It was still snowing, and the roads were icy and frail. What Kaufman and the interns had called an “ambulance” was actually a Chevy van the same gray shade as the snow. Its antiseptic-scented carriage was roomy enough for the stretcher and the portable hospice bed. The interns sat in front, hardly speaking during the drive. I took the seat beside my mother and watched her sleep. Now and then her scabbed lips trembled soundlessly. I held her hands and spoke as though to an impatient child: We’re almost there, just a few miles more. Soon you’ll be home, all snug and warm.
I bent lower to whisper stories of New York in her ear. Just down the street from my apartment, I said, is a cramped antique store with the most amazing things. There’s a crotchety old lady who hardly hears a word you say. I bet you could get a good bargain out of her. When you finally come to visit, I’ll take you, and we can buy whatever you want.
At Pen & Ink, I told her, the textbook writers are required to follow certain guidelines. We can’t write stories that might upset our young readership or rile their parents. No stories about illness; no addiction or alcohol or drugs. Nothing about disappearances or kidnappings. So I guess that means I’ll have nothing to write about! I suppose I can’t go back! I’ll have to stay with you forever!
A few miles from home, my mother made a wet, clotted cough: leaking from the corners of her mouth was a rusty grit, like the undissolved grains of instant tea that often floated in her glass. I dabbed her mouth with my shirtsleeve. The nurse named Pearl had told me she’d done this twice before, and Kaufman had said it was normal toward the end.
Even as she coughed, I couldn’t stop whispering in her ear. I’ll find the answers for you, I said. I’ll learn about Warren. I’ll learn what happened when you disappeared.
When we reached the house, the nurse from Hutchinson Hospice was waiting on the snowy front porch. Her station wagon, with an identifying HH sticker on the door, had replaced Alice’s car beside the garage. In the nurse’s hands were clipboards and two overstuffed medical bags. So here she is, I thought, the one assigned to join us at the end. Her clothes were plain and seemed a size too small; although her skin smelled piney with soap, I saw faint stains on her blouse. There were flesh-colored hearing aids in her ears. When she smiled, she regarded me pityingly over the rims of her glasses, as though she knew I hadn’t slept in days.
Upon seeing the hospice nurse, the interns bowed their heads and waited for instructions. As a girl, she’d doubtlessly endured constant teasing from boys like these. Now she was their sergeant, coaching as they retrieved the stretcher and bed from the van. Lastly, they moved my mother: tentative and painstaking, as though moving a sculpture. Above their heads, the power lines and branches were creaking in the wind.
When we got inside the house, they all stopped to look at me. “For days and days she’s been waiting to come home,” I said. “If only she’d wake up to enjoy it.”
“It does get lonely in the hospital,” said the nurse. “Without all your things around you.”
It was time for proper introductions, and the boys offered their dampened hands. The nurse’s name was Mary McVickers. The interns were Wesley and Doug.
“And this is Donna’s son,” Mary said, as though they were seeing me for the first time. “He’s the primary caregiver.”
The title was daunting, unnecessarily official. But Mary had used my mother’s name, where so many others had said her son or the son. I straightened and shook the boys’ sturdy hands. Then the three of us helped Mary unfold the starched hospice linens: one red blanket, one yellow, and a heavy sheet of blue plaid. Thankfully, nothing was white. As we arranged the bed, I watched ruffs of snow melting from the boys’ coats, flakes fading gently from their commanding shoulders, from the napes of their necks. Strangely, the snow wouldn’t melt from my mother. I couldn’t take my eyes from it, the bits of snow clinging to her earlobes and lashes and hair.
It was clear the interns hadn’t noticed these particulars, the tiny sounds and sights I knew I’d carry forever. Their job was finished now; they prepared to leave, shuffling their feet, murmuring like hypnotists. “Good-bye,” said Wesley. “Our prayers are with you,” said Doug.
Suddenly, my mother coughed. We all looked down at her. She was still sleeping but had spat up again, the grainy fluid tarring her lips.
