Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

“Alright, I’ve got one fireman at the precinct here who was wavering a little. I’m going down to harass him. You have to get up early for the testing, yes?”

“Six.”

“Good. I’ll call you after midnight, then.”

I put the phone in its cradle, lay back in the bed, and fell almost immediately into a deep sleep, with one spark of vivid dream in it. In the dream I was in a jewelry shop where I had once bought sapphire earrings for Giselle for her birthday, only Carmine Asalapolous was behind the counter, lifting out one beautiful ring after the next, and setting them in a neat row on the glass countertop. “Wait three days and give her this one,” he said. I was struggling to tell him I couldn’t wait three days, trying to find the words, trying to get the urgency of things across to him, when the telephone woke me. I rolled over to the edge of the bed and grabbed it.

“This John Entwhistle?” the voice said.

I squeezed my eyes tight and shook my head hard. “Yes.”

“Governor Valvelsais. Listen, I’ve given it some thought and I’ve decided to give a lung to Janet.”

I held the phone against my face.

“Are you there?”

“Here.”

“Well, say something, then.”

I said, “A…a lobe…you only have to give one lobe. Your right lung has three lobes and your left-.”

“I’m stepping up,” he said.

I was squeezing the phone hard.

“Where do I report?” he said.

“Pulmonary testing. Mass General. Seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll be there at eight.”

“Good,” I said, awake by then, clearheaded as could be. “You’re…you’re a good man.”

“Coming from you that means so much,” he said.

“Right.”

“There’s a condition.”

He paused. A list of conditions ran through my head. He wanted Janet back. He wanted me to leave town.

He said, “When people ask, you say I volunteered without a moment’s hesitation.”

I could not speak.

“Clear?”

“Fine.”

“That’s the phrase: ‘without a moment’s hesitation.’”

“Got it,” I said.

“I want your word.”

“You have it.”

“Then I’m stepping forward for her. Tomorrow, eight a.m.”

“Mass General,” I said, but he had hung up.

I called and left a message for Doctor Ouajiballah, and at the nurses’ desk for Janet’s mother. I called Gerard. I lay back on the bed in the darkness and did not go to sleep.

WHEN I ARRIVED there at quarter past six the next morning, the beautiful beast of hope was prowling the hospital corridors. I could see it in Amelia’s sleepy face as we stood outside Janet’s room, and hear it in her voice. She said that Janet was out cold then, had been awake for two hours in the middle of the night, coughing up blood, that she’d told her then about the governor’s decision, and that Janet had smiled a smile to break your heart in five pieces.

“What a fine fine man he must be,” Amelia said.

At the nurses’ station, and at the reception desk of the pulmonary testing department, it was the same: the nurses, orderlies, and technicians knew Janet’s story, knew what she’d been through. Some of them had watched for years as the bacteria with the big names did their work on her. They knew exactly what was happening, and what would happen-they’d seen the same slow sinking with a hundred other CF patients, and thousands of people with cancer and MS and ALS and diabetes and diseases they had no name for. They were lined up like foot soldiers against those diseases. All their working lives went into that war, all their tiredness and tedium. They had the smartest generals in the world and the most sophisticated weaponry, and their weeks were filled with one lost battle after the next.

So when they understood that there was a chance to save someone they cared for, that was not a small thing to them. You could see it plainly on their faces: it was not a routine Saturday morning.

The governor and I spent all that day getting blood drawn, and more blood drawn, breathing hard into sterile tubes, peeing into sterile cups, answering questions, filling out forms. Sometimes we were in the same room; usually we weren’t. We did not exchange a word. Our eyes met once when he was on a machine, blowing every last molecule of air from his lungs. He looked away immediately and blew harder, as if it were a competition, and our pulmonary function numbers would be published on the front page of the Herald the next day.

Fine, I thought. Knock yourself out. Break every lung record known to man, as long as you don’t back away from this.

At the end of that day I went up and sat with Janet and her mother for a little while, and talked with her aunt in the hallway for a little while, and talked with Doctor Ouajiballah, who seemed to have forgiven me. Then I drove-tired by then-to the fancy mall in Chestnut Hill and found the jewelry store just before it closed, and bought a simple gold ring with little pairs of triangular notches at its edges from a salesman whose name was Dimitrios Cassas.

On Sunday, it was more of the same. Only, in the afternoon the fun was capped off with two hours in a room talking to a mustachioed psychiatrist, who worked, I guessed, not for the hospital but for the insurance company. “You are aware that you are putting your life at risk,” he said.

I said that I was.

“You understand that, even if the surgery goes perfectly, you’ll have a period of painful recovery.”

“Yes.”

“And you understand that, even if the recipient survives the surgery, she may live only a day or a month or a few months if her body should reject the new tissue.”

“I understand that very well.”

He went along like that for a while, giving me horror stories about transplant operations gone bad, infections, collapsed lungs, bleeding, suffocation, rejection. He showed me pictures of men and women with drainage tubes sticking out of their chests and frightened expressions on their faces, and when that was over, and I’d responded calmly and rationally to every question, he made good aggressive eye contact and he said, “Why are you doing this, Jake, really?”

And I could not help myself. I was tired from the testing, and worried because Janet had looked like a skin-draped skeleton in the bed that morning, and because more blood had come out of her overnight, and we hadn’t been able to talk at all the day before. I was pretty sure the governor wasn’t being grilled this way. He had, in fact, made the front page of the Herald that Sunday morning: GOV GIVES TILL IT HURTS superimposed over a full-page photo of his face. There was a glowing article inside, complete with a quote from John Entwhistle, who said the governor had agreed “without a moment’s hesitation.” And I didn’t care about that. I was a little bit nervous about the operation and the recovery, but not afraid. I didn’t care about the drainage tubes, or about not being able to run as hard as I liked to run, and I didn’t care about whether or not Doctor Ouajiballah liked me, or Amelia thought I was a decent boyfriend for her daughter. All of that had somehow boiled away. I was just tired then, and worried we were too late. The whole thing was taking on a cold realness that seemed to echo off every square inch of the plain walls and the chipped linoleum and the lab machines.

Against that realness, I heard the psychiatrist say, “Why are you doing this, Jake?”

And so I looked back at him very calmly, and I said, “Because I’m hoping to be president one day.” And he blinked and closed his notebook and went off to tell whoever he had to tell that we were a go for Monday morning.