Equal Affections (26 page)

The boy was named Jaime Delgado. Around the time April and Danny were getting off their plane from New York he had been applying a lit match to a gasoline canister. His parents, Jesús and Dorell, themselves never wept, though they smoked and chewed their nails. Jesús was a biker, not quite a Hell's Angel; he was of a type familiar to April, who in earlier days had sometimes accepted the protection of bikers during potentially violent concerts. Nat had never met a biker in his life, much less straddled or even imagined straddling the warm leather seat of some mufflerless machine, but it didn't matter here. In the burn unit old distinctions—age, wealth, religion—ceased to have any meaning. Here was the perfect democracy; suffering, the great equalizer. Gallows humor, yes, but also gallows compassion, gallows clearheadedness.

Jaime Delgado had third-degree burns over most of his body, and Nat was full of questions and concern for his recovery; at the same time Dorell—a woman who seemed to be all elongations, long black hair, spindly legs and fingers, predatory red nails—couldn't seem to get enough information about Louise's situation. She nodded earnestly as she absorbed everything Nat was only too glad to tell her. One symptom of the waiting room was not being able to stop talking; “How's your wife doing?” was a risky question, bound to trap the unexpecting querier in a good half hour of conversation, so the nurses and receptionists and social workers deftly avoided small talk on their way to and from lunch. Fortunately Nat and Dorell seemed to be able to draw relief from each other, or at least distraction. They leaned close together, and spoke so softly that usually all anyone else in the waiting
room made out of their conversation were matchbook strikings of tongue against palate, and slow givings out of breath, and expelled grunts of disbelief mixed with horror.

Jesús Delgado was less inclined to discuss his son's condition, but he liked to talk. He told Nat about the three times he'd crossed the country by motorcycle. “That's my idea of an education, Professor.” (He and Dorell called Nat Professor, which was more than he could say for his students.) “Seeing the world, the wind at your back and all that. Going real fast, watching everything pass by. It's a big country. Now I don't pretend to know nothing like you must know, but I know how big things are.”

“I wish I knew that,” Nat said.

“But maybe you can tell me something else, Professor. Maybe you can tell me why us instead of anyone else, any of those other people, have to be sitting here tonight, instead of at home eating dinner? And don't say God, I stopped believing when I was twelve.”

He looked across the waiting room at his ancient mother, Aurora, who, dressed in black, was crocheting roses onto a pink background and murmuring novenas to herself. “Lucky she don't understand English too good,” Jesus said, and, smiling at her, laughed. She raised her eyes and smiled back.

“So what's your answer?” Jesús said a moment later, and Nat pulled himself up, back straight.

“Well,” he said, fumbling, “statistical probability suggests that bad things happen to everyone sometime. In other words, chance.”

“The old wheel of fortune,” said Jesús. “Spinning, spinning, spinning.”

“Yup,” Nat said. “But in real life, you can't put it on a gift certificate.”

At that Dorell raised her eyes and laughed. “Oh, that's funny,” she said. “You know, I tried out for that show last time I was in L.A. Made it to the final nine. Too bad, I would've loved a trip to the Bahamas, Puerto Rico. Someplace you could lay out in the sun and relax.”

“Yup, that would be nice,” Jesús said, stretching his arms behind his head, “laying on a beach right now.”

His mother suddenly lifted her eyes, looked at them all, then returned to her crocheting.

__________

In the waiting room, cigarette butts filled stained and weather-beaten plastic ashtrays; periodically someone sitting there got disgusted and emptied them into the wastebasket. As night wore into day—a single, timeless progression, marked only by the departure of the secretaries (there were no windows)—the one substandard fluorescent light tube flickered, dimmed, but never blew out. Sometime in the late evening a custodian passed through with a bucket of strong disinfectant and swabbed the linoleum floor until, for a few brief minutes, it actually shined.

___________

Dinner time. Too many friends always had the good idea to bring food. Eleanor arrived with platters of turkey and roast beef, homemade mayonnaise, rye bread, and tomatoes; Danny went out for cartons of Chinese noodles, fried rice, chicken with Peking sauce; Jesús's Aunt María brought enchiladas, flautas, chiles rellenos. There was too much food, an overwhelming abundance of food; plates and trays covered the coffee table as well as a good portion of the floor. No one knew where to begin, except Eleanor, who loaded her plate with everything. “Oh, this is so delicious!” she said as she tasted the chiles rellenos Jesús's aunt had brought. “What is your recipe?”

