Not in any danger and doesn’t know where the hell she is? thinks Carl. “Sundowning?”
“Yeah. Sometimes they get confused after the sun goes down.”
“Okay. Tell her I’ll be over there in a minute, if you don’t mind. Just go down and let her know. And I think she might be in some danger inside her head, even if she’s not on the outside, you know?”
“Sure, I’ll get right on it.”
CARL DRIVES TO ROSEHAVEN, parks his truck under the drive-under. The front door is locked, so he presses the intercom button and explains who he is. Beverly lets him in.
Aunt Lil is sitting in her big chair. Her little portable blackboard says, “Today is Wednesday, September 6, 2000.” But it’s Thursday night.
“Well, hey there,” he says.
She swings her head and stares at him. “Who are you?”
“It’s me. Carl.”
She keeps staring. “Oh. Carl. Yes. I am so glad to see you.” She reaches out a hand and he takes it.
He got here fast, she thinks. All that long way. He must have flown in an airplane. Why would these people do this to her? It’s one of the strangest things that has ever happened. Nothing is going right anymore. The whole wide world is coming apart at the seams. But Carl stands right here now. Things are finally going to be okay.
Carl places his hand on her shoulder. She is skin and bones. What can be going on inside her head? He has a sudden idea. He kisses her on the cheek. “Let’s go home.”
“I am so glad. I don’t know what I’d do without you. I am so glad you’re here.”
“Come on. Stand up. I’ll hold your hand. We’ll get you right back where you belong.”
“I can make it.” After a few tries, she stands up, takes hold of her walker. “Let me get my sweater. It was cold when I came in. It was like the halls of winter.”
“I’ll get it for you. Which one do you want? How about this blue one?”
“That’s good. I’m certainly glad you’re here. Is that the navy blue one?”
“Yes ma’am.”
In the hall, Carl walks along very slowly so she can keep up.
She goes a little way and then stops and looks all around before starting out again. “They’ve made the place up to look just like Rosehaven. Look, they’ve got the very same pictures on the wall. Look at that. Look. I am so glad you’re here.”
“Yes ma’am.”
It’s late. Nobody is in the lobby except for Beverly, reading a magazine at the front desk.
At the truck, Carl folds her walker and places it in back. Her address book drops out. He puts it back. He helps her into the front seat, starts around the truck. Someone is coming up the driveway in a . . . wheelchair? It’s L. Ray Flowers. What in the world is he . . . ?
L. Ray’s hair is windblown. It’s been washed, it looks like, but not sprayed. He’s in his pajamas. “I’ve been for a little ride,” he says. “Out one ear and in the other. That just came into my head.”
There is something about the way L. Ray holds his head that seems off to Carl. Or is it his hair?
“I know the secret combination to the box on the side door,” says L. Ray. “I like a night ride down the hill every once in a while. And this is my last week, so I decided to do it tonight.”
“That hill?” Carl points to a side road that winds downhill in a wide curve.
“That’s right. It takes longer to get back up. I go out about once every week or two. Is Miss Lil sick?”
“No.” Carl checks the truck windows. They are up. “She thinks she’s in South Carolina and I’m going to drive her back to Rosehaven.”
“She’s probably got a urinary tract infection. Or it’s medicine. Open your door there so I can speak to her.”
Carl opens the driver’s door and L. Ray looks in. “Miss Lil? They got me down here too, and I’ll be getting back to Rosehaven tomorrow. I’ll meet you back there.”
“Who is that?”
“L. Ray Flowers” says L. Ray, leaning in closer.
“I don’t want him near me, Carl. He did that awful thing. You get away from me. Come on, Carl, let’s go.”
“Oh, mercy,” says L. Ray as he backs away in his wheelchair. “I’m back where I damn well started. I . . . you all have a good trip.”
“Thanks.” Carl gets into the truck, closes his door. “What did he do?” he asks.
“Who?”
“L. Ray. Mr. Flowers.”
“He started all this jail business. It has something to do with vulgarity, I think.”
