Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

“Try anyway.”

“All over it, Colonel,” he said.

My mind, when I hung up, went shooting off in eleven directions. I was holding the black plastic receiver in my left hand, with two fingers pressing down on the metal tongue that killed the dial tone, while the right hand fished around in my pocket for another couple of quarters, and I was trying to remember a phone number, cursing myself for getting rid of my cell phone, starting to imagine what would happen if we didn’t find a second donor, knowing that, at some point very soon, I would have to tell ildottore the truth. And I was worried about Janet right then at that moment, and I ended up fishing out a quarter, then a dime, then another dime, and placing them carefully on the top of the black metal phone box, and then switching hands and trying the left pocket, where there were three pennies and some sawdust.

I hung up the phone and hurried across the lobby toward the gift shop, forgetting my neatly lined-up change (which Gerard’s daughter Alicia used to call “monies”). Halfway to the gift shop in search of more monies I had a moment when my mind cleared and I understood something I should have understood before: Janet had been hired and promoted partly because she had some kind of intuitive understanding of how people behaved under particular circumstances, what motivated them, what drove them, where their fears and needs overlapped. That was her special talent, that was the way her mind worked…even two steps away from death. I changed course in mid-stride, headed for the stairwell, and sprinted up the four floors. Janet had not moved. Her mother sat by the bed, sleepily pushing the beads through her fingers. A nurse was there, switching the IV bag.

“Amelia, I need Janet’s purse,” I said, and I was breathing pretty hard and might have said it too loudly. “Where’d she leave it?”

Janet’s mother pointed to the peach-colored metal cabinet next to her and shifted her chair over so I could open the drawer. “I have money if you want it,” she said. The nurse gave me a look.

I rifled the purse, found the phone, and went out of the room without saying anything. I went down the hall to the bathroom and closed the door. It seemed to take about thirteen minutes for the phone to power up, and then another ten minutes for me to scroll down through her saved numbers until I reached the one I wanted. I went past it twice because I was looking for GOVERNOR.

When I finally figured things out, I highlighted CHARLIE, punched the call button, and sat on the toilet. Five rings and the man himself answered. “Nettie?” he said, and there was such a chord of boyish vulnerability in his voice that I winced. I closed my eyes, and leaned my head down so that my palm was wrapped around my forehead and I could focus on getting the words exactly right and not on anything else. “Janet has three or four days to live,” I said, as calmly as I could.

“Who is this?”

“This is John Entwhistle, the guy who wrestled with you in Janet’s office a couple months ago. Don’t hang up. She’s just about ready to die. A few minutes ago she asked me to come and see you and give you a message. I need two minutes of your time. It has to be today and it has to be face-to-face…I don’t even want it, Janet wants it.”

“Let her call me herself, then.”

“She’s the next thing to comatose, Charlie. I’m at the Mass General right now. I can be in your office in six minutes. I’ll give you her message and I’ll leave.”

“I have an appointment with the head of Ways and Means in sixty seconds, and I’m solidly booked for the rest of the day. Say what you have to say.”

“I have to say it to you in person, that’s what she asked me to do.”

He put his hand over the receiver. I kept my eyes closed and focused on him, on his heart, on his insides. I pretended to myself that I had some control over what went on there, though at that moment I understood very clearly that I had control over nothing. It was a hunch, that’s all, an intuition that I should talk to him face-to-face. My legs were trembling from the kneecaps down, which was something that used to happen to me right before big crew races.

“I’ll give you two minutes at ten past five,” the governor said. “And if this is some sort of a trick, I’ll have you arrested.”

“Fine. Ten past five. I’ll be-”

He hung up. I put the phone in my shirt pocket and splashed cold water on my face at the sink. I went and spent the rest of the day in Janet’s room, but she did not wake up except when the nurses came and moved her around, or when she coughed so hard she had to spit. I tried to take Amelia down to the cafeteria for lunch, but she wouldn’t move from her daughter’s bedside, and wouldn’t stop praying, so I stayed there, too, pacing the room, rubbing Janet’s feet, watching her breathe, going into the hall every little while to get away from it.

In late afternoon I kissed Amelia on the forehead, and Janet on the eyes, and I put on my coat and went out and crossed Storrow Drive on the pedestrian bridge and walked to the river. Four o’clock on one of the shortest days of the year, and the sun had already gone behind the low hills to the west of the city. To the left of where I stood, the sky was colored in winter pastels-robin’s-egg blue, a smoky scarlet, streaks of willowy yellow-all of it swinging and splashing in a broken-up reflection in the deep river basin just in front of me. Every few seconds a little more of the color would leak out of the sky, and the water would take on more purple, blue, and black. The wind was dying-as it did sometimes at that time of year-just as the sun went down. It would gust up and then calm a bit, then gust up again and calm entirely. In the quiet between gusts you could feel the steady cold night coming on, then there would be another, weaker gust, as if darkness were blowing in over the city in diminishing pulses.

I don’t know why I had wanted to go to the river, or why I was thinking so much about rowing then. Maybe it was because I’d had some times on that water when I had pushed myself so far into the precinct of pain and shortness of breath that it almost had no power over me anymore. A whole boatload of us had done that, day after day, year after year, for reasons we couldn’t really understand or explain. We’d be all lined up and ready to go at the starting line, a cool river wind blowing across the skin of our arms and legs, hearts going, hands sweaty. The coxswain would be telling the bow man or the number two man to just touch the water with his oar to keep us from drifting offline. The race was going to start in five seconds or ten seconds and then everything would be happening at such a rate of speed that it would not be possible to think, not be possible to do anything but react the way we had been trained to react. If the referee waited too long to yell out “Ready!” through his megaphone, my lower legs would start to shake, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. “Ready all!” he would say next. And then “Row!” and all hell would break loose, the oarlocks clacking and the seats ripping along their tracks, and the cold river water in your eyes and face. A minute and a half into the race your muscles would reach a point where you couldn’t get oxygen to them fast enough no matter how you breathed, no matter what kind of condition you were in, and from that point until the end it would be pure focus, pure willpower, pure pain.

Our friends were smoking dope and getting laid and taking naps, and we were making our bodies hurt. Crazy thing for a college kid to do. But sometimes, doing that, you felt as though you’d gone across some line into a territory where you could will yourself to do anything, anything at all. The spring races lasted only six minutes, but if it was a longer practice piece-ten minutes, thirty minutes-the pain would creep up slowly inside you and reach you on another level. The will and the force and the strength in you and all the hard conditioning scraped up against something impossibly large and brutal, and you would remember that feeling long after you were done rowing hard for the day and were climbing out onto the dock. You’d remember it after you had showered and changed into street clothes and were walking across the BU Bridge to your supper. You’d be very small, but it was a magnificent smallness.