Wait Until Tomorrow (19 page)

“Sir, please don't talk to my daughter,” I lean over and say in a loud voice. He laughs his wicked little-boy laugh.

On the airplane, a man sitting in the row in front of us has a snore like a buzz saw, and Hank periodically jolts the man's seat to get him to stop, giggling maniacally every time he does it. Again, Emmy and I can't help but laugh when he does. It's viral.

When we get to Hank's parents' house, Jean is waiting for us as she always is. But she has been diminished by half. Taking care of her dying daughter and her sick husband has carved up her soul. Her strength in the face of this adversity makes me feel like a welterweight. I know antidepressants are helping her deal with it all, but for God's sake, she's eighty years old, and she's got rheumatoid arthritis. Yet, she's ever stalwart.

“One time we were at the hospital to see about Beth, and I turned around and Hank Senior had passed out,” she says to me. “They had to check him in right then and there. So there I was
with both of them in the hospital, running from one floor to the other.”

“How do you do it?” I ask.

“I don't have a choice, Pat,” she says. “What else can I do?”

She could turn into a raving lunatic, I think. But she doesn't. She finds whatever helps her, whether it's the serenity prayer or a bridge game with friends, and she copes.

Fortunately, Hank's brother Steve has been there to help her. He reconnoiters with us at the house, and we pile into his Blazer to visit Beth. Beth is tall and gaunt. She hugs us fiercely. I've noticed that the dying tend to express love with reckless abandon. Hank is aghast at the sight of his bald sister with a black line of stitches across her skull.

“Ya look like Beetlejuice,” he says.

Hank's family is not renowned for tenderness, but they're a loyal bunch. Steve has shown his true mettle, captaining the ship of this beleaguered family. Generous and handsome, with a big laugh almost as infectious as Hank's, Steve is now figuring out the next step for Beth. He thinks she's ready to come home, and he's also found a hospice down the street from his parents' house for that inevitable step.

Hank notices a pretty nurse and whispers to Steve, “You should ask that nurse out. She could take care of the whole family. I think she's hot for you.”

But Hank doesn't know how to whisper, and I'm sure the nurse has heard him, so I look at him wide-eyed and Emmy joins me, and soon we're all cracking up there in the hospital room at Hank's faux pas.

The next day Beth comes home. She needs help getting her long white compression hose on, and since this is something I'm fairly experienced at, I go in to help her. In order to have something
to say other than how awful her situation is, I bitch about Hank.

“He didn't even want Emmy to go to that arts school,” I complain.

She sucks her teeth in disgust. We're the same age, and ragging on Hank has been one thing we can agree on, as if we're both the younger siblings. She doesn't sleep well. Neither do I, and in the early morning the two of us are alone in the quiet light of the living room enjoying the hush before everyone else wakes up. She eats a donut and drinks her coffee. Since the return of her cancer, she loves sweets. She's not exactly watching her weight. In some ways she reminds me of my mother. A lot of things don't matter when you're on the precipice. She can't remember much. She's not interested in much. She's become an aficionado of silence.

When we leave there's still a miniscule thread of hope, but in December Beth dies. Hank Senior has lung cancer and a brain tumor. We stay home that Christmas.

ANTHEM

What need have you of further demons?
Figures from your own hells are enough.
(Save us from our minds!)
Dry papers flutter about your feet,
Lifted by poisonous dust.
(Save us from our words!)
Your monsters devour the hills,
The forests are laid low.
The oceans are slowly dying.
(Save us from our works!)
Traced deep in each man's being
Are the tracks of his transgressions.
For as soon as the wind goeth over it,
It is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.

Rosalind MacEnulty
An American Requiem

WINTER 2008

The year 2008 came down on my little family like the Four Horsemen on a rampage. It started all right. I was in my second year of a full-time teaching job. My third novel had just been published, and it was getting good reviews, though, of course, not raking in the big bucks. All my life my dream had been to publish a novel. Now I had three of them and a short story collection. This was the time of my life I needed to be doing whatever it was that writers do to promote their work. I needed to “get out there” and do readings and workshops—something I hadn't really done for my previous books. So I had two trips scheduled for the spring—one to a conference in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and another to New England.

In the back of my head I knew that it was risky—planning these trips—but I'd received a local grant to fund both, and I was determined to go. I let my brothers know that I had made my plans and that nothing would stop me from going. Nothing, I insisted. Even if Mom wound up on her deathbed (which I was sure was exactly what was going to happen) I would not alter my plans. I had sacrificed enough. So I bought my airline tickets and waited for the inevitable disaster to strike.

It did, of course. In February.

Mother's belly had blown up to the size of a basketball, and she constantly complained of constipation. Over the years, I had given her enemas and plied her with laxatives recommended by the doctor, but her large intestine simply didn't have the power to do its job. This time she was backed up so badly that Roto-Rooter couldn't have helped us out. And the doctor wasn't sure what was going on with that enormous pregnant-looking belly. So it was time to go back to the hospital.

 

At first she charms everyone there. One of the doctors, an elderly Jamaican man, is smitten and tells me what an intelligent woman she is, how much he enjoys chatting with her. But this little honeymoon ends soon.

They are going to flush my mother out. They need me to stay there and make sure she drinks several gallons of Drano. Already my mother's fabled intelligence is getting murky. Hospitals have that effect on old people, I am told. I sit at her side and say, “Drink up, Mom.” Mother balks, of course. Who wouldn't? But she has to drink it all, and I keep after her for several hours till it's all gone. Then we wait for the inevitable eruption.

