch a little girl in a hospital gown bounce up and down on a giant orange ball.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” I say, but there’s no one listening.

  I head back the way I came, follow signs to the G elevators, those bastions of familiarity. I take a wrong turn somehow and find myself in more unknown territory. These corridors are foreign to me. Plastic map placards are of no use. A room ahead glowing bright and blue. Bright, soft blue light spilling out onto the linoleum. They’re showing movies inside, I think. I take my time getting there and stand for a moment, looking in. There’s a technician, a short Asian guy, seated before a large monitor displaying static.

  “Check it out,” he says, turning to me with an odd expression, as if he has been waiting for me.

  “I know you?” I ask him.

  “Nah, man,” he says. He motions me closer.

  I step into the room. It’s small, with one wall made entirely of glass, through which I see a billowing hunk of machinery, a white cushioned bed, fitted inside a man-size tube.

  “MRI?” I ask.

  “Nope,” the technician says. He has glassy, lost eyes. He presses a button underneath the monitor, and undulating blue and white pulses replace the static. Moving things. Like amoebas or jellyfish. Cells.

  “Beautiful, man,” he says. “Breathtaking.”

  I stand next to him. We don’t say anything for a while. We just watch the forms on the monitor change and grow and curl on top of each other. The amorphous blobs fold inside themselves, are reborn into newer things. Different things. It all fits.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Everything,” he says, and he says it like he can’t believe I didn’t know.

  “WHERE’VE YOU BEEN?” my brother asks when I finally wind my way back to our father’s bedside.

  I can hear him vomiting inside the bathroom. I take a seat in one of the plastic chairs near the closet and wait. He emerges moments later, wiping his mouth. My mother is at his side, hands bolstering his upper body, hobbling with him in a bizarre dance, the IV stand rolling behind them.

  Chip stops pacing back and forth in front of the windows to watch this shambling procession back to the bed. “You okay?” he asks.

  “No,” my father says. I can see tears in his eyes.

  “They weren’t kidding about that antinausea medicine,” my mother says.

  Elissa is asleep in a chair. She looks peaceful. Her hair is a tangle of knots. I ha
ve a strong urge to wake her up and make her comb it.

  “Chemo’s all done for tonight,” my mother says, once she has tucked the old man back under the blue sheet and adjusted the contours of the bed to his liking.

  “Thank God,” he says. He coughs dully a few times, rubs his face with his hands. “I should have brushed my teeth while I was in there.”

  “It’s okay,” my mother says.

  “You guys don’t have to stay,” he says. “I’m exhausted. I’m just gonna go to sleep. If I can.”

  I stand up and come around to the side of the bed and look at him. One of his arms is above the sheet, folded across his chest. His veins are at attention like a maze of worms beneath the sagging skin of his forearm. I reach down and trace the bulges with my finger. I don’t know why I do this.

  “Chip,” he says, “will you bring me the blanket I packed?”

  My brother goes to the table where the orange bag sits and unzips it. He takes out a plastic package containing a safety blanket. Together, my brother and I unfold it and drape it over the frail body before us.

  “Thank you, boys,” he says.

  We don’t say anything else. My mother rouses Elissa. We move around the room, gathering the garbage that has accumulated over the few hours we’ve been here. The four of us huddle in the doorway and look back for a moment. He is already asleep.

  << 13 >>

  They come for him the next day. He panics. He is an anxious mess. The doctors huddle, murmuring. The whole thing is almost called off.

  “This isn’t going to work,” my father says. His face sags, his eyes fill with tears.

  “You’re acting like a baby,” my mother says. “Don’t start. You have to be strong, Jim.”

  “Come on, Dad,” I say. “It’ll be fine.”

  His hands shake. He worries them together.

  Dr. Nadoo is here, Dr. Schore, their teams of nurses and interns and assorted hangers-on. Elissa and Chip and our mother. All of us. A convention. Everyone standing clumsily around the bed. There must be a dozen clipboards.

  “Okay, Jim,” Dr. Schore says, his face stern and frozen, like he’d rather be elsewhere. I can see lint in his beard. “You have nothing to worry about. We do this all the time. It’s nothing new.”

  “But how do we know we haven’t missed the window of opportunity?” my father asks. “The cells are probably all dead by now.” He moans. He buries his face into the leathery pocket his hands make when he clinches them together.

  “You really have nothing to be anxious about,” Dr. Schore says in his genteel, measured way. It is the lexicon of all doctors to speak in soothing, noncommittal phrases at times like this. “The worst is over. You already went through the chemo. This is nothing compared to the chemo.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” he says quickly. “If they’re dead, you’ll be putting dead things into my body. My body doesn’t want dead things.”

  Dr. Schore lifts his glasses, rubs his eyes in frustration. “We’re wasting time here,” he says. He turns to one of the nurses. “Doris, can you get some morphine in him. We’ve got to get moving on this.” Doris, a rounded, middle-aged woman with curly blond hair, nods and clicks the self-medication button two times with a sausage finger.

  A few heads turn and glance at the clock. It’s 1:13. The sun, high above the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, is bursting in the windows.

  “These guys know what they’re doing,” Chip adds.

  “Dad,” Elissa says, “everything’s gonna be okay.”

  Elissa squeezes between Dr. Schore and one of the clipboarded interns to take our father’s hand in her own. It is only then that he begins to calm. He weeps unabashedly but quietly. He seems oblivious to the fact that the room is crowded with lab-coated men and women eager to attach tubes to him.

  Soon, his red-rimmed eyes grow slack and his head cants to the left and he stops crying and doesn’t say much of anything. Elissa continues to hold his hand until she is asked to move out of the way.

