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This is not my beautiful life.
Far away, in the kitchen, water runs. What’s that for? Tea? God help me, no more tea.
The water runs and runs, far more water than a kettle requires. I can’t hear anything under the damned running water, but I know the conversation is intense. Anna’s antennae are already up. Anytime she comes in here, she scans the room for my phone and drops her voice, assessing and conferring with her sister or the hospice nurse like she’s the mother, not me.
I can feel the twitch at the corner of her right eye. I can feel Elena’s mouth draw in and pucker with the effort not to cry. They are mine. Both girls, trying to do the right thing. It drags me like a rip current. I can’t get pulled along. I have my own problems. I don’t want them in here. I’m busy.
Yes, okay, yesterday I fell. Or was it the day before? I was on a mission, I needed my phone. I got out of bed and made my way over to the dresser to where it was charging. I leaned on Tom, he braced for me, he paced himself for me, he’s a good dog, but I stumbled. Not his fault. Yes, I cracked a rib, my compromised bones gave way, yes, yes, high alert.
Now Anna wants caregivers around the clock. Now Anna wants to confiscate the phone. Now Anna wants me in a special bed, secured, so I can rest and revive and survive, for how long? Another week, another month? She wants to fix me, fix everything. She is trying to will a miracle.
Laney’s stunned. I need to leverage that. She’s still in her kid mind-set, waiting for direction, not wanting to disrespect me, wanting to believe I have enough mother left in me to rally, to assert control over this, too, the process of my dying. But I have only so much energy left and now with the rib, every breath hurts. They want to strap me down and take the phone. I need that phone. Like I said, I’m busy.
Let me think. Not easy. My bedroom hums with monitors. Soft, steady beeps track my … I was going to say “progress,” but that’s not right. What’s the opposite of progress? Regress? If only I could go back.
I remember when this bed, surrounded now by equipment, was a raft that rocked and rolled as we navigated the briny seas of each other. In the mornings, after he left, waves rose in me again, knocked me off balance, made me blush as I untangled sheets, retrieved pillows, tried to restore order.
This bed is not that bed. Here, I am anchored by a line embedded in the back of my hand, and morphine keeps me bobbing and drifting, a little ways away from the pain. I’ve noticed everyone seems eager to press the button that releases the drug, on my behalf.
Not me. I prefer the pain. Anna cannot possibly understand that. The pain keeps me sharp. When I am sharp I go inside, and I make myself feel it again, how it was with him, how I was, when everything was slippery with the chemistry of new love greasing the rusty mechanisms of my heart, and—I’ll say it—my soul.
I shouldn’t do that. Idealize the past. It’s not healthy. Ha.
But memory is seductive, especially here at the end, and I follow and it lures me down the same old hole, I follow it back, back, until it turns on me and I am where I started, without him, in the land of the left-behind, two hours out from the next morphine push. Swapping one pain for another, cancer for heartbreak, down in the hole, alone.
He’s moved on. Meaning Ned.
Meaning, love of my life, mate to my soul, late-night listener curved around my body, with late-night fingers stepping across my lines and furrows, the terrain of me, and into me as the light rose pink like me over the Hudson River, through our window, and lit me up, and opened up my folded desire. I showed myself.
Ned put his hands on me and he stopped time. Ned put his hands on me and he stopped cells. I came alive. This, after chemo and the menopause that comes with it. I got my period again. That happened. My skin glowed. My hair, my wayward hair, flowed back shining. I trusted my body again, and forgot to run my visualization exercise, the daily action movie, bad cells in black Speedos and swim caps poised to jackknife into my bloodstream, while good cells, valiant surfer boys in board shorts and hippie hair, built dams.
I told Dr. Keswani, “He’s younger,” as if that fact might be another symptom, which, in retrospect, it was. She laughed and said, “The best medicine.” Which, in retrospect, it was.
Well, the medicine was addictive, and then it was poisonous.
But that first night, when we were up against each other, I had to halt his hand. My shirt was off. He was working at my bra. “Wait, wait a second. I need to tell you something.” He looked stricken. Sexually transmittable disease? Pre-op transgender? Or any number of other show-stoppers I was too old-school, or just too old, to count.
I reached behind and undid the hooks and let the bra drop to the floor. I said, “I’ve been sick. I have scars. Here. And here.” I closed my eyes and took his fingertips on a walk along the ropy ridges underneath each new breast, and finger-stepped him along the scar higher on my chest, the one the bathing suit did not hide.
That was five years ago. I was a topless, middle-aged woman splayed on a grad-student sofa. Did we even pause to sweep away strewn papers, his mess of a dissertation? A window was open somewhere, the room was chilled and I was tense with the cold and the reveal, I was like a sensor, every nerve distended, my hand guiding his hand, feeling for the slightest recoil from him.
