Miriam's Well (16 page)

The question startled me. Of course I wanted to be well, and I wanted God to answer my prayers, and I wanted not to disappoint Brother James or Mama, or disgrace myself with cowardice and infidelity. But I could not tell him any of this.

He continued, “Because I know what the church wants, what Brother James wants, what the hospital wants, what Adam wants, what I want. But my God, Miriam, what do
you
want?”

It was a question I had never expected to hear, and at the same time had been dreading all along. And I thought about Mama, when she talked about my father: “No one ever asked me what I wanted.”

“I want the pain to be over with.”

“What's it worth to you?”

“I don't understand.”

“How far are you willing to go to be pain-free?”

It was unfair of him to ask; he wasn't a believer. “Well, I'm not willing to denounce God.”

“But are you willing to take legal measures open to you? You could petition the Court to let you give informed consent for your own treatment. If you knew what you wanted.”

“I could never do that.”

“Wait, wait, consider it at least. Admittedly, it's stacked against you, because you're only seventeen, and you have one accessible parent who has already denied treatment. But I ran across a 1970 Kansas case where a seventeen-year-old-girl gave consent for a skin graft from her arm to patch the end of a finger that got cut off in a car door. That wasn't even a life-threatening case, and they accepted her consent. We could use this as a precedent, if you wanted to.”

I shook my head.

“Don't reject it yet. Think about it.”

“I don't think it's right, Mr. Bergen, for you to suggest such an idea when you're representing not just me, but Mama and the church, too.”

“You're too smart.” He slumped back in the chair, looking troubled. I felt a pang of guilt. My being sick was causing everyone I liked so much anguish.

“Here's the thing,” Mr. Bergen said. “I've got Adam biting at my heels on this case, and he's not as whipped up over the Constitution or freedom of religion as I am. All he wants is to have you up and well. The truth is, I want that too, Miriam. Believe me, it's no fun to come here at lunchtime and see you cringing with pain and turning away this beautiful gray hospital grub.” To punctuate his point, he got up and lifted the aluminum hood that hid something stewlike on my plate. He was right: the meat, the potatoes, and the green beans were all gray. He quickly covered the dismal mess up again. “If you want to pursue this informed consent thing, you're right, I can't ethically represent you on that, but I can ask some of your court-appointed people to check it out and advise you on it. Just say the word.”

Again, I shook my head. “The subject is closed tight.”

He cleared his throat and sat down again, fumbled for a plastic bag of apple slices in his lunch, and offered me a slice. I turned it down with the same determination, as if accepting it meant accepting his blasphemous idea. I knew I could never go against Mama and Brother James and the church. I just would not allow myself to think of this in terms of my comfort alone. I had to think about what God had in mind for me. Never for an instant did I doubt that God would heal me with remedies far stronger and long-lasting than those of the doctors. Where I waivered was in wondering when. How soon? Would my strength hold out until He saw fit to relieve my pain? I wasn't afraid of dying. I was terrified of pain and what it told about the weakness of my soul.

Mr. Bergen said, “I'll bet you think if you did this consent thing, you'd be betraying your mother and Brother James, right?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “That's part of it. The other part is I'm not honestly sure I know what I want anymore. I am praying for a clear sign from God. I know it will come soon. Be patient.”

“Well, there's another alternative, Miriam.” He blew up his empty sack and popped it, just as Adam would have done. “Gerri Kensler, your social worker, could track down your father and appeal to him to give consent for treatment. The Court would go with his consent, and you could be returned to your mother's custody, and both you and Mom would be off the hook. How about it?”

“That's impossible. He can't be found.”

“He's in Portland, Maine. Sandstone Street. Everyone is findable,” Mr. Bergen said.

“Not this one, not now. I think you'd better switch to your lawyer hat.”

He put his hand up, signaling “halt.” “Okay, okay. We never had this conversation.”

Something bizarre happened. I think I was hallucinating. It wasn't frightening; no devilish monsters appeared to taunt me, but I wasn't tracking at all. The nurse came in to take my blood pressure, and she talked to me from the deep, wide end of a tunnel, of a funnel. Sound poured like liquid through the cone. I became aware of the ticking of the clock, which seemed as loud as a drumbeat. I itched, but my efforts to scratch my arm were clumsy, as though I had to reach through whipped cream.

