“Man, am I sick of watching that same footage,” said Jackson. He did an imitation, slackening his jaw and letting drool drizzle his chin, emitting a thin nasal bleat.
“Stop it,” said Carol. “That’s disrespectful.”
He realized too late that the impersonation was a little too close for comfort to Flicka.
“What makes me mad is that this has nothing to do with Terri Schiavo anymore,” said Glynis. “The husband and the in-laws hate each other, it’s all about who wins, and that poor girl gets lost in the shuffle. They could as well be fighting over a scrap of meat.”
“It’s no longer all in the family,” said Shep. “Whole country’s at each other’s throats over this one. But honestly, if you saw a movie in which some private medical face-off ended up involving the governor of Florida—the president’s brother—the state legislature, the state Supreme Court, the federal Supreme Court, and the Congress of the United States, you’d think the plot was totally overdone and unbelievable.”
“When you look at those video clips of Terri,” said Carol, “it seems pretty clear that someone’s home. Withdrawing the feeding tube would be murder.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Jackson. “Those are involuntary movements. Like when you poke at a sea anemone. Except that a sea anemone has more brains.”
“What fascinates me,” said Shep, “what with all the publicity, going on for months? I haven’t heard a single shock jock speculate about how much keeping that woman plugged in for fifteen years has cost.”
“Yeah,” said Jackson, “and if you add in the lawyers’ fees, court costs, and the time squandered in legislatures and the statehouse? That one human house plant in Florida must have cost millions, tens of millions—maybe even hundreds of millions.”
“So?” said Glynis, looking back and forth at her husband and his best friend in horror. “What does that matter? What it costs?”
“We’re talking about human life, Jim!” Jackson supplied, but Glynis didn’t smile.
“Is that all that matters to you two? What someone’s life costs?”
“It’s not all that matters,” said Shep. Jackson figured his friend was about to back down again, but surprisingly he held the line. “But it matters. It takes about five dollars a head to save the life of a kid in Africa with diarrhea. Something like two million kids on that continent basically shit themselves to death every year. If you took all the money spent on keeping Terri Schiavo alive—if you can call her alive—and spent it in Africa instead, I bet you could save every single one of those kids this year.”
“But the money wouldn’t be spent in Africa, would it?” Glynis glared. “Who else would you like to kill off, to save money?”
“No one, Glynis.” To Shep’s credit, he met his wife’s eyes. “Like you said, the money wouldn’t go to Africa anyway.”
Jackson decided to come to the rescue. “Thing is, these gonzo evangelicals, who are so fired up to save Schiavo—who’s reverted, at best, to a hundred-and-seventy-pound baby? They’re the same folks who support capital punishment. They’re gung ho on any military adventure abroad. If they had their say, they’d roll back the clock and you couldn’t get birth control out of wedlock. They oppose stem-cell research because it uses a few microscopic specks from an embryo that’s otherwise going to be tossed into medical waste. They may back national health insurance for children, but couldn’t care less about health insurance for the kids’ parents. They get hysterical about pedophiles like Michael Jackson, but they don’t get excited about women being raped, who are supposed to bear the babies of their attackers. Add it all up? This type? They don’t give a shit about grown-ups.”
The diversion came at a price. Carol wasn’t born-again, but he had still derogated a host of his wife’s opinions. Her voice was frosty. “That’s because adults can stick up for themselves.”
“Not against these people!”
“These people stick up for the weak.”
“Prefer the weak,” Jackson countered. “No competition. And they use the weak to boss other grown-ups around.”
Carol rolled her eyes. “The point is, we have no idea what kind of rich interior life Terri Schiavo might be enjoying. The dreams, the memories, how much she knows her family is there and feels them caring for her even if she can’t communicate. Her husband has no right to make the high-handed decision that since he’s tired of visiting and he’s in love with someone else he’s going to snuff her out.”
