The Living Blood Read online

  healing

  “Who taught you all this, Doctor?”

  The reply came promptly:

  “Suffering.”

  —Albert Camus, The Plague

  1

  Tallahassee, Florida

  May 13, 2001

  Mercy Hospital didn’t have the best emergency room in town, but it was the closest. And to Lucas Shepard, at that moment, any hospital was better than no hospital. Nothing mattered now except getting there and getting there fast.

  At 3:30 A.M., with the roadway blanketed in darkness, Tallahassee was so deserted that it looked every bit like the overgrown market town and tobacco community it once was, virtually free of lights or cars as far as he could see. The Blazer’s headlights sliced through the foggy blackness in defiant cones, sweeping into view the road and the overgrown stalks of wild grass cloistered alongside it. Lucas’s neighbor Cal was hunched over the steering wheel like an old man, his head close to the windshield. Cal was going seventy-five miles per hour in a thirty-five zone, and Lucas knew any unexpected stop might send them flipping over the embankment. Cradling his son in his arms in the passenger seat, Lucas was breathing in thirsty gulps. He had never been so scared, and it wasn’t because of Cal’s driving.

  Lucas had called Cal instead of trying to get an ambulance because he figured they could cut in half the time it would take to get to the hospital. He could only pray that was fast enough. Right after he’d called Cal, he’d phoned ahead to Mercy to ask a surgeon to stand by. Looks like a hemorrhage, he’d told the physician on call. Pulse was still strong, thank God, but erratic. Blood pressure bottoming out. Lucas had thought of everything he could, even though his hand had been shaking so badly he’d nearly dropped the receiver. The sound of his son’s earlier cries of pain still gnawed at his memory, as if they were echoing in an endless loop.

  No, they hadn’t been cries; they’d been shrieks, followed by an even worse silence. The sounds of every parent’s worst nightmare come to life.

  “Jared?” Lucas nudged perspiration-damp strands of hair from his son’s forehead, above his slack face. Not long ago, the regrowth of Jared’s hair in downy patches that had gradually thickened closer to normal had been a triumph, signaling better days ahead. That notion seemed far away tonight. Still wearing his cheerful Mutant Men cartoon pajamas, Jared was limp in Lucas’s arms like a fainted bride, his head dangling against Lucas’s chest. He’d lost weight. He’d never regained his appetite during his illness, not really, but he looked even more frail than usual, his bones jutting sharply in his cheeks in a way that added years to his features. He was only ten, but he looked thirteen now. Jared had inherited bright cherry-red lips from his mother, but tonight his lips were pale as his circulatory system slowed. Jared’s skin had cooled dramatically, so clammy it stuck to Lucas’s fingertips like paste.

  I’m losing him this time, Lucas thought, barely comprehending. I’m losing my son.

  Lucas leaned toward his son’s ear, struggling to speak coherently through his heavy breathing. “Can you hear me? Daddy’s here. We’re going to see the doctor. Stay with me, Jared. You stay right here.”

  “Is he awake?” Cal asked. They were the first words Cal had spoken since they’d climbed into Cal’s Blazer, and the sound of his neighbor’s sleep-roughened voice startled Lucas. He’d forgotten, for those few seconds, that Cal was even there.

  “He’s out.” Lucas’s own voice was strange to him, too. “Looks like shock.”

  “Goddammit.” Cal sounded perplexed, angry, and sad all at once. Lucas heard the Blazer’s engine kick up a notch into an urgent roar. The vehicle pitched around a corner so violently that the tires seemed to scream against the road, a sound that seared itself into Lucas’s mind like an omen. It mirrored the screaming inside of him, all his raw emotions clamoring for release past his rationality. Rage. Terror. And a grief he believed was waiting for him with such enormity that it would knock the breath from his lungs, maybe forever.

  Suddenly, the lights of the squat, two-story hospital appeared before them. The parking lot, nearly empty, was slick and bright with the lights’ streaking reflections against puddles from that night’s rainfall. The word EMERGENCY was lit up in red neon, both beacon and warning.

  “There’s Mercy,” Cal said. “We’re going to make it, Lucas.”

  “We’re going to make it,” Lucas said, simply repeating the words for his son’s sake, no longer sure he had a right to believe it.

