A dark sealed room of survival gear—tubes and tanks and lighted instruments—in a mining tunnel we called it a refuge chamber. Safe but severe, useful in the event of a rockfall or other hazard, it came to mind when I entered Mother’s room in the ICU in Littleford Hospital. It was sepulchral in its gloom and its paraphernalia, spooky, shadowy, a subterranean burial chamber, shaped like a refuge bay where we sometimes sheltered.
Frank said in a low voice, “This is costing a shit ton of money, like you wouldn’t believe.”
Droning through his nose, he sounded like one of the moronic machines in the room, the peep-peep of a monitor, the hiss of air in a pleated hose, the glug of a tube in a glowing dial—Mother herself on an upraised bed that was like a platform, her face slack and yellowy, her half-closed eyes angled upward, her flesh like marble, the poor woman wrapped in white sheets as though on a shelf in a deep recess of a pyramid, like a glimpse of the pharaonic: her head immobilized with a cranial clamp that could have been a halo over her marmoreal skull. It was how I imagined a mummy in a tomb.
“She’s about as comfortable as we can make her,” the nurse said. “Are you family?”
“I’m her son,” Frank said.
“I’m so sorry.” The nurse touched his arm in consolation.
“I’m her other son,” I said, from behind Frank’s back.
“This bozo left her in the house alone. He was supposed to be looking after her.” Frank leaned toward the nurse, as though making a crucial point to a jury. “I found her on the floor, facedown.”
“She must have fallen when she had her stroke,” the nurse said.
Frank turned to me and said, “See?”
When the nurse left, Frank smiled at the door, his face wolfish in the pale light flickering from the dials on the chugging and peeping machines, and his tone changed, not scolding any longer but sighing with pleasure as the door sucked shut.
“Nurses are so hot,” he said. “The way they fondle sick people. They’re not afraid of anything. They’ve seen it all—blood, bodily fluids, naked flesh”—he chuckled a little. “They’re unshockable. I love that.”
He was still whispering when we both stepped into the corridor; he looked up the corridor at the departing nurse.
“Whereas, your average doctor—he’s got these women to do the dirty work. He shows up, makes an ambiguous pronouncement, always tentative and noncommittal, all the while wearing a goofy hairnet and blue booties.”
Jerking his head at the passersby, Frank was alert and talkative, as the medical staff strode purposefully past, nurses, doctors, an orderly pushing a gurney with a cadaverous man on top; then a limping man on crutches, one of his feet encased in a big plastic boot. With the nurse Frank had blamed me for leaving Mother alone, but now he was almost jaunty, engrossed in his narration.
“Cal, you’re looking at a fortune here in potential lawsuits—I could score so big with these people,” he whispered as they went past, the bruised and the bandaged. “Ankle injury, probably fell, tripped on a sidewalk crack. That’s actionable, that’s a payday. Broken arm, concussion, knee brace—someone’s responsible. Medical malpractice. Maybe workers’ comp case I could inflate—they have no idea.” He slapped the wall. “Know what I should do? Advertise right here, buy some space right on this wall. Run an ad on the TV in the waiting room, put up my posters. Hospitals are always hurting for cash infusions. They’d gladly let me advertise here for a fee.”
He went on in this vein for another few minutes, eagerly imagining his strategies for suing someone on behalf of these poor shufflers and limpers.
To stop him I said, “I’m thinking about Ma.”
“You weren’t thinking about Ma when you stole her earrings.” He said this with gusto, as though I was squirming in the witness box, watched by a jury.
“Correction. Having them cleaned.”
“Extraordinary notion—dirty gold. The one metal that doesn’t tarnish. And you say you wanted to give it a good scrub. Imagine that.”
He was bobbing his head, he was energized, weirdly so, because this was hushed, busy Littleford Hospital, nurses moving swiftly, with urgency, not acknowledging us; patients seated awkwardly on benches, wounded and silent. The doctors loped, clutching clipboards and stethoscopes. And Mother was just behind that door in the refuge chamber, supine, sunken cheeks, hooked up to a purring monitor, tubes inserted in her nose, stuck in her arm, her wrist, one finger pinched in a clamp.
“What’s with you?” I said. “This lawsuit talk. Are you all right?”
“Never better,” he said. “Funny, but I get such a rush in hospitals. Among all these feeble people. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t feel superior, not at all, just amazingly lucky.”
He did feel superior. Frank often denied the very emotion he felt, stating the obvious. I get no pleasure from this, he’d say when he had the upper hand and was pleased with himself. Being in a hospital, among weak and sick and sorrowing people, he felt strong.
