They put her in a bed in the ICU and drew the curtains to make a private space. The neurosurgeon came first and wanted to operate immediately; the blood-thinning medication Phoebe had been taking had led to a slow leakage of blood into her brain cavity, and the resultant pressure was cutting off the circulation. The cardiologist showed up next and said that there was no way Phoebe’s blood pressure could be sustained at a high enough level for her to survive surgery, that her arteries would give way; the cerebrovascular guy, a moment later, agreed.
“How long will she survive, even if she has the surgery?” Rebecca asked the neurosurgeon.
He shrugged. “A week, maybe two, assuming we succeed in relieving the pressure. A month at most. But I’m afraid the brain damage is already enough to—”
“She wouldn’t survive the surgery,” the cardiologist said quietly. Rebecca glanced at the cerebrovascular doctor, who looked pained but nodded.
“How long without the surgery?” she said.
“I’m amazed she’s alive now, to tell you the truth.”
“Well, what can we do?”
“We can arrange for hospice care and make her as comfortable as possible,” the cardiologist said. She had to give him credit; the man looked truly miserable. Both the other doctors nodded. They appeared relieved that the cardiologist was doing the talking.
Rebecca looked at Mike, who met her eyes quietly. Her call, completely. She had never loved him more. She said, “I hate to say it, but it sounds to me like we should just take her home.”
“Yeah,” he said.
They were all silent a moment.
“What is my prognosis?” Phoebe demanded suddenly from the bed.
They all looked at her in astonishment. Phoebe’s eyes were open, all lights on. The doctors exchanged not-supposed-to-happen glances among themselves.
That’s my mother, Rebecca thought. That’s the one I know.
“Not good, Mom,” she said. “There’s not much they can do for you here right now. I mean, there’s some kind of risky brain operation—”
“What would be the point, really?” Phoebe said, as if they were talking about whether to find a use for a loaf of week-old bread.
“That’s sort of what we thought,” Rebecca said. She hesitated, then said, “We’re thinking about just taking you home.”
Her mother looked at her sharply. “Home to die?”
Rebecca drew her breath in, looking for a way to soften it. But Mike said, “Yes.”
“Well then,” Phoebe said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Chapter Twelve
Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit.
LUKE 23:46
Back at the house, they set Phoebe up in the master bedroom. Propped on three pillows, she had a view of the backyard and, across the housetops of the outer Sunset, the ocean. It seemed crucial to Rebecca that her mother have a view, though after her burst of lucidity at the hospital, Phoebe had settled into unresponsiveness again, her face a stolid mask without particular focus, her eyes closed much of the time and not particularly engaged when they were open. They’d gotten her dressed in her best flannel nightgown, the exquisite Victorian effect of which was somewhat diminished by the presence of the bedpan.
Mike called Anita, one of the nurses he worked with at the mission, and she arrived within half an hour. She was a sturdy woman in her midthirties, with henna red hair, sharp blue eyes, and an air of placid, no-nonsense efficiency. Rebecca was impressed by how Anita and Mike worked together, quietly in sync, and by their easy, unobtrusive black humor. It was a glimpse of a side of Mike she hadn’t seen before. The two of them set up the IV rack beside the bed—a simple saline solution and a bag of morphine with a click mechanism to limit the dosage—in a brisk, wordless dance, and then Anita stood beside Mike while he slipped the IV needle into Phoebe’s arm and connected the tubes. Rebecca hadn’t realized how much of the technical part of things Mike had picked up along the way; it was clear that Anita had been training him.
Mike had also called Tom Dougherty, who showed up while they were still getting all the medical paraphernalia in place. Rebecca, who hadn’t met the priest yet, had been prepared for him to some degree by Mike’s wry stories, but Dougherty’s fractious physical presence was still a bit of a shock. The man who had come to give the last rites to her mother looked like the guy most likely to get into a fight in an Irish bar.
“I’m sorry we have to meet this way,” he said to Rebecca, after Mike had introduced them.
“We’re just very grateful to you for coming so quickly, Father. It means a lot to my mother.”
