The Healing (3 page)

chapter four

Karen strolled down the dry goods aisle at the Wayside Market. It had morphed from a small country deli, where her grandmother used to send her for milk, into a gourmet food store complete with organic produce and a prime-cut butcher. It had been three months since Karen had moved to Southold, yet running errands still had a
Twilight Zone
effect on her. Places and things appeared familiar, but sometimes she had the feeling she had never really been there before.

Her life was enough of a
Twilight Zone
without ordinary trips to the grocery store making her question her sanity.

A box of cereal bearing a picture of a sunlit wheat field caught Karen's eye. She picked it up. There were only three ingredients on the label. When she looked at the price, she almost laughed out loud. Six dollars? Who paid six dollars for cereal? Was it some kind of marketing experiment to see how much people would pay for just wheat flakes and a drop of honey?

Karen put the sunlit wheat field back on the shelf and picked up some generic corn cereal. Lori liked it, and Mike hardly ate anymore anyway.

She made her way to the front of the store. Just as she was thinking how things couldn't get stranger, she spotted the woman in black in the checkout line. She was holding a small tin of tea and a package of deli meat.
Definitely not a ghost,
Karen thought.
Wait till Helen hears about this.
Without hesitation, Karen got behind her in line. She couldn't help it; the woman intrigued her beyond reason. Even on a jaunt to the local market, the woman in black was wearing her trademark attire and carrying her straw tote. The only difference Karen could see was that her sunglasses were perched on her head, revealing large brown eyes that were earthy and serene. The woman in black didn't turn around when Karen put her items on the counter, although she was courteous and direct with the cashier. She wasn't standoffish or stiff; she was simply an entity unto herself.

Before leaving, the woman glanced at Karen and gave a barely noticeable nod in her direction. Face-to-face, Karen could see fine wrinkles around her eyes, and the slight leathering of her suntanned skin showed her age, which was probably in the mid-sixties.

“Hello,” Karen said. She wondered if the gesture denoted recognition. Her gaze followed the woman in black as she set the sunglasses back on her nose and breezed out of the store. Through the window, Karen watched her cross the main road at her usual unhurried pace.

“Do you know who that woman is?” Karen asked the cashier. “I've seen her walking all over town ever since I was a kid, but I've never met her.”

“Who, Grace Mitchell? She's been around forever. One of those eccentrics you hear a hundred different stories about.”

Karen's curiosity was piqued. “Like what?”

“Well, I heard she was a nurse years back, but not in a regular hospital,” the cashier said as she scanned Karen's items, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Supposedly she worked for one of those holistic institutes and traveled around the country with some band of quacks. But that was a long time ago, and these days I hear she's some sort of religious hermit or a New Age channeler or something. Lives all by herself in that big old house. She could be celebrating Black Masses in the basement for all we know.”

“The house on Terry Lane?”

“Yeah, that's been in the Mitchell family for generations.” The cashier met Karen's gaze as she started bagging the items. “Did you grow up around here?”

“We were summer folks.”

“Well, when I was a kid we used to think that house was haunted.”

Karen was surprised. “Really? I always thought it was grand and romantic.”

“That's because you only saw it on nice summer afternoons. You should have seen it on a dark Halloween night, when the moon was out and the leaves were off the trees.” The cashier rang up the total. “That'll be seventeen twenty-eight.”

Karen fished in her bag for a twenty. “Wow,” she said. “My sister and I used to think she was so mysterious. I guess we weren't too far off the mark.”

As the cashier handed Karen her change, she leaned forward to let her in on another secret. Her voice dropped even lower than before. “Grace Mitchell has always been a little strange, but there are a few stories about her that aren't so far-fetched. Some people say that she had some kind of major breakdown years back, and others say that she lays low because she's dodging an arrest warrant in another state from her days of medical hoodoo. I guess it was just too easy to believe she was some kind of witch or something.”

