by Unknown
Hospice arrived a little after five, an hour or so after Mrs. Thiel came back. Rising from the wooden chair where she’d stayed all day—to her mother-in-law’s visible annoyance, and not once had Mrs. Thiel taken the empty La-Z-Boy—Kagome watched the two nurses and one social worker fan through the room, silent and efficient as the elves in that story about the shoemaker, who come in on a moonbeam. Truly, they were marvels. Even the doorbell when they rang seemed muffled. Even Mrs. Thiel went quieter when they were here, though her ferocious half-grin never wavered.
The two nurses sponged Joe down, changed his bedding; one combed what was left of his hair while the other washed out the tumor over his mouth with a syringe. The social worker brought Kagome tea in one of her porcelain cherry-blossom cups, and may have spoken to her, too. Kagome might even have spoken back. She couldn’t be sure, knew only that the muttering in her ears and her blood had gone quiet. She could hear it, still, but barely. As though it were out on the deck in the falling dark, and just once she glanced that way, through the sliding doors, and saw only shadow.
I know you, she thought, and didn’t even try to make sense of that.
“You know what hospice does?” Mrs. Thiel had halfway shrieked, when Kagome had insisted on bringing them in. “Hospice kills you. You understand that, right? You think they’re coming to help? They’re coming to kill Joe. They’re the angels of goddamn death.”
And of course, she was right. The smothering doses of morphine and methadone that ate away at the brain, the thousand other little drugs they gave that the body couldn’t really take, all meant to keep Joe comfortable, mask the pain. The words they used, to settle them all. Get them ready. Or, not ready, there was no such thing, and they would never have used so crude a term. Tranquil, maybe. Sort of. Angels of death they truly were. But why did Americans always focus on the death part? What else did they imagine angels were for?
So pervasive was the spell the hospice workers cast that Kagome only noticed the positions they’d taken and realized what they were about to do a few seconds before Joe woke up. Way back in her throat, a groan formed, and though it came out choked, barely even audible, the sound grated against everything else in the room and rattled Mrs. Thiel to wakefulness. And so Mrs. Thiel realized what was happening, too.
“Get away from him,” Mrs. Thiel said, but even her voice seemed to come from under a layer of gauze, as though she’d been gagged. “Get…”
Her words sank to nothing as her son’s eyes flew open. For one moment, he lay there, blinking, before rolling with surprising alacrity onto his side. His glare was like a bucket of water flung over the hospice workers. They were human after all, Kagome noted; all three flinched back on the chairs they’d arrayed around the bed so that their medical whites formed a sort of picket fence between Joe and the rest of the room. The life he’d lived. Just like that, they ceased to be angels, and their features resolved into ordinary, comprehensible, human ones. One of the nurses had a Band-Aid under the lobe of her left ear. The social worker had pretty auburn hair—just moments ago, it had seemed gray, Kagome had assumed that was a required color for the job, like a uniform—clumped in an unflattering working bun at the base of her neck.
It was the social worker who spoke, as a new shiver rippled down Joe’s obscenely articulated bones. The woman’s voice was trained, alright, lulling as a 2 A.M. smooth-jazz disc jockey’s, but warmer. At once more detached and more genuine.
“Joe,” the woman said.
Beside Kagome, Mrs. Thiel beat her arms against her sides like an enraged mother eagle. But she held her place. Waited.
“Joe, you’ve fought so hard, for so long. For thirty years, is that right?”
To Kagome’s astonishment, Joe answered. And his voice came out fuller, with more of his joyful, prickly Joe-ness than at any time in the past two months. Also with more consonants.
“Thirty-three. Got sick when I was seven.”
“Thirty-three years, when virtually anyone else would have been dead in six months. Incredible. Please know, Joe. All we want is to help you make meaningful use of every meaningful second, and also provide comfort. To you, and your loved ones. We’ve been coming here a month. I’ve never seen anyone fight like you do.”
Was Joe smiling, now? Oh, God, was Joe crying? The tumor seemed to float across his mouth, obscuring it, like one of those black blotches television stations use to blur victim’s features on true crime shows.
