“It’s like that Groundhog Day movie, only worse.”
“I like Groundhog Day,” Dad says. “What’s his name, that actor? And Andie. She’s wonderful. Leah gets jealous, how much I like Andie. Hey, even an old man still has eyes.”
“Bill Murray,” Dr. Margoni says. “The part with the puddle. I like that. I stepped in a puddle on my way here. Would have been nice to know it was there.”
“Happy endings,” Dad says. “The ending is good.”
Not this ending, I want to tell him. This ending really sucks. But he already looks sad, and I can’t tell him about Mom again.
Dr. Margoni seems to read my mind. “This isn’t the end yet,” she says, softly. “We’re at the messy middle.”
Boy howdy, does she have that right. She has no idea how messy.
“So you do have a decision to make,” she says, after we’re all quiet for a minute, reminding me that I am now the responsible adult in the family. There will be plenty of decisions. God, I hadn’t even thought about the funeral. Maybe if my long-lost sister were here, she’d help me plan it.
Dr. Margoni isn’t thinking about the funeral. “What are you going to do when your dad is ready to discharge from the hospital?”
“What? Oh. I hadn’t even thought that far.”
Dad has slipped away from us altogether, eyes closed, chin on his chest.
“I’m going to keep him another day. Per Medicare, if he’s admitted for three days running, we can transfer him directly into another facility.”
No, no, no. I can’t have heard her right. “You mean a nursing home?”
“I was thinking more of assisted living. He’d have more privacy and autonomy than in a nursing home. I know it’s hard,” she goes on. “But he can’t stay here. He’s certainly not able to care for himself at home. Even if his altered mental state is just due to grief and being off his medications, it would be pretty hard for him to manage on his own.”
A memory comes to me, of Dad staying up with me one long night when I had an ear infection. The doctor’s office was closed, and Mom was not about to incur an emergency room bill. She dosed me with Tylenol and sent me to bed. It was Dad who heard me sobbing with pain at midnight and came to comfort me. All that long night, he sat on my bed with my feverish head in his lap, stroking my hair, distracting me with funny stories, feeding me more Tylenol every four hours around the clock.
“He’ll get better, though, right? This is just grief and shock and not taking his meds.”
“Possibly,” Dr. Margoni says, but there is too much hesitation in the way she shapes the word. “It’s hard to tell. Sometimes it takes weeks for an elderly person to bounce back from an illness.”
Dad jerks awake, startling my heart into a gallop. “Leah,” he says. “We need to tell Maisey. You can’t—” And then his eyes fall on me. “Oh dear. Oh hell. Do you know?”
Where is he in time, and which question is he asking? The aneurism in my mother’s brain? Her past life? Marley?
“Yes, I know,” I say. “I know everything. It’s okay.” I keep patting his hand, my heart free-falling over and over, no safety net to catch it. It’s not okay. He’s not okay. Some things time cannot fix.
“I told her we should tell you,” he says. “Over and over, I told her, ‘Just call her, Leah. Or let me call her. Let her come to say good-bye.’”
“I was here, Daddy. I was with her when she died.”
“I need to see her. Take me.”
He presses against the chair arms with his hands and leans forward. His whole body is vibrating, though, and this time when he tries to stand, he only clears a couple of inches from the chair before he falls back. It doesn’t stop him. He tries again.
A vivid image of my mother the way I left her makes me hold him back.
“Not a good idea. Not now.”
“It might help him,” Dr. Margoni says, very gently. “To see her body. It might help him retain the finality and let her go.”
I shake my head, but I can’t say anything. If I open my mouth, I’m going to vomit, and I clamp my lips tight together and drag deep breaths in through my nose, trying to settle the stormy seas in my belly.
“Let me see if they’ve got her cleaned up,” Dr. Margoni says. She squeezes my shoulder, gently, and leaves the room.
Dad tries to get up, and again I press him back.
“We’ll go in a minute, okay? Just hang on. We’ll go see her.”
It seems longer than a minute before Dr. Margoni shows back up, this time with a wheelchair. “Let’s take a ride,” she says. Her calm, professional compassion helps me calm my own body. The two of us help Dad up onto his shaky feet and into the chair. But the reluctance to go back to that war zone of a room, to confront the body of my mother—after I defied her wishes and tried to make her live, after the things I said to her and knowing the lies she told me—is overpowering.
I sink into Dad’s chair, still warm with his body heat. “Maybe I’ll wait here.”
“You might find it helpful to see her one more time,” Dr. Margoni says. “Otherwise you’re going to be stuck with that last visual.”
I press my hands against my eyes, making black spots dance, but I still can’t shut it out.
“I need you,” Dad says, stretching out a tremulous hand. “Be with me, Maisey.”
Which does it, of course. I’ve lost my mother and my entire framework for reality. He’s lost the woman whose secrets he’s kept for almost forty years, whoever she was. So I get up and follow the wheelchair down the hall. We go to a different room, for which I’m grateful. It’s a corner room with windows on two walls, letting in sunlight and the reminder that outside there are blue skies and timeless mountains.
Mom lies in a hospital bed, a sheet pulled up over her chest, her hands folded over it. She wears a clean hospital gown. Her hair is neatly combed, her face washed, the horrible tube removed from her mouth. Except for the color of her skin, which is all kinds of wrong, she almost looks like she’s sleeping.
Still, I hang back at the door while Dr. Margoni rolls Dad up to the bed.
“Leah,” he whispers, touching her hand. “Oh, Leah. It should have been me.”
I’m braced for an emotional storm, but it doesn’t come. He just sits there, almost as still as she is. When he pushes himself up to standing, Dr. Margoni doesn’t stop him. Dad smooths Mom’s hair, touches her cheek, leans down to kiss her lips.
“Soon,” he whispers. “It won’t be long.” He lets out a long, tremulous sigh that leaves him smaller, older, frailer, if such a thing is possible, then falls back into the chair.
Dr. Margoni looks at me, eyebrows raised in a question.
The answer is no. No, no, a thousand times no. Mom looks peaceful enough from where I’m standing, but closer-up death will get me with a bitch slap. I don’t want to smell it on her. Don’t want to touch her skin now that the soul is gone. Don’t want to risk her eyes snapping open, her finger rising to point at me, her dead lips opening to croak, “You are in so much trouble, Maisey Dawn.”
I don’t need her to put any more guilt on me.
So I stay where I am, feet planted, spine stiffened by stubbornness and fear. The tears betray me, though, running down my cheeks, warm and alive where the rest of me feels as cold and dead as my mother looks.
Dr. Margoni crosses the room, takes my right hand, and uncurls the fingers I’ve clenched into a fist. She tugs at me, gently, and my feet obey, taking me to the bed, to my mother.
Her skin is as cold as I expected when I touch her hand, and her face looks subtly different, like one of those wax museum figures. I shiver at the idea that maybe she’ll start to melt if I touch her.
“Just tell her good-bye.”
I don’t want to tell her good-bye. I’m not ready to let her go. Not yet, not like this. But I feel compelled to tell her something, and I lean down and press my cheek against her cold one. I mean to tell her I love her. That I’m sorry my last words to her were angry. But what comes whispering out of my lips is not at all what I thought I wanted to say. Not angry words this time, but lost and bereft, with the bewilderment of a child.