Hollowby Kelley Eskridgea novel in progress |
This is the novel that I’ll probably never finish. I said in this post that it didn’t speak to me anymore. That’s not entirely true — it does speak, there is some real power here, but it’s not where I want to be right now.
- – -
It just happened. They were on Highway 20, Bill steering carefully on the curves that swept them out over the glassine beauty of Diablo Lake far below, so Maura felt as if the old Chevy had become a giant graceful bird. She turned to Bill to say We’re like eagles, and then a faded brown pickup truck was there, a man’s face wide with no in the windshield, and they all flew.
She never remembered any sound at all, not the screams that must have been, the celery crunch of metal on rock, the wet noise of meat. Just the silent kaleidoscope of which she was the center, the sky upside down, the lake rushing up. Was there an eagle? Something is wrong here, something’s wrong, and then the ground reached for them like the first time she kissed Bill, took hold of his strong arms and pulled him in, the surprise on his face. She wanted to tell him it was just like this, my life turned inside out and spinning.
And then it was done. The car shuddered to rest fifteen feet from the water, slewed sideways on flat tires, one of which, shredded to its rim, dug into the hard earth and held them from the final drop into the green that looked so tropical and was so killing cold. Small rocks spattered down through the torn roof and the empty space where the windshield had been. She saw Bill bent over the steering wheel with his head turned sideways, as if in relief, the way a man would stoop for a moment when the doctor came out to the waiting room with good news. Gravel rattled onto his head and a piece hit his open eye, and it was as if she became two people: one who thought He won’t like that and the other who thought Oh. Oh. And this second woman knew there was more. There was something she should remember. It was behind her, this thing she could not quite bring to mind. She tried to turn against the weight that pushed her body in wrong ways. There was no pain yet, just heavy grunting effort, and it took a long time to twist and peer into the back seat. Abby. She remembered. But Abby shouldn’t be here. Maura would have to get her out of the car before she saw her father, and here Maura’s mind skipped a little — like this, she finished the sentence after a moment, before she sees her father like this. “Abby,” she said, and saw that Abby’s hair was a mess, her face dirty, and her small body torn nearly in half.
Now, instead of spinning, the world stood still. She thought, I am seeing my child dead. Now I must die too.
- – -
Noise roused her. Was it screaming? Was someone hurt? She was supposed to know something about this, but she couldn’t remember. Go to sleep, honey, Bill said, so she did, while around her the high-pitched grinding continued as people with machines pulled the corrugated car from her. Aaaeeeeaaah, in her dreams, aaaeeeeaaah. When they unfolded the metal clenched like teeth around her, someone said oh, Jesus, and someone else turned away, but she was dreaming of Bill and Abby. They were all flying in a copper sky above a great canyon, making for the distant rim. Maura and Abby played a leapfrog game of loop-the-loop. Bill caught her by the waist and they danced as they had at their wedding, and she felt again that sense that it’s all ahead of us. She was purely happy. Then Bill held her close and said, My gillyflower, you can’t come; Abby said, I love you, Mom; Bill touched her face and smiled as big as the sky. And they were gone, and she was alone with her dreadful wounds and her punctured soul and her first moment of never.
Mack Sorenson was the lead paramedic who stopped her dying, and continued to work on her as she came to consciousness. He was grateful she could not see the bodies being placed in bags behind her. It was better to remember your dead still and straight if you could, rather than the broken bundles they became in these moments. It was better not to see strangers handling your beloved people as if they could no longer be hurt.
“Do we have a name?” he said sideways to his partner.
“Miller,” she said. “Maura, forty; William, forty-two. We don’t have the child’s name.”
“Mrs. Miller,” Mack said. “Maura, can you hear me? Maura.”
“Abby,” Maura said.
Mack put his ear above her mouth.
She said, “Her name is Abby” in a sliver of a voice, and the pain, which had only been waiting for her to wake, began to eat her.
- – -
The next days were snapshots caught in wooden pins, fluttering on a clothesline. Snap: she floats on her back over ground that moans as she passes, mmmaaooohh. Snap: a copper smell so strong it’s as if someone wiped the inside of her nose with it. Snap: masked faces in a circle above her, a hand that holds a piece of her in metal pincers, bandits stealing her in bits.
Then she woke to a world that did not click away, a soft white world like the laundry days of her Florida childhood, where wet white sheets sagged on double wires strung between two sets of metal poles in the back yard, and the sun shining through them made a tunnel of light like warm sweet milk that small Maura would run through again and again. Then she grew tall enough to carry the basket and reach the line, and her mother, having found someone to shoulder the load, followed Maura’s father into a graceless and comprehensive eighty-proof collapse. The first time had taken Maura hours to pin the sheets in place while they dripped and dragged and picked up a delicate fringe of dust along their bottom edges. She had cried all afternoon, learning to manage the whippy weight, the unexpected smack and smother when the wind came up.
