Love and Laughter in the Time of Chemotherapy Page 19

  “It is amazing,” she responds, intrigued by the possibilities. “Like if your blood was found on a crime scene, the DNA analysis would say it was him! And if they tried to test you, instead of giving a blood sample, you could give a cheek swab, those cells are still yours, right? And then you would get away with it.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me, if it’s even true. And I really hope it doesn’t occur to him.

  I work and rework the email in my mind, right down to the careful wording of the subject line (“RE: Stem cell transplant”). I decide that would be nice and neutral.

  Dear Jay,

  I am the person whose life you saved. I was diagnosed with leukemia on April 28, 2014. At that time I was 47 years old, happily married with 11-year-old twins, and a job I loved. My doctors said that unless I had a stem cell transplant I only had a 40 percent chance of surviving. I spent months in hospital undergoing chemotherapy. But miraculously I found a match in you and had the stem cell transplant on October 28, 2014. I am almost completely recovered and plan to return to work this October. My chances of surviving by that time, two years post transplant, will be 90 percent.

  My husband and I are planning a trip to New York City for a few days in late August or September to celebrate before I return to work. I would love to meet you, for an hour or so, for coffee say, while we are in town. I really hope that will be possible. Are there days that are better for you? We are flexible about the timing of our trip.

  I look forward to meeting you,

  Manjusha

  He emails me back immediately and it’s like corresponding with someone I already know. He’s thrilled I’m visiting and tells me to come anytime. He tells me that the moment he got the phone call, more than a year after the transplant, telling him it was successful and I was doing well, was the most gratifying moment of his life. We email back and forth asking each other questions. I struggle with using the words “thank you” in the emails and decide in the end not to use them at all, because I don’t want to trivialize them or ever sign off with the “thanks, Manjusha” that I use in almost every email I send, work or personal. I want to save those words for when we meet, so they will be fresh.

  The night before we leave, I’m too tense to sleep. I lie down for only a few seconds before leaping out of bed because I forgot to tell Jack something. I can see from under his door that his light is still on, so I knock, and then enter. He props himself up so he can see me from his top bunk where he’s reading. He puts his book down; the earbuds from his iPod dangle from one ear. He looks at me questioningly.

  “I forgot to tell you. You know those papers you asked me to sign for your trip? I checked and they’re not due until next week, so I’ll do it when we get back from New York. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He returns to his book and I close the door and return to bed.

  Minutes later I’m back at his door. His light is off now, but I figure he can’t be asleep yet. I knock again.

  “What?” The room is dark, but I can almost make him out.

  “I realized we were talking about you starting to volunteer at Cubs tomorrow, but September 28 is actually next Wednesday, not tomorrow, tomorrow’s the 21st. So I wanted to let you know it’s next week, not tomorrow like we thought.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  I’m in bed for almost an hour before I realize I better cross off the line about Jack being at Cubs from the note I left for my mother on the kitchen counter. I go downstairs and amend the schedule.

  At 3 a.m. I’m back in the kitchen, this time to cut the tight shrink wrap off the cheddar. It’s always hard to cut it off an unopened wedge. Anna will be making her own lunch tomorrow and I don’t want her to cut her hand. I rewrap the cheddar in plastic wrap and return it to the fridge.

  It’s too overwhelming to think about meeting Jay, so I continue to think about cheese until finally it’s 5 a.m. and time to get up to catch our flight.

  When we finally make it to Central Park, where we have planned to meet Jay, we have just enough time to grab a quick lunch before our meeting. We get a couple of hot dogs from one of the vendors lined up outside the entrance and carry them carefully into the park; I’m wearing a white shirt and don’t want to show up for this momentous meeting covered in mustard and ketchup. We are halfway through our lunch when I notice, from reading the sign on a hot dog cart inside the park, that we have been charged double the usual price. I’m assuming it was because the vendor could tell we were tourists, with our backpacks, and especially with Simon’s British accent. Simon’s philosophical about it. “I guess we’ve learned a valuable lesson,” he says. But I’m furious.

