Breaking Night

by Liz Murray

  “Sam, oh my God,” I said, stumbling. “Her nursing home is right next door! She’ll call the cops and report me, I know it.” Carlos ran over to us. Without ducking, he threw his hood over his head, gathered the bottom of it with his fist and peeked out the top, exposing only his eyes.

  “Who we hiding from?” he asked in a playfully girlish voice. “I’m so scared.”

  “It’s my mother’s mother. She’ll report me as a runaway. She’ll call the cops. They’ll take me away to a home. Just be quiet.”

  We peeked out from behind the wall, watching Grandma make her way through the snow. Her being there was like something from a dream, or an unconvincing scene in a bad movie. Without a thought in my mind, I let out a huge laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Sam placed her hand on my shoulder, squinting in Grandma’s direction.

  “What’s wrong with her?” she asked. “She’s walking funny.”

  Only then did I notice that Grandma wasn’t walking so much as inching her way down the street. More than once, she stopped to catch her breath and clutched her chest. As she drew close, I saw that her skin seemed pale, almost white. When she finally made it to the café, it took her several minutes to climb the few steps, while we looked on in silence. Once there, she flopped back onto one of the café’s hard plastic seats. None of the other patrons, who I assumed were also from the nursing home, acknowledged Grandma. She sat alone. Promptly, the grill guy brought a cup of tea to her and she passed him a folded bill, which she drew from her bag. It seemed a routine exchange.

  Watching the whole thing, I became incredibly sad. It was a glimpse into her isolated world, the one she’d always complained of when I, Ma, or Lisa was stuck on the phone with her. Her words echoed back at me. “I’m lonely at the home. My granddaughters don’t come to see me. Even my rosary doesn’t cheer me up,” she’d always say. Now her loneliness played out in front of me like a somber, silent movie. It made real for me the impact of my neglect throughout the last few years.

  “Weird,” Sam said. “It’s like we’re in the Twilight Zone.”

  “I know,” I told her. “It’s so strange.” I looked behind me; Carlos was already upstairs. We turned to follow him, and made our way up the stairwell together. I wondered whether or not, in Grandma’s opinion, I would go to hell for all my sins: driving Ma crazy, abandoning her in her time of need, sleeping with Carlos. If you knew me better, Grandma, you wouldn’t want a visit from your granddaughter, at least not this one. I’m not the same little girl who spent Saturdays in the kitchen listening to your scripture. I’m reckless and I neglect everything, especially you.

  Sam was speaking a jumble of words at me.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I said, isn’t that crazy, what that guy said to me when I left the store?”

  “What?”

  “Happy Thanksgiving. That’s crazy, I didn’t even realize. Kind of a downer, I guess, to think today is Thanksgiving,” she said.

  “Oh,” I replied. “Wait, what? It’s Thanksgiving? Now? I mean, today?”

  “Yeah, ain’t that somethin’? Who really cares anyway,” she said, pushing the motel room door open to reveal Carlos, who sat flipping channels on the old Zenith TV.

  I did. I cared that it was Thanksgiving, and that I was so disconnected from the rest of the world I hadn’t even realized. I ate my bagel in a daze and watched the morning news curled up beside Carlos, half listening to him and Sam throw around jokes and conversation. I was busy thinking about how Lisa had begun Lehman College this term. It occurred to me that I never asked her how that was. It always amazed me that she could handle school, our family, and even boyfriends, without ever buckling under the pressure, without missing class. I was suddenly filled with panic at the realization that she was becoming yet another item on my list of growing regrets.

  When Sam and Carlos eventually fell asleep, I lifted Carlos’s heavy arm up off my side, gathered change out of his army pants, not daring to touch his cell phone, pushed my feet into my boots, and slipped out the door to the pay phone. The cold stung my nose and ears, and the sound of Brick’s phone ringing quickened my heartbeat. I prayed for him not to pick up.

  “Hello?” It was Lisa.

  “Lisa, hi. Did I wake you?” My nervousness made me come off sounding chipper. I held my breath, waiting to see if she noticed.

  “Lizzy?”

  “Yeah. Hey. Did I wake you?”

