“Okay. Right to die?”
“I joined and sent them a check for five hundred dollars. There’s a court case. They need the money, for that nurse who killed all the people in the critical care ward. A big fat woman; I can’t remember her name. There’s a court case.”
“Yes?”
“Do you understand?”
“Okay. There’s a court case?”
“Yes, darling! You understand.” Then Hazel tapped a number on her phone’s keypad and said, “Oh, darling, that beep means I have another call. I have to go!” She dropped the phone abruptly, as Anthea said goodbye.
For a moment she sat in the dark, illuminated only by the greyish light of her screensaver and wondered why Hazel always ended phone conversations with a lie. Why also her conversations were so saturated with import and yet so opaque, so Anthea felt Hazel’s urgency, but never understood what was going on. Was the court case the point? Or assisted suicide? Or something to do with history? For another, longer moment Anthea imagined Hazel at her dark, gin-smirched tea table.
On the thirtieth of April of that fourth year, having finished her exams, Anthea caught a bus north to Duncan’s Crossing to see her parents. Colm met her in town and told her they were going to see Hazel that night or the next, though he did not elaborate. Anthea wilted a little, but she didn’t argue, because Colm wore an expression she knew well, where he sucked on his teeth and his fingers made fists around the steering wheel.
Anthea watched Duncan’s Crossing go by and hated it: the Glass Castle and the RVs, the car dealerships and the new prefab fast food spots adrift in huge parking lots, the highway that bisected the town with four lanes and a Lego-green meridian, the low slate-coloured clouds on the hills all around.
While she hated the town, Colm broke his anxious silence. He tried to prepare her. He said, “Yeah, no. Anthea. You need to be prepared.”
“What?”
“Just, yeah, okay. No. Yeah.” Colm said. “It’s Hazel. She did something.”
Anthea thought down the list: heart attack, a fall, pneumonia, the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s, home invasion, stroke.
“See, she did something.” Colm stopped again.
“What did she do?”
“No. Yeah. She.”
“What? ”
“Well, see, we didn’t want to tell you before, while you were away. We thought we’d wait. Max doesn’t know either. We’ll tell him when he gets here next week.”
It came out painfully, in Colm’s nearly impenetrable syntax. Last week he had been worried about Hazel, and in the usual way he worried since Grandpa Max had died. On Thursday, in the early evening, he had worried enough, and went over to Hazel’s house where he found her on the Naugahyde chesterfield in her front room, with a thin plastic bag over her head, tied at the neck with a black silk ribbon. On the table beside her, he saw a bottle of Gordon’s gin, and around it the empty containers: Valium, Nembutal, Librium, Clonazepam. She was still breathing when he tore the plastic off her face.
“She’s in the hospital now,” was all he said, and then Anthea did not know what to say, and sat watching the edge of the ugly town pass them, until they were in the country again. She wondered how it would feel, a plastic bag over her mouth, and the alcohol leaching from her stomach to her blood, and the tranquilizers following, and how the world would seem tiny and far away on the other side of the plastic, and there would be panic at first, then the tyrannical calm of the tranqs and then nothing until Colm and the paramedics and the horrible smell of plastic from the mask on her face, and the paralysis, and the taste and scent and texture of vomit.
“Maybe you don’t have to go see her, not right away,” he said, finally. “Maybe we shouldn’t go so soon. Someone has to be with her all the time, but I don’t want you to have to. Your mother’s there now. We’re pretty busy.”
“Did you tell Ada?”
“Your mom called her.”
And when the mask was pulled away, the narrow, high bed and the steel bars on either side, the weight of the covers on her legs as heavy as paralysis, now that she couldn’t move properly, and the horrible fluorescents of the nighttime hospital and the windowless room and the long, long descent.
