The Survivor

Cielle’s voice, high and tremulous, came from the backseat. “Are you okay, Dad? Is he gonna be okay?”

“I’m … fine, honey,” Nate said.

Jason: “He doesn’t sound fine.”

The noise of Cielle smacking him. “Shut the fuck up, Jason.”

“… where…?” Nate managed between swells of nausea.

“We’re going to my hospital,” Janie said, “if this asshole in an Audi in front of us ever learns to drive.”

“No … first place they’ll look.…”

“I know the doctors, the intake nurses. I can get you in without putting you in the system. You’ll be John Doe. It’s our best bet.”

Already they were redlining up smog-drenched Van Nuys Boulevard. Sure enough, the long white block of the Sherman Oaks Hospital zoomed past. Despite its unpromising location, the community hospital had top-notch staff who serviced a full gamut of the injured and the ailing. Meeting Janie here for lunch early in their marriage, Nate was as likely to stumble across a gardener cradling a severed, hankie-wrapped finger as a celebrity walking her kid out of the world-class burn unit.

“… Cielle shouldn’t … with us…”

“She can wait in the park up the street.”

“I can drive,” Jason said brightly.

“Fine.” Janie tugged a wad of hundreds from her pocket and tossed it back at Cielle. “Take the Jeep and the dog. I’ll call you every hour.”

Nate tried to shape his mouth into another complaint but had to focus on breathing so as not to throw up. The Jeep lurched to a stop in front of the emergency-room doors, and then Casper was barking as Jason clambered forward into the driver’s seat. Janie appeared through Nate’s window, her fingers at the handle, and then he was tumbling out into her arms.

They headed in, Janie bearing half his weight, the glass doors yawning open before them.

* * *

“Antibiotics?” Dr. Griffin flipped the chart. “Who the hell put him on antibiotics?”

Janie looked across at Nate, who rustled on the stiff white sheets of the hospital bed and said, weakly, “She was … ER doc.”

“ER doc. Terrific. With his condition she didn’t think it necessary to pick up the phone to his treating physician? Or at least to consult Epocrates on her iPhone? What’s he taking?”

“Keflex,” Janie said. “Five hundred mg’s qid.”

“What for?”

“I keep getting stabbed,” Nate said.

Dr. Griffin shot him a look over the top of his perpetually slipping tortoiseshell glasses. His brown eyes, nearly as dark as his skin, held a pinpoint focus that didn’t match the saggy mien, the professorial potbelly, or the day-old scruff.

“We have an interaction?” Janie asked, getting the doctor back on task. Though Nate wasn’t familiar with Dr. Griffin, Janie’s working rapport with him was evident.

“Antibiotics raise the level of riluzole in the blood,” the doctor said. “Not only do the liver enzymes spike- which can cause liver failure-but they increase the likelihood and severity of side effects. Which are-”

Janie cut in: “Weakness, fatigue, nausea, headaches, abdominal pain, dizziness-”

“-which in turn can exacerbate ALS symptoms.”

Nate rolled his head on the pillow, keeping pace with the Ping-Pong match. An IV line pushed fluids steadily into his arm; already he was feeling a bit more clearheaded. As he untangled the medicalspeak, he felt a faint pulse of hope. “So it’ll get better?” he asked. “The muscle weakness?”

“It should subside, yes, along with the dizziness and nausea once your blood levels drop.”

Nate took a few cautious sips of air, relieved. “How long will that take?” he asked. His voice box felt feeble, no weight behind the words.

“Six to eight hours for Keflex to leave the bloodstream,” Janie said. “Another six or so for the riluzole levels to back down to normal.”

“But that’s not the point.” Dr. Griffin tugged at his jowls, which had surprising give. “You need supportive care. Fluids, rest-”

“Rest,” Nate protested.

“You are sick, Mr. Overbay. I don’t have to tell you that ALS is serious business. What you’re doing to yourself-it’s not tenable. You are dehydrated, hypoglycemic, suffering from lack of sleep. You can’t do this given your condition.” Dr. Griffin dropped the chart on the end of Nate’s bed and turned to Janie. “Give your John Doe here another liter of saline and see if you can talk some sense into him.”

Janie crossed her arms, shot a breath at the ceiling. “I’ve been trying for years.”

The needle’s pressure in his arm stayed constant, even when Nate dozed off. He surfaced from a brief sleep, blinking to consciousness, and focused on the tiny form at the foot of his bed. At first he thought it was a dream image hanging on, a vision from the spirit world. A painfully thin Hispanic boy, maybe six, with a bald, leukemic head that in combination with oversize eyes made him look vaguely alien. He wore black pajamas decorated with white bones-a skeleton costume-and clutched a starched pillowcase.

“Trick or treat,” he said.

Nate sat up quickly. Charles he was used to, but this? He managed to say, “Uh…”

The boy shook the pillowcase imploringly. “It’s Halloween.”

Was it? Nate rewound the days, reorienting himself. It was. And the boy was real, or at least he appeared to be. The ceiling-hung dividing curtain had been partly drawn back so that Nate could see, above the unoccupied bed, dusk darkening the windows. Trick-or-treat time.

He glanced across at his food tray. “I have Jell-O.”

“No. There.” The boy pointed to a cup that had appeared on Nate’s nightstand. “They leave you candy for us. See? So we can have Halloween even though we’re stuck in here.”

Nate reached into the cup, pulled out a mini-Three Musketeers, and with a trembling hand dropped it into the boy’s pillowcase. “Want more?”

“You hafta save it for the others.”

“Others?”

But the boy was already at the door, heading to his next benefactor. “My bones glow in the dark,” he announced. His little hand clicked the light switch. Sure enough, there it was, a cartoonish skeleton with a faint green tinge. The light came back on, Nate making sure to wipe the astonished expression off his face.

A little girl entered next with fuzzy angel wings and a burn savaging her chin and throat. Fighting the knot forming in his throat, Nate produced a gentle grin for her and a bite-size Butterfinger. Next, a preteen pulling her own IV pole. They kept trickling in, one after the other, with their tiny voices and heartrending costumes.

After the last child departed, Nate carefully extracted his IV line and stepped into the hall. There they all were in the corridor, a ragged parade, standing in rough assembly under the benign direction of an immense, soft- featured orderly. Nate’s hand quaked and his ankle had again gone numb, yet he refused to tear his eyes from the spectacle and withdraw to his bed. With their glow-in-the-dark bones and angel wings, the children seemed to point the way to where he was headed. Pixie faces lit with delight, they showed off their costumes and compared their hauls. All that hope and promise, uneroded even here in a hospital ward on Halloween.

From the nurses’ station at the far end of the hall, Janie looked on, too. Nate managed a nod, and she gave a smile and a little wave.

“Come on, now,” the orderly called out to her brood, “time to hit the next floor up.”

They followed her to the stairs like a row of ducklings, a diminutive Darth Vader wrestling off his mask and taking a few genuine asthmatic wheezes as he passed from sight.

The tender display unlocked something inside Nate’s chest, and all the anguish of the past week and a half rushed out, overwhelming him. Sagging against the wall, he pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes. But it was no use. The emotion came, swelling over him, and he hunched into himself, drawing halting breaths, struggling not to cry.