“I wish…,” he began.
“What?”
“I wish you could have seen me at my best.”
“I am,” I said. I thought about his gentleness, his hand stroking Rocker, how carefully he listened to the birdcalls, how patiently he taught me to do the same, how much he loved the ocean, how calmly he faced what lay ahead. “I am.”
“Liar,” he said. He brought my hand to his lips.
AFTER A while, he again dozed off. I went to the kitchen. I cleaned up the dishes and dumped the rest of the soup into Rocker's bowl. He came in and lapped it up. I pulled on a sweater and got his leash, for it had grown dark, and I couldn't risk letting him run free. Outside, the air smelled the way it did after spring rain. As if the earth had been cleansed. Renewed.
You know I do.
Back inside, I carried Lily's sheets upstairs and stripped Luke's mattress. It had the slightly musty smell of a bed long unused. I remade it with the soft linens; then I went down to him. He was awake but had not switched on the lamp, and I could not see him in the dark. “Do you mind if I turn on the light?”
“If you want.” His voice was neutral, as if our earlier intimacy had not been.
“What's your routine at night?” I asked, carefully matching his tone. “Do you need to use the bathroom? Or to change?”
He looked down at his sweatshirt and pants. “I can sleep in these,” he said, “but I need to use the john.”
I helped him up, guided him to the toilet.
“I can take it from here,” he said, and smiled. I was so grateful for that smile. When he was back in the bed, he asked for and I gave him another Dilaudid.
“I appreciate everything you've done today,” he said. “This must have screwed up your day.”
“No. Not at all.”
“Is someone coming in later for the night?”
I shook my head. “I'm staying,” I said. “I made up a bed upstairs. I can sleep there.” I wondered what he was feeling. Maybe he wasn't feeling anything.
“You've done so much already,” he said.
“It's not a problem. Really,” I said carefully. “Do you want the TV on?”
“No.”
“Here,” I said. “Let me rub your feet. It will help you go to sleep.” I was afraid he would refuse. The center of all human experience is yearning.
“You don't have to,” he said.
“I know.” I sat at the edge of his bed and folded the blanket back. His feet were long and thin, like his hands. Webbed bones outlined against sallow skin the color of buttonwood. Back in Richmond, my closest childhood friend had been Catholic. A crucifix hung over her bed, and when I stayed there overnight, I would fall asleep looking up at the body of Christ, the thorn crown, bowed head, impaled hands and feet. Feet like Luke's.
“Thanks,” he said when I was finished. “That felt good.” His voice was heavy from the pain medication.
I shifted on the bed, sat closer to him. The house felt solid and safe around us. I watched the sinking and rising and sinking of his chest, and a river of grief took me with surprising force. I bent and kissed him on the lips. It seemed as if that was all I ever wanted. I kissed him again, felt his lips open beneath mine. When I pulled away, he made a soft sound, like a bird calling to its mate.
His hands, when he reached for me, were unsteady. “I don't want…,”
“What?”
“I don't want your pity.”
Pity? How could he think that? “Trust me,” I said. I brushed his forehead with my lips, then his mouth. “This isn't pity.”
His face twisted, an expression close to disgust. “I know what I look like now.”
“You're beautiful,” I said. I had never before said that to a man, but it was true. I kissed him again, felt him respond, surrender, moan that birdlike sound. I kissed his chest, inhaled the yeasty, medicinal scent of him. I had once read somewhere that everyone had a deeply individual smell, a personal bouquet comprised of diet, hormones, hygiene, and health. I tried to imagine what Luke's was before he became ill. I thought of the herring finding their way home, guided solely by the smell of the water. I understood. I felt as if, after a long battle upstream, I had come home. My body was weighted with desire.
I slid my hand over his shoulders, his chest, the hollow of his stomach.
“Oh God,”he moaned, and pulled me closer.
When I was six and afraid of thunder, I would climb into bed with Ashley. There I felt safe and protected from the storm. I felt that way that night with Luke.