Anthea didn’t go see her right away. She stayed at home in her old bedroom, in front of her old computer while her parents and Hazel’s niece Beatrice shuttled back and forth to the hospital, sitting with Hazel as she came down from three days of hallucinations. Anthea stayed in her room while Colm talked to his sister Ada, and explained about Hazel’s condition. Ada did not join them, though she asked for regular updates, which was more than anyone expected. Anthea played solitaire, and sometimes talked to Jasmine, and avoided calls from high school friends who wanted a reunion party, which was silly because they’d only been out of school four years. She wrote long emails to the boy she’d met at the last party of the semester, without mentioning the most important part of her visit home: Hazel with the plastic bag and the thin, black ribbon around her throat.
When it was time, Colm took her to the hospital. On the way, he tried to explain things, starting out, “The way she speaks. It’s not always easy to follow.” Then he said, “And she’s changed quite a bit.”
“Okay,” Anthea said.
They were on the highway where it brinked the spiny ridge of mountains. Anthea looked up the stone face toward the summit, then down to the inlet below, and over the peninsula toward the islands, and beyond those, the strait.
“It’s hard for her. She can’t say what she means, even though she tries really really hard. And she keeps trying hard, all day long, when you sit beside her. She doesn’t seem to sleep much.”
She looked up through the stones and down to the water as it narrowed to a mudflat, then a creek, and said, “In On The Beach, when they take the nuclear sub down to Bellingham and Seattle, they pass by a place sort of close to here, and they see there’s like a whole bunch of forest burnt out, and they say that probably an airburst went off short of its target. I guess the target would be the base? Or maybe the test range at Nanoose?”
“Why are you reading about that? That’s the stuff that scares you.” Years later, when she remembered that afternoon, Anthea coiled her fingers into fists so tight that her nails bit the palms of her hands and left red crescents in the skin. Of all the events around Hazel’s suicide, it was the afternoon ride with Colm that brought to her heart a regret so deep and tidal it might have been the Pacific that lay west beyond the mountains. An instant, when the pickup flashed between light and shadow on the highway, with the narrowing inlet below them and the flashblinding on the mountains above them, that moment mushroomed, and she felt it now, Colm’s silence, her empty talk.
“Okay, that was like a million years ago? I’m not scared of it now. Now it’s just interesting.” Colm didn’t get it, and how she was just trying to make conversation.
The truck was warm and Anthea yawned. She thought about the scar of an airburst and how they’d discussed the nuclear singularity in a cultural studies course, which she knew Colm would find strange. He’d shake his head and talk about the practical effects of compression waves, and use terms like p.s.i. and kilopascals and shear stress. He’d point out that a nuclear detonation wasn’t singular, because it had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Bikini Atoll and Nevada and in the northern deserts of India and deep underground in places they’d never know. It couldn’t be singular, because it started at one place in one moment and moved through matter at a speed measured in time, even if that speed was so great it seemed an instant to the human brain. The word “singularity,” he said, should be preserved for things that are properly singular.
When they arrived she was not prepared to feel as sick as she did walking down the brown-tiled wing of the old hospital, down the windowless hall decorated with amateur oil paintings. Down the corridor lined with hampers full of sheets the colour of pee stains, or a faded green like the blades of grass that try to grow up through sheds and u
nder old cars. She could not bear to look closely at remaindered meal trays, bloody Jell-O stains, the pools of sticky, ash-coloured gravy, and above it all the smell of piss and the sweetish-salty aroma of institutional chicken fat from old suppers unexorcised.
They went through a door to a four-bed room of old women, surrounded by wilting flowers and stainless steel spit trays and bedpans. There was Hazel with white hairs covering her chin, which Anthea had never before seen, long, thick ones like the spines of a cactus. Her eyes seemed to stare at something they couldn’t see, something in the middle of the room, five feet from the floor. Anthea had not meant to, but she found herself standing in that place, the unintentional object of her grandmother’s slack gaze. She felt Colm behind her, and heard the long, deep breaths he made when he was trying not to be upset. Then one of his hands wrapped around hers and squeezed, and she did not know if it was for her comfort or his. She was preoccupied with Hazel’s pale, wet eyes that looked back at her without seeming to see, and with the way the muscles behind her skin seemed to free-fall from the left side of her cheek and jaw.
