Good Family (3 page)

How, exactly, to phrase my response? Do I say that it’s an abomination that our mother is lying bedridden in a diaper, drooling out of the left side of her mouth? That she can no longer walk or talk coherently or smile or give any indication of what she’s thinking, or if she thinks at all?

I touch the mark on the wall and stand up.

“The guard brought your suitcase, and Dr. Mead is coming over,” Dana says. “This afternoon.” She pushes her glasses up on her nose, looks from me to the wall, but doesn’t ask. I was hoping to go swimming this afternoon, but the rain I predicted last night is waiting to drop, and the lake is a forlorn gray.

“Did hospice call?” I say.

“Still waiting.” Dana looks exasperated as she says this. “The phone’s been tied up,” she adds in a tone as if she’s been stewing over something for the longest time, and that this particular transgression, which should have been obvious, is left to her to rectify.

“It was Ian,” I reply evenly. “We’re in the middle of a project.” I know she won’t ask,
What project?
That would acknowledge a world outside of this one, one that involves productivity and colleagues. It is a threatening, tainted world, and the borders of Sand Isle are sealed.

“Does Mother want to see her?” I ask, referring to Dr. Mead.

Dana crosses her arms. “I thought
you
might want to.”

I know where she’s going with this. Already, I am feeling sucked in, asphyxiated. I want to say,
It has
nothing
to do with me.
Mother and I have made our truce if not our peace. Rain has started to beat against the dining-room windows. I wonder if Philip will cut his sail short. “Okay, okay,” I say, backing against the wall of initialed heights. “I’ll see the doctor.”

My sister reaches forward, lays her hand on my head. It is as if she is giving me a blessing, but I’m sure she’s only measuring me.

A
half a day, and I’ve avoided the nursery. There’s no reason to go back there other than my therapist’s suggestion that it may be (A) edifying and/or (B) cathartic. Dr. Anke, dispeller of bogeymen and tainted memories. She asks relentless questions about my parents. She makes me go into rooms I would dearly prefer to avoid.

In the Lantern Room, I turn on the faucet. Most of the bedrooms have their own sinks from the days when water closets were sequestered, and bathtubs had their own cells. In houses like these, plumbing was an afterthought. The faucet sputters and burps, coughs out a liquid that is insidiously brown. I let it run for a while, waiting for the cold, rich stream of hard water to erupt from its artesian source.

When it runs clear, I splash some on my face. I’ve learned to control my panic attacks.
Breathe,
Dr. Anke told me.
In and out.
I can walk through the bathroom to get to the nursery, or go down the hall and enter it from the west. Two doors—one in, one out. Like breaths.

There is a buzzing in my ears. If only I’d adjusted that baby monitor. I envision the crib. I breathe.

D
r. Mead has been tending my mother since the year before she had her stroke. Dr. Mead is the only one other than Miriam who, as far as I can tell, talks straight to her. Two years ago, Mother had gone
over to the hospital in Chibawassee for some complaint—plaque in the eyes, a slight blurring of vision—and lucked into Dr. Mead moonlighting in the ER. Dr. Mead had checked my mother’s vitals, moved a pin light around her eyes, examined her skin for bruising.

How much do you drink, Evelyn?
Dr. Mead had inquired, yanking her stethoscope out of her ears.

Oh, my mother had said airily,
a couple of cocktails around dinner.

Your liver’s enlarged. You don’t get that kind of liver without knocking back a lot of booze. And you have emphysema. You’re going to stroke, Evelyn, if you don’t cut this out.

Dana, who had accompanied our mother to the doctor, braced herself for one of Mother’s withering responses that she gave to taxi drivers or hairdressers when they were too familiar. But my mother’s nose crinkled conspiratorially as if she and Dr. Mead were sharing some delicious joke, and after that, she and Dr. Mead were friends.

It wasn’t Dr. Mead, however, who was scoping my mother’s carotid at Cedar-Sinai last fall when she threw the clot to her brain. They knew instantly my mother was stroking. First she vomited; then her hand went rigid. The operating room filled with people trying to revive her, to keep her heart beating, her blood flowing. When she finally came to, her mouth drooped and she could not speak.

