Dessert First (17 page)

I called Rachel on her cell phone during the passing time between first and second period.

“This better be important.” She sounded annoyed, as usual.

“Yeah. Beep wants to stop treatment and come home. He wants to go over it with the docs and Mom and Dad this afternoon.”

On her end, there was the babble of students in the halls, talking, and a locker slam over her long pause. “Is he sure?” Sounded like tears in her voice.

“Why don't you come talk to him and see?” As a senior, Rachel had already gotten into college and could get an excused absence for being at the hospital to talk to her brother about stopping treatment—at least in my view. My World History teacher Mrs. Miller might disagree, but I'm right.

Rachel said she'd drive over.

I sent an email and left a voicemail for Dad, saying there was a conference with the docs at three today to discuss stopping further treatment and sending Beep home, and Dad
had
to come. Then I called Mom, and left her the same message.

In the bone marrow transplant isolation rooms, the hospital only lets in one visitor at a time. Rachel stayed for half an hour. When she came out, she took one look at me and started crying so hard she couldn't say anything, so I gave her an awkward hug, and held it for a long time, while she shook and we cried.

Then Dad showed up,
hours
before the three o'clock meeting, and he went in to see Beep and didn't come out for an hour and a half. When he came out, his eyes were red and wet. His shoulders were slumped, and he looked like something had broken inside him.

I gave him a hug, so he wouldn't have to talk, and then Rachel was hugging both of us. Someone was shaking our group hug with little sobs. Me.

After half a minute, Dad cleared his throat. “We have to talk—” He stopped. Cleared his throat again. “Talk to your mother. Beep shouldn't have to take her on. Alone.”

“No,” I said. “We'll all talk to Mom.” I squeezed Dad harder.

“Together,” Rachel said. “So Beep doesn't have to.”

Dad cleared his throat again, but didn't say anything. He just nodded, making our group hug bob.

So we sat, on the couch in the too-bright waiting room outside the PICU and its bone marrow unit, waiting to ambush Mom. Dad sat between us. Rachel held one of his hands, and I held the other in my chapped one, rough from the months of washing and hand-sanitizing to keep from getting germs near Beep. Dad's phone vibrated dozens of times, in his suit-jacket pocket, from incoming emails, but he never touched it.

My phone and Rachel's dinged at the same time. I pulled mine out. Mom had texted Rachel and Dad and me.

I showed Dad the text. We all stood. I moved toward the PICU entry, like I was going to physically block Mom from going in there from the elevator. I took a deep breath. It'd be a huge struggle to get her to accept reality.

The elevator's arrow lit up in red. The doors slid open, and there was Mom, clutching her purse, with her face already crumpled and her eyes wet.

She stepped forward, into the lobby, and then just looked from Rachel to Dad to me, as if begging us to tell her it was something else.

“Oh.” It wasn't a word, just a long sound of hurt. She burst into tears and put up her hands. “I know. I know.”

Then Dad hugged her and they both sobbed. As I stood there watching my parents trying—and failing, utterly—to comfort each other, I knew: Beep was coming home.

To die.

Beep had been out of it most of the evening before, so I didn't get a chance to talk to him about my scheme. I told Rachel, who thought it was great. Evan thought it was great too, when I called him to get a second opinion. Mom was so flipped out about bringing Beep home, probably to die, there was no talking to her about anything.

We left UCSF Benioff Children's, for the last time, a little after seven in the morning. Seven o'clock was change of shift, so a lot of Beep's regulars were there, coming on or off shift. Beep was popular. Half a dozen nurses, including Chestopher and Adrienne and Terry and Chris, walked us out to say good-bye, following our family in a little scrubs-wearing knot, as we wheeled Beep down the hall.

Beep looked small in the wheelchair. He'd lost so much weight. He had my 49er ski hat on to keep warm, and a jacket a size too big. Rachel pushed him, and when we got to the front door, down on Parnassus, she glanced at me, and I nodded. She set the brake.

“C'mon, Beep,” I said. “Get on up. We'll hold you, and you can walk out of here.” Rachel had stopped his wheelchair a couple of feet short of the outside sliding doors, close enough so they opened. Beep looked over, not understanding. Mom looked anxious.