“It’s not sexual—ill-health is an unsensual downer.”
No—he believed the opposite. He could exert his will on these sick people who were too weak to resist, susceptible to any ray of hope. The young woman pushed past in a wheelchair, a pale, almost angelic face, tousled hair, loosely buttoned smock—no ability to refuse him—Frank was aroused by her passivity. Maybe it wasn’t sexual, maybe it was the knowledge that he could get her to sign anything he put in front of her.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I couldn’t stand listening to his gloating.
I slipped into Mother’s room, the refuge chamber, and was grateful for the darkness and the murmur of the machines, reassuring gulps and beeps, screens flickering with jumping lines and twitching dials, a bubbling in a tank somewhere. Mother—plugged in—was silent, unmoving. She scarcely seemed to be breathing; she was a slender shallow oblong under her sheet, a small head, a young girl’s profile, a frizz of hair, sunken cheeks, a skinny naked arm stuck with tubes. The activity in the room, the only proof she was alive, were the beeps and the whirring of the machines she was attached to, the dark diminishing transfusion bag, the emptying saline pouch.
“You’re welcome to take a seat.” It was a soft voice, the nurse entering behind me.
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s struggling a little. She was in distress when she was admitted. We managed to stabilize her.” The nurse was in the shadow of the monitors, though her arm was illuminated when she reached to tap on a dial. “She’s very weak. Poor old heart.”
“A good heart,” I said.
Hesitating a little, the nurse said, “I understand she’s been under a lot of stress, coping on her own.”
“No,” I said. “Very happy. I’ve been looking after her.”
“But doesn’t your job keep you overseas most of the time?”
“I quit my job. I’ve been living with my mother—fixing her meals, doing her laundry, making the bed, monitoring her medicine—all those pills”—I found myself going hoarse as I protested. “The only time I left her on her own was when I had an urgent errand to run”—I looked at my watch, it was ten thirty at night—“earlier today.”
“Was that with the gold earrings?”
“Who have you been talking to?”
My tone seemed to startle her, she excused herself, and as she ducked out I followed her, hoping to get her to repeat these slanders in front of Frank, so that I could bust him. He wasn’t on the bench, he was nowhere in sight. I found him downstairs in the hospital cafeteria, talking to another nurse, sipping coffee, holding the cup askew to his crooked face, a bubble of coffee seeping from the lower corner of his mouth as he began to speak.
“Here he is, brother Cal,” he said, and before I could speak, he licked his lips and said, “Cal, I want you to meet Nurse Nicole. She knew our mutual friend, Chicky Malatesta.”
“Pleased to meet you,” the nurse said, tugging her green scrubs straight and smoothing her sleeves. “Poor Chicky, he took a real bad fall. But I’m glad it turned out okay for him. Now I have to go. My shift begins pretty soon.”
“What are your hours?” Frank asked.
“Eleven until eight a.m. I’m on nights this month.”
Frank took a sip of coffee and with damp defiant lips said, “Graveyard shift.”
Nurse Nicole looked flustered, excused herself, and left us.
As she hurried away, Frank said, “Even in plain hospital scrubs, a magnificent body—maybe enhanced by plain hospital scrubs, which resemble peejays.”
He lost his smile when he saw me glaring at him. I said, “What did you tell Ma’s nurse about me?”
“Nothing.” He twisted his face into a haughty form of indignation, and with stiff offended legs he strutted away from me—so fast, so determined, that I next found him in Mother’s room, his face yellow from the glow of the monitor he was studying.
“You said that I neglected Ma,” I said, picking up where I’d left off, and hissing to keep my voice low. “That I was always away, traveling for my business. That I boosted her gold earrings. Jesus, Frank, you know very well none of that is true.”
“Keep it down, Cal,” he said in a scolding tone. “You probably don’t know this—most people don’t—but Ma can hear every word. Even comatose people, ones in vegetative states, they show no outward manifestation of cognition . . .”
“Wait a minute,” I said.
Frank lifted his hand and lowered it to signal that I must not interrupt and went on in the same dismal drawl.
“One example, of many, true story. Bedridden man, seemingly at death’s door, is visited by his supposedly grieving relatives. He hears them discussing the disposition of his estate, and they’re sort of conspiring, as he lies there silent and motionless. Then—surprise, surprise—he recovers, wakes from his coma, and is restored to health. And he disinherits all these low-life relatives who had no idea he’d heard them. How do I know this? Because I’m the counsel who fought them off in court. The man was able to recount what had been said by the grifters in his hospital room—huge case, landmark judgment . . .”