  • • •

  He’d known, all along, it would come to this. Without wanting to admit it to himself, and especially to his son, he’d known since the very first day.

  Lucas, there’s a problem with his white count.

  Two years before, Jared’s pediatrician had called Lucas just hours after the visit. Jared had been listless for the past few days, with a low-grade fever that had kept him out of school that Friday, but that sort of ailment had become commonplace since Rachel’s death. Jared had been sick much more often since his mom had died, susceptible to colds and fevers Lucas knew were stress-related. Lucas had been thirteen when his own mother had died, and he remembered spending many hours in bed nursing phantom fevers before and after she finally succumbed to her illness. For a long time now, sickness had seemed to be roosting in Lucas’s house.

  So, Lucas didn’t have a particular reason to be worried about Jared. Still, he was. He’d taken Jared to see Graham at the doctor’s gaily decorated office at Governor’s Square Mall at 10 A.M. Saturday morning, and Graham had checked Jared’s temperature, looked at his tongue, and felt his lymph glands (which Lucas thought felt a little swollen, though not much), and just because Lucas had asked him to, Graham drew blood he promised to get analyzed that same day. Just in case. Then, Graham had given Jared a handful of Tootsie Rolls and sent him home with orders for bed rest.

  Jared had already proclaimed he was feeling better by the time the phone rang at exactly two-thirty, as they were eating a pepperoni pizza for lunch and watching a video, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, one of Jared’s favorites. Jared was propped up in the leather reclining chair in the living room with pillows and blankets, snug as a bug. On the video, Charlie’s mother had just bought him a Willy Wonka chocolate bar for his birthday, one she could barely afford, and Charlie was eagerly peeling the wrapper away to see if it had the coveted Golden Ticket inside. And it did not, of course. “Ooh, I wish it was there!” Jared had said, which he said every single time, though they both knew from at least a dozen viewings that Charlie would get his Golden Ticket soon.

  Then, the phone rang.

  Lucas would never forget any of these details while there was still breath in his body. Though he missed Rachel like hell, he’d been finding his way back to some sort of balance, living his own life again, before that telephone call had come from Graham. By the time he hung up, another man’s life had begun. “Lucas? I’ve got Jared’s blood work here, and there’s a problem with his white count. It’s high.”

  Ridiculously, Lucas had first thought Graham was only concerned about a minor infection, maybe mono. “How high?”

  The pause wasn’t long, but it was long enough for Lucas to detect, and during that silence a part of his mind crumbled, because that was the first time he knew. He didn’t hear Graham’s answer the first time, so he asked him to repeat it. Then, he realized he had heard, but his ears just hadn’t accepted what he’d heard: “One hundred fifty thousand.”

  Lucas didn’t say anything, the number ringing in his head like gibberish that needed translating, because a normal white-cell count was only ten thousand, and that was what his son should have, not fifteen times that. Graham went on, “You’d better get him over to Wheeler for more testing. I’ll let them know you’re on the way.”

  Wheeler Memorial Cancer Center.

  Rachel had spent time at Wheeler, too. Rachel had died of brain cancer almost exactly two years to the day of that phone call about Jared’s blood on June 5, 1999. Lucas had just been throw
n off of one heartbreaking merry-go-round, and now he was being forced to board one whirling faster and more furiously than the last.

  “Leukemia?” Lucas said in a hushed breath, out of Jared’s earshot.

  “I can’t say for sure, but like you, that’s the first thing I was afraid of,” Graham said, speaking with a frankness Lucas knew he would not dare with any other parent, especially on the phone. “I know it doesn’t make sense. But he’s elevated, Lucas, and we need to jump on it. I’m sorry. This blindsided me, it really did.”

  Jared was giggling in front of the television set, the first time Lucas had heard his son giggle in three days, and one of the few times Jared had allowed himself to giggle at all since Rachel had died. Tears stung so viciously at Lucas’s eyes that he felt as if he were blinking acid. Soon, he’d have to tell his eight-year-old son there was something terribly wrong with his blood, and it was probably cancer, just like his mommy had, except his cancer was in his blood.

  “I’m sorry, Lucas,” Graham said again, as if he were blaming himself, and Lucas wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, not at all. Lucas swallowed back a sound that would only have come out like a half-hysterical laugh.

