Fishing With RayAnne

by Ava Finch

  Had she had chemo? RayAnne already has a dozen more questions for Dr. Phillips. Most of the hours tossing in bed were spent reconstructing what the last few months might have been like for Gran. She needs to know exactly how long her grandmother has been ill, if there has been much pain, what her symptoms and suffering have been; she wants to see her chart, and more than anything wants to ask the question Dr. Phillips likely cannot answer: Why?

  With ultimate care, she plucks individual hairs from the sweater. When she finishes the front, she takes it off and arranges it on the counter to pluck the back. Gathered up, Dot’s silvery curls look like a mound of smoke. Staring at the little wastebasket, RayAnne knows tossing them is not an option and looks around for a place to put them. Inside the medicine chest is a half-empty aspirin bottle that she opens with her teeth. After the tablets cascade into the toilet, she stuffs the hair into the clear bottle.

  The medicine chest has been cleared except for little wrapped hotel soaps and Pepto-Bismol. There’s nothing in the wastebasket. It seems any pharmaceutical evidence of the previous months has been cleared. Dot’s nightstand is empty as well, not even a ring of dust to suggest bottles and vials—all obliterated, as stealthily as a Pawnee sweeping away her own footprints.

  RayAnne had forced Dot to sit through numerous screenings of Little Big Man, got her to admit Old Lodge Skins was pretty sexy for an old guy. It never failed to make Dot laugh when the old chief inquired about Jack Crabb’s relations with his wife: “Did you mount her with pleasure?

  Absently slipping the aspirin bottle into the skirt pocket, she looks to the mirror, blinking. Noticing the writing on the T-shirt, she frowns: “It’s my birthday. Spank me!” She remembers how Dot had laughed as she’d held it up to her chest, modeling for all to see while wagging her backside like Trinket wags her tail.

  Out on the patio, RayAnne stands in the late afternoon sun while the salty breeze bats the hem of the skirt against her knees. The deck chair had been pushed to the middle, where Dot’s slice of ocean view glints between the other cottages. The chair. Dr. Phillips had said that if the ambulance had been ten minutes later, Dot would have died as she’d intended, sitting in her deck chair.

  Draped on the arm of the deck chair is Dot’s afghan, damp with sea air. The little side table has nothing on it, cleared by someone, maybe the paramedics. There is no sign, no physical evidence of yesterday’s scene (just yesterday?). Even as she’s thinking it, a reflection catches her eye, something stuck between the decking, cylindrical, glossy, and difficult to make out in the shadow. Squatting, she wriggles a finger in to pry it out and yelps.

  She’s been stuck—it’s a syringe.

  “Oh. Oh?” The bleeding finger is jammed into her mouth. With her other hand RayAnne pries the syringe loose by the plunger end. When she’d asked Dr. Phillips how he was so sure Dot had meant to kill herself, he’d said the paramedics had collected four empty insulin syringes. Well, here is a fifth. This time she fights to control her knees and lowers slowly to sit where Gran had, facing the narrow vista of the sea, straining to hear the distant shush of surf.

  To live on the ocean had been on Dot’s bucket list for years. She could have moved here much sooner, but she wanted to stay near Minneapolis while Kyle and RayAnne were still young. But then, when they were teens, she lingered, kept changing her mind, modifying her plan until it included staying to see them graduate from high school. Then she argued with no one—what’s a few more years—and stayed on until both RayAnne and Ky had finished college, when Ky went out of state to graduate school and RayAnne starting working for Big Rick and hit the fishing circuit. Only then did Dot go live her dream of a little old cottage by the sea, even though it’s not quite a cottage and not very old.

  Dune Cottage Village was a developer’s scheme to crowd in as many units as possible; outwardly they are meant to look like quaint fishermen’s houses, complete with floats and nets hung as if to dry on the gray shingled exteriors, while inside the handicap-accessible rooms are as beige and boring as any senior housing.

