Everything (9 page)

Then the pain hit again and she disappeared inside. Maybe it wasn’t pain, maybe it was confusion, illness, something. Her eyes
went blank but they stayed open and her mouth opened a little and she breathed hard through her mouth like she was walking uphill and her forehead and cheeks broke out in a cold sweat. Her skin went pink and gray in these moments of pain and sometimes he could see fear in her eyes. Ashes and roses, animal flight. I wouldn’t make a dog do this, he thought. I’d put a dog down, before I made him go through this.

Then she was asleep, or something like it. Gone, anyway, the light out of her eyes and her eyes half closed. It was spooky to look at them. All he could see were the whites. The room was half dark, somewhere in the windowless internals of the hospital, and the lights of the various instruments and pumps and gauges shone like a distant city on a hill. The oxygen breathed with her and the drug pump rattled, clicked and cycled. She might come back around but she probably wouldn’t soon, at least that was how it had been lately.

On the edge of organ failure, is what the oncologist said. There were other possibilities. An ordinary infection, a case of the flu could speed her away.

RL didn’t know what he was doing there. It wouldn’t make any difference to Betsy, she didn’t know what planet she was on. Plus she had a husband and all. This felt at times that it was really not his job, not his place, not his cross to bear. But then, when he was at home and she was here, he felt this constant pull. She shouldn’t suffer this alone.

RL sat in a pastel chair next to the bed, a pile of magazines next to him:
Travel & Leisure, Field & Stream, Modern Maturity
, the dregs of the waiting room pile. He had read everything twice. Maybe, he thought, maybe it was as simple as this: he wouldn’t wish himself to
go through this alone. Everybody dies alone, everybody said so, but this was—what?—a lyric from a rock song or something. Everybody smokes in Hell. So what? Among the living we love company. He liked to think that she would know, but even if she didn’t, it was the right thing to do. Besides, Layla was back in Seattle and without her, RL’s house was empty and creepy. It was always like that when she left.

Ann child, said Betsy. What are you doing, baby?

Her daughter, eleven years old. RL had never met her. Betsy settled back into the pillow. RL felt a momentary threat of tears, sentimental …

She had her reasons for not wanting them around, Betsy did. There was some small chance—7 percent said one doctor, 12 percent said another—that she would live, and she did not want her children to see her in this extreme. It was true, this part; she looked like the she-devil in a Japanese movie, come to tempt the sailors into Hell. Even her tear ducts looked red and torn. Her hair was tangled and she smelled of her own vomit. He would not want Layla to see him so.

And yet … He did not think that Layla would stay away. She wouldn’t care what he wanted. She would come anyway. This was the mystery part: where was her husband, Roy? Taking care of the children, was the party line. Feeding the chickens, the children, the thousand small chores of a country place. RL did not believe this, but he did not know what else to believe. They tended toward the practical and stern, Betsy and Roy. They were rough people, country hippies. There was a right and a wrong and if this was right, they
would find a way to do right because that was the kind of people they were.

Pizza
, said the lady with the alligator purse.

RL went out into the hallway. Wayne, the nurse’s aide, was joking at the main station down the hall. The new duty nurse, whose name RL did not yet know, was looking at him with spaniel attention, waiting for the punch line. An empty gurney with wrinkled sheets, a pillow with an outline of a human head, waited outside one of the rooms, some new emergency. They lived with emergency every day here, with death, dismemberment, bad smells and weeping wives. RL did not grudge them their jokes and brightly colored uniforms, the fresh flowers on the ledge of the nurse’s station, but he could not share these small comforts with them.

Fading daylight filled the hallway outside. RL was surprised to find it so. Inside, in the rooms where all the dirty work took place, it was always night. Where was Roy? This autumn twilight, lonely time. The only time he missed the city, men in black jackets, women in makeup and dresses, hurrying to meet each other in the falling day. All those other people he could have been. All those hundreds of doors closing, one by one, until there was just the one door left, the last one. A friendly bartender, a cool drink, a meeting, a woman. I am lonely, RL thought. I am lonely. I was born lonely. I am best so.

