His mother’s arms beneath the sheet appear to be tucked in a mound over her chest, but while he watches, her fingers jut over the top of the hem, then withdraw. She moved—did she understand me, he asks the nurse, who says some movements are involuntary; we’ll know more later. Like when, asks Charlie. She’ll probably sleep for up to twenty-four hours, the nurse says. They’ll know more then. As he turns to go, he is stopped by the EMT, who hands him a white plastic bag, the top cinched shut. It’s her swimsuit, the man says apologetically. We had to cut it off her; I already gave your father her ring. Charlie accepts the bag with its soaked weight and damaged, useless contents, the navy and turquoise flowers of the swimsuit showing through.
It is not until he returns to the windowless waiting area that his mouth begins to tingle and his forehead contract. It’s been years since he’s had a full-fledged panic attack, but he still lives with his own mind as if with a once-wild animal.
Breathe-count
, he tells himself out of long habit, and his hand reaches for Rachel’s, but he must be gripping too tightly because she winces and loosens his hold. He slides his hands between his thighs, then, squeezing harder and still harder, wishing he could vise himself and make of his own finger bones an inner core. Rachel touches his arm; he shakes his head. As he counts backward from a hundred, his breathing slows, and he is back, almost back, to normal when the nurse appears and tells them cheerfully, as if delivering the first bit of good news, that a bed has opened on the ICU.
LATER, DETAILS WILL EMERGE: HOW
André had packed the car, ready to go; Helen was determined to have one last swim, though the sea was rough, the day windy, and André was not in favor of her going in. I swim
ever
y day unless there’s lightning, she’d said to him and, earlier, to Jane. They had agreed to meet Jane there at noon, but as they were going out the door, she
’
d called to say she wasn’t ready, she had too much packing to do, and in any case she didn’t think Helen should swim, the wind was up and from the northeast. Of course she didn’t listen, Jane will say. I should have gone with her; I should have known.
Helen swam out to the raft without a problem, but it was choppier coming back, and she swallowed water and struggled and went under. A girl, on the dock with her toddler, saw and dove, pulled her in, gave her CPR on the dock. Got her—heroically, André will say—breathing again (the “girl” being the wife of one of the Wilson boys, it will turn out, a former lifeguard who thrust her son into André’s arms before she went in after Helen). And then André yelled and Margie Childs heard and came and left and called the ambulance and Jane heard sirens and they followed the ambulance in the car.
For now, just waiting. They all go up an elevator, down a maze of halls, to another waiting room, really just the dead end of a hallway, a twist and turn from the ICU. While downstairs it was hot, here it is air-conditioned and freezing. Charlie walks down the hall to find a men
’
s room but finds, when he gets there, that he cannot pee and returns to sit shivering between Rachel and Jane. You can put this around your shoulder, his father says, offering him the striped towel, and Charlie says, No, Dad,
Jesus
, and Jane says, Easy, Charlie, and he says, You’re right, I’m sorry, but his father doesn’t seem to hear. A nurse passes by now and then. Food carts. Doctors in a rush. His father goes in and out of the ICU and comes back, each time, announcing that his mother is still breathing, on oxygen. Do you want me to call the other children, Jane, now dry-eyed, asks, and André says no, he will, and rises with new purpose to find a phone. Margie Childs and her husband show up at some point, leave and return with sweatshirts and fleece blankets, which they pass around. Eventually Percy shows up, having driven home to Wellesley, received a phone call, driven back. For long stretches, Jane shuts her eyes, holds Paul’s hand, her lips moving. She is praying, Charlie sees, and he wishes, not for the first time, that he had even a sliver of her faith.
Every once in a while, someone speaks into the silence. The water was rough, Jane says. I had a bad feeling. I told her not to go, says André. But she insisted, and she’s a good swimmer. An
excellent
swimmer, says Jane. André nods: I met her at a swimming pool in Lausanne; she challenged me to a race. You’ve always said you let Mummy win that race, Percy says, but
she
claims she let you think you let her win. The word
let
, Charlie silently observes, detaches from all meaning when repeated, and he says can we not talk about her as if she’s dead, which shuts them all up, but then he apologizes, and Jane says the trouble is, there’s nothing right to say.