  “Um, not really. Where are you?” She spoke in a perplexed tone that implied my call was somehow inappropriate.

  “Not that far away. I just wanted to see how you are.” I wished that I could tell her what had been happening, how unpredictable Carlos had turned out to be, where we were staying, how I had just seen Grandma in all her loneliness. But it wasn’t safe. I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t tell Brick, who would tell Mr. Doumbia, and then I’d be taken into custody. I wouldn’t risk that.

  “Oh. How am I?”

  “Yeah, how’s Lehman?”

  “Lehman?”

  It was so annoying, the way she kept repeating everything I said in the form of a question and pausing uncomfortably long between her responses. I could feel her suspicion, her mistrust of my good intentions and her anger toward me. It made me aware of every word coming out of my mouth.

  “Yes, I, uh, just wanted to call and see how you’re doing. I was wondering about school and about you . . . and about Ma.”

  “Lizzy, Ma’s in the hospital. She’s sick. She’s been there for the last week and a half. She’s in the hospital all the time now. She was asking for you before, but I think you blew that. She’s been pretty out of it lately.”

  A lump invaded my throat. Maybe it was the cold or the lack of a good night’s sleep that obscured my thinking, but for some reason, I hadn’t counted on the confrontation from Lisa. I thought we might talk like sisters, maybe catch up with each other. I fished for something to say.

  “Okay. I know . . . do you want to meet up or something?”

  “Well . . . why, do you want to meet?”

  Since as far back as I could remember, I’d felt that Lisa’s responses toward me usually bordered on the brink of hostility. Years later, a therapist would explain that growing up with few resources had turned us into competitors—over food, over our parents’ love, over everything. At the moment, we were competing for who had the better handle on Ma’s illness, and we both knew she was winning.

  “I don’t know, Lisa. I was thinking maybe we should see Ma.” There was another drawn-out pause.

  “Well, I can make it around six. Get a pen and paper, I’ll give you her room number.”

  “Lisa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Yeah, Liz, you too. See you at six.”

  “Hi. I’m looking for my mother, Jean Murray. She was transferred here from North Central last week. My sister told me I could find her on this floor.”

  The nurse looked at her list.

  “Let’s see . . . Jean Marie Murray. Okay, you’ll have to take a mask.”

  “A mask? Why?” This was a first.

  “All visitors for patients in quarantine need to wear a mask. And how old are you? You can’t be here if you’re not at least fifteen.” The nurse looked me over, seeing my confusion. I thought of the reading I’d done on Ma’s condition—something struck me as odd.

  “Why would I need a mask if AIDS is not airborne?” I asked.

  “It protects against TB,” she said. “Your mother could cough and expose you. It’s for protection.”

  “What?”

  “Tuberculosis, honey. It’s a lung infection; people with AIDS are vulnerable to it. Didn’t they make you do this before? Don’t tell me that someone let you up here without a mask before.”

  My face went hot. I remembered Leonard and Ma during their weeklong binges in the kitchen on University Avenue. The whole time, he coughed incessantly, his lungs crackling with phlegm until he worked up a sweat t
hat dripped from his face and his skin glowed bright pink. Daddy used to comment, “Boy, you’d think he’s ready to keel over and drop dead in there, from the sound of it.”

  “When was my mother diagnosed with TB?”

  “Honey, I’m the charge nurse. I have no idea. You’ll have to talk to her doctor about that.”

  She placed a soft orange mask in my hand. Hesitantly, I slipped it over my head and looked around.

  There was a deadness about the ward, and it gave me an eerie sensation. The mute backdrop of the hospital magnified the few noises: the distant ringing of phones and the incessant beeps of numerous machines. The entire area seemed unusually desolate, even for a hospital. It was unlike the last few wards Ma had been in, where nurses bustled around and visiting hours brought all kinds of faces. This place was different. I pushed myself forward, in search of Ma’s room.

  “Turn left, walk ’til you can’t go no more,” the nurse called from behind me.

  I passed a sign that read INTENSIVE CARE UNIT and another that read ONCOLOGY. I had no idea what oncology was, but figured that it couldn’t be any good if it was somewhere between intensive care and quarantine. I passed door after door, within which patients lay unconscious, their heads cocked back to allow for the breathing tubes lodged in their throats.