Anthea stepped back into Colm.
“It’s alright, sweetheart, it’s alright,” he said. “It’s alright.”
She said, “I’m okay.”
Hazel raised her right hand. It looked like Colm’s, except that her fingers curled about one another like the petals of some heavy, fleshy flower, a lily or a camellia. Her fingernails were dirty. Colm led Anthea closer to her grandmother, and with his left hand picked Hazel’s arm out of the air, where it hung as though she had forgotten about it.
“Hey there, Hazel, hey there. How are you doing?”
Hazel, her hand in Colm’s, opened her mouth and closed it again.
“Pudding,” she said. Only it came out like she was full of marbles, a spit-choked plosive trailing off. Pu-in.
“Oh yeah? You had pudding? Was it tasty? What kind?”
Hazel patted the tray with her left hand, and dabbed at the mushroom-coloured remains of her lunch pudding.
Anthea looked away.
Colm fumbled for a Kleenex, and inexpertly wiped his mother’s hand. “You alright there, Panther?”
“Ann-ah,” Hazel said. She stopped. “Nuh,” she said. She reached away from Colm’s ineffectual Kleenex, and when her fingers touched Anthea’s skin they were cold. She could feel the smear of pudding spread irrevocably over her own fingers.
“Fin-uh. Bay-hen. Boo-fu,” Hazel said. She chuckled then, and patted Anthea’s hand with the fist that was like the bud of a decaying flower.
A month later Hazel came home to her old bedroom. She had stated in her suicide note that she wanted to die on her own terms, without the indignities of the hospital, and when the doctors said the time was near, Colm and Tess and Bea arranged the move, informing Ada, who still did not join them.
They sat with her on shifts, with Colm sitting two hours for everyone else’s one. Anthea didn’t know how he stood it, hour after hour in there with Hazel, who spoke so urgently each time she crept to consciousness, though there was no way to understand or answer her garbled speech, or do anything but hold her hot, dry hands as they plucked at your arms and your face.
On the first morning, Colm sat at the dining room table, filling syringes with a liquid morphine derivate, the tiny vials in a box beside him. Opposite him, Anthea watched the methodical taptap on the side of the syringe, and watched the bubbles rise, and the growing cup of 4 mL doses to his right. They said nothing. It was a bright day, and Anthea blinked in the sunshine. It was hot on that side of the house, facing the water.
The longer Hazel lay in the bedroom, the more her bones seemed to show in her face, along her wrists, her skull newly apparent through her thin, grey skin. She took the morphine derivative from the syringe, absorbed it through the mucus membranes in her cheek. She took it every four hours. Anthea was not yet allowed to measure doses, but she and Max had each taken a shift at her bedside, while their parents and Hazel’s niece Bea slept on couches and foamies around the house.
When her shift was over, Anthea went out onto the deck and looked across the inlet toward the airport. She looked down at the water under moonlight and thought how much deeper it seemed at night. When she slept, she dreamed about all the submerged geographies, and the creatures that lived among them, about whales and octopus, the jellyfish blooms they saw in summer, and phosphorescent algae, and the deeper, colder places they could not see, valleys and plains that stretched out beneath the water, and far away to the west whole mountain ranges sunk in the dark parts of the ocean.
The next afternoon she and Max followed the short path down to the beach for a few minutes of clean air, and sat together skipping shells on the water. Max beat her with six skips. She couldn’t crack five. Above them, in her bedroom, Hazel’s lungs rattled like a rusty pump through the long, bright afternoon, through the darkening blue of evening, and into her second night unconscious. Every four hours the drug seeped through her mucus membranes and into her blood, so she remained beneath the surface of things. Some time that evening—a moment none of them recognized—she passed from sleep into coma. Outside, Anthea felt the night sky press down upon her head, the stars in deep space seemed so close, and so heavy, she could reach up and touch them.
