by Unknown
I am coming to live…
She was moving his hand against the inside of one of her wrists, now. Feeling the paper-thin membrane against her smoothness, right where the sleeve of her robe ended. Dazed, she moved his hand to her cheek. Held it there. Stroked once, so gently, down. Back up. Down again. Then she slid Joe’s hand to her neck. Down farther, into the V of her robe to brush one nipple. The other. How long had it been now? Two years? Three? They’d had such sweet touching in the eighteen months before what they’d always known was coming—or, coming back—arrived for good. Such patient touching, as though they’d had all the time in the world. Now his skin—what there was of it—just felt scratchy and hard, like a dried-out loofah.
I am coming to live in your mouth.
She jerked upright and dropped Joe’s hand to the hospital bed that had taken the place of their couch and swung around.
Screaming, she thought. I should be screaming.
She couldn’t see his face. He was standing in the corner, just where the shadow of the tallest oak spilled through the glass sliding door. His stained tan overcoat hung too low, all but brushing the tops of his galoshes, which looked shiny and wet, though there hadn’t been so much as a mist out there yet this fall. He had his head bent low, the brim of his trilby completely shading his face.
“Get out of my—” she started, and his voice overrode her though it was barely a whisper, hollow as respirator breath in an oxygen mask.
I am coming to live in your mouth. Because you never have anything to say.
Then she was screaming, crying, too, “Out! Get out! OUT!”
The figure in the corner didn’t even lift its head, but it was still speaking, or else those words had rung a resonant spot inside her, because she could hear them over her shouting. Coming to live. Never have anything…
“What in sweet God’s name?” Mrs. Thiel snapped from the stairway, and Kagome whirled, her own voice choking to silence but that other’s still echoing.
At least the mask was down, Kagome thought, watching Joe’s mother’s razor-thin eyebrows squeeze together like crayfish pincers. For a long moment, she just held Mrs. Thiel’s gaze, then remembered and leapt to her feet, swinging around.
By the sliding glass door, she saw the shadow of the oak shaking slightly, as though ravens had just sprung from its branches. Bare floor. The boxes of sterile needles and spare tubing tucked neatly against the breakfront. Nothing else.
I am coming to live in your mouth.
When she turned once more, she found Joe’s mother smiling. The eyebrows hung in their carefully separated spaces like precisely hung photographs. The mask, in place once more.
“Jasmine?” Mrs. Thiel said brightly. “Help us greet the new day grinning?”
Moving to the stove, ignoring Kagome’s elegant tetsubin tea things arrayed on the shelf by the sink, she filled the utilitarian silver kettle she’d brought with her when she’d finally dropped the pretense and moved in a few weeks before. The kettle made an ugly, banging sound as Mrs. Thiel settled it over the burner.
“Think the newspaper’s here? I’ll get you your crossword. Or is it more a sudoku kind of hour?”
Instead of answering, Kagome gazed down again at what was left of her husband. Her screaming hadn’t roused him. Would today be the last day? Would the next time he opened his eyes be the final one? Good God, had she already had the final one? When had it been? She couldn’t even remember.
She watched Joe’s chest, which just lay flat.
Lay flat.
Lay flat.
Lay flat.
And finally, fitfully, inflated, as though some small child were shoving at it from inside. Joe’s mouth didn’t exactly open anymore, but part of his lower lip quivered as air slipped past it. He gurgled once, and pus ran down his teeth onto his tongue. Then his chest clamped down again.
Kagome glanced toward the corner. With a brief, discreet brush of her husband’s palm with her fingertips, she turned to face Mrs. Thiel. She had no smile in her but managed one. At least, it felt like she did. “Sudoku, I think,” she said. Without even slipping her fuzzy overcoat over her robe, she crossed to the front door and stepped out into the icy mountain air to wait for the paper she knew wouldn’t come for at least another hour.
But the cold didn’t help. Nor did the shower when she came inside. Nor Mrs. Thiel’s superb slow eggs and salsa. The final proof for just how unsettling her 4:00 A.M. encounter had been came as Mrs. Thiel was clearing the breakfast dishes, leaning over her shoulder while Kagome tapped the last unfilled boxes of the Thursday Times crossword with her pencil eraser.
