10

INDUCTION, INTUBATION, EXTUBATION.

They were still at the intubation phase. The patient was in a deep narcosis, Eleonoora was finishing up the suture. The surgery had been an easy, routine operation.

Riitta, Eleonoora’s favorite anesthesiologist to have in the operating room—quick to smile, a little odd but intently focused on her work—checked the patient’s status, decreased the anesthesia and nodded approvingly. There was time to make a careful suture.

Even after twenty years in the operating room the mystery of artificial sleep never ceased to amaze Eleonoora. She saw it every day and knew the history of its attempts and failures in detail.

No one knew how the mechanism of sinking into sleep actually worked. All that was known was that certain substances caused sufficient unconsciousness and numbness for an operation to be performed. There was no way to measure the dose beforehand. The same amount could cause deep narcosis in one patient and leave another merely drowsy, at the edge of wakefulness. Most people didn’t remember what happened while they were under anesthesia. But there were those who remained alert during the surgery and described stepping outside themselves and watching the operation, feeling the incision.

A patient once told her of an experience of grace that exceeded her comprehension. “It wasn’t an angel or God that I saw, but it took me in its arms and I felt like I never had to be alone. It was absolute safety, like a child in its mother’s arms.”

Watching a patient sleep, Eleonoora often thought about where they were while they were under. Riitta had once said that patients went toward birth and death at the same time when they were anesthetized. It has its own time stratum, that’s what I think, Riitta said. All of your memories are there, all the people. Think about how it would feel to hold your whole life up, see it in its entirety, from a little distance. If all the patients remembered their mental state while they were under anesthesia, that’s what they would tell you they saw. I think it’s like the state a person is in just before they die. To know everything, see everything clearly. It’s too bad people so rarely come back to the rest of us with the information.

Maybe it’s a blessing, Eleonoora thought. Maybe we’d be crushed by the knowledge. Maybe only God is meant to see life in its entirety, if there is a God. And the dead, if there is life after death. And writers, who put themselves outside of life and diligently follow each character’s every thought and feeling and shine a spotlight on everything that happens.

Eleonoora finished the suture and Riitta started the extubation.

“How’s your mother?” she asked when the operation was over and the patient had been taken to recovery.

Eleonoora had told Riitta about her mother in early spring, when her brief cancer treatments had ended.

“She wants to be at home. We’ve been trying to manage it for a few days.”

Riitta touched her shoulder gently. A familiar feeling flooded over her from somewhere in the most secret, guarded part of herself: gratitude for her concern. There was a touch of surprise in it. People were endlessly good, wise, and gentle in the midst of all the hurry, the conferences, the dinner invitations, the smell of disinfectant, the meeting reminders.

She would have liked to tell Riitta what she had tried to say to Eero every day in different ways—nagging him about going to the grocery or cleaning the wrong way, complaining that no one else in the house ever seemed to wash the dishes: I don’t know if I know how to be motherless, and I don’t know if I can learn how in the weeks we have left. It feels like it will take the end of my life away.

“Time is growing shorter,” was all she managed to say.

“That’s the way it always is,” Riitta said. “Talk to your mother, reminisce with her about what’s been. And when the time comes, let go.”

There it was: let go. She hadn’t let go of anyone, not for a second. She had always clung to everything, tried to keep everything together. Where did this worry come from? Why did she think she was the one who should hold up the whole world?

One tear, then another, rolled down her cheek.

Riitta hugged her.

HER FATHER ANSWERED the phone after three rings.

“Did the home care people come over?”

“They took some blood and brought a pain pump. The nurse showed me the dose but your mother still won’t agree to use it. Apparently there’s no need yet.”

“Has she eaten?”

“Not yet. She’s feeling a little poorly.”

Eleonoora felt the floor pitch. She fixed her gaze on the bar of soap at the edge of the sink.

“What is it?” she heard herself ask.

“Just something,” he said. “She spent the morning resting and hasn’t really wanted to get up.”

Eleonoora sensed other meanings behind his words.

“I’m going to drive to Tammilehto this evening with Anna. Don’t touch the pain pump. I’ll come look at it on the way there and see how it works.”

She knew her bossiness annoyed her father, but she couldn’t help herself. She changed clothes, opened the door, walked down the corridor. The hospital carried on with diligent industry around her. The vendor in the cafeteria was putting berliners on a tray, a nurse walked quickly by and nodded at her.

She dialed Anna’s number. The phone rang six times. She remembered that Anna was at work, and left a message.

She chose Eero’s number. She let the heaviness come. She let it come two seconds before Eero answered, but for some reason, she didn’t really understand why, her tone of voice changed at the last minute to something slightly bored, demanding.

