Elegies for the Brokenhearted (29 page)

“You're home now,” Les said. “You're finally home.”

Then you noticed Michael, who had been lurking in the doorway. He was a reserved boy and it was his custom to stand apart from people, watching them, until someone spoke to him. When you saw him you flinched. For the briefest flash you fell out of character. A pained, desperate look came across your face, and your eyes welled with tears. But then you recovered.
Well hello there, darling,
you said.
I've been waiting a long time to meet you. Welcome home.

I wasn't at all at home in that house, but for the next month I more or less moved in, wandering about like an explorer who had stumbled upon a new civilization. There were always a great many people there, their cars lining the driveway and spilling out into the street. They milled around, conducting the business of the church, which seemed more like a corporation, or a political campaign, than a spiritual undertaking. You and Les had set up a kind of headquarters in the bedroom, and all day long people came in and out with questions and requests. There were recordings that Les had to review and approve, sermons and speeches to be prepared, bills to be paid, money to be invested, study groups and camps to be coordinated, staffing and promotion of the day care center. Most of the time Les waved these questions away, saying that they weren't important, but you insisted he deal with them.
The church,
you said,
is more important than either one of us
. For years I had wondered how you could have changed so entirely, how you could have forgotten your old life so completely, but with all the commotion going on around you, I understood.

The motto of Les's team was “Make it happen.” People were always shouting it to one another—they answered their phones this way. Les and his followers seemed to be under the impression that they could make you well, that your cancer was some kind of trial whose outcome was under their control, that it was simply a matter of faith. Now and then, when an idea struck him, Les would clap his hands together and rub them. “Here's what we're going to do,” he'd say. “We're gonna find someone who knows something about herbs. Someone who's lived in the rainforest. A medicine man.” Sometime prior to my arrival, Les had declared that talking about your illness only gave it strength, and so people were forbidden to speak of it. The only people who mentioned your pending death were your doctors, who spoke of it in vague terms. “With cases like this,” they said, “it can take weeks, sometimes months, for the cancer to overtake the body.”

“With the exception of miracles,” Les would say.

“Of course, of course!” the doctors would say, flustered. “Miracles.”

You had a full-time nurse named Quiz. She was a short, squat woman with the rasping voice of a lifelong smoker. She wore the same thing every day—maroon-colored scrubs and white tennis shoes—and she gave off an air of no-nonsense practicality. Her attitude toward you was pitiless and pragmatic. She moved around constantly. She changed your sheets, did your laundry, washed your hair, vacuumed your room, monitored your vitals and distributed your medications, bathed you, massaged your legs. When I offered to help with your care, Quiz wouldn't hear of it. “I'm paid till five,” she said, “and that's how long I work.” She hardly ever took the breaks she was entitled to. For her meals she liked bologna sandwiches with mustard on white bread, which she could make in under a minute, and eat in just a little more. “No fuss, no muss,” she said. She drank diet soda all day straight out of aluminum cans, and when she was finished she crushed them in her hand as though they'd done her a personal injury. Every two hours she stepped outside on the front porch for a cigarette, which she smoked as if she were in some kind of race.

It was during one of these cigarette breaks that I learned about the nature and history of your cancer—no one else in the house would speak of it. Not long ago, Quiz said, you had suspected you were pregnant—your womanly cycles, as she called them, had stopped, and your stomach was swollen. But you'd taken a test and it had come up negative. For a few months, busy with work, you did nothing. Weight gain, you thought. Menopause. But then you grew tired, and you were overtaken with sharp pains. When the doctors cut you open, they saw that the cancer was everywhere, and they simply closed you back up. The only care that your doctors could recommend was palliative. “Which is me,” Quiz said, draining a Tab. “Twenty years I've been doing this. The same thing every time. But it never gets any easier.”

“How long does she have left?” I asked her.

“Week,” she said. “Ten days. It's hard to tell.”

