This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (19 page)

A
s far as decisions go, you’ve certainly made worse in your day, possibly even more far-reaching, considering your husband is ninety years old, and let’s face it, nobody’s been busy planning a birthday party. But you’ve never made a decision quite this difficult. Yes, on one level it’s a no-brainer (sorry, bad metaphor), but on another level it’s unthinkable (oops, did it again).

If that first drive to Sherwood Arms was long, the drive to St. Joseph Med in Tacoma is interminable. Once again, you slump in the backseat of Skip’s SUV, which smells even more florid than usual. This you know, because Skip keeps politely cracking his window.

None of this seems real. It feels as if somebody, without warning, has pulled the plug on the rest of your life.

Okay, bad metaphor again.

The point is, more than anything else, the suddenness of your grief has you reeling. You have no idea what your life looks like after today. Hard as you try, you can’t even see tomorrow.

You hate seeing him this way, arranged corpselike, lips and extremities bloodless, respirators jammed up his nose, heart monitors beating, IVs dripping. This is even less your Bernard than was the man who recently spit in your face and accused you of trying to poison him, the man who tried to eat a remote control. But none of this makes it any easier, does it, Harriet? Because some part of you wants to believe there’s still hope. You’ve got to believe. You weren’t sleeping all those years in church.

Maybe the fall jarred something, you tell yourself. Maybe he’ll snap out of this coma and miraculously remember everything, and the two of you can go back to your contentious Scrabble matches, your early dinners, and the stultifying routine that marked your days before Bernard began losing his mind.

Even if he didn’t remember you, that wouldn’t be so bad.

Even if he returned to Sherwood Arms, and you made your daily visits and baked him lemon ginger scones, that would be okay. Even if he just lay here like this, insensate, maybe
twitching an eyebrow now and again, wiggling a toe, as you read the history of the Civil War to him or combed his hair and trimmed his fingernails, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

No, this is the worst thing in the world: reality. Trumper of hope, killer of faith. The reality that there’s no going back, that once those monitors stop beeping, the only man you’ve ever loved will never again hold your hand or touch your shoulder or berate you for a dripping faucet.

When Skip and Caroline leave the room, you stand there stupidly, all alone in the chill hospital air, not knowing what to do or say as the life support ceases functioning.

“I’m sorry it ended badly,” you say.

He’s already dead, you tell yourself. There is little significance to this moment. But something happens, doesn’t it, Harriet? As you watch his chest rise and fall for the last time, watch his ribs contract with the tiniest of paroxysms, you actually feel him take leave, not of his own body but of yours, like a shiver running from the base of your neck out the top of your head.

Only then do you realize that all these years he lived inside of you.

C
aroline’s been gone less than two minutes when Harriet feels a familiar presence beside her in bed: Bernard.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says from behind the cover of his newspaper. “Maybe cut Skipper a little slack,” he says. “He’s desperate, you know.”

“That’s what Caroline says.”

“She’d know.”

“But selling my house from under me, locking me away in a nursing home? And not even having the courage to do it himself. What really gets me is he could have just asked for help.”

Bernard lowers his newspaper, his eyes scanning the room
nervously. “We all could have. The point is, Skip’s on the ropes. Hell, half of America is. He’s not in his right mind, at least he wasn’t when he hatched this ridiculous plot. It’s amazing the things we can talk ourselves into when we’re desperate for a result. And really, maybe it’s not such a bad plan, after all. You’re gonna break your neck on those basement stairs one of these days if you’re not careful. You can’t possibly handle that big yard by yourself.”

“I chose that house. And I choose it still.”

“Whatever you say. I’m running out of time here. We both are, Harriet. You forgave Caroline. Now forgive Skip. Go easy on him.”

“I went pretty easy on you, didn’t I?”

“You did, yes. And forgive yourself while you’re at it. That’s the biggest one of all.”

They retreat into silence. After a moment, Bernard peels the covers back, rolls up his newspaper like a baton, taps it decisively once upon his lap, and climbs out of bed.

“Well, I think this is it, Harriet.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I have to. No time to explain, but I haven’t got a choice.”

“What will happen to me?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

Standing now, he looks down on her sympathetically. “Amounts to the same thing. I’m sorry I made a mess of us. Of everything, really. I could have been more, a lot more.”

“What will happen to you?”

“Nothing.”

