“What about your work? They’ll hold your job for you until you get back?” Until Mom dies, he meant. Until a few days after the funeral.
“They’ve been great. Really supportive.”
“While I’m visiting, you could go back to work for a while. I’ll watch Mom during the day.”
“I want to be here. As much as I can.”
He doesn’t trust me, Curtis thought. Last night could have been his dream instead of mine. The uncaring son returns, only to hasten his ailing mother’s death. A smothering pillow, poison in the food, the wrong medicine slipped into the I-V line. Or Mom calling for help while Curtis lounges in a distant room, her desperate words straining to reach him, so quiet that he hears them and chooses not to hear, pours himself another two fingers of bourbon from the decanter. When he checks her room she’s on the floor beside the bed, legs tangled in a twisted sheet, a plastic tube wrapped around her throat, her bristle-bald scalp and pale cheeks flushed a dark, airless blue.
That’s what Glen’s afraid would happen.
“You could still visit Mom if she was in the hospital or at Evergreen,” Curtis said.
“We’re not doing that.” Glen slapped the newspaper against the edge of the table as if swatting a fly. “A hospital isn’t going to help her at this stage. We’re making her comfortable.”
“Okay,” he said.
“You agreed, Curtis. It’s what Mom wants.”
“You’re right.” Curtis scooped up a few more spoons of cereal in the silence that followed.
“How are you feeling today?” The voice from the portable monitor startled him, reminding him of the sinister storyteller from his dream.
“Hurts,” their mother said. In the absence of visual cues, Curtis tried to imagine what part of her body she indicated. Or maybe it was a general sense of hurt, all over.
“How about some more of the good stuff?” the nurse asked.
“Please.”
Glen clicked off the volume to the monitor. “It’s kind of like eavesdropping, isn’t it? Lillian’s with her, so she’ll be fine.”
A guilty move, suggesting Glen was afraid he’d hear too much. Details of their mother’s pain, perhaps. Or the medications administered to ease that pain. What exactly was this “good stuff” Lillian spoke of?
Glen slapped his hands on his knees then pushed his chair back from the table. “Check in on Mom, will you? When you get the chance, I mean.” He stood up. “Tell Lillian I’ll be back in an hour or so—in plenty of time to cover her smoking break.”
“I could spell her, too,” Curtis said. “Where are you going?”
“Out for a run. Every Sunday morning, if the weather’s nice.”
But you’ve just finished with the exercise machine. Now was the proper time, as Glen shifted into run-in-place mode, a jogger waiting for the light at a busy intersection. You’re doing it again. You’re not healthy. We’ve got to talk about it.
“See you when you get back,” Curtis said.
•
Curtis clicked the volume knob and the monitor’s power light illuminated. He set the volume at mid-point, but heard nothing. He dragged the unit from Glen’s vacated place and set it next to his empty cereal bowl. The speaker crackled static as he tweaked the volume a notch higher, then another.
He heard breathing. A slow wheeze through a slightly open mouth—probably Lillian, rather than his mother. He concentrated, staring at the speaker grill as if that would help him distinguish sounds, or create images to accompany them. A hand across fabric, a sniffle, a body shifting in a bed or chair. The frog-croak of a flexi-straw contorted into a new shape. A dry swallow.
“Leave me.”
His mother’s voice? He couldn’t quite decipher the words, but she sounded frightened.
Then Lillian, a sing-song nurse. “Careful. Don’t get upset.”
He thought his mother said, “Why are you here?”
He leaned close to the monitor—as close, he imagined, as Lillian leaned to his mother’s ear to whisper, “Don’t you dare let your children see you like this.”
“You’re hurting me,” his mother said.
The nurse, next, full of malice. “You old fool. This is best for everyone.”
Faint, so faint: the scrape of a needle pressed into a pinch of skin. A rubber plunger squeaks and forces liquid through a hollow cylinder.
“She’ll be groggy for a bit.”
