The Best of Sisters in Crime (43 page)

Jackie shrugged.
“Let him take one. I just had my hair done. So I make the front page as well?”

“Oh yes. We’re
devoting the whole page to Erma Bradley’s suicide, and we want a sidebar of
your piece:
I Was the Last to See the Monster Alive.
It will make a nice contrast. Your picture beside pudding-faced
Erma.”

“I thought she
looked all right for forty-seven. Didn’t the picture I got turn out all right?”

Ernie looked
shocked. “We’re not using that one, Jackie. We want to remember her the way she
was.
A vicious ugly beastie in contrast to a
pure young thing like yourself. Sort of a moral statement, like.”

Back to table of
contents

Carolyn Wheat has been a
lawyer for the New York Legal Aid Society, and the New York City Police
Department. Currently a full-time writer and teacher of writing, her novels,
Dead Man’s Thoughts
(nominated for an Edgar),
Where Nobody Dies, Fresh Kills, Mean Streak
(nominated for an Edgar), and the forthcoming
Acid Test,
feature Cass Jameson. Cass is a
Brooklyn criminal lawyer who focuses on the plights and pleasures of city
dwellers trying to manage life in the Biggest Apple. Carolyn’s short stories,
which have won an Agatha award and been nominated for Macavity and Anthony
awards, are varied and masterful, providing evidence of the range of her vision
and voice.

In “Life for Short,” a
woman’s journey toward her own death takes a decided detour.

When
you’re dying, you don’t get to sleep
the way you
used to. There are tubes. You lie on your back, propped up by pillows, so your
overworked lungs grab all the air they can get. At home, you loved curling into
a ball, arms wrapped around your body, knees folded up to your chest. Compact,
childlike, comfortable. At home, you had a choice.

Nothing here is
the way it was at home. Everything’s white: sheets, walls, nurses, food.
Shrouds.

Excuse that,
please. Excursions into morbidity are not appreciated by the living.

I go in and out
of consciousness now. It’s better that way. Less boring, for one thing. Less
pain, for another. Face it, dying wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the
pain. Pain is my pet raven, eating my liver day by day, night by night. (I
think often of Prometheus; at least he got fire in return for his pain. What
was it I received?)

It grows fatter,
sleeker, my black bird, while I waste away to a weight I haven’t known since
twelve. If then. I was a tad chubby in my youth.

My youth. It
wasn’t so long ago, which is the sad part. New nurses sometimes have to leave
the room, tears in their eyes, when they see me for the first time. “She’s so
young,” I hear them say in the hall.

It’s not true. I’m
in early middle age—or what would be early middle age if I were going to have
an old age. Since I’m not . . .

Morbidity again.
That’s what happens when you tumble down the rabbit hole into the world of
death. Nothing’s the same. The life you once had is stripped away, piece by
piece, replaced by a white world with new rules, new importances. Meds are
important: how many you take, how often, with what degree of cooperation.
Needles are important. Starched white vampires appear at all hours, drawing
blood I feel I can scarcely spare at this point. I tell them I gave at the
office, but my attempt at humor is not appreciated. The syringe fills with my
bright red life as I lie and watch, turning whiter.

It’s like a
convent, the hospital. You leave the world behind and take vows of poverty,
chastity, obedience. Poverty is relative; I probably still have a few bucks on
the outside, in the Bank of New York, but what could it buy me? A new liver? A
box of Godiva chocolates?

Chastity is
pretty much a given. I haven’t the strength or the inclination to entertain
myself, let alone a man. Once in a while my fingers approach the little mouse
between my legs and I pet her. But she doesn’t respond; the tiny dancer that
used to rouse herself and give me so much pleasure seems to have passed on
before the rest of me.

