“It’s weak and there are grounds in it,” he tells me, giving his abandoned cup the stink eye. “I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “Guess I just like my coffee stronger than this.”
And yet, he reaches again for the cup before remembering there’s nothing left in it.
There’s an anger in his demeanor. A sadness. It doesn’t have anything to do with the coffee. He just needs something to take his anger out on. I see it in his blue eyes, how he wishes he was somewhere else, anywhere else but here.
I too want to be anywhere else but here.
“My mother’s dying,” I tell him, looking away because I can’t stand to stare into his eyes when I say the words aloud. Instead I gaze toward a window where outside the world has gone black. “She’s going to die.”
Silence follows. Not an awkward silence, but just silence. He doesn’t say he’s sorry because he knows, like me, that sorry doesn’t mean a thing. Instead, after a minute or two, he says that his brother’s been in a motorcycle accident. That a car cut him off and he went flying off the bike, headfirst, into a utility pole.
“There’s no saying if he’ll make it,” he says, talking in euphemisms because it’s easier that way than just saying there’s a chance he’ll die. Kick the bucket. Croak. “Odds are good we’ll have to pull the plug sometime soon. The brain damage.” He shakes his head, picks at the skin around his fingernails. “It’s not looking good,” he tells me, and I say, “That sucks,” because it does.
I rub at my eyes and he changes topics. “You look tired,” he tells me, and I admit that I can’t sleep. That I haven’t been sleeping. Not for more than thirty minutes at a time, and even that’s being generous. “But it’s fine,” I say, because my lack of sleep is the least of my concerns.
He knows what I’m thinking.
“There’s nothing more you can do for your mom,” he says. “Now you’ve got to take care of you. You’ve got to be ready for what comes next. You ever try melatonin?” he asks, but I shake my head and tell him the same thing I told Mom’s doctor.
“Sleeping pills don’t work for me.”
“It’s not a sleeping pill,” he says as he reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out a handful of pills. He slips two tablets into the palm of my hand. “It’ll help,” he says to me, but any idiot can see that his own eyes are bloodshot and tired. It’s obvious this melatonin didn’t help him worth shit. But I don’t want to be rude. I slip the tablets into the pocket of my own jeans and say thanks.
He stands from the table, chair skidding out from beneath him, and says he’ll be right back. I think that it’s an excuse and that he’s going to take the opportunity to split. “Sure thing,” I say, looking the other way as he leaves. Trying not to feel sorry for myself as I’m hit with that sudden sense of being alone. Trying not to think about my future, knowing that when Mom finally dies, I’ll be alone forever.
He’s gone now and I watch other people in the cafeteria. New grandparents. A group of people sitting at a round table, laughing. Talking about old times, sharing memories. Some sort of hospital technician in blue scrubs eating alone. I reach for my now-empty cup of coffee, thinking that I too should split. Knowing that the doctor is no doubt done with Mom by now, and so I should get back to her.
But then the guy comes back. In his hands are two fresh cups of coffee. He returns to his chair and states the obvious. “Caffeine is the last thing either of us needs,” he tells me, saying that it’s decaf, and it occurs to me then that this has nothing to do with the coffee, but rather the company.
He digs into his pocket and pulls out four rumpled packets of Equal, dropping them to the table beside my cup. I manage a thanks, flat and mumbled to hide my surprise. He was watching me. He was paying attention. No one ever pays attention to me, aside from Mom.
Beside me he hoists his feet back onto the empty seat across from him, crosses them at the ankles. Drapes the red hood over his head.
I wonder what he’d be doing right now if he wasn’t here. If his brother hadn’t been in that motorcycle accident. If he wasn’t close to dying.
I think that if he had a girlfriend, she’d be here, holding his hand, keeping him company. Wouldn’t she?
I tell him things. Things I’ve never told anyone else. I don’t know why. Things about Mom. He doesn’t look at me as I talk, but at some imaginary spot on the wall. But I know he’s listening.
He tells me things too, about his brother, and for the first time in a while, I think how nice it is to have someone to talk to, or to just share a table with as the conversation in time drifts to quiet and we sit together, drinking our coffees in silence.
*
Later, after I return to Mom’s room, I think about him. The guy from the cafeteria. After the hospital’s hallway lights are dimmed and all is quiet—well, mostly quiet save for the ping of the EKG in Mom’s room and the rattle of saliva in the back of her throat since she can no longer swallow—I think about him sitting beside his dying brother, also unable to sleep.
In the hospital, Mom sleeps beside me in a drug-induced daze, thanks to the steady drip, drip, drip of lorazepam and morphine into her veins, a solution that keeps her both pain-free and fast asleep at the same time.
Sometime after nine o’clock, the nurse stops by to turn Mom one last time before signing off for the night. She checks her skin for bedsores, running a hand up and down Mom’s legs. I’ve got the TV in the room turned on, anything to drown out that mechanical, metallic sound of Mom’s EKG, one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It’s one of those newsmagazine shows—Dateline, 60 Minutes, I don’t know which—the one thing that was on when I flipped on the TV. I didn’t bother channel surfing; I don’t care what I watch. It could be home shopping or cartoons, for all I care. It’s just the noise I need to help me forget that Mom is dying. Though, of course, it isn’t as easy as that. There isn’t a thing in the world that can make me forget. But for a few minutes at least, the news anchors make me feel less alone.
“What are you watching?” the nurse asks, examining Mom’s skin, and I say, “I don’t even know.”
But then we both listen together as the anchors tell the story of some guy who’d assumed the identity of a dead man. He lived for years posing as him, until he got caught.
Leave it to me to watch a show about dead people as a means of forgetting that Mom is dying.
My eyes veer away from the TV and to Mom. I mute the show. Maybe the repetitive ping of the EKG isn’t so bad after all. What it says to me is that Mom is still alive. For now.
Ulcers have already formed on her heels and so she lies with feet floating on air, a pillow beneath her calves so they can’t touch the bed. “Feeling tired?” the nurse asks, standing in the space between Mom and me. I am, of course, feeling tired. My head hurts, one of those dull headaches that creeps up the nape of the neck. There’s a stinging pain behind my eyes too, the kind that makes everything blur. I dig my palms into my sockets to make it go away, but it doesn’t quit. My muscles ache, my legs restless. There’s the constant urge to move them, to not sit still. It gnaws at me until it’s all I can think about: moving my legs. I uncross them, stretch them out before me, recross my legs. For a whole thirty seconds it works. The restlessness stops.
And then it begins again. That prickly urge to move my legs.
If I let it, it’ll go on all night until, like last night, when I finally stood and paced the room. All night long. Because it was easier than sitting still.
I think then about what the guy in the cafeteria said. About taking care of myself, about getting ready for what comes next. I think about what comes next, about Mom’s and my house, vacant but for me. I wonder if I’ll ever sleep again.