“I’m glad you’re talking. It’s important to talk.”
“Then there’s the juice. Sometimes, I swear, I watch him drink it and see the juice in his throat.”
“How do you see it?”
“Sticking to infected cells.”
“But orange juice doesn’t cure disease. You know that, right?”
“It helps.” I walk toward the hall.
“It may help with hydration and vitamin deficiency.”
“It helps with the immune system. I know it does.”
We go into the living room, and Macon sits next to the bed. Luke says, “It’s so Louis the Fourteenth in here, isn’t it, Macon? But this place is all I’ve got, and I do love it so. Who is going to the grocery store?”
“Of course you love it.” Macon reaches for Luke’s hand. “It’s your home.”
“It’s been a good home. If there’s one thing that Gaird knows how to do well, it’s to make a home. She’s crazy about you. You know that, right?” Luke talks as if I’m not standing there. “You two are going to make some beautiful babies. I just wish I could be around to see them.”
“Do you have to talk like that?” I say. “What are you saying?”
“Unless there’s a drug breakthrough tomorrow, or unless you can
get some of that vaccine that Dr. Picard’s friends haven’t invented yet, I’m not going to meet your babies. It’s time to be honest about this.” He tries to sit up. He’s so lucid. “It’s also time I took a walk. I’ve been in this bed so damn long. I need to get outside. Are you going to the market, Macon? I want to come with you. I want to get some pudding. Chocolate pudding.”
“Luke,” Macon says. “We have all the time in the world. You rest. You sleep. We’ll talk when you wake up, and if you want to go then, we’ll make it happen.”
“Are you good for your word?” He puts his head back on the pillow. “I am feeling sort of tired right now. I’d like some barbecue chicken. Spicy. Crispy on the outside. Can I have that, please? I’m so hungry.” He closes his eyes, and he’s gone. Out. Sound asleep. I can’t move from the bed. This part is heartbreaking. He’s with us. Then he’s not with us. It happens within seconds and I can’t see it coming.
“Let’s give him time to sleep.” Macon takes my hand and pulls me into the kitchen. There are orange halves all over the counter. “Wow,” he says. “That’s a lot of oranges, Willie.”
“You never know when you might need more fresh juice.”
“I think we’ve got enough.” He gets out a plastic garbage bag and starts sliding the oranges into it.
“Juice, you mean? Never enough.” I sit at the table in the corner and make a list of what Luke’s eaten in the last twenty-four hours: six bites of Jell-O, two spoons of raspberry sorbet, and half a glass of juice. I want to be able to show Sara this when she comes. “You’re going to put the juicer away?”
“I’m just cleaning it,” he says. But then I watch him slide it into the cupboard.
“I know what you’re doing. You can put it away. But don’t think I can’t see you. I still have hope. If you put the juicer away, then it means you don’t have any hope.”
Macon stares at me. Then he takes the juicer out of the cupboard and puts it back on the counter and leaves.
Luke wakes up an hour later. Gaird is back and sitting with him.
I walk by them on my way to the couch and Luke says, “When is Mom getting here, Willie?”
“Soon,” I say. I can’t bear any of these parts about Mom. Sometimes I, too, think she’s coming. Or that she’ll send a sign. I don’t mean something concrete—but something that lets us know she’s here. This is what Luke needs.
I hold his hand all afternoon. He opens his eyes just as the dusk settles around the furniture. This is the scariest part of the day. This is how I’m afraid my whole life will feel after he’s gone. Somewhere gray between twilight and full darkness. Crepuscular. Empty. “You have to beg Dad to stop singing.” I try to laugh.
“Which one of us is lying in a hospital bed? You say something to him. I don’t have the heart to. Where is he?”
My eyes fill with tears. Macon’s gone to get Thai food for dinner, Betty has driven home for a few hours. She has a husband. Teenage boys she’s told me about who miss her. Gaird’s on the phone in the bedroom. Dad’s taking a nap in the study. “He’s resting. I’ve been waiting all week for you to make him stop.”
“You’ve got to admit it’s sort of amazing—our father singing psalms at my deathbed.”
“Stop.” I force a laugh again.
“But you have to give him a break, Willie. You get what you get. We got him. And you have to stop laughing, because it takes too much energy for me to laugh.”
“Your fingers are cold.”
“All of me is cold. I keep telling you. No one listens.”