Obedience is the
toughie. Never my best thing, and now that too is a given. Nurses must be
obeyed. Doctor must be obeyed. My hungry raven must be obeyed. The only thing
that breaks the rules is my body, my Judas body. It wets the bed, it throws up
the white dinner. It either won’t produce the bowel movement Nurse insists on,
or it lets go as soon as the sheets have been changed. It embarrassed me terribly
at first. How could it not? I was breaking childhood’s first taboo, soiling
everything, losing control. I cried, blushed, apologized.

Now I take a
secret pleasure every time my body makes a mess. It’s the only rebellion I’ve
got left.

Except for The Plan.

The Plan keeps
me going. The Plan lets my wandering mind focus, gives me a purpose beyond
waiting for the next awkward visit from the next old friend who hides her shock
at my wasted body and bald head, telling me I look wonderful. The Plan fills
the time between crossword puzzles.

I once saw a
great crossword puzzle clue: Life, for short. I don’t remember how many
letters, or if it was across or down. The clue itself entranced me: Life, for
short. What could be shorter than life? Who would want an abbreviation for the
all-too-little time we spend on Planet Earth?

When I first
became a novice in the convent of death, I fought the idea altogether. I wasn’t
ready. I tried bargaining with the doctors, with my pet raven, with God. Two
more years, just two—so I can get the spring list out, make senior editor.
Maybe even meet someone. A decent guy, not a New York City bastard. Okay, one
year. Forget senior editor, forget the guy. I’ll just pick up one-night stands.
What the hell, I don’t have to worry about AIDS anymore.

When it became
very clear I was never going to leave the white convent, I turned my face to
the wall and stopped eating. I cried a lot, slow silent tears that slid down my
face into my pillow. I cried for everything and everyone I was leaving behind,
even people I hadn’t thought of for years, like my crazy Aunt Regina and Bobby
Slocum, the boy who hit me with a baseball bat in Cherokee Park. Like my fifth-grade
teacher, Sister Mary Magdalen, who let me read all my compositions in front of
the class. Like Wendy Bentine, who stole my first boyfriend, Harold Kimmerling,
in ninth grade. (Terminal illness didn’t make me any more charitable; I hoped
she’d already died from a brain tumor.)

Then The Plan
came to me. I had to die. The script said so. No rewrites. Okay. I can live
with that.

Then let
me
write the damn thing, let me direct. Let me
choose when and how. Let me kill the horrible black bird before it eats my
whole liver.

Tools. I needed
tools. Tools of death were all around me, needles, scalpels, poisons. How to
get them, that was the rub. Novices in the convent of death aren’t allowed near
the sacred objects.

I started with
pills. Traditional, time-honored method. Slip one under your tongue while you
swallow the water, then take it out and hoard it. Pretty soon. I had a nice
little stash, ready for use. Pretty soon the hard-faced West Indian night nurse
opened my nightstand drawer to hand me a book, found my precious relics, and
flushed them down the toilet.

I was too mad to
cry. I cursed her out, called her every dirty name I could think of. I went
into a tantrum I would have been ashamed to throw at two, kicking and screaming
and pounding my chicken-bone arms against the bed. I dislodged all the IVs and
ended up spending the night in restraints. Tethered, like the heroine in a
silent movie, waiting for the Midnight Special to round the bend, hoping the
hero would get there first.

He wouldn’t, of
course. Not in this movie. In this movie, the villain was going to win. No
happy endings here. Very post-modern, this movie.

Part of me hoped
the nurse would get fed up and put the pillow over my face as I lay there,
helpless to stop her strong black arms.

Not a bad idea.
Could I do it myself? Could I, in cold blood, hold a pillow over my face until
my lungs stopped gulping air I no longer wanted, no longer had faith in?

Not tonight, not
in restraints. Tomorrow night. I’d be good as gold the next day, sweetly
apologetic. Dry of bed. A model patient. And the next night, free of
restraints, the heroine liberated from the railroad tracks, I’d carefully lift
the pillow from under my head and hold it as hard as I could over my face.

