And beautiful. Christ, so beautiful.
He was alive. He’d done it, beaten the son of a bitch grim reaper again.
He could sense the drugs in his bloodstream, the blurry softness of Demerol that made him feel as if he were drifting on a warm, soothing sea. He knew that soon the drugs would wear off, and the pain would be back, tightening his chest, stabbing through his lungs and heart, but right now he didn’t care. He was alive.
The door whooshed open with a whining creak. Rubber-soled shoes squished across the floor—speckled white linoleum, no doubt—and paused beside the bed.
“Well, Mr. DeMarco, you’re awake.”
It was a deep, masculine voice. No nonsense.
Doctor. Cardiologist.
Angel slowly opened his eyes. A tall, undernourished man with a deeply etched face and flinty black eyes stared down at him. Untamed gray hair stood out in a dozen different directions around his face. Einstein on Slimfast.
“I’m Dr. Gerlaine. Head of cardiology at Valley Hospital here in LaGrangeville.” He bent and pulled up a chair, sitting down as he flipped through Angel’s charts.
Here it comes, Angel thought. The stand-up routine.
Gerlaine closed the chart—so goddamn symbolic, that quiet closing. “You’re a very sick young man, Mr. DeMarco.”
Angel grinned. He was still alive, still breathing, and he’d heard this doctor’s shtick for years. You’re playing on borrowed time, Mr. DeMarco. You need to change your life—change your life—change your life. The conversation lived on tape in his brain, winding, rewinding, replaying a million times in the darkness of the night, but he didn’t want to change his life, didn’t want to eat right or exercise or play by the rules.
He was thirty-four years old, and years ago he’d started down a dark road of rebellion for rebellion’s sake. He knew it was a useless, meaningless existence—that’s what he liked about it. No one counting on him, or needing him. He flitted from party to party like an acrobat, swinging through, swilling booze, having sex, and moving on.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he answered. “No shit.”
Dr. Gerlaine frowned. “I’ve spoken with your doctor in Nevada.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“He told me you were a cardiologist’s nightmare.”
“That’s why I like Kennedy. He’s more honest than your average doctor.”
Dr. Gerlaine slipped the chart back into its sleeve. “Kennedy says he told you six months ago that if you had another episode of heart failure, you were going to—in his words—be in deep shit. And son, it doesn’t get much deeper.”
Angel laughed. “Slow down, I can’t keep up with the technical jargon.”
“Kennedy told me you’d make jokes. But I don’t think anything here is funny. You’re a young man. Rich and famous if the girls at the nurses’ station are correct.”
Angel thought about the stir his presence must be creating and felt a jolt of adrenaline. “They’re right. I’m both.”
There was a pause before the doctor spoke again. “You’re not taking this seriously enough, Mr. DeMarco. You’ve been sick for a long time. The viral infection you had as a young man weakened your heart. And still you drank and smoked and used drugs. The cold, hard truth is that you’ve been using up that heart of yours at a very rapid rate, and if we don’t do something soon, we may not be able to do anything at all.”
“I’ve heard that before. But I’m still here, Doc. You know why?”
Gerlaine eyed him. “It’s certainly not because you listen to doctor’s orders.”
“Nope.” His voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “Here’s my secret, Doc: Only the good die young.”
Gerlaine leaned back in his chair, studying Angel. Minutes clicked by on the rhythmic tide of the monitor. Finally the doctor spoke. “Do you have a wife, Mr. DeMarco?’
Angel gave him a disgusted look. “I think she’d be here if I did.”
“Children?”
He grinned. “Not that I know of.”
“Dr. Kennedy said in all the years he’d treated you, he’d never seen anyone visit you in the hospital except your agent and a horde of reporters.”
“What is this, Doc, some macabre ‘This Is Your Life’? You going to bring out my high school guidance counselor to confirm that I never played well with others?”
“No. I’m asking who will grieve for you if you die?”
It was a mean question, designed to hurt, and it succeeded. He thought suddenly of his brother, Francis. All at once his childhood was inside him, and the nostalgia was so sharp and sweet, he could smell the grass and the rain and the sea.
