Moonface (7 page)

Charlie leaned over me and pushed away a teardrop on my cheek with his thumb. “Why are you crying?” he said, though he knew the answer. His voice was quieter than I've ever heard it before. “There's no reason to cry.”

He helped me up from the gurney, putting his hand between my shoulder blades as I sat up. The catheter swung like a pendant jutting from the side of my neck with tubes hanging from it. We walked in slow motion across the hall to a room as wide and as bright as a cafeteria, but free of tables and commotion. There were just white vinyl seats around a large nurses” station. Each of the seats had a machine beside it.

A nurse with blond hair and thick black roots walked us through the treatment procedure, showing us the scale where I would weigh myself upon entry and departure, showing us my assigned seat and machine. “There are blankets if you get cold. You'll probably get cold,” she said. “Pillows, too, if you need them.”

Once in the chair, I watched as she flushed my new catheter with a syringe of saline. Then she took the short tubes hanging from it and attached them to the long tubes dangling from the machine. There were buttons she pushed and liquid solutions she shook, but by the end of all her maneuvering, the long clear tubes that tethered me to the machine turned red with blood. I had started my treatment. “We'll just do a couple hours on the first day, okay?” she said. “Just holler if you need me.”

Charlie sat in front of me on a stool, reading the digital numbers on the dialysis machine. He was scrunching his eyes over me to see, and then he focused back on me. “See, not so bad,” he said. “There are some good parts to all this.”

“Like what?” I said, my voice sounding a little hoarse.

“Well, it seems that dialysis has nothing at all to do with dying. It's a misnomer: die-alysis. Should be Iive-alysis.”

“Thank god for misnomers,” I said, smirking.

“Really!” he agreed. “This is going to make you feel better. For the past few weeks, I've been worried about getting a call that you were passed out on the floor or in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. But now, you're not going to get sick anymore. Now your blood pressure will even out and you'll quit getting those weird old lady problems.”

“You don't even know what this is, Charlie. This is bad. Three hours a day, three times a week.” I opened my hand and looked around the room. “This is like my second home now. It's like my new life.” I heard the whining in my voice and I tried to trap the sound back into my mouth.

“Three hours? Do you know what this is? That's a nap! That's a long lunch! That's a couple soap operas and a talk show. Shoot, Moony, it's nothing.”

The windows in the dialysis room were black now. It was past seven at night, and I realized that I was tired. The overhead light had been dimmed so the late-night customers could sleep.

“Have you eaten anything yet?” Charlie said.

“Not since lunch.”

Charlie stood and asked a nurse who was passing by, “Can she eat?”

“Yes, something small,” she said. “Something from the vending machines maybe?”

“Ah! She loves the vending machines.” Charlie grinned in my direction. “What do you want?”

I pretended like I was trying to think about it. “I want Cheetos.”

“You got it!” He stepped from the dimness of my room to the glow of the hall. My machine started a high-pitched beep just as Charlie faded out of sight. Immediately, the nurse with the black roots jogged from behind the nurses” station and headed toward me. She was not even done fidgeting with my machine before another one across the room began to beep.

“I swear these machines can talk to each other. They try to see how crazy they can drive me,” she said. She was definitely younger than I was, maybe just out of nursing school, but she seemed like a veteran. She pressed a few buttons on the machine and swiftly poured liquid from one bottle into another, as if she were making a cocktail. She set the bottles down at the bottom of my machine, adjusted some tubes, then popped up on her white sneakers and headed toward the other noisemaker. “You should be fine, sweetie,” she called back to me before she turned completely. “Just a little adjustment.”

I didn't know what she had done, but now I was supposedly back on track—in a matter of speaking. But, really, there was more recalibrating to do. What now? Is teaching out? How was I supposed to plan for the summer, let alone the semester? This changed everything.

