The Best of Sisters in Crime (44 page)

I make it sound
as though I was always lucid, always planning. Not true. I went in and out of
consciousness with little warning, one minute chatting with an orderly who
wants to be an actor. But the next minute, right in the middle of the
conversation, there I am going down the rabbit hole into an old memory.

It was like
going to the movies, so vivid were the pictures I saw in coma. Sharply real.
Yes, I remember, I wore that dress, the not-quite-pink, not-quite-rose that
flattered my face as no other shade had ever done. Whatever happened to it?

Sandy was there
too, her hair in pigtails, her knee skinned, her tennis shoes coming untied.
The exact truth, down to the colors of our bikes, the dank-sweet-rotting smell
of the pond behind her house, the way she always said, “Neat-o” when I told her
one of my stories.

That night,
after the white meal, after the orderly came by to check on me, I was ready.
Restraints off, lying calmly waiting for sleep, having kept my vow of obedience
and swallowed the red pill.

Suddenly, I was
in Marrakesh. The city as real, as vivid as Sandy’s blue Schwinn. Narrow,
winding streets older than time, dirty children calling in high, shrill voices,
mingled smells of spicy lamb and camel dung. The marketplace bustling with
veiled women hurrying on scuffed sandals, gleaming brassware glinting at me
from under tented bazaars, dust rising into my nose. The wail of the muezzin
calls the faithful to prayer from atop a minaret.

Elation fills
me. Marrakesh. Here I was happy, here I was alive, fresh, ready for adventure.
Here I was fully myself. I enter the dream wholeheartedly, walking the streets,
greeting the children, buying a peacock-blue scarf flecked with gold in the
marketplace. Drinking hot black coffee out of a tiny cracked cup.

I wake to a
poached egg and a bedpan and realize the pillow stayed beneath my head all
night.

I realize
something else. I have never been to Marrakesh.

I’d planned to
go, with Colin, but first the roof on the summerhouse needed fixing and then he
met Hilary and we broke up and I didn’t want to go alone, so no Marrakesh.

At first my eyes
fill with the hot salt tang of regret. No Marrakesh. But was that the truth?
Didn’t I go there last night, didn’t I see all I would have seen, feel all I
would have felt? And without jet lag or dysentery.

Mrs. R’s family
comes to see her and are told the news. It’s just like I pictured it: her
daughter Rachel says, “Thank God. It was so hard to keep on seeing her like
that, day after day.” She cries into a Kleenex, and tells her husband to call
the rabbi about the service.

The smallest
grandchild, the one who reads block printing, the one whose big dark eyes
remind me of Mrs. R’s, looks up at his mother and says, “Is Nana coming home
now?” All Rachel can do is sob harder into her soggy Kleenex and pat her son’s
head.

I did the right
thing. I know I did. It was just like Mrs. R could talk, and said to me, “Please,
Mr. Barrymore, please don’t let the vulture eat me. Let me go while my children
can still remember that once I was alive, that I wasn’t always a pile of bones
lying on a bedpan.”

So I did it. I
snuck the extra pillow out of the closet, held it over Mrs. R’s face, and let
the life ebb out of her. She kicked a little—it’s just the body fighting death,
like a headless chicken running in the yard—and then she lay peaceful.

I have another
friend on the ward. She was an editor at a big publishing house, and knows lots
of writers. She used to go to plays all the time, she says. She’s not old like
Mrs. R, so it’s real hard to see her wasting away.

She wants to
die. Nurse found pills in her room, pills she was saving. Lots of them do that,
while they still have the strength. Why does Nurse have to take them away? Why
can’t people be put to sleep like old dogs that have chased their last car?

I wish I could
tell her not to worry. When her time comes, I’ll do the right thing.

In between IV
changes and vampire bloodsuckings and watching my raven grow red-eyed with
hunger, I glide down the rabbit hole again.

