Charles Bock: Alice & Oliver

“Do you understand,” Doc Glenn said to Alice, “you are in the thrall of a neutropenic fever?”

Tearing eyes looked at the doctor like he was insane. “Of course I don’t understand,” Alice answered.

“For all practical purposes,” the doctor said, “your body can’t protect itself from anything right now.”

She urged Oliver to ignore the old man, “drive us straight back to the city — our people are there, they can help with whatever needs helping.” In response the doctor let Oliver know that, in his professional opinion, Alice would not make it back to Manhattan alive. “We have to have an ambulance anyway,” Oliver thought out loud. “Can’t the same paramedic just stand over and care for Alice all the way back to the city?” Oliver volunteered to foot the bill for the mileage costs, then nodded through the doctor’s administrative blarney — the drive being a nonemergency, elective use of an ambulance probably not covered by insurance as an in-network cost. Like he knew or cared what any of it meant.

Oliver pressed further. Calls were made. But even if one of the Manhattan hospitals covered by Alice’s insurance plan had an available bed — which they didn’t, but even if they had — none of those wards would accept a body with almost no white blood cells after six straight hours on the road.

Frustrating as this clusterfuck was, Oliver — like many of his programming peers and former grad school classmates — had spent huge swaths of his adult life devoted to logical progressions, the evolutionary dances of trial and error that went into problem solving. So, yes, he felt the urge to lash out, punch something solid. But he also understood that every reason something couldn’t work provided more information, another small jigsaw piece, the borders and edges gradually filling, a cumulative suggestion developing.

This is happening, he told himself. Whether it feels surreal, or melodramatic, or whatever, this is happening.

Now two men in dark uniforms angled the stretcher, making sure Alice’s legs were raised higher than her head so that the blood would flow toward her brain. “Precautionary measure,” explained the bulkier paramedic, whose responsibilities seemed to include talking to Alice. “Keeps patients from going into pulmonary shock.”

That’s really a possibility? Oliver started to ask. The question stalled in his throat. Its answer was apparent in the black stabilizing straps being buckled tight across his wife’s chest, the secondary set constricting her thighs, the exam room now crowded and jostling and serious. The paramedics were counting to one another, one two tres; Alice was looking up, searching, her face pale, waxy. Her eyes were red and brimmed with tears. Now she locked in on him.

—

He would never forget those contractions, Alice taken by pain so encompassing as to be frightening, this highly functioning adult — this woman he loved so much (he felt his love throbbing inside each of his heart’s four chambers) — reverting back to her mammalian origins, making horrible, primal sounds, the totality of her being committed, shrieking. Oliver was freaked, admittedly, and self-conscious to the extreme, but he absorbed the shooting pain from his wife’s grip, and squeezed her hand in return; he breathed in tandem with her, and the contractions continued, and, on count, she pushed with all she had ( pushpushpush, breathe, pushpushpush ), and his gaze remained trained on her spread legs, making for damned sure that he was watching every second. Why had nobody told him he needed to watch and stay trained, why had he needed to figure this out for himself? Only after each contraction receded, when the baby was that much closer but not yet crowned, when they had a minute or whatever to recover and get ready for the next push, only then had Oliver looked back up at his wife’s face; still continuing to count, still breathing in tandem, he’d used his free hand to pat her sweaty brow, repeating just how beautiful she was, how great she was doing.

This time her grip wasn’t crushing the long bones of his fingers. Rather, she was clasping his fingertips. When this became too difficult, she was hanging on to the edge of his coat, holding its seam between her thumb and pinkie. Oliver still had the warm bundle of their daughter on his chest. He leaned down. Alice had just begun losing the pregnancy weight from her cheeks and chin. “I can’t believe how much I want to fuck you right now,” he whispered.

She coughed out the laugh he wanted. But by then the paramedics were lifting her, she had to let go of his sleeve. For an instant her arm remained hanging, outstretched. She looked back at him, her eyes huge.

Shielding his daughter from the sight of Mommy being wheeled out of the room, Oliver shouted, “Don’t worry about anything.” He rocked the baby to his chest, promised, “We’re right behind you. We’re with you.”

His wife was receding, down the hall, toward an ambulance, away from him. “We’re in your heart,” Oliver shouted. “We’ll beat you there, I bet,” his screams almost gleeful. “We love you so much. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.”

—

Flakes of snow, random and swirling, drifted through the darkness of the small twin windows. She followed a single flake: it flipped along a gust of wind, ricocheting off the glass. Alice couldn’t guess how long she’d been in here, how long they’d been driving. She couldn’t hear the sirens, but from the way any pothole jostled her, the ambulance had to be going pretty fast. If she concentrated enough she could block out the beeping updates of her vital signs, the itching down the middle of her torso from this thin cheap blanket. What couldn’t be ignored was the weight. Settling atop her chest. She imagined it so clearly. Light but firm. The black box with that black ribbon, tied in a huge, sagging black bow.

“I know this is overwhelming,” Doc Glenn had said. Deep rivulets were etched in the skin around his eyes. “But whatever you are about to go through, you’ll be able to get through it a lot better if you can learn to live with not knowing the answers. It’s the patients who can handle uncertainty. They’re the ones who deal with these situations better.”

The ambulance came out of a turn and slowed, its vibrations lowering an octave. Arriving felt important: one part ending, a new one beginning. This was the transition. These moments were moving her into the part where she found out what was happening inside her body. The engine cut; the ambulance went still; for long seconds Alice looked up through the two long square windows, into the gloom, alone with the darkness and the black box and the anticipation. Then the doors opened; night flowed into the chasm, the chilled air stinging her cheeks. A few orange bulbs scattered light across the loading dock. As the paramedics set Alice down onto the cement landing, cascading flakes landed on their knit hats and thick winter parkas and gloves and thermal masks. She noticed the far wall of the parking area was cushioned: rubber bumpers for when the ambulance couldn’t afford to slow down.

Alice’s stretcher rotated, turning at an angle; she was rolled over rough asphalt. Beyond the boxy silhouette of hospital buildings, she could see the layering of dark mountains, a smear of charcoal sky. Inside swaths of the dock’s streetlamp and tower light, the snowfall seemed like fireflies and stardust and the refractions off untold tiny spinning diamonds. It seemed to her the scene could have been manufactured on a Hollywood soundstage, or was part of an odd dream. She raised her head from the stretcher; snow stung her cheeks. For long moments she almost believed some peculiar form of magic was indeed waiting for her. Alice could not help herself: she extended her tongue.