Death Benefits

by Sarah N. Harvey

  “You don’t need to ride,” she says. “Lars is coming for you. Just be ready, okay? And can you bring me a toothbrush and maybe some sweats? I’m going to stay here tonight.”

  “Sure, Mom,” I say.

  “You’re a good boy,” she says.

  “See you soon, Mom.” I hang up and grab a black garbage bag from the kitchen. By the time Lars arrives, I’m standing outside, ready to go. No dirt bike today, no Beowulf.

  I’m grateful he doesn’t try to chitchat on the ride to the hospital, apart from saying that he’s available to do whatever we need.

  All he says is, “Your mom is a great lady. This is very hard for her.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” I say. He doesn’t take it any further. The last thing I want to think about is my mom’s love life. I call Dani and leave her a message telling her what’s happened and that I’ll call her later. I’m kind of glad she doesn’t answer. I don’t think I can deal with anyone but Mom right now.

  Lars drops me off at the front doors, and I run up the stairs to Arthur’s room, the garbage bag bumping against my legs. I don’t want to be stuck with strangers in the elevator. When I get to his room, Mom is waiting outside in the hallway.

  “The nurses are turning him,” she says.

  “Turning him?”

  “He’s paralyzed, Rolly.” She starts to cry, and I put my arms around her. It’s strange, being the one to comfort her.

  “But he was paralyzed before,” I say into her hair. She shakes her head and mumbles into my shoulder.

  “This is much worse. He can’t swallow. He can’t speak. He doesn’t know who I am.”

  I think about what that means for a minute. He probably won’t know me either. “So they’ll put him on an iv, right? To feed him.”

  She nods.

  “He’s tough, Mom. You always say that.”

  “I know, Rolly, I know. But this…this is different.”

  She pulls away from me and wipes her face on her sleeve. “I need to call his lawyer, find out if he had a living will. I should have done it before, but he was doing so well.”

  “A living will?”

  “It’s a legal document that says what kind of medical treatment you want if you can’t express your wishes verbally. Which he can’t. I haven’t been able to find one at his house. Can you sit with him while I make a few calls?”

  “Sure.” The nurse comes out of the room and tells us it’s okay to go in.

  “He’s sleeping,” she says. “Poor old fellow. Call me if you need anything.”

  Mom leaves to make her calls, and I go into the room. Arthur is lying on his back, with the blankets drawn up to his chin. His body looks small, almost childlike, under the covers. His mouth is drawn down on one side in what looks like a snarl. I know it isn’t. Tears form in my eyes as I lower myself into the chair by his bed and stroke his arm.

  “Hey, Arthur. It’s me, Rolly. I’m staying here until Mom comes back. I brought you something.”

  I pull Mom’s portable CD player from the garbage bag and set it up on the night table. I’ve brought about twenty CDS with me—mostly classical, mostly Arthur. I put one on—Brahms’ Double Concerto in A Minor, with Arthur on the cello, Itzhak Perlman on the violin and the Berlin Philharmonic—and sit back as the music fills the room. I’ve never heard it before, so I read the liner notes and find out that it was Brahms’ final work for orchestra and that it was a form of musical reconciliation between Brahms and Joseph Joachim, the violinist he wrote it for. Joachim’s motto, which inspired Brahms to write the concerto in F-A-E, was frei aber einsam—free but lonely. Sort of says it all. About Arthur anyway. About me too, until a few months ago.

  I pull the laptop off the bedside table. Someone has closed it, but it’s still plugged in. I open it and the last page of my transcription fills the screen. At the bottom of the page is something I didn’t write.

  Royce, I know there will be another stroke. I want to die. Please kill me. Arthur.

  My hands tremble as I read the words again, remembering what he said after the first stroke: Kill me. I was kidding myself, thinking it might have been an accusation. Now that I have it in black and white, there’s no room for discussion, no ambiguity. He wants me to end it. Snuff him out. Turn out the lights. I delete the words on the screen and click on Empty Trash. The words disappear, but they are etched in my brain. Please kill me. At least he asked nicely.

