The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  On Valentine’s Day, in San Miguel, Jim woke up with a fever so violent that no blankets could warm him. Friends drove us to the emergency room.

  We spent the day there getting tests. Jim had some kind of infection, but the doctor there concluded that the antibiotics would get it under control, and by the end of that day it appeared they had.

  We might have flown home to San Francisco, but once the antibiotics kicked in, Jim was feeling better, and he didn’t want to miss Jane’s visit. Nothing mattered much more to him than repairing what had been, for years, an uneasy relationship. Things had seemed good since the diagnosis, and he wanted to shore up the good feeling that existed now. I was happy about the visit too. Jane had asked if I’d bake pies for her wedding—and though the event was taking place three thousand miles from the kitchen where I generally baked, and pie for a hundred people was a lot of pie, her request seemed to signal good things in our relationship, so I told her yes.

  After the scare in Mexico, Jim and I met up with Jane at the airport in Guatemala City and made our way to Lake Atitlan. In the back seat of the car with the two of them I studied Jim’s face as he studied his daughter’s: how happy he was that she was there.

  We spent four good days with Jane. Jim was tired, but he felt good, or as good as he ever did at that point—the infection apparently behind him. Our conversation was full of plans for the wedding, set for the end of April. Earth Day. We’d be there, of course.

  The day after she left, the chills and fever—rigors, the name for this—returned. This time it seemed clear to me that we needed to go home. I got online to buy plane tickets, and within twenty minutes our bags were packed and carried to the road, where the driver I’d called was waiting to bring us to the airport.

  The whole drive there I held Jim’s hand. “It’s going to be better once we’re home,” I said. Always one more thing that would make the difference.

  By the time we reached the airport, Jim was disoriented. A person observing him might have imagined he was drunk, or on drugs. Well, he was on drugs, of course. He was always on drugs. But this was something else.

  I checked our bags. By the time we reached the security gate Jim was more dazed than ever, but he had to go to the men’s room, he told me. I hovered by the entrance, picturing Jim on the floor inside, unable to speak Spanish—the men around him supposing he had simply consumed too much Ron Zacapa. I was just about to find someone to go looking for him when he emerged. He had no idea where he was.

  “We need to get to the plane now, Jimmy,” I told him,

  Jim needed me to hold him up, so I left our bags at an airport restaurant. Once I got him settled safely at the gate, I’d run back to get them.

  Two heavy carry-ons. Two backpacks. My ukulele. His Cuban cigars (not strictly legal to bring into the country, but no one ever checked).

  I dragged the bags down the long airport corridor, out of breath, heart racing. When I got to the gate, two airport security officers were sitting on either side of Jim.

  “Is this your husband? He is a very sick man.”

  They would not let us on the plane, though I was begging. “It’s just to Miami,” I said. It seemed like a better idea to get Jim partway home, at least. But the security officers shook their heads.

  I took Jim by taxi—Jim, and all our bags, retrieved from security—to a private hospital in Guatemala City recommended by a friend. Jim sat in the back seat, shivering, as I wrapped myself around him.

  At the hospital, they put him in the ICU. It was an infection again, and a bad one.

  He stayed five days at the Hospital Herrera Llerandi, where doctors identified the particular bacterium in Jim’s body from blood cultures and treated him with IV antibiotics that saved his life. By the fourth day, he was sitting up in bed and discussing the Rolling Stones with our gastroenterologist, a guitar player. He was worried that his hair had grown too long at this point, so I found a hairdresser willing to come to the hospital and give him a trim. “Your husband has such good hair,” she told me, as she packed up her scissors.

  We were OK again—the infection not totally eradicated but under control. Flying home was not possible until Jim could complete a course of intravenous antibiotics, so we returned once more to the lake, and every day an American nurse we’d found in the village came over to give Jim an injection of more antibiotics.

  The plan was for Jim to go on ahead of me back to San Francisco, to see his doctors there while I stayed on another two days to close up the house. Standing on the dock the morning the boat came to get him—the fishermen already out with their nets, the sun just coming up over the volcano—I kissed him good-bye as he stepped into the lancha and watched as it disappeared around the tall rock bluff.

  “I’m going to start practicing law again, baby,” he told me, over the phone that night, from back in California. He had a couple of new estate-planning clients. He was setting up meetings with attorney friends in the city to let people know he was back. He was going to get back to the gym. And then there was Jane’s wedding to think of, less than two months away.

  Two days after Jim got home—the night before I was due to return, myself—the fever returned. It was close to midnight when he drove himself into San Francisco and checked into the emergency room at UCSF Parnassus, which was where I found him—in a room on the fourteenth floor—when I got home myself the next day. There was the familiar IV pole beside him again, with more antibiotics dripping into his veins.

  We thought he’d be there a day or two.

  81.

  I had briefly supposed it was good news when they told us that Jim was suffering from an infection again. At least this wasn’t cancer.

  But this was not just any infection, and it was not just one. On the white board in Jim’s room, the doctor heading up the team on his rotation had written down the names of the bacteria attacking Jim’s body: Streptococcus. Pseudomonas. Micrococcus luteus. Enterococcus. Stretched out on the bed next to him as I was now for most of every day, I had them memorized. Also the names of the attending physician and the nurse on duty that day, the Special Instructions, and Goals for the Day. (Walk down the hall. Eat solid food.)

