CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

February was one of the most thoroughly exhausting months Al had had in a long time. He remembered stressful times with NASA, weeks with little sleep, never-ending exercises and eternal rounds of tests. In his days training aviators at Lakehurst there had been the occasional stretch of sleepless nights filled with worries and paperwork. None of it, though—nothing he had been through since repatriation—came close to touching the strain of the second month of 1982.

Stevie was admitted to the hospital while they put him on loading doses of the toxic cocktails that would hopefully let him see another summer. Those four days weren't so bad. It was afterwards, when he went to outpatient therapy, that things began to get complicated.

Al hadn't exaggerated the limited support net that Celestina had to deal with. There was her brother-in-law, now working somewhere in New Mexico, the elderly neighbor who had provided childcare during the previous summer, and the two Calaviccis. Juan was too distant to be any help, and the old woman could neither take Stevie to the hospital nor cope with his symptoms. Celestina worked from eight until three each weekday at the dry cleaner's, and Stevie had intravenous therapies on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.

After some careful thought and several conferences, Al, Celestina and Sharon worked out care for the child. On the three days of the week when Stevie went in for chemo Al went with him. He sat next to the boy in the oncology clinic, talking to him, singing to him and trying to distract them. The unwanted stimuli were endless. The frightening parade of physicians and nurses, the gurneys and chairs filled with patients receiving similar treatment, the nausea and weakness, and the line trickling poisons into his little body. It took all Al's faculties to get the child through these long and difficult mornings.

Unless something went wrong, as things occasionally did, chemotherapy took four hours on these mornings. Then an orderly would settle Stevie in a wheelchair, for by then he was too dizzy to walk, and Al would wheel him out to the 'Vette. He could carry the boy for very short distances, but his shoulder was undeniably painful, and there was no doubt that weight-bearing of any kind aggravated the agony. So he used the chair, when there was no one around but Stevie to see and wonder. They would return to the trailer park in time for Al to lie down in the Calaviccis' big bed with the boy, and they could both catch ninety minutes of sleep before Celestina came home from work. When she arrived, Al would leave for the Project, and the two women would take care of the child.

On chemo days Al didn't arrive at the Starbright compound until four-thirty in the afternoon, and even then only because he had a heavy foot and a sleek car. Four-thirty was still early enough, though, that he could have a full half-hour of griping from the Admin staff before they shipped out for the night. The hours between five and ten were usually occupied with distractions from the 'round-the-clock scientist like Eleese, and the ever popular Colonel Smythe, head of Project security. After ten things fell quiet, and Al could labor over the unending requisitions, rosters and miscellaneous paperwork until he was cross-eyed with exhaustion. Then he would stumble blindly to the elevator and so to his suite upstairs. There he was able to grab a quick nightcap and sometimes a bit of supper before passing out until the alarm sounded at seven. He averaged about three and a quarter hours of sleep on those nights. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays he woke up at Starbright. On the weekdays he would put in a normal eight-to-seven day (on Saturdays he usually stayed 'til mid-afternoon) before heading home to spend the night with Sharon and starting over with Stevie's chemo in the morning.

Sharon took care of Stevie on Tuesdays and Thursdays, giving him his oral medications, feeding him whatever she could tempt him to eat, and trying to keep him happy. At first this was easy. She would simply set him up with watercolors in a corner of her studio, and go about her painting as usual. It was a nice change of pace: fourteen hours of childcare each week was a different and not especially onerous task.

As the therapy began to take hold, however, Stevie morphed from a happy and ostensibly healthy child into a piteous invalid. His cheeks lost their glow. His eyes grew enormous and glassy. He bruised at the least provocation and was often in pain, and always tired. Tears came easily and often. The nausea got worse, his appetite vanished, and frequently when you could get food into him he just brought it back up. Through no fault of his own, he went from pleasant diversion to difficult and tiresome patient. Sharon hid her frustration with his deterioration beautifully: Stevie didn't know and Celestina, always on the lookout for signs that she and her child were a burden on their kind neighbors, never even noticed. Yet Sharon had to unload on someone, and that someone was Al.

Domestic tranquility was a thing of the past. Now when they saw each other the Calaviccis were either absorbed with the sick child and his stricken mother, or they were arguing. Sharon would tear bloody strips out of Al with her tongue, demanding to know why the hell she had to do this, how much longer it could be expected to go on, and why she, damn it, was always the one stuck doing the nursing!

Al let her rant. In part he did so because he didn't have the energy to stop the tirades. In part he endured it because at least she was good to Stevie and kind to Celestina, so it was only fair that she have someone to bawl out. And in part, he tolerated her ravings because he had discovered that if he picked his moment to cut her off with an impassioned osculation he could turn her energy in other directions. It always proceeded in the same way. He would take hold of her in the midst of an expectoration of rage, kiss her as hard as he could, and pull back just enough that she could fix her velvety green eyes on his, shocked by the unexpected advance. And no matter how many times he tried it, she was surprised. Then they could temporarily forget their problems and get busy with the bingo-bango-bongo.

It happened on that on the fourth Sunday of Stevie's course of treatment that the dynamic in the Calavicci household shifted yet again.

