He was glad she didn’t tell him he was being morbid.
“That glow of the red light,” she said. “Do you remember how magical the glow of a red light at night was? As a kid? Just being outside after dark.”
He remembered.
He thought he might cry then, thought his body might wrack itself with dry tears, but Fiona stopped stroking his forehead and when he opened his eyes he saw that she was already crying herself, and it stopped him. He said, “I’m okay. It’s okay.”
But she was shaking her head fast and he saw, turning, how tightly she gripped the bar of his bed. Her face had gone pale even as her cheeks had gone red.
He said, “Fiona. What.”
“My back hurts.”
“Your back?”
“I think—”
“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.”
She gasped in air as if she’d been holding her breath, which maybe she had. “The thing is, it keeps spasming like two minutes apart. But it’s in the back.”
“That sounds like contractions, Feef.”
“It’s probably just those false ones, those Brixton whatevers. But I keep thinking maybe I should like—no, don’t do that!” Yale had pressed his call button. “Why’d you do that?”
“Maybe don’t have your baby on the AIDS ward.”
“I’m not having—it’s not due for four weeks.”
“And I wasn’t supposed to die till I was eighty.”
Debbie was already in the doorway. “Not me this time,” Yale said.
Fiona said, “I’m okay.”
“You don’t look okay,” Debbie said.
“Is there—there’s a maternity ward here, right? Or do I have to go around to the ER?”
“Heavens! Well yes, we do provide that service. One-stop shopping. Let’s get you a wheelchair.”
“They’re not even that bad,” Fiona said. “I mean, I’m basing that on the movies, people screaming and whatever, but they’re not that strong. It’s just, they’re coming pretty fast.”
Debbie said, “Here’s what we’re doing. I’m calling up to maternity, I’m getting you an escort up there, no ER for you, and Yale is sitting very tight and I’m staying right with him all night. Maybe you come back a lot skinnier, maybe you come back a couple ounces bigger. Okay?”
And Fiona, who appeared to be holding her breath again, squeezed Yale’s hand and nodded. “But they’ll—can you keep me filled in? If I’m there a while, I want to know what’s happening. I still have power of attorney, right? Even if I’m up there?”
“We can call you,” Debbie said, “and you would not believe how fast I can make an orderly run.” She was already beckoning someone in from the hallway, already picking up Yale’s phone to call Labor and Delivery.
* * *
—
When Yale woke from night sweats, Debbie was still there. Fiona was resting, she said, and they were trying to delay the labor. Her husband was on his way from Canada, where he’d been speaking at a conference. She’d let Yale know as soon as she heard anything. Meanwhile, she’d get his sheets changed.
His heart felt bad. He could feel it working so hard, a fist trying to break through a wall. Which was exactly what Dr. Cheng said would happen. “The thing about you having multiple concurrent pathogens,” he’d said, “is we’re going to treat them all, but the treatments won’t necessarily get along. And it’s a lot of medicine, a lot of IVs, a lot of fluids. The risk is that we’re going to stress your heart out, more than it’s already stressed.” The almost inevitable result, in short, would be congestive heart failure—the same thing Nora had died of. How had she seemed so serene through all of it?
* * *
—
In the morning, everything was much worse. Debbie was gone and Bernard had taken her place. Bernard changed the catheter bag, and Yale tried to ask about Fiona, but all he got out was her name.
“She’s calling the nurse’s station every ten minutes, I swear to God,” Bernard said. “She wanted to know when you woke up. No baby yet.”
Dr. Cheng came by. He said, “You’re gaining weight, which is, for once, not a great thing. We’ve got some fluid collecting in your abdomen now. Which means the kidneys and liver aren’t doing too well.”
Yale’s fingers tingled from low blood-oxygen, and he wasn’t sure he could feel his toes. His heart was climbing a mountain with every beat.
In second grade, Mrs. Henry had been hospitalized with pneumonia and the substitute, a man who mostly told them stories about his time in the Peace Corps, had attempted to explain what was wrong with Mrs. Henry. “Take the deepest breath you can,” he said, “and don’t let it out.” They did, and then he said, “Now take another breath on top of that. Don’t let that one out either.” They tried. Some of the kids gave up and let it all go with a wet raspberry noise, fell off their chairs laughing, but Yale, who always did as he was told, managed to keep going. “Now take another breath on top of that one. That third breath is what pneumonia feels like.”
There was something comforting in the midst of all this about knowing he’d been warned so early. That sitting there with his healthy, strong little body, he’d felt, for one second of his seven-year-old life, how things would end.
Dr. Cheng said, “I want you to just nod or shake your head. If I can’t understand you, we’ll go to Fiona, alright? I want to know if I have your okay to take you off the pentam and the amphoterrible. That means we’d be officially starting hospice. And I want you on morphine.”
It was one of the things Yale appreciated about Dr. Cheng, that he just went ahead and called it amphoterrible.
Yale used all the strength he could to make it as clear as possible when he nodded yes.
* * *
—
He woke up after God knew how long to see a very tall young man hovering over the bed. He couldn’t quite focus; the face was cloudy. The morphine was a rug, a warm, numbing rug that was on him and in him.
“Hey, it’s Kurt,” the man said. “Cecily’s son.”
Yale tried to breathe in to say something, but he coughed out far more air than he’d taken in, and each cough was a morphine-dulled boot against his ribs.
Debbie was here. It must be night again. Now that he thought about it, he’d known Debbie was here. He’d felt her beside him for a while now. She knew about the spot between his eyes.