The Lavender Hour (18 page)

“What do you need?” I asked, at his side in minutes. “Another pill?” Light leaked in from the night-light in the hall. He stared at me in its glow.

“What is it?” I said.

“I'm not going to go bit by bit,” he said.

“What?” I was still in dream confusion.

“I'm not going to sit around and die by degrees.” His voice was so steady, he could have been asking me to take Rocker for a walk. “I'm not letting it kill me off piecemeal.”

A chill ran through me, a seizure of fear. “Don't—”

“I don't want to hang on, drag out the inevitable.”

I tried to hush him, but he wouldn't stop.

“I'm not afraid of dying, you know. I just don't want to be alone.”

I
REMEMBERED
suddenly what Faye said about the time she had to put her dog down. No one should die alone.

“I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“There's a bag in the bottom drawer of that desk. Would you get it?”

I crossed to the desk, opened a drawer.

“Not that one,” he said. “The bottom one.”

I closed the drawer, opened another. “What am I looking for?”

“A plastic bag.”

I rooted around. There were several manila folders, a small photo album, a stack of canceled checks. “I'm not finding it.”

“Turn on the light. It's in there.”

I switched the lamp on, tried again.

“You're sure it's here?”

“Positive. Reach in back.”

“Got it.” I held up the bag. It contained two vials. “What is it?”

“Seconal,”he said. “And an antinausea medicine.”

“Why?” I said, already knowing, refusing the knowledge.

“For when it's time.”

“Where did you get this?”

“That doesn't matter.”

I shoved the bag back in the drawer.

“I know what to do,”he said. “I'm just afraid of waiting until it's too late. Until I can't manage it. I need to know there's someone who'll be there. To help me if I need it. I could never ask Nona,” he said. “And Rich—Rich could wrestle a bear, but he isn't capable of this. I tried to talk to Paige once, but she walked out of the room. Stayed away for a week.”

“Shush,” I said. I couldn't listen to this. I closed the drawer.

“Will you—”

“Shhhhh,” I said. “Don't talk now. In the morning. We'll talk in the morning.” Things are always worse in the night, I thought. Everyone experienced the dark hours of doubts and fears and anxieties— terrors that were eased by the light of dawn. I would negotiate for each minute, each day. I remembered what Faye had said about patients who willed themselves to live. For one more anniversary. A birthday. A holiday. I would give Luke a reason to stay. Through the power of pure desire, I would make him will himself to live. Truly believing this possible, I sat with him until he fell into a fitful sleep.

Of course, later I would see that, in that moment, I was no different than Paige, locked in militant denial fueled by desire, blindly refusing to see the truth because it was too terrible to bear. Not listening to Luke's need because my own was too great. And because I believed I could never bear to do the one thing he had asked. To sit with him while he died.

I
WOKE TO
the sound of birdsong, insistent and exuberant, and for an instant, my heart rose in response, and then I recalled the elevator dream, a vision that clung like a wine hangover the way dreams could, and I recalled the midnight conversation with Luke, which—in the confused half sleep of that waking moment— seemed as unreal as the dream. Moving slowly, I got up from the couch as if drugged. Voices came from his room.

“Good morning,” Ginny said when I went in. I watched while she checked Luke's pulse and took his temperature. “I tried not to wake you when I came in,” she said. “You were out to this world.” Luke stared at me, his gaze unflinching; I knew then with swift and chilling certainty that our conversation in the night had not been part of any nightmare.

“I'll let you finish up here while I put on some coffee and get breakfast started,” I said, and escaped to the kitchen. Rocker followed, and I let him out, watched from the door as he tore across the yard and lifted his leg to pee against a tree stump. Ginny came into the kitchen as I was calling the Lab back into the house. Although it was early in the day, she already looked exhausted. She sat down, flipped open her patient's record book, and began jotting notes.

“Luke told me about Nona,” she said. “He said you stayed all day, and then through the night.”

“Yes,” I said, my throat dry.

“You should have called, you know. They would have arranged for a night nurse.”

