Stiltsville: A Novel (38 page)

I took Dennis and Margo—Stuart had a meeting—out on the boat that night, and we anchored in the spot where the stilt house had stood and ate stone crabs at the stern. I’d cracked all the claws into bite-size pieces before we’d left, and Dennis was able to dip each morsel in the mayonnaise sauce and eat it without too much trouble. Margo and I ate the same way. When we finished, I cut a piece of key lime pie into little squares and put the plate on Dennis’s lap. We all ate from it. The downtown skyline, which had doubled in height in the thirty years since I’d come to Miami, resembled a foggy lineup of many-sized blue bottles. The buildings gave off faint stars of light. “From here,” Dennis said very slowly into his voice box, taking a deep breath, “it looks like nothing changes.”

The first time I’d been on Biscayne Bay, the only tall downtown building was Freedom Tower, where immigrants were processed when they first reached the country. It had changed slowly, yes, but it had changed.

“I miss Stiltsville,” said Margo.

“Me too,” I said, though I had the thought that with Dennis so sick, we wouldn’t have used the stilt house much even if it still existed. It had collapsed before becoming a sad, abandoned treasure.

“Me too,” Dennis said. The antidepressants were working: he didn’t cry, and neither did I.

T
hat second year after the diagnosis went by in a bright, blinding flash, blanketing us in doctor’s appointments, symptoms, and steady decline. Dennis woke almost every night coughing violently to rid his throat of phlegm, which he was no longer able to do naturally. We finally got around to having the house tented in January, during which time Dennis and I stayed at Marse’s condo, as she’d offered. We spent evenings drinking wine in the chaise lounges on her balcony, watching the lights of the cruise ships making their way up Government Cut. “We could go on a cruise,” I said one night to Dennis, thinking that surely cruise ships had handicap access.

“Why?” he said softly.

“Because it would be relaxing and fun. People would cook for us.”

“People—already—cook—for us,” he said.

It was a cool night and I’d spread a blanket over our legs and moved our lounges next to each other so I could hold his hand. Being at Marse’s was a little like a vacation in itself. She had good crystal wineglasses and a big-screen television with more cable channels than I knew existed, and her bed was as high and wide as a boat, with a view of the bay. We used an ottoman to help Dennis climb into it. Lola had the week off, and every morning Dennis and I used the pool at Marse’s condo for his exercises, but more often than not we ended up floating around with foam noodles laced under our arms, talking idly. “That’s true,” I said. “I guess we don’t really need to get away.”

“I—don’t,” he said. “My life is—vacation.”

I looked over at him. His hair was disheveled from the breeze. I’d taken to cutting it myself, on the back deck with a sheet tied around his neck like an apron. In the moonlight, I could see the lines around his eyes and his sweet, soft half smile. He was happy. He was deteriorating and wheelchair-bound, and with anyone besides me he was more comfortable writing than speaking, and we were short on cash (a cruise was out of the question financially, anyway)—but still, in these and other moments, I saw his happiness. The illness takes the body, not the mind or the spirit.

In February, Dr. Auerbach offered us a twig of hope: a clinical trial. He mentioned it offhandedly, as an afterthought at the end of a checkup, saying that it was unlikely to work but he didn’t think it would hurt. Dennis shrugged and wrote on his board, LET’S GO FOR IT. Later that week, we went to a clinic at the University of Miami and picked up a box full of needles and vials, a chart to mark each time the shots were given, and a list of dates when we had to check in at the clinic for tests. A nurse at the clinic showed me how to administer the shots on a grapefruit, then drew a bull’s-eye on Dennis’s hip with a permanent marker. The drug was called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, though in the weeks of the trial, after mixing up the letters a dozen times, Dennis and I would come to refer to it as BFD—Big Fucking Deal. There were almost two thousand patients enrolled at forty sites. We started the injections the night we received the drugs, and for a month the scheduling and checkups were like another job in our lives, but then the study was halted. No patients had reported progress. It was a bust.

