FIFTEEN
Emma watched them out into the channel, saw them nose around the islands, then disappear, the boat low in the water, the two of them sitting at some distance from each other and waving to her as she waved to them, removed by layers of formalities: man and girl, hero and adolescent fan, and -- she supposed -- whatever formalities described their feelings and fears about her. The boat rode so low that the wake from the inadequate motor lapsed behind them like soiled lace, a swathe of barely frothing white.
Goodbye, my daughter, she thought; goodbye, my... what?
She laughed at herself. My what, indeed. It was too easy to think so of Flynn, too terribly adolescent of her. My ride, she supposed, summed it up. A ride back from Syracuse repaid by some few days understanding. Women have paid much, much more for a ride in a fancy car.
My friend, she thought, then literally turned heel and walked up from the dock, leaving them to the particular formalities of the river.
Behind her the boats screeched at their mooring, and a low murmur hung above the water like a haze, the whole river humming. Ahead the road rose slowly past the rental cottages and the combined office-store. The monarchs were back, dusty orange and slowed by the sun, landing in a fold of wings then flitting on in corkscrew flights. She walked toward them.
It felt like skipping school, the sun some constant force upon the mud and gravel here, upon her arms and shoulders, the back of the sundress she was naked under. Cool, Emma thought, not seductive or suggestive, only cool.
But there was some license to it, she knew. Like the low and subtle breeze in off the water, like skipping school or skipping off, especially to one raised in a Canadian convent school. She remembered the French nuns as motionless, their woolen habits the color of concord grapes, starched wimples about the skull and down in a stiff half circle across the impossible breasts, the fabric of the wimples as dazzling white, as wheaten, as communion wafers.
Nonsense, she thought, there is no connection save in books. The same nuns had dark lisle stockings and Irish linen handkerchiefs, they shared wine on name-day celebrations and whispered secrets to one another daily under the stone arches of the cloistered gardens. Even in classes you could see they had other lives, for they read in French of Eloise and Abelard, the consonants sighing, dark eyes alive behind the white bibs. You grow to know you are beyond the illusions you have of your own early innocence. There are simply choices to be made. A girl from Trois Rivieres goes off to Paris and becomes a nun in blue, returns to teach a younger version of herself in the guise of a girl with a name from a romance novel.
Molly too, Emma thought, and Esther. Bertie also. Each of us naked under ourselves. Even so, she did not, as she had planned, go back to the car, but continued up along the dirt road through the cottages. Looking for something, she thought, courage or grace or whatever was lost. Or merely sustaining the feeling of skipping free.
We came here the first day and so he comes back here now. He skipped stones and seemed Ulysses by his ships. Regained his senses, went to sea. I am, she thought, whatever is the opposite of Circe, the un-enchanter.
And a nun of sorts, she could not deny. Even officially, the Lay Healing Order of Saint Luke, a blue scapular in my purse ready for healing visits.
Is it this Flynn, I've done, healed you?
Ha, she thought, healed myself as well.
There was -- had been from the shore -- a pebble in her sandal. A small, grey bean of stone there like a penance, a reminder of what she had before her, what she had planned. She turned back toward the car, but was stopped by the roses.
They were in the yard of the only cottage with both a yard and a different facade, this one alone cedar shake not clapboard, painted not cottage white but barn red some years back. The red paint was powdering now, chalky except where the shingles met. Behind the cottage a split rail fence surrounded a green square of lawn which seemed to float there uneasily, as if there was not thatch enough to grip the clay here where only broad fescue and crabgrass thrived. The rose bed was just outside this compound, an island of its own, a bare trench holding off the ground ivy, the bushes carefully pruned and high and lush.
She had seen them from the rear on her way up the sloping road, as if coming upon a stage set, only a few blooms bending obstinately back, toward her and opposite the natural westward exposure. There were no more than five bushes across the twelve foot bed, their canes strong and green at the tops, but bent forward and heavily laden, the root stock thick and dark, woody arms holding all this up. From this aspect it had seemed more a hedge than a garden, the bushes trimmed flat, the flowers intended elsewhere.
