“You have enough room, Anna?”
“Let’s all go back to Tarifa,” Ming said. “Okay, Anna?”
Every sentence had Anna’s name.
11:11
11:11 on the bedside clock. Everything aligned, upright numbers, singular and paired, palindromic time. That lucky, twice-a-day. 11:11. Wished on for years. With each emergency, each recurrence, she wished Anna alive. Helen also wished for her sobriety, for the kids’ forgiveness and understanding, for her painting. She’d wished herself a man she loved. For a good life with him. Had she overwished? Was there any wish left? 11:11. Anna was a palindrome. Asa was a palindrome, too. Helen placed her cheek against Anna’s back, sliding against the sweatshirt fabric until her chin hooked under Anna’s pointy wing blade. The shivering stopped. Anna’s breathing was slight, slow motoring breaths.
The stove clock clicked to 11:12, but Anna’s breath steady on the bed was its own hour.
Anna did not smell like Anna anymore.
The Quiets
Now she is quiet, her body slowed. Her thoughts quiet. Her dreams quiet. Her breath like sips, not breaths. Even her farts are quiet. This amuses Anna.
Scribe
And look at that! She does not even need to wait for the scribe.
Dearest One. That is what Anna calls the unborn child. This one will be a girl. Dearest One will tell all the boys and girls that follow.
Others are in the room. But she is talking only with the not-yet-born child. She is writing a letter. She is writing a long book to Dearest One.
Dearest One is much closer than the others.
Look, they are standing together at the gate, Anna and that beautiful tenderness, the secret, the first child of her first child.
April 2013
1
Mud Season
They came back with the crinkle of paper bags, the rasp of plastic, the click of screw-off tops. Dropped shoes in a clomp by the back door, dirt in the lugs of boot soles, the angled heels of work shoes, still always a scratch-scratch brooming of mud tracked inside. Mud season they couldn’t keep outside. They came in smelling of outside. They shuffled through rooms in worn cotton socks, asking, “Does Anna need anything?” They sat near the bed or lay next to Anna on the bed, smelling of town—shop and sidewalk—car oil and a lavender wash. They wore the aftertaste of restaurants—ginger and garlic, a smeary trace of deep-fry. Food was a holiday she’d taken years ago. Places she could no longer exactly remember. Or what she remembered was off camera, the white porcelain handle of a café mug, the clank of metal hangers in a shop where last summer she bought a dress. She must give that dress away. Give away all the dresses in her closet. She imagined her dresses flouncing through town, a flutter of hems waiting at a crosswalk, an A-line flare pressing a code at an ATM. She knew still the sounds of this house, the squeak of the cupboard by the sink, the stuck jostle of a dresser drawer, and the uneven stairs up to the children’s empty bedrooms. The children, they had been back in those empty rooms, wandering in to lie next to her. “Momma, can I tell you something?” “Please,” she would say when she could speak, or she would nod her head and nod again when they asked if she wanted them to keep speaking. They went on interviews. They saw films with subtitles shot in countries where the film could never be shown. “See you in a bit, Mom,” they said, and then they were back. “You won’t believe who I bumped into,” they said. She tried to imagine running into someone unexpectedly, but it was confusing how anyone got anywhere or why and where they went. Someone left and someone else came back. The nurse said, “Are you comfortable?” They brought in flowers from the yard. “Here’s the garden,” they said, so that even with her eyes closed she saw Ball jars of daffodils and tulips. “What a spring,” they said. “We could carry you outside.” Soon there’d be lilacs, they promised. Your favorite.
She shook her head no.
They’re not your favorite?
No. Outside, April. Anna is shaking off the possibility of May.
Scribe
She wants a greater eloquence. What Anna needs to say is simple. Still, it sounds like slogans. Have courage. For everything. Look closely at flowers. Listen to wind. There is comfort in numbers. To make a strong, clear whistle, stretch and slick the blade of fresh grass along your thumbs. Then blow. Be foolish. Goofy is good. Be diligent about brushing your teeth. Love abundantly. When your courage fails, and it will, find courage again.