I sit at a
table, books piled high around me. Books with
my
picture on the back,
my
name on the front. There are a dozen titles at least, all
best-sellers. People stand in line for a few words scrawled on the title page.
One after another, they tell me how much my books meant to them, how reading
Ultimate Journey
or
Revenge
changed their lives. The books are my
children; I know each one well and remember so vividly how they looked on the
screen of my word processor, amber letters flowing after one another in a
golden stream of words. Well-crafted words, limned with the care an artist must
take, yet reaching so many different people. Characters who lived and grew in
my head, the way my stories lived for Sandy as we picnicked beside the pond
back home.

It’s not the
fame I revel in as I sign my name on all those flyleaves. It’s not the
satisfying ring of the cash register as the buyers shell out top dollar for my
words.
My
words.

It’s the look in
people’s eyes when they tell me how real Stella was in
Moonlight Secrets
or how the divorce in
Broken Vows
was just like their experience. It’s
the hands touching mine, the shy smiles, the enthusiastic replays of my last
plot. My hand is cramped, yet I sign on and on, staying after the bookstore
closes to autograph stock copies for mailing to special customers.

I wake in a
puddle of cold urine.

I can’t ring for
the nurse. Best-selling novelists do not wet their beds.

There’s a world
of tears in my chest. My novel attempts lie buried in a cardboard box in my
sister’s basement in Omaha. Stillborn children. She who can, writes. She who
can’t—or won’t, I never knew which—edits.

The nurse comes
and I let her change the sheets and run me a new IV. She gives me a shot and,
just as she finishes, there’s a Code Blue down the hall. She turns and runs
out, leaving me with—a hypodermic. A nice big one, thick and empty. Empty of
medicine, full of air, it sits on the edge of my tray, staring at me. Is this a
dagger I see before me? Is it really true you can kill yourself by injecting
air into your veins?

At least I can
find my veins; the vampires have inserted a plastic shunt into my arm to make
injections easier. All I have to do is empty that syringe into my vein, let the
air bubble float freely through my bloodstream till it hits a vital area—heart,
maybe, or fast-fading brain—and I’ll have my poisoned strawberries at last.

I slip the
needle under the sheets. Not good enough. I reach behind me. This is a slow
process, taking much more time to do than describe, but in the end I manage to
drag the pillow—extraordinary how heavy pillows are now—to chest level. Using
the needle point, I rip threads one by one until I have a hole big enough to
slide the hypo through. I bury my newfound weapon in fiberfill. then begin the
painful task of putting the pillow back around under my head.

I knock over the
IV. It crashes to the ground with a clatter that instantly brings two nurses to
my bedside. My heart pounds; one of them is the nurse who left the hypo in the
first place. What if she remembers? What if she asks me what happened to it?
What if she fluffs the pillow and the needle stabs her hand? My own skinny
witch-hand trembles as she comes near me.

The raven sits
at the foot of my bed. growing larger and leaner. Not sleek now, not fat, but
scrawny, his head bent forward, his beak long. He exudes a rancid-meat smell
that makes me want to puke. If I didn’t know better, I’d call him a vulture.

I need the
needle. I need The Plan. I need a choice.

I smile
sheepishly at the nurses and point to the pillow. “Heavy,” I say in my tiny “patient”
voice. They nod with sympathetic smiles. One lifts my head while the other
replaces the pillow behind me. Then they rehook the IV into my blue-veined
arms, using the shunt. I wince; the black-and-blue flesh around the shunt hurts
every time they touch it, but I don’t care now. Nothing matters as long as they
don’t find the needle.

The careless one
looks around the room, her forehead wrinkled. I can see her thoughts as clearly
as if a bubble formed above her head: Didn’t I leave something here? It’s the
way I always looked around the apartment before going off on a trip—haven’t I
left the gas on? Am I sure I packed my hair dryer, and what about the presents
for the kids?

I hold my
breath. Please, I pray to the gods, or to the vulture on the bed, to whoever
will listen,
please
don’t let her remember, don’t let her search.

At last, shaking
her head, she leaves. My breath whooshes out of me, a hot-air balloon coming
back to earth a sagging bag of spent magic. Safe. A choice. Free to be or not
to be, that truly is the question.