  You need it for protection. I thought of all the times Ma came home from the bar in need of my help. I thought of the vomit that had seeped into her clothing by the time she finally reached me. I recalled the putrid odor of the wet mess mixed with vodka rubbing off on me when I lowered her into the bath; Ma’s coughing fits as I washed her body clean and we both pretended not to notice her nakedness and her shame. I thought of her ninety-something-pound body, swathed in clean sheets, lulled to sleep by her own drunkenness, as I breathed in the fresh-out-of-the-box smell of the nurse’s mask one more time before deciding it was pointless. I pushed open Ma’s door and removed the orange cloth from my face.

  “Hi, Ma.”

  No response came from behind the brown-and-green fishnet curtain surrounding Ma’s bed. It took all my courage to pull that curtain aside, and it took that much more to conceal my shock over what I saw behind it.

  Ma took up just a fraction of the bed. Her skin was yellowed and tight on her face, cheeks sloped dramatically inward, painstakingly molded by her illness. The hospital sheet was cast off to the side, revealing her emaciated body, curled up like a child’s skeleton, barely dimpling the plastic mattress beneath her. Up and down her limbs ran angry, little red scabs, each attached to a raised mound of flesh. Her eyes were wide open, but fixed on nothing, and her mouth was slowly moving, almost spelling out words, sputtering small sounds. That and the machines hooked up to her body were the only noises in the small, airless room.

  I was trembling. I opened my mouth almost involuntarily, before I was sure of what would come out.

  “Ma? It’s Liz . . . Ma?”

  Her eyes drifted around the room in response. For a moment they landed on me and I thought I’d captured her attention, but then they kept roaming, her mouth maintaining that same choppy, wordless movement as they went. On the narrow table wheeled to her bedside was the hospital’s celebratory Thanksgiving dinner. In teal Tupperware, there sat an untouched serving of sliced meat saturated in congealed gravy that streamed its way through a scoop of mashed potatoes and onto the cranberry sauce. Lying on the tray beside her plate was a smiling cartoon cutout of a turkey decorated in red and gold feathers. The caption above its head read: A Time to Be Thankful.

  “Ma . . . look.” I took a seat. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner, Ma . . .”

  I didn’t know how to speak; my throat felt squelched shut, too full to draw breath. I might have been suffocating, drowning on the tears I wasn’t allowing to come. I took two deep breaths and reached out for her hand; it was not much warmer than the metal rods upholding her hospital bed. Touching it sent shivers up my arm.

  “It’s like she’s dead already,” I mumbled to myself. Then to her I said, “You’re not even here right now.”

  The door clicked open, sucking air outward, floating Ma’s curtain into a small breeze. Lisa walked in wearing heels and a black peacoat, her long, dark hair wrapped in a neat bun. She could have been a social worker, a lawyer, or any type of professional grown-up. I felt dingy, dressed in layers of sweaters, thumb holes punctured near the fronts of the sleeves, my long brown hair, tattered and stringy, falling down from under my knitted skull cap. Lisa clicked a few steps forward, looking from Ma to me.

  “Hey” was all we said to each other. She avoided eye contact and pulled up a chair to sit down near Ma. My heart raced. Seated there next to her, I judged myself through her perspective: I was a high school dropout who’d abandoned our sick mother to live in a mysterious location with my street boyfriend.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “Just a little while.”

  We spent a few moments sharing an awkward silence, and then Lisa leaned over the side of Ma’s hospital bed, tears spilling out of her eyes.

  “Ma? Hi, Ma. Sit up. We’re here. Lizzy is here. Ma?”

  “Lisa, don’t bother her. I don’t think—”

  “She can sit up. Ma?”

  Ma’s eyes raced all around. Her hand opened and closed, and she began muttering gibberish louder than before.

  “Came here . . . came here to give me your soul. Spare me. Spare me . . . that am I all . . . spare it. Mine and yours . . . yours, yours!” She wasn’t looking at either of us; there was no sign that she knew who we were.

