Authors: Liz Murray
“When was my mother diagnosed with TB?”
“Honey, I’m the charge nurse. I have no idea. You’ll have to talk to her doctor about that.”
She placed a soft orange mask in my hand. Hesitantly, I slipped it over my head and looked around.
There was a deadness about the ward, and it gave me an eerie sensation. The mute backdrop of the hospital magnified the few noises: the distant ringing of phones and the incessant beeps of numerous machines. The entire area seemed unusually desolate, even for a hospital. It was unlike the last few wards Ma had been in, where nurses bustled around and visiting hours brought all kinds of faces. This place was different. I pushed myself forward, in search of Ma’s room.
“Turn left, walk ’til you can’t go no more,” the nurse called from behind me.
I passed a sign that read
INTENSIVE CARE UNIT
and another that read
ONCOLOGY
. I had no idea what oncology was, but figured that it couldn’t be any good if it was somewhere between intensive care and quarantine. I passed door after door, within which patients lay unconscious, their heads cocked back to allow for the breathing tubes lodged in their throats.
You need it for protection.
I thought of all the times Ma came home from the bar in need of my help. I thought of the vomit that had seeped into her clothing by the time she finally reached me. I recalled the putrid odor of the wet mess mixed with vodka rubbing off on me when I lowered her into the bath; Ma’s coughing fits as I washed her body clean and we both pretended not to notice her nakedness and her shame. I thought of her ninety-something-pound body, swathed in clean sheets, lulled to sleep by her own drunkenness, as I breathed in the fresh-out-of-the-box smell of the nurse’s mask one more time before deciding it was pointless. I pushed open Ma’s door and removed the orange cloth from my face.
“Hi, Ma.”
No response came from behind the brown-and-green fishnet curtain surrounding Ma’s bed. It took all my courage to pull that curtain aside, and it took that much more to conceal my shock over what I saw behind it.
Ma took up just a fraction of the bed. Her skin was yellowed and tight on her face, cheeks sloped dramatically inward, painstakingly molded by her illness. The hospital sheet was cast off to the side, revealing her emaciated body, curled up like a child’s skeleton, barely dimpling the plastic mattress beneath her. Up and down her limbs ran angry, little red scabs, each attached to a raised mound of flesh. Her eyes were wide open, but fixed on nothing, and her mouth was slowly moving, almost spelling out words, sputtering small sounds. That and the machines hooked up to her body were the only noises in the small, airless room.
I was trembling. I opened my mouth almost involuntarily, before I was sure of what would come out.
“Ma? It’s Liz . . . Ma?”
Her eyes drifted around the room in response. For a moment they landed on me and I thought I’d captured her attention, but then they kept roaming, her mouth maintaining that same choppy, wordless movement as they went. On the narrow table wheeled to her bedside was the hospital’s celebratory Thanksgiving dinner. In teal Tupperware, there sat an untouched serving of sliced meat saturated in congealed gravy that streamed its way through a scoop of mashed potatoes and onto the cranberry sauce. Lying on the tray beside her plate was a smiling cartoon cutout of a turkey decorated in red and gold feathers. The caption above its head read:
A Time to Be Thankful
.
“Ma . . . look.” I took a seat. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner, Ma . . .”
I didn’t know how to speak; my throat felt squelched shut, too full to draw breath. I might have been suffocating, drowning on the tears I wasn’t allowing to come. I took two deep breaths and reached out for her hand; it was not much warmer than the metal rods upholding her hospital bed. Touching it sent shivers up my arm.
“It’s like she’s dead already,” I mumbled to myself. Then to her I said, “You’re not even here right now.”
The door clicked open, sucking air outward, floating Ma’s curtain into a small breeze. Lisa walked in wearing heels and a black peacoat, her long, dark hair wrapped in a neat bun. She could have been a social worker, a lawyer, or any type of professional grown-up. I felt dingy, dressed in layers of sweaters, thumb holes punctured near the fronts of the sleeves, my long brown hair, tattered and stringy, falling down from under my knitted skull cap. Lisa clicked a few steps forward, looking from Ma to me.
“Hey” was all we said to each other. She avoided eye contact and pulled up a chair to sit down near Ma. My heart raced. Seated there next to her, I judged myself through her perspective: I was a high school dropout who’d abandoned our sick mother to live in a mysterious location with my street boyfriend.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Just a little while.”
