Part 1: Character Creation / Chapter 4

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I lived in San Rafael, California—part of the sprawling expanse that is Marin County.

There are various hospitals in Marin, but I was headed for Sutter Health—a blocky beige compound in the semi-rural area of Novato, about twenty minutes from my apartment.

My nephew, Robbie, had been in and out of the place for the better part of his life—which is to say the better part of his life could have been a lot better.

By the time I arrived, they’d already found a small private room for him. That was the good news and the bad news: the good news being that he wouldn’t be stuck on a cot in the ER hallway, the bad news being that whatever the preliminary workup had shown was bad enough that he needed to be admitted.

Robbie had been born with severe cardiomyopathy, which is doc talk for a bum ticker. They’d given him five years, unless he got lucky and landed himself a heart transplant, which would give him a whopping 50% chance of living an additional five years. But he’d have to get very lucky, as the folks who found homes for hearts weren’t eager to put one in a kid with such a grim prognosis. Just the same, he was on the list.

As for my own condition, I thought maybe I should try for a CT scan while I was at the hospital, considering I’d been seeing things all morning. But earth-shaking as they were, my hallucinations seemed suddenly trivial as I walked through the hallways toward Robbie’s room.

“How you doing, buddy?” I asked him as I entered the room and gave my sister a quick hug.

“So good,” he said. “I really laid on the old ‘Poor me, I’ll be dead by fourteen’ act and one of the nurses is getting me a chocolate chip cookie from the cafeteria.”

“Score,” I said, drafting off of his gallows humor-fueled joviality.

Robbie owned his condition with a courage I couldn’t comprehend. He was the toughest human being I’d ever met in my life.

“And how are you doing?” I asked my sister, Margaret, who was seated at Robbie’s bedside.

It was a stupid question. The constant weight of despair was like a lead suit, weighing every part of her down. But instead of collapsing into sobs, she gave me a weak smile. I knew that was for Robbie’s benefit. Robbie knew it too.

“She’s pretty upset,” he answered for her. “They’re not getting her a cookie.”

She rewarded his quip with a soft chuckle. Then she got to her feet, shouldering the weight of the lead suit, and gestured for me to follow her out into the hallway.

“Mom, are you gonna do the thing where you go outside to tell him stuff you don’t want me to hear, even though I already know it all?”

“Uh huh,” she answered.

“Solid,” he said.

Then he looked at me and added, “If you see my cookie headed this way, don’t let her steal it. We both know how she is.”

Margaret fixed him with a gaze that was half adoration and half exhaustion. I knew his radical acceptance of his condition and his constant wise cracks were coping mechanisms, but I thought they actually made it harder on her.

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We headed out into the hallway and she gave me the rundown. Robbie had collapsed briefly after breakfast. It had seemed like a curveball in the face of his otherwise predictable decline but so far there was no new pathology to concern the doctors. They thought maybe he had simply stood up too quickly as he left the table. Still, they were being thorough.

For Margaret, the incident had resurfaced all of the dread and demoralization of the inevitable. As a single mother, she had her hands full with Robbie and her job. Most days, I think she was able to compartmentalize her grief and put on a brave face for Robbie. But when something like this happened, it was like getting the news about his prognosis all over again.

Our dad had been killed in a car wreck when I was twelve and my sister was fourteen. At that point my mother had begun a slow downward spiral into depression, disappearing two years later, with the only clue to her whereabouts being a postcard from a night club in Guatemala. We’d then gone to live with my father’s sister Maxine, a widow who gave us nothing but love and was rewarded with a terminal cancer diagnosis. She’d passed just a few years ago.

Between the two of us, Margaret had been the social networker and she’d tried to replace the family we’d lost with friends. But many of those so-called friends had distanced themselves after Robbie was born with his condition, not wanting to endure the second-hand sadness. And the stragglers had jumped ship after her ex-husband Doug had ditched her and Robbie, making her story even more painful to witness.

Long story short, Margaret and I were really all one another had. I noticed how frail she seemed. She’d always been thin, but she’d started to look positively malnourished over the last few years. There was even a hint of grey running through her black hair. The worry had worn away at her. But my concerns shifted from her back to Robbie as she wrapped up her rundown.

“They’re going to do some tests, keep him for observation overnight, and most likely send us home tomorrow,” she said.

I nodded. I knew there was nothing I could say to ease her mind. But I took a whack at it anyway.

“I should move in with you guys. So I can be there more. Help more.”

“We’d never find a place big enough that we could afford. And how could you help more? My God, Henry you bailed me out of that whole NeuroVista circus.”

“I also got you into it,” I lamented.

NeuroVista was the star of the story of my good intentions gone wrong. You see, I was always chasing treatments for Robbie and I’d read every medical journal ever published on cardiomyopathy or any related condition. Obviously, I wanted the best for my nephew, as any uncle would. But my commitment bordered on mania at times. Part of me thought my concern had predated his illness—maybe even his birth. I’d spent hundreds of dollars on prenatal vitamins for my sister and practically force-fed them to her.

Anyway, in my research I’d run across a medical trial utilizing a new technology that scanned and mapped the human brain. There were endless theoretical applications—including the possibility of identifying and “recoding” the area dictating the heart’s development and function. But days after we got Robbie into the trial and his scan completed, the FDA reversed its provisional approval, setting the company back years. Along the way, the insurance company had revoked coverage for Margaret’s portion of the costs, leaving her with a hefty bill. I’d wiped out my savings clearing it.

“It was worth a try, Henry,” Margaret said genuinely, as she read the regret on my face.

Looking at me in earnest for the first time, I think she noticed the one band-aid that covered the tiny bite wound on my left cheek and the other band-aid that only half-concealed the fairly gruesome knife wound on my right temple. I’d hoped any fresh blood would blend with my brunette hair as the gash crossed into my sideburn. But it hadn’t.

“What happened there?” she asked. “Did some woman’s husband finally catch you sneaking out the back door?”

I was glad that even under the circumstances, she hadn’t surrendered her sense of humor. Me getting slashed by a slighted husband was even more absurd than me getting dragged into doll-based gang warfare. I wasn’t one to self-medicate with meaningless flings. In fact, I’d barely dated since high school, what with being willfully or tragically abandoned by everyone I trusted or cared about.

I noticed Margaret still peering at my wound, waiting on an explanation.

“Ah, it’s nothing,” I said with a breezy tone that suggested I’d cut myself shaving. I needed to get my head checked asap, but I didn’t need her worrying about me. The notion of me cracking up may be more than she could bear. I was glad I’d put on a long-sleeve shirt to avoid a conversation about my ridiculous new tattoos.