“Cancer and leukemia are the same thing,” Miko said.
“Joseph Smith wasn’t perfect. But he said that whatever was exalted or good or wise from other religions, Mormons wanted to bring into our religion, too,” I said. “Why are we having a religious argument? This is stupid.”
“Where’s that written down?”
“What?”
“That Mormons wanted all the good stuff from other religions.”
“I’m not sure. Do you have the whole Catholic service memorized?”
“No,” he said, “I haven’t gone to church except on holidays or when my parents made me since I had First Communion.”
“Well, then what’s the point? I have. And what does it matter if Joseph Smith was loony? What he started turned into a really good thing, in time. Our way kept a lot of people off drugs and drunk driving and smoking and getting STDs. . . .”
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” Miko finally said. “Every religion is crazy. Yours is crazier than most. And I guess some of it, only some, makes sense. Like, I’ve never thought that you could make yourself all cozy with God just through going to confession and saying the rosary. I always thought you had to do good stuff. Like walk the walk, not just talk the talk. I . . . guess.”
“And I always thought Catholics had it too easy. All they had to do was say sorry and pray a little and everything was so fine again. I believe you have to do good things. All Mormons do. It’s just sensible. So what does it matter if stuff some of the early Mormons did was nuts? I’m not nuts.”
“That’s, uh, debatable,” Miko said. “Given your recent behavior anyhow.” I pretended to ignore him.
“My family isn’t nuts,” I finally said. “Clare’s not nuts. There are people who call themselves Mormons, and they really are nuts. It’s just that when it’s so-called Mormons who do the bad things, it gets on the news. Look at all the stories about Catholic priests molesting little boys. Does that mean all Catholic priests are child molesters? Or make people wonder how anybody could be Catholic?”
“Do you have any relatives who are polygamists?”
“Is your uncle in the Mafia?”
“Catholics don’t go building gigantic temples all over the place no one can ever see!”
“No, just Notre Dame! And the Vatican!”
“Anyone can go in the Vatican!”
“Well, people use those temples constantly! And you don’t have to pay to go in! If you go to Salt Lake on, like, even a Wednesday, you’ll see people taking wedding pictures in every doorway. They sign up months in advance to—”
“Let me kiss you,” he said, interrupting my speech. “It’s more fun.” He took hold of my shoulders, and my necklace popped out of my sweater.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Something I made a long time ago.”
“What is it? Is it made from plants? Or hair woven from Jade’s tail?”
“Not that, but something like that.” I didn’t tell him for years what it really was, and then only in a letter.
He kissed me again, pulling me closer. “Don’t keep this up, Miko,” I said. “I’m not a game you can play.”
“I’m not playing.”
“We’re too different,” I said.
“But I want you,” he said.
“That’s . . . just being young and alone in the dark. With a girl who was on the news.”
“You really think I am that shallow, then,” he said.
“I guess,” I said, thinking, Miko! Don’t let me get away with being snotty! It’s just . . . like me playing defense down at the barn! Don’t let me let you go! But he only shrugged.
Finally I said, “For what it’s worth, I . . . want you, too. But you’re right, that’s not the same as love.”
“Who said anything about love?”
“No one. And so that’s why we have to go back to my house now. And be friends.”
“We will,” he said, stroking my cheek from my hairline to my chin. “We’ll always be friends, Ronnie-o.” It wasn’t supposed to end this way, I thought.
I got into bed and cried myself to sleep. But beneath the tears, a part of me was thrilled, even in my gloom. It had happened. What we’d both felt was love, no matter what we said. And I didn’t care what came of it in the end, or so I told myself. The experience itself was so unexpected and exhilarating that it stopped the nightmares. As I drifted between sleep and waking, I imagined riding Jade to Miko’s house—only with both of us the ages we were now. I jumped off Jade’s back, and he took me into his arms and kissed me, the way he had that night, not like the kid down the road. I slept for eleven hours. No dreams.
Chapter Twenty-two
I did finish my full paramedic training before I went to college. It wounded my vanity that I wasn’t the youngest freshman at Harvard—the youngest freshman at Harvard was, like, thirteen. But as Miko later said, I was undoubtedly (except for the thirteen-year-old) the only virgin.
