The Lavender Hour (13 page)

I was spending more time with Luke. My hospice responsibility required two visits a week, but almost from the beginning, I
stopped by more often. We rarely talked about his illness. He continued to take delight in besting me at backgammon. He told me that his great-grandfather on his father's side had immigrated to Prince Edward Island from Ireland. I'd smiled when he told me that. That black hair.

Sometimes we listened to music. Marvin Gaye. Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Neil Young. Other times we'd sit in companionable silence. And then, for no particular reason, he'd start talking. He told me what it was like growing up on the Cape. He'd started fishing when he was thirteen. Never wanted to do anything else. He said he only went to college to please Nona. She'd been saving for his education since he was born, working every job she could find.

When Luke knew I was coming, he would leave his door open. Occasionally I read to him. He liked Steinbeck. After I finished The Red Pony, I got a copy of East of Eden from the library, but he wanted to stick with the short stories. He never said it, but I believed he thought he didn't have enough time left for novels. I refused to accept this. Some days he just wanted me to sit with him. He said I brought a calmness to the room, and, recalling what Nona had said about his ex-wife's inability to sit still, his words would make me happy. I could not admit, even to myself, how deeply I had come to care. When I remember those blessed days when things were still relatively good, I remember all of this, and I remember the background song of the birds.

Luke was different than any man I had ever known in many ways but especially in his connection to the natural world. One day he told me he was going to teach me how to recognize birds by their calls. Blue jays. Grackles. The bossy English sparrows. Nuthatches. And the titmouse—as gray and timid as the name suggests, a tiny, feathered nun. At first, all I could hear were tweets and trills, indistinguishable one from another. “Close your eyes, clear your mind, listen,” he told me. At first, I learned the easier ones. Catbird. Cardinal. Chickadee. He told me that instead of a larynx, birds had a
syrinx, two-sided so they could sing several notes at once. When we sat and talked like that, I could almost come to believe a future was possible.

“Birdcalls differ from their songs,”he told me one day. “Calls are innate to each breed, but songs have to be learned.” I quizzed him about the difference, and he said calls were to signal danger, to claim territory, things like that. “Then what is song for?” I asked. “For joy,” he said. “Simply for joy.”

I wondered what birds did to show grief. But perhaps, unlike us, they knew only rapture, not sorrow.

So the days passed, filled with questions and struggle and punctuated by occasional moments I would later come to think of as nearly sacred. It was hard to tell the blessing from the curse. Sometimes he dozed while I read. He was getting morphine now and was noticeably weaker. And frequently the room smelled of foul emissions that embarrassed us both until Jim rescued us by making a joke about how Luke's farts were industrial-strength, so bad even Rocker wouldn't stay in the room with them.

More than once, while Luke slept, I sketched him, memorizing the bones of his cheeks and brow and jaw, his elegant hands. The planes of his face stood out like farmland in the spring, before it was softened by crops. His pain and my giving him comfort created a growing intimacy between us, and therein, of course, lay the danger. He recognized this more often than I and would pull away, draw back into himself, but I would wait patiently, tend to him, and he would come back. Occasionally, nights when I was alone at my cottage and struggling to sleep, I allowed myself to fantasize that he would go into remission.

Like Luke, Nona too was losing weight. And aging. Her roots had grown out a good two inches, and the white stood out in stark relief against her dyed jet hair. She seemed to have shrunk another inch in height and constantly smelled of arthritis ointment. When we sat at the kitchen table, I'd catch her massaging and kneading
her hands, working her thumbs across misshapen knuckles and wrists. When I left, I would embrace her, and lately she had started to hug me back.

O
NE MORNING,
Nona met me when I arrived and looked so distressed, nearly ill, that I was instantly alarmed.

“Nona,” I said after a quick embrace, “what's wrong?”

“I don't know what do to anymore.”

“What's going on?” A knot of anxiety thickened my throat.

“Luke's not eating. Last night he asked me to make him some of my macaroni and cheese. His favorite thing as a child. But he only ate a bite, and even that he couldn't keep down.”

“Oh, Nona,” I said.

