Elizabeth was singing to her children, making promises about laying herself down, and Piper thought, Of course you would. Don’t you think they know that? But tangled up with this thought in Piper’s head was another thought: Emma, worrying about whether her mother would fall forward or backward when she died. A sob caught in Piper’s throat.
“I know. That song. It’s rough, isn’t it?”
Piper opened her eyes. Tom stood there in his coat and gloves, concern in his eyes. Ever since Elizabeth had stopped treatment, Tom had changed, thank God. Or changed back. He’d dropped the walking-wounded routine and that awful hangdog helplessness. He’d even gained a little weight. “And a good thing, too,” Piper had told him one morning, giving him a poke to the sternum, “or eventually, I would have had to beat the crap out of you.” They’d laughed, even though they’d both understood that she wasn’t really joking.
“Yeah,” Piper agreed, but she straightened and swiped a forefinger under each eye in a businesslike manner. “Sorry.”
“For what?” asked Tom, quietly. “What could you possibly be apologizing for?” Months ago, Piper had made him agree to stop telling her “Thank you,” and he’d stuck to it. But there were still plenty of times, like right then, when Tom was thinking the words so hard in her direction that he might as well have been shouting them, so she turned abruptly and peeked around the corner at Elizabeth and the kids.
“Looks like they’re finished,” whispered Piper, and she and Tom had walked into the room. But Piper had been wrong. They weren’t finished, not quite.
The children lay pressed against either side of Elizabeth. Her eyes were closed and her face looked not just tired, but extinguished, as it did every night after lullaby time. The ritual exhausted her so much that Piper half wished she’d give it up, just let it go, but she understood why Elizabeth had hung on to it for so long. No matter where Piper was—an airplane, a grocery store—she didn’t even have to close her eyes to conjure up the feeling, a full five-senses memory, of her children in impossibly soft pajamas, fragrant and damp from the bath, radiating heat, their little chugging breaths growing slower and slower the closer they got to sleep.
Emma wasn’t asleep. When Tom and Piper got to the bed, she uncurled herself from around Elizabeth and sat up, her shoulders high and tense, locks of still-damp hair sticking to her cheek. Like blades of grass, thought Piper, smoothing the hair away with her hand. It was an absent, loving gesture, the kind any mother would make, and as she had many times over the months, Piper felt a pang of self-consciousness, touching Elizabeth’s child as though she were Piper’s own, even though Piper and Elizabeth had touched each other’s children this way always, from the very first day of each child’s life.
“What’s up, Em?” asked Tom, smiling at her.
“It’s two weeks until Christmas,” Emma said. Her eyes were round and frightened, and as Piper watched, Emma shivered hard, her arms suddenly covered with goose bumps. Piper felt a rush of compassion. She recognized panic when she saw it. Panic was coursing through this child like electricity.
“That’s right,” said Tom, gently, “it’ll be here before you know it.”
Emma shook her head, adamantly. “No! It’s too long.” She looked at Elizabeth’s face, then looked back, shifting her gaze between Piper and Tom. “I want…I want…” She broke off, but Piper knew what she wanted. Not eternity, not even a year. Two weeks. It was such a small thing for a five-year-old to want, so reasonable and limited. The smallness of Emma’s wish made Piper want to cry.
Piper had looked at Tom, then; their eyes had met and held, and there it was: a resolution, a pact like the ones people seal with blood. Elizabeth was slipping away so quickly—sleeping a lot, knocked out by painkillers or simple exhaustion, not eating much, rarely asking to get out of bed—but she would spend one last Christmas with her family, whatever it took. Tom and Piper would see to it. They would will it. Come hell or high water, thought Piper, furiously. Bring it on.
Tom had reached over and lifted Emma into his arms.
“No, it’s not, Em-girl. It’s not too long.” He was talking to his daughter, but looking at Piper, and Piper nodded.
