The doctors’ lounge was much more friendly than the sterile emergency-room waiting area outside (although the term doctors’ lounge, at any hospital, struck Lucas as an oxymoron), with plush, wine-colored chairs and cherrywood-paneled walls that projected the air of a library. At the center, a handsome matching cherrywood conference table had chairs for a half dozen people. A cleaning woman had come in to begin brewing coffee about a half hour before, but Lucas and Cal had been relatively undisturbed since they’d been ushered to this room. Their only company was the television set, which had been playing a test pattern earlier, but was now blithely showing the Mutant Men cartoon Jared would ordinarily have risen to watch by now. Neither Lucas nor Cal had thought to change the channel. Lucas found himself watching the manic cartoon, trying to memorize the antics of the deformed but noble heroes, vowing he would tell Jared exactly what he’d missed as soon as he had the chance, as soon as Jared woke up. If he woke up, a voice in his head corrected him, trying to protect him from his hopes.
After all, he reminded himself, he might find himself sitting on the other side of death today.
There were plenty of doctors who’d learned to manage their emotions well enough to treat the seriously ill not only with dignity but with patience and compassion, and Lucas had known some wonderful doctors during Rachel’s illness and his residency in med school—but he would also never forget a senior doctor, his adviser, who always sounded pissed with terminal patients and their families, routinely reducing them to tears, as if they’d brought their illnesses upon themselves and were refusing to improve simply to fuck up his day. Dr. Everett Lowe. Lucas often thought of Dr. Lowe since his own brief stint in pediatrics, when his first three young patients had died in harrowing succession. Children crying and dying. It was too much. Each night, Lucas had gone home feeling as if he’d swallowed crushed glass. Maybe Dr. Lowe had been like that once, and he’d turned so vile to keep his sanity. The experience had spooked Lucas so much that he had decided right then he would get his Ph.D. and become a researcher. He’d fight disease, but he’d keep his soul safe in the process.
Thank God there were good pediatricians for Jared. Good pediatricians reminded Lucas of veterinarians: they considered cooing and coaxing a part of their job description. That meant fewer stony faces, less contempt, more of what patients referred to as that oft-craved bedside manner that still was not, as far as he knew, part of the standard curriculum at medical schools.
And it should be. Because death could never be mundane.
Lucas had always thought so when he was only on the other side of it, but he definitely understood that now. There was nothing the least bit mundane about watching his son die. It was like breathing hot coals, each breath more painful than the last.
Lucas’s glazed eyes were so fixed on the television set overhead that he hadn’t seen the door to the doctors’ lounge open, hadn’t noticed Mandini walk in. Lucas only glanced at the doorway when he felt Cal tap his knee, and Mandini stood there in his scrub suit, which was hugging his chest with streaks of perspiration.
Lucas lurched to his feet, looking for clues about Jared in Mandini’s eyes, and he felt the same voiceless hope he’d seen in the faces of patients’ family members his entire life. He’d first seen it in his father’s face when his mother had gotten sick, a childlike hangdog wondering, the first time Lucas had realized his father couldn’t fix everything the way he’d thought he could. He’d seen it in Jared during Rachel’s illness, when Jared quizzed Lucas every day she spent in the hospital, waiting for the news that his mommy would soon be coming home for good.
And at the pediatric leukemia center where Jared had received his rounds of chemotherapy, there had been a special room where doctors took parents when they needed to impart bad news. And all of the other parents—himself included—had felt sympathy for those poor folk they saw ushered into that room while at the same time they thanked God they weren’t the ones about to have their hopes crushed.
Lucas knew what crushed hope sounded like. Through the closed door, all of the fortunate families in the waiting area had been able to hear the unlucky parents’ screams.
“Well?” Lucas said hoarsely.
Finally a hint; not a smile, or anywhere near a smile, but Mandini nodded and beckoned Lucas toward him so they could speak privately. “He’s alive. But . . .”
Lucas didn’t want to hear the rest. “Just tell me where he is.”