He reached up and stroked my face, kissed me again. Everything felt new. First time new. That first time new. The moment felt near holy. And hopeful, that, too. The impulse toward life is so strong, I remember thinking. Even close to death, we reach for life.
I MUST have dozed off, for I woke to hear him retching, deep and racking convulsions. Vomit stained the sheets, his clothes; the reek of it filled the air.
“Christ,”he said, managing speech between spasms. “I'm sorry.”
“Shhhh,” I said. “It's all right.” I got the wastebasket and brought it to his side, held his head while he puked, tending him naturally and easily, as if this were something I had always known how to do.
When he was done, I stripped away the soiled linen and his shirt, then I washed him and found him a clean shirt from a pile on the dresser. While I tended to him, he tried again to apologize, but I shushed him.
I had just finished putting fresh sheets on the bed when he began to shake, trembling so violently, his teeth rattled. “Hold on,” I said. Upstairs, I ripped the blanket and quilt off Nona's bed. I piled them over him, then crept in and lay beside him and let the heat of my body flow into his. Gradually he quieted. “I'm so sorry, Jess,” he said once, but I stopped him, pressing my fingers against his lips. And then he slept.
I waited until he was deep in sleep, and then, too restless to sit still, I rose and switched off the lamp, wandered into the kitchen, made a pot of tea. I checked on him again before finally settling on the couch. I didn't want to go upstairs to the bed I'd prepared, afraid I wouldn't hear him if he called. I didn't believe for a minute that I would sleep, but I woke later from a dream. I was in a hotel somewhere out west. Las Vegas. Somewhere like that. I had become separated from my friends and could not remember my room number. As I got into the elevator, I was joined by five men, all strangers. I stabbed the button for the second floor—still unsure of what room, what floor—but the car shot up, zooming skyward so fast, we were all thrown off balance. Up and up we went in an elevator out of control. I woke in the panic dreams could produce, unsure of where I was. And then I heard Luke call my name.
“What do you need?” I asked, at his side in minutes. “Another pill?” Light leaked in from the night-light in the hall. He stared at me in its glow.
“What is it?” I said.
“I'm not going to go bit by bit,” he said.
“What?” I was still in dream confusion.
“I'm not going to sit around and die by degrees.” His voice was so steady, he could have been asking me to take Rocker for a walk. “I'm not letting it kill me off piecemeal.”
A chill ran through me, a seizure of fear. “Don't—”
“I don't want to hang on, drag out the inevitable.”
I tried to hush him, but he wouldn't stop.
“I'm not afraid of dying, you know. I just don't want to be alone.”
I REMEMBERED suddenly what Faye said about the time she had to put her dog down. No one should die alone.
“I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“There's a bag in the bottom drawer of that desk. Would you get it?”
I crossed to the desk, opened a drawer.
“Not that one,” he said. “The bottom one.”
I closed the drawer, opened another. “What am I looking for?”
“A plastic bag.”
I rooted around. There were several manila folders, a small photo album, a stack of c
anceled checks. “I'm not finding it.”
“Turn on the light. It's in there.”
I switched the lamp on, tried again.
“You're sure it's here?”
“Positive. Reach in back.”
“Got it.” I held up the bag. It contained two vials. “What is it?”
“Seconal,”he said. “And an antinausea medicine.”
“Why?” I said, already knowing, refusing the knowledge.
“For when it's time.”
“Where did you get this?”
“That doesn't matter.”
I shoved the bag back in the drawer.
“I know what to do,”he said. “I'm just afraid of waiting until it's too late. Until I can't manage it. I need to know there's someone who'll be there. To help me if I need it. I could never ask Nona,” he said. “And Rich—Rich could wrestle a bear, but he isn't capable of this. I tried to talk to Paige once, but she walked out of the room. Stayed away for a week.”
“Shush,” I said. I couldn't listen to this. I closed the drawer.
