Free A Little Love Story by Roland Merullo Page A

could feel whole battalions of jealous soldiers in new uniforms. And I could hear a lying old self trying to convince me that Janet was a one-night type of woman. Skate on, skate on, the voice said. Too much trouble. Skate on. I gave up on the painting, cleaned the brushes, turned the easel around so I wouldn’t have to look at what I had done. After thinking about it for another little while I picked up the phone and called Janet to ask her out again, and we didn’t talk about the governor, or the alphabet diseases, or any kind of subject like that.

Book Two

    O c t o b e r

1
    I N B OSTON , O CTOBER is the month when you have to stop pretending to yourself that the good weather will go on and on. The leaves catch fire and swirl out gold and lemon patterns at the bases of maple trees, but it’s just a last show meant to take your mind away from the fact that things are dying all around. If you work outside, you can feel this dying very plainly in late October in the afternoon. The cold Halloween air has an unsympathetic quality to it. Lights blaze out from storefronts and third-floor apartments, but the darkness seems to swallow them after they’ve traveled only a few feet so that they feel cut off from each other, isolated pockets of warmth that offer themselves happily and optimistically but really are only hoping to make it through another night.
    I like October—early October, especially—in spite of the slow death of things. Janet, it turned out, was a big October fan. And it turned out that we matched up in other ways, too. Drives in the country, Middle Eastern food, art museums, music that ran the spectrum from Bach to Pearl Jam, weekend nights in bed, weekend mornings in bed, spontaneous bursts of harmless adventuring, long rides on Friday nights (it took a while for the replacement parts to come in, but I’d gotten the truck fixed up finally), people who were quirky and generous—we had an appreciation for a lot of the same types of things.
    We did not talk about the governor, or Giselle. And we talked only in short, rare bursts about cystic fibrosis—those were the unspoken rules for us. She was getting sicker; it did not take a pulmonologist to see that. And, by the time we’d been going out for a few weeks, I had done so much reading on the disease that I knew where the getting sicker would take her, and along what routes, and about how fast.
    I had learned that there are certain kinds of bacteria with pretty names like Burkholderia cepacia and Pseudomonas aeruginosa that thrive in the thick mucus in the lungs of cystic fibrosis people. These bacteria are everywhere—in the skin of onions, in the moist air of a shower stall, in Jacuzzis, in river water—but they move into and out of normal lungs without anyone ever noticing. If they visit the lungs of a person with CF, though, they stay there and form colonies, and the colonies throw up dense films that act as shields against the assault of antibiotics. The delicate tissue of the inside of the lung tries to protect itself against these colonies and becomes inflamed. Over time, the inflammation breaks the cells down so that the complicated system of blood and breath doesn’t work anymore the way it was designed to work. Over time, over almost thirty years in her case, enough lung tissue has starved and rotted so that you can’t walk up three flights of stairs to your boyfriend’s bedroom without sounding like you’ve just been on the treadmill for an hour at the gym.
    Near the end of September, Janet’s pulmonologist, whose name was Eric Wilbraham, sent her into the hospital for five days of intravenous antibiotics to try to control the bacteria, and I went there every day after work to make her laugh. One night I caught Doctor Wilbraham in the hallway. I have the bad habit of forming solid impressions about people on first meeting, and I didn’t like him. But we had a pretty good conversation about spirometers, and pseudomonas, and cepacia, and