They take a right on Forrester, drive by Don’s Pool and Dogs, which is closed—it’s after midnight—on around the block, and then out to TechComm Commons and back around and into the driveway at Rosehaven.
“Well, here we are,” says Carl.
“That was just an awful time. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I’m glad I can help you out, Aunt Lil.”
Beverly lets them in the front door.
Back in her room, she says, “You don’t know. You don’t know how it is. Nobody does. It’s awful. Where’s my gown?”
“Is this it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll wait outside till you get dressed. Can I help?”
“No. I think I can do it. Sometimes I call them for help, you know, but sometimes they don’t come. I’m going to have to get somebody to help me out at night and in the morning. Do you think we can get Carrie?”
“We can sure try.”
Carl waits in the hall while Aunt Lil gets dressed for bed. It takes a while. He looks in once, as she is getting her gown over her head, and sees her in only her under-pants. He thinks of Holocaust photographs. He wanders down to the end of the hall, looks at a seascape painting for a while, then goes back, knocks on her door. Inside, he watches as she slowly manages to get under the covers.
“I’ll see you soon,” he says. “You be good.”
Which one is he? Lil thinks.
LATER, JUST BEFORE she falls asleep, in the dim glow from the floodlight outside her window, she looks over at the photo of her business-school friends standing on those steps, waving. One by one, they grow larger, carefully stepping out of the photograph and into the room. She wants so badly to remember their names, but she can’t. In her room, they make themselves at home, looking around, separating the blinds and looking out the window, helping themselves to Tootsie Rolls. Lil realizes that if she stays very still, they will not know she is there and she will not have to embarrass herself by speaking to them without remembering their names.
At the End of the Hall
CARL STOPS AT A red light, but no one is around and it’s 3:00 A.M., so he runs it. It’s Monday morning. After the jail episode, Aunt Lil had a fairly good weekend but felt bad on Sunday afternoon. Someone has just called from Rosehaven to tell him the rescue squad came to get her. She’d pulled the cord in her bathroom, and an aide found her unconscious. They could not find a DNR order and began CPR. When Carl arrives at the hospital, he has no idea what to expect. He’s not clear about whether or not she has been revived. He’s afraid a machine might be keeping her alive, something she said she didn’t want; she signed a DNR order, he’s sure, making that clear. Why can’t they keep something like that straight? She had signed it, hadn’t she?
A nurse at the emergency room desk sends him on back. The doctor on duty is Dr. James Starnes. “Come on in,” he says. “She’s right back here. I’m afraid there’s not much hope. I’m sorry.”
The doctor opens the big, wide door and Carl sees her. A nurse nods and leaves the room. Carl steps closer. The lights shine very bright. She is on her back with a thick pillow under her head so that she’s positioned to look down across her feet, and a long tube—almost as big around as a flashlight—is in her mouth. Her tongue is hanging out beside the tube. Her eyelids are drooped over half-open eyes; they are perfectly still and dry, like a doll’s eyes. Her sparse hair is out over her ears. Somehow she looks like a scarecrow, or
a clown.
“She’s not supposed to have that tube down her throat,” says Carl. “She was supposed to be DNR.”
“I’m bound by law until I get something in writing or verbally from the next of kin. You’re the next of kin?”
“Yes. We had something on file at Rosehaven, I think.”
“I’ll turn this machine off. It’s not helping her anyway. It’s just a matter of time, with or without the breathing machine. Less than an hour, I’d say. I’m sorry.”
The doctor walks over to the machine and stops it.
Carl rests his elbows on the bed railing, then places his hand on the cold hand resting on her stomach, and asks the doctor, “Is it okay if I try to close her eyes all the way?”
“By all means.”
Carl closes her lids by pushing them down gently. They stay closed. He remembers something about coins on eyelids. He thinks about asking the doctor to remove the tube, but then decides not to. The machine is off. Pulling out that tube might disturb or hurt her in some awful way. Her gown is wide open at the neck—tight skin over bones, with the places at the base of her neck all hollowed out—and he sees a blue vein at her collarbone jump. He stares at it. “Is that her heart beating? That vein?”
