Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

IT TOOK SIX minutes for the ambulance to come, another four minutes for the attendants to have Janet out the door, strapped to the gurney, the oxygen mask on and something injected in her arm that had immediately started to calm the panic reflex in the muscles of her chest.

Strange, what you remember. For those ten minutes I was concentrating on nothing but keeping Janet alive-making sure the clear tubing didn’t slip from its place, keeping a hand or both hands on her body to calm her-but the image that has planted itself in my mind is the image of Gerard scooping ice cream onto wedges of cake for his two girls as we followed the attendants along the six-foot hallway and down the stairs. My mother had gotten up from the table and was resting one hand on the railing of the stairs. Janet’s mother stayed three-quarters of an inch behind the ambulance attendants as they were carrying her daughter-feet first-down toward the door. I was a step behind, watching Janet’s chest. But what I remember most clearly is one glimpse of Gerard. He had two forks in his mouth and was waggling his big black eyebrows and at the same time spooning out huge scoops of chocolate ice cream and twitching the forks this way and that way in his lips-anything to tease a smile from his twins, anything to scrub the terror from their faces. Later, with the help of his daughters, he would clear the table, pack away all the uneaten food except for a kind of picnic plate for Janet, which she would never eat, wash and dry the dishes, sweep the kitchen floor, and leave a note for Janet’s mother telling her what a wonderful cook she was.

My friend, el macho .

Before they slid the gurney into the back of the blinking ambulance, with half the neighborhood out on their front steps, watching, I put my hand on Janet’s thigh. She flapped her fingers around, caught my hand and squeezed. She boomed out a cough, the mask jumped, and the vein in the side of her neck bulged. Her mother climbed in, the doors closed, the siren startled us.

With my mother belted securely into the pickup’s passenger seat, puzzled still, mute, pondering, I sped along the holiday-empty streets, and back over the bridge into Boston. At the hospital I parked with two wheels up on a curb not far from the emergency-room entrance.

By the time they let me in to see Janet, she had already been given a breathing treatment and was coughing less violently, exhausted and asleep. She lay on a stretcher in the emergency room, pale and gaunt and alive, the pulse monitor reading 121, antibiotics dripping into her arm, a hemoglobin saturation monitor there, too. Nurses, doctors, and phlebotomists walked calmly here and there, checking digital readouts, unwrapping sterile needles, their running shoes squeaking on worn linoleum. And that was the horror of it: this was routine to them-people choking their way back and forth across the border between life and death, people with their stomachs blown open by gunshots and their necks broken in car crashes and their babies’ faces burned with hot oil. Routine as could be. And for everyone else it was a hideous nightmare.

I have always believed that, conscious or not, people know if someone they care about is beside their bed. So I stood there for a long while with both hands on Janet’s left arm, watching her face and her chest as it moved up and down in quick flexes. Her mother-drugged a bit herself-stood at her other shoulder. My mother was behind Janet’s mother, swinging her eyes right and left. The scene was vaguely familiar to her, a face from the distant past, a painting that hints at something you’re sure you recognize, just hints at it, just suggests it, but leaves you to puzzle it clear.

AFTER AN HOUR and a half, Janet was moved upstairs to a semiprivate room. There was no one in the other bed. Her aunt Lucy arrived, a small, dark-haired woman with the same kindly toughness that radiated from Janet’s mother, and from Janet, too.

We all slipped into hospital time, that strange, slow wash of quarter-hours where you feel cut off from the rhythm of the rest of the world, trapped in a sterile, off-white room with the faces of the nurses changing at three o’clock. We took turns standing next to Janet’s bed. We touched her on the arm or leg, adjusted the blanket, looked at the machines, and then walked away past the empty bed to the window and stared down at the gray city. My mother sat in an orange armchair and watched a college football game on the TV, looking up at me from time to time with a cloud of daftness over her eyes.

At some point late in the afternoon, after we’d been standing there for several hours watching Janet sleep, Lucy persuaded Janet’s mother to go home. Janet was going to be alright for now, there was nothing we could do to help. I told Amelia I’d stay and talk to the doctors, and call to give her the report, and she squeezed me and kissed me again, and cried against my chest and went reluctantly out the door, clutching her sister’s arm.

Not long after they left-half an hour, an hour and a half- a tall, slightly stooped man with an unfriendly mouth-Doctor Wilbraham-came in and introduced himself. We had spoken more than once during Janet’s last hospital visit, her “tune-up,” but he did not remember me. Janet said he was a big supporter of the governor, a yachtsman and a perfectly competent pulmonologist, with the bedside manner of a tuna fish. “She’s in no immediate danger,” Doctor Wilbraham said, in a rumbling, Charlton Hestonesque voice.

“We thought she was going to die.”

“Yes,” he said, meeting my eyes briefly.

My mother had gotten up out of her chair and sidled over and was listening in.

“What about the transplant?” I asked.

“She’s on the list.”

“I know she’s on the list.”

He looked at me with the smallest wrinkle of irritation on his lips. His face was almost a perfect rectangle, straight gray eyebrows, straight brown and gray hair brushed straight back. His eyes traveled down to my work boots and back up to my face, as if what I was wearing would dictate the type of answer he ought to give. As if he spoke several languages and was trying to choose one I might actually be able to understand.

“Will she live long enough to make it to the top of the list?”

“We can never say. There is a continual ratio of approximately five potential recipients to each available pair of lungs.”

“How much longer is she going to live?”

“We can’t possibly say.”

“A month? A year? When you see people like this, with her lung function numbers, how much longer do they usually live?”

“It varies.”

“Between what and what?”

He took a breath and sighed. “Between a day or a few days and perhaps a few months, depending.”

“On what?”

“Many factors.”

“Can we change any of those factors?”

“We’re giving her powerful drugs,” he said, in a tone you might use to describe the Dewey decimal system to a four-year-old. “Drugs called ceftazidime and gentamicin.” I thought for a minute that he was going to spell them out very slowly. G-E-N-T…Beside me, my mother was nodding. “We had to take an arterial blood gas reading, which is quite uncomfortable. If that reading is not too bad and if she gets no new infections-”

“So you’ll want her to stay in the hospital.”

“Probably, yes.”

“Until when?”

“Until compatible lungs become available.” He reached out and patted me on the shoulder, already leaning toward the door. “You can call us with more questions if you think of them.”

I stayed as long as I felt my mother could stand it, going down to the cafeteria once with her, for sandwiches and coffee, and then coming back up. Darkness had fallen long ago. My mother had given up on the football and on the TV, and had taken to walking back and forth along the length of the room, talking to herself in a quiet voice. I knew her well, of course, every wrinkle around her eyes, every spot on her hands, every lilt and dip of her high, warbling voice. But I had never spent that much time with her in a hospital, and I could see another woman stirring and rising up. I waited for her to click back into her doctor-self, but that did not happen.