“I have to agree with Carol,” said Glynis. “You never know what kind of a life someone might still value even if you don’t think you’d put up with it yourself. In fact, you might be wrong. You might put up with it. You never know what you’ll put up with if the alternative is nothing.”
Helping to clear the dishes, Jackson marveled at the last discussion’s curious alignments. This foursome conventionally divided on issues of the day along the same axes. Shep and Carol were sentimental (they would say compassionate). Glynis was customarily on Jackson’s side. They were both practical (the other two would say callous). For Glynis to be arguing to continue artificial life support for a woman who, according to earlier photographs, used to be quite a looker, and who—were she to realize that the pics of her face running on front pages all over the nation were of a fat, vapid, floppy imbecile—would turn in her grave, if only she were allowed to have one … Well, Shep must have been wrong. Cancer did change people.
By the time they were picking at the bakery layer cake, the mood had sobered. They all seemed to remember the reason for this occasion; past midnight, Glynis’s surgery was only a day and a half away. They shouldn’t keep her up any later. She looked tired, and Jackson was rounding on an exit line when she rounded on him.
“Jackson, have you had a chance to think about what products you and Shep might have worked with in the early eighties that could have contained asbestos?”
“Well, I’ve really put my mind to it, but—”
“Jackson and I have already talked about this, and I told you we talked about it,” said Shep, his tone uncharacteristically testy. “Maybe you should drop it.”
“Hey, I don’t mind—” said Jackson.
“I mind,” said Shep.
“If some company had done this to you,” Glynis charged her guests, “would you honestly be inclined to drop it?”
“Had this happened to any of us,” said Shep, his voice flattened in a hyper-evenness that was obviously a substitute for shouting, “and if you’re right about where the fibers might have come from, everyone at this table could have been exposed—I would hope we’d all concentrate first and foremost on getting well.”
“It would be one thing if I fell and hit my head,” said Glynis. “Or smoked my whole life when I knew it was bad for me and then got cancer. But this was done to me. By people who deliberately buried medical evidence. Who kept deadly products on the market because they wanted to make more money. Those people should pay the price.”
Shep glanced at his guests with chagrin. They were close friends and went back decades, but he didn’t commonly conduct marital spats in their presence. “I know it isn’t fair,” he said softly. “But you’ll be the one who pays the price, Gnu, even if you do win a lawsuit.”
“People who care that much about money can only be punished by losing it,” said Glynis. For someone who was sick and at the waning end of a long evening, she marshaled a surprising vehemence, allowing Jackson to glimpse one appeal of her fixation: it gave her energy. “There’s a whole specialty practice of ‘mesothelioma lawyers’ who advertise on the Internet. Asbestos is their entire practice, and they represent cases on a contingency basis. So it wouldn’t cost us a dime, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Jackson rarely saw Shep have trouble with self-control. But the guy’s jaw muscles were clenched, and he was holding his silverware like a pitchfork. “I repeat: the purchasing records for that era are no longer on file. I checked with Pogatchnik. I’ve done exhaustive searches on all the
potentially suspect materials we might have worked with at Knack. Once in a while a brand name sounds vaguely familiar. But ‘vaguely familiar’ will never stand up to legal cross-examination. I do not—do not, Glynis—have any physical proof of having ever worked with a particular product whose manufacturer we could haul into court.”
Jackson wondered how many times Shep had recited that same speech. Since this time, too, Glynis gave no sign of having heard it, his guess was several. “When you buy things, and especially when you work with them professionally, you rely on those manufacturers to have a conscience! You have to be able to trust that when you buy a loaf of bread it’s not laced with arsenic! In metalsmithing, I have to be able to assume that if I subject a lump of solder to the torch, it is not going to give off poisonous fumes, or if I slip a piece of silver in the pickle it’s not going to explode! I—”
And then she stopped. Her face suspended in an expression of intense concentration. She cocked her head and looked a little to the side, with her forehead creased.