Seinfeld reruns. Mango sorbet. Carole King’s Really Rosie. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” Hugh Grant. Dim lights. Bright lights. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” The J. Crew catalog. Curtains open. Curtains halfway open. Curtains closed. Chicken broth. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Bananas. Pink roses. Tom in his brown suede jacket. Emma singing “Jingle Bells.” A cashmere wrap. Candy canes. The smell of frying bacon. The smell of baking sugar cookies. SpongeBob SquarePants. Cornelia’s pumpkin bread. Kate’s homemade applesauce. Law & Order reruns. Piper reading Little Women aloud. Astrid reading Emma aloud. Tom doing the crossword puzzle aloud. Evergreen-scented candles. Peppermint tea. Peter in his earflap hat.
Whatever made her smile, seem about to smile, laugh, seem about to laugh, lift her eyebrows, stop crying, sit up, wake up fully, fall asleep quietly, take an interest, tell a story, make a joke, put on lipstick, forget to be angry, feel like talking, feel like eating, feel like drinking, feel like getting out of bed. Piper and Tom would do all of these things, would give her every one over and over. Whatever satisfied her. Whatever made her ask for more.
This was their logic: if it worked once—Piper putting the cashmere wrap around her shoulders, Elizabeth rubbing the softness against her cheek, smiling and saying, “Heaven!”—it could work again. Or: if these things worked individually, they would work even better in combination. Cookies baking in the kitchen, SpongeBob on the television, a mug of peppermint tea steaming on the table beside her. Piper reading Little Women, Moonlight Sonata in the background, an evergreen-scented candle burning on the windowsill.
It sounded logical. It was logical. Piper told herself this, and she defied, dared anyone to argue. The hitch was that it wasn’t really true, and, in her deepest places, Piper knew it. In her deepest places, Piper knew that like countless desperate people before her, she—she and Tom together—had begun to practice witchcraft. Piper remembered having done this as a child: if I wear the yellow shirt, it won’t rain on Field Day; if I sleep with my stuffed cat on my left and my teddy bear on my right, I won’t have bad dreams; if I set the table silverware first, plates second, my mother will act like a normal mother. If we watch for what makes Elizabeth feel alive, if we keep careful track, miss nothing, and give her these things again and again, she will not die.
Piper knew that the trick was to stay focused, to never let the goal of keeping Elizabeth alive until Christmas slip—even for an hour—from the forefront of her concentration. To accomplish this, Piper had systematically pulled the distractions from her life like weeds from a garden: volunteer activities, lunches with the girls, playdates, dinners, shopping, and because it was the season for them, holiday parties.
She and Kyle had fought about the parties. Actually, they would have fought about the parties, would have had six separate fights, no doubt, if Kyle had known about all the invitations Piper had declined, but since Piper was careful to dispose of the invitations quickly and quietly, they fought about one party: Kate’s, an annual black-tie, champagne-flooded, no-holds-barred sit-down dinner that felt as close to the kind of party Truman Capote might have attended in his heyday as any party in a fairly distant suburb of a fairly small city anywhere in the country could feel.
Kyle had found the RSVP card with the regrets box checked before Piper had gotten a chance to tuck a personal note into the tiny, engraved, silver-bell-embossed envelope and send it winging its elegant way back to Kate, who might not have been the brightest bulb in the marquee, but who would’ve understood perfectly and instantly why Piper and Kyle could not make it to her Christmas party this particular year.
But Kyle had gotten to the RSVP card first. He’d dropped it dramatically onto Piper’s empty plate one morning, while she was waiting for her toast to pop up (somehow, without meanin
g to, Piper had begun to eat carbohydrates again), and he’d launched into the most infuriating kind of tirade regarding what he perceived as Piper’s skewed priorities and twisted sense of obligation. The tirade was delivered in measured, quiet tones, but it was a tirade nonetheless, and what made it worse was the way Kyle tried to disguise it, to coat his anger with a fuzzy, blurring concern—like that awful dandelion-fuzz mold that Piper kept finding on food in her refrigerator lately—concern for Piper’s well-being that was so utterly phony it made her want to throw the toaster at him.
She tried to block a lot of what he said, but some of it got through, and Piper’s mind seethed with comebacks.
“Kate’s a terrific person and your best friend.” (With regularity, you call Kate “the brain-dead boob job.” Elizabeth is my best friend.)
