Reuben stayed at the bottom of the mattress, his knee doing its bouncy thing, steadying himself. It steadied her.
“Defibrillator,” John corrected her, and explained again that Anna had an implanted combination defib and pacemaker. The pacemaker, he explained, should stay on. It would keep her comfortable. But the defibrillator could be deactivated. Yes, it might shock the heart as it slowed. John wanted her to know that not all doctors agreed on the necessity of turning off a defib. Or if it even actually slowed things down.
“I want it off.” Again she said that she was afraid not of the end but of getting to the end.
“I’m not sure I can today.” He didn’t have the correct communicating device for an ICD. He held up a ceramic device that housed a magnet. “This might work,” he explained. “Or I’ll get the right one from a cardiac friend.”
Floorboards creaked out in the living room. Hadn’t Reuben asked everyone else to leave the house? Take a walk. Yesterday when he opened the bedroom door, two local women squinted at him, guarding Anna’s old marital complaints. “She wants you in there?” But there was no one out there today.
Still, when Reuben sat back on the bed, he said, “Man, they went to Taser me,” just to hear Anna laugh.
“Let’s try.” She shoved herself up in the bed. Took measure of what she knew.
John held a ceramic device to her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Pushed his hand away. Her mouth grabbing for air. Panic then. She waved her hands. “No, no. I can’t.”
When she quieted, she said, “I think I just got scared.”
“The whole point of hospice is to keep you comfortable. I’m not sure this needs to be done at all.”
“I should try again.”
“No rush, Anna. It’s not a contest.” He knew that Connie would be glad to hear it hadn’t worked. His wife kept reminding him that Anna was impatient. “She doesn’t want time,” Connie said to him this morning. “But I need time.”
“You’re wrong about the rush,” Anna insisted now.
“Turning it off isn’t going to really speed this up.”
“I have children. Their lives need to move forward. It’s not right, this dragging on and on.” She asked for more. More drip. Morphine under the tongue. More of whatever made it all faster.
“There’ll be more of everything as you need it. I’ll get the defib part turned off in a few days if that’s what you want. But I want to keep your arrhythmia smoothed by leaving the pacemaker on. It can get uncomfortable. And that’s not what we want, Anna.”
He wouldn’t tell Connie that he could have made it work. Could have turned it off today. Taping the magnet over the implanted device would have done the trick, at least temporarily. It was used in emergency situations. But he couldn’t bear the look he’d have seen on Connie’s face when he went home. He’d do it, eventually, like he promised Anna. He was a doctor. But he was also Connie’s husband.
Anna held John’s hand, which still cupped the magnet. “You know what I want, John. It’s not really about comfort. I need your help.”
Done
And she was done with fear.
a) All that nattering, constant interior conversation she couldn’t banish—gone.
b) All the effort not to let on to others that fear was always there, a gauze between her and the vivid rest of her life.
c) That the fear was way more present than the rest of her life.
d) Done with the terrible shame that her body had betrayed her, had harbored rogue cells, allowed killers to hide out in her heart.
e) Might right at this moment be beginning a new round of unfaithfulness.
Oregon
“I’m going to need more help,” Anna said as soon as she’d sent Reuben out for a glass of water. “You need to help me.” She fixed on John, widening her green eyes. Tilt of her shoulder. Using all her tricks. Flirting her way right to the end. Had to give her that.
“I can’t do it, Anna.” He could pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. But he did.
“John, you know you can’t resist me,” Anna vamped. Always been a looker. She’d used it well, openly and without consequence. Tragic now, this twist of gaunt and swollen, her blinking eyes popped more bulgy than she’d ever care to know.
“Not allowed. Not in Massachusetts.”
“Do you feel that’s right, John?”
“It doesn’t matter what I feel. It’s the law, Anna.”
“Can we pretend this is Oregon?”
“Sure.” John played right back. Had to give it to her, she was quick, always an original. But he’d been through enough of these conversations to believe she wasn’t as certain as she sounded.