  “It’s the principle, not the nine dollars,” I repeat, as I insist we march back to the vendors.

  I can’t believe it. The cart we got the hot dogs from is gone. Even though it’s only half an hour later, it’s been replaced by a cart selling Popsicles. I approach several nearby vendors to ask if they’ve seen the hot dog cart that was right beside the book kiosk. One vendor is particularly sympathetic, or possibly worried I’m about to embark on an exposé of Central Park hot dog vendors. He brings out a battered sandwich board listing prices to show me that his own business is honest. “Next time go to the police!” he tells me. “It’s bad for the rest of us too when this happens.”

  Simon waits, at first patiently, and then, not so patiently, for me to focus. “We’re going to be late to meet Jay,” he warns me.

  “Let me just ask one more person,” I say, “and maybe that person over there too if they know where that cart went.” No one knows. It’s very difficult. The sun is so hot and it’s all too much. The buskers that were sitting near us move farther down to a bench that’s in the shade. My eyes are burning from lack of sleep. I was so eager in anticipating this day; now it’s here, I feel slightly sick.

  I give up on finding the vendor and we re-enter the park. I perk up when we reach the pond with the remote-controlled sailboats. I recognize them even though I’ve never seen them before. I realize this is where Stuart Little raced his sailboat. I hadn’t known until now it was an actual thing, not just a scene in the story about the famous mouse. Finally we’re at our meeting point, the Alice in Wonderland statue. It’s beautiful, shining in the sun, and the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, and the dormouse are there too. In a real garden. Look how far I’ve come, I want to tell Alice, from those flowers in the hospital’s glass garden. Simon and I sit and watch while people stroll by stopping for photos. We forgot to bring our camera. We switch to a shady bench.

  Then I see a young Indian man walking quickly toward us and suddenly he’s right in front of me and we’re hugging and he’s sobbing and for some reason I’m laughing, but I can’t say anything. He’s late, he eventually explains, because he walked in the wrong direction from the subway station.

  I’m usually chatty, but I find it difficult to speak. I was saving “thank you” for this moment, but I can’t say it. The words are used up, too meager, too ordinary. I’ve said them a hundred times today already, to the shuttle bus driver for dropping us off at the airport, to the flight attendant for giving me a bottle of water, to the woman crossing the street with us for telling us which way was west, even to the vendor who handed me our nine-dollar hot dogs.

  I’ll save it for later, I think, when we’re at his house, with everyone gathered around. He had invited us to Staten Island to meet his family. It’ll be better there, I decide, it’ll be special, like a speech. So I don’t say much now, I just ask him questions. I’m starving for every detail of his journey. How he was in his last month of law school when he got the call, how he thought it was a telemarketer at first, because he didn’t remember the name of the blood services. It had been seven years since he’d given a cheek swab at a Gujarati conference, in response to a plea by a member of their community. He was twenty years old a
t the time, and he’d casually given the swab as he was heading out for a drink with friends. Luckily, there was no lineup, or he may not even have paused to do it.

  When he finally understood what they were calling about, that he was a match for someone, he had only one question: “Are there any other matches?” And when they said, “No, you’re the only one we found,” he said, “I’ll do it.” Before they explained anything about the process, about what it would entail, even when he mistakenly believed it would involve an operation, he still said yes immediately.

  “I’m scared of doctors,” he says sheepishly, “so I never go, and then I had to do all these tests to see if I was healthy, an EKG and stuff, so I was glad to find out I was.” But then he was annoyed when, in the week or so before the transplant, he got not just one call, but several, to confirm he was really willing to go through with it, that he hadn’t changed his mind.

  “I said I would do it!” he remembers telling them, thinking they shouldn’t be questioning his commitment, and also thinking that their repeated checks would scare people by making them believe it was a bigger deal than they had thought it would be. “I thought they were like inviting people to back out, it didn’t make sense,” he says.

