“I can’t do it. Being in the hospital is misery enough for him. If you’d known him before this you wouldn’t even suggest it,” Raney said.
The doctor leaned forward across her desk and pressed her lips together for a moment before she spoke. “He may not need to be the brave one. At some point you will have to decide how much you can do. Sometimes people forget what they’re asking their children to go through.”
—
When Grandpa finally came home he had regained some use of his right arm and right leg, but combined with the persistent wound on his left leg, he was effectively bedridden unless Jenny, Raney, and Jake were all there to get him into his wheelchair. His immobility infuriated him. The worst affliction, though, was the loss of his speech, which lagged behind his recovery of the written word. Raney kept a thick legal pad and a large-grip pen tethered at his side and he would scrawl his needs and curses in large block letters. When he did not feel they were attracting the attention they deserved, he would whack the bed frame and any nearby attendant with the hard pad. It was worth the beating if it humored him, in Raney’s opinion, though a real fit would leave him wheezing and blue.
For fifty days Grandpa slid further and further from comfort and communication, but death backed away from him like a tease, locking him in the purgatory of his stubborn body. Raney sat in the rocking chair beside him, waiting for him to fall asleep, waiting for him to wake, to swallow, to breathe, to need her; trying to fathom the words locked inside him.
How could he not be afraid? Everyone, it seemed to her, was terrified by the black hole of whatever lay beyond consciousness. Everyone except him. He was looking forward to the adventure—or so he’d always said. Now she saw her grandfather as if he were standing at a train platform, listening to the thunder of the approaching cars, listening to the rising swell of the horn. There’s a prepaid window seat waiting, with an unmatched view of untold wonders, narrated by the master of the universe himself, and her grandfather is ready, more than ready, to put down his load and let this train carry it. But the moment he shifts his weight to step on board, he falters. Could the view from this window beat the view from his own backyard, where he knows the shade of every tree and the blooming season of every shrub and the moment the sun will break across his pond? So he picks up his bag and backs away, with the doors still open and waiting, waiting, and there is no other exit.
—
One night Raney didn’t hear him on the baby monitor. It was her habit to check on him once or twice, but she slept for seven hours straight, the longest stretch she’d gotten in weeks. She woke almost panicked in the morning, much as she’d done the first night Jake had slept through as a baby. But she found Grandpa asleep on his side breathing comfortably, his sheets clean and dry. The pad of paper had come loose from its tether and lay on the floor some feet from the bed. She picked it up and saw his large block letters filling one page. “Death is not the enemy. The enemy is a cowardly conscience.” It must have taken him an hour to write that many words, and all his remaining strength to rip the pad from the string and fling it away.
The last week of November the season changed from fall to winter, a north wind swept through, and the temperature dropped so fast the dew froze in a single pane of crystal stars on her windshield; the sky was so blue and clear it seemed too thin to hold air. Jenny reminded Raney that Grandpa was running low on pills, which meant a drive all the way to the Tacoma VA to fill them at the lowest cost. She got Jake off to school early and filled the car with gas and made a day of it. She drove across the Hood Canal Bridge with the sun still rising, catching bare glimpses of Mount Rainier until she hit Highway 5 where the volcano loomed in all her glacial majesty. She wished she had bundled Grandpa into a blanket and brought him along. “She’ll make St. Helen’s look like a sparkler when she blows. Good-bye, Seattle! What a party that will be!” he would say.
It took more than two hours to fill all his prescriptions. On the drive back from Tacoma she passed a Rite Aid outside Bremerton and pulled into the parking lot. She took the white caps off Grandpa’s nine orange plastic bottles and removed from each a single capsule or tablet. She held them in her palm and tried to read the tiny cryptic numbers and letters stamped on them, then closed them in her fist and went into the store. Near the back there were five aisles stacked higher than her head with cold cures and bowel cures and pain relievers, plus a thousand herbal fix-it-alls. She bought twenty nutritional supplements, some Tylenol and baby aspirin, and got back into her car, then back onto Highway 3. Just before the bridge she turned off the road to Kitsap Beach and parked. The entire Olympic range stood across the water, so vivid in the cold air she could make out the trees and boulders on the foothills near her grandfather’s former land, as dwarfed by the highest peaks as the farmhouse had once been dwarfed by the foothills.
