Nighttime and the second shift in the oncology terminal ward at St. Luke’s, where the dying count the minutes and hours listening to the meager span of their heartbeats: a single wail of pain from a patient’s room, the soft shuffling of slippers upon tile, the muted sound of prayer from Mrs. Polaski’s bedside, where the family priest is performing the last rites, a telephone ringing at the empty nurse’s station. From partially open doorways that look in upon dark rooms comes the sound of monitors and IV pumps clicking and beeping softly, methodically. Maggie sits in the dark and stares at Deirdre Malone asleep on her bed, breathing raggedly through a respirator. On the railing of the bed a PCEA pump, which allows her to self-administer morphine at the push of a button. From a radio on the nightstand comes the soft sound of big band music from World War II. She recognizes “A Sleepy Lagoon” and then Jo Stafford’s “Long Ago and Far Away” and then perhaps Benny Goodman or Harry James.
Earlier in the day, Maggie had sat with Deirdre after her latest biopsy; she’d cried herself to sleep and now her cheeks are streaked and sullied. Tenderly, Maggie wipes them with a warm, damp cloth, lifts the mouthpiece of the respirator, and wipes it clean, softly sings the Latin from the Requiem Mass, for she can never be sure that Deirdre can’t hear her, and hopes that it provides some small measure of comfort: Inparadisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem.
She takes Deirdre’s vitals, records them on the patient log at the bottom of the bed, stares at her face so that she can memorize it for when she’s gone; she tries to do this with all of her patients, especially those who have died alone without family or loved ones, as if this small act can somehow allow them to live in the world after they’re gone, and by doing so she is promising that she will never let go, that she will never leave them. Her head is filled with the faces of hundreds of dead and she often feels so powerless and sad it is as if a great weight were placed upon her heart that she feels will never lift; but if she can keep their memory alive, then they will not be alone, no matter where they are, where they have gone on to. And when she and Duncan attend Mass at St. Mary of the Wharves, she will imagine their faces and light a candle for them and pray for an end to their suffering.
She pulls a chair up to the bed and takes Deirdre’s hand now: She will be here when she wakes and here with her when she receives news of the biopsy—she will not leave her. Maggie closes her eyes, lets the dim pulse in Deirdre’s hand inform her breathing. Deirdre’s monitor clicks and beeps softly. From the hallway comes the sound of slippered feet, the loose clattering wheel of a gurney, a page for a doctor from the nurse’s station reverberating forlornly through the empty halls, and then the silence of the night, which somehow seems worse, capturing as it does in the absence of noise and hectic industry the solemn weight of pain and suffering and loss. So much loss.
Maggie rubs at her eyes. She is eight again and staring up at the adults passing about her, their footsteps continually thumping up the back stairs from the landing to the third floor of the apartment on Bartlett Street just outside Boston’s Dudley Square. The sullen heat of late summer and even the birds silent in the trees outside the window.
Tar-streaked ceilings still smelling of other people’s smoke, the broken latch hook by the back screen door that jangles soft and metallic as people come and go, the smell of boiled foods, and a fan turning impotently in the window of her mother’s bedroom, where Mother was lying with closed eyes and dressed in her pastel blue floral summer dress, the spit that glistened her lips in the final rictus of pain now dried, and those same lips that had kissed her goodnight a mere night ago already seeming shriveled and pale despite the recently applied lipstick, like two slivers of worm left upon the sidewalk in the hot sun, and no breeze at the window—the lace curtains flat as a board—to push the strange smell of her out. But where was her father?
Men, holding bottles of beer or glasses of spirits, attired in their mourning wear: black pants and jackets, crumpled white shirts, and thin black ties—she smelled their aftershave and cologne, cigarettes and sweat, a sense of her father in all that, as if many of them had just come from their daily labors. Pushing in and about them she desperately searched for him, an unexplainable panic rising in her chest, first in the kitchen, then the crowded small living room overlooking the street, the bathroom, and finally her mother’s bedroom, where she stood looking at her mother, and then to her aunts and female cousins sitting on chairs arranged about the bed, red-eyed and crying softly.
She expected to feel his heavy hand on her shoulder and for him to pull him to her, to hear his voice in song, some manner of lullaby, soothing and yet heartbreaking, filled with the loss of past generations of his people—hundreds upon hundreds of years of it, and that loss came to life with his voice at night as he crooned her to sleep when he and her mother came in from the Dudley Street Opera House or the Rose Croix, and his breath warm with stout and whiskey. The comfort and shelter of her father’s songs, which captured such tragedy and yet were so filled with passion it trilled beneath her skin, reassured her that as long as he was near, nothing could harm her, and if he were here to sing now, surely her mother would awaken. Why wasn’t he here? Why wasn’t he by her mother’s bed?