  “Lisa, I just think we should leave her alone. Maybe she’ll get up, but she’s probably not feeling too good.”

  “Lizzy, look. She was talking at home last week; I know, I was there. She would want to know that we’re here.”

  Her tone was scornful. I quieted down as Lisa moved her chair up, right near Ma’s face. She spoke louder than I would have dared.

  “Ma, get up. It’s Thanksgiving. We came to see you,” she said in a softer voice.

  More gibberish. But then I was shocked to see Ma start to sit up. Very slowly, she lowered her feet onto the floor and peeled off the monitor as we quietly watched her make an attempt to go to the bathroom, dragging the IV pole behind her. I reached out to support her weight when she wobbled the six-foot distance, steadying herself on the door and the wall. As she turned away from us, Ma’s gown floated open in the back, revealing a full view of her upright, naked body. Pictures flashed in my mind of one of Daddy’s PBS specials on the Holocaust. If she stood still, I could count her vertebrae; they looked something like the metal links of a bicycle chain with flesh taut over them. Her pelvic bones protruded, and there was absolutely no fat on her bottom or her thighs. In the bathroom, I took a short towel from the chrome towel rack and wet it; I wiped Ma’s backside clean with one hand while supporting her frail body with the other. The fluorescent lights flickered on the white walls and on us. I bit down on my lip to keep from crying, and did all I could to stifle my need to cough on the smells of her sickness. “It’s okay, Ma, we’ll get you all fixed up,” I reassured her. “We’ll make you nice and comfortable, just relax.”

  “Okay, Lizzy,” she said in the weakest voice.

  When we were done, I took her hands in my own and lifted her from the toilet with almost no effort at all; she was so light, it scared me. All of it scared me. I was terrified, and wanted more than anything in this world to make her better. When I tucked her back into bed, I knew I had to get out of there.

  “Are you leaving already?” Lisa asked as I hovered in the doorway. I was shaking; I needed to be alone. My heart pounded; I could not take one more moment of being there. And I was not going to lose it in front of Lisa.

  “Well, um, it’s just that I was here before you, for a while . . . and I just think I should get going soon because I’m kind of tired. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes and turning away from me.r />
  “Lisa, it’s just not that easy for me, okay?”

  “Yeah, I know, Liz. I’m dealing with it, too. I know it’s not easy. I figured you wouldn’t stay long anyway, so just go ahead and go,” she said, sobbing.

  “People deal differently, Lisa.”

  “Yeah, they really do,” she snapped.

  I hadn’t prepared for how scary this would be, for what I’d feel seeing Ma like this and being powerless to help her. I didn’t know what to do with the frustration I felt at not being able to change things for Ma; I wished Lisa and I could see each other through this, but she wanted me to sit in it the way she was, and I could not afford to. I felt stuck. If I stayed, I didn’t feel I could handle it. If I went, I was a bad daughter and sister.

  “I have to go, Lisa. I just have to go. Please understand.”

  I ignored Lisa rolling her eyes and leaned over to talk to Ma. At the time, I had no idea that it was the last thing I would ever say to her.

  “Ma. I have to go, okay? I promise I’ll come back later. I promise. I’m okay. I’m staying with friends. I’m going to school, soon. I really am, I promise.” I reached down and touched her hand. “I love you,” I told her. “I love you, Ma.” I did get to tell her that. She said nothing in return, and I slipped out into the hallway, where I rested my back on the wall and inhaled deep breaths; holding in tears, I felt like I was descending, free-falling into nothingness. I wanted to scream. Lisa stepped out into the hall.

  She addressed the floor. “You know, Lizzy. You just leave . . . that’s fine for you, but it’s just so cold.”

  “This whole thing is hard for both of us in our own way, Lisa; I just can’t stay here, sorry. You act like I’m having a blast out there, but it’s not like that. Not having a stable place is no fun, okay?”

  She turned in disgust and went back into the room; I escaped down the hall away from her, away from Ma, and I left.

  That night, after hearing of my visit to the hospital, Carlos decided I needed cheering up. To get my mind off things, we’d do something absolutely crazy: go out for a good meal at a decent restaurant with good service—dressed in our underwear.