  I’m totally confused. And angry. I didn’t sign on for this. How can he be so selfish? What he’s asking me to do is every kind of wrong. Isn’t it? I’m only sixteen, for god’s sake. My life would be over too if I got caught snuffing him out. But what kind of life is he going to have now? I look at him—paralyzed, mute, catheterized—and I know the answer: no life at all. Maybe he doesn’t mean that he wants me, personally, to kill him. Maybe this is just his version of a living will. Maybe I shouldn’t have erased it.

  The rage subsides and is replaced by a tsunami of sadness. I look at the shriveled figure on the bed and it hits me: Arthur—grumpy, brilliant, infuriating, smelly Arthur—is never coming back. He needs me to do one last thing for him. I can almost hear him say, “Just do it, you pussy,” like a demented Nike ad. I take a deep breath. The music flows over me as I pick up a pillow and place it over his face. I hold it there—one second, two, three, four, five. My hands start to shake and when a muffled moan leaks through the pillow, I jump back and fling the pillow across the room.

  When Mom comes into the room, she finds me sitting by the window, head back and eyes closed. I have spent the last ten minutes breathing deeply and evenly, trying to calm my racing heart. I have managed to stop crying, but I can’t believe she won’t notice something different about me. I have, after all, just tried to murder her father. Surely it shows.

  I lift my head and slowly open my eyes.

  “Did you talk to the lawyer?” I ask.

  She nods and sighs. I can tell by the look on her face that it hasn’t gone well.

  “No living will,” I state. Except the one I erased.

  She shakes her head. “His lawyer tried to get him to do one a while ago, but he refused. Said he trusted me to do the right thing when the time came. We’ll have to decide what to do. You and me and Marta. When the time comes.”

  I nod. I can’t speak. I know I should say, “He wants to die, Mom,” but I can’t. There’s no proof anymore. I just deleted it. Put it in the tiny trash can because it freaked me out. I tried to do what he wanted. I failed. I don’t want Mom to think badly of him. Or me. I thought he had the right to die. And I still couldn’t pull the trigger. Did that make me a coward or a saint?

  “We don’t have to decide anything today,” she adds.

  “Okay,” I say.

  The final notes of the Brahms die away. A tiny sigh comes from the form on the bed.

  Fourteen

  Arthur improves, but at a glacial rate. Mom has to take him off the list for the nursing home she found because he needs way more care than they can provide. I go with her when she visits other potential facilities. Some places are downright disgusting—you wouldn’t send a dog you hated there—some are like prisons, with locked wards for the Alzheimer patients. Some have lobbies like luxury hotels, but the residents’ wards are pretty much the same everywhere. Carpeted or not, potpourri notwithstanding, ugly art aside, the smell is overpowering—part industrial-strength cleanser, part bodily fluids, part overcooked vegetables. In some places the inmates are dressed and tooling around with expensive walkers, playing bridge, singing “Wait ’Till the Sun Shines Nellie,” doing chair yoga. In other places, the corridors are lined with people slumped in wheelchairs, staring into space, catheter bags filling up, stained hospital gowns gaping to reveal veined legs and swollen ankles. There are far more women than men. At one place, the director of care, a woman in a designer suit, refers to the facility as “the Cadillac of care facilities.” For some reason, this strikes Mom and me as hysterically funny and we both burst
out laughing. The woman frowns as Mom stands and picks up her purse.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom says between snorts. “A Cadillac? That just wouldn’t suit my father. Maybe a BMW or a Mercedes, but a Cadillac? I think not. So nouveau riche.” This sends us both into another fit of giggles. We shake hands with the bewildered director and run out to the truck, where I pound the dashboard and Mom bangs her head on the steering wheel. I haven’t laughed so hard since my friend Doug shot Coke out his nose at my tenth birthday party.

  Eventually we find a place that will take Arthur as soon as they have room. Translation: as soon as one of the residents dies. In the meantime, Arthur continues his daily routine: speech therapy, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, meds, diaper changes, sponge baths, iv feeding. When I visit, he’s often asleep. If he’s awake, he looks right through me, even when I talk to him. Mom thinks there was a moment when he tried to say her name, but even with Lars’s help, his speech is indecipherable. When he does try to speak, he usually gets so frustrated that he gives up and sulks. Every time I see him, I relive those few seconds when I held the pillow over his face. If I’d had the guts, he wouldn’t be suffering. Sorry, Arthur, you picked the wrong guy.

