Fireflies: A Father's Classic Tale of Love and Loss

You get the idea.

  Each day, for seven days, as Matthew received intravenous chemotherapy, monumental, life-threatening doses of it, a nurse wrote numbers on a chart on the wall. These numbers were in columns and referred to the various vital aspects of his blood.

  And each day the numbers went lower. A white-blood count of six thousand is wonderful, but David, Donna, and Sarie watched Matthew’s white-blood count descend to …

  Zero.

  That’s when a simple ingenious system gets scary. Someone with a slight case of the flu can contaminate a bone-marrow-transplant patient, and instead of giving the patient a mild stomach upset, the flu makes him very sick indeed. Because the patient has no white blood cells to attack the usually mild infection. Further, the bone-marrow physicians can’t assume that the patient’s fever and nausea are merely produced by the flu; to guard against other, potentially lethal infections, they might be forced to administer unnecessary extreme medications.

  Before entering Matt’s room, David, Donna, and Sarie washed their hands thoroughly, then put on hospital gowns. They interrogated Matt’s visitors to make sure no one had been exposed to even a cold. “Wash your hands. Put on that gown.”

  After seven excruciating days, and a day of rest that allowed the deadly chemicals to be purged from Matthew’s body, his bone marrow has unfrozen and returned to him.

  Cause for joy.

  But Matt was fifteen, past puberty, though the hospital classified anyone under sixteen as a child. The preservative in his bone marrow, which worked well on children but caused occasional allergic reactions in adults, sent his blood pressure soaring to one hundred and seventy. His head ached so severely he told David he feared his skull would burst. He convulsed. His breath (because of a peculiarity of the preservative) filled his room with the smell of garlic, and that made him vomit. But medication reduced his blood pressure. The headaches and convulsions stopped. The garlic stench eventually went away. And everyone waited for a zero white-blood count to climb.

  15

  That was when David took his turn sleeping next to Matthew … when Donna went home to rest … when Donna returned to the hospital in the morning and David went home to run as was his custom … and stumbled into the house, couldn’t stop sweating, filled a glass of water, raised it to his lips, and suddenly fainted on his kitchen floor.

  16

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  Four Quartets,

  “Burnt Norton”

  17

  Floating.

  His daughter grieving below him.

  Hovering. His aged body succumbing beneath him.

  Forty years later.

  Or forty years earlier in a nightmare on his kitchen floor?

  He didn’t know! He didn’t understand!

  Rising. Drifting.

  Floating through brilliance.

  A radiant hallway. A splendrous door.

  Pushing. The door swinging open.

  Fireflies.

  Power chords.

  But where was Matthew? He had to save Matthew!

  PANIC ATTACK

  1

  David struggled against his dizziness as he rushed from the Pediatrics Ward. The corridor, the rooms, the administration area, the blond nurse he’d spoken to—they unnerved him, as if he’d seen them only recently and yet remembered them from long ago.

  My God, what’s wrong with me?

  The tingling that had started in his hands and feet had now spread up his arms and legs, rushing toward his heart.

  He felt so off-balance he almost leaned against a wall. The humming behind his ears so disoriented him he wanted to sink to the floor. But he had to keep moving.

  Hurry!

  Matthew! He couldn’t explain his fear that tomorrow afternoon his son would contract septic shock and eight days later die from its effects. Whatever had happened to him while he’d fainted, David knew what was going to occur. He could see it, as if each terrifying instant had been seared into his memory.

  Lurching around a corner, he found an open door to an elevator and rushed inside. Vision blurry, he fumbled to press the button marked 7.

  The doors hissed shut. The elevator surged upward. Again the pressure in David’s skull swelled, making him grab his temples. He stifled the urge to vomit.

  Abruptly the elevator stopped. Its doors opened. He staggered into a corridor, not sure which direction to choose (but wasn’t I here just this morning?), then suddenly realized he had to turn right.

  Down another corridor. A man and a woman stared at his unsteady movements. He fought not to waver.

  Passing elevator F.

  Passing elevator E.

  Through a gradually clearing haze of memory, he regained his bearings.

  Turn right!

  He found a door, pushed through it, and hurried down still another corridor, this one lined with rooms in which elderly patients blinked listlessly at game shows on television.

  “Now you’ve got to try to eat, Mr. Standish.” A nurse raised a spoon of what looked like pea soup to the lips of an aged bone-thin man.

  David hurried farther, passed a nurses’ station, pushed through another door, and at last he was here, at the source of his nightmare, the Bone Marrow Ward.

  2

  Its safety procedures were meticulous. Because of the danger of infection, the air inside this ward was filtered, purified, and recirculated every two hours. The nurses took off their gowns each time they left a patient’s room and put on fresh gowns whenever they entered another patient’s room. If a patient wanted to watch a videotape, the VCR was scrubbed with disinfectant before it was taken inside the patient’s room. Every precaution (short of total isolation) was maintained.