She took the bag of Grandpa’s bottles and the bag of Rite Aid bottles out to a picnic table overlooking the rocky beach, lined all of them up, and took off the lids. There were plenty of good matches. When she was done she swept the leftover capsules and tablets into the Rite Aid bag and carried it across the open beach to the water’s edge. Handful by handful she flung them over the water and watched them float and drift and slowly sink to the bottom. In a few days they would be dissolved into sand, at rest where they could look at those mountains forever.
She took a leave from work and let Jenny go, not wanting anyone but herself to be putting the pills in Grandpa’s mouth. Jenny came to the house anyway most afternoons and Raney knew it was more for her than for Grandpa. The last day Raney dozed off in her chair and startled when Jenny placed a hand on her arm, terrified he’d gone while she slept. Instead he was looking straight at her for the first time in months, clear-eyed and present, telling her the words he couldn’t make his injured body say, affections shared without words most of their lives together. She took his hand. How much it had changed. Shed of the calluses so familiar to her touch, his skin seemed no more than a likeness of all he had been. Then he sank again into openmouthed slumber, the regularity of his breath faltering so that at moments Raney did not think another breath would follow. She wanted to call Jake, didn’t want him to miss this moment, but discovered she was afraid to let him see, uncertain what she should say. Was death always such a lonely process? She was terrified and knew she was ready and knew she would be no less terrified in a day or a year. Jenny said, “Tell him it’s okay. Tell him it’s okay to go.”
* * *
It snowed five inches three days before Christmas, a rare event in Quentin. And particularly lucky as the snowfall itself made a good Christmas present and Raney had next to nothing for Jake—a framed poster of the newly opened Tacoma Narrows Bridge and two boxes of Red Vines. He’d been begging for the Deluxe Erector Set, but it could be that or a decent Christmas dinner, not both. Like every other parent in the grand U. S. of A., Raney had represented Christmas as a time to celebrate the blessings of spiritual wealth and material poverty, but every kid knew it was about the toys. Even the president had christened shopping a patriotic duty.
Raney made hot chocolate with cinnamon and whipped cream, put two mugs on a tray, and pushed Jake’s bedroom door open against a drift of dirty T-shirts and blue jeans. He had barely left his room since school let out for Christmas. “Jake,” she said. He jerked, rolled onto his stomach, and pulled his blanket over his head, burrowing back to the coma-sleep of infancy and adolescence. She raked a different pile of clothes off the chair with her foot, releasing a pungent whiff of body odor. “Hey, Buddy. It snowed!” She put the mugs on the chair and sat beside him on the bed, surveying the room to spot the origin of something gone moldy and sour. “It’s after eleven, Jake. Snow! Half a foot or more.” She gave him a shake and he slammed the pillow over his head. Raney went back to the kitchen, opened the door, and scooped up a handful of snow, came back to the immobile blanketed lump that was Jake, and slipped a large wad of ice under the covers and down his shirt.
Jake yelp
ed, throwing his covers off like they were filled with fire instead of ice. “Jesus, Mom!”
“Watch your language. I brought you a hot chocolate.” He finally swung his legs over the side of the bed, and Raney was startled at how hairy they were—when did that happen? He would be twelve next month, an impossible trick of time, surely. In so many ways he had a mind much younger than his years. She pulled his curtains open, and the sight of snow scalloped along his windowsill seemed to brighten him. “Grandpa would have liked it,” Raney said. “Anything that made disaster feel closer at hand, huh?”
Jake was quiet, paying extraordinary attention to the job of blowing a tiny ship of whipped cream across the surface of his chocolate. When he looked up she couldn’t read him. He brought his hand toward her face and she felt a quick sting at her temple. “Gray hair.” He held up a long white strand.
