Nora crept closer to the hall, where she could hear more clearly.
“Mom,” Gordon persisted, “what I mean is that the way Georgia would have died from the cancer would have been a lot worse. Peaceful deaths aren’t really peaceful. Your lungs fill up. It’s like drowning in your own body. But think about on TV, how a gazelle looks when a lion grabs it,” he said, words coming faster, “You know, at the last moment, the deer just lets go? That’s when the endorphins kick in—it means ‘endogenous morphine,’ Mom, your body’s own morphine, and so even the worst kind of bleeding or bruising, well, you probably feel pretty good during the last seconds.”
“Shut up, Gordon, honey, just shut up,” said Lorraine quietly.
“Lor,” Mark put in quietly. “Leave him alone. He’s only trying to help . . .” Nora peeked around the edge of the door. Her sister-in-law sat huddled in a shawl, a line of untouched plates of pie and cups of coffee arranged on the table before her, with the two men standing, leaning toward her, both of them so tall and her so little. It struck Nora that they often appeared that way, leaning down to Lorraine as she told them what was what; it reminded Nora of one of those funny photos you saw once in a while in the Country Journal. A bantam hen set unawares on a clutch of Canadian goose eggs, and when they hatched, there’d be this tiny little mother with huge chicks four times her size toddling along behind her.
“I know he is, Mark,” Lorraine said. “But he doesn’t think.” She scanned the counters again. “Look at all this food. Who’s going to eat it? I’m glad I don’t have to. I don’t ever have to eat again if I don’t want to. I don’t have to keep my strength up anymore.”
“Yes, you do, Lor,” Mark said.
“No, I don’t,” Lorraine answered. “Well, you take it home, Gordie.”
“I don’t eat cake,” he said. Gordie, Nora thought, was a health nut.
“Well, someone will eat it. Maybe Mike or Matt. Maybe cousin Delia. She doesn’t look like she ever missed a meal.”
“Lor!” Mark chided.
“Well, it’s just so . . . isn’t it? It’s disrespectful. People chowing down like it’s their last meal.”
“It’s what people do,” Mark said softly.
“All I meant was,” Gordon began again, “if you just think about it the way it really is, if she would have died at home, it would have been better for us, but not for her. That’s all I meant.”
Lorraine’s voice, when she replied, made Nora’s neck prickle. “I warn you, Gordon. You’re the one who doesn’t get it. The way it really is. This is your sister! Your only . . . my only . . .”
“Your only . . . what?”
“My only daughter.”
“I thought you were going to say, my only child.”
“I would never say that. And Gordie, for God’s sake, this is not about you, so just, just shut up, honey!” And Lorraine was up, knocking over cups in her flight, brushing past Nora, her shawl cloaking her head to toe, her dark shape triangular, like bats’ wings, dark on dark. Nora expelled the breath she had been holding. She could barely see Gordon’s blond head in the cage of his clean hands, where he sat slumped at the table, his elbows soaked by the rivulets of dripping coffee, his knees blocked by overturned chairs. Mark stood beside him, his hand extended, not quite touching Gordon’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, son,” Mark said.
“Make her come back, Dad,” Gordon said.
“She will,” said Mark.
Patting the bulge at her waist where the sweatshirt lay, Nora pictured her niece up there, still tethered to earth like a kite, unable to comfort her loved ones or stop them from turning on one another. Nora recalled that priests always used the child’s name in the context of sainthood at a baptism, even if it was Saint Tiffany or Saint Justin. Nora said a prayer to Georgia. I’m going to need your help, she said. She hoped it was not blasphemy, especially at a time like this.
Diane Nye hoped she did not look as stupid as she felt, because she felt stupid enough for three people, and the size of three people, with a purple foam rubber harness strapped around her middle and purple foam slippers strapped onto each foot, churning her legs up and down in the deep end of the pool at Sandpiper. This water aerobics class had been Shelby’s idea. Shelby, Diane’s herbalist and best friend, though probably not much older than Diane herself, was starting menopause and starting to pack on the pounds. She’d cajoled Diane into at least trying the class with her, pleading she’d otherwise be the only lady there under sixty. Diane owed it to her friend, whose floral teas had banished Diane’s migraines three years before and who was now concocting everything in her power to help save Georgia.
