Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

I WENT UPSTAIRS after the testing, and walked through the doors of the ward, and Ouajiballah was right there in front of me, talking quietly to one of the nurses. When he saw me he said good-bye to the nurse, put the palm of his hand against my shoulder blade, and steered me to a two-chair waiting room at the end of the hall.

“She is sitting up and talking, sir,” he said. “She is quite energetic. But this is not necessarily the best of signs. With cystic fibrosis patients, shortly before the end of their lives, we can sometimes see an unnatural burst of activity like this. We are not sure what causes it. The lungs have very little capacity remaining and are working very hard. When the body works that hard, certain other chemical processes are triggered. Perhaps that is the reason. We don’t know. I did not want you to be falsely encouraged.”

“Her mother is falsely encouraged, though, I bet.”

“Yes.”

“The governor passed?”

“Yes, both of you are extraordinarily fit. He visited with Janet briefly.”

“Will she live until the operation?”

“Most likely.”

I thanked him for everything he had done, then I went into Janet’s room, and saw her sitting up in the bed. Her eyes were flashing. She was thin as a stick, and her face was as swollen as if someone had been pumping air into it all afternoon, but even under the oxygen mask, she was smiling.

“The governor was here!” Amelia said, and if Janet was happy, then there is no word for what Amelia was. “He passed! He passed! You passed, too! Look at Janet, look at her!”

Janet pulled the mask down off her face. When she lifted her arm, the hospital bracelet slipped all the way to her elbow. She smiled and pushed at her hair with the fingers of one hand, as if, for the first time in weeks, she cared what she looked like. She and her mother asked me some questions about the testing, and I tried to make little jokes when I answered, exaggerating things. I told them the psychiatrist looked exactly like Geraldo Rivera. I told them the doctors had made me do calculus problems to be sure Janet was getting an intelligent lobe. As a comedian, that night, I wasn’t at my best.

After a while, Janet took the mask off completely and said, “Ma, I feel like a chocolate milk shake now, all of a sudden. Would you mind going downstairs and getting me one?”

“A chocolate milk shake?” Mrs. Rossi said. “I’ll get you five chocolate milk shakes!”

“Just one, Ma. Or two, if Jake wants one.”

Amelia came over, took my face in both hands and gave me a hard kiss straight on the lips, then marched happily out the door on her milk shake run.

“You okay?” Janet said when we were alone. She had taken hold of my right hand and was gripping and regripping it. Her eyes shone out from the puffy skin around them. She was breathing in short gulps.

“Sure. Other than the bruised lips.”

“Are you okay about Charlie? Be honest.”

“Honestly?”

She frowned.

“He has my vote for all eternity. I don’t care what he runs for, or how many times he says he loves you.”

“He does love me.”

“I figured that out.”

“But that street only runs one way.”

“Good. We’ll fix him up with somebody. We’ll start a fund to keep him in escort-service babes and fried clams for life.”

She started to laugh, but the laugh caught in her throat and became a cough, and she spit up a bloody mess into the pan. I took the pan to the sink and washed it clean.

“Didn’t we start with this?” she said, when she’d caught her breath and wiped her face twice. “Me spitting into a bucket.”

“You spit into a bucket only after an evening of gourmet sex.”

“Right. I remember now. A swim in the river and gourmet sex. Under a drop cloth, wasn’t it?”

“And we started with you smashing my truck, is how we started.”

“My insurance company compensated you fairly.”

“Blessed are the insurance companies,” I said.

She stopped and looked at me long enough so that the little joking air we’d been puffing out floated away. That fast-two blinks-and we were right in the middle of the bright warm room where we never went with words. I thought, for a second, that she was going to thank me, which is not what I wanted. She was holding my fingers. “We had some fun anyway, Jakie,” she said. “No matter what happens.”

“Sure,” I said, but I was starting to have a little trouble talking. Janet was squeezing my hand in sad, excited pulses. Her eyes were like hot black coals in a face as pale and gray as ash. I could see that she was sinking, the little burst of energy already leaking out of her. After all those years of wrestling with it, she knew her body from the inside out, and I knew she could feel the end of her life close by-or at least the end of the life those lungs had given her. It seemed to me then that she was trying to tell me she knew the transplant wasn’t going to work.

I started shaking my head against that. My throat wouldn’t let anything through, and I would have been afraid to say those things anyway, but what I was thinking was that there are times when you have to push back hard against what happens to you. There are times to yield, and times to push back hard, and this time I wasn’t yielding, and I wasn’t going to let even the smallest wisp of doubt into the warm, bright room with us. It was very strange, because I wasn’t thinking that way for my own benefit, or even for hers. I was having a vision of her, healthy again, pushing two little children on swings in a park. It wasn’t a sentimental feeling but a calling almost. A certainty. A vision. We were there in our little puddle of light, speckled and mottled-we were human-but there were parts of the connection between us that were as pure and perfect as threads of virgin silk. I would be thirty-one in eight more days, old enough to know how rare those threads were. Janet knew it, too. She put the mask up to her face for a few seconds, then took it away.

She was holding my left hand. I had my right hand in my pants pocket, poking just the tip of my middle finger through the ring. I wanted to do what I was going to do in a way that was movie-star cool, just taking the ring out with one hand and slipping it onto her finger without saying anything, without pulling my other hand away. I tried it. And I got the ring most of the way out of my pocket pretty well, without her noticing anything, but then, somehow, it got snagged up on the edge of the pocket, on the little double line of thread there. Snagged up pretty bad. But I still wanted to do it one-handed, so I tilted my wrist down an inch, and turned it sideways, and then somehow the ring came unsnagged all at once and as I was turning my hand palm-up, it popped out into the air. It flew up only a few inches, but it seemed to stay there for an impossibly long time, wobbling in the light. We were both looking at it. I pulled my hand out of hers and cupped my hands together and caught it, but all hope of being cool was ruined. Before she could say anything, I reached out and slid it onto her finger. She’d lost so much weight that it was like sliding a hula hoop onto a pencil. I took my hands away and the ring almost slid right off. Janet was staring at it.

I waited a few seconds, then I said, “The salesman promised it will shrink after you wash it a few times.”

She looked at the ring and looked at it and then looked up at me finally, with such a gleam of joy and love on her face that it almost didn’t matter to me what happened after that, whether she lived, or I lived, or whether we would ever be able to adopt children, and pour the feeling we had for each other all over them, minute by minute, year after year. The world was speckled and mottled and full of pain and evil, but during those few months we had stumbled into this little bright room together, and stayed there for a while. That was almost enough.