Rupture

Getting ready for my infusion this morning, I had just found two matching socks when an email alert flashed on my phone. It was from Kyle, my newish neighbor, the one who introduced himself to me for the first time by saying “I know we look like a hetero couple, but we’re both bisexual.” Now he was writing to tell me that in today’s warmer, thawing weather a pipe burst in my basement, sending water into theirs. I didn’t think they could get in to shut off the water so I threw on my shoes and took off for Bay Ridge, trying to shut up the inner voice that was saying, “you’re never going to be able to move back home.” I had barely left when I got a message from H. “She’s gone and I want to kill myself because I walked out of the room to do something.” On the phone, I told her “That’s common. People often wait for someone to leave before they die.” “I wanted to be there, holding her hand.” “You were there, you got yourself and E there,” I told her. “Her last word was E’s name,” H. said sobbing. “You made sure E. was there, that they had the last two days together.” “I don’t want to leave,” she said, some part of her still holding on to her mother’s physical presence. H. headed off with her uncle to choose some things from her mother’s apartment. Approaching my house, I could see the basement door open a few inches. When I looked inside, I saw water four inches deep on top of the terra cotta basement tile, but I didn’t hear any water. The leak seemed to have stopped, so I rang Kyle’s bell and his pregnant wife let me in, her green t-shirt matching the one on their blond-haired son who was crushing Cheetos in his high chair. I moved a few random toys off a chair and sat down. Kyle apologized for going into my basement and I told him that if I’d known the door was unlocked I would have told him to. He had shut off the water at the main shut off, inside a closet near the basement door, and bailed out water until it was low enough that it was no longer coming into his basement. He told me he thought the water was coming from somewhere near the sink, which is right up against the front of the building, close to the cold outdoors. He had a pipe in that area freeze too, but had slowly thawed it with a hair dryer. “If you had been home….” said the unhelpful voice. I elbowed it hard and shoved it into a corner of my mind. There was nothing urgent to do right that minute, and it was getting alarmingly close to my infusion time, so I left them and headed into Manhattan, texting John Henry along the way. He asked some questions, but they started to get too detailed for what I had seen, so I told him I would go back in the morning before work and try to get a more specific idea of where the rupture was. The untiled edges of the basement, like the closet with the water turnoff, are kind of sandy dirt so John pointed out that at least some of the water will be absorbed. Making my way into Manhattan, I picked up a call from my Very Sick client. “I have to get out of here,” he said. I know this mood of his well, it’s what always precedes his attempts at leaving AMA. “I’ll call the transfer office at NYU and see if we can get you moved,” I tell him. He’s impatient when he gets like this, so I tell him it won’t be today. He calls me half a dozen times during my infusion anyway, but I don’t want to move much and risk dislodging the IV in my left hand. Checking in with Jeff, who needs to return the three cats he’s been keeping for me, he tells me that the client has already tried to convince both his Dad and Jeff to bust him out of the hospital. The cats, Smokey, Jackson and Marley are another dilemma. If Jeff drops them at my house Friday, they’ll be OK with no running water. I can fill their bowls with bottled water. It would be much more challenging for me to live there with no water, so then they would be in the same situation as Saucy, depending on me coming back and forth to feed them. “Things just get worse and worse,” says the voice. I made it back to Ocean Parkway before H called again. Her uncle had taken her and E home, bought them Wendy’s. She’s still in shock. “I don’t want to do anything, I don’t want to cook,” she says. “E can just have snacks.” “What if you get some easy stuff, like frozen pizza?” I suggest. “I could just get TV dinners,” she says, “that’s a lot of sodium, but who cares.” Her heart condition is the last thing on her mind right now. I know those days, right after a death, when your brain is working so hard to absorb and process the loss that there’s hardly any left for daily life. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life now,” she says. “Don’t worry about your whole life,” I tell her. “Just get through right now.” That’s all any of us can do, really. On my facebook, a video is playing, the Singing Resistance. "Hold on," they sing, "Hold on, my dear one, here comes the dawn."