“We won’t tell anybody.” Anna grinned, satisfied. “Not Reuben, not Connie.”
“You’ll have to ask me again in fifteen days.”
“No.” She swiveled, her face reset from coy to resolute. “I’m ready now. Or after the weekend. When the kids leave.”
“But we’re playing Oregon, right?” John pulled his case up onto his lap. It was an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. Most of his colleagues had long ago switched out to more casual instrument-rigged backpacks. But John found it comforting, calming his hands along the worn leather skin.
“In Oregon there’s a first oral request, then a fifteen-day hold till the patient can make a second oral request. Then comes the written request.”
Anna flipped John the bird. Waggled her finger for emphasis.
“What did I miss?” Reuben backed through the door. “What’s going on?” He stood by the bed balancing three glasses of water in his hands, looking between Anna and John to figure out what weird vibe was ricocheting through the room.
“Just your lovely Anna trying to seduce me and break my sacred vows yet again,” John said, blowing her a kiss.
Reuben handed John a glass and clinked an imaginary toast, “Does this mean it’s a full-on swap and I can move on my twenty-year infatuation with Connie?” Reuben said, winking at Anna.
The Secret
“Stay,” Anna said after John took up his leather bag and left the bedroom.
Reuben flopped into the armchair across from her.
“I just want to be quiet. For a bit. I love my friends, but they’re—”
“Exhausting, annoying, morose,” Reuben interrupted. “Take your pick.”
They could finish each other’s sentences. Since they were nineteen. They loved that. The private language of the marriage. Even if often they used it against each other.
“What happened with John?”
“Forget it. That was useless.”
Then Anna smiled. That lopsided smile. He knew that look. Her secret smile. Sly and smug. He knew all her expressions.
“What?”
“Someone told me something.” She wiggled her lips. “And it’s pretty much the greatest thing. Ever.”
“What? What do you know?” When she did that lip wiggle, it meant she was on the edge of telling, that she was dying to tell him.
“That it’s wonderful. It’s a beautiful surprise.”
“At least tell me who it has to do with.”
“For me to know and you to find out.”
“You’re a major asshole.” He could tease any secret out of her. “You’ll die an asshole.”
“Yes I will. You’ll know that terrible and brutal truth. But everyone else will claim that I was perfect.”
1978, All You Girls
“This better not be what’s happening,” Anna says without looking up from the clipboard. Helen watches her flip a page; she’s writing furiously, as if she has so much she needs to fit in the small spaces. The waiting room couldn’t be bleaker. Orange plastic bucket chairs, mustard walls, green carpet—each color choice, Helen decides, is uniquely bad, the mix beyond terrible. On the walls are metal-fr
amed prints of paintings, the colors soft, the light diffuse. Impressionism. A Degas dancer. A Mary Cassatt. All meant, no doubt, to create a calming effect. Psych 101 meets art history 101. Notably, she thinks, not one of Cassatt’s mother-and-child paintings.
“At least it will be both of us.” Then Helen quick-checks “No” to a long list of medical problems she never wants to have.
“That’s not a good outcome.” Anna scowls as if Helen hasn’t really understood where they are. As if Helen thinks this is like when they wore matching dresses in middle school. Obviously Anna’s right. Both of them are late with their periods. Obviously it’s better if neither tests positive. But second best, Helen thinks, is that they’re both pregnant. That way what they face, they face together.
Other than the two of them, the office is empty of clients. There’s only the dour woman behind the glass partition who snaps up both clipboards when Helen slides them under the gap. She tries to keep unbroken eye contact with the woman. Helen hopes in a glance to convey that she has a steady boyfriend, that she uses birth control. That she’s not embarrassed to be in this office. Truth is, it makes her feel grown up. Like at the end of her junior year of college, she’s finally, almost, caught up with Anna.
