The Wanting Life

by Mark Rader

  Those who shared stories about him and tried to make him smile Britta liked the most; those who were awkward and pitying she liked least. But she was thankful to each and every person who showed up. The couple whose son had committed suicide, whom Paul had counseled for years after. The single mom who had a daughter who was a server at Mass. The fortysomething guy who brought over a little cooler full of walleye fillets from his recent fishing trip up north. The McNamaras, again, who gave her the biggest hug when they left. Whenever someone made a reference to something she wouldn’t understand, Paul paused to explain it to her, his usual manners resurrected. And in return she typed notes on her phone about the sweet things his visitors said, so she could repeat them to him later, if his mood took another turn for the worse.

  Over the course of these few weeks, he became visibly weaker, his liver doubling down on its mission to kill him. He started eating less, and what he did eat, he often threw up. His skin turned the pale yellow of old candlewax; the whites of his eyes were tinged orange. The tumor on his right side bulged like a perverse pregnant belly, blotchy purple and brown and yellow, and Dr. Shaw prescribed water pills to redirect the fluid in Paul’s abdomen to his kidneys. But the pills made his hands and feet cramp up so badly he’d cry out in the middle of the night, as though he were being stabbed. To ease the pain, Britta sat beside his bed and rubbed his hands with lotion and pushed her thumbs deep into the joints of his hands and feet. One night he told Britta that his back was really hurting (he gasped whenever he got up or lowered himself into a chair), and she took him in the following day. An X-ray confirmed their suspicions: the cancer had spread to his bones.

  But even so, when he was lucid and well medicated, sitting on the sofa, propped up with pillows and facing his guests, the unbroken Paul she’d always known him to be flickered to life, for fifteen minutes or a half hour at a time. His eyes were pained but they smiled when he smiled. His face calmed, and he closed his eyes when he was hugged. He seemed in these moments to be accepting the love being showered on him from all these strangers who were, she knew, his other family. They were blessing him, though they didn’t know it.

  More than once, she felt so moved she had to excuse herself to the bathroom to sob into one of his big soft towels. It wasn’t a total victory, but it was victory enough.

  By the middle of August, Paul needed a wheelchair, and in the early evenings, at his request, they went for walks—Britta pushing him first into the church parking lot, then down the long entranceway and onto the paved county road that ran past the church. Sometimes he dozed as the wheels crackled along the shoulder of the road; sometimes he looked around him, gazing out at the world like a tired child. Often, the drivers of the cars that passed by, recognizing Paul, would tap lightly on their horn, saying hello.

  Their first time out, she made it maybe half a mile before her body said, Fuck this. Her hips were on fire, her lower back throbbed, and her mouth filled with so much saliva she felt like throwing up. Back at the house, she felt so sore and light-headed she took three ibuprofens and lay on the couch with a cool hand towel on her forehead. That night, feeling nauseated, she barely touched her dinner and skipped her wine and went early to bed. The next morning, as she knew it would be, her back was so tight it took great effort to stand up. On the other hand, she felt very rested; she’d slept deeply and straight through the night. So when Paul asked her to take him out again that night after dinner, and the night after, she said okay. She wanted to be useful, and this was the only thing he had directly asked her to do, and by the end of their third walk, she knew that they would go out every day like this after dinner until he asked her to stop, that they were creating a ritual, and that every time she would try to go a little farther than the time before.

  It was possible Paul had asked her for this favor because he knew the exercise would be as good for her as the sunshine and fresh air would be for him. But she didn’t ask him, and honestly, she didn’t want to know: if this was his plan to help her, she wanted no part of it. However, if walking a little farther every time happened to require smoking fewer cigarettes, and eating less of the rich casseroles the altar society women kept dropping off and more of the vegetables from Paul’s garden, and recorking her wine bottle after a few glasses at night, then fine. She would try, at least, to do it.

