A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (11 page)

“
Maybe we should wait until we get home before the birthday thing.
”

“
No, we have to do something.
”

“
I hate that this room is on the first floor.
”

“
Yeah, but it
’
s a nice room.
”

“
I don
’
t like the headlights.
”

“
Yeah.
”

“
Should we close the curtains?
”

“
No.
”

“
What about in the morning?
”

“
No, why?
”

At 4:20 Beth is asleep. I sit up and look at Mom. She has hair again. For so long she did not have hair. She
’
d had five wigs, at
least, over a number of years, all of them sad in the way wigs are sad. One was too big. One was too dark. One was too curly. One was frosted. Still, most of them had looked more or less real. The odd thing was that her current hair was real, but had grown back much curlier than her original hair, and curlier even than her curliest wig. And darker. Her hair now looked more like a wig than any of the wigs.

“
Funny how your hair grew back in,
”
I had said.

“
What
’
s funny about it?
”

“
Well, how it
’
s darker than before.
”

“
It is not.
”

“
Of course it is. Your hair was gray almost.
”

“
No it wasn
’
t. I had it frosted.
”

“
That was ten years ago.
”

“
It was never gray.
”

“
Fine.
”

I lie back down. Beth
’
s breathing is heavy, quiet. The ceiling looks like milk. The ceiling is moving slowly. The corners of the ceiling are darker. The ceiling looks like cream. The metal bar that bisects and supports the bed
’
s mattress digs into our backs. The ceiling is fluid.

When my father was in intensive care, about a day and a half from throwing in the towel, a priest was sent, presumably to administer last rites. After meeting him and ascertaining the purpose of the visit, my father quickly dismissed him, sent him out. When the doctor related this story later—it had become something of a legend on the floor—he made reference to the axiom that denies the existence of atheists in the proverbial trenches:
“
They say there are no atheists in the trenches,
”
the doctor said, looking at the floor,
“
hut...whew!
”
He wouldn
’
t even let the man do some sort of cursory prayer, Hail Mary, anything. The priest had
come in likely knowing that my father was not a churchgoer, not affiliated with any church at all. But thinking that he was doing my dad a favor, he offered some sort of chance at repentance, a one-in-a-thousand raffle ticket for redemption. But see, my father had as much patience for religion as he did for solicitors ringing the bell. To them, he would open the door, grin his dopey grin, say no thanks quickly and brightly, then close the door firmly. Which is what he did with this poor, well-meaning priest: He grinned his big grin, and, being unable to get up and show the poor man the business side of the door himself, just said,
“
No thanks.
”

“
But, Mr. Eggers
—
“

“
No thanks, goodbye.
”

We
’
ll get her out in a few days. Beth and I have vowed to get her out, have planned to break her out, even if the doctors say no; we will hide her under a gurney, will pose as doctors, will wear sunglasses and go quickly and will take her to the car, and I will lift her and Toph will provide some distraction if necessary, something, a little dance or something; and then we
’
ll jump in the car and be gone, will bring her home, triumphant—
we did it! we did it!
—and we
’
ll get a hospital bed and put it in the living room, where the couch was. We
’
ll arrange for a nurse, twenty-four hours a day—actually, the bed and the nurse will be arranged by a woman, Mrs. Rentschler, who used to live across the street, in the house whose yard my father was looking at, on his knees, a woman who had moved away long ago, but only to another part of town, and then suddenly she is again there, she is part of the hospital
’
s hospice program, and she will make the arrangements and she will hug us and we will like her though we never knew her before. One of the nurses will be a large, middle-aged black woman from North Chicago who will speak with a southern accent and will
bring her own Bible, and will cry sometimes, her shoulders shaking. There will be a sullen younger woman from Russia who will show up angry and will perform her duties in a clipped, rushed manner and will nap when we aren
’
t watching. There will be a nurse who comes one day and will not return the next. There will be women, our mother
’
s friends, who will come and visit, in makeup and fur coats. There will be Mrs. Dineen, an old family
’
friend, who will come out from Massachusetts for a week, because she wants to be here, to see Mom again, and will sleep in the basement and will talk about spirituality. It will snow prodigiously. The nurses will clean my mother when we are not in the room or awake. There will be vigils. We will enter the room at any hour of the day or night and, if our mother is not awake, we will freeze, then get ready, then walk over and put our hands over her mouth to see if she
’
s breathing. One day she will let us summon her sister Jane, and we will pay to fly her out, just in time. When Aunt Jane arrives at the bedside, after we have picked her up at the airport, our mother, who at this point will not have sat up in days, will shoot up like a child from a nightmare, and will hold her sister who will smile wide and close her eyes. There will be an endless stream of visitors, who will sit casually at our mother
’
s side and chat about recent happenings, because, because a dying person doesn
’
t want to talk about dying, would rather hear about who
’
s getting divorced, whose kids are in rehab or will be soon. There will be baked goods. There will be Father Mike, a young red-haired priest who will make it clear that he
’
s not going to try to convert anybody, and will do Mass while she stays in bed, will skip the wafer part for her lack of stomach, and Mrs. Dineen will take communion too; I
’
ll watch some of it as I
’
m cooking a frozen pizza in the kitchen. There will be the rosary fetched from the cabinet upstairs. We will light candles to stave off the smell that emanates from her pores after her liver stops working. We will sit next to the bed and hold her hands, which are hot. She will sit up suddenly in
the middle of the night, talking loudly, incomprehensibly. All words will be considered her last, until they are followed by others. When Kirsten walks into the room one day she will rise suddenly and insist that Kirsten see the naked man in the fish tank. We will suppress laughs—she will have been insisting on the naked man for days—and Kirsten, with a certain degree of seriousness, will actually go over to the fish tank to look, a gesture Mom will take, with first a roll of the eyes and then a deeply satisfied smile, as vindication. Then she will lie back down, and in a few days her mouth will dry up, and her lips will chap and scab, and the nurse will moisten them every twenty minutes with a Q-tip. There will be morphine. Between her hair, which for some reason will continue to look oddly pert, fluffy, and her skin, shiny, tan-and-jaundiced, and her glossy lips, she will look great. She will be wearing the satin pajamas Bill bought for her. We will play music. Beth will play Pachelbel and, when that seems a bit much, we will put on sweeping New Age music produced by my father
’
s sister, Aunt Connie, who lives in Marin County with a talking cockatoo. The morphine drip will not be enough. We will call again and again for more. Finally we will have enough, and will be allowed to choose the dosage ourselves, and soon will administer it every time she moans, by allowing it to flow through the clear tube and into her, and when we do the moaning stops.