The doctors went on to fill her with anticoagulants and antispasmodics and antidepressants and antibiotics whenever she ran a fever. She won’t have a year, they told Dana, so when June came, Philip and my sister brought her back to Sand Isle via private jet loaned by a friend.

Now we are sitting at the kitchen table with Dr. Mead. I have risen twice to refill our coffees, offered butter cookies from a flowered tin.

“She refuses to move,” Dana explains to Dr. Mead. I notice that Dr. Mead is about my age, but she seems older. She certainly has a more attractive hairdo, her hair swept up from her face like that. “And,” Dana adds, her voice pinched with disgust, “Miriam is giving her vodka in the Ensure.”

“Very practical,” I say.

My sister shoots me a look. At the very least, given my own history, Dana feels I should exhibit at least a modicum of outrage concerning our mother’s alcohol intake. But what can I tell her? That I might do exactly the same, given the circumstances?

“Under the circumstances,” says Dr. Mead, “I don’t see that as a problem.”

I try not to smile, although I feel vindicated and even further allied with Dr. Mead. Dana, who has never so much as taken a hit off a joint, done a line of coke, or had a major hangover, doesn’t quite understand the exquisite pleasure of leaving one’s body. But I know. I know it as my mother knows it.

“These doctors in California,” says Dr. Mead, leaning in toward the two of us. “What’s with all these meds?” I had noticed Dr. Mead picking up all the little orange containers on my mother’s bedside table, reading their contents. “Antidepressants?” she says.

“Well,” says Dana, “she’s depressed.”

“Of
course
she’s depressed,” snaps Dr. Mead.

“Agoraphobic, too,” I say, avoiding Dana’s eyes.
What would you know about Mother
? she could say.
You’ve been AWOL yourself.

“Well then, maybe these drugs would have done her some good ten years ago.” Dr. Mead shakes her head. “Now they’re just dragging out a process that can’t be pleasant for anyone. Least of all, your mother. Your mother”—she beats us down with eyes that have seen it all—“just wants to die.”

I have decided Dr. Mead is the sanest person I have ever met. Her candor is like a drink of springwater. I want to ask where she buys her clothes. She looks neither resort-y nor JCPenney-ish, which are about the only choices in this area. She resembles a sister of mercy. But just as I am about to ask her what we ought to do, Philip pushes through the kitchen door.

“Hey,” Dana says to her husband in an unnaturally cheerful voice. “We’re talking about Mom’s meds.”

Philip pulls off his hat. Either he has gotten caught in the rain or is sweaty with humidity because his wildly curly hair is plastered to the top of his head. There is a priestly quality to Philip having to do with his
black-Irish genes—a whiff of Erin go bragh and
Father forgive me.
“Maddie,” he says, nodding as if he just saw me last week. “Good trip?”

Before I can answer, he turns to Dr. Mead. I expect him to firmly request a change in the treatment, to say with pastoral conviction that something should be done, that this whole sorry mess was because of doctors in the first place. Instead, he says, “Enough’s enough, don’t you think?”

Philip rarely speaks without careful consideration of his words. Words, like money, should be sparingly allotted rather than spent, lest they become as unruly as his nemesis hair.

Dr. Mead brings her coffee to her lips, sips it daintily. “It’s
your
decision,” she says, looking at each of us. “Yours and Evelyn’s.”

Flinching at the implication, I back-paddle frantically. “It’s just that I’m not going to be here in Sand Isle very long, Dr. Mead.”

“No?” she says to me, her eyebrows heading north in a familiar way that gives me the willies. “You might want to reconsider that.”

The alliance I formed with Dr. Mead evaporates like the steam from her coffee. It is my sister’s turn to suppress a smile.

O
ur porch sits high in the trees. Maples, mostly. An occasional curly-leafed oak. Below, the hill falls away to the beach—a sandy dune anchored by Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and blackberries. Mixed in are the sunflowers and lilies and black-eyed Susans our great-grandmother once planted, attempting a garden down to the beach. That’s when there were three gardeners to tend it, cutting back the overgrowth, trimming the trees, repairing the boards in the walk that switchbacked to the shore.

Dana has been in a foul mood for the last hour because the cook she has hired called to say she won’t be available, that there is a family illness. “A better offer, more like it,” Dana says. These days, we have only the yardman who sweeps, and the flowers and boardwalk have all but disappeared.