I go into the bedroom and wave to Gaird, who’s lying on the bed with a notepad and pen, talking to Dr. Picard’s resident about whether or not Luke can have any of the new drugs in the works now that he’s been on AZT. Gaird still has hope. I grab two more fleece blankets from the closet and lay them on top of Luke. “You have three blankets now, my friend. You are very, very diva about the cold.”
“Am not.”
“We need to keep you warm, but you have to beg Dad to stop singing.
Tell him you’re not feeling well. Say the doctors think you might actually have something wrong with you—some kind of condition—and that you need rest. So could he wait on the singing?” I pull the top blanket up higher under Luke’s chin and sit back down. “You have to do this for me.”
“So just in case you missed something. A lot of men with symptoms like mine lose their minds, Willie. They go absolutely nuts.”
“Will you not joke?”
“I bet I’ll get cancer of the brain. If I do, I want you to suffocate me with a pillow.” He reaches for the one under his head.
“Enough. You have to stop.”
“I’m serious.” He holds my wrist. “I’m so worried about you.”
“Me?”
“I’m so worried about what will happen to you when I’m gone.”
I can’t hear this. I put my hand on his face. “Luke. Listen to me. Please. Please don’t worry about me. I am good. I am fine.”
He nods. “You’re going to have to do something important for me.”
“What are we talking about?”
“You’re going to have to fight.”
“Who?”
“Dad.” Luke looks away.
“I always fight Dad.” I can’t believe he’s talking so much.
“No, really. You’re going to fight to keep him from burying me.”
“Don’t.” My voice gets sharp.
“Will. Tell me you won’t let him do it.”
“I won’t. But we don’t need to go over this. Not now. Not yet.”
“He wants to bury me next to Mom. He told me yesterday about the graveyard and said he would have another bench made with my name on it. It’s cold in Hardin, Montana. I don’t know anyone there.” Tears slip down my face, and I let them fall off my chin. “So say it.”
“I get it. I don’t need to say it.” I grab Luke’s wrist.
“Please say it.” Time slows down. The ephemera float away. At first this slowing down was a comfort. Now every day it feels like it slows even more, until we’re almost not moving forward, almost not part of the great human march.
“I can’t do this. Please don’t make me.” I long for the old life, where Luke used to tease me about my cowboy boots. How is it that the passage of time has changed our lives so irrevocably?
“I’m tired, Willie. I want to sleep. Say you will not let Dad bury me.” He’s trying to get me to face the real business of his death. The preparation. Is he asking me to let him go?
“I will not let Dad bury you.” I hold my breath. It’s all there. The hurt of losing him. I’m still not letting him go. “Fuck,” I say to no one and to him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I’m crying loudly now.
“And that you will keep my ashes with you.” Luke turns his head to the side and closes his eyes. “Say that you will not let Dad fly me to Hardin.” I stare at Luke’s hand. “Please say the ashes part,” he whispers, drifting in and out. “I need to rest.”
“I will keep your ashes,” I whisper back. “I will keep your ashes, Luke Pears.”
Sara comes to see Luke that night around seven. I’m so grateful that she’s here. I meet her at the front door and hug her tightly. Then we stand in the hall together, looking at Betty and my brother in the living room. Betty is checking his vital signs and writing them down on a clipboard. “Will you make sure he’s not in pain?” I ask. “He hasn’t woken up now for an hour.”
“You’d know if he was in pain, sweetness.”
“How would we know? How do we know that Betty really understands what she’s doing?”
“We know because this is a qualified nurse sent from my hospital.”
“But this is not cancer, Sara. This is not juvenile diabetes, and people aren’t trained. We don’t know how it might turn here at the end. Do you, Sara? Do you know what he might be feeling right this very minute? He’s counting on me. Can you see that? We’ve got to do this right.”
“You’d know if he was in pain because he would cry out, and he hasn’t. I can see he’s sleeping peacefully. So I’ll check his morphine drip and his pulse. We’ve seen a lot of AIDS at the hospital, Willie. Too damn much. Every case has its own story. I’ll go sit with him. And you.” She fingers my hair and smooths some of the bangs that
hang across my eyebrows. “You should take a shower while I’m talking to him. And I can tell you’re not eating.”
Sara holds Luke’s hand and occasionally touches the stubble on his head. She cries sometimes. Sometimes she talks to him. A lot of the time she’s quiet. After a while, I go to nap in Luke and Gaird’s bed. When she’s done being with him, she finds me and lies down next to me and puts her arms around me. There’s nothing for us to say. I thought there would be, but really there’s nothing except to be with my friend.