Shelby, whose face was ruddy with effort, glanced over at Diane, and Diane tried to smile. But she kept feeling as though at any moment she was going to tip over like a duck diving and end up with those absurd slippers waving in the air.
This was a little much. Diane liked a walk, and tennis, but she had never gone for that Ironwoman crap, and she never would. She knew Shelby was trying to hold back time, so that she might still have a baby with that really sweet (and much younger) guy of hers. But she thought Shelby ought to be looking to freeze-dry some of her eggs before she ran out of them instead of lifting weights and churning up the club pool.
“Okay, now let’s stride!” called the instructor, miming giant steps on the edge of the pool. The teacher was no older than Diane’s children, and had one of those peekaboo little navels, the kind Diane had been proud to display like a tiny smile above her hip huggers even after she’d had Raymond Junior and Alison. Of course, she’d been only twenty-one after those first two, with skin that snapped back like a Spandex leotard. It was Caroline, who weighed ten pounds, who stretched Diane’s poor tummy to such a size her belly button still looked like a shut eye winking. Well. Couldn’t hurt, Diane sighed, trying to synchronize her arms and legs to sluice through the water like one of those big old skinny bugs that skated over the pond at her grandpa’s horse farm when she was a little girl.
At first, Diane thought it was the heat or all this damned flailing around that made her think she saw her daughter, Caro, standing with her mouth open and her hands pasted against the glass of the clubhouse grill. But, no, it was Caro, and she was crying.
Diane went still in the water, then awkwardly rowed herself over to the ladder, hauling herself up even though the foam-rubber belt felt like a huge purple sponge. Big Ray, she’d thought first, he’s had heatstroke or palpitations. Merciful God, the man couldn’t stuff himself with cheeseburgers and martinis and then go out in this heat and play nine more holes . . . then, she’d thought, oh, no, oh, it’s Georgia. Georgia’s had a seizure again. Georgia’s dead. As she walked toward Caro, Diane had a last, irritating notion. Caro should still have been at work. It had to be Caro’s husband Leland. Some new fart-witted nonsense from Leland, like the time he’d gone off to New Mexico to turn himself into a he-man by drumming with the Indians. Then Caro had disappeared and come running out the door of the ladies’ locker room and said the thing that would break open Diane’s world like a boot to a melon.
She’d been shaking Caro, shaking her daughter’s shoulders hard, her clenched fingers digging wet ridges into her daughter’s silk blazer, when Shelby pulled her off; but Diane, as if watching from a distance, kept on yelling, “You shut up! Stop it! Raymond’s dead? Raymond’s dead?”
“Mama, it’s true, Mama! They were in a car accident!”
“I don’t believe you!”
“It’s true, Mama.”
“What do you mean?” Caroline had never had the sense God gave an angleworm.
“Diane, honey,” Shelby said. “Come on. We’ll phone. Someone get Mrs. Nye a drink, please.”
The instructor had scurried over with a paper cup full of water, which Shelby regarded with disdain. “I mean, get Mrs. Nye a drink, please. A drink.”
Diane was sitting there, holding a glass of red wine, staring down at those ridiculous rubber duck feet, while someone took off on
a golf cart to get Big Ray, when Caro said in a baby voice, “Mama, my brother loved Georgia so. At least they’re together.”
And Diane, who did not care at that moment whether God forgave her, said, “Caroline. They never should have been together in the first place. If Georgia hadn’t talked my boy into moving to that frozen hellhole, he’d be here with us now. He’d be . . . warm and safe, and where he belonged . . . he’d have had the life he was supposed to have. All this”—Diane gestured, the wine sloshing over the rim of the glass, red splashes staining the concrete of the pool deck—“was his life. My baby. They took it all away.”
CHAPTER three
It was a produce counter, but instead of lettuce and apples there were pills, all shapes, sizes, and smells, her child’s garden of pharmacology.
