by Jodi Picoult
Like I was, now. Brian was not handsome, he was cute. He had edges that needed to be smoothed, and a smile that was crooked. Looking at him was not like stepping outside, unprepared, into a heat that took my breath away. It was more like being able, finally, to exhale.
“The woman came up to her and said, Forgive me…?”
I blinked. Forgive me.
Suddenly I was not in a little Italian restaurant; I was not holding the stem of a wineglass. I was in a place where the atmosphere had a pulse, where there were stars I could not see in Boston.
I was with someone else.
But Brian, of course, knew none of this.
“The woman asked my grandmother if she had been in Pionki. My grandma said yes, but she didn’t recognize the woman.”
“It was Tobie!” I said, shaking myself back into the conversation.
“Yeah. But she wasn’t five anymore, obviously.” Brian smiled at me. “They’ve stayed in touch all this time. She visited my grandmother about a week before you came to the hospice.”
I took a long drink of my wine and focused on Brian. “So you noticed when I showed up.”
“September fourth, just after ten A.M.,” Brian said. “Which sounds way creepier out loud than it did in my head.”
I wondered what it would be like starting over in Boston, after Egypt. I wondered if Brian’s grandmother had woken up for years after her liberation, panicked and bitter as memories of her prewar life grew harder and harder to recall.
When Alzheimer’s came at the end, was it actually a blessing?
Suddenly I wanted to cram my brain with details that had nothing to do with the Book of Two Ways or what Wyatt Armstrong looked like when he was asleep, and a dream was chasing him.
“What’s your middle name?” I demanded.
“Rhett.” Brian laughed. “My grandmother didn’t just love Gone with the Wind. She got my mom to love it, too.”
“Look at the bright side,” I said. “You might have been Ashley.”
Brian grinned. “Brussels sprouts. Yay or nay?”
“Yay,” I told him. “But God save me from celery.”
“Who doesn’t like celery?”
“It’s what sad people eat. It has no taste and it’s hard labor for your jaw,” I insisted. “First pet?”
“Komodo dragon,” Brian said.
“Why am I not surprised?”
“In a world full of elementary school kids with hamsters, I was an original.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking hard. “Theme song you know by heart?”
“M*A*S*H*,” I replied. “Used to watch reruns with my mom. How about you?”
“The Facts of Life,” Brian said. “Don’t judge me.”
We kept this up through the main course, a shared tiramisu, and a second bottle of wine. I learned that he could tie a cherry stem into a knot with his tongue. I told him I could whistle through my thumbs. By that time, the room was soft at the edges, and we were the only diners left.
“When was the last time you sang?” I challenged.
He ducked his head, smiling a little. “To my grandmother. She’s the only person who thinks I’m a decent baritone.” Brian drained his wineglass. “Okay, what’s your best cocktail party random fact?”
“When the mummy of Ramesses II was sent to France in the 1970s, he got his own passport, and the occupation was listed as King/Deceased.”
Brian burst out laughing. “That is so, so good.”
The waiter appeared with the check. I couldn’t imagine how expensive it was; I never ordered bottles of wine, only glasses. But I reached for the little leather folder anyway, only to be stopped by Brian, who grasped my wrist. “Please. My treat,” he insisted, but he didn’t let go, and his fingers tangled with mine.
I nodded, accepting his offer. “Well, don’t leave me hanging,” I said. “What’s your fact?”
Brian stroked his thumb over the back of my knuckles, watching, as if he were certain I would vanish beneath his touch. “M&M’s stands for Mars and Murrie,” he said quietly. “My grandfather Carl’s pension came from Mars, and as a kid, I used to think that was amazing—that he got checks from outer space.” He took a fan of twenties out of his wallet and set it on top of the bill. “If you could go anywhere when you blink your eyes,” he asked, “where would you be?”
“Egypt.” The answer came as easily as my next heartbeat. “How about you?”
“Wherever you went, when you blinked,” Brian said.
I felt as if I had been transformed. When was the last time I had smiled, laughed, had a normal conversation? Waiting for my mother’s death was like a slow suffocation; I had been holding my breath for weeks. In this moment with Brian, I could escape. I wasn’t a girl whose mother was dying. I wasn’t a grad student whose future had been upended. I hadn’t left a relationship halfway across the globe.
I was just someone who needed to forget the real world for a little while.
In retrospect, I was probably not being fair to Wyatt or to Brian. I was not thinking clearly. In fact, I was actively trying not to think.
We went back to the house he shared with his grandmother, who of course was not there. His room was painted in shades of gray and his sheets were charcoal. Then we were facing each other, naked, tangled at the ankles. His palms bracketed me, and I thought of his physicist’s ket, the quantum state of how a thing is. “I’ve never done this before,” Brian confessed. “Does that matter to you?”
“I have,” I told him. “Does that matter to you?”
He smiled his sideways smile, then. “Well, one of us should know how to steer this thing,” he said, and he rose over me. His hair, like the feathers of a raven, fell onto my forehead as he kissed me.
When he arched like a bow I wrapped my arms and legs around him, as if he could carry me with him as he fell. It was too fast for me, though, and so I held on. I held him.