Thinking about the past made him feel … disconnected. He knew that his Hollywood acquaintances were just that. Not the kind of friends his brother had once been. They didn’t see him, that group of hangers-on who drifted through the movable feast that was filmmaking.
For a split second he felt a stinging regret, a sense of loss for all he’d walked away from, the brother he’d left behind. Ruthlessly he shoved the emotion aside and stared hard at the doctor. He wanted to tell him to go to hell; but damn it, he needed the man. It was time to turn on the charm that had gotten him so far, so fast. “Hey, you’re right, of course. This must be where they got that famous line ‘serious as a heart attack.’ Well, you can bet your ass I’m going to take my health seriously from now on. No drugs—or hardly any. And I’m going to give up booze. Just beer. Beer’s okay, right?”
Gerlaine stared at him in obvious distress. “If you don’t do something quickly you’re going to die, Mr. DeMarco. Soon. And whatever dreams and hopes you have will die with you. No second chances.”
Angel smiled. Same old schtick. “Define ‘soon’ for our viewers.”
Gerlaine responded with the expected shrug.
Angel smiled triumphantly. That was always the way of it—that shrug was doc body language for sometime between this second and 2010. They didn’t have any real answers, just advice and more advice. “I’ll die someday, is what you mean. Well, pal, so will you.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Gerlaine answered evenly. “If you don’t do something, Mr. DeMarco, I think you’ll die this year.”
Angel’s cocky smile faded. “This year? But it’s almost October.”
“Yes, it is.”
Angel couldn’t comprehend what he was being told. Something was wrong, his hearing was going. “Are you shitting me?”
Gerlaine gave him a superior look. “I don’t ‘shit’ patients, Mr. DeMarco, I inform them.”
This year. No one had ever said anything like that before. It was always a bunch of hemming and hawing about somedays and future times. Lectures about alcohol abuse and the accumulated effect of cigarette smoking and fat in your diet.
Angel wanted to hit something, punch his fist into a solid brick wall and feel the familiar pain radiate up his arm. “So fix me,” he snapped. “Cut me open and repair the damage.”
“It’s not that easy, Mr. DeMarco. The damage done by this last episode is too extensive. I’ve spoken to Chris Allenford at St. Joe’s, and he concurs that repair isn’t a viable option.”
Damage. Too extensive.
Bad words, very bad words.
“Are you telling me I’m going to die and you can’t do anything to save me?”
“No. I’m telling you that standard heart surgery isn’t an option. It’s too late for that. You need a new heart.”
“No. You don’t mean …”
’Transplant.”
For a split second Angel couldn’t breathe. Ice-cold fear stabbed deep, deep in his heart. “Jesus,” he said on a breath. “Jesus …”
Transplant. A new heart. Someone else’s heart in his chest. A dead person’s heart. Beating, beating.
He stared at Gerlaine, trying to sound normal, unafraid. He forced a weak smile. “No way. I don’t even buy used cars.”
“This is no joke, Mr. DeMarco. Your heart disease is in end stage, and that is
as bad as it sounds. You’re going to die unless you receive a healthy heart. We’ll put you on the transplant list and hope a donor is found in time.”
A donor. Angel thought for a second he might puke. “And give me a life as what—Frankenstein’s pet project?”
“It’s a surgery, Mr. DeMarco, not unlike other surgeries. There’ll be guidelines, of course, restrictions on activity and diet, but with a few lifestyle changes…”
Angel was almost speechless. “Jesus Christ…”
“There are excellent psychiatrists who are trained to help in times like this….”
“Really?” Angel shot the word back. He knew he should be charming right now, try to get what he wanted with honey instead of piss, but he couldn’t manage it. He felt as if he were falling off a cliff into a deep, dark pit, and the helplessness of it made him want to scream out in anger. “How many heart transplants have you done, Mr. Head of Cardiology for LaGrangeville Hospital?”
“None, but—”
“But nothing. I’m not taking your word for anything. Anything, Do you understand me? Make arrangements to fly me to the best transplant center in the country.” He glared at the doctor. “Now.”
