UNTIL ANGELS CLOSE MY EYES
Chapter Nineteen

Thursday, September 30, 2004

Rose was on her way to work when her cell phone rang. She quickly picked it up from where it lay on the passenger seat and answered it, hoping it was Jack.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Rose."

"Jack!" She pulled to a stop at a red light. "How are you doing? Do you know when you’ll be admitted to the hospital?"

"I’m supposed to be there around 4:30 this afternoon. Dr. Stellar made all the arrangements."

"Well, that’s good, I guess. Were you able to drive yourself to your appointment?"

"No. I didn’t feel up to it. Dad drove me and got some other teachers to cover for him. He’s helping me get packed for the hospital right now. I was so tired when we got back from seeing Dr. Stellar that I just wanted to sleep for a few hours."

"How are you doing, Jack?" Rose asked. "I mean, how bad is the leukemia? Do you know?"

Jack was silent for a moment. "It’s not good," he finally told her. "My white blood cell count is way too high, and they’ll probably give me a blood transfusion as soon as I get there and start the chemotherapy tomorrow."

"Jack…" Rose shook her head. "Do you want me to come by after work? I promised I’d work a couple of hours extra tonight, but I might be able to get out of it…"

"I don’t want you to put your job at risk for me. You already skipped one day when I passed out at school. Maybe you can come tomorrow night. Mom will be bringing my books then."

"Are you sure? Because I can try to get out of the extra hours…"

"They’ll pretty much be getting me settled tonight, giving me the first medication. But if you can come tomorrow…Mom and Dad could give you a ride."

Rose thought for a moment. "Are you sure?"

"If you weren’t working, you could come to the hospital with Dad and me this afternoon. But I don’t want you to get into trouble. Go to work, and I’ll see you tomorrow."

Rose sighed. "Okay, but if you want to call, I’ll be getting off work at nine tonight."

"I’ll probably be asleep by then, but…yeah, if I’m still awake, I’ll call. I’m bringing my cell phone with me."

"I’ll get your schoolwork from your teachers tomorrow…maybe we can work on the stuff for Mr. Carter and Mrs. Baldwin’s classes together if you feel up to it."

"Yeah…I hope I feel up to it…it’s hard to tell how I’ll feel."

"I know…I’m going to come and see you as often as I can."

"Thanks. Rose…I’m going to make it through this. I know I am. I’m a survivor."

"Jack…" Rose’s voice softened. "I hope you’re right. I really hope you’re right."

Friday, October 1, 2004

Jack sat up in his hospital bed, moving his pencil half-heartedly around a sheet of paper in his sketchbook. In about fifteen minutes, he’d be receiving his first round of IV chemotherapy, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

He had felt better for a while the day before, after undergoing leukepheresis, a procedure to reduce his white blood cell count, and after a blood transfusion. Later that evening, though, he had been given his first round of oral chemotherapy, and he’d been feeling queasy ever since. He was on a particularly strong regimen of chemotherapy this time, as this was his third bout of the disease and it became harder to treat each time.

Jack finally set the half-finished drawing aside and lay back, taking a deep breath to dispel a wave of nausea.

The person in the next bed, a young man named Tommy Ryan, grimaced and shook his head at him. "Why don’t you just let it come up? You’ll feel better."

Jack shook his head slightly and took another deep breath, willing his stomach to calm down. He’d be sick enough after the IV chemotherapy later; he wasn’t going to let himself throw up right now if he could avoid it.

He glanced around at the other three patients in the room. All were young men like him; two were fellow cancer patients. The third, Richard Calvert, was waiting for a heart transplant.

Jack had been puzzled—in fact, was still puzzled—at Richard’s presence in the oncology ward. Wouldn’t he be better off in the ward with other heart patients, with cardiologists who were far more familiar with a case like his than an oncologist would be?

Jack had asked Richard why he was in the oncology ward, if his need for a new heart was because of cancer or severe side effects from cancer treatment, but Richard had fallen asleep before he could answer.

It had been Tommy Ryan, who had been best friends with Richard since kindergarten and was in the hospital for the treatment of the lymphoma he had been diagnosed with just a few weeks earlier, who had answered Jack’s questions.

Richard and Tommy had both been born and raised in the town of Hinkley, California, a town made famous a few years earlier by a lawsuit put together by a woman named Erin Brockovich over contaminated water in the town. The water, contaminated by substance called hexavalent chromium, had been responsible for the unusually high cancer rate in the town over the years, and Tommy was sure that it was responsible for his cancer, too, as his family had moved to Hinkley just before he was born, and there had been no family history of cancer on either side, and yet his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer just a few years earlier, when she was in her late thirties, and had survived, and now Tommy, at the age of twenty, had lymphoma.