• • •
As Lucas walked alone in the hallway toward the intensive-care post-op ward, all he wanted to focus on was that his son was still breathing, his brain was functioning, his heart was beating. Lucas had been told Jared was on oxygen, but not a respirator. That was good.
But with each footstep, Lucas’s mind swept him back to his memory of the frank talk he’d just received from Mandini and Gonzalez, both of them speaking in turns with condescending patience, as if Lucas didn’t have his own medical degree and hadn’t himself served on a medical school faculty and once won a national microbiology award—as if he were a witch doctor who needed a stern talk on the wonders of modern American science.
Have you tried to get him a bone-marrow transplant? There have been some real strides there, and that’s the only cure for the kind of leukemia he has. Chemotherapy isn’t very effective. His short-term prognosis is very poor. We couldn’t save his spleen, you know, and his other organs will be attacked by infection after infection. By the way, our on-site pastor doesn’t get in until eight—is there a family minister you want to call?
And Lucas had just listened, nodding with pursed lips. He’d resisted equally strong drives to burst into laughter and to punch both of them in the face, but he was afraid he would lose touch with his own mind if he did either. That is, if he hadn’t lost it already.
Lucas could have given both of these doctors an education on autologous bone-marrow transplants himself, because Jared had undergone one last year. He’d nearly died of pneumonia as a result, and it simply hadn’t worked. Only six months after the transplant, when Jared still hadn’t regained his ability to taste food (thus robbing him of the joy of chocolate ice cream, one of the few pleasures the kid still had left in the world) and was getting regular blood transfusions and couldn’t interact with people because his platelet count was still so low, the leukemia had shown up yet again. And he and Jared, together, had cried all night long.
So much for science.
Jared’s doctors said maybe it would have worked with the bone marrow from an outside donor; or ideally, the marrow from a sibling. But Jared didn’t have any siblings—though he’d always begged for a little brother or sister; and Lucas and Rachel had just decided they would try to have another baby only a couple of weeks before, as they always put it, The Day the Earth Stood Still—and there hadn’t been any movement on the waiting list Lucas had placed Jared on the same day he was diagnosed.
And even if they found a donor, they all knew a second bone-marrow transplant might kill Jared sooner than the leukemia would. Not to mention that Jared had told Lucas, in all earnestness, that he would rather die than go through that procedure again, because he’d finally regained the use of his taste buds and chocolate had become a miracle to him, and he didn’t want to risk losing it again, maybe forever this time.
And he didn’t want to be so sick for months and months that he couldn’t play outside or see any of his friends. And he was so, so tired of hospitals. And medicine. And being in bed. And he hadn’t started feeling really bad until he’d started the treatments, and if he was going to die anyway, he wanted to feel good as long as he could instead of taking treatments and feeling bad all the time.
Besides, Daddy, maybe Mommy misses me too much in heaven, and that’s why God gave me leukemia in the first place. The doctors and the Magic-Man aren’t as strong as God, right?
That was what Jared had told Lucas only three months before. And they had both cried for more hours on end after he’d said it, because Jared was only ten ye
ars old and was accepting death, which made him more grown-up than most adults Lucas knew. And as he’d hugged his son, Lucas kept imagining the last day Jared had truly been a child, when they’d been sitting in the living room watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and eating pizza, when neither of them had had any reason to suspect, much less know, that Jared would never grow up.
As he walked down the deserted hospital hallway, Lucas longed so much to return to that last day of normalcy, just for twenty-four hours, that he felt his chest burning.
Because Lucas could not accept what was happening. He could not accept what Mandini and Gonzalez had told him, that even if Jared survived the next twenty-four hours, his body was likely to fail him in the next six weeks, or sooner. There had to be something else Lucas could do, something else he could try. Somewhere, there had to be a Golden Ticket for his son, too.
The sign on the door at the end of the hall read I.C.U.—Authorized Personnel Only, posted above a mop and a large rolling yellow bucket full of dingy water someone had left nearly in the door’s path. The water smelled so strongly of disinfectant, grime, and urine that Lucas had to pinch his nose. He pushed the glowing blue button beside the door to unlock it, then he turned the knob and let himself in, sidestepping the mop and bucket.