MEER-EE-AHM, TAKE UP THY TIMBREL …

I didn't exactly hear the words, nor did I see them. They seemed to be formed in the beige sand of my mind, etched by eddies of swirling waters, and when the waters parted, the words were clear as sound. MEER-EE-AHM, TAKE UP THY TIMBREL …

“Whazza timbrel?” I asked the nurse.

“A what?” She had my right arm propped on the shelf of her slung hip, and she pumped air into the blood pressure cuff.

“Tim-b-rel.”

“Never heard of it.” She let the pump go, and it hissed like air from a tire. “You've got company.” She signaled for Adam to come in.

“Hi.” He flopped on the end of my bed. “How're you feeling?”

“Fuzzy.” My tongue was thick and stuck to my teeth. I know I talked far too loud. My voice bounded back to me off the walls, but I didn't hear it inside my head at all. “Whazza timbrel?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” I sensed Adam pulling away. I struggled to keep him in focus. Then he was on his feet, backing toward the door, blocks away, maybe a mile, and then he was gone, way off down the beach. He must have alerted the nurse to my crazy condition, because she hurried in and put a cold washcloth on my forehead, hung an IV bag, and waited by my phone for the duty resident to call back. As soon as she had the doctor's approval, she called for a lab tech to draw blood. “Analyze it stat,” she said.

I drifted in and out of sleep, surprised to see her still standing there. “What timezit?” I bellowed.

“It's 4:15.”

“What timezit?”

“It's 4:18.”

“What timezit?” And on it went until the lab results came back, and she stuck me with the IV.

The next morning my breakfast tray came without milk or butter. I wouldn't have used either one, but hospitals have a way of snatching away your major privileges, leaving you to indignantly demand the silliest ones back. I commanded Dr. Gregory to my bedside, and he explained everything.

“Your calcium climbed right off the charts, Miriam. It made you incoherent and muddled. Did you feel slightly out of control?”

“Yes, it was awful. I probably did something terribly embarrassing. Was I cackling like the three witches in
Macbeth
?”

He snickered. “I've seen worse.”

“But why did my calcium leap so high?”

He wrinkled up his brow before answering. “Well, that's a symptom of tumor activity in the bones. I'm ordering another bone scan.”

“Not again!”

“It alarms me, kid, I'll admit it. We know what you've got, and we know how to treat it aggressively, but we're not treating it.”

“You think it'll get a lot worse?”

“No question, the longer we delay.”

“Well, I won't allow it to get worse.”

He patted my hand. “You do your best to stop it. Everything helps.”

With the calcium regulated, I was back to my old self in a day, but I still had the IV in when Adam came to visit me after school. “Did I look totally stupid yesterday?” I asked.

“Let's put it this way. On a scale of one to ten, with one being stone cold dead and face down in the river, and ten being Joan Rivers doing a two-minute monologue, you'd be a twelve. If I didn't know about Brother James and the church and all, I'd have thought you were stoned.”

“Thanks for getting the nurse in right away. I feel more like a regular person now.”

“Can we go for a walk? I hear the scenery's beautiful down by the elevator.”

I yanked at the tether of the IV. “Too complicated. We'd have to roll the IV stand down the hall, too, as a chaperone.”

“Aw, forget it,” he said, pouncing on the foot of my bed.

“Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about this odd conversation I had with your father. He's really confused about my case. Do you think he'll resign?”

“Not him. He's always preaching about long-term commitments and sticking it out and hanging in there. I guarantee, he's in it till the end.”

The end? But I was relieved. I was also afraid for Mr. Bergen, because it was wrong for him to be talking about bypassing Mama and the men, or hunting down the man who was just barely, by scientific definition, my father. I thought about telling Brother James that our lawyer was practically defecting, but I liked Adam's father so much. I really wanted him on my side. What I wasn't sure about was exactly which side Adam was on.