“Where are you?”

“At work,” Eero said. “I’m on my way home.”

Eleonoora couldn’t say it. She always wore a mask that Eero had to come and remove, patiently, over and over.

“We’ll be at Tammilehto. Buy something for you and Maria for dinner.”

“OK,” he said.

“But don’t use the grill yet. Maria said she’d wash it today, but I want to be there when we use it for the first time.”

“OK.”

The line was quiet, an invisible cord stretched between them.

“Are you all right?” Eero asked.

She didn’t answer right away. Tomorrow evening when she came home she would close the bedroom door and press herself against him and let the tears come. She would tell him what she was keeping to herself now. They would keep the door closed, let the walls shelter them, go to bed and build a fort, pretend there was no death for a brief moment.

“I’m fine,” she said.

ELEONOORA’S MOTHER ASKED her to bring her some water. Eleonoora asked her father to leave. She wanted to examine her mother, but she didn’t want him to see it. He preferred not to see her take the doctor’s role. But what else could she do? It was easier to palpate her abdomen than bear the blunt pain of worry.

The home care worker had come again because Mom hadn’t been feeling well. Mom was cool and polite through the whole visit. She only gave in to her petulance and annoyance after the nurse had left.

Eleonoora poured some water into a glass. Her mother tried to drink, but the water made her feel sick and she wanted it taken away. She told her to open the drapes. That wasn’t enough—she wanted the drapes taken down so she could see the whole sky. When Eleonoora had done this, standing on the windowsill, twisting her neck wrong, reaching up till her arms ached, her mother lay for a moment enduring the rays of sunshine, then asked her to put them back up again.

“What’s the matter with you?” Eleonoora huffed. “You’re like a child.”

“Out. Get out of here,” her mother yelled. “Leave me in peace.”

Eleonoora was closing the drapes, her hand halfway raised, paralyzed by the command. She looked at her mother, baffled.

“Why don’t you get crabby with Dad? Why are you never like this with anyone else? Don’t you know how hard this is?”

The question came out as an accusation. Suddenly her mother looked angry.

“So this is about your pain now? I’m the one who’s dying.”

“And you won’t let anybody help you. You just make it harder to help.”

“How are you supposed to help me?” Elsa said. She waited a moment, then said the heaviest thing: “Everyone dies alone.”

For the first time Eleonoora saw helplessness in her mother’s face. For some reason she answered it harshly, maybe because she wanted to quickly bury her mother’s words with her own: “And you can die all by yourself if you keep this up. Let me know when you’ve decided whether to accept any help or not.”

She closed the door louder than she meant to. Tears came as soon as she left the room.

She had cried in these rooms when she was five years old, shouted accusations at her mother as a teenager, slammed doors, maybe this very door. She had run out into the hallway and raged. It seemed like it had all happened just a moment ago. Sometimes she had been so vehemently angry with her mother and father that even she wondered where it came from.

She went into the kitchen, opened the dishwasher, ran water in the sink. This was an old habit, washing dishes and crying and feeling she had been mistreated. When she washed dishes she could court martyrdom, the running water and choreographed movements helped the feeling come. There were two wineglasses on the counter with a little wine in the bottom.

She opened the trash cupboard door. There was an empty Syrah bottle.

Before she had time to think she had grabbed the bottle and was on her way to the bedroom.

“What’s this? Have you been drinking wine?”

Her mother looked as if she didn’t understand the question.

“You drink some wine and then you complain that you don’t feel well, is that it? Who with, Anna?”

“With your father. I’m a grown woman. I can have one glass of wine.”

“Not when you’re in this condition you can’t.”

“You don’t know anything about this,” her mother said in a strangled voice. “You think you know about this kind of pain, but you know nothing. You know nothing.”

Eleonoora was quiet, the bottle dangling from her hand, dripping red drops on the floor.

There was anger in her mother’s eyes. The thought came to Eleonoora that she would be relieved when her mother died, secretly relieved, if not downright happy. She shoved the thought aside in the nick of time, before it had a chance to show itself.

“You wouldn’t believe how happy I would be to take some of your pain for you. If it were possible I’d even take all of it.”

Suddenly she remembered the helplessness that had surrounded her when Anna was small and experienced her first pain.

Sometimes it had felt like every one of Anna’s cries carried her farther away.

When Anna was two years old she had burned her fingers on the oven. They were making gingerbread cookies and she had been careless, letting Anna watch the light-brown stars puff up in the heat of the oven. As Eleonoora took the pan out of the oven, Anna pointed with her little finger at one of the star’s points. She’d turned her back for just a moment, a second, leaving the oven door open behind her. And while her back was turned, the little girl grabbed the oven door for support.