“So now. Joe.” This time, as she spoke, the social worker slid forward on her chair. As if on cue, the others edged forward, also, and Kagome almost screamed, it was like watching hyenas dance in from the edge of a clearing.
“What is your goal now, Joe? Can you tell me that?” At this, the woman gave a practiced but mournful glance over her shoulder toward Kagome and Mrs. Thiel. Kagome watched her auburn bun shake. “What do you still want to do?”
There was no doubt anymore. Joe was crying. If there’d been a smile, too, it was gone. “Survive,” he said, in his dead man’s rasp. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.
“You bitch,” Mrs. Thiel murmured, and Kagome started to nod right along with her, wanted to raise both fists in the air and cheer or scream, and then realized her mother-in-law meant her. “I can’t take this,” Mrs. Thiel went on. “I’m going to the movies.” Already, her voice was molding back into its chirp, as though it were pottery clay she was rounding, relentlessly rounding. “I’ll be back soon. Bring you those chocolate stars you like, if they have any, Kagome. Bye, Ryan, see you tomorrow?”
Moments later, she was gone, and hospice, too, leaving a message pad full of numbers to call, anytime, for help or advice, or just to talk. They promised to be back tomorrow afternoon. Kagome returned to her wooden chair and Ryan to the La-Z-Boy. Ryan left his ukulele on the floor. They stayed there in silence a long time. Full night fell.
Kagome wasn’t sure when she realized Ryan was asleep. He had his arms crossed tight across his thin chest, his head twisted at an ugly angle, as though someone had slipped up behind and wrenched it halfway off. His leg, barely touching hers through her skirt, felt almost hot. So palpably living. Gently, she reached over, lifted his head, and leaned it in what she hoped was a more comfortable way against her shoulder. When she looked up, the trilby man was watching through the window.
For the second time in less than a day, a scream jagged up her throat, but this time Kagome managed to catch it between her teeth, and her tongue and everything inside her sizzled as though she’d bit down on electrical wire. How did she know the trilby man was watching, she couldn’t even see his face? The hat and the dark hid his features, made her wonder if there was a face under there at all, his head just looked like a blacker circle pasted on the black out there.
Because it wasn’t out there. She was seeing his reflection. He was right behind her.
She whirled, banging Ryan’s forehead with her own. His head rocked back, stars shot across her eyes, and she swept her gaze wildly through the room but saw nothing. Wait—near the counter. By the kitchen. But that was Briny, Joe’s cat, creeping back.
Tears poured through her squeezed lashes all at once, as though she’d tipped a vase that had been stored there. She couldn’t stop them, felt the shakes seize her. Then Ryan’s arms were around her shoulders, enclosing her. She let herself fold forward. For long minutes, she had no idea how long, she just leaned into Ryan and shook. He held tight.
The only thing she was absolutely certain of, later, was that she’d started it. And that she’d been looking at Joe when she did. At the stump where Joe’s right ear had been, and the black, ball-shaped scar over the hole in his jaw where the second-to-last of the twenty-three surgeries she’d been through with him had focused. The little tumors swelling all over his face, seeming to wriggle when she looked away, like pregnant spiders scurrying over her husband with their sacs of young.
Partially, it was triggered by the awkward way Ryan held her, with his hands seemingly affixed to her s
houlder blades like defibrillator pads he was trying to place. For most of the time Joe had been able to hold her, he’d done so like that. He’d avoided dating, most of his life. Hadn’t seen the point, he said. And so he hadn’t known what to do with his hands, at first. She’d had to show him.
But partially, too, it was Ryan’s heat. His pale arms, with her tears streaking them, and the surprising force of his skater’s thighs pushing against hers. It was like holding Joe, but a different Joe. Joe healthy. Joe capable of expressing the hunger she knew he felt, that was too strong for his frail frame, that he’d been afraid would shake him to pieces every time they touched. She wasn’t exactly thinking any of this, but she was conscious of it all as one of her hands slid down Ryan’s chest into his lap, and her mouth lifted and found his.
