Equal Affections (24 page)

“The children are on their way,” Nat said. “They'll be here in the morning.”

So I must be dying, Louise thought. It's okay, she wanted to say, I'm not so afraid now, but something blocked her throat.

___________

Danny stood at the luggage carousel with April and Eleanor, watching a planeload of suitcases thunking down the conveyor belt. He was naming the colors to himself as they fell over the lip: blue, green, gray, yellow, gray, gray.

“You're staying at your house, April,” Eleanor was saying. “That nice couple who are renting it said it would be fine, they'll turn down the couch.”

“You mean we aren't going home?” April said. She had taken a Valium on the plane and was still woozy from it, running her fingers through her hair.

“Well, honey,” Eleanor said, “they're moving your mom tomorrow morning to the burn unit in San Francisco. It's a long drive. We figured you'd want to be closer.”

“The burn unit,” April said.

“They've been talking about it since yesterday morning, sweetheart. Didn't your dad tell you?”

“Yes,” Danny said.

“She's not burned. It was a rash,” April said.

“I know, I know, she's
not
burned, but what's happened to her, they think they can treat it better at a burn unit, where they have special equipment and doctors for dealing with skin problems like that. And anyway, those nice friends of yours, Jeff and Tina, I called them and explained everything, and they said it would be fine for you to stay at your house.”

“Jeff and Nina.”

“Yes. Sorry. As for your dad, the hospital has some apartments
across the street, so they're putting him up in one of those. And by the way, Joanne wanted me to tell you, anything she can do, she will. I know you two haven't gotten along that well, but cousins are cousins.”

April put her hand on her forehead. “I can't believe this,” she said. “I mean, we were just sitting in Danny's living room, in New Jersey, and I was singing, and everything was normal—”

“There's my bag!” Danny said, and ran for it.

___________

After they'd collected the suitcases, Eleanor led them out onto the curb. “Sid should be pulling around any second with the car,” she said. “You know it's impossible to park here these days, so he's been circling. What a day.”

Danny looked up. The sun was high and yellow, the sky a nervous, bright shade of blue. He remembered he ought to take off his coat and sweater and roll up his sleeves.

“Are you hungry?” Eleanor said. “I thought you might be hungry, so I brought some cookies.” She pulled a foil-wrapped package from her purse.

“No,” April said. “Christ, no.”

“Okay, okay,” Eleanor said. Then a battered station wagon rounded the bend, and they saw Uncle Sid waving and honking the horn.

___________

Sid drove them to April's house. Jeff and Nina, old friends of April's from college, greeted them with a wariness which, Danny suspected, was only partially the result of not knowing what to say. Looking around, he saw signs of sudden rearrangement—lines in the carpet suggesting a recent repositioning of the sofa, some concert posters hung askew—all evidence of a hasty attempt on their part to put
things back in the order they'd been in when April had rented them the house six months before. The place was theirs, legally, for another year, but even so, April marched through the door with territorial fervor. “Why isn't there any Tab?” she asked, after opening the refrigerator.

“Well, we don't drink it,” Jeff said.

“But I'll get it next time we go to the store,” Nina said.

April sat down at the kitchen table.

“Seltzer?” Jeff offered. She nodded.

“We're so glad to see you,” Nina said, reaching for a glass.

“Only sorry it had to be under circumstances like this,” Jeff added.

The sofa bed was pulled out and neatly made, and noticing Danny notice it, Nina said, “We thought one of you could stay here.”

“And the other in the study. We put the kids together.”

“That's fine,” April said absently, sipping from the glass of seltzer.

“Fine.”

There was a pop of relief, as if a blister had been punctured.

Jeff and Nina were responsible leftist ex-hippies in their midthirties, both social workers, so no one would have suspected anything dishonorable of them. Hidden under their bed were the shards of a Mexican vase that their three-year-old, Esther, had knocked over a few months before and which they'd decided not to mention unless April mentioned it first.

“It must feel funny, being a guest in your own house,” Nina said now, mostly to make it clear April was the guest.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” April said. She got up and stumbled to the bathroom.

