It is a horror and a miracle to see him. He is lying in his crib in his room, tubed up, splayed like a boy on a cross, his arms stiffened into cardboard “no-no’s” so that he cannot yank out the tubes. There is the bladder catheter, the nasal-gastric tube, and the Hickman, which, beneath the skin, is plugged into his jugular, then popped out his chest wall and capped with a long plastic cap. There is a large bandage taped over his abdomen. Groggy, on a morphine drip, still he is able to look at her when, maneuvering through all the vinyl wiring, she leans to hold him, and when she does, he begins to cry, but cry silently, without motion or noise. She has never seen a baby cry without motion or noise. It is the crying of an old person: silent, beyond opinion, shattered. In someone so tiny, it is frightening and unnatural. She wants to pick up the Baby and run—out of there, out of there. She wants to whip out a gun: No-no’s, eh? This whole thing is what I call a no-no. Don’t you touch him! she wants to shout at the surgeons and the needle nurses. Not anymore! No more! No more! She would crawl up and lie beside him in the crib if she could. But instead, because of all his intricate wiring, she must lean and cuddle, sing to him, songs of peril and flight: “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. We gotta get out of this place … there’s a better life for me and you.”
Very 1967. She was eleven then and impressionable.
The Baby looks at her, pleadingly, his arms splayed out in surrender. To where? Where is there to go? Take me! Take me!
That night, postop night, the Mother and Husband lie afloat in the cot together. A fluorescent lamp near the crib is kept on in the dark. The Baby breathes evenly but thinly in his drugged sleep. The morphine in its first flooding doses apparently makes him feel as if he were falling backward—or so the Mother has been told—and it causes the Baby to jerk, to catch himself over and over, as if he were being dropped from a tree. “Is this right? Isn’t there something that should be done?” The nurses come in hourly, different ones—the night shifts seem strangely short and frequent. If the Baby stirs or frets, the nurses give him more morphine through the Hickman catheter, then leave to tend to other patients. The Mother rises to check on him in the low light. There is gurgling from the clear plastic suction tube coming out of his mouth. Brownish clumps have collected in the tube. What is going on? The Mother rings for the nurse. Is it Renée or Sarah or Darcy? She’s forgotten.
“What, what is it?” murmurs the Husband, waking up.
“Something is wrong,” says the Mother. “It looks like blood in his N-G tube.”
“What?” The Husband gets out of bed. He, too, is wearing sweatpants.
The nurse—Valerie—pushes open the heavy door to the room and enters quietly. “Everything okay?”
“There’s something wrong here. The tube is sucking blood out of his stomach. It looks like it may have perforated his stomach and that now he’s bleeding internally. Look!”
Valerie is a saint, but her voice is the standard hospital saint voice: an infuriating, pharmaceutical calm. It says, Everything is normal here. Death is normal. Pain is normal. Nothing is abnormal. So there is nothing to get excited about. “Well now, let’s see.” She holds up the plastic tube and tries to see inside it. “Hmmm,” she says. “I’ll call the attending physician.”
Because this is a research and teaching hospital, all the regular doctors are at home sleeping in their Mission-style beds. Tonight, as is apparently the case every weekend night, the attending physician is a medical student. He looks fifteen. The authority he attempts to convey, he cannot remotely inhabit. He is not even in the same building with it. He shakes everyone’s hands, then strokes his chin, a gesture no doubt gleaned from some piece of dinner theater his parents took him to once. As if there were an actual beard on that chin! As if beard growth on that chin were even possible! Our Town! Kiss Me Kate! Barefoot in the Park! He is attempting to convince, if not to impress.
“We’re in trouble,” the Mother whispers to the Husband. She is tired, tired of young people grubbing for grades. “We’ve got Dr. ‘Kiss Me Kate,’ here.”
The Husband looks at her blankly, a mix of disorientation and divorce.
The medical student holds the tubing in his hands. “I don’t really see anything,” he says.