She addressed this question to Jesús's mother, Aurora, who looked at her blankly and smiled. “You like?” she said.

“Oh, I like very much,” Eleanor said. “I write a cooking column.” The old woman nodded.

“A cooking column—you know, in the newspaper—and I'd like to write one about you.” Eleanor pointed at her and said, “You.”

The old woman nodded some more.

“Yes,” she said. “Mexican cooking very good.”

___________

Inside the burn unit was a life of perpetual battle, small headway against huge disaster.

Nat was always there already when April and Danny and Walter arrived in the morning; either he'd been there all night or he'd come before dawn from the dingy apartment he'd been given across the street. Around eight when they pulled in, smelling of wind and car exhaust, he'd fill them in on the night's activity, and then the four of them would meet with Dr. Thayer, usually in the waiting room, sometimes in the little conference room.

Good news was not plentiful, but it came sometimes. “She's looking good,” Dr. Thayer said on Tuesday, “really rallying.” By Wednesday the respirator was in place—no more talking—and her fever was up to 104º. Wednesday afternoon it was down again, and the antibiotics were taking hold. Early Wednesday evening her kidneys failed. The doctors and nurses huddled round to work on her; that was the phrase Kitty, the night nurse, used. “They've been working on her a couple hours now, trying to fix her up.”

Inside Louise's room, machines with inscrutable dials and red-lit readouts spun lines of blue light that told her heart and breathing rates. The smell of burning rubber subsided, or seemed to—maybe they just adjusted to it. Even Louise herself looked more like herself, in spite of the tubes that snaked into her throat and nose and under bandages into both her arms, one leg, her right side. Her hands had been unwound; she was kept covered with a light blanket. But when she slept, her head fell to the side, her jaw hung loose and open. Danny watched her sometimes through the glass as she slept, while around her the machines continued to draw the progress of her life in their fine, glowing hands. There was something brutal about her having to lie there like that, alone among all that life-sustaining technology.

Thursday morning she was lucid and had things to say. Nat sat with her for three hours, engaged in a game of charades, Louise gesturing as best she could with her hands, Nat struggling to interpret the gestures. Mostly she wanted to tell him things he already knew. She couldn't breathe; she was afraid of suffocating; she wanted her own
kleenex. Sometimes she tried to write. The sheets piled up, her illegible messages usually zigzagging off the page in a pencil-breaking scrawl of rage.

Outside Cousin Joanne had arrived for a visit. “Hello,” she said to Dorell Delgado. “I know we haven't met. I'm Joanne Finkel, Louise's niece? And I heard about your son, I was so sorry but, um, I wanted to give him this.”

She handed Dorell a Macy's bag inside which was a big box wrapped in Masters of the Universe gift paper.

“It's a Lego assortment,” Joanne said. “You know, for building airplanes, houses, cars. The guy at the store says boys love it. And it should keep him busy, once he's feeling a little better.” She smiled, looked away. “I don't know, I just thought he might like it. You can return it if you want.”

“Thank you,” Dorell said. “That was nice of you.”

“Oh, good,” Joanne said. She fell back against the wall, relieved, apparently, not to have the present thrown back in her face. “I do what I can,” she said. “I'm like my mom that way, only not so good a cook. And I love kids. I don't have any of my own—yet.” She looked up at the ceiling and said, “I guess what I'm trying to say is just, I don't know you, but I feel for you. Woman to woman. You know what I mean?”

“Listen, I'm sure Jaime will like this. He's probably gonna be here a long time; he needs toys like this to keep him busy. I'll show it to him today.”

Joanne smiled, looked at the floor. “Great,” she said. “Thanks. I mean, you're welcome. I mean, thanks.” She laughed. “Thanks and you're welcome,” she said. “Isn't that the right thing to say?”