My co-patients in the dialysis room were few at this time of night. Later, I would learn that the prime-time slots were in the morning—best to get the burden out of your way as early in the day as you can. The few who were there were much older than I—a couple of grandmothers, a droopy old man whom I had yet to see open his eyes or lift his head. These were retirees with time to spare. In a secluded corner of the big room, behind a glass wall, there was one young man who seemed more muscular and fit than the others. He wore an orange jumpsuit and shackles around his ankles. He had his own private escort—a police officer—and they sat in the corner and watched TV. The irony of this man's situation was not lost on me: he was not only imprisoned by the state, but he was also shackled down to this machine. But as he and the police officer laughed in unison at whatever show they were watching, it seemed to me that the inmate wasn't really bothered by his situation.

When Charlie came back, I told him I wished this machine were draining more than my toxins away. I wished it were pulling this disease away, or pulling away everything that's wrong with my body. “You'd think that if they could come up with something to clean out your blood, they could figure out a way to get rid of the underlying problem, too,” I told him.

Charlie put a hand down on each armrest of my chair and bent down so his eyes were even with mine: “Then pretend it does. This is a new moment for you. This is the new you. Pretend for a second that everything you're scared of is getting washed out by this machine. That somehow, you'll come out of this whole thing feeling refreshed and brand new. Healthy. Maybe even better than before.”

“Yeah, right?” I said, exhaling with force.

“Really,” Charlie said, not taking his eyes off mine. “Believe.”

When I secured a morning time slot the following week, Charlie drove me to dialysis on his way to work. Sometimes Beth picked me up when I was through, or Bonnie, or whichever one of our friends was available. Sometimes I'd stand out on the sidewalk behind the hospital in the hot sun, weary and ready to pass out, and I'd wait for the campus bus to take me back home.

I quit my job at the Johnson County Administrative Building. Tammy didn't like me anyway. And I, apparently, was too distracted to pick up another distraction. On the days I had dialysis, I came home from the treatment and I slunk myself down on the couch. Charlie kept all the windows open all day to make sure I could smell the grass and watch the kids across the street blasting through the slip-n-slide. It was, after all, summer.

After a few weeks of coming home to find me exhausted on the couch, Charlie came into the kitchen one day and offered me his kidney.

I was standing over the pea-green linoleum counter chopping onions to add to the stir-fry, so my eyes were already a little misty when he said, “I'll give you mine.” He sat down in front of the kitchen table, laid his forearms in front of him, and entwined his fingers. I joined him, and a low-hanging pendant lamp lit the space between us and made me feel like we were in the interview room on a TV cop show. A comedy wherein investigators in shiny black suits hunched over us. I pursed my lips and waited for the punch line.

“It makes sense,” Charlie said. “I'm here, I'm healthy, and it would take you off dialysis.”

The options I had been presented with were clear: I could be put on the transplant waiting list. My father was thinking about donating, but I discouraged him, because I knew it would drive him crazy to be away from his patients for that long. I also did not want to imagine what kind of patient he would be. And my mother, though she was out of consideration because of her hypertension, offered to call in some favors to see if she could get a kidney off the black market. “Those people want to give their kidneys up,” she reassured me when I brought up the ethics of selling and buying body parts.

But Charlie? The thought might have crossed my mind for a second, but the idea seemed like a stretch. First, he would have to want to do it. And he'd have to be a match. I couldn't stop thinking about what this would say about me. What kind of person asks her boyfriend for a kidney? I had dismissed the idea almost as quickly as I thought of it, and I had never mentioned it to Charlie.

It was hard for me to believe that now, as he was broaching the subject, I was slowly getting excited by the prospect of getting Charlie's kidney. But I tried to play it cool.

“We've got to get tested. And if you happen to match up, I'll give it some thought.”

“Don't worry,” he said, “we're a match.” He nodded once, as if he knew it to be true. That's when a girl can start fantasizing and get her hopes up high. When she can stare across a table and see a pale white guy with a five o'clock shadow and a torn old T-shirt and see her Prince Charming.

