Fire & Water

by Betsy Graziani Fasbinder

  Jake laughed his deep giggle that was both manly and childlike and always delighted me. He explained how cracks in stone, ice, wood, glass, and earth can at first appear random, but how they actually follow along a predictable path of least resistance, like a river cutting its course. A crack in a rock or a log or even in the earth searches for weakness and creates itself there. “Kind of Darwin in reverse, with weakness overcoming strength.”

  “Maybe not in reverse,” I said. “The strong is still surviving, right? From the perspective of the crack.”

  “Exactly,” Jake said, smiling. “Exactly.”

  We talked for a while longer about the installation, his first in two years. Jake dropped his gaze down to his lap.

  “It’s getting late.” I said. “You’ve got your plane, and Alice is expecting me for supper.”

  Jake looked into my eyes. “Stay with me for just a little longer. I’ll make you dinner. Ryan’s garden is full of vegetables and fresh herbs.” He donned his pitch-perfect imitation of my dad’s brogue. “It’d be a sin to let ’em go to waste now, wouldn’t it, Kitten?” His eyes flashed.

  Ignoring the small voice of hesitation, I nodded.

  Fragrances of fresh ginger, cilantro, and garlic rose through the kitchen from the sizzling wok on the stove. I found myself watching Jake’s fluid movement as he chopped vegetables. He moved like a dancer, his body flowing with purpose and intention. “You look better. What meds are you taking right now?”

  He spooned vegetables from the wok onto my plate. “They were throwing the whole pharmacy at me for a while. Antipsychotics, mood stabilizers. Most of it just twisted me up, messed up my sleep and my memory, gave me stomach cramps, night sweats, dry mouth, tics. The plagues of Job. I started looking over my shoulder for locusts and floods.”

  Science had always seemed to me like the solution for every malady. For Jake, it was a cruel temptress, mocking and deceitful.

  The first bite of the stir-fried vegetables filled my senses all at once. He’d just thrown it together, but it was as sublime as any meal I’d ever eaten. “And now?” I asked. “What’s your medication regime?”

  With the back of his fork, Jake moved food on his plate. His face dropped, and without looking up he spoke in a level voice. “Can we not, Kat? Can we just enjoy this little sliver of time right now without the medical exam?”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m like the crack, huh? Always pushing through, looking for the weak spots I guess.”

  We talked about my reunion with my family, Jake’s treatment with Dr. Gupta. JJ’s surgery. Mary K’s new house. But mostly we talked about Ryan.

  Jake sighed. “I’ve missed so many things.” His regret was a dead thing—a carcass rotting in the room. “I’ll do the installation in New York, then come back and help pack up the house. You can sell anything you don’t want. The money can go to pay off some of the debt.” Jake pushed his barely-touched plate aside. “I’ve arranged to sell some of the art. Do a few commissioned pieces. That should get us out of the hole. The new assistant is managing the sales. Checks will all come to you.”

  “Thanks. I know this is hard.”

  Jake’s shoulders rose with a deep inhale. “Seeing me just wrecks Ryan, doesn’t it.”

  “She loves you, Jake.”

  “I know, but I confuse her. I scare her. My mood cycles are more frequent than ever, more… volatile. I can’t tell from minute to minute what I’m going to be like. They call it a maturing of my disorder. Ironic name, huh? Sedatives help me sleep, but then I wake up and the pain of losing you and Ryan is right there with its fist in my face ready to give me another punch.”

  “I don’t want to keep you from Ryan, it’s just—”

  Jake put up his hand to halt my words. “You have to.”

  I looked at the sleeves that covered Jake’s arms. “Jake, the heroin. Are you still using?”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Sometimes, when nothing else works,” he sighed.

  We’d had hours of discussion with Dr. Gupta and Dr. Malmstrom about how Jake, like so many with manic-depressive illness, used street drugs to moderate his moods. And though sometimes there was a dual diagnosis of addiction in cases like his, Jake was not a classic addict. This had been his first foray into needle use. I’d never been a prude about casual drug use and had imbibed my share of pot before Ryan was born, but the idea of heroin made my stomach turn.