  The bag seems to materialize out of nowhere, passed along from intern to nurse to Dr. Nadoo to intern until it reaches Dr. Schore. A light pink color, like weak lemonade, with a sticker that reads MORETTI, JAMES A. Schore turns the bag around in his hands.

  “What are you looking for?” I ask him. He cocks his head at me, birdlike. He doesn’t answer. He hands the stem cell liquid to Doris, who hangs it next to the saline bag on the IV stand. She selects the correct tube from the drawers by the sink. She pulls down the top of my father’s gown to expose the chest port. She disconnects the saline tube and swaps the two, starting the drip again.

  “There we go,” she says, rubbing her gloved hands together, latex upon latex making an unnatural sound. “Easy as pie.”

  “Now what?” Chip asks.

  “We wait,” our mother says.

  “Exactly,” Dr. Nadoo says. He nods in satisfaction and points a finger at the door. He and his team file out into the hallway, followed closely by Dr. Schore and the rest of them. Doris tells us she will be back to check on him in a little while.

  “Oh God,” he moans, but it is low, almost inaudible. He is exhausted. He must be exhausted. He gives himself over to sleep. He makes sharp yelps from inside whatever visions his brain is conjuring. Night terrors. He stirs now and then. I watch the clear pink liquid drain from the bag and move through the snaking tube into his chest, his body.

  He sleeps.

  My mother takes a seat next to him and seems to fall into a trance, her gaze moving slowly from his face to the IV and back again to his face. She says nothing. Machines in the room beep and it is one of those times when I’m happy we are together. Sometimes, being present is enough, and if nothing else, we are here. All of us.

  << 14 >>

  A week after the transplant. A week into his twenty-one days of isolation. All visitors must don surgical masks and paper skullcaps. They must remove their shoes and put on cloth slippers. Touch as little as possible. His immune system is on the mend, slowly climbing back to normal levels. Word from the doctors on high is the stem cells are holding and his white blood cell count is returning.

  I hike into the woods with Elissa and Doug M. After work, Doug M. picks Elissa and me up in his Nova and we drive across the Tappan Zee. Gabby comes, too.

  “Hello,” I say, surprised to see her when I get in the car.

  “Whatever,” she says, her blue eyes hidden beneath the bill of her baseball cap.

  We traverse a dense stretch of forest. White paint ticks on the sides of rocks and trees mark the Appalachian Trail, a path that stretches some two thousand miles from Maine to Georgia.

  Doug M. leads us. A portly, noble guide. We pass a stream and a patch of stone formations like crooked teeth. We wind up a steep hill and negotiate short, curling switchbacks. We come to a large plateau of enormous flat rocks, running at least three hundred yards to a cliff overlooking the entire park. The lake is visible below and the cliff wall dropping off to the forest floor. The tops of trees are visible, swaying in the wind.

  “I can’t believe we made it all the way up here,” Elissa says.

  “It wasn’t that hard,” Doug M. says.

  “I could stay forever,” Elissa says. She walks forward, toward the edge. I follow her, rolling my eyes as I go. “Let’s camp,” she yells back as the wind picks up. Her hair flies into her face.

  “We don’t have sleeping bags,” I tell her.

  “So what?” she says. The wind gusts again. Gabby’s hat flies off her head and she turns to follow it frantically. For the first time, I really see her hair: long and blond, straight and peppered with brown. She turns after the runaway hat so quickly I don’t get a chance to see the hole in her head.

  “Follow that hat,” Doug M. says.

  Gabby recovers the hat and the four of us make our way toward the edge of the plateau. We can go no farther. Beyond us, the rolling forest and hills stretch off to the horizon, where the sun and orange sky meet the treetops. I toe the cliff lin
e. Let my foot dangle over the side. Doug M. walks with his hands on his stomach, leaning back slightly. He looks more like a king than ever. He turns his head this way and that, squinting in the wan sunlight. He undoes his pants and urinates off the side of the rock ledge.

  “There might be people down there,” Gabby tells him.

  “Fuck ’em,” he says. “Let ’em come get me. I’m a warrior.”

  Elissa gathers small rocks from the ground around her. She draws back her thin arm and, one by one, flings them out into the air. I watch them arc, falling through the branches. Everything is glowing yellow and dull as the sun begins its dip. Behind us, our shadows are long. Mine seems to belong to a much more handsome version of myself. My shadow is attractive, I think.

  We stand looking out over all of creation, or at least all of Harriman State Park, New York. Gabby holds a hand to her head. She’s returned her hat to its familiar spot. She pulls her hair into a ponytail and threads it through the back of the hat. She and Elissa are laughing, pointing toward the lake. I can’t hear what they’re saying. It doesn’t seem to matter. I walk over to join them.

  “Can you believe we’re only twenty miles from home?” Elissa says.

  “Unbelievable,” I say.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” Gabby says, pushing me slightly. “It’s beautiful. Admit it.”

  “I admit it,” I say. And then none of us speak for a long time. We just stand there, listening to the wind, which has picked up so strongly I have to turn my head to take a breath. Elissa edges closer to me, puts her hand through my arm. I am a whole head taller than her.

  “You should enjoy this,” she tells me.

  “I am enjoying it,” I say.

  “It’s time I told them,” she says. “Told him.”

  “The longer you wait, the harder it will be,” I say.

  “Part of me thinks he’ll be happy about it,” she says. “That it will be good for him.”

  “He acts like a grown-up baby,” I say.

  “And you wouldn’t?” my sister says. “He can’t fly, which is like the only thing he actually loves to do. He can’t pay the bills. He can barely walk.”