Until Death

by Kari Anne Kilgore

  Maria stared into that empty pantry for a long time, conversations blaring through her mind.

  They all asked the same questions. The doctors, the healers, even Ana and Paul.

  What does Leo think?

  What does Leo feel?

  Oh sure, they asked about her, but she knew what the real question was. Leo was healthy. Leo was normal. He wouldn't go through all of this, poking and prodding and jerking off into a cup over and over again, if it didn't matter to him.

  He wouldn't spend so much money and see doctor after doctor unless he wanted children even worse than she did.

  Maria could imagine many things, too many things by far. But she couldn't see herself sitting with Leo and another woman on one of those absurd sofas, the woman carrying Leo's baby. A baby Maria had nothing to do with making.

  He'd be better off with a healthy woman, a normal woman, than trying to pretend Maria was either.

  Rummaging through the spotless half-bath on this level didn't help any more than inspecting the kitchen had. She knew the upstairs bathrooms wouldn't be out of a damned thing, either.

  Leo was his usual logical and organized self, even when she was gone. Even when she didn't want him to be. The three items on the list, yogurt, potatoes, and polenta, hardly seemed worth making a trip.

  Her thoughts hardly seemed worth thinking, not when they tore through her brain like jagged bits of metal. Maria had thought enough for a lifetime.

  Time to put an end to thinking.

  Time to let Leo get on with his own life.

  Maria added limes to the bottom, deciding an organic market three towns over would be the best place to find fruit and everything else she needed rather than any of their usual stops closer by. More intrusive questions about whatever she happened to buy wouldn't make a damned thing better. Nor would a clueless—or gossipy—friend telling Leo what Maria bought.

  She grabbed her purse and headed back out into the mid-afternoon heat.

  Chapter 14

  A month ago

  The transparent glass doors of the hospice ward lurched as Leo passed under the oval black sensor on the pale blue wall above his head, his body breaking the tiny red spot of light on the speckled dusky gray linoleum floor. Before his stride carried him into a skull-cracking impact with the glass, a feat he'd been trying to manage for the last several weeks of this waking nightmare, the doors slid open with a reluctant sigh.

  The floor inside was broken with an unyielding line of dark blue tiles. Every time Leo stepped into this too carefully antiseptic hall, he felt a hook deep in his guts, a hook that had responded to Maria since the first time he saw the endless pools of her clear emerald green eyes. Now that internal catch, built into his flesh long enough to feel like part of his elemental DNA, was connecting him to a dead woman without sense enough to stop breathing.

  A thrill of anticipation, a jolt of nausea, as if he were at the bottom of the big hill on a wooden roller coaster and the slow ascent just kicked in, drew Leo forward. A scrawny young man with an aggressive crew cut slouched over the growling floor polishing machine. His puke green wrinkled uniform shirt flapped around his thighs. A round cap with Tranquility Gardens embroidered in cheerful orange lettering was shoved to the back of his head. A bright silver nose ring clashed with the cheap fake gold studs shoved through every surface of his ears.

  The kid gave a strange backward nod, thrusting his chin into the air to acknowledge Leo's reluctant, shuffling march toward his wife's eventual deathbed. Leo nodded in return, a simple recognition of someone who was there for a paycheck. Not because someone the kid loved more than his own life had grown tired of living.

  Leo counted his steps, his shiny black work shoes squeaking on the floor the kid had polished clean. Twenty-five steps brought him to Mr. Evans' room, decorated from floor to ceiling with the yellow and black pennants, posters, and stuffed animals of some football team back East. Mr. Evans' daughter Joyce had been the first person to make an effort to talk to Leo. Her simple greetings reminded him that even though he was here visiting a breathing corpse, he wasn't quite ready to cross the line himself. Not yet.

  Joyce Evans-Robinson sat like she always did. Book open on her lap, one hand on her father's wrist, staring out the window at the parking lot. Her father’s flesh was thin as dark brown gauze covering a naked bone. When Leo knocked, Joyce jumped before she smiled.