“Will you—”
“Shhhhh,” I said. “Don't talk now. In the morning. We'll talk in the morning.” Things are always worse in the night, I thought. Everyone experienced the dark hours of doubts and fears and anxieties— terrors that were eased by the light of dawn. I would negotiate for each minute, each day. I remembered what Faye had said about patients who willed themselves to live. For one more anniversary. A birthday. A holiday. I would give Luke a reason to stay. Through the power of pure desire, I would make him will himself to live. Truly believing this possible, I sat with him until he fell into a fitful sleep.
Of course, later I would see that, in that moment, I was no different than Paige, locked in militant denial fueled by desire, blindly refusing to see the truth because it was too terrible to bear. Not listening to Luke's need because my own was too great. And because I believed I could never bear to do the one thing he had asked. To sit with him while he died.
thirteen
I WOKE TO the sound of birdsong, insistent and exuberant, and for an instant, my heart rose in response, and then I recalled the elevator dream, a vision that clung like a wine hangover the way dreams could, and I recalled the midnight conversation with Luke, which—in the confused half sleep of that waking moment— seemed as unreal as the dream. Moving slowly, I got up from the couch as if drugged. Voices came from his room.
“Good morning,” Ginny said when I went in. I watched while she checked Luke's pulse and took his temperature. “I tried not to wake you when I came in,” she said. “You were out to this world.” Luke stared at me, his gaze unflinching; I knew then with swift and chilling certainty that our conversation in the night had not been part of any nightmare.
“I'll let you finish up here while I put on some coffee and get breakfast started,” I said, and escaped to the kitchen. Rocker followed, and I let him out, watched from the door as he tore across the yard and lifted his leg to pee against a tree stump. Ginny came into the kitchen as I was calling the Lab back into the house. Although it was early in the day, she already looked exhausted. She sat down, flipped open her patient's record book, and began jotting notes.
“Luke told me about Nona,” she said. “He said you stayed all day, and then through the night.”
“Yes,” I said, my throat dry.
“You should have called, you know. They would have arranged for a night nurse.”
“It wasn't any problem. I was glad to do it.” I was surprised the truth wasn't plain on my face: I didn't want anyone else there.
“How was he in the night? Any problems?”
“He woke up once and was sick, but after that, he slept through.”
Ginny asked a few questions about the vomiting, made a notation.
I wanted to ask her the things I couldn't ask anyone else. I needed to know if there was hope for a miracle, or did cures and complete remissions happen only in fiction? Did we hold on to desire, even to the end? Was that the last to go? Ginny was a nurse. She would know those things. “How does he seem to you?” I asked.
“About as expected.”
Which means exactly what?
“He tells me Nona is coming home today.”
“That's what they told us yesterday. They were supposed to be keeping her just for the one night. For observation.”
“These past months have been a terrific strain on her, as you can imagine. I'll call Faye. See if we can arrange for some more help here.”
“I can stay,” I said. “It isn't a problem.”
“You've already done too much,” Ginny said. She finished up writing in her notebook and rose.
“Can I get you some coffee before you go?”
“No. I'm behind schedule. Story of my life.”
After she left, I made Luke tea and hot cereal and fixed coffee for myself. I toasted a slice of the soft white bread, smeared it with jam, and brought it into his room with my coffee. I might as well have been eating Styrofoam the way the toast caught in my throat. He watched me, and although neither of us mentioned the midnight conversation, it hung in the air between us like the acrid aftersmell of an extinguished candle. You want too much of me. Not quite true. I would have given him anything, anything but the one terrible thing he had asked.
I bustled about the room, folding the blanket and quilt I'd brought down from Nona's room, straightening the pile of newspapers, clearing away a half dozen empty glasses, fussing about like a deranged maid. Yesterday's cozy domesticity—Luke's haircut, the chicken soup, the house secure against the storm—all that seemed long ago.
