Although their eyes met only momentarily, Natalie had no doubt her friend sensed her deep melancholy.
'Just set them in the corner,' she said. 'I'll open them all when I get home.'
'Natalie,' Berenger said, 'I have an idea I'd like to discuss with you. Some friends and I have a small business rehabilitating apartment buildings and turning them into condominiums, which we then sell at an obscene profit. Well, it just so happens that at the moment we have a new building in East Boston that we've just finished, and all the units are sold except for the demo, which is a nicely furnished two-bedroom. I'd be honored to have your mother and your niece live there until they can settle up with their insurance company and work out something more permanent. It's on the first floor and totally wheelchair accessible.'
Natalie suppressed the knee-jerk impulse to say they would be fine in her place.
'That's very kind of you,' she said instead. 'It's a wonderful gesture. Just one thing if you do it. If my mother smokes…she's out. No second chances. She can go and rent a room or an apartment, and I'll take Jenny. I should have put my foot down more firmly years ago.'
'If she smokes, she's out,' Berenger said. 'Hopefully this will be the event that does it for her, and if you say that's the rule, that's the rule. But nicotine addiction is a powerful monkey. Just think about Carl Culver, that patient of mine whose head your pal Tonya Levitskaya almost bit off. Getting a new heart put into his chest wasn't enough to keep him from smoking again. You'd be amazed at how many liver transplant recipients drink alcohol — some quite heavily, even though it's been proven that as little as a couple of ounces causes fatty changes in the liver.'
Natalie wouldn't be moved.
'We've got to keep the pressure on,' she said.
Berenger tented his fingertips and bowed.
'So it is written, so it shall be done,' he said. 'I shall see if your mother wishes to make the deal.'
'That's terrific. I've always suspected that my mother has mystical powers…Don't let her persuade you to back down about the cigarettes.'
'I will do my best,' Berenger said, backing from the room. 'I'm not kidding, Doug. I love her very much, but the highway in her rearview mirror is littered with people who thought they could get the better of her.'
'Mostly men, I'll bet,' Millwood said after Berenger had left.
'You got it.'
'Pardon me for saying it, but for a heroine you don't seem too bubbly.'
'I'm not. Rachel French says my lung's been damaged. At this point there's no way to tell how badly. She said that just in case, she's turned my name in and started me on the road to a transplant.'
'I know,' Millwood said. 'I just spoke with her. Nat, the transplant thing is just a precaution because the whole evaluation and lung allocation formula is so cumbersome and time-consuming.'
'I can't do it, Terry.'
'I know it's hard, but you've got to try and stay in the moment. No projecting until you know what you're up against.'
'Easy for you to say. You're not the one whose lung is rotting away.'
'I'm just saying don't get down about what you don't know about. You've come too far to give in to this.'
'I'll see what I can do,' she said acidly.
Millwood stood.
'Nat, I'm sorry. I really am. If you need anything, anything at all, I'm your man. Our friendship means everything to me.'
'Good enough,' Natalie said with little enthusiasm.
Millwood seemed for a moment as if he were going to say something else. Then he merely shook his head in frustration and sadness, and left. Once in the hallway, he turned to the right, away from the elevators, and went to the nurses' station. Rachel French, working on some notes, was waiting for him.
'Well?' she asked.
Millwood sighed.
'She's as close to beaten as I've ever known her to be. Just a few days ago she was high as a cloud over the news that she had been reinstated at school. Now this.'
'I'm afraid I haven't handled things too well. I should have waited until after she was discharged before even bringing up the word 'transplant.' The whole business has her believing that her lung is done for even though I keep telling her that we have no way of knowing at this point.'
'She's very smart and very intuitive.'
'Good thing she doesn't have all the facts yet.'
'What facts?'
'I have some friends in the tissue-typing lab, so I decided to call in a favor or two and have them do a rush job on her.'
'And?'
'She's O-positive, which as you know already puts her in a reduced recipient pool. But there's more. I just got the preliminary analysis of her twelve histocompatibility antigens. Many of them are rare — some very rare. The odds on finding a donor are long, and even if we are willing to cut some pretty big corners in terms of donor- recipient matching, she would require a lifetime of fairly high doses of anti-rejection drugs. We haven't addressed the fact yet that in her mind, she's blown the toxicity of the medications out of proportion, but her fears aren't groundless either.'
Millwood grimaced.
'So where does that leave her?'
'It leaves her,' French said, 'squarely between a rock and an extremely hard place.'
CHAPTER 18
We mean our guardians to be true saviors.
It would do something of a disservice to the jungle surrounding the Whitestone Center for African Health to say that it was ever quiet, but over the years, Joe Anson had noticed a strange, predictable lull in the white noise between three and three thirty in the morning. Over that specific span — not much more than thirty minutes, and not much less — the peepers, Popillia and stag beetles, chimpanzees and other monkeys, bees and cicadas all seemed to quiet in unison. None of the Cameroon natives was willing to substantiate his observation, but Anson knew what he knew.
On this particular early morning, he leaned against the bamboo railing outside his main lab, and listened as the cacophony from the blackness all about him began to fade. The air was rich with the scents of hundreds of different species of flowering plants, as well as curry, licorice, mint, and a myriad of other spices. Anson inhaled deeply, treasuring the act.
Life following his transplant was as Elizabeth had optimistically predicted it would be. The surgery itself was hell, but he was heavily medicated for the two or three days afterward, so even those memories were vague. The only real problem his doctors encountered occurred in the immediate postoperative period. An epidemic of in hospital infection with an often deadly bacterium caused them to transfer him precipitously out of Amritsar, and in fact, out of India altogether. He was flown, anesthetized and on a respirator, to a renowned hospital in his native Capetown, where the rest of his recovery was uneventful. Thanks to a virtually perfect tissue match with the donor of his lung, the amount of anti-rejection medication he was given initially and was still taking could be kept to an absolute minimum, thus greatly reducing the chance of infection from opportunistic organisms.
If he knew how effective the procedure was going to be in restoring his breathing to normal, Anson admitted to anyone who would listen, he would have sought the transplant several years ago.
'This is your favorite time here, isn't it.'