“That’s common at this stage,” Mary said. She bent to the floor for her medical bag, but by the time she could unzip it, I’d already cleaned the mess with my sleeve.
When Dolores arrived, she couldn’t keep still. She sifted through the mail, watered the browning plants, sprayed paper towels with furniture polish and ran them over the room’s dust. She organized the magazines, then set a bowl of oyster crackers on the coffee table, as though preparing for a party. She helped me tote Mary’s things from the station wagon: the aluminum oxygen tank, the packages of bathroom supplies, and a new wheelchair, which we folded sacredly into a corner. Neither of us spoke about the chair; we seemed to sense she wouldn’t need it again.
“I’m willing to mosey on over here whenever you need me,” Dolores told Mary. “I can stay as long as you want.”
“Whatever’s best for Scott.”
“Dolores is welcome anytime,” I said. “They’re best friends. They’ve been through a lot together.”
Dolores lifted her chin, lightly blushing with pride. We were colleagues now. In the lamplight, I noticed the lenses of her pink-framed glasses had been smudged with fingerprints, as though she’d been holding her face in her hands. She wore the same jacket and boots from yesterday’s trip to the stable. She stepped to the bedside, smoothed the blankets, and bent close to my mother’s face. “Are you really sleeping,” she asked, “or are you fooling us all?”
“I think she’s fooling us all,” I said.
Mary showed us a sheet of paper on her clipboard, where she’d written the various dosages and instructions in impressively ornate calligraphy. “Since today’s the first day, I’ll go through everything with you. After this, you can both take over the duties.”
“So that means you won’t be staying here?” I asked.
“Oh, no. Is that what you thought?” She patted my arm, like an aunt. “I have too many others to oversee. You’re the caregiver now. But I’ll be back every day. You know, to help things along.”
Hearing this, I recoiled from her touch with abrupt resentment. I’d mistakenly assumed she’d give us her full attention; I hadn’t realized her obligations, her further doomed and bedridden patients. Dolores saw this change in me, and I sensed her scrambling to avert any possible scene. She tried to ease the tension by relating stories of my mother, telling Mary about the antiques, the carousel horses, the handcrafted scarves. “Now, why don’t you run and get some of those to show Mary,” Dolores said. As I left the room, I thought of the legion of women to whom my mother had mailed her scarves, trading stories of doctor reports and diagnoses, communicating in their exclusive, reckless lexicon. I wondered how many of these women were still living; how many would outlast my mother.
When I came back, Mary was standing by the antique high chair, running her hand along the finials, staring at me with an awkward pity. “Here’s what I want to know,” I told her. “Will she be able to talk some more? Or will she just be sleeping now, until the end?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” said Mary. “We need to keep the morphine very strong.”
“I just want to talk to her.”
“Oh, you should always talk to her. You should talk all you want.” Mary moved closer; I briefly feared she would take my hand or hook her arm through mine. “One of the best things is to keep talking. Use as pleasant a voice as you can. At the end, they might lose the ability to speak, and they might not be able to see well. But their hearing stays. Their hearing’s still good. It’s their last connection to the world.”
Behind us, Dolores cleared her throat. “I bet you need to eat something,” she said. “Maybe go to the bedroom for some rest. Or how about a bat
h? Bet you could use a nice hot bath.”
Of course: my sloppy appearance, my sour smell. This explained the suspicion in Mary’s eyes; surely the interns, returning to Hutchinson in the van, were ridiculing me now. And so, shamefully, I took Dolores’s suggestion. I locked the bathroom door, stripped, and twisted the bathtub faucet as hot as I could stand. In the tarnished mirror above the sink, my eyes were bloodshot and swollen. I felt too tired to shave, and the toothbrush proved too severe for my bleeding, meth-softened gums. As the steam filled the room, I tried thinking of ways to describe my appearance, words that my companion freelancers at Pen & Ink might use: gaunt…repellent…pallid. Yet I knew they couldn’t write a story about me. And no one, certainly no acquaintance from that old life, needed to see me now.
After the bath, I returned to help Dolores. She had removed her boots and pulled the rocking chair closer to the bed. The room was darker and smelled of evergreen, as though my mother had been dreaming of trees.