Karen hoisted her bag of groceries. “You never know,” she said, more mystified than ever about the woman in black.

chapter five

The bathwater was as cool and refreshing as a deep pond on a hot day, and Mike was immersed to his armpits in its womblike comfort. Closing his eyes and resting his head on the rim of the old porcelain tub, he savored the remedial effects of feeling weightless and unburdened by movement. He was tempted to pretend he was in his old body, intact with its extraordinary strength and inexhaustible energy, but it would have been too painful to open his eyes and see the reality of his withering self. The indiscriminate daylight exposed his atrophying legs—two white, shapeless branches with knobby knees and ankles. The dark body hair that was once an external coat of virility now just floated around his pale skin like mossy seaweed on a shipwreck. His waist was the size of a woman's, his stomach concave and twitching with his pulse. Even the sight of his own genitals horrified him. It looked like some drowning slug had crawled up between his legs, had died on a dark bed of grass, and was decaying in the sun.

How was he supposed to relax and appreciate
anything
?

Even if he could tolerate the sight of his own ravaged anatomy, how was he supposed to accept the fact that another full-grown man was in the bathroom with him, making sure he didn't unintentionally (or intentionally) slip under the water's surface?

Mike finally opened his eyes. He glanced at Raymond, who was sitting on the closed toilet seat flipping through a magazine. The young man looked so strong in his snug red T-shirt, so relaxed with his long legs crossed. Mike never felt insecure in his grip. He never feared he would end up on the floor somewhere between the tub and the wheelchair. The water was never too hot or too cold, so Mike could take a bath without worrying it would exacerbate his symptoms. It was as if Raymond had always cared for someone with MS and had grown up thinking this was a routine part of everyone's day.

A gentle breeze moved the bathroom curtain above the tub. Mike watched as Raymond reached to close the window. He was an imposing figure, with his enormous shoulders, melon-sized biceps, and wide torso. His body cast a shadow on Mike as he loomed over him.

An imposing figure, like Mike used to be. Now Mike was merely a shadow in a bathtub, a shadow that had to be protected from drafts. And his home health aide, who should have been appreciated for his admirable work ethic and profound humanity, only reminded Mike of all he had lost since the onset of his primary progressive multiple sclerosis.

Mike closed his eyes again.

He had been a decorated fireman for twenty years. He had carried grown men on his back while toting fifty pounds of gear. From the time he had been a child, he had played sports year-round and probably could have landed a scholarship to college. Instead, he pitched for the FDNY baseball team and ran for every charity event he could fit into his schedule. When he took off his shirt, women of all ages stopped and stared. One year he was even August's pinup for the FDNY
Calendar of Hunks
. His friends never let him live that one down. They tacked it up on the wall at the firehouse and threw darts at it.

These were the same friends who drank with him, played cards with him, railed against the politicians with him, and brought their families to the Jersey shore with him. When he was first diagnosed with MS nearly seven years before, they even went into denial with him, carrying on as if everything would be fine. But then he started stumbling and quaking. Still they covered for him. Finally, he was forced to retire. At first his friends made it a point to stop and see him when they could. Then the visits dwindled. Now they barely even called on the phone. Mike knew it was too painful and awkward for them, especially his friends from the job. He knew they couldn't bear to look at him.

He was dying the slowest death imaginable. At the age of forty-nine, he was forced to acknowledge that someday soon he would probably be in a nursing home, totally incapacitated, a prisoner in his own body. On some cosmic level, he should have considered himself fortunate because he had been forced to leave active duty a year before the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. He could have been another casualty on that fateful day—another name on the wall at the firehouse. Yet any healthy, productive man, if given the choice, would have preferred going down with the World Trade Center towers if the alternative was to live out the rest of his years in such demoralizing physical decline.

“Mr. Donnelly?” Raymond's resonant voice breached the silence. “You all right?”

Mike opened his eyes and saw Raymond kneeling beside the tub, peering at him with concern. Thank God it wasn't pity. Just concern. “Yeah,” Mike rasped. “I'm all right. If you can call this all right.”

Raymond gave him a tight grin.

Mike tried to grin, too, but it was hardly cheerful. Raymond went into motion and immediately drew Mike's attention away from himself. He talked about the New York Yankees as he began to wash him, his confident hands dipping in and out of the water almost as an afterthought. The topic of baseball momentarily detoured Mike's train of thought, and he actually chatted while Raymond helped him lean forward to lather his back.