He flunks! “You don’t?” The Mother shoves her way in, holds the clear tubing in both hands. “That,” she says. “Right here and here.” Just this past semester, she said to one of her own students, “If you don’t see how this essay is better than that one, then I want you just to go out into the hallway and stand there until you do.” Is it important to keep one’s voice down? The Baby stays asleep. He is drugged and dreaming, far away.
“Hmmm,” says the medical student. “Perhaps there’s a little irritation in the stomach.”
“A little irritation?” The Mother grows furious. “This is blood. These are clumps and clots. This stupid thing is sucking the life right out of him!” Life! She is starting to cry.
They turn off the suction and bring in antacids, which they feed into the Baby through the tube. Then they turn the suction on again. This time on low.
“What was it on before?” asks the Husband.
“High,” says Valerie. “Doctor’s orders, though I don’t know why. I don’t know why these doctors do a lot of the things they do.”
“Maybe they’re … not all that bright?” suggests the Mother. She is feeling relief and rage simultaneously: there is a feeling of prayer and litigation in the air. Yet essentially, she is grateful. Isn’t she? She thinks she is. And still, and still: look at all the things you have to do to protect a child, a hospital merely an intensification of life’s cruel obstacle course.
The Surgeon comes to visit on Saturday morning. He steps in and nods at the Baby, who is awake but glazed from the morphine, his eyes two dark unseeing grapes. “The boy looks fine,” the Surgeon announces. He peeks under the Baby’s bandage. “The stitches look good,” he says. The Baby’s abdomen is stitched all the way across like a baseball. “And the other kidney, when we looked at it yesterday face-to-face, looked fine. We’ll try to wean him off the morphine a little, and see how he’s doing on Monday.” He clears his throat. “And now,” he says, looking about the room at the nurses and medical students, “I would like to speak with the Mother, alone.”
The Mother’s heart gives a jolt. “Me?”
“Yes,” he says, motioning, then turning.
She gets up and steps out into the empty hallway with him, closing the door behind her. What can this be about? She hears the Baby fretting a little in his crib. Her brain fills with pain and alarm. Her voice comes out as a hoarse whisper. “Is there something—”
“There is a particular thing I need from you,” says the Surgeon, turning and standing there very seriously.
“Yes?” Her heart is pounding. She does not feel resilient enough for any more bad news.
“I need to ask a favor.”
“Certainly,” she says, attempting very hard to summon the strength and courage for this occasion, whatever it is; her throat has tightened to a fist.
From inside his white coat, the surgeon removes a thin paperback book and thrusts it toward her. “Will you sign my copy of your novel?”
The Mother looks down and sees that it is indeed a copy of a novel she has written, one about teenaged girls.
She looks up. A big, spirited grin is cutting across his face. “I read this last summer,” he says, “and I still remember parts of it! Those girls got into such trouble!”
Of all the surreal moments of the last few days, this, she thinks, might be the most so.
“Okay,” she says, and the Surgeon merrily hands her a pen.
“You can just write ‘To Dr.—Oh, I don’t need to tell you what to write.”
The Mother sits down on a bench and shakes ink into the pen. A sigh of relief washes over and out of her. Oh, the pleasure of a sigh of relief, like the finest moments of love; has anyone properly sung the praises of sighs of
relief? She opens the book to the title page. She breathes deeply. What is he doing reading novels about teenaged girls, anyway? And why didn’t he buy the hardcover? She inscribes something grateful and true, then hands the book back to him.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“The boy? The boy is going to be fine,” he says, then taps her stiffly on the shoulder. “Now you take care. It’s Saturday. Drink a little wine.”
· · ·
Over the weekend, while the Baby sleeps, the Mother and Husband sit together in the Tiny Tim Lounge. The Husband is restless and makes cafeteria and sundry runs, running errands for everyone. In his absence, the other parents regale her further with their sagas. Pediatric cancer and chemo stories: the children’s amputations, blood poisoning, teeth flaking like shale, the learning delays and disabilities caused by chemo frying the young, budding brain. But strangely optimistic codas are tacked on—endings as stiff and loopy as carpenter’s lace, crisp and empty as lettuce, reticulate as a net—ah, words. “After all that business with the tutor, he’s better now, and fitted with new incisors by my wife’s cousin’s husband, who did dental school in two and a half years, if you can believe that. We hope for the best. We take things as they come. Life is hard.”