  And yet …

  And yet …

  David knew that tomorrow afternoon his son would …

  He hurried toward the bin in which the fresh gowns were stored. Putting one on, tying its strings, he noticed a worried mother carrying a tray of barely eaten food from her daughter’s room. This woman (like the nurse in the Pediatrics Ward) he remembered vividly and yet as if from a great gap in time.

  He tried to smile, though his dizziness made the ward seem to swirl, and managed to walk a straight line toward Matthew’s room.

  But when he peered through the open door, the bed was empty.

  In David’s nightmare, Matt had been helped down the hall and was having a bath right now. If that turned out to be true, would everything else in the nightmare also come true?

  Panic rising, David turned …

  And saw the most lovely vision he ever hoped to appreciate.

  Not Matthew, though he would have been vision enough.

  But Donna, who came around a corner, adjusting the ties on her hospital gown, and paused as David smiled at her.

  David’s smile was broad enough to hurt his cheeks, deep enough to squeeze his heart.

  Donna, who had died in his nightmare at the age of seventy-nine, and who even then had seemed as beautiful as the day he had married her.

  On his wedding day, he’d been so afraid to give up what he thought of as his freedom, even though he’d made the commitment to combine his destiny with hers, that he’d almost fled from the church.

  But he’d abided by his commitment, and when he’d turned from the altar to witness his soon-to-be wife proceeding with such pride and dignity down the aisle, her white gown so magnificent, her brown eyes, auburn hair, and dark oval face so lovely, his heart had rejoiced.

  Just as it rejoiced now as he stared at her with wonder—her experience-wearied features midway between the glowing smoothness he’d witnessed on his wedding day and the ashen wrinkles he’d seen on the day she died.

  Despite the swirling in his brain, David walked toward her, put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “I haven’t seen you in a while.
”

  She studied him with welcoming eyes. He swore they glowed. And he swore something else. As eerie as it seemed, he felt that she felt, she knew, that they were gazing at each other, with wonder, as if a miracle had occurred, from a perspective forward of another half-lifetime, of almost forty years.

  “In case I haven’t told you often enough,” David said, “I love you.”

  Donna’s grin was as winsome as when she’d been twenty-one or seventy-nine. And her humor was as endearing as ever.

  “Oh, hell,” she said and kept grinning. “Don’t bore me.”

  “Deeply,” David said. “Always. You don’t know how much I mean ‘always.’”

  “Don’t I? I do know. Yes!”

  Inches away, they surveyed each other’s eyes, and David was suddenly sure that he saw behind her eyes the same desperate knowledge he had, as if they had both returned, both been given a second chance. A reprieve. A miraculous opportunity. To reverse the greatest loss of their earthly existence.

  To save their son’s life.

  “Yes, always,” David said. “Deeply and forever, I love you.”

  Donna’s grin changed to solemnness and, more, the epitome of determination. “I understand. Believe me, yes. Deeply. Forever. We’ve got a job to do, the greatest job of our lives.”

  David’s festering question burst from him. “Where’s Matt?”

  “He went for a bath.”

  Just as in my nightmare! David thought.

  “Dad.”

  Turning, David saw him.

  3

  The interval between extensive surgery and the bone-marrow transplant had permitted sufficient time for Matthew’s hair to begin to grow again. Matthew’s scalp was fuzzy with hair. He even had the shadow of a mustache.

  But as Matt returned from his bath, holding his robe together with one hand while he gripped a portable radio in the other, he looked flushed. His eyes looked dull. And he was staggering.

  “Jesus,” David murmured.

  He and Donna rushed to him. Matt wobbled, about to fall as they caught him.

  “Almost lost my balance in the … almost cracked my head getting out of …”

  “The tub,” a nurse said behind him. “I kept a close watch. I held him tight, but …”

  “Slipped. Dizzy,” Matthew said. “Could hardly get out of the … nearly hit my head on the sink.” He gasped. “Need oxygen. Can’t breathe.”

  While the nurse took off her gown and put on a fresh one, David and Donna helped Matthew into his room. His knees kept buckling. They eased him onto his bed, then quickly used the sink in the room to wash their hands with disinfectant.

  By then the nurse had joined them, washing her hands as well.

  “Can’t breathe,” Matt repeated.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Donna asked.

  David fought to control his dizziness.

  “The effects of the chemotherapy. His low blood factors.” The nurse’s tone was reassuring. Nonetheless she frowned, checking Matthew’s pulse.

  “David, he’s been like this since you left this morning,” Donna said. “I’m worried—more than usual.”

  She had good reason to worry, David knew with inexplicable certainty. His arms and legs tingled in cold, then hot rushes.

  “His heartbeat’s slightly higher than normal for him. Eighty-five instead of seventy,” the nurse said. “That’s probably from the exertion of taking a bath and coming back to his room.”

  But her frown persisted as she wrapped a cuff around Matthew’s arm and pumped it full of air to monitor his blood pressure.

  “Need oxygen,” Matthew repeated.

  “Give it to him,” David said.

  “He probably doesn’t need it. Most likely he’s just short of breath from walking back to”—the nurse interrupted herself, putting a stethoscope to her ears, then watching a blood-pressure monitor on the wall behind the bed. “Slightly higher than normal for him.”