Studying harder than I’d ever studied in my life and working on the campus emergency services didn’t leave me much time for a social life. Our crew chief, Ian, was full-time. He’d done the work for fifteen years. Ian began as a student majoring in business but loved working on the campus so much, he never finished his degree. (Imagine! Being accepted to Harvard but choosing to work there instead of going out into the world and making the big bucks! I respected him for it.) He told me once, “I think this job makes me feel more alive than bloodless corporate warfare. My buddies love that crap. It makes them feel alive. I tell them what I do sure makes the kids who overdose feel more alive, if I get to save them.” He appreciated having me on his crew, because I was a paramedic, and he knew I could have gotten a city job for more money. But all I wanted was to make sure my scholarship was funded and have a little extra to spend on CDs and clothes and my cell phone bill (huge).
The kinds of trauma we saw were different, on campus, from what I’d seen in California: drunken kids falling off statues where they were posing for dumb photos, getting concussions and greenstick fractures, a case of meningitis we caught just in time, an abortion in a dorm that ended with the girl losing a third of her blood through internal bleeding, and those sad and painful attempts at suicide Ian had described (mostly over grades or busted relationships).
“I don’t know why they can’t go on just long enough for it to feel a little better,” I told Ian. “Why can’t they have enough hope to wait just a little while?” He knew what had happened to me.
“They don’t know it will ever feel better, Ronnie,” he said with his perpetual melancholy. “You had your faith. It’s funny. So much misery, here among kids who supposedly are the brightest kids from all over the country, from all over the world. Brains are no guarantee of happiness. There are times I think brains make it worse.” I was, probably for the first time, humbled, not just appreciative, that my upbringing simply ruled out that kind of self-destruction. If it hadn’t, I might have done what those girls, and they were usually girls—only three boys in all the time I was there—did. I knew that I fit the profile: emotional, impulsive, obstinate.
There was one case. I shouldn’t call her a “case,” although most of us got through by distancing ourselves that way. She was a gorgeous Latina girl who’d almost finished her degree when she blew a critical test in her major, organic chemistry. One test. It would have meant taking the class over, because she failed. But that was all it would have meant. Taking one class again, one more summer at school. It was spring. The chestnuts were in bloom, and the hydrangea. I thought she could have held on. But instead, she found a vein and used a syringe filled with air, and, well, she knew where to give herself the shot. I thought, Father, help me; this girl used the food of life to end her own life. She wrote in the note she left, “My parents worked long and honorably to help me go to Harvard. I let them down. Mom, Dad, Lucinda, Jorge, Luis, your big sister loves you so.” I can close my eyes and remember her tranquil, bluish face, her fan of dark hair, the
immaculate orderliness of her room, the stack of textbooks to return left in a pile with a Post-it note on top. One of the other girls, who was on her first crew, became hysterical. She hyperventilated. I was one of the people on her debriefing the next day. I had to get out of a class for it, and for once, I didn’t care.
There were car accidents, but most of them were minor, big dents in the Beemer.
I saw only one other fatality the whole three years, that of an old law professor who died quietly, and well into his eighties, during a lecture on torts. Kids later joked that he died from boredom. But I found those jokes cruel, and so did a few kids in my ward who were majoring in law. It isn’t a tragedy when an old person dies. But it’s not a joke. Mrs. Sissinelli had once told me that Catholics prayed to the Virgin Mary for a peaceful death. I got the sense of that, for the first time. If you die doing what you love, well, that really is a blessing.
It was also a blessing that there was a nice Mormon ward in Cambridge. But although there were some nice kids, guys and girls, whom I liked, they weren’t “like home.” And in any case, I wouldn’t have wanted just to hang out with Mormons.
I had other friends.
And that was why, although I’d received a full-ride scholarship to the University of Chicago, too, and to Brigham Young, I chose Boston. I felt better being closer to Clare, who was, of course, in New York, and to Serena, who finally decided to major in art at the Boston Conservatory.
And Miko was there, too, in medical school.
