by David Gates
“Would you like us to disappear for a while? We do need to go to the store at some point.”
“No, it’s fine. He already got the last sweet blow job. Under this fucking apple tree—sorry. I just feel like somebody should know. And all the way up here, he keeps finding these sports-talk stations. Did you know that the World Series begins next week? It’s going to be quite a matchup.”
We found him sitting up on the sofa, propped up by pillows under his back, looking at The New York Review of Books. “So,” he said, “did she tell you what a dick I’m being to her?”
“I can imagine how hard this must be for both of you,” I said.
“Ah, still the slick-fielding shortstop,” he said. “But we’re into serious October baseball here.”
“Can you just stop?” Simone said.
“Isn’t that the whole idea?” he said.
Janna came downstairs with her arms full of sheets and blankets. “We’re going to put you guys in the den tonight,” she said. “I thought it would be easier than having to do stairs.”
“She has to go back,” I said.
“You know,” Paul said. “Stuff to do with the, ah, e, s, t, a, t, e.” Simone turned to me. “They said they’d be coming with the bed tomorrow morning. And the nurse should be here. You have my information, right?”
Paul shook his finger at her. “Now that should have been said sotto voce.”
“Let me make you some coffee,” Janna said. “I don’t know if anything’s open between here and the interstate.”
“She’ll be cool,” Paul said. “My guy brought over some Adderall before we left. He gets the real stuff. Made from adders.”
I walked Simone out to the car. She opened the driver’s door, then turned back and came into my arms, taking deep breaths. “He’s been lucky to have you,” I said.
“And now he’s lucky to have you,” she said. “There’s just no end to his luck.”
In bed that night, I said to Janna, “Can we really do this?”
“What’s our choice at this point?” We were lying on our backs, and she rolled over, her breasts against my arm. “Did you two talk at all?”
“I don’t want to, you know, press him.” I worked my arm over her shoulder and pulled her closer. Her belly into my hip. She sighed and moved her palm up my thigh.
“Why didn’t he ever, you know, find somebody?” she said. I felt myself beginning to get hard—could we really do this? “That woman loves him.”
“He never had any trouble finding them,” I said.
“Do you ever wish you were like him?”
“What, you mean dying?”
She jerked away and rolled onto her back again. “I hate when you pretend to be stupid.”
“No,” I said. “Who would ever want a life that lonely?”
“It’s even more obnoxious when you try to figure out the right thing to say.”
I shoved a pillow against the headboard and sat up. “Are we fighting?” I said. “Because this is a hell of a time for it.”
“For the record, I don’t blame you for getting us into this. I just hope it gets over with quickly. Is that horrible to say?”
“No, it’s actually the kindest thing you could say.”
“But would you say it about me? If I were in the situation?”
“Come on,” I said. “Nobody can ever—”
“Okay, I need to go to sleep,” she said. “Obviously I’m not going to get laid tonight. Why don’t you go down and check on your friend and see if he’s still breathing. Then you can get yourself a drink and forget all about it.”
I put my legs over the side and got to my feet. “I bring you one?”
“I’ll be asleep,” she said. “You don’t even listen anymore.”
—
The rooster woke me at six. I heard Janna breathing away and couldn’t get back to sleep. But when I came downstairs Paul had already dressed himself—except for shoes and socks; he’d told us it hurt to bend down—and had managed to get from the den, where Janna had made up the fold-out, to the living-room sofa, and was stretched out listening to something through earbuds. He flicked them out when he saw me.
“How are you?” I said. “You hurting? I can get you another Vicodin.”
“Just took a couple. They’re coming with the real shit this morning, right?”
“They should be here by ten,” I said.
“What we like to hear. Listen, did I even thank you for this?”
“You’d do it for me.”
“There’s a hypothetical we won’t be putting to the test. Man, I have been such a shit. To everybody in my life.”
“You were never a shit to me,” I said.
“You weren’t in my life. Well, who the fuck was. Not to be grim. How did I get onto this? That Vicodin must work better than I thought. Your lady still asleep?”
“She was.”
He nodded. “She’s going to need it.”
I was in the kitchen cutting up a pineapple when I heard Janna come downstairs. She must have smelled the coffee brewing. “You boys are up bright and early,” she said.
“Only way to live a long and healthy life,” Paul said. “Get up, do the chores, plow the north forty—I don’t mean anything sexual by that.”
“No, I’m sure that’s the last thing you’d think of.” She came into the kitchen and put a hand on my arm. “Did you get enough sleep? I’m sorry I was being…whatever I was.”
I set the knife down and put an arm around her. “I think you get a free pass, considering.”
“I hope I was just getting it out of my system early.” She poured a cup of coffee and put in milk for me. “Will you be okay with him if I go in for a while? I should get some stuff done while I can.”
“Hey,” Paul yelled out. “Why’s everybody talking behind the patient’s back?”
“Shut up, we’re having sex,” she called back. She poured a cup for herself. “He seems pretty chipper this morning.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what to hope for,” I said. “Quality, I guess. And then not too much quantity.”
