Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Trevor
The oxygen tubing has slipped from her nose again.
I notice it the way you notice anything in a room you've sat in too long — the water glass on the nightstand needs refilling, the curtain hangs slack in the July heat, and the clear plastic cannula has worked loose from Eileen's left nostril, dangling beside her cheek like a pale worm while she dozes in the armchair.
The concentrator hums on the floor beside her, pushing its steady breath through twenty feet of tubing that snakes across the carpet.
Low, constant, the kind of white noise you stop hearing until it changes.
I've been in here ten minutes with a magazine I found on the dresser — something about gardening, which is funny given the state of the side yard — and I didn't catch the loose tubing until her breathing shifted, going from the ragged but rhythmic pull of assisted oxygen to something thinner, more desperate.
I set the magazine down and crouch beside the chair.
Her face is turned toward the window, eyes closed, the skin around her mouth slack.
Up close, the damage is worse than it was two days ago, or maybe I'm just seeing it clearer now that the funeral's over and there's nothing to look at but the truth.
Her collarbones are sharp under the thin cotton of her nightgown.
The veins in her temples stand blue against paper-white skin.
I reach for the cannula. My fingers are careful, which is not a quality I associate with my hands.
These are the hands that held an M4 in Iraq, that put a tourniquet on a corporal's leg while rounds snapped past my helmet.
Now they're adjusting plastic tubing with the delicacy of a bomb tech, and the disconnect would be funny if it weren't so sad.
The cannula slides back into place. I tuck the tubing behind her ear, my thumb brushing the dry skin of her temple, and that's when her hand comes up and catches my wrist.
Her grip is stronger than it should be. Thin fingers, dry as kindling, but there's a tensile strength in them that surprises me. Her eyes are open, fixed on mine with a clarity that cuts through the morphine haze I know she's riding.
"I need you to stay," she says.
Not a question. A statement, steady despite the way her chest rises and falls in shallow, labored pulls. The concentrator hisses beside us, indifferent to the transaction happening three feet away.
I straighten. My jaw goes tight without me telling it to, the way it does when someone says something I don't want to hear and I've got no good reason to refuse.
I look at the water glass, low and smudged.
I look at the curtain, faded from years of sun.
I look at the wallpaper — a pattern of faint blue flowers I've never noticed before, probably because I've spent the last decade trying to forget this room exists.
"Not for the paperwork," Eileen says. Her hand is still on my wrist. "For a while."
The words hang there. For a while. How long is a while? A week? A month? The rest of her life, which the doctors put at eight months, six months back — which leaves what, two? Three? The math is simple and brutal and I don't want to do it.
"I'll stay a bit longer," I say. Flat, stripped of ceremony, the verbal equivalent of a shrug. I didn't plan to say it. My mouth decided without consulting the rest of me.
Her hand drops to her lap, fingers settling into the blanket with the tired precision of something that's done its job. She gives me a small nod — satisfied, unsurprised, like she knew what I'd say before I said it. The corner of her mouth moves, not quite a smile.
"Thank you, sweetheart."
The word lands somewhere I don't usually let people reach.
It's warm and it hurts and I don't examine it.
I stand there with the concentrator humming at my ankles and the smell of medication and old wood in my nose and the weight of what I've agreed to settling across my shoulders like a coat I didn't ask for.
A creak from the hallway. I turn.
Cole is in the doorway, in a gray t-shirt thin at the shoulders, his hair pushed back like he's been dragging his hands through it. His eyes move from me to Eileen to the concentrator, cataloging the scene with the efficiency of someone who's been managing it alone for months.
He catches the tail end of whatever just happened. I can see it in his face — the way it closes, shutters coming down, his mouth going flat. He doesn't ask. Something in my face tells him, or maybe it's the satisfied set of Eileen's features that says mission accomplished.
He steps into the room. The doorway is narrow — this house was built for people smaller than either of us — and he has to move past me to get to the concentrator.