Jack had listened sympathetically, but still hadn’t understood what that had to do with Richard’s presence in the oncology ward, but Tommy had gone on to tell him that he was sure that the damage to Richard’s heart had been partially caused by his exposure to the contaminated water when he was growing up in Hinkley, even though Richard’s cardiologist had said that his heart had been damaged by a virus contracted while he was in college.

Richard would normally have been placed in the cardiology ward, but his father, Dr. James Calvert, was an oncologist at the hospital at Loma Linda University and wanted to be able to keep a close eye on his son, and furthermore, Dr. Calvert had a long-standing rivalry with the head cardiologist and didn’t quite trust him with his son.

Jack thought that Dr. Calvert’s decision was amazingly irresponsible, especially since he had seen so many people die over the years, and thought that Richard should have been placed in the care of a cardiologist, no matter what kind of disagreements his father had with the head cardiologist, so that he would have the best possible care. Richard didn’t seem to be suffering much because of the decision, though, and he and Tommy spent a lot of time commiserating over their illnesses, which seemed to keep both of them in better spirits. Jack had only been in the hospital with them for twenty-four hours, but he knew how much having a friend who understood what it was like to have a serious illness could help, so he hadn’t said anything.

Jack sat back up, once again willing his stomach to stay calm and finding that sitting up straight helped a little. He looked for his sketchbook, then realized that the patient in the bed to the left of him, a young man named Fabrizio di Rossi, had picked it up and was looking through it, stopping to admire some of the drawings.

Fabrizio was a few months younger than Jack; he had just turned eighteen when he was diagnosed with leukemia in mid-September, his first experience with the disease. He was a senior in high school, too, having been held back a year to learn English after his family had immigrated to the United States from Italy when he was ten years old, and was hoping to achieve remission quickly so he could go back to his school in Los Angeles.

Though Jack had known him for only a day, they were already becoming friends; their shared experience with the miseries of leukemia and cancer treatment had given them something in common, and the discovery that they had made that morning that they both found art fascinating had sealed their friendship.

"These are good, Jack." Fabrizio looked up from his perusal of the sketchbook when he noticed Jack watching him. There was only a trace of an accent in Fabrizio’s voice; after several years in ELD classes tailored towards Spanish-speaking students, who were the majority of English learners in the schools Fabrizio had gone to, he could speak both English and Spanish with nearly as much fluency as he spoke Italian, and because he had begun learning the new languages at a young age, he could speak both with only a hint of an Italian accent.

Jack leaned over to see which drawing Fabrizio was looking at, glad for the distraction. It was a drawing of Rose done in colored pencil; he had made the drawing for art class just before he and Rose had gotten into the argument about his not telling her he had leukemia.

"That’s my girlfriend, Rose," he told Fabrizio, pointing to the drawing.

"She’s pretty."

"Yeah, and she’s cool, too. She’s sticking with me even though I’ve got leukemia."

"You’re lucky," Tommy interjected. "My girlfriend visited me once after she found out I have cancer, and then she called and told me it wasn’t going to work between us."

Jack nodded. "Some people just can’t handle it when someone is really sick."

"I don’t have a girlfriend," Fabrizio interjected. "There’s a girl I like who’s on the dance team, but she hardly knows I’m around, except she borrowed a pencil from me just before I had to come here, and she smiled at me then." He sighed. "She has blonde hair and blue eyes, and her name is Helga Dahl."

"You should ask her out when you get back to school," Jack told him. "You’ll never know if she likes you back if you don’t."

"Maybe," Fabrizio conceded. "After I get better and my hair grows back." He touched what remained of his once-thick black hair regretfully.

At that moment, a nurse walked into the room. "Jack Dawson?" she asked, consulting her clipboard.

"That’s me." Jack paled, feeling more nauseous than ever at the very thought of the IV chemotherapy, which he had never been able to get through without getting sick, and which he had always found to be worst the first time around.

"I’m here to take you for chemo, just a few rooms away."

"I know." Jack got out of bed reluctantly, knowing that he needed the treatment, but dreading it all the same. With the possible exception of spinal taps, there were few things he disliked more about leukemia treatment than IV chemotherapy. "Fuck," he muttered, not as quietly as he intended.

"Not with that stuff," Richard interjected from his bed by the window, drawing snickers from the others.

Even Jack laughed a little. "Shut up," he told Richard, turning and following the nurse out of the room, more laughter following him as he left.

*****

Jack’s good humor faded when he followed the nurse into the room where patients were given IV chemotherapy. He was the only one there at the moment, for which he was glad. He didn’t like having other people around during his chemo sessions—he hated getting sick in front of them, though many other patients went through the same thing.

He was quiet as the nurse got him settled in a chair and hooked up the bag containing the medicine, watching with dread as she attached it to the needle already in his arm and released the clip to allow the medicine to flow into his body.

"I’ll be back to check on you in about fifteen minutes," she told him, making sure that the liquid was flowing properly from the bag.