—
“I know I am,” Anna says after the bloods are drawn and they’re both fidgeting, back in the scooped plastic chairs. “I really feel different.” She starts to cry. Anna’s coiled down in her seat, so that Helen has to force her own hand between Anna’s squinched legs to hold her hand.
“Me, too,” Helen says. But sitting there, she’s afraid she feels too much like herself. She presses her palms to her breasts, testing for telltale soreness. Are her breasts more sore than any month’s soreness? Isn’t her period regularly irregular?
Helen gestures to a Seurat print of bustled women strolling in the park. “They’ve got the preggers bump backward in the picture.”
—
“It’s all fine, Reuben,” Anna announces later when she calls to tell him. “I mean, it’s fine for me. We were lucky. It’s Helen. She’s scheduled for Friday.” Anna’s voice drops as if signaling to Reuben she doesn’t have the privacy she needs. “No, they’d broken up. He’s an idiot. . . . Of course. . . . Obviously. I’ll take her. I’ve gotta get off, Heli’s a mess. . . . Sure, I’ll tell her.”
Anna hangs up the phone and falls back on Helen’s bed. “Reuben says he’s really sorry.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“Of course I am. You don’t understand. We’ve got this all worked out. We graduate, work for a year, maybe two, he goes back to school, and after that we start our family. Our first at twenty-seven. Twenty-eight the latest. It’s ridiculous how much time we spend talking about our babies. I can’t bear us both being heartbroken.”
Anna sounds so confident. Not at all teary. And Helen hears in her tone that mix of determination and denial that allows her to convince anyone of practically anything. Even herself.
“But telling him it’s me?”
“Well, I needed a reason he couldn’t come down.”
“Come on, Anna, it gets so complicated. It’s a lot of lies. Shouldn’t Reuben know?”
“You don’t get this. He can’t. It would wreck everything. Forever. Either way.”
Anna rolls away, yanking the comforter over her head. She’s crying now. There’s some relief hearing waves of sobs come up from the blanket. But when Helen puts her hand on Anna’s back, she squiggles away from Helen’s touch, her body in a clutch at the edge of the twin bed. Helen wishes it actually had been her. To spare Anna. But also because it’s always Anna to whom things happen first. And as wrong as it is, Helen thinks it would feel weirdly good to be the focus of the drama. To be hysterically crying. Or stoic. But it’s not her, and Helen isn’t sure what to do. Push Anna to come clean? The whole festering-lie thing can’t be good. Should she even open up the larger question?
But with Anna it’s best to stay quiet. But stay. That’s what works for them. Let Anna know that above all else Helen’s right there for her. Anna will unravel whatever knot she’s twisted inside. She always does. Then she’ll be ready for talk.
But when the phone rings and it’s Reuben telling Helen how sorry he is but that he’s glad she has Anna, she lowers her voice to sound quietly devastated. “You know I’d do the same for her.”
This is how it will be. She will lie for Anna. She will do whatever Anna needs her to do.
Anna takes the phone, then sits with her back to Helen, her feet dangling off the bed.
“Yes, I’ve been crying.” Anna’s tone is terse. Almost contemptuous. “Helen’s a wreck. What do you expect? We both are. . . . No. No. You can’t come down. There’s nothing you can do. It would make everything harder. I need to be there for Helen.”
Helen knows that Reuben will also do exactly what Anna says, because part of loving Anna is being bossed around by her.
Helen listens while Anna unwinds a plan to Reuben. The appointment is scheduled for Friday. That part’s true, but from there the confabulation begins. And it’s elaborate. When did Anna come up with this plan? Without even a momentary hesitation. Helen learns that after her procedure she and Anna are leaving for Nantucket. To find summer jobs. Something they’d apparently been talking for months about wanting to do. And Ming’s offered to drive them to the ferry. They don’t have jobs, but they have a friend waitressing at some fancy hotel, the White Elephant, where the staff are given rooms. She’s said it’s cool for them to sleep on her floor while they figure it all out. They’ll probably wind up working right there at the hotel. There’s a lot of turnover. When they’re settled with jobs and a place to stay, then Reuben can come. For a weekend.
