9

SHE’S JUST MADE TOAST WHEN the hospital calls, the voice on the phone cool and transparent, a man’s. It takes a moment to put name and voice together: Doctor Sheridan. He asks how she’s doing, which makes saliva pool in her throat. Preparing her for the worst, she thinks, and then he explains how they want to try weaning Harry.

“Excuse me?”

From the respirator, the doctor says, too patiently. They want to try it little by little, he repeats, to see how Harry does on his own. “If he can breathe on his own,” he adds quickly, and she imagines his white-coated presence behind a desk or even, absurdly, filling a phone booth with vapour like the stuff these long-haired so-called musicians have at concerts. Dry ice, Robert calls it, and wouldn’t that describe Doctor Sheridan’s tone?

“If he stops breathing,” that chilly, distant voice winds through her, a voice like a gas, like ether perhaps? “We’ll resuscitate, don’t worry.” Resuscitate sounds like something you’d do to a car. But the thought is slightly cheering, somehow; didn’t Harry say once in the middle of Ben Casey that we were all just like old Fords anyway, the heart like a carburetor, whatever a carburetor was? “But I need your permission,” the voice seems to echo; maybe it’s the phone that’s bad, bad like the radio.

“Permission?”

“To try weaning…” he clears his throat, and she thinks not so much of Harry as a baby being offered a sugar-tit, but of him being mad and saying she was weaned on a pickle. Weaned on piss, he’d even said once in the heat of the moment. But then she thinks of Jewel taking his first steps and refusing the breast; her relief back then chased instantly by a slippery feeling of loss. “Mrs. Caines?” The doctor sounds wary.

Let Jewel do it, let him say yes, she thinks wildly. But the doctor knows best, or should, she tells herself, not convinced. Suddenly she’s on a Ferris wheel again, the very feeling as when she’d accompany Robert, swinging her legs at the top and dreading the downward rush, but desperate to have it over with, too. Forcing all her worry, her fear, into a dizzy grace, slowly she says, “If it’s for the best, if it’s something you have to do?” As if the question will let her rest at the bottom, her stomach in her mouth, but still in one piece—even knowing the wheel will jerk upwards again, having a mind of its own.

“We’d like you to be present, then,” the doctor says—no escaping—“you and your son.”

SHE’S COME TO SEE THE plastic snake as almost friendly, as good as a snake can be with Harry’s poor lips closed around it. But the gauze holding it in place is frayed and bloody; the corners of his mouth are raw. Except for that, the rawness, she realizes that she’s gotten used to this, the way one gets used to anything if one has to. Harry lying there like a landscape, constant yet still, there but not there, hills hidden by mist. She can’t even think about what’s locked inside him, the dips and bends of memories.

Jewel’s face is stony as he grips her hand; she feels like the child as they watch, and in a dizzy way the scene becomes framed, wavy, as if there should’ve been a test pattern first, that Indian in a headdress that Harry’s been known to stare at. She tries to imagine that they’ve been plunked into an episode of Ben Casey, only Doctor Sheridan isn’t nearly as handsome. The whole picture tilts as the nurse snips through the gauze strips knotted too tightly to untie. There’s a dreadful gurgle and Lucy stops breathing as the tube slides out, slowly, slowly; could it be like a magician extracting a dove? Please, please, she wills Harry to breathe, but then comes a choking sound, like water coughing through a hose. Another nurse, the gap-toothed one, holds Harry’s wrist as the doctor murmurs something, and Lucy sees that they’ve already unrolled fresh gauze.

And then Harry’s chest flattens, his body a brook under snow; or is this an illusion too, a cruel sleight of hand? For it looks to be the moment, the fine, sharp sliver of time that, for as long as she can remember she’s dreaded seeing, the passing of someone—someone else—the line dividing life from death finer and maybe fainter than the horizon between grey sky and sea. Hadn’t she thought it would be like watching a blade drop from heaven, silence stretching forever on the other side?

Someone else: Harry. But she’s already somersaulted ahead of herself, so intent on seeing the line that it’s as if he’s a specimen, a dummy for their experiments, and none of it real or serious or permanent, just a game someone’s decided to play, a lark. A trick to jog him from his sleep, a slap to shock him back to life. Except that Jewel’s eyes are the eyes of a little boy marooned on the rocks, hollering. His grip on her hand is so tight it hurts, and suddenly he gasps No! It’s like having her knee tapped with a mallet, or receiving a karate chop from behind, as Robert had once demonstrated, long past his cute phase. The doctor’s mouth forms the hard line she’s been looking for as he shakes his head. Not yet, says his look, and the little nurse nods and the snake is quickly replaced. Not yet. And before her very eyes, hers and Jewel’s, once again Harry breathes, pulled back to the safe side; of this much she’s certain.