“There are stipulations, of course,” he said, squaring his shoulders.

“Of course,” I said. I was just waiting for them.

“You've got to watch your diet.” I nodded enthusiastically.

“If we decide to do this, you've got to cut out the bacon, the Cheetos, and watch your salt intake. We'll keep an eye on your blood pressure.” Our dietary habits in recent years had been a point of contention for me and Charlie, seeing as how Charlie had not only the mannerisms and humor of an old man but also the diet of one. Charlie was big on fiber, on an apple a day. On top of that, he was slowly eating less and less meat. Bad news for an omnivore girlfriend who was the main cook of the household. “Chicken, too?” I asked him.

“Chicken, especially!” Charlie said. “You know how they treat those birds? It's deplorable.”

“But chicken is like 90 percent of my repertoire!” I protested. I couldn't imagine life without my mother's pork- and shrimp-stuffed lumpia, or her chicken adobo. And lechon. No roasted pig? Ever? I wasn't sure he was serious about his commitment until one night at a dinner party, when he'd waved off the hostess's flank steak and dove head first into the tofu meatballs.

The hostess had then turned to me and said, “You, too? Are you vegetarian?”

“No,” I'd said, “I'm Filipino.”

Back at the bargaining table, Charlie was waiting for a response. “Okay,” I said. “A cleaner diet.”

“No more drinking,” Charlie continued. “I'm talking like one glass of wine at dinner, maybe. And no more smoking your 'occasional” cigarettes.”

“Done,” I said.

“And lots of exercise. You have to promise. I'm talking three days a week, half an hour of cardio. No more sitting on the couch. If I give you my kidney, you've got to keep it, be good to it. I'm not doing this for my health. I'm doing it for yours.”

For me
, I thought.

Charlie was concerned about his investment. And I couldn't blame him. He was hoping for a good turnout here; something that would last me a long time. But I wanted to make sure he was thinking about his side of the deal, too.

“There are factors you've got to think about.”

“Like what?” he said.

“The surgery.”

“No sweat. Slice me open,” he said, running an imaginary scalpel across his midsection with his thumb.

“The tests—MRIs, x-rays, all that poking and prodding,” I reminded him.

“I've gone through worse. Especially during those drug-testing years, ” Charlie reflected fondly.

“Rejection.” This is the one that worried me the most.

“Moonface, come on, seriously. Could you ever reject this guy?” He pointed his thumbs in the direction of his chest. His eyes twinkled under the pendant light.

How could I?
How could I ever reject him now? There was nothing about Charlie I could resist. In fact, I wanted to take all of him, not just his kidney. I wanted us to be like one person, one brain and one body, moving through the world. It was already starting to feel this way. I had already felt myself relying on him to verify my own feelings and to finish my half-baked ideas. Would taking his kidney make our relationship stronger? Would our plan even work?

“I don't know, Charlie,” I said. “So many things have to go right.”

“They will,” he said, quick and sure. “Things will go right. Now, let's finish making dinner. I'm starving.” He jumped out of his seat and walked toward the counter. The sun was setting in the window over the sink, and it outlined the power lines above our neighbor's garage. Shades of pink and lavender filled the sky. “Come on, Moonface,” Charlie said, motioning to me with the knife. “Soak the noodles.” I wanted to get up and help him, but I couldn't move. I was taking in this scene in the kitchen, which was well-lit even though daylight outside was slowly creeping away from us. Charlie chopped away at the cutting board, moving the knife in a wavelike motion over the onions. He lifted the slices from the board and heaped them onto a plate. He repeated this several times—chopping, then lifting, then stacking. He piled the stacks higher and higher until they were towering, precarious mounds. I sat in my seat, hoping they wouldn't fall.

Chapter Six
In an Act of Brave Stljpidity, Two Daredevils Lalgh in the Face of Death

T
he first time i ever saw Charlie cry was in Hawaii.

