Chapter 7
Rue
The phone in my cottage rings at four-fifteen in the morning, three weeks into December.
I am already awake. I have been awake for an hour.
Thaddeus is asleep beside me, on his stomach, his arm thrown across my waist, his face turned into the pillow.
He has been sleeping like this for almost a month now.
He says it is the first time since Elena died that he has slept more than four hours at a stretch, and I believe him, because there is a softness in his face when he sleeps now that was not there when I first knew him.
I do not want to answer the phone.
I answer the phone.
It is Jo.
"Garrett," she says. "He's hemorrhaging. Get to the clinic."
I am out of the bed and into my clothes before she has finished the second sentence.
Thaddeus is awake. He has heard. He does not ask.
He gets up. He pulls on his flannel. He gets the woodstove going while I wash my face, because I am going to be at the clinic for hours and the cottage needs to be warm when I come home, and the small considerations of him doing this without being asked are, even in the rush, a kind of love I have not encountered before in my life.
"Go," I say.
"I am coming with you."
"Thaddeus."
"I am coming with you to the door. I am not coming in. You will do your work. I will be at the workshop. Come to me when you can."
"All right."
He walks me to the clinic in the dark. The snow is heavy underfoot—two feet, packed and rebroken over the past week. The compound is asleep around us. The cabins on the east side, where Garrett lives with Neena and the girls, are dark.
Beau-or-Garrett. I have, by now, learned both names. Garrett is for the family. Beau is for the club. I am, depending on the day and the room, allowed both.
Jo is already in surgery when I arrive. Garrett is on the table.
The tumor has hemorrhaged. The pressure on his brain is increasing.
Jo is going in, and she has called me because she needs an experienced hand at his head, and because, when this is over—and we both know how this is going to end, in the way we both knew with Wyatt—she is going to need me with Neena.
I scrub. I assist.
Jo is good. She is the best I have ever worked with.
She gets the bleed under control. She buys him time.
By six in the morning we are out of surgery and Garrett is alive, and Jo says, in the small clean voice she uses when she is not yet ready to make eye contact, "Days.
Maybe a week. Maybe less. The next bleed will be the last."
I nod.
I go out to find Neena.
Neena is in the waiting area with the two girls, who are ten and twelve.
The twelve-year-old, Mira, looks like Garrett.
She has his eyes and his serious mouth. The ten-year-old, Wren—named for Neena's grandmother, not the patient I lost a week ago, which I learned at a community dinner that I am still grateful for—has her mother's softness and her father's anger, and is currently holding herself together by an act of will I do not, in a ten-year-old, want to see.
I sit with them.
I tell them what has happened. I do not strip the truth.
I do not protect them from the prognosis.
I tell them their father has had a bleed, and the bleed has been controlled, and there is more bleeding likely, and we do not know exactly when.
I tell them I am sorry. I tell them I am going to be with them through this, and I am going to be with their dad through this, and they are not going to be alone.
Mira does not cry. She looks at me for a long time and says, "How long?"
"Hours to days, sweetheart. Probably days. But the next bleed could be very fast."
She nods. She closes her eyes. She opens them. She is a child holding the weight of a forty-one-year-old man, and the weight is going to crush her later, but for now she is holding it.
Wren bursts into tears.
I open my arms. Wren falls into them. Mira sits against my other side, and I have both girls under my arms, and Neena across from me with her hands knotted in her lap and her eyes on the wall opposite the door.
We sit like this for a long time.
By eight in the morning Garrett is conscious. He is in considerable pain, and the language he is using to communicate it is intermittent, but he is awake. He recognizes the girls. He recognizes Neena. He recognizes me. He says, "Rue. Hey."
"Hey, Garrett."
"Did Jo go in?"
"She did."
"How bad?"
I look at him. I do not look away.
"Bad," I say. "We are talking about hospice now, Garrett. We are no longer talking about treatment. I want to move you home. I want you to be at home with Neena and the girls for what's coming. Is that what you want?"
He looks at me for a long moment.
"Yes," he says.
