Authors: Sharon Butala
Moments pass, she paces, staring through the double doors, the top half of which are glass, into the suite of rooms where her sister has vanished.
“You can go in now,” somebody tells her. She finds Elaine in the room next to the nursing station, seated nearly upright in what looks like an old-fashioned dentist’s chair. At least six doctors, nurses, and technicians surround her, each of them doing something to Elaine, although Lucia, in her confusion, can’t make any sense of the scene, except to relax a little because her sister is in good hands. A man in operating-room greens, his mask dangling from a string, detaches himself from the scrum around Elaine and introduces himself as doctor somebody. He questions her about Elaine’s diagnosis, her condition, and repeats in a casual way some of her answers to the crowd around Elaine.
Before too long Lucia sees someone else being rushed past on a stretcher into the room next door to Elaine’s and most of the people clustered around Elaine abruptly leave. She hears orders being given, she hears the new patient moaning, she sees nurses rushing out and then in again. Listening, Lucia hears the unmistakable sounds, which she knows from watching television hospital dramas, of someone dying and being brought back to life. Twice, she hears this. Her abdomen and chest feel hollow. She’s not sure she’s breathing, although she must be, but if she is, it seems she isn’t getting any air. Elaine is drowsy now. Lucia kisses her cheek, gets her a paper cup of icy water, murmurs softly whatever comforting words come to her.
Elaine is breathing less quickly now, although when Lucia surreptitiously takes her pulse, it’s still over a hundred beats a minute. It occurs to her to wonder why Pierre Trudeau didn’t
make time metric too, but then she thinks, maybe it already is. How bizarre these thoughts are doesn’t occur to her until months later. Nurses return and try again to insert a line into Elaine’s vein and Elaine cries and behaves like a frightened child and one of the nurses snaps at her. Once more Lucia has to explain why Elaine is hospital-and-needle phobic.
It is because of the polio when she was five years old, when she nearly died in the old wing of this very hospital, according to their mother, screaming with pain for days and nights on end until the head nurse told their parents Elaine would not live through another night. Then she was kept here for more than seven months in isolation, with two dozen other children, living as if they were all orphans. She summarizes the surgeries, each one more horrible than the last. Lucia has to do this in such a way that Elaine does not hear that she is not as smart as other people, that in some ways she remains a child still, while the nurses do hear Lucia’s message.
Hours later, while Elaine sleeps on a ward in the hospital, Lucia drives through the summer twilight to her sister’s apartment. She remembers how earlier she’d careened around corners, sped down residential streets, and screeched to stops at traffic lights, only to arrive ten minutes ahead of the ambulance. She’s been told now, or rather, since nobody ever tells her anything she considers meaningful, she’s figured out that her sister has narrowly escaped death. If Lucia hadn’t hit all those green lights on the way into town, she might have found Elaine’s corpse. And she realizes that the paramedics had tried and failed to find a vein while Elaine was on her way to the hospital. Now she thinks that maybe that’s why the driver went slowly, so as not to jolt the paramedic struggling with Elaine’s damaged veins, and why they’d taken so long to open the ambulance doors.
Alone in Elaine’s apartment, she picks up Wiesel’s
Night
again. This time she opens it to the first page and begins reading. At first she forces herself, then, although she wants to stop, she gets caught up in the harrowing narrative and can’t. She reads, her gut in knots, her palms wet with sweat, her breathing shallow and fast, as if she is perhaps asleep and dreaming some intense, frightening dream. She feels as though she’s caught in the throes of some terminal disease whose symptoms are amazement, horror, disgust, and an unfathomably deep shock that the world could, after all, contain such depths of savagery, such depths of suffering. When, hours later, she finishes the book, she sits on the side of her cot for a long time staring into space.
After a while she wanders to the balcony doors to gaze out over the concrete-grey of the city, tinged purple in the bleak light of the powerful street lamps. She thinks about Elie Wiesel, about a certain expression that appears on his face when she’s seen him being interviewed on television. She doesn’t think she’s seen it on anyone else’s face, and every time she’s seen it on his, she’s wondered what it means.
She thinks she understands it now. Since the camps he has become a witness, determined never to look away from the terrible pictures he carries in his mind, or from the stories he’s been told, the photographs he’s seen.
