The End of Eve (20 page)

I bought butternut squash and gluten-free macaroni. Abra was back now and the kids from the Native Arts College piled into our little adobe south of town for Thursday night dinners. Maxito made himself lettuce sandwiches and enticed the guests to jump with him on his trampoline.

Carter Quark, the trans guy everyone said I should date after Sol left, brought beer. I thought he was too young for me, but he made me laugh and seemed to know everyone. He already knew Abra anyway, and he already knew the chef. Carter Quark. He was just one of those guys people called by both first and last names.

“I'm trying to seduce the chef,” I confided.

His eyes brightened at that. “Glorious. I've
been
there, but I'm sure you'll make more progress than I did.”

I laughed. “You think?”

“I do.” Carter adjusted his bow tie, sipped his beer. “Let me know if there's
anything
I can do to help.”

ASPHALT, GLASS DOORS,
tile steps, elevator, tile hall.

I watched from the doorway of my mother's room. She had a new visitor, a strange blonde woman with a German accent who talked and cried under the fluorescent lights as my mother drifted in and out.

She had a full necklace now, my mother – those radiation tattoos.

Her strange friend stood like a preacher, read to her from
a new age book about finding one's soulmate. “Come on,” my mother's friend insisted. “Don't you want a new lover, Eve?”

My mother laughed, adjusted her oxygen tube, closed her eyes.

I left them there. Tile hall, elevator, tile steps, glass doors, asphalt.

NEW LOVER, I
flicked the words under my tongue.
My new lover.
The chef made me think of shark teeth and orchids. She was lovely like jagged rocks along the shore. I followed her home.

She said, “Come around to the kitchen door. Can we be discreet?” She made me hot red chile sauce, poured it over homemade tortillas, whispered, “This. Try this.”

On the edge of her couch, she rubbed lotion into my healing star tattoos.

She pulled me into her bedroom, whispered, “Is this all right?” She held my uneven ribs, licked the salt from my skin, whispered, “May I fuck you?”

I slept, fist balled on her chest. Woke legs entwined, like I'd slept there with her a thousand nights. And in the icy light through the window above her bed, I thought maybe I was learning how to stand firm where there is no ground. Learning how to hold this sadness.

Three weeks.

My legs were still smooth.

HOT WATER ON
the stove in the chef's little kitchen and my phone buzzed too early.

“Oh, darling.” It was the British accent. The palliative care nurse I'd never met. “I've just learned they're releasing your Mum from the hospital later today.”

I stared out the chef's window. The bare branches of winter trees.

“They're releasing her to you, darling.”

I didn't say anything. Just watched the trees against the
morning sky. My mother couldn't get herself to the bathroom now, couldn't eat solid food, needed the oxygen tank to breathe.

“Hospice will deliver a hospital bed to the house, darling, and we'll get her pain stabilized on the fentanyl patch and the morphine pump. We've got her accepted into a new hospice service and the nurses will come along and check on her every day.”

“I can't take care of her,” I squeaked.

But the voice just said, “I know, darling. I know.”

27.

Pirates are Beautiful

THE COLD BRIGHT OF THE DAY HELD STEADY
.

Delivery men wearing dark blue T-shirts showed up at the former duplex to install the hospital bed in my mother's room.

Nurses with name tags brought bedpans and enemas and walkers and machines with battery packs.

A man in light blue scrubs asked me to sign for the oxygen machine. He showed me how to use it so quickly that when he left I just sat down on the Saltillo tile floor and cried.

Sol called about something, said, “You sound like hell, Ariel. What's wrong with you?”

And I thanked God that I didn't have to do any of this to a Steely Dan soundtrack. I clicked the phone off, put Etta James on instead.

Runners from a pharmacy in Albuquerque came to the door with lunch bags full of prescription medications. Now we had morphine and fentanyl and Ativan and Oxycodone and Haldol and a dozen other pills and patches for pain and nausea and psychosis.

The palliative care nurse I'd only talked to on the phone appeared at the open door, walked in without knocking, red hair and turquoise cowboy boots. Tired gray eyes. She smiled and I never wanted her to leave me. “Are you managing, darling?” She cooed.

What could I say?
I was trying very hard to manage.

“The night nurses cost twenty dollars an hour, darling,”
she said. She sat down at the dining room table, started writing things on a half sheet of paper. Here was the number for the night nurses. Another service in town might send nursing students for ten dollars an hour, she said, but we had to go through an intake process. Here was that number. We'd need baby monitors so we could hear my mother from anywhere in the house. We'd need adult diapers, sippy cups, baby wipes, disinfecting wipes, soothing music, receiving blankets, soft foods.

I remembered a dream I'd had back in Portland when my mother was first diagnosed. A dream I was unexpectedly pregnant, crossing a desert border panicked and confused. I woke thinking that wasn't a normal dream for a lesbian – unexpected pregnancy – but it all made more sense now.

I left the palliative care nurse in the house, ducked out to buy the baby products. It occurred to me that someone should throw me a “hospice shower.” Maybe I could register at “Dying Parents ‘R' Us,” make a big tres leches cake. Then it occurred to me that I was perhaps getting a little bit morbid in my middle age.

