“Ready?” Lucy swayed across the porch. She’d wrapped a pareo around her middle in a bow to modesty, but the plunging suit scarcely hid the rest of her. I wore wrinkled shorts and an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, ready for action, which involved working on a Cuervo margarita with a tequila floater, and Shrimp Frances, a deliciously famous dish of shrimp served in hot garlic butter.
“I could use a little respite of margarita. Or piña colada,” I said.
We walked off the porch, right through the invisible walls, and across the beach. We checked on Marque, Ellie, and Bruce. They were still passed out and snoring into their towels, so we left them alone. I was glad because I wanted to talk to Lucy alone. I had some things I had to say.
So, we headed to the Sand Bar Restaurant, which, through the years, had turned into a sort of meeting point—a place on the beach where we ate and drank and sat for hours, as if there were not a care in the world, even when there were plenty. Like now.
18
MORPHINE AND MARGARITAS
The Sand Bar, just a short walk from the cottage, escaped Josephine’s wrath, probably because the restaurant was elevated on pilings, so that the water rushed under the building and slinked back into the boundaries of the Gulf. The height of only a few feet was all it took to save it from the claws of Josephine.
The Sand Bar actually began as a real sand bar in the ’50s. The floor was nothing more than a tiny island pounded hard by the drinkers who stood up to one long counter. Liquor bottles lined up along the shack wall and a refrigerator kept the beer cold. The first time I went there, I was barely taller than the barstool. My dad drank a beer and talked with his friend Cosby Bernard, a Chicago architect, who said an explosion of condominium growth was set to go off along the barrier keys, all the way from Tampa to Naples. He was concerned about the density on Longboat Key to the south of Anna Maria Island where the high-rise buildings on either side of the key were so close you could throw a baseball from a bayside condo to a Gulf-side house and break a window. As he predicted, the multi-unit buildings, many over six stories, went up on Longboat Key, and like clockwork, for three to six months, the northerners closed themselves up in their getaways of white carpet, glass-topped tables, and bamboo. Unfortunately, the only two-lane spine that ran through the island along Gulf Drive and Longboat Key couldn’t keep up.
In contrast, the crowding on Anna Marie consisted of shacks and small stucco ranch homes. The two islands adjoined by a bridge were worlds apart. Anna Maria became a slightly quirky colony of northerners—many of them artists, teachers, professionals—who hung out on the fishing piers, and, of course, at the Sand Bar, and tried to preserve the feel of Old Florida.
But the Sand Bar changed. The one counter stuck in the sand grew into a beachfront destination where grouper and shrimp—blackened, broiled, boiled, or buttered—was served. Somewhere in the bones of the fancy wraparound teak counter, the original bar top still existed, and just north of that center, a wooden deck with umbrella tables now spread out to seat a hundred diners and drinkers.
Lucy and I sat at the bar and ordered margaritas, kicking them up a notch with floaters of Cuervo, while we waited for a table out on the deck. Over the years, as part of our Anna Maria ritual, we often ended up sitting out on the deck for hours. We covered the white plastic chairs with beach towels, so we wouldn’t have the print of chair splats embedded on the backs of our flawless thighs. It had happened before.
That afternoon, a few regulars sat at the round white tables—Sharon and Vince from Sycamore, Keith Bailey from the bait shop at the Rod and Reel Pier, and a short, bald, loud guy I’d never seen before. He picked Lucy out right away, or rather the front middle section of Lucy, as he opened and closed his legs and yakked into a cell phone. It was clear he had the office on the line, and he was working hard to impress everyone on the deck that he had big business to attend to. He annoyed me, but Lucy was already giving him and his skimpy little Speedo the once over.
“Will you stop?” I said.
Lucy shot me a look, like she’d been caught. “He’s kind of cute, don’t you think?”
“He’s bald.”
“So?”
“He’s talking loud so we’ll notice him.”
“And again, so? He has a hot bod.”
“It looks like he thinks you do, too.”