What made June angry
was people who went through the fields behind her house, down to the river, and never shut the gates again so the neighbor cows would end up all over her pasture. Also, these same people when they stole the last few tomatoes out of her garden when she was at work. Also Howard, when he never answered his cell phone when she knew perfectly well that he had caller ID and knew it was her and June wasn’t a time-waster, was she? No. Direct and to the point. She wouldn’t call if she didn’t need to talk to him.

The people she got stuck behind who were trying to make a left onto Reserve Street which was impossible and took forever, these people infuriated her.

* * *

Out-of-state checks, welfare payments, Argentinean banks—there was no telling what kind of mayhem she could cause in a checkout line just because she was in it. Women who watched the checker ring up $105 in groceries and only when the last item was tallied did they begin to search for their checkbooks in their bottomless handbags. Those same women in the drive-up teller lane, filling out their endless deposit slips, doing the math wrong.

What completely pissed June off was the hospice, the way they never paid the aides and janitors enough to live on so it was always somebody new, always a fresh sad story. Last month it was a dude named Mad Dog, at least that was the name he had tattooed across the back of his neck in plain sight. Mad Dog was a cheerful or maybe overcheerful janitor and a comfort to the dying, but then he went out one weekend and came back on Monday with all his teeth kicked in. A few days after that he just stopped showing up. Seriously, June did not need that kind of energy in her life. She could barely care enough about her own people. Also, obviously, foreign policy, the whole Iraq mess, the fight-picking with Iran.

The whole oil business made her so mad, she went out and traded her little pickup for a Prius one Saturday. Now the Prius smelled like horse manure because she had no other way to get it for her garden. Also people mistook her for a hippie vegetarian Birkenstocker. OK, she did have Birkenstocks. Why did people have to judge her for it? It irritated her, this constant rush to judgment.

Do not even get June started on the bishops, the ones who closed their eyes all those years while the priests were molesting little boys, the bastards in their brocade robes who tried to cover it up and now all the money was going to the lawyers instead of the poor.

* * *

The Republicans. All of them, even the nice ones.

The pro-lifers, the ones outside the Blue Mountain Clinic with their pictures of fetuses.

The living. She couldn’t stand the living anymore. So headstrong, set in their ways, blind to possibility. The dying, she loved. Some old cowboy down from Arlee, been spitting and falling off horses and driving pickup trucks for seventy years and now here he is between clean sheets, talking about his emotions, listening to Arvo Pärt, music that sounds like angels, tears rolling down his cheeks, cheeks worn to the color of wood from seventy years in the wind and the rain. The vulnerability, possibility, the opening up. June loved this. It was like nothing could change until it was too late, but then at the last minute anything was possible. She felt them, looking over the fence at whatever would come next and seeing how small the operation was, how little it mattered, and then they could just let go and love.

The living, on the other hand. June just couldn’t stand the living.

Oh
, she thought. OK, the ship …

She woke, four thirty by the bedside clock, cobwebbed in dreams. The ship was leaving and they would all be left behind if she could not get RL, June, Daniel and her old dog Martha onto the gangplank in time, but one of them was always getting lost and the others would not stay put when she went to look for the stray.
Martha, my love
, she thought, and almost cried. An ancient Australian shepherd, lame but game. Pretty girl, Layla used to call her. My little pretty girl.

Layla was sitting by the window, looking out at the sleeping street, when Daniel came in shorts and a T-shirt to join her.

What’s up?

* * *

Nothing.

Come to bed.

In a minute.

What’s wrong? Nothing.

What do you mean, nothing?

What I said, she said. Nothing. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.

Come back to bed, then.

In a minute, she said. Really, I’m fine. I’ll be there in a minute.

He put his hand on her shoulder, then, but tentatively. He didn’t know if he should or not. Women were a mystery to him, they had established that much. Daniel was just a willing little victim, buffeted by estrogen and perfume. Layla just wanted him to say what he wanted. But he wouldn’t.