“Now you’re doing the shouting,” I said, to annoy him, and looked to see whether Mother had moved. But she was motionless, the breathing sound came from a machine with a bellowslike gasp, as the monitors blinked and beeped.
“And of course the relatives who lost out on the inheritance banged on my door and countersued.”
“So what did you do?”
“What I always do. I bit them on the neck, except one persistent cousin.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I mugged him with a rusty razor.”
“Like you did with Chicky Malatesta.”
“Supposition! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You scammed him. He told me the whole story.”
“Hearsay! He was lucky to get a penny. I dramatized his falling-down tale of woe.”
“Let’s take this outside,” I said, because if what he’d said was true, about Mother being able to hear us, she would be upset by our quarrel.
In the corridor, Frank said, “Chicky could have ended up with nothing. But I fought for him. I know he wasn’t happy with the payout. Some people . . .”
“He thinks you’re a cheat.”
“Ha, you should hear what Chicky says about you!” Frank looked delighted. “That you think you’re better than people in Littleford. That you’re secretive about your business. That you have money stashed in foreign banks. That you were unfaithful to Vita and a bad father to Gabe.”
“Please stop.” I knew Frank was repeating things he believed about me, or blamed me for, things that he whispered to people in town. But I trusted Chicky: Frank was every bit the cheat that Chicky had described.
Then I remembered what the nurse had said, and I began to object, lowering my voice when nurses of patients passed us in the corridor, the air thick with a soapy smell mingled with body odor and disinfectant and floor wax. But before I could resume and remind him of how he’d slandered me, he saw a doctor walk importantly past, in a gown and blue booties.
“I’m a doctor,” Frank said. “I’m a JD—Juris doctor. I could be a judge or a magistrate, whacking a gavel on a big bench, but no, I decided to help people—defend them, get them a fair trial and a payday. I don’t have a team of handmaidens in pajamas doing my work for me, like these guys.”
He kept this up, talking over me whenever I said something, and I thought, I hate this. He’s unbearable.
What stopped Frank was the door to Mother’s room opening, the nurse putting her head out and saying, “I think you need to be here.”
The room was unchanged, Mother still motionless among the sighing, wheezing machines and the beeping monitor, the shadowy atmosphere of a refuge bay in a mining tunnel. The lines on one monitor were flattening, the beep-beep slowing, the bag of saline drip down two-thirds, the pouch of blood almost empty.
“I put her on morphine,” the nurse said, reaching and lightly tapping a tube. “She’s weakening. I could increase the dose if you approve.”
“If you do that, she’ll be out of it,” Frank said, slipping his phone out of his pocket. “I need her to listen.”
I said, “She might be in pain.”
“I have to do this.”
He poked numbers into his phone and when it was answered he said, “Frolic, I want you to say goodbye to Ma,” and held the phone to Mother’s bluish ear, Mother herself motionless, her mouth half open, Frank hovering with his phone jammed against Mother’s head. And when Frolic was done there were more calls: he got his son, Victor, on the phone (“but keep that girlfriend of yours away”) and had his dog woof into the phone; he dialed Vita—a new home number I didn’t have, and Vita said a prayer of farewell. Frank asked for Gabe and spoke warmly to him, holding the phone away from me.
“She can hear you,” Frank kept saying, as Gabe said goodbye to his grandmother, while I sat silently, detached from this leave-taking by phone, too tearful to speak, devastated by this deathwatch.
I hated to listen. I resisted, thinking, I never want to see Frank again. The house is mine. I’ll sell it and go away. I will be free of him. I need to concentrate on Mother’s suffering, to cling to her, and give her strength to breathe.
Frank shut down his phone and beckoned to the nurse. “Go ahead, increase the morphine now.”
“You know, it’ll depress her breathing.”
“Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
The nurse hesitated. “She might not have long.”
As the nurse fiddled with the knob of the morphine drip, I heard Mother gasp—a sorrowful deflation, not a single gasp but a series of agonized breaths, her struggling to suck air into her half-open mouth, laboring and losing the breath, suffocating in the still air of the shadowy room, as though she was underwater.
It pained me to look, I hated to listen, I glanced at the monitor and saw the line on the screen—no longer jumping and jagged, no peaks and troughs, but squeezed and finally flattening to a vibrant horizontal stripe.
Only then did I turn to look and saw Mother’s chin fall, her mouth gaping open in defeat. I wanted to run, but in a reflex of concern I remembered Mother’s piety.
“Let’s say a prayer.”
“A lot of good that’ll do.”
I loathed Frank too much to reply to that—and now I knew I was free of him. Walking out of the room, I said, “I’m going back to my house.”
Calling after me, Frank said, “Our house!”