I didn’t explain that she wasn’t going to be living in the apartment long, that she would be in the hospital. I took her hand and led her back past the tidy line of mailboxes, the pristine blue pool, the petunias in neat rows, the long shiny bank of Camrys and Nissans, the border shrubs groomed into tight angular lines. Every living thing had bowed its head in submission to the landscaping team. It seemed like a movie set or Disneyland, where my little brother Dylan had once run up to each tree, placed his palms upon the bark, and asked, “Is it real?”
Surely living in such a controlled environment was a hedge against chaos or heartbreak. But I hated it. Every time I drove into the complex, the phrase “a less soulful life” would dart across my mind.
Back in the apartment Gabe was riding Brian around our new living room. For a man happiest discussing the nuanced differences between Henry James’s late and early work, Brian was surprisingly willing to be a pony. He moved at an old-mare pace, afraid Gabe would fall off. Gabe flung his legs up and down. “Go, go!”
I looked around the room, flummoxed: there were no lamps and no dining room chairs. At the furniture rental place, a beleaguered woman answered the phone, probably juggling multiple disgruntled customers at once.
“Listen, if you can’t get it together to deliver what we need, I’ll come there,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” she answered, “we don’t disclose our location.”
“You don’t disclose your location? Really? You must be a very exciting, black ops furniture rental business.” Lately, my public face had begun to warp.
She didn’t say anything. Maybe she had a policy against responding to people who, within the first minute of a phone call, stooped to sarcasm and political innuendo.
I felt for her. But I also felt for me. I was exhausted and frightened, and she was the only one I could get on the phone. There were, to my knowledge, no customer service centers open for questions along the lines of Why do innocents suffer?
Ultimately, and not on the strength of my charm, we got our lamps and dining room chairs. Though it did not quell my larger anxieties, making the apartment functional gave me a delicious, illusory sense of control. Within twenty-four hours we had matching silverware, lemon-scented hand soap in every bathroom, sufficient paper towels and toilet paper to pass down through the generations, a utility room stocked with tinfoil, bug spray, laundry soap, and disinfecting wipes; we’d installed both Wi-Fi and a deluxe cable package, and stocked bottles of cabernet above a secret kitchen drawer that cooled multiple grades of dark chocolate. In our walk-in closet (another perk of southern living, I’d never before walked into a closet), my bras were folded (yes, they can be folded) into neat piles of ascending pink and ivory.
On Thanksgiving morning, Brian ran out to Whole Foods and returned with an entire meal. We heated, served, and ate it, laboring to feel thankful. Afterward I took the kids outside to fly a kite. There’d been an early snow, the lightest dusting over the open green space beside our unit. The kite lifted and dove, caught and lost wind. Against the snow, it formed a startling red diamond on white. Gracie ran to it, picked it up, and held it against her chest with care. “It’s OK. Flying is hard.”
32
We’d been to Duke once before for a consultation, but walking in as the parents of a girl who would, for certain, receive a transplant in this building, we saw it as if for the first time. The ceiling rose four stories above us. On each floor an open balcony curved into the high lobby space. The balcony railings were rimmed with see-through rounds of glass, so that children could look down on doctors below in white coats, cut down to size. Finally, smaller than the children themselves! Hanging fifty feet overhead were gigantic mobiles made of colored feathers. They twisted in the ventilation breeze. Someone, probably many someones, had spent vast amounts of time and money designing a space that would put children at ease, delight them.
I tried not to think of Temple Grandin’s humane redesign of slaughterhouse chutes with obfuscation. Don’t let them see what’s coming, how bad it is going to get. The cattle chutes, bending, dipping into water, bending again, but still, always, ending at the same silver blade.
Brian was making low-key jokes with the kids, pointing out the giant fish tank and fountain in the lobby. He took my hand and squeezed it in rapid pulses, an old code, I’m here, you’re here, I’m here.
We rode the glass elevator to the Green Level, floor four, home of the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinic.
In the waiting area I looked around with dismay. Until now, we’d been in the minor leagues. Not only did these kids look terrible, but most of them looked terrible in the same uniform way. They’d been transmogrified. They were, for the most part, bald, bloated, sallow, and slightly hairy-faced. They’d traded in their healthy bodies for oddly shaped sacks. The life force, the spark, had been siphoned out of them.
An older, slightly overweight girl said to her mother, casually, “Maybe I won’t have children.”
A toddler at the train table in mismatched Crocs, one blue, one green, stumbled and leapt up again, “I’m OK!” he said. A little loud, a little overeager. An assertion to the world, get this, take note, I am OK.
A playful redheaded girl holding a Barbie by the hair said to her doctor, “Bye, Dr. Googley-Eyes.” Her father, one hand on her shoulder, exchanged a look of despair with the doctor.
I felt an urgent wish to grab Gracie by the hand and run.
Look, I told myself, it’s just a hospital. Don’t be melodramatic. Take your cues from Brian, be calm. Take your cues from Gabe, get into the fish.
Across from us sat a boy some years older than Gracie. He was bald, with Groucho Marx eyebrows. His body looked overinflated and frail: a sack of vapors that might collapse under pressure. I might come to feel a certain affection for this look—the transplant bloat—but not today.
Gracie and the boy eyed each other, both a bit bored, investigating.
“Are you sick?” he said. She looked too good, out of place. He was questioning her credentials.
The mom looked up from her magazine. “Jake, that’s not polite.”
“I get blood,” Gracie told him. This was good enough. She and Jake moved toward the balcony railing so they could look down to the lobby. Gabriel snatched a pair of reading glasses off Brian’s head and trailed after them. That was his job description, trail after.