“I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to think of this,” she said. “In art school. The soldering blocks. The crucibles for casting, the lining we used. The heat-proof mitts. I’m almost sure they contained … asbestos.”
“Almost sure,” Shep said warily. If his wife was in the process of letting him off the hook for involuntary manslaughter, he didn’t look too thrilled about it.
“Well, yes, pretty sure. In fact, very sure. When I think back, I remember one of my teachers mentioning the material in passing. But when you’re a student, you work with what they order. You—trust.”
“You can’t sue the school,” said Shep. “You told me that Saguaro Art School closed years ago.”
“No, but virtually all our supplies were from the same company. I can visualize them perfectly, down to the elliptical logo printed on the bottom of the soldering blocks. The insulation lining for the crucibles was packaged in a cardboard canister with a metal top, like top-shelf whiskey comes in, only wider and shorter. The label was black and green. The mitts: they were cream-colored, printed with little purple flowers and green sprigs, and piped in pink. Those products have surely been discontinued or had the asbestos removed by now, but the company is still in business, because I ordered from them only last year.” Glynis looked up with an expression of beatific revelation, like Mary after the appearance of the Archangel. “Forge Craft.”
“That was weird,” Jackson said on the way home. Having kept to soda water after one ceremonial glass of champagne, Carol was driving. She was the one who could really stand to cut loose once in a while, and he felt a little guilty that his own—call it expansiveness—rarely allowed for that.
“How so?” Her coolness derived from his having, in her view, drunk too much. So she had to take care of him, just as she took care of Flicka. Little wonder that at dinner parties her husband stuck up for the rights of grown-ups. Carol was the consummate grown-up, and he sometimes worried where she found any joy in her life.
“What took her so long to remember she worked with asbestos in art school? It’s been weeks. Meanwhile, Shep’s been raking himself over the coals about having been careless at Knack.”
“Memory’s fickle.” Though there was hardly another car on I-87, Carol always drove the speed limit.
“I guess this asbestos thing has turned out to be a gold mine for a lot of people.”
“I doubt Glynis cares about the money itself in the slightest,” said Carol. “I’m glad if she’s stopped blaming Shep. He’s going to have his hands full in the coming months without feeling like, on top of everything else, her cancer is all his fault. Still, the asbestos thing—it gives her a sense of purpose. It makes cancer seem bigger than her small personal misfortune; it makes it seem more important than ordinary, pointless bad luck. It connects her to the world: to history, to politics, to justice. I can see why she’d cling to that. Because when you get sick, I think that’s the hardest part: living in a separate universe from everyone else, like having been exiled to a foreign country.”
Much like Shep, Carol wasn’t given to speeches, but when she did say something it came out whole, considered. He knew what she meant, too. When they’d hugged goodbye at the door, the feeling was like being on the deck of an ocean liner with the horn sounding. It was time for the non-passengers to get ashore. When their car reversed out of the drive with their two friends waving on the porch, it was the house that seemed to be pulling away instead, released from its moorings to recede toward a horizon from which it was impossible to send postcards.
“Sort of like Flicka, and the Jewish thing,” said Jackson.
“Yes, exactly.” She seemed unnervingly pleased that they were conducting a successful conversation. “The members of our support group … The fact that FD only afflicts Ashkenazi kids, it makes them feel that gene handed down through the generations amounts to more persecution of the Chosen People, more of God’s testing their faith. As if FD means something.” Carol allowed herself a rare surge of speed. “Of course, it doesn’t.”
Though outsiders would never have guessed, Carol was much more of a nihilist than her husband. She sat for hours numbly at her computer doing sales outreach for IBM, filled the humidifier in Flicka’s bedroom before fetching a new roll of Saran Wrap for their sadly plastic version of tucking their daughter in, and for years had risen wearily at 1:00 a.m. to pour the first of the night’s two cans of Compleat into Flicka’s feeding bag—all without any sense of mission. She just did it.