Jesus! He’d just heard Lillian’s voice over the monitor, but now she stood in the kitchen, directly behind him. She hadn’t had time to walk here from his mother’s sickroom.
“There’s somebody in there with Mom.” Curtis straightened up in his chair, half-ashamed that he’d been caught hunched over the eavesdropping device. The nurse looked different today. She stood with confidence, her hands behind her back—to hide a carving knife, perhaps, or a scalpel.
“The medicine confuses her for a bit,” the nurse said. “Her voice changes.”
“No. Definitely another person.”
“Who did you hear? Her husband? Dr. Porter? Sue from the bridge club?”
He didn’t respond. The nurse’s hands worked behind her back, he was certain—twisting the rope of a noose, or preparing the opening of a plastic bag to throw over his head and tighten at his neck.
“Oh, I get it. Listen, patients often complain about their nurses. Bedpan humor, jokes about needles and pincushions—like we’d torture patients willingly. Your Mom, sometimes she does Nurse Lillian’s Evil Twin. And she sounds just like me. Makes me say the most horrible things.”
Was it possible? Currently, the monitor was silent.
“What did you give her?”
“Something for the pain.” Her hands came into view, and she’d only been holding a purse by its straps. She hung the purse on the back of the chair Glen had vacated, then sat down.
“What, exactly?”
Lillian rattled off some chemical names. He recognized only a few syllables. “Maybe I should tell you the street value,” she said.
He laughed a bit. “That good, huh?”
“If I didn’t have ethics, I could easily supplement my income.” A weak joke, but she continued in a more serious tone. “Listen, these drugs have a bad reputation because they’re strong, and because people abuse them. But they’re not too strong for your mother’s pain. And, forgive my bluntness, with the time she has remaining, we needn’t worry about long-term addiction.”
Curtis never cared for nurses. When he had his appendix out a few years back, the day-shift nurse had a bubbly baby-talk manner that made him want to throttle her. She asked if he’d been able to “tee tee” yet, and called him a “good boy” for finishing his broth lunch. Lillian had a different effect on him. Her manner was overly familiar, tinged with dark humor that—he had to admit—was a necessary defense mechanism when working with terminal patients. He couldn’t very well blame her for the nightmare his own anxieties had cooked up for him. As he talked with her now, the woman’s slightly abrasive qualities were the same ones that helped him decide to trust her.
She would say anything. She would tell the truth.
“This pain medicine,” he said. “It’s the best you can do?”
She nodded. “Some steroids and corticosteroids, too, for help with pleural effusions—problems with her lungs and breathing, essentially. Not doing as much good as we’d hoped, I’m afraid.”
“What happened with the chemotherapy?”
“Well, it’s poison, isn’t it? The drugs are designed to fight cancer cells, but they kill a lot of healthy cells, too. It’s like buckshot: you aim at the bull’s-eye, but hit all around the target.”
“So, it was the right decision to stop the chemo.”
“Absolutely.”
“I was never sure if it was Mom’s decision, or Glen’s, or the doc
tors…”
“Everyone’s decision.”
To his surprise, Curtis suddenly fancied himself the most devoted son in the world, desperate for more time. He would give blood or marrow, donate a kidney or amputate his own limb. For the slightest promise of his mother’s recovery or remission, he’d summon unreasonable faith in new age medicine, throw his life savings at snake-oil cures, bargain with insurance companies for experimental treatments. If an occult ceremony would restore his mother, he’d draw a chalk pentagram on the kitchen floor, chant in forgotten languages, slit a chicken’s throat over a stone bowl. “I want to do something more for her. Tell me what I can do.”
“You’re here,” she said. There was nothing more.
He could ask her again later, after the next change in his mother’s condition. Maybe then the nurse would have a different answer.
“Thanks,” he said. Then: “Uh…shouldn’t you be with her?”
