Apologize, Apologize! (25 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

L
OOKING AROUND, I SAW THAT EVERYONE WAS THERE—THE BOY,
tall and slim and ill; the boy’s shaken parents, pale mom, dad unsmiling; an intern; and a nurse. The nurse had a run in her stocking; I know because I was checking out her legs. Thick ankles, Jesus, ankles like a cart horse, as Pop would say, whatever the hell a cart horse is. Something you don’t want to rub up against in the night, Collie, I was thinking.

The boy’s name was Gary. He was seventeen years old. His leukemia had reappeared after a long remission. I was treating him for the first time. His regular doctor was sick at home. I was annoyed because we weren’t on the oncology ward. There weren’t any available beds. Instead we were on a surgical ward, and it was seven o’clock in the morning.

The official inquiry would eventually refer to the cumulative effect of small factors.

Geography was small factor number one.

I was new to St. Agnes-Marie Hospital and still learning their protocols.

Small factor number two.

Gary was prepped to receive the first round in a chemotherapy regimen of spinal canal injections of methotrexate, cytarabine, and hydrocortisone. I gave my head a shake and focused. Later in the day he was scheduled to receive an intravenous treatment with a drug called vincristine.

I was accustomed to protocols on the oncology ward at my previous hospital, where intravenous medications were stored separately for safety reasons. In oncology, they weren’t allowed in the same room together. And they were packaged differently. Drugs such as vincristine were double-bagged and wrapped in a towel. On other wards, on this ward, they weren’t so meticulous. Hospital rules didn’t oblige them to be—small factor number three. I wasn’t thinking about that, of course. Somewhere in my unconscious, I was making the assumption that standards of risk management with regard to drug handling were the same on all wards.

But even on oncology I always double-checked the medications—that’s how thorough I was; that’s how seriously I took my responsibilities. I always checked the labeling first. I was strangling, all that virtue a lump in my throat. I could hardly breathe for my determination to do it right, follow through, be better than I was, elusive maturity choking the life out of me.

So when a nurse brought a bag containing what I thought were the three syringes into the room, I checked just to make sure. But I didn’t remove the syringes from the bag. I never touched the bag—small factor number four.

The nurse was unfamiliar with chemotherapy procedures. She didn’t know anything about the drugs and how they should be administered. That would never have happened at my old hospital.

Small factor number five.

Viewing the syringes through the transparent plastic, I visually confirmed the contents and the labeling. But there was a fourth syringe. I didn’t see it. It was concealed by the other three.

Small factor number six.

I was chatting with Gary about football. He was a bright, likable kid, cheerful as an accordion. He was making fun of me for not looking like a doctor, and he was right. You look like a skater, he said, and I was shrugging because I knew it was true.

“How’d you get that limp?” he asked me.

“Heliskiing in Nepal,” I told him. I’d told the story so many times, I’d come to believe it myself.

We were laughing and talking. It felt like fun, what was going on between us. I liked the way we were ignoring the crisis, our levity a nice counterpoint to the gravity of the situation.

Ever since medical school I couldn’t help myself: If it looked like fun—and joking with this kid was fun—I was running it down, dog after cat, just for the hell of it, for the sheer pleasure of chasing and catching.

Why didn’t I pull the syringes from the bag and check? Was it because I was having too much fun?

The intern automatically withdrew the syringes from the bag and put all four syringes onto the tray. Small factor number seven. And why wouldn’t he? He had watched me approve the contents. He knew my reputation for thoroughness. I was so confident in my abilities and judgments, I instilled the same assurance in others. Everyone knew I was a star. Unlike Collie the boyish fuck-up, I didn’t make mistakes. That was behind me.

I sat down and began the procedure. The tray stand was at shoulder level when I was in a seated position. Because I was looking across, rather than looking down, I still didn’t see that there were four rather than three syringes. Now there were eight small factors at play.

At that moment, a fire alarm sounded out in the hallway. The boy’s mother looked anxiously over at the door, as did Gary. I was mildly distracted by the noise and was focused on trying to ensure that Gary remained perfectly still. Small factors nine and ten.

The nurse handed me the syringes one by one, and one by one I injected the methotrexate, the cytarabine, and the hydrocortisone, and then I injected the fourth syringe.

That’s when I killed him.

The second I withdrew the syringe I knew. A fourth syringe. Why did I know the second after and not the second before? I looked down at the syringe. The label was clear: vincristine, written in black letters.

I made immediate efforts to flush out his central nervous system, but vincristine injected into the spinal canal is fatal. It was certainly fatal for Gary.

It took him three agonizing days to die. I have no memory of those three days.

An inquiry exonerated me. There was persuasive testimony as to my competence, my academic standing, my impeccable training and credentials, my reputation for caring and conscientiousness, the conspiracy of circumstance. The hospital decided the matter should end there.

