Miracle Cure (2 page)

Oh, my God
, she thought, as she frantically gulped down one pill from each of the medication vials.
Oh, my God, what’s happening to me?
Suddenly she remembered that the nitroglycerin, which she had not had to take since the early days of her Vasclear treatment, was supposed to be dissolved under her tongue, not swallowed. She tried to get a tablet into place under her tongue, but her hands were shaking so hard that she spilled the tiny pills all over the bed and onto the floor.

Her left ring finger was beginning to throb. The gold band she had worn for over fifty years was completely buried in her flesh. The finger itself looked terribly swollen and dark violet, almost black in color.
Oh, please God, help me.… Help me!

Drowning now, she struggled to force air through the bubbling in her chest. A boring, squeezing pain had begun to mushroom outward from beneath her breastbone and up into her neck—angina, just like before she had begun the treatments. She had to get Ricky on the phone. Or was it better to call 911? She had to do something. Her nightgown was soaked with sweat. She was breathing and coughing at the same time, getting precious little air into her lungs. There was no telephone in the guest room.

Gamely, she pushed herself off the side of the bed and lurched across to the bureau. Her feet were like water bottles, her toes little more than nubs above the swelling. Another spasm of coughing took away what little breath remained. She clutched the corner of the bureau, barely able to keep herself upright. The cough was merciless now, unremitting. Perspiration was cascading off her. Her head came up just enough for her to see that the mirror
was spattered with blood. Behind the scarlet spray was her ashen face. She was a terrifying apparition. Her hair was matted with sweat. Bloody froth covered her lips and chin.

Seized by fear unlike any she had ever known, Sylvia turned away from her reflection, stumbled, and fell heavily to the floor. As she hit, she heard as much as felt the snapping of the bone in her left hip. Sudden, blinding pain exploded from that spot. Her consciousness wavered, then started to fade. The agony in her hip and chest began to let up.
Ricky … Barbara … Maria … Johnny.…
One by one her children’s faces flashed through her thoughts. The last face she saw was her Angelo’s. He was smiling … beckoning to her.

T
WO
Y
EARS
L
ATER

“Y
OU CAN’T THROW THE SEVEN OF HEARTS
, B
RIAN
. I just picked up the eight of hearts three cards ago.”

“I’m betting you’ve got eights.”

“Okay.… Bad bet.… Gin.”

Brian Holbrook watched his father score up gin plus nineteen and sweep the cards together with practiced ease.
The hands that had once been thick and strong enough to crush walnuts were spotted from sixty-three years in the sun and bony from almost a decade of infirmity. But they could still handle cards.

Jack Holbrook—
Black
Jack Holbrook to many for as long as Brian could remember—wasn’t a professional gambler. But he dearly loved to bet. He called it wagering, and he would do it on anything from the Super Bowl to whether the next car coming around the corner would be foreign-made or domestic. Two bucks, ten, a hundred—it really didn’t matter to Jack. The game was the thing. He was, and always had been, the most fiercely competitive man Brian had ever known.

Careful not to let his father see, Brian glanced at his watch. Three o’clock. They had been playing gin for almost two hours. At a penny a point, they kept a running score until one of them, invariably Jack, reached ten thousand. Brian was currently down over seventy dollars.

“How about we quit and watch the ball game?” he suggested.

“How about we ride into Boston, have an early dinner, and see that new Van Damme movie?”

“I’ve got to be at the club at nine.”

“There’s plenty of time. I don’t remember the last time we spent a whole day together like this.”

Jack was right about that. With two jobs and his weekly supervised visitations with the girls, Brian was usually either on the move or dead asleep, facedown on the bedspread. The club was Aphrodite, one of the Day-Glo rock spots on Lansdowne Street, across from Fenway Park. Brian was a bouncer. At six three, 215, he fit the part well, though at thirty-eight he was a bit long in the tooth for the work. Then, of course, there was the matter of his education. An M.D. degree with board certification in internal medicine and cardiology made him an oddity
among the bouncers. But without a license from the Board of Registration and Discipline in Medicine, those certifications were useful only for the bottom of a birdcage.

