by Sally Mandel
The doctor, whom Mrs. Adams regarded as practically a teenager (a know-it-all as well, although she’d never say so), pronounced her well enough, though a little dehydrated and probably overtired. He recommended twenty-four hours of bed rest. Then, sometime after midnight, Mrs. Adams’ temperature began to climb. By morning, it was 102 degrees, and she had developed a cough.
“You just don’t like spring, do you?” Alice complained when she came to relieve Mary. Last year this time, Mrs. Adams had contracted a strep throat from her bridge partner. It took three weeks to get it under control.
“When did you say Amy was due?” Mrs. Adams asked. It was a struggle to talk. She felt as if she had a large furry animal lodged in her chest.
“Day after next,” Alice said. “Friday. Would you like me to phone her? Or your daughter?”
Mrs. Adams waved her hand impatiently. “You girls make such a fuss over a little fever.”
“Do you remember talking to me in the middle of the night?” Mary asked. She smoothed Mrs. Adams’ blankets with her large practical hands.
“No,” Mrs. Adams said. “I slept like a log.”
Mrs. Adams had always awakened during the night, usually to read for an hour or so. She regarded her interrupted sleep as perfectly restful and refreshing. “It’s just left over from waiting up for Stella to come home,” she had explained. “Or William.”
“Well, you were chatty, all right,” Mary said. “First you asked me if I heard the music. Then a little later, you said they were serving hors d’oeuvres.”
“Sounds like a good party to me,” Alice said.
Mrs. Adams was quiet. She must have stepped into that room with the voices. She wished she could remember.
She was unable to eat anything all day. Alice pressed her to take a few sips of her “Endure,” which was tough going. With each passing hour, Mrs. Adams’ chest felt heavier. It was difficult to breathe, but she slept most of the time. Then, at five o’clock, the doctor showed up again.
He sat beside her on the bed. “Lily!” he shouted at her. Alice scowled as Mrs. Adams’ eyes flew open. “Let’s get a look at you!” His collar was too big around his neck, as if he hadn’t yet grown into his clothes. Mrs. Adams peered at him through a fog of fever. His face was pink and round, a face that would never be taken seriously. She tried to give him an encouraging smile but felt that her effort fell short. She was so tired.
The doctor listened to her chest for some time. She fell asleep before he was finished; he had to wake her up again to deliver the verdict. “You’ve got a touch of pneumonia, Lily. We need to send you to the hospital for just a few days until we can clear it up.”
Mrs. Adams looked at him balefully. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Oh, yes, indeed,” the doctor said, squeezing her hand. “And a ride in the ambulance, too.”
“No more hospitals,” Mrs. Adams said.
“Nonsense,” he said. “We’ll have you out of there in a jiffy, right as rain.”
“Doctor,” Mrs. Adams said, lifting herself up on her pillows. “I’ll recover right here in my own bed, thank you. If I should curl up my toes and die, I won’t hold you accountable.” She fell back against her pillow and began to cough.
“Could you get a nurse over here?” Alice asked him. “You can hook up an IV for the antibiotics. I see other folks here in the complex do that.”
“These people don’t know what’s best for them,” the doctor grumbled. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s beginning to suffer from dementia.”
“She’s got every marble she was born with,” Alice retorted.
Have I become invisible all of a sudden? Mrs. Adams wondered.
The doctor sighed. “I’ll see what I can do about a nurse.”
Her temperature did not go down. She lay with an IV in her arm and plastic tubing in her nose to provide extra oxygen. The doctor had ordered twenty-four hour nursing, but just the same Alice dropped by. She knew Mrs. Adams’ ways, her favorite foods, and the television programs she liked if she got strong enough to go into the other room to watch. Charlie came to see her, too. He stood next to the bed and wrung his hands.
“Oh, Lily, look what I’ve done to you,” he said.
“Don’t be absurd,” she said.
“I never should have taken you out on such a windy day.”
“It was a beautiful day and I’ll never forget it. Those trilliums.” She closed her eyes. “Or trillia? Which is it?”
