Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

He looked as if he would spit. I closed the door quietly, smiled a trembling crazy smile at the secretary, and went down the blurred sets of stairs and out into the cold blackness. I walked and walked along Beacon Street. At some point I stopped on a corner, took Janet’s phone out of my pocket, and called my apartment like a robot-no messages-and then Gerard-no volunteers.

Eventually, I went back to the hospital. But I couldn’t bring myself to go up to Janet’s room, so I sat in the cafeteria sipping bad coffee and watching the nurses and doctors and orderlies on their breaks. I went and sat in the dimly lit chapel on the first floor, a perfectly nondenominational, quasi-religious place with pews and stained glass. I put my face in my hands. For a long time after Giselle died I had been angry at God, and at a lot of other things. And then one day it occurred to me that it was anger that had killed her and everyone else who’d died on that day, and I started trying to imagine my way backwards in time to where that anger had come from, a crazy-making, evil, righteous anger. And then I started to notice, firsthand, that anger was almost always righteous and crazy-making. All you had to do was turn on the radio talk shows and you could hear that plainly enough, hear the pot being stirred and heated. All you had to do was yell at somebody in traffic and you could see it in yourself. Anger began to seem wrong to me, almost always wrong, and I began to think it might be my problem, not God’s. So I talked to Ellory about it. Ellory said, “You always have a choice,” which made sense, and was helpful.

I tried not to be angry. I tried to pray.

Maker of cells, I said. That amount of suffering has to count for something. I’m not trying to tell you what to do or how things should be set up. I just believe that that amount of suffering has to count for something, I just believe that. It can’t be just random. If it’s just random, and people suffer like that, then count me out, I don’t want another second of this. I’m going to go and jump-

Someone in one of the other pews was weeping quietly. I stopped trying to pray and just sat there for a while, then I left the chapel and took the elevator upstairs, where the nurses all knew me, and knew what was happening to Janet. One nurse in particular-a very large, very dark-faced woman named Bethany-was such a kind, sweet soul, and cared for Janet so tenderly and patiently, that I had an urge to ask her, as I walked past, who she prayed to, how she put the words together.

I went into Janet’s room, all set to lie to her and tell her Valvoline was considering it-when I knew he wasn’t. But she was sleeping, her face turned sideways on the pillow, her mother asleep, too, in the chair beside the bed. Amelia woke up and lifted her tired eyes to me, all the hope in the world there.

“No news yet,” I said. “Gerard’s calling everyone we know.”

“My sister is, too.”

“We’ll find somebody, don’t worry.”

Doctor Ouajiballah came by on his last rounds and checked the digital readouts on the various machines near Janet’s bed. Pulse. Blood pressure. Oxygen level. Janet’s mother gazed at him as if he’d been holding out on us, and was now going to raise her daughter up with a sweep of his hand. But he had nothing to say to Janet’s mother.

I followed him out into the hall, and when he started to tell me what to expect in the way of testing the next day, I tried to listen carefully but couldn’t.

“There’s a problem,” I said, when he finished. “Right now we have only one donor.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Something like a smile wavered along his thin lips. He was looking for a punch line, and when none was forthcoming he said, “You told Doctor Vaskis you had two donors, sir.”

“I had to tell him that to get him to do it. I lied. We have one. We’re working on getting the second.”

I watched the kindness on his face just evaporate.

“You lied, sir?” he said.

I nodded.

“To Doctor Vaskis and to me.”

“Yes.”

“And you had me call the insurance bastards and tell them we had two donors to test, when we do not. The same bastards I will have to call again, on someone else’s behalf, in a week or a month or a year, and ask them to underwrite a quarter-million-dollar operation, or a lifetime of medication, based on my judgment and integrity.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You had me call the pulmonary testing lab and ask them to put you ahead of people who already had appointments?”

“Give me one day. We’ll find somebody, I’m sure we will. Just one day. I’m sorry.”

But I was only partly sorry, and he knew it. He spun around and went striding down the hall past the nurses’ station. I went back into the room.

Janet stirred often, and coughed, and moaned loudly from time to time. Every ten minutes I called my apartment for messages, but there was only something from a prospective customer who wanted us to bid on her apartment-house renovation, and from a painter we sometimes used, looking for indoor work, and something else from Jeremy at the gallery. It was not easy to be there with Amelia. Every time I hung up she was watching my face for the smallest twitch or sparkle of news. Every time I shook my head-nothing-it felt like I was sawing off one of her limbs. Worse, I could see that the thought of Janet dying had brought back the pain of the other big death in her past, and the same thing was happening to me. Giselle was haunting me then, not a lover but a sister, a cousin, a ghost.

Eventually, Amelia told me she had to eat something, she’d be gone twenty minutes, and would I be sure to have her paged if Janet woke up, or if something changed?

By that time I was so twisted up by the ghosts and the echoes and the pure misery of everything that I pulled my chair close to the bed and just lay my face down on the sheet over Janet’s thigh, not thinking anything or hoping for anything. When Amelia came back upstairs with her sandwich in a Styrofoam box, she found me that way, and came and put her hand on my back.

Janet’s aunt Lucy arrived after supper. I used that as an excuse to leave. I drove my truck around Boston for an hour, in the Friday night traffic, under a kind of evil spell. When I couldn’t do that anymore, I stopped at Adam’s Steak House, where Janet and I had gone a few times, and tried to eat my way into oblivion. A sixteen-ounce sirloin, two glasses of Cabernet, salad, potato, two pieces of pecan pie, coffee. I had done the same kind of thing the day after Giselle died, though I didn’t remember that until I was sitting there with an aching stomach.

My stomach still hurt by the time I got home. The phone was ringing when I came through the door, but when I picked up, there was only a dial tone. I called Gerard, thinking it might have been him, and for once he answered by saying, “Hello?”

“Anything?”

“Jake, I’m going up to complete strangers and asking them to volunteer for major surgery on the Monday before Christmas.”

“I forgot Christmas. What about friends?”

“Julie, Alex, Bob Twining-O-negative, a closet smoker, and a sympathetic-but-no, in that order.”

“Did you call Coach Florent? I should have called him.”

“Sympathetic, sort of, but no. And no, you shouldn’t have called him. How’s Janet?”

“Lousy. I told Ouajiballah we lied. He’s not happy.”

“We had no other option.”

“He doesn’t see it that way.”

“What about the gov?”

“He has a state to run.”

“A state to run? That’s what he said? A state to run?”

“Under other circumstances he’d oblige me.”

“What about Janet’s family?”

“They’re all too short, and the ones that aren’t too short have asthma. Her aunt is still trying, though. Neighbors, friends of neighbors, cousins of cousins.”