A little after nine they came with the hospital bed, and the guy helped me move the sofa into the corner so we could set the bed up in the living room, by the window looking out at the hills. Janna and I would take the fold-out in the den when it became clear that we had to be nearby. Paul watched us from the armchair, his bare feet on a footstool, his earbuds back in, his eyes on us. When the guy left, he turned the iPod off, plucked out the earbuds and said, “Why am I reminded of ‘In the Penal Colony’?”
The FedEx truck delivered a cardboard box with the drugs, then the nurse from the hospice showed up. She had thick black hair, going gray, down her back in a single braid, and hoop earrings—not what you’d expect with the white uniform. Her name was Heather. I brought her a mug of herbal tea—she wasn’t a coffee drinker, she said—and she showed me the spreadsheet-looking printed forms on which we were to record dosage and time, then opened the FedEx box, picked up her clipboard and took inventory. She wrote down Paul’s temperature and blood pressure, listened to his heart. “So, Paul,” she said, “how would you say your pain is right now?”
“One to ten? Let’s give it a seven. Good beat and you can dance to it.”
“We can improve on that,” she said.
“Can you do less than zero?”
“That’s going to be up to you. And your caregivers. I’m a believer that you keep on top of the pain. This shouldn’t be about you being in any discomfort.” She got up and put on her jacket—wool, with a Navajo design. “I’ll be by tomorrow, but if you have any concerns or questions, any emergency, someone’s always there.”
I took my jacket off the coatrack. “Here, I’ll walk you out. I’ve got to feed the hens.”
“Smooth,” Paul said. “Jesus Christ, why don’t you just ask her how long?”
“I knew I was going to like you,” she said to him. “I’ll be seeing you tomorrow—that much I think w
e can count on.”
I followed her to her car. “I’m not asking you to make a prediction,” I said. “But just from your experience.”
“Okay, based on nothing? I think he’ll move fast.”
When I came back in he was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, bare feet dangling, pushing the button and making it go up and down. “So, we gonna break out the good stuff?”
“Should you wait till what she gave you kicks in?”
“Don’t start that,” he said. “You heard the lady.” He lay back, stuck out his tongue and pointed at it.
He dozed—call it that—until the middle of the afternoon while I sat in the armchair, checking from time to time to make sure his chest was rising and falling and making notes in my new paperback copy of Middlemarch; the covers had finally come off the old one. If Janna could hold the fort tomorrow while I went in to campus, that’s what I’d be teaching.
“Let’s go for a ride.” I looked up: Paul’s eyes were open. “I want to see some trees, man. And can we bring some music? I got weed.”
“If you’re up to it,” I said. “Stanley Brothers? You remember driving back from Roxbury that time?”
“Not really,” he said. “Did I have that fucked-up Triumph?”
“Yeah. Whatever became of that?”
“Whatever became of anything? I should’ve kept a journal. Fucking years of fucking lost days.”
The truck had a handle above the door frame that you could grab to pull yourself up onto the seat; Paul used both hands, but I still had to take his legs and hoist. I could feel the bones.
We took back roads, dirt roads when I could find them. Cornfields with ranks of tubular stubble, broken-back barns with Holsteins standing outside in the mud. Hunting season had started—that morning I’d heard gunshots in the woods—and we passed a double-wide where a buck hung from a kids’ swing set, one front hoof scraping the ground.
“My kind of place,” he said. “You know, when they say you’re dead meat—like isn’t meat dead by definition?” He snapped the buck a salute. “Shit, I should’ve settled up here. Come to think of it, I have settled up here.”
“I always thought you’d get a place out of the city. At least for weekends.”
“I think that would’ve ruined it,” he said. “I was really just into the songs. Hey, can we have the Stanleys?”
“I just want to say,” I said. “I admire how you’re dealing with this.”
“Yeah, wait till the screaming starts.”
I put in a Stanley Brothers CD—Can’t you hear the night bird crying?—and he began packing a bowl. He blew out the first cloud of skunky smoke, then held it out to me. I put up my hand and opened my window.
“You mind cracking yours just a little?” I said. “If this is that shit you had last summer…”
“That? That was fucking ditchweed.” He exhaled again. “Yeah, actually I wouldn’t advise you.” He closed his eyes. “Okay. Better. I haven’t heard this for fucking ever.”
After a few miles, he packed the bowl again. “What’s so weird,” he said, “I can’t tell if something’s beautiful anymore. Like, is that beautiful?” He pointed at the CD player: the Stanley Brothers were singing “My Sinful Past,” where the harmony comes in on A hand reached down to guide me.
“Well,” I said, “I’m not always in the mood myself.”
“Okay, you don’t want to talk absolutes,” he said. “Can’t blame you there.”
I stopped at the convenience store outside of West Rumney—we’d run out of milk. “Anything I can get you?” I said.
“I’m disappointing you,” he said. “You want to know what it’s like.”
“Not unless you want to tell me,” I said. “This isn’t about me.”
“See, that’s my point,” he said. “Listen, would they have eggnog this early? I mean in the year?”
“That’s a thought.”
“Yes it is,” he said. “Good for me, right? Could you leave the thing on?” We’d switched over to the King recordings; the Stanley Brothers were singing “A Few More Years.”