“I don't know what Steinbrenner was thinking,” Mike said. “I knew that trade was going to come back to slap him in the face. I don't care
who
it is and how much they're paying out. Did you see what happened in Cleveland?”

“They're still four games ahead,” Raymond said.

“Yeah, but they're sweating it out because this guy isn't holding up his end of a ten-million-dollar deal.”

The brief respite from reality came to an end when Raymond rinsed Mike off and began to lift him out of the tub. The bliss of weightlessness also came to an end, and Mike's muscles trembled violently as Raymond hugged him around the torso and hauled him forward. For the first time, Raymond actually grunted and strained, because Mike couldn't make his body cooperate in the least. His arms were draped around Raymond's neck, but there was no strength in them to hang on, and his legs could not bear his weight.

“Oh, God,” he muttered.

“I got you, Mr. Donnelly,” Raymond assured him.

Mike's heart hammered against his rib cage, thrust into panic mode by his total inability to stand or pull himself forward. Raymond lifted him out of the tub and put him in the chair without any help. Mike couldn't even whisk his dripping hair back because he was too weak to lift his hands. It felt like the last of his energy reserves were being used to keep his heart beating and his lungs panting. When Raymond stepped back, Mike could not feel the stream of urine that was arcing up from his own body. But he saw it, and he was horrified. It looked like some silly fountain lacking water pressure.

Raymond matter-of-factly dropped a towel onto Mike's lap. He didn't acknowledge in any way that his own clothes were soaked or that Mike had just pissed himself. He was professional all the way.

Mike couldn't take it anymore. The towel grew warm on his lap, and Raymond laid a larger towel across his shoulders to prevent further chill.

“Oh,
God
—” This time it was like a voiceless sob.

“It's okay, Mr. Donnelly,” Raymond said, stepping to the linen cabinet. “We'll just get you some clean towels.”

“I pissed on you!” Mike gasped in disbelief. No amount of soothing talk or competent caregiving was going to pacify him, especially since Raymond hadn't wanted to put him in the bathtub in the first place. For weeks the occupational therapist had warned them that it was no longer safe or practical, but Mike always talked Raymond into it because he didn't want to give up those few moments of blessed immersion.

That was Raymond's reward for being kind. After nearly getting a hernia, he got pissed on.

Mike didn't want to face it. The doctors had already advised him to get a permanent catheter, but Mike kept putting it off. Why would he want to endure a surgical procedure that would leave him with a tube jutting out of his lower abdomen? How could he admit, after catheterizing himself for years, that it was one more thing he couldn't do for himself anymore? Worst of all, a permanent catheter would mean the end of a very basic human function, rendering that part of his anatomy more useless than it already was. The final emasculation.

It was all happening too fast, and he wasn't going to be able to keep the truth from Karen much longer. In just the past week his weakness and spasticity had worsened considerably. He was no longer able to hobble into the bathroom with his walker and clean himself.

If he couldn't be of any help in moving his own weight, how was Karen going to do it by herself?

Raymond was in full motion again with washcloths and clean towels, murmuring softly to Mike the whole time. “Don't give it a second thought, Mr. Donnelly. We'll put everything right in the laundry.”

“I
pissed
on you!” Mike kept saying, getting more upset with each choked exclamation. Ten years ago he would have thrown an old-fashioned, bellowing tantrum to mask his grief with anger. But he didn't have the energy or the will to drum up the passion of rage, so the tears leaked out of his eyes unchecked. Just when he thought he couldn't be more humiliated.

“Maybe it's time to let the doctor put in that catheter,” Raymond said as though they were still talking about baseball. He pulled Mike forward and set out clean towels beneath him on the wheelchair. “I know you've been trying to avoid that, Mr. Donnelly, but now your health and safety are at stake. I'll talk to the occupational therapist about a shower chair and a Hoyer lift to get you into bed. God knows Mrs. Donnelly wouldn't be able to move you on her own.”

Mike's arms were once again draped around Raymond's neck, and this time he buried his face in his health aide's hard shoulder. “I'm sorry,” he said, his voice breaking.

Raymond eased him back down, and Mike was grateful that he waited a moment before releasing him.