“What you
standin’ there for, like a bump on a log?” Nurse’s Jamaican accent cuts through
the quiet night. “And poor Mrs. Rosen lyin’ in 3B needin’ her bedpan emptied?
Get a move on, you lazy—” She stands there, hands on her hips, talking in that
hard-edged voice they all have, loud enough for the whole floor to hear.

Don’t call me
lazy, you stupid old bag, is what I want to say but don’t. I know Mrs. Rosen
needs her bedpan emptied every two hours. Her kidneys are about gone, they say.
And so is she.

You can see it
in her eyes. Sunken eyes, in a face like a raisin. Like a skinny old hen cooked
up for dinner when you killed all the fat ones already.

I walk toward
3B, but I take it slow. Partly to spite that Nurse. Who does she think she is?
If she was any good she’d be on days instead of the lobster shift with the
losers. By which I don’t mean me, because I have ambition, but you should see
some of the other orderlies. Real geeks.

But that’s not
the real reason I don’t rush to 3B. Once it was a pleasure to visit Mrs. Rosen,
to talk to her, to do for her. Once she was alive.

It’s not like I’m
afraid of death. Hell, on the C-ward, you better not be afraid of death. It’s
just that I hate when it takes so long, when a nice lady like Mrs. R starts
losing the things that made her special: the way she read the
Times
all the way through every Sunday, then let
me have the Arts & Leisure section so I could read about the Broadway
plays. The way she laughed when I told her I wanted to be an actor—a nice
laugh, like she thought it could really happen and was already excited to think
she knew me when I was just an orderly. The way she wrote little cards to her
grandchildren, block printing for the little one just learning to read. The way
she used to knit—or was it crochet?

It’s been a long
time since Mrs. R’s hands moved through the air, her needles clicking, like a
spider spinning a colored web.

Nurse is right,
of course. Mrs. R’s bedpan is full. I lift her real carefully—which isn’t hard ’cause
she only weighs eighty pounds or so—and slide the pan from under her without
spilling on the bed.

Is tonight the
night?

I look at her—I
take a really good look at Mrs. R, who came in six months ago like a cheerful
little sparrow and is now a dead, half-decayed bird you find under fall leaves.
I remember her quick lingers, her sharp old-lady eyes, her calling me “Mr.
Barrymore” after her favorite actor.

I look at the
foot of her bed and see the bird. At first, when the patients come in, the
birds are like crows, black and kind of scary, but not big. Then they get
bigger, fatter, as the patients get skinnier. Finally, when their time is
almost up, the bird is a giant, red-eyed vulture waiting to strip the body.

Mrs. R’s vulture
is bigger than her now. If I don’t do something, that bloodred beak will rip
the poor lady like a chainsaw.

I’ve seen it
before. I saw it with Mr. Fanelli in 3G, then with Kenny Foster, who was only
sixteen when he died. I remember what Kenny’s family said the day he finally
went: “Thank God, Doctor,” his mother said. “Thank God his suffering is over.”

They were right
to thank God. They were wrong to thank the doctor. It wasn’t him saved Kenny
from the vulture.

It was me.

And tonight I’ll
save Mrs. R. It’s the least I can do for her.

My best friend
Sandy, the one who comes to see me most often, who brings me crossword puzzle
books and chocolate milkshakes and news of the publishing world I no longer
really care about, is a Zen person.

Sandy told me a
story when I first got sick. A Zen story. A man is chased by a tiger. He runs
and runs until he finally falls over a cliff, where sharp rocks way below mean
certain death. On the way down, he grabs a root and dangles over the rocks, the
tiger still snarling at him from the top of the cliff. Death in either
direction. He sees two strawberries growing from the side of the cliff.
Reaching out his free hand, he plucks them and puts them into his mouth. “How
sweet they tasted!”

That was the
punchline: how sweet they tasted. I said I wanted my strawberries poisoned, and
Sandy laughed uneasily. Clearly I hadn’t gotten the point, but I was serious.
Poisoned strawberries. How sweet they would taste!