“You’re one of the tough ones. You always have been. The one who wouldn’t put up with anybody’s crap. It just makes you angry. You remind me of your grandmother.”
“Thanks.” She didn’t want to be like any of them. She said, “You know what I’m hoping? Once Mom’s feeling better, I want to move somewhere else. It’s a big world and I don’t want to spend my whole life in this stupid town. I mean, it’s not stupid, I’m stupid. For sticking around . . .”
She shook her head and bent over the dishwasher. She was stupid for saying anything, for her black, unworthy thoughts. She was stupid for starting to cry.
“Don’t I know it,” her uncle said, and she was grateful that he kept his distance, kept his tone light and did not try to comfort her. “This town, it’s like everybody’s known your business from way back before you were born.”
* * *
“Lung cancer survival rates are not what one would wish.” Grace came across this sentence two-thirds of the way through one of the informational pamphlets and handouts. It was after the sections on self-empowerment and the benefits of support groups, good diet, and spirituality. Talk about burying a lede.
They’d gotten through Christmas, January, February. In March it was discovered that the cancer had spread to her mother’s spine. Grace was angry, as were they all. It did not help anything to be told that anger was one of the common and expected reactions to setbacks in treatments. The phrase “setbacks in treatment” did not help either.
“Am I going to die?” her mother asked. “Am I dying right now?” No one would say. It was understandable that doctors would rather deal in false hopes than false despair. There were still different drugs, therapies, strategies that could be employed. More radiation, more chemo. Did you really want doctors who gave up? But when Grace looked up the prognosis for lung cancer patients whose cancer had metastasized to the spine the first word was “Sadly.”
There was another hospitalization to allow for a new kind of scan, involving radioactive particles and hi-tech imaging. The doctors offered biophosphonates to help prevent fractures, anti-inflammatories and medications for pain. Palliative care. There was no point in getting angry at the doctors. They were magicians who had only so many tricks. Her mother came home and said she wasn’t going back to the hospital again, no matter what. She didn’t have to, the family assured her, although they kept an open mind when it came to no matter what.
Grace’s father moved into the guest room because Grace’s mother had so much trouble sleeping. None of them slept, not really. Her father sat up late at night in front of the computer, researching lung cancer, lung cancer treatments, lung cancer online communities and forums. He had stopped drinking. He said it didn’t work anymore. Michael slipped in and out of the house like a ghost. Sometimes he dragged his pillows and blankets into his parents’ bedroom and spent the night on the floor so that if his mother couldn’t sleep, there was someone to keep her company. Grace washed dishes, washed sheets and towels, sorted the mail, organized medicines. She still spent nights at her own apartment, for now, still went in to work at the food store for occasional shifts. A substitute taught her yoga classes. It was normal life once you took the normal out of it.
Grace’s mother said, “You read in all these obituaries about people who died after a long, courageous fight against whatever killed them. Cancer or something else. But what does that mean, fighting?”
“I don’t know, Mom. Maybe, they didn’t give up hope.”
Grace’s mother said, “And then they died anyway.”
“I guess so.”
“I think it’s so people can feel better about themselves. You’re a fighter, not some miserable whiny victim.”
“Mom.”
“All right, I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better. My poor girl. None of this is fair. It’s not fair to you.”
“It’s OK, Mom.”
“You’re the one who’s getting stuck with me.”
“That’s not the way it is,” Grace said. Although it was. By the end of the month she was spending the nights in her old bedroom so she could manage her mother’s pills and her appointments and help her with hair washing and dressing. There was talk of home health aides, but her mother was fierce about resisting these for as long as possible. In theory, Michael and his father were pitching in more around the house, but in practice it meant sour heaps of laundry left in corners, frozen meals, and dust balls rolling across the floors. Grace cleaned up after them with black-hearted efficiency. It was true, the women always got stuck with such things. And here she had been determined not to be that kind of woman.
There were visitors too, all her mother’s friends, people who wanted to help, people who thought they were helping. They meant well, but you could not ask them to pitch in and clean the bathrooms. The visitors brought flowers and casseroles and gift shop stuffed animals, and Grace’s mother always said, “Thank you, that is so sweet of you.”
Her mother’s friend from work came on two different Fridays. Becky? No, Becca. A little woman with a mouth stenciled bright pink, and dangling turquoise earrings. “Happy hour,” Becca said, producing a pint bottle from her bag and asking Grace for ice and glasses. When Grace said she wasn’t sure, with all the medication, if alcohol was advisable, Becca shook her head so that her earrings clinked. Her short, curly hair was streaked and frosted like some elaborate cake.
“It’s not going to hurt anything, I promise. Little bit of liquid comfort. Is your father home? You know, I’ve never met him. But I expect there’s times his ears were burning.”
Grace couldn’t think of anything to say to this, nor to the drinking, when it came down to it. Becca went upstairs with the ice and Grace could hear them laughing together. When Becca came down again, her lipstick was blotted and pale. “She’s sleeping like a baby,” she told Grace with satisfaction.
