“It was an event,” Pierce said carefully. He was wearing one of those blue shirts with a white collar, which Rebecca had never liked, and his face was deeply tanned except for a distracting goggle-shaped area of paleness around his eyes.
“An ‘event,’” she said, trying to focus.
“Obviously something happened. The brain is very mysterious. The CT and the MRI are not showing any new damage. It may be a reorganization of some kind.”
“Her brain is reorganizing into a coma?”
“One step forward, two steps back, that kind of thing,” Pierce said feebly. It might have been an attempt at humor. He was clearly unhappy to be baffled. “It’s not a coma, per se. Her EEG indicates that she’s asleep.”
Rebecca told herself that none of this was the doctor’s fault, that her anger was misplaced, that his silly shirt was not the point. But that goggle patch made the man look like some kind of demented raccoon. And it felt good to be mad. It felt like doing something.
She realized that Pierce probably got a lot of this, and she took a deep breath.
“I know you’re doing everything you can,” she said as mildly as she could.
“There’s not that much we can do at this point. That’s the hell of it. We’re just going to have to wait and see.”
“Then I guess we’ll wait and see.”
Pierce hesitated, a basically decent man with a misguided sense of fashion. “Is your mother a religious woman?”
“Are you saying I should call a priest?”
“It couldn’t hurt,” he said.
She called Mike at work instead, and he arrived less than an hour later in his McDonald’s uniform, with his name tag still on. She began to cry as soon as he came into the room, and they embraced without a word. Mike smelled of hamburger and grease, a seasoned rankness like an old camping blanket’s that was oddly comforting after Pierce’s cologne.
He turned to the bed, and Rebecca saw her mother through his eyes for a moment, shriveled and flimsy, almost a stranger, collapsed inward like a spoiled apple. Her brow was still contorted in that unnerving, private scowl of effort or of pain, and Mike reached at once to soothe it, as Rebecca had. Phoebe’s features relaxed for a moment, and then, as if recovering from distraction, she frowned again.
Mike glanced at Rebecca, who nodded at the chair by the bed. Mike sat down and took Phoebe’s hand. Rebecca realized that he was already praying. It was something that had happened without perceptible transition, a different air. His long, sad face simply settled into an almost Byzantine repose, a calm like a penitent’s in the fringes of a Giotto, and suddenly the silence was alive.
She drew the room’s other chair over and sat down beside him. Phoebe’s respirator wheezed and clicked; her mother’s lips were chapped. For some reason it was impossible to keep her hair combed. Do you want me to be good, God? Rebecca thought. Do you want me to keep her hair combed? What do you want from me?
“She’s fighting,” Mike noted quietly, and Rebecca stirred, half unwillingly, resurfacing to speech.
“Yes.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“He said that I might want to call a priest.”
He met her eyes, then looked back at Phoebe. For a long time he said nothing, but Rebecca waited patiently. She could feel a strong, strange calm of her own now; she felt that there was time for everything important.
At last Mike said, “Wouldn’t she want the real thing?”
“She thought you were fine for the baptism.”
“That was different.”
“Was it?”
“You know that it was.”
Rebecca stood up and circled the foot of the bed to the window at the far side of the room. She had been keeping the curtains drawn to protect Phoebe’s eyes, but Phoebe’s eyes were closed now and she didn’t want her mother to die in bad light. She eased the heavy drapes open and was surprised to see that it was raining outside, a quiet, steady rain, the first of the season. Dr. Pierce could ski on real snow soon. The mid-morning traffic on Potrero Avenue, five floors below, was vigorous in an unreal, distant way, with cars and buses cleaving swift-fading wakes on the wet black pavement and the sidewalks mushrooming with umbrellas.
Rebecca turned back toward the bed. It seemed to her that Phoebe’s face had shifted slightly, seeking the gray light like a plant. Mike had let go of her mother’s hand and was watching Rebecca closely.
“Are you saying you won’t do it?” she asked.
“I’m sure the hospital has a priest on call.”
“I don’t want some goddamned stranger in here!”
Mike stood up. “Maybe we should talk about this outside.”
“Phoebe’s heard me yell before,” Rebecca persisted combatively, but she followed him out of the room. Mike continued five steps up the hallway, an oddly touching discretion.
When she had caught up with him, he said, “What you’re talking about is a sacrament—Extreme Unction, now called the Anointing of the Sick.”
“Okay,” Rebecca said, as unencouragingly as she could.
Mike took a breath. “Okay. The Catholic Church teaches that a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace and that its value stems from its divine institution, ‘from the work already done,’ ex opere operato, by the saving action of Jesus Christ. The sacrament properly performed by a presbyter of the Church is seen to convey God’s grace independently of the moral character of its celebrant or recipients. Another school of thought would have it that the value of the sacrament does in some way depend on those who celebrate and receive it, ex opere operantis, from the work being done in the particular instance. But any way you look at it, I’m not qualified—”
Rebecca said, “Mike, if my mother dies while I’m out here with you discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, I’m never going to forgive you.”
“You’re asking me to do something very serious and very real. Something I’m no longer authorized to do.”
“You did the baptism.”
