Chapter Thirty-Six
Thirty-Six
BEAR CREEK LODGE
THE PAIN WAS WORSE AT the end of the day, an ever-louder drumbeat she could feel for two hours before the nurse gave her the next dose of meds.
A growing hot coal inside her flesh. Mazelle was grateful when the clouds of confusion and sluggishness lifted slightly like a rising curtain, allowing her to peek backstage at life’s indulgences, sometimes giving her enough clarity to eat a piece of the Mr. Goodbar on her nightstand or turn on her cassette player to listen to the Duke Ellington cassette Ricky had bought her, aptly titled Masterpieces.
Music, as Mazelle always had suspected, was her truest and most enduring joy.
“Mood Indigo.” “Sophisticated Lady.” “Solitude.” “Vagabonds.” Classic Ellington reminded her of the concerts she’d attended with Mother and Dottie when she was with Richard.
The bitter pain she’d feared Richard would stamp her with was trivial in the end, overpowered by the joy of the music.
Hell, Richard wasn’t the worst thing that had happened to her, no matter how rough his hands or which names he had called her.
It was worth a flash of remembering his slaps and sloppy grunts to escape to memories of concert halls and the bright pealing of live horns.
But beyond the curtain of clarity and happy memories lay the pain. She lost interest in music when the pain came. Or chocolate. Or memories, good or bad. With pain, she was consumed only with enduring. With dying.
The oxygen machine beside Mazelle’s bed hissed; the green glow of her tea lamp couldn’t make the gadget any less ugly, further insult to injury. The cool flow of air flooded her nostrils through her cannula, but maybe the tank had sprung a leak, the way it hissed like a snake.
“… All I asked you to do was watch him in the cabin. That’s all I asked…”
Sadie’s voice, soaked with the anger that had overtaken her daughter by the time she was twelve—after Ricky told her how she’d hurt his knee.
Ricky had forgiven her eventually, but not Sadie.
Never Sadie. And Sadie would never forgive her for hurting her son last year.
From Sadie’s voice, it might have happened five minutes ago.
They must be outside on the kitchen porch. They always forgot she kept her window cracked open. She’d heard an earful, all right.
“You acting like I’m the one who burned him,” Ricky said in that whiny voice Mazelle despised, the opposite of the way a grown man should sound. She’d been cursed with a son who never grew up. Maybe that was her fault too. “You know who you should really be mad at…”
Why did they talk about her like she wasn’t here?
Did they think her cancer had taken her hearing too?
Or was this their sly way of reminding her of her biggest shame?
Mazelle knew the things they said when they thought she wasn’t listening—their awful plans for her medicine dosage, pretending it was in her best interest if she never woke up again. (But wasn’t it?)
“What’s all that noise?” Mazelle called out as loudly as she could to interrupt any new plotting before it could begin.
They fell silent. But calling out hurt; she’d shifted slightly in her bed, rubbing against the pillow that was meant to prevent extra pressure on the bedsore on her right butt cheek.
“Coming, Mother!” Sadie called. But although Mazelle counted to a hundred, trying to forget the pain, Sadie never came to her door.
The drumbeat of pain grew steadily louder.
Ricky and Sadie forgot her as soon as they had an excuse.
Now that Sadie was here, Mazelle knew she couldn’t count on Ricky to hover over her like he usually did.
Were they having a party? Mazelle heard music playing through her cracked open doorway—or what was passing for music these days.
The Jackson 5, the boys with that wild hair and bubblegum tunes they twirled to onstage.
Admittedly, that younger one, Michael, moved his feet well enough to remind her of Sam sometimes, and Sam had agreed.
This music brought a wave of guilt, since her grandson had been playing this group when she took his cassette player.
She’d been unkind to him from the start when she was only angry at Sadie for keeping him away from her.
She’d planned on taking a walk with him in the woods and telling him about the college fund she had set aside for him, but she had ruined it from the first night, showing off what a “proper” grandmother she was in front of her guests.
What did she know about being a grandmother to a boy she barely knew?
She just couldn’t bear to reveal her ultimate humiliation to her friends—that she’d traded her relationship with her family for her long, pointless waiting for—what?
