FOR A WHILE THEN, during the last week of November and the first week or so of December, Janet’s body went into a resting mode, as if preparing for some great private exertion. I had been writing to my brother about her every few weeks, and some where near the start of December I sent Ellory a note saying she was not getting better and asking him to pray for her-not the kind of thing I had ever done. Janet’s new doctor was a very small, coffee-skinned, tight-mouthed fellow named Ronald Ouajiballah. He was from Fiji or the Solomon Islands, I could not remember which, and he was as different from Eric Wilbraham as two people in the same profession can be. Even the way he touched Janet was different. I never saw him at her bedside when he didn’t have a hand on her shoulder or arm or foot, and it was a personal, not a professional hand, the touch of a cousin with a medical degree. He switched around her medicines, beefing up the Albuterol inhaler with another steroid, adding into the IV mix an antibiotic cocktail called Zithromax, which was used for bronchitis and sinus infections, and usually prescribed for CF patients with less lung damage. He discovered she had some kind of allergy called ABPA, and prescribed prednisone. All of this seemed to help her breathe more easily.
What helped her most was just that, without pretending everything was fine, il dottore, as we called him, didn’t stop trying, and didn’t seem to have built up a wall to protect himself from his patients’ pain and discomfort. When the flesh around the shunt in Janet’s right arm became inflamed he had the nurses move it right away; when the pain of the strenuous coughing overwhelmed her, he was there with Valium or Oxycodone-she did not have to whimper and scream to make it real to him.
For those two weeks we fell into a routine: I stopped in to see Janet before work-usually with a raspberry muffin from a place she liked, though she had very little appetite-and spent three or four hours there at night. I brought her newspapers and political magazines. Her mother, who believed in the healing powers of red meat, brought meatball and roast beef sandwiches that Janet took one look at and set aside. If she could talk we talked about everything around the edges of us-the weather, the world, the strenuous craziness of the early Christmas season. Gerard visited a few times and made her laugh with his Bob Dylan imitations (for which he was locally famous), singing “Train of Love” so loud at one point that the nurses came in to ask him to cool it. We were at the tail end of Jacqueline’s addition-hanging interior doors, grouting bathroom tile-and she was pleased, and we had our priorities straight, and so, on those early December days, we didn’t worry about cutting ourselves a little slack.
Janet was still eleventh on the transplant list, and no one was talking about her leaving the hospital anymore. But for those short, cold days we all pretended things could go on like that indefinitely. It was a kind of trick, a wishful self-hypnosis, and I suppose we all knew it-Janet’s mother, me, the orderlies and good nurses who emptied her bedpans and rubbed her back and changed her IV-but we needed a stretch of relative peace then, and for fourteen or fifteen days we had it.
And then, on the second Sunday of the month, the trick stopped working. That day I took my mother out for a nice Yankee pot roast lunch and an ice cream sundae and spent a little time watching TV with her in the community room at Apple Meadow. I hoped she would remember the Thanksgiving dinner at Amelia’s house-the first good hour at least-but it seemed to have left no mark on her memory. Janet had skidded off her radar screen. She went on and on about Lauren, a sometime friend who lived down the hall and who, my mother seemed to think, was constantly chasing the men residents who were rumored to be still capable of having sex. “Your father and I enjoy it as much as the next person,” she told me, in a voice right out of the high school hallways. “Probably more than the next person, if you want to know. But we are discreet about it, Ellory. Why, just last week we were in Aruba, and you children were asleep in your rooms and they have these beaches there, you know, not far from the hotel, and we sneaked out on the beach and he started to-”
“Mum, you don’t want to keep watching football, do you?” I said.
And so on.
When I got back to my apartment the light on the phone machine was blinking, and Janet’s mother’s voice was on the tape. “Jake, Jake, Jake. Come right away when you get this. Come right away.”
Janet was all bones and sallow skin, eyelids slowly fluttering, incommunicado. Her left lung was working like an old, worn-down bellows that had been mostly filled up with sand, and her right lung was not working at all.
I sat there with her and her mother for several hours, watching her, touching her, sinking inch by inch in a cold quicksand. Amelia was making the rosary beads go through her fingers faster and faster, and would not eat, and would not leave the room. I stayed until ten o’clock, then left the hospital and just drove aimlessly back and forth on the long east-west avenues of the Back Bay: Beacon to Marlborough to Boylston to Commonwealth, just staring out at the holiday lights, just shifting gears, just going from brake to gas to brake and slamming in the clutch. Snow was falling, large indifferent flakes twirling and skidding through the headlight beams. Eventually, I turned west onto Commonwealth and kept going as if headed home, and then, because I was near Betty’s, I stopped and bought two coffees and half a dozen doughnuts-Carmine wasn’t there-and took them over to Gerard’s.
Gerard rented the top floor of a maroon and gold Victorian in North Cambridge, not far from where Anastasia and the girls lived. Two small bedrooms, a room for his books, computer, and bicycles, a kitchen and bath-the place suited him well enough, though the ceilings slanted down in a way that made for a lot of bruised foreheads. “It has encouraged me to begin dating short women,” he liked to joke.
I told him about the change in Janet’s condition. We drank the coffee and went through all the doughnuts-unusual for him-and then we sat at his fifties-style Formica-topped table, which was the one piece of furniture Anastasia had let him take from the house, and looked out different windows. I called my apartment four times and the hospital twice. I did not want to go home. At last I said, “Let me look at the computer, will you?”
I brought up the search engine and plugged in the same thing I always plugged in: cystic fibrosis and lung transplants. The same 239 pages came up. I started to flip down through them, looking for something new, but Gerard was standing at my shoulder. “Try something else, will you?” he said impatiently. “That’s not the way to do research.”
“Something else like what?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Last ditch or something. Don’t just hit the same stupid nail in over and over again. Refine the search. What’s wrong with you?”
I typed in cystic fibrosis, transplants, last ditch, without much hope, and got forty-seven pages. I’d seen most of them before: stories of fifteen-year-olds whose lives had been saved, or prolonged, by a cadaveric transplant; professional papers so filled with medical terminology that you needed a translator to understand one-tenth of them; statistics on survival rates with various bacteria, in various hospitals, in various countries. I tapped the down arrow without much enthusiasm. When I hit the eleventh page I saw Living Lobar Transplantation in Cystic Fibrosis Patients, and I stopped there. I almost moved on, but something was making me keep looking at those words, and then a little faint bell sounded, a little blink of light.
“What?” Gerard leaned down closer.
I opened the page and we read it.
What it said was that, for cystic fibrosis patients, a lung transplant was the treatment of last resort. I knew that already. It went on to say that the number of people who wanted new lungs far exceeded the number of lungs available at any given time. I knew that, too. But in the next paragraph there was something about a surgeon in California who had been the first to try what was called a “living lobar transplant,” in 1993, removing a lobe each from two healthy donors and sewing them into a patient whose lungs had been destroyed by the same bacteria Janet had. The patient had lived three years. The operation was riskier and more complicated and more expensive than the usual cadaveric transplant, and so it was done only about a dozen times a year in America, but some recipients were still alive and doing well seven years after they’d received the new lobes.
There were six or eight more paragraphs, having to do with complications and problems, but I did not want to know about that then. “My mother mentioned this,” I told Gerard.
“Your mother mentions it,” he said over my shoulder, in the tone of voice he reserved for the courts and the IRS and the big multilingual corporations. “She’s got sixty-three brain cells left, she mentions it. Nobody else says a word.”
Before he was finished with that sentence, I was offline and on the phone to the hospital, asking for Doctor Ouajiballah. But it was one o’clock in the morning. Doctor Ouajiballah, the nurse on duty told me, would not start rounds again until eight.
When I hung up, Gerard said, “I’ll doan.”
“What?”
“I’ll doan. You need a donor, I’ll doan. I’ll give her one of my lobes.”
“You wouldn’t be able to race anymore.”
“Get your priorities straight,” he said. “It would be a way of getting inside her body without actually betraying my best friend. You gonna compare bike racing with that, Colonel?”
“No.”
“Good. You’re still in the general vicinity of sane, then. Go home and let me sleep.”
I DROVE HOME and went to bed for a while and then got up and put my clothes back on. I went into the painting room and walked in circles. I looked at the unfinished paintings in one of my racks, paced some more, stood at the window. Usually if I leave a canvas alone for a month or two, I come back to it with a fresh eye. I see everything that’s wrong and I think I see how to try to make it right. It’s something like looking back on your own life and being able to change part of it-things you blurted out, people you should have been kinder to, or blunter with-except that your life is cut in stone and your painting mistakes are only blots of colored oil pressed onto linen. Those patches of color show the deep patterns of your mind, though, which is why it seems so important to get them exactly right.
