Irises (22 page)

She took a deep breath. She knew what she was doing and had no doubts. She wanted to make sure she didn't sound as if she did. “Did you mean it?”

She heard silence on the other end of the phone. “Where are you?”

“I'm at the church.”

Silence again and then, “I'll be there in a few minutes.”

She was sitting on the steps by the side of the church when he drove up. He got out of the car and walked toward her. It was a warm night and he was wearing a polo shirt, blue shorts, and flip-flops. “I'm glad you're dressed like that,” she said. She tried to sound cheerful.

“Why?”

“You look more like an Andy than a Reverend Soto.”

He sat down next to her on the steps. Moths flitted around the lightbulb above them. They stared silently at a row of garbage cans that lined the edge of the church's property. Andy leaned back on his elbows and stretched his legs. He acted as if she had called him to have a pleasant chat. After a while, he said, “Do you want to go inside and talk?”

She shook her head. “There are too many memories in there.”

He sat up. She was aware that he was looking at her as if trying to figure out the real reason for her call. It occurred to her that she herself did not know the real reason. Was she there for Andy or for Reverend Soto? She became aware of a nervous hope that he would ask her to go someplace quiet, but the idea that he would decide where they would go or what would happen next made her feel weak and helpless. The day had battered her with too many instances of her own powerlessness. She couldn't afford one more. He was about to speak when she preempted him.

“I know a place where we can get a Coke and talk.” He probably thought she was a child for suggesting a Coke. A cup of coffee would have sounded more mature.

“That sounds good to me,” he said.

They went to a place called Menudo 24, the only place she knew that was open twenty-four hours. She and Simon used to go there occasionally and sit in a back booth. They ordered a Coke for Kate and a cup of coffee for Andy. As she sipped th
e Cok
e through a straw, she tried to figure out where to start. All her thoughts and feelings were like a ball of yarn that had lost its beginning and its end.

“So . . .” he started to say.

She cut him off. “I wanted to talk to you about the options you mentioned the other day.” It was the first thing that came to mind. She added quickly to soften her harsh tone, “It's so hard to discuss.”

“It is hard,” he acknowledged.

She took a deep breath. “How does one go about removing a feeding tube from someone who is in a vegetative state?” There. The words were out. They were real now.

He lifted the cup of coffee to his lips and blew on it. There
was not the slightest sign on his face that her words had shocked
him. He took a sip, then put the cup down and looked at her.
“How you go about it is not as important as the decision itself.”

“I don't understand,” she said.

“You're not a horrible human being for considering it.” She shrugged, though it was reassuring to hear his words. He went on, “What happened tonight? Did something trigger you wanting to talk about this?”

“Not really,” she said. But she was not sure her response was honest. Was she talking about disconnecting her mother's feeding tube because she broke up with Simon, because the insurance was denied? Was she thinking about this because all other options had run out? “I don't know.”

“Something must have happened. I can tell. The last time
I talked
to you, you seemed upset about even thinking abou
t it
.”

She twirled her hair for a few seconds, reflecting, and then she spoke. “About a year after the accident, one of the doctors told Father that the law would allow him to take Mother off life support, and Father went crazy. I've never seen him so angry. Father thought that ending Mother's life, I mean, her vegetative life, I don't know what to call it really —”

“Vegetative life is okay.”

“He thought ending Mother's vegetative life was a sin. We had no right to end human life under any circumstances.”

“And what do you think?”

“I never believed there was any hope of Mother coming back to real life. I always saw her as being gone to the world, to us. After I talked to you, I don't know, it seemed like we were keeping Mother alive for our sake, like we weren't being honest with ourselves.” She pushed the half-empty glass of Coke away from her. “I thought that underneath church doctrine and following God's will and everything, Father was really keeping her alive because of his own guilt.” She stopped. She felt as if she had just betrayed her father. “He was driving when they had the accident. It was his fault. He went through a yellow light, thinking he could make it, but he didn't.”

“Ahh.”

She pulled the glass back toward her and stirred the liquid with the straw. Andy was looking at her as if he could see what she was hiding. “Things are different now.”

“How?”

“Without Father, it will be hard to take care of Mother.”

“Hard, but not impossible,” he said.

“We were expecting money from Father's insurance policy, but that's not coming,” she blurted out.

He leaned forward and waited for her eyes to meet his. “If you wanted to keep your mother alive, there would be some way to do it. We'd have to investigate.”

He said we
,
she said to herself. The magnetic force she had felt last time came back stronger than before. She ran her hand over her hair and turned her head away to break their gaze. The man flipping hamburgers behind the counter had a white net over his hair, and an apron grimy with black grease and a brown smear that looked like dried blood. He pressed each hamburger with a spatula and the meat sizzled and smoked.

“It's hard to talk about this,” Kate said. “It seems so cold and calculating.
.
.
. I loved my mother.”

“Loved?”

“Love.”

“The thing is, the past tense,
loved
is also the right word. The person with a feeding tube in your house is not your mother. Love implies that there's another person to love
you bac
k. It's a two-way street.”

His words made her think of Simon. Was their relationship ever a two-way street?