We had remained friends. As much as I’d hoped for, well, more, I was thankful for his familiar presence. He was like a big brother, taking me to the farmers market, helping me avoid the tourist boutiques. And because we set a lunch date—usually for sushi—a couple of times each month, he became a closer friend, the kind of person in your life to whom you can tell anything. I even went out to the Cape with him and Serena for a few weeks, the summer after my freshman year. They all said later they could see everything just by looking at us, though Miko never laid a hand on me.
He was all about Diana.
When I went back to school, Miko met the guy I had been seeing, Eric Lock, who was majoring in business. He called Eric a head on top of a suit. I told him that I thought Diana Lambert, who was majoring in Miko, was a boom-boom body attached to a head. We were both goofing around, of course, but not really. It was more what Papa used to call “kidding on the square.”
There were some nights when neither Eric nor Diana was around. Miko and I sat alone together on the Commons and talked and talked, as we had before dawn that one night, watching the water tangle down through the rocks above Dragon Creek. We never had a real date. But after a while, it became clear, without either of us saying anything, that something that had begun in the hut near Dragon Creek was intensifying between us. We didn’t make out. We didn’t even hold hands. But it was as if we did. Miko started to throw pebbles at my dorm room window at night. When I’d come down, he’d say, “I was feeling homesick. I wanted to talk to the kid down the road.” And we’d talk until the sky went gray. We talked about his internship coming up. He wanted something in the Pacific Northwest, Washington or Oregon. Some of those hospitals were major resources for people in Alaska, who didn’t always have access to the best medical care. “Imagine having to fly in to some remote place and take care of a kid with a burst appendix, or e-vac him to a hospital. It’d be so cool. I know I’ll do my share of looking at sore throats and bad backs, but that’s what I think about when I think about going out there.” I knew just what he meant. It was why I did what I did.
Miko also told me that he’d spent half his life near Boston, and he wanted to see that other ocean. I certainly understood that. After one of those long nights, I’d get up for school feeling as though I’d been knocked on the head with a baseball bat. But I still got my grades.
The following spring, he got his match: Harborview Hospital, his first choice. I was the first one he told. I was happy for Miko and miserable because the first thing that crossed my mind was that even with taking a full load during summers, it would be a year or more before I graduated.
Lectures? I gave myself hundreds. Why do you care, Ronnie Swan? What’s it to you? You aren’t really going out anyhow! Be glad you ended up having fun together as long as you did. But then other thoughts would come stealing: I could apply to the University of Washington Medical School. It wasn’t really my first choice. Yale was my first choice. Yale! Get over it, I’d tell myself. We were just Ronnie and Miko, pals. Well, not really. But neither of us was giving in to feelings we probably both had and dismissed as impractical for several hundred reasons.
Then, one night, Miko yelled for me to open my dorm window. “I’ve got a pebble down here I want you to catch. Remember? The girl with the great basketball hands?” The pebble he threw up to me was a diamond, set in a simple platinum swoop of a ring. I ran downstairs and jumped into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist. He said, “I figured I might as well get it over with.”
“How terribly romantic,” I told him after we kissed, each of us in complete relief. “Like catching my first striped bass. In fact, catching my first striper was more romantic.”
“Ronnie,” he said, pulling the combs from my hair until it filled up his hands and spilled down over my shoulders, “you knew damn well guys don’t ever get over their first redhead.”
“It’s just lust, then,” I said, kissing him again and again and once more.
“Who said anything about lust? I’m in love with the kid down the road.”
He got mad when I left him standing there and ran upstairs to call Clare. I was only twenty years old.
Two summers later, after we were married in the temple at home, we flew to the Cape house for a short honeymoon before my classes began. My mother-in-law had filled every room with white roses and jasmine. I can close my eyes and remember the enchantment of that overpowering bath of scent. And years later, I only have to touch Miko’s shoulder while he sleeps, and my body remembers everything else. There’s one picture of us, black and white, that we have above our bed. It’s me in my grandmother’s wedding gown and Miko in gray morning clothes, looking into each other’s eyes and laughing as if we’d both just medaled in the Olympics. That was how we felt.
The time apart until I graduated was brutal. Miko made me feel complete, and stolen weekends didn’t fill the lonely void they left behind. There were times I almost dreaded going out to see him, that huge trip for two sleepless nights together. I was already missing him before I got on the plane. It was like being married and not married, not at all the same situation my parents had together at BYU. Once, when my mother visited me, I asked if she ever thought Miko and I would be together. She said, “I hoped you would.” And I was surprised.