“Well, he checked you out.” Lucy threw that in to mollify me, but it landed with a thud. I stared at the Gulf, where a pelican cruised and then abruptly dove after his unsuspecting prey.
I dove into the margarita. The lime bit my taste buds and the Cuervo went straight to my head. I sat back in the chair and twirled the plastic tumbler in circles.
“Lucy?”
“Huh?”
“Remember that morning?” She looked up at me as if she understood, and then, we were both back with Mom the day she died.
“I really don’t want to think about it,” Lucy said. “Or talk about it.”
“I know. But I think about it. A lot. Did we do right?”
“What do you mean?” Lucy said. “She was crying; almost every day she was moaning and crying.” Many times, Lucy cried, too, telling Mom she could go, but, for some reason, she wouldn’t.
Lucy looked like she was about to cry right then. Her flirtation forgotten, she stared sideways out at the water, a shiny bleached lock of hair over one eye. She took a long slug of her margarita.
I felt uncomfortable bringing the pain to the surface again. There hadn’t been a moment’s peace since Mom’s demise, and then all the confusion in moving Dad seemed to propel us both to this moment.
“It was the right thing to do,” I said, trying to elicit a response. We sat in silence then, each of us back in the doll-house, with the hospice nurse and Mom in the hospital bed.
“Of course it was. What else were we going to do?” she said. Instantly her expression switched. Lucy had a theatrical quality that changed the way she looked with every mood, a happy fanciful face that lit up and drew you to her. She was not exactly pretty, but neither was Scarlett O’Hara. Lucy could be silly and stupid, and sometimes I wanted to kick her, but she could be decisive without looking back. She surprised me with her decisiveness. This was where metal struck metal, and it never made us dull; it made us sharp. As the eldest, I had to believe that I was going in the right direction. It was expected. But it was important that Lucy and I agreed. I couldn’t tell why that was true, but it was. We finished each other’s sentences. She supported my way of thinking, even when, overtly, she didn’t, because she said things that made me stop and think until it felt right. It was one of the good things about Lucy. It was one of the good things about having her as a sister.
A day or so before Mom died, it was my turn among the siblings to sleep in our parents’ room and administer the morphine. Mom was in the hospital bed set up in the bay window. Dad was asleep in their king-size bed. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the white mound that was my mother. I set the alarm for 1:00 a.m., but I didn’t need an alarm clock. I didn’t sleep. What was the use, knowing I’d be buzzed out of it in less than an hour? The morphine only worked for a little while, and then the cancer had its way. Again.
I put the dropper filled with morphine inside her cheek and slowly squeezed. One drop at a time, so she didn’t choke. She absorbed the drug, rather than swallowing it. Almost instantly she was quiet again.
I sat back down on the edge of the bed between my parents. I gazed at my mother a few feet away, then turned to see that my dad was lying on the far side of the bed. His eyes were wide open. I thought he’d been sleeping, but he wasn’t. I couldn’t speak, and neither did he. In the faint night light, I could see the glimmer of one big tear spilling from the corner of his eye. That tear felt like a boulder smashing into me.
When would this ever end?
The night was black with another morning far off—when the birds would twitter in the holly bushes outside the window. My mother lingering in this comatose st
ate. She was there, but she wasn’t—even though the hospice nurse said Mom could hear us. I hoped she heard the twittering of birds and not the squabbling of her kids, day in and day out.
Still, I sat, propped on some pillows. Hadn’t it always been like that? Me. Propped between my parents, seeking affection and approval, laughing and disagreeing, but often, in it together. I didn’t feel together in this. I felt miserably distant, and I could see a door closing—and wondered what would open next.
My father rested with his eyes open, but not a sound or movement came from him. I touched his wrist.
Dad let out a low grumble, and I leaned forward to listen, but then he seemed to drift away. He was half asleep, his face relaxed into soft lines, eyes now closed.
“Good night, Dad. Please, sleep.…” I sang to him in a whisper: May God bless you wherever you may go.
These words he sang to us at night when we were little, after making finger puppets, and making half dollars disappear, and telling us stories about McGillicutty, who got into trouble and then got out of it, a character, I guess, who bore a striking resemblance to my father as a child. Good night, Dad.