  Hadn’t Graham figured it out yet? It was just the Curse, at work yet again, maybe for the last time. A trilogy. It had taken Lucas’s mother, then it had taken his wife, and now it was going to take his son; it was a spiteful brand of evil he’d stirred up long ago without even trying, something stalking him that he’d never been able to shake, that was determined to steal everyone he loved. First one. Then another. And another.

  “I’m okay,” Lucas said, uttering the biggest lie of his life, because at that moment he’d finally known he would never be okay again.

  • • •

  “He has leukemia, and he passed out. He looks shocky, so I’m afraid he’s had some kind of internal rupture. Maybe he fell and didn’t say anything to me about it. Where’s your trauma surgeon?” Lucas said, following the gurney carrying his son down the hospital’s overly bright hallway; one of the back wheels danced in a crazy whirl as it wobbled across the riotously gleaming white floor. Nurses and orderlies stared at their processional, frozen in place where they stood, as if they weren’t used to late-night interruptions.

  “We don’t have one,” said the crew-cut physician who’d met Lucas at the mechanical double doors. Lucas had been mortified to see him; he must have been at least thirty but barely looked twenty-five. His smooth, boyish face was covered with freckles, and he was wearing a lilac-colored scrub suit and bright orange sneakers, an overall effect that was so clownlike that Lucas had wondered for a moment if he was hallucinating. The young doctor, whose picture identification tag dangling from his neck identified him as R. Mandini, went on, “We usually refer the serious traumas to General—”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Lucas said, the sickly dreamlike sensation sweeping him again. He brushed Jared’s forehead as if he needed to physically touch him to feel assured he was still there. Jared’s eyelids were fluttering slightly, involuntary impulses.

  “—but I went ahead and paged Jaime Gonzalez, who’s affiliated here through the university. He’s on his way,” the young doctor finished, and Lucas felt such a surge of relief that he thought his knees would buckle. Jaime Gonzalez was on staff at Florida State University, and he was a damn good surgeon. Thank Mary and Jesus above.

  While one of the nurses wrapped Jared’s arm in a blood-pressure cuff, Mandini pressed his hand gently against Jared’s abdomen, then pierced his pale stomach with a long needle. In an instant, blood spurted into the hypodermic’s plastic casing. There was internal bleeding, then, and a lot of it. Seeing his worst fears confirmed, Lucas’s heart went cold.

  “Blood pressure’s only fifty,” the young nurse said. Her eyes were wide, alarmed.

  Mandini looked up at Lucas. “You’re right, Dr. Shepard—your son is hemorrhaging, and he’s in distress. I need to get him open to stop this bleeding. Dr. Gonzalez will back me up when he gets here. In the meantime, you’re free to assist.” Then, Mandini looked at Lucas almost hopefully, as if willing to defer to an elder.

  “I’ll go in the OR with you, but I’m not a surgeon,” Lucas said, more sharply than he’d intended. He hadn’t performed anything remotely resembling a surgery since med school thirty years before, and even then it had only been on cadavers. Was this doctor so inexperienced that Lucas would be forced to take the scalpel in his own hand?

  “Okay, right, I wasn’t sure . . . ,” Mandini mumbled, his face flushing red.

  Lord, please deliver me from fools, Lucas thought. Please deliver Jared tonight.

  “Well, Dr. Shepard, I’m going to do everything I can for your son. I hope you have, too.” Then the young doctor added reproachfully, practically under his breath, “I hope you know a kid this sick needs a hell of a lot more than voodoo.”

  Lucas stared at him, momentarily stunned, wondering if he had heard wrong. Then, when he’d decided he hadn’t, he was too weary even to be angry. How could this doctor even ask him if he’d done everything he could?

  “What do you think?” Lucas said. “He’s my goddamned son.”

  Mandini only glanced at him with nervous resignation as he shuttled the gurney toward the operating room, preparing to witness a death.

  • • •

  “I couldn’t believe that little twerp, practically asking you to do the operation yourself,” Cal said, biting into a powdered doughnut he’d just bought from the row of well-stocked vending machines in the Mercy North Medical Center doctors’ lounge. Cal’s sand-colored hair was splayed wildly across his head, betraying his sudden arousal from sleep. Gazing at his neighbor, Lucas realized he must look like hell, too. He glanced down at himself and saw he was wearing only a pair of tattered sweatpants and a stained undershirt, the clothes he’d been sleeping in. He was lucky he hadn’t run out of the house buck naked.