“Even though he was a Catholic then,” I said.
“Love doesn’t care about those boundaries,” she said. “I prayed that he would see the right way for both of you, and that you’d have all the happiness as a woman you didn’t have as a child.” She held me, with my head on her shoulder. “You’ll get through this time, Ronnie. You’ll get through this time because you’re the most determined person I know.”
Naturally, I applied to the University of Washington Medical School. Then I prayed as if I were mounting an assault on heaven. And I was accepted. When I got the letter, I sent Miko red, white, and silver heart balloons at work. Everyone thought it was his birthday. Later that night, over the phone, he said that a muscle in his neck that had been tensed for months had finally relaxed.
The apartment we found was really only a big room, a converted attic with ells and nooks made over into a kitchen and a bedroom—not unlike the one in Mrs. Desmond’s house. Though it was hardly lavish, the tiny slice of a view of the Sound from the front window made it feel luxurious. We draped slant-roofed corners with fabric stretched on bungee cords for makeshift closets. Every vertical space was crowded with traditional student brick-and-plank bookshelves, except w
e painted the cheap pine planks to match the blue wall and used glass bricks that seemed to capture more light and, seemingly, more space. One wall was periwinkle blue, covered with my father’s photos of the flowers and mountain meadows, and a single glad shelf displayed my mother’s favorite porcelain, a sinuous, milky vase with the shape of a thistle curved around its narrow neck. She’d given it to us for a wedding gift. The kitchen was so small that I couldn’t stand in the middle and extend both my arms straight out. But everything seemed to expand on those rare occasions when we had friends over and filled the twenty-five-CD changer to the max. The bathroom had the same kind of big claw-foot tub I remembered from San Diego. And I could sink into it, down to my nose, when my feet were swollen, as they were most nights, especially after we learned we were expecting. It wasn’t exactly planned, but it wasn’t exactly prevented, either. It was sort of the way Miko and I happened, fate ignoring human objections. And, like our marriage, it was certainly welcomed.
Dr. Sissinelli wanted to buy us a house then. He wanted at least for us to let him rent a big three-bedroom apartment. But we wanted to make it on our own, or almost, because my in-laws did help out with tuition. We simply draped another corner and made a stamp-size extra room. We painted purple-and-yellow polka dots on the walls and got ready for the little one everyone had hoped we’d put off for a while. All the parents wanted me to take a year away from school to be with the baby, but I’d seen other women manage a baby and medical school. I could do it, too. And I did, although I felt some days as though I were running in wet sand.
None of our parents could get there in time for the birth, because the baby surprised us and came just a few weeks early. Selfishly, we were almost glad about that. I felt the first bite of labor coming on while we were at the movies, but we waited until the end of the film before we set off for Harborview.
Miko was all so over-the-top proud that his child was born at “his” hospital, where the obstetrician in the labor room called both of us “Dr. Sissinelli.” I’d wanted a midwife, but Miko was the best coach imaginable. In labor, you’re supposed to “visualize” beautiful vistas, so you don’t notice that the pain makes you want to claw somebody’s face off. Still, no one could help me do that better than a guy who’d known me, and the places closest to my heart, for all of our lives. He held me, and when the pain was at its worst, he held me harder; and he told me the story of our first kiss, that day I scraped my hand falling off Jade in his front yard. He told me about the night in the mud fort, when we first realized we were in love. He told me how we’d teach our baby to ski and to swim and to bike and to ride a horse. He made me laugh when he told me that he’d bought sparkling cider to toast the occasion with his nonalcoholic bride. As an Italian man, tender and funny by nature, and sort of a charmer by design, Miko was known around the hospital for making all the patients, especially the elderly women, feel comfy and safe. And I’d always known that beneath his jokey surface, he had huge emotions. But that night, when we saw our daughter for the first time, alone together in the room except for the doctor and nurse, Miko began to laugh and then to sob like a little boy. That moment was so powerful, it all but fused us into one being in a way even our marriage hadn’t. That sounds kind of pukey, I know. But there are moments in life that really feel that way.