Sharon came home early from her weekly visit to her father. Recently these trips were getting shorter and shorter, and after each one Sharon came home in lower spirits. Al wondered sometimes what was wrong, but he was so bogged down with his own worries and the eternal struggle to make it through one more day without slipping into an enervated coma that he could never pursue it.

Today she came in just as he was toweling Chester down after his bath. Al stiffened, instantly wary of her reaction to this activity. She frowned disapprovingly as she trudged past towards the bedroom.

"Hi!" he called when she was safely out of the way. "Welcome home!"

"Ugh!" she shouted back.

"Stevie's feeling better today," Al said. "We took him down to the park for a while." It had been nice to see him laughing again, sitting in the baby swing and tossing his newly-shorn head in delight. His hair had started coming out in clumps last weekend, and Al had taken him in to have the rest of it cut short. Stevie didn't care, but Al had caught Celestina running her hand over the bristles that had once been soft curls, tears glinting in her eyes. The child had lost ten pounds, and his limbs were like sticks, but the nausea wasn't so bad right now and he could walk on his own, though neither very far nor very fast. If it weren't for the fact that so far there had been no improvement in the test results, Al would have felt almost optimistic.

"Oh, good," Sharon said sarcastically, coming out of the bedroom wrapping her robe around her body.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Al snapped. "If the poor kid can feel better for a while—"

"I'm just sick of it, Al, okay?" she snarled, glaring at him. "I'm sick of it! I'm always stuck looking after the people no one wants to look after, and—"

The intimation that Stevie was in any way unwanted roused anger and banished all recollections of how well the day had been going. Al was weary and he was angry and he was heartsick, and she had no right to talk about Stevie like he was some kind of surplus equipment!

"I want to look after him!" Al cried, erupting. "I'd kill for the chance to stay home with him, but you know what? Someone has to pay the bills! Someone has to cover the rent, buy food and gas, and finance your hobbies!"

He expected her to snap back, but instead she slumped and sighed. "I'm sorry, Al," she said. "I know this has been rough on you. Esteban isn't the problem. It's just… it's hard to see him so sick."

Al let his face melt into a fond smile. "That's my girl," he said, setting down the dog's towel and moving to stroke Sharon's face. She sighed and leaned against him. "I'm sorry," Al whispered.

"It's not your fault," Sharon said. "It's just that I'm feeling old today."

"Old?" Al asked.

"Ancient."

He nibbled her ear a little. "How come?"

She shook her head. "I dunno," she sighed. "I'm gonna be forty-four in a couple days, and—"

"God, I almost forgot!" Al exclaimed. He tried to make it a point never to miss a wife's birthday. It was… not nice. "What do you want for your birthday? Name it, it's yours."

Sharon laughed a little. "Oh, really?" she said skeptically.

"Really," Al promised.

"Well…" she said, kissing him. "You know what I'd really like?"

Al chuckled a little. "Doll, if I knew what you'd really like I wouldn't have to ask," he said.

"In that case… I'd like a bath," Sharon said.

Al frowned in confusion. "A bath?"

Sharon nodded. "You know I haven't had a bath since our honeymoon?"

He laughed. "Do you have any idea how yucky that sounds?" he asked.

"I'm serious!" she said. "I want a nice, long, hot bubble bath! You asked what I really want: that's it."

"A bath?" Al mused. "Hmm. Sounds reasonable. I'll see what I can do."

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Sounding reasonable and actually being reasonable in practice were very different things, as Al quickly realized. The following morning, Stevie lost consciousness during his chemotherapy and the treatment wasn't concluded until almost five. Al showered with military efficiency and hurried off to Starbright, where he had to deal with the repercussions of turning up two and a half hours later than expected. That was going to set him back for the entire week, and to make matters worse there were concerns about the pass-codes on the four lower levels. After working straight through the night and all day Tuesday, Al was beginning to feel like a character in a fairy tale. He had promised his woman something simple, and now he wasn't going to be able to deliver it without striking a bargain with some kind of beast.

The rest of the week continued in frustration, but Stevie's I.V. therapy went more smoothly on Wednesday, and by Friday it seemed that he would be well enough over the weekend that Celestina wasn't likely to need the help of her neighbors. Al conferred with her at some length on Friday afternoon, and as all seemed to be going well he called up Starbright to say he wouldn't be in today, and started to make the appropriate arrangements.

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Dan Penvenen hung up the phone, and his brow furrowed in a pensive frown. The work of informing Ms. Pharris and Mr. Prysock that Captain Calavicci would be absent until Monday evening was complete, and now he was free to speculate about the reason for this.

Of late the Captain's schedule was sporadic at best. As far as Dan had been able to gather from his casual inquiries and a brief telephone call with Congressman Davies, Calavicci was keeping up with the necessities of running the project and of communicating with the Committee. However, he was less than accessible to the majority of the staff, and thus failing in that respect to dispatch his duties as Project Administrator. His failure to maintain regular daytime hours was a frustration to many of the department heads—the scientists so fundamental to the nature of the Project. No explanation for this recent change had been offered, either to Human Resources or to the staff. The Administrator was simply making arbitrary changes.

It was unorthodox, inefficient, disturbing and given the delicate nature of Starbright Project, potentially dangerous.

It was unacceptable.