“Yes. That’s an artery.” The doctor looks at a machine. “Her heart is beating only a few times a minute. That can’t last very long.”
Carl can’t take his eyes away from the blue artery, the very slight, blue artery. He waits. It jumps. He starts counting slowly. At twenty it jumps again. Every twenty seconds—three times a minute. A pulse rate of three.
“I’ll turn down the lights,” says Dr. Starnes.
“Yes. Thank you.”
Carl keeps his eye on the artery. It finally jumps again. He pushes her hair back behind one ear, then the other. The top of her head is almost completely bald. He follows an urge to rest his hand on her head. It feels like a cool, smooth cantaloupe, and then Dr. Starnes is standing across from him.
“So, she’s your aunt?”
“My favorite aunt. She was like a second mother.”
Carl notices that the artery hasn’t jumped in a while. If it has, he missed it. Starnes is talking about something. Carl stares at the artery and starts counting. He counts to sixty while Starnes talks quietly.
Carl feels as if he might be up above the scene, watching.
“She’s passed on now,” says the doctor. “And sometimes people like to be alone with a loved one at this point. I’ll be happy to wait outside.”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Out the door to the left, at the desk, is where I’ll be,” he says, “unless I’m occupied, in which case just leave me a note if you need to leave—there’s a pencil and paper there. I think the form says Wayside Funeral Home. Is that right?”
“Yes. Thanks. I’ll . . . I’ll go get her wig and bring it back.”
“That’ll be fine. She’ll be here for an hour or more, I’m sure.” Starnes leaves, then sticks his head back in. “I should mention that it might be a good idea to go ahead and remove her wedding ring now.”
“Okay. Sure.”
Carl looks at her face again. The world is holding together, and Aunt Lil has just . . . died. He feels a tingling in his lips. The building and everything in the room is staying in its place. The light is steady, not changing. He picks up her hand. It is cold. “Aunt Lil, I’m sorry you had to go through all this. I thank you for all the attention you always gave me. Good-bye. . . . You’re going to have to . . . to give up your driving.”
He slides her ring over the second joint and then the first.
He is stunned, numb. Something comes up inside him that he instantly feels ashamed of: a stab of relief. He dismisses it.
There is a phone. He pulls out his billfold, gets Anna’s business card, and dials all but the last digit of her home number, then hangs up.
He drives to Rosehaven. In Aunt Lil’s room, he looks around—the La-Z-Boy, the Kennedy rocker, the foot-stool, her table, the bag of midget Tootsie Rolls. He removes her wig from the Styrofoam head, places his hand on that head in the same way he’d placed it on his aunt Lil’s head in the emergency room. As he steps into the hall, he meets L. Ray Flowers, rolling his way. Carl looks at his watch. It’s 4:35 A.M. L. Ray holds an envelope in his hand.
“I’m sorry about Miss Lil. I was awake and it didn’t look good. How’s she doing?”
“She died.”
“I’m sorry. She was a mighty fine lady. Here. Here’s a little note I was planning to leave for you. Read it when you get time. And you might as well wait until tomorrow night to try to sleep. Maybe a nap tomorrow afternoon. Voice of experience.”
“Thanks. I will.”
Dear Carl, my good man,
I think all the time, now. And this morning with your dear aunt en route to the hospital, I sit and think some more. And it’s hard for me to avoid thinking as a preacher at a time like this.
Time is a very long hallway full of thick fog. All you see in front of you is whiteness. Far, far down that hallway, at the end of it, is a little campfire. It burns forever. But we don’t see it, day to day. It marks the end of the hall, and you cannot see it because of all that fog.
We’ll all be there quickly, as quickly as tomorrow’s supper, and on approach to the camp-fire, somewhere in the bottom of our hearts there are tiny, sinking feelings of campfire knowledge. To prepare, we think of all the things we need to do before we get there, and one of your aunt Lil’s gifts to the world, and to me, is her part in coming up with the idea of the First Breakfast. No matter if it happens or not.