As if my activity had attracted it, the house suddenly came alive with more commotion than it had held in weeks. The neighbor, who'd watched from her window the previous morning as the ambulance came for Nona, appeared, bearing a tuna casserole and a pineapple upside-down cake. Luke's door was open, and she marched right in before I could head her off. As I carried the food into the kitchen, I was surprised to hear Luke talking to the woman, as if overnight he had decided to end his self-imposed isolation. Then Paige called, stunned to learn Nona was in the hospital. “Is she going to be all right?” she asked, her voice suddenly young and stripped of attitude.
“She'll be home today,” I said. “It was an anxiety attack.” Paige asked if Nona needed a ride home from Hyannis and promised to come right over. Then Betty, another hospice worker, arrived and pretty much took charge. When I left, she was settling in to read to Luke.
“Tell Nona I'll see her tomorrow,” I told him before I left. I wished we were alone. I would have kissed him good-bye.
He nodded, reached for and squeezed my hand. “See you soon,” he said. A long finger of sunlight fell through the window and lit his face. His words were heavy with an intention I could not bear.
I thought I had long ago learned all there was to know about desire, but the longing I felt for this man—this dying man, I made myself remember—shook me. It transformed all past relationships into childlike diversions. Things I once had thought important were now meaningless, as insignificant as a rice grain. I tried to convince myself that my feelings for Luke had been born out of my loneliness, coupled with the intimacy of the times we shared when my ordinary defenses collapsed in the face of his utter vulnerability.
The cliché of a nurse and patient. That was an argument I might have made to any friend who came to me in this situation, but it was not true. What I felt for Luke was inexplicable and extraordinary and terrible. Never had I felt so possessed. Or so lost. Much later, when I looked back on that spring, I did not—could not— think of my feelings for him as some twisted obsession, although many people would come to voice exactly that opinion. “See you tomorrow,” I agreed.
fourteen
ALL THAT WINTER and spring, even on the wildest of days with winds near gale force or fog so impenetrable I was the one foolish enough to brave it—those days when I sought escape from boredom, from fear of an unsettled future, from a formless, fre
e-floating anxiety—I would head for the beach at the end of our street, a narrow strip of sand with stone jetties that jutted out into the sound every thirty feet, and I would walk. That stretch of beach held the power to bring me some measure of calm, some semblance of peace. After I left Luke, I drove straight there.
Although it was still cool for June, I kicked off my shoes, peeled away my socks, and rolled up the cuffs of my jeans, then walked across the sand to the jetty and, progressing carefully from one to the next, made my way to the large gray boulder at the very end and folded myself down, perching like a herring gull. The tide was low, and the water lapped in the crevices between rocks where barnacles and periwinkles clung. In the distance, Monomoy Island lay flat on the horizon like a mirage. There was a light onshore breeze, and I inhaled its salt, closed my eyes against tears. This was where Faye found me.
I hadn't heard her approach, and the first I knew of her presence was her hand on my shoulder.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I'm fine,” I said, although a blind man could see the blatant untruth of this.
Faye lowered herself to the rock. “Lily called last night.”
“Mama called you?”
“Just after midnight. When she couldn't reach you.” Just after midnight. When Luke was telling me he had no intention of dying piece by piece. “She's worried about you.”
I searched Faye's face, wondering how much she knew, how much she had guessed. It occurred to me that Ashley might have called our mama and repeated the details of our last conversation. That would explain Lily's call to Faye; certainly she hadn't been worried simply because I was out after midnight. There were times in my late teens when I hadn't come home until morning, and Lily had long ago given up trying to control my behavior or my morals. Or maybe she was afraid I was sick. Why else would she call Faye?
“I stayed overnight at Luke's,” I said. “Nona was taken to the hospital. They thought it was a heart attack, but it turned out to be anxiety.”
“I know. Jim caught me up on everything.” Faye waited for me to say something, but I stared out at Monomoy. The island shimmered in the sun, and although it had been deserted for decades— the last of the beach shacks long ago had surrendered to time or fire or vandalism—some deception of the eye made buildinglike silhouettes seem to rise above its shores.
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