And here she was again, wrapped in white that smelled faintly of bleach. It must be time to find the basket and get back to work. She blinked against the brightness and the blur, and the world fell into place.
A medical room, white white white: acoustic ceiling tiles, laminated wheeled bedside table, the broad painted sill underneath the window. White dotted with jumbled color and sound and sensation: the pink thermal blanket over the sheet, the green digital display of the machine that beeped gently near her, the yellowish liquid in the tube running into her elbow vein. The pain there. A machine at the foot of the bed, pneumatic tubes snaking under the covers to cuff her ankles and squeeze, wsssh wsssh. A cast lying heavy on top of the right side of the blanket like a stone sunk in sand. The pain there. Was that her arm? Everything looked funny and flat, and when she blinked only one eye moved. The other one was bandaged; she could feel it along her eyebrow and the bridge of her nose, down her cheek onto her neck. The pain there. The turquoise plastic pitcher on the table with a thick, clownish straw, and her mouth so dry; but her left arm would not bend because of the needle, nor her right arm because of the cast, with the hand at its end bundled in white like a child wearing two layers of mittens. Like a child. The pain there. She began to cry slowly, tears as soft as the touch of Abby’s breath on her cheek. They ran out of her open eye and the loose edge of the bandage, along the bones of her face into her ears, down her neck, onto the white bed, ran away and could never be caught back, never, and there was nothing to be done. There was nothing. Her nose clogged and her chest hurt, everything hurt, everything would always hurt.
A step, a hand on hers, and she jerked.
“Hold still, please” the nurse said, her fingers on Maura’s right wrist, her attention on her watch even though the green display was there to tell her that Maura’s pulse was eighty-five and her breathing was fearful and fast.
“Follow my finger, please,” the nurse said. Maura thought, Where are we going? The nurse said in a stronger voice, “Mrs. Miller, please pay attention and follow my finger.”
Maura tried with her one eye. The pain there. “It hurts,” she said in a whisper.
The nurse said, “You’re in Intensive Care at Cascade Medical Center. Doctor will be in shortly to discuss your situation.” Then she left without a backward look at Maura’s wet face or her pain, or the blasted space where her heart had been.
Surely this was a bad dream. She waited patiently to wake. Drying tears and mucus stiffened her skin. The day seeped through the sheer white curtains as if poured into a bowl, a slow curve that pooled along the floor and gradually filled the room until she floated in light. Left-hand parts of her body felt heavy and swollen; as her vision cleared, she could see the black bruises on her arms and sense them under the sheet and the bandages. She felt snags and twinges when she breathed, so she tried to bring air in like smooth water that barely lapped at the sore places. But it was her right side that frightened her, because she couldn’t understand the shape of her body under the bandages and the giant’s cast. Her topography was wrong. She felt herself balanced on the cliff between healing and horror, poised to slide. Best to make no sudden moves. So she lay still, suspended between the sheets, bargaining with God. Let them be okay and I’ll do anything. I’ll go back to church. I’ll give up music. Take whatever you want. The light pushed the shadows across the room. The tears came and went, gentle tides on the broken beach of her body. The same nurse came an hour later to take the same readings, and then again an hour after that. The doctor did not come, nor God, and Maura began to shame herself. Just leave me Abby, I’ll find another man, a good father, I’ll do whatever I need to make him love us. And later, Then leave me Bill, we’ll heal together, we’ll have another child and love her so.
The day had run out of the room by the time the doctor arrived. He hesitated at the door, seeing her eye glinting in the dim. “Mrs. Miller,” he said, “are you awake? I’m Doctor Adoula. I’m putting the light on now.”
She closed her eye. There was noise, then silence. When she squinted, she saw him seated beside the bed. He was tall; he had folded himself, like origami, to fit into the small visitor’s chair. He held a damp cloth.
“Let’s see if we can get some of that gunk off you,” he said, and wiped her face, working down and out from the center of her forehead like someone trained in domestic work, leading from the clean into the dirt.
He said, “May I call you Maura?”
“My family,” she said. My voice, she thought. Is everything broken?
He put his right hand over her left. Again, she became those two women. The first would have taken her hand back, because it didn’t like being with strangers: but the second thought, No, wait, this is how they do it when it’s bad.
“Do you remember the accident?” he said.