We will leave while they take her away and when we come back the bed will be gone, too. We will move the couch back, against the wall, where it was before the bed came. A few weeks later a friend will arrange for Toph to meet the Chicago Bulls, after they practice at that gym in Deerfield, and Toph will bring his basketball cards, one or two of each of them, rookie cards mostly, those being worth more, so the players can sign them and make them more valuable. We will watch them scrimmage through the window, then, after practice, there they are, in their sweat suits— they come out specially, had been asked to—and Scottie Pippen
and Bill Cartwright will ask Toph, as they
’
re signing his cards with the permanent marker that he
’
s brought, why he isn
’
t in school, it being a Wednesday or Monday or whatever day it will be, and he will just shrug— Beth and I will pull him from school from time to time that spring, when something comes up or just whenever, because while we want to keep alive an air of normalcy, half the time we just say fuck it, and he
’
s so happy, glowing to have met the Bulls, now has all these ludicrously valuable cards, and on the way home we will discuss getting them notarized to make sure people know that he was there. Bill will change jobs to be closer, will move from D.C. to L.A., just after the riots, and will do his think-tanking there. He
’
ll handle all the money, from insurance and the house—there was nothing saved, nothing really at all— and Beth will handle the bills and forms and other paperwork and, because we
’
re the closest in age and it was never really up for debate, Toph will be with me. But first he
’
ll finish third grade, and I
’
ll drop some classes and, though whatever number of credits short, will go through the graduation ceremony, with Beth and Toph and Kirsten there, dinner afterward but low-key, let
’
s keep it low-key, no big thing. And afterward, a week at most, while people, old people, are frowning and clicking their tongues and shaking their heads, we will sell that house, will sell most of its contents, would have burned the fucker down had we been able, and we will move to Berkeley, where Beth will start law school and we
’
ll all set up somewhere, a nice big house in Berkeley with all of us, with a view of the Bay, close to a park with a basketball court and enough room to run—

She stirs and her eyes open slightly.

I get out of the bed and it squeaks. The floor is cold. It is 4:40 a.m. Toph rolls into the spot on the bed I have been occupying. I step over to my mother. She is looking at me. I lean over her bed and touch her arm. Her arm is hot.

“
Happy birthday,
”
I whisper.

She is not looking at me. Her eyes are not open. They were open a slit, but are not now open. I am not sure if they were seeing me. I walk to the window and close the curtains. Outside, the trees are bare and black, quickly sketched. I sit in the taut pleather chair in the corner and watch her and the light-blue suction machine. The light-blue suction machine, working rhythmically, seems fake, a stage prop. I sink into the chair and lean back. The ceiling is swimming. It is milky, stuccoed in sweeping half-circles, and the half-circles are moving, turning slowly, the ceiling shifting like water. The ceiling has depth or—the ceiling is moving forward and back. Or the walls are not solid. The room is maybe not real. I am on a set. There are not enough flowers in the room. The room should be full of flowers. Where are the flowers? When does the gift shop open? Six? Eight? I bet myself. I bet it is six. All right, it
’
s a bet. I consider how many flowers I can buy. I do not know what they cost; I have never bought flowers. I will see what they cost and then buy all the flowers that they have that I can afford, move them from the gift shop to this room. Fireworks.

She will wake up and see them.

“
What a waste,
”
she will say.

She stirs and opens her eyes. She looks at me. I get up off the chair and stand by the bed. I touch her arm. It is hot.

“
Happy birthday,
”
I whisper, smiling, looking down into her.

She does not answer. She is not looking at me. She is not awake.