We spent a few moments sharing an awkward silence, and then Lisa leaned over the side of Ma’s hospital bed, tears spilling out of her eyes.
“Ma? Hi, Ma. Sit up. We’re here. Lizzy is here. Ma?”
“Lisa, don’t bother her. I don’t think—”
“She can sit up. Ma?”
Ma’s eyes raced all around. Her hand opened and closed, and she began muttering gibberish louder than before.
“Came here . . . came here to give me your soul. Spare me. Spare me . . . that am I all . . . spare it. Mine and yours . . . yours, yours!” She wasn’t looking at either of us; there was no sign that she knew who we were.
“Lisa, I just think we should leave her alone. Maybe she’ll get up, but she’s probably not feeling too good.”
“Lizzy, look. She was talking at home last week; I know,
I
was there. She would want to know that we’re here.”
Her tone was scornful. I quieted down as Lisa moved her chair up, right near Ma’s face. She spoke louder than I would have dared.
“Ma, get up. It’s Thanksgiving. We came to see you,” she said in a softer voice.
More gibberish. But then I was shocked to see Ma start to sit up. Very slowly, she lowered her feet onto the floor and peeled off the monitor as we quietly watched her make an attempt to go to the bathroom, dragging the IV pole behind her. I reached out to support her weight when she wobbled the six-foot distance, steadying herself on the door and the wall. As she turned away from us, Ma’s gown floated open in the back, revealing a full view of her upright, naked body. Pictures flashed in my mind of one of Daddy’s PBS specials on the Holocaust. If she stood still, I could count her vertebrae; they looked something like the metal links of a bicycle chain with flesh taut over them. Her pelvic bones protruded, and there was absolutely no fat on her bottom or her thighs. In the bathroom, I took a short towel from the chrome towel rack and wet it; I wiped Ma’s backside clean with one hand while supporting her frail body with the other. The fluorescent lights flickered on the white walls and on us. I bit down on my lip to keep from crying, and did all I could to stifle my need to cough on the smells of her sickness. “It’s okay, Ma, we’ll get you all fixed up,” I reassured her. “We’ll make you nice and comfortable, just relax.”
“Okay, Lizzy,” she said in the weakest voice.
When we were done, I took her hands in my own and lifted her from the toilet with almost no effort at all; she was so light, it scared me. All of it scared me. I was terrified, and wanted more than anything in this world to make her better. When I tucked her back into bed, I knew I had to get out of there.
“Are you leaving already?” Lisa asked as I hovered in the doorway. I was shaking; I needed to be alone. My heart pounded; I could not take one more moment of being there. And I was not going to lose it in front of Lisa.
“Well, um, it’s just that I was here before you, for a while . . . and I just think I should get going soon because I’m kind of tired. I didn’t sleep much last night.”
“Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes and turning away from me.
“Lisa, it’s just not that easy for me, okay?”
“Yeah, I know, Liz. I’m dealing with it, too. I know it’s not easy. I figured you wouldn’t stay long anyway, so just go ahead and go,” she said, sobbing.
“People deal differently, Lisa.”
“Yeah, they really do,” she snapped.
I hadn’t prepared for how scary this would be, for what I’d feel seeing Ma like this and being powerless to help her. I didn’t know what to do with the frustration I felt at not being able to change things for Ma; I wished Lisa and I could see each other through this, but she wanted me to sit in it the way she was, and I could not afford to. I felt stuck. If I stayed, I didn’t feel I could handle it. If I went, I was a bad daughter and sister.
“I have to go, Lisa. I just have to go. Please understand.”
I ignored Lisa rolling her eyes and leaned over to talk to Ma. At the time, I had no idea that it was the last thing I would ever say to her.
“Ma. I have to go, okay? I promise I’ll come back later. I promise. I’m okay. I’m staying with friends. I’m going to school, soon. I really am, I promise.” I reached down and touched her hand. “I love you,” I told her. “I love you, Ma.” I did get to tell her that. She said nothing in return, and I slipped out into the hallway, where I rested my back on the wall and inhaled deep breaths; holding in tears, I felt like I was descending, free-falling into nothingness. I wanted to scream. Lisa stepped out into the hall.