She nodded as much as she could against the pain in her neck.
“Bill and Abby were very badly hurt. They died either immediately or in the time it took the emergency crews to get down the mountain to you. There was nothing anyone could have done differently to save them. I’m very sorry.”
She nodded again. She had known all day that God had heard her and only shrugged, and turned to other business. And then she was crying for Bill and Abby and herself and the way the world had swatted them. The doctor sat silent with his hand on hers. Finally he tucked a tissue into her palm and said, “Who can we call to be with you?”
“We don’t…” she said. “We just moved to Seattle a few weeks…” She squeezed the tissue into a ball.
“Where are you from?”
“Atlanta.”
“Do you have family there? Or anywhere? We’ll try to track down anyone you want.”
“We’re orphans,” she said. That was what they always told people.
“You shouldn’t be alone now,” he said, with a gentle authority that made it into medical fact. Doctor says take two people as needed daily for the rest of your life. Watch out for that wicked withdrawal.
“There’s no one,” she said, because now it was true.
He didn’t answer. That was fine. She was done talking about other people. They were all strangers. She could see some of them now: medical people in white with sensible shoes and the harried look of being five minutes behind; visitors with somber faces and bloomed-out flowers from the hospital gift shop; patients on unsteady legs, wearing blue robes that made them look like ceramics wrapped in soft cloth, just taken from a drawer for the first time in years. They moved across the small cinema screen of her open doorway, tangential to her life.
She looked up. Another stranger. “What’s your name?” she said.
“Doctor Adoula.”
She waited.
“Mani Adoula.”
“How am I?” she said.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow, when you’ve had some rest.”
“I want to know what happened.”
A man hit you with a big old truck, baby, Bill’s voice said inside her, his special blend of sarcasm and genuine good humor at the vagaries of the world. We fell down a mountain, isn’t life wacky? She would have answered him, but tears were still sticky on her face to remind her that he was dead and she could never…. And just like a dam closing, a barrier came down and part of her soul went dry. It was either that or drown.
“I want to know,” she said. That wasn’t really true, but how could she lie here and wonder?
“It would be better to talk about this when you are stronger.”
“Tell me now,” she said, and saw the softening in his eyes that meant he didn’t want to, and the hardening of his jaw that meant he would. It’s that bad, she thought, I take it back, I don’t want to know. But it was too late, he was already telling her.
- – -
What it was: three broken ribs. Right shoulder dislocated. A triangular hole in her abdomen where a bone of the car had punched through the fascia and stopped just short of her small intestine. Appaloosa bruises spackling her hips and legs. Lacerations, a medical term for the bites the car had taken from her thighs, breast, arm, head, face. Skin zested like a lemon rind. Right eyelid sliced through. The cheek that burned bright when Bill made love to her was strip-sliced like London broil; they had fitted it back the way you might glue a broken plate, never seamless again. Bruises on her brain where it had bounced against the inside of her skull like a pinball in play. A compound fracture of her lower right arm, the tendon severed. Her right thumb and two fingers chewed into handburger, bones crushed, sinews ground into paste. And this was when she began to shudder, when she began to see what must be under the bandages, the small crippled meatbags still stubbornly attached to the hand they had always served so well. If she could, she would have leaped from the bed in a tangle of IV stand and blankets, and shot howling through the door. But Mani Adoula pressed his hand more firmly over hers, to hold her to the telling. “You have a lot of work ahead of you,” he said. “More surgery, probably. The hand surgeon thinks you may lose those fingers, but he decided to try to restore the blood supply and see how much overall function they are able to retain. You will need skin grafts, physical therapy, occupational retraining.”
What does that mean, she thought, occupational retraining, but he went on to say, “It’s something of a miracle that your injuries are so localized, and that you have no organ damage, no spinal trauma.” He patted her arm and stood. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
Snap: the dusty music room of her small grammar school, made cool and private by the rain’s gray allegro on the window; the piano teacher’s hands whose grace seemed so out of reach of her own awkward scales. Snap: turning years later from a morning’s practice to find her father in the doorway: I guess you’re pretty good, the only time he ever said it, the way it twisted his face. Snap: the best concert ever, in the small community center in north Georgia whose acoustics were impossibly perfect, where the music became water, wind, light, became joy that blew through the room and added tears to the sweat on the faces of the carpet factory workers and onion farmers in their wooden folding chairs.
Snap: the car rolling in arpeggios down the mountain.
“I’m a musician,” she said.
After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry.”