  Jim had a private room, but it still felt crowded with the IV pole and the monitors, the chair for visiting doctors and medical students. They’d brought in a chair that folded into a cot for me, but most nights it sat vacant. I preferred to climb in alongside Jim in his hospital bed. Thin as he was, fitting the two of us into that bed was not a problem.

  As a person with no health issues of her own—a broken or breaking heart didn’t count—it was an odd thing to be living in a hospital. We had a wonderful home back in Hunsaker Canyon, with our music and our garden, the birds, the stars. But it felt better just staying with Jim in the hospital than going back and forth between that world and this one.

  When I walked out the door, I’d be hit with all the busyness of the world carrying on without us. News of the presidential primaries, oversized images of the San Francisco Giants attached to lampposts, e-mails about upcoming events Jim would not be attending at The Family—Storkzilla rehearsals, wine tastings, Ladies’ Night. I’d see the buses barreling down Market Street, daffodils coming into bloom, joggers along the bay, signs announcing the imminent reopening of the newly expanded SFMOMA, an event Jim had been talking about since we first met. It was all too much—all these signs of life, all those reminders of what we used to do, where we used to go, Before.

  I remembered registering this same sense of amazement that long-ago summer I cared for my mother when she was suffering from the glioblastoma that killed her, and I was spending my days at her bedside. How could people be sitting in cafés, drinking wine, picking up dry cleaning, heading off to the symphony—arguing with their husbands at the supermarket over which cut of meat to buy? Biting into their sandwich without taking a single pill. Pedaling their bicycles. Walking their dogs. Looking bored. So few held hands. Didn’t they know how lucky they were? If my husband h
ad their husband’s pancreas, we’d never complain about one thing ever again.

  Mostly I stayed away from the world of the healthy people, that spring. I preferred to stay in the room with Jim, up on the fourteenth floor—alongside him in the bed, under the covers even, watching shows together on his laptop (the O. J. Simpson miniseries, a documentary about Keith Richards) or comparing our observations of that day’s nurse. We still took our walks when he was up for it—down the hall to the window with the view of Golden Gate Park, or to a set of stairs where we practiced going up and down. Ten steps. Seven. Five. This was our world, the fourteenth floor. Growing smaller all the time.

  82.

  He knew I had a terrible sense of direction, and got lost regularly—even in the seemingly familiar territory of the hospital. He worried, when I’d head out to the cafeteria, that I might get lost. So when he could, Jim got out of bed and—still attached to his IV pole—walked me to the right elevator.

  He was not wrong that I needed his help: I had lost my way in this place more than once. One time, when I was slow in returning to the room—caught up in a maze of corridors—my cell phone rang. It was Jim, sounding worried. “I thought I’d lost you,” he said.

  “That won’t ever happen,” I told him.

  83.

  A week passed, and then two, and the infection hung on. Scans of Jim’s abdomen had revealed a whole cluster of abscesses in his liver collecting fluid and breeding bacteria, like craters on the moon. Every week now, he needed a procedure to drain the fluid again. Gallons of it.

  He needed another procedure to insert a stent in his bile duct. Another procedure to remove the port that appeared to have bred its own infection. Each time he needed surgery required twelve hours of fasting beforehand and a trip to the third-floor operating room, where we would sit in the hallway for an hour or two—three sometimes—waiting our turn. Then came the recovery room. Then the trip back to the fourteenth floor, where Jim could eat again, if the nurses had remembered to set the Creon on the tray beside his food. Sometimes they did, but now and then they didn’t, and if they’d neglected to set those Creon pills on his tray, it didn’t matter how many hours Jim had fasted or how hungry he might be. He’d have to wait for the pills, and I’d go into battle mode, procuring them.

  Something happens to a person when he lives in the hospital for a certain period of time. Maybe it’s the lack of sunlight, the lack of fresh air, or just living in a world of other sick people and doctors.

  Jim’s fingernails went gray. His eyes took on a watery cast. His hair, which he always took such good care of, was matted. His body filled with fluid, so his belly—always so trim—now stood out like that of a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy. His feet swelled so much that the skin cracked, and I borrowed size-thirteen shoes for my size-nine-and-a-half husband. (The only pair I could locate were bright green, borrowed from a friend with large feet; I brought him a pair of sweatpants he had back home in the identical shade. “Look,” he said. “Now I’m an elf.”)

  Still, he was getting out of this place. “I’m going to be there for Jane’s wedding,” he still told me daily. Three weeks to go. Plenty of time.

  We booked a flight for the two of us. We’d get to the city with a couple of days to spare so I could bake all those pies.

  Two weeks away. Ten days. Eight. Jim was still on the IV, the bacterium still mutating every couple of days, his abdomen filling with fluid in between procedures to drain it.

  All our doctors knew the wedding date now. “We’ll do our best,” they said, but the looks in their eyes told me what they really believed.

  “I have to be there,” Jim told them.