  "Leo. How's it going?"

  That was one of the unspoken rules in this temple of the dying. You didn't ask how the resident was. Only how the person who might somehow manage to survive was holding up.

  "I'm hanging in there," he said, then he held out a small pink paper bag with braided grass handles. "One of my clients brought this by. Thought you might like it."

  The grey-haired woman raised one eyebrow as she took the bag. She drew out a gold foil box with a clear plastic top. Nine elaborate chocolates snuggled down inside.

  "You devil," she said, shaking her head. Leo saw tears at the corners of her eyes. "You know I don't need any such thing."

  "Yeah, none of us do," Leo said, looking back over his shoulder with the biggest smile he could manage. It barely curved his lips. "But sometimes that's not the question. Take care."

  That chocolate had cost more than he paid for his own food all day long these days, and he'd gone far out of his way to the best chocolatier in Los Angeles to get it. But Mr. Evans hadn't done a damned thing to end up here except keep breathing for just over a hundred years. His daughter, rail thin and hollow-eyed with mourning, would eat that chocolate if nothing else.

  Forty-six steps further along the blue tile line, Leo stopped outside the closed door to the last room on the left. The room that held someone who'd spent the last four years doing everything she could to end up here before either of them turned fifty. Everything she could to twist a dull knife deep into his heart and guts. She didn't quite love him enough to kill him instead.

  The nobility and peace he saw in Mr. Evans' daughter waiting by his side eluded Leo, mocked him even though he knew Joyce would die herself before doing such a thing on purpose. All Leo found in this hall, the pine-scented cleaner too close to the goddamned juniper in his nose, was disgust laced with regret.

  Chapter 15

  One week ago

  Leo never had a chance to say goodbye to Joyce Evans-Robinson. She said goodbye to her father in the middle of the night, and all evidence of either of them vanished before Leo’s next visit. The sadness of not seeing his deathwatch friend hurt: a sharp contrast to the dull ache of sorrow he lived with every moment.

  That room surely had new occupant in such a well-regarded facility, but Leo never bothered finding out. He simply passed by the door that was always closed now, just like Maria’s. He took care never to look in any of the narrow windows in those anonymous doors.

  A wide black fabric belt embroidered with red and blue flowers covered the window in Maria’s, more for Leo's continually breaking heart than for his wife. By the time she'd transferred to this ward, she didn't care any more for her privacy or dignity than she did for her life. He'd brought the belt anyway, a cherished reminder of a trip to Prague when his first big client returned a favor by bringing both of them to a movie location.

  The staff hadn't argued with him. He knew as well as they did that they'd simply open the door. His wife was past the days of opening doors for herself. Leo didn't bother with the fake smile that caused both of them so much pain in the beginning.

  The hospital bed was raised but Maria was asleep, head lolled to the side, mouth open. Leo hardly knew the woman he'd fallen in love with when he was barely twenty years old. Her formerly thick, shining brown hair was thin and brittle. Her full cheeks and mouth wasted as a woman twice her age. Irregular brown spots, stigmata of her dying liver, decorated the yellowish flesh of her hands and forehead. He wondered, not for the first time, if he would even recognize her without the room number to guide him.

  Maria had a private room, a benefit of Leo
's obsession with having more insurance than they needed. He'd done his best to hide the pale green walls for a couple of weeks. She'd finally shouted that she didn't want this to look like home, so he'd taken almost everything away.

  A group of photos of the two of them, taken every year, still hung on the wall beside her. He didn't have the heart to take that away. She'd never mentioned it. Leo didn't think she'd looked at it for a long time, either.

  Two reclining chairs that converted into meager beds sat under the window and a small flat-panel TV hung on the wall, but other than that the room was empty. Leo sat in the chair closest to the bed. He watched his wife's wasted chest rise and fall. Rise and fall.

