Charles Bock: Alice & Oliver

—

If she hadn’t pulled it together at the rest stop, found a second wind, and recovered enough to convince Oliver to get them to her mom’s, so they could all have one nice goddamn holiday weekend, please. If her mom hadn’t looked at her daughter in the bedroom that morning and ignored Alice’s protests and placed that call. If good old Doc Glenn had been hosting his children and grandkids for Thanksgiving like he did during even years, and had been occupied with all that, instead of just waiting to board a flight, his mind not quite engaged by that newsweekly magazine. If the pay phone hadn’t been free, and the doctor hadn’t checked his service, heard that panicked call from a longtime patient, and followed up. If what might have been some dinky country office hadn’t actually been fairly up-to-date, with modern equipment including a gizmo that could take lung X-rays. If the very same doctor whom Alice had considered a cornball bozo when she was growing up, with such little mental firepower, had indeed been a cornball, and had been satisfied with the X-ray’s discovery of pneumonia, and hadn’t ordered a round of blood tests, just to be sure. If that same little office hadn’t had access to a blood lab that not only turned around results on the same day but also remained open for business on all days, including legal holidays. If pretty much everyone in the area code with anything resembling a normal life hadn’t taken a proverbial hike on the day before Thanksgiving, and if local junkies hadn’t had their veins full of a particularly average batch delivered down from Montreal, and if there’d even been a smattering of crazy accidents or family disagreements involving carving knives, so that the skeleton staff working at the laboratory, as often is the case with commercial medical labs, had been dealing with something other than a clear and cloudless docket, and had been forced to wait an afternoon, or even into the evening, before processing Alice’s samples. If too much time had passed before the discovery that Alice possessed zero white blood cells, zero. If that same lab had discovered that slightly above fifty percent of Alice’s blood cells were cancerous, rather than the number they found, which was just barely below. If one of the top cancer hospitals in the Northeast hadn’t been available less than two hours away via ambulance — close enough that its doctors could apply their considerable expertise and equipment before more of those infected blood cells had replicated past the point of no return. If Alice hadn’t been isolated and her treatments hadn’t started before some random nearby person let loose with a stray sneeze whose germs had landed inside of her ridiculously compromised system, or before her pneumonia or fever had finished her off. Any individual clause in the list. Any offshoot of who knew how many other improbabilities. Any of the uncountable possibilities that happened to break her way when they could have easily broken the other way instead. If Alice spent a moment reflecting on any one of these, let alone all of them; if she so much as considered how lucky she’d been to make it to this moment, especially when she couldn’t allow herself to conceive of what she still had to go through — the ifs were enough to stop her cold.

Do not pursue the past, she reminded herself. Do not lose yourself in the future.

She needed to appreciate the now.

—

Day three: her nose swollen outward from the nostrils, her cheeks inflated. A deep crimson discoloration had started behind her ears and now covered the underside of her jaw, the top of her neck. “Not all that unusual for daunorubicin,” said the disheveled resident. “I don’t think anything for concern about,” added the visiting fellow (Mongolian, an emerging star, he’d been called in for a consultation).

The next morning, on rounds, the attending physician addressed those students who’d followed him into Alice’s room. Exclaiming his pleasure about Alice’s lack of a fever, he offered similar talking points about her newest rash (not at all unusual, no cause for concern). This one was a purplish shade, creeping out from under her pits, spilling in all directions. The attending possessed the good sense to keep his mouth shut about the possibility of the two rashes joining in a superrash. And no student doctor was brazen enough to broach the subject.

Alice took solace in the attending’s air of authority but also had a flash of sorrow for all the years she’d dismissed Dr. Glenn. “Ointments should take care of the burning,” continued the attending physician. He acknowledged the difficulty of keeping her hands still. Then, as if talking to a child, added, “Staying away from the rash is how we keep it from spreading or getting infected.”

“I’ll be good,” Alice answered. “Scout’s honor.”

Still she scratched. She picked. Oliver also noticed her running her hand over her hair. More and more she did it, like one of those poker tells. This concerned him — he wondered if a catheter had wriggled free from a weak or wandering vein in the crook of Alice’s right arm; if the IV drip was going into her biceps instead of her bloodstream. The resident, the fellow, and the attending were all sanguine. The infiltrating medicine was not a lethal mix; the swelling would recede. However, they also insisted: she had to keep that swollen arm stationary. And still she skimmed. Incessant, straight swipes with that same fucked-up arm, her fingers combing backward. To Oliver it now appeared as if his wife’s face was in the middle of transforming into a mutant boar’s; and watching her — ridiculously bloated, garishly discolored, frail, weak, covered in blankets, hooked up to all those goddamn tubes — all of that was bad enough. But here she was, willfully and continually disobeying doctors’ orders, running her hand over her skull, checking yet again, displaying each new wisp that clung to her finger.

“Nothing like the handfuls you’d expect,” she said. Her voice was hopeful, maybe even convincing. “I’ve heard stories — women who survived all sorts of chemo and kept a decent head of hair.”

The attending physician let Alice get it out of her system. Then he answered, plain as white bread: “It’s all going to fall out.”

—

Of course, Alice’s mom checked herself in to the nearby hospice. The white-haired woman who’d combed out Alice’s tangles, apologizing, always, for the pain she caused; who’d asked that Alice hold still, wrapped her hair into untold ponytails, and taught her girl how to braid, ending each lesson with a kiss on the top of the head. The hospice was available for loved ones of long-terms and potentially terminal cases, and charged twenty dollars a night, more than reasonable, thought Alice’s mom, especially with the lodgings being so homey: hand-stitched quilts and Americana on the walls, lace tablecloth and fresh flowers on the common table. Alice’s mother was calm and rational and not a complainer in any way, and she quickly proved indispensable, each morning finishing her grapefruit, cornflakes, and strong black coffee, then exchanging best wishes with the sad married couple whose son had been in a hunting accident, and then changing and re-dressing her grandchild.

Whenever she and Doe found their way back to the hospital, Oliver’s shift on guard ended, and it became his turn to ride the complimentary shuttle downtown, into four blocks of brick buildings that had been renovated to look historically quaint. This luxury, these few hours to himself, was mainly full of errands: sending necessary insurance faxes from the cluttered rear of the office supply store; settling into the phone booth of the nearby university library’s lobby, where he used his long-distance calling card to update friends and family on the latest; concocting plans for how the biz would deal with things while he was stuck here.