“May I just sit by you for a while? I won’t make you talk.”
“All right,” she said.
He settled in the little cane chair in the corner, dwarfing it with his lanky body.
“You’re my knight, Charlie,” she murmured after a while.
He had thought she was asleep. “What was that?” he asked her.
“My knight, I said. That’s you.”
Charlie struggled to find his voice, and croaked out a muffled thank you. Finally the nurse came in to banish him.
Mrs. Adams drifted in and out of fever dreams, mostly pleasant and populated with a cast of thousands. She rode on a roller coaster with her father. He was wearing his collar. Though that was more of a memory than a dream. Her father was a thrill seeker. She wondered sometimes if he hadn’t chosen to be a missionary simply to get paid for traipsing off into uncharted territory. He had complete confidence that God would protect him, though her mother liked to protest that he pushed God to the limit and beyond. There had been that incident with the tribe in New Guinea. “You’re just like me, Lil,” he had told his daughter more than once. “You’re not afraid of anything.”
That was not entirely true. She had been afraid of William on occasion, of anyone in a rage, really, even strangers. They felt physically dangerous, as if their personal shrapnel might explode right into her. From time to time, she thought she might be afraid of God as well, but the fact was Mrs. Adams wasn’t at all sure she believed in him. There had been entirely too much religion in her early years, pulling the curtains on Sundays and reading from the Bible until she felt like flinging it across the room. Certainly, she resented any force that could have allowed Stella to suffer painful ear infections as a baby. What kind of omnipotent spirit would permit such suffering in an innocent? And then there was the lost one. No, Mrs. Adams had no patience with that sort of cruelty. She preferred to believe in the human spirit, that it was precious and indestructible.
“What day is it?” she asked the nurse.
“Thursday,” the woman answered. She was gentle, with a pretty accent, maybe Indian, or Pakistani.
“Ah, still Thursday,” Mrs. Adams said. Her room looked distorted, as if she were peering at it through the wrong end of binoculars.
That evening, they started pestering her about a proper hospital bed.
“Since you won’t go to St. Joseph’s,” the doctor said in an injured tone.
“We can make you so much more comfortable in a hospital bed,” the nurse said. This one spoke too loud and seemed always to be chewing on something.
Mrs. Adams smiled a little. She knew whose comfort they were talking about. “You wouldn’t bully an old woman,” she said.
They moved to the other side of the room and conferred together. The binocular vision rendered them oddly small from where she lay, but her hearing aid was having one of its moments of clarity, and their voices were very distinct. She heard the nurse ask the doctor about trying a different antibiotic.
“Just make sure she doesn’t dislodge that oxygen tube,” he said. “It’s the only thing keeping her alive.”
Amy arrived on Friday afternoon. Alice was in the sitting room with the newspaper, making an attempt to do the crossword puzzle.
“Gran napping?” Amy asked.
Dropping her heavy backpack to the floor, Amy was tall and slim in her jeans and cable knit sweater. Her pale hair was pulled back in a ponytail, making her look younger than twenty-eight. At Alic
e’s expression, Amy’s features tensed, like an animal in a forest catching the first scent of fire. “What’s wrong?”
“She’s got a respiratory infection. Pneumonia.”
A groove appeared between Amy’s eyebrows.
“Hasn’t responded to the antibiotics yet,” Alice went on. “Then again, it was the same way last spring, with her throat. It just took some time for the medication to work.”
Amy tiptoed to the bedroom and peeked in, then turned back to Alice with a face almost accusatory. “There’s a nurse!”
“Oh, honey, she’s tough. It’ll be all right.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Alice.”
The older woman couldn’t help smiling. The word choice differed, but the tone was unmistakably that of her grandmother. Amy went into the bedroom and pulled the cane chair up next to the bed.
Feeling Amy’s hand on hers, Mrs. Adams opened her eyes, and seeing it was Amy, smiled broadly. “It’s Friday.”
“Why didn’t you call me, Gran?”
“I knew you were coming.”
“What about Mom?”