When he gazed through the square-shaped window of the first door on the left, he saw a narrow room with a row of unevenly spaced curtain partitions, presumably separating patients. This door was unlocked, so Lucas walked inside. He could hear Jared’s heart monitor, or at least that’s what he assumed it was. He followed the beeping, his stomach clenching. Someone attached to an IV was pushed up against the wall on a rolling bed, waiting for a room assignment. The man or woman—he couldn’t tell which—was curled up in a fetal position facing the wall.
As he walked past, he could tell that the patient on the table was a woman after glancing at the thinning tangles of long silver hair on her pillow. He saw a freshly bandaged, bloody stump where her right foot should have been, as if her stick-thin leg had simply vanished at the tip. An amputee. Probably diabetes, he thought. Lucas heard the old woman moan softly, but he kept walking, his son’s heart-song beckoning him.
Beyond the partition, through the clear plastic of the isolation tent over Jared’s bed, Lucas could see his son’s face. His eyes were closed, his eyelids no longer fluttering.
Immediately, Lucas gazed at the electrocardiograph monitor at Jared’s bedside, to be reassured by the jagged pulses of his heartbeat on the small screen. The heart rate was slow, but the rhythm was good. How many nights had Lucas fallen asleep to the sound of that machine’s beeping? Often, sleeping near Jared’s heart monitor, he’d awakened from dreams that he’d heard the jarring tone of a flat-line, signaling that Jared’s heart had stopped.
Maybe they hadn’t been dreams, he thought sadly. Maybe they’d only been glimpses into a future that was drawing closer all the time. Because he had known all along that Jared would not get well, hadn’t he? Even when he’d pretended his knowing was only irrational dread left over from losing Rachel, it had probably been genuine intuition all along.
No surprise that Jared’s acute myelocytic leukemia had turned out to be so difficult to cure. No surprise that the chemo hadn’t worked. No surprise that the bone-marrow procedure hadn’t worked, either. And ultimately, it had been no surprise that one of the most powerful shamans in the world, the one Jared called Magic-Man, hadn’t been able to help him even a little. The Something, whatever it was, was determined to have Jared, too. And contrary to what Jared believed, Lucas didn’t think it had the first thing at all to do with God. Lucas was convinced it was the work of something else altogether.
Three Ravens Perez, the Arizona-based healer known globally for his successful treatment of terminal patients, had told Lucas as much in a rare moment of weary frustration. Perez was an old friend, one of the first shamans to teach Lucas the observable merits of spirit-based healing rituals, and Lucas had seen the anguish in his friend’s face. When Perez had flown to Tallahassee to perform a healing ceremony on Jared shortly before the bone-marrow transplant, Lucas’s optimism during the brief remission period had been crushed by something haunted in the powerful man’s eyes. And Perez’s words, spoken to Lucas in a hush while they drank tepid coffee, had been even more haunting. This is hard for me to say to you, but you have a right to hear it. The shadows have Jared, Lucas. I saw the same shadows with Rachel, smelled the same foulness. I have never known shadows like these. I’m afraid they won’t heed good medicine. I think they have hunted for him.
“Well, champ, you missed a good one today,” Lucas began at Jared’s beside, his tone much more upbeat than his thoughts. Jared had told him he sometimes heard the things Lucas said when he was unconscious or sleeping, so Lucas had made it a habit to talk and sing to him. Jared had probably heard him sing every Robert Johnson song ever recorded, from “Love in Vain” to “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” if slightly off-key. In case it made a small difference.
Slipping his gloved hand into the tent, Lucas smoothed back Jared’s wispy, light-brown hair, which only curled where it grew thickest at the top of his head. The hair, too, he’d inherited from Rachel, along with his skin color. Jared’s complexion had always been very pale, lighter than Lucas’s peanut-colored skin, but his son’s face was now almost ghostlike, as if he’d been dusted with powder. In the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights above them, Lucas could even see tiny blue webs of capillaries under Jared’s skin, just below his eyes. He looked almost like a stranger.