We had just started dating and were living in an expansive apartment overlooking Baker Beach in San Francisco with three dogs and six other humans. The real estate was prime, but it was difficult to have a romantic dinner without a tail wagging in your face or a hand trying to mooch off your plate. It wasn't the most ideal situation in which to start a relationship. Then, one day, Charlie goes: “Tell me where you want to go, Moonface. I'll take you anywhere.”

“Hawaii!” I said, having never been and suspicious of his offer. But then Charlie started depositing fives or tens or anything he had into his bank account, and sooner or later, we were packing up our rucksacks and heading out over the ocean.

I woke up in the window seat on the plane and saw the entire island of Kauai from the air. A two-lane road wound around its circumference. Tiny cars drove between the ocean on one side and a dark, dense mountain that rose from the center of the island on the other. The ocean was sparkling, but I couldn't take my eyes off the mountain.

We weren't quite sure what we were doing there; we were both new to this.
What do people who are in love do?
Within a few days of our arrival, we found an apartment furnished with 1970s rattan chairs and a lumpy queen-size bed. It was on the southern end of the island, just a few yards from the beach. Charlie unpacked our rucksacks, stuffing our clothes into the closet shelves, and I walked down to the corner market to supply our kitchen with some basics.

At about four o'clock every afternoon, just as we got back from a swim, the sky would open up and a rain shower would move across the island, changing the mood from a balmy summer beach day to a cool, romantic evening. We left the windows in the bedroom open all day, and sometimes Charlie and I would make love to the sound of the rain on the palm trees and on the windows, before it quickly disappeared, and the quiet clear sky returned.

Our landlord, stopping me every time I walked past the rental office, gave me sugary-sweet oranges from the tree in his backyard. The neighbors, who were gone most of the day, were native Hawaiians who kept the place clean and quiet. I bought dishes and hand towels from the local Walmart, and with a few hundred dollars, we bought a well-used tan Oldsmobile from a guy who was sailing to Tahiti and selling everything he owned. The car had headlights that wouldn't turn off, so every time Charlie parked the car, he had to lift the hood and turn off the battery so it wouldn't drain. The owner threw in an electric typewriter with the deal for free.

“Why wouldn't you be totally happy in paradise? It's like you have no excuse,” Charlie said, sipping a beer and leaning back on a lawn chair we found at the Goodwill.

In the tan clunker, we drove around the island looking for work at upscale hotels. We applied for every position—waiter, bartender, security guard. But because the island was so small, our prospects were low. We handed our resumes to everyone from Poipu Beach all the way up to Princeville. Nothing. We drove around the island, trying to keep a lookout for more prospective stores and restaurants. But my eyes kept being drawn to the middle of the island, to the dark, rainy spot at its center. The mountain, with its mossy flora and its ever-present rain cloud, seemed darker and creepier than it looked from the air.

We took a break from job hunting on Super Bowl Sunday to watch the Broncos play the Packers, in an open-air bar in walking distance from our apartment. I had many margaritas, as did Charlie, and we stumbled home, falling into the sand a few times and rolling over in laughter. The next morning, my head throbbing with a hangover, I started throwing up. This would be otherwise unremarkable except for the fact that once I started, I did not stop. Not that evening, not the next day, not the next evening. Charlie camped out beside me on the bathroom floor, but since he had yet to see me this sick, he really had no idea what to do.

“I'm just a puker,” I tried to explain. This was true. At the first sign of illness, whether it was gastrointestinal or not, my body always tried first to get rid of whatever was in my stomach. I tried to convince him that it was probably something I had eaten, but by that third day, Charlie insisted on taking me to the emergency room.

“You're being ridiculous,” he said as he pulled me off the bathroom floor and carried me to the car. In the outdated island hospital, with its walls of concrete blocks and its palm trees in the front lawn, we waited for hours for a general practitioner to review my blood tests. I wrung my hands as we waited and cried into Charlie's shoulder in the exam room.