“Mulliner,” Mrs. Thiel said suddenly, and Kagome stared at the puzzle. The answer was correct, of course. 65 down: Old hat, at the Angler’s. Jobs misspelled to make Wodehouse characters, the theme of the day. When, exactly, had Mrs. Thiel started nailing crossword clues like that? Never before, in the time Kagome had known her.
“Get the crazy glue,” Mrs. Thiel said, and Kagome grabbed her hand and almost made her drop the dishes. She could feel Mrs. Thiel’s scowl on her shoulders—God forbid either of them should actually show any emotion other than radiant, resolute hopefulness—but Mrs. Thiel held on, too. For one second, no longer.
Get the crazy glue. It was what Joe said when he turned away from a ball he’d bowled immediately after bowling it, before the ball was halfway down the lane. When he knew he’d rolled a strike, and that the pins would be flying. In the three, maybe four times Kagome had gone bowling with Joe, she’d never seen him guess wrong. “ ’Cause there’s no guessing involved,” he’d say. And touch her cheek gently with one finger as he returned to his seat.
I am coming to live in your mouth…
The doorbell rang at eleven while Kagome was still combing out her long, black hair and beginning to weave it into the complicated sakkou fashion she’d learned from her mother, and that had always hypnotized Joe. Fascinated him. “Like a wild knot,” he’d said once, slipping his long fingers in and out of the whirl of loops and crosses she’d made. Then, when she’d lain still long enough, he told her what that was, as she knew he would. A knot built out of infinite sequences, with a seemingly infinite number of edges. “In the actual universe—the physical one—” Joe told her, “there’s no such thing.”
Abruptly, she came out of her reverie. Hospice. She’d blocked that out. Forgotten they were coming. Then she heard the door opening, a single strum of an out-of-tune ukulele, and her first real smile of the day spread over her pale, exhausted face. Pinning the last twist of her hair into place, she stepped into the hall and caught a fleeting glimpse, galoshes sliding silently around the corner, into the guest room they never used, who would come?
Sprinting for the room, she threw open the door—closed? It was closed?—and found the erg machine Joe had ordered to keep his muscles in shape while his skin rotted off and his lungs shriveled and his organs imploded, one by one. Beyond the bare windows, she saw the tops of trees, all but bare now, swaying.
More ukulele strums from downstairs, and Ryan’s ridiculous, keening laugh, and his croak of a voice. “Going down, chum. Going down hard.” And then that roaring, ripping cough—the cancer growling as it fed—that told her Joe was awake.
Kagome hurried downstairs, ignoring the urge to swing around, just once, to make sure. She’d made sure. And already knew, anyway.
“How long has he been awake?” she asked Mrs. Thiel, who was wiping down the kitchen counters, having already washed every dish and tucked away the supplies from last night’s feeding. Only occasionally did the woman allow herself a glance toward the couch, where her son, propped up, was trying to get his fingers around the Playstation controller and his thumbs into place. Finally, Mrs. Thiel looked at Kagome. And grinned.
Kagome smiled back. They stood together and watched.
Ryan, in his usual holey black Warped Tour skateshirt and Vans, was alternately flipping at his mop of brown hair and fiddling with the television controllers. Ev
entually, the screen burst into color, and pumping techno music thudded through the room. Returning to his seat, Ryan spied Kagome, waved the ukulele he was still holding by its neck in his free hand, and settled in the chair closest to Joe. On the screen, twin rocket-propelled race cars approached a starting line as the riff in the music repeated itself, then froze as the START NEW GAME? message appeared.
It was hard to remember, watching them, that Ryan had started out as Kagome’s friend. He’d been her intern at Mountain Living. In some ways, he fit the copy editor stereotype even more closely than she did: glasses, nervous twitch to his fingers, permanent pale-yellow cast to his skin. Computer tan. Except he also wore Vans and played the ukulele, told invented shaggy dog jokes that made Kagome laugh—no mean feat, in this particular era of her life—and kick-boxed.
