What We Have

by Amy Boesky

  It was just a question of time, she said. “Quality of life” and time. Dr. Brenner had met with my mother and father last week and laid it all out for them. They were all on the same page. They were shifting now to what he called “palliative care.”

  “What does that mean?” Sara asked.

  Palliative care, my mother said quietly, meant they would try to keep the pain to a minimum. Taking care of the symptoms, basically, instead of trying to slow them down.

  So, in essence, keeping her comfortable. Waiting for her to die.

  I just stared at her.

  There was nothing to say. Nowhere to look. In the distance, the Beaver Islander blew its horn again: a signal to the drawbridge. Get ready. We’re coming into the harbor.

  My father wanted to help her back up to the car and then to the condo. She was exhausted and needed to rest.

  The steps looked different, standing at the bottom, holding her by one arm, staring up. The spaces between them wider. So many times as a kid I’d run up and down these steps, stopping (maybe) to wriggle out a splinter, the damp wood cold under my bare feet. But now, seeing them with her, they looked unwieldy. From behind she looked so sick, her back hunched, shoulders stooped, her sweatshirt billowing around her emaciated frame like a sail. Like a hieroglyph, where once a person had been.

  BACK IN BOSTON, I HAD a Charlevoix dream.

  We were on our way to The Park Side, all of us. My mother was well, tanned, healthy, way ahead of us, impatient because we were dawdling (Girls! ) and we were going to lose our reservation. She had her laundry bag slung over one shoulder, kind of like Santa Claus, because she liked to drop it off at the village Laundromat before we ate. Such a multitasker, my mother, even in dreams. She crossed the bridge first, hurrying across as the bells begin to ring, turning back to us, urging us on, hurry, hurry, but it began to lift just as she reached the other side.

  “Girls,” she said, chiding us. We could hear her perfectly, it was like she was right next to us instead of all the way across the bridge, then she was shrugging, smiling, a what-can-I-possibly-do-about-this? expression on her face, and at the same time a don’t-worry-it’s-fine-we’re-all-fine look, too. She was on one side and we were on the other, and the drawbridge kept lifting higher and higher, its metal jaws locking us apart.

  Going Back (II)

  NOW THAT LABOR DAY WAS behind us, you could feel it. September: cooler in the evenings, the shadows longer, shop fronts crowded with mannequins in sweaters, paper cutouts of leaves at their feet. You could smell fall in the air.

  Next week I’d be teaching again.

  I’d been preparing for weeks—getting my office organized, Xeroxing things to put on reserve in the library, meeting colleagues. Since we’d come back from Charlevoix, I’d been going to my office most mornings, but we were so close to campus I could still come home for lunch to see Sacha. I didn’t feel like running, for some reason—I must’ve gotten some kind of bug while we were traveling, because my stomach felt funny. But in the afternoons, while Sacha napped and Annabel was still with her, I took walks—usually to Newton Centre, a mile and a half away. I liked walking around the center of town, watching people, going in and out of stores, trying on clothes I thought looked like what I used to wear: skirts with a rumpled, linen feel, loose sweaters, boots with flat heels. Once I stopped in to see Sandi at Centre Realty to see if she’d heard back from the owner of the house Jacques liked. “Yes!” she said, setting her pencil down; she’d actually just heard, if I could believe it—the owner had been away, but had just gotten back from the Cape. And apparently she was more flexible on price than she’d been previously. She’d come into some inheritance money, and that meant there might be “some wiggle room” on the asking price. Would we like to go over and take a look and see what we thought?

  “Yes,” I told her. “We would.”

  Sandi said she’d call and set it up, and get back to us.

  Later, I walked back to the House with the Green Shag.

  It felt funny not having Sacha in my arms or in a stroller—I’d forgotten what I used to do with two free hands. Annabel and I were starting to fall into a routine, but it was all still new to me. At about nine each morning she’d come in, smelling of shampoo, carrying a batik bag bulging with a paperback novel and a huge water bottle. She’d call out enthusiastically to Sacha, put her things down, and right away, they’d start playing.

