“I’m so sorry,” Mindy sobbed over and over as the four women closed in to catch Anna as she swayed and then, like a soggy piece of paper, began to buckle and wilt.
That Kind of Life
Standing in the doorway, her hospice bag and knapsack cushioned against the door frame, Kate watched Reuben sleep. He was curled, the blue comforter wrapped tightly, his hands in a fist around the welt of fabric. He had the look of an exhausted stray. It was deep, the sleep. A magic-potion sleep. Like something from the storybook she read to her son at night. Reuben was a dark-haired Goldilocks who had wandered in. Or, with that gruff snore, more a kindly wolf, if any of the stories had a kindly wolf. He snored a steady, thick engine. Clearly he’d broken his nose more than once. She recognized that deviated sound.
The bed rails were up. He’d done that? He must have. Yes, he’d put the rails up. And looking at his fingers, their twitchy release and grasp of the coverlet, she remembered that it had once been his comforter, too. And the room, yes, this had been his room. His room with Anna. How long ago? She couldn’t quite ever get that story straight. Even as simple as were they still married or not? So it was less Goldilocks testing the bed than a return. Which tale would that be?
Watching Reuben, she’d completely forgotten about Anna! Who was where? Had it happened?
No, if it were the end, Kate would have been called. That was a clear part of the protocol.
When she arrived, she’d been glad for the quiet. It was hard to have a moment alone with Anna. She never knew who’d be camped out in the room—some new woman friend insisting on relaying old escapades or looking cheerful and asking confused, increasingly desperate questions. There were the two brothers every weekend, and sisters, or maybe those were the wives of brothers—she couldn’t tell. And children, Anna’s grown children, of course, but also nieces, cousins, grown kids showed up and wanted to hold her hand. Once Kate had arrived to a crew of middle-age men jamming an acoustic-rock show in Anna’s room.
Everyone acted affronted when she’d ask them to clear the room. The brothers hung around saying they were doctors. Always challenging her, challenging hospice as if hospice were her invention. She had to explain it again and again. There were things best done without family and friends. Even after she insisted, she’d hear them linger just outside the door, wanting to reclaim their place.
Of course, she’d been doing this work long enough to know that this overflow, this bounty of love, was infinitely better than the apartments and houses where she’d helped men and women die mostly alone. How many times had she sought out an adult child, paging through local phone books, working hard to sound neutral? “Even an afternoon’s visit would be calming. I think he’ll sleep better after you visit,” she’d said to too many daughters and sons.
Yet with Anna it might finally come to shooing the whole swarm from the room, their buzzing vigil of insistent love.
Reuben rolled onto his back. His arms flopped out. He spittled forth a throaty gasp. Kate backed out of the doorway. Did not want that awkward moment. Did not want to be caught watching him sleep. But she couldn’t take her eyes off him. It was nice to watch a well person sleep. It had been a while. And a man. That, too. To see the long, healthy stretch of his body, his easy, good sleep. Easy, that was the word, his breath easy. His muscled arms flung wide. Nothing labored. Even the thick snoring was the sound of a healthy man snoring. Stunning. Why shouldn’t she want to watch? To watch his vulnerability. Sure, each night she looked in on her boy. This was different. It was pleasurable, it was intimate watching a man.
The other morning when Kate had been in the room, out of nowhere Anna struggled to remember a line from a book she’d quoted in her wedding vows. She’d become increasingly agitated, fixated that she couldn’t even retrieve the name of the book it came from.
“It’s about shells. But not really.” Anna’s face scrunched and bothered.
And later her mouth struggling, as if it were just there, on the verge. “A gift something.”
Now Kate has the book. She’s certain it’s the book Anna meant, right there in her knapsack along with supplies for restocking. She’d been on her rounds, at another home hospice visit. After showing Tom how he could regulate the pump himself, he’d asked if she’d bring him over the second volume of the Dune trilogy. A couple weeks earlier, he’d declared the hope of rereading his entire library before he died. “But Pynchon might send me to an early grave,” he reconsidered. She’d scanned his makeshift plywood-and-cement-block bookshelves for what he’d wanted and seen a narrow blue spine with the simple capital letters, Gift from the Sea.
