CHAPTER 4
It didn’t happen right away. Eddie’s white count held for another ten months before it started creeping up.
Those ten months were good. I would go over to his apartment when school let out.
Sometimes I would bring him dinner. He was trying without success to teach me how to play bridge.
He brought me advance reader’s copies of the books he knew I would like. “You and Skip,” he said. “No one else.”
Later things began to tilt. Often when I came by, he was sleeping, or when we walked, I could hear his shortness of breath. He took my arm. One day over lunch, he told me that he had retired.
“You’re going to retire?”
He shook his head. “I did it. Needless to say, they pretty much ran me to the door as soon as I mentioned it. ‘Goodbye, Mr. Triplett! Good luck, Mr. Triplett!’ They’ve been waiting for me to give it up for years now.”
“But you love your job.”
“I do,” he said carefully. “I did. But everything comes to an end. I’ll keep editing the books I’ve been working on, maybe do some freelancing after that. No authors left behind. Why are you looking at me like that?”
Because I’m afraid you won’t be happy. Because I’m afraid this means you’ll die. “I’m surprised, that’s all. Give me a minute to catch up. Is there going to be a party?”
“Will Polly rent out the Century Club but this time decorate in a book theme? Will Skip give a speech about my wasted potential? Will there be a sheet cake in the shape of a book that all my former assistants will come to eat a square of?”
I told him all sheet cakes were in the shape of books.
“The answer is no, no party, and the going-away lunch is right now and you are the only person I’ve invited. In fact, I’m going to order a glass of Chardonnay to celebrate.”
“Does this have to do with your health?”
Eddie rolled his eyes. “Things were so much nicer back when you were in the dark.”
“The dark is no longer available.”
“Well, I shouldn’t complain. If Polly hadn’t spilled the beans, I never would have met Dr. Ocean, and I love Dr. Ocean.”
Eddie’s oncologist, whom he had seen so irregularly since his first diagnosis, had retired some months after his last treatment, and Jonathan got him in to see a woman named Dr. Ocean who practiced on the Upper East Side.
Her office was in a building beside a hospital.
Jonathan thought it was the hospital Eddie should go to should a hospital become necessary in the future.
“In fact, I’m going to chemo on Thursday,” he said. “Are you free?”
“Of course I’m free,” I said, which technically wasn’t true but would be true by Thursday. I had not retired, but I knew how to take a personal day from school.
Other things had changed in those ten interim months. Jonathan and his sister finally finished emptying the house in Fond du Lac. Near the end, Bea found a heavy lockbox in the wall behind the hot water heater. “What even made you look there?” Jonathan asked when she led him to the basement.
She crouched down. “Look. There’s no mortar between the bricks,” she said. “I was going to put it on the repair list.”
They drove the box to a locksmith, who had to make a key, a production more costly and time-consuming than they had imagined.
Inside were six pocket watches from the 1800s, two of them solid gold, seventeen gold coins, and a diamond solitaire that neither brother nor sister had ever seen before—a small treasure chest. “Which is why you don’t hire a company to get rid of the past for you,” he told me over the phone.
After the house had sold, they used part of the money to take the trip to Norway they had talked about.
They went to Tromso to see the northern lights, swaths of bright green illumination arching through the night sky.
They both agreed it changed their understanding of what the world was capable of.
When all of that was over—the sorting and cleaning and sale and trip—Jonathan was left with only our relatively tidy house to manage, and he paced around it looking for things to do.
He cleaned out the garage and built a new set of raised beds in the backyard.
He went through all the files in his home office, and the files on his computer, getting rid of everything that could safely be gotten rid of, but it wasn’t enough to occupy him.
There was only so much winnowing a person can do.
Then he got a call from someone he knew at the hospital in Bronxville, not two miles from where we lived.
Their chief administrator had been tapped for a better job in Chicago, giving three weeks’ notice.
The hospital’s second-in-command was not sufficiently commanding.
What they needed was an interim head who could steer the ship until a hiring committee could be assembled.
Did he run to the hospital? Did he dance his way there?
