The Girl in Times Square (41 page)

“Lily, where have you been?”

“I thought we were on a two-week test schedule.”

“I haven’t seen you for a month!”

“I meant to come but then I was in Maui and then I was…” I was too busy living for cancer. “So tell me?” She paused. “Are things not so good?”

“Things aren’t so good.”

She held her breath a moment, two. “How not good? It’s only been three weeks.”

“It’s been four. And before that you weren’t improving, you were holding.”

“All right. And now?”

DiAngelo said nothing.

“Is it back?”

“It’s back.”

“Is my blood black caviar again?”

He didn’t say anything.

Four weeks of induction, thirteen weeks of consolidation, one of pneumonia, six more of maintenance with radical new leukemia treatment that was supposed to attack only the cancer cells and leave the rest unchanged, twelve months of my life, of
Spencer’s life, of Amy’s life, of my family’s life and after that effort, the doctor says nothing.

Lily sat silently in DiAngelo’s office. “Well, now what? Consolidation chemo again?”

“No, the blastocytes are immune.”

“Immune to
chemo
?”

“Yes. They were obviously immune to Alkeran.”

“So what’s left?”

“Well, there are two more things we can do.”

Why did Lily feel so suddenly incapable of listening to him? What was happening to her? Her hands started to shake.

“I want you to have an open mind about this. It’s not an easy thing after all you’ve been through. But I told you from the beginning this was going to be a tough fight.”

“Yes, yes, you’ve covered yourself admirably.”

“I wasn’t covering myself. I wanted you to know the truth. Didn’t you want that?”

“You know, Doctor D.?” Lily said. “I’m finding out little by little that, as it turns out, the less truth the better.” She got up on unsteady legs.

“Come on, you don’t mean it.” He came around his table to where she was standing, ready to go, and put his arm around her. “Didn’t I tell you that it wants you to give up first? But
I
don’t want you to give up first.”

“No.”

“You have become my personal crusade. It’s not going to lick us, Lily. Now sit.”

But she couldn’t sit. She wanted to go. She just couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t take it alone in his office, sitting in his chair, telling her that there were only two more things they could do.

She couldn’t listen. “Can I use your—can I just—”

And in the bathroom, Lily leaned facing the wall, her head pressed to the cool white tile, eyes closed. Her palms were pressed
against the wall also. She slid down to her knees, breathing, breaking, so hard, so shallow, catching her losing breath, her forehead against the cold tiles.
Please, take this cup from me.

What a foe. What a formidable opponent.

On her knees, she folded over, touching the floor tiles with her forehead, prostrate. She hadn’t expected it—feeling so afraid.

“Arsenic?” She had managed to leave the tiles of the bathroom somehow, get back into his chair. DiAngelo was still at the edge of his desk. “Arsenic—the deadly poison?” she said incredulously.

“Yes.”

Lily tried to remember what little she learned about arsenic in school. “Doesn’t continued exposure to arsenic cause cancer in human beings?”

“Yes. Remember? We treat poison with poison. The cancer cells are also susceptible to being poisoned. So we’re going to poison them.”

“The drug cocktail didn’t work. Alkeran didn’t work, your wonder drug.”

“Don’t worry. This will. A new study just completed over at Sloan Kettering showed that patients who have failed all standard treatment for advanced acute promyelocytic leukemia and relapsed, like you, have had a near complete remission when given arsenic trioxide. I think we should try it.”

“Do we have much choice?”

DiAngelo paused, before he said not much, no.

Lily withdrew into a study of her hands. From drawing Milo, they were covered with indelible black 8B pencil that even a shower couldn’t get out. “How big was this study?”

“Lily, come on, it’s experimental therapy!”

“How big?”

“Ten people.”

“Ten people?” she repeated, looking up at him. “Ten?”

He nodded, rolling his eyes.

“How many of them achieved remission, doc?”

“Six. Out of those, four continued to test negative.”

“And the other two?”

“Died.”

“From the cancer or from the arsenic?”

“Lily!”

“I’m just asking,” she said calmly. “So what you’re telling me is, in this broadbased study of ten whole people, six people died?”