- – -
“Hi there,” someone said, sometime later. “I’m real sorry to bother you, but you know how doctors like their numbers.” Maura saw a young face like a small ripe apple, blushed and a bit mottled, with four silver studs in each ear: a matched set of small sun, moon, star, and tiny heart that glinted as the girl bent to wrap a blood pressure cuff around Maura’s left arm. “I’m your night nurse,” she said. “Jenny.”
She took a stethoscope from one of the wide pockets in her blue smock. The stethoscope wore a knitted purple sock. “Keeps it warm,” she said as she tightened the blood pressure cuff on Maura’s left arm; and then, “I’m real sorry, I know that’s sore,” as if she understood how it felt to have a bruise squeezed from the inside. Then she put her tongue in her cheek and gathered the numbers in silence: pressure, pulse, temperature, urine volume in the catheter bag. She produced a syringe and said, “This is a sedative the doctor ordered for you,” as she put it into Maura’s IV, then rubbed ice on her dry mouth and tucked the light blanket into place around her. Maura lay wordless, hopeless, so much less than before.
“You press that button if you need anything. Well, what’s it doing over here?” Jenny moved the call button from Maura’s right side, where the afternoon nurse had put it, to the left. “Sleep now,” she said. So Maura did.
- – -
She had thought she understood what medicine was: the minor invasions of glass or a sixpenny nail, the bacterial throat wars, the fright of a false positive Pap smear. Finding the right doctor, building trust, fine-tuning the rhythms of communication. Relationship medicine. But this was different. Dr. Adoula wandered in and out of her room seemingly at random. Other doctors popped up at odd intervals: she’d open her eyes and find one looking at her chart or undoing the dressing to get a better look at her hand, and it didn’t matter if she jerked: the hand was tied down, as if it might run off when no one was looking. The afternoon nurse’s behavior was so incomprehensible that Maura began to think of her as the Plant Creature from Alpha Nine, alien and unknowable. How could she connect with a giant yam? But it didn’t matter: the yam was only a cog in the hospital factory, the machine that fixed broken people. The gears of the machine meshed well or slowly or sometimes not at all, but they had no relationship with the product beyond the moments of processing. She had never felt so fucking helpless.
They had already made frightening choices for her. It wasn’t until she thought about what Dr. Adoula had said — The hand surgeon decided to try to restore the blood supply — that she’d understood they had discussed amputation across her as she lay blank and bleeding in emergency. We decided. Not to take your hand while you were sleeping. To let the surgical intern stitch up your face because he needs to learn. To rebuild, rewire, plaster and patch until no more function could be restored. Then doubtless they would smile like customer service people who say they can’t refund your money because you don’t have your original packaging — I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s no more I can do — and turn to the other repair projects waiting in the rooms up and down the hallway, whose voices Maura heard most clearly in the small night world, like echoes down the tunnel of dark hours. Nurse! Nurse! And one time, please oh God please ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, until she trembled that some unbearable thing was hunting from room to room, that it would find her and bring that noise out of her.
But what came instead were the doctors on their rounds, the interns who stared owl-eyed as if she were their private grunting textbook. And the nurses: the yam who was perfectly unreachable even when she leaned across the bed so close that Maura could smell her deodorant, the morning nurse with the bad teeth, the cheerful night apple. And the hospital Patient Services Representative who arrived one afternoon with a long list of questions and a short ration of patience. He sat on her right side so that she either had to tilt her neck and sear her damaged nerves, or strain to see him with her left eye, which made her feel sick. Instead she stared at the ceiling while he talked. Please review and sign the inventory of belongings that had been collected from her on admission. Please provide her Social Security number. The hospital required a designated next of kin. “It’s our policy,” he said. “Any relative of you or your husband will do.”
Don’t go there, baby, she felt Bill say, and she couldn’t shut him out. He was a trickle in the soul dam, a little buzz inside her breastbone, as real and strong as the three thousand times his face had nuzzled there.
“There’s no one,” she told the ceiling.
“Please try to understand, Mrs. Miller,” the man said, in a voice that made clear he thought it might be beyond her. She lay in her lacerated body, unable to flee, and tried to remember if he’d told her his name. He must have. People always did, didn’t they, when they came into your room and pressed on places that hurt? That was the difference between business and torture, when they gave you their name first. He went on, “It’s our policy. We can’t continue to treat you without proper designation of next of kin. What if something were to happen?”
Surely he hadn’t said that. Maybe this was another nightmare. She peeked at him with a roll of her left eye, waiting for him to turn into a giant lobster or her father, the way that people did in dreams. But he didn’t: he just shifted in his chair, turned his palms up, and said, “Mrs. Miller, I really have to have a name.”
