I stopped looking for opportunities to call for help. My job had just changed into something else. I stopped begging and stopped shifting around. I stayed next to her on the bed, facing her, but sat up, close enough so I could feel the heat of her body in the blankets pressed against the sides of my legs. I loosened the light bones of her fingers from the grip I’d had on them. I waited there, her hands damp and cold inside mine, and watched her try to breathe. The last time I’d been in a position anything like this, I’d had that stupid marker in my hand, tracing its way around her body.
How long had this been going on, how long had I been here? I was afraid to talk to her because I felt I must concentrate on letting her communicate if she wanted to. Nevertheless I became aware of soft sounds I was making without meaning to, a long shushing, a sibilant murmur. I brushed her hair off her face though it fell right back with each spasm, letting my hand linger on the curve of her skull. I wanted to be calm and comforting, but I felt my mouth trembling uncontrollably.
I laid my hand against her forehead, then her cheek, and she closed her eyes, briefly, as if in comfort, so I left it there. Her skin was chilled; a fresh sheet of moisture had risen from her pores. I stroked my hand over her forehead. I thought she might keep her eyes closed now, that that might make it easier. She was concentrating. I could tell. She was still gasping, her mouth open so wide, her chin high in the air, as if to let in as much air as possible, but I could hear her lungs letting up. Her chest beneath my hand wasn’t rising and falling as hard. It felt more like a flutter, a tiny shudder of the fragile bone.
Her eyes sought me out again, her gaze darting around, as though she couldn’t quite believe I still held her and needed to see me too. She was frightened, but losing the strength even to show it.
This was not how I had ever thought she’d be. I’d imagined her stoic.
Her face was genuinely blue now, her lips lavender, and finally she arched her neck, her head starting to drive farther back against the pillow as she reached for breath, and it was like the motion couldn’t finish itself. She lost momentum part of the way through and relaxed.
I felt a fog of stillness fill the room. Kate’s eyes were still turned in my direction but the darting, frantic energy was gone. I stared back into them even though I knew she no longer saw me. I felt myself to be a rapidly dissolving shape, a dimming shadow.
In the rest of her body, there was no sag of relief in muscles that hadn’t been able to hold themselves taut in the first place. All that movement and effort had been concentrated at her neck, her mouth. I could only see the release in the way the pillow no longer creased as deeply from her pressing her skull into it. I waited for her face to relax too, but it didn’t, not all the way. Instead a rush of air was released from her lungs, whatever she had kept or managed to claw into herself, and I felt its tepid warmth against my face where I still leaned in close to her. I smelled the faint must of saliva and the artificial mint of her toothpaste, the cooling heat of her breath as it returned to the air she’d snatched it from.
I WAITED THEN. I
sat next to her, holding her hand, and waited for another twenty minutes. We had only discussed it in the vaguest terms: Wait. Then call. We had never talked about what I was supposed to do in the meantime.
I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t go get a drink, or put a robe on. I couldn’t go about the business of comforting myself while she lay there. I didn’t even want to get her papers, her will, her living will, her lawyer’s contact information, from their clearly marked folder in the front top drawer of her file cabinet. But I did shut her eyes, tip her jaw up so her mouth was closed again. Outside it was still pitch dark.
I couldn’t feel my body. My awareness of it went in and out: Suddenly I would realize I was holding my eyes so wide that they must have been bulging, that my lower lip was drawn away from my teeth, my shoulders hunched so far forward my back hurt. Then I would try to fix it, and a minute later I’d realize I’d tensed up again.
Finally I got up to call. I couldn’t just reach across her to the phone, like reaching across a table, so I went to the kitchen and called from there. I unlocked the front door and turned the porch light on. Then I went back down the hall.
When I got to the door of her bedroom I went in slowly, as if something would have changed while I was gone. For a moment I was sure
something had. Maybe I’d been wrong about everything—she was merely unconscious. I was no doctor; it was to be expected that I was too inexperienced to find a weakened pulse. I had a mighty faith in my own incompetence just then. I had misinterpreted the whole thing. What did I know? There would be a movement on the bed, a turn of the head, and she would take a breath and speak to me.