Gerlaine slowly pushed to his feet. “Kennedy told me you’d take this poorly.”
“Take it poorly?” Angel mimicked. “Take it poorly? What is that, some kind of joke?”
Gerlaine pushed the chair aside and sighed deeply, shaking his head. “I’ll make arrangements for a transfer. St. Joseph’s Hospital in Seattle would be your best bet. Allenford’s probably the top cardiovascular surgeon in the country.”
“Seattle?” His heart hammered out of control, sent that idiotic monitor clicking and blipping. He was so furious, he could barely breathe. “Jesus Christ, it’s a comedy of errors. You’re sending me home.”
Gerlaine brightened. “Really? I didn’t realize you were from Seattle. Well—”
“If anyone finds out about this—anyone—I’ll sue this goddamn hospital so fast, you’ll be emptying bedpans at a nursing home, you got that, Doctor?”
“Mr. DeMarco, be reasonable. You came here from a Hollywood party. People saw you arrive.”
“Nobody is gonna think I need a new heart. You figure out a way to hide it, Doc.”
Gerlaine stared down at him, frowning. “You have strange priorities….”
“Yeah, yeah, bite me. Now, get out of my room.”
Gerlaine shook his head and shuffled wordlessly to the door. He turned, gave Angel a long, worried look, then left the room. The door clicked shut behind him.
Quiet descended, settled uncomfortably onto the blank walls and speckled linoleum. The monitor blipped on and on and on.
Angel stared at the closed door, feeling the blood hurtling through his body, pounding at his temples, catching and releasing on the tired old valves of his heart. His fingers were cold, so cold, and he couldn’t draw a decent breath.
A transplant.
He wanted to laugh it all off, to tell himself that he was in some backwater, low-rent hospital getting bad advice, and part of him even believed it. But not all of him, not deep, deep inside of him where the fear had always lived, the dark spot in his soul where even the booze and drugs couldn’t reach.
Transplant.
The word circled back on itself and returned.
Transplanttransplanttransplant.
They wanted to cut his heart out.
Drugs swirled soothingly through Angel’s body. He couldn’t keep his eyes open, and his body felt weighted and tingly. Consciousness came and went with the ticking of the wall clock.
Home. They were sending him home.
He tried not to think about it, but the memories were persistent. He didn’t have the pills and the booze and the women to keep them away this time, and without his narcotic armor, he was so damned vulnerable. He closed his eyes, and slowly, slowly, the antiseptic smell of the hospital was blown away by a rain-sweet breeze. He no longer heard the monitor, but the growl of an engine….
He was seventeen again … riding his motorcycle, the Harley-Davidson that had cost him his soul. The engine throbbed and purred beneath him. He drove and drove, not knowing where he was going until he reached the stoplight. The sign hovered above him at a cockeyed angle: Wagonwheel Estates Trailer Park.
He urged the bike forward, inching past one trailer, then another and another. Each mobile home huddled on a thin strip of asphalt, living rooms shored up with piles of concrete blocks, backyards a six-by-six square of gravel.
Finally he came to his boyhood home.
The trailer, once butter yellow, now and grayed by time, sat in a weed-infested patch of meadow grass. Trash cans heaped with garbage lined the chain-link fence that separated the DeMarco “estate” from the Wachtels’ domain next door. A dilapidated Ford Impala was parked at a suspicious angle in the driveway.
He pulled up alongside the chain-link fence and cut the engine. He sat there a second, uncertain, then very slowly he set the kickstand and got off. He walked along the fence and up the split asphalt driveway, across the necklace of aggregate gravel stepping-stones that led to the front door.
As he passed it, Angel glanced at the garbage can, saw the crushed paper bags and bent pop cans that peeked over the rim. It was his job, never Francis’s, to carefully construct the rubbish facade. The real garbage—the weekly allotment of gin and vodka bottles—had to be hidden at all costs.
As if the neighbors didn’t know. For years they’d heard the raucous, drunken fights that emanated from the piss-colored trailer, had heard the slamming doors and breaking glass every Saturday night.
The music of Angel’s youth.