No, she thought, this is real, this is happening. The lie she and Bill had told for so long had become this unexpected, terrible truth.
She said, for the first time, “My family is dead.”
He flushed, and pushed himself back as if trying to put distance between them. “Yes, all right,” he said. How can it be all right? she thought of asking, but he went on, “Can you please just help me out here? I’ll take the name of anyone who knows you. Just someone we can contact if we need to. Your third grade teacher. I really don’t care, Mrs. Miller.”
She had no answer. No one knew her now.
“Mrs. Miller,” he said, and she said, not knowing that she would, “Betty Greene.”
He looked surprised. Me too, she thought. “Greene with an e,” she said.
“And what is her relationship?”
“She’s my boss.”
“You have a job.”
“It’s Elliott Community College in Seattle. I’m…I was supposed to start teaching two weeks ago, but the class was rescheduled to the second summer session, so we thought…” That the free weeks were a gift, the world’s way of rewarding them for coping with the move and the bad time before it. That they would regroup and rejoice a little at their escape, then settle into their new lives.
“Do they provide insurance coverage?”
“Maybe. I think so. I mean, they must…. You should check with Betty.”
“Does she know…?”
“No,” Maura said.
“Well, thank you,” he said, not quite managing to cover the note of Why was that so hard? She hoped it was done, but he shifted again, uncrossed his legs and put them back over each other quickly as if they needed something to hold onto. “Now,” he said, looking down at his clipboard, “there’s the matter of arrangements.”
It took her a moment to understand, and then she wondered if she would bear it. Arrangements. What to do with the wreckage of their car, the pieces of her husband, the scraps of her child? He was very sorry for her loss, but these decisions had to be made. She stared at his heart-attack face made more red by his unfortunate green and brown tie; then she felt her husband buzz inside her, and she thought Bill would settle your hash in a New York second; that gave her the energy to say, in a fierce voice unlike the one she’d been using, “Please go away now.” His mouth puckered open and closed for a moment; and then he did.
Thanks, Bull. The private name had begun as a comment about Bill’s aggressive persistence; he was a man who decided what answer he wanted, and then went from one person to the next until he got it. It should have been a bad strategy, but he had a way of making the world line up for him, even if only because it got tired of the fight. You’re a bull in a china shop, she’d said once after he’d bruised the ear and the spirit of the appliance repair service manager who was refusing to honor the warranty because it was nine days expired. I’m a bull everywhere, baby, he’d said, and she’d had to laugh because it was true. And of course it became a lovemaking game, the kind you would rather die than describe to anyone because it sounded so stupid, but in the moment was almost unbearably sexy.
Such good days, Bull. But he didn’t answer. He wasn’t here. It was only left to her to make arrangements for him and their summer storm of a daughter, their child of blue skies and squalls and rainbows, who would have been on the dean’s list forever if her teachers measured the joy she generated in the world instead of how many words she could spell. It was only left to burn or bury her.
And Maura couldn’t do that: so she closed her eye and began to go away.
- – -
“About 407,” Jenny said to Maggie Sorenson in the break room, and then stopped. She wasn’t sure how to say what she meant, and Maggie could be terse; it didn’t do to waste her time. But Maggie was only on Intensive Care for a couple of days until they could find someone to cover for Polly Arger, who practically had her baby in the middle of changing a patient’s IV, she was so determined to work until the last minute. And Jenny wouldn’t be on shift with Maggie again for ages. Next month she would rotate over to afternoons with snarky Nora Lerner who thought critical care patients were a disruption to the real work of organizing medications, keeping records, and impressing doctors with the Latin names of every human body part. Nora would never answer a question, just huff between pursed lips and say Don’t they teach you people anything?, forgetting she was supposed to be one of the teachers.
But Maggie was a real nurse, and her husband Mack was what Jenny’s mom called a humdinger, which was a good way of describing how Jenny felt around him: like her whole body was making a low, happy noise. He would never look twice at her. It hurt, but that was how it was, and she would kill herself if he ever found out how much she liked him, although she’d have to do it in another state, maybe Canada, because around here he would probably catch the call and be the one to resuscitate her. Then she would die anyway, of embarrassment.
“It’s not a numbers game,” Maggie said.
Jenny frowned.
Be patient, Maggie told herself for the nine thousandth time, don’t bite the young people. She gave a no-teeth smile and said, “Does 407 have a name?”
“Oh.” At least this one had the grace to blush. “Sorry. Maura Miller.”
“Diablo,” Maggie said.
Jenny nodded.
“Something bothering you?”