“Screw borrowing. Take it,” Tom said in his burly way. “I don’t remember which girlfriend left that shit behind.”
But before she left, he said, “Actually, if she kicks first, I’ll take the idiotic book back.”
Kate had looked forward to giving Anna the book. After putting her son to bed, she’d read a little of it. She liked holding the blue book in her hand. The simple line drawings. It was beautiful, even if she couldn’t stay awake and then woke with the light on and the book next to her. She’d tried to guess which passage Anna had used in her vows. What she’d said to Reuben. No shortage. The whole book was quotable. If you had that kind of life. The book assumed everyone had a marriage that might endure.
Really, it stung to read the book. All that reflecting, taking time to nourish a life. All that getting away from a life Kate had never had. Frankly, she wasn’t sure anyone ever had.
What had Anna wanted to say to Reuben? It was hard for Kate to imagine Anna young. Impossible to imagine her well. When she conjured a wedding, she could picture Reuben in his twenties—same curly hair, thicker, no gray—but he stood beside an old, gnarled stick of a dying woman.
There it was again. It was her failing as a nurse. She couldn’t ever see the young face inside the dying face. Even those patients she’d cared for, the ones who’d fully reverted, pulled back into the sturdy safety of their childhood—babbling to mothers, talking to little sisters, at family tables that hadn’t existed for sixty years—she saw them only in their diminished, frail, dying bodies, the baby talk coated in the drool and stench, the gummy toothlessness of last days.
It was terrible, a lack of empathy, this, when she was in the job of empathy. But watching them die, she couldn’t spin the dial of time and muster an image of the once-fully-vital self. Even all the pictures inevitably clustered bedside—that lineup of prior selves dressed smartly or rafting wild rivers—seemed invented. It was her secret failing, this lack. It’s not like it killed anyone.
Maybe she could leave the supplies and the book for Anna with a note. On the bedside table. No, that was way too creepy; Reuben would know that she’d been right there in the room, seen him sleeping in the hospital bed. She’d stood just beside him arranging the vials of pills. Even if she left supplies organized on the kitchen counter, Reuben would figure out she’d been in the house.
Maybe it would be a kindness for him to wake and find the book, to know that Anna had wanted to recall words she’d once said to him. Or he wouldn’t like it at all. Hard to tell with Reuben. He was so wound up; he was in a perpetual twirl of doing, always a task at hand, always in his pocket a scrawled list of questions. “What about something for the sadness?” he had asked, and it took a minute for Kate to understand he meant Anna’s and not his own. Kate had freaked herself out by putting both hands on his shoulders and saying, “Reuben, is there anyone here giving you support?” It wasn’t the gesture, or even the hands on his shoulders, it was that her tone sounded unprofessional. What was she actually offering? He’d been gracious saying, “Do I look like a guy who has time for support?”
Reuben juddered, half hoisted himself toward the door. She held her breath, expecting his eyes to blink open. He groaned, still sleep-blind, shifting back into a fetal tuck.
She was out of there. Down the hall, past
the wall of framed family pictures. Wherever Anna actually was, there was enough of everything to get her through the night. Kate couldn’t imagine who’d dragged her anywhere but with this crowd anything was possible.
Kate would come back. Try to fit it into her rounds. But she’d promised her son a game of catch, help him break in his catcher’s mitt. After throwing, she’s planned to teach him how to soften a glove with oil and twelve-minute-interval heatings in the oven.
The book will wait till morning. She’ll kick everyone out of the room and even convince stubborn Anna to use the oxygen tube. Then she’ll read aloud to Anna. Stay a little extra. Wait for her to remember the passage from the book. Ask Anna to read it to her, encourage Anna to say the passage aloud. She’ll watch Anna’s face carefully as she recites the vow. See if she can bring herself to see something in Anna’s face, to learn whatever hope exists in a woman who believed love might endure.
Next Stop
“Next stop Machu Picchu,” Molly announced as she parked close to a picnic table.
Ming sprang into motion, pulling bags and a wicker basket from the popped-open trunk. “Brought to you by our chef, Sebastian,” she said with a deep bow. Indeed, he’d packed pretty much everything but the actual donkey that would carry the basket up a mountain. She wasn’t ready to give up. This was when she’d begin arguing her case with Anna. Maybe they’d pushed too far going to the spa. Still, Anna had wanted to go out. Had wanted to go on vacation. That meant something.