  And then one day in early September, as she was climbing up the basement stairs, a boxful of Paul’s college textbooks in her arms, Britta heard, first, a thump and then an awful moan, like the lowing of a cow. Quickly, she set the box on the step and rushed up the stairs. In the hall, she found him sprawled in his underwear, dark blood worming out of his nose, his eyes open and scared. He’d been trying to walk to the bathroom without his walker, lost his balance, and landed hard on his face, unable to throw out his arms in time: that was her first guess. But when she pulled him up to a sitting position and got a good look at his face, the left side of his mouth hung slack, his left eyelid drooped. When he said her name, it sounded like Bitta, without the r. He’d had a stroke.

  Awkwardly, she propped him against the wall, like a giant doll. On her knees, she dabbed the blood from his nose as she talked to the woman who picked up when she dialed 911; an ambulance was on its way. She didn’t want him to show up at the hospital half naked, so she dressed him, moving his heavy legs and arms for him as needed. His eyes, one bigger than the other, were alarmed, so she told him it would be okay; whatever that could possibly mean she didn’t know.

  Two days later they returned from the hospital, and the day after that, two hospice nurses—a petite Filipino woman with a long black ponytail named Mai and a large, flushed guy with rimless glasses named Tony—arrived in a white van. When they asked Paul if he wanted the hospital bed they’d wheeled in to stay in the living room, where there was more space, he said no, his bedroom was fine. So Tony and Mai moved the sofa and the end tables to clear a path to roll the bed through and then rolled in the IV and a box, in which Britta saw a silver bedpan, not unlike the kind their mother would slide under their beds as young kids, before they got the indoor bathroom. They were sweet, these two, but their sweetness seemed practiced, institutional, a Walmart greeter’s shtick. Their hustle reminded her of ants blindly performing a ritual, assured of their purpose, and for a few minutes she hated them and their heartless competence. But once the room was set up and she wheeled Paul over, and they demonstrated how to raise and lower and adjust the bed and explained how Britta might help Paul lower himself onto the bedpan if needed, and after they sat altogether on the sofas making small talk about Mai’s eight brothers and sisters (she was Catholic too) and the two Rottweilers Tony raised with his partner, Dane, her hatred disappeared. Her pride had been bruised, she realized: she’d enjoyed being his one and only savior, and now she had to share him. That’s all it was.

  The funeral suddenly loomed, and Britta knew if Paul wanted to help plan it they should start now. She asked him what readings and hymns he might like read and sung, and by that evening he’d jotted his selections down on the legal pad that hadn’t left the side of his bed since his stroke. When Tim suggested they hand out CDs burned with some of Paul’s favorite music on it at the service, Paul agreed, and for a day and a half he made his list.

  Up at the cottage, he’d told her about the fleeting hallucinations the morphine sometimes gave him: a feeling he was in the stands at County Stadium, watching the Milwaukee Braves, when he opened the fridge; the overwhelming sensation that he was back on the farm, watching a storm from the safety of the barn, when he was standing outside on the porch watching the rain. He’d not talked about these episodes since Sister Bay, but she knew he still had them, because she saw him in their thrall. They arrived most reliably when she wheeled him into the backyard to look at the birdfeeder and the cornfields behind his house. Three times she’d come upon him, eyes glassy, frowning, mumbling to someone who wasn’t there. Who are you talking to, Paul? she’d asked. Harlon, he said the first time: their old hired man, a ha
rdworking but unreliable drunk. The next time it was Luca (Don’t go too far out, she heard him say). And the last time it was their mother, who, apparently, was holding Hammy, the runt of a pig that had been, during the year after her last miscarriage, her beloved pet. Can’t you see her? he said. She’s right there.

  One morning, after he woke from a long nap and she was feeding him a few teaspoons of Ensure, his eyes cleared and he said, “How Maur’ doing?” His words were clipped and slurred like this now, but rarely did she not understand him.

  “I don’t really know,” she said. She wondered if he’d forgotten they were out of touch. “I still haven’t heard from her.”