“Well…” Jenny frowned again, but this was the face of a person thinking hard.
“You got a beep on your radar,” Maggie said. “What is it?” And that was nursing in a nutshell: confident hands and an eye for incremental change. A person was a process, a bundle of behaviors in which even the most subtle shift could be a cue that you’d miss if you saw them only as a collection of symptoms, a static puzzle to be solved.
“It’s not any one thing,” Jenny said.
Maggie nodded.
“Maybe it’s nothing.”
“If you saw it, you saw it,” Maggie said. “I can’t help if you don’t tell me.”
“Well, I’ve been taking her readings, you know?” Maggie waited for her to go on, until she realized that Jenny was waiting herself for confirmation. I’ve been charting patients since you were in third grade, I know what a reading is, she nearly said. But it would be silly to blame the kid for doing what Maggie herself had taught her: always make sure the patient understands one thing before you go on to the next. Students got a new skill between their teeth and practiced it on everybody for a while.
“Okay,” she said.
Jenny nodded. “So her fever is down, and there’s no sign of infection in the ab wound. It seems like she should be getting a little stronger. Maybe transfer to the surgical ward. But she still looks like someone who should be on ICU, you know? She’s… I know that hand must hurt like fu — like the dickens,” she said, a spot of red on each cheek now. Maggie nodded again so Jenny wouldn’t get flustered and lose her train of thought. She was pleased Jenny remembered that hand surgery was bad pain, the kind that made people want to crawl out of their own bodies to get away from it. Helpless pain.
“And so I’ve been expecting her to be restless, maybe snappy. I keep going in there ready to gentle her down if I can. But she’s so still…just now it looked like she hasn’t moved a muscle since I was last in. And her urine seems a little low to me, we’ve been pumping fluids into her but….” She hooked her lower lip under her teeth. “And her blood pressure is still in normal range, but it drops just a teeny bit every day. I don’t know…”
Now Maggie’s radar was beeping too, gently but persistently. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go take a look.”
Their rubber-soled shoes squeaked in rocking-chair rhythm down the corridor, past the dim curtained rooms that smelled faintly of alcohol layered over sweat and sickness, that buzzed with the noise of pumps and monitors, sighs, tears, late-night television. The picture window at the far end of the hall had become a midnight mirror that showed Maggie the ward station behind her, the patient privacy curtains billowing as they passed, the girl at her side pulling her wholesale-warehouse cotton cardigan across her breasts. Maggie understood that Jenny was nervous, that this girl looked to her the way Maggie had imprinted on Susan Cromwell all those years ago, when being a head nurse had seemed like being queen of the universe. And so it was, Maggie thought, and walked a little straighter even though she was tired: Jenny was watching.
In her room, Maura drifted. She was a leaf on the last bend before the falls, so light on the water that she barely felt the speed toward the edge that would tumble her into the next great change. It was good to be carried along in this nearly weightless state, to be nearly cleansed of the mud of these last days.
She heard the curtain rings rattle. The noise seemed a long way from her. The night nurse back so soon? And the other one she’d seen once before, taller than the apple, more like an ear of corn, or a sunflower. It didn’t matter. She was going somewhere else.
She closed her eye.
The sunflower came to the left side of the bed and said, “My name is Maggie. How are you doing, Maura?” Her cool hand touched Maura’s forehead and brought a brief, vivid memory of her mother checking her for fever on a long-ago day when Maura was small and safe, and her mother still loved her more than Johnny Walker.
Maggie moved her hand from Maura’s forehead to her left shoulder, and raised an eyebrow first at Jenny, and then at the chart at the foot of the bed. Jenny flipped open the chart to the first page and held it where Maggie could see it. Good girl, Maggie told her with a smile. Then she turned her attention to the notes. It didn’t take long to trace the gentle decline, the slow ebb of Maura Miller. Oh no you don’t, not on my watch, Maggie thought. She looked down at Maura’s shuttered face, with its insult of bandages and the greater offense beneath. She couldn’t give this woman the strength to survive; no one could do that for another person. But there was another gift, although most healers didn’t have the stomach or the skill for it. Maggie had been a nurse a long time before she’d seen it, and even longer before she’d ventured it herself. She spared a second to wonder about Jenny: would this be her baptism into the mystery, or only a story she’d tell ten years from now about the weird thing she saw her head nurse do one time?
She spoke softly and evenly. “Jenny, stay in the room, but close the door and stand by it. If someone comes, tell them I can’t be interrupted and I’ll be with them in a few minutes. Don’t let anyone in.”
