PART 2
He was wearing navy scrubs.
A surgical cap.
Blue gloves.
A lanyard with a photo ID that said GABRIEL ORTIZ, RN — HOME INFUSION SERVICES — and, beneath it, the name of the hospital where my wife had told me, five months ago, that she’d “started seeing a specialist about the fatigue.”
The black case had sprung open on the floor.
Inside, in foam cutouts, were vials.
Tubing.
A small pump the size of a paperback.
Alcohol swabs.
And a sharps container, the kind with the biohazard symbol on it, half full.
Half full.
I let go of his wrist.
“Elise.”
My wife was sitting up in bed with the blanket pulled to her chest, and she was not looking at me.
She was looking at the case on the floor, at the one vial that had cracked, and she said, in a voice I had never heard from her, “Gabriel, is that tonight’s dose?”
“It’s fine.
I carry two.
Elise — ”
“Elise,” I said again.
She finally looked at me.
“You didn’t take the pill.”
“Lily told me a man comes in every night.”
Her face did something then — not guilt, not fear.
Grief.
“She sees him?”
“She sees him.”
Gabriel Ortiz, RN, picked up the case, checked the second vial, and said, to both of us, in the voice of a man who had stood in a great many bedrooms at 1 a.m., “I’m going to step into the hall.
I’ll come back when you’ve talked.
The infusion can wait twenty minutes.
It can’t wait until morning.”
He closed the door without letting the latch click.
“How long?” I said.
“Five months.”
“What is it?”
She told me.
The name of it doesn’t matter to anyone but the two of us and a woman named Dr. Sekou.
It is a rare autoimmune disorder, and it attacks the bl*od, and it had been discovered the week before Lily’s birthday, when Elise had gone to the specialist about the fatigue and the specialist had gone very quiet reading a lab result.
There was a trial.
An experimental therapy, at a teaching hospital forty minutes away, that required nightly subcutaneous infusions for six months, administered by a home nurse, on a strict schedule, ideally while the patient was resting.
“Ideally at night,” Elise said.
“Ideally with the household asleep.
Dr. Sekou said that’s when the body does the least fighting.”
“Why the sleeves.”
She pushed one up.
Her forearm was a map — small purple ovals, old and new, where a ne*dle had gone in every night for five months.
“Why didn’t you tell me.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“Ben.
You were fourteen when your father got sick.”
I didn’t move.
“You told me on our third date.
You told me you didn’t sleep for a year.
You told me you still can’t hear the word ‘infusion’ without — ”
“That’s not — ”
“You had a panic attack in a CVS last spring because the pharmacist said ‘chemo bag’ to the person behind you.
I was there.
I held your hand in the vitamin aisle.”
I had forgotten that.
She hadn’t.
“The trial had a forty percent response rate.
Forty.
I did the math you would’ve done.
If I told you, you’d have spent six months not sleeping and watching me for signs, and Lily would have watched you watching me, and if it didn’t work — ”
She stopped.
“If it didn’t work, I wanted you to have had six normal months.
I wanted her to have had them.
I was going to tell you either way, at the end.
Dr. Sekou has a letter.
I wrote it in the first week.
It’s for both of you.
For if.”
For if.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, on her side, where the man with the case had stood.
“And my mother.”
Elise almost laughed.
“Your mother asked me, in September, why I looked tired.
I said I was seeing a specialist.
She asked what kind.
I said it was private.
She’s been calling Mrs. Dunphy every week since.
Mrs. Dunphy’s told her about the car.
Your mother thinks I’m having an affair with a man who parks at midnight.”
“She called me.
Three weeks ago.”
“I know.
You hung up on her.
I heard you from the laundry room.”
“I was on your side.”
“I know you were, Ben.
That’s why I couldn’t tell you.
You’d have been on my side so hard you’d have broken.”
Gabriel knocked.
Once.
Soft.
“Elise.
It’s been twenty-two minutes.”
She held out her arm.
He came in, and set up the pump on the nightstand — my nightstand, I noticed, because hers was covered in the things she’d been hiding — and swabbed the inside of her elbow, and I sat there and watched a stranger put a ne*dle into my wife with the gentleness of someone who had done it a hundred and forty times.
“You can hold her hand,” Gabriel said, not looking up.
“Most of them do.”
I held her hand.
It took eleven minutes.
“It’ll only take a minute,” I said, when it was done.
Elise looked at me.
“That’s what he says every night.
So I don’t count.”
Down the hall, a door opened.
Lily stood in the bedroom doorway in her pajamas, with the pink backpack on, because she’d fallen asleep with it, and she looked at the man in scrubs, and at her mother’s arm, and at me, and she said, in the voice she uses for the moon:
“Is he the man?”
“Yes, baby.”
“Is he bad?”
I looked at Gabriel Ortiz.
“No,” I said.
“He’s the opposite.
Come here.
I think it’s time somebody explained to you what he’s carrying.”