Dougherty shrugged as if it pained him. He actually looked furious, unsettlingly so. Mike had warned her of this as well: death pissed Dougherty off.
“Call me Tom,” he said.
While Mike, Anita, and Dougherty moved quietly around the bedroom setting things up, Rebecca went to find Mary Martha. She and Mike had already talked at the hospital about what to do with her when they got home with Phoebe. Rebecca had the sense that Mike felt Mary Martha could stay if she wanted, though he hadn’t pushed it enough for her to be sure. But he hadn’t disagreed when Rebecca had decided to call Rory to come get their daughter and keep her for the duration, and Rebecca had been grateful for that. It seemed to her that it was one thing for your grandmother to die but another thing entirely to be there when it happened and have that last image frozen in your brain for the rest of your life.
She found her daughter in the studio, in the big armchair that Phoebe had been using. Mary Martha had her grandmother’s needlepoint-in-progress in her hands; she was clearly trying to figure how to work on it. Rebecca’s heart hurt at that.
The armchair was big enough for two, and she slipped into it beside Mary Martha and put her arm around her.
“Will you teach me how to do this, if Gran-Gran can’t?” Mary Martha said.
“Of course, sweetie.”
“I want to finish it for her, as a surprise.”
Rebecca blinked fast for a moment; she really didn’t want to cry just yet. She said, “You know your grandmother is very sick now.”
Mary Martha nodded somberly. “Her brain is hurt.”
“Yes.”
“And she’s going to heaven soon.”
“Did Mike tell you that?”
“Daddy did.”
Rebecca digested that for a moment. Rory, as far as she knew, styled himself spiritually as some kind of Zen pagan; she suspected that he believed Phoebe’s elements would merge with the life force or something or that death was actually an illusion if you smoked enough dope. But she could appreciate him keeping it simple, mythologically, for his daughter at crunch time. Nobody really wanted someone they loved to disappear into the damn life force. You wanted someplace you could meet up later.
She said, “Well, that’s right, she’s going to heaven very soon. And now it’s time for us to say good-bye to her and tell her how much we love her.”
Mary Martha nodded and looked at the needlepoint in her hands.
“Will her brain still be hurt, in heaven?” she asked.
Rebecca’s eyes filled with tears afresh, and she blinked through them again. Still not time to cry. She said, “Do you remember that time at the beach, when you went into the water with Gran-Gran and the waves were too big and she lifted you up over them? And you two were laughing so much and you said she was the coolest grandmother in the world?”
Mary Martha smiled. “Yes.”
“That is how she will be in heaven,” Rebecca said.
Dougherty made short work of the last rites; with Mike quietly assisting, the ceremony had much the same flavor as the setting up of the IV lines, and it went almost as quickly. Standing with her hands on Mary Martha’s shoulders, while the priest blessed each of Phoebe’s extremities in turn, Rebecca looked at her mother’s uncomprehending face and remembered the first time they had gone through this, on an afternoon the previous autumn, after Phoebe’s first stroke.
Her mother had been comatose then, and it seemed like a pretty sure thing that she wasn’t going to make it. Rebecca knew Phoebe would want a priest, but the thought of calling an official stranger with a holy agenda stuck in her throat. She had been mad at the Catholic Church for decades by then for all the standard reasons, and she saw nothing in her mother’s dying that inclined her to lighten up on either God or His damn institution.
Instead, she had called Mike, who was working at McDonald’s then. He had come straight from work, spattered with grease and reeking of hamburger, still wearing his bright blue uniform like a clown suit and a bright yellow name tag with a picture of a grinning Ronald McDonald that said, in red, “Hi! My Name Is MIKE! You Deserve A Break Today!” They had been sleeping together less than two weeks at that point.