Connie and John
“It will finally be her. Her will. Not any hospice protocol.” John lowered the rail to sit on the edge of the mechanical bed.
Now John was just John all the time in Anna’s room, even two days ago when he’d successfully shut the defib, leaving the pacemaker on.
“Not that she was ever a patient who went by the book.”
“What are you saying?” Connie snapped defensively, her knitting needles clacking like punctuation.
“What are you saying about her?” Connie was fried. She’d spent the last two nights at Anna’s. “Are you accusing her of having done something wrong?” Anna’s nights were increasingly restless, legs cramping, dreams uneasy. The sharp hallucinations and sudden bursts of energy.
This morning John came by before heading into the office with coffee in a thermos and Connie’s yellow iris mug. Connie was grateful for the coffee. But she was more grateful to behold her husband’s face. Two nights, and their life, their house, the first buds on the trees in their garden, seemed so distant, something almost in a rearview mirror. Everything now shrunk down to ice chips, to moistening peeling lips, to managing unseen hallucinations.
But here was John. Still she wished he were just her beloved husband and not the doctor.
“Just that she could be frustrating from a doctor’s point of view. What can I say, Connie? She wasn’t an ideal patient. She was her own kind of stubborn. On the other hand, denial’s probably what’s kept her going.”
Connie pulled at the skein of yarn in her knitting bag. She’d taken on an elaborate pattern that involved actual concentration. Multiple yarns as well as cables. But the mistakes she kept making were basic—dropped stitches, botched stitch counts. A complicated project seemed like the right idea to focus her mind. Now Connie wished she’d opted for mindless, shuttling her needles in steady rows of knit and purl.
“You think I don’t know her?” Connie knew this wasn’t what John was saying. Her voice had gone all squirrelly. A better friend would have forced Anna to show for every appointment, to obey all the medical instructions. “Sometimes she just needed not to be a patient,” Connie said.
“No, Connie, I know you know. It’s just helpful to understand that her dying is going to be like her living.”
“Hello, I’m still here,” Anna piped up from under a pile of comforters on the bed. “At least technically I’m here.”
John and Connie burst out laughing, Connie bordering on hysterical. It was clearly too important to both of them that out of nowhere Anna still cracked a joke.
She this, she that—another thing Connie knew that Anna hated about being a patient.
“Jesus, you’re a pain in my ass,” John said. He windshield-wipered his hand, flattening folds of the comforter looking for Anna’s arm. “An unpredictable pain in my ass.”
Connie rested the knitting in her lap and lifted her mug of coffee. Here was her husband holding Anna’s hand. And then—Connie knew he couldn’t really help himself—John’s fingers slipped up to Anna’s wrist, and Connie watched as his eyes narrowed in concentration while he took Anna’s pulse.
Scribe
Pick a number, Dearest One. Double it. Add 9. Subtract 3. Divide by 2. Subtract the original number. Your answer will always be 3.
Not memories. In her head. But math. Math tricks.
Pick a number. Double it. Add 10. Divide by 2. Subtract the original number. Your answer will be 5.
Dearest O
ne, pick a number, Anna thinks. Square it.
2
Ming, Getting There
“Well, what exactly do you think?”
“Give me a moment to consider.” But instead of actually thinking about her client’s divorce negotiations, Ming thought about walking straight out of the conference room. She’d drive directly to Anna’s. All week she’d been deep in an argument with herself. Helen was right. She’d yielded too easily. Been swayed by emotion. Given up the fight. In her law practice, she prided herself on keeping steady when her clients were ready to throw in the towel. She’d counseled not to let circumstance force an easy settlement. Hospice was the easy settlement. How hadn’t she grasped that earlier? In the week since they’d been there, apparently Anna not only had voluntarily given up food, she’d shut down her pacemaker. Still, Ming could turn this around. Anna would eat again. Have the pacemaker turned back on. She’d convince Anna. Her logic would work better than Helen’s bullying. Even if Ming’s steady logic hadn’t always triumphed over Anna’s impulsivity, Anna usually admitted that she should have listened to Ming.