  “I can’t have Ryan alone around you with even the possibility of drug use.” Fear and anger clung to my words. The vision of Ryan holding a syringe was a scar in my mind.

  He put his glasses back on and looked at me again. “You can’t let me be alone with Ryan at all, Kat, even without the drugs. Ever. We know that, right? If I was just a junkie I could recover, but—”

  “The needles. I got tested and I’m fine, but maybe you just got lucky. You’re playing with another kind of fire.”

  He opened the drawer in the old sideboard next to the table and moved the stack of table linens aside. He removed a mahogany box where the good silverware was usually housed. The flatware had been replaced with a Ziploc bag filled with syringes, each still in its sterile packaging, and the rest of the paraphernalia I’d seen before. He picked up a carton of sterile syringes. “I guess I still had a modicum of sense; I used clean needles. AIDS is probably the one thing you don’t have to worry about.”

  He reached for my hand. Gently, he turned the platinum bird’s nest ring I’d tried a dozen times to stop wearing. He still wore the ring of platinum twigs he’d designed to match. He brought my fingertips to his lips and kissed them one at a time. His lips were a creamy balm.

  “I don’t want to mislead—”

  The sweet tarragon on his breath and the citrus of his shampoo formed a haze around me. “I know it’s only for just right now. I’m not asking for anything more than just this.”

  I closed my eyes and remembered seeing Jake’s ice sculptures on Ocean Beach. I’d wanted them to stand forever in their shimmering crystal beauty. Words of our years together flooded my mind. What makes them special is that they’ll only be here for a flicker of time.

  We wrapped our arms around each other. His body’s vibrancy radiated through me, down to my bones. We swayed there, like dancers to our own inner music. Without speaking, we walked together to the living room.

  We came to rest together, like the first night we shared together, on the smooth suede chaise. Our bodies fit together like a well-worked jigsaw puzzle. I felt my heart, not racing wildly as it had when we’d first met, but beating with steadiness and strength. We lay there fully clothed and yet somehow utterly exposed.

  Jake stroked my cheek with his fingers, like a blind man reading brail. His voice was pinched with pain. “It kills me to give us up.”

  His words were needles puncturing my skin. “Things will seem better when you’re feeling stable again.”

  Even in shadow I could see sorrow on his face. “I’ll never be stable. I’ve been like this since I was fourteen. My father hired every shrink on the East Coast. I’ve taken every legal and illegal drug known to man. I’ve meditated with gurus in Tibet. I’ve cleansed my chakras, purified my chi.” He let out a low chuckle. “I even got exorcised by a priest in Spain once. Then I met you and we had Ryan. I thought you were my cure. But I was only, what would you call it? In remission?” He sighed a ragged sigh. “I don’t want to be a disease in your life.”

  I closed my eyes, willing tears back. “You’re not a disease.”

  In that moment, it seemed impossible to remember why we had to part. This man loved me, loved his daughter, and we loved him back. It all seemed so cruel.

  The only sound in the room was the crashing of the surf below and the aching bellow of a foghorn. Like the waves outside, the relentless force of my grief pounded at me. Jake wrapped himself tighter around me, holding me until the intensity of the wave subsided. The moon appeared, showing its gauzy face in the window. “Your flight,” I whispered.<
br />
  “There’s always another flight.”

  I leaned into him and caressed his freshly shaved cheek, its softness yielding to my touch. I pressed my lips to his. Like the first sip of water to an aching thirst, his kisses, his touch, his embrace all made me crave more. My deepened breaths drew in the rich scent of him: ocean and earth. His erection hardened against my thigh and he uttered a soft moan as my hand slipped beneath the waistband of his jeans.

  Jake unbuttoned my shirt as though he was opening a gift, and when the wrapping was off, he paused to look at me in the blue half-light. His kisses formed a trail of heat down my throat and between my breasts—the same path he’d once formed with cool, black stones. We couldn’t find enough ways to touch each other: with fingers, with thighs, with lips, with tongues. We moved slowly, two starving people savoring a last meal.