His shoulder brushes my arm. Not hard. A glancing contact, the kind that happens in crowded elevators, except there's nothing crowded about this moment but the air between us, suddenly dense with everything we're not saying.
We both go rigid. I feel it in my arm, the muscles locking at the point of contact.
I feel it in his shoulder, the way it tenses against mine for the half-second we touch.
Neither of us acknowledges it. Neither steps back.
We endure it like something painful, which it is, and then he's past me, crouching at the concentrator, checking the settings with hands that know exactly what they're doing.
"Flow rate's low," he says, not looking at me. Neutral, professional, the voice of a man discussing a mechanical problem rather than his dying mother's oxygen supply.
"I just adjusted it."
"You adjusted the tubing. The flow rate's different." He turns a dial, and the hiss deepens, takes on a wetter quality. "There."
I stand there a second too long, watching the back of his head, the sharp line where the fade meets the longer hair on top. There's a smear of grease on his neck, and I have the stupid, useless urge to reach out and wipe it away.
I don't.
I step back into the hall instead. The wallpaper is cool when I press my palm flat against it, like I'm checking for a pulse in the wall itself.
The blue flowers run the length of the hallway, faded and persistent.
I listen to the concentrator behind me, to the murmur of Cole's voice saying something to Eileen I can't make out, and what I've agreed to settles deeper, finds new bones to rest against.
A bit longer. That's what I said. A bit longer in a house where every minute feels like an hour and every hour holds the strain of wanting something I can't have, watching something I can't stop, and carrying a guilt so old it's grown comfortable, like a bad knee.
I take my hand off the wall and head for the kitchen. The linoleum sticks under my feet. In the living room the ceiling fan turns with a wobble that means the bearings are shot. Normal sounds. A house that's been falling apart for years and finally stopped trying so hard.
I fill the water glass at the tap and drink it standing at the sink. The water tastes like pipes. Through the window, the side yard with its tangle of weeds and the neighbor's rusted swing set beyond the fence. Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.
The days take on a rhythm, and the rhythm is collision.
It starts in the galley kitchen with its sticky linoleum and the one working burner.
The other clicks but won't catch, and after the third try I give up and cook everything on the left side, so it all comes out off-center — eggs with one crispy edge, grilled cheese with a black line down the middle like a border between edible and ruined.
Cole has a system. Of course he does. The pill organizer lives on the counter beside the microwave, a plastic thing with the days and times in black marker on masking tape: MORNING, NOON, AFTERNOON, BED.
Each compartment holds pills of different sizes and colors, arranged by a man who's memorized the pharmacy by heart.
I move the organizer to wipe the counter.
Just slide it six inches to clean up a coffee stain.
When I put it back, I'm off by maybe an inch.
Cole comes in twenty minutes later for the noon dose, picks it up, and pauses.
His eyes go to the spot where it usually sits, then to where I've left it, and he doesn't say anything.
He just moves it back with the quiet certainty of someone righting furniture after an earthquake, and the silence of that correction is worse than if he'd shouted.
I forget to refill the water pitcher. Eileen keeps a lidded plastic one on her nightstand that needs filling twice a day with filtered water from the fridge.
I forget once, then twice, and the third time Cole fills it himself while I'm making coffee, efficient and wordless, and the message is clear: I've added a task to his list, and he won't give me the satisfaction of complaining about it.
He's been doing this alone long enough that my being useless changes nothing for him.
I leave the wrong burner on low. The working one I shut off after scrambling eggs.
The broken one — the one that clicks and won't catch — I leave open, and three hours later Cole walks in, smells gas, not enough to be dangerous but enough to notice, and reaches past me for the knob.
His arm brushes mine. We both step back like we've been shocked.
"You left the burner on," he says.
"I turned it off."
"The left one. The right was still on."
"It doesn't work."
"It still uses gas." He turns and walks out.
Our exchanges have the economy of radio traffic. Necessary information, stripped of everything else.
"She needs the afternoon dose in twenty minutes."
"I know."
"You moved the nebulizer."
"It was in the way."
"It was exactly where it needed to be."