“We should trim those trees,” Philip says.

“Amen,” I say.

“And what will that cost?” says Dana.

But I agree with Philip. The view is the most spectacular feature of this house. You can see the whole bay, the lights of Chibawassee, and to the right, the open lake—a glacier-carved gash of blue in the middle of the industrial wasteland and cornfields of the Midwest.

“So,” I say, “shall we tell Mother?”

We are all three sitting in rocking chairs, staring at the lake in a perfect line as if we are onstage, looking back at the audience. It’s five in the afternoon. Mother, as usual, is sleeping. In years past, this would be her cocktail hour. She would have napped from three to five, risen and made a drink, started to get dressed for the evening. Now the naps merge into other naps, semiconsciousness into sleep.

Philip takes a long, contemplative sip of beer, but says nothing. Dana shifts her weight. She is uncomfortable with the notion of taking our mother off all medication except painkillers. It is unclear to me if it’s religious conviction or that she doesn’t want to let Mother go. Dana converted to Catholicism when she married Philip, and though I don’t think of her as fervent, she seems to express more zeal than Philip, who describes himself as lapsed.

“You want her to go on like this, Dane?” I say. “What kind of life is this? Lying up there like that, having everything done for her. It’s one thing when you’re a baby and you’re cute, but this is a horror story—”

“Oh, thank you very much,” says Dana, interrupting me. “Thank you for explaining to me just how awful the situation is, and how ghastly Mom’s life is, and what it takes to care for her and do the things that have to be done, and resist the urge to put her down like a dog.”

I take a long, calming breath. “Fine, fine, fine.” I do not want to argue with her—not really. Besides, Dana’s righteousness always trumps mine. She is the designated repository of virtue in this house, the good daughter who stayed home. I, on the other hand, left years ago, and thus saved my life. Were Dana any less virtuous, any less responsible, it would not have
been possible for me to do so. This I know—not because of any personal insight on my part, but because it was pointed out to me by my therapist, Dr. Anke.

“Besides,” I say, “it’s not as though we’re pulling the plug. Just no more heroic efforts. It’s what she wants.”

Philip clears his throat. “Will she get plenty of morphine?”

I can never be sure what Philip’s position is on any of our family. Does he regard my mother as a burden? Me as an annoyance? The cousins he endures every summer the way he endures inclement weather on the lake. Yet I believe that, lapsed or not, his concern about my mother is sincere, that his musings about morphine aren’t malevolent in any way.

“Who’s going to tell the cousins?” Dana says.

The cousins. I have purposefully avoided asking who’s coming and when, as if my lack of interest renders more probable my exiting sooner rather than later. “I think we should tell Mother first.”

We all three start to rock in unison. It is late afternoon, and no one has done anything about dinner. Miriam is upstairs tending Mother. No one else is going to help us. There are some eggs in the refrigerator and a wilted head of lettuce. My offer to make scrambled eggs and salad is gratefully accepted by my sister and brother-in-law.

“I’ll go to the market tomorrow,” I say.

“I’ll try to find another cook,” says Dana.

“Forget it, Dane. We’ll do it ourselves. We’ll make a list about who does the shopping, the cooking, the cleanup,” I say to Dana as the sunset bleeds out. “Charts. Matrices,” I add with a flourish. “A whole organizational system of labor rotation.”

Philip slaps a mosquito and eyes me warily, gauging the distance between sarcasm and sincerity.

My sister’s eyebrow rises again. Dana can practically conduct a symphony with her eyebrows alone. “Adele?” she says.

“Depending on the incarnation,” I say, holding up my hand like the open palm of Buddha, “even her.”

I
’m ’m staying,” I say to Ian in the phone at the foot of the stairs.

“I knew this would happen,” he says. “I knew it.”

His voice burbles for a moment, as if he is underwater. Then I hear honking and sirens in some far-off place—discordant in contrast to the rustling leaves, the trilling bells on the horses of Sand Isle.

“Where are you?” I say.

“Forty-fourth and Madison.” More honking, and I hear Ian say “sorry” to someone, not me. He might as well have said Forty-fourth and Jupiter. “So let’s clarify this point. You get there. In about two minutes, you’re climbing the walls. You can’t breathe. You can’t think. And now everything’s cool?”