In the wake of it, she barely feels Jewel leading her to the lounge with its flowered curtains and ripped magazines; it’s as if she’s had her oxygen cut off, then been lassoed from the dead. “Take me home,” is all she can say, relief spilling and tumbling over, leaving her all but paralyzed.

RINGING OR NOT, THE PHONE becomes an instrument of torture; every time she passes it she thinks of a book in Robert’s room, which he’d pulled out once from under a heap of clothes. It was full of devilishly ingenious gadgets to maim, even kill people after ripping secrets out of them. “Have a look, Gran,” Robert had gleefully flipped the pages to something named an Iron Maiden.

Rebecca’s laxness, no doubt, allowing such trash in the house. Not that it’s easy shutting out the world, and she thinks perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad living aboard the Apollo, or Benny’s awful little houseboat: at least there’d be no phone. Don’t answer it then, is Jewel’s advice, as if she’ll heed it; not answering is something Robert might do. What’ll it be next? Have a cigarette, Ma, a few drinks? For Pete’s sake, next they’ll be saying she ought to try that illegal tobacco!

So when it rings of course she picks it up, and as usual now (does this mean it’s permanent?) her heart’s in her throat. But this morning, rushing around getting ready to visit Harry, once more she’s thrown off guard. “We missed you at the raffle, Mrs.—” The voice is sharp and vaguely familiar, though not familiar enough. “We thought you were gonna come and donate.” Her pulse in her ear, she has to stop and think, what on earth? Except in her head it’s Harry gasping, What the bejeezus? “Mrs. Caines? Lucy?”

Like a bird landing, recognition. But then she beats the air for an excuse; the last thing she wants is to talk, explaining that the bus is in half an hour. There’s a pause, rather deadly, as she explains where she’s off to.

“Oh, gosh,” the woman exclaims, a notorious talker. “Are you sick? My mom—Mrs. Slauenwhite?—well she just went in for tests and, oh my—”

“It’s not me, dear,” she struggles to interrupt and explain; glory, it takes so much energy, energy better conserved. Mrs. Slauenwhite’s daughter takes a short breath, then there’s a long, forced “Ohhhhh.” For Harry’s never set foot in St. Columba’s, never has and never would; all these years he’s staunchly refused to. A matter of pride, she’s always supposed, blind stubborn pride that’s left her feeling at times like a bike with no back wheel. At least that’s how she figures people see her, since everyone knows she’s got a husband; they know she’s got a son. Word jumps around here like flames from dry branch to dry branch, so it could be that Harry’s fall is old hat, last week’s news. His fall, she’s already labelled it; it’s simpler that way.

“Look, I’m that sorry, Lucy,” the caller chimes in, so morosely that it’s infuriating.

Now she has to backpedal; why, oh why, has there always been this need to protect Harry from someone or some thing or another, including himself? “Oh. Don’t be sorry—yet,” she pussyfoots. “He’s not out of the woods, but…”

Mrs. Slauenwhite’s daughter sniffs solicitously. “We’ll keep you in our prayers, luv.”

Luv? She’s a far cry from her poor old mother, thinks Lucy, but then, maybe not. Misery loves company, the daughter’s voice tempts—already passing judgment?

But Lucy won’t rise to it. “I’ll remember that,” she murmurs politely. “We both will.”

She just makes it to the bus. Hurtling towards her, it reminds her of Robert and their trips to the fair, his grading present every June till his twelfth birthday; the memory itself mostly pink and sticky, riding home with him, his mouth full of cotton candy. The driver barely allows time to pay; she falls into the nearest seat. There’s hardly anyone aboard besides a clutch of people at the back. Rude to gawk, so she fixes on the fare box, the driver’s creased pant leg. But there’s a smell, quite distracting, of sweat and, oh for goodness sake, pee. Its unpleasantness transports her to the hospital room, the plastic bag suspended under Harry’s bed. For a dismal moment she frets that the odour might be from her—impossible to avoid the odd little leak, rushing the way she has been. But the smell wafts from the seats behind; the driver even glances back, wrinkling his nose. Well, that’s it; who can resist peering around? At least she smiles. There’s a teenager, he could almost be Robert in his ragged jeans, and someone in a suit. And near the back, Benny the traveller, that odd duck, slouches in a seat, pressing his face to the window. Just opposite, staring out the window is someone who could be Benny’s lady friend. They don’t look like much of a couple, seated an aisle apart, but then she thinks of herself and Harry. The driver gazes up at his mirror for what seems like a dangerous length of time.