The painting of Janet in her sea-green pajamas was sitting in one of the racks I’d built. When I took it out and set it up on the easel I could see how little I had known her when I did it. She looked smart and pretty, when in fact she was smart and pretty and almost unbelievably brave. Every morning when I walked into her room at the hospital I could see that bravery in her because all through the night she had been a step or two this side of suffocation. Every day she coughed up and spit out as much as a quart of green and bloody mucus-not pleasant to think about, excuse me. But she did that, lived that. Not once, not just one awful time, but night after night. Not one sip of GoLYTELY, but glass after glass. Not one annual invasive procedure, but dozens of them-bronchoscopies, enemas, throat cultures, sinus irrigations, shunts, IVs, pinpricks, blood tests, intestinal surgeries-from the time she was old enough to hold her head up without help. And she woke up day after day and went about her life, trying to be pleasant, wanting to be normal, working, cleaning her apartment, facing everything she had to face without making a big fuss about it. There was no way to measure bravery like that. There were no medals given for it. Instead of calling you a hero and making a fuss over you on TV or in the magazines, people heard the wet cough and shot you nasty looks, moved away from you in subway cars, made remarks in movie theaters. Natural enough from their point of view, maybe. But a kind of second-degree torture for Janet. I had not understood all that when I tried to put her on a canvas.
So I mixed white and red and brown in different amounts on different places on my glass-topped table until I had a shade of skin that seemed right, then I wiped almost all the paint from the brush and ran the tip of the bristles diagonally in under her cheekbones, one stroke each side. I cut a sixteenth of an inch from her smile, one stroke each side. Each of her irises got one more spark of light. I tried to make it so you could see the tiny hairs on the veins on the backs of her elegant hands, and I made her hair shinier than it had been in months. In all, I put maybe ten touches of paint on the canvas.
And then, just before going to bed, I ran some lighter gray here and there into the background, because the first time around I had made it one shade too dark.
IN THE MORNING I brought Janet flowers with the raspberry muffin, but I did not say anything about what I’d seen on the computer the night before. It was not easy to do that, and I was not sure it was the right thing to do. But hope is an almost-tame lion-gorgeous to look at and capable of turning on you in a nanosecond. According to the nurses on duty, she’d had a miserable night and couldn’t eat or talk, and I didn’t want anything else that could hurt her to be in the room then. I stood or sat by the bed and held her long fingers. I pulled the blanket up an inch higher on her chest. I wiped away the saliva that dribbled down her chin. A little bit after eight o’clock she moaned and slowly woke up. We made eye contact, she squeezed my hand, and I almost told her. There was just about nothing left of her-the beating heart, a few weak puffs of air, the movement of her eyes, enough strength to say, “Hi, Joe Date,” in a voice that was like three scratches from a broken violin. I opened the get-well cards from her cousins and coworkers, one from the governor himself. I read them to her and turned them so she could see what people had written: how much they missed her and were praying for her; how they knew everything would be fine. When I couldn’t stand to be there anymore, I kissed her eyelids, said I would be back that night, and went out of the room as if I were only headed off to work.
Doctor Ouajiballah weighed maybe a hundred and forty pounds. I nearly knocked him flat going fast around a corner of the hospital corridor, looking for him. I didn’t even say I was sorry, or good morning. I said, “Living lobar transplant.”
He lifted his coffee-brown eyes to me and said, in his soft, lilting, Pacific Island voice, “Yes?”
“Why didn’t anyone tell us about a living lobar transplant?”
“I assumed Doctor Wilbraham had done so.”
“He didn’t.”
“I assumed you knew it was one option.”
“We didn’t. Is it an option?”
He pinched his lips together and tilted his head sideways. “It’s not commonly done, sir. You would need two donors.”
“We have them.”
“They would have to match blood type or be O-positive.”
“I’m O-positive.”
“The other donor would have to be. And be of a certain size. Each lobe would have to be large enough to take up much of the space left by the removal of a whole adult lung. The body abhors a vacuum, sir.”
“He’s an inch shorter than me. He’s a champion bicycle racer.”
“You cannot be a smoker, or an asthmatic. You will have to be in excellent cardiovascular condition. The psychological motivation must be appropriate.”
I looked at him.
“There are many factors,” he added weakly.
I said, “The insurance company won’t pay for it, am I right?”
He pinched the skin over his Adam’s apple and shifted his eyes to the back of a passing nurse.
“Will they pay for something like that or not, at this point?”
“It’s a quarter of a million dollars, at a minimum.”
“Will they, or not?”
“They do not like to, not in general. In the case of the types of bacteria Janet harbors-one bacterium in particular-the data on survival after such a procedure is not encouraging. Many hospitals will not do it.”
“Has this hospital ever done it?”
“Yes.”
“On somebody with that bacterium?”
“Yes. In fact, twice that I am aware of.”
“And the people lived?”
“Yes, at first. One is still alive.”
“Will you recommend it for Janet, officially, in writing?”
“Many surgeons will not do it.”
“Is there a surgeon here who does it?”
“There was. The very finest surgeon. He retired three weeks ago, unfortunately. If he were here I would recommend it. But, if we were to do it now, without him, we would have to go to New York. If the donors are qualified. If the insurance company will pay. If patient is strong enough to endure traveling, and to survive the procedure itself.”
There was a bustle of traffic in the hallway. Someone rolled an empty gurney past us and we moved aside. A doctor came hurrying in the opposite direction and nodded at Ouajiballah. He nodded back at her.
“I want one thing from you,” I said, when no one could hear. “I want the home address of the surgeon.”
“His name is Leicus Vaskis. His address, home address, is in Dover, Massachusetts, I believe. I could perhaps find it for you, though it would be highly irregular for me to give that information out.”
“This seems like a good time for highly irregular, don’t you think?”
He looked at me. He raised and lowered his eyebrows.
“I want your word that if he agrees to do it, you’ll recommend that the insurance company pay for it.”
He raised his eyebrows a second time. It was some kind of island code for yes. He said, “If all other factors are in order, I would surely consider doing that.”
“Why didn’t you consider doing it before?”
“Because the chances of success at this point are exceedingly slim, sir. Because I wasn’t her doctor. Because it should rightly have been tried two weeks ago if we were going to try it.”
“How much time do we have before…before it would be too late to try?”
“At the minimum, two days. At the maximum, I would guess, ten days.”
I asked il dottore another handful of questions, yanking the information out of him, short melodies of polite and beautifully cadenced speech, and then I thanked him three times and nearly crushed his hand in mine, and, instead of waiting for the elevator, I ran down the four flights of stairs.
From a pay phone in the lobby I called Gerard’s cell. I knew he would be at the job site, and I guessed he’d be putting hardware on the louvered bifold doors in the professor’s new bedroom. Every couple of weeks he changed the way he answered his phone: sometimes it would be a quote from Anna Akhmatova, or a scrap of T. S. Eliot; because he had a fondness for Chinese women, he’d ask a waiter at a Chinese restaurant how to say, “I know you love me,” in Mandarin, and then practice it until he believed he’d gotten it right. Anything but a simple “hello.” It was funny sometimes; other times it made you crazy.
“Nixon residence. Gerard the plumber,” he said when he picked up.
“Gerard.”
“Speaking.”
“I talked to Ouajiballah, and it’s a possibility.”
“That’s what we like to hear!” he said. “What’s Janet’s blood type?”
“O-positive, like me.”
“I can’t doan, then. I’m AB-negative. I stayed up until three last night doing research.”
“Alright.” I kicked the base of the telephone, hard. “Alright, we’ll find somebody. Do you know how to get to Dover?”
“Of course. I go there regularly. My bookie lives there.”
“Forget the closet hardware for now. And forget the damn jokes, will you please? Meet me at my place at nine-fifteen.”
“Yes, Mister Liddy,” he said, and hung up.
I swung by Doctor Ouajiballah’s office, which was in a building next to the hospital. When I told his secretary my name, she handed me a manila envelope, which I opened in the hallway. Inside was a piece of paper with the logo of a pharmaceuticals company on it and beneath the logo: “1339 Madison Road.”
AT THAT POINT in my painting career, I’d had three solo shows, all at the same small gallery between Newbury and Boylston Streets. In order to get my paintings there-physically move them there, I mean-I’d built a wooden box that just fit between the wheel bays in the bed of the pickup, and a balsa-wood rack (the same light, strong wood that racing shells used to be made from) that could be slid neatly into the box. I’d wrap the canvases loosely in plastic and bubble wrap and slide them into the rack so they were standing up on one edge. A piece of quarter-inch-thick red rubber glued to the top of the box kept the rain and snow out.