At some point, Rachel offers to go find food at the cafeteria. Good idea, Jane tells her. Get something for André; he needs to eat. Jane pulls out twenty dollars, but Rachel pushes it away and shakes her head. What should I get, she asks. Maybe fruit if they have it, Jane says. Maybe, I don’t know . . . bananas? I’ll go with you, Charlie tells Rachel, and together they walk down the corridor and into the stairwell with its cinder block walls, then out to the lobby with its plate glass windows, and he feels a new lightness—he might walk away, go out into the sunshine,
leave
—and they do, in fact, go outside into the sunshine, gulping the fresh air, but the day looks glassy, shimmering, and the people are in wheelchairs or on crutches or holding Mylar balloons shaped like pacifiers (“It’s a Girl!”), and they don’t stay out long. The cafeteria isn’t selling bananas, or much of anything, on Labor Day. They buy a few apples and soggy roll-up sandwiches. Bottled water. Juice.
When they return to the waiting room, his father is not there, called into the ICU. “Yes, we have no bananas,” Charlie tells his aunt, who smiles thinly, takes an apple and sets it in her lap. Percy opens a water bottle and downs it in several gulps, then crushes the plastic loudly between his hands. And then their father is coming down the hallway. Stabilized, he says, tears rolling freely down his face. Still unconscious but breathing on her own. And stabilized.
“It eez possible,” he says (and only then does Charlie realize that his father has fully expected her to die), “that she will be all right.”
T
O SEE YOUR
mother as a baby, that is what it’s like, and therefore heartbreaking and wretched, and therefore also cleansing in some crooked way, the self wiped clean of static, pared down to its essentials, the human core that bore you, which was borne. When, the next morning, Charlie is finally let in to see his mother in the ICU, she is still unconscious. Whereas in the ER she had just one IV, now she is elaborately hooked up to drips, wires and machines. One foot sticks out from beneath the sheets in a yellow hospital sock with a nonskid sole. An arm goes up, she curls; her eyes open, sweep the room. Charlie speaks, his voice croaking: Hi, Mom. His father reaches out to pat her leg through the covers:
C’est moi, chérie. C’est André, mon lapin, c’est moi, ton mari
.
Salut
. For long moments, she is still; then a leg bends up, an elbow jabs and swims. Charlie takes these movements as a good sign, not knowing, yet, about abnormal flexion, the body stripped to impulse, a chicken without a head.
That she has not yet woken up can mean nothing good, but there will be no definitive answers until the doctor runs brain scans in the afternoon. Until then, largely mystery, which will leave forever open the possibility that his mother has a slow departure, a gradual fading out. As Charlie stands beside her, sometimes her eyes open, settle briefly, even, on his face. Can you hear me, Mom? It’s Charlie. Mummy? Blink if you can hear. Sometimes she blinks, but then one does blink; one does hear, and there she is, so entirely herself, her long hands, the unchanged blueness of her eyes.
Midday, Charlie asks his father if he can be alone with her for a few minutes, and his father says yes, this a good idea, so after the doctors’ rounds, Charlie goes in and sits with her, interrupted only by the comings and goings of the nurses, who perform their duties silently and retreat. They come, he stops talking; they leave and he begins. He shuts the curtain around the bed, pulls the chair close and sits for a good half hour, talking to a mother who may or may not be able to hear him, certainly cannot respond, but still he speaks, and extreme though the situation is, he is grateful for the chance to sit and talk to her, for his own sake, for hers—there, your firstborn, apple of your eye, bane of your existence, bending near you, telling you some of what he could not tell before.
I know I’ve disappointed you, he says, but I hope not entirely. He tells her that he admires her work and energy and how passionate she is, and her sense of humor and how long and close her friendships are. Were he younger and it a different time, he might also be tempted to pull out his laundry list of grievances, but they have largely lost their potency, and he tells her this and acknowledges how the strains in their relationship might sometimes lead her to think he doesn’t care about her, but he does—and accepts her, and himself, more or less, and appreciates what she’s given him. He tells her he is grateful for Ashaunt but sorry it has been a battleground between them. He tells her that Rachel had a miscarriage in May and will probably get pregnant again—might even be pregnant now—but if that doesn’t work out, they’ll adopt. I’d like to be a father, he says, and when no limbs move, no eyelids flutter open, he lays his head down on the sheet and rests there, the top of his skull lightly touching his mother’s cocooned side. Perhaps he even dozes off a little, coming and going, eyes shut, breathing as she breathes.