God, but Harriet wants to reach out and touch him one last time, to grab hold of him and never let go. But she’s stuck in place, unable to budge, held there in bed by some invisible force akin to gravity.

“What are you?” she says. “You owe me that much. A ghost, an angel, a dream?”

Crow’s-feet bunch at the corners of his eyes. “It’s not for me to say.”

There’s something timeless etched beneath their gray-green veneer, some truth or recognition regarding the nature of existence, some celestial reckoning, Harriet is sure of it. But hard as she tries to apprehend it, it is simply beyond her reach.

Bernard backs away from the bed slowly, a sheepish smile on his face. “Well, here goes nothing,” he says.

In that instant, the key latch clicks and the cabin door swings open.

Still backing away, Bernard blows her a kiss.

“Don’t go,” she says.

“Mom?” says Caroline, from the doorway. “What’s up? You’re doing it again.”

“No, no, dear. Just thinking aloud.”

When Harriet turns back to Bernard, he’s gone, disappeared into thin air.

Caroline stoops to pick Bernard’s rolled-up newspaper off
of the floor, tossing it absently on the coffee table. “Maybe Ketchikan is too much, Mom. Maybe we should just stay aboard tomorrow, watch some movies, order room service.”

“Heavens, no,” says Harriet. “I wouldn’t hear of it. It’s our last stop, dear.”

M
y, but how we’ve grown, Harriet! To think, from a scrawny six pounds and change, we’re now officially off the charts at twenty months. Our neck disappeared at three months. Our arms and legs ballooned. When we smile, we have more chins than teeth.

Everybody expected us to start thinning out after our first birthday, once we started walking. But we still look as though we’ve got rubber bands around our wrists and ankles. Our mother calls us “Little Piggy” even as she foists another formula bottle full of powdered milk and Karo syrup on us. She may as well be injecting it into our thighs. We yearn for real food, but for reasons we will never understand, our mother forever pushes the bottle on us.

Our father adores us, every ounce. Not without pride, he characterizes us as his “little bruiser.”

Ample. Substantial. Tubby. All words used to describe our one-and-a-half-year-old personage. Quiet, of course, is another.

No, we’ve still yet to utter a sound, Harriet, beyond the occasional yelp, sniffle, or burp. What are we waiting for? Nobody’s expecting sentences, Little Piggy. A few grunts would suffice, even some crying would be a welcome development. While nobody can fault us for our stoicism, they’d like to know that we’re at least capable of utterance.

Speak, Harriet, it’s in your best interest!

A simple “Help!” might have come in handy on that fateful Fourth of July 1938 as friends and family of Nathan, Montgomery, Ferris, and Fitzsimmons gather to celebrate American independence.

Look at us, Harriet, squatting beneath a picnic table at Volunteer Park, staring at our mother’s swollen ankles, inhaling the blue smoke of the barbecue, and listening to the muffled laughter of other children as a greedy bite of frankfurter, scavenged from beneath the table, lodges itself in our esophagus.

Silently, we panic as our eyes bulge from their sockets.

Quietly we gasp for dear life as the inky black ghosts crowd our vision. This is it, Harriet. Say something! Speak, child!

Okay, the truth is, we couldn’t have made a sound if we wanted to, not with that hot dog wedged in our gullet.

Consider us lucky, Harriet.

Our frantic kicks alert the second-nearest adult, who finding us bug-eyed and blue at his feet, pulls us out, and promptly executes his version of the Heimlich maneuver. In dislodging the offending sausage, he inadvertently breaks two of our ribs, a fact that will not be discovered until late the following afternoon when the bruising becomes impossible to ignore.

Still, he saved our life, Charlie Fitzsimmons. Not that we owe him anything. I mean, it’s only one life.

But let’s not dwell on debts, Harriet. Instead, let’s talk about the moment, that instant when we leave our body, when we feel our mother’s legs, the grass, and the whole world begin to recede, as though down a dark vortex. Let’s talk about that millisecond of instinct, that invisible force that seizes us, body and soul, and pulls us back into the world, just as sure as Uncle Charlie drags us out from under the table by the ankles.

That invisible force, that was you, Harriet, that was us, before we parted ways, wanting to live.

I
t’s sixty degrees and drizzling when Harriet, Caroline, and Kurt disembark in the bustling port of Ketchikan, the cruise’s final scheduled stop. According to the pamphlets, this rain-battered hamlet of eight thousand is Alaska’s southeasternmost city and also its most densely populated. A working-class town smelling of barnacles and rust, wood rot, and diesel smoke, wet dog hair in heaters, and fish nets hung out to dry. Despite civic-minded efforts to splash some vibrant color about, there’s no disguising the town’s blimp gray underbelly.