For once, the streets outside the apartment are quiet, no drunken young people shouting, nobody roaring his motor or squealing his tires on the road leading onto the bridge that crosses the wide river, no fire trucks or ambulances or police cars screaming past where she stands alone in her nightgown in the shadows. She stares up at the moon hanging hard and white over the city, and thinks of all the millennia it has been shining down on this planet. For a moment, the belief she’s been taught, that every single human death matters, wavers and almost disappears.
The world does not make sense, she thinks. One horror ends and somewhere another is beginning. She must not look away either, she tells herself, but doubts she has the courage to carry out such a resolve.
After Elaine’s return from her week-long stay in the hospital, her needs grow in quantity and intensity. Since they can’t afford to hire a professional nurse to stay with her—only the rich could do that—the visits from home care attendants and nurses increase. Elaine’s case manager drops in, drinks coffee with them, chats in a friendly way. She’s here to assess the situation: both Lucia and Elaine know that soon, if she doesn’t die first, Elaine will have to go to a facility equipped to care for someone as ill as she is, maybe even to a palliative care unit in a hospital. When Lucia hasn’t the strength to lift her out of bed one more time, to leap up from sleep one more time to rush into her room and pull her up in bed, even then, she can’t imagine how they will get Elaine to consent to go.
Lucia has lost quite a lot of weight, she has chronic diarrhea now and a number of random aches and pains which she tries to ignore, but which, nonetheless, alarm her. She wants to go home, she wants to lie down and sleep for a month, she wants George to come and hold her. One day someone phones to tell her that the friend she ran into at the cancer clinic so long ago, and to whom she made that stupid, unfunny joke, has died.
Now Elaine is staying alive on oxygen and morphine and an unwillingness to die. Lucia has begun to wish the end would come, the quicker the better, and she finds herself irritated with Elaine’s refusal to face what is happening to her. Early on, when Elaine had misunderstood a doctor’s message to her, taking it as hopeful when it was really a statement of hopelessness, and Lucia had tried gently to correct her misunderstanding, Elaine had screamed, “I’m sick and tired of you telling me
I’m going to die!” Now Lucia can’t bring herself to try to talk to Elaine about her impending death, and she hates herself for her desire, which she can no longer deny, that Elaine should give up this fight she can’t win.
She’s read all the books in the stacks behind the kitchen door now, or all that she can bear to read; there is only a work by Primo Levi left that she’s determined to try. Primo Levi comes highly recommended from a rabbi-professor friend of George’s, and so she places his book on the top of the pile to begin reading once Elaine has had her evening morphine and for a few hours will be unconscious. Although it seems to her she’s done what she set out to do, however unclear that intention was and, in some ways, remains, her new knowledge has not brought her peace, or any new understanding, or even any satisfaction. She doesn’t know what it is she wants, but whatever it is, it hasn’t yet come. Maybe it never will, maybe she isn’t wise enough or smart enough. Maybe she’s too weak. Or maybe she has to be the victim, instead of just a helper, to know what it is.
Evenings now, after the last visit from the palliative care nurse, and the last home care helper has long since departed, Lucia spends a lot of time on the phone. Relatives call from across the country, there’s her evening talk with George, sometimes the family doctor calls, or a friend or two. It’s quite late before she’s able to make up her cot, undress for bed, and climb in with her book. Since she learned how as a six-year-old, to read before sleep has been her habit, and now, despite her exhaustion, she clings to it as the only remnant of normalcy left in her life.
Levi’s book is a careful, scholarly dissection of the degrees, causes, and purposes of specific daily cruelties in the concentration camps of the Second World War. It examines in detail,
coldly, human evil as it manifests itself in the simplest and smallest of everyday acts. This book is the worst of them all, and she’s read only a few pages before she begins to wonder if she can go on.
Elaine has begun to cough. Lucia throws back her blanket and sheet and hurries into the bedroom. Surprisingly, given that she is now constantly heavily drugged with morphine, Elaine is awake. Her blue eyes, grown large and beautiful in these last weeks, shine in the semi-dark, and through her spasms of coughing she tries to speak to Lucia.