“Hard earned. I’m surprised there’s only one.”
“It was the only one I could grab quick enough to get away with it,” he said.
“They make you smarter, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. But only if you let them accumulate.”
Raney found one of Cleet’s oversize fishing sweaters and his rubber boots and gave Jake three pairs of socks, hoping the boots would fit, surprised to discover that his feet were now as large as Cleet’s had been. All she could think, watching Jake tramp designs in the deep snow, was how every other boy in his school was out building snow forts and arsenals of snowball bombs, and none of them would invite Jake to be on their team. All right, then. She would be his team.
They rolled the white winter yard down to bare black earth in circles and stripes that wound about like a crazy racetrack, ending up with three great mounds of snow it took both of them to pile atop each other, the crown too high for either to reach. Raney brought a kitchen chair outside so that Jake could straddle her neck just long enough to stick on charcoal briquette eyes. They capped him with fans of fir and cedar that draped all the way to his shoulders, and so decided that he must be a she and found a bright-red leaf of Oregon grape for her mouth.
Jake saw David first. The surprise made him lose his balance and grab on to his mother’s forehead so they both ended up in the snow.
“Hi, Jake, how’ve you been?” David said with his eyes locked on Raney. Then he said her name, Raney, at half volume, maybe a greeting, maybe to convince himself she was really in front of him, as stunned as if she’d awakened from a nightmare and discovered it scarier in real life. Or maybe he was already offering a lame attempt at a hopeless apology.
Raney reacted without a moment’s planning. She closed her right fist around a pile of muddy snow, packed it hard, and shot it straight into David’s chest. He took one step back but made no other move to block the missile, as if he’d conscientiously steeled himself against the natural instinct to even cover his face. Noble son of a bitch! She scrabbled forward on her knees, reared back, hurled the contents of her left hand—a very large and knobby stub of carrot—and saw it bounce off the side of his head despite his last-second corkscrew dodge. She wished it had been a rock, furious that she didn’t see blood on his vile face. If she had any guts at all she would grab Jake’s hand, get into the car, smash David’s Tahoe on the way down the driveway, and leave him here to freeze.
And then the worst happened—a bile that boiled in her throat and made her stomach convulse—the tiniest explosion went off inside her brain and she knew, detested herself for knowing, that she was glad he was back. If he gave any reasonable explanation, she was actually going to forgive him, maybe just to escape the empty space he was already filling.
He pulled a package wrapped in bright-red paper out of his pocket and held it out on his open palm. “Brought the boy a Christmas present.”
Even without looking at Jake, Raney knew he was ready to grab the gift that second, before his mother could scold it away. She had made up a lie to cover David’s disappearance—not to save David’s skin but to spare Jake’s. Now she almost wished she’d recruited Jake into her sorry sense of rejection. She finally let herself look at Jake’s face—a mix of astonishment at his mother’s behavior and obvious longing to get his hands on that red wrapping paper—and she gave in to all of it. “Go on. Put it under the tree, Jake. Save it for Christmas Day.” She could do the dirty work of changing her mind and telling David off after Jake went to bed.
“You got your tree already?” David asked.
She nodded toward the forest at the boundary of their yard. “Still out there.” She let him hear how brittle she was, ready for him to leave the present and go back to whatever small town or small-town girl he’d bounced back here from. He looked utterly contrite standing there with his hands stuffed into his bright-yellow slicker, her muddy snowball dribbling down his stomach. Damn.
“I’ve missed you,” David said.
“Well, apparently not enough to use my telephone number or e-mail in four months.”
“You never check your e-mail.”
“I answer my phone.”
He didn’t respond, and they both pretended to be interested in Jake’s attempt to identify the gift through the wrapping paper. She was cold. She pulled off Jake’s mittens to give him some advantage and said, “Well, come on in. You can help us cut down a tree after lunch.”
