Kill Me (35 page)

SIXTY-EIGHT

Outside the FBO at the Tweed New Haven airport, Lizzie asked me to stand back while she gave a yawning taxi driver our destination. Only then did she allow me to get into the cab.

She was all business. The quasi-erotic episode on the sofa in the plane had, apparently, never happened.

“I’ll know soon enough where we’re going,” I said, pretending patience, as I settled onto the seat beside her.

“Yes. Soon enough.”

“We’re going to see Adam, aren’t we? Right now?”

“You are. Adam isn’t one of my ifs,” she said. “My girls aren’t in New Haven. Roger hates snow. But, yes, you’ll find out … about Adam.”

There was enough sadness in her words to fill Long Island Sound.

I was quiet for a few miles. I spent the time rehearsing what I’d say to Adam, how I’d make him understand the ifs that I had tried to avoid, the when that was coming.

The mistakes I’d made.

“They’re not far behind us, you know,” she said, jolting me from my reverie.

I knew. To keep her talking I said, “You mean the Death Angels?”

She nodded.

“How far behind us do you think they are?”

Lizzie answered me with a question. “When — exactly — did the pilots amend the flight plan to bring us into New Haven?”

“Forty-five minutes out, maybe fifty. Why?”

“You got the plane we were on from Jimmy Lee, right?”

Her question stunned me. “Yes, I did. From his company. How do you know about Jimmy?” Had she overheard me talking with Mary in the car? Or during the flight? She must have.

No surprise.

I stared at her face and saw a different truth in her eyes. The pieces tumbled into place for me. The puzzle came together; it was like watching Adam solve the Rubik’s Cube.

My God. Lizzie was telling me that Jimmy Lee didn’t just
know
a guy.

Jimmy Lee was
one
of the guys.

Jimmy Lee was one of the Death Angels.

“They already know we’re in New Haven,” I said, digesting the news, accepting defeat.

“It will take them a short time to mobilize, but yes, they know we’re in New Haven.”

“Jimmy is one … of them? One of you?”

She shook her head. She wasn’t denying that he was a Death Angel. She was telling me that she wouldn’t divulge anything about the roster. In a perverse way, I understood her loyalty. Still, I couldn’t keep another question to myself.

“Is he involved in … end-of-life services?” I was wondering if my old friend’s body was crumpled beneath a Dodge pickup truck in the Edwin C. Johnson Bore.

I was wondering if his sweet kids were orphans.

If I’d made his sweet kids orphans.

She touched my hand. Once again, she shook her head. She wasn’t going to go there, either.

“Did I kill him in the tunnel?”

“You’ll never know. It’s better that way. If he was there, he would have killed you.”

“Yes, but I hired him to kill me. There’s a difference.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “Not really. I once thought it was. But it’s not.”

“How long before they’re here? In New Haven?” I asked. “The Death Angels.”

“Maybe a few minutes. Maybe a few hours. No more than that. Our — their — resources are astonishing. The reach is, at times, breath-taking.”

“Could they be ahead of us?”

“They could be,” she said. “Depends where the closest resources were available when they got word. Certainly no farther than New York. If it turns out that they’re ahead of us, we’re going to be walking right into their trap.” She turned toward me on the seat. “Is that okay with you? To walk into their trap?”

“If I get to see Adam first, yes.”

She squeezed my hand. “Well, that’s still the plan.”

SIXTY-NINE

The taxi took us into the city, but not toward the familiar territory of the Yale campus. Lizzie still wouldn’t reveal our destination. My heart plummeted from my chest to my toes when I realized that the cab was rolling to a stop on York Street outside a building I recognized from a previous visit I’d made with Connie back when he was — barely — ambulatory. We’d stopped by to visit a philosophy department friend of his who was recovering from prostate surgery.

Involuntarily, I said, “No.”

Lizzie threw some bills at the driver and pulled me out of the cab onto the sidewalk. Outside the front entrance. She held my face in both her hands and said, “I said he needed you. I wasn’t lying. What do you know about acute liver failure?”

Above her head I could read the sign on the outside of the building. YALE-NEW HAVEN HOSPITAL.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Where is he? He’s here?”

“What do you know about acute liver failure?” she repeated.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I’m going to call you ‘Doctor’ once we’re inside. Do you understand?”

Inside the Yale-New Haven Hospital.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re a physician, a colleague of mine from out of town. It’s natural for you to feel out of place.”

“Okay.”

“The less you say, the fewer mistakes you’ll make.”

“Yes,” I said. I was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other. Falling on my face would certainly be one of those mistakes.

We’d arrived near morning shift change and the elevator lobbies were full of staff waiting to head up onto the patient floors. Lizzie held me back from the group. She said, “Wait.” Two cars arrived simultaneously a moment later. The lobby emptied. “I think we’re about to get lucky,” she said. “It’s a good sign.”

I wasn’t feeling lucky.

A third elevator arrived. We stepped on alone and waited for the doors to close. Ever so slowly, they did. We had the car to ourselves.

Little-known fact: Hospital elevators are the slowest moving vehicles on the planet. They are the sloths of vertical travel. Usually I found their torpidity frustrating. That day, though, the languid pace gave Lizzie time to tell me a story I was desperate to hear.