“Take a pitcher,” Benny’s snarl drifts up, “it might last longer, bud.” Before her eyes dart away, his meet them, small and beady as a turtle’s in a face that leathery.

“Calm yourself, Ben,” his lady friend warns; cam, she says, the way Harry does, and once more it’s as if Lucy’s been lifted then plunked prematurely in the hospital room; the reason she doesn’t mind the bus is because it takes a while to get there. But then she realizes the “calm yourself” has to do with her.

“Nice day, ain’t it, even when you’re all stuck up!” Benny starts in, his voice uncommonly shrill. Then he begins to rant, starting off with the Yanks putting an effing man on the moon and bombing effing Vietnam, then launching into the weather, how it’s gonna be “some jesus winter, ’cause the squirrels are some busy.” His language would strip paint. But you’ve got to be prepared, he says. “Ain’t that right, Driver? Huh, Missus? Out ridin’ around, la-de-da,” he jeers, repeating how you’ve got to be ready “for every event-u-al-i-ty, or else,” then switching topics again, as if everyone there needs to know about some nice little sloop in the cove that some knucklehead got for a song and “don’t give a shit about,” and how he’s got his eye on ’er. “Oh yeah,” he rambles, sounding preachy. “Always gotta be prepared. But you know no man’s a fuckin’ island, even when he gotta live like one—”

“Okay, philosopher. Tone it down,” the driver finally shouts. Pinning her eyes on the big wiper in the middle of the windshield, Lucy can hear the woman make shushing sounds.

But Benny won’t be silenced. “Gotta earn a living somehow,” his voice rises even higher. “Got my tools, oh yeah. Keeps a fellow goin’ but you gotta eat, like death and taxes, winter’s coming, thank you very much, we got that right, and—”

“Shh, Ben.” The woman’s voice is soft but firm, almost bossy, motherly in a funny way. Well, better late than never, thinks Lucy; the poor critter couldn’t have had much mothering as a kid, and got nothing at all in the way of fathering, by some accounts.

“Shut up, man,” shouts the teenager, who’s kept surprisingly quiet till now. In his place surely Robert would have the sense not to yell like that, because it’s the wrong thing to do.

“You buncha fuckin’ hypocrites,” Benny hollers back, and she supposes he means everybody. “Look at you. Easy street, eh?”

Barely tapping the brakes, the driver swivels around again, telling him to watch his language. Lucy focuses on the handle of her purse, where some of the stitching has come away, and thinks deliberately of Harry. Goodness, why can’t people just sit quietly?

Not soon enough, the bus sidles up to its main stop by a department store. “Come on, Ben,” the woman coaxes, taking his arm as the doors lurch open, and Lucy steals a look at her. Where do they come from? she thinks. Not all that old, the woman might’ve been pretty once—well, in another life. And smaller, perhaps, she decides, the woman’s bulk shifting under her puffy dress. Maybe her size helps keep Benny in line, though he doesn’t get off without seizing the last word: “You bastards have a fuckin’ nice day, a’right?” That word hovers in the air like a bee even after the bus pulls away. The bad smell is gone, though, but not Lucy’s queasiness, a feeling now of being somehow remiss; instead of making her feel less stuck on Harry, all this ruckus has just rubbed it in.

A new raft of people squeeze aboard, so that she has to make room. Normally, she’d find entertainment in studying them; researching, one might call it. Normally, she might even play Harry’s game: picturing some climbing trees or grooming each other like apes on that nature show. Though the rest of the route meanders, she doesn’t even bother with the knitting stowed in her purse. Socks begun ages ago, thick ones for wearing around the house, since Harry has always hated slippers.

When she finally gets off outside the hospital, dread almost stops her. Not only that, the September sun has buttered everything with such warmth it almost feels sinful to go inside. We all gotta do stuff we don’t want to, she imagines someone—Harry?—lecturing Robert; a lot of good it would do, too, but never mind. Up up up, she travels, the elevator and corridors a steely harshness of chrome and fluorescent light. All around her, voices blur and footsteps shuffle and click along as if marking out some diehard rhythm.

