Birds of America (31 page)

Nurses come and go; their chirpy voices both startle and soothe. Some of the other Peed Onk parents stick their heads in to see how the Baby is and offer encouragement.

Green Hair scratches her head. “Everyone’s so friendly here. Is there someone in this place who isn’t doing all this airy, scripted optimism—or are people like that the only people here?”

“It’s Modern Middle Medicine meets the Modern Middle Family,” says the Husband. “In the Modern Middle West.”

Someone has brought in take-out lo mein, and they all eat it out in the hall by the elevators.

Parents are allowed use of the Courtesy Line.

“You’ve got to have a second child,” says a different friend on the phone, a friend from out of town. “An heir and a spare. That’s what: we did. We had another child to ensure we wouldn’t off ourselves if we lost our first.”

“Really?”

“I’m serious.”

“A formal suicide? Wouldn’t you just drink yourself into a lifelong stupor and let it go at that?”

“Nope. I knew how I would do it even. For a while, until our second came along, I had it all planned.”

“What did you plan?”

“I can’t go into too much detail, because—Hi, honey!—the kids are here now in the room. But I’ll spell out the general idea: R-O-P-E.”

Sunday evening, she goes and sinks down on the sofa in the Tiny Tim Lounge next to Frank, Joey’s father. He is a short, stocky man with the currentless, flatlined look behind the eyes that all the parents eventually get here. He has shaved his head bald in solidarity with his son. His little boy has been battling cancer for five years. It is now in the liver, and the rumor around the corridor is that Joey has three weeks to live. She knows that Joey’s mother, Heather, left Frank years ago, two years into the cancer, and has remarried and had another child, a girl named Brittany. The Mother sees Heather here sometimes with her new life—the cute little girl and the new,
young, full-haired husband who will never be so maniacally and debilitatingly obsessed with Joey’s illness the way Frank, her first husband, was. Heather comes to visit Joey, to say hello and now good-bye, but she is not Joey’s main man. Frank is.

Frank is full of stories—about the doctors, about the food, about the nurses, about Joey. Joey, affectless from his meds, sometimes leaves his room and comes out to watch TV in his bathrobe. He is jaundiced and bald, and though he is nine, he looks no older than six. Frank has devoted the last four and a half years to saving Joey’s life. When the cancer was first diagnosed, the doctors gave Joey a 20 percent chance of living six more months. Now here it is, almost five years later, and Joey’s still here. It is all due to Frank, who, early on, quit his job as vice president of a consulting firm in order to commit himself totally to his son. He is proud of everything he’s given up and done, but he is tired. Part of him now really believes things are coming to a close, that this is the end. He says this without tears. There are no more tears.

“You have probably been through more than anyone else on this corridor,” says the Mother.

“I could tell you stories,” he says. There is a sour odor between them, and she realizes that neither of them has bathed for days.

“Tell me one. Tell me the worst one.” She knows he hates his ex-wife and hates her new husband even more.

“The worst? They’re all the worst. Here’s one: one morning, I went out for breakfast with my buddy—it was the only time I’d left Joey alone ever; left him for two hours is all—and when I came back, his N-G tube was full of blood. They had the suction on too high, and it was sucking the guts right out of him.”

“Oh my God. That just happened to us,” said the Mother.

“It did?”

“Friday night.”

“You’re kidding. They let that happen again? I gave them such a chewing-out about that!”

“I guess our luck is not so good. We get your very worst story on the second night we’re here.”

“It’s not: a bad place, though.”

“It’s not?”

“Naw. I’ve seen worse. I’ve taken Joey everywhere.”

“He seems very strong.” Truth is, at this point, Joey seems like a zombie and frightens her.

“Joey’s a fucking genius. A biological genius. They’d given him six months, remember.”

The Mother nods.

“Six months is not very long,” says Frank. “Six months is nothing. He was four and a half years old.”

All the words are like blows. She feels flooded with affection and mourning for this man. She looks away, out the window, out past the hospital parking lot, up toward the black marbled sky and the electric eyelash of the moon. “And now he’s nine,” she says. “You’re his hero.”

“And he’s mine,” says Frank, though the fatigue in his voice seems to overwhelm him. “He’ll be that forever. Excuse me,” he says, “I’ve got to go check. His breathing hasn’t been good. Excuse me.”