On good days her mother was arranged on the downstairs couch with a blanket and pillows. On bad days people were told not to come. There were a great many people who visited or called. Her mother had lived here all her life, and now her life was circling back around her. There were school friends, work friends, friends who had moved away and those who had stayed. Grace ran interference, taking messages, holding her hand over the phone so that her mother could indicate yes or no, who she wanted to talk to, who she wanted to see. One time Laura plucked a greeting card from the pile of mail, opened it, and tossed it directly into the wastebasket. “Do you know the Bible verse about hypocrites?” she asked Grace. “How they are like whited sepulchers, pretty outside, but filled with dead men’s bones and uncleanness.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace asked her, but her mother wouldn’t say any more, and when Grace thought to look for the card, it was gone.
When people did come over, Grace stayed out of their way. She did not want to hear what she did not want to hear. Sometimes it couldn’t be avoided. She was in the den folding laundry. Her mother’s friend Susie had come over with cupcakes, red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, because her mother had always liked these. She didn’t have much of an appetite these days. The pain meds put her in some zone where eating was as tiring as climbing a flight of stairs. “They look so pretty,” Grace’s mother said. “Really, they are too pretty to eat.”
“You’d better eat them, that’s why I made them.”
“Maybe later. I’m just not hungry right now. Isn’t it silly, all those times we tried not to eat too much? How about I have a little taste of the frosting. Oh that is so delicious. Thanks, Suse. You’re the best.”
Susie’s voice dropped to a murmur. She was asking Grace’s mother how she was, really, how are you?
“Scared. I want to get it over with.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Well you asked. Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.”
They talked a while longer, keeping their voices low. Finally Grace’s mother said she was tired and she was going upstairs to rest. Grace came out
to see if she needed any help, but her mother said she was all right. Susie hugged her for a long time. “Oh for God’s sake, Susie, I’m still right here. You can come back tomorrow if you want.”
She climbed the stairs and they heard her go down the hallway and the click of the door shutting behind her. Susie was crying. She said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t carry on so. After all, she’s your mother. It must feel so much worse.”
“I don’t know how it’s supposed to feel,” Grace said, and that was true. How were you supposed to feel, day by day, hour by hour, when it just kept going on? Susie gave her an odd look and told her to make sure they all had some cupcakes.
The times that her mother’s pain broke through the medicine, Grace’s father was the one who climbed into bed with her and let her cry against him. He was the one who called the hospital and blistered the ears of the nurses until the doctor agreed to a morphine drip and hospice care. He massaged her feet, read the newspaper headlines out loud to her, coaxed her with food. One night Grace said to him, “You’re being really, really great. About Mom.” Surprising herself with how much she meant it, suddenly shy about her own feeling.
Her father shrugged. Grace saw in his face how tired he was, how tired they all must be. He said, “It’s the last chance I have to make things up to her.”
Michael was different. He didn’t want to talk. Not to anyone about anything. He came and went at all hours, and Grace was never sure if he was home unless she stood at the closed door of his room and listened and knocked and opened it to confront the emptiness and neglect inside. She hoped he wasn’t using again, she saw no signs of it, but Michael was going to have to take care of that himself. No one else had energy or time to worry about it.
One night Grace was in the basement, loading up the washer and dryer, when she heard her brother’s voice filtering down from overhead, unexpectedly clear, and knew it was coming through the laundry chute in their parents’ room. She stopped moving so she could listen. “I can’t. You won’t be here and I can’t do it.”
Her mother’s voice, less distinct. Grace could barely make out the words, but the tone was soothing, reasonable. “No,” Michael said. “Nobody else. I’ll be all alone. I can’t do it, I’ll crash and burn.” He might have been crying. More of her mother’s reasonable, chiding tone, he was not to talk that way, feel that way, of course he would not be, not be, of course not. “Not like you,” Michael said. “Not ever in my whole whole life.”
Grace left the laundry for later and took herself quietly back upstairs. You did not want to hear what you did not want to hear.
By now there were the hospice workers, the professionally compassionate. The family had to get used to the presence of other people in the house just as, before long, they would have to get used to an absence. The schedule of visits was posted on the refrigerator. Someone came for four hours in the morning and someone else for four hours at night. There was one bad incident: a new aide had arrived to work the evening shift. When Grace went in to see if anything was needed, her mother was attempting to get out of bed as the aide, a heavy-set woman with black hair, remonstrated with her. “Now there, Mrs. A., let’s just relax,” and expertly blocked her efforts with one arm.
“What’s going on here, what are you doing? Mom?”
Her mother thrashed and panted and fell back on her pillow. Grace had to bend over to make out what she was saying: “She’s the one.”
“What?”
“She’s the one kills you.”
“All right, Mom, don’t worry. Listen . . .” Grace straightened up. “I’m sorry, it must be her medicine.”
Her mother made swimming motions with her hands. “Go away. Her.”
“It’s all right, Mom, calm down. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name. . . .”
“Angela. It’s all right. I don’t take it personal. Some of them get that way.” The woman gathered up her coat and handbag. “I still get paid for this shift, right?”
Day after day it was almost spring, sometimes a little closer, sometimes farther away. Day after day her mother wandered off, traveled back, disappeared again. The morphine made her float; an oxygen machine tethered her to earth. One morning she was calmer than usual, more awake. She asked Grace to get her some lilacs.