I called the night nurse service from a parking lot. Y
es
,
I needed someone for the first three nights at least.
I did the math. All these nurse hours would add up, but there was no way I could move into the former duplex full-time again. My mother's social security check would pay for ten nurse-nights a month. It boggled my mind to think that people poorer than me dealt with this kind of thing every day. People with less flexible jobs. I stopped at the new candle shop that had replaced ours, bought a Virgin of Guadalupe, headed to the Southside to pick up Maxito from his Spanish immersion daycare.

I knocked on the arched door the way I always knocked.

Maxito's pretty teacher opened the door the way she always opened it, but she didn't quite make eye contact. Two unfamiliar white people stood behind her.

I could see Maxito and his friend Diego playing with colored blocks in the main room, but something was off. The
place smelled skunky like weed and smoke. “Everything all right?”

“Not really,” Maxito's teacher hummed.

One of the white people piped up. “We're with the Children, Youth and Families Department. We've suspended Ms. Martinez' license until she works out a number of issues. This day care facility is now closed.”

Ms. Martinez' lip quivered, but I just shook my head. Of course this day care facility was now closed.

I took Maxito's little sweaty hand in mine, led him outside. As I lifted him into his car seat, he bit his lip. “Will I be able to play with Diego tomorrow?”

I squinted into the afternoon sun, buckled him in. “Probably not tomorrow. But you'll see him again soon. How about we go get a Lego set?”

“A pirate set?”

“Sure.”

Subject:
We need help in Santa Fe

From:
[email protected]

Date:
January 31, 2012 4:57:20 PM MST

To:

Greetings friends and friends of Eve,

As many of you know, my mom was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer over two years ago. Her health has taken a sudden turn, and I need your help now.

After three weeks in the hospital, she's being released into home hospice care. This is not a 24-7 care service. I need friends willing to come for a few days or week each to help her here at home.

Please let me know if you can take on any time in February or March.

Thanks so much,

Ariel

I SENT THE
email to the twenty or so old friends I could think of. No one I knew of had come to visit since we'd moved to New
Mexico, but maybe now they would come. I hated to sound helpless, had been trained that asking for help meant I was a loser, but I had to grow up. I had to admit there was no way I could pull this off by myself.

Like a miracle they wrote back. A few of them wrote back, anyway. Yes, maybe they could come. They would check their calendars. Yes, three days or a week? They could probably commit to that. They'd had their hard times with Eve, they said, but they loved her. Maybe they even had some frequent flyer miles. They would check.

Leslie would come for a week if I bought her a ticket. Her son, Leo, would come next. A new-age priest we'd always known in California could do a long weekend. An old friend, Afton, would drive from Los Angeles.
Would it be all right if she brought her seven dogs?
Tom could be here as soon as he got home from the Middle East. A nurse who'd been part of my stepdad's church community could come the weekend I had to go teach a writing workshop in Iowa City. My godmother, Deborah, would come from Monterey. Carmen would fly in from El Salvador.

I bought calendars and dry-erase boards, flowers and dark chocolate, medication logs and cheap wine. I set up the
DVD
player at the foot of my mother's hospice bed, bought
The Maltese Falcon
and
The Letter
with Bette Davis. I set up the music player. Stacked Cat Stevens, Carol King, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez.

I tried to be honest with my mother's old friends: “If you need to see her alive, come as soon as you can. But if you can hedge your bets, we're probably going to need people for at least a few months.”
Was it harsh to put it that way?
I didn't know.

She could live five more years, the oncologist had said, but the palliative care nurse shook her head at that. “Oh, darling,” she said, “let's just budget for six months. Your mum's on her journey.”

Maxito focused on his pirate Legos. “Beautiful,” he kept saying. “Pirates are beautiful.”

It was starting to get dark, but no one turned on a light.

Six months. That worked for my brain. I could plan for six months.

The palliative care nurse's cellphone beeped. She read a text from someone, looked up at me. “All right, darling,” she said. “They'll bring your mum now.” She stood up suddenly, clicked her cowboy boots on the tile floor, grabbed the tape and a rolled-up piece of paper from the table, and unfurled the red and black sign. She marched over to my mother's bedroom door and taped it up.
DNR
. Do not resuscitate.

28.

Pot Stickers at Yummy Café

“
I JUST NEED MY MORPHINE PUMP AND A CHECKBOOK
,” my mother said as the palliative care nurse and the night nurse helped her into her bedroom.
Helped.
Maybe that's a euphemism. They carried her, one on each side.

She wore the loose-fitting Mexican embroidered cottons I'd left for her at the hospital, looked too thin to be wearing them.

I knew people would still call her beautiful, but she had that look of death now – eyes sunken, teeth too prominent.

She'd never asked to come home from the hospital, had in fact refused to leave, but this was how they released people. This was how they released my mother, anyway. The only other option was Casa Que Pasa, the nursing home where the state itself had deemed residents in “immediate jeopardy.”

As the nurse-women lifted her into her hospice bed and started hooking up the tubes, my mother gazed at a painting of a crow on the wall. “That's the last painting I bought,” she sighed. “It's my friend. My crow. The artist found my crow dead out on the old highway. Think of that. She painted its portrait. She used its bones in art pieces. She buried its organs. She let the river carry away its feathers. Think of all that.”

The night nurse's face relaxed into an easy smile. She was smitten. I could tell. And I prayed she would stay smitten, that my mother would stay charming, that everyone who set foot in this house would fall under her spell – fall in love with her – and fucking help me.

My mother glanced at the pile of
DVD
s, kind of threw her head back to the extent she could throw her head back.

“Do you like old movies?” The night nurse asked.