Ming shook out a red gingham tablecloth. She wafted it and let it settle on the picnic table. In the basket Sebastian had neatly stacked metal containers—empanadas, spinach frittata, sliced tomatoes, melon, soft goat cheese, and grilled breads rubbed with garlic.
While Ming set out a feast—right down to cloth napkins she folded into fans on each of the blue metal plates—Helen picked along the pond’s shore, gathering dry branches and limbs, breaking them down, and going back to collect twigs and brush for a fire in the cooking pit beside the picnic table. After the initial high flare, while the fire burned steady and solid, Helen and Caroline locked wrist to elbow, making a chair of their arms, and Molly slowly lifted Anna from the backseat, adjusting the blanket around her shoulders.
“You doing okay?” Even as she asked it, Helen could not imagine what that meant. But still, hadn’t it all sort of worked out? Maybe not the full turnaround that Ming claimed could still happen. But didn’t some of the magic she hoped for happen? Anna rising from the bed, insisting they go away. Anna taking them off on an adventure, another Anna adventure even right down to—God bless her—Mindy crying and Anna counseling Mindy to take the episiotomy, take all drugs offered when she goes into labor.
Molly kept one hand on Anna’s waist and the other braced around her neck as they stepped their way to the picnic table. They lowered Anna to the bench, and when she tilted, listing unsteadily, Molly wiggled in right behind her on the bench, holding her in a clasp.
“I’ve got you,” Molly said quietly. Seated behind Anna, Molly knew, was the most alone she’d have of her. “There’s something I need to tell you.” But before she could begin to describe the principal’s office and that brutal fraction of a second when she saw the ink on her daughter’s cinnamon skin, she heard the stutter thickness in Anna’s breath. Anna struggled with each inhale. Molly tried to breathe along with her. Anna would say, Don’t be so dramatic, it’s just a stupid tattoo. Molly shaped the wool blanket around Anna’s shoulders. You’re not losing her. You’re a great mom, Anna would say, turning her head with that confident, certain look. For now, with a cheek against Anna’s back, hearing the effort of her breath, it was enough just knowing what she would say.
“Eat up, ladies, this is Michelin-rated,” Ming crooned. “What do you want, Anna?”
“I’ll watch. The smell of food’s still good.”
“Okay, are you all finally ready for the story of the week?” Caroline said and leaned forward, positioning both arms theatrically on the table. She waited for Ming to serve Molly and Helen to sit back down from poking at the fire pit.
Around them a soft spring light hovered, haloed over Puffer’s Pond. The jumble of marsh wren and spring peepers chorused, the staccato of woodpecker—the air was a dense sound fabric.
“No contest, I have this week’s winning story,” Caroline said, and the others waited for her latest situation to unspool. This is what they have always done together. Talk and listen. And any vacation, however exotic it might be, would finally be that—talking to make sense of their lives, the necessity of saying out loud, This is what happened. Talking for the sheer pleasure, the hilarity. To be one another’s witness to the stunning accumulation of a life.
“It starts last Thursday,” Caroline began, “with a collect call from Jacqueline Bouvier.”
Deadline
“I might need help?” Anna folded back in Molly’s arms.
“You bet. What do you need?” Molly stayed close to Anna while Ming packed up the picked-over food and Helen doused the last logs in the fire pit. The light on the pond had shifted golden—magic hour—the birches and pines along the shoreline glowing, the colors saturated and alive.
“I’ve set a deadline.” Anna sounded official. “If it’s not over, then I want a drug that can finish this. Can Serena help?”
Caroline froze holding the melon rinds she was dumping into the trash.
“It’s illegal.” Ming snapped shut the picnic hamper. If she’d lost the moment to make her other case, she’d hold ground with law.
“I know what it is, Ming,” Anna shot back. “I wanted to keep Reuben out of this loop because of the kids. I’m asking whether you four will help if I need it.”
“Serena can’t,” Ming declared officially. “She can’t. I can’t. I’m a lawyer.” Ming looked to Helen. Helen kept crouched by the fire pit, her back to everyone. The wet wood hissed, and the gray smoke twisted vaporously.