“He's just wasting away, Jessie. Not eating enough to keep a flea alive. Fluids are about all he's managing.”

Panic edged in. Weeks or months? Yes.

“What about those milkshake things?” I asked, remembering the cans of Ensure stacked in the cupboard. “Have you tried them?”

“He won't touch them. They cost about as much as a good sirloin, but he says they taste like chalk. All I know is that he has to keep eating. If he goes on like this…”

“Maybe you could try something different,” I said. “Like smoothies.” Toward the end of my six weeks of radiation, I had pretty much existed on smoothies.

“What are they?”

“Yogurt and fruit drinks,” I said. “They're easy to get down. And yogurt has acidophilus.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Acidophilus? It's the good bacteria that makes a healthy climate in your intestines.”

“He sure could use something healthy in there,” Nona said, smiling a bit. Jim had gotten us all joking about Luke's farts.

“I'll bring a blender tomorrow,” I said. “And some fruit. What does he like best?”

“Blueberry,” Nona said. She looked better, hopeful.

I felt a flash of guilt for my part in Nona's optimism. We had been told to offer courage and hope—whatever the stage of disease—but we had also been cautioned against offering false promise. I found the line between the two was slippery. But false or not, looking back, I know that I was clinging to hope as tightly as Nona. Hope is so strong. So unwilling to give up. Even now, I marvel at its power. It carries us sometimes. It had held me through the worst of times, and, of course, it was hope for a new beginning that had led me to the Cape in the first place.

“Where are you off to today?” I asked. Members from Nona's church had set up a driving schedule. Someone drove up from Wellfleet and took her out so that she didn't have to rely on Helen for everything. I couldn't imagine being so reliant on others. I had asked her once why she never got her license, and she said when she'd gone for her test years ago, she'd driven right up on the sidewalk and sideswiped a fire hydrant before she'd even pulled out of the registry parking lot. The inspector had failed her on the spot, and she never got up the nerve to try again.

“Oh, I guess we'll ride around for a bit.” She had run out of errands. “You know what I'd like to do?”

“What's that?”

“I'd like to go home. I miss my house.” It was the first time I'd heard her offer one word of complaint.

“Well, why don't you go there for the afternoon?”

“I don't know. That would mean I'd have to ask someone to drive me there, and then bring me all the way back here. That's an hour for the driving alone.”

I spoke without stopping for one moment to think. “Why don't you go back for one night? It would do you good.”

“How can I? I can't leave him alone.”

“I'll stay here.”

“I couldn't ask you to do that.”

“Of course you can. I'm not doing anything else. It will do you
good.” I reached out and stroked her head. “Get your hair done. And you could use a night of undisturbed sleep.”

“I don't know,” she said, but a bit more convincing was all it took. Within twenty minutes, she had packed the few things she'd need. Luke was sleeping and she wanted to wake him, then decided against it, reluctant to draw him from sleep. Recently, sleep and drugs had been his only sure escape from pain. She scrawled him a note instead.

I saw her off, then went to Luke's room and sat by his bed, sketching him, happier than I had any right to be. As soon as he stirred, I flipped shut my pad, set it on the floor. I told him Nona had gone back to Wellfleet and would return tomorrow. He read the note Nona had left and then studied me for a minute, not saying anything.

“You won't be alone,” I said quickly. “I told her I would spend the night.”

He turned and looked out the window, his face shut down, as withdrawn as he'd been the first time I saw him.

“Unless you want me to call someone else,” I said, now nervous.

“Don't you have anything better to do than sit with a dying man?” he asked. He still wouldn't look at me. I could see he was slipping into that separate place he went to, the closed-door, loud-television place of isolation. He did that without warning, switching from trust to withdrawal and, occasionally, to bitterness. Once he referred to himself as the rubber plant. “Just set me on the porch and water me,” he said.

“Look,” I said, in a cool, no-nonsense voice, knowing sympathy or pity would only drive him further away, “if you would rather have someone else here, I can arrange it, but Nona hasn't been home in months, and she needed to go there. She's tired. She needed a break.” I thought I had lost him, but he came back.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm being a perfect asshole.”