  Annabel was great. “Cautious, yet fun,” I told Julie, mocking myself, but in fact, it was true. She lit up the house every time she came. Maybe it was the sheer ruddy joy of being nineteen, having just recently left home, living with her boyfriend, earning her own money—even if it wasn’t a king’s ransom. Or maybe she was just a joyful person. We all loved her; we soaked up her energy like parched plants absorbing water.

  Every day was different: one day a game in a makeshift fort; another day a stroll up to a place Annabel had seen that she thought would be perfect for a picnic. Annabel mapped out every detail—she daubed Sacha with sunblock twenty minutes before departing, to let it “sink in”; she hinted—ever so gently—that there was an organic brand she could pick up from Whole Foods that was gentler than our brand for baby skin; she found an adorable hat Sacha had never tolerated and now accepted without a murmur; she prepared a snack (unsweetened Cheerios; a sippy cup of water with a splash of juice); she brought not one but two books to read with Sacha “under a shady tree,” as she put it; and she infused the whole outing with such a sense of possibility and fun that I was temporarily mournful when they were gone. I wanted to be under that tree.

  Great as she was, I felt a kind of sadness wash over me every morning when Annabel came. Keys in the lock, ebullient voice, that scent of shampoo—it made me ineffably blue, though I couldn’t quite say why. Maybe partly it was the acknowledgment that the summer was over, that Annabel’s presence signaled the end of my year alone with Sacha. I’d hear them laughing together when I was upstairs, putting final touches on teaching notes, and I’d press my fingers to my temples, straining to hear them, straining not to.

  One morning just before I started teaching, after they left for a walk, I stood in the kitchen and looked out the window. A flash of sadness crossed me. I still wasn’t feeling great—I’d probably been eating too many protein bars, skipping too many meals, because my stomach was still bothering me. Or maybe it was just the stress of getting ready for teaching. Our yard—I was beginning to think of it as “ours”—was parched and sere. I decided to call my mother to check in, but she was groggy, half asleep, could she call me back later?—and briefly, dizzyingly, I had neither of them, neither baby nor mother, I was neither mother nor daughter.

  I hated that my mother slept so much now. Sleep was stealing her from us. We had so little time left with her, why was it so hard for her to stay awake? One of them, it seemed, was always sleeping. Sacha, my mother, my mother, Sacha, the naps blurring into each other, except that Sacha was more alert with every passing day, and my mother less so.

  In this and so many other ways, they seemed to be crossing each other, moving in opposite directions. Chiasmus, that’s called in literary terms, for the letter X. Poems that begin and end with the same word, but cross in the middle. Characters who change position halfway through a novel. My mother slept more, Sacha, less; my mother moved less, and suddenly Sacha was pulling up on things, taking steps along the couch while she hung on. She crawled so fast now it was terrifying. By this point, every second of the day one of us was chasing after her, yanking her back from the edges of things, calling after her to be careful.

  LIKE US, MY PARENTS WERE also getting used to having help at home. Just before the trip to Charlevoix, they’d made two decisions. First, they’d asked their contractors to convert their upstairs linen closet into a laundry room. They were starting this week.

  “You remember Hank and Jimmy,” my mother said slurrily.

  This news was greeted, on my end, with silence.

  “Tell me more,�
�� I said, feeling my way. If she weren’t so sick, if she hadn’t given up on the F-U, I’d tell her the truth: She should be committed, instantly. What on earth was she thinking about? Even setting aside how absurd it was to have a bunch of guys traipsing in and out of the house with her so sick, what was the point? My parents had a perfectly good laundry room.

  “Down in the basement,” my mother said, as if she could read my mind, “is a long way to go just to throw in a few towels.”

  Now I remembered: She’d wanted two things for her birthday—to go into remission and to build an upstairs laundry room. Now, only the second looked possible.

  I pictured my mother up in the Hilton. The basement, two long flights down. I remembered the stairs in Charlevoix, the way she struggled to hide each wince as she heaved herself up, riser by riser.