“I’ll ask Serena.” Molly knew that Serena would say no. Adamantly. But Molly knew other doctors, colleagues from Fenway Community Health, who believed in assistance and had taken the risk. “And yes, Anna, I’ll do what you need.” Molly was glad to be the first to say yes.
“Whatever you need.” Caroline’s shoulders tensed up to her neck. “This is hard.” Every muscle in her caretaking body was trained to rescue.
“It’s a lot to ask,” Anna said. “But not knowing if there’s two days or three months is stupid. Saying good-bye is getting old.”
“Helen?” Ming’s voice vibrated stiff and friable. It was two to one.
“Whatever you need,” Helen said quietly. A wave roiled through her. She understood. They wouldn’t need to secretly assist Anna. It was days, not weeks. That was clear. What Anna needed was to know that she wasn’t alone. It would help her.
Helen went close and wrapped her arms around Ming. She buried her face in Ming’s soft hair.
“Whatever you need, Anna,” Helen said again.
Lucky
Jarrett was driving up Bull Hill Road when he saw the baby skunk. Odd in the daytime. Not impossible—he’d seen a few. But a baby? Now, that was something unusual. Maybe it wasn’t a skunk. From the distance he couldn’t see white markings. A mink? A marten? No, this creature was bushy. Not sleek at all. He slowed the truck. Probably just a stupid cat. It was stopped in the middle of the road. He heard a car coming down the hill. People took Bull Hill as a shortcut. Took it too fast. Teenagers liking to churn up dust on the curves. Like they were in their own video-game chase. Every year some idiot rolled.
He slammed on the truck horn. Warn the car. Warn that skunk. Really, he didn’t have time for this. For any of it. He was late already. And he couldn’t be late to pick up his son. Most of all because Daniela wouldn’t let him hear the end of it. Two late school pickups and she was calling him a deadbeat dad, throwing the phrase around like she actually knew what it meant. Dead
beat nothing, the back of the truck was piled with wood for their house. The house he’d built for his family with his own two hands. The house on which he paid the electric and the mortgage and every other bill. The house she’d said was her dream house. The very dream house she now seemed on the verge of asking him to leave. Everything with her these days felt like a test that he was failing. Every cup left on the counter. A clump of mud on the rug. And that was just the surface. It seemed like suddenly there was a ten-page list of problems. Or worse, there was a list but he wasn’t even allowed to see what was on it. He wanted to say, Come on, Daniela, we have a good thing. But these days he couldn’t say even something that simple without flubbing it. Okay, he wasn’t the most talkative guy in the world, and he certainly wasn’t some poet. Okay, he had plenty of room for improvement. Who didn’t? If she wanted him to do more of the house stuff, he’d try. She’d said she was sick of taking care of everyone’s food. Okay, he’d try, but he couldn’t promise gourmet anything. Nothing like the amazing meals Daniela rolled out as if they were nothing tough. Was he wrong for having believed she enjoyed cooking? He was the first to admit that right now he couldn’t do a lot more than a breakfast-for-dinner meal. Eggs and bacon, toast and potatoes. But that didn’t make him kick-out-able, did it? And she wasn’t quiet about any of it. Couldn’t she see that their kids had the willies?
Yesterday when he’d pulled in to the circle at school, Owen hopped into the cab of the truck and turned to Jarrett. “No worries, Pop. I just got out here. I’ll tell Mom it was my fault. I was helping Ms. Brown clean our bunny cages.” The poor kid’s face looked stricken.
Then a car rounded the sharp bend ahead on Bull Hill. It barreled down, a red flash of speed, and it looked like it couldn’t brake fast enough to avoid the animal right in the road. Jarrett could tell it was a lady driving. Would she spin out into his truck? Or would she pull hard right where a dense bank of white pine shouldered the road? Neither was going to end well. He kept his hand flattened on the horn. Watched the car brake, the woman’s wrenched face. The animal crouched. He understood then it was a dog. Not a skunk. A small dog. “Don’t turn in to the tree!” he shouted. The car windows were closed. Then the car slipped past, a slick red ribbon of motion, skidding to a stop below him.
Before Everything Page 18