“Don’t make fun,” Jonathan said, confiding to me alone that his plan was to make himself indispensable.
I told Eddie I’d pick him up at his apartment on Thursday.
“That’s silly,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”
I told him that’s not how chemo worked.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Trust me,” I said. “I’m picking you up.”
And I did. We took a taxi to the Upper East Side. I brought a thermal bag of drinks and snacks. I signed him in.
“Oh, this is nice,” I said as the nurse led us down the hall. Every patient had their own pod with frosted-glass dividers and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. The space was small but private, luminous.
“Even on a gray day like this, we don’t get complaints about the view,” the nurse said.
Eddie got into what looked like a dentist’s chair, and she brought him a blanket. “Watch me. I’m going to fall asleep.”
“You can’t fall asleep,” I said. “You have to keep me company.”
“You should get a hygienist,” Eddie said to the nurse. “People could get their teeth cleaned while they’re having chemo. Maybe a pedicure.” He wagged his feet back and forth.
“You’re ambitious,” the nurse said.
“I like to get things done,” Eddie said.
“Me, too,” the nurse said, and then she was gone.
“She’s off for the poison,” he whispered to me. He was careful to keep his voice down as the pod had no door.
I looked out the window at the light fall of February snow. “They could rent these out at night, market it like one of those tiny Japanese hotel rooms.” The pod had a small sink. There was a toilet down the hall and surely, somewhere, a shower.
Eddie agreed. “They’d make a killing. This is a very comfortable chair.”
“There isn’t room for the hygienist and the manicurist if the nurse and I are both in here with you.”
“Take shifts. I’m here for hours.”
Eddie’s was the last pod on the left, and while I hadn’t meant to notice, every patient in every other pod had someone with them.
Everyone had found another person to sit with them through chemo.
Not having any doors was the thing that made the design possible for the nurses who went in and out with their hands full, keeping an eye on all the sparrows.
It also meant the people on the right-hand side of the hall could still enjoy the view.
It was masterful. “The place where Buddy had chemo was nothing like this,” I said.
Eddie smiled. “Of course you took Buddy to chemo. Of course you did. What was that like?”
“It was one big room, all the chairs in a circle, all the nurses going around checking on everybody. Don’t get me wrong, it was great, or great for chemo.
Everyone was incredibly kind, but some of the patients were so sick, and when I see a place like this, I think how nice it would have been for them to have had a little privacy. ”
The nurse returned and asked Eddie to state his full name and date of birth, which he did, cheerfully, even though it was the fifth time he’d been asked the question since we arrived. “Edward James Triplett, May 2, 1949.” He held out his arm and she scanned his wristband.
“How are you feeling today, Mr. Triplett?”
“I have a smile on my face and a song in my heart.”
The nurse smiled at him. “I noticed that. No fever, no pain?”
He shook his head.
“In that case, I’m going to hook you up.”
Eddie didn’t have a port, and so the nurse started a line on the front side of his elbow. “A stick and a sting,” she said. I turned my head.
“What’s that called, that vein?” Eddie asked, admiring her work.
“The median cubital vein.”
“Well, now you’ve taught me something new. Median cubital. We come to chemo to grow.”
She got the chemo running, and when she was sure the line was good and Eddie had everything he needed, she left.
That’s when Eddie returned to his question.
“I was vague,” he said. “I didn’t mean, what was the treatment center like, though don’t get me wrong, I find it all interesting.
I meant, what was it like for you to take your father to chemo? ”
“Oh, that,” I said, suddenly flush with memory.
“I loved it. Is that a terrible thing to say? I bet if Buddy were here, he’d tell you the same thing.
We had such a good time. We’d never spent much time together before.
When he first called to tell me he was sick, I don’t think I’d seen him in a year or more.
I was in Newton then, and he only lived over in Gloucester. ”
“He stayed in Gloucester?” Eddie asked.
“Born and raised and died. Aside from college and those few miserable years he and my mother were married, he was always in Gloucester. You remember the apartment he had when we were kids?”
“Don’t tell me,” Eddie said.