The Best of What Life’s Supposed to Be About
HIS COUSIN’S WIFE had sworn she would be at the apartment by eleven, at the absolute latest. Reliable, for the most part. Her fervor to help sure was genuine. Yet the absolute latest had come and gone, and still there was no word. Most likely she was stuck: in transit, on a subway, in a cab jammed in traffic. Jonathan also had stopped answering his phone, meaning he hadn’t heard anything, either, or was in a meeting, or had nothing new to say, just didn’t feel like answering.
Oliver lay in bed, feeding the kid a bottle, rocking her lightly, singing to her just a bit. Doe was overtired, wanting Mommy, not happy but responding anyway, moving less, getting quieter, one more stage closer to sleep. Oliver slowed his rocking. Being with the baby was fascinating. It was involving, necessary, rewarding, all the good shit that Alice — and every other woman he knew — had promised when she was pregnant and he’d been freaking out. Only there came that point; you reached a ceiling to all the Suzy Creamcheese homemaker blessing bullshit. Oliver could be making calls, like maybe to figure out how to save his goddamn wife’s life. Just where the fuck his cousin’s wife was, Oliver wanted to know.
Instead of the phone, he heard a muted clacking. Carrying from the loft’s work area: terminal keyboards, that itch that he could not reach. His programmers, for sure, were keeping it down as much as they could, they were trying to be respectful, but Oliver could still hear them. And there you had it: his family, his old life, his company, the camaraderie of friends, and the mental involvement of a challenge, all of it was yards away, on the other side of a plasterboard wall. And whenever it seemed like he could join them, when the kid seemed ready to drop, or had passed into slumber, just when Oliver started disentangling himself, Doe. What looked like a tremor. A spasm. Rousing. Again reattaching her little arms around Oliver’s neck. Clinging that much tighter.
Those first fleeting moments: his newly born daughter had been resting on his chest. Oliver told himself that, in the years ahead, he’d be looking back at these moments, trying to remember the soft warm exhalations of Doe’s little lungs on his face right now, the way her little fingernails were digging into his jugular.
—
Finally he emerged onto Whitman’s fourth floor, Alice’s backpack dragging on his shoulders and smacking against the middle of his back, shitloads heavier than he would have guessed, especially considering the way she gallivanted all over the city with that thing. Oliver also was pulling her travel suitcase behind him. He was worrying about how pissed she’d be. The hallways perennial in their brightness, that constant tart, antiseptic smell of cleaning fluid. Rolling shelves were abandoned at random junctures, their uncovered trays of half-eaten lunches stacked in sloppy piles. Oliver passed blood vials left on some sort of lab rack. He flashed back to New Hampshire: he couldn’t use the john in Alice’s room because they were measuring her urine output, and it wasn’t worth the risk to disturb the plastic pot that had been placed over the toilet’s opening. One night, like always when he had late-night soda, Oliver’s bladder had acted up. In the bathroom at the end of the hall, he’d heard the night security guard; locked behind a stall door he was quietly moaning and making sounds of quick friction, noises any man recognizes from his own fist-pumping episodes.
Oliver focused about two-thirds of the way down the hall, about where Alice’s room number would be. The stylish Indian doctor stood, addressing an Asian man and woman as if directness would ensure understanding. “You really should talk to Eisenstatt about this,” Bhakti said. “And we do need a decision on the DNR order.” The Asian woman turned from the doctor and started speaking in some Asian language to the man, who was maybe ten years older. He answered, and the two began trading phrases. Oliver clearly heard the word resuscitate. He moved beyond them as quickly as possible.
Warning signs on the door served as yet another reminder of what they were dealing with, but Oliver didn’t need their printed proscriptions. He’d donned the protective masks and gloves for fourteen hours a day, was well accustomed to that layer of sweat bubbling inside the glove latex so his finger pads were always squishy, his breath ricocheting off the insides of his paper masks, rising into steam.
The small rectangular window peering into the room was covered with black construction paper, he noticed. A trademark Alice maneuver — she hated people looking in on her, wouldn’t want excess light if she was napping. Had to be a decent sign. He also knew she’d have the room like a sauna, and he removed his coat, followed by his sweater. Turning to the side vestibule, Oliver blopped pink fluid into his hands, which he washed and dried at the sink. Since it was easier to put on the mask before the gloves, he reached into the cardboard box and brought one of the little yellow guys to his face, its chemical smell immediately pungent. His last name was being called, “Mr. Culvert. Good to see you.”
Coming toward him, Bhakti showed a controlled irritation. She was a handsome woman nonetheless, striking for her dark hair and skin, her long lashes and slim figure. She asked how he was doing, though he knew it was a formality.
“Well, we got to this point,” Oliver answered. “Day fifty-one, that’s pretty good.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The first hundred days after diagnosis? They’re key, right? We’re on day fifty-one.”
Bhakti softened, eyes widening enough that she looked embarrassed for him. “I’m not sure what you were told or read.” Her mind was active, calibrating. “Those first hundred days after a diagnosis are key. Getting through these first six months is key.” Lashes batted, emerald-green irises focusing on him. “Your wife will go through a number of risk periods. That’s what happens. She gets past one marker, we look to the next. The first hundred days after the transplant. The first year.”
Down the hallway the Asian brother and sister’s discussion had turned heated. An orderly had stopped next to a nurse, and both were watching. Dr. Bhakti, meanwhile, had a shapely upper lip, one ripe with possibility. She told him that Dr. Eisenstatt was going to be in shortly. If Oliver needed to talk to him more…
Oliver stopped listening. Washing his hands for a second time, he left the faucet dripping, grabbed protective gloves from the box with the L sizes. He piled his jacket and sweater together, folded them under one arm. Pulling the travel suitcase behind him, he steeled himself, leaned his shoulder into the door.
—
Alice wore a tie-dyed motorcyclist’s bandanna wrapped around her head and the white-framed cat’s-eye granny glasses she favored whenever she was hand sewing. The purple and pink knits that she often described as magical were wrapped, twisted around her neck like a boa constrictor, or the scarf of an early aviator. Inside her fluffy, cotton-candy-colored robe, with her lower extremities covered by a multicolored quilt that had been knitted by her great-grandmother (then passed down through the generations of women in her family), Alice looked luxurious in her comfort. From beyond a fuzzy pink sleeve, she was waving three postcards.
The purpose of overhead lighting panels was to make evident to the medical staff all possible physical problems, but orange sheets of crepe paper had been taped over them, and the space had the muted vibe of a hospital room transformed into an opium den. A lovely melody, courtesy of Stevie Wonder, carried from the bedside CD player, where framed family photos faced the room. Oliver followed the arc of his wife’s waving hand, across the room, to the imaginary line’s logical end point. What had been a dull wall now boasted an oil spilclass="underline" bright colors, body parts, ripped magazine pages.