 

I
asked you why you hadn't called Nana and Pop, who had retired to Florida and were only a short drive away, and you said it was because you weren't dying—that God was merely putting you through a trial. So I called them myself, and they drove up to see you. They visited you every day but didn't stay long. They were always wearing the same thing (Pop in his bus driver's jacket and Nana in her Senior Ladies Bowling League windbreaker, with its clever slogan across the back: “Dolls with Balls”) and as with other people whose clothes never changed—waiters, soldiers—they seemed less like people than functionaries, people fulfilling a duty. Nana had drunk herself nearly into a stupor. All she could do was press your hand and give you a sad half-smile. Pop simply patted your shoulder and said, “You look good today. You look good.” Theirs was an uncommunicative generation. Pop had been held for five months as a prisoner of war in a German camp and had been starved to the brink of death, but he'd never once spoken about it. And so your premature death wasn't about to start him talking. “Well,” Pop said after twenty minutes, “we don't want to wear you out.”

They declined to stay in the house, and continued to live in their mobile home, parked outside on the street. In the evenings they invited me and Michael into their miniature world, where the beds and tables folded down from the walls. They drank highballs and watched game shows—
Wheel of Fortune
,
Jeopardy!
Each of them had developed a tremor that caused their heads to nod in perpetual agreement with everything. They were in their eighties now, and their lives had come to this, this tiny coffin-shaped pocket of the world.

What a family. Whatever instinct it was that brought normal families together, that bound them to one another, we lacked entirely. We only came together in times of crisis, and even then we couldn't get it right. We didn't even know where Malinda was, and she didn't know you were dying. She was out there somewhere, probably alone, probably struggling. You hardly mentioned her, except to say that you knew she was safe, that God was looking after her.
Everything's going to be just fine,
you kept saying. You still spoke of being saved, of the miracle that would be visited upon you. All you had to do, you said, was wait for it, all you had to do was believe. I wanted to shake you. Your faith seemed to me like a way of letting go of whatever brutalities you didn't wish to think about. I wanted a glimpse of the mother I'd always known—savvy, sarcastic, brutal—instead of the regal, beatific creature you'd become since joining the church. The ways in which we'd lived, and failed each other—I wanted to face them. But you only faced me, as you faced everything those days, with a calm, vacuous smile.

In the last days you grew weaker, you had trouble breathing. The cancer had spread to your spine and even the smallest movement was painful. Your doctor ordered a morphine drip. You and Les stopped talking as if you were going to survive—you talked instead of meeting in the hereafter, of God's plan, which was mysterious at the moment but which you had no choice but to believe in.

You slept much of the time. When you woke it was always from a vivid dream, a memory from your life which you felt compelled to relate. You believed that certain long-lost memories were returning to you for a reason, that God was speaking to you.

On one of your last lucid days you told me a story about myself I'd never heard before.
You were born on a spring day,
you said.
It was sunny and warm, I went to the hospital in a sundress, two days later when it's time to take you home there's a snowstorm, and Pop has to put chains on the tires. Nana and Pop are in the front seat with Malinda, I'm in the back holding you, we're making our way home, the car's sliding around. We're almost home, we're stopped at a red light, and suddenly the back door of the car opens and some lunatic gets in—he's escaped from the mental hospital in his pajamas, you can tell right away his mind isn't right. His feet are wrapped in white trash bags. He has this long, ugly face, he's missing his front teeth, his hair is all over the place.

And the crazy man says he wants to go to New York, he needs to get back there to finish a painting, he has a paying client waiting for it, millions of dollars. He starts telling us all about this conspiracy against him, these demons underground are trying to suck his talent out through his feet, the hospital is run by them and they're trying to trap him and make him powerless, they took away his pencils and paper and the only way he could draw was to scratch on the walls with his nails. He says he's the most talented artist in the world. Pop, he just turns around and acts perfectly normal. I guess he was used to this kind of thing from driving a bus all those years. “We'll get you to New York right away,” he says. We drive around for a while and I'm holding on to you for dear life. Then Pop pulls over in the parking lot of a grocery store and says, “Here we are, New York City.” And the crazy man looks out the window and nods. Before he gets out he leans over and takes a long look at you. He takes his finger—this skinny finger with a long, dirty fingernail—and he strokes your forehead with it, back and forth, back and forth, and I start crying, I thought he was going to take you, or hurt you. He could have hurt you very easily. But he didn't. He just got out of the car and shut the door. He waved to us as we pulled away. I can still see him standing there in his pajamas, in the snow.