Cluttered with thank you cards and a fruit basket, the nurses’ station reminds her of an abandoned ship, nobody at the helm. But in the greyish distance a crowd’s gathered outside Harry’s room, and her heart beats faster. A blur of white—uniforms, caps, shoes—they’re like snow people, or angels maybe. She thrashes around for whatever it was Robert said that day when Harry first landed here, about somebody else’s grandpa. Angels: that’s exactly what Harry might think if he woke and saw them hovering like this. But then he’d ask where they’d put the trumpets! Dear God.

As the thought settles, her stomach does a loop-the-loop and the hand gripping her purse goes weak; it’s as if the elevator has risen too rapidly but she’s still inside and the doors haven’t opened, and she could just as easily push a new button. You could just leave, something inside her advises—a voice rather like Robert’s, no, Jiminy Cricket’s. Some tiny critter’s, anyway; maybe Greta Grub’s, the worm on that Maggie Muggins show that Robert used to adore. But it’s too late. Before she can turn away, someone waves and lopes toward her, more quickly than the little voice can repeat itself. Down the hall the elevator dings, the light above it flashing up. It’s the young nurse again, the little one with the spit-hole, as Harry would call it; maybe she reads minds, because she’s smiling. Harry and his way with words.

“What timing,” she beams, saying they’ve been calling and calling. “Hubby’s awake—opened his eyes this morning.” Her voice bubbles over; it’s as if they’ve won the Irish Sweepstakes. The corridor goes fuzzy, all that green bleaching to yellow, and it’s as if Lucy herself is melting, the feeling washing from head to toe; a wetness like in the moments climbing out of a steamy bath—or after giving birth. Oh glory, an instant, tiny dribble—a joyful drop. As if wading through an ankle-deep yellow stream she finds herself at Harry’s bedside.

“Harry? Sweetie?” She’s never called him that before, ever; would’ve choked on it before, the way one would a stale humbug. And suddenly she is choking, swallowing tears and saliva, everything inside her tightening, then lifting and pushing open like a bud. “Lord God Almighty!”

The poor, poor fellow, he’s a sight, like Rip Van Winkle all right, lying there so withered. She could stick a knitting needle down her throat for every bad thought she’s ever had; she could eat a whole dumb cane. As she strokes his yellowish wrist, an eyelid flutters, half-opened, reminding her of a camera shutter that’s stuck. He looks like a mushroom, that pale, after ruminating so long in the darkness, a darkness of the sort she can only guess at. Quickened by dreams? By death, more like it.

“Harry? Answer, dear, if you can hear me.” It’s the same as begging God for a favour, the way she used to when she was little, believing in her heart that all one had to do was ask. But lo and behold, the dullness of Harry’s eye responds, a glimmer. Then one of his hands moves, a tiny, spidery movement—the hand not paralyzed—and touches hers. Harry. His touch is faint and chilly as a draught, and its lightness sends a phantom tingle through her, as remote as if her arm’s been severed.

It’s more of a shock seeing him now than it was while he slept or journeyed, whatever and wherever—the damage in plainer view and worse than she’d let herself imagine. Somehow, it strikes her sharply, underneath all her pickling and praying and feverish dread, a little of that girlish fancy had fanned itself back to life, unawares: of course Harry would be all right—in the fullness of all right, and not diminished. In her darkest doubts, she’d clung to that. For she’d always figured he’d been at his lowest lying there on that church cot, years ago, most everything about his life blown away like dandelion seeds in a single puff. But, tough as a weed, he’d come back. Of course. And by some fluke, by some odd, unforeseen favour, here he was again, at least in part.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, she imagines the puppet mouthing on Ed Sullivan—Charlie somebody—the ventriloquist nodding along. And Harry himself teasing, Smarten up, unless you want a slap upside the head! Tucking that cool, limp hand beneath the flannelette, she’d give away both her arms, legs too, to hear him say that—but who’d want them? Tears prickle as something clamps down inside her. “I’m here, my darling, and I won’t be leaving,” she fights for some humour, plucking it from the clouds in her head, “—not till someone gives me the boot, that is.” She makes herself laugh and it feels like a sun shower, tears, and using those muscles for better economy; but maybe it’s true, it is less work to smile than frown. And how long since she’s called him my darling! Maybe he’s wondering the same thing, as the side of his mouth sags and there’s a bubble of spit.

“Jewel’s on his way,” she says, speaking from a place above her collarbone, a place that perhaps uses fewer muscles, too. But then a new worry arises. It is as if Harry’s just returned from a very long trip; who knows what, if anything, he’s brought back? Speaking slowly—he may as well be foreign—she explains, “Jewel, darling—our boy.”

And then, more than she could’ve bargained for, a miracle happens. “Looschee,” she hears him say, or believes she does.