  School is starting soon, and I won’t be able to visit very often. Dani is excited about going back to school; me, not so much. I still don’t know very many people. She’s introduced me to a few of her friends. The guys seem pretty cool; they even invited me to go off-road biking with them and offered to lend me a mountain bike. It’s all so…normal.

  I feel like a fraud hanging out with them.

  I don’t see Dani as much as I would like, although she seems okay with it. She’s not clingy, that’s for sure. She’s warned me that she gets pretty busy in the fall— not a promising sign—but she hasn’t shut me down either. Glass half full, right? Sometimes she comes out to the hospital with me to visit Arthur, whom she entertains with anecdotes about her catering job, her little sister Lisa, her dog Yoda. Once in a while, the non-paralyzed side of his face creases into what might be a smile, but for the most part he looks like he’s made of granite. Granite that can cry. The nurses tell me he’s not really crying, it’s just that when his eyes water, he can’t blink the tears away. He looks pretty sad to me.

  I keep playing music for him, since I run out of things to say pretty quickly. My stories seem boring compared to Dani’s: I don’t have a little sister or a dog or even an amusing goldfish. So I alternate between my CDS, my mom’s and his: The Killers, Yehudi Menuhin, Metallica, Glenn Gould, James Taylor. I even find an old three-CD set called The Best from Broadway Musicals. The first CD, which is all Andrew Lloyd Webber, stays in the case. That’s one thing Arthur and I agree on: Andrew Lloyd Webber is the anti-Christ. The Phantom of the Opera sucks ass. The second CD is all Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, the third is Irving Berlin. When I was little, Mom used to play me to sleep with show tunes, so I know all the words to “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “Shall We Dance.” It’s not something I usually tell people. I’m less familiar with the Berlin songs, but I can still hum along and, it turns out, so can Arthur. At first I think there’s something wrong with the CD, but then I realize that the strange scratchy noise is coming from the bed. Arthur is humming along to “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” from Annie Get Your Gun. He’s not getting every note, and he sounds like he has a mouthful of mashed potatoes, but his pitch isn’t half bad. When the song comes to an end, I push the Pause button and give him a standing ovation.

  “Nice work, Arthur,” I say. “Good song choice. Could be your theme song.”

  Of course he doesn’t reply. I press Play, and he hums along to “Hello, Young Lovers.” I rummage through the bag of CDS and find an old CD of my mom’s, a greatest hits package from the thirties and forties: “Inka-Dinka-Doo,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “Indian Love Call.” He knows them all. I switch to Mozart, and the humming stops. Back to Ella Fitzgerald crooning, “Lover Come Back to Me,” and he’s at it again. Chopin is greeted with silence. I only stop when the nurse comes in to check his diaper and to see if he has bed sores. They always ask me to leave, which is fine by me.

  I run into Lars on my way out. When I ask him how he thinks Arthur is, he replies very slowly and deliberately, as if he has trouble forming words. I wonder if he has had speech therapy himself for some long-ago injury. Then I remember Mom saying that English is Lars’s second language. He also speaks German and French, apparently. So European.

  “I think he is getting better,” Lars says. “But you have to be patient. It is a long process.”

  “Did you know he can hum?” I ask.

  “Hum?” Lars sounds as if he doesn’t know what humming is.

  “Yeah, you know.” I hum a bit of “Happy Birthday.” “He hums.”

  “When?”

  “Like, just now.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve been playing music for him every day. When he hears show tunes, he hums along. He’s got perfect pitch.”

  “This is amazing.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. I thought it was too soon.”

  “Too soon?”

  “For MIT. Melodic Intonation Therapy. It is a way of helping stroke patients with speech recovery. I just took a workshop. I was hoping to use some of the techniques with Arthur, but you are way ahead of me.” The more excited Lars gets, the stronger his accent gets and the faster he talks. I wonder if he reverts to Danish when he’s really juiced. Like when he has sex. I yank my mind like it’s a dog on a choke chain and get it back on track.