Jack nodded, not trusting himself to open his mouth at the moment. He winced at the burning sensation as the medicine began to flow into his arm, breathing deeply to try to control the overwhelming wave of nausea that hit him a few seconds later.

As he had expected, it didn’t work. He clapped one hand over his mouth, the other groping blindly for the emesis basin that was always left beside him when he underwent this type of chemotherapy.

It wasn’t there. Jack looked around in dismay as he realized that the nurse had forgotten to leave it for him, wondering if he could possibly control his rebellious stomach long enough to search the cabinets in the room for a basin, then realized he couldn’t as his stomach heaved uncontrollably, again and again.

*****

Rose sat in the back seat behind James and Lorraine, Jack’s books stacked beside her. The Dawsons had waited until she got home from work to go to visit Jack, bringing her with them.

She thought about seeing him, hoping that he was feeling okay. He had called her the night before, sounding tired and miserable. They had only talked for a few minutes before she had let him go, since he had sounded like he was about to fall asleep while talking to her.

Rose fidgeted nervously with her necklace, wondering how bad the treatment for cancer really was. She had visited her grandmother when she had had breast cancer, but had never been allowed to visit while she was undergoing the harsher treatments.

Lorraine turned to look at Rose, noticing how quiet she was. "How are you doing, sweetie?" she asked.

"I’m okay," Rose told her. "I’m just worried about Jack, is all. He said the treatment was bad, but…how bad is it? Is it really that awful?"

"It really is," James responded, his eyes on the road. "Since he was undergoing IV chemo this afternoon, he’s probably going to be feeling pretty miserable. He won’t have much energy, and he’ll probably be more interested in throwing up or sleeping than in anything else. Still, I think he’ll be glad to know you’re there, if only because it means you haven’t abandoned him. He was a bit worried about that when I was driving him to the hospital yesterday."

"I won’t abandon him," Rose said with conviction. "I’m going to stick with him through this, no matter what."

"Have you ever been close to someone with cancer before, Rose?" Lorraine wanted to know.

"Just my grandmother," Rose admitted, "and I wasn’t allowed to see her when she was feeling really sick, but…I didn’t try to avoid seeing her or anything. And," she added, "I’m not going to avoid Jack. I promised I’d stick with him, and I will. I love him—"

She clapped a hand over her mouth, her face turning red with embarrassment. She hadn’t meant to blurt that out to Jack’s parents.

James and Lorraine were silent for a moment, processing that bit of information. Finally, Lorraine turned back to Rose.

"I think he returns your feelings, Rose. He seems to feel very strongly about you."

"He said he did." Rose stopped, not wanting to discuss this with her boyfriend’s parents. "Um…how much longer until we get there?"

"About another twenty minutes if we don’t hit traffic." Lorraine decided not to pursue the subject of Rose’s relationship with Jack, seeing how uncomfortable Rose was with discussing it with them. "I hope Jack appreciates his books. Trying to check them out for him was a trial, to say the least."

Rose was glad that Lorraine had decided not to discuss how she and Jack felt about each other. "Why? Were they out of some of them?"

"No…they had the books he needed, but that librarian…" Lorraine shook her head.

"Who? Miss Hulstrom? I always thought she was nice."

"The older one, with the short hair and bad temper?"

"Oh, that’s Miss Coney. She’s kind of mean. She’ll yell at people, sometimes for nothing, and then she’ll turn around and be really nice, and then she’ll be mean again. She yelled at me once for asking Miss Hulstrom something, but then she was really nice when she wanted me to go to the office and get a box of paper for the library."

"Well, she was in a bad mood when I went to get Jack’s books yesterday…she yelled at her assistant for telling her I was there, then got angry because I was in a hurry to get back to work and started slamming the books on the desk. I thought she was going to break something. I was late getting back to work because of her, but fortunately my boss was more understanding."

James turned the car down a freeway offramp. "We’re almost there."

"Good." Rose brightened, looking forward to seeing Jack. "I’m glad I got off work an hour earlier than usual tonight—I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to see him until tomorrow."

"Just remember that he probably won’t be feeling very well, and he probably won’t look too good, either. You can see him, but he’ll probably be more alert tomorrow."

"I still want to see him, even if it’s just for a few minutes. And now that I know the way to get to the hospital, I can come over after work to see him."

"That’ll make him happy." James turned down another street, then turned into the hospital parking lot. "We’re here."

Rose got out of the car, staggering under the weight of Jack’s books. "I sure hope he appreciates these."

Lorraine and James hurried to take some of the books from her. "Well, we certainly won’t ask him to try to lift all these at once," James remarked.