“I'm scared,” I confessed. “What if something is really wrong?”

Charlie was quiet and bounced his knee on the ground. He said he hadn't been in many emergency rooms and just didn't like the idea of hospitals.

The doctor who examined me deemed me officially dehydrated and not, in his opinion, having a problem with my kidney . . . yet.

“But if you plan on moving here, you should know that there are no nephrologists on the island. You'd have to fly to Oahu just to see a specialist. Just something to think about,” he said, as he left us in the room to think about our next move.

I came back to the apartment feeling like a surfer who had just been tossed by a wave. I sat on the bed while Charlie pushed my clothes back into my backpack. It was not an easy decision when we agreed that I should go back to San Francisco and see a kidney specialist as soon as possible. Charlie'd follow once he got us out of the lease and sold the car.

“Geez, you're in it now,” I told Charlie, as I watched him from the bed.

“Eh,” Charlie said, “I don't know about the humidity here. And the sun! What's an Irish guy doing trying to get a tan? Our plan was just bound to fail.”

I thought to myself that this was not the way to start a relationship. I didn't want to scare him off; I wanted him to find paradise with me.

He smiled at me as he moved from room to room gathering our things and putting them back in our bags. I lay on the bed and watched the walls turn dim. The sound of the rain rattled on the roof and it tapped metallically on the windowsills. I got up from the bed to find Charlie in the living room standing in front of the window, his chin to his chest, his shoulders rising and falling with his rapid breath, tears sliding down his face like raindrops.

He could have left then. He could have sent me on that plane and never followed me to San Francisco. But instead he flew to the mainland a few days later and took me to my doctor to make sure my kidney was still healthy, that it really was just dehydration. I had made him relinquish paradise, and brought him back to the rainy season in San Francisco, where the sun didn't burst through until March. So, years later, when Charlie offered his kidney to me, I joked to myself, How much more does this guy have to give?

Not long after Charlie made that offer, kerry stood in front of The Pita Pit waiting for me. Her corn-silk hair caught the bright sun even as she tried to hide under the awning. A red skirt partly covered her long heron legs. Kerry was another writer in my program who came to Iowa the year before I did. She brought her Long Island wit with her, but seemed softer and gentler than most New Yorkers I knew. She wrote often about death, about her mother dying from melanoma when Kerry was still young. But for someone who thought about death as much as she did, she was lively and joyous whenever I saw her. She celebrated everything. I liked her from the moment I met her, but didn't always like her hugs, because they were like choke holds around my chest. Her bony arms were deceiving. I wove through a crowd of college students on the sidewalk to finally get to her, and when I did, she grabbed me tightly and nearly collapsed both my lungs, as usual.

“How are you feeling?” she said. I hadn't seen Kerry since the end of the semester, but I assumed she'd heard of my recent medical dilemma. I had heard she was taking the summer easy, jogging in the morning and writing in her attic apartment in the afternoons. When she had called a few days before, she was eager to meet. It was only after we found a table that she came clean. “I don't really want a pita,” she said.

“I think they have other things,” I said, scanning the paper menu. “Subs, salads.”

“I want to give you my kidney,” she said.

I looked up, and the collar of her jean jacket was brushing against her glossy pink lips. Her face was frozen with a raised eyebrow waiting for me to answer.

“Pardon?” I said. The place was loud; surely I had heard her wrong.

“I want to give you my kidney.”

“What could possibly possess you to do a thing like that?” Behind her was a wall mural of a giant dancing pepper, and as I slid back in my red plastic chair, I tried to negotiate the seriousness in her face with the goofiness of that pepper. There was an eggplant, too, which was not helping.

“I want to help. My mother always told us that if you can help, then you
should
. This, I can do.”

“No way,” I said almost instinctually, shaking my head, thinking that this was as silly as a dancing eggplant. She didn't know what she was getting into. I knew she wanted to help me, but this was not going to be the way she was going to do it.

