B0042JSO2G EBOK (17 page)

Hush, Ann Lord said.

Her face seemed to Nurse Brown as if a light had been thrown from beneath it and she saw in Ann Lord the young face she’d seen in some of the photographs around the house. There was one of Ann Lord as a young woman with her hair blowing and her teeth white in profile. Nurse Brown picked up the tray and left the room.

She sat next door in the room with the pilgrim wallpaper. In the corner was a small grey TV which she sometimes turned on without
the sound while she did the crossword or looked through a magazine. The ceiling had waterstains, it was true of the best houses. She sat with the door ajar and listened as she’d listened in hundreds of other rooms with glasses gathered on bedside tables and boxes of plastic needles and checkerboard squares for pills and cotton balls and cards propped up, rooms of yellow stains and dressing gowns draped over chairs and piles of unread books. She knew that downstairs by the back door there were seamed vases from the florist empty with dry foam cubes and knew how the air in the room grew close from sleeping. A change of sheets swept hope through the room. She no longer needed to see the visitors, their voices were familiar. She knew the coats spotted with rain and umbrellas dripping in the hall and the presents tied with bows. There were silent visitors with furrowed brows, ones who didn’t stop chattering, ones who whispered to her conspiratorially and ones who looked through her, she was just the nurse. Smiles might be expressions of fright. Some people with cheerful natures remained unintimidated by pain, other compassionate ones were undone. Restless people made short visits. One could only imagine how many were too uneasy to come at all. Some people were stunned and seemed oddly unmoved. The older ones were familiar with this business and their hands sat resigned in their laps and they spoke little. Children skipped in on the rug or burst into tears. Sometimes they were made to kiss the sick person which they did with trembling arms. And always there were the ones who flocked to sickbeds, regardless of their relation, the ones who brought casseroles and knocked on the door at the wrong time.

Nurse Brown saw her patient watch all this for the first time. The face propped against the pillows grew more still and watchful as the days went by till it stopped turning and soon only the eyes moved, going from one visitor to the next, watching with trepidation a cup approach.

And in the early hours of the morning Nurse Brown saw another face in the lamplight, the face wild with pain, pleading for this not to be true, a face incredulous and lost.

A nurse’s first obligation was to bring comfort to the patient and there was no reason in this day and age for pain to be overwhelming. When consciousness was not engaged a patient was more susceptible to pain, so night was a critical time. Sometimes patients refused medication saying their minds were too confused. It wasn’t usual but she’d seen it, some preferring pain to confusion.

Ann Lord reached for her hand. Make it go away, she said. Her hand was small and dry.

Nurse Brown bent down for a fresh needle.

No, Ann Lord said. It’s over there. She pointed over Nurse Brown’s shoulder. Tell it to go away.

Nurse Brown glanced behind her. It will go away when it’s ready, she said.

She felt the thickness of the morphine surrounding her. Beneath it were thieves with knives ready to jab her if she dropped down so she lay very still trying not to fall through the hammock of mist holding her up and searched through herself to locate the point … the point was … but she’d lost the point. She was dissolving, only her heart was left. The world was vast and off people went and were engulfed in it and some came back and some never did. Thirty, forty, fifty years went by, at her age she could say that—fifty years. An old face might reappear, the eyes softer, the skin slack, but one could always see the earlier face. She thought of all the faces which never returned and the last times of seeing them, her mother’s face twisted after the stroke, Kingie Montgomery still smoking with the tube in her throat. Some went quickly, her father, Ted, there one day then gone, and Paul … But she could not think of Paul …

She would have none of that clean break. She had not supposed the end would come for some time, she could have lived on another twenty-five years without it being remarkable. Twenty-five years more, as old as Nina. With Oscar gone she had thought glancingly of the end. She imagined it would be like standing on a
plateau from which one looked down and reviewed the various roads one had traveled and saw the territory one had covered. But it was not like that. She lay looking up not down. And instead of long meandering roads and their destinations she saw a snowfall of images—faces she’d known and rooms she’d lived in and tables sat at and oceans swum in and clothes worn and streets turned onto and other beds she’d slept or lain awake in.

Her shoulders could just fit into the narrow opening but if she came off the ladder to crawl further into the shaftway she thought she wouldn’t make it around the bend where it grew more narrow. She should try to go around the other way, but was there another way?

Take this off
.

The music played in the afternoon, a foghorn sounded, no she was getting ahead of herself, rocks were clicking on a beach, a glass chandelier clicked in the dark, an old floor creaked. She rolled herself back so she wouldn’t leave anything out. Sometimes time spread out like ink in water but it also had an order and one thing could not come without the other coming first.

You have a visitor
.

A young woman held a yellow plant.

It’s Can, said a high voice. Then in a normal voice, I don’t know if she can hear me. Then the high voice: Hi Aunt Ann.

Lila?

It’s Can. She whispered to the nurse. Can I take her hand?

Certainly.

It’s good to see you, said the yellow flower.

Have you got Lila with you?

No, Mummy sends her love. They’re still in Maine. She can’t get around very well with the brace on, but she wants to come visit soon. She wanted me to give this to you.

We’re all falling apart, said Ann Lord, smiling. Your mother carried white and blue flowers.

She did?

You’re looking very tan like your uncle Buddy. He used to get black.

Yes Mummy said that too.

I hear you’re getting divorced.

I am.

I guess its what they do now.

I don’t really have a choice, said Can Cutler. He left me.

A man doesn’t want to hear a woman complain, said Ann. They do not want to hear your problems.

No, Can said.

I don’t know if Margie learned that.