  Normal for Matt was one hundred and ten over seventy-five.

  “What are the numbers?” David’s voice was strained with urgency.

  “One hundred and twenty over eighty. Well within an acceptable range.”

  “But look at him. He’s sick.”

  “It’s to be expected. After all the treatment he’s had. When his blood counts start to rise, he’ll feel a lot better.”

  “My stomach hurts,” Matt said.

  “As if you might vomit?” The nurse grabbed for a plastic basin.

  “No.” Matt gasped. “It burns.”

  “You might have ulcers from the chemotherapy,” the nurse explained.

  “But he’s had six months of chemotherapy,” Donna said, “and he never had ulcers before.”

  “Because he never had treatment in such large doses.”

  “Oxygen.” Matt’s chest heaved.

  “Give it to him,” David said.

  “But I can’t!”

  “Why?”

  “Here.” The nurse handed David a sheet of paper. “Before he went for his bath, I took a sample of his blood—to have it analyzed for its oxygen content. The computer just printed out the results of the test. His blood gases are just what they should be. The lab test shows he doesn’t need oxygen. If I give it to him, I’d hurt him more than help him. Oxygen’s toxic to a patient’s lungs if it’s administered when he doesn’t need it.”

  The tingling rushed from David’s arms and legs toward his chest. His heart beat faster.

  “But you said you took the blood-gas test before Matt went for his bath. Maybe he didn’t need oxygen then, but what if his condition changed in the meantime? What if he needs the oxygen now?”

  “His condition couldn’t change that fast,” the nurse said. “Not without something to indicate the change. I just took his temperature. It’s normal.”

  David’s lungs pumped. The swirling in his brain intensified. A peculiar kind of swirling. Not the sort in which the room seemed to spin. Instead the room remained still while his mind spun.

  Again he saw fireflies. Again he floated down a brilliant corridor. Again he heard power chords.

  But the fireflies could have been glinting specks behind his eyes.

  And the power chords? David suddenly realized that Matthew’s portable radio had been playing heavy-metal rock all along.

  My God, is this really just a delusion?

  And yet he knew, he was sure that Matthew’s weakness and stomach pains were warnings of the septic shock that soon would kill him.

  No!

  He liked this nurse. She knew her job. She did it well. She was sympathetic, talented, motivated, and totally wrong.

  I can’t waste time. I can’t let my son die.

  His pulse thumped faster, increasing the humming behind his ears. He’d hoped to intervene subtly in Matthew’s treatment, to point out this or that minimal change in Matt’s condition, to maneuver Matt’s physicians into humoring David’s increasing concern and taking precautions that they saw no need for, given Matt’s presently acceptable vital statistics.

  But now he realized that if he did believe in his premonitions, he couldn’t keep following the indirect tactic he’d chosen. He had to insist, to do and not just make suggestions, to act against the system instead of within it.

  “Antibiotics,” David told the nurse. “He needs them right now. Give them.”

  The nurse stepped backward. “What are you talking about?”

  “Donna, do you understand?”

  “Yes. Believe me.”

  Again David saw her in triplicate—as a vibrant bride in her early twenties, as a dying elderly woman, as the middle-aged desperate mother she was at present—all equally beautiful, each the object of the various lifelong, profoundly increasing stages of his love.

  But at the moment, he thought he’d never loved her more. And again he was struck by something behind her eyes, a frightened conviction, a terrified certainty, as if she truly did understand what he was warning about.

&nb
sp; “Antibiotics. Matt needs them. Give them to him. Now,” David told the nurse.

  “But I told you”—the nurse stepped farther back—“he doesn’t have a temperature. His other statistics are somewhat high but well within normal ranges. There’s no reason to give him antibiotics. Even if he had an infection, which he doesn’t, we’d need to do lab cultures on his blood, to learn what kind of infection it was, so we could decide what kind of antibiotics would be best to fight the—”

  “Who’s the doctor on duty?”

  The nurse veered quickly past David, her eyes no longer nervous but apprehensive. “I’ll hurry and get him.”

  “No, I’ll go with you. Donna, in the next ten minutes, Matt’ll be so weak he won’t take phone calls. He’ll send away visitors, the friends he’s been anxious to hear from. He’ll ask you to turn off his music. Understand? He’ll start rejecting everything that’s important to him.”

  “Yes,” Donna said, that same unsettling knowledge behind her eyes. “I understand. Do it. Whatever you think is right. I’m so afraid.”

  “Twice is too many times.”

  Donna nodded, as if she sensed exactly what he meant.

  With a frightened look, the nurse left the room.

  David followed.

  4

  In the corridor, the nurse whispered to the head physician, her remarks attracting a second physician. They turned, eyes narrowed, as David approached.

  The first physician straightened. “We gather you’re having some reservations about your son’s treatment.”

  “Fears.”

  “That’s understandable.” The second physician cleared his throat, obviously hoping to avoid an awkward conversation in public.

  “You’re following the procedure you explained to me. I understood the logic of that treatment. I agreed,” David said.

  “Well, good,” the first physician said. “Then we don’t have a problem.”