Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Evelyn
April 2002
I teeter outside, hold on to the walls until I reach the porch and make my way to my bench to sit beside Joseph. He kneels with his back to me, clearing yellowed stalks and withered stems to make way for fresh green shoots. The air has a chill to it, the breeze dragging tannins of winter despite the brightness of the spring sun.
He turns as I crunch through the debris. “How was your rest?”
I wonder how long I slept; I don’t even recall lying down. “I dreamed about my mother again.”
“Want to talk about it?”
I finger the buttons on my sweater as the breeze picks up, not wanting to ask for Joseph’s help. “The way she was in the end, how scary it must have been for her... I can’t imagine going through this without you. She didn’t have anyone.”
“She had you.”
“She barely knew who I was by then.” All those visits to the nursing home, unsure what year in her mind I entered as I opened the door, or if she would recognize me at all. She had gotten lost in our neighborhood six times; when she was found wandering after midnight in the dead of winter, claiming to have a birthday card to deliver, we had no choice. The last four years of her life were spent there, the sharp smell of cleaning solution over the musky stench of decay was enough to make me want to turn around each time I stepped through the automatic double doors. Each day her reality shifting into a different point in time, where lost loved ones were alive, where ancient wounds were fresh and gnawing, and sometimes two people who never coexisted found themselves together in her mind. The stark rooms, silent except for the drone of a television or occasional incoherent moans, the blank stares on the residents’ faces, the way time never seemed to pass from one minute to the next, from one day or week or month. The lives each one of them had lived, stories within their bones. The forgetting. The waiting. Waiting for loved ones. Waiting for a meal to be brought to their laps, fed to them from a spoon.
“I still think you were a comfort to her.” He notices me fumble with the buttons. “Are you cold?”
I shake my head as a cloud slips away, wrapping me in sunlight. The dream nags at me again. “I feel sorry for her...she was so alone, her whole life.” I had never seen my parents be affectionate, not like Joseph’s parents. Mrs. Myers planted kisses on Mr. Myers’s scruffy cheeks, he twirled her around the living room to a spinning record. I rarely saw my mother and father in the same room except for meals, saw them touch only to pass matches for their cigarettes. And the way I fought with her, the way I left her when Tommy died...was it she who wouldn’t come out of her room, or me who didn’t consider her unimaginable sorrow, a mother forced to bury a child, me who never pushed open her door, even to say goodbye?
“In my dream, she called for help and I didn’t save her, all because she was angry with me and yelled at me.” Another tear falls, and I let it.
Joseph is quiet, listening as he yanks the wilted brush, creating a pile beside him.
“I was angry at her for so long...she was so critical. But maybe that was the only way she knew how to get people’s attention? I don’t know...” I shrug, shame rises pink in my cheeks. All along I thought she cast me aside, but maybe it was me who never needed her. I was the one safely on land. I had Tommy, and Joseph, then Maelynn, and the children. She was trapped in the house like a restless spirit, mourning her son, abandoned by her daughter, ignored by her husband, drifting, waiting for someone to notice her. “I hate that it took losing her to finally understand her...” Our last conversation rings in my ears. “I couldn’t be there for her before it was too late.”
Joseph nods. “There’s no use punishing yourself. Sometimes, it takes time to see things the way they really were.”
I try to remember the dream even as it begins to fragment and slip from me. The details blur, but I can hear her call my name, crying for help. I feel the waves roll over my feet as she floats away.
Joseph continues to work as I sit with wandering thoughts. My mother’s nursing home, how few men I ever saw there. Room after room of women who had lost their husbands, friends, family and often their minds. Which is worse to lose, the one you love, or your ability to recognize their face? Gratitude washes over me that I will never have to know years without Joseph, or years without the memories we spun together like the warmest wool.
I ask, “Are you afraid?”
The surge of love I feel for him is nearly unbearable, his crooked knuckles, the dull ache he kneads out of his leg after a long day, his affinity for night swims, every intimate detail that I carry, the affection I feel even for the dirt beneath his fingernails. If we were younger, I’d crawl through the grass and rest my head into his lap, my eyes on the clouds, or wrap my legs around his waist and nuzzle my nose into his neck, whispering, Are you afraid? but today it’s an exertion to have come outside, to merely ask him from where I sit.