“Worth the wait?” I whispered.
He blushed all over his body. “No physicist worth a damn would run an experiment once and give his conclusions.”
I smiled. “Tell me more about this scientific method.”
“Lectures are overrated. I’m more of a hands-on researcher.”
I remember that night. His touch was so different that where it should have felt awkward, it was a revelation. When I should have cried, I cried out. Brian traced my body, mapping me as if I were a new constellation, and his destination depended on navigating by it. That giddy thrill of falling, I realized, was rivaled by the discovery of a soft place to land.
I knew Brian would say quantum mechanics didn’t support it, but I had jumped timelines.
I fell asleep with him curled around me, and dreamed of my mother and the tide pool exhibit she manned at the Boston aquarium. Hermit crabs, she used to say, are too soft to survive on their own. To protect themselves, they find a shell that fits. They’ll tuck themselves inside, for protection. They’ll carry it with them, wherever they go.
* * *
—
THE FIRST NIGHT Brian and I made love, I woke up in the middle of the night, slipped out of his bed, and wandered through the little house. I opened the medicine cabinets and read the pill bottles. I scanned the contents of the refrigerator. I picked up every photograph I could find, learning Brian’s history by seeing him in a T-ball uniform, in a prom photo, at graduation. I touched tiny knickknacks on shelves: glass fashioned into the shape of an acorn, a brass mortar and pestle, bookends made of a stone that glittered as if it were weeping.
I looked at the books, too.
There was a full set of Hardy Boys mysteries and Isaac Asimov novels. War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Poems in their original Polish by Szymborska and Miłosz.
There was one book bound in tattered green cloth, a worn collection of Polish fairy tales. The spine fell open to a h
orrific pen-and-ink drawing of Jędza, skeletal, clawed, living in a house made of the bones of children she had eaten. She stole babies from their mothers, put them in cages, planted them till they grew plump, devoured them. I read the story of a young boy who was told to lie down on a pan, so that she could roast him. He told her that he didn’t know how, and when she showed him by doing it herself, he stuffed the pan into the oven and ran away.
I thought of Brian’s grandmother, reading him these stories after his parents had died. Of her liberation from Bergen-Belsen, when she was too weak to stand for the American soldiers who came to her rescue. I imagined her in the shoe department at Saks, as timelines crossed.
I thought of my mother, lying so still that when I walked into her room at hospice, I had to rest my cheek on her chest to see if she was still breathing.
Then I went back to Brian’s bed and folded myself back into his arms before he even realized I’d ever gone.
In every fairy tale, the only way out is to keep running forward. To never look back.
* * *
—
BRIAN CATCHES UP to me as I turn the corner of Harvard Square where a long escalator leads underground to the T, like a passage to hell. He catches my arm, spinning me around. We are suspended in time at the point of JFK Street and Brattle, in front of the Curious George store, where I used to take Meret when she was little. I stubbornly refuse to look at Brian, staring instead at an enlarged cartoon image of the little monkey and the man in the yellow hat. “What was his name?” I say.
This throws Brian off. “What? Whose name?”
“The man in the yellow hat. Who writes an entire children’s series and never names the main character?”
He shakes his head, as if that can clear the space between us. “Why did you come to my lecture?”
I force myself to meet his eyes. “You ought to be asking why I left.”
The tips of his ears pinken. “Dawn. She was there because it’s her job. She’s a postdoc, working under me.”
“That seems to be exactly what she’s hoping for,” I say. To my surprise, I feel tears sliding down my cheeks. “She talks to you like you’re the only two people here who speak the same language.”
Brian seems nonplussed. “She told me I was about to be late for an appointment. That’s not a state secret.”
“It’s not what she said. It’s how she said it.” Like the verbal equivalent of straightening his tie before he took the stage, or wiping a crumb away from his lips. Like she had the right to lay claim to him.
He lets go of me, as if he has only just realized that we are standing in the middle of a crowded public place. “Can I ask you something?” Brian says. “If I had slept with Gita…would you be treating me even worse than this?”
When I was an undergrad at U Chicago, I’d gone out once with a guy to a movie. Afterward, we went to a bar, and then he invited me back to his dorm room. We lay on his twin XL bed, kissing, his hand sliding under my shirt. When it started to move lower, I sat up and said I was heading home.
He was at the door before I could open it, holding it closed and trapping me against it. He smiled, as charming as he had been the whole night. You don’t really mean that, do you?
I don’t know what it was that made my amygdala kick into high gear, seeing this as a threat, instead of a lazy invitation. But I was painfully aware of how much bigger than me he was, how much stronger, how I was caged by the brace of his arms.
I kicked him in the balls and I ran and I never spoke to him again.
I have not thought about this incident in over twenty years, but even now, I could tell you the color of the sweater he was wearing, what I had for dinner that night, his name. I could not tell you the movie we saw, or the name of his dorm building, but that fuzzing of the edges of the memory does not make the incident any less real. And yet, when it happened, I stayed silent. My friends didn’t know. I didn’t go to the administration or tell my mother. I was one of the lucky ones, after all. It could have been so much worse.