I screeched up in front of the apartment and double-parked there, flashers on. Gerard was waiting. He and I cleaned some wood scraps and a sawhorse out of the bed and threw them on the frozen mini-lawn. We carried the rubber-topped box down from my apartment and bolted it in place with freezing fingertips. I ran back up, checked the portrait of Janet to make sure the new paint had dried, then wrapped it as if I were taking it to the gallery to be shown. I carried the painting, Gerard carried the rack. We slid everything into place in the box in the truck bed, closed and bolted the box, slammed the tailgate, and headed off.
“Sorry about the blood type,” Gerard said, when we were on our way.
“We’ll find somebody.”
“What about your brother?”
“My brother smokes.”
“We’ll broadcast an appeal. I dated a woman at WCVB, she’ll-”
“The hospital won’t allow any publicity.”
“Screw the hospital. What can they do?”
“They’ll refuse to do the operation. Ouajiballah told me. They don’t want some shithead coming in and saying he’ll be more than happy to give a lobe of his lung…for fifty thousand bucks or something.”
“Or her firstborn.”
“Right. Nice.”
“Sorry.”
“The first step is getting this guy to agree to do it. Ouajiballah says he’s an odd duck. He’d never even ever speak a single word to the person he put the lungs into, never even see them when they were conscious. He refused to talk to the press. He’d just come into the hospital in a kind of zone, go into the operating room, stand there for six hours, do something that about ten other people on earth can do, and go home.”
“A psycho.”
“Right. Psycho-genius.”
“I can relate. Why the painting?”
“He retired three weeks ago. The painting is the best bribe I could think of on short notice.”
“Ah,” Gerard said. “Something for the man who has everything.”
I AM A VERY CALM PERSON. I inherited that from both sides of the family. It wasn’t unusual for my mother or father to receive an urgent phone call at home, a nurse saying a patient had taken a sudden turn for the worse, or a client panicking about oil futures. Under my parents I’d served a kind of apprenticeship of calm.
But as we drove out of Boston into the picket-fence suburbs, I could feel a sort of salty panic rising like a tide in the cab of the truck. The sky was a woolly gray and the air outside cold and hard as metal. I had a feeling that Janet was going to die on that day. I had given Amelia the number of Gerard’s cell phone, and I kept expecting it to ring, and to have Gerard hand it to me across the seat, and to hear Amelia’s voice on the line, shaking with terror.
But the phone didn’t ring. The premonition about Janet built up in me. The nice houses we drove past turned into nicer houses, until, by the time we crossed the Dover line, “house” wasn’t even the right word anymore.
We could not find a single restaurant or public building in Dover. Finally we saw a library, and stopped there to ask how to get to Madison Road. Even after we found Madison Road, we had to drive the entire length of it-about two miles-three times before we could be sure which long, unmarked driveway corresponded to the address Ouajiballah had given me.
“And I thought you grew up in a fancy neighborhood,” Gerard said.
We turned in between two shoulder-high fieldstone pillars with stone lions sitting regally on top. The driveway was hard-packed gray gravel, and at first, to either side, we saw only hardwood trees with red brambles on the lower tier, the bare cold branches and trunks running the whole spectrum of grays and blacks and browns. A quarter-mile in, the terrain to the left of us opened into pastureland with white rail fencing enclosing it, and what might have been mistaken for a hotel-gray-shingled, many-windowed, three-floored-in the distance. A Thoroughbred horse cantered riderless toward the house, as if hurrying to announce our arrival.
“Wise of you to drop out of med school,” Gerard said.
But I had grown up around doctors. Doctors didn’t live like this.
Gravel crackled under the truck tires. When we reached a high spot in the driveway, about halfway between the street and the house, I could see two people jogging in front of us, climbing a long, gentle slope that crested just ahead of them and then flattened as it approached the front door. A few more seconds and I could tell that the runners were a man and a woman. They were dressed in blue sweat suits, the woman’s long straight black hair floating up and then bouncing down against her back, the man wearing a dark wool winter cap.
They were running fairly hard. They must have heard the truck wheels on the gravel because they moved to their left when we approached. As we passed I gave them as much room as I could, and slowed down and lifted my left forearm in a casual greeting, without looking at them. The way any deliveryman would.
We pulled up just beyond the path to the front steps, and got out. The man and the woman were probably seventy-five feet behind us, sprinting now, we could hear their running shoes scuffing and slapping the dirt, and then the sound of labored breathing.
I lowered the tailgate. Gerard and I started to loosen the wing nuts at the four corners of the box, but it was slow going in the cold, and by the time we had the wooden cover off and had set it in the pickup bed, the runners had reached their finish line-which seemed to be about even with the back end of the truck-and were trotting in loose circles and breathing hard, then walking with hands on hips. Ducking beneath the ladder rack, we tugged the bubble-wrapped painting out of its box, and balanced it on the tailgate. Gerard hopped down, then held it steady while I hopped down. When we started to loosen the outer covering of bubble wrap, I could not keep myself from glancing at the man and the woman again. The doctor was lanky and wide-shouldered, sharp-featured, sixtyish, breath spewing out of him in big clouds. I had told myself that I’d be able to guess our odds as soon as I had a good look at his face, but I’d been wrong about that. My hands were working the masking tape, and I didn’t want eye contact yet, and just as I started to glance away the woman turned toward me, breathing hard, and I saw in that second that she was young and healthy-looking and very beautiful. A little squirt of bitterness went through my mind-irrational, idiotic. I looked away.
We let the bubble wrap and the plastic sheeting fall to the ground and rested the bottom edge of the frame on it, facing us. It wasn’t exactly the way real delivery people would have done it. By that point the man and the woman were moving toward us, not breathing as hard as they had been. I realized I had not shaved that morning. Try as he did, Gerard could never completely erase a certain tough-guy pentimento from his face-the heavy eyebrows, the rough mouth and chin-and it occurred to me that it would not take any great leap of imagination for the doctor and his girlfriend to see us as thieves. Or worse.
The doctor was two inches taller than me, his eyes steady, an unnaturally pale blue, not particularly friendly.
I made my face pleasant and unthreatening. “Doctor Vaskis?”
He nodded curtly. He was not happy to see us. The gorgeous woman-thirty years his junior-had come up close to him and now pulled a foot up behind her, stretching her quadriceps and holding his elbow with her other hand for balance.
“We have a gift delivery for you,” I said, and though, by then, my voice was starting to wobble like the voice of an unpracticed liar, the word “gift” caught them. Everyone likes to be given a gift. The woman tilted her head slightly, as if she might change her angle of vision and see through the back of the canvas, and, in spite of himself it seemed, Doctor Vaskis let his features soften in expectation, too, the way you do on the morning of your birthday when someone is about to give you something and you want to assure them you like it. I had more or less prepared things to that point, and then decided I would just ad-lib. But no ad-lib was coming to me. The Thoroughbred had trotted up to the end of the pasture nearest us, and was snorting and fuffing his lips over the top rail, and when he was finished, a bad, cold silence started to creep up around us.
“We’re the delivery guys from Entwhistle Fine Arts,” Gerard ad-libbed.
The doctor and the woman looked at each other, and then at me. I took a breath, as if I had something else to say, but I didn’t, and the doctor seemed to sense then that things were not what they seemed. His face turned hard in the way of people with money or power when they are afraid. Another second and he would have thrown us off the property, or taken out his cell phone and called the Dover police, who would not have been kind to us. I saw it. Gerard saw it, too, and turned the painting around to face them. The woman studied the canvas, then bent her lips in between her teeth. She looked up at me, and then at the doctor.
“Who is it?”
“Janet Rossi,” I said. “She has cystic fibrosis and maybe a week to live.”
The woman moved her eyes back to the canvas. The doctor’s hard gaze flicked across it for a second, and then came to rest on me. I knew I could have been wrong, but it seemed to me then that, if you could judge by the good doctor’s expression at that moment, he was not a warm man. An exquisite mechanic, brave maybe; maybe as disciplined as the gods. Surely he had done more good for the world than a million people like me, but it was as if, in order to do what he did, he’d had to guard himself against the softening effects of sorrow and failure, against his own humanity, his own death. There’s a certain price you pay for that, and I thought I could read that price in the hard line of his lips.
“How did you get this address?”
“I hired a private detective,” I ad-libbed. “The hospital wouldn’t give it out. All the hospital would say is that there is one chance for her-a living lobar transplant-and there is one surgeon in New England who can do the operation.”
“She has cepacia?”
“Yes.” I watched him. “As of yesterday afternoon she’s tenth on the list for a cadaveric, she won’t come close to living long enough to get one.”