“Good news and bad,” says the Oncologist on Monday. He has knocked, entered the room, and now stands there. Their cots are unmade. One wastebasket is overflowing with coffee cups. “We’ve got the pathologist’s report. The bad news is that the kidney they removed had certain lesions, called ‘rests,’ which are associated with a higher risk for disease in the other kidney. The good news is that the tumor is stage one, regular cell structure, and under five hundred grams, which qualifies you for a national experiment in which chemotherapy isn’t done but
your boy is monitored with ultrasound instead. It’s not all that risky, given that the patient’s watched closely, but here is the literature on it. There are forms to sign, if you decide to do that. Read all this and we can discuss it further. You have to decide within four days.”

Lesions? Rests? They dry up and scatter like M&M’s on the floor. All she hears is the part about no chemo. Another sigh of relief rises up in her and spills out. In a life where there is only the bearable and the unbearable, a sigh of relief is an ecstasy.

“No chemo?” says the Husband. “Do you recommend that?”

The Oncologist shrugs. What casual gestures these doctors are permitted! “I know chemo. I like chemo,” says the Oncologist. “But this is for you to decide. It depends how you feel.”

The Husband leans forward. “But don’t you think that now that we have the upper hand with this thing, we should keep going? Shouldn’t we stomp on it, beat it, smash it to death with the chemo?”

The Mother swats him angrily and hard. “Honey, you’re delirious!” She whispers, but it comes out as a hiss. “This is our lucky break!” Then she adds gently, “We don’t want the Baby to have chemo.”

The Husband turns back to the Oncologist. “What do
you
think?”

“It could be,” he says, shrugging. “It could be that this is your lucky break. But you won’t know for sure for five years.”

The Husband turns back to the Mother. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

The Baby grows happier and strong. He begins to move and sit and eat. Wednesday morning, they are allowed to leave, and leave without chemo. The Oncologist looks a little nervous. “Are you nervous about this?” asks the Mother.

“Of course I’m nervous.” But he shrugs and doesn’t look
that nervous. “See you in six weeks for the ultrasound,” he says, waves and then leaves, looking at his big black shoes as he does.

The Baby smiles, even toddles around a little, the sun bursting through the clouds, an angel chorus crescendoing. Nurses arrive. The Hickman is taken out of the Baby’s neck and chest; antibiotic lotion is dispensed. The Mother packs up their bags. The Baby sucks on a bottle of juice and does not cry.

“No chemo?” says one of the nurses. “Not even a
little
chemo?”

“We’re doing watch and wait,” says the Mother.

The other parents look envious but concerned. They have never seen any child get out of there with his hair and white blood cells intact.

“Will you be okay?” asks Ned’s mother.

“The worry’s going to kill us,” says the Husband.

“But if all we have to do is worry,” chides the Mother, “every day for a hundred years, it’ll be easy. It’ll be nothing. I’ll take all the worry in the world, if it wards off the thing itself.”

“That’s right,” says Ned’s mother. “Compared to everything else, compared to all the actual events, the worry is nothing.”

The Husband shakes his head. “I’m such an amateur,” he moans.

“You’re both doing admirably,” says the other mother. “Your baby’s lucky, and I wish you all the best.”

The Husband shakes her hand warmly. “Thank you,” he says. “You’ve been wonderful.”

Another mother, the mother of Eric, comes up to them. “It’s all very hard,” she says, her head cocked to one side. “But there’s a lot of collateral beauty along the way.”

Collateral beauty?
Who is entitled to such a thing? A child is ill. No one is entitled to any collateral beauty!

“Thank you,” says the Husband.

Joey’s father, Frank, comes up and embraces them both.
“It’s a journey,” he says. He chucks the Baby on the chin. “Good luck, little man.”

“Yes, thank you so much,” says the Mother. “We hope things go well with Joey.” She knows that Joey had a hard, terrible night.

Frank shrugs and steps back. “Gotta go,” he says. “Good-bye!”

“Bye,” she says, and then he is gone. She bites the inside of her lip, a bit tearily, then bends down to pick up the diaper bag, which is now stuffed with little animals; helium balloons are tied to its zipper. Shouldering the thing, the Mother feels she has just won a prize. All the parents have now vanished down the hall in the opposite direction. The Husband moves close. With one arm, he takes the Baby from her; with the other, he rubs her back. He can see she is starting to get weepy.