I gaslit myself.
Now, it is all I can do to force the words through my jaw. “You act like nothing happened,” I say to Brian. “But something did. You made a choice to hire her. You made a choice to go to her apartment. You could have been with us that night. You should have been. I can’t unthink that.”
I leave him in front of a mural of Curious George holding the hand of the Man in the Yellow Hat. Stockholm syndrome, I think. How else could you be stolen from your natural home, and still call a kidnapper your best friend?
* * *
—
THERE WAS A three-week period where my mother faded away more and more each day, until there were times when I swore I could only see her outline against the sheets of her bed. It was during that three-week period, too, that the hospice social worker helped me to sort through my mother’s financial statements.
During those three weeks, the spring semester started again at Yale. I received official word that I could take a medical leave of absence for the term. And I learned that we were in debt.
It wasn’t just my education—although that was a large part of it. It was the mortgage on our house and credit card bills and the car we’d had since I was in high school.
I also learned that my parents, who certainly acted like they were married, never actually were. I had no idea why not, and my mother at that point was too unresponsive to tell me. What it meant, though, was that any military benefits we might have received after my father died while serving did not go to us.
I was almost twenty-five years old, I was $150,000 in debt, I was about to become the guardian of a thirteen-year-old, and I couldn’t afford a funeral for my mother.
When someone is about to die, they spend more time elsewhere than in the sickroom—lost in memory, processing the tapestry of their lives, or unconscious and dreaming. I spent as many hours as I could sitting next to my mother. I told myself that even if she wasn’t conscious, she knew I was there. What I really meant, though, was that when I looked back on those last few weeks, I would know that I had been there.
Egypt, at that point, seemed so foreign and far away I could barely envision it. There was here and there was now and even those moments were a senseless blur.
I did not see Brian very often. He never intruded on my privacy. But when I came out of my mother’s room to get a cup of coffee, he was in the kitchen with a snack for me because I had forgotten to eat. When I needed to cry, he was there to hold me. When I left to go home to Kieran, he walked me to the car.
My mother died on a Tuesday. One moment, the world was a place where I had a parent, and the next, it wasn’t. I remember feeling like something elemental was wrong, like I’d woken up and found the sky green and the grass blue, and was expected to pretend this was normal. She was cremated, and Kieran and I took a boat out to the Isles of Shoals. We scattered her ashes on the sea, and I like to think the tide swam her back to Ireland.
I began to settle my new life around me like a costume. I put the house on the market and circled rentals that would allow Kieran to stay in the same school district. I baked oatmeal cookies and took them to the staff at the hospice as a thank-you. When the director floated the idea of having me work there, I burst into tears in her office.
Then I asked her about Brian’s grandmother, how she was. How he was. “She died two weeks before your mom,” the director said, surprised. “I thought you knew.”
I shook my head, thinking of all the times that I had run into Brian in the kitchen, in the halls; the way I had slipped out of my mother’s room craving a moment with him, where I could breathe again. How every time I needed someone, he was there. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He’s been at the hospice this whole time.”
The director raised her brows. “For you,” she said.
* * *
—
IT IS VIRTUALLY impossible to put a price on a good death. Right now, death doulas are for people who can afford them, because Medicare doesn’t have the good sense to cover our services the way they cover hospice care. That means I set my own rates—and they vary. It’s hard to figure out whether to charge a flat fee or an hourly rate. If I charge a flat fee for an Alzheimer’s patient who is ninety-four and whose sleeping and breathing habits have been changing, she may live for another two weeks…or she may live for another two years. If I charge $1800 and spend two years with her, it’s not cost effective for me as a business model. But if she dies in two weeks, it’s a reasonable income. I try to base my fee on the illness, the prognosis, and some gut sense of how much the client will need me at the end of life—but the truth is, I win some and I lose some.
I know it feels crass to talk about death in such mercenary terms, but that’s the very problem with death in the first place. We don’t know how to talk about it. We use euphemisms and discuss pearly gates and angels while glossing over the fact that we have to die to get there. We treat it like a mystery, when in fact, it’s the one experience all of us are guaranteed to share.
I’m also painfully aware that having someone with you when you die should not be a privilege but a right. This is heart-centered work, and you don’t go into it to become rich. I would do this work for free. I have done this work for free. I’ve bartered services. I took care of a nail stylist’s mother and received manicures for a year. I got a side of beef from a farmer whose wife died of ALS. I have the luxury of doing this work because in spite of the fact that I run a business, I still have Brian’s professor’s salary to support us.
At my second visit with Win and Felix, they have iced tea sweating in glasses and small almond cakes. I hope they did not go to this trouble for me; I am supposed to make their lives easier, not more cluttered with things to do.
I’ve decided to take her on as a client, if she is similarly inclined to work with me. I keep telling myself it fits into my schedule well—I have several long-range clients with illnesses that will keep them alive for years, rather than weeks—but I know that there is more to it than this. There is something about Win that I cannot tear my eyes from. There but for the grace of God, and all that.