  She could be living in Maine with this David or wandering the Appalachian Trail, searching for the meaning of life, for all she knew, she said.

  Paul nodded. “I ’ope she’s ’kay,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “me too.”

  Later that day, Britta found Paul writing something on his legal pad, more carefully than he did to jot down notes for her, when he wasn’t in the mood to talk. He asked that she bring him an envelope and some Scotch tape from his bottom desk drawer, and once she had, he folded the piece of legal pad paper twice, slipped it inside, and taped the flap down. He wrote For Maura at the bottom in small, precise block letters.

  “Can I ask you what that is?” she asked.

  “You can,” he said, blinking heavily, “but I’m nah go’ tell you.”

  Come mid-September Paul was so fragile, he asked that when she pushed him around outside she stick to the parking lot: even the slight rumbling of his chair’s wheels moving over gravel was painful. For a while she did that, but going in circles in the parking lot felt silly, he said, so they stopped their walks together. And though she knew this was her opportunity to stop walking, she didn’t want to stop; the walking was one of the things that grounded her these days, so every day at the same time, she walked alone along the road, and without Paul and his chair to push forward, she felt as light as she’d felt as a girl. The first night she walked without him, she checked her weight on his digital bathroom scale. It read 223, and the number didn’t change when she checked again. Back in St. Louis she’d weighed 245: she’d lost more than twenty pounds.

  She was still fat, of course. Nobody—not even Jean—had noticed the change in her yet.

  But that was fine. She preferred it being her secret.

  When Tony arrived to give Paul a bath, every other day, Britta helped him remove the white T-shirt and black sweatpants Paul wore most days and laid out a plastic sheet over the cloth one. She would watch through the crack in the door as Tony washed Paul with a damp, slightly soapy sponge, careful not to press down too hard, always checking to see if everything was okay. The scene reminded her of the pietà: Tony as Mary; Paul, an old dying Christ.

  He’d come to the end of privacy, the end of shame. He belonged to them now the way he’d once belonged to their mother. There was no avoiding his (big) damp uncircumcised penis, his unruly thatch of pubic hair, the saggy wattle of his scrotum. Here was Paul at seventy, as God made him. In other circumstances, he might have cracked some wry joke about this strange intimacy, though she couldn’t imagine what. But now, as Tony washed his broken body, Paul lay very still, eyes closed, chest rising and falling, concentrating, she was sure, on Tony’s touch. The warm slippery suds. The tiniest differences in pressure. For a few minutes every other day, his existence reduced, wonderfully, to this.

  One unusually hot night Paul asked Britta to sing to him, and when she asked what he’d like, he said it didn’t matter, whatever she liked. So she sang what she could remember of the songs their mother would sing to them before bed, growing up. “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” “Red River Valley.” “How Great Thou Art.” Her voice wavered, but she remembered all the words. On hearing them, his mouth didn’t so much smile as smooth, contract. Another night, when he was lucid, Britta, sitting beside his bed, asked him if he felt ready. She didn’t have to say the words to die.

  “I thin’ so,” he said.

  Then his voice broke. Tears welled in his beautiful eyes, the irises as blue as ever.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For be’ here with me.”

  “Well,” she said, “you’re the one doing the hard part.”

  He closed his eyes. Tears raced down his cheeks, two faint paths, slightly darker than his skin. “You make me feel so loved.”

  She bit her lip to stem the swelling in her chest. Then she lifted his hand and kissed his knuckles. “You are, Paul. By so many people. You always have been.”

  He looked at her and nodded. He believed her.

  “It’s been my honor to be here,” she said, and it was true.

  When Tony pulled her aside one night to say it might be time to call family if anyone wanted to fly in to say goodbye, Britta got out her phone and did so. Shade first, because he was easiest, then her aunt Ginny who certainly wouldn’t be able to make it, frail as she was. Then cousins in Illinois, and then Maura. If anything was going to end the standoff with her daughter, it had to be this. And she was right: within an hour of leaving a voice mail, there was Maura’s name in all caps on her phone, for the first time in months.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “Maura. Sweetheart. It’s so nice to hear your voice.”