In March, at his appointment with Dr. Auerbach, we learned that Dennis had lost a total of forty-five pounds. He hadn’t been eating very much—this I had noticed. At first I’d thought he just wasn’t hungry, but then I’d watched as he fought to swallow a piece of lasagna, and I realized that the struggle simply wasn’t worth it. The doctor suggested a feeding tube—this was something we’d anticipated distantly, and now the time had rolled up on us in a tidal wave—and at the end of that week Dennis spent the night in the hospital to have the tube inserted into his stomach. I was taught how to attach the feeding bag to the tube, how to add a can of Ensure to the bag, how to clean it before and after each use. Dennis could still eat—thank God, he could still taste food—but he could not get enough to sustain him, and from then on I, or Margo or Lola or Stuart, gave him a bag of Ensure three times a day.

And then one night I realized, after Dennis grunted his thanks when I handed him a pair of pajamas from the dresser, that he hadn’t said a word to me in a week. His voice had trickled away like a stream in winter. This is actually what I thought of—the stream behind the home in Decatur where I’d grown up, which flowed modestly but steadily in summer and then in the fall slowed to a trickle, then stopped entirely after the first freeze.

S
ince inventing her image in the backyard on my birthday almost a year earlier, I’d thought of Bette every day and called her every week. We had long conversations, but they weren’t the same as being together. When the doctor gave us some bit of bad news, as he seemed to do at almost every one of our monthly visits, I thought about what she would have said if she’d been around, what irreverent quip she might have added. When she flew in at Christmas, we spent an evening on the back deck together drinking wine, and in a weak moment I told her that I didn’t think I could keep it together anymore without her. I said, “I feel like you chose her over us.”

She wore turquoise earrings and a large silver ring on one index finger. “I wish you didn’t think of it that way,” she said.

“We could really use you around here.”

She stared out at the waterway. “I used to sleep out here when I was a kid, did you know that?”

“Dennis mentioned it once.”

“My father would try to make me come inside, and my mother would say to him, ‘Dear, it’s Florida—what’s the worst that could happen?’ It was different then.” Her hair in the moonlight looked like the feathers of a white bird. Her sharp face was free of lines, free of worry. She said, “Once I thought I saw a ghost in those bushes over there, but it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. And once Dennis spent the night out here with me, and that night I found that with him there I was more afraid, not less. I lost all my gumption.”

“I don’t understand.”

She shrugged. “What about when it’s my turn? Dennis has you. If I left Suzanne, who would take care of me?”

“We all would.”

She shook her head and changed the subject. Santa Fe, she said, had excellent museums.

Time passed in great swaths, and very little other than Dennis’s condition seemed to change. I still posted a schedule every week, and everyone still signed up for days, using a pen that dangled from the fridge. Margo was promoted in her department to a coordinator position, which meant she taught a little less but worked more, and Stuart lost a big contracting job suddenly, but then found a new one building more or less the same thing, as far as I could tell. Lola went to Ecuador to visit her parents, and while she was gone a curt but capable male therapist named Mitch came to the house. Nothing monumental happened—except the one monumental thing that was happening, slowly and swiftly at the same time, all the time.

And yet I was surprised when, one afternoon when we were alone in the backyard, sitting in lounge chairs I’d dragged from the deck to the edge of the canal, Dennis handed me his writing board. It read: BEEN THINKING ABOUT MY FUNERAL.

It was the afternoon of the yacht club’s annual chowder party, an event we hadn’t skipped in more than fifteen years, since we’d first become members. I imagined that Grady and Gloria were there at this moment, drinking beer from colorful plastic cups, eating Gloria’s deviled eggs with caviar, being served chowder by the senior members of the club. I didn’t miss it. I didn’t ask Dennis if he did—I knew the answer. Dennis had always enjoyed that particular event.

“OK,” I said.

Dennis wrote carefully, with difficulty, I WANT TO BE CREMATED.

I closed my eyes. “I know, baby.”

WE HAVE TO TALK, he wrote.

“OK,” I said again.

SCATTER MY ASHES IN THE BAY, he wrote.

I nodded.

MY FATHER TOLD ME TO TELL YOU—he made sure I’d read, then erased with a cloth he kept in his lap, and started again. THEY DON’T WANT THE HOUSE. SELL IT. I shook my head. He erased again, nodding fervently. GIVE 1/2 TO MARGO. SHE WILL NEED IT.