“Lilacs? We don’t have any, Mom. Besides, I think it’s too early for them.”
“Back at the house.” It took Grace a moment to realize she meant the house she’d grown up in.
Against all expectations, the house remained unsold. In spite of its character, historic charm, etc. People wanted new kitchens and bathrooms, they didn’t want to move in and have to redo things right away. There had been two or three lowball offers. Another offer went to contract but the buyer backed out once the inspection found mold. Mold! There was no mold! It was just an excuse to renegotiate and drive the price down. The lawyers jumped all over it. The whole deal had fallen apart, in expensive fashion.
Now the house was back on the market. Grace parked in the driveway and nodded in wry greeting at the realtor’s sign, the realtor herself pictured with arms crossed in an energetic, can-do pose. The lilacs were in the backyard. Her mother was right. One bush of lilacs, the lightest mauve, had formed flower cones and the tight flowers were pushing open.
Grace had brought clippers along with her, but it was a messy job to cut and tear through the woody stems. The skin of her hands bruised, and when she reached up for the higher branches, they sent a shower of cold water down her neck. Everything about her mother’s dying had turned into a messy job of one sort or another, a mix of exhaustion, guilt, resentment, fury. She didn’t cry often but she was crying now, with no one to see her, bits of leaf and wet petals caught in her hair. Her hands were cold and scraped, and she was crying because it was so damned easy, at this moment, to feel sorry for herself.
Before she headed back, she used her key to open the kitchen door and walk through the empty rooms. They had a smell to them from being closed up. It was just a house. You wanted it to be important, a place where lives you’d known had left some echo. But nothing remained.
Her mother was awake when Grace got back with the lilacs. The aide was just leaving. She said her mother had had a good morning. Grace put the vase of flowers next to her bed, alongside the wet wipes and lip balm and hand lotion and mints, the Kleenex and prescription eyedrops and flexible drinking straws and all the rest that had accumulated there. “Can you smell them?”
“They’re wonderful. They’re in Walt Whitman.”
“What’s in Walt Whitman?”
“Lilacs.”
She thought her mother was having a morphine moment. Then she remembered. The poem about Lincoln’s assassination, though she couldn’t recall much of it. Here coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac. What a thing to think about.
“Jesus, Mom. You couldn’t come up with anything a little more upbeat?”
Her mother laughed. She had learned to make laugh noises in her throat, not farther down. Too much laughing hurt. She sipped air as if it was water. The oxygen tubing snaked from her nose. Her face was both familiar and not so, both smaller and looser. She was quiet for a while and Grace thought she might have fallen asleep. Then her mother said, “Nuisance.”
Grace knew what she meant. Dying was a nuisance. She said, “Do you want to sleep? Do you want me to leave?”
“Stay and talk to me. Prop me up some. I keep sliding down.” There were different layers of padding and pillows, all designed to protect and ease her mother’s back. No one position stayed comfortable for very long.
“All right then.” Grace rearranged the pillows, then sat on a love seat that used to be at the end of the bed. It had been moved against the wall so you could sit and talk to each other. But where were you supposed to start? There was an empty space they should have been filling up with words while they still had time. The faster the time ticked down, the harder it was to say anything.
Her mother said, “Only in th
e movies.”
“What, Mom?”
“People who look good dying. It’s all right. I don’t care anymore. You have to help them. Your dad and Michael.”
“I am helping them. They’re completely useless.”
“I don’t mean housekeeping. Help them get along.”
“Come on. How am I supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know. You have to try.”
Grace shook her head. “No Mom.”
“I worry so much.”
“Well don’t. They’ll work things out between the two of them.” Grace was less confident than she sounded. The last thing on her list of last things she wanted was to be in charge of their endless stupid pointless fighting. To fret about it and spend her life trying to calm them down and placate them and make them behave when they clearly didn’t want to. Why had her mother wasted so much of her time trying? Why should that be part of some female inheritance?
To change the subject, she said, “Anyway, Dad’s been a lot better lately. He’s really making an effort to get along with Michael.” Though that felt too close to the dangerous truth; that up until her mother got sick, he had made very little effort. Her mother’s eyes were closed. She might have been sinking into sleep. Then she roused herself.
“I wish you liked him more.”
“Hah. I wish you’d picked me a different father.”
“Oh Grace.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.” She’d intended it as a joke, a mean one. “I upset you, I’m really sorry.”
“He does the best he can.”
“I know he does.” She didn’t believe it. There was nothing that had stopped him from doing better, except his own bad temper and bad habits.
Her mother said she would tell Grace a story from back before they were married. It took her an effort to get enough breath into her words, and there were pauses and gaps Grace had to fill in for herself, but the story went like this:
I know how you feel about his drinking, and you’re not wrong to hate it. I’ve spent years hating it myself. I can’t say I didn’t have some warning. But everything’s different when you’re young. There’s nothing you can’t wish away or power through or ignore. Nothing you can’t imagine bending to your vision of how life ought to turn out, the rightness of it all.
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 18