DECEMBER 19, 2011
She is half-asleep on the couch in Hazel’s room. This vigilant tending. Hazel’s breath uneven, ragged. Rising and falling. The dark brown of the catheter bag, its sour, human smell. Her body occasionally arcing in what Deb can only assume is unbearable pain. Deb’s been giving her a dose of morphine twice a day, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. The nurse from hospice brought her into the kitchen yesterday, said quietly, “This is up to you. How much pain you want her to endure. How long this journey lasts.” She looked pointedly toward the jar of morphine on the table. “You know what I’m saying?” she said, her voice tender, and Deb had nodded. She understands.
And so it is up to Deb and Danny and Vale.
They slipped out an hour or more ago and have not yet returned. Cousins. Old friends. She is grateful they have each other as the world transforms into something other. Apocalyptic or just plain harder than before.
And who will she have as the great world spins? Deb pours herself some more wine and thinks of Stephen and the darkness that must have lived inside him. That quiet suffering. She thinks: it is good to approach sixty. The doors open. The birds fly out or in. The light in the painting quivers. The music becomes more expansive, essential, quixotic.
“Stephen,” she whispers into the dark. This room he grew up in. Its airs his own. “Life gets better. Less pungent. I wish you were here to find that out with me.” One’s suffering takes on hushed tones, Deb thinks. Becomes peppered with light.
But he is long gone. Twenty-five years she has been alone. Who will she fuck in the last half of her life? She would like to fuck Bird again. She would like to fuck the man who drives the town plow. She would like to fuck Georges Brassens. Oh how she would like to be found again! She would like to make love to Stephen in their bed, their sleeping child above. For so many years she has been waiting for Danny to come home and make her whole. And now Danny is home. And still she is alone.
Deb throws her head back against the cushions of the couch. “It’s never too late to want to be fucked,” she says out loud to Hazel, whose eyes flinch for a moment. “Never too late to learn to want something.” How drunk is she? She will go out looking next Tuesday, after work. She’ll go to the bar and sit there, like she did when she was nineteen, freshly washed, looking to get fucked. She’ll ask Ginny to join her. Deb laughs, moonlight streaking across her face and cheekbones. “Never too late to want to be fucked,” she whispers.
The dying woman takes a breath in, lurches to her side slightly, exhales. Those cheekbones, Deb thinks. Those beautiful unloved and dying cheekbones. Like Sandra Milo’s. Like Lena Olin’s. Like Grace Paley’s, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s and Sandrine Bonnaire’s in Vagabond. “May your journey be peaceful,” Deb says out loud, rising and going to Hazel, taking her hand in her own.