Lorraine knelt on the floor in Georgia’s bedroom, her elbows on the card table they’d set up to display all the translucent orange bottles with their childproof white chef’s-hat tops. There were shy pink pills to suppress Georgia’s normal, young-woman’s hormone functions. Business-like-scored white tablets—Lorraine thought of them as little nurses—to soothe the nausea. Pale blue footballs for anxiety. And then the big pills, the gulls and eagles that sent the neurological system soaring, capsules with serious beads of shiny amber and red. Those for sleep were lawyerly mauve and blue, sleek and seductive as miniature guns. Those for mood were more cheerful and squat, dental hygienists in kelly green.
Lorraine sighed.
Even the big-gun pills didn’t deliver her anymore. Her liver must have the density of a submarine. In college, Lorraine had inhaled enough dope to stagger a hippo and then unnerved her friends by asking, “Now what?” She had wanted to get noddy and giggly, but nothing ever pushed her over the edge.
And yet, not long after Georgia’s first surgery, Lorraine had begun hopefully abusing her daughter’s medications, just a little. It had been almost a reflex, a logical if asinine response to an emotional pain so fierce it seemed to cry out for medical intervention—two Percocet for you, sweetie, and one for me.
The pills had indeed been kindly. After no more than fifteen minutes came a heady wave, leaving Lorraine floating on what felt, unexamined, like well-being. Soon, she was doing it twice a day. The hospice nurses and the University of Minnesota doctors, bless their hearts, threw drugs at Georgia. They didn’t pay any attention to numbers and dosage this far down into the valley. It was a free-for-all, a Mardi Gras of pills. And yet, after a few months, the pills no longer lifted Lorraine up onto the lap of the awaited surge. But she still used them. They had the power to move truths into the next room.
On the morning after Georgia died, Lorraine had solemnly assured one of the nurses (one who happened to have once been a student of Lorraine’s, and would never have suspected kindly, grammatical Mrs. McKenna of anything bad) that she had flushed all those pills down the toilet. But Mrs. McKenna had no intention of doing any flushing. She had taken the bottles out of the Tupperware box, where someone had thrown them all ajumble, and lined them up in comfortable ranks on the card table. There was morphine here, and Nembutal, serious blot-out medicine for someone so inclined. Lorraine was going to guard Georgia’s pills. In the middle of the first night after the crash, she’d gone wandering in the dark to find a few for sleep and nearly sobbed when she could not locate them. They were options, not to be wasted, she’d thought, with growing panic, as she first carefully then with abandon opened and tossed the boxes of pressure bandages, bins of syringes; and then finally, she’d found them, plunging her hand in the dark into the rubber box where the pill bottles clicked like nestled beetles.
She didn’t intend to commit suicide with them.
Suicide seemed an awfully dramatic, athletic kind of thing to do.
But she was relieved that living was something she was no longer strictly required to do.
Any living she did from now on would be extra credit.
People would tell her to be strong. But she’d already been strong. She had lifted her dying, leaking, groaning little girl out of her sweat-and-pee-soaked bed. She had stayed awake for eighteen-hour stretches, lying or pacing on the carpeted floor, listening to the thump-hiss of the oxygen apparatus and Georgia’s moans. Freezing one set of washcloths, soaking another set in hot water and oil, Rhuli for the lips, bag balm for the bedsores. She had left school for a month of “compassionate” leave (after twenty-two years of service, that meant “unpaid”) and so had learned to use rice creatively and to forget phone numbers of friends she’d known for twenty-five years. For a year, she had not picked up a brush except to paint cat whiskers on Keefer’s cupid mouth, not ventured beyond the baby and pajama department of any store for six months, learned to live on four hours a night of sleep, though that had been the one constant she’d craved in quantity as sustenance her entire life, gotten glasses to be able to read Wuthering Heights in the dark so as not to assault Georgia’s light-sensitive eyes, watched the beloved flesh of her daughter mutate from exquisite to china pale to clay, and smiled and sang . . . be strong?
What about those books she’d been discreetly slipped by Natalie Chaptman? By Karen Wright and Nina Upchurch? Hope and healing books. Live a full life after loss? Come to terms? Understand that bad things happened to good people?
What would Lorraine’s seventh-graders say to that?
In your dreams.
I’m so sure.