  RayAnne wonders what else was on Dot’s bucket list. Gran never wrote anything down—would only rap her temple, saying, “If it’s not important enough to stick in here, it’s not worth keeping.” Indeed, as far as RayAnne knows, none of Dot’s recipes were even committed to paper. When the Dorthea’s supper club became popular, a publisher approached her about writing a cookbook, but Dot only scoffed, “You can’t describe to someone how to debone a quail; you have to show them!”

  RayAnne rises from the lounger and takes two steps when a horrid squeal announces her bare foot coming down on something soft and fuzzy. Rodent. Mouse? A shudder of revulsion travels her entire body. But it’s only one of Trinket’s chew toys, and as RayAnne instinctively kicks it away, she remembers, Trinket!

  Where is the dog?

  Dr. Phillips had mentioned that Trinket alerted a neighbor by barking unceasingly, which is only what Trinket always does.

  Looking around, RayAnne supposes that whatever neighbor called the ambulance might have taken the dog in. Trinket could be in any of the dozen cottages clustered around Dot’s, or maybe roaming loose. She walks down the boardwalk, calling in a loud whisper that comes out more like a hiss, “Trinket, Trin-ket. Trinket, you little . . . come!” She supposes she could knock on a few doors, but there’s no time to waste looking for a neurotic Pomeranian that is the exact color of sand—she has to get back to the hospital.

  In the house she collects herself, calls a cab from the landline, and pries on the only pair of Dot’s shoes that fit, the thick-soled orthopedic trainers she’d worn on the treadmill.

  Hurrying through the little lanes of cottages, RayAnne feels light-headed and remembers she’s not eaten anything since peanuts on the plane, a thousand hours ago . . . or at least twenty.

  That was then. Before what is now. A whole different life. Since seeing Dot, moments have stretched sideways and flowed parallel to real time, badly out of sync.

  When she reaches the main gate, her cab isn’t yet there. The dispatcher had said ten minutes and it’s been almost fifteen. A step-van idling near the guardhouse emits a discreet half honk, and a wizened arm beckons from the driver’s window. It’s an ElderCab, replete with wheelchair lift. Shunting into gear, it creeps toward her. True to the company brand, the driver is an elderly cabbie, and considering the volume of his radio, his hearing aids are in need of batteries. When she shouts the name of the hospital, he nods at her mouth as if lip-reading, then declares, “You are not from here, yes, miss?” His license says “Enrico Zagate.”

  “No, Minnesota.” Enrico better not want to talk—she’s almost glad for the pounding salsa beat coming out of his speakers.

  “Minnesota?” He points to the radio, shouting. “You hear about the storm they havin’? Radio says Middlewest get hit real hard.” He chuckles.

  She shouts back, “Did they say anything about the airports?”

  “Oh, they been closed down.”

  “Chicago?”

  “Closed. Blizzard like they not have since 1967.”

  When she whispers “Goddammit,” he seems to hear perfectly.

  “No reason for blaspheme, miss. Maybe God up there say it is time to deliver a whopper!”

  “That’s not really funny.” Her tone seems to shut him up. Enrico has a crocheted cross of acrylic yarn hanging from the rearview mirror and a rosary wrapped around the visor. The dash is plastered with illustrated postcards of Jesus in various Jesus-y poses, such as emitting holy rays from his palms, surrounding himself with lambs, blessing the heads of rainbow children, and leaning waggishly on a crook, gazing from the hooded eyes of a gigolo shepherd.

  The taxi seems to run on the blare of salsa. RayAnne watches the rosary sway with its tiny Christ pinned like a bug. Do people really believe God tests humankind by doling out things like snowstorms and cancer? People believe in a lot of things
, a lot of awful things.

  “Mr. Zagate?”

  “Call me Enrico!” He turns the radio down. “Yes, miss?”

  “You believe in heaven, right?”

  “Sí. Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” He looks in the rearview and eyes her as if she’s just asked if the world is flat. “Because . . . when you die? It’s either heaven with the angels, or the devil in hell.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Oh, yes, miss. Heaven or hell.”

  “But Enrico.” She sits back as they approach the hospital. “What if it’s neither?”

  SEVENTEEN

  There are messages for her at the ICU desk: Kyle confirming Enrico’s claim, all flights are canceled, the airports closed. She calls Cassi from the phone in Dot’s room.