Mike had been reluctant at first to perform what amounted to a guerrilla sacrament and argued briefly for the letter of the canon law, but in the end he knew perfectly well that Rebecca was right, that Phoebe would have wanted it according to the spirit and not sweated the details. The jury-rigged ritual had been perfect, simple and true, at once impersonal and unnervingly intimate. Dispensing holy water from a Dixie cup and olive oil for the unction straight from the Bertolli’s bottle, Mike had seemed like a timeless stranger, had disappeared somehow as Mike, like an opening door, and through the gap where he had been Rebecca had felt the warm surge of blessing, despite her rage, and the first touch of an unimaginable peace.
Dougherty was a different kind of priest, Rebecca thought now, watching him trace the final sign of the cross on Phoebe’s forehead. She could feel the hard edge of his sublimated fury, like a razor in a sheath. If Mike was a flute, clear, serene, and intricate, backed by violins, Dougherty was brass and bass and a pounding drum. But the music of the sacrament was the same, and Rebecca felt again, in spite of herself and her complexities, the reality of the blessing, and of her mother’s soul, poised before the mystery of a welcoming grace.
“Make speed to aid her, ye saints of God; come forth to meet her, ye angels of the Lord; receiving her soul, and presenting her before the face of the Most High….”
Mary Martha was crying now, but all the saints of God and angels of the Lord in the world weren’t going to change that. There was nothing to do there but just keep loving. Rebecca took her daughter in her arms and held her, her own lips still moving with the prayer.
“Rest eternal grant unto her, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon her. Amen.”
Rory and Chelsea showed up a few minutes later. It was starting to feel a little like one of the parties Phoebe had often thrown during the years of her widowhood at her house near Stinson Beach, eclectic affairs populated by artists, Buddhists, massage therapists, and freelance spiritual nutcases. Her mother had always drawn a heterodox crowd. Rory’s eyes were already rimmed with red. He was holding Stu-J, jouncing him gently. Chelsea was carrying a still-warm casserole and some kind of fat scented candle. Rebecca recognized the casserole at once: it was macaroni and tuna fish, another of Phoebe’s foolproof recipes for rookie chefs. Somehow, through everything else, her mother had found time to teach Rory’s second wife to cook too.
“This is the candle we burned when my grandmother died,” Chelsea said shyly. “It’s lavender, hydrangea, and white lilac.”
“It smells great,” Rebecca said. “God knows, Phoebe loves her flowers.”
“It’s soy.”
“What?”
“The wax,” Chelsea said. “It’s soy bean pod wax. It burns cleaner.”
“Wow. I had no idea.”
“It has a lead-free wick,” Chelsea said.
Rebecca, to her own surprise, began to sob, for the first time. She really hadn’t seen the tears coming. Chelsea immediately put her free arm around her and started crying too. Rory stood awkwardly to one side, still holding Stu-J and patting the two women with his free hand. With tears streaming down Rory’s face too, for a while the baby was the only one not crying.
When the wave of tears had passed, Chelsea went to put the casserole away. Rebecca noted that she went straight to the living room to do it. It seemed an odd but accurate measure of the degree of unanticipated intimacy she had grown into with Rory’s second wife that Chelsea took it as a matter of course that the refrigerator was in the living room.
Rebecca took Stu-J from Rory, put her nose on his forehead, and breathed him in. He smelled like lavender; maybe Chelsea had test-burned the candle or something.
“Who’s that holding you, Stoojie?” Rory said. “Who’s that nuzzling your head?”
Stu-J smiled his dazzling smile. “Wuh-behg.”
“Oh, my God, he said it,” Rebecca exclaimed.
“Can you doubt this child’s genius?” Rory said, and, to Stu-J, “That’s right, buddy. That’s your Aunt Wuhbehg.”
“Wuhbehg’s going to eat your ear,” Rebecca told Stu-J. “Grrr-ruf! Yum-yum!”
Stu-J giggled. What a giggle that kid had.
“How’s Phoebe doing?” Rory said.
“She’s pretty out of it,” Rebecca said, feeling the tears close again, concentrating on the baby’s face to keep them at bay for the moment. “The doctors said they’d be surprised if she makes it through the night. But you know Phoebe. I keep expecting her to wake up and insist on taking her afternoon walk.”
“How’s Mary Martha handling it?”
