Blinded

THIRTY

“I’m having some trouble with my leg,” Lauren said.

I’d deduced that already. The walking stick in her right hand was a dead giveaway. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen the thing emerge from the closet, but I couldn’t. I guessed that it had been years. I purchased it for her at a mountain equipment store in Ouray, on the Western Slope, during another health crisis. Or was it Telluride? I couldn’t remember.

I did remember that the circumstances were similar to these and that I’d seen the decline coming. It seemed disease exacerbations always arrived after a drumbeat of warning.

“Come, sit,” I said. I took her by the elbow and led her to a kitchen chair next to Grace’s high chair.

“It feels like it weighs a ton. I’m just dragging it around.” She was talking about her leg.

“Yeah.”

She bowed her head toward Grace and was immediately lost in the vernacular of baby talk that allowed her to reconnect with her daughter and forget about whatever was going on with her myelin sheath. Grace was oblivious to her mother’s malaise, but she was pretty interested in the walking stick. Were she developmentally able to stagger a few steps and simultaneously hold on to an object, I assumed I would see our daughter playing with a toddler-size version of the walking stick before the day was out.

I was examining Lauren for indications of other peripheral neuropathy. Her facial muscles were still unable to coordinate her blinks. Beyond that, my unskilled eyes found nothing anomalous.

“Any other weakness?” I asked. I wanted to hear her talk again, to taste the cadence for evidence of impairment in her speech.

She shook her head.

“Is that the same leg as before? You remember, that trip to help Teresa in Utah?”

“That was the other leg,” she said.

She sounded okay. “Should I call the neurologist?” Lauren’s neurologist, Larry Arbuthnot, liked to be aggressive with steroid treatment in the face of a fresh exacerbation that threatened serious consequences.

“I don’t want to start steroids,” she said.

Yeah, okay.“I know.”

She actually smiled. “I’m due for interferon today. I’ll take that and see how things develop.”

Ah, yes, interferon.

Lauren’s weekly interferon injection was preventive medicine; it was intended to protect her from waking up to mornings like this one. The IM injection that she plunged into her thigh once a week wasn’t intended as a treatment in the event that a morning like this one occurred anyway. Interferon was a toxic prophylaxis against a rare event, akin, I sometimes mused, to lighting particularly noxious incense in an effort to keep elephants out of the living room.

In the case of interferon, burning the incense usually seemed to be effective, but it was inherently hard to tell. Last time I checked, the living room was devoid of elephants. But then again, it usually was.

Was it the incense?

Answering that question was the rub.

Regardless, interferon wasn’t intended to deal with a rogue elephant that had snuck into our living room anyway. And that’s what we had right now: a rogue elephant in the living room.

“You sure that’s wise?” I tried hard not to say it in a tone that communicated that I thought her strategy unwise. I probably failed.

Lauren was almost totally focused on Grace. If it weren’t for the walking stick she had clamped between her knees, I could have convinced myself that it was any other Sunday morning.

She finally answered me. “No, not at all. I’m not at all sure. Will you bring me half a cup of coffee, please? Maybe some juice.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to take the damn disease she had by the throat and tighten my grip on it until it died.

“Lauren, we’re talking ambulation. It’s a big risk.”

She snapped back, “Don’t you think I know that? I hate steroids. I want to give it a few hours, okay?”

I retrieved her coffee and juice. Her request for a few hours was reasonable. But then, so was my alarm.

Her voice was much, much softer when she said, “Was that Sam before? On the phone?”

“Yeah, there’s a lot that’s going on.” I filled Lauren in on the events that had taken place outside Albany, Georgia, and Sterling Storey’s ironic demise on the Ochlockonee River.

“That’s convenient,” she said, almost devoid of sympathy. Death a time zone away was so much easier on the soul.

“That’s what Sam thinks, too. He said he wants them to render the body.”

She laughed. “I think you mean renderupthe body. Rendering has something to do with separating out fat, doesn’t it? It’s a cooking thing, I think. Adrienne does it to chickens sometimes around the Jewish holidays. Is Sam okay?”

Her laugh warmed my heart. “He’s doing the best he can. He’s so off-balance. The heart attack. His family gone. I don’t think he can really believe that Sherry took Simon away at a time like this.”

Grace seized the moment to toss her spoon across the table. I caught it before it hit the floor. She thought the whole thing was hilarious. If I gave it back to her, I was sure the game would get repeated. Piaget would have given it back. I kept it.

Lauren said, “I can’t either.” Panic crossed her violet eyes in a flash, like the reflection of a lightning bolt in a pane of glass at midnight.

“Nor can I,” I said. I didn’t know if my wife wanted me to say that I wouldn’t leave her, to reassure her that the latest permutation of her illness hadn’t changed a single facet on the surface of my heart, but I feared that the very mention of her vulnerability might make the circumstances too real for her. So all I added was “I can’t believe what’s happened with them.”

I slid the newspaper across the table to her, pointing at the article about Penn Heller’s arrest for possession of cocaine.

She read the headline, gazed up at me, and said, “Really?”

I could have lied and said,“I don’t know anything more than I just read in the paper.”But I didn’t. I said, “Apparently.”

She scanned the article quickly. “It sounds like they have him for intent to distribute. That’s not good.”

“What’s this going to do to Jara’s position on the bench? How damaging is it?”

She shrugged.

“Do you know her husband?”

“A little,” Lauren said. “Just a little.”

It was apparent that Lauren wasn’t eager to talk about Jara and Penn Heller.

A few minutes later Lauren hobbled back toward the bedroom with her non-walking stick hand full of the supplies necessary to inject a milliliter of interferon into her thigh. I glanced at the clock. I added two hours. That was when she’d start getting sick from the medicine. I added twenty-four hours more to that. That was when she would stop being sick from the medicine.

A day, every week, deducted from her life in a valiant effort to repel rogue elephants.

I waited until Lauren closed the door behind her before I turned to Grace and said, “It’s too late this time, I’m afraid, Gracie. The elephants are already here.”

Grace tried to say “elephants.” Anyway, I think what she tried to say was “elephants.”

She pointed at the dogs.

Close enough.

I realized that Emily’s paw umbrella needed my attention.