From the backyard the three-year-old, Esther, came charging. She was dressed only in a diaper. “Break out of jail!” she screamed, and ran directly into Danny's legs.

“Hello, Esther,” Danny said.

She looked up at him, shocked, he supposed, by his large and unexpected presence, and then there was that terrible openmouthed moment in which a child decides to cry. Esther twisted her face as if she were about to spit, put up her hands like a boxer, covered her eyes in sheer disgust and terror.

“Mama!” she screamed.

“Esther!” Nina said, gathering her up, and laughed. “What's wrong with you? It's Uncle Danny. You've met him before.”

“Hi, Esther,” Danny said.

Buried in her mother's sweater, Esther shot Danny a look so purely venomous he had to turn away.

“She's just scared,” Nina said, laughing nervously. “Right, Essie? She ran into the kitchen and didn't have any idea Uncle Danny would be there, and she got scared, right?”

Esther sobbed. April emerged from the bathroom. For a moment her eyes met Danny's. Immediately they looked away from each other, both frightened, suddenly, by a prospective intimacy that seemed almost incestuous. In all the hundreds of scenarios of his mother's dying that Danny had invented over the years, he had never imagined anything quite like what he was confronting now: April's house occupied by strangers; a burn unit; a child covering her eyes with fists. He had envisioned, dreamed, acted out more likely prospects: slow declines, darkened rooms, last requests, the familiar hospital minutes from the house he'd grown up in. Instead here he was, in a different house, half April's, about to spend a night on a couch before confronting his mother in a hospital he'd never set foot in.

Was it true he owned a house, had a car, an office with his name on the door, all more than two thousand miles away? That old feeling stole into him, of the East Coast, and all that mattered to him there, becoming unreal. Fear of the planes going on strike, and being trapped.

He excused himself to call Walter. April's study was in a state somewhere halfway between its previous identity as a shrine and its current one as the bedroom of a child. There were some hand-scrawled drawings on the wall, scotch-taped among all the pictures of April with famous people. A menagerie of Sesame Street animals was piled in a corner.

“It's seventy degrees here,” he said when Walter picked up. “What's it like there?”

“Probably forty-five or fifty.”

“Remember in New Haven, how I used to call you when I went home, and there'd be a storm or something, and I'd make you put the phone out the window so I could hear the wind and the hail? I'd just be standing there, in the sun, in my mother's kitchen, missing you so much, and I wanted to hear the hail, I wanted to know New Haven still existed, and snow, and you.”

“I remember,” Walter said.

“I could see you then,” Danny said, “holding the phone out the window, and the phone getting dusted with snow. I could see you.”

“I know,” Walter said. “I know you could.”

Danny cried.

“If you want me,” Walter said, “I'll be on the first plane. You know that, right?”

“The first plane,” Danny said. “Okay.”

___________

They borrowed Nina's car and drove to the hospital.

To get to the burn unit, you had to go up to the second floor, then cross a kind of corridor bridge that connected the new part of the hospital to the old one. There was a display of drawings done by burned children—red-scrawled figures, openmouthed, beating off the flames—then a dreary waiting room—three vinyl-covered sofas and a coffee-stained coffee table piled with old copies of
National Geographic
and
Boating News
and
Family Circle
. Nothing you would want to read in anything but a moment of desperation, during which, of course, you would want to read nothing else. The lighting was bare fluorescent strips, one of which, on its last legs, flickered a dull yellow. No effort had been made to make the place cheerier, probably on the theory that anyone sitting there was going to be beyond that point where decor could provide consolation.

Nat was lying on one of the sofas, a black visor over his eyes. He had Louise's blue bathrobe draped on his chest. “Dad,” Danny said softly, and his father's hand reached to pull off the mask.

“Son, hello,” he said to Danny, squinting into the bright light. “April.” He stood and hugged them distractedly, “just grabbing a few winks,” he said. “Listen, Dr. Thayer wanted to talk to us as soon as you got here, so I'll just tell the receptionist, okay?”