“It was getting drafty, so I adjusted the thermostat.” She saw my dampened hair and smiled. “Now you’re sparkling clean.”
“Where’s Mary?”
“She had to see another patient. She’ll be back around noon tomorrow.”
“I can tell she doesn’t trust me.”
“She was only worried, that’s all. She said to make sure you were careful with the morphine and the pills.”
I leaned against the mattress, the space beside my mother’s feet. Without my help, Mary and Dolores had propped the bed forward, and they’d replaced the hospital gown with her favorite lavender robe. On the floor was a round rotating fan, its base stamped with the Hutchinson Hospice logo, its flurry on the air. I realized that the evergreen was artificial, from Mary’s aerosol can; beneath it were the alkaline smells of urine and sweat she’d tried to cover or breeze away. I closed my eyes, and eventually Dolores stopped rocking the chair. For a long interval, neither of us spoke; I knew that both of us wanted my mother’s voice. Anything to hear it again, a sentence, even further bits of her dream-speak, that unintelligible wander of words. But the moments passed in stillness. We grew acutely aware of her breathing, the ragged, sand-scrape pulls of air. These breaths had started only yesterday. They were sharp and percussive, and I tried to focus instead on the noisy heater, or the empty and fill of the refrigerator’s ice. I listened to the sounds outside the walls: the limbs snapping from the trees, the occasional sparrow or arguing dog or distant horn. The noise of the living world, with all its persistent, unhesitant cadences.
Eventually, Dolores broke the quiet. “Did you call that Sporn woman?” she asked.
“Not yet. With all this ruckus of bringing Mom home…I’ll do it first thing tomorrow.”
“And I think you really should eat something.”
“I know. I look terrible.”
“You’ll look better if you put some food in your stomach.”
Nearly two weeks had passed since I’d last made a trip to the Haven grocery. I went to the kitchen cupboards but found only a can of soup, split pea with ham, a flavor I knew my mother had hated. The can was coated with dust; she’d surely bought it long ago for John. I stood at the stove, watching it simmer in its battered, red-handled pan. I thought of winter afternoons when I was a boy, cold days when she often surprised Alice and me with our favorite cream-of-tomato soup. But the split pea was nothing like her cream of tomato. It smelled faintly rotten, its color the same sullen green as the pickup’s seats.
In the chair beside the bed, Dolores was rocking again, humming softly to herself or maybe my mother. “Going down to the basement for a while,” I told her. She nodded without looking up. I stuck a spoon in the thickened pool of soup, then carried the pan downstairs to eat alone.
The basement remained as Alice and I had left it just two nights ago: the smells of laundry and loam, the dust and cobwebs and diffracted gray-white light, and, farther in, the Christmas tree and the boy’s tall, intricate constructions. I saw that it would take hours, even days, to dismantle the towers. I put the pan of soup on the floor, and then lifted a corner of the cot, dragging it back to the storage room. Beside the space where he’d once slept, the boy had loosed the contents of his pockets: a silver rat-tail comb; six pennies, two keys, and a lint-crusted quarter; a single wadded wrapper from a Cherry Mash bar.
Beside these items were the pictures she’d once kept in the secret binders, the children who resembled Donna and Warren. The boy had also unfolded the map, displaying the ink-circled towns of Haven, Hutchinson, Sterling. Lastly, bunched on the floor, was the pillow where he’d rested and dreamed.
He’d centered the name tag, facedown, on the pillow. Its paper was rimpled and smudged with fingerprints, but it was the same he’d worn on that day we’d found him on the road. I touched a finger to its adhesive and turned it over.
(My mother’s voice, on that overcast day in the truck: Did you see his face? Did you see who he looks like?)
For the first time, a name had been written in the white space. But the name wasn’t ALLEN. It wasn’t EVAN, HENRY, or even WARREN. The name on the tag was my own.