Kurt guides Harriet’s wheelchair down along the piers, among the kiosks and buses and herds of grazing tourists. She’s found an unlikely new companion in Kurt Pickens. On
the bus ride to the Saxman Native Village, he sits directly across the aisle from her, taking up two seats. Once again, he’s clean-shaven, and wearing a T-shirt (with sleeves, Harriet notes with satisfaction), announcing
I’M A VIRGIN
(
BUT THIS IS AN OLD SHIRT
).

“Y’all are sure you don’t mind me tagging along now?”

“Why, dear, we invited you, didn’t we?” says Harriet.

The bus is an ancient charter with blistered paint, squeaky seats, and a clattering diesel engine. The tour guide, whom Harriet can barely hear over the din of the engine, though spirited and delightfully informative, has an unfortunately lazy
s
: “To the thouth, you’ll thee Printh Rupert Thound.”

Pressing her face to the window, Harriet gazes out as the creaky old charter hugs the fog-tattered narrows along a two-lane highway. She learns all about Ketchikan and Revillagigedo Islands, learns of the 150 inches of rain per year, the world-renown fishing, the defunct brothels and pulp mills, along with its protected forests and misty fiords. She learns about the Tlingit people, a matrilineal culture of clans, the People of the Tides, as they call themselves.

At the Saxman Village, the bus empties into a mist of rain, its cargo spreading out toward the Clan House and the gift shop and the grand totem poles, arranged in lines and half circles throughout the village. Kurt and Caroline take turns pushing Harriet from one pole to the next, where Kurt reads the placards aloud.

“How ’bout that? Says here inanimate objects were forbid
den on totems—only living things could be portrayed. Seems to me, I seen one out near Pikeville with a hamburger on it, but I reckon it wasn’t Tlingit.”

The carvings are at turns playful and menacing, mischievous and somber. Harriet is particularly compelled by the stories they tell. The clan histories: Eagle and Raven and on down the line to Bear and Frog and Fox, Wolf and Beaver. The narratives of a people and the histories they cannot outrun. The inheritance of identity, committed to form, displayed for all the world to acknowledge. All the humiliations, tragedies, quarrels, debts, and shames bequeathed them through the unyielding cycle of generations. And other tellings, anecdotal by comparison: a birth, a wedding, a funeral. And on the edge of the village, away from the rest of the totems, a lone pole, faded and weather-beaten, telling the story of a child’s mysterious disappearance. For the second time in two days, Harriet intimates her impending death.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” says Caroline when she sees that Harriet’s eyes are misting over.

“It’s nothing, dear.”

Kurt clears his throat. “Well, think I’ll mosey on over to the gift shop.”

Harriet and Caroline watch him lumber off down the gravel path, Harriet wiping her eyes. Halfway there, Kurt turns and points up at the sky.

“Y’all see that?” he shouts.

A pair of bald eagles, maybe two hundred yards off, bank
high and wide in the southern sky. Harriet and Caroline watch them arc to the east, then circle north into the wind until they glide westward, not fifty yards above the Clan House.

“They make it look easy,” says Harriet.

In the gift shop, Caroline parks her directly in front of an end-cap display of miniature totem poles, then drifts toward the racks of postcards. Kurt is in the far corner, thumbing through Native art. When no one is looking, pride insists that Harriet abandon her wheelchair and hobble outside, around the corner to the portable bathroom, which she’s relieved to find well maintained.

Afterward, she pulls her pants up and straightens her hair in the blurry mirror. When she makes to leave, she finds the doorknob uncooperative. Inadvertently, she has managed to lock herself in the bathroom. Fiddling with the lock, she finds that the mechanism won’t budge. She knocks and knocks on the door, but nobody seems to hear her. She twists the knob, finesses it, jiggles it every which way, without success.

“Hello?” she says. “Is anybody out there?”

Outside, in the distance, she hears the throaty rattle of the bus’s diesel engine as it fires up. She pounds the door a little harder, with a hollow thunk-thunk-thunk.

“Hello, hello,” she says. “In here! Can somebody help me?”