It lasted longer than she could have hoped, certainly longer than she expected. Long enough for her to wonder if they were actually going through with it, and to understand that Ryan hadn’t come here only for Joe, after all. His hands had come off her shoulders at last, and they felt so good gliding on her back. His eyes were closed, but hers flicked constantly between this boy’s sweet, helpless face and her husband’s wrecked and sleeping one. It was like touching them both, touching Ryan, yes, but also Joe through him. Their mouths had come open, and she was caressing, probing, had Ryan’s belt unbuckled when she saw the cat staring at her and froze, just for a second.
Which was far too long. Ryan gagged, his mouth snapped shut, and he banged her head again with his own as he scrambled to his feet. “Oh, Kagome,” he said, fumbling at his snap and his belt and not getting either and finally staring down at himself and then her in disbelief. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and burst into tears.
“Ryan,” she said, and started to stand, and then she was just too tired. She watched him and offered nothing reassuring, just leaned her head into the side of the La-Z-Boy and let her hair droop almost to the floor. She didn’t cry, didn’t even want to. Mostly, she realized, she wanted to be alone. When was the last time she’d been alone, for any length of time? A month ago? Three?
Ryan kept crying, kept saying, “Sorry.” Not until he was at the door did he say he’d be back. She couldn’t even rouse herself to nod or wave.
Then she was by herself. She closed her eyes and listened. For a moment, she panicked. Even the wind outside seemed to have stilled, and nothing anywhere near her seemed to be breathing, not even her. Then, very low, she heard the rumble of Briny’s purr, and after that a sudden, rattling gasp from Joe, followed by another in no rhythm. Then silence again. She couldn’t even hear the air entering or leaving her own body. Maybe Mrs. Thiel was right, and she was more bonsai tree than wife. Decorative and silent.
And she never had anything to say.
Kagome. Even the name was meaningless, her mother had taken it from some childhood chant.
Opening her eyes, Kagome sat up. She considered dialing her parents in Sendai. But talking to them from this house was like shouting across a mountain canyon. Her mother’s health—and, maybe, her father’s unexpressed sense of betrayal or just loss that she’d decided to settle here—had prevented them ever from coming. And Joe’s health had prevented his going. And years had piled up, like snow in the Snow Country, so deep and so quickly. Kagome didn’t have the strength to traverse them tonight.
I know you, she was thinking, nonsensically. She sat.
At some point, she considered calling Ryan. Telling him he had nothing to be sorry for, that it was her fault. If there was fault. That she loved his coming to the house, and knew his presence was at least as crucial to keeping Joe alive as her own. But then she decided she didn’t need to say this. Ryan was so bright, so intuitive despite his awkwardness. Like Joe was. Had been.
To Kagome’s astonishment, Mrs. Thiel came home raving drunk. She stood swaying a while over her son, glared at Kagome, and Kagome wrapped her in a blanket and took her up to bed. The woman’s hands were rigid with cold, as though she’d shoved them in an ice bucket for the past few hours. As Kagome flicked out the bedroom light, she heard Mrs. Thiel murmur, “Thank you, Kagome. You are, without question, the easiest person in the world to go through this with.”
Kagome almost threw herself back across the room, shrieked in Mrs. Thiel’s face. I tried to fuck his friend, she almost said. Wished she’d said. Easiest?
Instead, she shut the door and stood a few silent seconds on her balcony, in her silent house. That would soon be empty for real. Silent for good. She didn’t open her eyes until she was halfway down the staircase.
The hospital bed was empty.
At first, the sight made so little sense that Kagome couldn’t process it, couldn’t begin to think what to do. Then she was flying downstairs, all but crashing onto her face as she leapt the last five steps into the living room and stared around at the kitchen, the deck—Shit and God, had he thrown himself from the deck?—and saw nothing, and no one.
“Joe?” she said. Spun back to the stairs, to the deck again, expecting the trilby man to materialize out there, he’d said he was coming, warned them he was.
“Joe?”
Then she heard it. One single sob. From the bathroom. Skidding across the hardwood, she rattled the knob, which was locked, beat with her palm against the door. “Joe? It’s me.”
“I killed Briny.”
In mid-beat, with her arm still raised, Kagome froze. “What?”
Sob. Then a sawing, rattling gasp of a breath.