He sets down his spade and brushes his palms against each other, standing with effort to join me on the bench. Another stab of longing, yearning to fold myself into his lap once more. The women in the nursing home. Years living without their loved one beside them—but living. To make the plan is one thing, but to go through with it...
“Having second thoughts?” he asks gently.
“All the time. Aren’t you?”
He doesn’t have to answer for me to know we share the same trepidations; the repercussions of our decision heavy between us. Across the garden, a bedroom window is thrust open at Violet’s house, rooting me back to reality. To have a conversation like this, with our family so near, to discuss the unthinkable.
“Do you think it will feel like anything?” I ask.
“I hope it will be like falling asleep, the way we’re doing it.”
The pills in the cabinet, stocked up prescriptions to help me sleep, to make me comfortable, from doctors who only heard me say the pain is too much to bear. Who didn’t hear what was underneath, that there will be a day when what I lose is more than what I keep.
“What if there is nothing after?”
“Well, then we won’t know the difference.”
I consider this, and realize he’s right. There is no way to know for sure. “Do you think it will be heaven?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know what heaven could offer that could be better than the life we had.”
I wiggle my eyebrows. “How about one where you don’t scrub toilets?”
Joseph laughs, smiles sadly. “I hope there is an ocean. And a sun to warm us after swimming.”
I lean against him. “I wouldn’t mind if it was sort of like this, all over again.”
Joseph brushes a strand of hair behind my ear, and I am young again, like two kids we once were, tangled in this very meadow. He meets my gaze, teary-eyed. “Like I said, this life with you, this has been heaven for me.”
I swallow hard, the words that keep rising in me. I don’t want to die, not yet, not ever. I’ve loved my life, I’ve loved our life, I want to stay.
Grateful we chose to wait until after the first few months of spring, to not miss the whimsical forsythia, the azaleas and tulips, the purple spouts of crocuses. “Have you thought about where you’ll put a section for Rain’s baby?” I ask. Rain, well into her third trimester. It won’t be much longer. Another pang, a different kind of longing.
“There is some space by Jane’s gladiolas, I thought it’d be nice for her flowers to be near her grandchild’s.”
“Jane is going to be a grandma. What does that make us?”
“ Very old,” he says, and I laugh.
“Look at it, Joseph.” The garden is at the beginning of the beauty to come, as April turns to May and May to June, it will burst with color and life. It helps me remember their names, sometimes when I lose them, I imagine their flowers and the names find their way back to me. I want to see the blossoms that will represent Rain’s baby, I want to see her baby grow and plant a garden of his or her own. I want to live here forever, to roll through the soft petals and press them to my nose. What a cruel side effect, to lose the scent of cookies in the oven, the sweet fragrance of a meadow. Had I known, I would have lain in the garden each morning, breathed in honeysuckle and rose. I would have filled the kitchen counters with fresh baked goods, cupcakes and muffins and sweet breads. I would have gone to Bernard Beach, inhaled the salt air and the musk of sandbars and seaweed. I would have lain against Joseph, breathed in his skin and soap and sweat and cologne. But you can’t know. Sometimes, these things get taken without warning, and you can’t get them back.
“Would you like some iced tea?” I ask. It is too late in the day for coffee, but it seems like the perfect moment for two glasses filled to the brim with ice, two lemon wedges, two straws and enough tea to sip away the afternoon.
“Sounds great. I can make it for us.”
“No, Joseph, let me. I’ll be right back.” Before he can argue I press a shaking hand into his thigh, lifting myself off the bench. I make my way gingerly along the path, past Violet’s daisies and the green stalks that will bloom into Thomas’s lavender in later summer, to the porch.
I am there, almost to the steps, when I hit the ground. The blue sky fuzzy above as a rippling pain strikes white-hot across my back and my hip and my elbows. A warm stream of urine trickles down my leg.
Joseph above me, eclipsing the sun, asks if I am okay, if I can get up, if anything feels broken. I’m able to get up, but the pain sears like a burn. He lifts me carefully to my feet and guides me inside, inspects my elbows, scraped raw and bleeding from the cobblestone walk, miraculously the worst of it. He gapes at me, fear carved into his face. I have never fallen before. I’ve come close, stumbled from the shower or miscalculated a threshold, but I’ve always caught myself, or Joseph has steadied me. Never this.
“I peed myself, Joseph, I—” A sob rolls over me as he guides my soiled pants past my thighs. I weep as he holds me up, a doll in his arms.