“Is she having money problems? Do you know something?”

He hesitated, then shook his head and wrote, MONEY ALWAYS A PROBLEM.

I laughed a little, and laughing made me cry a little.

He wrote, THE BOAT—DON’T GIVE TO STUART. GIVE TO PAUL.

I hadn’t given a thought to what would happen to the boat. It was worth eight thousand, maybe ten thousand at the most, but I knew boats didn’t hold their value, and I supposed giving it to someone who would appreciate it was worth more than trying to make a little money. “Why?”

He wrote, FOR FISHING. He erased, then wrote again. HE’S BEEN HUNTING ONE JUST LIKE IT.

“Fine,” I said.

UNLESS YOU WANT IT.

For a moment I thought about this. Maybe I would keep the house, and maybe I would take the boat out on my own and—what? “No,” I said.

GIVE MY FATHER’S WATCH TO STUART.

“Fine,” I said.

AND KEEP MY CUFF LINKS AND ROD— He made sure I’d read, then erased and started again. FOR HER NEXT HUSBAND.

I laughed and he laughed, and out of habit I glanced around to make sure no one had seen, and gestured for him to erase. This was not something we’d allowed ourselves to mention before, but in that moment it seemed as though this possibility—a divorce for Margo, a second husband—was not all that awful, not any kind of tragedy. When we were quiet again, he wrote, WILL YOU— but then he stopped and erased.

“What?”

He shook his head.

“Will I what? Ask me.”

He studied my face in the way he did sometimes. He paused with the marker in his fist, deciding what to write.

“Are you asking if I’ll stay in Miami?” I said.

He put the marker down and nodded, swallowing.

I thought for a moment, and then said, “Of course I’ll stay. This is my home.”

And I justify saying it, because Dennis was alive and sitting beside me, and as long as he existed in this world I would have stayed. How could I answer him except this way? As long as he was flesh and blood and had the ability to ask the question, that was my answer, and in this moment I even partly believed it myself. And I think my answer gave him peace.

W
e’d graduated from so many gadgets by this time: the cane, the walker, the voice box, one electric wheelchair, and then a better one. By April, when the mangoes started to ripen on the trees and the frangipani trees started to drop their pinwheel blossoms, he wasn’t speaking or walking at all, and could barely make it down the swimming pool steps to exercise with Lola. Instead, they lay on the back deck and she pushed his muscles around for him, bending his knees to his chest or stretching his arms above his head. By May, by the time of my fifty-first birthday, he had no more use for the dry-erase board; it was too difficult for him to write. By June he was eating almost exclusively from the tube, and staying almost exclusively in the living room, because it was too difficult to move him back and forth. Marse bought him some expensive ergonomic footrest pillows, and I bought soft flannel sheets for the living room sofa. People still came by all day, every day, flowing into and out of the house, but instead of congregating on the back deck or in the kitchen, we hung around in the living room, mostly, and once or twice a day someone helped Dennis into his wheelchair, fitted a blanket over his legs, and took him for a walk around the block. We played a lot of board games—Dennis was still good at them, though they tired him out. For Scrabble, I sat next to him and he pushed the tiles he wanted to use toward me, then gestured to the spot on the board where he wanted the word to go. I kept the windows open all the time, and changed the sofa sheets every time Lola or Stuart took Dennis for a bath. I bought him several pairs of pajamas—he was usually chilly, even in the heat of the day.

In July, Paul and Marse picked us up and we went in Paul’s truck to a drive-in movie in Fort Lauderdale. We sat in camp chairs and ate marshmallows—a treat that had become one of Dennis’s favorites—and drank very cold beers. Paul had become a deacon at his church. He explained what this entailed, but I wasn’t listening. I was watching a foursome about our age at the site next to ours, sitting in camp chairs and eating sandwiches out of plastic baggies. They laughed a lot, loudly, and I felt that I truly hated them. I was relieved when the movie was over and we could get back into the cool car and drive silently back down the crowded expressway. Paul and Dennis continued to go fishing almost every weekend, but they returned early, usually without fish, and Dennis slept for hours afterward.