“You get her legs. I’ll get her body.”
Captured, Gracie began to scream, “Let me do it! I can do it!”
Exactly what the it was, was unclear.
We carried Gracie across the main lobby and out to the parking lot strung between us like a live electrical wire. She was rolling her body to the left and right against our grasp and screaming, “I can do it!”
I loved her faith in her own powers.
On the drive home, she fell into a deep sleep, her head flopped to one side, rolling with the turns; a light sweat dampened the hair around her face.
I called Brian to tell him what had happened, and he said he was already boarding an earlier flight back to Durham. I carried her into the house and laid her in bed. She was limp and warm and pliable, and her breath smelled of saltwater taffy. I pulled the covers over her. When Brian arrived home, just a few hours later, she was still asleep. He sat beside her, patting her back while she breathed and he read.
Later, I lay down next to her to nap. We woke up at the same time, in a dark room. She put one of her hands on each side of my face and leaned close. Her eyes were two blurry, bright smudges in the dark. “I’m so happy you are back,” she said. “I’m so happy it is you,” and kissed me, very lightly, on the lips.
I walked out into the living room, “That was scary,” I said. “She was like Jerry Lewis on cocaine and tranquilizers simultaneously.” He gave me a wan smile. He was worried about the goose egg, about head trauma. As we sat there, deciding whether to fight or to cozy up to each other, my cell phone rang. It was Dr. K.
“MRI results are in. Her liver looks good,” she said. “Really good. We’ll admit you as planned, the day after Christmas.”
When I got off the phone, Brian was mad. “Why didn’t you ask her about the head injury?” he said.
“I was busy hearing the news that her liver is in good standing, and she can go to transplant. Sorry I forgot to ask about a bump on the head.”
“Go look at her; she has a yellow, bruised lump the size of an enormous kumquat.”
“Brian, you don’t know what a kumquat is,” I shouted. “You’ve never eaten one, and you never will. You couldn’t recognize the most commonplace kumquat, let alone an enormous one!” We laughed. But only a little.
38
Just before Christmas, The New York Post called and asked to do a follow-up story on Gracie. I wanted to be packing for the hospital, gift wrapping, or cooking. But the Post had been incredibly kind to us when we needed to raise money. We wanted to accommodate the request as best we could.
The Post sent down a photographer, for whom Gracie was uncooperative in the extreme. Miserable in her purple velvety shift, she tugged at the neckline until it was so stretched out that she could easily climb out of the dress, which she did periodically during the photoshoot. The photographer laughed it off at first, but after about forty-five minutes of our shenanigans, with no passable photo, everyone’s frustration level was rising, especially Gracie’s. One last time I got her into position—the photographer wanted to capture her hanging an ornament that reflected her face. As she hung the ornament I said, “Okeydoke!” by which I meant, “For the love of God, take the fucking shot!”
The photographer got the shot, thanked us, and went on his way with a few Santa cookies. On Christmas morning Gracie was on the cover of the Post, hanging a shiny green ornament in hundreds of thousands of papers around New York City. Friends and acquaintances called to tell us they were looking at Gracie’s face in their living room, on the subway, strolling down Seventh Avenue. Totally unbeknownst to her, she was having her fifteen minutes of fame. Kathy called, elated, and promised to buy a bundle of papers. My mom cried, saying that even though she couldn’t see the paper, she could feel the caring it was generating.
Gracie meanwhile was oblivious. Her amazement was reserved for Santa.
Christmas Eve we ate a quiet dinner. Gracie asked, “How is Santa going to get back up the chimney after he gets down?” She had a beautifully pragmatic streak. It wasn’t that he delivered presents to billions of homes in twenty-four hours; it was that he did it all without ringing a single doorbell.
Earlier, when we’d reminded her that we were leaving for the hospital the next day, she’d said, “Eden is going to be so happy that my scratchies are gone.”
Somewhere along the way, she’d come to believe that the point of transplant was to alleviate the itchy rash she had from the chelating agent. It was true that after transplant she wouldn’t, if all went well, have the rash. But that was sort of like thinking the point of chemo was to stop having to fuss over your hair.
Brian said, “Eden will be so happy for you.”
Gracie didn’t ask, “How long will I be in there?” or “How can I get out?” She asked, “Can I bring my ponies?”
I’d lit a pair of candles for the dinner table. Gabriel did his job and blew them out. I lit them again, and the game continued. The flame would erupt at the tip of the match, pass its orange-blue light to the wick, then instantly disappear. A beautiful, little ephemery.
We had B?che de No?l for dessert. I explained that it was made to look like a log used in the ancient fire-festivals celebrating winter solstice. “Is there chocolate on the inside too?” Gracie asked, picking up a soup spoon and preparing to lop off a branch. Gabriel started flapping his hands. We were going to eat a tree! At last the trees were at our mercy!
When we put them both to bed, Gabriel flopped around in his crib, talking to himself, “Yacie loves me.”
I lay beside Gracie. “Sweetie, we’re going to be in the hospital for a long time.” We’d told her this so many times, but I wasn’t sure she knew.
“Why?”
“So your body can get healthy.”
“OK.”
In bed Brian and I lay side by side, wired and anxious. Neither of us could sleep. Everything would change tomorrow. We were astride the nebulous line that divides before from after. I wanted to stay here forever.
“Next year,” Brian said, “we’ll be back in Brooklyn with two healthy kids.”
I tried to visualize us next Christmas, in Brooklyn, kids bickering beneath a lopsided tree. It was a faint, diaphanous vision. Not a mirage, I told myself, a vision.
It is impossibly hard to take a child who looks more or less healthy and place her into the medical mill of transplant, but we did it. We held our breath and stepped off the edge of the known world. Whatever the odds were, they were ours. We had this boy, this girl, this bag of cells; one chance for a cure, and we took it.
39