  Our clothing peeled away. My fingers found the fine lines of the mesh of scars on his chest and arms. I wanted to trace every scar and make it disappear. Jake found the eagerness between my legs. He rolled on top of me and slid inside. My body offered no resistance.

  For those moments there was only us in that room, unfettered by the past, unworried by the future. In the power of that slice of time, I understood Jake’s art more deeply than ever. For art and for passion, the power of the immediate, the instant, is enormous by comparison to any monument made in remembrance of it.

  We lay there, our bodies braided around each other. I looked down at us, my pale limbs entwined with his darker ones. “Marble rye,” I said.

  When I woke, the space beside me on the chaise was cool to the touch. I was covered with the soft chenille throw, and my clothes lay folded neatly on the couch.

  Silent as a dream, Jake had risen from where I slept. I blinked, trying in vain to see through the inky blackness that had swallowed all but a single beam of moonlight. I lay there, an ache deep inside of me, hollowed by the absence of him, fearing the moment when sunlight would split the dark.

  * * *

  Heat from the OR lamps pressed down on me as if it were made of lead instead of light. Rivulets of sweat trickled down my back, conspiring, along with the ticking clock and the pacing parents I knew were in the waiting room, to distract me.

  My eyes remained on the rectangular opening in the surgical draping that let me see the flesh I was repairing. Nothing was allowed into my thoughts but what existed in that rectangle: tissue, tendon, blood, bone, and the percussive accompaniments of pulse and respiration.

  Molly McInerney’s throat and chest had been so badly burned when her hair snatched the flame of her birthday candles that her airways had grown blocked with scar tissue, requiring her to use a breathing tube through her trachea. She’d been only four when it happened, and in the two years since she’d endured unimaginable pain and more surgeries than most people would have in two lifetimes. The skin on the side of her neck had stiffened to taut, shiny leather that tugged at her head, keeping it tilted to the left. She was missing an ear and the hair on one side of her head. This was the last surgery on her throat.

  I checked in constantly with Mark Goldman, the anesthesiologist. His job was to monitor the patient, to titrate just enough medication to keep her completely pain-free and unconscious. Molly’s eyes were taped shut and a tube projected from her lips, yet she appeared completely tranquil. The magic of chemicals having their effect.

  On the faces of the sleeping and the dead I had often encountered the appearance of peace. It was a look I could not even imagine on Jake’s face. He waited every conscious moment for the next betrayal of his mind, never knowing when it would come. It had cost him everything that mattered, and medicine offered him no promise of relief.

  Reentering the present moment, I became aware of the monitor that beeped with each of Molly’s perfectly paced heartbeats. Then it came to me: Death would free Jake.

  Like a dog shaking off water, I shook my head to rid myself of the germs of thoughts that had begun to plant themselves in my mind. I could help him. I had certainly let death come to patients, ceasing intervention that would only prolong agony—altered our course from medical intervention to “comfort care.” I had removed life support and allowed others’ loved ones to slip away. But to actually cause death was anathema to me: a line I had never imagined crossing.

  My hands worked independently of my thoughts; I completed the surgery and nodded to my surgical partner to close. I rushed out of the OR, afraid I might scream out loud.

  * * *

  Usually my work at the hospital absorbed me completely. But once the sour thoughts of helping Jake die had seeped into my awareness, my haven was destroyed. Every corner of the place held reminders of the comfort medicine offered—comfort unavailable to Jake. Death became not the enemy I’d always fought, but the relief I’d denied Jake by rescuing him from what he’d truly wanted.

  Images of Jake’s suffering were my waking nightmare: lying in a creamy white bathtub, his body a hatch-work of wounds; strapped by leather restraints into a hospital bed, more animal than human; his eyes fiery with fury, setting fires on our hillside. My daydreams—and my nightmares, too—were flooded with the piercing sound of breaking glass.

  Divorce was for those who no longer wanted to share a life together. There was no name for what Jake and I had become.

  But what if Jake just went away? Disappeared from our lives to some far-off patch of the globe, never to be heard from again? Such abandonment would scar Ryan like no other wound. And for Jake, such a leaving would also subject him to living as an emotional amputee, with no opportunity for healing.