"Rose…" Lorraine began. "I just want you to be prepared. Cancer treatment takes a lot out of a person, and there may be times when Jack is too weak to get out bed by himself, or he’ll fall asleep while talking to you, or he’ll get sick in front of you. He can’t control any of those things. He may also be feverish sometimes, from the chemotherapy or from the leukemia itself. His appearance might change, too—his hair might fall out, and he’ll certainly lose weight, but at the same time, some of the drugs will cause his face to swell. It makes him look a little strange, to say the least."

Rose nodded. "He told me about some of those things…I’m going to come visit anyway."

"Just so you know what to expect."

"I’m okay, and I think Jack will be, too. He’s a survivor."

"I hope you’re right, Rose." Lorraine patted her shoulder. "I really hope he gets better."

*****

A few minutes after they arrived, they were told that Jack was being brought back to his room after chemotherapy and they could go up to see him.

They arrived in his room just as Jack was being wheeled in on a gurney, too drained after chemotherapy to walk or even to sit in a wheelchair.

Rose stared in shock as two orderlies lifted Jack from the gurney and put him back in his bed. He looked awful—his face was deathly pale, and when one of the orderlies pointed to his visitors, he had to struggle to look up at them.

"Um…hi, Jack," she said, walking towards him, then stopped when she saw what was all over his shirt. She stopped, her face paling and a faintly queasy feeling coming to her throat, as she realized that he’d thrown up all over himself. "Oh…oh, gross!"

Rose turned and ran out of the room, almost colliding with the nurse’s assistant who was coming to clean Jack up.

Lorraine looked at James and shook her head. "I’ll go after her." She set her pile of books on the table and hurried from the room, following Rose.

James waited until the nurse’s assistant had gotten Jack changed into clean clothes, then approached his son. "How are you doing, Jack?" He leaned close to him so Jack wouldn’t have to make an effort to make himself heard.

Jack looked at his dad, looking more miserable than ever, then struggled to turn his head in the direction Rose had gone. "Ah…fuck," he mumbled.

Nobody made any remarks this time.

*****

Lorraine caught up to Rose in a waiting area on the oncology floor. She was wiping her eyes and trying to calm herself when Lorraine sat down next to her.

"You weren’t expecting that, I guess." Lorraine spoke to her, putting a comforting hand on Rose’s shoulder.

Rose shook her head. "No. He looks so awful…like he’s about to die." More tears started running down her face. "I’m sorry."

Lorraine handed her a tissue. "It’s okay. The first time I saw him after chemotherapy, I kept a strong front until we left the hospital, then cried all the way home. He does look awful…but he isn’t dying, and he should start feeling better in a few hours."

"Some girlfriend I am." Rose sniffed, taking a deep breath to calm herself. "I take one look at him, call him gross, and run off. I mean, he had puke all over him, but I’ve had stomach flu before, and I got airsick once…I’ve seen that kind of thing. But he just looks so…sick…"

"It’s scary, isn’t it?" Lorraine nodded, understanding what Rose was going through. "But the chemotherapy won’t kill him, and you have to remember that it’s actually helping him, no matter how bad it looks."

"I know." Rose took a deep, shuddering breath. "Do you think he’ll be mad if I go back in and see him now?"

"I think it’ll make him feel better if you go see him."

"Okay." Rose crumpled the tissue, looking resolute. "Let’s go see him."

*****

Jack was almost asleep when Lorraine and Rose returned, curled up on his side with an emesis basin not far away. He opened his eyes slowly when his mom touched his shoulder.

"Jack?"

"Hi, Mom." His eyes were drooping shut again when he caught sight of Rose. "Rose."

"Hi, Jack." Rose leaned closer, taking his hand and rubbing it gently. "I’m sorry I ran off like that," she whispered.

"’S okay…you came back." He wanted to say more, but he was exhausted, his eyes closing even as he tried to look at Rose again.

"Jack," Lorraine said, "we brought your books…when you’re feeling up to it, you can study and do your schoolwork…and the tutor will be by on Monday."

"’Kay," Jack mumbled, nearly asleep again.

"We’ll see you tomorrow, Jack," James promised, straightening and putting an arm around Lorraine.

Rose lingered a moment after the Dawsons left, still holding Jack’s hand. "Good night, Jack," she whispered, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek before hurrying after his parents.

The other patients in the room watched her go. "Do you think she’ll be back?" Richard asked quietly.

"Five dollars says she doesn’t come back," Tommy replied.

"She’ll be back," Fabrizio assured the others. "She promised him she’d stick with him."

"Promises can disappear pretty quick when somebody’s sick like that," Richard pointed out.

"So, are you in on the bet?" Tommy asked Fabrizio.

"Why not? Five dollars says she’ll be back."

"Five dollars says she won’t," Tommy countered.

"I’m with Tommy," Richard added.

Jack was barely aware of the betting going on around him. All he could think of as he fell into an exhausted sleep was Rose. She would be back, wouldn’t she? She’d promised to stay with him.

He clung to that thought. She’d promised.

Chapter Twenty
Stories