Relax, she tells herself. Somebody’s bound to need the bathroom before long. They couldn’t possibly leave without her. Caroline wouldn’t allow it. They’re probably looking for her right this minute. Still, she continues twisting the knob
this way and that, kicking the door with her tiny orthopedic shoe, until after five minutes she’s arrived at a considerable state of anxiety. God, don’t let it be here. Not in a public restroom!

“Help! Somebody! In here!”

Suddenly she feels a pinch at the back of her skull, and just like that, she’s got a headache.

“Somebody, please,” she says. “In here!”

Her limbs go heavy in an instant as her vision begins to blur. Dizzy, she lowers herself back down on the toilet, her heart beating rapidly.

“Somebody help me,” she says breathlessly as her anxiety edges toward panic. Stay calm, she tells herself, it’s only a spell. She quiets her breathing enough to call out again. “In here!”

Just as her heart starts picking up speed again, the doorknob begins to jiggle from the outside, then two brisk knocks.

“Y’all in there, Harriet? The bus is fixin’ to leave.”

Oh, thank God for Kurt Pickens, her knight in shining armor!

“Dear, I’m locked in. The doorknob is broken.”

“Well now, just hold tight. I’ll be right back.”

She hears his heavy footsteps down the gravel path.

Within minutes, Kurt returns with the proprietor, who, at some length, begins liberating Harriet with the aid of an electric drill and what sounds like a sizable mallet. With her impending release, Harriet’s anxiety abates. Her dizziness subsides. Her heart slows, and her breathing returns to
normal, though her slight headache persists, little more than a pinprick of pressure at the base of her skull. Nothing half a Vicodin can’t fix.

Outside, the weather is breaking.

“Thank God, you heard me,” says Harriet, clutching his huge hand.

“Y’all don’t honestly think we’d forget you?”

As Harriet resumes her seat on the bus, the sun is fighting its way through the clouds. Whatever happened back there in the bathroom has passed. Harriet feels her strength returning with each breath. Her thoughts regain their sharpness. All things considered, she’s cautiously optimistic that she’s not dying.

On the edge of town, the bus squawks to an abrupt halt alongside a guano-streaked retaining wall, triggering an explosion of seagulls. One gull remains on the concrete perch after the others have scattered. A miserable creature from all appearances, disheveled and stained, hopping listlessly along on one leg, the other leg missing completely. There’s clearly a problem with the remaining leg. As the bird hops closer, Harriet sees that above the lone foot a wire bread tie is wound hopelessly around its ankle, so snug it almost looks as if the leg has started to grow around it. The best it can do is drag the wire along behind it. Eventually, the handicap will catch up with it, Harriet figures, and the bird will be unable to care for itself, and it will die. Until then, it will suffer, with no better sense than to try and survive.

After a few hops along the wall, it arrives directly in front
of Harriet’s window, not two feet from her face, where it stops and looks in on her intently, as though it thinks she might have something for it. She wishes she did—it surprises her how much she wishes. As the bus pulls away with a groan and a black belch of diesel, Harriet feels, for the second time in an hour, her eyes begins to mist over.

But for a slight headache, Harriet is back to normal by the time the bus drops them downtown. Caroline pilots the wheelchair along the wharf, past the kiosks and gem shops, then up the hill and back down, Kurt wheezing like a ruptured balloon. The three of them converse pleasantly on a host of subjects.

In the afternoon, they eat lunch right on the water, the surf lapping at the piles beneath their feet, the gulls sounding their urgent cries. Harriet orders salmon cooked on a cedar plank, garnished with lemon and dill. Kurt orders a chopped salad, and when that’s not enough to curb his appetite, he refills his water three times and bravely gnaws on an orange rind. Caroline seems perfectly at ease sipping her club soda, now and then turning her face to the wind. The monkey’s fist never leaves her purse.

It’s not every day that there’s order in the universe, Harriet Chance, so enjoy this: Breathe deeply of that salty air, really let it fill your lungs. Feel that coho melt on your tongue, feel it slide down your throat like butter. Sink into that easy conversation. Feel that breeze blowing through your thin, white hair. Taste that lemon, Harriet. Wince with pain and
pleasure. Laugh, sigh, and massage your aching joints under the table. And while you’re at it, take a good long look at your smiling daughter across the table, the lines of her face moving in new directions, one hour, one day at a time. Recognize and give thanks for the crisp edges and heightened sensations of these moments, for they are precious. Remember them until you are no longer able.

Live, Harriet, live! Live like this salty breath is your last.