“The kids miss you. I miss you.” (How dare you suggest that I’m neglecting the kids? The kids are with me all the time, you stupid shit, which you would know if you were ever home, which you are not, but that’s a whole other conversation. And you don’t miss me; if you missed me, you’d bother to come home from work before nine P.M. once in a while, which you don’t, and you’d stop finding reasons to go into the office on the weekends. Furthermore, you probably think that I’ve been too busy to notice these things, but I’ve noticed. I’ve just been too tired to talk to you about them, so you should be glad I’m spending so much time helping Elizabeth and her family because it gets you off the hook, and come to think of it, I’m sure you are glad. Lucky you.)
“At some point, your altruism became selfishness, Piper. Yes, that’s what I said, your altruism crossed a line and became selfishness.” (Despite the fact that the thought you just voiced is entirely meaningless, you’re so proud of yourself for having thought it and said it and having included that big word in saying it, that you had to repeat it for emphasis.)
“Your identity is so caught up in all of this that I wonder who you’ll be after Elizabeth is gone.” (I am being a friend. I am doing what a friend does. If you had any real friends, you might understand that. Oh, God, I don’t know who I’ll be either. I have no idea at all.)
“Superwoman Piper saving the day. I hate to say it, but sometimes I think you’re actually enjoying this.” (I am not saving anything. I am taking care of children. I am cooking. I am talking and reading books and watching television with Elizabeth. I am doing one job and then another. Don’t say you hate to say it. You don’t hate to say it. Enjoying this? Enjoying this? Fuck you fuck you fuck you.)
“This isn’t normal. This isn’t friendship, whatever you think. This isn’t love.” (You wouldn’t know love if it walked up and slapped you in the face, Kyle.)
Piper didn’t say any of this. She didn’t say anything at all. As Kyle talked, she moved the RSVP card off of her plate, removed her toast from the toaster, spread it with strawberry fruit spread, poured herself coffee, took the plate and coffee to the table, and sat down. When he stopped talking, Piper was holding her coffee cup with both hands because her hands were suddenly cold. All of her was cold. She was chilled and frightened, not by what Kyle had said, but by what she hadn’t said. Her own thoughts sounded very much like the thoughts of a woman who did not love her husband, and this was not the kind of woman Piper could be. We are going through a rough time, she told herself. It happens to everyone. She wanted to say this out loud, but she couldn’t. If she opened her mouth, she might shriek, she might cry. At the very least, her teeth would chatter. After a few seconds, Kyle made a disgusted sound and left the room.
They went to the party, not because of anything Kyle had said, but because the next day Elizabeth told her to go. She insisted.
When Piper had arrived that morning, Elizabeth was with Lena, her favorite of the hospice workers, and she smiled at Piper over the powder blue photo album Lena held open before her and said, “Peter.” Peter’s baby album. As Lena turned the pages of the heavy book, Elizabeth pointed out Peter having his first bath. Peter in his super saucer, his bouncy chair, his swing, sleeping in the Björn on Tom’s chest with his bald head flopped to one side. Peter had been a sweet baby, chirpy and rosy and heavily eyelashed, the kind you might see curled inside a flower in one of those Anne Geddes photographs.
When Piper walked Lena to the door, Lena said, “Elizabeth was a little restless last night, called out in her sleep a couple of times.”
Piper felt a pulse of gratitude for the way Lena so often called Elizabeth by name when speaking about her. With others, sometimes even with Tom and Piper, Elizabeth was an omnipresent, inevitable “she.” Lena smiled wryly, reached out and squeezed Piper’s hand. Habitually physically aloof except with her closest friends, Piper was learning a language of small touches: a squeeze of the fingers, a hand placed on a shoulder or a cheek. Lena’s squeeze said, “It was a harder night than I’m telling you it was, but she made it.”
“But she’s good this morning,” Lena went on, nodding, “it’s a good morning.”
“When I see her sitting in a chair, smiling, I know it’s a good morning. Thank you.”