  “So it’s a good thing?” I ask.

  “Definitely. Simply put, it means his right brain is assisting his damaged left brain.”

  “But it’s just humming, not words.”

  “It is not just humming; it is evidence. Evidence that things are going on in his brain. Positive things. Words may be next. Listen closely.” Lars’s beeper goes off, and he glances down at it and says something rude to it in Danish. At least it sounds like Danish and it sounds rude. It could be Norwegian, for all I know.

  “I have to go,” he says. “We will talk again, yah?”

  “I guess. But what should I do?” I ask as he jogs off down the hall.

  “Keep playing the music.”

  “That’s it?”

  “For now,” he calls over his shoulder.

  I go back to school after Labor Day, and it’s surprisingly okay. My teachers seem nice enough, and a couple of Dani’s guy friends are in my classes. She’s got a lot of guy friends. We hardly ever see each other at school, except in math class and wood shop. Yeah, Dani’s taking shop, which lots of girls do, just like lots of guys take cooking. And yes, she’s better at it than me. I make my mom a spice rack; Dani makes an inlaid coffee table. She’s been taking shop for a few years, and her dad is a cabinetmaker, so I don’t feel too bad. She’s looks pretty cute in her goggles, handling the band saw like a pro. But I’m better at math, so we help each other out. On the weekends she has music lessons and dance classes and all kinds of rehearsals, so there’s not much time for a relationship, even if she wanted one, which she doesn’t seem to.

  I don’t see Arthur as often as I did before school started, and I feel guilty about that. Guilt is my new go-to emotion. When I do go, he’s often asleep, and if he’s awake, he can’t speak. He’s still on the iv, but he’s wasting away: he looks like a concentration camp survivor. His eyes follow me as I move around the room, and all I see in them is accusation. I fail him every time I visit. I know that. But I can’t do what he asked me to do. Not now. Not after the humming. So I sit with him and listen to music and look at his photo albums while he hums and glares.

  In my favorite picture, which is in the album marked 1937–40, he’s sitting astride his fire-engine-red Indian Chief motorcycle, wearing gauntlet-style gloves, knee-high black boots, and a brown leather bomber jacket. Around his neck is a white scarf. A pair of goggles is pushed up onto his hea
d. He is smiling—no, he is laughing—his head tipped slightly back, his mouth open. Whoever took the picture must have been laughing too, since the picture is slightly out of focus. I look over at the figure on the bed and then back at the man in the picture. How does this happen? Where has the laughing Arthur gone? Is he locked away inside the frail, twisted body, or has he long since shriveled up and blown away like a leaf in winter? If he’s still in there, will he ever reappear? If he’s not there, why are we keeping him alive? Is there any way of knowing? The doctors and nurses and therapists write up reports and discuss his care with Mom, who takes even the smallest bit of progress as a sign that he might yet come back to us. We never discuss whether we’re doing the right thing. In the absence of a living will, Mom (and Marta, I suppose) have adopted a “one day at a time” approach, which avoids the whole issue. In other words, they are doing nothing. I, too, have decided to do nothing, but for different reasons. Simply put, as Lars would say, I am a coward.

  I close the album and put it back in the box. Louis Armstrong is singing, or rather growling, that it’s a wonderful world, which strikes me as kind of funny in a morbid sort of way, given the circumstances. Arthur is humming, and then suddenly he is singing. Three words. “Skies of blue.” I’m sure of it.

  I get up and sit next to him so I can hear him better. His breath reeks, and they haven’t shaved him today. I should bring in his electric razor or call Kim and get her to come by and tidy him up. The thought of Kim in this sterile room is disconcerting; it would be like seeing an orchid growing out of a snowbank. Arthur opens his eyes and hums some more. I wait for him to sing another word—tree of greens or red roses too or clouds of white. I even sing along to encourage him. His bad hand, the paralyzed one, twitches, grazing my thigh. I jump up as if he’s pinched me. I feel like I’ve witnessed a miracle, like the face of Jesus in a bowl of Cheerios. I should run and tell somebody, but I don’t want the room to fill up with people. I don’t want to have to move aside so that Arthur can be poked and prodded. I just want to sit here and listen to him hum.