I’m in my weekend tank top and boxers, finally getting around to loading gas into the lawn mover, accepting my fate of riding around in circles on the bouncing, stinking seat of the ride-on mini tractor, when I glance at my speak and see Dad has dialed three times and even left a voice mail, which sets off alarm bells. I jog back into the quiet cool dampness of the garage and press play.
“Lucy, your aunts are here at the hospital. Oma’s not doing well, we admitted her again and they’re running more tests. But it doesn’t look good. I don’t know, honey, this is pretty serious. Call me.”
I stand there, frozen from top to toe, counting the seconds in my head to let my brain reset. I replay his message, thinking if I hear it again I’ll understand what this could actually mean. It’s not feeling real, not even a little.
I dial back and get him first ring, which makes me even more tweaked.
“Honey, I’m so sorry,” his shell-shocked voice says, the beep and blip of hospital noises and my brother’s high-pitched voice calling for him in the background. “She says she’s done, Lu. No more transfusions. Do you understand? It means she’s only got a little time left. A week or two, at most. She wants to be in her own house with all of us, and your aunts and I are gonna help her with that. She’s tired, Lu. She’s ready to go.”
“No,” I say. “I thought she was fine. Everybody said she was fine.” I swallow down a lump the size of my fist and feel my speak getting hot against my ear.
“I’m so sorry, Lucy,” he says again, but then Miles is crying and I’m handed off to my aunt who, with military precision, tells me I can either pick up my god-awful sister at the airport or go to Oma’s house and take apart her bed to make space for the medical equipment hospice care is providing. I opt for the latter and she says they’ll be there soon, so I better hustle and I almost ask her what hospice means exactly, but then I don’t. She says this is Oma’s choice and it’s not easy and everyone’s dealing with it in their own way. She says my Oma’s brave. Very brave.
I just say, “Okay.”
In the glass of the creaky front door, I catch a glimpse of my sad-sack face. I wanted to cry the whole way over but couldn’t. I think maybe I’ve forgotten how.
In the kitchen, Bitsy greets me with yips and snarls from under the old wooden dining set and I flick on the overhead light and stare at Oma’s place mat on the table, empty bowl, clean spoon on top, a tub of chocolate ice cream I discover is soup when I pull open the lid.
I find an old flat-head screwdriver and sweat and grunt while I break down her and Opa’s old bed and then vacuum at least three decades’ worth of animal and human hair from the musty, pink-hued carpet. My two younger shaver-Jack twin cousins, useless as ever, pull up in my aunt’s van, and half-heartedly help me haul Oma’s mildewed bedspring down her perilously steep cellar stairs. At the bottom I nearly send Bitsy’s skull careening into drywall as she whips past my feet to ransack her stored feed below. I chase her around the cellar for a few dusty minutes and then sneeze my way back up into the living room, where the boys turn on SportsCenter and glue their eyeballs to the screen.
Then Jesse From Hospice is knocking at the front door, rushing in with clipboard and badge, rambling at breakneck pace as I try and work the gears of my brain back to life. I remind myself I’m premed and can handle high-intensity medical banter as he’s loading in an oxygen machine and tank and a heart monitor and this almost-toilet thingy on wheels I should know the name of, but somehow, right now, can’t seem to remember.
Then comes Oma’s replacement bed, a glorified hospital cot on glistening steel limbs and I’m getting panicky as I help Jesse From Hospice pop this lever into that hole, this hinge into that socket, until it stands freely. And then he’s rattling on, telling me how to start up the Beep-Beep machine and how to hook Oma in and how the oxygen tank might explode if you push this button here, but on the other hand it probably wouldn’t even if you did, but just in case, don’t.
And I’m a slow-crumbling mass of brick and mortar, loose bits shedding and skipping in my clumsy, fragmented wake. I’m covered in cool, clammy sweat, a death grip of cold fear wrapping icy-hot fingers around my neck. I’m blinking my eyes, trying to focus on his lips moving and a faint buzzing sounds in my ears, a transparent green sheath of fuzz descends on my sight in a vibrating wave. And just then Dad and my aunts come ripping into the house and Jesse From Hospice gives them the same exact spiel and Dad’s a doctor, so everything’s under control, he’s seen this all before. No big whoop. None at all.
I prop myself in a stiff, high-backed formal chair in the corner of Oma’s room and breathe. Breathe. Breathe. And I’m doing okay, getting my head clear as order is restored with armloads of sheets and a quilt and a pillow on the thing looking more and more like an actual bed, when lo and behold here comes my Oma.
They’re rolling her up Opa’s old wheelchair ramp and they push her through the door and instantly stale body-and-rubbing-alcohol-scented musty wafts color the suddenly overcrowded bedroom. Oma’s sedated head lolls, with tubes in her nose, an IV in her rice-paper wrist, bruises up her arm, and the palest of pale, blue-tinted skin. I feel a dark, hot weight on my back and legs and arms, crawling, creeping, clinging. And more cars are pulling into the drive and the ambulance is backing out and here she is and this is all really happening.
And me, I can’t do it. I just can’t deal.
And I’m gone—to the clattering voices of the aunts bickering, the dark, moody pools of Bitsy’s bugged-out eyes, Oma’s unkempt snow-white curls, her tiny feet like skeleton bones inside Bigfoot’s woolen socks, tubes pumping this and that out of her thin, frail body, blood, skin.
I’m gone, heeling it outside into the cheery late-morning sun, too cheery. I leap into my banger to find I’m boxed in by all the new arrivals, so I wheel quick around the far side of her house, bumping over flowerbeds to make my hasty, sweaty-mitted escape.
Marta is climbing from Dad’s truck and she catches my eyes, hers rimmed in sooty black from freshly shed tears.
Thank you, call again.