  Then they explained to him that it was because I was about to start the chemo and radiation treatments to wipe out my immune system before the transplant. If he changed his mind after I started those treatments, I would die, because not only would I not be getting his immune system, I would no longer have mine. He said they told him it had happened, a related donor had changed his mind the very day of the transplant, and the patient died. They wanted to impress upon him that if he was going to change his mind, now was the time to do it.

  But far from changing his mind he never faltered. He says the daily injections the week before the donation hurt for a few seconds, but the donation itself, though it took a few hours, didn’t hurt at all. They kept him supplied with juice and cookies and a courier was right there, waiting to take the bag the second it was finished. “The nurse there asked me if I knew how lucky I was,” he said. I am surprised to hear that. Then he explains, “She said because lots of people give a cheek swab and don’t match with anyone. And I thought, yeah, I’m lucky. This is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, that I’ll ever do.”

  “And it worked,” I marvel.

  “Oh, I knew it would work,” he says, sounding utterly certain.

  “What do you mean, you knew?”

  “So many things had to happen,” he explains. “I’ve never even given blood before. That was the only time I ever gave a cheek swab. And the time of the procedure I was between law school and working, I was completely free. I made the donation in the same hospital I was born in. If all that worked, it meant the transplant just had to work.”

  The lesser stars aligned as well. We’re both in law; we both love the same television series (The Wire, Breaking Bad, Making a Murderer); we both worry about the words we use; we both have a terrible sense of direction. On our way to his home, he got turned around at the subway station by the ferry docks.

  “There’s no sign,” I say to Simon, sympathizing with Jay’s confusion.

  “Well, the ferry is probably by the water,” Simon points out, unsympathetically, as we retrace our steps and head toward the river.

  At his home, we meet his parents and his grandmother whom he lives with. They are all so happy to see me, like I’m the special one. I can’t believe I made it this far, and they can’t believe I’m here. I want to say my thank you now, but I feel overwhelmed and underprepared. I decide really I should wait until his fiancée and his brother and sister-in-law arrive; they are coming directly from work. Instead, I hand his mother a package from my mother containing five kinds of Indian sweets she has made (the number you make when you’re celebrating) and a letter. His mother starts to read the letter in front of us, but has to put it away for later because it makes her tear up.

  “His brother gave a cheek swab that day also,” his mother tells me on a more cheerful note, “and oh, he was so disappointed when Jay turned out to be a match instead of him. ‘Why didn’t I match?’ he wanted to know. Why Jay?”

  His grandmother says something in Gujarati and his mother translates. “She says Jay must have taken something from you in a former life and now he’s giving it back.”

  Jay’s mother puts the photo I gave Jay on an end table with a cluster of other photos of engagements and weddings and vacations. She puts my Ganesh on a shrine at one end of the living room; he fits right in, as there are at least a dozen other Ganesh figures spread out across the table. But they are softer featured and all white; he is small and precise and dark gray, intent upon his book. I feel a pang, which I ignore.

  Jay tells me blood services sent him a thank you card after the transplant with some movie tickets, which he thought was nice. And today, the exact day we’re meeting, he got an email inviting him to participate in one of those runs to raise money. He hands me his phone to read the message, because he’s so amazed by the timing. I murmur at the coincidence of it all, but really I’m cringing when I scroll down to where they tell him that, because he’s a donor, he’ll get ten dollars off the registration fee. Really, ten dollars? Suddenly I’m upset. Nothing, nothing, nothing is enough.

  The rest of the family eventually arrives, but in the bustle of introductions I miss my moment to make a speech, and now it’s time to eat, so I decide to wait until after dinner.

  I learn that Jay’s in the process of being admitted to the New York bar. He wants to go into criminal law, to be a public defender. His fiancée laughs when I mention wonderingly that he seems too good to be true. She describes how they met at a conference two years ago at which he had sung the American and the Indian national anthems. “I was sitting beside him,” she tells me, “and people kept coming by saying, great singing, congratulations on law school, hey we heard you saved someone’s life, and I was thinking who is this?”