The rest of the
afternoon I spend fighting with the raven-vulture. It eats, I cramp with pain.
It eats some more, its stink overpowering me as it lunges with blood-soaked
jaws at my stomach. I throw up my white lunch into an aluminum pan. The bird’s beak
is so sharp, its hunger so great that I can’t even get to the rabbit hole.
There is only reality, which sucks.

Tonight the
needle. Into the arm, instead of morphine, 10cc’s of air. A nice big bubble to
wend its way along the river of my bloodstream, killing me softly.

Two red pills
get me safely down the rabbit hole. Dylan sings “Lay lady lay” and I do just
that. Lying naked on a big brass bed, my body sleek and ready for love. The
night is sultry, a huge moon silvering my milk-white flesh as I lie crosswise
on the bed, arms and legs apart to catch every nuance of mimosa-flavored
breeze.

He comes into
the room. Tall and lean, his face ugly handsome, his smile twisted, his eyes
deep-set and laughing. He puts a cold beer bottle between my breasts. My skin
jumps, I shiver with delight as the cold hits my steaming skin. Then I raise
the bottle to my lips and take a long draught. He does the same, then lowers
his naked body onto the bed next to mine. Our kisses taste of beer.

He runs his
callused hand along my body, his touch light as the breeze. I shudder as he
strokes my breasts, circling his fingers round and round the tip of my nipple.
He licks his finger, lightly rubs the nipple, then blows on it. I curl with
pleasure, the tiny dancer between my legs eager to be set in motion by that
same finger.

I reach for him,
wanting to bury myself forever in the smell of him, wanting to taste his salt
sweat, to die in the safe place he makes with his strong arms.

Our lovemaking
lasts all night, the heat adding to our passion. He knows just when to touch
lightly, when to rub hard. His kisses are long, lingering, deep. We play, like
children at the beach. We laugh low dirty laughs, like a whore and her john. We
reach sublime heights, sweating human bodies transformed into light-winged,
big-souled angels.

As I fall into
sleep, my hand softly caresses his cock. No longer erect, yet still a loved
instrument of pleasure. His hand cups my breast.

I wake with
tears on my face. Never in my life was it like that. Never in my life. Only in
my death.

Tonight the
needle. I look at the bird perched hungrily on the end of my bed. No trace of
raven left, it is all vulture and it waits with terrible patience. When I shoot
air into my arm, killing myself, will it die too, or will its horrible body
grow fatter, feasting on my remaining flesh?

My new friend is
fading fast. In and out of coma. I come in to change the bedpan and see tears
on her face. Tears of pain, tears of frustration because Nurse stole her pills.
Don’t worry, I want to tell her. The vulture won’t win. I won’t let him.

But I can’t say
anything. The hospital would fire me. Worse, I’d be arrested, tried for murder.
As though you could murder somebody who’s already dead, somebody whose body
insists on staying alive after the soul is gone. Like the headless chicken. If
I “killed” a headless chicken, would anyone call that murder?

All I’m doing is
freeing them.

The next day is
mostly rabbit hole. I drift from age to age, from what was to what wasn’t to
what will never be.

I am a grandmother,
opening presents on my seventy-fifth birthday, children and grandchildren
around me. There’s Sally, my youngest. How shy she was, and how self-assured
she looks now, sitting next to Derek, her banker husband. My oldest son, Peter,
has his father’s smile—and now his father’s silver-gray hair. How did I ever
get this old? And who is the curly-haired child in the red dress? Is it Peter’s
grandchild Julia or Mandy’s midlife baby Andrea? Does it really matter, so long
as I have the laughter of children around me, who the children are?

I marvel at all
the life I brought forth.

Now I’m a kid,
riding a roller coaster, my hands gripping the railing as I plunge into
scarifying depths, then rise to heights only to fall again. Every second of the
ride I enjoy, from the wind in my hair to the smell of cotton candy to the
delicious sense of scared-but-safe I feel knowing Daddy’s with me in the front
car.