“What’s the matter with you? This isn’t a court of law. Forty percent remission when all else has failed is very encouraging.”

When all else has failed.

“What’s the second thing we can try? You said two things. What’s the second thing?”

“A bone-marrow transplant.”

Lily perked up a little. “Oh, so what’s wrong with that? I’ve read some good stuff about that on the Internet.”

“I told you to stop going on the Internet.”

“I know, I know. But it sounded pretty good. Where do we get good marrow from?

“Your two sisters. Your brother. They’re the most likely match for a donor. It’s good you have so many to choose from.”

“So what are we waiting for?”

Now it was DiAngelo’s turn to quietly study his hands.

And now Lily was quietly studying her Milo hands again.

“A bone marrow transplant is extremely invasive and debilitating,” he said at last. “BMT patients need to be in good health, free from disease and infections. Liver, heart, pancreatic functions all have to be fairly normal. Your white cell counts are through the roof again. I’ve never seen them so high, like your body has been fighting an infection for weeks. Your platelets are non-existent. The malignant cells are in record numbers. What have you been doing with yourself? What has your body been doing since I saw you last?”

“Nothing,” Lily said. Who have I been without cancer, without Spencer, without my mother, my brother? “It’s a Catch-22, what you’re telling me.”

“Quite a pickle, Lil.”

“Quite. Arsenic it is then.”

“Arsenic it is.”

She stood up, holding on to the chair. “How are the side-effects to having a poisonous solid injected into your veins?”

“Surprisingly mild.”

“Well, that’s a relief. When do we start? Tomorrow?”

“Right now.”

She tried very hard to be brave. “Blast crisis, Doctor D.?”

“Blast crisis, Lily.”

Joy came back into her life. She didn’t live with Lily again, but she came when Spencer was at work to take care of her. She took her to Sloane Kettering on 68th. Paul and Rachel came on days they weren’t working to be with Lily when she received daily infusions of low doses of arsenic, administered intravenously into her newly re-installed Hickman catheter.

Her family was overwrought. Every time they came to see her, alone or in pairs, they cried. DiAngelo finally forbade them to come until Lily felt a little better. He himself was there every day, even though it wasn’t his hospital or his arsenic to administer. Lily felt so close to him, she donated two hundred thousand dollars to DiAngelo’s Mount Sinai children’s cancer ward. On second thought and with the eleven-million-dollar apartment receding into the horizon of her lost dreams, she wrote a check for a million dollars to the cancer ward, and DiAngelo renamed it Lily’s Ward, and she even cut the red ribbon at the renaming ceremony.

Arsenic was a slow poison then? Lily began to smell metal in her brain, in her mouth, on her arms, on her pillow. Her tongue felt like a steel gray lollipop. The side-effects of tiredness, of light-headedness she barely noticed, but the poisonous taste in her mouth she couldn’t help but notice.

DiAngelo came every day. There were no days off for him. If Lily had to take arsenic seven days a week, then by God, he was
going to walk five blocks to Sloane Kettering even on his off days.

“You don’t have to come every day,” she said to him. “The million dollar check cleared.”

Her body a metal spring of raw nerve endings, there was no touching her, no love for her anymore, but there was for Spencer, and so one night, after she gave him some love, they were lying in bed together, covers pulled up, cozy and warm in the dark underneath, she said, “Spencer, you have a choice, you know. You
can
stop drinking.”

He smiled. “Quid pro quo, huh, Lily Quinn? All right, let’s talk about it. You think I
choose
to drink?”

“Yes. Of course you do. When you’re sober, and you take the first drink. That’s your choice. We choose what we want to be, how we want to live. It’s my grandmother who didn’t have a choice. My mother’s mother.” Lily’s voice broke. “But it was war then. You understand the difference?”

Spencer didn’t turn away from her this time, didn’t even prop up to spirit himself for a defense. He remained lying down with a small smile on his lips. Lily couldn’t resist, she leaned over and kissed him. “You’re lucky you’re so cute,” she whispered.

He kissed her back and then pulled away. “The choices you talk about are theoretical things. This is real, like your illness. This isn’t a conversation over a poker table with five septuagenarian women.”

“Octogenarian, but whatever.”