The question didn’t faze her at all. “I only stepped away for a minute.” She tapped at the monitor, indicating she’d hear if his Mom cried out. Behind that, maybe, a remark too blunt even for Nurse Lillian to speak aloud: What’s the worst thing that could happen? And would it really be the worst thing, honestly?
“I heard Glen go off for his Sunday jog,” she said. “The morning one, I should say, since he’ll go again this afternoon. I wanted to follow up on what we discussed last night.”
“Ah.” The anorexia. “I was skeptical at first, I won’t lie. But now I can’t help but see it. He bounces in the chair, does isometric exercises even when he’s sitting still.” The irony wasn’t lost on him: in the same chair, Lillian was a casual lump of inactivity. “No breakfast to speak of, and God knows how long he used the elliptical this morning—and of course the jog almost immediately after. You’re right about him. You’re right.”
“You confronted him?”
“Not yet.”
Lillian sighed—maybe at him, maybe at the whole situation. “I don’t think he’d respond so well to me if I brought it up. He needs to hear from someone close. That’s why I was pleased to learn about your visit.”
“Glen’s going through so much. I didn’t feel right about attacking him.”
She nodded slowly, trying not to register disappointment. “I brought you some literature.” Lillian unhooked her purse from the back of the chair, rummaged past the checkbook and cigarette pack, then produced a small collection of pamphlets. She placed them on the table, turning them toward Curtis. The top one illustrated a thin teenager standing in front of a fun-house mirror that made her appear overweight. “These are mostly about the visible forms of anorexia. But the hidden consequences for Glen can be just as dire. Things can happen to your body if you starve it. Irreversible things.”
“Like his hair loss?”
“That’s part of it, but not near as severe as when his muscles start to atrophy.”
“He’s not to that point yet, is he?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so.”
“Then we’ve got to wait.”
“How long? The longer he continues this behavior, the harder it will be to discourage it.”
“He’s not in the right place, mentally. I can feel it. We have to get past this thing with Mom.”
“I disagree. But you know your brother better than I do, of course.”
A gracious comment. But did he? Over the few weeks of Mom’s home care, Lillian had probably spoken with his brother as much as Curtis had over the past decade.
Even so, he held his ground. “Glen won’t get better until after Mom passes. He’s too vulnerable right now.”
“I won’t mention it further.” She pushed the pamphlets closer to his side of the table. “Except to say that, sometimes, the more difficult part of my job is not the terminal patients, but what happens to those around them. They stop living for a while. They almost forget how.”
Curtis didn’t have a response. He wanted to thank her—for taking care of his mother, certainly, but also for her sincere concerns about Glen. There would be time. There would still be time for him.
But he couldn’t shake the ghost of an unvoiced remark. Care for the living, not the dying. If Glen couldn’t get healthy right now, it would be better, for all concerned, if Mom died sooner rather than later.
-6-
After returning from his run, Glen stood over the bathroom sink and wiped at his face with a damp washcloth. He tried not to look in the mirror.
A portly comic on Leno once joked that he had one of the key symptoms of anorexia: “Whenever I look in the mirror, I see a fat person.” The audience laughed and laughed.
Lately, whenever Glen looked into the mirror, he didn’t see a fat person. He saw the Fleshless Man.
His reflection was an ancient, withered thing. The skin stretched over its face like a burnt, brittle shroud. The Fleshless Man stared at him through the cold fog of cataract eyes. Hair sprouted in soiled gray-white wisps among numerous bare patches in the monster’s bristled scalp. Thin black lips framed his cruel toothless mouth.
This is my goal weight, Glen thought. This is what I’m working toward.
Glen would shave first thing in the morning, he would comb his hair—what was left of it—and in the mirror a monstrosity would mimic his movements. Now, as Glen touched his face, his cheek felt loose, spongy, with only a thin layer of fat beneath the skin.