These were the kinds of things that happened, you said, when you grew up across the street from a mental hospital. It wasn't that unusual. In the old days, they used to let the patients out on weekend furloughs, and they'd walk the streets all day. Sometimes the doorbell would ring and one of them would be standing there with a broom, asking if they could sweep the steps or the driveway. It was just a part of life. What was unusual, you said, wasn't the episode itself, but the ways in which it now reminded you of your own misfortune with the crazy lady.
I see now that he put a mark on you, the same way a mark was put on me. I used to think it was a curse,
you said.
But now I know it means something good. God's trying to give me comfort about you. He wants me to know that our souls are joined, we'll always be together.

The last coherent thing you ever said had to do with time. You woke one morning and said that time was nothing like we thought it was.
There's no past,
you said,
and no future
.
Everything's happening all at once, it's like everybody's life is this hallway with a million rooms, white rooms, and in every room something is happening, it's all happening at once.
You said that the past felt very distant to us, but this wasn't really the case. We were young and old at the same time, all the scenes of our lives were unfolding all around us in a sort of perpetual present. If we looked carefully—if we really looked—we could see the past and the future, all around us. If we tried, we could feel it.

When we die,
you said,
it's not really the end, because all the moments you ever lived you just keep on living. And so we'll never be apart.

Whenever you spoke of these visions Les closed his eyes, he took your hand in his and raised it in the air, he trembled. “Dear God,” he said, “thank you for giving us your wisdom. Thank you for bringing us peace.” Tears ran down his face. I sat staring at him, at you. How certain you both were in your faith. How easy it was for you to believe. Everything made sense to you. Every trial had its purpose, every mistake was redeemed, every wound was justified.

I wanted to believe, too. I wanted to reconcile with you in some way. But I was too distant from you. In raising Michael I'd come to believe that what joined two people wasn't blood, or fate, or signals granted from on high—what joined people together were the small actions they performed for each other each day. I made Michael breakfast, I took him to school, I picked him up and took him to the park, we had dinner together, did his homework, played a game, I read him a story and put him to bed. What joined two people together wasn't always exciting. The cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the maintenance of the home and car, all the mundane things you never wanted to be bothered with—this, I believed, was what bound people together. At the end I gave you my hand, I nodded as if I agreed, because this was what people did when they loved each other. But as far as our souls were concerned—whether they were joined together for all eternity—I couldn't quite feel it.

 

S
till, I missed you when you were gone. After you died I thought about you more than I ever had before. I spent long hours conjuring you, trying to remember everything that had ever happened between us—every gesture, every word, every color and shape and texture and sound and scent. I wrote down every scene that came to mind. As if by doing so I could bring you back to life. If what you said was true, then the dead were still with us, the dead weren't really gone. Every moment that had ever passed between us was still alive in rooms all around me, and if I tried hard enough, I could break into them. I supposed that, sitting there putting words on a page, this was what I was trying to do. I thought of Uncle Mike, of the friends I'd known and lost, I thought of you. Somewhere unseen, but very close, you were young again, and I was newly born. You sat holding me in the backseat of Pop's car, the snow fell, the tires slipped on the road, a door opened and a stranger got in, he rode with us for a time, he leaned toward us, he extended his finger and moved to touch my forehead, you held me tight, there was no distance between us, nothing had gone wrong yet, we hadn't yet lost each other. Even now the stranger was touching his finger to my forehead, he was moving it back and forth, he was leaving his mark, his blessing, and if I believed, if I only believed, I could feel it, I could be with you again, I could almost feel it.