After a minute he took his hand away and then the rest of him, back to the bedroom without another word.

Outside the fallen rainwater was dripping from the monkey-puzzle trees in the park across the street. An ocean breeze was whipping the streetlight shadows around. Three thirty in the morning, the sidewalks empty. It made her cold just to look at the empty
street. All she wore was a pair of his flannel boxers and a T-shirt that said
Sputnik
on the front in Russian letters. That and a pair of wool socks. She had been crying earlier and her nose was red and her eyes were pink as bunny eyes. Layla went to the thermostat and turned it up to 73 degrees, from 63, where Daniel had set it. His parents had bought him this apartment across from Volunteer Park, and he could afford the nickel it would take to heat this place to a human temperature. Also, it would annoy him, which was fine with Layla.

But
why
.

Why sleep with somebody you didn’t even like? His semen drooling out of her still. Looking out at the empty sidewalk, she felt a thousand country-western songs rising up in her chest, all the ones about loneliness. All in a tangle. She wanted Daniel but she couldn’t stand the way he did things, which made her wonder if what she wanted was really this boy at all but some picture in her mind. His smile. A day at the ocean, his glossy hair in the sea breeze. She felt like she had ordered him from a catalog, only to find that he was not exactly what she had wanted.

Cunt prick bastard fuckhead. His dick in someone else’s mouth.

Outside a couple was walking home along the edge of the park, a punky pair in plaid and black jeans, weaving drunk, bouncing shoulders, laughing. They didn’t know Layla was watching from her dark window. Everything wet, dripping, though the rain had stopped. Along the iron palings the boy stopped and leaned against the fence and looked up into the sky. The girl pressed into him, hips on hips. They were drunk, she could see it from the window, his pale hand on her breast. She said something to make him laugh and he pulled her tight against him, against the dripping fence.

* * *

Suddenly Layla was lit with desire, buzzing with it, an insect swarm around her eyes and ears and mouth, the memory of him in the grass, the best mistake, the best mistake … Layla was dizzy with it, the thought of him, his delicate hands. And it was all wrong and it was all a mistake, she knew it. She should not want what she could not get. None of this could end well, not with Daniel, not with Edgar. She would end up alone, unloved. It didn’t matter. What was wrong with her? this emptiness inside, the place that wouldn’t fill, not with any of them inside her. More and more and more and more and she always ended up with less. I want, she thought, looking down at the drunk couple. I want what you have and I want more. I want all of it. I want more of it than there is.

Come to bed, said Daniel. He was standing there in his stocking feet, like a man in a joke.

He said, It’s late. Come to bed and we can talk in the morning.

Fuck you
, she thought, and almost said it.

Lay there awake with Daniel breathing next to her. Obedient, she thought. Like a wife. She may have slept a little, deeper into the night, and if she did, her last expiring thought was of the limitless array of stars above them, the Milky Way stretching like a river of light, and of the clouds and buildings and walls between the stars and the bed where she lay trying to sleep. A citizen of the Milky Way, she thought. That’s me.

The first three days after the chemo
, Betsy stayed in RL’s back bedroom, mainly sleeping. He brought her tea and clementines and soup, and kept fresh flowers in the room, the curtains open all day to catch the last strong light of fall. He bought her a little extra television to keep her company, and he would hear it sometimes in the night, three or four in the morning, whatever was on at that hour. She didn’t really have much to say. She seemed confused, injured in the brain. She looked infinitely older than her forty-four years.

On the fourth day, it was time for her to go back up the valley. He piled her bags and baskets in the little seat behind the main seat of his pickup and then went back inside for Betsy. A damp, blustery day with a high sky and a look of wildness in the ragged clouds.
When he was younger, RL would dream himself to be an Indian on a day like this, a Lakota, looking into a long cold winter. Then he would imagine himself up for the job, which he no longer did. He would die of the cold. On the other hand, in the old days with the Lakota, he would have been dead by now anyway so maybe it didn’t matter so much.