For Martin the hours at ArrowheadRegionalMedicalCenter had been a quicksilver streak of plastic waiting room chairs, bad TV, bitter coffee and his unbridled anxiety for the inevitable white-coat meeting. The Messenger had secured a new PPO insurance, which turned out to be just outside of incredible—he or she had already paid the deductible and Teresa had X-rays and lab results ready that same evening. So there’s no dicking with incompetence, laziness or any bureaucratic matters, thought Martin. There was just dicking with emotional ones.
After all the waiting and knuckle grasping, a dumpy, ashen doctor finally shuffled out to meet Teresa’s alleged husband. The doctor talked and Martin absorbed every word, pause and facial expression as though he’d need them later for all-out war. Many things were iterated and reiterated and Martin dwelled on those more than anything else. Aside from the head trauma from her fall, which Martin was assured Teresa would recover from, he also had these beauties to chew on: Localized squamous cell lung carcinoma. Stage 2b. Maybe video Assisted Thoracic Surgery? Lobectomy. And in the recent hour he had a new line of items to add: A pulmonary embolism. She’s sedated, oxygenated and drugged on a blood thinner called enoxparin.
Martin double-checked everything in memory from the library of med books he’d read. He drew a blank and cursed himself for not asking more questions. Now questions prevailed but only in his mind. What had the doctor meant by her doing well? Was she doing well with the embolism? With the head wound? Or with the cancer? Or was she doing well with everything? And cancer in stage 2b, was that all that bad? There were more numbers and letters, so was she even halfway there? She still had more stages to go. It might be possible to skip a stage. What if her stage 2b wasn’t like a full-blown stage 2b? Were there such distinctions? Who the hell rated these things? Who determined the level of tragedy associated with an alphanumeric?
“We need to get her ready for some hard work ahead. Tests, possible surgery. Undoubtedly she’ll need a course of radiation.”
“She won’t do that. We can’t—it would keep us here too long.”
“Pardon?”
“I guess I’ll speak to her when she comes around.”
The hospital wouldn’t let Martin in yet. They’d said he could visit in half an hour, which really meant an hour and a half in hospital time. That meant he had time to meditate a little more. This could be a good thing. Martin felt that in times of panic, Mother Nature was his only refuge of solace. He wondered sometimes if this affinity for the outdoors had been inherited through blood—through the Old Domain. It didn’t matter right now. All he knew was that he’d seen a lake up the street from the hospital on the way in and that’s where he headed. Teresa’s medical folders were snuggled inside his jacket under his arm to shelter them.
He found a cold stone bench and sat in the rain. For a time he just moved his eyes across the rippling surface of the lake. In the outlying shadows he saw indistinct humps: a golf course. The nets of a nearby driving range shuttered in the wind. He’d studied everything in Teresa’s file so carefully there was no need to even look at the past results of sputum tests or needle biopsies. The chest X-ray performed today was foremost in his memory, like a map to a buried treasure chest filled with radioactive gold. Leaning back and pinching between his eyes, he could see the white hacky-sack lump floating in her lung’s outline. The lymph nodes hadn’t reported metastasizing yet, and the tumor’s growth was slower than other types of cancerous masses. But did any of that sit well with him?
Hell no, he thought. I’m losing her.
Thinking about the Hearts crushed him with guilt, so he tried to push away any thoughts associated with the babies. It didn’t work. The idea of abandoning them to schedule an appointment with a thoracic surgeon left a bitter taste on his lips. Teresa was right: it couldn’t be done. The passion they had for the Hearts would not let them run from duty. Martin would go to the Hearts, as though under a spell, just like he had every year. And yet that doctor had no idea when Teresa would be coherent—it could be a couple days. Maybe if she woke up tomorrow they could see about that surgeon—
“You’re fooling yourself,” he said to the night.
Teresa would hate him for bringing her to the hospital in the first place. She’s going to wake up pissed.
The need to be absolutely alone overtook him. Not just alone from people, but from this world. He glanced up and down the street. Nobody was coming. The cold zone in his mind fluxed and that strange feeling of lost virginity sluiced down his spine. A mantle shaped around his body like a balloon. There wasn’t much ghost matter, only a thin layer with the capability of fifteen minutes or so of residence. Martin rolled forward inside it, the rain running at crazy angles around him from the bending contours. He coughed a bit, having sacrificed some oxygen.
The mantle bubble rolled into the lake with a subtle splash. Dull gray-brown fluid hugged the mantle and drank him in. The lake dipped to about ten feet deep in the center. He dropped under the surface completely and sat down inside the stuffy bubble. Snaky silver movements in the dark indicated fish, but he couldn’t see them through the darkness and silt. Regulating his breathing in short gasps, Martin reached into his coat and pulled out the medical file folder. The chest X-ray was on top. He couldn’t see the image but he knew the white blob sat there on the cold paper, displaced from its environment, just as he was right now. More than anything, he just wanted to bring Teresa here, or somewhere deep in the ocean, and wall them in with a mantle that would last forever. Doing something like that would be worth the agony of creation—to be away from the world. They’d be like his little fish in its plastic bubble aquarium.
And you’d both suffocate, dumb ass. The thought came with a sharp gasp. Inside a permanent mantle they would wither and die. Would they decompose? Or would their bodies remain preserved at the bottom of the ocean? That was an interesting thought. He tucked the file into his coat, stood up and began rolling his way back to shore. He felt done with his communion with nature and his mind raced with new ideas.
His eyes broke the water’s surface. A sedan sped down the road. When its headlights vanished, Martin crept forth. The weak fibers of his mantle crackled. He pressed his fingers one more time into the wall. No matter how they were shaped, weak mantles tended to feel like warm sandpaper. He’d never enjoyed touching them. Once he was firmly on land he let the mantle go, grateful for fresh air.
The half-formed plan stuck in his mind like an arrowhead. His steps back to the hospital quickened. This time he wouldn’t balk. He would make it work. All he had to do was set up some kind of fallback for Teresa if something happened to him. A safe zone like none they’d ever built. Safe for her and the Hearts, not for the Church. But the safe zone was the easy part. If Teresa didn’t regain consciousness tonight, he could go out tomorrow morning. Then he had to use what little time they had remaining. That would be where all his energy would go…
The automatic doors of the hospital lobby parted with a sigh. Martin’s blood felt enriched with hope. It was a new feeling, knowing exactly what to do and why. He almost wanted to sing out for the first time in this unending chase. He understood the near future, despite the underpinnings of his decision. Something harsh and irrational howled inside him, promising that with a slight misstep this plan could destroy them both.
Well, he guessed it might. But that was love.