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It was pneumonia that killed him. As the brain had deteriorated, the body parts had stopped working. His lungs filled with mucus. He drowned in it.
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After he died on March 7, 1999, she decided that if there was such a thing as a next life, she wanted to return under another sort of banner entirely—something ebullient like “Holiday” or “Sunshine.” This time through, though, she was Eileen Leary; she’d never remarry. This was life: you went down with the ship. Who was to say that wasn’t a love story?
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She slept on his side. She didn’t like his side particularly, but she couldn’t bring herself to sleep on her old one. Whenever she did, she lay there thinking of all the nights she’d slept facing away from him, and she wanted one of them back—a single one would be enough—so she could turn her body toward his.
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She knew he would have wanted his remains to contribute to the body of knowledge. The neurologists who’d diagnosed him weren’t going to order an autopsy, though; they were convinced that it had been Alzheimer’s and had long ago closed their investigations. The team that had conducted the drug study wasn’t going to order it either.
She could have paid to have him autopsied anyway. She would have had to do a little paperwork to have the body moved from one county to another. The whole procedure would have cost eight thousand dollars, or about how much she’d been paying per month at the end to keep him at Maple Grove. It struck her as unseemly to attach any dollar amount to the privilege of peering into the riddle of a mind as fine as Ed’s. They should have been clamoring to do it for the honor alone.
In the end, she couldn’t bring herself to have it done. She couldn’t stand to think of someone cutting her husband’s head open. His teeth were broken, his gums had grown red and swollen, he had straggly hair, his once-proud muscles had atrophied to saggy sleeves, he had cuts and scabs everywhere, his skin had turned hoary from lack of exposure. She couldn’t imagine destroying his body any further. And the thought of his being dissected like that, when he had so often been the dissector himself, filled her with a palpable revulsion. He went intact into the earth, all the questions answered that would ever be answered, all the unasked ones forever unasked. Science had reached the end of its utility. All that remained was the body, and she wanted to give it tenderness.
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After all that trouble she’d gone to to put a leather band on the LeCoultre watch, Ed had never worn it. It had sat in its box for thirty-two years.
She took it out of the case. Under the velvet platform in the bottom of the box the gold band lay like the desiccated skin of a snake. She went to a jeweler and had it put back on. The restored watch was worth a good deal of money, due to its pristine condition, its collectible nature, and the high price of gold, but that was immaterial now, as she buried him wearing it.
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The new tools she’d bought after the workers stole his old ones had never been used. A few weeks after his death, she paid someone to haul them away, along with the contents of his office: crates of records, VHS tapes, his science textbooks. The books were outdated. No one listened to records anymore. The tapes were fuzzy recordings Ed had made on the black-and-white set, old movies and documentaries about cathedrals and bridges. Connell had no interest in any of it. It had all run out of currency.
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In the surfeit of time that widowhood allowed, she had a recurring vision of her husband in the early days of the disease, after he’d retired. He was still handsome. His hair was thinner, but it had not lost its striking blackness, and his blue eyes coruscated in the light, though the whites had yellowed. He was smaller than he used to be; his clothes fit loosely on him. It was early afternoon, but the room was dark, save for the glow of the television and some sunlight filtering through the drapes on the patio door. When the trees shifted in the wind, the room pulsed with greater light. The lamp on the end table could have offered more lasting illumination, but in the flurry of activity that accompanied her departure she had forgotten to turn it on. He could not summon the fine motor skills to turn it on himself. He had been sitting there since eight in the morning, watching the channel that she had decided offered the best chance at diverting him for the length of her workday. He had, by then, seen every episode of the detective show he was watching, though his failing memory offered an ability to see familiar things afresh. He lost the plotline somewhere in the middle of the episode. What caught fire in his mind were the rudiments of narrative: a ringing retort, anguish on a face, a happy reunion. He could still feel. He could still cry. He did cry, without knowing he was doing so. He felt the tears drying on his face afterward, and it was as though he had awoken from an unhappy dream. He could no longer read. By the time he reached the end of a sentence, he had forgotten where it began. He could decipher headlines in the newspaper; from them he cobbled together a sense of what was happening in the world. He was left with television, and when she was around, listening to music or her reading to him. He was hungry. He tried to go to the kitchen. He had a hard time rising from the couch. It took a couple of attempts, but he eventually succeeded. When he returned he couldn’t find the remote control. He didn’t want to watch this channel anymore. He couldn’t follow the story. He knew there was something about a murder, some kind of investigation. Those detectives who were always there were working on the case. There had been some kind of theft. Something was missing.
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There was a skull in a box in the closet. It was a specimen of Ed’s; he’d taught anatomy with it. He’d called it “George,” but she refused to call it anything but “the skull.” He’d taken it out every now and then to show it to Connell and his friends, a grisly spectacle she’d always insisted on cutting short. The boys poked their fingers through the eye sockets, dug their nails into the grooves in the pearly skullcap, probed the crenellations in the ivory teeth and clacked the hinged jaw in dummy conversation. One year—Connell must have been eight or nine—she threw a Halloween party for all the kids on the block. “George will be making an appearance tonight,” Ed said to Connell at the breakfast table that morning, and when the party was in full swing, all the kids assembled in the basement, Ed donned a black robe, charred the bottom of a pan, and spread the black char all over his face. He shut out the lights in the basement as he descended the stairs, and when he reached the center of the circle in which they’d been arranged in anticipation of some kind of surprise, he spoke in a deep voice and held the floating skull up to the flashlight. The kids shivered and screamed in delighted terror—including Connell, who knew it was coming.
