The moment we step outside the ward she is disoriented, a recent parolee, dazed by the sunlight. She usually had a great sense of direction, but she’s been on the inside almost two months. She has no memory of which way the elevator lies. And she won’t let us guide her.
As much as Brian and I are dying to get out of here—quick before someone changes their mind!—we try to be patient as she leads us from one random hallway to another. When we make it down to the lobby at last, she asks where the Christmas tree went and why there is no snow outside. She’s an incredulous Rip Van Winkle. At the fish tank she searches for a misshapen goldfish she’d once claimed as her own. When he, or a passable substitute, appears she shouts, “Look! My orange fish remembers me!”
She moves to the lobby fountain, a massive structure of cascading tiers. She points to a piece of bark in a nearby planter. “Can I touch it?” Can you wipe bark with an antibacterial wipe? “If you put a glove on, lovey,” I say. She puts the glove on without complaint and picks up the piece of bark, studying the fountain. She throws the bark into the top tier and watches it swirl down to her level, then she throws it to the top again and waits for it to return to her, over and over.
Finally we get her outside; she looks up and around. “I’m out,” she says, and shivers. I try to get her to put on her sweater, but she doesn’t want anything weighing her down. As Brian gets the car, I squeeze her hand in a quick rhythmic pattern. She squeezes back, but barely. She’s distracted by all the cars, the sounds of traffic, of birds, the dozens of conversations taking place around us. Her world was so small for so long. And now it is tantalizingly big again. A bus pulls up across the street. She pulls me, leaning her full weight against the anchor of my hand, “Come on, Mom,” she says, “let’s take the bus.”
It scares me how possible this seems—heading off for a new life together, just us two. Though there were many people around us, Gracie and I had done this—get well—together. Brian was there; of course he was there. But in some fundamental way, pulling her through illness had felt like a two-person dance, or I’d made it one.
The mom/daughter blueprint of my childhood was reexerting itself, flexing its muscle. Meanwhile Brian was coming around with the car. Gabriel was at the apartment waiting for us, excited and nervous to see his sister again.
Time to shake off the old architecture. Time to reconstitute ourselves into a four-person tribe. Crooked as we might be.
Time, too, to stop counting. There will be more days until we can go truly home, to New York. There will be days and days. The chance that we’ll be released home on Day 100, as the doctors implied if not promised, is microscopic. That’s just a carrot the doctors dangle to keep you moving. And that’s fine by us; we’re in no rush. This day is gift enough.
43
Gabriel looked Gracie up and down, “Yacie?” During her stay in the hospital, he’d watched her transform physically. But this was home; here she should look like herself, but didn’t. “Will Yacie sleep in my room?” He sounded half pleased, half spooked at the prospect. “Gabe,” Gracie said, “you’re sleeping in my room.” Brian leaned into me. “It’s like when the mafia boss gets out of prison and takes over his turf again, and the second in command doesn’t want to give it back.”
But the hierarchy of birth order was quickly restored: on the way to their room Gabe stepped into all the places she stepped, touched every object she touched.
While they played, Brian and I set up a mini–staging area for the multiple medications we needed to infuse via her pump, at precise times throughout the day. The protocol was so complex we’d bought a white board to track dosage, time, and temperature. We placed each medicine on a separate tray with its attendant tubing and directions. Some of the meds had to be refrigerated, then brought to room temperature so they wouldn’t chill her heart during infusion. One of the medications could only be disposed of, legally, in a Hazmat container.
I was the designated med-giver. Every morning and night as I hooked her up, I would pray in earnest, Please God, let me not fuck it up.
That first night, they took a bath together, Gracie’s tubes taped to her shoulder so they wouldn’t get wet. Post-bath, in their pajamas, they smelled like French-milled soap and sourdough bread, almost too good to bear. Side by side, they brushed their teeth, which Gabriel hated. Brian coaxed him by saying, “Let’s just brush a select few of your teeth, scientifically.”
“Scientif-ically?” Gabe said.
“So very scientifically,” Brian said. Gabe brushed.
I cleaned Gracie’s lines with alcohol, attached the pump, and started her infusion. Gabe, flaunting his scientifically fresh teeth, climbed in beside her in the double bed they would share. We told them a story as they drifted off, reveling in the way we could lift a plump hand and lay it on a plump cheek without waking them. Reveling in the way their leaven bodies rose and fell in tandem. Two kids breathing side by side; ordinary and miraculous.
A few hours later, Gracie appeared in our room, clutching her pump under one arm. We’d disconnected it as she slept but she hadn’t noticed. She carried it carefully; her little sidekick. Seeing her attend to the pump, even when it was not connected to her, moved me. It was a friend she wouldn’t leave behind. I reached for it; she passed it to me carefully with two hands. “We unhooked you already,” I said. She gave a wriggle of freedom. “I’m a girl with no pump!”
*
Gracie was safe here, five miles from Duke, but we were afraid to travel farther than that. Her marrow still wasn’t yet making sufficient white cells to fight off an infection or a virus. Until her immune system rematerialized, we were tethered to Durham. And, most crucially, we weren’t allowed anywhere people congregated, anyplace germs could ride the current of a central ventilation system into her vulnerable lungs.
But, if we lived within our limits, we could impersonate a normal family: stroll around the apartment complex, visit the local outdoor mall to throw coins in the fountain, sit beside the nearby lake at dusk, when all the germy kids were inside eating dinner.
If our grazing lands were limited, at least we were together. Sometimes Gabe was so overcome with feeling for Gracie that he’d throw his arms around her from behind and squeeze, “My sissy.” When Gracie’s infusion finished and the pump clicked off, she’d often slip out of her bed and into ours where she’d burrow between Brian and me, touching my face with the back of one hand, touching Brian’s chest with a toe. Body as bridge; this had always been her way. When I’d nursed her as an infant, if Brian sat down near us, she would stretch her legs and feet to make contact with him.