  “He was scared is all,” Lucas said. “Knew he needed all the help he could get.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the kind of crap I would expect from Clarion, that HMO Nita and I are with. As long as the cheap bastards thought they could save a buck, they would’ve asked us to do the operation at home, too. Skip the emergency room altogether.” Even sleep-deprived and under stress, Cal’s face looked ruddy and cheerful because of his oversize cheeks. “Want some coffee, Doc? This fancy machine even has espresso.”

  Lucas shook his head. He was so tired it almost hurt, but he knew coffee would only make him anxious. He’d begun hoping again, and Cal’s attempts to be jovial fed his hope, even though part of him was afraid to hope at all.

  But it was six-thirty, and Jared was still alive. The sun was easing its way to full daylight outside, glowing ever brighter through the room’s louvered windows. The situation had slowly evolved into a maybe, not as dire as it had been in the car when he’d thought Jared might go into cardiac arrest. Maybe felt good. And having Cal here felt good. The day was beginning to dawn like one they might all survive. This time.

  Because it was only May, Lucas realized. It wasn’t June yet. Lucas’s mother had died in June. Rachel had died in June. And he felt a new certainty that if Jared was going to die, it would be in June. It couldn’t happen on that operating table, not on an early morning in May. Not yet.

  For Jared, today was not the day. It was like the line from Audre Lorde’s last poem, written while the poet herself was dying, that Rachel had taped to her wall for inspiration and memorized while she was sick: Today is not the day. It could be but it is not. Today is today.

  “Hey, Doc . . . I hope you won’t take this wrong, but you look kinda rough sittin’ there,” Cal said, pulling Lucas from his morbid thoughts. “Maybe you’d better put that operating gown back on before someone comes in here and sticks a broom in your hand.”

  “Fuck you very much, Cal,” Lucas said, nearly smiling.

  Lucas and Rachel had befriended Cal Duhart and his wife, Juanita, almost as soon as the Duharts had
moved into their neighborhood nearly ten years ago, when they all made the unlikely discovery that they were two interracial couples living across the street from each other. Juanita had lost her best friend when Rachel died, just as Lucas had, but thank God he hadn’t lost Cal. By now, after more than five years of striving, waiting, grieving, and then striving and waiting some more, Cal’s insults had become pure, lifesaving habit.

  “You know how it goes, one of these redneck MDs walks in and sees a black man lounging in here,” Cal went on, taking a seat beside Lucas while finishing his doughnut. “Some of the less enlightened may not realize you’re free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, you’re free at last.” Cal’s expert imitation of Martin Luther King’s preaching voice was almost frightening—especially from the lips of a blue-eyed white man whose usual speaking voice was cracker to the core. Cal had been raised in the hills of Georgia and usually sounded like it.

  Lucas laughed hard, from his gut. Then, the laugh caught in his throat and almost turned into a sob as it suddenly dawned on him that this might be the worst day of his fifty-five years of life. He squeezed his friend’s shoulder hard and didn’t let go for a long time, not saying a word. The silence seemed interminable. Cal broke it first, avoiding eye contact by staring steadfastly at the mounted television playing at a low volume above them.

  “You can’t let your mind whip you in circles from waiting,” Cal said gently, all mirth gone. “Waiting’s the killer, Doc. You know that by now. Jared’s a tough kid.”

  Lucas nodded, unable to speak.

  “At least they’re treating you right here. They’re giving you and Jared the red carpet. That’s gotta be good for something.”

  Yep, it was star treatment, all right. Maybe the medical community didn’t respect Lucas’s work in alternative medicine—as typified by Mandini’s snide comment about voodoo, a term so often misapplied that Lucas had given up correcting it—but at least his name still carried weight from the days he had won the Lasker microbiology prize in 1986, the field’s highest, before science had dismissed him as a kook. Or, maybe Mercy North just wasn’t interested in being noted in national news reports as the place where Dr. Lucas Shepard’s son had died. Whatever the reason, Mercy had gone out of its way to treat him and Jared well, and Lucas was glad.