  My mother had a thing about laundry. She did it daily, compulsively, folding shirts with neat sharp corners, the way Sylvia used to wrap parcels in the hat shop. We used to complain her signature scent was Tide. But these days, was she up to that? I was afraid by the time this new room was finished she wouldn’t be able to use it.

  “Well,” I said uncertainly. “That’ll be more—convenient.”

  She was already filling me in on domestic decision number two: the hiring of nurses.

  Her voice slurred a little as she explained to me the distinctions between nursing agency one, staffed by RNs who charged a fortune, and agency two, with LPNs, who were only half a fortune. Why did her voice keep slurring? “Are you OK?” I asked sharply.

  “I started taking some stronger stuff, Mellie,” she said. Her voice sounded like a high school drama student playing a drunk—an impersonation of slurring, rather than slurring itself.

  It turned out the “stronger stuff” (liquid morphine) was one of the main features of “palliative care.” It was also the reason nurses were needed now, because my father was at work during the day (he’d been back since they returned from Charlevoix) and my mother needed enough morphine that she couldn’t be alone. My mother didn’t tell me any of this—I found it out later, from my father. Instead, my mother described for me in great detail the nurses’ personalities and the ins and outs of their extended family members. Ray, the day nurse, was tidy, organized, but hard to talk to. She “ran a tight ship,” my mother reported. Dora, the night nurse, was “mellow,” “kindhearted,” and a superb knitter, which my mother found impressive, never having mastered this skill herself. Dora could even knit cables. It was a good thing my mother liked Dora, because my mother was up a lot at night, wanting to talk.

  “Why—” I tried to puzzle through this. “Why are you up a lot at night?”

  “Oh, one thing or another.” Slurring. “You know.”

  I didn’t know. But this was yet another thing that fell into that category for me these days.

  MY FIRST DAY OF TEACHING fell on the second Tuesday in September. Lapis blue sky, leaves brushed with gold, a day brimful with color, like a page out of a medieval Book of Hours.

  We’d rehearsed this for weeks, like emergency workers preparing for evacuation. Annabel arrived an hour ahead of schedule so I wouldn’t “stress out” (her term). She had a whole artillery of distractions for Sacha, not that Sacha—who adored her—needed distracting: three battered Dr. Seuss books; a vial of bubbles with a little wand; and—somewhat disturbingly—an heirloom Barbie, hair frizzled in simulated dreadlocks, wearing only a beach thong and one stubby high heel. Jacques was already at work and there was no time to discuss the pros and cons of Barbie before I left.

  I WATCHED SACHA CRAWL INTO Annabel’s open arms with a bitter taste in my mouth. There’s nothing generous about love, I decided, as I ran upstairs, pulling off pieces of my stay-at-home-mom clothes—leggings and T-shirt—as I went. Lying on my bed, carefully spread out, were the clothes I’d picked out last night. Without me in them, they looked like a flattened-out version of a person. The new linen skirt from Newton Centre. An oatmeal-colored sweater, loose fitting, lovely. I’d even set shoes in place, low-heeled, sober. Grown-up shoes.

  Annabel wore Keds.

  Nothing felt right. I had the weird sensation of pulling socks on after a summer at the beach. I looked different when I sneaked a look at myself in the mirror. Lines at the corners of my eyes. A kind of heaviness of expression. When I clattered downstairs, shoes sliding around, Sacha was chewing on Barbie’s leg, which bent forward implausibly at one knee. Annabel, serenely oblivious to the unwashed dishes in the sink, was lying on the green shag rug in front of her, plotting out a day of adventures.

  I had that bad taste in my mouth again. Wicked stepmother, I mentioned—only in the most casual and offhand way—the dishes, Sacha’s laundry. Just if there was time. Annabel couldn’t have been more cheerful and less promising. Babysitters, like oncologists, are masters of the conditional. We’ll see! It’s such a pretty day! So fun to go out!

  I kissed Sacha on the top of her head, with its fading aroma of babyhood. I went over the numbers for big and small emergencies. Rehearsed the what-ifs. Pediatrician. Poison control. Spare cash—just in case. I’d been practicing this for weeks. Why was it any different today, just because I’d actually be teaching while I was gone?