"All right."
"How long, Rue?"
"Could be hours. Could be a week. The next bleed will be the last. I cannot tell you when the next bleed will be."
He nods.
He looks at Neena. She does not look at him. She is still looking at the wall. I see her hand find his, fingers locking around his fingers, the way she has been holding his hand for twenty years.
"Neena, sweetheart," he says.
She does not turn.
"Neena."
"I cannot do this," she says. Her voice is very small. "Garrett, I cannot do this. I cannot do this without you."
"You can."
"I cannot. I have never done anything without you."
"You will. You will because the girls need you. You will because you are stronger than you have ever let yourself know. You will."
She looks at him then. The tears come in a long quiet stream that does not break her composure, which is somehow worse than a sob would have been.
"I love you," she says.
"I love you too. I love you all. I love you all so much."
We move Garrett home at noon. The pack helps.
Two of the patched members carry him on a board through the snow—he cannot walk—and Jo and I follow with the equipment, the morphine, the oxygen.
The clinic empties of him and his small house fills with him.
Neena's mother has come from town with food.
The girls' schoolteacher—a young woman I have not yet met—has been told and is keeping the other children at the small schoolhouse occupied so the girls can have their father.
I stay at the cabin.
I move into a chair beside Garrett's bed, and I do not, except for short breaks to walk and use the bathroom and eat a sandwich Della brings me, leave it for the next three days.
Thaddeus does not, except for a few brief check-ins, come.
He is at the workshop. I know what he is doing.
He is building the coffin. Garrett asked, two weeks ago, for pine with wolves running on the lid.
Thaddeus has, in the last three weeks, been doing the slow careful preliminary work of selecting and preparing the wood.
Now he is putting the box together. I have not seen it.
I do not need to. I know what his work looks like.
What I do not know, until later, is that Thaddeus is, this time, doing something he has not done before.
He is including the inlay of cherry from the tree behind Garrett's house.
He is, this time, carving the wolves smaller than usual—three of them, one for Garrett, one for Mira, one for Wren—and the carving is so fine that it takes him hours per wolf, and he is doing the work by lamplight through the nights, sleeping in two-hour stretches on the cot in the workshop, because the work needs all of him and he is, this time, giving it everything.
I do not see him for three days.
On the third day, in the late afternoon, Garrett begins the active dying.
It is gentle. The breathing slows. The pauses lengthen.
He is unconscious, has been unconscious for twelve hours.
Neena is on one side of the bed. The girls are on the other side.
I am at the foot. I have already given them the language for what is happening.
I have told them his hearing is the last thing to go. I have told them to talk to him.
They are talking to him.
Mira tells him about a song she learned on the fiddle last week.
She does not have the fiddle in the cabin and would not, even if she did, be able to play it for him with her hands the way they are shaking.
She describes the song instead. The notes.
The fingerings. He breathes in once, twice, three times, while she is describing, and on each breath the pause after it is a little longer.
Wren cannot speak. She is curled against her father's hip with her face hidden, and she is shaking, and I do not try to make her speak. I move my hand to her back and I rub small slow circles between her shoulder blades, and I let her be where she needs to be.
Neena says nothing for a long time.
Then, just before the last breath, she leans down to his ear and she whispers something in the old language—the language she used to her son Wyatt three weeks ago, the language Gallows used at the burial, the language I am beginning to recognize without yet understanding it—and Garrett, who has been unconscious for half a day, lifts his hand a fraction of an inch off the quilt.
It is the smallest motion. It is unmistakable.
Neena takes the hand.
He breathes in. He breathes out. He does not breathe in again.
Mira makes a sound. Wren does not.
I sit with them for thirty minutes. I do not do my post-death work right away; the family needs the body for a little longer, and I let them have it.
Mira eventually moves to where Wren is and pulls her sister into her arms, and they sit together on the floor against their father's legs, and Neena lies down beside her husband and closes her eyes against his shoulder.
I leave the cabin for the first time in three days.
I do not go to my cottage.
I go up the hill.