“Life’s a big problem,” agrees the Mother. Part of her welcomes and invites all their tales. In the few long days since this nightmare began, part of her has become addicted to disaster and war stories. She wants only to hear about the sadness and emergencies of others. They are the only situations that can join hands with her own; everything else bounces off her shiny shield of resentment and unsympathy. Nothing else can even stay in her brain. From this, no doubt, the philistine world is made, or should one say recruited? Together, the parents huddle all day in the Tiny Tim Lounge—no need to watch Oprah. They leave Oprah in the dust. Oprah has nothing on them. They chat matter-of-factly, then fall silent and watch Dune or Star Wars, in which there are bright and shiny robots, whom the Mother now sees not as robots at all but as human beings who have had terrible things happen to them.
Some of their friends visit with stuffed animals and soft greetings of “Looking good” for the dozing baby, though the room is way past the stuffed-animal limit. The Mother arranges, once more, a plateful of Mint Milano cookies and cups of take-out coffee for guests. All her nutso pals stop by—the two on Prozac, the one obsessed with the word penis in the word happiness, the one who recently had her hair foiled green. “Your friends put the de in fin de siècle,” says the Husband. Overheard, or recorded, all marital conversation sounds as if someone must be joking, though usually no one is.
She loves her friends, especially loves them for coming, since there are times they all fight and don’t speak for weeks. Is this friendship? For now and here, it must do and is, and is, she swears it is. For one, they never offer impromptu spiritual lectures about death, how it is part of life, its natural ebb and flow, how we all must accept that, or other such utterances that make her want to scratch out some eyes. Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter “Jesus Christ!” and shake their heads. Plus, they are the only people who not only will laugh at her stupid jokes but offer up stupid ones of their own. What do you get when you cross Tiny Tim with a pit bull? A child’s illness is a strain on the mind. They know how to laugh in a fluty, desperate way—unlike the people who are more her husband’s friends and who seem just to deepen their sorrowful gazes, nodding their heads with Sympathy. How exiling and estranging are everybody’s Sympathetic Expressions! When anyone laughs, she thinks, Okay! Hooray: a buddy. In disaster as in show business.
Nurses come and go; their chirpy voices both startle and soothe. Some of the other Peed Onk parents stick their heads in to see how the Baby is and offer encouragement.
Green Hair scratches her head. “Everyone’s so friendly here. Is there someone in this place who isn’t doing all this airy, scripted optimism—or are people like that the only people here?”
“It’s Modern Middle Medicine meets the Modern Middle Family,” says the Husband. “In the Modern Middle West.”
Someone has brought in take-out lo mein, and they all eat it out in the hall by the elevators.
Parents are allowed use of the Courtesy Line.
“You’ve got to have a second child,” says a different friend on the phone, a friend from out of town. “An heir and a spare. That’s what: we did. We had another child to ensure we wouldn’t off ourselves if we lost our first.”
“Really?”
“I’m serious.”
“A formal suicide? Wouldn’t you just drink yourself into a lifelong stupor and let it go at that?”
“Nope. I knew how I would do it even. For a while, until our second came along, I had it all planned.”
“What did you plan?”
“I can’t go into too much detail, because—Hi, honey!—the kids are here now in the room. But I’ll spell out the general idea: R-O-P-E.”