I stuck the name tag to my shirt and went back upstairs. In the rocking chair, Dolores had drifted to sleep, her fists clenched. Her face seemed troubled and tense, while, nearby, my mother’s was utterly calm. Morphine was the opposite of crystal meth, but seeing its effect made me want something equally precious and potent. I knew I had to call Gavin again. I wasn’t certain how to wheedle him into sending a second package to the phantom house, but I couldn’t risk the impending days of withdrawal.
First, I checked the messages on the bedroom answering machine. Kaufman had called to ask if things had gone well with Mary. Next, a message from Alice, saying the roads back to Lawrence had been fine, that she and the cat had arrived without harm. “I’m thinking of you,” Alice said. “Please tell Mom I’m thinking of her, too.”
Surprisingly, I still remembered the number for Gavin’s apartment. After five dismaying rings, someone finally answered. But instead of Gavin, it was his brother Sam. Instantly, I could picture their luridly painted apartment walls, could smell the incense and the scorch of the pipe.
At first, Sam didn’t remember who I was. When I reminded him, he said, “Oh, right. Back in Kansas.”
“Yes. That’s where I am now. And I really need to talk to him.”
“So you haven’t heard.” His vowels were short and raspy, like a continuous cough; he was obviously high. “Gavin hasn’t been here for days.”
“Please. It’s very important.”
“I’m not sure what to tell you,” Sam said. “I think he might’ve skipped town. Don’t know if he’s in trouble, or if he’s playing some kind of joke. But Gavin’s gone. Here one day, then gone the next. It’s like he disappeared.”
Just before midnight, she began randomly murmuring again. The sounds lured me from the bedroom and woke Dolores from her chair. We found a yellow notepad and one of Mary’s ballpoint pens, its HH logo on the side, its plastic cap grooved with teeth marks. But we couldn’t decipher my mother’s words. Her voice had gone thinner, curiously distant, as though she spoke through water: the neurons firing, all the secrets and thoughts, all the fading, unfinished intentions.
“She’s talking to someone who isn’t there,” Dolores said.
After a time, the noises stopped, and then, suddenly, her eyes opened. We hadn’t seen her awake in days, and she seemed confused, trying to turn her head on the pillow. Dolores dropped the notepad and pen to the floor. “It’s okay, Mom,” I said. We could see that her awakening was nothing like we’d hoped. “We’re right here.” I soothed a hand against her heart, the way I figured she’d done when I was a boy, back when something outside, some thunderstorm or nocturnal noise, had frightened me.
It seemed she didn’t realize we’d brought her home. Gradually, her breaths began to change. In sleep, they were ragged, yet came at steady intervals; after she woke, however, they quickened to sharp, panicky
coughs. She was still fighting it. I could sense the flutter of her thoughts, could feel her straining to unscramble them. “She needs water,” Dolores said, hurrying to the kitchen for a cup and the box of hospital straws.
I sat at the bed’s edge and vainly tried to ease the trembling. Her gaze moved across my face, but I could tell she didn’t recognize me. Her struggle brought forth bitter memories of New York: the three separate times I’d seen friends overdose, those fights against the speed of too much crystal meth or cocaine, the helplessly rigor-mortis holds of ketamine. The seizures, the darting eyes, the curled, clawing hands. How I hated myself for thinking of them, those fellow addicts from that ancient life.
Dolores placed the cup against my mother’s chin, and I bent the straw to her mouth. The new hospital straws were clear, corrugated with bendable necks, nothing like the ones I’d snipped in half and used for meth. My mother tried to drink. The muscles were twitching in her face; it was taking all her strength. Finally, a little water flowed through the straw. We watched her trying to swallow, her tongue moving dully across her broken lips. The blood was black where it had dried, warm red where the skin had newly split. We found the tube of ointment, thumbing it onto the sores as Mary had instructed.
“She seems cold,” Dolores said, so I went to the bedroom, opened the old steamer trunk, and unfolded one of my mother’s favorite quilts. The quilt was ragged, with many pieces missing or loose; she had bought it at an estate sale after a neighbor had died. Its meandering red and white pattern, she’d told me once, was called “drunkard’s path.” I remembered thinking how maudlin that sounded, how sad.