She addressed the floor. “You know, Lizzy. You just leave . . . that’s fine for you, but it’s just so cold.”
“This whole thing is hard for both of us in our own way, Lisa; I just can’t stay here, sorry. You act like I’m having a blast out there, but it’s not like that. Not having a stable place is no fun, okay?”
She turned in disgust and went back into the room; I escaped down the hall away from her, away from Ma, and I left.
That night, after hearing of my visit to the hospital, Carlos decided I needed cheering up. To get my mind off things, we’d do something absolutely crazy: go out for a good meal at a decent restaurant with good service—dressed in our underwear.
“Let them say something. If I’ve got the money, they’ll serve us,” he said, flashing a giant wad of fifties in the cab. “Right, Papa?” he asked the driver, who smiled and nodded blankly, glancing only at the cash. Carlos picked the Land and Sea diner just off of 231st and Broadway, a place where the walls were decorated with plastic fish, plastic lobsters, and plastic ship steering wheels—punctuated by bright pink fluorescent lights that wrapped around the diner walls. We flew down Broadway in the cab, Sam and I screaming as it raced through traffic. We pulled up to the restaurant like cops coming onto a scene, and Carlos peeled off a twenty to pay the driver for what should have been no more than a six-dollar ride. “Cheerio!” Carlos said, applying two hard slaps to the roof of the car to send him on his way.
Carlos led us to the largest table in the front of the restaurant. Customers turned their heads to watch the guy and two girls dressed in men’s boxers, boots, and hooded sweaters in the dead of winter. I kept my knitted cap on, hair half tucked in. Sam had found an old tie in one of the motel room drawers; she wore it dangling over her sweatshirt.
“We’re all British,” Carlos whispered. When the waiter came running up to our table to explain the dress code, Carlos addressed him with a purposefully terrible and unconvincing accent that made Sam and me burst out laughing.
“My good man, where we come from, this
is
appropriate dress. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Carlos took out a wad of money and placed it on the table without ever taking his eyes off the man. Problem solved.
We dined on lobster, T-bone steak, chicken fettuccini Alfredo, and half a dozen appetizers. I ordered using a totally inept British accent, enunciating all the wrong syllables, while Sam and Carlos burst into laughter. It didn’t matter; the waiter brought anything we asked for without question. I didn’t question it, either. I just watched Carlos pluck twenty after twenty out of his wad to pay for the whole outrageous meal. I didn’t care either way anymore; going with the flow was so much easier than pushing against it.
We drove around in cabs all night, stopping wherever, for whatever reason occurred to us, on a whim: Grand Central Station, so we could stretch out on the ground and stare up at the constellations on the massive ceiling; Chinatown’s arcade so Carlos could prove to us that there really was a chicken trapped in a machine who played you in a game of tic-tac-toe. There, we stopped in the black-and-white photo booth and snapped three strips of pictures: all three of us making crazy faces, contemplative faces, and one whole strip of me kissing Carlos, feeling his soft lips pressed to mine, while the heat from the bulb flashed through my closed eyelids onto our profiles.
“He
is
good,” I told myself. “He
does
love you, even if it’s hard for him to express it. Don’t forget the way this feels.” And it felt like heaven, the kiss, the whole night spent together—Carlos’s magic at work, again.
We took our last cab of the night to the White Castle drive-through on Fordham Road, just as the sky began to show streaks of morning light. We were only going to get milk shakes, but Carlos surprised us, asking for fifty hamburgers. We zipped up and down Webster Avenue, the Grand Concourse, Broadway, chucking the warm burgers out the windows, hitting parked cars, mailboxes, and lowered storefront gates. “Whooo!” Carlos yelled each time he sent another burger flying.
Back at the motel, we stretched out, a sack of greasy burgers on the floor beside us. I fell asleep in Carlos’s arms, something I hadn’t done since that night we’d first slept together. I wrapped my arms around his chest, where I buried my head in search of his heartbeat. He put soft kisses on my forehead and said, “I told you we’d cheer you up, Shamrock. I want to see a smile on that face again tomorrow, or we’ll have to go out there butt-naked next time.” Sam giggled hysterically from her bed. I was enchanted with Carlos all over again—with his kisses, his smell, and his ability to make me relax into him, drawing me far away from my growing emptiness.