Jake yanked his boots and jacket off, dumping both in the middle of the kitchen, and walked to the empty corner of the room where they always put their Christmas tree. He placed the red-wrapped gift on the bare floor and sat on the love seat, watching it like it might get away if he closed his eyes. Raney knew the package would look almost as lonely on Christmas morning. How could she explain to him that every day they got to stay in their own house was a gift? “Why don’t you watch some TV, Buddy? I’ll call you when lunch is ready.”
David stood dripping snowmelt onto the floor, looking as awkward and frozen inside the house as he had looked in the yard. Raney gestured to the table and stayed busy scrambling eggs and making toast so that she wouldn’t have to talk yet. She felt his eyes following her back and forth from the refrigerator to the sink to the stove, and when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she picked up the mixing bowl and turned to him, her fork whipping the eggs so hard and fast the metal sang. “So. You’re back.”
“I made a mistake, Raney. I was wrong and you have every right to hate me.” She could almost swear she saw tears and concentrated on twisting her heart into a cold knot. “I’ll leave if you want. But first I’m hoping you’ll let me explain, if for no other reason than so you could trust another man someday.”
“Oh, that’s good. What movie did you steal that line from?”
“Love Story. Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, 1970.”
Raney put the fork down. “You’re serious?”
“No. I made that up.” He crooked his mouth into his half smile—even more attractive when his eyes looked so sad. “So you’ll let me explain before you throw those eggs at me?”
She sat across the table with her hands locked in her lap. “Go on. Give it a try.”
The Friday before Labor Day, right before he and Raney and Jake were planning to go to the park, David’s ex-wife, Shannon, called him. He hadn’t heard from her since the divorce, so he knew it was something bad. She was sick, and wanted him to come home. Raney knew David’s ex had had breast cancer, that he’d stuck with her through a year of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. As soon as she was pronounced cured, she’d run off with his best friend. But this time David shared everything, talked so freely Raney felt the heat of his humiliated betrayal. The only reason he hadn’t waged war on them both, he said, was because he knew it was all a reaction to her disease. Once she’d beaten it she had to purge her life of everything that reminded her of cancer. “Got her chemo port out, got her breast implants, threw away the wig, and then threw me away too.”
He took a long pause, the smallest muscles around his mouth and eyes flickering. Then he seemed to collapse a bit and sig
hed. Shannon had called to tell him the cancer was back—in her rib cage, in her spine, in her lungs. It had erupted so aggressively her doctor started talking about hospice care before he talked about chemo. The boyfriend had walked out on her—no surprise. David’s hands were clenched so tight his knuckles blanched. Taut cords ran from his neck to his shoulders. Through the closed living room door the fast spiel of a cereal commercial whined and Raney moved to tell Jake to turn the volume down, but David put his hand out to stop her. “He doesn’t need to hear this. Let him be.”
Shannon was determined to fight it, David said. He had packed up her house and moved her to a small place near the hospital, staying with her at night while she threw up everything he fed her. He swabbed her bleeding gums with baking soda and mopped up her falling hair. Raney saw David steel himself to say more; instead he exhaled and sank into his seat, as if telling her all had depleted the last of his strength. “I didn’t love her anymore, Raney. I stopped loving her before our divorce was final five years ago. But it’s still hard to watch someone die.” His face went suddenly red and he bit his lower lip, then reached across the table toward her. “Oh, God. I shouldn’t have said that. Not after what you’ve been through.” His hand lay in front of her, curled palm up like a man begging coins. “I know I should have called you before I left. I was in such a state . . . I wouldn’t blame you for kicking me out. I’ll leave now if you want.” Raney looked at his defenseless hand open on the table and her core went momentarily weightless, a spin against gravity. It was not his hand she saw—it was the open palm of a man losing family and she could not do anything but take it in her own, just as she had needed someone to take hers when Cleet died. His story flooded right through the pores of her skin and drowned her bleeding heart, along with much of her common sense.
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