“Yes, okay,” Lucia murmurs, although she hasn’t been able to understand her sister’s broken mumbling. She tries, using her usual techniques, to partly pull, partly lift Elaine back up to a sitting position, but for some reason it is one of those nights when she can’t manage it. Maybe it’s because Elaine can’t help her any more by pushing against the mattress with her hands.
Frantically, she climbs onto the bed beside Elaine and puts one arm against her back to hold her up. Elaine’s cough has settled into a steady, gasping roll that is terrifying to hear. Lucia reaches with her other arm for the pillows and the foam wedge to pull them down to where she’s holding Elaine up in her sitting position, but she can’t get a grip on them, and when she does, the wedge refuses to move, seems to be caught on something she can’t see or reach. Elaine is trying to speak again. Lucia freezes.
“I’m … so … scared …” Panic grips Lucia, her helplessness, her desire to save her sister any suffering she can, her hopeless, endless failure to do so, and the demands of the moment that she can’t even consider rush through her mind. She tries, but from here she can’t reach the phone without letting go of Elaine and she doesn’t dare do that.
Upright now, Elaine’s coughing has subsided enough that Lucia can feel her short gasping breaths returning to shudder through her chest and ribs and spine.
“I’m … so … tired … I … need … sleep …” Elaine whispers: a word, a breath, a word, a breath. Lucia gives up the struggle to pull the wedge and pillows to her. Holding Elaine upright with her left arm, on all fours she moves around behind her, transfers Elaine’s weight to her left shoulder, while she tugs at and straightens her own nightgown that has twisted around her legs. Then she crouches behind Elaine, her face hovering level with the back of her sister’s stubbly head. Slowly she lowers herself until she’s seated behind her.
She spreads her legs so that they enclose Elaine, and the pillows and wedge fit her own back, neatly propping her upright. She puts both arms around Elaine, pulls up the sheet and blankets, pats them into place, folding them down under Elaine’s chin. Then she clasps her hands on Elaine’s lap, and accepts her sister’s full weight, surprisingly heavy for all her thinness, her frailty, against her chest and abdomen and thighs.
Elaine falls back into unconsciousness almost immediately, her head lolling against Lucia’s throat, chin, and shoulder. The concentrator drones on beside the bed and the city’s light glows in around the curtains so that Lucia can make out the shadows that are furniture. Slowly her sister’s twisted, knobby spine relaxes and settles into the warm cushion of Lucia’s breasts and belly.
Lucia’s mind wanders to the book by Primo Levi she’s been trying to read, she remembers reading that Levi committed suicide. She grasps Elaine more firmly, presses her lips lightly against her sister’s clammy cheek. She thinks of their parents, dead now, and of her and Elaine’s long childhood together in the bright, quivering aspen forests of the north, of the moving sky there, the intense green of the grass.
Elaine coughs, a light, shallow cough, moves her head slightly, her short, stiff hair brushing Lucia’s mouth, before she relaxes again against Lucia’s warm body.
They stay that way a long time, Elaine deeply unconscious, her polio-and-pain-stiffened shoulders, neck, and back slowly loosening so that they feel almost normal to Lucia, while Lucia drifts in and out of sleep, until the heat of their two bodies has so melded that, awake now as the first pale rays of dawn seep around the drawn curtains, Lucia can no longer tell where her sister leaves off and she begins.
“Pammy! Get a move on.” There was no answer, but feet began thumping down the stairs. Without turning around Bonny called, “Where’s Jason?” The radio was playing softly beside the sink and she reached with a soapy hand to shut it off.
“An aboriginal man claims that he’d been driven by the police to the outskirts of the city Thursday night, and left to walk back—” She pulled her hand back, soap bubbles sliding from her wrist onto the counter.
“I dunno,” Pam answered in a singsong voice, always happiest before figure-skating practice. “Com-ing, I guess.”
“He says that the policemen also took his jacket. It was forty below that night. He says that he pounded on the door of the power plant until the night watchman—”
She could tell by the muffled thuds and exclamations that Jason was at the back door now, too. Pam had stopped humming and the two of them were into the did-not-did-too-did-not quarrelling they seemed to do in their sleep, but which had been especially bad this winter with Ross gone from the farm all week.