But when Piper reentered the room, she saw that the good morning had ended. The baby album was lying facedown and open on the floor, and Elizabeth’s face was a mask of white-lipped, smoldering rage. Piper had seen Elizabeth like this before, but not often. Usually, the anger spattered out like grease from a pan and could be directed toward anyone: Piper for making the soup too hot, Astrid for hurting her head with the hairbrush, Ginny for not keeping the children quiet, Tom for buying the wrong fruit (tangerines instead of clementines), the wrong sheets (carded percale instead of mercerized sateen), the wrong small bottled waters (plain instead of fluoridated). She never let the children see her angry; possibly she didn’t feel angry in their presence. Only rarely did they see her cry.
Everyone who knew Elizabeth admired her general demeanor of good-humored forbearance; they took it as courage, and Piper could understand that. It was courage. But Piper treasured the angry Elizabeth, the one who lashed out indiscriminately, ignoring considerations of fairness or proportion. Failing to rise above, Elizabeth seemed more earthbound, lashed to this life with ordinary human weakness and emotion. Go for it! Piper would think at those moments. This whole thing is a fucking travesty. Take it out on everyone you know!
But moments like this one frightened Piper, when the anger wasn’t a short burst but a devouring fury that gripped Elizabeth with the force of a seizure. Invariably, this kind of anger left Elizabeth weepy and spent; it seemed to visibly suck life out of her. Now, from where she stood, Piper could see Elizabeth seem to catch her breath and then her chest began heaving too hard and too quickly, and Piper was running across the room, the phrase “irregular breathing” whipping around inside her head. Irregular breathing: like cool extremities, confusion, purplish mottling on the legs, irregular breathing was a sign of active dying.
Piper knelt beside Elizabeth’s chair and took hold of her hands. They were warm. Impatiently, Elizabeth shook off Piper’s touch, slapped her hands away.
“Betts,” gasped Piper, “Betts, it’s okay.” Elizabeth glared at Piper with so much hatred that Piper fell back on her heels.
“It. Is. Not. Okay.” Elizabeth shoved out the words through gritted teeth, and then, someplace deep inside her body, a sound began forming, forming and rising, forming and rising, until it came out as an unearthly shriek. In a flash, Piper remembered a wedding she’d attended years ago at a former plantation house: the peacocks and their unbearable screaming.
“It’s not fair!” screamed Elizabeth. “It’s not fucking fair!”
For a full five minutes, she shrieked and ranted, her body racked with the effort. Finally, she picked up her glass of water and tried to fling it against the wall. Water arced upward, but the glass fell short and rolled to a stop on the silk Kashmir rug she and Tom had bought themselves for their tenth wedding anniversary.
With Elizabeth’s wailing in her ears and with one fluid motion, Piper grabbed the glass and th
rew it as hard as she could. It went high, hit the crown molding, and shattered spectacularly, shards of glass raining down. The wailing stopped—for a second, Piper thought maybe time itself had stopped—and then Elizabeth began to laugh, not a hysterical laugh, as Piper might have expected, but a lovely, bubbly sound that seemed to fall around the room like confetti or snow.
The laughter didn’t fix everything. What could? After it stopped, Elizabeth was wrung out and still deeply sad, but the laughter cleared a space where Elizabeth could talk and Piper could listen. In a parched almost-whisper, Elizabeth talked about her children and how she could not bear to leave them, could not bear the thought of all she would miss.
“The story,” she said, sobbing, “I’ll miss the whole story. Dating, college, jobs, weddings. I don’t get to know how anything turns out, and I wanted to. I wanted to be there for all of it.”
Later, she said, “Wow. I’ve been talking about myself for hours. Clearly, I need something new to think about.”
Elizabeth gave a short laugh, smoothed her hair, and her smile held a trace of her old jauntiness. She said, “Okay. I didn’t want to say anything before, but here it is: I need gossip, Pipe. And you are seriously falling down on the job. I know Kate’s party is coming up because she sent us an invitation, and I get that you might not feel like going, but you have to. That’s just the way it is. You go to that party and get me some gossip.”
The party was not the ordeal Piper had imagined, but that was perhaps due to the fact that she never felt as though she were really there. When Kate opened the door to find Piper and Kyle, she did what Piper would consider, for the rest of her life, a beautiful thing: instead of ushering them in, she stepped down onto the porch, shut the door behind her, and enfolded Piper in a strong, true hug. “Are you sure?” she whispered in Piper’s ear.
Belong to Me: A Novel Page 19