Part Five
Second Ending
29
“Helen?” Bud said. He turned from the windows, and he walked to her, and she looked up from where she sat on the corner of the couch.
“Yes?”
“That... that Christmas... that time...”
“Yes?”
“I wanted you to know...” This was very difficult. He could barely look at her, and yet he felt he should put it into words, felt things would be better if he could put it into words. “I wanted you to know I’m sorry, truly sorry.”
She stared at him for a long time. “All right,” she said.
“And Helen...”
“Bud, I said it then. I don’t want to say it again now.”
“What?”
“It takes a hell of a lot more than ‘I’m sorry.’”
“I know, Helen, and I realize...”
The knock sounded on the door. Bud glanced at his watch. It was eleven o’clock. Helen opened the door, and the doctor entered. They took him to the couch where Andy had lain quietly through the morning. They stood by anxiously while he examined Andy. He was very thorough, a young man with a pale blond mustache, a meticulous young man. He packed his instruments with loving care when he was through.
“Your phone?” he asked.
“Over there,” Helen said. “What is it?”
“I’m calling an ambulance,” the doctor said. “Your friend is in a coma.”
The rain began at noon.
A slow steady rain that pressed against the windows in the hospital corridor. The corridor was very white and antiseptic. It smelled of ether, and it smelled of clean starched linen, and it smelled of sickness. There was a room at the end of the corridor, and there was a lettered sign on the door of the room, and the sign read: QUIET, NO ENTRANCE, and Andy Silvera was in that room. There was a basket of soiled linen outside the door of the room, and a wheel chair was against the wall farther up the corridor, and in the middle of the corridor was a desk, and a white-starched nurse sat at the desk. And sitting on the bench opposite the desk were Mr. and Mrs. Silvera and Carol. And standing to the right of the desk under the huge hanging light globe were Bud and Helen.
Mr. Silvera was a tall, cadaverous-looking man, an accountant whose eyes were weak and magnified by thick lenses. Mrs. Silvera was a small woman with pitch-black hair and deep brown eyes, eyes her son had inherited. They sat side by side on the bench, wearing their pain like a black cloak. A clock on the wall above the desk ticked loudly.
When the doctor came, he consulted a chart and then said, “What is this? A convention?” Mr. and Mrs. Silvera flinched under the blow of his words.
“We’re his parents,” Mr. Silvera said.
“And we’re his friends,” Carol added defiantly.
The doctor glanced coldly at Helen and Bud, shrugged, and then said, “He was taking drugs, did you know that?”
“Yes,” Carol said.
“Which may explain how he contracted the disease,” the doctor went on. “In the past few years we’ve learned that it can be transmitted by the use of contaminated syringes or needles, or by the administration of convalescent human serum. Even tattooing has come to be regarded as a dangerous means of transmission. If he was an addict, and there doesn’t seem to be much doubt of that, he may have come into contact with a syringe that had been used by someone with the disease. It’s not at all unlikely.” The doctor stroked his jaw. The doctor was a young man used to crowded wards and sudden death. He looked at Andy’s parents. “Your son is now in a coma. The coma was undoubtedly preceded by various symptoms — nausea, vomiting, right upper quadrant pain or distress, headache, perhaps diarrhea. And, oh—” the doctor thought, scanning his voluminous medical knowledge — “...acute chills, fever, anorexia, joint and back pain, urticaria, burning of the eyes” — he stopped, sighed — “and, of course, the jaundice. It’s not a rare disease. It is becoming more and more common among drug addicts. The amazing thing is that he didn’t seek medical aid sooner. When the symptoms presented themselves, he should have—”
“What does he have?” Carol asked.
“Acute hepatitis. Probably homologous serum hepatitis, although we can’t differentiate for sure between the virus IH and the virus SH without a knowledge of the incubation period, which we do not have.”
Incubation, Bud thought, and he remembered the party Andy had described, where a community needle had been passed. Had it been then? How many parties like that had there been? When had he been infected? How long ago?
“Is it... is it very serious?” Mrs. Silvera asked.
“I shall be quite frank with you,” the doctor said. “Until recently, our experience with acute hepatitis has not included recovery after coma. However, we have been using certain drugs with notable success, and we are trying them on your son.”
“What drugs?” Carol asked.
The doctor sighed impatiently, knowing the names of the drugs would mean nothing to Carol, annoyed because he had to transmit the information to her. “We have so far given him two hundred and fifty milligrams of cortisone intramuscularly, and intravenous glucose with five hundred milligrams of terramycin and forty milligrams of vitamin K.”
“What are his chances?” Helen asked, and Bud realized she had been unusually silent since they came to the hospital, and he searched her face and found only intense concentration on it, and again he admired her strength and her courage.
“His chances right now?” The doctor shrugged. “Fifty-fifty.”
“May we see him?” Carol asked.
“We want to keep him absolutely silent. We don’t want—”
“Please,” Carol said.
“His parents, perhaps.” He hesitated, studying Carol’s face, and then added reluctantly, “And you, of course.”
“We’ll wait for you,” Bud said.
“The priest has been here?” Mrs. Silvera asked.
“Yes, we thought it best to...” The doctor hesitated again. He seemed very nervous all at once. “Would you come this way, please? He won’t recognize you, you realize. He’s in a coma. But if you want to look at him...” The doctor shrugged, incomprehendingly, and then his eyes blinked and his voice softened, and he said, “Please, this way.”
They went down the hall to the door marked QUIET, NO ENTRANCE. Bud and Helen waited by the desk while Carol and Andy’s parents entered the room.
“He’s going to die,” Helen said. “I know it.”
“He’s got a fifty-fifty chance,” Bud said.
“If he takes it.”
“What?”
“If he takes the chance. He may not want it.”
Bud shook his head. “Such a kid. Why should he have to—”
“Such a kid, yes,” she said. She stood as stiff as a post, her shoulders back, her head high. Her eyes were bright and staring, and her mouth was a tight line across her face.