“It's giving cancer the finger, Beep. To walk out.”

Beep smiled.

“Honey, you don't have to do this.” Mom put a hand to her mouth. “I'm not sure it's safe.”

“We're totally doing this,” Beep said.

So Rachel and I each took one of his arms, carefully lifting, and pulled him to his feet. He set his right foot down just inside the threshold, barely putting weight on it. Then he touched his left foot down across the threshold. Applause broke out behind us.

Beep closed his eyes, taking it in, then opened them. “Okay. Now fly me.” He held his arms out to the side, like a little kid pretending to be an airplane.

Rachel and I exchanged a quick look and then linked arms under his chest and legs as he leaned forward onto them so we could hold him. We carried him a few steps while he held his arms out and flew. Applause broke out again. The Beepster left that hospital in style.

Someone pushed his wheelchair out to the sidewalk, and we put Beep back in. He closed his eyes briefly, breathing hard, but with a big grin. He waved to the nurses who followed us out, some in tears, and we wheeled him across to the parking lot and to our car.

Not everybody gets well. But there are other kinds of victory over cancer.

• • •

So Beep walked out on the hospital and its bad food, and we brought him home to hospice care. “Hospice” isn't French, but it might as well be, because it's just a fancy word to disguise the meaning: “keep someone comfortable, instead of curing them, while you say good-bye.” The ladies from Pathways Home Health and Hospice had it organized: Beep had his own hospital bed set up in our living room, with a nebulizer and a wheezy machine for concentrating oxygen. He also had separate oxygen tanks to wheel around if he wanted to wander all the way to the back yard.

Along with his antibiotics and his drugs for the fungus-lung, they gave us an eyedropper with a bottle of liquid Valium we could squirt in Beep's mouth if he was nearly in a coma but got restless that made him look anxious. Somehow, though, just being home made it so Beep didn't hurt as much. It even seemed like he'd gone into miracle spontaneous remission, or my borrowed bone marrow was finally kicking in, a little late.

When Dad carried Beep through the front door, Skippy wagged his whole little body. After we set Beep in his hospital bed, with his clear plastic face mask hooked up to his oxygen compressor making wet wheezy noise, Skippy jumped up on the bed and tried to lick every exposed part of Beep's face, while Beep giggled.

For the first time in ages, Mom didn't haul Skippy away, worried about germs.

Most other families—even if their mom has an anxiety disorder—probably don't take a body bag with them on a camping trip, expecting one of their kids to croak. But we brought one for our expedition to Big Basin. Beep had always been interested in space, and for his Make-A-Wish, he said he wanted to see a meteor shower. It was a little outside the Make-A-Wish Foundation business model to send a giant space rock our way (although if they can do that before I have to repeat a whole grade, that would be good). What they did instead was help organize a camping trip with Beep, away from the city lights, so he could watch a meteor shower in the middle of the night, when the moon was down and the shooting stars would be easy to see. Beep managed to hang in there for it for two whole weeks, to get to the night of the Geminid meteor shower, which was way past the doctors' expectations.

Along with the body bag (light) and tents and standard camping stuff, we had oxygen canisters (seriously heavy), saline drip bags, antifungal medicine, a portable cot with handles to carry Beep in on, and enough antibiotics to sterilize the coastal range. Make-A-Wish also supplied a nurse and burly porter volunteers in lumberjack shirts, including two cute college guys, which was pretty awesome, but weirdly impersonal. The nurse and a couple of the guys stayed in an RV in the parking lot, a quarter mile from our campsite, and for a while I wished I'd invited Evan, except that would have been a distraction and probably would have freaked out Mom.

We were excited about the trip, until we got to the trailhead, under a sky of solid gray. Watching a meteor shower is dicey. First, you have to have a night with meteors. They're fleeting, and rare, but a few times a year a family of them—like the Geminids—arrives on schedule. Second, you have to get away from the lights, so you can see the meteors. Third, you need a clear night, since clouds block seeing all the way to space. That was a problem, because it was completely overcast on the hike in.