It was a rare totally free Sunday afternoon for him. Becky and Caitlin were away for the weekend at Phoebe’s parents’ place, so his weekly visitation was postponed until Tuesday. And for some reason, his boss at Speedy Rent-A-Car hadn’t noticed that he failed to slot Brian for yet another Sunday in the office. A career man at Speedy, Darryl loved exercising power over people—particularly the new college grads who used the agency as their entry into the job market. He hadn’t found out until well after Brian started work at the place that he was an M.D., but since then, Darryl had done his best to make up for the lost time.

Bouncer … car-rental gofer … supervised visitations with his daughters … living with Dad … Brian knew that after eighteen months of hard work—counseling, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and endless hours with his NA sponsor, Freeman Sharpe, a building maintenance man with twenty years of recovery from heroin addiction—his internal demons were pretty much under control. But his external life still left a lot to be desired.

Brian’s Saturday-night stint at Aphrodite had ended after three, so it wasn’t until ten that he had gotten up. He had planned to go for a run, and then maybe hook up with some of the kids playing touch football in the park. They loved having him in their game, especially when he sent one of them deep and threw a fifty- or sixty-yard bullet spiral to him. But one glance at Jack had changed his mind. The man who had been Brian’s football coach from Pop Warner to high school and on to college was wrapped in an afghan in his favorite chair, where he had
been sitting up for most of the night. On the table next to him were several cardiac medications and others for pain. He looked drawn and in need of a shave.

“Got any plans for the day, Coach?” Brian asked.

“Yeah. The sultan of Brunei is supposed to stop by with his harem. I told him just three for me, though.”

“How about I make you some breakfast?”

Jack’s gray crew cut, chiseled features, and lingering summer tan helped him look younger,
and healthier
, than he was. But Brian knew that his cardiac condition was worsening. Portions of his six-year-old quintuple bypass were almost certainly closing. Brian picked up the small vial of nitroglycerin tablets and checked inside. More than half were gone.

“How many of these did you take yesterday?” he asked.

Jack snatched the vial away and put it into his shirt pocket.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t remember taking any.”

“Jack, come on.”

“Look, I’m fine. You just tend to your business and let me tend to mine.”

“You are my business, Jack. I’m your son and I’m a cardiologist, remember?”

“No. You’re a bouncer in a bar. That and a car salesman.”

Brian started to react to the barb, then caught himself. Jack was probably operating on even less sleep than he was.

“You’re right, Coach,” Brian responded, willing his jaw to unclench. “When I’m back to being a cardiologist again, then I can give advice. Not before. Let me toast you a bagel.”

The living room of the first-story flat that Jack had owned for the ten years since his heart attack was, like the
rest of the place, devoid of a woman’s touch. There were sports photos on the walls and trophies on almost every surface that would hold one. Most of the awards had Brian’s name on them. They were the trappings of a man who needed gleaming hardware and laminated certificates to pump up his self-esteem. When Brian had first moved in, being surrounded by all those trophies had been something of a problem for him. But Freeman Sharpe had helped him deal with his issues.
Remember, your dad loves you and he always wanted more for you than he ever wanted for himself. And if he pushes your buttons, just tell yourself that he’s a master at doing that because he’s the one who installed them in the first place
. And in the end, as with so many other things that had seemed like a big deal, the trophies meant nothing more than Brian chose to make them.

As he headed into the small kitchen, he glanced at one of the photographs on the wall by the doorway. It was the official photo of the UMass team taken just before the start of his fateful junior season. He was in the middle of the next-to-last row. Number 11. Then, for the first time that he could remember, his eyes were drawn to a face at the right-hand end of the very last row. Dr. Linus King, the team orthopedist. Brian had looked at the photo any number of times before—where it hung, he had no real choice. It was curious that he had never noticed the man until now. Over countless therapy sessions and countless recovery meetings, Brian had come to accept responsibility for his addiction to prescription painkillers. But if there was anyone else who bore accountability, it was King.