A stupefied look, bewildered. As if she felt betrayed. Eleonoora felt like she was the one who had betrayed her. She had made her daughter believe that baking would be fun, that life would be fun. There she stood with her gingerbread, smiling, while her daughter was experiencing horrible agony. Being betrayed, the incomprehension at being left alone, the reality of her own pain, all of it showed in the little girl’s face for a hundredth of a second.

It was the first time that Eleonoora had simply seen Anna for her own self. My daughter, who came from me, but completely her own self.

At the same time Eleonoora realized she would never be able to completely protect her from harm. Then Anna had started to cry.

They had to take her to the hospital—the burn had formed large white blisters. They had to lance the blisters every night for a week and coat her hands with thick medicated cream. And every evening Anna cried bitterly.

Anna always stopped crying once Eleonoora comforted her long enough, always. But Eleonoora could always see that stranger inside Anna, that other person developing little by little, differentiating herself with every sob.

Eleonoora looked at her mother and reached out a hand helplessly. “Tell me what I can do. Tell me.”

Her mother was quiet for a moment, then patted the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

She took Eleonoora in her arms. She gave in. They would lie side by side like this when Eleonoora was a child.

“Your father can’t bear this,” her mother said. “He pretends to be strong, but he can’t bear it, I can see that.”

“He’ll be all right.”

“You don’t know.”

“What? Hasn’t he always been here? Decade after decade. Hasn’t he always stayed close to you? That’s not a small thing.”

Her mother looked out the window, her face closed up.

“No,” she said. “It’s not a small thing.”

They lay side by side. Eleonoora lifted her legs onto the bed and stretched out.

She tried to put a different tone in her voice. “Did you get quite drunk?”

“No,” her mother answered. “Hardly drank any at all. Three glasses.”

“Three! You’re not dying, you’re hungover.”

“Well, you know what they say,” her mother said. “A hangover is a small death.”

“That’s what they say about orgasms.”

“Oh, is that what it was?”

Eleonoora finally got it out. She dropped the sentence carelessly, as if it were one of many: “I don’t want you to go.”

“I’m not going yet,” her mother said. “Not quite yet.”

They heard the front door open. Maria yoo-hooed to them, came to the bedroom doorway. Anna followed her.

“How are you feeling?” Maria immediately asked.

“Just gathering some strength here,” Elsa answered.

“More pain meds?” Maria asked Eleonoora, as if she were her assistant at the hospital.

“Something else. Medicine’s not what we need,” Elsa answered lightheartedly. “We need a song. My sedimentation rate’s over twenty and my CRP has risen to a hundred. I ought to get a song for that, ‘The Ballad of CRP.’”

Anna was finally brave enough to come into the room. She went to the foot of the bed and pinched her mother’s toes affectionately.

“We brought a song with us, just in case. How does that rhyme go?”

“The rhyme for when you’re hurt,” Maria said, pleased.

Eleonoora said the first verse.

“Uh-huh,” Elsa said, suddenly glum.

“What?” Eleonoora said. “Don’t you want us to say it?”

“Haven’t we heard it enough?” her mother said.

“What do you mean?” Maria asked, uncomprehending. “What do you mean enough?”

Eleonoora looked at Maria, then at Anna. Anna’s hand was still on her foot. Anna looked at her, then at her grandmother.

“What is it?” Eleonoora said, looking at each of the girls in turn. “What’s going on here?”

Elsa shrugged. “Nothing. Nothing at all. How about a funny song?”

Anna smiled and Eleonoora made a note of the nervousness on her face.

ELEONOORA DIDN’T START to cry until they were walking to the car.

For some reason the car alarm went off. She quickly tried to punch in the code, but the siren shrieked, piercing, reached whining into their ears and stayed there, ringing.

Maria asked something over the noise, and then the tears finally came. Maria came around the car to where she was and took her in her arms. This was the kind of daughter she’d raised. This girl who came without question, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that mothers break down sometimes, mothers who have to worry about the groceries and the dishes and the cleaning and the medicines and the car alarm, all the while enduring their own mother’s temper and peevishness that only just manages to hide the reality underneath—the slow but inevitable journey toward oblivion.

The lights flashed, the siren howled.

“Shhh, it’s all right, it’s OK,” Maria said, as if things had always been this way, as if she’d always had her arms around her.

Eleonoora looked at Anna, recognized that same helplessness in her gaze that she’d often seen when Anna was in pain. On the day of the oven door when she was a child, on the day when she said she’d been lying on the floor for more than a week.

She saw Anna’s hesitation, then she closed her eyes and left the world alone for a moment.