I went around the corner and peered in: the window cranked open, a filmy curtain billowing in and sucked back against the screen, the panic button on the floor, the rumpled blue bedspread drawn up off the corner of the mattress, the gleam of her hair on the pillow, her impervious profile against the white sheet.
I picked up the panic button and set it down next to her on the bed, thinking it didn’t look good, so far from her. But I wasn’t faking anything, I thought, suddenly fearful. I was just tidying up. I fixed the comforter, smoothing it down over her. The outline of her body showed through it, the long twin hills of her legs, the flat plain of her belly and chest. Her body had been drawing into itself all spring. She must have known this, though she had not discussed it with me. Perhaps she hadn’t thought she could: The notion of making eggs and stews for her, as I had wanted to so badly a few weeks before, as though it would have helped, struck me as ruinously stupid. I’d focused on the wrong thing and let her approach this completely alone, as if she’d asked me for morphine and I’d petted the back of her hand.
T
HE LONG DISTANCE ACROSS
my parents’ backyard had lent an odd drama to certain childhood memories: I had several images of my father walking the length of the grass toward me as I sat on a swing set and watched him approach, my toes braced in the dusty hollow beneath, my fingers smelling of iron from the chains of the swing. Was I really out there so often that every time he had to tell me bad news—my grandmother had died, my kindergarten best friend was moving—that was where they found me, or did I simply race out there the moment I sensed something coming?
That would be like me, to hear one ominous murmur in the next room and zip outside to swing or do something else equally pointless until they forced me to listen to whatever they had to tell me.
I was sitting in a fraying green lawn chair on the patio behind the house, wearing a T-shirt and shorts rolled up to the tops of my legs. It wasn’t really sunny enough for the outfit, but I’d slept in it. My toenails bore patches of red polish across the centers, what was left after the nails grew out and the polish flaked off. When I shifted in my chair a faint, sour scent rose up off of me. That morning my mother had promised me lunch at the Kiltie if I got myself ready. I’d made a sarcastic comment about dressing for the drive-in, but I got her point. I’d been here three weeks. It was probably time to try and get it together.
A book was facedown on my lap. After reading the same paragraph four times I had turned it over on one leg and stared out across the yard. The swing set, dome-climber, and jungle gym had all been gone
for years, but I thought I could still see a slight depression in the earth, the grass sparser in the spots where the hollow metal poles had been sunk into the dirt.
You couldn’t plan a truly wonderful day in the backyard, I was remembering. You never said,
Today is the day I’m going to build a town under the dome-climber
. You just went out there with an old blanket and threw it over the metal dome and got inside the tent it made and waited to see what came to you in the warm musty-smelling shade. If it was a good day, everything unfolded as you went: You lived alone in the forest beneath the blanket and ate roots and berries, and you stayed out there well into a fall evening, till your fingers were pleasantly numb from cold. Or the swing was a time-and-universe-traveling swing, operated by pressing the chain-links as buttons, and you might accidentally end up on the Viking planet and battle your way through them before launching yourself back onto your swing, belly down, clutching furiously at the links to blast off. I remembered the Viking war as taking up most of a day, but it had probably lasted twenty minutes before my mother called me in for an egg salad sandwich. I had tried to re-create it a few times, but it never worked.
I was reinstalled in my old room. For some reason Mom had wheeled in the television, though I could have come out and sat on the couch in the living room. I didn’t point this out, figuring it was easier for both of us if I stayed out of her way. She brought me plates of eggs, cooked carrots, and sliced pink supermarket tomatoes. When I was sitting out in the yard, as I often was, she’d appear at my elbow bearing sweating glasses of ice water or juice with an odd, gritty texture and malty aftertaste. I suspected she dissolved some kind of protein powder into it.
I’d been out in the yard since Simone and Hillary left an hour before. They’d driven here from Madison, sat with me in the living room for half an hour or so, and then stood up and hugged me. I was embarrassed at looking the way I knew I did and kept the hugs brief and distant, averting my face.