Where’s Daddy? she asked Aunt Una, the one with the lantern jaw and the sharp nose and the sweat beading above her upper lip and the red hair like Maggie and her mother.
I looked all about the place, Maggie said, but I can’t find him anywhere—did he go down to the square? And the women in the room stared at her with such pity that she felt she couldn’t breathe and Aunt Margaret reached out her hand and then pulled her onto her lap, held Maggie’s head against her shoulder and began to cry, her great bosom heaving, but this brought Maggie no comfort—she only wanted to pull away from this woman and demand that they all tell her where he was; she wanted to scream: Where’s my father! I need my father! And as if she knew this, Aunt Margaret’s words came to her slowly, hiccupping with grief: He’s left dear child, sure his heart is broke with your mother’s death. He left this morning before dawn. I’m so sorry, my dear. I’m so very sorry.
It’s near two A.M. when Maggie leaves the hospital via the emergency room. A young man with long, disheveled hair and high on PCP is bleeding out onto the floor and hollering about angels. He’s fallen from a second-floor balcony onto a wrought iron railing, impaling his eye socket, stomach, and leg, and yet somehow he is upright, talking and walking, searching the room with his one blazing eye and clutching his guts spilling from the cavity in his abdomen. She stares at the purple intestine, the deep red of muscle, the strings of tendon and white bone as two nurses and a surgeon frantically work to hold him down upon a table and stop the hemorrhaging.
At home Maggie heats up leftovers in the kitchen, pours herself a whiskey. She pads the hallway, looks in on Duncan, sleeping, turned away toward the wall, the light from the hall casting slivers of refracted light upon his ceiling of stars and constellations. Static pops and bursts from the old Vulcanite radio glowing amber at his bedside, like an eye in the dark, and from which comes the sudden, brief sound of someone talking. She waits, listens to Duncan’s breathing, and then, satisfied, goes to change. In the bedroom the television is on, casting shadows upon the wall, and Joshua is on his back, arms stretched wide, and at first she thinks he’s asleep. She leans over the bed, kisses him on the cheek. He’s looking at her in the dark; she can see his eyes glistening with the light cast from the television.
Florence Nightingale, he says, and she smiles. How was your night, baby?
It was fine. I’m fine, just tired.
How’s Deirdre?
Still alive.
She has the sense that he nods in the dark.
You should be asleep, she says. You’ve got to be up in less than three hours.
I know, baby. I already slept a bit, once Duncan went to bed.
She knows he’s lying, and that if he’s awake now, he’ll probably stay awake until the alarm sounds. She asks: Did you take your meds?
Joshua sighs, rolls his shoulders. She can hear tendons and ligaments crack. Nah, you know I don’t like how they make me feel. I can only do so many days and my head gets messed up.
You’re not supposed to start and stop, she says. It’ll make you manic. No wonder you can’t sleep.
I promise I’ll go back on them tomorrow. Don’t look at me like that, baby.
Howabout you take them now?
Okay. Sure. They’re on the dresser.
Maggie brings him the pill bottles and he takes them from her and she can see that his hands are trembling. He pops three of each in his mouth, washes them down with water from a glass on the side table.
That the right amount?
It’s whatever works.
By the way, thanks for dinner.
No problem. Duncan and me, we made it together. Was it good?
Best lasagna I ever had.
Liar.
Maggie grins. Maybe just a little bit.
How is he?
He’s fine. Wanted me to listen to that radio of his when he went to bed. So, I did.
And?
And what? The damn thing doesn’t work, yet he still listens to it.
Maybe it comforts him to have something from the orphanage with him. I think he gets scared in the night.
We all get scared in the night. I get scared in the night, especially without you. Why don’t you come to bed?
In a little bit, I need to unwind first, decompress.
I’ll help you unwind.
Shhhhhh. You’ll sleep, that’s what you’ll do. Should I turn the TV off?
No, no, I like it on. It helps me sleep.
Okay. Close your eyes.
Joshua laughs and closes his eyes. Goodnight, Baby.
Goodnight.
Maggie pulls the bedroom door closed, leaving it slightly ajar in case Duncan calls out in the night, and glances back at Joshua, bathed in blue light, still staring blankly at the flickering black-and-white images on the screen. She wonders if he’s even aware of what he’s watching. She thinks of Deirdre not because Joshua is dying but because he is never at rest and his soul, she knows, like hers, is a damaged, fragile thing, and she wonders if two people such as herself and Joshua can, together, make the other one strong, and with Duncan, if they can make a life.
May angels lead you into Paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your coming and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem and O sweet Lord Jesus, grant them rest; grant them everlasting rest.