Gary’s parents heroically supported their decision. I found out later both the hospital and the parents accepted large sums of money from the Falcon.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

G
ARY’S FAMILY WASN’T AFFLUENT. HARDWORKING, INDUSTRIOUS,
thrifty—their clothes were wash-and-wear, off-the-rack. My clothes were all wrong. My suit, my shoes, my shirt, my tie, everything about me was wrong. I shouldn’t have gone. I don’t know what I was thinking, showing up at the funeral in those clothes and with my shoes shining.

I was standing alone at the back of the church, and I dipped my fingers in holy water and made the sign of the cross. I genuflected, and then I heard someone gasp; there was this long, low moan, and from the front of the church Gary’s father looked up and around. “Jesus!” he said as his wife began sobbing loudly at first sight of me.

Crying, everyone was crying, the church was swaying, and the volume grew in intensity and fervor with every step I took until it became one long wail without end.

When Mambo died, Bachelor howled every night for weeks. Pop told me about it, and then I heard him myself; he woke me up, making this purely mournful sound that rose and fell and resonated throughout the house. To listen, it felt as if I were dying and being born at the same time.

“You heard it, did you?” Uncle Tom asked me the next morning. “Now, you tell me there’s no God.”

I watched from far away, from beneath an old oak tree, as Gary was interred, and then I drove to the caves where Bingo died, the first time I’d been back since he and Rosie and Erica drowned. I sat amid the rocks in the dark; it was cold, early spring, and I listened to the rush of the waterfall. Nothing had changed—the waning light of day shone through the gap in the rock overhead. Nothing had changed—the spray of the waterfall was like rain against the wet mossy stone, jagged rock, so sharp that I cut my hands, the black water shining and churning under the moon and the stars, blackbirds going round and round above me. Nothing changes.

It didn’t matter. Everywhere I looked, inside and outside, inner eye and outer eye, in crowds and in solitude, I saw him there, in the familiar faces of dogs, in the circling of blackbirds at dusk, reflected in the eyes of those who looked back at me. Even now, all these years later, behind every tree, there he is. Hiding, following me, I turn to look and there he is, persistent and inextinguishable, holding his breath waiting for me to say yes, to nod, to give him leave, there he is, there he is, there he is.

He’d been dead for almost nine years, and sometimes deep in my heart was this terrible ache, acute and fleeting, this feeling that haunted me, a recognition, not that I didn’t miss him, I missed him, but that I didn’t miss him as much as I once did.

I was holding an ivory-colored candle from the church. I lit it, and I sat in the barely illuminated darkness, watching the candle flicker, warm wax rolling down all sides, melting onto my fingers, until my fingers looked like candles and the candle faltered and went out, leaving me invisible to the night and indistinct, and knowing as I had always known that he would have jumped in after me.

I had my own place in Boston, but I couldn’t face going back there. I didn’t want to walk in the door and be met by myself—my choices everywhere—the stuff I owned, my things, my life hanging on the walls and crowding the cupboards.

I drove to Cassowary. It was the middle of the night. Cromwell barked from the upper hallway, where he slept in front of my grandfather’s bedroom, but he wagged his tail when he recognized who it was, giving me a sloppy greeting. The light in my grandfather’s room flickered briefly on and then shut off when he realized it was me coming home.

The next day, groggy and giving in to the panacea of sedation, I could hear a commotion outside my bedroom door, the vague sound of raised voices, not so muffled that I didn’t recognize Pop in all his fury. The door opened and banged shut and then opened a crack, Pop’s big rubber overshoe acting as doorstop.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Ingrid was trying to prevent him from entering the room.

I lifted my head off the pillow, propped myself up on my elbows, and saw Pop’s intruding shoulder form a wedge against the open crack of door.

“I’m here to get my son.”

“Well, I’m going to speak to his grandfather about that—”

“The hell you will!” Pop shouted, pushing hard against the door.

“Pop!” I said as he charged toward the bed. “What are you doing?”

He took me by the arm. “Come on, Collie, you’re coming with me.”

“Now, Collie, your grandfather will want to talk to you before you go anywhere,” Ingrid said, appealing to me. “We’re worried about you.”

“This hasn’t a thing to do with his grandfather. Collie’s my son. Peregrine Lowell has nothing to say about what happens to him.”

Neither, apparently, did I. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that I wasn’t a kid anymore.

“But Pop . . .” I was struggling to clear my head, trying to shake off the residual effects of too much Valium.

“Collie’s exhausted. Let him rest here for a day or so. . . . Be reasonable, Charlie, for heaven’s sake,” Ingrid was sputtering as the futility of her protest became evident to her.