___________

In the late afternoon Walter and Danny broke their vigil and walked the length of gridded streets, up and down steep hills, until the bay and the red-ribbed Golden Gate Bridge were staring at them. San Francisco may be the quietest city in the world, especially
on a brisk, bright afternoon when the wind lurks and surprises, coming out of nowhere among the steeply staggered houses, then disappearing again into its hiding place. Chimes, somewhere. A dog scampering up a sidewalk, its own leash in its mouth.

They stood for a while, gazing at the panorama of boats and blue water.

“I think we should probably get back,” Walter said after a few minutes.

“Oh, Walt. Do we have to? Couldn't we walk a little more?”

“I think your dad will be wanting us back.”

So, regretfully, they headed back, stumbled down the same hills they'd marched up, across the parking lot and through the sliding doors and into the elevator. Here, on the elevator, Danny visibly tightened with fear. The doors finally opened, and in the main waiting room Walter took Danny's hand; he turned; they hugged. A middle-aged nurse, walking by, said, “Really, couldn't you be more discreet?”

Instantly they broke apart, pretended not to know each other.

After a few seconds they found each other again. “Let's go,” Danny said, rather miserably, heading off toward the corridor bridge. But Walter said, “Hold it right there, ma'am. Ma'am, hold it right there.” He followed the nurse down another hallway, calling, “Hold it right there, ma'am.” His hand on her shoulder. Very loudly, so that people turned, he said, “I want to see your name. Jenkins. Mary Jenkins. Good, I'll remember that.”

She looked up at him rather timidly.

“You're making a spectacle of yourself,” she said.

“I'm making a spectacle of myself! No, I wouldn't say that. In fact, I'd say I'm making a spectacle of you.”

The nurse's eyes darted, checking for witnesses. Then she came closer. “There are children around here,” she whispered.

“Mary Jenkins. Yes, I'll remember that name,” Walter said. He turned, started walking away, before announcing to the lobby at large, “Please be aware that Nurse Mary Jenkins is a bigot.”

“You're just making a fool of yourself,” Mary Jenkins said, rather uncertainly and loudly.

“We'll see who your superiors consider the fool.”

He walked in one direction. Mary Jenkins walked in the other.

___________

When they got back, Louise's fever was 105°. Kidney function was at a standstill. Skin healing nicely, Dr. Thayer added, as an afterthought. “Too bad, because now her skin is the least of her problems. Even with the antibiotics taking effect, we're not out of the woods.”

How was this different from any other moment in the last twenty years, with death always in the vicinity? This was the difference: What had been vague was now palpable. That elderly aunt in the attic, who sat in on all their meals but did not pay any rent—they had hoped she'd disappear one day, look for other lodgings. Now, it seemed, they were having to realize what Louise, perhaps, had known all along. Her lease was infinitely renewable. She would always be the last to leave.

___________

Thursday night Louise's fever was down to 100°, and Dr. Thayer used the phrase “guarded optimism.”

Danny and Walter agreed to stay late so that Nat could take a rest. They sat for hours doing crossword puzzles in the dim waiting room. Around midnight they were just about to eat some Chinese food they'd brought in when Kitty, the night nurse, came out for a break.

“Care for an egg roll?” Walter said.

“Thanks,” Kitty said. “Boy, you guys sure have a lot of food out here all the time. It's like a twenty-four-hour picnic.”

“It helps to pass the time,” Walter said.

Kitty put the egg roll on top of a napkin and then, taking another napkin, drew off the excess grease.

“Your mom's fighting hard,” she said as she took a bite. “They're working on her again now. Some problem with the dialysis, but nothing too serious. But, boy, I've got to hand it to her. She's got fight.

“You must see a lot of that around here,” Walter said.

“That's for sure. Really, some of the bravest people ever. It breaks my heart, but it also makes me feel, like, the human race really is pretty amazing. You know, the guy I live with now, I met him when he was a patient on the unit.”

“Really?” Danny and Walter said simultaneously.

“Yup. He was in real bad shape, but we talked a lot, and it started getting pretty serious. At first I thought it was unprofessional—I was married at the time, though my husband and I weren't living together—but then I asked my supervisor and she said, ‘Go for it.' She understands that things like this are rare, you can't pass them up.”