“It wasn't any problem. I was glad to do it.” I was surprised the truth wasn't plain on my face: I didn't want anyone else there.

“How was he in the night? Any problems?”

“He woke up once and was sick, but after that, he slept through.”

Ginny asked a few questions about the vomiting, made a notation.

I wanted to ask her the things I couldn't ask anyone else. I needed to know if there was hope for a miracle, or did cures and complete remissions happen only in fiction? Did we hold on to desire, even to the end? Was that the last to go? Ginny was a nurse. She would know those things. “How does he seem to you?” I asked.

“About as expected.”

Which means exactly what?

“He tells me Nona is coming home today.”

“That's what they told us yesterday. They were supposed to be keeping her just for the one night. For observation.”

“These past months have been a terrific strain on her, as you can imagine. I'll call Faye. See if we can arrange for some more help here.”

“I can stay,” I said. “It isn't a problem.”

“You've already done too much,” Ginny said. She finished up writing in her notebook and rose.

“Can I get you some coffee before you go?”

“No. I'm behind schedule. Story of my life.”

After she left, I made Luke tea and hot cereal and fixed coffee for myself. I toasted a slice of the soft white bread, smeared it with jam, and brought it into his room with my coffee. I might as well have been eating Styrofoam the way the toast caught in my throat. He watched me, and although neither of us mentioned the midnight conversation, it hung in the air between us like the acrid aftersmell of an extinguished candle. You want too much of me. Not quite true. I would have given him anything, anything but the one terrible thing he had asked.

I bustled about the room, folding the blanket and quilt I'd
brought down from Nona's room, straightening the pile of newspapers, clearing away a half dozen empty glasses, fussing about like a deranged maid. Yesterday's cozy domesticity—Luke's haircut, the chicken soup, the house secure against the storm—all that seemed long ago.

As if my activity had attracted it, the house suddenly came alive with more commotion than it had held in weeks. The neighbor, who'd watched from her window the previous morning as the ambulance came for Nona, appeared, bearing a tuna casserole and a pineapple upside-down cake. Luke's door was open, and she marched right in before I could head her off. As I carried the food into the kitchen, I was surprised to hear Luke talking to the woman, as if overnight he had decided to end his self-imposed isolation. Then Paige called, stunned to learn Nona was in the hospital. “Is she going to be all right?” she asked, her voice suddenly young and stripped of attitude.

“She'll be home today,” I said. “It was an anxiety attack.” Paige asked if Nona needed a ride home from Hyannis and promised to come right over. Then Betty, another hospice worker, arrived and pretty much took charge. When I left, she was settling in to read to Luke.

“Tell Nona I'll see her tomorrow,” I told him before I left. I wished we were alone. I would have kissed him good-bye.

He nodded, reached for and squeezed my hand. “See you soon,” he said. A long finger of sunlight fell through the window and lit his face. His words were heavy with an intention I could not bear.

I thought I had long ago learned all there was to know about desire, but the longing I felt for this man—this dying man, I made myself remember—shook me. It transformed all past relationships into childlike diversions. Things I once had thought important were now meaningless, as insignificant as a rice grain. I tried to convince myself that my feelings for Luke had been born out of my loneliness, coupled with the intimacy of the times we shared when my ordinary defenses collapsed in the face of his utter vulnerability.

The cliché of a nurse and patient. That was an argument I might have made to any friend who came to me in this situation, but it was not true. What I felt for Luke was inexplicable and extraordinary and terrible. Never had I felt so possessed. Or so lost. Much later, when I looked back on that spring, I did not—could not— think of my feelings for him as some twisted obsession, although many people would come to voice exactly that opinion. “See you tomorrow,” I agreed.

A
LL THAT WINTER
and spring, even on the wildest of days with winds near gale force or fog so impenetrable I was the one foolish enough to brave it—those days when I sought escape from boredom, from fear of an unsettled future, from a formless, free-floating anxiety—I would head for the beach at the end of our street, a narrow strip of sand with stone jetties that jutted out into the sound every thirty feet, and I would walk. That stretch of beach held the power to bring me some measure of calm, some semblance of peace. After I left Luke, I drove straight there.