But Pop wasn’t listening; his aggressive indifference had a gangster’s edge—he might as well have mashed a grapefruit in her face. He threw off my blankets, pitched them onto the floor, and pulled me up so I was standing, pathetic in my pajamas and bare feet. He reached for my cane and threw his raincoat over my shoulders.

“What the devil?” The Falcon stepped out of his bedroom, dressed for an early flight to Vancouver, turned to the left, and walked right into us.

“Out of my way, Perry,” Pop said, tightening his grip on my elbow.

“What’s going on here?” the Falcon demanded.

“Call the police!” someone was shouting.

“Don’t call the police,” I said. “Why would you call the police?”

“Collie, you’re not going anywhere,” the Falcon said as he reached out and hooked his fingers in a tight grip around my forearm.

“Get your lousy hands off him,” Pop said, pulling me toward him.

The Falcon yanked back. My cane clattered to the floor. I felt like the main course at a feast of jackals.

“You drunken maniac. What do you think you’re doing?” The Falcon raised his voice as he and Pop tugged away at me.

“Settle down, you guys, this is crazy. Just give me a moment to think,” I said, but no one was listening to me.

“He’s my son. Let him go!!” Pop was shouting, and then with one great heave-ho he pulled me free, so I was standing behind him as the yanking force propelled him into the Falcon, who was forced to take several steps backward. He was chest to chest with Pop, who struggled to keep his balance by hanging on to the Falcon’s outstretched arm—the collective gasp of anguish from the staff could be heard throughout the universe.

“Run, Collie, run!” Pop was hollering, pushing free of the Falcon. “Head for the stairs, I’m right behind you.”

“Jesus,” I said, stunned as I watched the Falcon stagger backward, disbelief in his eyes, hands to his face, fury like blood spurting between the cracks in his fingers.

“Well, see what I’ve got,” Pop said, chortling, as we emerged into the sunlight from the front door. He was holding up the Falcon’s antique money clip, containing several inches of cash.

“You picked his pocket!” I couldn’t believe it.

“I did not. It’s just a bit of magic. A little sleight of hand. I should have done it years ago. When your mother and I first got married and we stayed at the house, he used to leave great wads of money lying around in the hope I’d steal it and confirm his worst suspicions about me. I fixed him—I blew my nose on his dressing gown.”

“Pop, it’s stealing. . . .”

“The hell it is. I earned every cent. Jesus, Collie, you need to put finances in some perspective. It’s only money,” he admonished as we descended the front steps in silence. “Do you think he’ll put a stop to the monthly checks?”

“Pop! You humiliated him in front of his employees. You stole his money clip! The Falcon! What do you think?”

“It’s a sin to lose hope, Collie,” he said solemnly. “And anyway, a little humiliation never hurt anyone. I guarantee you your grandfather will be thanking me for this before he’s through. You don’t want to be proud, Collie. Is there a greater sin than pride? Not from where I sit there isn’t.”

We reached the driveway—why the hell was I going along with this? The waiting taxi driver looked up, stunned to see me in my pajamas, and hesitated; his fingers fluttering on the top of the steering wheel, his feet tapping nervously, he reacted as if he were the driver in a kidnapping.

“I don’t know about this,” he said, swallowing deeply. “Is this allowed?”

“For goodness’ sake, man, he’s my son,” Pop said, climbing into the passenger seat. “It’s not a prison break.”

“It’s okay,” I said, sliding into the rear seat behind the cabbie.

“If you say so,” the cabbie said, shaking his head resignedly.

“Now, I want you to drive us back to the ferry, and we’ll need you to cross over to the island with your car and drive us home. Whatever you charge is fine. Spare no expense. And don’t you worry,” Pop said to the cabbie, leaning forward confidentially, peeling off several large bills, part of the Falcon’s stash, “there’s a big fat bonus in it for you.”

Pop was chattering away from the front seat, enlisting the increasingly involved cabbie’s support for his plan to take me abroad with him the next day. “You’ve got a touch of the aristocrat about you, Collie. Just a tincture, mind you, no reason to sharpen the guillotine, but you’re a tiny bit rarefied, prone to ‘the nerves,’ as my aunt Margaret used to say. She was a great believer in the curative powers of the beach for people such as you.

“Marrying into a nervous family like the Lowells, I’ve come to see she was right. The beach calmed your mother down, not much, but without it, she would have soared way beyond the earth’s atmosphere, like some sort of mad kite. A mouthful of sand is the only antibiotic old money needs. You and I are going home to Ireland—now there are beaches! And then you’ll come and spend the summer with Tom and me, and we’ll have you right as rain by the fall.”

I took an extended leave of absence. For months, the last word I said to myself each evening was the first word in my head when I woke up the next morning—
vincristine.

I think I will never be free of the power of that word.

And in my mind, I carried on the brutish practice of scattering quicklime over the dead.