“Lily, you think I choose this? Not to be able to drink at weddings, at Christmas parties? Not to be able to sit with you at dinner and have a cocktail? No more drunk bowling, fun with friends, no mimosas in the middle of Palm Court? You think I choose to drink so that I’m unconscious through a sixth of my life?”

“Oh, Spencer.”

“I know who I am, Lily. I have no illusions. I’m a cop. I’m an Irish drunk. That’s who I am. You want to know what my choice
is? Where my free will comes in? It’s where I struggle every day, every week, to stave off the need for whisky until I can’t take it anymore, until the staving off becomes in itself the reason to reward myself with Glenfiddich, for being
good
so long. The longer I keep from it, the more I feel I deserve the most expensive Scotch there is. A month off? It’s Johnny Walker Blue Label for me. No AA, no God, no reason, no fear, no threat keeps me from wanting it. From craving it.
That’s
ancient war, that’s modern war. You willing yourself to grow healthy blood, to keep going, to keep living even though you have nothing left, that’s war. Me at home every Sunday, desperately trying to keep my idiot brain from convincing me I can have just
one,
me getting up every Monday and going to work, that’s war. What your mother goes through, tell me that’s not war—against herself, against you, against your father.”

Lily squeezed her eyes shut. “She didn’t do so well.”

“No. No, she didn’t.”

“You’re doing better.”

“A little better. Since you, I’ve been doing better, there’s no denying it.” Spencer smiled. “But I wouldn’t be doing better if I were living in Maui. I’d be just like her, sprawled out on my patio, wondering where my next drink was coming from. You think now that she’s without a foot she wants drink less? You think she’s seen the error of her ways?” Spencer exhaled skeptically. “She wants it, needs it more than ever. Her whole being is concentrated on that single need and she will not rest until she figures out a way to hobble over, peg-legged and all, to the drugstore to get it for herself. She does it the way we all do it—because we are weak and human and cannot help it.”

Lily watched him.

He stroked her face.

“So what’s the subtext of what you’re telling me?” she asked. “After I’m better and our passion hour has passed, you want to be just friends again, Spencer? You want me to find someone else to be with?”

“No. I just want you to understand that no matter how much we repair each other’s damage, and we do, I cannot be without the drink. That crying room? I can’t leave it. Rather, I leave it, but I can’t not return to it. And that’s no life for you.”

“What do you know about what I want, what I need for my life? You don’t know. Staying with you, is that at least
my
choice, or has
that
also been removed from me?’

“That’s your choice. Don’t be upset with me. This life is not just the only life I know, it’s the only life I know how to live. I’m being as honest as I can.”

“I wish you were a little less honest,” said Lily.

He fell silent in the dark. It was the worst to have him fall silent.

“Spencer, tell me, do you think this arsenic stuff will work? Forty percent chance. Will it work on me?”

“Of course it will, Liliput.”

She tried to move away, crawl away from him on her bed, but he wouldn’t let her, holding her to him from behind, caressing her breasts, his lips nuzzling her head.

The two of them, in their own
pas de deux,
lonely, isolated, softly knocking on each other’s souls, in their own Hungarian Dance, she with cancer, he full of a naked and desperate desire for drink.

I’m exercising my free will, Lily thought, rolling over and wrapping the wraith of herself around him. And I choose
you.
However, whatever, halved, damaged, wounded, bleeding, dying, drinking, in the crying room with the wolf forever at our door, it’s you I choose.

Spencer was not around Friday night, Saturday night. Lily didn’t discuss it with him. She didn’t bring it up. She didn’t say, Spencer, I’m having arsenic injections and you’re doing God knows what. She didn’t say that. What she did say with an ahem was, “Spencer, DiAngelo needs me to come in on Friday for an injection and some blood work.”

“On Friday?”

“Yes. Arsenic seven days a week. Blood work three times a week now. Is there any way you can come and take me home? Paul and Rachel are working.”

And he would come.

And with another ahem: “Spencer, I’m feeling so weak, I can’t carry my paintings downstairs on Saturday morning. Look how many I have now that you’re back. Is there any way you can come and help me carry them down? Maybe put them in the car for me? Help me set up my table?”