Roland Merullo: A Little Love Story

I said, “It doesn’t matter if those old lungs get infected now, does it?”

She shook her head. She was squeezing her left hand to keep the ring on, and her eyes were full of silvery wet light, and she was the one who couldn’t talk now, and we had one quick, over-the-side-of-the-bed kiss, one little breakdown of borders. Then she held me against her with one thin weak arm around the back of my neck, no words coming out but her spirit all wide open against me, yes to yes.

BEFORE HER MOTHER could come back with the milk shakes, I went out of the room to the sound of Janet coughing, and down the stairs, and outside into the damp, cold night. The surgery on Governor Valvelsais and on me had to be done at a different hospital, four miles away, because no hospital wants to tie up all its operating rooms and all its surgeons on one patient. As I drove across town, snow began to fall, cutting diagonally through the darkness. During the testing I had heard the nurses and technicians talking about a storm, and there it was: swirls of small, icy flakes above Boston Common, and a quick dusting of white on the cars and sidewalks of Tremont Street. By the time I’d parked in the lot of the other hospital, the wind was picking up, too. People were walking out the front door with their coats wrapped tight in front of them and their faces lowered.

I checked in and went upstairs. I changed into the hospital gown and lay down in the bed. After a while two nurses came in and talked to me, took my temperature and pulse, made sure I hadn’t eaten anything. They told me a little bit about what to expect and then left me alone in the darkness. I listened to the hospital sounds-nurses’ shoes, announcements in the hall, the clinking of a cart going past with its load of instruments or plates. I closed my eyes but could not fall asleep for a long while.

Sometime after midnight I heard footsteps in the room. I opened my eyes to see a priest’s plain black overcoat in the darkness next to the bed. I thought it was my brother Ellory. I looked up, past the collar, and saw Gerard’s smiling face.

“What do we need in the way of materials for tomorrow, Colonel?” he said.

“You have a thing about disturbing my sleep, you know that? I must have lived in the apartment next to you in a past life and played my electric guitar loud all night.”

“It was a violin,” he said. “You were very devoted.” His face was shadowed and tired, but fierce somehow. “I just came from the other hospital and I can report two things: one, members of the clergy are allowed into that ward at any hour. Two, the love of your life is coughing in her sleep.”

“Outstanding work.”

“I appreciate it, sir.”

“Those lungs have to last seven more hours.”

“It appears that they will. I will be there when she awakens from the surgery, Colonel, in my capacity as her spiritual counselor. And I shall come give you my report soon afterwards in person.”

“Excellent.”

“Anything to confess before you go under?”

“Impure thoughts and desires, Father.”

“Describe these thoughts and desires in detail,” he said. Then he shook my hand, told me he’d seen the ring on Janet’s finger, said, “Don’t screw it up like I did,” and was gone.

I lay awake for another little while, thinking about him and about his wife and the girls.

In the morning I woke up nervous, but not afraid. Snow was still falling outside the window. A nurse came in and gave me a Valium and two sips of water, but the Valium did nothing to make things less real. I knew the governor was already in surgery by then, and Janet, too. Doctor Vaskis would be making a looping incision from her right armpit, down beneath her breast, cutting the muscle between two ribs, then sawing through the sternum, and then making another looping cut on the other side. A lobe from the governor’s right lung, and a lobe from my left, would be pulled out between two of our pried-apart back ribs and sent across the city in special coolers, one by one. Time-release life gliding in ambulances through the snow. When everything was set, Vaskis would lift the top of Janet’s chest cavity as if it were the hood of a car, take out the ruined right lung while the blood that should have been going through her heart was detoured through a machine at the side of the table. He’d wash and clean the chest cavity. He’d set the governor’s lobe in, and then, if everything went well, he’d begin the slow process of sewing together the pulmonary vein and the pulmonary artery and the tube through which Janet’s breath would pass-the bronchus.

He’d run some blood through to check the first lobe, then start in on the left side of her body, and do the same thing there, with a part of me.

Two nurses and an orderly came in to the room. They asked if I was ready. I said that I was. I climbed out of the bed and onto a gurney and we rolled off down the hall beneath a parade of ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights. In the elevator, one of the nurses rubbed my arm. When they wheeled me into the operating room, a very young doctor with sandy, boyish hair greeted me, and after they’d wheeled me up beside some machinery I did not want to look at, he said, “Now, Mister Entwhistle, we are going to insert a needle into your vein.”

“The veins are the blue ones,” I said.

He didn’t smile. He put the needle in, and checked the tube attached to it. He said, “Now we are going to start a medicine called fentanyl, a narcotic, which will prepare you for the actual anesthesia.”

“Narcotic away,” I said.

In another moment the room began to spin and shift in a kaleidoscope of delight. I could feel the drug going through me, down into my arms and legs, pulsing warmly in the middle of me like a billion cells having orgasms. With the pain taken out of it, the world was a wonderful place, a perfect place, and I thought, for an instant, about my sister and brother and mother and dad. They seemed, then, like just four more drips of good matter in a singing, happy sea. I held a picture of Janet in my swirling mind.

“Now we are going to put you to sleep,” the doctor said, and from the deepest part of me, the soul of my will, I struggled and struggled and tried to push some words out into the air between us.

“Just give me another few seconds of this,” I wanted to say, but I could not manage it.

Conway, Massachusetts

May 3,2003-January 20, 2005

Roland Merullo is the critically acclaimed author of Revere Beach Elegy and In Revere, In Those Days . He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and two children.