Paying Wendy in cash, Jackson reasoned that the nurse may have been worth it, since by some miracle both girls were asleep. As he and Carol got ready for bed, he waited for her to finish brushing her teeth before darting into their master bathroom himself, catching a startled expression as he closed the door in her face. “It’s for your sake,” he explained through the door. “Have to cut a wicked fart.”
How many times a day was he going to have to fart? This was going to be trickier than he realized, and he wondered if he’d thought his strategy through. He took advantage of his privacy to inspect matters, since matters had begun to hurt. He’d been relieved at first that the “discomfort” was so minimal; the real story was that the local was only now wearing off.
By the time he emerged, Carol was in bed, her bare breasts curved over the top sheet. For her slender figure, they were unusually full, the kind of knockers that other women were always trying to buy and couldn’t. That said, the lesson that you either had it or you didn’t was not one he could accept on his own behalf.
“What’s with the boxers?”
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He had rehearsed this all day. “That appointment I had this morning. Seems I’ve got some kind of skin condition, probably from showering in the gym. The dermatologist warned me that it was microbial or something.” He’d picked up the word from a pharmaceutical ad on the news the night before. “It’s contagious, and you could pick it up if I’m not careful.”
“Well, let me see it!”
“No way. It’s kind of gross. I don’t want to turn you off.”
Carol slid down the pillows. “Since when do you ever turn me off?”
God, it was a waste, with those cherry nipples like the garnish on a two-scoop banana split. He loved her with her hair down, and had been wanting to pick the bobby pins out all night. Nevertheless, though most guys would consider him lucky, for Jackson desiring his wife was always accompanied by a gnawing little torture. He never felt quite up to her. Even after having been married these many years, he was never quite sure what she saw in him.
“That’s the other thing,” he said. “We can’t—not for a while. This thing takes a long time to clear up, or that’s what he told me.”
“I still wish you’d let me take a look at it.”
“You’ve nursed Flicka all day,” he said, slipping in beside her with a discreet glance at his fly, which did indeed stay closed with the help of the safety pin. “You don’t have to nurs
e me, too.”
He didn’t relish lying to her about the boxers, but she wouldn’t have understood if he’d been straight—if he’d explained that when you give someone a present, especially a really big present, you had to wrap it first.
Chapter Seven
Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
February 01, 2005 – February 28, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $664,183.22
The Sunday before the surgery, Glynis wasn’t supposed to eat any solids. Out of camaraderie, Shep felt he shouldn’t eat anything, either. To his embarrassment, he got hungry. The fridge was packed with leftovers from the dinner with Jackson and Carol the night before. Fasting with so much food destined to go bad seemed perverse. So he would wait until she went to the bathroom, then stick a surreptitious finger in the hummus.
Zach came home from his overnight with a fellow hikikomori, hacked off a hunk of cold roast beef, and went straight to his room. Depleted and radiating an anxiety she wouldn’t articulate, Glynis watched TV in the den. Whenever he checked on her, another pharmaceutical ad was reminding them of all the other ailments that lay in wait, and if they didn’t slay you, the cures would:
… is not for everyone. Tell your doctor if you have an allergic reaction that causes swelling of the face, mouth, or throat, or affects your breathing or causes rash or hives. Side effects may include upper respiratory infection, stuffy or runny nose, and sore throat and headache … serious stomach ailments, such as bleeding, could get worse. Some people may experience fainting. Some people may have nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, bruising, or not sleep well. Some people may have muscle cramps or loss of appetite or feel tired … If you develop fever or unexplained weakness or confusion, tell your doctor, as this could be signs of a rare but potentially life-threatening condition called TTP … may have a higher chance of pneumonia … may increase your risk of osteoporosis and some eye problems … may increase the chance of heart attack or stroke, which can lead to death. All prescription NSAIDs increase the chances of serious skin reactions or stomach and intestinal problems, such as bleeding and ulcers, which can occur without warning, and can cause death.