  She'd let him promise her, back when he was still convincing himself this was a temporary stay, that he'd never leave without waking her. Leo knew it had been his idea all along, but now he thought of breaking that promise for the first time. The weariness he saw in Joyce Evans-Robinson's face as she waited for her father to die seemed to have replaced all of Leo's own bones and muscles.

  He hadn’t expected Joyce to escape her obligations to this place before he escaped his.

  Before he could make a choice, decide whether to break his promise to a woman who'd broken so many to him, the door opened again. The head nurse's bright cartoon-patterned scrubs broke the somber quiet of the room before he said a word.

  "Hey Leo, good to see you," Dan said, as if he didn't see Maria's soon-to-be-widower almost every night.

  "You too, Dan. She looks a little out of it. Early pain meds tonight?"

  The tall, slender man picked up Maria's chart, running a finger down the list of medications and notes.

  "No, nothing special. Her pulse is a bit slower over the last couple of days. That's why I'm checking on her now, but we know that's going to happen. She might just be taking a nap. She'll have to wake up in an hour for her bath if you want to wait."

  Leo shook his head. Whether Maria cared or not, he'd learned early on that he couldn't tolerate seeing her so weak she needed a sponge bath.

  The one thing she'd refused was to let him bathe her. Watching someone else do what she'd denied him was more than he could handle.

  "I'd just be in the way," Leo said.

  Dan nodded and reached for Maria's wrist, pale white but nearly as thin as Mr. Evans' had been. Her eyes fluttered open before he raised his watch.

  "Hello, beautiful," Dan said. "I'll get out of your hair in a second. That handsome man of yours is much better company than I am."

  Leo's heart twisted at the blank expression on his wife's face. Her eyes, yellow around the green and sunken since he'd seen her the night before, were just as empty when she looked into his.

  "This is Leo, sweetheart," Dan said, gently putting her hand down and patting it before he made a note on her chart. "Your husband."

  Maria stared for several more seconds, seconds that felt like an eternity, before she squeezed her eyes closed. She held out her hand and Leo took it.

  "I'm sorry, baby," she said. "I was sleeping pretty hard."

  Dan gave a lopsided, sympathetic smile as he stepped out the door.

  "I'm like that most of the time whether I've been asleep or not. Let me know if you need anything."

  "Don't apologize," Leo said. "I'm sorry to wake you."

  He held her cold hand as carefully as he could in both of his, not wanting to bruise the nearly exposed bones. She hated to be cold. Her flesh always was now.

  "You promised me, remember?" she said. "I have friends who will make sure it holds up in court if you sneak out of here."

  "You're right," Leo said, kissing the tissue thin skin between her thumb and fingers. "I won't forget."

  "Listen, I need to tell you something. This new drug they've got me on is knocking me out longer and longer."

  "I'll tell Dan," Leo said. "I'm sure he can adjust it."

  "No, baby." Maria moved her head slowly against the pillow. "It's for the pain. The only way he can adjust it is up, and not much further. I want to be buried in Transylvania, where my father is."

  Leo blinked, then scowled before he could stop himself. Talk of death wasn't especially surprising at this stage, at least not according to everything he'd read. But this was.

  "I thought you wanted to be here, by the ocean."

  "I did. I do," she said. "But I need to be there. My whole family is there in that village, Leo, going back longer than anyone knows. I feel it more and more the closer I get."

  "I'm not there," Leo said.

  He knew it was selfish. For once, he didn't care.

  "No, and I don't want you to be," Maria said. "Not while you're still alive. I don't want my only family that matters spending the rest of his life visiting a bunch of bones in the ground. If you insist on going to Romania once in a while, I guess I can't stop that. But I don't want you wasting time over me."

  The molecule thin layer of frost that protected Leo, kept him from falling to pieces from the second he woke up alone to the second he got back into bed alone, fractured under the strain. His confusion and rage and agony, so firmly confined to that lonely bed, nearly pushed him into screaming at the person he so desperately wanted to protect from it.

  "I'm not wasting time if I'm spending it with you," he said through a tight throat. "I'll decide when my time is wasted."