  With six days to the wedding, we made a new plan. A shorter trip to New York. I’d buy the pies instead of baking them. We’d use Jim’s airline miles that we’d been saving for an Italy trip to fly first class, to make the flight less arduous.

  He kept trying to get well enough to travel. Every afternoon, if he didn’t have some surgical procedure, the two of us would make our way to a staircase at the end of the hall—Jim in his Maine Media Workshop baseball cap and the yellow paper gown he had to wear, identifying him as a patient with serious bacterial infection. Very slowly, for the next fifteen minutes, we’d go up and down a flight of steps together—up, down; up, down—as I held his hand and counted. He wanted to be strong enough for Jane’s big day.

  In the end, I flew alone to Jane’s wedding—the second wedding I’d attended on my own in eight months. I left the hospital on that Friday morning and landed that Friday night, with fourteen pies waiting for me at the best pie shop in Brooklyn. The night of the wedding party, I read the toast Jim had written for Jane. The truth was, Jim had needed help writing this. He knew what he wanted to say to his daughter, but putting the ideas together was hard for him now.

  The night of the wedding I brought my laptop with me so Jim could Skype in from his hospital bed, but when I reached him, he couldn’t say much, and when I told him I’d bring the laptop over to Jane and her new husband, so they could Skype with him, he seemed not to hear me.

  “I have to go to sleep now,” he said. His voice seemed to be coming from someplace farther away than California. The bottom of the ocean, maybe.

  I flew back to San Francisco the next morning. When the plane landed, I went straight to the hospital. I climbed into the bed next to Jim to show him the photographs of the wedding. One, of his three children all together, he studied for a very long time, saying nothing.

  There had been a time when we talked of grandchildren. We didn’t do that anymore.

  84.

  More days in the hospital. Five weeks. Six. Jim slept a lot now, though it was never a deep sleep, and seldom for long. Very often, when he fell asleep, he’d have his laptop in front of him, and a cup of the herb tea in his hand.

  Two times that season, when he fell asleep, he had spilled the tea onto the laptop. Both times the hard drive had been wrecked, requiring the purchase of a new computer.

  “I’m giving up tea,” he said.

  For months, Jim had been taking Dilaudid for the pain. First twice a day, then three times. Now it was every three hours, and if the nurse was five minutes late delivering the pills, I raced to the nurses’ station to remind her.

  The drug made his mind blurry. We could still talk about things (the Republican primaries—Donald Trump no longer a joke; a Netflix documentary we both loved about Keith Richards). Sometimes we listened to music, and sometimes we read, though concentrating for more than a few pages was difficult. My sister—often a distant figure in my life over the years, but a comforting presence these days—had taken to sending us poems she liked. I read these out loud to Jim. One of our favorites, by Jane Kenyon, a poem written when she herself was suffering with the cancer that ultimately killed her, was called “Happiness.”

  Sometimes, in our hospital bed together, we watched the final season of Downton Abbey, whose sponsor’s ads—for Viking River Cruises—we loved as much as the show.

  “I’m taking you on one of those, baby,” Jim told me.

  He was still funny, and his capacity for tenderness and love remained unaltered. But he had lost a lot of his old sharpness, and he knew it.

  “You have no idea,” he told me one afternoon, “how it feels when your brain stops working the way it used to.”

  Still he was holding on to life—every scrap of it he could keep in his grasp. At the photographer’s golden hour—near sunset, when the light was best—he’d make his way slowly down the hall on the fourteenth floor with his camera. His destination was a window that looked out over Golden Gate Park, the place where, in Octobers past, we’d run like a pair of maniacs from one stage to another trying to catch every act we could at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. Now, wearing the yellow paper gown announcing his infection, Jim held his iPhone up against the glass and pointed it toward the San Francisco skyline and the sun going down over the Golden Gate Bridge. I conjured images for him of
our old, good days.

  “Remember those oysters we had outside in Marshall, with the fresh bread and the wine?” he said. “That first cold beer we got after the Gulf Haggas hike, when the police were going to arrest us for drinking from an open container?”

  There was that night in Guatemala, Jim at the wheel of our rented Jeep, driving in near-total darkness on that crazy road to Semuc Champey as a fire raged above us.

  “Remember that time,” I said, “when we drove home so late there wasn’t one car on the road and I took my shirt off on Mt. Diablo Boulevard?” We’d been in the Boxster, with the top down. “Remember the time we went to the Jean-Paul Gaultier show at the de Young Museum, and after, I got you to dress up in my black leather pants and that metallic silver shirt, with the boots?”

  This would be Jim, my Brooks Brothers man. The man with a closet full of identical white shirts and navy blue striped ties. He had actually let me take his picture in that getup, and he had looked very good in it.

  I had put on a black bustier that night, and my other pair of leather pants—gold ones—with hot pink feather-trimmed boots I’d found in a Goodwill store, along with every piece of dime-store jewelry I owned. Out on my deck in Mill Valley, we shared a bottle of wine and pretended we were Paris hipsters, but when it was dancing time, we’d chosen our John Prine song, “Glory of True Love.” At the end of the day, that was more our style than Gaultier.