“She started crying during the last rites, and kept going for a while. But I think she’s all right, all things considered. She’s in the studio now, sitting in the Phoebe chair. She wants to finish her needlepoint for her.”
“That’s our girl,” Rory said.
Rebecca hesitated, then said, “She said you told her Phoebe was going to heaven.”
Rory looked embarrassed. “Well, yeah. Was that okay?”
“Of course,” Rebecca said. “I mean, that’s my story too, and I’m sticking to it. I was just surprised.”
“Well, Mike and I had talked about it, you know—”
“You did?” Rebecca said, trying to picture it.
“Sure. We sort of agreed that it would probably be best to not get her all confused with conflicting mythologies. I mean, jeez, the kid’s just turned eight, her grandmother’s dying. She just needs something to hang onto. There will be plenty of time in the long run to give her more perspective on the cultural contingency of the, uh, hermeneutic constructs.”
Rebecca laughed. “Mike didn’t really say that, did he? About the hermeneutic constructs?”
Rory smiled. “Well, no, that’s me, of course. And Derrida. You know Mike. I think what he actually said was that there was plenty of time to sort out the pony from the horseshit.”
“Probably best to just stick with heaven for the time being,” Rebecca said.
“That’s what I’m thinking too.”
They were silent a moment. It was strange for Rebecca to realize how sure she was that Rory would handle the responsibility of taking Mary Martha, how much she trusted him and Chelsea at this point with their daughter. She had actually come to count on him.
She said, “I really do appreciate you guys taking her.”
“Oh, God, of course.”
“No, it means a lot to me that she’s going to be with you guys. I feel bad enough sending her away. I’m afraid maybe she’ll be…traumatized—you know, missing out. She’ll be on some therapist’s couch in twenty years saying that her mother kept her away from her dying grandmother and it’s warped her whole outlook on life.”
“My grandmother died with a look on her face that I wish I’d never seen,” Rory said. “Let’s face it, if Mary Martha is not in therapy for one thing, she’ll be in it for another.” He gave her a grin. “She’ll have been working on father issues for five years, anyway, by the time she even touches on this grandmother stuff.”
Rebecca laughed, weirdly heartened by the truth of that. “I think Mike thinks she could handle it.”
“Mike spent the last twenty years wearing one color and
thinking about God,” Rory said. “He’s got an unusual perspective. Mary Martha is eight years old. Let her remember her grandmother alive.”
Chelsea returned from the living room just then and smiled when she saw Rebecca holding Stu-J.
“Who’s that holding you, Buster Blue Eyes?” she said. “Who’s your favorite auntie?”
“Wuhbehg,” Stu-J said, quite firmly this time. He seemed very pleased to have found something that would make all the grown-ups laugh.
She could smell lavender, but maybe that was the morphine, and she was smelling something in the garden in New Jersey in 1958 or from her mother’s garden when Mr. Hoover was president. There was a part of her brain that could still place everything in space and time, more or less, and know when it was misplaced. That understood there were people she loved coming and going, that there were IV lines, saline and sedatives, and everyone fretting over ponderous medical procedures that affected nothing. Phoebe thought she might still be at the hospital, or perhaps they had brought her back to Rebecca’s house; she’d lost it to that extent, but that didn’t matter anymore. And yet that earnest little part of her brain went on and on, trying heroically to keep it all straight. Like the navigation officer on the Titanic, still on duty in the tiny map cubicle with the charts and figures, still drawing the arcs on the map and making calculations based on the latest information. It didn’t matter a bit, but she knew, give or take a few nautical miles, where she was going down.
The sea was everywhere now, was the thing, and always had been. Once you saw that, it was easy. This bed was the sea, and this smell of flowers; and the love of the ones she loved, and the mystery of the next moment; and soon enough the sea would enclose her. She’d thought for what now seemed like such a ridiculously long time that the sea was something you had to get to, but it turned out that was just the last hurrah of the navigation officer and the captain’s ego. In the end, the sea came to you. Most of what you’d been doing up to that point, indeed, was keeping it away.
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