  "While I'm alive, you're right," she said, squeezing his hand harder than he thought she could. "But that won't last much longer. You're not dying, Leo. I am. I'm running out of choices just as much as I'm running out of heartbeats. You need to respect this one. And do everything they say, no matter how strange it might sound to you. Promise me."

  Leo watched her, thinking of her doctor's last words. Her final doctor, the one who was tasked with sending her as easily as possible into death. Not months, probably not even weeks. This woman he couldn't remember not loving, spending as much time as he possibly could with, was leaving him.

  He could yell and scream and sob over that all he wanted to, but never around her. After she was gone, it wouldn't matter anymore. He wasn't about to waste any of his remaining time arguing with her.

  "All right, Maria. I'll make sure of it. I promise."

  Chapter 16

  Five days ago

  Leo closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead, not quite aware that the spot matched Maria's deep scar. He wished he could push a button and make everything and everyone slow down around him, then edit the scene like a movie.

  The long, airy meeting room at the Transylvanian village inn was big enough for at least twenty people, more than twice the number sitting at the round table with him. High windows tilted open at the top lined three of the stone walls, the warm spring breeze at odds with the frozen thing in his chest.

  "I'm sorry, Ana, I'm not following," Leo said to the woman next to him.

  He'd known her more than half his life, but even she wasn't making sense to him right now. Everyone at the table had paper in front of them. Only Leo's was blank. Ana smiled sadly, patted his back, then leaned forward and started talking in much faster Romanian.

  Two black-robed priests sat across from them, along with Maria's mother and two fragile but intimidating old women from the village. All wore black mourning headscarves. They were joined by a middle-aged man who was some sort of leader. Leo couldn't tell if Igor was anything as formal as a mayor, but even the priests glanced at him for approval from time to time.

  He'd never been as fluent in Romanian as he'd wanted, and now he barely understood a word.

  His command of English hadn't been much better since the doctor told him his wife's heart beat no longer.

  Ana nodded at the two old women, then turned to Leo. Her waves of long, dark blonde hair glinted in the sunlight, and her round, open face was made for far more pleasant expressions. Right now her brow was knotted and her mouth drawn tight.

  "They say her burial here is okay as long as their traditions are followed," Ana said, her accent a softer, warmer version of a Russia
n's. "The flight keeps them from watching the body properly. As long as everything else is correct, they will let it pass."

  "Watching the body? What do they want?" Leo said, then whispered. "Maria never liked any of this. She thought it was all superstition."

  "Sometimes ideas of superstition change when we get older," Ana said. "I'm sorry, but you did tell me she wanted to be laid to rest here. She said that right before she passed, did she not?"

  Leo tilted his head to the side and closed his eyes. His love had told him again minutes before her last breath. Whispers he would never have believed true if she hadn't said the same thing a few days before.

  "Yes," he said, his voice rough and low, his gut churning. "After years of telling me she wanted no part of this. Apparently she hid a lot more than drinking from me."

  "I'm truly sorry, Leo. All of us have broken hearts, but yours the worst of all. Do we need to wait and discuss this another time?"

  Leo looked at the dark logs spanning the ceiling for a few seconds, wanting nothing more in that moment than to keep himself from crying in front of the friends and strangers alike. Igor stared at Leo with his arms crossed, wearing a brown polo shirt and khaki pants but with the attitude of an expensive suit and tie. All of it was a strange contrast to the man's unshaven stubble, a mark of respect to the dead.

  "We don't have another time, Ana," Leo said. "She'll be here tonight. Just tell me what they want."

  "You've been to funerals here before," Ana said. "You know about her fir tree, the songs. You don't have to worry about the food and things like that. Everything will be at her auntie's house, and Elena will handle it."

  Leo looked at his mother-in-law and tried to smile, hoping it wasn't too much of a grimace. He hadn't spoken to Elena since that terrible phone call from the hospice ward. Breaking the news that her daughter was dead. The older woman nodded, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of her scarf.