Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dot died at dinner a few nights later. So we missed it. She was alive—for some definition of life—when we visited in the afternoon, but then Maisie’s phone rang during dinner, and she was gone.
“A blessing,” Moth said.
“It was time,” I said.
“It was bullshit,” Maisie said. “It’s never time.”
I imagined Dot holding her breath, some tiny seed of life deep in her brain whispering on her last exhale, “Dottie, my girl, you’re so weak, you’re nearly there.
If you can just manage not to inhale for a few more moments, we can get on with phase two.
You’ll love it. It’s such a kick!” I tried to be grateful for phase two.
I tried to be grateful for the eighty-nine years Dot had had—so many more than so many people got—but I failed.
Then the phone rang again, and it was mine this time, and Dr. Kim said, “Listen, Pepper, I’m putting you on bed rest.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds, but I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it much. You don’t have a choice, though. Your blood pressure’s too high. Your latest labs are the wrong side of borderline on any number of fronts actually. The whole team agrees.”
I did not find this as alarming as Dr. Kim apparently thought I should.
Dot’s deathbed combined with the Phymore Pharmaceutical encounter had made me feel less attached to the world.
Less attached like less tethered, but also less attached like less desperate to stay.
Dot made dying look like a peaceful, not unappealing option.
Dot made dying look worth getting on with already.
“I’m supposed to just lie here for the next twelve weeks?” In some ways, it sounded lovely. But I knew it would get old fast. (Irony.)
“You can do more than lie there,” she said. “Just not a lot more. I don’t want you standing for long periods. For example, no showers longer than fifteen minutes.”
“I can sit in the shower,” I assured her.
“Excellent. No cooking anything that takes longer than fifteen minutes either. You can’t sit while you cook, can you?
Go down to the dining room three meals a day.
But don’t sit without moving for more than half an hour.
Gentle walks, but mostly around your apartment.
Maybe your hallway but no farther. Lift nothing.
Lie in bed on your side as much as possible. ”
Maybe being pregnant wasn’t so different from dying, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t even all that different from being dead.
Nights like this one didn’t make the brochure, but of all the arguments for Vista View, they were the most compelling.
You’ve lost a loved one, but you have other loved ones right there to comfort and to comfort you.
You’ve been out into the world where the young and ravenous come for your body and its secrets, but the wise and measured are waiting patiently to welcome you back home.
You are consigned to your four walls, but they contain multitudes.
And yet? We were so tired, the three of us, the remaining three of us, that we barely managed muttered good-nights before heading off separately in three remaining directions.
I decided to stop by the library before going up—bed rest would no doubt require any number of surpluses but none so pressing as reading material—and there I ran into a volunteer restocking shelves.
He came over to hug me. “I’m so sorry about Dot,” Father Frank said into the top of my hair. “She was a damn good soul.”
I tried not to cry on his shirt. “You say that about all the souls.”
“I’m supposed to say that about all the souls. But I don’t. Only the good ones. And trust me—I have excellent taste in souls—hers was one of the best.”
“Was?” I managed only the one word before I couldn’t say any others, but he got it anyway because wasn’t the present tense the party line as regards this sort of thing? Wasn’t that the whole point?
But he opened his hands. “Was. Is. How the hell should I know?”
“Isn’t that your job?”
“Depends who you ask.” He smiled.
But I wasn’t being flip. “And isn’t that the miracle? That Dot is? Still is?”
He tilted his head shoulder to shoulder. “I’m not sure ‘the’ is the right article here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re the English teacher, but the miracle suggests there’s only one. I like a miracle.”
“I hate a miracle,” I said darkly, though it was not his point.
But he nodded. “Sometimes that’s the way with miracles. That’s what my job is, I think, helping people parse their miracles. And it’s everyone’s question, no matter the circumstances. Isn’t it yours?”
“My what?”
“Your question. Why has this thing happened? And why has this thing happened to me?”
He said it so simply, like it was obvious, but my knees buckled and I sat like I’d been pushed.
He was right. That was my question. It was my question about the terrible wonders, like how someone good and beloved can still—must still—die.
It was my question about the tender wonders, like Moth.
It was my question about the wondrous wonders, like the pupacorn.
It was the question I’d been asking about nearly everything that had happened since I came to Vista View, good, bad, and incomprehensible.
Why had this, all of this, happened, and why had it happened to me?
“There’s so much we don’t understand,” Father Frank was saying while my head spun.
“There’s so much we can’t understand. Sometimes it’s showy miracles—a pregnancy a quarter century postmenopause.
And sometimes it’s quiet miracles—a pregnancy a quarter century before menopause.
And sometimes it’s so nebulous we don’t even realize it is a miracle. ”
Enormous wings, I thought.
But he said, “Wherever Dot went this evening, we can’t know it, no matter who we are, no matter what we claim. At least your miracle is clear. Manifest. That’s what everyone’s doing out front, you know.”
“The horde?”
“They’re not looking for an explanation. They just want to be part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“A miracle they can see.”
I tried to decide if this made me feel better. “So what’s the answer? Why has this happened?” I held my hands around the pupacorn, who no longer fit into them. “And why has it happened to me?”
“Same as before. You’ve got the wrong article. Not the answer. An answer.”
“Okay.” I was willing to settle. “What’s an answer?”
He shrugged then smiled. “You’re just fucking lucky, I guess.”