“I’m retired,” he said. “Sorry.”
“The only other surgeon who could do it is in New York. Janet won’t survive a trip to New York.” I looked at the woman, but if there was any well of sympathy in her, she wasn’t letting me near the pump. She avoided my eyes, studied the painting for another little while, and then she said, “I’m going in to shower, Leski. It’s nice, though, isn’t it?” He nodded. She did not look at us, and walked up the path and up the stairs and through the front door.
“I know you’re retired. And I know there’ll always be one more and one more you could do, but this woman has been fighting her whole life. From about the age of six weeks she’s been through things that most people-”
“I know the disease, thank you.”
“I know you know it, but-”
“You two are the potential donors, I suppose.”
Gerard said, “Yes.”
“Blood relatives?”
“Friends. A fiancé and a friend.”
“You’re the fiancé?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s my painting. I paint. I’m a painter. We want to have children. Adopt. Look, I’m sorry we came to your house. We’re not criminals and we’re not crazy, and you can keep the painting either way, yes or no, because of what you’ve done for other…you know…I swear to God you’ll never see either of us again.”
He just watched me from beneath the dark wool hat, blue eyes close-set beside a sharp nose. He said, “The procedure ties up three operating rooms, three teams of surgeons at two different hospitals. It puts at risk the lives of two healthy individuals. It costs between a quarter of a million and a million dollars, not counting the follow-up care. She’ll have to take antirejection drugs for the rest of her life and the potential side effects from those drugs are manifold-renal failure, tremors, bruising, digestive troubles, weight gain, bone loss, diabetes, risk of opportunistic infection.”
“I know all that,” I said.
“And I suppose you also know the survival rate for cepacia patients?”
“Forty percent are alive after two years,” Gerard said. “But the data sample is small.”
“And do you know how fondly the insurance companies look upon those kind of numbers?”
“Your survival rates are better,” Gerard said.
“How do you know?”
“I did some research.”
I looked at Gerard then. Every drop of his usual abrasive and needy goofiness had disappeared. He was like a fact, standing there, a challenge incarnate. He wasn’t blinking.
“Doctor Ouajiballah said he’d go to bat with the insurance company if you’re the surgeon,” I put in.
“Ouajiballah said that?”
“Gave me his word.”
“Gave you this address, too, if I’m not mistaken?”
“Yes.”
He smirked. His horse nickered. “No private detective, then?”
“No.”
“Any other falsehoods involved here?”
“None. Except I’m Entwhistle Fine Arts.”
He looked out past the horse to the expanse of frozen pasture. He should have been chilled by then, standing there in the cold air after a hard run, but there was an odd stillness about him. You couldn’t imagine him being chilled, or afraid, or making a mistake, or admitting to having made a mistake. Exactly the kind of guy you wanted if you or someone you loved were about to be cut open. For probably a full thirty seconds he didn’t speak to us or move, and then, without looking at us, he said, “I’ll take the painting-my wife liked it-and I’ll call you within twenty-four hours with an answer.”
“Fine,” I said, and he cut me off when I started to thank him.
“I will tell you I’m leaning toward no.”
“Why?” Gerard said.
The doctor turned his head and sent Gerard a look that was lined with ugliness, and I could see the pride in his pale eyes as clearly as if it had slithered up his spine and out through the front of his pupils.
“Oops, sorry,” Gerard said, not very sincerely. I saw something in my friend then, some old bad energy from the streets where he had been brought up. I did not know if the doctor could see it. “We’re sure you have your reasons. Look, let me carry this into the house for you while Jake closes up the box and cleans up this mess. And then you’ll never see either of us again unless you decide to cut us open.”
“I wouldn’t cut you open,” the doctor said. “Someone else does that. I cut her open.”
That’s comforting, I almost said. In fact, I came within an absolute whisker of saying it, because I had just given away a painting that meant everything to me, and was going to get nothing in return, and because, by then, I felt I was in the presence of a thin slice of something almost hideous between two pieces of remarkable talent. Gerard felt it, too, I knew that. We had our own proud serpents pressing out through our eyeballs. I thought of Janet pursing her lips. I said, “Again, our apologies. I know we’ve intruded and I appreciate it that you’re even willing to think it over. My mother was a doctor-Judith Entwhistle-and I know she would have been pissed as hell if the friends of a patient ever came driving up to her house asking for special care.”
“I appreciate it, too,” Gerard said, but there was a note of disgust in his voice. He was hoisting the painting over his head, just pressing in against the outside edges with the palms of his hands, not a fingerprint anywhere, showing off his upper-body strength. He walked up the path that way, two steps ahead of the good doctor.
I picked up the bubble wrap and plastic sheeting and jammed it into my homemade crate. Threw in two of the wing nuts and bolts and twisted the other two in place. I sat in the truck with the heater on and looked at the horse in the pasture-creature of incredible grace. I had a few sketches of her at home, photographs. I could try to make another painting, though there is a difference, painting someone who is right there in front of you, alive.
Gerard stayed inside the mansion for eight or ten minutes-giving detailed hanging instructions, I guessed. At last, I heard his boots on the gravel, then the passenger door closing. I put the truck in gear and we rattled down the long driveway, onto Madison Road, back in the direction we had come, past the library, past mansion row, and then down into the upper class.
“I see sufficient reason for hope, Colonel,” he said.
“Not a prayer.”
“I worked him a little.”
“Tell me you didn’t talk to him about Giselle.”
Gerard shook his head. He never mentioned Giselle’s name, under any circumstances. “I complimented his horse,” he said. “You should have seen his eyes light up. Then I made my face ugly-you know how I do, you know how much work it takes-and I asked him if he remembered that fabulous scene from The Godfather, Part One. The horse’s bloody head under the sheets. His wife was watching, fresh from her shower. I said it in a happy voice, my crazy happy voice. I made my eyes just the tiniest bit crazy, like it was just a little goofy joke.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem.”
“We’ll end up in jail.”
WHEN WE WERE BACK in the busyness of downtown Boston, Gerard turned serious, which happens to him about once every lunar cycle. I always know when this turning-serious is coming because he has a certain way of tapping his left work boot in a slow, steady rhythm. These are the kinds of things you learn about people when you build houses with them for a lot of years, smash fingers with them, drop $650 replacement windows when they are holding the other side, find some ingenious way of making up for an architect’s oversight after you’ve spent an hour cursing, put in a very hard week of hammering and then go out someplace and have a cranberry juice with a twist of lime and tell lame jokes.
“You know,” he said, in what I think of as his “normal” voice, “I like what we do pretty well, I enjoy it. But I think if I ever come into a lot of money someday-I don’t know how that could ever happen; maybe we’ll buy an old triple-decker someplace and fix it up and sell it for a huge profit-then what I want to do is open a nightclub for crippled and deformed people. A place where they can go and dance and listen to music and have a drink and not worry about anyone looking at them, you know? I’ve had this dream since college. Handsome people, pretty people, people who can walk right-we wouldn’t let them in the door. Just men and women in wheelchairs, legless people, spastics, hunchbacks. I mean it. That’s my real dream, if you want to know.”
“It’s a good dream,” I said. We drove a little ways. I thought about his dream. I said, “You don’t have your girls this weekend, am I right?”
“The colonel is correct.”
THAT AFTERNOON I called my apartment from the job site every half hour. Gerard and I were within about one full workday of finishing Jacqueline’s addition, and when she came home from her afternoon class and saw how close we were, she went floating through the rooms with her arms held out like the wings of a gliding falcon. It was our turn to watch and smile. She stood at different windows, she paced off part of the sunny second-floor room where her bed would be, opening and closing a beautiful little cherry cabinet Gerard had fashioned for a corner of her new bathroom. It had been a nice project. Besides building the two stories of new rooms, we’d sort of reached into the adjacent part of the old structure and cleaned up some of the messy work there from a hundred years ago-taken out old rough-sawn, weird-dimension studs and bulging lath and plaster and replaced them with new spruce two-by-fours and Sheetrock, leveled the old floors in two rooms so they matched up evenly with the new ones, improved the insulation in the part of the wall cavity we could get to. Everything had come out smoothly, almost perfectly. But I had the cold understanding then, watching her enjoy our work, that I would always think of Janet when I drove past this place.
That afternoon I hung two interior doors and put the lock-set assemblies in-I remember it very well. Hanging doors is not a simple job, the tolerances are small. My mind would stay on the work in my hands for a few seconds at a time, then swing away. I had to take one of the doors down and put it back up again four times before I got it right. Gerard did not make one joke.