But when I came out with the milk and a half gallon of eggnog, already with holly wreath and red ribbon on the carton, he was sitting in silence. “I didn’t want to run down your battery,” he said. Could he have been crying? His eyes had looked red all day. Though of course he’d been smoking. I had to help him get the eggnog open and hold the carton up so he could sip. “How did Bob Cratchit drink this shit?” he said. “Guess I can cross this off too.”
Back at the house, he lay on the sofa for a while, then got up, bent over, groaned and picked up the mandolin case. “You know, I haven’t played since your million-dollar bash,” he said. “I want you to have this.”
“Come on, no way. I could never play mandolin for shit. There must be somebody who could really—”
“Fuck somebody,” he said.
—
Just two days later, he’d gotten so weak that Heather brought him a walker, which he used to get back and forth to the armchair and the bathroom. Then he stopped making that trip, so she brought in a commode; he could get his legs over the side of the bed, and if you’d bring the walker over he could get to his feet, go the two steps by himself, turn and sit, in his open-backed hospital johnny. And then Janna had to help him; he wouldn’t let me. And then the bedpan. And then the day Heather came to catheterize him. He said to Janna, “Here goes our last chance.” That was the same day Heather hooked him up to the morphine. “Think of this as the baseline,” she told us, “and then you give him more by mouth. This is in your hands. You understand what I’m saying?”
After our car ride, he never wanted music again, and he had no interest in hearing the World Series. He’d brought pictures in standup Plexiglas frames: a photo of Simone, a postcard reproduction of Scipione Pulzone’s The Lamentation (1591)—I looked at the back—and a snapshot of the two of us standing in front of my house. I set them up on the table by his bed, but I never saw him look at them.
He screamed when we turned him to prevent bedsores—it took me and Janna together—but still insisted on being turned, until he didn’t. When he could no longer drink, we swabbed the inside of his mouth with supposedly mint-flavored sponges the size of sugar cubes, on plastic sticks. At first he’d made faces at the taste of the morphine; then he was sucking at the dropper.
One day, the day before the last day, he motioned me to bend down and whispered, “Why will you not just do it? They’re not gonna say shit to you. She knows.”
“Buddy,” I said, “you know I can’t.” Which she did he mean? He’d gotten to a point where he was conflating Heather and Janna.
“I’m not your buddy,” he said. “You cocksucker.”
On his last night, we both slept in the living room with him, though I guess “slept” isn’t the word—Janna on the sofa, me on the floor—and took turns getting up every half hour to dose him again. I’d stopped drawing the morphine up to the exact line on the dropper: just squirted in as much as it would hold, then watched the tip of his tongue touch at the green crust on his lips. I’d write down the time and “20 mg,” hoping they wouldn’t check my chart too carefully against what drugs would be left. When the light finally started turning gray outside, I switched on his bedside lamp—I saw his eyelids tighten—and gave him the next dropper, ten minutes early, then another one for good measure. In a while, the moaning quieted down; I turned the lamp off, went to the window and saw pink above the mountains. I pulled my fleece over my sweatshirt and went out to feed the hens. Frost on the grass, a faint quarter moon still high.
Walking back to the house, I saw the light go on in the living room. Janna was standing over his bed and holding his hand, the one with the needle taped to it. “Where were you?” she said. “He was asking for you.”
I leaned over him; he was still breathing, but with shallow breaths. “Should we call them?” I said.
His eyes came open and he said, “I’ve never been here before
.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Janna told him.
He rolled his head an inch to one side, an inch to the other. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“You can just let go,” she said.
“Oh, fuck,” he said. “You are one stupid twat.”
Janna’s head jerked back, but she kept hold of his hand.
“Is there anything you want us to do?” I said.
He closed his eyes. “You won’t.” He began drawing harder, deeper breaths. “I keep being mean,” he said.
“Rest,” I said. I took his other hand.
He rolled his head again. “I need to get this right.”
Janna put her other hand on his, over where the needle went in.
“We both love you,” she said. “It’s okay to go.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
We watched him breathe. It took longer and longer for the next one to come, and then there wasn’t a next one.
I looked at Janna. She pointed back at him. You could see it: there was nobody in there anymore.
I let go of the hand. “I better call them.”
“Can’t you take a minute?” she said. “This is what he came to give you.”
—
After Heather left, and the guy from the funeral home took the body away in the back of his black Escalade, I drove Janna into town for breakfast. It was still only ten in the morning. There was a family in the next booth, so it must have been Saturday. Or Sunday. One of the kids was playing games on his phone or whatever; I could hear the little beeps and the snatches of metallic music. How could this not be driving the parents crazy? Janna ordered a grapefruit that she didn’t eat; I had pancakes and no coffee. They were supposed to pick up the bed around noon, and I planned to sleep away the rest of the day.
“How are you holding up?” I said.
“He was absolutely on the money,” she said. “I am a stupid twat. At least you kept your mouth shut. We love you we love you we love you it’s all right to go. I’m going to be hearing that the rest of my life.”
“He didn’t know what he was saying. We did right by him.”
“So that’s what you’d want? Somebody doing right by you?”