  I walked the hospital corridors listening to the moans of those for whom medication provided inadequate relief. I’d thought myself compassionate, but now I knew just how insulated I’d become from the suffering that surrounded me. Orderlies pushed gurneys that concealed dead bodies so that visitors wouldn’t notice. Charts of the expired sat stacked, awaiting final signatures. Doses of medication lay unadministered because death had won the race. I had never been numb to pain and loss, as some of my colleagues had been. But now I knew that I, too, had shielded myself from the most agonizing images. I’d focused on the solutions I could provide—the treatment plan, the medication regime, the surgery—and I’d blurred the pictures of pain.

  Like a cat burglar, I became obsessed with planning, researching security systems and drug-custody protocols, determining how to avoid detection. I would never deny patients by taking what was intended for them. Nor would I rob a meds cart, which might result in a pharmacy tech being blamed. I began to imagine myself palming leftover drugs and slipping them into my pocket, just to see if I could.

  Almost involuntarily, my eyes scanned every surface, every cart, and every cabinet, like I was on a macabre Easter egg hunt. I was surprised at how quickly and easily my basket could be filled. A hospital provides enough distraction and chaos that miscalculations occur more often than anyone would ever admit. Equipment gets lost. Papers get misfiled. Medication gets misplaced. In almost no time, I could have a cache of pharmaceutical-grade narcotics. Even with the protocols, it would not be hard to gather what was needed. I was trusted. I had a backstage pass to the medical theater.

  Doubts droned like the dirge of bagpipes at Irish funerals. Shouldn’t Jake’s disease be allowed to take its course? Who was I to intervene? Another suicide attempt seemed all but inevitable. Why not just wait?

  It was a gradual knowing that came upon me. The only real end to Jake’s torture was death. He’d tried to hasten it, but I’d denied him that relief. If I contorted my thinking and looked at it through just the right lens I could see that helping him die would simply be righting a wrong I’d caused.

  My father had assumed when I was small that the accidental death of a parent is something a child can withstand. Nearly every fairytale starts with a child who’s lost one or both parents to illness or accident. Bambi. Cinderella. Dorothy. But fairytale characters are never orphaned by suicide.

  I could slip my st
olen booty, pure and potent, into the supply of drugs that Jake had shown me in the kitchen drawer. It would be only a question of time until he’d seek comfort there. Like Mary K’s holiday overdose cases, Jake could die an accidental death. A death that Ryan could understand. A death that would bring her no shame.

  I’d have to be careful—no, flawless—in my execution. I couldn’t just write a prescription for narcotics and pick them up at the pharmacy. If discovered stealing drugs, I’d lose my job, my license to practice—my daughter.

  I could not allow myself to shield my intentions with the pretty words of rationalization. What I was considering would be called murder by many, including the courts. Murder. Murder. Murder. The word, though accurate, had nothing to do with the actions I contemplated. Murder was about rage, revenge, greed. I sought only mercy for Jake, peace for myself, and safety for Ryan.

  I reasoned that it would be easier for Ryan to lose Jake completely than to lose him a thousand times to bouts of madness. He didn’t mean to die, I’d explain, teaching her the tragedy of drug use.

  I could see only one possibility to free us all.

  Eggs in One Basket

  Even the engine of a chartered jet and my third tumbler of scotch failed to drown out the roar of my conflicting feelings about going to New York to see Jake’s installation. My father’s admonition rang in my ears. You’ll not find your answers in the bottom of a bottle, Kitten. But his voice grew dimmer with each glass I emptied. And the scotch now had another duty; to drown the obsession I now had with Jake’s death. Ryan, wearing headphones, had her eyes glued to a large TV screen, watching Little Mermaid. Another orphan’s tale.

  It had been nearly a month since I’d shared that night with Jake, and we hadn’t spoken since. Burt, who called each night to speak with Ryan and me, had arranged our travel and urged us to come.

  The plan I’d begun to form was a bruise, its aching silence another barrier to my talking with Mary K. I’d managed to gather a small cache of narcotics, which I’d housed in a safe-deposit box. The cache grew, a malignant, unseen cancer.