When I came home at the end of the day, there was one message on the machine-Jeremy Steams, who owned the gallery where I showed my paintings. He did not know anything about Janet. He was calling to tell me that he was using one of my paintings in a half-page ad in Art in America, something he’d been promising he’d do for the past two and a half years. When I called him back, I tried to sound pleased.
I showered and changed and drove across town to the hospital. Janet lay on her side, raking in one shallow breath after another, occasionally lifting the oxygen mask to ask for water, for help turning onto her other side, or for her mother or me to hold the metal pan up to her mouth so she could spit. I wanted in a terrible way to tell her about our trip to Dover. Every now and then she would make eye contact with me or with her mother and it tore through me and I kept wrestling with myself about whether it was better or worse to give her hope. I pictured myself telling her, and then Vaskis saying no, and then having to tell her he had said no, or having to tell her he’d said yes but we couldn’t find a second donor.
On the way home, I thought I should have done it, though, at least should have let her know we were trying everything we could try, that there was still some last little glimmer.
At a specialty shop on Harvard Avenue, I bought a bottle of white Argiolas and some bread and cheese and two Granny Smith apples. I went home and made up a plate and poured a glass and sat in the kitchen, not eating and not drinking, looking at the telephone. Gerard had promised not to call. Janet’s mother wouldn’t call unless it was an emergency. I took a sip of wine, carried the glass with me into the painting room, and sat on the sofa there. I got back up and paced, drank a little bit, put the food away when it was clear I wasn’t going to be eating any of it. I looked out different windows, poured a little more wine. Hours passed this way. At quarter after midnight, because I knew I would not be able to sleep, and knew I couldn’t paint, and knew it was too late for any good news, I wrote Ellory another note telling him what was going on, and when that was done I called my sister. She answered on the third ring.
“Lizbeth, it’s Jake.”
“Jake who?” she said, in a voice just absolutely dripping.
“Your brother.”
“Mum alright?”
“She’s the same. She asks for you every time I see her.”
Lizbeth paused. I thought she might be turning down her TV or something, or talking to a client, and then she said, “Here comes the guilt trip, sailing across the sand-shit desert. Mum asking for me. You visiting, me not visiting. Same old sand-shit, snake-talk Jakie.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Some of us have the money to fly, you know, and some of us just don’t.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, really.”
“Right. My good-boy, snake-talk brother.”
“Look, if you want to come back to see her, I’ll send you a ticket.”
“Send me the money and let me buy my own ticket. I can get a deal here. I have friends who work in the airlines.”
“I’ll send a ticket tomorrow if you want. I’m not sending money.”
As soon as those last four words were out of my mouth, my sister started to yell, a quick crescendo about how nothing mattered to me but money, and how all I thought about was money, and how she was sick and tired of being the only daughter and being treated like a baby because of that, and how hard she worked, and how easy I’d always had it, and just on and on and on. The four words had been a mortar round, and the mortar round had blasted a hole in the wall of a dam, and now a whole lake of bitterness was pouring out.
“Lizbeth,” I said, three or four times, but the bitterness drowned me out. It was not exactly a new experience for me. My sister had been systematically destroying herself for a decade by then, and over the course of that decade I had sent money, and self-help books, and humorous cards, and I’d made well-meaning suggestions, and talked to friends of mine who were therapists, and passed on their advice, and stayed up half the night worrying about her, and fielded unpleasant phone calls from bail bondsmen, bikers, bookmakers, and casino security types. None of it had changed the trajectory of her fiery downward arc by so much as a fraction of a degree.
I knew, once she started using the word “coward,” that we were close to the end, so I did my best then to try to listen beyond the words and not have bad thoughts toward her. I tried to match the notes in her voice to the notes that had been there when she was a young girl, a happy soul, joy to be around. It didn’t work.
“You’re a coward and you’ve always been a coward and you call up like the coward you are and you should be ashamed of yourself for the way you treat me…”
And so on for another minute or two, top volume, before she slammed the telephone down in her sad little apartment in Reno, and the dial tone droned across the lower forty-eight.
I turned out the lights and lay in bed, looking at the shapes the shadows made against the wash of street light on the ceiling, listening to the muted sounds-car engines, horns, conga drums from downstairs. There was no real possibility of going to sleep, I knew that, but I held out some hope for twenty minutes or so, and then sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, thinking I would go to Betty’s for a doughnut and some company, or go back to the hospital. The phone rang. I let it ring twice. Sometimes, if Lizbeth was high enough or angry enough, she would decide after stewing for a while that I had hung up on her and she’d call back with more shouting. At which point I usually pulled the phone cord out of the wall.
I answered on the third ring and heard an unfamiliar woman’s voice saying my name. The bedside clock read 12:56. I thought it was the hospital calling. I was already moving toward my shoes. But the woman said: “I’m Louise. Doctor Vaskis’s wife. Calling unconscionably late. He says he’ll do it Monday morning if you and your friend pass all the tests you have to pass. He said to tell you he’ll call the other doctor, what was his name-”
“Ouajiballah.”
“Yes. He’ll call him in the morning.”
“What’s today?” I said.
She laughed a carefree laugh. “As of about fifty minutes ago, Friday.”
“Tell him for me that…tell him I can’t find the words to thank him.”
“I softened him up,” she said. “So you can thank me, too. He didn’t really want to retire, you know. He’s been a little bit grumpy since he decided to. That was his whole life, saving people. It’s not something you just give up.”
“No…I imagine…Thank you. Thanks…I-”
“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.
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.
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 to 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 after 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.
I tried to imagine I was speaking directly to that need and not to him. “Two minutes and you’ll never see me again,” I said.
The secretary was looking up at him like a puppy. For her benefit, perhaps, he struck the posture of an unafraid man, a big man. But what was hard for him was that, inside, he was tiny-not in the good way we’d felt after rowing hard, but in a frightened way, a sad, self-pitying, little-boy way-and he knew I knew it. He motioned me into the office with a sideways swing of his head.
Near his small desk was an oval conference table. He took his place at the head of it. There was a kind of steady pulse of power in the high-ceilinged room, with the portraits on the walls, the limp flags held up by spear-topped poles, the small couch and table with the pictures of his girls. I sat down across from him. He swiveled back and forth once and then looked at me over the tips of his fingers.
“Janet has three or four days to live,” I said. “At the outside.”
“I’m extremely pained to hear that. We sent cards, all of us. We call every day. We’d visit if we were allowed.”
“She appreciates it. Her mother said to thank you. But she’s tenth on the transplant list. She won’t live to be ninth.”
He kept his fingertips together, tapped them once. “If you’ve come here to ask me to put her at the top of the list, that’s something I simply cannot do.”
“I’m not asking that. The one thing that could save her life is something called a living lobar transplant. She needs two people to give up one lobe of a lung each. The donors have to be taller than five foot ten, nonsmokers, in good shape. We have one so far-”
“You?”
“Yes. We have probably the best transplant surgeon in the country set to operate on her first thing Monday morning. Leicus Vaskis. The insurance is all approved.”
“I know Vaskis,” the governor said. He blinked twice. He lowered his forearms so that his hands hung down over the ends of the chair. He said, “And?”
“And Janet asked me to ask you to be the other donor.”
He closed his eyes and let out a quiet, one-note laugh.
“No donor has ever died in surgery. You’ll lose some of your lung capacity, but won’t really notice it very much in the course of any ordinary day. You’ll-”
“I have a state to run,” he said.
I looked at him when he said that, really looked at him. I had an urge to go over to one of the windows and open it and throw all the chairs out, including the one he was sitting in. “You’d be out of commission three days,” I said. “The lieutenant governor runs the state for longer than that when you’re on vacation. You’d be in the hospital two weeks, tops.”
“I understand that,” he said. “And under different circumstances…” He fluttered one hand at the windows. “Under different circumstances I’d oblige you.”
“It’s not me you’d be obliging. It’s her.”
He looked out the window for a little while. I thought we were finished, but then he swung his head around so that he was facing me dead-on and spoke in a quiet, violent voice, all the politician stripped away so that, even in his suit and behind the big table he was not the governor then: “You couldn’t begin to know what I felt for her. You couldn’t begin to guess what was between us. I was going to marry her,” he said, and it occurred to me then, in a hideous flash, that I was looking at myself in a terrible dream, talking to Brian, about Giselle. “I didn’t care what it cost me, with my children or with anyone else. You couldn’t begin to know what it was like to see her day after day after day and not touch her, not talk to her except about business, to feel her drifting away from me.”
By then the trembling I’d had in my legs earlier, talking to him on the cell phone, had started again, and moved into my arms and hands. It occurred to me that maybe Janet had a residue of love for the governor, some secret feeling she hadn’t wanted me to know about. In my mind I had been making him out to be pure ego. Naturally, it was my own ego, my own anger, my own jealousy, my own smallness, that had been doing that.