I don’t think so.
Not.
No hardened adult could ever talk so jaded as they: My world, your problem. Talk to the hand ’cause the mind don’t understand.
Right they were. They had the balls not to be fooled. Adults were not mature, they were chickenshit and full of pretense. Not kids.
At first, when Mark called her from the oncologist’s office—it had just been a precaution by the obstetrician, to “rule things out”—she had wanted for Georgia to die. Right away. Before she got home. Lorraine had copied articles from the library, from the books about rational suicide, recipes for pill cocktails. Mark had had to take Georgia to work and the doctor, because Lorraine could not bear to look at her beautiful child. A copy of the Golf Week photo, the one from the feature story about up-and-comers on the minor tours, the ones with real PGA hopes, with Georgia crisp and slim wearing the obligatory chinos and loafers, gazing proudly at her Ray, was still propped on the mantel. And she had been sick then! It hadn’t been nursing that let her “get in shape” so quickly after Keefer’s birth. After that photo and the interview tension that went with it, Georgia had slept fourteen hours. That had been the beginning of the end. Weight had continued to peel off, and then the tenderness under Georgia’s arm, first attributed to a blocked milk duct, had worsened.
Not until months later, when Georgia was finally too sick to work, too sick to be alone, and Ray was away, did Lorraine finally take over. Neither Mark nor Gordie could do the personal things. And it had been, to Lorraine’s surprise, like having a baby again.
Two babies, Georgia and Keefer.
Lorraine loved it. For the first time in decades she hadn’t been running off to her studio or to a conference or to get just one more phone call in before running out the door. She spooned applesauce into Georgia’s mouth. She cut up washcloths and froze them, as she had when Georgia was a baby and teething, to soothe the sores that pitted Georgia’s mouth. After Christmas, Lorraine’s prayers changed. She began to ask the Lord to allow Georgia to simply stay, disabled if she had to be, just as she was. Lorraine would adjust. Mark would adjust. Ray would find a way. They would be like those families Lorraine would see in the street sometimes lifting a child into a motorized wheelchair. She would wrench away her gaze thinking, how can they do it? But it had become second nature.
It had become a life.
A life, at least preferable to a death.
Twenty-four hours from now, Lorraine would have to iron a blouse. Unroll new stockings from a package, and put on makeup. Look dignified and smoothed for a ceremony that would end
with lowering her little girl into the ground and covering her with dirt. Do that, and then think about it and all the lovely years and unlovely months before it, until she got dementia.
So.
She didn’t have to die, but she didn’t have to really live, either. She had the option of neglecting herself to the point of consequence, and it made her feel free.
She had a job. She’d had a job. She could no more do it than be a shepherd or run the honey wagon for Septic King. She’d loved her job, her small art shows, working with other teachers. Could she go back to school? Teach? Teach girls whose every gesture—even the absent tucking of a strand of hair behind one ear while reading—would make her shriek and keen for her daughter? Could she even go through the motions?
Think of Gordon, Nora would say. Think of Mark.
Think of Keefer.
She would not think of Keefer.
She would think of Gordon. But not protectively. Gordon adored her, but he was self-sufficient, even self-absorbed. He had copious things to keep him occupied, and with Keefer, he’d have things to occupy him without end. He’d had a markless life to this point. Co-valedictorian. The hallowed Florida State golf team. The credit for that was all Gordie’s, but true, he’d been raised by parents so grateful to have him and so determined to prove it, that they’d gone forth into family life with missionary zeal. The high school principal, Hart Rooney, had once confided to Lorraine that her kids were so great he would never have suspected they were adopted. Lorraine had never spoken to the man again.
Mark, well . . . she could not imagine ever again being his life’s most amiable companion. Mark would be lonely and bemused. But Lorraine was not responsible for him. She would no longer be able to tantalize him and surprise him, lead him on the lively chase for her approval that she had somehow been able to play for more than thirty years. Could she ever attend another Medi-Sun Christmas banquet, accept her stocking full of SuperC and B-Blasts with the smile all Mark’s coworkers told him was visible from Saturn? Mark would . . . oh, Mark would undertake good works, in Georgia’s name.