The house on Chambers Street was empty, they’d told me. No one had heard from Evan what he would do with it.
Here
, they had said, and they each handed me their keys to the front door. There had been no
advance decision that I would be in charge of it, but there was a faint air of deference in the way they dug into their pockets at the same time, each presenting me with a key on the palm of her hand.
I had set them in the crumbs on the half-empty plate of cookies my mother had put out. They both stared at the keys for a moment and then turned back to me. Hillary tore at a cuticle.
Simone cleared her throat. “The funeral was terrible,” she said. “Her parents planned it, so it was all God’s great plan and what did we learn from it all.”
Hillary looked at me and looked away, sipping the iced tea my mother had made for them. The sunlight glinted off her glasses. It was hot in the living room, I realized; the heat baked the dark carpeting and heated the air. I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t showered in days.
“Why didn’t you come?” Hillary said. She’d set her glass down. “It was very odd that you weren’t there.”
“Hillary,” Simone said. She turned to me. “People understood. You were there when it mattered. I wouldn’t ask but . . .” She paused, then shrugged slightly, as if to say there was no gracious way to continue. But she kept her gaze on me. It was clear she wanted an answer.
I felt sick, the tannic tea on an empty stomach, the aspirin I had taken for a headache before they arrived. Simone, flushed, dropped her eyes to the cookie in her hand.
“I just . . . I woke up and it felt like I’d heard something in my sleep. I went in to check on her but—” I felt my face getting red. “She was . . . I wasn’t there fast enough, I guess.”
They stared at me. I shouldn’t have tried to lie. They weren’t amateurs—they knew what we’d been trying to prepare for, and in fact they seemed calmer about this than I was. Had everyone else understood how close we’d been to the end but me?
I could have told them the rest of the story, but suddenly it occurred to me how it would sound. How could I say I had taken away the call button, whether she had told me to or not? I had actually moved it out of the way. At the time I was sure I was preventing her from accidentally summoning someone, the same way I’d forced my own hand away from the button, but in the days since Kate had died, everything that had happened in that room seemed mysterious and malleable. I
could reinterpret every part of it, second-guess each decision I had made. What if I had completely misunderstood her? In that professional, appraising way, Simone and Hillary might hear what I’d done and know I’d done it wrong. Most people had no idea what to imagine, but they did, and my worst fear was that they would find some loophole I hadn’t, and say simply,
But why didn’t you just—
“And I was at the funeral,” I said. “Jill and I came late and stayed toward the back. I just didn’t want to make a scene.”
Hillary looked at me. “Why would you make a scene?”
I was afraid of Evan. I was afraid he’d grab me and drag me off to a corner to demand I explain.
“I guess I wouldn’t have.”
We had arrived as they were closing the casket, unfolding a cloth over it, and as Jill and I waited to sneak in to a seat I had had the overwhelming urge to walk forward, calmly, so everyone would know I wasn’t crazy, and just raise the lid, keep the coffin open. The urge didn’t feel as macabre at the time as it seemed later; I’d just realized with the force of irrefutable logic that we didn’t
have
to seal her inside that thing, cover her indifferent face, which I had glimpsed surrounded by pale satin. We had been standing at the back of the chapel, Jill and I, and I’d grabbed her wrist without thinking, captivated by the possibility of reprieve. I was the only one who knew we could all refuse to do this. We could still have her here. Not forever, but we could put it off. For an hour, a whole afternoon, till tomorrow.
Up toward the front of the chapel I’d seen Evan’s blond head, his dark suit. I felt Jill staring at me, and shook my head without looking at her. We stood there and watched two people wheel the casket toward the front of the church, covered in a green-and-white sheet that looked like a tablecloth and that Kate would have hated. She would have hated all of this.
Jill and I had taken a seat in the last pew. I didn’t run after the casket, it goes without saying. But I could not forget that I could, that we all
could
, and I marveled at the sheer willpower of what we were all doing there—not the service itself, but its aim. Step by step we’d force ourselves to cover her, layer by layer, take her body somewhere else, somewhere far from us, and leave her there.