I said, “She asked me to ask you if you’d do it. She could barely speak. She said your name.”
He slammed one fist down on the wood. “I have a state to run!” he yelled.
I said, “Fine.”
His face was shaking. Jealousy funhouse mirrors.
I said, “I asked you to give me two minutes and that’s about two minutes. My name is John Entwhistle. In case you change your mind, I’m in the phone book in Boston. Or you could just be at the Mass General Hospital pulmonary lab at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. For testing, you know.”
I stood up. He was breathing hard. I thought, for one second, that if I made the wrong kind of move or said the wrong kind of thing, he was going to charge at me, and we were going to end up wrestling around on the floor again. I wanted him to do that. I waited two seconds, hoping, then I made a quick turn toward the door, so quick I accidentally bumped my thigh on the arm of the chair. And then I turned back to him and said, with almost no bitterness, “I’ll tell Janet you sent your best. I’ll tell her you said you’ll be praying for her.”
The governor did not stand up.
At the door I turned around again. “I was envisioning the headlines, though, you know? GOVERNOR DONATES PART OF LUNG, SAVES STAFFER’S LIFE. A person could go a long way on publicity like that.”
He looked as if he would spit. I closed the door quietly, smiled a trembling crazy smile at the secretary, and went down the blurred sets of stairs and out into the cold blackness. I walked and walked along Beacon Street. At some point I stopped on a corner, took Janet’s phone out of my pocket, and called my apartment like a robot-no messages-and then Gerard-no volunteers.
Eventually, I went back to the hospital. But I couldn’t bring myself to go up to Janet’s room, so I sat in the cafeteria sipping bad coffee and watching the nurses and doctors and orderlies on their breaks. I went and sat in the dimly lit chapel on the first floor, a perfectly nondenominational, quasi-religious place with pews and stained glass. I put my face in my hands. For a long time after Giselle died I had been angry at God, and at a lot of other things. And then one day it occurred to me that it was anger that had killed her and everyone else who’d died on that day, and I started trying to imagine my way backwards in time to where that anger had come from, a crazy-making, evil, righteous anger. And then I started to notice, firsthand, that anger was almost always righteous and crazy-making. All you had to do was turn on the radio talk shows and you could hear that plainly enough, hear the pot being stirred and heated. All you had to do was yell at somebody in traffic and you could see it in yourself. Anger began to seem wrong to me, almost always wrong, and I began to think it might be my problem, not God’s. So I talked to Ellory about it. Ellory said, “You always have a choice,” which made sense, and was helpful.
I tried not to be angry. I tried to pray.
Maker of cells, I said. That amount of suffering has to count for something. I’m not trying to tell you what to do or how things should be set up. I just believe that that amount of suffering has to count for something, I just believe that. It can’t be just random. If it’s just random, and people suffer like that, then count me out, I don’t want another second of this. I’m going to go and jump-
Someone in one of the other pews was weeping quietly. I stopped trying to pray and just sat there for a while, then I left the chapel and took the elevator upstairs, where the nurses all knew me, and knew what was happening to Janet. One nurse in particular-a very large, very dark-faced woman named Bethany-was such a kind, sweet soul, and cared for Janet so tenderly and patiently, that I had an urge to ask her, as I walked past, who she prayed to, how she put the words together.
I went into Janet’s room, all set to lie to her and tell her Valvoline was considering it-when I knew he wasn’t. But she was sleeping, her face turned sideways on the pillow, her mother asleep, too, in the chair beside the bed. Amelia woke up and lifted her tired eyes to me, all the hope in the world there.
“No news yet,” I said. “Gerard’s calling everyone we know.”
“My sister is, too.”
“We’ll find somebody, don’t worry.”
Doctor Ouajiballah came by on his last rounds and checked the digital readouts on the various machines near Janet’s bed. Pulse. Blood pressure. Oxygen level. Janet’s mother gazed at him as if he’d been holding out on us, and was now going to raise her daughter up with a sweep of his hand. But he had nothing to say to Janet’s mother.
I followed him out into the hall, and when he started to tell me what to expect in the way of testing the next day, I tried to listen carefully but couldn’t.
“There’s a problem,” I said, when he finished. “Right now we have only one donor.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Something like a smile wavered along his thin lips. He was looking for a punch line, and when none was forthcoming he said, “You told Doctor Vaskis you had two donors, sir.”
“I had to tell him that to get him to do it. I lied. We have one. We’re working on getting the second.”
I watched the kindness on his face just evaporate.
“You lied, sir?” he said.
I nodded.
“To Doctor Vaskis and to me.”
“Yes.”
“And you had me call the insurance bastards and tell them we had two donors to test, when we do not. The same bastards I will have to call again, on someone else’s behalf, in a week or a month or a year, and ask them to underwrite a quarter-million-dollar operation, or a lifetime of medication, based on my judgment and integrity.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You had me call the pulmonary testing lab and ask them to put you ahead of people who already had appointments?”
“Give me one day. We’ll find somebody, I’m sure we will. Just one day. I’m sorry.”
But I was only partly sorry, and he knew it. He spun around and went striding down the hall past the nurses’ station. I went back into the room.
Janet stirred often, and coughed, and moaned loudly from time to time. Every ten minutes I called my apartment for messages, but there was only something from a prospective customer who wanted us to bid on her apartment-house renovation, and from a painter we sometimes used, looking for indoor work, and something else from Jeremy at the gallery. It was not easy to be there with Amelia. Every time I hung up she was watching my face for the smallest twitch or sparkle of news. Every time I shook my head-nothing-it felt like I was sawing off one of her limbs. Worse, I could see that the thought of Janet dying had brought back the pain of the other big death in her past, and the same thing was happening to me. Giselle was haunting me then, not a lover but a sister, a cousin, a ghost.
Eventually, Amelia told me she had to eat something, she’d be gone twenty minutes, and would I be sure to have her paged if Janet woke up, or if something changed?
By that time I was so twisted up by the ghosts and the echoes and the pure misery of everything that I pulled my chair close to the bed and just lay my face down on the sheet over Janet’s thigh, not thinking anything or hoping for anything. When Amelia came back upstairs with her sandwich in a Styrofoam box, she found me that way, and came and put her hand on my back.
Janet’s aunt Lucy arrived after supper. I used that as an excuse to leave. I drove my truck around Boston for an hour, in the Friday night traffic, under a kind of evil spell. When I couldn’t do that anymore, I stopped at Adam’s Steak House, where Janet and I had gone a few times, and tried to eat my way into oblivion. A sixteen-ounce sirloin, two glasses of Cabernet, salad, potato, two pieces of pecan pie, coffee. I had done the same kind of thing the day after Giselle died, though I didn’t remember that until I was sitting there with an aching stomach.
My stomach still hurt by the time I got home. The phone was ringing when I came through the door, but when I picked up, there was only a dial tone. I called Gerard, thinking it might have been him, and for once he answered by saying, “Hello?”
“Anything?”
“Jake, I’m going up to complete strangers and asking them to volunteer for major surgery on the Monday before Christmas.”
“I forgot Christmas. What about friends?”
“Julie, Alex, Bob Twining-O-negative, a closet smoker, and a sympathetic-but-no, in that order.”
“Did you call Coach Florent? I should have called him.”
“Sympathetic, sort of, but no. And no, you shouldn’t have called him. How’s Janet?”
“Lousy. I told Ouajiballah we lied. He’s not happy.”
“We had no other option.”
“He doesn’t see it that way.”
“What about the gov?”
“He has a state to run.”
“A state to run? That’s what he said? A state to run?”
“Under other circumstances he’d oblige me.”
“What about Janet’s family?”
“They’re all too short, and the ones that aren’t too short have asthma. Her aunt is still trying, though. Neighbors, friends of neighbors, cousins of cousins.”
“Alright, I’ve got one fireman at the precinct here who was wavering a little. I’m going down to harass him. You have to get up early for the testing, yes?”
“Six.”
“Good. I’ll call you after midnight, then.”
I put the phone in its cradle, lay back in the bed, and fell almost immediately into a deep sleep, with one spark of vivid dream in it. In the dream I was in a jewelry shop where I had once bought sapphire earrings for Giselle for her birthday, only Carmine Asalapolous was behind the counter, lifting out one beautiful ring after the next, and setting them in a neat row on the glass countertop. “Wait three days and give her this one,” he said. I was struggling to tell him I couldn’t wait three days, trying to find the words, trying to get the urgency of things across to him, when the telephone woke me. I rolled over to the edge of the bed and grabbed it.
“This John Entwhistle?” the voice said.