When she stands up, she says very quietly, “He’s leaving us now, you know. It’s the start of a coma, I think, Willie. Long, peaceful sleep. How lucky for him that it may end this way. I want you to try to think like that if you can. About the luck of a peaceful ending. Think about Luke. Think about making this easy for him.” I nod at her and nod again and I can’t really speak, but that’s okay because I understand.
T
HAT NIGHT
Gaird paces the apartment and looks for things to question Betty about—the IV drip, the occasional spikes on the EKG machine. Macon goes to sleep in the den. Dad stays up, and comes into the kitchen for a glass of water around midnight. I’ve run out of things to do, so I’m scouring the top of the stove. “How are the numbers?”
Dad fills his glass from the faucet. “A hundred and one degrees and holding. It’s where I thought he’d be tonight. It’s good it hasn’t gone up. But overall, the numbers are not where I’d like. They don’t tell a good story and the fever never abates, which means the body is working too hard. It feels like Luke’s slipping from us, Willow.” I stop scrubbing. “I want to go over things,” he says. “Luke may not know anymore what he wants and doesn’t want. I’d like to make some plans.”
I stare at my father’s bare feet. He has very small toes. I want to watch Luke sleep in the living room. It’s relaxing to see his lungs fill with oxygen. “He knows what he wants,” I say. “He told me yesterday.”
“I know what the Lord wants for him. So let’s stay calm here.”
He takes a white hankie from the back pocket of his jeans and pats his forehead. “I’m trying. I don’t pretend to understand my son. He’s a homosexual, yes, and I don’t fully understand that either, but I don’t hold it against him, irrespective of what certain people think the Bible says. I’m too much of a scientist to believe all that. I just believe in forgiveness.” He wipes his face with the cloth. He looks old and weak and vulnerable.
This is the first time I can imagine what it’s like for him. His wife dead. His son dying. I know how much he loves Luke, and the pain of that has to be swallowing him. “I want to honor him.” Dad starts to weep. “It’s one of the few things we can actually do for the dying. I think it would be nice if your brother could be buried next to your mother. What is so horrible about that, Willow?” His voice rises. “What is so wrong about a son being buried next to his mother?”
Luke made me promise. But what would be so wrong about Montana? Dad is trying. He never turned his back on Luke. He’s standing in his dying son’s kitchen in the middle of the night, trying to figure out where to bury him. My anger at him at the cemetery last year seems so inconsequential. So small. It’s another one of the things that float away. Dad was just terribly, terribly sad when Mom died. I see that now, but how can I explain that I’m sorry?
Luke forgave Gaird for leaving. Macon forgave me for lying about Gita. Gita wasn’t angry with her mother or Morone for not realizing what Manju was doing to her. She taught me about this openhearted kind of love. I grab the dish towel off the fridge and dry my hands. “Dad,” I say, “he doesn’t want to be buried. It’s just the way Luke feels about it. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. He loves you. He adores you.” I don’t want to hurt him. He’s already hurting so much. It has got to be the very worst hurt of all.
He scratches his beard and fills the glass again and drinks. Then he nods and doesn’t say anything, because we don’t have any more words for what this is. I walk out of the kitchen and run into Betty in the back hall, coming out of the bathroom. “He’s having a good night, Willie,” she says. “He’s not in any pain.” I smile at her and go sit down next to Luke.
This isn’t how I imagined it, even though I have no fixed idea in my head because I’ve never gotten to this point. What I hope is that he’s peaceful. Gaird sits and rubs Luke’s hand and talks to him very quietly in Norwegian. Betty sits in her own chair and watches over the room. Dad comes in and stands at the head of the bed. It’s one o’clock in the morning now.
I have to convince myself all over again that my mother isn’t on her way. Dad looks so tired. He moves over to the couch and falls asleep. Gaird says he’ll lie down for an hour in the bedroom. I stare at Luke’s breathing. Then I’m in India and there’s the smell of creosote. I felt so alive in that country, but so far away from my brother.
He’s my history. I don’t have a childhood without him. It’s erased. Because he had my parents first, and they were his touchstone—his world order. Then he had me. But I had him first and then my parents. His chest moves up and down rhythmically for two hours. Then his breathing changes. Without any warning, it becomes labored and thicker. There’s a rasping sound—in and out and in and out. I stand and lean as close as I can over his mouth and watch and listen. Then his arms and legs twitch under the blankets. I call to Betty. She jumps up from her sleep and checks Luke’s pulse.