  “Any luck finding my mom?”

  “Yup. A monastery on the Isle of Iona. The next ferry isn’t until tomorrow, but then she’ll still have to make her way across another island and another ferry, then a cab from someplace called Oban to the Glasgow airport.”

  “So how soon?”

  “She’ll land in Sarasota in thirty-six hours—if she makes the flight.”

  A day and a half. With her eyes closed, RayAnne wraps the phone cord tight around her fingers. She really is alone.

  “Ray?”

  “Here.”

  “She sent a message . . . Breathe.”

  One of the platitudes that RayAnne usually finds so annoying. This time she tries to obey, only to find breathing isn’t as easy as it sounds.

  The second-shift nurse hands RayAnne a sheaf of papers. “Dr. Phillips wants you to go over these and says to call him with any questions. He’ll be by to check your grandmother during late rounds. You can talk with him then.”

  In the room, nothing has changed except Dot’s gown and the IV bag. She is still a shell on the bed, the ventilator forcing her breaths: shuck-shhhh . . . shuck-shhhh. RayAnne watches the machine for ten minutes until nearly hypnotized. Shaking herself to, she sits and looks at the sheaf of papers. One is a “Do Not Resuscitate” order. Another is an organ donor form; a third donates Dot’s body to science. Stapled to them is a brochure with a dreamy photo cover of a foggy country road, “The Five Stages of Grief.” RayAnne quickly shuffles the papers one behind the next, as if to stanch the blur of print.

  She looks to Dot, trying to remember if they had ever had a conversation regarding death. It was not spoken of when growing up—she was so young when Grandpa Ted died that she’d been fed the lines about angels and heaven and sleeping. Mostly, death happened to other people in other families, or in the distant past before she was born, like the drowning of Dot and Ted’s little daughter Betsy, a tragedy that to RayAnne has always been taboo, the name an ancient wound barely mentioned for fear of tearing it open. Suddenly, RayAnne feels terrible for never having asked about Betsy, asking Dot to tell in her own words. RayAnne had wanted to offer some comfort, useless or not, but the moment had never come.

  The tape holding Dot’s breathing tube has been reapplied in a clumsy manner, making a fold in the flesh of her cheek. The skin under the tape is red with irritation and is the only color on her pale face. RayAnne peels away the tape as gently as she can, thinking of a moment months before, during their last visit, when she’d reached across to thumb away some excess powder from roughly the same spot on Gran’s cheek. She had laughed. “Promise you’ll come wipe my face when I’m over at the Falls in my wheelchair?”

  RayAnne, unable to think of Dot as anything but her energetic self, pinballing around her kitchen or careening along on her big trike, had joked back, “Yes, Gran, I’ll wipe your face, but that’s all.”

  Right now she’d give anything to see Gran at the Falls in a wheelchair.

  A male nurse sidles in and injects something into Dot’s IV line. He checks and charts her vital signs, all the while taking surreptitious glances at RayAnne, sitting stiffly in her chair, arms like scaffolding propping her upright. He catches her eye and ventures, “You can talk to her, you know.”

  “Pardon?” RayAnne frowns. “Talk to her?”

  “She might be able to hear you.”

  She frowns. “With brain damage?”

  “Who knows.” The nurse shrugs. “If nothing else, you might be able to hear yourself.”

  Watching the respirator, RayAnne concentrates on Bernadette’s advice—with the help of the prompt of the respirator she’s soon miming the same level breaths that Dot’s machine makes. Watching the nurse’s back as he leaves, she scowls.

  Idiot. Talking to Gran’s inert body is the last thing she feels like doing. Talk about what, anyway? She’s never been so angry with Dot as she is at this moment. Shaking, she stands and paces to the foot of the bed, and in spite of herself, RayAnne does speak to Dot, whispering, “I cannot. Can. Not. Believe you’ve done this, Gran.”

  Whispering and muttering, at first. Then in a raised voice, nearly shrill. From the hall, anyone looking in the window would see RayAnne facing the bed, speaking angrily and using halting gestures, her face red as a scrape.

