Читать книгу The Hard Way Back to Heaven - Karl Dehmelt - Страница 15

7

September 20, 2009

One of Michael McGregor’s best friends had been a man named Thomas Rosenbaum. Thomas had been almost fourteen years older than Mike, but the two had been friends for over 30 years at the time of Thomas’s passing. He had been soft-spoken, a man who made up for his lack of finances in the wealth of his compassion. Thomas, or Thom, as his friends knew him, had never left Willow Grove. That’s where he had raised his only son, Barry, and where his wife, Nancy, had left him when she fled off the face of the planet with the tandem of a spiraling addiction to painkillers and another man named Victor. Thom raised his son as a single father into a man of quality any pair of adults would’ve been proud to call their own, while working two jobs, in a house he financed himself.

Michael had been married his high school sweetheart, Rachel Maria Edwards, and had gotten her pregnant when they were both 16. They ended up marrying when both of them were 20, a childless couple.

Thom was the best man at Michael’s first wedding. After seven years of Rachel becoming addicted to the same vein of drugs which had stolen Thom’s wife, Thom told Michael to ditch her before she wrecked Michael like a drunken teenager in a sports car. Between best friends, there is a mindset and a protection which exists far beyond the scope of logic. Six weeks following the divorce, Rachel Maria Edwards tried to sell an undercover police officer a package of the most potent cocaine in the history of Willow Grove. She became famous for creating one of the largest drug busts in the history of her county, and she fell off the face of the planet.

Michael started relying on Thom after Eve moved away. Sister Eve is a woman as strong willed as her biological mother and as benevolent as Harlan. She had caused quite an argument at their biological mother’s funeral, and Michael, who had housed his biological mother and cared for her in her dying days, ejected Eve in front of all in attendance. It had taken Eve over 15 years since the woman’s death to acknowledge that a part of the woman had been worth a service.

Their mom had given Eve her blonde hair and blue eyes, the angular face, medium build, and the light freckles adorning her California trimmed skin. Harlan bequeathed to her his personality, his movements, and his musical taste. Such is the reason for Eve and Michael’s silence over seven years—the classic battle between their biological mother and Harlan lives on.

The argument which split Eve and Michael was over a trivial matter. Michael’s heart absorbs every shot fired at him. Every communication runs a direct line to his conscience. They had screamed at each other. She had been in from California to visit, probably for either an anniversary or birthday. The words flying had been words of calamity, bringing up the alcohol, the fighting, and the darkness of a past that still lies in the house Harlan calls home. Michael never understands why Eve moved to California, and Eve never understands why Michael stayed. The apocalyptic argument hides now underneath a set of stairs somewhere in a house.

Thom had told Michael to wait, to let her come back on her own. Thom had seen the pain in his friend’s face. Whenever Michael was in pain, he’d travel over to Thom’s small house, and talk amidst the reruns on TV and the small air conditioner poking into the living room like a burglar through the window. Michael was convinced to follow Thom’s advice, waiting for Eve to come home, rejecting the cards she sent. If she wanted a relationship with her nephew, she would have to come through him.

“Just because the two of you don’t talk don’t mean the two of them shouldn’t.” Thom would say as he lit a cigarette, the sparks bouncing off his dark skin.

“Thom, I don’t get it. What is so hard about her contacting me, making this kind of stuff right?”

“People aren’t put here to be understood, Mike.” Thom’s house had featured a brick fireplace among its five rooms. Thom would toss in the cigarette buds, brush the residue off his tan overcoat, and walk to the fridge to grab something to eat from the night before.

“Understand this much about your sister, my friend.” Thom would say as he reached into the fridge. “Actually, understand it about your entire goddamn family. You McGregors have a lot of pain in this town.”

“I know.” Michael would look across the small path. Mike wondered what would happen if he moved his entire family across the street to live in proximity to this man, who had inspired and aided him when either his father was too busy or his sister was nowhere to be found.

“I know Eve. I’ve known her, you, your dad, your mom, all of them, since you were still singing those love songs in the 70’s like some white version of Stevie Wonder.”

Michael would smile and enjoy a laugh of freedom.

“At least you weren’t blind in that way, though. Some others, like with that Rachel Edwards bitch you got hitched to, that made me second guess.”

“Hey now,” Mike said, bumming his cigarette on the concrete outside the door. “We all make mistakes. Some just stick with us longer than we’d like.”

“Admit it,” Thom replied, walking back out onto the porch, two Fillets o’ Fish from the local McDonalds wrapped in his hands. “You want to talk to her.”