When the scan results arrive later that day showing no brain activity whatsoever, a vegetative state, he is not surprised. The doctor explains their options, though there’s really only one thing to decide: to feed or not to feed. The rest—when she, her body, will stop its breathing, is up to her, for it’s still her on some level, isn’t it, her pulse and heart, her life force? Charlie isn’t ready, nor are the others, to stop the feeding tube, but he does not go into her room after the scans come in, not even once to say good-bye, though other people do—his sister, for one, returning and returning until the very last moment. His father. Jane. His father is making sure his mother still gets her Valium so she won’t go through withdrawal, attending to her and spending time at her side in a way that almost seems, to Charlie, to disregard the test results. It feels unreal, André says several times to Charlie, who comes a few more times to sit in the waiting room with his family but never again to cross the threshold to the room. Their mother’s hair, Caroline reports, is growing fast, full of perverse health, and her wig has disappeared. Friends from New Jersey call the Red House, leave messages. Suky forgets about the time difference and calls from England before dawn. For days, then a week, then over a week, the report remains the same: Helen, tube-fed, is still breathing (even mindless, she is stubborn in her will to live) on her own.
She dies ten days after Labor Day. She might have held on longer with the feeding tube, but what is life—what is sentient, wired, brainy Helen-life—without a brain? This is her idea of hell, Jane says on the ninth day, and the others agree. Only Dossy, who comes to see Helen once and then goes home to Katonah and climbs into bed and does not leave her house for several months, is not consulted. The family decides to have the feeding tube removed, and André signs the papers, and so they let her let her let her let her go.
IT IS A VIOLENCE AND
a blessing, what happened that day. This is how Charlie will come to view it over time. A violence to go down so quickly; a blessing to go down so quickly. Probably, in the end, more a blessing than a violence, given what lay in store for her: ever more unremitting suffering, a wrung-dry, rasping year of it—at most a year—and at the end, death, what she liked to call, along with love,
le grand sujet
.
La mort
,
l’amour
(she’d pretend not to be able to pronounce the two words differently). And so better off this way; they will say so eventually. Most of them will, though never Dossy, who will go temporarily and quite cheerfully out of her mind after her sister’s death, chattering away to her family, to Bea and Agnes, and return to sanity largely intact but vaguer, as if always listening for someone only she can hear. Jane will host the reception after the memorial service, order food and flowers, busy herself, invite Charlie’s father for dinner every Tuesday. It was the best summer of her life, she’ll say of Helen. She told me more than once.
Might she have done it on purpose, Rachel’s mother will ask her daughter at Thanksgiving in Poughkeepsie, while they stuff the turkey, as Charlie, just back from running, listens from the stairs.
No
, Mom, Rachel will say. But you said the water was rough and she was weak and— She loved to swim, Rachel will counter, then add, You didn’t know her. It wasn’t intentional, Charlie will say as he steps into the kitchen, and when Rachel’s mother startles and apologizes, he’ll reassure her: I can see how you’d wonder—it’s just that my mother was too attached to life—she
clung
to it, more than anyone I’ve ever known. He will not tell her that the clipping his mother gave him the night before her accident turned out to be a
Times
obituary for a judge who had ordered dramatic reforms of living conditions in California prisons, the article left unread in his shorts pocket until an October weekend, when he retrieved the shorts from a hook in the cabin, pulled them on and found the article. He feels sure that it’s the details of the man’s life, not the fact of his death, that interested his mother (who, like Charlie, enjoyed a good obit): the man’s life and work, and its relation to his own. Still, to come upon the obituary in his own pocket had been a quiet shock.
THE MEMORIAL SERVICE IS A
huge affair at Jane’s Episcopal church. Some three hundred and fifty people attend. Charlie’s father has asked that he speak, and he’s said yes, though as he sees the masses of people filing in, he regrets it. There are many people he knows, but also quite a few he doesn’t recognize, most of whom turn out to be from his mother’s life as a historian. There are old family friends, his cousins and their families on his mother’s side, his father’s sister—the aunt he barely knows—come from Switzerland. Streams of well-dressed white-haired women file into the church, followed by men in dark suits, looking frail and disheveled in the firm trail of their wives. Charlie sits between Rachel and Holly, his body does; his mind perches at a great distance from it all. The organ music begins, Bach swelling, overfilling the church. Around him, family members are already crying, but he, folding and unfolding his eulogy, is far from tears.