  Half an hour later, her tirade gives way to tears, and after tears she paces more. She will hyperventilate if she cannot calm herself. She settles back to mimic the respirator, now relying on it.

  The best thing about the exhaustion is that it numbs. She cannot take her eyes off Dot, because what if she does wake? What if the machine tracking her brain waves has been broken all this time, is wired badly, is faulty? She slides down in the chair, exhaustion netting over her. Though she fights it, sleep overtakes her within minutes.

  Where did the night go? She is aware of someone leaving the room, and of sunlight coming through the slats in the blinds to slash at her face. She blinks, startled, and stands too quickly, nearly collapsing on her leg, which has fallen asleep. While RayAnne stomps her foot to wake her muscles to action, a young aide with dreadlocks corralled into a hairnet appears at the foot of Dot’s bed with a tray.

  She frowns. “What?”

  The youth is sullen. “Breakfast.”

  RayAnne turns. “Seriously?”

  “Yup.” He checks the computer-generated tab. “Dorthea Dahl?”

  “She can’t eat.”

  “Well, this slip says she can.” He plunks down the tray and leaves.

  Whoever had been in earlier had changed Dot’s gown and combed her hair.

  “Look, Gran.” She lifts a lid on the tray to a mound of cold scrambled egg whites and cold wheat toast. There is a cup of drying grapefruit sections and a bowl of runny yogurt. “See what you’ve done? Landed yourself someplace with total crap food.”

  She stares at Dot’s hand while her own picks up the fork and maneuvers it robotically from the eggs to her mouth. Between swallows, she shakes her head. “If you were awake, I’d make you eat this yourself.” The coffee is lukewarm and bitter.

  “This is worse than mine.”

  Gran would laugh at that. She would.

  When Dot’s index finger twitches, RayAnne sets down the coffee.

  At the desk she learns Dr. Phillips had come and gone while she’d been sleeping. When she insists Deborah track him down to come back, the nurse plants her hands on her hips, but before she can object, RayAnne lies, “It’s about the ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ form.”

  When he comes, she excitedly tells him about the twitches she’d seen her grandmother make.

  “Well, yes, you can expect some movements. But you know most are involuntary reactions.” When he adds, “Miss Dahl, now is not the time for hope . . .” she simply turns away, remaining silent until he leaves the room.

  She closely surveys Gran—watches her hands, the little mounds of her blanketed feet. She scans her eyelids, but the orbs beneath do not move in their sockets. Nothing happens. She caresses Dot’s arm, lightly running her nails acros
s her inner wrist. She lays a palm over the papery forehead like some healer and demands, “Wake up, now, Gran.”

  There’s a desktop PC with Internet in the ICU family waiting room, where she looks up some of Dr. Phillips’ words and phrases: “brain stem death,” “persistent vegetative state.” She Googles “pancreatic cancer” and reads symptoms of the final stages.

  When Deborah comes on shift, she finds RayAnne leaning gray-faced into the computer screen. Deborah is pushing a cart with antiseptic, gauze, and tape. Scanning the web page RayAnne is glued to, she presses a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t need to know all this, I can tell you. There are better ways to go, and your grandma’am knew that for sure. That why she do what she done, girl. Now I’m gonna change the filthy dressing on dis hand of yours.” She sits.

  RayAnne holds out her hand and Deborah gives her wrist a kindly squeeze before bending to the task. What Deborah says may be true, but there are certain things she needs to know for herself.

  “You sign those DNR papers yet, hon?”

  “No.”

  “You read them, at least?”

  “No.”

  Deborah swabs around the wound. “Looks healed up nice. You want me to snip those stitches?”

  When RayAnne nods, Deborah glances at the waiting room door. “Don’t tell anybody. Downstairs this costs you four hundred dollars.”

  Once the stitches are out and the much smaller beige bandage is secured, RayAnne stares at it. “Thank you.”

  “You gotta look them papers over. Dr. Phillips need those.”

  Once Deborah leaves, RayAnne does go over the papers. One document gives permission to donate Dot’s body to medical research. The next, the “Do Not Resuscitate” order, has a red stickum arrow aimed at the signature blank.