“Where's Mom?” April asked.

Nat pointed toward a door that said: BURN UNIT—STERILE ENVIRONMENT—PLEASE WEAR APPROPRIATE PROTECTIVE CLOTHING. He
signaled to a woman seated at a desk across from the sofas, and she nodded and picked up a phone. Then she hung up the phone, looked at Nat, nodded again.

“Okay,” Nat said. He led April and Danny through a swinging door into a tiny, windowless conference room. Dr. Thayer came in; he was a man in his sixties, with professorial glasses, graying hair, and a bow tie.

Danny and April shook the doctor's hand, said their names, and everyone sat down.

“Well, I've got to say this for your mom,” Dr. Thayer said, “she is one strong lady. Tough as an ox. You take a woman in her sixties, immunocompromised, and with all the shit she's been through, I wouldn't have put money on her getting this far.”

No one said anything.

“Her heart is good and strong, that's why,” Dr. Thayer said. “And she's skinny.”

“All these years Louise swam every day and kept to her diet,” Nat said. “She always said it would be worth it, I should do it too. I didn't listen.”

“What's happened to her?” April asked.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘chemical burn'?” Dr. Thayer asked.

“No.”

“Well, basically what's happened to your mom is that—something very, very rare, but which happens sometimes to immunocompromised people. There's a reaction—it could've been that drug she was being given, the chlorambucil, or maybe the dental trauma when she had that crown put in—but whatever it is, there's a reaction in the skin, like an allergy, only much, much worse. It starts off looking just like a rash, and that's why it's so hard to recognize. Then it turns into a burn. The skin is the body's most sensitive organ, and once it's damaged, anything can happen. You become susceptible to all sorts of viruses and bacteria, and even more so if your immune system's shot to begin with. And that's what's happened to your mom. Her skin has been damaged, and as a result, a number of secondary infections have come in. Pneumonia, for one, and blood septicity, which is what used to be called blood poisoning. Plus there's some kidney trouble, and a few secondary bacterial infections that wouldn't in and of themselves be anything to worry about but with insult added to injury are causing her some
serious problems.” He coughed. “We've got her on every antibiotic you can name, and she's starting to respond, but I have to be frank with you. I don't know for sure if she's going to make it.”

Danny felt a palpable retreat, a giving way, inside himself.

“I've had twelve cases like this,” Dr. Thayer said, “and I've lost eleven of them.” He adjusted his glasses. “Still, your mom is strong. She's an ox. We're fighting for her, and she's fighting with us. We're doing everything there is to be done—treating her skin, putting her through the baths, the whole shebang. It hurts like hell, but she's taking it. And by the way, the one nice thing about a chemical burn, it doesn't leave scars. Your mom pulls through, she'll look great, like she's had a face-lift.”

“You know, I told her that,” Nat said, “and she gave me this look, this classic Louise look, as if to say, ‘Great, all this for a face-lift.'” He laughed. “A sense of humor's a good sign, I think, don't you?”

“Absolutely,” Dr. Thayer said. “A great sign. So now the job is, get her skin on its way to healing, then deal with everything else. As it stands, we may have to put her on the respirator if the pneumonia kicks up again, but that's not so bad, really; at least she's breathing that way. And we may have to hook up dialysis if her kidneys don't get going. But as I said, we're waiting before we decide. She's being monitored sixty minutes an hour twenty-four hours a day in what I can guarantee to you is the best-run burn unit on the West Coast and maybe in the country.”

“Can we see her?” Danny asked, hoping Dr. Thayer would say no. But Dr. Thayer said, “Sure. I think it would be great for her to see you all.”

“When?”

“Right now, if you like.”

“Wait,” April said. “Wait. I don't know if I should go in there—I'm pregnant.” She looked around, as if she expected someone to laugh or accuse her of lying.

“No problem there. It's a sterile environment to protect the patients from you, not the other way around. As long as you wear protective clothing and don't stay too long at any one time, there's no risk to your baby's health.”