The girl took a breath, the questions so clear on her face that Maggie was tempted to scare the bejesus out of her by answering them in a string; she wished she’d known all those years ago that Susan Cromwell didn’t have psychic powers, just more mileage. But Jenny surprised her by closing her mouth and tugging her sweater across her chest, then shutting the oversized door carefully, easing the handle so there was no click as the latch engaged. She put her back against it for good measure. Maggie could see that she was trying to look stalwart, bless her, even though she had no idea what was happening and might twitch into pieces if someone tried the door. I could get to like this one, she thought; then turned her back on Jenny and forgot her utterly as she reached for the body on the bed.
In the place where she drifted, Maura felt movement, a wash of warm air, a soft shadow across her face. Perhaps she was stretched out on the springy grass in the park near their house in Atlanta, on the worn blanket with the raveling edges, so many years on their bed that it still smelled of them even after these weekends of groundcover duty. Perhaps she drowsed in peace while her husband and daughter played nearby, while summer wrapped around her and a flock of birds wheeled between her closed eyes and the sun. Weight settled next to her, someone’s hip pressed against hers, and then, with great care, the someone slid an arm under her left shoulder and took her weight, held her in the only way possible without pain. It was infinitely gentle and very strange: a slow curiosity took hold of her, and she let herself pay attention.
“The world is full of holes,” the someone said in a quiet, ruminative voice, as if they were sisters in a private moment, perhaps sitting on the broad steps of a hundred-year-old wooden porch under a hot black sky, with a thousand tree frogs and a hundred million stars for company; talking about things that could not bear too much light, that sounded like metaphor until they happened to you.
“Invisible holes,” her sister said, then pressed her hand against Maura’s back. Maura waited for her to explain, but there was only the touch that seemed to say Goddamn it, kiddo, the world really bit you on the ass this time, I’m so sorry, I wish I could fix it, I love you. The layered vocabulary of the body.
What are we talking about? Maura thought.
“You’re going along, living your life, and in the middle of a breath, the person next to you drops through a hole in the world. Or you do.”
I don’t understand, Maura thought, and felt Bill say Yes, you do, without words, the way he did so well, the raised eyebrows, the rectangular eyes, the mouth tense and ready like an actor waiting for his partner to get back on track with her lines.
“One day we all fall away forever, I guess. I don’t know. But until then, you just land somewhere hard, and it always hurts.” Her voice changed a little, and Maura thought her sister might be remembering that first winter their mother held her amber-full glass close every day, but never again her child; the first lesson that precious things could be taken without warning. She made a small, restless movement with her chin: she didn’t like this. But her sister held her the way she would if Maura were leaving home for college or marriage, the way that meant For this moment I will keep you here.
“And it’s not fair that you weren’t ready,” her sister said. “That you had plans, that you were trying really hard to make something work. It’s not fair that you can’t go back to the way things were.”
And they had been so good before. She had loved their house in Atlanta. The window seat where she had breast-fed Abby while afternoon thunderstorms flashed and boomed, turned the world into liquid and lightning; where she’d sat in later years, planning birthdays or strategizing about Brownie badges. The butcher block kitchen island she assembled herself, the first time she’d ever used tools beyond pounding picture nails into the wall or opening cans of paint for Bill with the end of a screwdriver. It came in a box so heavy that she had to drag it into the house on a blanket; it took her an age to find things in Bill’s toolbox, and to figure out that the little L-shaped metal pipe was the instructions’ idea of a wrench, even though it didn’t look anything like what Bill used to fix a faucet. But she had done it. Bill clapped his hands in delight when he saw it, and said, “Jesus Christ on a dirt bike, baby, if I’d known you were so handy, I’d have stopped changing light bulbs years ago.” And sometimes, chopping green peppers or making sandwiches, she felt a flash of pride like a soap bubble bursting bright inside her.
A happy house, a place to be settled and safe. Joyful work at the Grodier School of the Performing Arts, teaching children to wrestle music from the piano while some of their peers were still mastering shoelaces. Let Dick Sommers have the older kids with their polished recital pieces and the hormonal angst that drenched their work in drama. Maura delighted in the little ones, their awkward hands vibrating with the need to play a proper scale or descending fifths. Their faces when they did. She carried their hope and stubbornness with her into her own performances: such expressive playing, critics said, not knowing that she was trying with each note to reach back in time, to tell her own small self See, you’ll make it, see how beautiful it will be.