“I’m not fetching her back from Belize.”
“Do you feel very awful?”
“Well, I do have an emu nesting in my chest. And I don’t suppose I look very glamorous with this tube stuck in my nose.” There was laughter and a smattering of applause off to the right. She ignored it and kept her focus trained on Amy.
“What?” Amy asked, seeing her grandmother’s eyes flicker.
Mrs. Adams shook her head. “Now, tell me what’s happening with the book.”
“Oh shit,” Amy said. “Another rejection.”
“Did you change the scene by the dam?”
“No.”
“Good,” Mrs. Adams said. “It’s what holds the second half together.”
“I got a job as a receptionist at a law firm,” Amy said.
Mrs. Adams frowned.
“I know, but it’s a pay check.”
“If you’d just be sensible,” Mrs. Adams said. Amy was so proud when it came to money.
“You know how I feel about that, Gran,” Amy said. “It’s enough that you have faith in me.”
“Well, you’re just lucky I’m too pooped to argue,” Mrs. Adams said.
“Do you want to sleep for a little?” Amy asked.
“Are you staying?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll sleep.”
A stab of pain under her ribs woke Mrs. Adams. The night nurse was on, so she must have been sleeping a while.
“You’ve been moaning,” the nurse said, leaning over her. “Let me give you something for the pain.”
“Will it make me muzzy?” Mrs. Adams asked.
“It’ll help you rest.”
“All right, just don’t make me muzzy.” And then she drifted away again. When she awoke, Amy was beside her, her hair loose around her face.
“Did you get any sleep on that awful couch?” Mrs. Adams asked her.
“Like a rock,” Amy said. There was a sudden report as the window shade snapped open. Mrs. Adams startled.
“It’s okay,” Amy said. “Just the shade.”
Archy and Mehitabel, the two bedroom shades named long ago by Mrs. Adams, had the habit of rewinding for no discernable reason. Amy had always taken their whimsical behavior for granted, and it wasn’t until she studied American literature at college that she discovered who Archy and Mehitabel actually were.
“Which one?” Gran asked.
“Archy,” Amy said.
“Oh, that Archy.” Mrs. Adams shifted a little in her bed.
“How are you, Gran?”
“Fit as a fiddle.” She coughed and put her hand to her chest. It felt as if all her ribs had cracked. Amy’s face told her that she looked as dreadful as she felt. “Talk to me,” she said.
Amy took Mrs. Adams’ hand and put its soft dry skin to her cheek. “Did you know that my very first memory is of you?” Amy asked. Mrs. Adams heard the quaver in her granddaughter’s voice and pretended she hadn’t. “I was pretty close to the ground,” Amy went on, “so I couldn’t have been more than three. We were walking outside together, looking at the grass. There was a little white moth on a piece of clover and suddenly a garter snake slid right up and ate it.”
“My. How gruesome.”
“I was fascinated. ‘There you have it,’ you said. ‘The short happy life of Murray the moth.’”
Mrs. Adams smiled. “I think you made it up.”
“I did not.”
“I mean, your memory made it up.”
“What’s the first thing you remember, Gran? Unless it hurts to talk.”
“Snow. Coming down outside my window. And then a cardinal flying by — red against white.” She drifted into a doze again. Coming to sometime later, she pressed Amy’s hand. “How’s Kevin?”
“Finito.”
“Phooey,” Mrs. Adams said. It troubled her that Amy had never had a relationship of any real length.
Then it seemed that Amy dissolved and the doctor hovered over her, the hand he’d fastened to her wrist like ice against her fiery skin. “I just don’t know,” he said under his breath.
She fell asleep again, although it wasn’t sleep exactly. She was aware of the room, and could hear all the voices—Amy’s and the nurse’s—but when she opened her eyes, she only saw through a kind of mist. There was a small rasping sound coming from her mouth. How rude, she thought.
Amy appeared beside her, an impressionist landscape—her face like the sun, her blue sweater a summer sky. “Pretty,” Mrs. Adams said.
“You’re my best friend, Gran,” Amy whispered.