He shrugged his sweatshirt over his head and lay it on the counter, then removed his soaked T-shirt. He looked down at his belly, at the loose paunch that draped over the elastic waistband of his pants. The stomach should be tighter. So much work remained. He lifted one arm, and pinched at a clump of flesh that hung beneath the bone. In the mirror, a frail hand duplicated the motion, scratching with long, curling fingernails at a raised arm as if trying to scrape bark off a tree limb.
The black lips parted, and Glen’s reflection spoke to him in his own voice.
“Flesh is soul,” the Fleshless Man said. “You’re trying to lose your soul.”
The comment made no sense. Glen knew his soul was eternal. It was separate from the worst parts of his body, the dead weight he’d dragged through life for so long. If anything, his spirit was stronger now. Anyone could see that.
“Ask your brother,” the Fleshless Man said.
His brother knew nothing about soul. Curtis had never suffered. He had an easy time at school, moved away from home after college. He did whatever he wanted, not caring who he might hurt.
And yet…Curtis had stared at him last night, uneasy. He’d held his tongue about something this morning—a judgment, perhaps, or a new variation of the cruel taunts from childhood.
“Your family is weight, too,” the Fleshless Man said. “Your mother, especially. She’s a cancerous weight.”
Glen tossed his sweatshirt into the corner hamper then walked to his bedroom for a fresh T-shirt.
As was often the case, the Fleshless Man followed him.
-7-
Glen and the nurse must be used to his mother’s weakened voice, but Curtis had to strain to listen. He moved the chair even closer to her bed, careful not to snag the plastic tube that ran from the I-V pole, along the floor, then under the blanket.
“I’m sorry about… all the rules.” Her speech was measured in short breaths, the last word in each phrase nearly lost. “I worried…not having your father…to raise you.”
“Hey, I’ll take some of the blame. I was a tough kid to control, I bet.”
“You were good,” she said. She winced at the word good, but it was a pain in her throat, a symptom of the disease in her lungs. His mother was saying the things he’d always wished she would say. She could barely speak, and yet it was the best conversation they’d ever had.
“I wish we’d talked more these past years,” Curtis said, and meant it. “I know that’s my f
ault.”
“Nobody’s fault,” his mother said. “Life changes…drift apart.” Her lips barely moved as she spoke, her words breezeless in the room’s stale air. Mom had been so light when he’d helped prop the pillow behind her; his hand on her back was like the ventriloquist’s hand as he lifted his hollow puppet into place.
“Should have been…nicer to Lauren.”
“You can talk to her,” Curtis said. “I’m going to call her later this afternoon.”
“No…you tell her…how I feel.”
“Okay. Yeah. That’s a good idea.”
He almost wished Lauren had come home with him. Seeing his mother this way was upsetting, of course—she was so weak, and he couldn’t escape the impression that she tried to hide the ongoing severity of her pain. But at the same time, his mother was making a real effort to speak to him, even to apologize. It was a more positive homecoming than he’d ever dreamed possible. Cathartic.
It would be a better chance for him and Lauren to heal.
A mother’s judgments are important, even when you’ve moved away from home, even when you pretend you don’t respect her. Those years they didn’t visit home, his mother was still a part of him. She was still a wedge between him and his girlfriend.
That was changing now. He’d call Lauren, convince her of that. His mother was in her final days, unfortunately, but they were younger and healthy. They could move forward.
“Good enough,” his mother said.
Yes. Lauren was good enough for him. So gracious of his mother to finally accept her.
“Not enough…settle.” His mother coughed, her eyes closing in a wince.
She needed prompting. You deserve better, he could say for her. Someone prettier, more intelligent. How easy it would be for his mother to slip back into these earlier pronouncements—ones that pretended to flatter her son, puff him up with importance, when they really served only to wound Lauren. The frail, sweet version of his mother couldn’t last. If he stayed here and kept talking with her, the illusion would inevitably crumble. It would be best to end things now.
The Fleshless Man - Norman Prentiss Page 4