Four months ago, out of nowhere, hunched over his computer in the midst of a particularly gnarly edit, he’d mentioned his Boggle prowess. She’d said nothing, but brought Joe’s travel set the next day and set it wordlessly before Ryan at lunch. It had taken her two rounds to realize he hadn’t been kidding, and seven for him to win the match. Which made him exactly the second person she’d ever met to take one from her. She hadn’t so much invited him to dinner as thrown down the gauntlet. He’d shown up singing “Tiny Bubbles,” Joe had skunked him at Boggle but lost every Playstation game they’d tried and also computer Jeopardy, and that had pretty much been the last time Kagome had spent with Ryan except at work.
When Ryan was at their house, which was almost every night now, he was with Joe. Once the sickness consigned Joe permanently to the couch, Ryan came more frequently, not less. She didn’t think she’d ever been happier about another human being’s existence except her husband’s.
“You’ll be wanting me to say I’m lucky,” Ryan told Joe now. She watched his eyes flick to the tumor on Joe’s mouth. On Joe’s lap, Briny aimed an annoyed glare at Ryan, then hopped down and disappeared upstairs.
“Nnuz nuuuuhne,” said Joe. He couldn’t really turn his head, but Kagome saw his gaze stray in her direction.
“He says, ‘Because you will be,’ ” Kagome told Ryan. Even Mrs. Thiel could no longer understand her son.
Ryan grinned. “Then you’re admitting defeat before we begin. It’s what I’ve always wanted from you.”
He triggered the game, and on-screen one of the racers launched from the start and hurtled out of sight around a curve, while the other spun immediately into a side wall and blew up.
“Nnuk,” Joe said. Ryan grinned wider, and kept going.
Kagome saw the panic first, and moved immediately, silently. Mrs. Thiel was right behind her, and Ryan didn’t even notice until they were already beside Joe, gently disentangling his catheter tube from underneath him and beginning the several-minute process of preparing to help him up.
“What… oh…” Ryan said, wrinkling his nose at the smell and standing. “It’s okay, dude.” He held out his hands.
“He knows it’s okay. Could you get a water bucket and the sponges?” Mrs. Thiel snapped.
“Under the sink,” Kagome murmured. “Thank you, Ryan.”
Somehow, once they got Joe to his feet, he managed to stay there while Kagome and Mrs. Thiel bundled up the mess in the sheets, and Kagome scrubbed at the slimy, brown streaks sinking into the pillows. Those streaks seemed so devoid of mass they barely even qualified as shit. When she’d finished, she leaned back on her haunches and brushed her nose with her forearm and looked up at her husband. So thin as to be almost two-dimensional, pale as paper, like an origami approximation of himself. To her delighted surprise, he was fully alert, staring back. And smiling?
“Nnnay nur nuky,” he said.
“I’m lucky,” she whispered, and kissed the bones of his hand.
“How about Tijuana Taco?” Mrs. Thiel chirped as she returned from whatever she’d done with the sheets. Framed them, probably, Kagome thought, then chastised herself for thinking it. “Kagome, green chile for you, right?”
“Just soup,” she murmured. A few chattery seconds later, Mrs. Thiel mercifully left the house on her errand.
Standing for so long had completely exhausted Joe, and he was swaying and shivering more violently than the trees outside as Ryan and Kagome lowered him back onto the home-care hospital bed he’d chosen to die on and settled his heap of comforters and blankets and coats around him. They weren’t enough, and Joe went on shivering even as sleep swallowed him.
Stripping off her rubber gloves, Kagome stood and gazed down at her husband. Behind her, Ryan muted the TV, though from the clicking of the controllers, she knew he was finishing Joe’s race for him. Starting right where Joe’s car had exploded. After a while, he took up his ukulele again, stroked that quietly. The chords he played changed so slowly, she wasn’t sure they were even connected or part of a song until he started half-humming a vocal line, in his strangely sweet croak that was far too old for him.