“The baptism was a circus stunt. And a mistake.”
“The baptism was beautiful. I loved you that day. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who could have brought a grain of dignity to that scene. That’s all I’m asking you for now—a grain of dignity. I don’t want some canon lawyer in here filling out the proper forms.”
Mike looked at her unhappily.
“Listen—” she said. “My mother is a good Catholic. She married my father in a church, forever. She raised me right—Baptism, Confession, First Communion, confirmation. I mean, it pained her when Rory and I got married on a beach. She’s lived a wonderful life, by any measure, and it’s certainly not her fault that I’ve turned out the way I have. Are you really going to tell me that God of yours is checking your license at this point? That’s he’s going to let her die in this stupid little room with a daughter like me and a tube down her throat and no one to do the right thing? Because I’m not going to call some standard-issue priest. I’m so mad at your fucking God right now that I could bite through steel. It’s a goddamned miracle that I’m asking you to do this at all. But I’m asking you to do it for Phoebe. Because it’s what she would want.”
Mike had ducked his head during this tirade, like a man in a rainstorm; when she was finished he continued to study the floor at their feet for a long moment before he looked up and met her eyes.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “I’ll need to go get a few things.”
“It’s a fragmented culture,” Rebecca said, astonished by how relieved she was. “We don’t need the whole nine yards.”
He was back within twenty minutes with a small brown paper bag from the corner store, a Dixie cup with holy water from the hospital chapel, and a sprig of jasmine. He had even rounded up a Bible somewhere. Sitting by Phoebe’s bedside, holding her mother’s hand again, Rebecca watched him make his preparations, impressed by his quiet gravity. Mike went into the room’s small bathroom and was
hed his face and hands at the sink, then cleared off Phoebe’s bedside table and covered it with a white cotton towel. He took two votive candles, one mauve and one cream colored, out of the bag and lit these with his cigarette lighter. Rebecca smelled vanilla and some other, sweetly indefinable fragrance.
“What’s that other smell?” she asked, amused in spite of herself.
Mike rolled his eyes. “Raspberry. Lucky for us, the Council of Trent never got around to pronouncing on the use of cheap scented candles.” He took his rosary out of the pocket of his McDonald’s uniform and set it on the table between the candles, with the crucifix visible. From the paper bag he drew an eight-ounce bottle of Bertolli’s olive oil. He’d brought a glass of water and a clean washcloth from the bathroom, and he arranged these on the table; he blessed the olive oil and poured some into a second Dixie cup. Then he took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Okay,” he said.
“Should I kneel down or anything?” Rebecca asked.
“You’re fine where you are.” Mike picked up the sprig of jasmine and dipped it into the holy water, then made the sign of the cross over Phoebe. “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit—”
Rebecca crossed herself self-consciously, feeling the cool drops on her left hand, which was still holding Phoebe’s. Mike began to pray in the firm, straightforward voice she recalled from the baptism, an Our Father and then a Hail Mary, prayers straight out of the Sunday mornings of her childhood. Her family had always risen early for the nine o’clock mass, because her father didn’t like the priest who said the ten-thirty and didn’t want to miss the start of the one o’clock football games if they went to the mass at noon. They would skip breakfast, in accord with the stricter rules of fasting then in effect, and Rebecca remembered how solemn she had felt in her hunger as a little girl, the fierce, secret joy of it, as if that gnawing in her belly were a private communication from God. That had been as real as God had ever gotten for her, that hunger and the ringing of the bells during the canon, the silence that had seemed so palpable and pregnant as the priest, his back still to the congregation in those days, lifted the bread and then the wine. She had always tried to convince herself that the bread and wine were God now, by some holy magic, though she’d never quite been able to pull that off. But it had been easy to believe that God was in those bells.
“…and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us…”
After mass, the family would stop at a nearby pancake house, and there would be immense glasses of fresh orange juice and the smell of the grown-ups’ coffee, stacks of steaming pancakes and a cheerful, post-mass crowd at the tables all around them. Phoebe had loved blueberry syrup, Rebecca remembered; they had never had anything but Aunt Jemima’s maple at home, and the silken purple sprawl of the blueberry syrup, the way it mingled with the slabs of melting butter and slid down the fluffy stacks to fill the edges of the plate, had always seemed like a continuation of the mysterious mass itself, an integral part of their faith, and a privileged thing she shared with her mother while her father teased them about their penchant for the exotic and stuck to good old Vermont maple.
“…Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our deaths. Amen.”
Mike paused, his head bowed; then he took a deep breath and reached for the Bible, flipping through it toward the end.
“Be patient, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. For behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. So be ye also patient; strengthen your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.”
Mike glanced tenderly down at Phoebe, as if checking whether he still had her attention. He seemed at ease now, collected in the ceremony, solemn and gangly in his blue McDonald’s uniform, his bright plastic name tag glaring, HI! MY NAME IS MIKE! YOU DESERVE A BREAK TODAY!
“Is any sick among you? Let her call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over her, anointing her with oil in the name of the Lord.…”
Rebecca began to cry quietly. She wasn’t even sure why; it just seemed suddenly that there was room for it, as if a space were opening up within her, a vast, quiet place with room for grief.
