OPTIONAL ORGANS PT. 3

The following morning, I broke down and showered. The communal bathroom, reeking of hand sanitizer and bleach, reminded me that I was no longer an eighteen-year-old college co-ed at UCLA, but a spoiled, middle-aged woman who had grown deeply unaccustomed to shared spaces, standing barefoot on tile, or being mildly damp.

Warm water spilling out of a handheld showerhead hit me straight in the chest as I lathered my body in soap. I balanced a bottle of shampoo in one arm while scrubbing my head with the other. Looking down at my rubber Havaianas, now covered in suds, I laughed at how unmistakably this was not the Austrian spa vacation I’d imagined for Christmas.

While I was gone, my assistant, Caroline, sat with Lazlo as he continued his marathon of aggressively age-inappropriate documentaries. To stop his crying, I’d given up on parental control and let him roam my Netflix queue freely, clicking on whatever caught his interest. The poop cruise. A murder in Monaco. The second Woodstock. Anything to help him forget that he couldn’t eat or drink and that there was a tube running the length of his torso.

Lazlo was waiting impatiently for me when I returned.

“I’m so thirsty,” he whispered, still convinced the tube in his throat was somehow hindering his speech.

I offered him ice chips, but he was over ice chips. He was over all of it. He wanted to go home.

“I’m missing all of Christmas!” he lamented. “Will I at least be home before Christmas Eve?”

I wanted to tell him yes. I wanted to tell him we would. But I didn’t have an answer, so I reached for another distraction.

“What do you want to watch next?”