DAY 19
Brian comes in while we are asleep. He has brought me a stack of trashy magazines and a bar of dark chocolate. He’s brought nothing for Gracie because she isn’t able to enjoy anything. I read my magazines. He reads E. L. Doctorow’s new novel. Gracie breathes in, breathes out, breathes in. Beautiful sound. I’m not sure if I’m breathing, or if Brian is. How long since we drew a deep breath, eight days? Nine? We don’t talk. I’m aware that, sometime over the last weeks, my feelings for Brian have radically rearranged.
Glancing at him used to bring me joy. Or a sense of well-being. Now, watching him turn pages, I feel nothing. He’s the same man. Same long, studious face, which can break into an immense smile at any invitation. But Brian no longer looks entirely real to me. He cannot affect the outcome of Gracie’s sonograms. He cannot prescribe lifesaving medicine. He cannot ensure she lives; he doesn’t have that power. So he can’t help me. He’s one of the nonessentials, receding, half ghosted.
He looks up and catches my eyes. I look back down at my magazine, afraid he’ll see what I’m thinking. Afraid he already has.
Later in the day, Dr. P comes to see us.
“So her mortality risk is over?” Brian asks.
Dr. P looks at us carefully. “Her risk of mortality from VOD specifically is over. As you know, transplant is a dangerous process. She still needs to engraft, and until she engrafts she’s vulnerable to infection or virus.”
I block out the second half of the sentence and focus on the first. “Can you repeat what you said about VOD, please.”
“We can say for certain that her mild case of VOD failed to progress.” I love this phrase failed to progress.
I feel light. Like when you force your arms against a door jamb, and when you step out, they float upward, of their own accord, weightless.
Dr. P is handsome. Extremely handsome. How have I not noticed before? Dark, wide-set eyes, an aquiline nose. I actually squeeze his arm a little. Dr. P, kind but reserved, recoils toward the door. “I’m very glad to give you good news,” he says, and steps out.
I turn to Brian, who is also suddenly, acutely handsome. I want to make a joke, “Where have you been all my life?” As if I hadn’t noticed him until now. But think better of it. Too close to home. I put my arms around him; he puts his arms around me. “Her VOD failed to progress,” I say. “I’m so happy and proud to be the parent of a failure.”
It feels as if everything that matters has already happened: she’s walked to the edge of the abyss, looked down, peered over her shoulder at us, as if to ask, “Should I stay or go?” And, beautifully, mercifully, chosen to stay.
Brian and I walk around wearing the insipid, blissed-out smiles of recent religious converts. Even though we know nothing is settled. Even though the abyss still surrounds her bed, and she’s still a patient on 5200, a transplant unit, with the ricketiest of immune systems, still between bone marrows, unengrafted, unable to produce sufficient red cells on her own. Even though she’s blank and bored, and awash in the malaise of living in a box, her liver works. Her liver works!
DAY 20
Time shears in half: before and after. After is better and faster; the days lift their heels out of the sticky tar of anxiety and fear and speed past us in flip-flops, spewing sand. We’re allowed to be happy again or to relax, space out. Singular moments leap into focus.
Gabriel and Brian are at home, where I can finally spend a night. Gabriel pats the bed beside him and says, “Sleep, Mommy” and “Sleep, Daddy.” He wants our company, even when unconscious. We hope to lie down just for a minute, but he entangles a hand in my hair, pegs a foot on Brian’s arm; two sleepy-time paperweights to make sure we stay.
Brian and I both swear that, just before falling sleep, Gabriel mumbles “bone marrow transplant.” It is the end of a long day, and he is babbling a lot of stuff. We ask him to repeat it, and he does. He isn’t enunciating with perfect elocution, but he says the same thing several times, and the thing he says sounds like bone marrow transplant. He’s two years old, almost.
When he’s asleep I say, “Your cells are doing a great job.” I bend to kiss his feet. “They are helping Gracie.” This idea might be as arbitrary, as anthropomorphizing, as trees who don’t like him, but I believe it’s true.
I keep wishing Gracie could see him. He would be a Tasmanian devil in a jar, in her tiny room, and he is too germy for the unit, but he would cheer her up. Once or twice they talk on the phone.
“Hi, Gabriel.”
“Yacie!”
“Hi, Gabriel.”
“You sick?”
DAY 24
Engraftment is our new everything.
“She needs to engraft,” Dr. K says, “so we don’t have to keep dumping blood in her. We need to see that the marrow works, that Gabriel’s cells can do their job.”
“Do your job,” I say as she sleeps, speaking to the soles of her feet, to the palms of her hands, to the cells of her interior spaces.
Engraftment is defined as three consecutive days of an ANC (white cell) count above 500. If the body is making that many white cells, theory has it, then the stem cells have transformed into bone marrow cells. Her ANC count bobs erratically; it hits 500 then dips below, hits it again and dips once more. Our spirits are tied to this value; our happiness rises and falls in direct correlation.
DAY 25
It’s the coldest day we’ve had in Durham yet when Gracie, at last, engrafts. Outside our window, a thin layer of ice coats every surface. Inside Gracie’s bones, Gabriel’s stem cells fuse to the walls, divide and multiply, replicating his healthy matrix in their new ecosystem.
I take a walk after we get the news. The gardens of Duke are crystallized beneath a suspended veil of white branches; lace shot with sunlight. I envision her engraftment like this, as a stunning architecturally intelligent design writ in miniature and encased inside her. I walk and pray, let it work, let it work, let it work.
When I get back to the room, my face is cold and red.
“Poor Mama,” Gracie says. “I will warm you up!” She presses her cheek against mine. She’s happy to share whatever she’s got, even body warmth. I can feel her heat, her inner engine. I hug her back, too tight. She pulls away. “Look what I learned to do while you were out!” She motors the head of her bed all the way up and the foot of the bed all the way up, to make the U shape. She has already learned this trick and shown me, but if it feels new to her, I rejoice in the discovery. She climbs to the top of the head of the bed and flings herself off, into the valley, like a cliff diver. Brian and I stand and applaud. Inflationary approval; we can’t help ourselves.
Later Brian says, “It seems strange to say you admire a child who’s three years old, but I do.”
I know exactly what he means. She finds the speck of gold amid all this dross.