If they were remarkable, she had not sensed it, only noting that this was surely the cottage of the proprietors of this small non-village. The red shake, the floating lawn, the established roses all said this. Emma imagined a woman left here, making something home here while her husband tended to the rental cottages, the broad and low rental boats with their swathes of dull lace trailing behind them, the bait shop and grocery, its shelves stocked with overpriced and minature cans of soup and chile, family-style loaves of airy, substanceless bread, charcoal lighter.
She had paid more attention to the window boxes with their jarring marigolds, the rust orange making the cedar shakes seem even duller; and to the rowboat planter out in front, swamped in dark potting soil up to the seats, daiseys and columbine and whatever else sprouting through as if from under the whole hull of the world.
On the starboard side of the bow she had carefully lettered the words S.S. Primrose in periwinkle paint, the hand showing some talent, perhaps even some art training, the letters proportional and with serifs.
Emma had told herself a little story and just as promptly forgotten it: a life led here, a woman with dreams, some perhaps fulfilled. But now, coming back down upon the roses, the story suddenly frightened her. It had substance in the awful weight of the cabbage-like blooms, unwound by the sun, and in the floribunda spreading like panicked mouths, all of them screaming. It was all too much, abloom like this and untrimmed, it was the trouble with roses. You could never keep up with them. If blackspot and aphid and fungus and mite did not get them or demoralize you, then there was the constant cutting, the trim and cut and cut back to the cinqfoil eyes, the tilling and watering and spraying, all to keep them coming. There was a wall of them now, in all possible stages of bloom, blast, and decay; a few tight, long-stemmed buds buried in the greenery like forlorn and doomed virgins about to fade into the wilt and spoilage, the cabbage fulness of the surrounding matrons. The wall of them -- the steaming, pungent and invisible fog of their fragrance hanging over the road -- was momentarily too much for her. It was a stupid story, and she had told it to herself, had herself to blame. It was no way to ready for what she had to do this afternoon while they were out there on the river.
She willed herself away from the roses and the story both, hurrying down the road to the car, slipping into its anonymous odor, popping the small grey bean, the stone, under her tongue, keeping it there not as a penance but as a reminder of what persists, feeling the saliva rise to wash it and turning it sweet there, smooth, solid and immutable, knowing that this too heals.
The stone was still there when she entered the tile room.
"Hello Esther!"
The woman did not stir, nor had Emma expected her to. It was a habit, the greeting, come of years now in a healing order. "Reality orientation" was the fancy term for it, a simple courtesy really, an invocation. The dying and the failing alike suffer a disorientation not unlike that which strikes the living who come to see them. Any illness first assails the concept of self, the body floats off above, as if in a dream or accident. This cannot be happening to me, one thinks, or -- because it is -- I am no longer who I was. It is as if the old self gives birth to a new at the end; it was not uncommon to find dying women thinking, a delerium, they were again giving birth.
Before Emma had known any fancy terms, she had known that the first step in healing was to invoke the self.
Yes, it is you who this is happening to. Not fate, but the beginning of a last achievement. The illness is not outside you, nor has it taken you over; you are simply who you are, living the life you have been led to live.
Emma shortened the invocation for Esther. Normally, she would say what day it was, tell the time of day, and then perhaps mention the prevailing weather, or the number of days the patient had been here.
A quiz: what previous meeting did Jack Flynn not remember?
Answer: who was the anonymous "nurse" who told them the trick of using styrofoam cups to keep the sheets from pressing on the pain-wracked flesh of his father?