“Look,” she said, leaning into toward the table and softening the lines in her face, “I want you to know that I've thought about it and I want to donate it to you. I want to at least get tested.”

Her voice dropped low, and I could tell that she had thought it through, that this was something she had already committed herself to before coming here. Knowing this, my heart swelled. I could feel it filling my chest, pushing against my sternum, making it hard to breathe. This girl just loved to take my breath away. I went over my relationship with Kerry in my head. I had known her for less than a year. Even though I barely saw her during the week, when we would sit down to chat at a park bench, our talks lasted for hours, long after the school kids threw their backpacks on the ground, goofed around on the jungle gym, and went home. Why would she give her kidney to me? I almost didn't want to tell her that I would be taking Charlie's donation. But when I did, she let me know that the offer would stand: “In case, you know, something doesn't work out.”

Later that week, my mother, who had begun reporting on my health to everyone she knew, told me that my cousin Joanne in California had called. She wanted to give me her kidney, or at least get tested, too.

“So sweet,” I told my mother, but to myself, I thought:
What is wrong with these people?
This was major surgery they were committing to, opening their bodies and letting me steal a living part of them. I would not accept their offers, but would it be wrong of me to keep them on reserve, in case, you know, things actually didn't work out?

“That's impossible,” Charlie said when I confessed this to him. He folded his arms over his chest and said, “You don't need a backup.”

Our transplant coordinator at the hospital agreed with him. The medical team had already begun the poking and prodding process to see if he would be a fit. Charlie came home from the clinic, happy to show me the papers on which it was repeatedly stated that none of Charlie's results came back abnormal.

“Healthy as a horse,” he told me. “Someone actually used the cliche.”

I watched our coordinator's pink lipstick as she sat across the conference table and said, “He's good enough.”

“Perfect, you mean,” Charlie corrected.

“Well, your blood type is O-, so you are a universal donor. That works out great. But your antigens—it's impossible that the two of you would match all six. You matched one. We were hoping for more, but one will work.”

“So he'll work?” I asked her.

“Told you,” Charlie said, smiling annoyingly. I just knew it was coming.

Charlie's mother called one evening in late May. She called often to check on us in those days, when my health was slowly fading. Charlie talked to her on the phone in the kitchen, and I listened from the living room as their normally uneventful weekly exchanges suddenly became heated.

“No, she's fine, she's lying on the couch.”

“I won't . . . No . . . What? . . . No, mom, we've got it covered . . . No!”

His voice grew louder but not in the usual excited, sprite way Charlie turns up the volume. He stood up from the wooden chair and paced the floor in short, impatient laps. When I sat up from the couch, he looked at me, and shaking his head, he mouthed: “She wants to give you her kidney.”

It was her insistence that was driving him mad, that she wasn't listening to him when he told her that he wanted to do this, that he had to this. I watched Charlie from the edge of my seat on the couch as if he were in a boxing match. I wanted to throw my hands in the air and say “Move to the left” and “Don't forget the ropes!”

“Mom, we'll be fine.” He sat down again, putting his elbow on the table and his head in his hand. “You're not doing this . . . No.”

Charlie's mother had always been soft-spoken and even-tempered, quietly listening as we told her where we were moving to next. She didn't yell at Charlie when he took long hiatuses from working. Instead she'd bring up the subject of money and careers to him slowly, over dessert, in quiet conversations that lingered nowhere near the topic. But once she started, she didn't stop. She wanted him to know that there were other things he could do with his life.

“Physical therapy,” she would say to him repeatedly. “You're very athletic, you know. Or a teacher. You love kids!”

Charlie would always kindly turn down her suggestions, and then grab my leg under the table in frustration. She welcomed me into her home and into their lives and always treated me like the daughter she had always longed for. I liked the times when she and I stood in the kitchen over a cup of tea, and she'd tell me stories about Charlie's childhood: his boundless energy that she had given up trying to contain, his friendship with his stuffed penguin, his imaginary friends.