Still, aided by the oxygen tubes in his nose, Jared’s chest rose and fell steadily. His breathing sounded good, not bubbling in his chest the way it did when he had fluid in his lungs. Lucas squeezed Jared’s unmoving fingers, and the warmth that bled through the plastic felt like sunshine.
“Let’s see now . . . you know I get the names all mixed up, but I’ll remember as best I can,” Lucas said, stooping over to speak close to Jared’s ear. “These Mutant Men of yours are ugly as can be, Jared. Is Ned Nuke the one with the face like Swiss cheese? In any case, I think Ned Nuke found out about some kind of conspiracy to kill the earth’s population by poisoning the air. So he and the other one, the black one . . . is his name Freddy Fallout? Well, the two of them teamed up with that really big one who has tentacles for arms, that one you like so much . . .”
Hearing the soothing tones of his own voice, Lucas began to forget where he was, and details from the past few hours, the past few wretched years, began to melt away in his mind. This was no different from countless times before, when he’d told Jared bedtime stories about his other favorite heroes trying to save the world. It wasn’t so different at all.
But his fantasy ended abruptly when he realized he could hear the old woman calling out. He must have been ignoring her, dismissing her voice as background noise, but now he could hear her soft, piteous voice from across the room. She spoke almost politely, as if she didn’t want to intrude, but she repeated the same phrases over and over, too proud to beg but desperate to be heard: “I’m cold. Can someone bring me a blanket? This room is so cold.”
Glancing over the top of the partition, Lucas could see her lying shivering on her side in her thin gown, thoroughly and completely invisible to the world, her droopy buttocks exposed through the gap. This woman was alone, and no one else could hear her. It wouldn’t take him more than a couple minutes to find someone to look after her, he told himself. But though he wanted to, Lucas could not force himself to let go of his son’s warm little hand, not even to search for an old woman’s rightly deserved blanket.
Not if it meant leaving Jared alone, if it meant Lucas might not be there when his son finally opened his eyes and looked for his father. Lucas realized that was the only thing in the world he was living for, all he could afford to care about. In the end, that was all human life boiled down to, wasn’t it? Only survival. Only love.
“Please . . . I’m so cold,” the woman’s voice pleaded.
br /> Bent over his dying son’s bed, Lucas Shepard wept.
2
Three weeks later
June 6, 2001
“Lucas? Hang on, Doc. Got a little somethin’ for you.”
Lucas heard Cal’s voice as he wrapped one arm around Jared and bumped his elbow against the driver’s door of his Toyota pickup truck to swing it shut. The door’s muted sound was absorbed by the quiet of his street, with its scattering of homes built at the trunks of towering oak, dogwood, and sweet-gum trees on a steep road. His street had a virgin quality bordering on sloppiness. Kudzu grew wild, untamed, blanketing everything in the woods around them beneath its leafy green vines. As though following the kudzu’s random lead, Lucas and his neighbors tended to leave torn screen doors flapping, windows unwashed, and old cars rusting in the dirt paths leading to their homes. Most of them also still kept their doors unlocked, despite living only minutes from Florida’s state capitol building. Their street’s main security precaution was a habit of noticing when their neighbors’ cars drove up the winding, clay-orange Okeepechee Road, returning home from “the city,” as they all called it, as though the center of town were a full day’s journey away.
“Hey, Jared, my man,” Cal said as he leaned across the bed of Lucas’s pickup. The truck sank slightly beneath Cal’s weight.
“Lookit, Uncle Cal,” Jared said, modeling his new Chicago Bulls jersey, which was so big on his rawboned frame that it looked like a potato sack. After taking Jared on his first shopping trip since his release from the hospital, navigating his wheelchair through the dizzying layout of cartoon-colored chain stores at Governor’s Square Mall, Lucas figured he’d had enough of the city to last him through the weekend.