In spite of the little campfire, we have all these good times and bad times, and then one day we happen to be looking out there in front of us and we see the glow, a faint little orange glow way down there ahead, at the end of the hallway, and it takes our breath for a minute, because we now see that in spite of it all, if we’re lucky, we have loved every minute, no matter how good or bad, every minute that we’ve been in that white fog, and look at that . . . it’s down there now: a very, very dull glow at the end of the hall.
Your aunt brought me hope toward the end of my hallway. And in my mind our little group will be there on the porch at Rosehaven, talking, until the stars fall and every porch and chair and church and nursing home in the world is reduced to a tiny, pure, young, and happy mote of dust that will be the cornerstone of yet another universe where there will be a First Breakfast Nurch in every town and village (there will be no cities) and we’ll be playing the old hymns and other music every night of the week except Sunday evenings, when we’ll all be at BTU (Baptist Training Union—remember?) studying the new word of the same old God. Huh?
Your good man, falsely accused,
L. Ray
As Carl, carrying the wig, enters the emergency room, he meets Anna coming out. They both stop. She reaches for him. He lets her hug him hard and is conscious of not hugging back as hard.
She stands back but holds to his arm. “I’m so sorry, Carl. They always call me. I couldn’t get back to sleep, and so I was hoping I might catch you here. I just talked to Dr. Starnes. He told me.”
“Yes . . . it’s pretty hard.” He holds out the wig. “I’m bringing this for her. She . . .” He knows he’s about to cry, but he holds on hard. “I’m glad I was with her. Her vein, or artery, right here”—Carl touches his collarbone—“would jump once about every twenty seconds. And then it just stopped.”
“We’ll all miss her. But it’s good she didn’t have to suffer and linger for months.”
“That’s right. That’s right. I’m not sure what I’ll do now. Who’s with your girls?” Shouldn’t have asked that, he thinks.
Her face tells him.
Music Is Poetry without Words
“SHE WAS A GOOD ONE,” Carrie says. “She was spunky.”
Carl sits on the porch after several trips to his truck to load Aunt Lil’s belongings.
Little Maudie is here, in a wheelchair—she’s falle
n and sprained her knee—along with Clara, and a new woman, dressed in a red dress with a white scarf around her neck and wearing sunglasses. Maudie tells Carl how sorry she is about Lil, and then she asks Clara, “What is today, anyway?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I know it’s a sad time—without Lil and Mr. Flowers.”
“It’s Saturday,” says Carl. He checks his watch. Things seem empty.
“It is a sad time,” says Maudie. “I miss Lil so much. But he had it coming. He was just too big for his britches, and the very idea that he did all that.” Maudie turns to Carrie, frowning, a touch of panic in her eyes. “Do you know if my niece will be here today?”
“I don’t know for sure. Today is Saturday, though, so she’ll probably be here in a little while.”
“Will you roll me in?” Maudie says to the new lady.
“I’ll roll you in,” says Carrie.
“No. I want her to roll me in.”
“I can’t do that right now,” says the new lady.
“Will you roll me in?” Maudie asks Carl. She looks worried.
“Sure. I need to be getting on, too.”
They roll along the hall. Maudie’s door is open—307, next to Aunt Lil’s room. Carl glances in. He doesn’t know the aide changing the bed.
“Just push me over beside that table, where I can watch the television. . . . There we go. That’s good. Thank you very much.” A basketball game is on the TV.
The room smells like carpet cleaner. Carl hears a vacuum cleaner come on in the next room. Wouldn’t be a Kirby. What will he do with that Kirby? Should he have buried it with her? They would have in Egypt.
“Would you like some candy?” asks Maudie.
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s those candy Kisses. Can you get me the bag out of that drawer right there? Right there.”
“Certainly.”
“I don’t see why you don’t have one. Or two. It’s hard to eat just one. Oh, look, the basketball game is on. Carolina’s playing. Don’t you want to pull up a chair and watch a little of the game?”
Lunch at the Piccadilly Page 15