I squeezed my eyes tight and shook my head hard. “Yes.”
“Governor Valvelsais. Listen, I’ve given it some thought and I’ve decided to give a lung to Janet.”
I held the phone against my face.
“Are you there?”
“Here.”
“Well, say something, then.”
I said, “A…a lobe…you only have to give one lobe. Your right lung has three lobes and your left-.”
“I’m stepping up,” he said.
I was squeezing the phone hard.
“Where do I report?” he said.
“Pulmonary testing. Mass General. Seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll be there at eight.”
“Good,” I said, awake by then, clearheaded as could be. “You’re…you’re a good man.”
“Coming from you that means so much,” he said.
“Right.”
“There’s a condition.”
He paused. A list of conditions ran through my head. He wanted Janet back. He wanted me to leave town.
He said, “When people ask, you say I volunteered without a moment’s hesitation.”
I could not speak.
“Clear?”
“Fine.”
“That’s the phrase: ‘without a moment’s hesitation.’”
“Got it,” I said.
“I want your word.”
“You have it.”
“Then I’m stepping forward for her. Tomorrow, eight a.m.”
“Mass General,” I said, but he had hung up.
I called and left a message for Doctor Ouajiballah, and at the nurses’ desk for Janet’s mother. I called Gerard. I lay back on the bed in the darkness and did not go to sleep.
WHEN I ARRIVED there at quarter past six the next morning, the beautiful beast of hope was prowling the hospital corridors. I could see it in Amelia’s sleepy face as we stood outside Janet’s room, and hear it in her voice. She said that Janet was out cold then, had been awake for two hours in the middle of the night, coughing up blood, that she’d told her then about the governor’s decision, and that Janet had smiled a smile to break your heart in five pieces.
“What a fine fine man he must be,” Amelia said.
At the nurses’ station, and at the reception desk of the pulmonary testing department, it was the same: the nurses, orderlies, and technicians knew Janet’s story, knew what she’d been through. Some of them had watched for years as the bacteria with the big names did their work on her. They knew exactly what was happening, and what would happen-they’d seen the same slow sinking with a hundred other CF patients, and thousands of people with cancer and MS and ALS and diabetes and diseases they had no name for. They were lined up like foot soldiers against those diseases. All their working lives went into that war, all their tiredness and tedium. They had the smartest generals in the world and the most sophisticated weaponry, and their weeks were filled with one lost battle after the next.
So when they understood that there was a chance to save someone they cared for, that was not a small thing to them. You could see it plainly on their faces: it was not a routine Saturday morning.
The governor and I spent all that day getting blood drawn, and more blood drawn, breathing hard into sterile tubes, peeing into sterile cups, answering questions, filling out forms. Sometimes we were in the same room; usually we weren’t. We did not exchange a word. Our eyes met once when he was on a machine, blowing every last molecule of air from his lungs. He looked away immediately and blew harder, as if it were a competition, and our pulmonary function numbers would be published on the front page of the Herald the next day.
Fine, I thought. Knock yourself out. Break every lung record known to man, as long as you don’t back away from this.
At the end of that day I went up and sat with Janet and her mother for a little while, and talked with her aunt in the hallway for a little while, and talked with Doctor Ouajiballah, who seemed to have forgiven me. Then I drove-tired by then-to the fancy mall in Chestnut Hill and found the jewelry store just before it closed, and bought a simple gold ring with little pairs of triangular notches at its edges from a salesman whose name was Dimitrios Cassas.
On Sunday, it was more of the same. Only, in the afternoon the fun was capped off with two hours in a room talking to a mustachioed psychiatrist, who worked, I guessed, not for the hospital but for the insurance company. “You are aware that you are putting your life at risk,” he said.
I said that I was.
“You understand that, even if the surgery goes perfectly, you’ll have a period of painful recovery.”
“Yes.”
“And you understand that, even if the recipient survives the surgery, she may live only a day or a month or a few months if her body should reject the new tissue.”
“I understand that very well.”
He went along like that for a while, giving me horror stories about transplant operations gone bad, infections, collapsed lungs, bleeding, suffocation, rejection. He showed me pictures of men and women with drainage tubes sticking out of their chests and frightened expressions on their faces, and when that was over, and I’d responded calmly and rationally to every question, he made good aggressive eye contact and he said, “Why are you doing this, Jake, really?”
And I could not help myself. I was tired from the testing, and worried because Janet had looked like a skin-draped skeleton in the bed that morning, and because more blood had come out of her overnight, and we hadn’t been able to talk at all the day before. I was pretty sure the governor wasn’t being grilled this way. He had, in fact, made the front page of the Herald that Sunday morning: GOV GIVES TILL IT HURTS superimposed over a full-page photo of his face. There was a glowing article inside, complete with a quote from John Entwhistle, who said the governor had agreed “without a moment’s hesitation.” And I didn’t care about that. I was a little bit nervous about the operation and the recovery, but not afraid. I didn’t care about the drainage tubes, or about not being able to run as hard as I liked to run, and I didn’t care about whether or not Doctor Ouajiballah liked me, or Amelia thought I was a decent boyfriend for her daughter. All of that had somehow boiled away. I was just tired then, and worried we were too late. The whole thing was taking on a cold realness that seemed to echo off every square inch of the plain walls and the chipped linoleum and the lab machines.
Against that realness, I heard the psychiatrist say, “Why are you doing this, Jake?”
And so I looked back at him very calmly, and I said, “Because I’m hoping to be president one day.” And he blinked and closed his notebook and went off to tell whoever he had to tell that we were a go for Monday morning.
I WENT UPSTAIRS after the testing, and walked through the doors of the ward, and Ouajiballah was right there in front of me, talking quietly to one of the nurses. When he saw me he said good-bye to the nurse, put the palm of his hand against my shoulder blade, and steered me to a two-chair waiting room at the end of the hall.
“She is sitting up and talking, sir,” he said. “She is quite energetic. But this is not necessarily the best of signs. With cystic fibrosis patients, shortly before the end of their lives, we can sometimes see an unnatural burst of activity like this. We are not sure what causes it. The lungs have very little capacity remaining and are working very hard. When the body works that hard, certain other chemical processes are triggered. Perhaps that is the reason. We don’t know. I did not want you to be falsely encouraged.”
“Her mother is falsely encouraged, though, I bet.”
“Yes.”
“The governor passed?”
“Yes, both of you are extraordinarily fit. He visited with Janet briefly.”
“Will she live until the operation?”
“Most likely.”
I thanked him for everything he had done, then I went into Janet’s room, and saw her sitting up in the bed. Her eyes were flashing. She was thin as a stick, and her face was as swollen as if someone had been pumping air into it all afternoon, but even under the oxygen mask, she was smiling.
“The governor was here!” Amelia said, and if Janet was happy, then there is no word for what Amelia was. “He passed! He passed! You passed, too! Look at Janet, look at her!”
Janet pulled the mask down off her face. When she lifted her arm, the hospital bracelet slipped all the way to her elbow. She smiled and pushed at her hair with the fingers of one hand, as if, for the first time in weeks, she cared what she looked like. She and her mother asked me some questions about the testing, and I tried to make little jokes when I answered, exaggerating things. I told them the psychiatrist looked exactly like Geraldo Rivera. I told them the doctors had made me do calculus problems to be sure Janet was getting an intelligent lobe. As a comedian, that night, I wasn’t at my best.
After a while, Janet took the mask off completely and said, “Ma, I feel like a chocolate milk shake now, all of a sudden. Would you mind going downstairs and getting me one?”
“A chocolate milk shake?” Mrs. Rossi said. “I’ll get you five chocolate milk shakes!”
“Just one, Ma. Or two, if Jake wants one.”
Amelia came over, took my face in both hands and gave me a hard kiss straight on the lips, then marched happily out the door on her milk shake run.
“You okay?” Janet said when we were alone. She had taken hold of my right hand and was gripping and regripping it. Her eyes shone out from the puffy skin around them. She was breathing in short gulps.
“Sure. Other than the bruised lips.”
“Are you okay about Charlie? Be honest.”
“Honestly?”
She frowned.
“He has my vote for all eternity. I don’t care what he runs for, or how many times he says he loves you.”
“He does love me.”
“I figured that out.”
“But that street only runs one way.”
“Good. We’ll fix him up with somebody. We’ll start a fund to keep him in escort-service babes and fried clams for life.”
She started to laugh, but the laugh caught in her throat and became a cough, and she spit up a bloody mess into the pan. I took the pan to the sink and washed it clean.
“Didn’t we start with this?” she said, when she’d caught her breath and wiped her face twice. “Me spitting into a bucket.”