Recognition? Respect? An offer to star in Reaper, this time as Mama Mae instead?
She had been waiting for a mirage like the clouds in the sky, a handful of nothing if you tried to grab hold.
So, yes, when she’d caught Johnny listening to music on his headphones instead of sleeping that night when she peeked through his door, it was as if Aunt Ruby was reborn, wresting control of her hands as she snatched Johnny’s headphones away.
She’d even scratched him like Aunt Ruby would have—she’d felt her nail catch on his ear.
Maybe Aunt Ruby was haunting her. Maybe she deserved to be haunted.
The wind chimes outside of her window tinkled ever so softly.
Scout sensed when she was in pain, and he only nudged the bells in a melodic whisper now that Ricky had moved in full-time to oversee her care.
When he wasn’t stoned out of his mind, anyway.
Scout wanted her to know he was there, asking permission to enter.
The window quivered in its frame as Scout slid inside, flattening his long torso beyond what should be possible.
But that was Scout. He was as big as a bobcat now, but he could slide through a four-inch gap. If the nurse or Ricky closed her window, complaining that her room was too cold despite the fireplace Ricky kept roaring, Scout had learned how to pull it open himself from the outside.
“Hello, sweet boy.” Mazelle didn’t recognize her own voice anymore.
She hadn’t recognized much about herself in years, but especially since her diagnosis.
She had known what to expect from Hattie and her last years with Mother, but she had hoped to be spared of the insidious disease that had raged through her life like a wildfire.
Scout chittered a greeting, a sound as unfortunate as his appearance; his way of showing her love.
His snout popped up on the side of her bed as he raised himself, his wormlike whiskers moving like centipede legs across her bedsheet near her hand.
He rubbed her with his whiskers instead of licking her, since this new form did not give him the same ready access to his tongue.
Neither of them wanted Scout’s teeth close to her.
Mazelle’s new hospital bed with metal rails was a monstrosity in her elegant bedroom, which was in crowded disarray to make room for it, but this bed prevented her from falling when she lay on her side to avoid her bedsore.
She couldn’t bear to look at her wound, but the last time the nurse held up a mirror to her fanny to see it, the red, oozing pit was the size of a golf ball—a hole in her skin!
Dying was one indignity after another. Even her skin wasn’t strong enough to hold her anymore. But Scout helped her forget the pain. Unless she imagined it, his presence beside her calmed the throbbing sore trying to overwhelm her weakening dose of codeine.
Mazelle’s ears were still sharp, so she heard glass break from the dining room down the hallway.
And then Ricky and Sadie snorted with laughter.
Their laughter stung the corner of Mazelle’s eye as a tear traveled across the crepe-paper skin on her cheek.
She was only sixty-one, but her illness had shrunk her to invisibility.
“Not worth a damn…” she whispered. Sensing her irritation with her children, Scout growled. It was the one aspect of his dog form that had not changed. “Let it go. Just let it go.”
Talking was so exhausting, even to Scout. So Mazelle stopped using her croaking voice and spoke to Scout in a way only he could hear; the way she’d been able to communicate with him since she was a child. He had always known what she was thinking, after all.
(You listen to me, Scout. I want to talk to you about my grandson. You hear?)
Scout chittered to let her know he understood. His brown eyes encased in that unnatural silver rim looked as sad as Scout’s eyes when he was still a dog. When she stared into his eyes, she could forget about the rest of his form. Maybe Scout still saw her as a little girl too—not this.
(Last time he was here, I did something I shouldn’t have done. Something I wish I could take back. But the past is the past. And the future’s the future—so I know both of you will be left here long after I’m gone.)
Scout nuzzled her wrist with his soft, fleshy whiskers. She felt his anxiousness rising.
(You never mind that worrying. You’ll be able to fend for yourself fine, just like you always did when I was working.
Just listen to what I’m telling you—my grandson may never want to set foot here again.
But if he does… I want you to look out for him.
Don’t let anything happen to him or the people he loves.
You know perfectly well what I mean, don’t you?)
Scout chittered with a hint of a whine that sounded more like buzzing. He understood.