“Aren’t these people nice? Don’t you feel better hearing about their lives?” he asks.

Why does he do this, form clubs all the time; why does even this society of suffering soothe him? When it comes to death and dying, perhaps someone in this family ought to be more of a snob.

“All these nice people with their brave stories,” he continues as they make their way toward the elevator bank, waving good-bye to the nursing staff as they go, even the Baby waving shyly.
Bye-bye! Bye-bye!
“Don’t you feel consoled, knowing we’re all in the same boat, that we’re all in this together?”

But who on earth would want to be in this boat? the Mother thinks. This boat is a nightmare boat. Look where it goes: to a silver-and-white room, where, just before your eyesight and hearing and your ability to touch or be touched disappear entirely, you must watch your child die.

Rope! Bring on the rope.

“Let’s make our own way,” says the Mother, “and not in this boat.”

Woman Overboard! She takes the Baby back from the Husband, cups the Baby’s cheek in her hand, kisses his brow and then, quickly, his flowery mouth. The Baby’s heart—she can hear it—drums with life. “For as long as I live,” says the Mother, pressing the elevator button—up or down, everyone in the end has to leave this way—“I never want to see any of these people again.”

There are the notes.

Now where is the money?

Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached thirty-five that holding babies seemed to make her nervous—just at the beginning, a twinge of stage fright swinging up from the gut. “Adrienne, would you like to hold the baby? Would you mind?” Always these words from a woman her age looking kind and beseeching—a former friend, she was losing her friends to babble and beseech—and Adrienne would force herself to breathe deep. Holding a baby was no longer natural—she was no longer natural—but a test of womanliness and earthly skills. She was being observed. People looked to see how she would do it. She had entered a puritanical decade, a demographic moment—whatever it was—when the best compliment you could get was, “You would make a terrific mother.” The wolf whistle of the nineties.

So when she was at the Spearsons’ Labor Day picnic, and when Sally Spearson handed her the baby, Adrienne had burbled at it as she would a pet, had jostled the child gently, made clicking noises with her tongue, affectionately cooing, “Hello,
punkinhead, hello, my little punkinhead,” had reached to shoo a fly away and, amid the smells of old grass and the fatty crackle of the barbecue, lost her balance when the picnic bench, the dowels rotting in the joints, wobbled and began to topple her—the bench, the wobbly picnic bench, was toppling her! And when she fell backward, wrenching her spine—in the slowed quickness of this flipping world, she saw the clayey clouds, some frozen faces, one lone star like the nose of a jet—and when the baby’s head hit the stone retaining wall of the Spearsons’ newly terraced yard and bled fatally into the brain, Adrienne went home shortly thereafter, after the hospital and the police reports, and did not leave her attic apartment for seven months, and there were fears, deep fears for her, on the part of Martin Porter, the man she had been dating, and on the part of almost everyone, including Sally Spearson, who phoned tearfully to say that she forgave her, that Adrienne might never come out.

Martin Porter usually visited her bringing a pepper cheese or a Casbah couscous cup; he had become her only friend. He was divorced and worked as a research economist, though he looked more like a Scottish lumberjack—graying hair, red-flecked beard, a favorite flannel shirt in green and gold. He was getting ready to take a trip abroad. “We could get married,” he suggested. That way, he said, Adrienne could accompany him to northern Italy, to a villa in the Alps set up for scholars and academic conferences. She could be a spouse. They gave spouses studios to work in. Some studios had pianos. Some had desks or potter’s wheels. “You can do whatever you want.” He was finishing the second draft of a study of First World imperialism’s impact on Third World monetary systems. “You could paint. Or not. You could not paint.”

She looked at him closely, hungrily, then turned away. She still felt clumsy and big, a beefy killer in a cage, in need of the
thinning prison food. “You love me, don’t you,” she said. She had spent the better part of seven months napping in a leotard, an electric fan blowing at her, her left ear catching the wind, capturing it there in her head, like the sad sea in a shell. She felt clammy and doomed. “Or do you just feel sorry for me?” She swatted at a small swarm of gnats that had appeared suddenly out of an abandoned can of Coke.