“Come on,” Anna says to Reuben, “how sexy will that be? Me changing sheets and scrubbing shower stalls? It will be great.
“That’s ridiculous,” Anna dismisses, already an expert. Helen understands that Reuben is suggesting that traveling on the same day sounds a little dangerous.
“There’s nothing risky. God, this isn’t like a back-alley thing. I’ve got to go deal with Helen.”
—
On Friday, Helen sits with Anna in the pre-procedure meeting. “I’m the family-planning counselor,” the woman says, speaking so slowly that Helen wonders if she believes English is not their first language. Helen thinks there should be two counselors—the family-planning and family-unplanning counselor.
The counselor works a kind and neutral expression as she asks questions. “Yes,” Anna says, her voice opaque and distant. This is necessary. What she needs to do. Yes, she’s considered alternatives. Yes, she has a boyfriend and she’s spoken with him. Yes, they use birth control. Yes, she knows how to insert the diaphragm. Yes, she knows to reapply the jelly each time.
The counselor leans toward Anna in what wants to be an empathic gesture but seems oddly threatening as she describes how the morning will unfold.
“But I need her with me,” Anna says, grabbing Helen’s arm.
“She isn’t allowed in the room,” the counselor repeats. “I’m sorry.” Her eyes narrow in a firm but compassionate way. It reeks of practice. Reeks of training sessions with role-playing—women crying, hanging on to boyfriends and mothers, and counselors learning to show firm friendliness.
“Please,” Anna pleads while the woman continues the description of the aspiration and termination.
“There will be a nurse with you the whole time. Your friend will be right outside in the waiting room. She’ll join you in recovery. We just have to take care of the fee, and then we shall move forward. I know you’re anxious.”
Anna starts to argue, then looks up helpless, digs into her leather bag, and takes out her checkbook.
The counselor taps a line with her finger on the paper Anna has in front of her. “Only cash.”
“I don’t have cash.” Anna’s voice
cracks. “I have checks.”
The counselor remains quiet, just her finger moving to underline the bold type.
“It’s okay, Anna,” Helen says. “I’ll go to the bank while you’re inside.”
—
Helen’s struck by how familiar the world is outside the clinic. It should somehow be different. The light dramatic. Or dark even in daytime. But the world is the same world. And she’s driving, the way she always drives. Cars have not stopped because her best friend is back in a room with a nurse holding her hand. Out here the clinic doesn’t exist. The lights go red. Then green. Helen presses smoothly on the gas pedal. She drives effortlessly. Turn signal. Speed limit. Everything lawful. Her hands spin the wheel for a right onto Woodward Avenue. There’s the school and then the public golf course. Just where they always are. In the distance white golf carts and men bent over clubs on the green expanse. A normal day in early July. Men hitting tiny white balls into holes. How is it that the ordinary continues? Even this thought, this small revelation, is not a new one for Helen. She’s always been astonished at how the exceptional barely announces itself. In art history she learned that even this revelation is not exceptional. That was Brueghel’s observation as Icarus falls. Then she is passing Sacred Heart, where as a little girl she accompanied Rosie, her Irish babysitter. What was the story she learned about Rosie? That when her mother sought help from the parish priest, he frowned bitterly, practically spit, “Those girls come over and right away they’re pregnant.” What happened to Rosie? Where did she go? Did she have the baby? Helen wishes she could ask her mother. All this braiding through her mind while driving toward the bank and all the time trying, too, to stay in tune with Anna, as if she’s really sitting in that clinic waiting room ready to be called into the recovery room. She imagines Anna on a table. The electrical thrum of the vacuum aspirator that the counselor described.
Helen angles her car into a parking space. Bolts into the bank. This will take two seconds, to withdraw two hundred dollars. It’s going fine. It’s all going to be fine.
Before Everything Page 7