Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

“Vaskis said yes.”

“Outstanding work!” Gerard yelled into the phone. And then: “How much time do we have to find donor number two? Behind donor number two, is-”

“Probably a day. To allow time enough for the testing.”

“Donor number two likes sports, pretty women, and hospital beds!”

“Right.”

“We’ll cast a wide net,” he said, and hung up. Which made me realize he’d had a woman there with him the whole time.

THE ENORMOUS DOSES of ceftazidime and gentamicin did not clear up the trouble in Janet’s right lung, and overnight she had begun a slow, steady slide the doctors could not stop. That morning, when I went in to bring her the good news, she was lying on her back, propped up at a forty-five-degree angle, able to keep her eyes open for only a few seconds at a time. The oxygen machine was humming and bubbling. Antibiotics were dripping into her right arm, and some kind of liquid nourishment-she could no longer eat-into her left. The hospital gown hung from her shoulders and over her breasts as if it had been draped across sharp stones to dry, and her face, so gaunt just the day before, had started to swell. The nurses had washed her hair and tied it on top of her head in a bun, but there was no life left to it. When I came through the door, her eyes, half-closed, went to me immediately and clung to me, and I could see everything there-the pain and unbroken discomfort, the fear, the resignation, the love. She smiled with just the corners of her lips, but the pain cut her smile off almost immediately.

I leaned over the bed and rested my hand gently on her chest-she liked me to do that-and kissed her on the forehead and both closed eyes. Her mother had spent the night, and was asleep on a cot against one wall, quietly snoring. For a little while I sat with them. I’d rub Janet’s arm, adjust her pillow, put water on the tip of my finger and touch it to her lips. What I’d liked was that, after the first few dates, we hadn’t had to talk about certain things and could just rest in some deep agreement about the way to be in the world. We thought it was right to leave lavish tips at restaurants, to let people cut in line in traffic, to make fun of arrogance and of ourselves, to be goofy and affectionate with children, to do our work well, to be unembarrassed about our bodies, to take what we really needed and then give and give, to fight honestly and without waiting and without being ugly about it. That was a sort of foundation we hadn’t even had to try to set in place, and it was solid and level, which would have made building something nice and longer-lasting on top of it just a matter of keeping mistakes small and catching them quickly.

So, after a while, there were whole areas we didn’t have to talk about-Valvoline, Giselle, why I painted and banged nails instead of going back to med school, why she wanted to keep working, even though, at the end, it drained away strength she could have used to fight her illness. We did not need to say how we felt about each other. We did not think we needed to.

But that morning, sitting with her, watching the last fibers of her spirit stretch and break one by one, I was sick with the understanding that I should have put certain things into words. I could stay close and rub her arm and wipe her mouth, but I had left something important undone, I knew that. Sometimes there has to be something concrete to anchor the unspoken feelings. Two nurses came in and helped her pee into a bedpan, changed her underwear, checked the monitor. They could barely look at me.

When they were gone I leaned my mouth down to Janet’s ear and I said, “I know you want to just go. It’s alright. But there’s one more thing we can try if you want to try it.”

She turned her head half an inch.

Doctor Ouajiballah came through the door then, stopped when he saw us, and went back out.

“If two people give you a section of their lung, a lobe each, then you can get a transplant that way.”

She held her eyes half open. I could see her balancing between two worlds. I could see that she could decide then to turn her back on the beast of hope once and for all and close her eyes and die. And I would never have blamed her for that, because she had had a weight put on her shoulders when she came out of her mother’s body, and she had been made to walk with that weight on her for almost thirty years, and she was just tired of carrying it then, at that moment, tired to the root of her soul.

Her mother stirred and sat up on the edge of the cot.

“I can do it,” I said, talking quietly into Janet’s ear. “Gerard has the wrong blood type or he’d do it. My brother smokes or he’d do it. We have the surgeon. Il dottore will recommend it to the insurance company and the surgeon is so good he thinks they’ll go for it. If you say okay, I’ll find another person somehow. You’d have to stay alive until Monday morning. It’s Friday today. If you want to try it squeeze my hand once, alright?”

I could barely look at her. She did not move or try to speak.

“Squeeze if you want to try,” I repeated after a few seconds.

Though the clear plastic tube from the oxygen machine was in the way, I lay my face in the pillow, against her neck, the way I’d done sometimes when we were making love. I held her fingers loosely. I heard her mother get up and shuffle along the linoleum, then the sound of the hinges on the bathroom door. I could feel Janet breathing-five breaths to my one. I wanted then to let her be completely, absolutely free. I did not want to hold her on this earth. I did not want her to suffer one second more because of what I wanted, or what her mother wanted, or what the doctors or nurses thought was right.

When the toilet flushed and we heard her mother wrestling with the door handle, Janet tightened her grip on my fingers.

I kissed her so hard on the side of her face that the oxygen tube came loose. When Amelia shuffled up to the bed, Janet was crying, so she started crying, too, in solidarity. Janet moved my hand this way and that, and I bent down so that my ear was near her mouth and, in a whisper, she said, “Valvoline.” Then Ouajiballah came into the room, our white-coated pal with a pen in his pocket. And I was, as Gerard would say, all over that.

IN THE HALL, out of range of Mrs. Rossi’s hearing, Doctor Ouajiballah told me Janet might not live until Monday morning, but that he was going to recommend her for the living lobar transplant in any case, as soon as he could get a certain person from the insurance company to return his call. Doctor Vaskis had already contacted him. Ouajiballah thought that, when the certain person at the insurance company heard the name Vaskis, they would agree to pay for the operation, and would hold to their agreement as long as Janet was alive and not on life support. If she went on life support she would never come off it, and the insurance company would back away. “So then, sir, you and your friend can start the donor testing tomorrow at seven a.m. It will take as long as two full days. You should find at least one backup donor if you possibly can, because even people in good health have been known to fail these tests. They are quite rigorous.”

I had to look away from him then, as I thanked him.

I called Gerard from the pay phone in the lobby and told him to call every man and woman he knew over five-foot ten inches tall and get as many O-positive nonsmokers as he could to show up at the hospital on Saturday morning at seven, people willing to spend two days being tested, then have themselves cut open, lose three or four weeks of sick time, and twenty percent of their lung capacity for life.

“We’ll need a bus to get them all there,” Gerard said. “We’ll need a motor scooter.”