Brian repressed the sudden urge to slam his fist into the photo. Over the year following his reconstruction of Brian’s knee, Linus King, a sports-medicine deity, was always too busy to conduct a thorough reevaluation of his work, to say nothing of sitting down to talk with his
patient about persistent discomfort in the joint. Instead, he had preached patience and rehabilitation, and had prescribed hundreds of Percocets and other painkillers. Finally, a repeat MRI had disclosed a previously undiagnosed fracture. A cast and three months of rest took care of the cracked bone, but by then Brian had acquired a string of harried doctors, each willing to dash off a prescription in exchange for not having to listen. His addiction was full-blown and well-fed years before he violated the law and his own principles by writing the first prescription for himself.

“Jack, do you really think you’re up for a trip into the city?” Brian asked now.

“I don’t know. I think so. I’m going slightly stir-crazy, son. And beating you at gin isn’t what I’d call the most challenging activity in the world.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll cut cards with you. You win, it’s Jean-Claude and the restaurant of your choice.”

“And if I lose?”

Brian could tell his father knew what was coming.

“You lose and we still go into Boston. But you’ve got to promise me you’ll go back and see Dr. Clarkin.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. It’s been six years since your operation. Clarkin can revise those grafts or replace them.”

“No more Clarkin, no more surgery. I’ve told you that a thousand times. I’ve had my last catheter and my last tube.”

As often seemed to be the case with a physician or a physician’s kin, everything that could have gone wrong postoperatively for Jack did. Heart failure, infection, graft revision, reinfection. A total of eight miserable weeks in the hospital which, in the era of managed care, spoke volumes as to how spectacularly ill he was. For many of those weeks, he literally begged to die. True, Black Jack
was more stubborn than most. But having seen the man every one of those fifty-six days, Brian could hardly blame him for taking such a hard line against any return to the OR.

“All right,” Brian said. “But I’ve never seen you chicken out of a friendly wager before.”

“That’s because I have a reputation for always paying up on my losses. And I know I’d end up welshing on this one. Tell you what. How about one cut: the seventy-one bucks you owe me versus you treating for dinner and the movies.”

“Deal.” Brian turned over the queen of clubs. “Hey, maybe my luck is changing.”

Jack cut the three of diamonds. He stared at the card for a few protracted seconds.

“Maybe mine is, too,” he said.

He pulled on his favorite sweater, a frayed orange cardigan Brian’s mother had given him just before her death nearly thirteen years ago.

“You gonna be warm enough if I put the top down?” Brian asked.

“Sure.… Um … son, there’s something I gotta get off my chest before we leave.”

“Go ahead.”

“I … I was out of line saying what I did this morning about you not being a cardiologist.”

“Don’t worry about it. Besides, I never paid any attention to anything you ever said before. Why should I start now?”

“I’m frustrated, that’s all. And I don’t understand how you could have let this happen.”

“I know, Pop. I know. Sometimes we have to hit bottom before we figure out how to really enjoy life.”

“I’m sure something will come along.”

Brian looked away.

“I’m sure it will,” he said.

Actually, he was reasonably certain it
wouldn’t
. The Board of Registration in Medicine had determined six months ago that he was in good recovery and ready to resume practice, but it was their policy in drug and alcohol cases to insist on a physician having a work situation in place with tight on-the-job monitoring and random urine testing before a license would be issued. No job, no license. It was the board’s immutable law. Brian had argued that in Boston, with three medical schools and a plethora of teaching hospitals, cardiologists were more plentiful than cod. Why would anyone take a chance on hiring someone without an active license?

Two children and Jack’s shaky medical situation made a move too far away from eastern Massachusetts out of the question. So Brian had done what he could, responding to ads in the cardiology press and the
New England Journal of Medicine
and sending out at least two dozen resumés. He had networked until he had absorbed more than his quota of rejections, and had seen colleagues he thought were his friends turn away. He had even placed an ad himself.