It was the occasion had blinded him, Emma knew. And the scapular. It was an effective blazon, a badge of office, keeping the living focused on the healing and not the healer. At certain times the whole healing task was little more than convincing the living to let the dying one pass. Sometimes you could see the patient linger for days until she or he was certain that the awkward, frightened family would let go. They would be ready to die, but hold back, denying themselves what by that time they were certain was rapture, arguing by their silent presence that what was to come was not unlonged for and not lasting.
Eine Augenblick, a blink of the eye, the last two words of an old dairy farmer she had attended to once. He was smiling when he whispered the words, trying to console her even as he died alone. Sometimes the healing is letting oneself be healed.
She wet her thumb with spittle and blessed the forehead and the eyelids of Flynn's sister, careful to open the lids again after she had blessed them.
There was no established rubric for Emma's office, and so she made do, sometimes improvising sacrament and ceremony as the occasion called for. A patient would want to confess when there was no priest on call or no hope of his making it there on time. Emma heard their sins and asked their prayers for her sins. One of the delerious women begged that Emma baptize what she imagined to be her newly born child; Emma performed the rite as well as she could remember, using the bloody spittle at the woman's lips for unguentum and the sweat from her brow for holy salts, leaving out the part about denying Satan and his works.
Sacrilege? Perhaps. But each woman makes her own priesthood, and Emma had come to this whole process sacrilegiously enough anyway.
The first death had been her own mother's, and she had discovered her calling then. In what later turned out to be the last twenty four hours, the devout woman had suddenly, perplexingly, turned doubter. She could not understand why she hated the idea of nothingness, the simple fact that one morning would dawn without her.
"Look," her mother had said, "You see these chocolates he puts here?"
It was a satin box with satin roses on her bedside table. Their father had put them there as if a ransom against death; in the last weeks, when her appetite failed her, late one night she had craved chocolate, and now at the end he sought anything that would detain her.
"Yes, Mama, you want one?" Emma's sister asked.
"He loves you," Emma said, "He gives you roses."
But their mother ignored her, focusing on the foolish Ann.
"I'll be gone before they melt," she said, "Put them in the sun and see what I say."
"She's lost her mind," Ann said, turning oddly hysterical, "The cancer has gone to her brain, don't you see, Emma?"
"A casket," their mother said, "A casket of roses..."
Ann fled the room weeping. Emma stayed.
"Would you like me to sing a sad song?" she asked.
It was new ground for her, the nearest she had ever come to inspiration. She merely knew that it was she who would have to be here for Mama, and that there was no guidance, no precedent, and so she resolved to say whatever came to her, and to pray for grace that it be right.
Her mother nodded and Emma knew she had spoken well. It was an exileration to know this, she felt an unaccustomed strength pour through her marrow. She was excited about what would come next. She began to hum, crooning low and waiting And in time the song came, the fool's song from Twelfth Night, the least known one.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there.
Her mother's eyes had closed, but Emma knew she was there. The song had come from school, a Shakespeare course once, something she had never even hummed before. It was a calling.
"Is that it?" she asked, "You are afraid for him?"
"He has to know he'll lose me."
It was desperate and loving to say this, and Emma told the truth, even though they had been made, absurdly, to agree not to.
"He knows, Mama... He knows. The doctor told him you don't have long. We all know."
And then, without knowing why, she added, "You can go now, you can leave when you are ready."
At first instinct it felt to her like treason, but as soon as it was out she knew it was right. Her mother's eyes opened.
"I'm afraid there is no heaven, my Emma."
"There is."
"Ha! How easily you all can say that," there was some spite in her voice, a testing. "You are not where I am now," she said.
"I can only tell you what I feel, Mama, and promise you that I believe it enough that I will always think that you are there."
"If there is one, I will be there for you," her mother said, and for a time she stared toward the ceiling watching nothing.
"I just don't know," she sighed, and then turned toward Emma, "I am very tired and I need to think. You can leave me now, I promise, there's no need yet."
"Sleep," Emma whispered, "I want to stay. When you wake, I will wash you and change your gown."
"I will wake."
"I know," Emma said.