“Joe, please.”
“It wasn’t me. I couldn’t help it.” His voice so clear. As though, right at the end, he’d swallowed the tumor whole, or ripped it off in one last savage spasm of defiance.
“Joe.”
Sobbing.
Cautiously, squeamishly—which was hilarious, in a way, given what she’d seen and done and immersed herself in ever since she’d married her husband—Kagome glanced around for the cat. Briny was so much Joe’s, she’d never developed a deep-seated attachment to it. But she’d loved the way it loved him.
God, did he have it in there with him?
Sinking to her knees, Kagome leaned her forehead into the door and closed her eyes, willing herself through the wood. “Joe. Please.”
“It’s like I had no control over my hands. Like they weren’t my hands, anymore, I wasn’t even part of it.” Rasp. Rattle. Long silence. Sob.
“I think I pulled her head completely off.”
Kagome stifled a sob of her own, felt her fingers curl into claws, as though she could scratch her way through, opened her eyes and saw the cat. It lay curled sleepily in the impression Joe had left in the hospital bed when he’d somehow dragged itself off it, licking a forepaw, watching her through one half-open eye.
“Joe? Joe, Briny’s fine. She’s right here.”
Silence. So long that Kagome caught herself making loud, bellows-like sounds with her breath, as though she could blow air through the wood, around the tumor and into Joe’s desperate, deflating lungs. She knew what was happening, now. It had happened so many times. One of the new drugs—who even kept track anymore—had reacted with one of the old drugs. Or had built up in his system, or triggered some unexpected reaction. And now he was having an episode. And there was nothing to do about it except talk him through.
“Kagome?” Joe said, and his voice sounded different yet again, so small, like a seven-year-old’s. “Kagome, I don’t want to die dumb. Please, I don’t want to be—”
“What? What are you talking—”
“What time is it?”
“Huh? 1:15 or some—”
“Date? What date? How long have I been like this?”
Sick? Sad? Dying? She could hear in his wheeze that he was dying. The rattle had changed, gone heavy in his throat, like a motor shutting down. She started to weep, glanced sideways. The trilby man stood at the top of the stairs.
All she could see of him, really, was his galoshes, the bottom of his coat, his legs up to his knees. No, she thought, shri
nking back, looking frantically around for anything heavy. Something she could swing.
I am coming to live in your mouth.
“Won’t,” she heard Joe grunt, his breath bubbling. “Oh, God, not this way. How long? I killed the… I won’t. HOW LONG?”
Thumping, as though Joe was pounding his own chest. Or driving his head into the wall. “Joe,” Kagome said, starting to weep.
“I don’t want to be dumb.”
“Dumb?”
“I want to be me.”
“Joe, you’ve been you since the day I—”
“Date? What date? How long have I just been lying there? I killed the—”
“Never,” she hissed. “Never, for one second, my husband, have you just been lying there.” She blinked, and the trilby man was closer. Three steps down from the balcony, visible to the waist now. Without even moving. I know you. Even as Kagome thought that, he was five steps down. Absolutely still, with his long arms at his sides. Like she was watching a spliced film.
Because you never have anything to say.
Trilby. Trilllll…
She was panicking, frantic, wanting to flee the house and unable to move, rolling that word on her tongue. Over and over. Trilby. Useless name, for a hat no one wore. No one she’d ever known. Where had she even learned it?
“I killed Briny. Kagome, WHAT TIME IS IT?!”
“Constantinople,” she said abruptly, heard her husband gasp and go still.
On the stairs, the trilby man winked closer. Still not moving, hands at his sides. She could see the top of the hat now, the head bent down on the chest, obscuring the face.
“Come on,” Kagome muttered. Which of them did she mean? She didn’t know, wasn’t sure it mattered.
“Calcutta,” Joe whispered, voice catching hard, ripping on the teeth of his cough, and Kagome threw her head back, almost smiling. Almost.
“Cheating,” she said, as tears erupted down her cheeks. “Hasn’t officially changed its name yet.”
“Just because…” Ripping, ravaging cough. Then the rattle, low and long. “… the west hasn’t acknowledged, doesn’t mean…”