Sunday evening, she goes and sinks down on the sofa in the Tiny Tim Lounge next to Frank, Joey’s father. He is a short, stocky man with the currentless, flatlined look behind the eyes that all the parents eventually get here. He has shaved his head bald in solidarity with his son. His little boy has been battling cancer for five years. It is now in the liver, and the rumor around the corridor is that Joey has three weeks to live. She knows that Joey’s mother, Heather, left Frank years ago, two years into the cancer, and has remarried and had another child, a girl named Brittany. The Mother sees Heather here sometimes with her new life—the cute little girl and the new, young, full-haired husband who will never be so maniacally and debilitatingly obsessed with Joey’s illness the way Frank, her first husband, was. Heather comes to visit Joey, to say hello and now good-bye, but she is not Joey’s main man. Frank is.
Frank is full of stories—about the doctors, about the food, about the nurses, about Joey. Joey, affectless from his meds, sometimes leaves his room and comes out to watch TV in his bathrobe. He is jaundiced and bald, and though he is nine, he looks no older than six. Frank has devoted the last four and a half years to saving Joey’s life. When the cancer was first diagnosed, the doctors gave Joey a 20 percent chance of living six more months. Now here it is, almost five years later, and Joey’s still here. It is all due to Frank, who, early on, quit his job as vice president of a consulting firm in order to commit himself totally to his son. He is proud of everything he’s given up and done, but he is tired. Part of him now really believes things are coming to a close, that this is the end. He says this without tears. There are no more tears.
“You have probably been through more than anyone else on this corridor,” says the Mother.
“I could tell you stories,” he says. There is a sour odor between them, and she realizes that neither of them has bathed for days.
“Tell me one. Tell me the worst one.” She knows he hates his ex-wife and hates her new husband even more.
“The worst? They’re all the worst. Here’s one: one morning, I went out for breakfast with my buddy—it was the only time I’d left Joey alone ever; left him for two hours is all—and when I came back, his N-G tube was full of blood. They had the suction on too high, and it was sucking the guts right out of him.”
“Oh my God. That just happened to us,” said the Mother.
“It did?”
“Friday night.”
“You’re kidding. They let that happen again? I gave them such a chewing-out about that!”
“I guess our luck is not so good. We get your very worst story on the second night we’re here.”
“It’s not: a bad place, though.”
“It’s not?”
“Naw. I’ve seen worse. I’ve taken Joey everywhere.”
“He seems very strong.” Truth is, at this point, Joey seems like a zombie and frightens her.
“Joey’s a fucking genius. A biological genius. They’d given him six mon
ths, remember.”
The Mother nods.
“Six months is not very long,” says Frank. “Six months is nothing. He was four and a half years old.”
All the words are like blows. She feels flooded with affection and mourning for this man. She looks away, out the window, out past the hospital parking lot, up toward the black marbled sky and the electric eyelash of the moon. “And now he’s nine,” she says. “You’re his hero.”
“And he’s mine,” says Frank, though the fatigue in his voice seems to overwhelm him. “He’ll be that forever. Excuse me,” he says, “I’ve got to go check. His breathing hasn’t been good. Excuse me.”
“Good news and bad,” says the Oncologist on Monday. He has knocked, entered the room, and now stands there. Their cots are unmade. One wastebasket is overflowing with coffee cups. “We’ve got the pathologist’s report. The bad news is that the kidney they removed had certain lesions, called ‘rests,’ which are associated with a higher risk for disease in the other kidney. The good news is that the tumor is stage one, regular cell structure, and under five hundred grams, which qualifies you for a national experiment in which chemotherapy isn’t done but your boy is monitored with ultrasound instead. It’s not all that risky, given that the patient’s watched closely, but here is the literature on it. There are forms to sign, if you decide to do that. Read all this and we can discuss it further. You have to decide within four days.”
Lesions? Rests? They dry up and scatter like M&M’s on the floor. All she hears is the part about no chemo. Another sigh of relief rises up in her and spills out. In a life where there is only the bearable and the unbearable, a sigh of relief is an ecstasy.
“No chemo?” says the Husband. “Do you recommend that?”
The Oncologist shrugs. What casual gestures these doctors are permitted! “I know chemo. I like chemo,” says the Oncologist. “But this is for you to decide. It depends how you feel.”