Seth had problems too I think.

They all have problems. But Constance, she learned to support herself. That’s the important thing. That’s the only way to be free.

Nurse Brown listened to the conversation with the door ajar.

Does she like Paris? Can said.

Ann Lord waved the subject away. So you brought in the summer with you.

Mummy said you liked begonias.

I like things hard to keep, said Ann Lord. I’ll look after it for a while. She was beginning to fall asleep again.

I thought the yellow was nice.

Yellow is for heroics, she murmured. I’ll give it to Constance, she’s my hero.

Nurse Brown repeated this conversation to Mrs. Lord’s daughter.

Constance looked wistful. Must be the drugs, she said softly.

Nora Brown was thirteen when her father got cancer. In the two years he battled it he never once complained and she took a lesson from him believing that complaining like criticizing put cracks in the world and there were enough cracks already without her adding to them. She’d chosen a profession which mended cracks. In her patients she always saw her father’s face.

She entered into people’s lives at the end and watched them change. Some grew more stiff, others broke apart, some spread like spilled syrup. Nurse Brown heard things brought up which
had never been said before and saw new relations formed in the final hour and nearly always she made a few new ties herself.

She was a large woman with round shoulders and often wore a light blue sweater which flapped above her lower back. Her mouth slanted in and her features looked as if they were melting or shaped from melting wax. For each patient she kept a daily record in a blue notebook with a spiral binder, the sort one could always find at a drugstore.

She watched people go. She once looked after a woman who was comatose for a week who opened her eyes and said, I’m coming Charlie, and that was it. Some said they really did hear beautiful music or angels singing or saw birds with swirling colors. Mostly they weren’t awake at the last, they were unconscious. If they did speak it was confused. The faces were mostly resigned by then, not that they had much choice. A few might struggle against it but it was unusual to see a face in its final repose looking tortured. One saw a tortured look more often in life, one saw it on the faces of those left behind.

Patients came back. When she’d worked in the emergency room they’d bring patients back and it wasn’t always the best thing. More times than not there was too much damage done. Patients said they came back after they heard people calling.
Don’t leave me, Stew, don’t leave me
. They said it had been pleasant in a sort of soft blackness and they would have been content to stay. But someone needed them. Floating up on the ceiling they saw themselves below on the bed being slapped and pounded on the chest while they felt calm and serene. Suddenly they’d be zapped back into
their bodies and pain. They didn’t know what had made them come back. They could hardly say. There was that person calling them, a child or a wife, and they felt a duty to return. They never said they came back because they wanted to live.

When the patients saw other deceased entering the room or sitting in chairs he or she wouldn’t last for more than twenty-four hours after that.

Do you have a husband, Nora?

I’ve got Fred.

Fred Brown? Do you love him?

Sure, he’s my husband. Maybe not like at first but I do.

I’ve had lots of husbands. It was different with each one.

That sounds right.

One could keep on having different love, if you had enough energy. It takes a lot of energy. A woman throws herself into it more than a man does, I think. She lets it take over. I let men take over my life many times. She laughed self-consciously. You must hear a lot of life stories.

Not so much. Usually sick people are more interested in what’s coming for lunch.

I did, said Ann Lord. I let them take over.

But it’s the women who move on, said Nora Brown. They have that. Much harder for a man to move on. Not easy for a man to change.

I don’t know if I’ve seen that, Ann Lord said.

No, said Nora, not unkindly. You wouldn’t have.

A wave of pain appeared on Ann Lord’s face. Nurse Brown had seen many patients weep. It was a natural human response to pain and it was notable when she came across someone, man or woman, who did not weep. It gave you a different idea of them. Ann Lord was one of the ones who didn’t weep.

One day after Ann Lord had not been out of bed for a few days Nurse Brown heard noises in the next room and stood up and listened. She didn’t like to disturb a patient, a patient needed privacy
as much as the next person and got it less. She heard footsteps moving across the room. She had seen patients who could not lift their hand off the coverlet one day the next day be able to walk downstairs. A piece of furniture scraped the floor, the footsteps creaked. She heard a drawer open then realized it was a window being lifted. She can call me if she needs me, Nurse Brown thought, and pulled her chair near the door. She heard a restrained groan and continued to listen as she sat down, and heard more sounds but none that Nurse Brown had not heard before.

I
n the center of the ceiling was a roundish plaster mold with a pink and black glass chandelier Mrs. Wittenborn had brought back from her honeymoon. It was poignantly out of place in the little guest cottage with the molded bedposts and braided rugs and its transparent shadows looked glamorous on the ceiling. Ann Grant lay looking up at it and thought how sweet it had been with Harris Arden and went over again all the things he’d done and where his hands had been on her and saw his face and again heard his voice in her ear. She thought of their standing in the dew of the rock garden, and of the crumpling sound of sailbags, how he’d not let her turn around on the porch and of the bark pressing against her back in the fog. She felt again the jolt she got each time he’d made her feel a new thing. She relived it thinking, I will always have this, this will always be with me, his hand flat on my chest, no one can take it, I will never forget it. Nothing would alter its vividness, she would never lose it. As she went over each
sensation her understanding grew of what life was for. It was for this.

She knew a change was taking place in her, she felt linked to the world. The change took place inside and no one saw it and that it happened only she knew.

Something cracked across the ceiling.

The certainty she’d felt that night remained intact. A shell had formed around it and now was cracking open. It had disappeared and yet had never gone. Was that proof of its importance or simply its lack of resolution? And what was she to do with it now after forty years? She didn’t know where it came from so how could she put it back?