“How’s that considering going?”
Ming steeled herself against the sneer of the opposing counsel’s tone. She felt practically giddy. Just to consider rolling back the dilapidated swivel chair and stand from these negotiations to go to Anna’s, where Ming’s skill as a negotiator was more crucial than arguing for her client’s alimony and the payment of children’s summer camp.
Yes, the idea of bolting made Ming feel better than she’d felt in weeks.
All she had to do was stand up.
Instead she sank deeper into the rolling chair and palmed the scratched-up teak conference table.
“I think we should move forward and not try to reopen what at our last meeting both clients figured out so successfully,” she said.
Because, however wonderful her fantasy was, there were two serious fantasy busters that kept Ming at the table.
The first was that she was notoriously dutiful. A dotter of i’s. She’d never bolted from any meeting. Thanks to her father, she seemed genetically grateful to be overworked, never able to switch off the anxious DNA from when she’d first hung her shingle, certain that no one in this small upstate community would hire a woman lawyer with a Chinese first name and an Ecuadorean surname. She still panicked that clients wouldn’t keep coming. For that reason Ming remained of counsel at Winters and Trell, her old Albany firm. Sebastian tried reminding her she’d spent twenty years uselessly worrying, that her practice flourished, that it was his work in the restaurant business that was far more fickle. What did he know? With his Latin blood, Sebastian was wired so optimistically.
But the real truth—who was Ming kidding?—was that there was relief in work. It was comforting to put her head down and focus, her vision narrowing so tightly that it occluded Anna. Hours passed. Looking up, she would have accomplished something. Even with a divorce like this that trailed on, at a certain moment from the tedious tangle of human pettiness she’d see the path to close a deal. You can’t count on human decency, she’d learned, but you could count on the legal process. She believed in the law. It was what distinguished her as a lawyer—that she actually believed that the logic of law helped manage human foibles. She would triumph in this divorce negotiation. And even if she failed, who really suffered?
Failing with Anna was different.
“It’s too late now to turn things around,” Helen said yesterday, reporting that Anna was hardly awake. In and out. Though mostly out.
“It’s not,” Ming countered. She’d work on Helen, woo her back. “I’m sorry I didn’t back you up last week.”
She’d finish—get the ridiculous negotiation about summer camp and college tuitions done—and then leave this meeting and drive east out of the Berkshires to Anna in the Valley. She’d use all her logic to steer Anna. Sebastian had prepared a lunch and dinner in the hopes that Ming could convince Anna to resume eating. There was a cooler and a wicker hamper in the car with foods that would be easy on Anna’s system. Wild mushroom and garlic soup again. Honey and pollen from his bees.
She’s so sorry she lost any time. Ming can’t lose her. Anna is her firecracker of joy. It was Anna who burst Ming out of the rigid order of her strict parents. Years later it was Anna who had Ming making jokes while Lily’s brain was severed. Sitting in the stupid massage chairs getting pedicures, Anna looked at Ming, and Ming instantly felt lighter. There would be no one who could unfasten her so easily.
“You hanging in?” Ming touched her client’s arm. Her client, Jenny Hyde, had her stiff meeting face painted on, an armor of pancake and lipstick. In contrast, last week Jenny showed up at the office for a meeting with lunch. She’d been at the stables—no makeup, in riding clothes; she was a beautiful woman. The two women sat on the back porch of Ming’s office taking in the spring warmth and eating turkey sandwiches. “I actually miss him,” Jenny said out of nowhere. “I woke up this morning remembering this thing he used to say that was guaranteed to crack me up. I’m not sure why I stopped finding him funny.” Ming took off the top piece of bread and quietly ate her sandwich. Best not to offer commentary. Jenny was talking to herself. Could be the spring air. Could be something lasting. Ming couldn’t guess with any certainty, having seen people get back together who had knuckles hard against each other’s windpipe. It wasn’t all that different from staying married. Any given day Ming found herself furious with, annoyed by, thankful for, attracted to—oh, the list went contradictorily on—Sebastian. Ming recalled a law professor who provocatively declared that every married couple has grounds for divorce. Ming then was twenty-four, newly married, and thought the professor a cynical asshole. Still it stuck in her mind. Twenty-five—no, twenty-eight years later, just seeing Sebastian’s socks in a threadbare crumple every night on the bathroom floor made her want to slit his throat. Still, moments later she loved the way he roughly slid close to her in their bed and they slept folded in their own well-creased origami.