  Annabel was shooing me away, smiling, sure of herself, go, go, we’re fine! and I was out the door, walking to work, halfway to my office before I realized I hadn’t told Annabel where we kept the fire extinguishers.

  First day. Funny how it never changes, from place to place, time to time—that feeling of butterflies in your stomach, sweaty palms, worrying if you’re wearing the right thing, if they’ll like you—whoever “they” are. Or you.

  It was baffling to be here. The same in some ways, so different in others. I had a plaque with my name on my office door. In my office there was an ugly brown desk with a drawer that locked, two metal file cabinets, a view of the quad. It had been almost eight months since I’d been at Georgetown, but it felt more like eight years. At Georgetown, classes started at ten minutes past the hour, and without even realizing it, I showed up for my first class at ten minutes past. The students had clearly been waiting for me, pencils tapping on desktops, eyes narrowed. I felt like a substitute, and they could tell—eyeing me as if to gauge how long it would be before I snapped.

  BECAUSE I WAS NEW, AND because most classes filled based on word of mouth, I had only eleven students in Stuart Literature and Culture: 1603–1649. On my file folders I’d nicknamed it “Slac.” I was surprised by how nervous I was facing them, four boys and seven girls.

  The girls all looked like Annabel. They seemed barely awake, hair still wet, the room smelled like apricots and lavender, their skin was so fresh it looked like it might burst open, lashes matted with moisture as they stared vacantly out the window, guys with their hands jammed in their pockets, caps on their heads turned backward, breathing softly as if they were still asleep and I was some weird apparition in their dreams. I called their names one by one, the syllables like stones in my mouth. Michaela. Christina. Nicholas. All multisyllabic, sonorous. They didn’t look at one another or at me, they sat in a semicircle, drowsy, young. Who knew what they were daydreaming about as I pronounced or mispronounced their names?

  To settle myself down, I told them what I knew about the seventeenth century. It was like describing a country I’d visited years ago: Each detail reminded me of another detail, line after line taking shape until I remembered or thought I remembered it vividly. It was strangely comforting, ruminating on the defects of another era—the rotten sanitation, the barroom brawls, the rapiers, the illiteracy rates and sex scandals and political debacles. Our current scandals seemed less abhorrent in light of James I and his paunchy favorite, Bucking-ham. Against the soothing mantra of some other country’s debauched miseries, we seemed so sturdy and oversized, so buffeted by overhead projectors and the cool glow of fluorescent lighting.

  They had their copies of Hamlet out on their desks, waiting. In this class we would be covering the period
from the death of Queen Elizabeth (1603) to the execution of Charles the First (1649). Forty-six years, two reigns, but a whole revolution in politics, science, representation. Hamlet, written just after the death of Elizabeth, was the consummate tragedy of mourning. It was also, I told them, a play situated in an anxious political moment. Elizabeth had just died. Who was in charge? What happened when one ruler died, leaving a gap in power?

  I asked them to open their copies of Hamlet.

  We were starting with the first act. With the changing of the guard. One watch giving way to another.

  “What do you think of the word watch here?” I asked them. “How do you think it’s being used in this context?”

  They looked at one another, uncertain.

  “Well—it means to look at,” Michaela suggested. Self-conscious for speaking up first.

  I nodded, remembering how much I liked this, asking questions, waiting for answers, and one of the guys, Nicholas, added something about alarms and lookouts, and we went from there.

  An alarm, a signal, a lookout. One guard leaving, another coming in; one Hamlet dead, another bound to revenge him.

  I asked if they could think of any other meanings for the word watch, and when nobody could, I pointed to my wrist. Mine was from Nike, black rubber, twenty-six dollars.

  Oh, they said—that.

  We talked for a while about the word watch and I told them that it was just beginning to be used in the early seventeenth century to mean a portable timekeeper you could wear or carry. For a long time, I told them, clock and watch were used interchangeably. Bit by bit, the word watch started to replace the word clock. I asked if they could think of any associations with the word watch that weren’t there with clocks, and the atmosphere loosened up a little.