  “Hold September 1, 2, and 3,” his mother tells me. “For the wedding. And your children and your parents, your whole family, must come.” I smile and nod and think a Labor Day weekend of festivities with 400 people we’ve never met would be a pretty accurate depiction of Simon’s idea of hell. But then it hits me, who Jay is. He’s my blood brother. Literally.

  If you actually think about bloodlines, blood relations, blood being thicker than water, then we are closer to each other than to anyone else in our families. I turn over my hands and look down at my pink palms. The blood that my heart is pumping every second to my fingertips, to every part of my body, is the same as the blood that is flowing through his veins right now. Every single cell of my blood comes from his stem cells, the same stem cells his own blood is coming from.

  I look over at him. We’re now at the end of the evening; we’re done eating, we’re done talking; he has brought down the family’s harmonium to the living room and is playing and singing an Indian classical song while his brother accompanies him on the tabla and his mother and grandmother tilt their heads and call out in soft bursts of appreciation.

  I tilt my own head and glance at Simon. He’s on the sofa and he’s looking at me and smiling. And I know he knows. Of course we will go to the wedding. Jay is my brother. His family opening their arms to me was much more than Indian hospitality; they did it with full hearts, welcoming a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister. I had been looking forward to this trip as the endpoint of my ordeal, my chance to thank the person who saved my life. Turns out I haven’t ended anything, I’ve added another whole family to my life.

  He drops us off at the ferry docks, narrowly avoiding several collisions in the process, honking at every driver in front of us who has the temerity to slow down for a yellow light. We benefit from the breakneck speed, and manage to catch the ferry seconds before the gates close. The New York City skyline glitters against the blue-black night. The light of the Statue of L
iberty’s torch is like a star, and I’m busy planning what to give him for his birthday (just two months away), what to give him for his wedding, even what to get for the birth of his future child, when I realize I never did say thank you.

  “Don’t worry,” Simon says. “I said it.”

  “Not just for dinner right? But for actually—”

  “Yes,” Simon confirms. “Not just for dinner.”

  I’m going to steal a line from Simon to end, which should not surprise anyone because all the best lines in this book are his. It’s something he’s been saying to me starting in Rome, and almost every day since; yes, even through all this cancer stuff. But I’m not remotely ashamed by my theft, because the words make much more sense coming from me.

  “Will you tell me now? How did I get to be so lucky?”

  The End

  Epilogue

  Savitri sits under the spreading branches of a banyan tree, Satyavan’s head in her lap. Her fingers are raking softly through his hair, as light as the breeze that lifts the ends of her own unbraided locks that ripple down her back. But the only breath that joins the breeze is hers.

  “It is time.”

  She doesn’t have to look up to know who has spoken. After all, she has spent the last three days with no sleep closing her eyes, no food or water passing her lips, as upright as the trees she stood among, with prayers as silent as theirs. But still he came, just as she knew he would.

  Her lips press tightly together, but otherwise she doesn’t stir as Yama bends down between the backswept horns of the wild water buffalo he rides and effortlessly lifts up her husband’s body and drapes it in front of him. She doesn’t even look up until the god of death is almost out of sight, his dark ox and darker skin melting into the night.

  Though he would never admit it, being a god and all, he is relieved. He thought for sure he would have trouble with her. She is famous; the only child of a king who prayed to the sun god for years, literally years, for a son. The sun god, impressed with the king’s steadfastness, said, “You have been so faithful I will grant you more than what you seek. I will grant you not a son, but a daughter whose capacity for devotion will one day match your own. Trust me, it will be better this way.” If the king was disappointed he hid it well, loved his daughter warmly, and indulged her in every way. He even let her leave to search for a husband herself when she grew up to be so beautiful and so pure that no man dared approach to ask for her hand in marriage.