“Honored,” Mrs. Adams said.
“What can I do to help you?” Amy asked. Her voice grew small. “Help you do this.”
“Stay … if you can stand it.”
“I’ll do whatever you want me to.”
“Don’t be frightened.”
There was a long pause. “Okay,” Amy said finally. And then, “Are you?”
“Not so much. Curious ….” And then she was off again, halfway between here and there.
The next morning it began to rain, sighing in waves against the window. Mrs. Adams could hear it beyond the labored creak of her own breathing, each breath seeming to cost her all the strength she had left, until somehow she managed to summon the effort for one more, and then another. Speech was beyond her now. She sensed that Amy was there beside her. Others came and went as well, causing the room to vibrate softly with their movements.
Time took on the fluidity of a dream. She imagined she saw Stella and Amy sitting side by side on a picnic bench swinging their legs. In dream logic, they were contemporaries, though, rather than mother and daughter. Stella’s bare knees were grimy as they’d always been in the summertime, and she jabbed at Amy’s polka-dot shirt with her index finger the way Mrs. Adams’ older cousin used to do to her. “Polka dots are for poking,” he would say. It had always made Mrs. Adams frantic, but in the dream Amy just laughed.
“Can you hear me, Gran?” Amy was saying.
Mrs. Adams tried vainly to summon up the strength to answer. She felt sorry, hearing the sadness in Amy’s voice. She couldn’t stand for Amy to be sad. Even when she’d been a baby, crying as all babies cry, it had been unbearable.
Recently, Mrs. Adams had come to confuse Amy’s birth with the lost baby, her own little boy who had died at one month because his underdeveloped lungs had become infected. Now that child, Jed, came into focus so clearly—his dark hair, pale skin, his lips round and pouty, the dimple on the left side of his mouth just like his older sister.
They’ll tell you that it’s just gas, but Jed was one of those babies who smile practically from the moment they’re born. Mrs. Adams was forty, and for a long time she had blamed herself, among all kinds of other failures, for being too old to conceive a healthy child. She had been toppled by the dept
h of her grief. How was it possible to be nearly ruined by the loss of someone you’d only known a month? Nor did it end, not ever. It got easier, of course, but even now, not a year passed that she didn’t remember the anniversaries, both birth and death. Feeling Amy’s hand covering her own now, she recalled Jed’s tiny fist grasping her index finger.
Midmorning, there was a disturbance at the outer door. She could hear male voices, busy with a masculine project of some kind.
She turned her head to Amy.
“It’s the hospital bed,” Amy said apologetically. “They’re bringing it in.”
Mrs. Adams lay still and listened to the invasion. She tried to lift her free hand but it lay helpless beside her. She concentrated. Perhaps if she relinquished the effort it cost her to take a breath, she’d have enough strength left to do this one last thing. She focused on her hand, willing it to rise to her face. Yes, it was working. She found the plastic tubing and pulled it from her nose.
“Oh, Gran,” Amy said.
There were no words any more, but she could still look into Amy’s face and tell her with her eyes. Amy gazed back at her, and Mrs. Adams saw that she understood.
After a while, the rattling sound of the hospital bed ceased. The voices were stilled. She heard weeping. It sounded like rain sweeping the surface of the ocean. Nothing hurt her any more. She closed her eyes and was lifted into the dark on a buoyant swell of gratitude.
Night of the Animals
Amy: 1980
The thing was, she didn’t even like Theo. That was what was so remarkable. The first time she met him, she was sitting on the front steps of the town library after trying for an hour to research her history paper topic. She couldn’t keep her mind on it, and after aimlessly flipping pages and doodling, had simply given up. A light snow was beginning to fall, freakish but not unheard of in April. She didn’t bother to pull up the hood of her sweatshirt, just sat there with her rear end practically frozen to the concrete, trying to find a metaphor for how she was feeling: like the shell of a hermit crab, maybe, whose occupant had moved out. She could envision the “VACANCY” sign hanging off her, her eyes just empty holes you could look into, nothing inside.