“You spit into a bucket only after an evening of gourmet sex.”
“Right. I remember now. A swim in the river and gourmet sex. Under a drop cloth, wasn’t it?”
“And we started with you smashing my truck, is how we started.”
“My insurance company compensated you fairly.”
“Blessed are the insurance companies,” I said.
She stopped and looked at me long enough so that the little joking air we’d been puffing out floated away. That fast-two blinks-and we were right in the middle of the bright warm room where we never went with words. I thought, for a second, that she was going to thank me, which is not what I wanted. She was holding my fingers. “We had some fun anyway, Jakie,” she said. “No matter what happens.”
“Sure,” I said, but I was starting to have a little trouble talking. Janet was squeezing my hand in sad, excited pulses. Her eyes were like hot black coals in a face as pale and gray as ash. I could see that she was sinking, the little burst of energy already leaking out of her. After all those years of wrestling with it, she knew her body from the inside out, and I knew she could feel the end of her life close by-or at least the end of the life those lungs had given her. It seemed to me then that she was trying to tell me she knew the transplant wasn’t going to work.
I started shaking my head against that. My throat wouldn’t let anything through, and I would have been afraid to say those things anyway, but what I was thinking was that there are times when you have to push back hard against what happens to you. There are times to yield, and times to push back hard, and this time I wasn’t yielding, and I wasn’t going to let even the smallest wisp of doubt into the warm, bright room with us. It was very strange, because I wasn’t thinking that way for my own benefit, or even for hers. I was having a vision of her, healthy again, pushing two little children on swings in a park. It wasn’t a sentimental feeling but a calling almost. A certainty. A vision. We were there in our little puddle of light, speckled and mottled-we were human-but there were parts of the connection between us that were as pure and perfect as threads of virgin silk. I would be thirty-one in eight more days, old enough to know how rare those threads were. Janet knew it, too. She put the mask up to her face for a few seconds, then took it away.
She was holding my left hand. I had my right hand in my pants pocket, poking just the tip of my middle finger through the ring. I wanted to do what I was going to do in a way that was movie-star cool, just taking the ring out with one hand and slipping it onto her finger without saying anything, without pulling my other hand away. I tried it. And I got the ring most of the way out of my pocket pretty well, without her noticing anything, but then, somehow, it got snagged up on the edge of the pocket, on the little double line of thread there. Snagged up pretty bad. But I still wanted to do it one-handed, so I tilted my wrist down an inch, and turned it sideways, and then somehow the ring came unsnagged all at once and as I was turning my hand palm-up, it popped out into the air. It flew up only a few inches, but it seemed to stay there for an impossibly long time, wobbling in the light. We were both looking at it. I pulled my hand out of hers and cupped my hands together and caught it, but all hope of being cool was ruined. Before she could say anything, I reached out and slid it onto her finger. She’d lost so much weight that it was like sliding a hula hoop onto a pencil. I took my hands away and the ring almost slid right off. Janet was staring at it.
I waited a few seconds, then I said, “The salesman promised it will shrink after you wash it a few times.”
She looked at the ring and looked at it and then looked up at me finally, with such a gleam of joy and love on her face that it almost didn’t matter to me what happened after that, whether she lived, or I lived, or whether we would ever be able to adopt children, and pour the feeling we had for each other all over them, minute by minute, year after year. The world was speckled and mottled and full of pain and evil, but during those few months we had stumbled into this little bright room together, and stayed there for a while. That was almost enough.
I said, “It doesn’t matter if those old lungs get infected now, does it?”
She shook her head. She was squeezing her left hand to keep the ring on, and her eyes were full of silvery wet light, and she was the one who couldn’t talk now, and we had one quick, over-the-side-of-the-bed kiss, one little breakdown of borders. Then she held me against her with one thin weak arm around the back of my neck, no words coming out but her spirit all wide open against me, yes to yes.
BEFORE HER MOTHER could come back with the milk shakes, I went out of the room to the sound of Janet coughing, and down the stairs, and outside into the damp, cold night. The surgery on Governor Valvelsais and on me had to be done at a different hospital, four miles away, because no hospital wants to tie up all its operating rooms and all its surgeons on one patient. As I drove across town, snow began to fall, cutting diagonally through the darkness. During the testing I had heard the nurses and technicians talking about a storm, and there it was: swirls of small, icy flakes above Boston Common, and a quick dusting of white on the cars and sidewalks of Tremont Street. By the time I’d parked in the lot of the other hospital, the wind was picking up, too. People were walking out the front door with their coats wrapped tight in front of them and their faces lowered.
I checked in and went upstairs. I changed into the hospital gown and lay down in the bed. After a while two nurses came in and talked to me, took my temperature and pulse, made sure I hadn’t eaten anything. They told me a little bit about what to expect and then left me alone in the darkness. I listened to the hospital sounds-nurses’ shoes, announcements in the hall, the clinking of a cart going past with its load of instruments or plates. I closed my eyes but could not fall asleep for a long while.
Sometime after midnight I heard footsteps in the room. I opened my eyes to see a priest’s plain black overcoat in the darkness next to the bed. I thought it was my brother Ellory. I looked up, past the collar, and saw Gerard’s smiling face.
“What do we need in the way of materials for tomorrow, Colonel?” he said.
“You have a thing about disturbing my sleep, you know that? I must have lived in the apartment next to you in a past life and played my electric guitar loud all night.”
“It was a violin,” he said. “You were very devoted.” His face was shadowed and tired, but fierce somehow. “I just came from the other hospital and I can report two things: one, members of the clergy are allowed into that ward at any hour. Two, the love of your life is coughing in her sleep.”
“Outstanding work.”
“I appreciate it, sir.”
“Those lungs have to last seven more hours.”
“It appears that they will. I will be there when she awakens from the surgery, Colonel, in my capacity as her spiritual counselor. And I shall come give you my report soon afterwards in person.”
“Excellent.”
“Anything to confess before you go under?”
“Impure thoughts and desires, Father.”
“Describe these thoughts and desires in detail,” he said. Then he shook my hand, told me he’d seen the ring on Janet’s finger, said, “Don’t screw it up like I did,” and was gone.
I lay awake for another little while, thinking about him and about his wife and the girls.
In the morning I woke up nervous, but not afraid. Snow was still falling outside the window. A nurse came in and gave me a Valium and two sips of water, but the Valium did nothing to make things less real. I knew the governor was already in surgery by then, and Janet, too. Doctor Vaskis would be making a looping incision from her right armpit, down beneath her breast, cutting the muscle between two ribs, then sawing through the sternum, and then making another looping cut on the other side. A lobe from the governor’s right lung, and a lobe from my left, would be pulled out between two of our pried-apart back ribs and sent across the city in special coolers, one by one. Time-release life gliding in ambulances through the snow. When everything was set, Vaskis would lift the top of Janet’s chest cavity as if it were the hood of a car, take out the ruined right lung while the blood that should have been going through her heart was detoured through a machine at the side of the table. He’d wash and clean the chest cavity. He’d set the governor’s lobe in, and then, if everything went well, he’d begin the slow process of sewing together the pulmonary vein and the pulmonary artery and the tube through which Janet’s breath would pass-the bronchus.
He’d run some blood through to check the first lobe, then start in on the left side of her body, and do the same thing there, with a part of me.
Two nurses and an orderly came in to the room. They asked if I was ready. I said that I was. I climbed out of the bed and onto a gurney and we rolled off down the hall beneath a parade of ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights. In the elevator, one of the nurses rubbed my arm. When they wheeled me into the operating room, a very young doctor with sandy, boyish hair greeted me, and after they’d wheeled me up beside some machinery I did not want to look at, he said, “Now, Mister Entwhistle, we are going to insert a needle into your vein.”
“The veins are the blue ones,” I said.
He didn’t smile. He put the needle in, and checked the tube attached to it. He said, “Now we are going to start a medicine called fentanyl, a narcotic, which will prepare you for the actual anesthesia.”
“Narcotic away,” I said.
In another moment the room began to spin and shift in a kaleidoscope of delight. I could feel the drug going through me, down into my arms and legs, pulsing warmly in the middle of me like a billion cells having orgasms. With the pain taken out of it, the world was a wonderful place, a perfect place, and I thought, for an instant, about my sister and brother and mother and dad. They seemed, then, like just four more drips of good matter in a singing, happy sea. I held a picture of Janet in my swirling mind.
“Now we are going to put you to sleep,” the doctor said, and from the deepest part of me, the soul of my will, I struggled and struggled and tried to push some words out into the air between us.
“Just give me another few seconds of this,” I wanted to say, but I could not manage it.
Conway, Massachusetts
May 3,2003-January 20, 2005