He climbed the creaking metal steps and stopped at the top, staring at the dirty door. For a second he didn’t want to go in. It was crazy, he knew, to be seventeen years old and afraid to enter your own home, but it had been that way for as long as he could remember.
There was a rustle of movement from within. The trailer shifted and whined on its blocks as footsteps thudded toward the door. Suddenly the knob twisted, the door arced open.
His mother stood in the doorway, a cigarette in one hand, a glass of gin in the other. Her skin had a sick yellow-gray tinge, the mark of chain-smoking, and accordion-pleated wrinkles creased her cheeks. Black hair—a color too severe to be found in nature—lay in frizzled disarray around her pudgy face. Puffy purplish bags underscored her bloodshot brown eyes.
Eyeing him, she took a long drink of her gin, draining the glass and tossing it back onto the brown shag carpet. “Where you been?”
“What do you care?”
She burped, wiped the moisture from her mouth. “Don’t you sass me, boy.”
Angel sighed. Why was he here? What had he hoped for? A smile, a welcome, a come-on-in? When would he stop wanting something from his mother? “I got a problem, Ma.”
One bushy gray eyebrow shot upward. “You’re in trouble.” She said it without a hint of emotion, just a flat statement of fact.
“Yeah.”
She took a deep drag off her cigarette, then blew the smoke in his face. “Whaddaya want from me?”
He felt a stab of disappointment, and it pissed him off. “Nothing.”
She flicked the still-burning cigarette onto the driveway. “Francis brung me his report card yesterday. It was the best present a mother could get.”
Angel fought the immediate resentment, refused to let it get the best of him. It had always been this way with his mother, and it always would be. Francis was her golden boy, her fair-haired child. Francis the good and pure, Francis the altar boy. Her ticket to Heaven. And Angel was her shit-kicking, hell-raising mistake. How many times had she told him she “shoulda had an abortion”?
“You wanna drink?” she asked, still eyeing him.
“Sure, Ma,” he said tiredly. “I’ll have a drink.”
“Martini?”
He knew what her martini was—eight ounces of gin and two ice cubes. “Fine.”
Without another word, she turned away from him and headed for the kitchen.
Reluctantly he followed her into the murky interior. Pale light shone through a dirty beige lampshade, reflected on the shag carpet. A faded bronze velour sofa was pressed against the fake-wood-paneled wall. Press-board end tables were littered with celebrity magazines and piled with ashtrays. There was a fine dusting of ash on the floor beside a black Naugahyde La-Z-Boy.
Angel sat down on the sagging sofa. Within seconds his mother was bustling back toward him, drinks clanking in her hands. He tried not to care that she didn’t speak. She didn’t want to talk with Angel, didn’t want to be with him, but she always had time to drink with him.
Back when he was a kid, ten, eleven, she’d started him on the road to alcoholism with a motherly shove. She’d wanted someone to drink with, and she’d never ask pious Francis. Angel was the perfect choice—as long as he didn’t talk much.
It was pathetic how much he’d valued that time with her. For a while it had felt as if she’d chosen him, wanted to be with him. By about seventh grade, he understood the truth. She’d share a drink with Adolf Hitler if he stopped by at “cocktail hour.” Anything or anyone to prove to her soggy brain that she was a social drinker.
For the longest time, they sat there, he on the sofa, she on the La-Z-Boy, drinking silently. The rattling ice and swallowing gulps seemed inordinately loud in the quiet room. Angel wanted to tell her what he came to say—good-bye—but he couldn’t face the look in her eyes when he said the word. She’d know instantly that he was running from trouble, and her triumphant smile would confirm everything she’d ever said about him.
After a while, he heard a car drive up. The engine roared, sputtered, died. Footsteps clanged up the metal steps.
Ma put down her drink and flew to the door, wrenching it open. She threw her arms wide and squealed with delight. “Frankie!”
Angel put his drink down and got to his feet. Anxiety twisted his gut into a knot. He stood there, waiting. His heart started beating hard in his chest. He wasn’t ready to tell his brother good-bye, not yet….
Ma moved aside and ushered her savior inside.