Like Mom, Dad was different now, too. More asleep than lively, and in that aspect, he was in tune with Mom. I still couldn’t figure out how all this had happened so fast. Where did my parents go? Dad sang songs and told stories such a short time ago. He and Mom went to China only a few years ago, and last year, we were all down at Anna Maria sitting on the deck of the Sand Bar eating grouper sandwiches and drinking margaritas, enjoying the orange sunset while it snowed in Chicago.
My night watch nearing an end, I dozed, sitting upright. Sunrise was on its way, and it was time for another dose of morphine. I hated to move her, but she was getting restless. I put my arm around the back of my mother’s neck and gently bent her upright while I held the dropper ready. It was easy to do, because she was light and didn’t respond when I began the slow drip into her cheek. I hummed something, and I told her I was tired and that she looked beautiful and delicate like a silver fairy queen. But in the half dark, I shuddered and looked away from her bone-white face. The skin had pulled tight on her skull. This wasn’t my mother anymore. I couldn’t stand to see her like this, her frail, stick arms, her belly distended, and not a single response from her except for a moan. She had always laughed so much.
I finished administering the drops and laid her back on the pillow.
She began to cough and gag, her face twisting, her eyes still closed. I struggled to right her again, but she went rigid, weakening my grip on her. Finally, I managed to sit her up, patting her back, rubbing and soothing her.
Then, like a shot with no warning, a fountain of brown liquid gushed out of her mouth, and then again. My senses shattered. Horror blotted out the dim room and the white bedclothes stained with evil. Dawn crept in slowly behind me, while Mom heaved, ready to crack. She bent over and gagged. She couldn’t catch her breath. I thumped her back, wiped her mouth and chin, her gown soaked with the awful stuff. I yelled, and then I yelled again, but I couldn’t hear myself. I looked at the strange liquid pooling on the bed, the light filtering in, an eery blue, and I held on.
My father was silent, not moving at all. It was terrible that my father, the Navy officer who had commanded a ship, was so out of it he couldn’t do a thing to help. He didn’t even speak while my mother gagged and coughed and I held her, coaxing her to relax, all the while, exploding inside. She was strangling. At that moment, I hoped it would end. Mercifully. I wanted my mother to die. To just not have to do this anymore. I didn’t want to have to do this anymore. I was out of mind. Out of this world. In hell. I wanted this over with.
Now.
I didn’t know what to do, and then I heard Lucy running from the back bedroom. She grabbed the aspirator, an awful little vacuum cleaner on a stand in the corner. It looked like a torture device. I drew Mom closer. Lucy flipped a switch and held the hose firmly, shifting the small carriage that wheeled on a rickety stand. She cupped Mom’s jaw, working to pry it open.
“You’re not going to use that thing!” I said, paralyzed. The machine had a hose that resembled the long proboscis of some sort of monster. It made a horrendous noise—the only noise in the world—while it sucked rhythmically with an awesome, steady authority. It was saving a life where there was hardly any at all.
Lucy didn’t even look at me, while she took up my position next to the bed. My sister Lucy, the restaurant maven of Chicago, hanger-on of celebrities and beautiful people, who could hardly operate a blender except to make darn good eggnog, stuck the end of the hose into Mom’s mouth and sucked the fluid from her throat so that the gagging and coughing stopped. My mother’s bird-like neck relaxed, and I looked at my sister, who had never impressed me, not in all my life, more than she did that moment. We looked at Mom’s face, now smoothed over in sleep, which showed no recognition of what had happened.
We rolled her over gently and she woke up a little, without opening her eyes—she never opened her eyes again—and then she groaned when we moved her to change the gown and sheets. It was the sound I cannot forget.
“I thought I was killing her with all that morphine,” I said.
“Well, I don’t think so,” said Lucy. She’d flipped her gaze from the water back to me and held onto her second margarita, then neatly changed the subject. “Bali chicken or blackened grouper?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Listen, I want to talk about this.”