Such a nice life, so neatly packaged, seams straight, corners tucked in, until the Sunday afternoon the police sirens yowled onto their street and she ran outside to find Bill soiled and scratched, nearly cataleptic with rage, lying full length on Eddie Short with his forearm pressed against Eddie’s throat while Eddie’s face swelled purple as a plum, and that was the beginning, that was when —
No, she thought, won’t think about that now. Now I am here with my sister and everything is –
Bill said, You haven’t got a sister.
Maura jerked, and opened her eye.
It was the sunflower who leaned against her, close enough that Maura rested in her scent of fertile earth, the smell of someone rooted to the world even when she stood three stories above it. With her brown eyes and strong arms, in her pink and blue scrubs smudged with traces of lanolin and blood, she seemed to Maura like a well in sunlight: a quiet, cool channel to deep places.
They looked at each other for a moment; then in a small, breathless voice of discovery and despair, Maura said, “We fell down a hole.”
“Yes,” the nurse said.
“Bill and Abby died.”
“I know.”
“Why not me too?”
“You’re dying now,” Maggie said, and even with her back to the door, felt the shock and consternation that made Jenny take a step toward the bed, then stop and tug her sweater.
Maura nodded slightly, as if to say, So that’s what it is.
“Not because of the accident,” Maggie said. “Because your life is gone, and that’s too hard, so you’re dying instead. And the doctors can’t stop you, and neither can I. You’ll just….”
“Float away,” Maura said.
Maggie nodded. “Float away. Easier than falling, easier than climbing back up. No more pain, no more sadness.”
“See Bill and Abby again.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Maura said, after a moment, “Okay.”
“No, it’s not,” Maggie said. She leaned closer to Maura. “It’s not okay at all, and I’m going to fight you for it. I can’t stop you, but I can make it harder, and I will. Unless.” She stopped, took a breath. Maura stared up at her. That’s right, you just pay attention now, Maggie thought, you hear this, and let the power come into her voice low and slow and clear, a tool to pierce the drugs and the dying that stood between her soul and Maura Miller’s.
“Unless you can look me in the eye tomorrow,” she said, “or the day after, or anytime from now until then, and tell me there is no happiness left for you anywhere in the world. That you will never enjoy anything again, not a strawberry or a glass of wine or the ocean or a conversation or a movie or a hot bath. That you know in your heart you will never have another moment’s peace or excitement or curiosity or wonder. That no one will ever make you laugh or cry again. You tell me that, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you, because no one should live that way. But you have to convince me there’s nothing good here for you for maybe the next forty or fifty years. Tell me that, and then die if you need to.”
She pressed Maura’s back in one more brief hug, careful of her wounds, trying with her touch to say a fierce thing gently: Think hard, think hard, because it matters. Then she slid her hand from under Maura’s shoulder, bent to kiss her forehead. “No one will bother you tonight,” she said. “Jenny will make sure.”
Maura looked up at her, battered, bereft, tears welling in her unbandaged eye, and Maggie wished she could make it all go away. But she couldn’t: so she went away herself instead.
- – -
At the shift change, a nurse came in and opened Maura’s curtains. Pre-dawn fog pressed against the window. It hurt to turn her head, so she lay and watched the mist lighten from slate to steel to ash, and then burn away, the world becoming wider again. Finally she could see the mountains that had killed her. That’s how it was; she was dead. She couldn’t envision a life without Bill, without Abby, so she would lie here in her skin of bandages, being dead, waiting for her body to catch up. Dead but not done, she thought, the walking dead. Well, more like the lying dead. It was the sort of running joke she and Bill and Abby would have shared while she healed, Mommy the mummy!, and in spite of despair and death she couldn’t help but find it just a millimeter funny, and what was this, how could anything be funny ever again, and God damn it, she thought, God damn it, no I don’t want to, it’s too hard, I can’t, I can’t. But it was too late: now that she’d felt that tiny traitor laugh tickle for its instant in her belly, now she could see the rest. The sun behind the mountains, chubby and cheerful in a pale blue sky that was almost white at its edges. The valley that seemed to yawn and stretch itself into the light of the new day. A bird wheeling in the space between. Was it an eagle? She had always wanted to see an eagle. And now she was gasping for breath, now she was weeping, not dead after all but alive, alive and broken in the beautiful world.
2 Responses to “Hollow”
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I just read this and felt compelled to comment, but I’m really kind of stunned. I didn’t have any expectations, but this caught me be surprise. It’s definitely powerful.
I’m not sure whether to be pissed that you left me hanging with this one chapter, or relieved that I’m not going any further down that path.
All I really feel like saying is – holy fuck.
Thank you. For what it’s worth, it’s a hard path and I don’t want to go down it right this second, although there is something there…. Someday, perhaps. We’ll see.