Colm was with Hazel when the end came before dawn on the third day. The house was silent and the birds had not yet begun to sing. As they waited together, the dark around them lifted, and a patch of sky above the trees—not light, but lighter than the woods—showed in the window. He knew his family slept just on the other side of the door, but that seemed very far away, while the room in which Hazel lay measured the whole world, as though a globe of some subtle element enclosed just the two of them.
The steady, rusty noise of her lungs had not altered since late afternoon, but now the first change had come upon them. In his exhaustion he did not realize it for some time, but when he noticed the new sound he leaned toward the bed. In the dim light of the window, her eyes seemed to flicker, and for a moment he thought she had surfaced from her coma and, for the first time in days, looked at him. She made a noise—a sound of surprise, as though she saw something she had not expected—and then her breathing changed again. Each breath was quieter and shallower. She drew one more, and he touched her throat and felt her slowing pulse against his fingertips.
The birds outside singing. The scrap of sky above the trees illuminated. He waited with her for an hour and then leaned across his mother’s body and kissed her forehead. Her skin was cool against his lips. First he was surprised at the touch of her skin, but with it he knew she was dead, and this was his last sight of her on earth. He thought then of her brain, beneath the bone, already gone, and of the margins of her body as they lost to the invading world. The stilled blood pooled in her heart and then coagulated, the electrical impulses no longer travelled along her nerves to light the deep reaches of her mind.
She has flipped the switch and it is dark. She had locked the door behind her. Here on earth only the organs of memory in collapse, and with them gone sensations and flavours, voices, music. And returned to mud and ash those parts of her experience she did not speak, the last sparks rendered untranslatable as they fire, at random, in the closing moments of her life. There were questions he could not ask, there were answers he wished to possess, and secrets he would never know, and explanations. And all that receding from him, as he was carried forward alive and her body remained behind, her flesh going first, falling in on the bones that supported it in the absence of her soul, but soon the bones gone, and then the dust.
REMITTANCE GIRL
Anthea had never seen a will before she saw Hazel’s, which was delivered to her residence on an afternoon late in September, a month after her grandmother’s death. She signed a form and the courier handed over a large buff envelope. First she thought that it was Colm’s way of including both her and Max in the business of inheritance. But then she unfolded the sheets and found her name listed after Colm
’s, who was the executor, and beside that an article detailing her inheritance. Ada’s name did not appear.
She sat on the floor of her dorm room and looked at the number, and plans blossomed in her mind: a doctorate, travel, a warm thought between her and the world. It came, for no reason she could discern, from Hazel. She thought of her grandmother as she always did now, in a plastic bag with a narrow black ribbon at her throat, but now signing the papers. And though the will had transformed her life, it gave no reason for Hazel’s decision.
She phoned Colm and said, “I got a thing in the mail.”
For the first time she realized how much his voice had changed since Hazel died. “Yeah. No,” he said. Then he said, “Panther,” and finally, “I don’t know about it. I guess you’ll have to talk to the lawyer.”
“But why would she do that?”
She heard him breathe in and out again. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”
Suddenly the will, which had felt a moment before like the explosion of opportunity, seemed shameful.
“I didn’t mean it. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t, Dad.”
“I know.”
“She called me before she did it.”
“Did she? It’s okay if she called. It’s okay.”
“But I didn’t do anything. I didn’t mean it.” She knew she shouldn’t say it again, but she did, because Colm seemed to think she had done something wrong, that she had made it happen.
She wanted him to tell her it wasn’t her fault—that Hazel’s will was like her suicide, out of their hands and beyond their powers to understand.
“It’s alright,” was all Colm said. For a moment she felt better, then he said, “It’s alright,” and the second time it meant less, and then the third time it meant nothing at all.
When she picked up the envelope there seemed to be a faint scent of corruption about it, one that she worried would cling to her, even as it made her into a little-time gentlewoman, a remittance girl.
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