“Nobody's perfect,” I said, and was rewarded when he gave a small smile.

“It's just…,” he began.

“What?”

“Yesterday. You didn't come.”

I perched on the edge of his bed. “Luke,” I said, “I wasn't scheduled to come yesterday.” We both knew the schedule was a joke. As I said, I was dropping by four or five times a week.

“I know,” he said. He closed his eyes, sighed. “It wasn't that you didn't come. It was that I missed you when you didn't.”

I picked up his hand, unable to suppress the joy his words gave me. “And that's a bad thing?”

“Yes,”he said. “Given the circumstances.”

“It doesn't have to be.”

“We both know it does. There's no future in it, is there?”

I turned away so he wouldn't see my eyes fill with tears. “Well, what is it you want from me? Do you want me to stop coming? Do you want Faye to get another volunteer?”

“I want…,”he said.

I waited. I knew it would kill me if he said yes.

He sighed a long, deep sigh. “I want to get in your car and take a ride.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“I want to go down by the cut.”

I saw he was serious. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “And then I want to head over to Harwich Port and get a Dairy Queen.”

I hesitated. As far as I knew, he hadn't left the house in weeks.

“I want to do something ordinary, something normal.”

I studied him for a few minutes.

“Please,”he said. “I want to be with you somewhere outside this room, this house. Somewhere where we can pretend for a minute that things are normal.”

I
FOUND
him a clean sweatshirt and shoes, helped him dress. Of course, there was no way we could leave Rocker, and so he came
along, too. By the time Luke had walked to my car, leaning on me the entire way, he was weak and out of breath, and I was already second-guessing the outing. I slid into the driver's seat and sat for a moment, trying to decide if we should continue, when he said, “Well, what are you waiting for? A push or a shove?”

I switched on the ignition.

“God, this feels great,” he said. He didn't look so great. I wasn't sure how long he'd be able to last and so went directly down Main Street and toward the Coast Guard station and the cut, a break in the barrier beach on the Atlantic. It was a warm day, one of the rare windless ones, and I started to roll down my window when I noticed he was hunched forward, hugging himself. “Cold?” I asked.

He nodded. I closed the window and cranked on the heater. I hadn't thought to bring a jacket for him, since the temperature had reached the midseventies. I pulled into the parking lot opposite the station but kept the engine on. The heater pushed hot air through the vent by our legs. There were about a dozen other cars there. In the SUV next to us, two girls ate sandwiches and drank takeout coffee. I looked across to South Beach, just past the breach where the tides had shoaled the sands, forming a connection from the barrier spit to the mainland, a corrugated arc of sand. Winter-weary walkers were spread out along the beach, strolling along the water's edge. Occasionally someone stooped and retrieved something from the sand.

“What are they picking up?” I asked him.

“Probably shells, maybe a few sand dollars or starfish.”

“Really? I found a starfish one summer when I was about five. I still have it.”

“Ah, the amazing starfish,” he said. “Another question for the poets and Nona's God. Why should the starfish hold the miraculous power to regenerate and not us?”

Of course there was no answer to that. I wanted to take his hand but held back, afraid he'd interpret the gesture as pity. To tell the truth, I'd been off balance since the moment he'd admitted that
he had missed me the day before. Again, the air between us had shifted, but I wasn't sure of the new ground. It was as if, over the past weeks, we had been moving and moving toward a certain destination, and then suddenly had arrived but didn't have a name for the place we found ourselves occupying, or even the right to speak of it. I think he felt it, too. He rolled down his window. Rocker sat up and put his paws on the back of Luke's seat and nuzzled his nose to the opening.

“Will you be warm enough with that open?” I asked.

“I need to smell the salt,” he said.

We sat for a while, watching the beachcombers. The girls in the SUV finished their lunch and left. A fishing vessel made its way in through the channel, on its way back in to the fish pier.

“God, but I miss this,”he said.

“The ocean?”

“All of it.”

I focused on the boat cutting through whitecaps, watched it hook around a marker buoy.