Mike set the book down and turned to the altar. He wet his hands from the glass of water and dried them with the washcloth. He laid his hands briefly on Phoebe’s head, formally and gently; then he turned and dipped his fingers into the oil. He traced the sign of the cross on Phoebe’s forehead.
“Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit.” He traced a second cross on her hand. “May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.”
“Amen,” Rebecca murmured. She realized that she was waiting for her mother to open her eyes, that some part of her expected a miracle, as she had at her first communion, when the priest laid the host on her tongue. After so many months of preparation for a holy thrill, the unleavened bread had seemed disconcertingly stiff and dry, unwieldy as a piece of cardboard. She had rolled it on her tongue, wondering if she was doing something wrong, and the wafer had softened and stuck to the roof of her mouth. The girls in line behind her had made their own communions, knelt beside her, and moved on; the congregation had finished the communion hymn and fallen silent; and still she had knelt at the altar rail, trying to work the obstinate bread from the roof of her mouth with her tongue and waiting for something, for something very special. For a sign.
She realized that Mike had been silent for some time.
“Is that it?” she asked, and he nodded. She looked at Phoebe and tried to tell herself that she looked more peaceful, at least. But what she really wanted to do was wipe that oil off her mother’s head.
The door behind them opened, and a nurse came in.
“Oh dear—” the woman said with a trace of alarm. “I’m afraid we can’t allow you to burn candles in here.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike said, sounding sincere enough. But he made no move to extinguish them.
The nurse hesitated, then bent and blew the candles out.
“And how’s our girl today?” she asked, resuming her professional cheerfulness.
“She seems about the same,” Rebecca said and reached instinctively to stroke her mother’s hair into place. She could still smell raspberry in the air, a luscious hint, mingled sweetly with vanilla and edged with smoke from the snuffed wick. She wondered if Phoebe could smell it too. She wondered if you could get blueberry candles anywhere.
She spent the night at the hospital on Monday, dozing in the stuffed plastic chair in the corner of her mother’s room and waking every two hours when the nurse came in with her blood pressure machine and her thermometer. But Phoebe did not wake.
Mike had gone home Monday evening to take care of Mary Martha, and he returned the next morning after dropping her off at day care. Rebecca wanted to tell him that it was all right, that she could handle it, that he should just go to work, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was glad to see him, and she liked the way he was with her mother, relaxed and attentive, always treating her as a presence in the room. Also, Mike had found a courtyard on the seventh floor, where they could slip outside and smoke. It turned out that the pysch wards were on the seventh floor too, and sometimes a subdued little group of patients from one of the locked wards would shuffle out in their bathrobes and frayed slippers. The shepherding nurse would issue them their cigarettes, one at a time, and they would scatter desultorily to every corner of the courtyard, smoking assiduously for a precise ten minutes, then troop back inside again.
Mike said Mary Martha wanted to see Phoebe, to bring her card, to tell her about the pumpkins. But Rebecca didn’t want that yet. All she could remember of her own maternal grandmother now was a withered woman in a bed in a room that smelled bad. It took a real effort to get beyond that image, to recall the grandmother who had baked and decor
ated Christmas trees, the grandmother who had taken her to the zoo and who had sung “How Do You Solve a Problem like Rebecca?” in a takeoff from The Sound of Music when her granddaughter got testy.
Mike simply nodded at this decision, though she sensed he disagreed. But she didn’t feel like pushing it, and she appreciated his tact. The two of them sat on either side of Phoebe’s bed and talked quietly about their days, like an old married couple over cocktails. Mike had cooked the brussels sprouts for Mary Martha’s dinner the night before, with predictable results. Rebecca suggested peas. He said they had finished The House at Pooh Corner and started on Beezus and Ramona, which Rebecca found painful. She and Mary Martha had been in the Pooh phase for months; an era had ended without her.
When Mike went home that evening, Rebecca took a shower in the hospital room’s bathroom and then ate Phoebe’s dinner, which the orderly continued to deliver every day like a newspaper to a family on vacation. Then she settled in beside her mother’s bed.
The odd thing was, this felt like reality now. This tiny room with the drapes closed against the city’s night glare and bustle, this place where nothing really happened, where only patience mattered. Where love was as simple as sitting here. The ritual the day before had had its unforeseen effect, and Rebecca felt unexpectedly freed; she had done what she could, which amounted to nothing, and the rest of it was this vast immediacy, this halt, this drifting, dodging, denying mind of hers brought home again and again to the brute fact of her mother helpless in this bed. Her childhood was here, surfacing in odd moments like bubbles from a recent shipwreck; her furious adolescence whirled through like weather in the Midwest; and all the missed opportunities of her adulthood hurt her anew, all the moments when anything had seemed more important than loving this woman who had given her life. The good times were here too, the laughter in kitchens and the quiet moments halfway up the stairs, which for some reason was where she and Phoebe had often had their best conversations. And her father was here. Sometimes Rebecca even felt that he was in the chair beside her, strong and comforting, smoking his pipe, and that Phoebe was somewhere between them now, touching them both. All the precious dead were here.
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