“You really know how to kill a buzz, don’t you?”
I took a gulp of the margarita to chase that buzz, and so did Lucy.
“Don’t you remember what the hospice nurse told us?” Lucy’s question was rhetorical. Of course. I remembered every word. “After you started interrogating her like she’d just arrived from Old Salem?”
“I guess. It’s one of those times I went off the chain.”
Lucy threw her head back and laughed. “You! That’s great. You’re a regular Rottweiler, and you tell me that was one of those times.” She had another good laugh, then squeezed half a lime in her drink. “The nurse told us not to let up on the morphine. She said the vomiting was part of the process. Don’t you remember that? The GD process! ”
The grouper sandwich and Mediterranean plate arrived. Our discussion had absolutely no effect on Lucy’s appetite, while I could only shove the olives around my hummus. Lucy took a huge bite of the fish. It was so easy for her to live in the moment, taking one bite at a time. It was something I would always have to work on. I hated her for about half a second.
“Oh, yes, the process,” I said. “That was good. I really did lose it when she said that.”
“Yeah, and then the poor thing tried to explain to you, that things happen.”
“No, shit happens! And the whole long insufferable insane journey into the unknown was all just that!”
“Well, you do know how to put your finger on it,” said Lucy. “If you recall—geez, you have a short memory sometimes—after that god-awful night with the choking and the aspirator and all, what did that nurse tell us?”
“That there were a lot of powerful drugs in the house, and that we should definitely not let up on the morphine.”
That was when we decided. Lucy and I stepped up the doses of morphine. We didn’t talk about it; we just did it. Every half hour. We did not let her have any pain. Not even for a second. We tried to stay ahead of it, although the nurse said we couldn’t stay ahead of it.
“It will win,” she said.
At one point, Julia appeared to say that we shouldn’t give Mom too much morphine, because she would have “an adverse reaction.”
Lucy and I ignored Julia.
At noon that June morning, greyer and colder than a November day, the hospice nurse found me sitting on a dining room chair with a shot of Jameson’s warming to my touch through the crystal tumbler. I was numb, and I wanted to be even more numb.
“It’s time,” the nurse said.
W
e all gathered around my mother’s bed. I stood at the foot, watching her. She didn’t move, and we didn’t say a word, except to pray. My father’s white, papery fingers absently stumbled over the beads of a black rosary, while he leaned over his wife. Each breath she took seemed to be her last, until finally the breathing turned ragged and coarse—and then she relaxed, gave in. If she could have said it, she would have—“Peace.” In a way she did. We felt it. It was over. Dad fell back in the chair. A shiver raced through me the instant she was gone.
I became a different person altogether then. A person without a mother. One who was expected to “grow up and get on with it, and be strong.” I could hear her say it like she was standing next to me.
The waiter appeared with two frothy, green, salted margaritas, snapping me back to the present. He wore a blue Hawaiian shirt, and his greased black hair stuck up in all directions.
“You have an admirer,” he said. He jerked his head in the direction of the bald hot-bod and plunked the drinks down in front of us. Baldie was right behind him.
“Mind if I join you?” he said. He must have thought the invitation was in the bag, because he was loaded up with a drink in one hand, and a cell phone and legal pad in the other.
“Yes, we do mind.” Lucy whipped her head around, blond curls on fire. “We’re talking about how we killed our mother.”
His mouth dropped open and he started to back away. “Wow!”
“Lucy! We did not kill our mother,” I hissed. I looked up at our visitor and smiled. “I’m sorry. We had a death in the family. My sister is upset.”
In fact, Lucy was drunk. I leaned over and peered at her. “Are you all right?” I hadn’t been able to eat or drink very much, due to my brain going around in circles. Our visitor left briskly.
“Lucy?”
“No we did not,” she said, straightening up in the chair. “We did not kill our mother. We did what she wanted, in the end. She didn’t want to go to Marilyn and Ben’s wedding that June, and she didn’t. She told me she did not want to lie around and die for weeks in a coma, and she did, and that was enough of that!”
The Last Cadillac Page 12