“Adam, I know you're a friend I can trust and I know you wouldn't intentionally do anything to hurt me, so please tell me something.”

“Anything. My locker combination?”

“It's 30-18-9. I already know it. I knew it before.”

“Before what?”

“Before
before
. I mean, before things got hysterical and I started fainting in class.”

“You spied on my locker combination?” He pretended to be horrendously shocked. “Don't you realize you could get suspended from school for that?”

“Too late. I'm already out. Actually, I knew everything about you. I knew your birthday, I knew your home address. I passed your house every chance I got. How humiliating to admit this.” I covered my face with my hands, but peeked at Adam through my fingers. How would he react to such a corny disclosure?

“Wait a minute, hold it. Now I've got this figured out. This whole incurable disease thing was just a trick to trap me?”

“Yes! Has it worked?”

“And you got Mrs. Loomis, you got the Great Wall of China, to assign us as poetry mates as part of your diabolical plot?”

“Worse. I got Emily Dickinson to write the poem about the thing with feathers, so you could look idiotic trying to interpret it, and I could save you from idiocy.”

“I didn't look idiotic.”

“Yes, you did. Bickering over words and telling me that Emily's frail little bird was a vulture. That's got to be the least poetic of all birds.”

“What about a falcon? Or a bald eagle?”

“Bald eagle!” Suddenly the mood shifted. “Adam, I'm having another bone scan, and if that—thing—is bigger, the doctor will ask the judge for me to have chemotherapy, drugs. Dr. Gregory says I could lose—”

“Your lunch?” Adam went into a violent wretching act.

“My hair.”

That sobered him, but old Adam, I really had to hand it to him, made a fast recovery. “Okay, from now on your nickname is Indian Squaw Bald Eagle.” He leaned across the hump of my knees, ruffled my hair, and shook it all over my head. I saw his sad eyes through straggles of hair. He drew a strand of hair to his face. “I like the way it smells,” he said. “Head and Shoulders?”

“No, Simon and Garfunkel.” It felt so good to laugh with him. You can't hurt and laugh at the same time. And I forgot about the question I was going to ask him, until he was gone, and I was alone again.

After the bone scan, Dr. Gregory asked the Court to order treatment without delay: the tumor was growing and spreading. What I had was called Blanding's sarcoma. I wondered who Blanding was and how his children felt about having a cancer named after them. Dr. Gregory's big concern with the Blanding thing was that it would leap to my lungs.

Adam's father went to court to argue for me. I suspected, when Mama didn't come to the hospital that afternoon, how the decision had gone. Mr. Bergen came to tell me about it, Adam with him. “Dr. Gregory asked to administer a drug called Cytocel. It's very effective against your type of cancer.”

“Has a terrific track record,” Adam said. They sat at either side of my bed, and I turned my head from side to side as if I were watching a tennis match. Finally Adam came around and sat on the bed between his father and me.

Mr. Bergen said, “I argued before the judge about the possible side effects.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, nothing important. I just had to make it sound as bleak as possible, to appeal to the judge's weak stomach.”

“Like what?” I asked again.

“A few intestinal problems, nausea, occasional hair loss, canker sores. In rare, rare cases, and, hardly ever in kids your age, kidney complications. There have been a few incidents of congestive heart failure, two or three cases maybe, but nothing you'd need to worry about. Other than the tumor, you're as healthy as an Amazon.”

“So,” I asked quietly, but I already knew the decision, “did you persuade the squeamish judge?”

Adam took my non-IV'd hand, even in front of his father. I would never have dared do such a thing in front of my mother. We locked fingers as Mr. Bergen delivered the treacherous news: “The judge ordered that, beginning tomorrow, you're to start on Cytocel, in the dose prescribed by Dr. Gregory.”

“Any other drugs?” I asked. I tried to sound calm, but my heart was racing.

“The hospital has to go to court for any other treatment, like combinations of drugs or immunotherapy or radiation. This is a one-trick pony, Miriam. But, once the judge has allowed one, the hospital won't have any trouble convincing him of others. I'm sorry.” I thought he might cry. Adam looked positively jubilant, which was the answer to the question I hadn't asked him.