Some of us Monroes were a tad cranky with God to begin with, over Beep's ALL, AML, two relapses, and failed transplant. So, with the heavy clouds on the hike in for his one last chance to see a meteor shower, we were all “well,
this
figures.”

Not everyone gets a miracle cure. But come on—couldn't we get a clear night for all those prayers, as a consolation prize?

But Dad was optimistic, looking at some weather app on his phone, babbling about “rising barometric pressure,” and that there might be clear skies by midnight.

Beep was dozing off and waking up, being carried in on his little cot/stretcher. “What?”

I almost said “God farts,” I was so upset. But I was still hoping for a miracle, and even I didn't want to be that blasphemous. With my luck, I'd lurch against Beep's stretcher when I got hit with the lightning bolt, and take out everyone. “Dad thinks it'll clear up. The air pressure will drive out the clouds.”

“Oh. Okay. Cool.”

After we hiked in and set up camp, our Wish-a-porters left. We had dehydrated “backpacker meals,” which, I guess, are used to punish backpackers who don't do their homework. We added water and cooked them on a camp stove, because apparently someone thought the Monroe family hadn't suffered enough. Mom brought some actual real spaghetti for Beep and a jar of sauce, because he had definitely already suffered enough, and it might be his last meal. Beep didn't even taste it. He just had a little melted ice cream, which had turned liquid like a milkshake. Because there was no meat in the sauce, Rachel split Beep's leftovers with me.

The Geminids were supposed to show up and be easiest to see after the moon set, around 2
A.M.
, so we were supposed to sleep for a few hours first. Beep nodded off before eight, and Rachel and I roasted marshmallows, while Mom complained we would set a National Forest on fire, which made us overcook them more, until they burned like little tiki-torches.

Mom and Dad slept in the big tent with Beep. It was still overcast at 11
P.M.
, and we couldn't see a single star. The closest thing was drifting sparks from poking the campfire. I figured if Beep was out of it enough, maybe we'd just fake a meteor shower with drifting embers. Thanks, God.

Rachel and I shared a little tent, which was actually okay. In case of emergency, a bear would go for her first—she looks more delicious, and she's already been tenderized, over time, by boyfriend slobber. Even mosquitoes go for Rachel over me, which for once was fine.

Dad woke us up around 2
A.M.
The clouds had cleared completely. It was face-hurting cold outside. Rachel and I kept our sleeping bags wrapped around us as we crawled out of the tent, stood up, and awkwardly shuffled over to Dad and Mom and Beep by the dead campfire, making rustling noises as we shambled like giant standing caterpillars. I thought of starting a caterpillar fight with Rachel, like we'd had when we were little and camped out in the back yard, but I didn't want to annoy her. On Beep's meteor night, it seemed out of place.

We were lots of miles from any towns or major roads, and the moon was down. There were zillions of stars in the cold, clear sky. Dad had Beep out there in his sleeping bag, looking up, with only his face poking out, the little cannula oxygen tube at his nose. Dad pointed out Orion, the easiest constellation to find in the sky because of the three-in-a-row belt. To its left was Gemini, the two stars of Castor and Pollux.

And out of there, every few minutes, a yellow flaming space rock would come out and streak silently across the sky, burning up in the atmosphere. It was awesome.

“Ooh,” Beep said at the first one Dad pointed out. Then “Aaah” at the second. He kept that up, for dozens and dozens.

God's own flare gun, signaling “It's beautiful up here. Join us.” Or, if you insist, just space rocks burning to dust and ash, with their own message: “Be at peace. Even dying can be beautiful. People will remember your bright spark.”

Either way, it worked for Beep. His face peeking out of the sleeping bag had the broadest smile. We must have seen forty meteors in two hours. At a break between incinerating space rocks, Dad pointed out the Milky Way. It was a band of lighter sky from one horizon to the other, because of so many stars in it, the spiral arm of the galaxy we're in.

“I'm going there,” Beep mumbled. “When I catch the bus.”

Dad shined the flashlight over at Beep. Beep squirmed a hand out of his sleeping bag, by his face, and waved it. “Good-bye meteors. Good-bye stars. Good-bye night.” He waved again.

I pulled my sleeping bag over my head then, so as I cried it wouldn't spoil the moment for everyone else.