She said, “Adam was dropped off at the emergency room two days ago by a Hispanic man. I’m guessing that it was your brother’s friend, Felix. He told the triage nurse that the kid’s name was Adam, that he’d been sick for a couple of weeks but had gotten much worse in the past twenty-four hours. He said that he was going back out to his car to get the kid’s papers and things. He never came back inside. Adam had no ID with him, no insurance info. Nothing. He presented with fever, obvious fatigue, nausea, vomiting. Severe confusion. It took the ER docs a few hours to identify what was going on. Your son is suffering from acute liver failure.”

“From what?” I asked. I was baffled. And I was argumentative. I tried to counter her words, to change the reality. “He’s never had liver problems.”

The truth was that I didn’t really know that. I’d never asked about my son’s medical history.
God.

She recognized the desperation of my tactics and lowered her voice to slow my escalation. “I don’t think they know the cause. It’s not always simple to identify the etiology. Most likely it’s something infectious — maybe viral hepatitis. But it could be toxic — an overdose of Tylenol could do it. Or it could be something idiosyncratic and metabolic. It could even be a complication of something cardiac and chronic that’s previously gone undiagnosed.”

“What’s your fear?” I asked. I could tell she had one.

“Worst case? If it’s fulminant viral hepatitis, it could be … critical. Very serious.”

Some of her words made sense. Some didn’t. “Fulminant” was one of the words that didn’t. My medical-technology background failed me; all I could manage was to ask her for some variation of the same assurance I’d asked for three times since she held my face in her hands outside the cab: “He’s okay, though? He’ll get through this?”

She answered the same way she had the other times. “He’s very sick. Prepare yourself. He won’t look well.”

“It might not be him up there,” I said. “There are lots of Adams in the world.” I wanted it not to be him.

I want it to be him.

“It’s him,” Lizzie said.

It’s him.

Seconds before the elevator doors opened, she said, “We don’t have hospital IDs so this is going to be tricky. Improvise with me. Confidence and arrogance. Ready?”

“Yes. Where are we?”

“Intensive care.”

“Oh shit.”

“Some advice?” she said.

“Anything.”

“If confidence fails you, rely on arrogance. Double up if you need to.”

Lizzie marched to the sprawling nursing station that was separated from the patient rooms by a wide corridor. She stepped behind the counter as though she’d been there a hundred times.

After perusing a chart rack, she selected a plastic-jacketed chart with the name “Adam Doe” written in block letters on a piece of tape on the front.

“Those labs back yet?” she asked the unit clerk, who was gazing back at Lizzie over her shoulder. The look from the clerk was tired and mostly bored, but partly curious. She was wondering if she knew Lizzie. But it was the end of her shift and she wasn’t sure if she really cared if she knew Lizzie.

Finally, in an uninterested voice, not a suspicious one, the clerk said, “The blood just went down ten minutes ago.” Left unsaid:
You should know that, bitch.

Lizzie sat down at a computer and went online. Within seconds the screen was covered with columns of lab values. She sent a couple of pages to the printer, picked up a phone, and punched some numbers. “This is the ICU. I need an ETA on the new liver numbers for Adam Doe … Yeah … I know they’ll be in the computer when they’re done. The problem is they’re not … Okay, you’ll do that now? … Promise? … Great, thanks.”

She grabbed the pages out of the printer tray, stuffed them into her bag, and said, “Come on, Doctor.” After a momentary brain cramp, I realized she was talking to me.

I followed her from the nursing station across the hall into a vestibule that led to Adam’s room.

“Gown and gloves. Do what I do,” she whispered. She was pulling a pale yellow gown over her clothes.

I started to do the same. But I couldn’t take my eyes off a teenage boy, suddenly visible through the window in the center of the door.

It was Adam.
My Adam.

He was yellow. Not the same yellow as the gown I was holding. His yellow was more mustard, less lemon. God, he looked sick.

Lizzie grabbed my wrist. “Focus,” she insisted. “Do what I do. Come on. Act like you’ve been here before.”

Somehow I managed to pull the flimsy gown over my clothes and snap some latex gloves onto my hands.

She handed me a face mask. “Just hold the mask up to your face. Don’t bother to tie it.” She modeled how she wanted me to do it.

I did what she did.

“You’re his doctor, not his father,” she said.

Wrong.

We walked into the room and stood beside Adam’s bed. She picked up the clipboard hanging at the foot of his bed to check his ins and outs, and then started checking the labels on the infusion bags hanging above the IV pump. I read his blank, yellow face. It took every bit of self-control I had not to crawl into the bed and hold him.

He was hooked up to fifty leads, surrounded by a dozen monitors.

Lizzie said, “They’re giving him neomycin to treat encephalopathy. The chart said there was no edema so far. That’s good.”

What?
“Edema?” I whispered, parroting her. The word was, of course, familiar, but I couldn’t put a definition to it.
I should know what that means,
I thought.
I should.

“Swelling in his brain. It would be a serious complication.”

Shit.
“Can he hear me?” I asked.

“I doubt it. No.” She paused. “Maybe.”

“I need to tell him things.”

The intercom sounded from a location near the door. I almost jumped out of my shoes.

“Doctor? Those labs are back,” the unit clerk said in the exact same bored voice she’d used earlier.

“Thank you. I’ll be right out,” Lizzie said. To me, she whispered, “I’m going to go look at the labs. You stay here while I do. Remember, you’re a doctor, not a father. People don’t know you; they’ll be watching.”

She took a step toward the door before she stopped and turned back toward me.

“What I was fearing? It’s happening. Adam needs a transplant. Without it, he could die. They’re looking for a donor liver.”

“What?”

What?

“He could die without a new liver.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“What soon? Next week? Next month?”

“Sooner,” she said. She stepped from the room.