A recoil that did not come. I opened my eyes, expecting to see his face clouded with disappointment by my body. He pushed up. He looked into me. He said, “You okay?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. I think. I hope.” I gave a little smile, a little shrug, to protect myself against the gods of irony, who were surely listening, waiting for me to get cocky, to drop my guard and let myself feel a future. “I mean, I am. I’m fine.” I had to add another “I hope.”
“Does this mean we can’t…?” He was concerned only that the slide inside, so close, was in jeopardy. It was so normal a thing to say that it took me by surprise. He was not repelled. He was worried he wasn’t going to get laid. Ned had a reassuringly male, one-track mind that made cancer irrelevant for a little while.
I wanted him. I was wearing the pricey lingerie to prove it.
Even though technically they were nerveless, with cosmetic nipples, created from belly fat and tattoo ink, my new breasts remembered what my real breasts once responded to. Like phantom limbs, they were gone, but the yearning was still there.
“Does this mean we can’t…?”
Relief flowed, loosening my thighs. I pulled him in. After, he touched his lips to the ridges where his fingers walked, kissing away my self-consciousness. That’s when I came up with the nickname. Doc. I felt healed.
I was forty-six and he was thirty-one. I was by far the oldest woman he’d ever been with. “Is it weird for you? Do I feel old?”
He said, “Of a certain vintage, maybe, but not old.”
I hid my face. “Vintage! That’s just code for ‘old’!” He pulled my hands away.
He said, “Textured,” in his smoke voice, and stroked the skin at the corners of my eyes.
He said, “Wise,” and let his fingers flutter over a scar.
“Complex,” he said, and put his hands between my legs. He moved over me again and pushed in again and whispered, “No more talking.”
I am not healed. He did not stop time, he did not stop cells. Did I mention? Ned’s moved on. Ned’s living the high life now with someone younger, richer. Healthy. She’s iconic. She’s a celebrity skin doctor. She’s one of the best-known female entrepreneurs in the world. She’s everywhere and he’s right next to her. Smiling. Can you believe that? He’s smiling. Swipe, tap, scroll. See? There they are again, those lucky ducks, at last night’s events. There you are again, Doc, you moved-on, up-trading, lucky-duck bastard. It’s like I never existed.
Jealousy, whoa. I hadn’t ever experienced it, never really related to the scorned-woman thing. Not like this. I guess I was always the dumper, rather than the dumpee. But now. Wow. I see them and my brain whirs like an old jukebox gearing up to search and reach and set the disc on the turntable and drop the needle into the open vein of an Adele song, any Adele song. I feel ennobled by jealousy, diva-like. I have been wronged. I have been betrayed on a level that is Adele-esque.
Still, I need to see Ned, even if it’s only on the small screen in the palm of my hand.
Swipe, tap, scroll. I’m fascinated. I’m disgusted. The display, the showing off, the bragging. When did that become okay? Didn’t that used to be discouraged? Look at our expensive objects, look at our famous friends. This is what we are eating, wearing. Here’s where we are, here’s where we’re going. Everyone is healthy, everything is special. Everyone poses in a sunny, filtered future where the unphotogenic are not allowed. Well, I got older, I got sick, I got totally unphotogenic.
Refresh, refresh, refresh. Talk about ironic. I’m pushing my own buttons. I need my phone so I can check Twitter, Instagram, newsfeeds, posts. So I can see. Good morning, Doc. Good morning, Doc’s new woman.
Trudi Mink, dermatologist to the stars.
Trudi. I don’t like that name.
He’s moved on. I have to accept it and move on too. If only.
If only he would acknowledge what we had. What we meant to each other.
If only he would apologize for walking out on me in the hour before my darkest hour.
If only he would stop ignoring me.
If only cyberstalking weren’t so easy.
The truth is, I want nothing more than to move on. Except it’s too late. Where am I going, in this condition?
Where is my fucking phone?
I’m sobbing now, that’s what happens when the morphine is at the end of its shift. Sobbing brings coughing. I try and stifle myself with a pillow so my daughters don’t hear, so they won’t come in, and then the pain in my ribs sears me, and I can’t hold the coughing back, and then the pain in my ribs sets me on fire. Tom, who has been resting heavy against me, like ballast, raises his big dog head and looks at me with anxious eyes. He steps off the bed. He paces. He pants.
The silence outside my door is full. Someone listening. Someone entering. Here comes the tea. Elena murmurs and fusses, but now there is something formal in her voice, something harder than before, something not-Laney, something more Anna, adapted from the kitchen conference. Things have been decided.
Caregivers, around the clock. New bed, no phone. No phone, no reason. I can’t face it. I push the button myself this time. The morphine blur spreads thick like gel across my brain, such as it is, and it doesn’t take long, I fall away just as Laney enters, I mumble nonsense as she approaches, I’m going under and I won’t have to face her. I pretend if I can’t see her, she can’t see me.
Copyright © 2016 by Stephanie Gangi