What Ming knew with certainty, having negotiated too many divorces, was that when kids are involved, the marriage goes on after papers are signed. You don’t live together anymore. You don’t have sex together anymore. Though Ming can point to those who continue living together and those who continue having sex. But it doesn’t matter if the grown-ups can’t abide one another; they still remain responsible for the children. She and Sebastian have weathered a sick child; all the pivotal-event divorce statistics were against them. Every day there were challenges so far beyond the cost of music lessons or camp. Ming believed in the known challenges of marriage.
“Useless!” Suddenly Mr. Hyde was shouting. “You’re useless!” He bucked up, the chair tipping in a clatter behind him. Hyde’s voice was a razor. “I have no time for this!”
“Control your client.” Ming watched the opposing counsel swivel toward the curtained window to signal that he neither condoned nor condemned.
She needed to stay put. It was a game. Who bolts first?
Instead Ming pressed the recording device on her phone, preserving the full onslaught of invectives spilling from Mr. Hyde’s ugly mouth.
“I’m done here,” she said when he paused.
And, like that, Ming was done. She was up and walking out of the conference room, Mr. Hyde’s voice a harsh wind at her back.
Opening her car door, she remembered another moment from the vacation in Tarifa—a chubby nudist family on the beach and their chalky flesh rolls going lobster red as day after day they nakedly bounced about playing netless badminton. She was counting on the story to make Anna crack up. And Ming will use that openness—however momentary—to step-by-step show Anna the path back to food and medicine, to another round of living.
Even before Ming snapped her seat belt, she was prepping her case. Anna had relied on her before. Anna respected her pragmatism. From the first illness, Ming had made sure there was a living
will and a health proxy. “It’s the best way to ward off disaster,” she’d insisted when Anna said a last will and testament seemed like giving up. She’d overseen every update. Ming had managed Anna’s recurrences with practicality, as if her logic and diligence, her order and reasoning, would trump each advance of illness. As if there were always a way to negotiate.
It would work again. Helen was right but tactically wrong. Caroline and Molly would back her. Today, together, they’d navigate correctly. Ming felt confident. She knew how to win.
Helen, Getting There
This morning when Asa carried in two mugs of coffee and settled back into bed with Helen, he said, “You’ve had an unexpectedly good week. Think about that on the drive? Tell Anna. She loves hearing about your life.”
Helen leaned against Asa. “I will.” But all of it—the perfectly brewed coffee, the week’s surprises—seemed more twisted than good. A stellar week if Anna weren’t dying. A stellar week if she hadn’t learned that Anna had stopped eating. Or had the pacemaker or whatever it was called shut off, even though Layla kept repeating over the phone that that actually didn’t speed anything up?
Now, here, at the New Haven rest stop, as Helen angled against her car, the gas pump clicking at full, she thought, Good things come in threes. She crammed the pump handle back into its slot and pressed YES for a receipt, but she couldn’t wait for the receipt, buckling into her belt and throwing the car into gear in one move, she accelerated in a fast swerve onto the interstate.
Helen knew that if she said out loud that she was suddenly positive Anna was going to live, she’d be accused of magical thinking. Superstitious. That was a dirty little secret of Helen’s. Nonreligious, down-to-earth Helen secretly checked her daily horoscope, stepped onto airplanes with her right foot, was a sucker for chain letters that promised good fortune or bad luck. Helen, who shook her head over any New Agey hocus-pocus, was in fact driving like a bat out of hell ready to pronounce the inevitable future like she was goddamn Tiresias.
Before Everything Page 14