Michael sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do, but …”

“But what?”

“I don’t know if I’m at a point where I want to do that, with the way my life is.”

Thom stopped halfway through unwrapping his sandwich.

“Bullshit.”

“How is that bullshit?”

“Because,” Thom would say, his intense eyes looking at Michael with guidance and experience, the dark complexion of his skin contrasting with the whiteness of his shirt but still falling in line with the tan jacket.

“You love your sister. You miss her to death, and you feel bad for your parents that you two can’t stand in the same room without digging up things, or people, who’ve been dead for twenty years.”

“Maybe they aren’t buried that well.” Mike said, lighting up.

“They’re not. You know it, I know it, your dad knows it, your mom knows it, and Eve sure as hell knows it.” Thom bit the sandwich. Ketchup splattered onto the ground, from the wound on the bread.

“Let me tell you something, Mike.” Thom swallowed.

“Some shit you can bury, some of it you can push down, some of it you can run from. Some men run from it their entire lives, trying to go faster and faster or wait ‘til it just falls away from them, as if it’s gonna die. But it can’t die, because it’s a part of you. It’s what made you who you are. So you and Eve are gonna have this conflict, this pain that comes from whatever your mama or daddy did when you were kids, whatever you left back on Wales road in 1970-whenever. Let me tell you, Mike, you can’t outrun parts of yourself. You can’t do it. You can jump states, jump countries, kill people, hell, you can even try to snuff that part of yourself with things like money, or sex, or drugs, or stamp collections, or even stupid shit like smoking a pack of cigs ‘til your lungs fall out, but you will never get enough.”

Thom folded the wrapper, tossing it aside.

“The only way to get true happiness in this life, the only way to do it, is through the people you love and those who love you. Look at this shithole,” Thom stood up, gesturing to the house behind him.

“I don’t have anything special. Yeah, I’ve had a job, and I’ve earned my money well. But I ain’t no millionaire. I don’t have a heaven here at the moment. But I’ve got a kid who I’ve given a good head through hard work. I have the ability to sit here and yell at you when you’re acting like an asshole. I have grandkids from that same son who I spoil completely rotten, and, on top of that, I have the ability to sit down and night and know I ain’t gonna go to bed with a regret for what I have done. I’m sixty, man. You’re forty, forty one? Shit.”

Thom walked over, and slapped Michael on the back.

“You ain’t gonna be happy ‘til you get Eve back in your life. That’s your sister, she’s the only one you got.”

Mike looked up at him, taking in the words slowly, partitioning them as to not overload his senses.

“I’ve got you, too. You’re close enough to family.”

Thom grimaced in false pain.

“Mike, you’re white. I’m black. Nobody would ever believe that you and I are from the same parents, especially when yours are both white as printer paper.”

Mike thought for a moment.

“You know who would believe it?”

Thom sighed, standing at the threshold to the house.

“Who?”

Mike stood up, walking inside through the open door.

“Stevie fucking Wonder.”

Thom laughed, a deep, hearty sound; a bass well tuned.

“Now that was just mean. You’re a mean man, Mike. Maybe that’s why Eve left you for California.”

“Yeah, right.”

Thom stopped him short of the door, and looked at him straight in the eyes.

“If you don’t do it for you,” Thom said. “Do it for your kid. He needs to know her.”

“I know.”

“Listen to me, let me tell you, as a single parent, there’s one lesson I learned,” Thom stood abreast of Michael, and pointed to the cautious light of the afternoon.

“To you, he may be the sun, but to those other people out there,” Thom gestured to the hedges and the neighborhood.

“He’s just some small little star out there in the sky, a million miles away. So you had better make him feel like he’s the only son you’ve got, because he is. And he was given to you as a gift. You almost lost him once. He needs to have every opportunity to succeed. But I know you, Michael.” Thom smiled, the wrapper from the sandwich pressed on Michael’s chest.

“I know your kid, too. And I’m gonna tell you something. No matter what happens, Alex is gonna be ok. He’s gonna make it.”

“I’ll make sure he is.” Michael said, iron in his eyes.

“You’d better, or I’ll haunt your ass. It don’t matter if I’m alive, or dead, or in some retirement home with Alzheimer’s like how my own daddy died, I’ll tape a goddamn sticky note to the wall wherever it is I sleep to remind me. If I forget every other thing in the entire world besides my own family, I will remember to come and kick your ass when I wake up the next morning.”