And it was cast then, without her knowing. She sat there for another hour, washed her, changed her, went down to tell them not to worry, to tell them that she had told her. They understood and seemed relieved, despite the agreement not to say. The next morning she had washed her again, sponging over the cooling flesh, already feeling the warmth receding from her mothers arms and legs. She went down to tell them and they came up. Emma had hummed a tune and held her hand and then closed her eyes for the last time when no one else moved to do so.
It was a calling, but there wasn't much call for it. There was Molly and Yves to use her time and anyway people didn't really ask you to come and help them die. It's like they say about some stories, funny stories, you really had to be there.
She had laughed.
"You really had to be there...ha..."
"You lied," Flynn had said.
"No," she said.
"You came out to find me. It was all a lie, the motel and the road back. You lied."
"No."
"They sent you to find me."
"Who?"
"Bertie, that doctor, Lenny... everyone."
There was an awful storm out on the river, moving in. They could hear the thunder, like giant's boots. Molly was whimpering in the next room, whether waking or sleeping Emma did not know. They were all in the house and Wolfman would be coming in. Flynn had seen Esther, and now he had to do whatever he would do. Emma's only lie was saying Esther was no one; she \was\ someone, she was herself, but not who Flynn wanted her to be. It had been necessary to use this lie so he could see. It, too, was a healing.
"I have to know the truth, Emma."
"Yes," she said, "you do."
There was a sudden crack, a flare, a rolling cannonade of thunder, echoing off the nearby houses and then far away on the river. All the house had been a hum of different fans, but now the humming slowed and died, the pale eye of the bedside clock dimmed. The lightning had been near, the crack was a tree splintering, the electricity had died away. They could hear the thump of Molly's feet across the bedroom carpet, the slap as her feet reached the wooden floor of the hall. As she pushed in with them, the fans resumed and the light from the clock washed across her face. The rain came in a great sigh and a rush of cool air, the rainfall rattling against the roof and open windows. Flynn rose to shut the windows, switch off the fans. Molly pressed against Emma.
"Love me, Mama," she whispered.
"I do," Emma said, "I will."
Flynn was sitting on the edge of the bed. The rain came in clattering waves against the house, hard knots of rain, hail perhaps. The house was breathing on its own again, without the fans.
"There are two places where you can lose a game," he said, "the first innings when you haven't yet found your rhythm, and the middle innings when, if you're not careful, it can leave you without warning. You tire all of a sudden and its gone. Maybe it's a ground ball too sharply hit, it looks like an error on the books, but you know he got to you, hit something too hot to handle. It opens the floodgates, next there's a clean shot, or maybe a squibber, a walk, then a long fly. You're on your way out... someone else wins or loses it for you.
"The early innings you maybe can or can't survive on your own. I been in games where I let them get three, then the other guy lets us get four, or two, or tie it up. Then it's like the heat is off. We both settle down and it's a pitcher's duel... until the middle innings anyway, when either one of you loses it. It's funny, but in a game like that it's never both of you, always one of you stays in his form, you know..."
Why are you telling me this she thought he knew.
Molly made a big deal of pulling the pillow down over her head. She could still be an unreasonable girl in the night, in a storm.
"I'm feeling like the one who goes out in the middle," he said, "I'm feeling like I lost it both ways, Emma."
Molly flopped over on her other side, groaning slightly, pulling the pillow back over her head. Flynn picked the pillow up and dropped it back against her, he was teasing her.
"What do you say we all go fishing tommorow?" he said.
"In the rain...?" Molly groaned.
"It won't be raining. It's moving off already. What do you say?"
Molly sat up straight. "Really?" she said, then "Mom...?"
"Sleep," Emma said, "Go back to your bed and sleep..."
"No," Flynn said, "I'm going to get up for awhile anyway."
"I'll come..." Emma said.
"No."
And the rain had moved off then, moving with him, the cool air sliding in behind it with the wind shift.
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