I carried the kids to bed and tried to figure out what on earth was happening. Who were we if we could fight like that? If Brian was willing to have a public tantrum when his writing time was whittled down, was he capable of family life? Maybe he’d understood himself better than I had, all along. And what about my hyperbolic This is over; was I that unsure of our life together that I could end things over a single fight, even a bad fight?
The next day Brian came home early from work. We didn’t say much to each other. It was a Monday night. We fed the kids dinner, then ate peanut rolls and Thai soup. I felt reassured. If we could drink from the same soup bowl, there must be some mutual understanding. We put the kids to bed and went through the routine of med mixing, numbing cream, needle in, pump on. Gracie didn’t wake up, only stirred enough to roll on her side and mumble vowels. Her light brown curls clung to the back of her neck with night sweat.
When she was hooked up, we went downstairs to talk.
We sat side by side on the couch, bent double, head to the knees, and turned to each other. This was the ultimate posture of defeat, no stamina to even hold the body upright.
I looked at him for a long time, and he looked at me.
“You frightened me.”
“I know I did, and I’m sorry. I would never hurt you.”
“You threw groceries at me.”
“I threw groceries. Not at you.”
“You frightened me.”
“I was really angry, but I wasn’t trying to scare you. I’m sorry I scared you. If you want me to go to an anger management program, I will. I will go somewhere where they teach you not to throw organic yogurt, no matter how mad you are.”
If someone is volunteering to go to anger management, chances are they don’t need anger management. I was wary of him but also comforted that he still looked like himself. Brian’s face, even with the greenish cast of fatigue and worry, was so very Brian. His high forehead; his twice-broken nose that, midlength, bends right, as if, having considered its options, chooses to turn this way; his full mouth, with the sensual lower lip bestowed on lucky Jewish intellectuals. A line from a Sharon Olds poem drifted to mind, in which the iris of her lover’s eye has a calm like “the dignity of matter.”
This was what we could offer each other when we were lucky enough to stay awake for a few minutes beyond the children. Looking. Seeing. Being seen.
We were touching along the length of our sides: ankles, knees, thighs, hips, arms, shoulders. We laid the backs of our hands together, an old intimacy. After a while Brian looked down at the floor.
“Gracie is sick,” he said.
“I know she is.”
There was a long quiet, broken by sounds outside. Teenagers at the end of the block, throwing their voices for dramatic effect. “She fucking lied! What the fuck!”
“I’m ready to take her to North Carolina,” Brian said. “Are you?”
“Yeah,” I answered, “I am.”
We sat for a while longer, listening to the street. Ten p.m. on Webster Place. Faintly, from a few blocks away, the ice cream man’s insanity-inducing jingle. The brisk river of traffic on Prospect Avenue. Beneath this a chorus of harmonic chirps and rubbed notes. “Do you hear crickets?” I sat up. Brian shook off my question with a lift of his left shoulder.
He looked as if he was bracing himself for something painful and inevitable. Like someone trapped inside the lucid, elongated moments between losing control of the wheel and impact. Those baggy, expanding seconds in which you realize that even as the humped, dark shapes at the edge of the road draw closer, grow bigger, you have no idea what the hell it is you’re about to hit.
30
Lifesaving medical care is the kind of thing you buy whether you can afford it or not. And so we prepared to go disastrously broke.
Shortly after deciding to go to Durham, we received a letter alerting us that, upon reviewing our insurance coverage, the Children’s Organ Transplant Association (COTA, the family support agency we’d been referred to by the hospital social worker) estimated we would need $85,000 to cover uninsured medical expenses and Brian’s commute during the transplant period. I could hardly believe that Brian would once more be living in one state with us and working in another, but we had to keep our health insurance, no matter what. And that meant he had to teach full-time, in New York, while Gracie got treatment in North Carolina.
Raising $85,000 in a couple of months sounded about as likely as Gabriel translating Moby-Dick into Arabic, tonight. I pictured $85,000 in the form of the kids’ blocks: a stack of plastic cubes towering over Brooklyn in a long, skinny, tilting line.
Brian was working as hard as was humanly possible. I was taking Gracie to the doctor, watching the kids, my mom was in California, my generous grandmother’s money was long gone. Who exactly was going to raise this money?
When Brian arrived home I’d said, “Are you ready for this? It turns out we can’t afford a transplant!”
“What do you mean?” he came toward me for a kiss, with a kiss.
A kiss between two people in need of $85,000, neither of whom had a clue where to find it. A kiss to keep the world spinning. Brian’s lips were soft and warm, brief and promising.
I showed him the letter. “Eighty-five thousand dollars,” he said. He wasn’t as shocked as I’d been. He was more of a realist. He knew we were raising money for Gracie to join the ten kids crossing the street.
We were capable of going $85,000 into debt, or more, if that was what it took. We had credit cards and health insurance; that would get us in the door. But unless we raised money for Gracie’s care, and plenty of it, we would come out the other end in bad shape. An absolutely American story.
If you had told me ahead of time that Kathy would raise the money, that her husband, Steve, would make it happen, that a handful of Brian’s longtime friends and colleagues from Dissent magazine and Sarah Lawrence College and my friends from World College West would rally around in the most astonishing ways, that two separate millionaires would offer to pay the entire thing, I wouldn’t have believed you. But that was what happened.
On the West Coast, Dawa organized a Westie fund-raiser with two weeks’ notice at the community center in Stinson Beach. On the Upper West Side, Brian’s dear friends Mark and Melissa hosted a fund-raising party/brainstorm session in their big, beautiful apartment for Brian’s Dissent and Sarah Lawrence College colleagues. And in Brooklyn, Kathy dreamed up, organized, and galvanized an entire neighborhood into a block party.
And then it went wider. Kathy’s husband, Steve, had worked as a journalist. He got in touch with a few media people interested in Gracie’s story, they ran short pieces, and then suddenly, and briefly, her story caught fire. She was on the cover of the New York Post, on NY1 (the local cable TV station), in almost all of the Brooklyn papers. Every paper ran COTA’s website address for donating. Donations began to pour in.