Thom developed emphysema in 2004, coupled with a crippling staph infection in 2005 that never healed. Mike remembered coming to meet him at the care facility, watching his old friend wither away from a disease no amount of heart or resolve could overcome. The very lungs with which Thom had spoken inspirational words became his downfall. For the last three months of his life, he was stuck on a ventilator. Michael had been the friend who helped him cleanse himself after using the restroom, who had aided him in dressing himself in return for every thread Thom had sewn into Michael’s life.

The sound of the ventilator haunts Michael, the pulse of automatic respiration. It had taken the proudest man Michael’s ever seen, the brother beyond all limits of biology, and turned him into nothing but a breath count until he passed. Only the machine remains.

Michael McGregor stares at Dr. Richard Fost.

“I’m sorry?” Michael says. Lauren sits in the same chair she used during the previous visit, flanking him. Dr. Fost reads from a chart.

“The surgery might require for you to be on a ventilator. We’re talking about removing part of a lung here, Mike. It’s a little more risky than the bronchoscopy.”

“Well,” Michael wets his lips. “At least it isn’t tuberculosis. How do you pronounce it again?”

“Mycobacterium Avium-Intracellulare infection.” Fost reads the words from the assortment of paper. He holds the results of the bronchoscopy, the initial chest x-ray, and a bevy of other tests as if they are scripture.

Lauren stares at the floor, her hands folded in her lap. Occasionally, she glances up to meet either Fost or Michael’s eyes. Pieces of advice flit from her mind to her teeth, bouncing off and ricocheting back down her throat.

“I’ll just call it MAI, to keep things simpler.” Fost continues.

“Like I said, you have two treatment options. First, we thought it was tuberculosis because the symptoms of MAI and TB are extremely similar. However, there are some major differences between them. Now, while the cells are showing a nearly flawless indication of MAI, we cannot yet rule out other diseases. The only way to be 100% certain would be to go into your lung and remove the mass. That would require the lung biopsy I mentioned earlier, and would require you, potentially, to be on a ventilator. That’s the only surefire way to define your illness. The other option is a salvo of drugs that we can give you to treat this disease.” Fost changes his document order like a coordinator on the sideline of a professional sports game.

“The only issues with those are that they have some detrimental side effects.”

“Such as what?” Michael asks.

“Fatigue, generally. It saps the energy out of you.”

“How long would I have to take these drugs?”

Fost sets the clipboard down.

“Anywhere from twelve to eighteen months.”

Lauren looks up quickly. “Really?”

Fost nods.

“Yes. Again, we will continuously monitor your developments from here if you choose the medicinal route. If you choose the surgery route, which will allow us to reach a concrete conclusion, albeit at a more immediate risk, then it might be different. In the end, it is up to the two of you. Personally, I recommend the surgical option.”

Lauren clicks her feet on the floor softly. “What other diseases could it be?”

Fost coughs. “There is a very, very slim chance of cancer cells being present.”

Lauren freezes. She sees Michael looking at the ground. His eyes are taking the floor apart and putting it back together, tile by tile. The Cheshire cat of fear perches directly under him, grinning at her with its cold, iris-absent eyes. Fear and Hurt stare at her from that big, dumb animal.

Michael finally speaks. “I don’t want to be on a ventilator.”

Lauren shakes her head, and the cat is gone. “What?”

Michael’s eyes are the shots of a flare gun on a distant shore. “I’m going to go the medicinal route.”

Lauren digs her nails into the plastic of her chair. There’s the man she fought with, loved, argued with, and made love with for 18 years. The father of her child, the man she gave herself to utterly and wholly. He’s electing to deny the opportunity of surgery and instead use drugs to fight the illness. Cancer? The mouth of the Cheshire cat grins at her with death on its lips like a balm.

“What possibility is there that it could be cancer?” Lauren asks Fost.

“Lauren,” Michael interjects, wiping his face with his hands. “It’s not cancer. They’d be able to see it.”

Fost selects his words carefully, a tailor mending at gunpoint.

“We cannot rule out that it might be cancer, but we’re almost positive that it’s MAI. If you choose the drugs, we’ll monitor your treatment, if you choose the surgery, we remove the bleb, and we eventually remove part of the lung.”

Michael and Lauren’s eyes talk.

Why? her hazels ask.

Everything will be ok, Michael’s blues reply.

“The medication, then?” Fost takes the pen from the top of his clipboard.

Michael turns to him like a soldier approaching the front of a phalanx.

“Yes.”

Silence leaks into the room, a clear and odorless liquid clogging their lungs.

“Alright.” Fost says, pushing his chair over to the granite desk in the corner.