“Your views are so different from Father's, but you're both ministers.”

He furrowed his forehead. “Different churches have different views on this. The Church of God doesn't have one set doctrine on end-of-life decisions. It's possible for your father to think one way and for me to think another. Anyway, it's you and not I who will make the decision. What does your faith tell you?”

Faith?
She hadn't heard that word since her father used it the Sunday when he died. “You mean like ‘What would Jesus do?'
” She wondered for a second what his faith was telling him about the way he was looking at her now. The tension made her laugh, and he laughed with her.

“In some ways it's as simple as that and in others it's extremely complicated,” he said, still smiling. He gestured to the waitress for a refill of coffee.

“You won't be able to sleep,” she said.

“That's all right. I don't much feel like sleeping tonight,” he answered, looking at her, and she found it hard to breathe. She tried to refocus on his question.

“I'm not sure what happened to my faith,” she said. There was almost sadness in her voice.

“You don't believe?”

“Believe? I don't even know what the word
faith
means anymore.”

“What do you hope for, then?” he asked.

She thought of Mary. Mary hoped that Mother would wake up one morning, really wake up, and take up where she had left off. She'd walk to the kitchen and start making flour tortillas. Kate's own hopes seemed small in comparison, more like wants and wishes.

“We can live without faith,” Andy continued quietly, “but not without hope, not without some kind of hope that we ca
n make
our lives mean something. Without hope we are empty.”

“I want to be a doctor,” she said. “I was accepted by Stanford. That's a university in California.”

“I know where Stanford is,” he said. He sounded impressed.
When she didn't elaborate, he went on, “That's your hope
— to
be a doctor.” He said this as if it was the explanation for many things. “When did you decide you wanted to be a doctor?”

“I must have been about eight. My father was in the hospital, and while he was there, my mother asked one of the nurses to give me a tour. I met this little girl, her name was Patty, who had cancer. We became pen pals. A year later she died.” Kate paused. Her eyes reddened. “That's when I decided I wanted to be a doctor, to work with children like her.”

“You see, that's your hope.”

“It kept me going,” she confessed.

“And now?”

Kate looked at her hands. Then, raising her eyes, she said, “Am I selfish for wanting to go to Stanford?”

“I don't know. Are you?”

“I promised Mother that I would be a doctor. I even promised her that I would go to Stanford. She wanted me to go there.”

“You know”
— he stopped to swallow
— “I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I have a good idea of how your father was with you. I've seen it many times before. Fathers like yours want a household where everyone is a saint, and a saint always sacrifices her interests for others. Saints are taught to think that wanting to go to the best college or wanting to have a high-paying job is a kind of ambition that God forbids. You're not selfish because you want to go away to Stanford. When I was telling you that there were probably ways to keep your mother like she is, it was because I wanted to make sure that if you disconnect her feeding tube, you'll be doing it without guilt, without the sense that you're being selfish. If you do it, it's because it's in everyone's best interests, including your mother's.”

“You think letting my mother go is best for my mother? Why? You think she's being kept from going to heaven?” She was not being cynical.

He puffed out his cheeks as if he were blowing a high note on a trumpet. “Your mother is already in heaven. Her soul is already there.”

“You should talk to my sister, Mary, someday,” she said, drinking the last of her Coke from the bottom of her glass.

“Why?” He finished his coffee. She hoped he would ask for more, but he simply wrapped his hands around the cup.

“She talks to Mother as if Mother can hear her. She'll tell you that Mother's soul is still with her, that God has kept her alive for a purpose.”

“I see.”

“That will make it harder, won't it? I mean if I decided to
.
.
. I would need to get Mary to agree.”

“I don't know. Maybe not. You're an adult and she's not. You asked me how you would go about it. I suppose you would need to go before a judge with a doctor's affidavits and so on. That shouldn't be too hard. Texas law permits the stopping of life-support systems in cases like your mother's. Maybe your sister could fight you if she didn't agree with you. It would certainly be better if she agreed with you. Do you think you can convince her?”

“I'm not sure,” Kate said, her voice weighed down with a sudden realization. What would happen to Mary if she went through with it?

“There's a lot to think about. You need to keep your sister's welfare in mind. What is ultimately best for her?” There was a moment of silence as Andy waited for Kate to respond, but she didn't. “What will you do?”

“I don't know. I don't know. I needed to talk about it, th
at's all
.”

“At 12:30
a.m.
?” he joked.

She smiled back at him. “I'm sorry. It was a rough day and I needed someone to talk to. I broke up with my boyfriend tonight, Simon, then I got home and saw the letter that said we weren't going to get any insurance. I couldn't talk about this with Mary. She would worry. I know how she is. And I kept going over and over what you said to me in Father's . . . in your office the other day. I couldn't stop thinking about all you said. I'm sorry.” Kate stopped abruptly.

“I'm glad you called me. Does it look like I'm regrettin
g this?”

She took a deep breath and looked at him directly, in a way that let him know she saw him as a man. She wanted to be equal to him in all respects when she spoke.

“You said we could be two people searching for the truth together. What did you mean by that?”