  “Yeah,” Maura said. “You too.” And then: the muffled sound of a sob, Maura probably holding the phone away from her face. “How’s he doing?” she asked.

  “Well,” Britta said, “it’s a matter of days now. But I think we’re managing his pain pretty well.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s all you can really do at this point.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch,” Maura said, after a brisk wet sniff. “It’s been a really messed-up summer.”

  “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Well,” Maura said, “in case you’re wondering, we’re still together. But I asked for a divorce. And then I took it back. And now we’ve decided we’re going to try to work it out.”

  Britta felt a door unstick inside her: “I’m glad to hear that. I think that’s wise.”

  “Yeah,” Maura said. “I guess so. I still don’t really know what’s going to happen, though. We just started seeing a counselor a few weeks ago. We’ve only been twice. But that’s the plan. To just keep going and see if we can fix it.”

  “Good. The more you go the easier it’ll get.” She didn’t know if that was true, but it sounded true enough. “Do the kids know what’s going on?”

  “Not really. They know we’ve been fighting. But they don’t know about David. And we’re trying to keep it that way.”

  Britta nodded. “Good.”

  Maura sniffed again. “I can tell you more about it when I’m there, if that’s okay.”

  “So you can come?”

  “Yeah. But Thursday morning is the earliest I can leave. And it’ll just be me.”

  “That’s just fine,” Britta said. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

  The second they hung up, Britta cried quietly on the couch, then poured herself a glass of wine and walked outside. She finished the wine quickly, then smoked three cigarettes one after the other, breathing deeply until she felt relief.

  That night, after checking on Paul, she fell quickly asleep and had a succession of vivid, fleeting dreams: in one, she and Paul were running with their old dog Shep through the woods behind their house; in another, Ray showed up at the door of Paul’s house dressed in black, holding a gigantic bouquet of pink flowers; in another, they were at the lake they sometimes went to in the summers, and Paul was floating on his back near the dock, as old as he was now, but lively, spitting plumes of water high up in the air, like a whale, happy as could be.

  Early in the morning, something jolted her awake—she wasn’t sure what. And though she hadn’t heard a sound, she walked the ten steps to Paul’s room without hesitation and pushed open the door
. His eyes were closed but he was awake. “Get Jean and Tim,” he said, and nothing more, and she saw the time had come. It was four thirty in the morning, so it took three calls to get Jean to pick up the phone. But within forty-five minutes they were both beside his bed, solemn, their hair uncombed, tears already in their eyes. There wasn’t much space to stand around his bed, but they made it work. Jean massaged his hands with lotion and told him that soon he’d be with God; Tim cleared his throat to keep from crying and gave him last rites as he sat beside him holding his right hand.

  For a few minutes Paul struggled to breathe, gasping horribly, his mouth opening and closing like a banked fish. Sunlight glowed in the belly of the window curtain. The room was quiet. The world outside was quiet too. The little bottle of hand lotion stood at attention like a loyal, broad-shouldered soldier. And then, as she said, “It’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay, we love you, we love you,” Paul’s eyes closed and stayed closed; his mouth opened and didn’t shut.

  Both Maura and Shade canceled their Thursday flights, there being no rush anymore, and instead arrived at St. Iggy’s a few days later, the Saturday before the funeral—Shade by himself and Maura with her family, their arrivals an hour apart. Shade would stay with Britta at Paul’s; Maura’s family would stay, for free, at Father Tim’s insistence, in the two spare rooms at the rectory at St. Boniface in town. This was the plan.

  When their rented SUV pulled up, Britta threw on her coat and walked urgently to the car. Maura broke into tears at the sight of her, mouth pinched, nostrils flaring. She looked healthy, despite everything she’d been through. Thin as always, arms strong. Britta hugged her longer than normal, pressing herself into Maura as hard as she could. Then she hugged the kids and Harden too.