I won't go into the details. Suffice to say the toilet is never as close as it needs to be, and not only do I become a medical professional, but I also serve as janitor.

That should be the end, right? But it isn't. My mother makes the mistake of letting the nurses know that she is in pain. Well, she's always in pain. Because the doctor nicked a nerve in her back during her spinal operation, now her brain has gotten locked onto the idea of pain. This is a trick that brains do though I won't fully understand this till later when a friend explains that the same thing happened to her sister. So my mother is in constant pain. In hospitals they don't like pain. I understand this. Why should anyone
be in pain if it's unnecessary? We have the technology to get rid of it. A little visit from Sister Morphine and all your cares slide under the table to sing about dead roses. And they always think they're doing you a favor by giving you just a little extra bump. Oh, wouldn't the junkie I once was have loved these folks?

So they start to give her morphine, which does not put her to sleep. Instead my mother goes from being an outspoken witty old woman to a deranged madwoman. I must be loony myself because I actually go home one night to try to get some sleep.

The phone rings at two thirty in the morning.

“Will you come do something about your mother? We can't handle her,” the nurse says.

“Yeah, I'll be there in twenty minutes.” I roll out of bed, put on my jeans and shirt and head out the door.

In my mother's hospital room, I settle on a little plastic-covered reclining chair and try to drift back to sleep, but she won't be quiet. She's babbling about how guilty she feels and how sorry she is and not really meaning it because she's out of her head, and finally I growl at her, “Would you shut up! Just shut up!”

A nurse walks in at this very instant and stares at me in horror. I am rather notorious among those few who have heard this particular verbalization come from deep in the back of my throat. Emmy says, with a touch of admiration, that it is the scariest sound she's ever heard. I used it once to quiet some unruly girls on a choir trip, and she has never forgotten it. Just as it worked on the choir girls, it works on my mother, but I'm sure the nurse thinks I am an awful daughter. Yes, damn it, sometimes I am. But Mother will never remember this transgression.

At least I get a little bit of peace. Finally it's 6:30 a.m. and I can head to the cafeteria for something to eat. My mother is finally out of it. The food offerings in a hospital cafeteria are not particularly
appetizing; I get some scrambled eggs and a biscuit and sink down in a booth in the deserted room. I'm mechanically ingesting the food when my cell phone buzzes. It's Hank.

“Hello?” I say.

“Yeah, I've called the paramedics and need to know which hospital to go to,” he says.

“Come again?”

“My blood pressure has skyrocketed, and I feel bad. I'm all shaky. The paramedics are on their way and I'm probably going to have to go to the hospital. Which one do I go to?”

“Good Lord. Go to the one in Pineville,” I tell him. It's not the same hospital where my mother is, but she has a different insurance policy than we do. “I'll come by on my way to school.” I spend the day bouncing from one hospital to the other and somehow manage to teach my classes as well.

Hank comes home that night with a list of different doctors to see. My mother, on the other hand, spends ten days in the hospital and is much worse at the end of those ten days than when she went in. She's had a colonoscopy and every kind of test known to humankind, but they can find nothing seriously wrong with her. She is simply old and the plumbing doesn't work anymore. But now she's caught infections and something has gone really wrong with her brain. She seems to be in such misery that I actually wish for her death. She can't understand why she is still alive. And I am helpless to do anything for her.

“This is so awful,” she says over and over.

One of the nurses insists that he has to give her the full dose of morphine that the doctor has prescribed, which is nuts. The morphine has sent her into another dimension. She doesn't need that much, I try to tell him. You can give less than the doctor orders, just not more. This isn't penicillin, for God's sake. It's morphine. I
manage to win this battle but something bad has happened to my mother's brain.

She is somehow still alive at the end of this ordeal. The hospital, however, is through with her. They've done their worst, and now it is time for her to leave. She is heading back to the nursing home where she was last year. But now the insurance rules have changed and I'm looking at the possibility of a bill that will make me a pauper. Still, there is no choice. And no matter what, I'm going to Mexico in another week.

I visit her every day at the nursing home and stay for hours. She has infections. She can no longer form complete sentences. She spends a half hour trying to tell me about her problem with the telephone. There is no phone. In spite of her condition, I am determined not to cancel my trip to Mexico. My brother Jo and his girlfriend come to Charlotte to relieve me of my duties. I get on a plane and I am gone.

In Mexico I sleep a lot. Hal and Lynda live in a beautiful five-story apartment. Each story consists of a single room. I am ensconced on the bottom floor on a futon mattress. It's comfortable. I am surrounded by books, and I lose myself for hours in someone else's words, someone else's woes.

In San Miguel Vitamin D is plentiful, church bells ring often and randomly, dogs bay, pigeons worry about the sheen of their feathers, and bread smells slide over the balcony ledge to place a calming hand on my shoulder.

In Charlotte my life is a litany of despair. Hank and I lie next to each other trading our tales of woe, calculating the calories of
grief in our daily diet. My mother can no longer defecate, I tell him. Hank counters that his father's brain is riddled with cancer like Swiss cheese. And then we list the others gone or going—his sister, my friends, his coworker, my professor. We are paralyzed, and only our tongues can move obsessively, tolling the bad news.

In San Miguel de Allende I don't tell Lynda the details of my life. This is not a conscious decision, but simply a response to the unwritten code of Paradise. Leave those shit-filled diapers back in the nursing home. Do not defile the sanctity of this crystalline dream with the tales of your endless tears.