“Because you never… because you never… have anything…”
She didn’t mean to hit him, of course she didn’t, but the words he had sung didn’t register right away, and when they did, she panicked, spun so fast that the fist still holding the shit-rag smacked across his cheek and her knee drove the ukulele out of his hands and across the room. Stunned, streaked with brown and red across his cheeks, Ryan stared up at her, while her free hand flew to her own mouth.
“What did you just…” Her brain was screaming back to this morning, and she was crying again, too, seeing the stick-thin, galoshes-guy in the corner. “Ryan?”
Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t so. She hadn’t seen the trilby man’s face. But he’d been considerably taller. And even though his shape had been disguised by his trench coat, it hadn’t been Ryan’s shape. No. It had been… what? She couldn’t remember. Furthermore, Ryan had been downstairs, just coming inside, at the moment Kagome had seen the trilby man ducking into the guest room. Because he had been there. She was as sure of that now as she’d been that he was imaginary a few hours ago.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, blinking to try to stem her tears. She bent to wipe at the streaks on Ryan’s cheek, and he let her. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
“It’s okay,” he said, though she’d clearly frightened him. “You’ve been through so—”
“That song.” Dropping the rag, she slumped into the wooden chair Mrs. Thiel always sat in, leaving the armchair for Kagome. Precisely the sort of gesture Kagome despised in her mother-in-law, even though it probably had no other motive behind it than kindness. “What made you sing that?”
Now Ryan was staring. “Sing what?”
“What you just sang.”
“I wasn’t singing. I was barely even—”
On the couch, Joe unleashed a cough that lifted his spine off the pillows and convulsed him with shudders but didn’t waken him. Kagome dug under the blankets, found the IV tube, and followed it down to Joe’s hand. Then she held on. After a while, she turned her gaze once more on Ryan. Her eyes had dried, her features settling into their comfortable, familiar impassivity. Mrs. Thiel’s wasn’t the only mask, she realized.
“Kagome,” Ryan murmured. “I’m sorry. I was just… strumming. Wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” Kagome lied, and her heart banged. “I think probably you were.”
After that, they sat and breathed and watched for Joe’s breaths. At some point, Kagome’s free hand found Ryan’s, and for a fleeting few minutes, she felt a peculiar, suspended stasis. Not peace, nowhere near peace. But there were people in this room who loved her.
And someone else, too, who was coming to live, and Kagome gripped Ryan’s hand and closed her eyes and held still and held on.
“She driving you crazy?” Ryan said. “Joe’s mom, I mean? What’s she so happy about, anyway?”
For a long time, Kagome didn’t answer. Didn’t want to. Despite the waves of panic and loneliness and nausea and fear, she wanted to stay right where she was, propped in place
, like a birdhouse with birds hopping around and into it, even though there was virtually nothing left inside.
“She’s never been happy,” Kagome answered. “She just… she thinks it’s what Joe wants. You know, he’s never liked even acknowledging that he’s sick. She also thinks it’s why he’s still here. If you don’t look at it, it can’t see you. That kind of thing. I think. Maybe she’s right. You know he’s been told he had less than a year to live since he was seven years old.”
“Does she like you?”
The question startled Kagome out of her half-trance. For the first time in who knew how long, her eyes left Joe’s face. She looked not at Ryan but at the mountainside folding into nightshadow as the November day drained away.
Then that voice was in her ears again, and her bones, too, and the soft tissue of her arms and chest, whispering, scratching. I am coming to live in your mouth. Coming to live in your mouth. Coming…
“She thinks I’m a vacuum,” Kagome said, and didn’t cry, or squeeze Ryan’s hand. She squeezed Joe’s, though. Hard. “She thinks he married me to have a calming presence near. Because he finally got scared.”
“Does she know you can beat him at Boggle? Does she actually think that calms him?”
“Scrabble. Not Boggle. Not ever.”
Her eyes flicked to Ryan’s face. Behind his glasses, his surprisingly large green eyes seemed to swivel in their sockets like a bird’s. To her immense relief, he was smiling, a little. Somehow, in his Warped T-shirt, with his long legs bunched up against the hospital bed and his hair falling over his face, he looked completely adrift on the currents in this room, bobbing like a bottle with a message in it. Whether the message was for or from her, she had no idea.