Although it was still cool for June, I kicked off my shoes, peeled away my socks, and rolled up the cuffs of my jeans, then walked across the sand to the jetty and, progressing carefully from one to the next, made my way to the large gray boulder at the very end and folded myself down, perching like a herring gull. The tide was low, and the water lapped in the crevices between rocks where barnacles and periwinkles clung. In the distance, Monomoy Island lay flat on the horizon like a mirage. There was a light onshore breeze, and I inhaled its salt, closed my eyes against tears. This was where Faye found me.

I hadn't heard her approach, and the first I knew of her presence was her hand on my shoulder.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I'm fine,” I said, although a blind man could see the blatant untruth of this.

Faye lowered herself to the rock. “Lily called last night.”

“Mama called you?”

“Just after midnight. When she couldn't reach you.” Just after midnight. When Luke was telling me he had no intention of dying piece by piece. “She's worried about you.”

I searched Faye's face, wondering how much she knew, how much she had guessed. It occurred to me that Ashley might have called our mama and repeated the details of our last conversation. That would explain Lily's call to Faye; certainly she hadn't been worried simply because I was out after midnight. There were times in my late teens when I hadn't come home until morning, and Lily had long ago given up trying to control my behavior or my morals. Or maybe she was afraid I was sick. Why else would she call Faye?

“I stayed overnight at Luke's,” I said. “Nona was taken to the hospital. They thought it was a heart attack, but it turned out to be anxiety.”

“I know. Jim caught me up on everything.” Faye waited for me to say something, but I stared out at Monomoy. The island shimmered in the sun, and although it had been deserted for decades— the last of the beach shacks long ago had surrendered to time or fire or vandalism—some deception of the eye made buildinglike silhouettes seem to rise above its shores.

“Jim was under the impression you had arranged for a respite nurse for the night,” Faye said.

“I don't know, that seemed kind of silly when there was no reason for me not to stay. I wasn't doing anything.”

“Still,” Faye said, “you should have called. You know volunteers aren't supposed to spend the night. We would have called one of the staff nurses.”

“It seems a silly rule,” I said. “I didn't have anything else to do. It made sense to stay. I didn't see any harm in it.”

“You know, Jess,” Faye said, “hospice patients and their families come to us at the worst possible time in their lives. They're tremendously vulnerable.”

“I know,” I said, dismayed that I couldn't keep the emotion out of my voice.

“And…”

“And?” I echoed.

“And it's pretty easy to get overinvolved.”

“Am I in trouble for staying there?” I dug my fingernails into my palms, afraid Faye was going to take me off Luke's case. I turned away, but not before Faye saw my tears. Of course she misunderstood them.

She put her arm around me, pulled me close. “You meant well, Jess. I know that.” Her voice was steady, comforting. “But in the future, let's stick to the guidelines. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, so relieved I would have promised anything. The breeze intensified, lifting my hair.

Faye shivered and drew her jacket tighter, then put a hand on my shoulder and used it to brace herself as she stood, reminding me that, like Lily, Faye was no longer young. “Shall we walk back together?”

“I'm going to stay here a bit longer,” I said.

“Maybe dinner, then? Later?”

“I'd like that.”

I watched Faye walk back down the jetty, stepping from boulder to boulder in slow but sure-footed progress. As I often was, I was struck by her grace despite her size and her age. When Faye reached the sand, she cupped her hands to her mouth and called back to me. “Don't forget to phone Lily.”

“I won't,” I hollered back.

I
PHONED
Ashley first. I needed to know what my sister had already told Lily so I would know what I was dealing with.

“Have you changed your mind?” Ashley asked as soon as she heard my voice. “Are you coming down?”

“I'm thinking about it,” I said.

“Jesus be, Jesse. Don't think about it. Just get yourself back here.”

She sounded so exasperated, I had to smile. I could picture my
sister clearly. One hand on her hip, a full eye-roll. Ashley, the queen of eye-rolls.

“So I heard Mama was trying to reach me last night,” I said.