Ed said once that when he died he wanted his skull to be used in anatomy classes. He had been delighted by the story of a classically trained stage actor who willed his skull to the company he’d been in, to play the part of Yorick in Hamlet, thereby assuring his immortality.
She took the box down from the closet and set it on her desk. She had never opened it. She lifted one of the cardboard flaps, then another, then the last two, slowly. She shuddered to see the top of that cranium, but she lifted it out of the box and set it facing her on the desk. Despite her years of nursing, her encounters with death, the anatomy classes she’d taken, she’d never been able to shake a basic awe in the face of relics of the body. She sat staring at that empty gaze. The whole time she knew Ed, there had been a skull behind his features. The man whose skull this had been, whose flesh had hidden this bone, had had his own ties of family and friendship. It struck her that she was much closer to the end than the beginning.
She thought of donating it to the science department at Saunders High School, then decided against it. There would simply have to be an orphan skull lying around after she was gone. Connell would find a home for it or take responsibility for throwing it out. He would be the arbiter of its fate, as he would decide what to do with her body, as she had decided what to do with her husband’s, as someone would decide what to do with his.
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The more she thought about Ed’s turning down NYU all those years back, the more she began to entertain other, more mysterious possibilities: that he may have had reasons other than vocation for evading ambition’s prod; that he may have needed BCC more than they needed him; that he may have been afraid of changing his routine or exposing himself to closer scrutiny; that he may have known more than he let on; that he may have known it earlier than she’d ever thought possible.
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The study had lasted three years. She’d kept him on the medicine another two, until it was too hard to get him to swallow the pills. It wasn’t entirely to spite her that he resisted: he had an instinctual fear of choking.
The drug didn’t have a name, just a string of letters and numbers—SDZ ENA 713. Later it acquired a name, Exelon, and could be prescribed. A lot of things were different later. Later they put patches on people so they didn’t have to take pills. That would have prevented a lot of trouble.
She asked herself, when she was feeling low, whether it was the medicine that had caused him to go so rigid that he couldn’t be picked up when he collapsed at the end. Rigidity was one of the side effects. Would she have been able to keep him home longer if she’d taken him off the drugs? Would he have avoided dying in a strange bed?
Sometimes she lay in bed thinking that somewhere they might be making drugs that would have changed everything. She knew she would find that bittersweet, though Ed would be thrilled. Advances in science were the things that made him happiest in life. Advances in science, and Connell. And herself, she had to admit. That was usually when she broke down.
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Many nights, she worked herself into a panic trying to imagine what would have become of him in his last years if she’d divorced him as she’d briefly considered doing before an explanation emerged for his sudden cruelty. Try as she did, she couldn’t picture where he would have lived or who would have taken care of him. As time passed she came to believe that she had been fated to be there for him at the end, that being there for him was what everything in her life—her care of her mother, her career in nursing—had prepared her for, that it was, in a sense, her life’s great work. In this way she was able to sleep soundly again.
This was his final gift to her: to silence her regrets about the paths she hadn’t taken.
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She kept going to the nursing home. She’d grown attached to seeing the other patients. She brought them cookies and sat in the television room with them, watching the evening news or reruns until it was time to go home. Some nights, she read to Mrs. Benziger from a magazine, but mostly she made herself useful by changing the channel when they grew restless with whatever program was on.
One night, as she was leaving, Mr. Huggins came toward her down the hall, pushing his walker. The overhead lights had been shut off for the night, and the only illumination came from a dim table lamp, which, reflecting off his stark white hospital robe, made him look like the herald of some malevolent spirit.
“Hello, Mr. Huggins,” she said as she neared him. He had stopped moving forward and was standing with both hands on the walker. He lifted a hand and pointed at her in apparent remonstration. He was saying something but too quietly for her to hear, so she leaned in closer.
“No more,” she heard him say, gently as a baby. “No more.”
She studied his face to see if he meant what she thought he meant. She couldn’t hear him without putting her ear almost directly up to his mouth, but she could read his lips. He was saying, “No more,” over and over, and he was shaking his head.
It occurred to her that she could elect to take this as a sign if she wanted to. No one was hanging on her decision; it was only her left with her life. Mr. Huggins was right; she couldn’t keep coming here forever. She had needed someone to give her permission to stop.
She kissed his hairy cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “Good night. Good-bye.” She passed through the barrier and out the door, where she stopped to turn and look. The last image she had of the place was Mr. Huggins’s gray-white back, like a glimpse of a surfacing whale, as he stepped in front of the lamp in his slow turn into the room that he had shared with Ed and that now was his alone. She wondered if he missed Ed too. She hoped he didn’t even remember him.
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Everyone told her to sell the house, find someplace smaller, cheaper, sock away the difference. But she didn’t need the money. The life insurance payout allowed her to pay back the home equity loan she’d taken out to cover Connell’s tuition and the nursing home bills. It even let her put the new roof on that she needed. She had little in savings, but she had the house, and she had Ed’s pension and her salary as long as she worked. There was no more nursing home to pay. She wasn’t paying Sergei anymore. Connell was almost done with school.
Besides, where would she go if she sold? Back to Jackson Heights? Nothing was left for her there. When she bought the house, she had planned to die in it. Her plan hadn’t changed.
Cindy Coakley said, imploringly, “The ghost of your former life is here.”
Not my former life, Eileen thought. My former future life. That’s the ghost that’s here. The ghost of the life I almost had. As long as I don’t leave this place, that former future doesn’t have to die.
And then she thought, We move around too much in this country.