Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

  Doesn’t it?

  31

  

  Outside the valley, the sky loosened, clouds merely puddling where they once were sea. Geneva didn’t gun it like she used to. The speed limit was plenty, so she let the speedometer creep just a few numbers above it, enough to stay in the flow. Not the flow of real traffic, the traveling cars and pickups, but the flow that was there underneath it all, invisible and rushing between yellow lines. No point in resisting and moving more slowly to acknowledge rules and regulations of which flow took no notice. No point in pushing either, trying to outrun it or beat it home. She knew the flow travels, always, at the optimal velocity. That’s why it’s called the flow.

  As she approached the highway exit, she gently pressed the brake. New and delicate growth peppered the close-cropped side of the road. Geneva cultivated her mindset as she drove the final stretch to Parkview Homes. Patience without waiting — that was the objective. To wait was to operate in violation of the flow’s dictates. Signing a Do Not Resuscitate order had set up a pending. But it was a pending that must be ignored. Ralph had a flow of his own, and it was to be respected. Her job, Geneva thought, was not to check her watch, but to stand by and witness and not allow him to die alone in the company of people whose only interest in him was his safety.

  She reached with her right hand to her purse and opened the flap, double-checking to see that she had remembered the tape she had made for Ralph. “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world . . .” It would suit the day perfectly. Geneva had recorded version after version of “What a Wonderful World.” She had opened the tape with Louis Armstrong and closed with an instrumental by Charlie Byrd. In between, she included Ray Charles, Eddy Arnold, Glen Campbell, and Ruth Brown, to name a few.

  She hadn’t listened to it through before snapping it out of the deck that morning, but she had checked all the transitions between songs, and they were clean. She didn’t put it in the car’s tape deck because she wanted to hear it for the first time with Ralph, in his room, the context for which it was designed. She was curious as to whether it would come off as a study of a song or just be repetitive and irritating. If the former, good for her and good for Ralph. If it turned out to be the latter, too bad for the social worker who served as Ralph’s guardian.

  Geneva parked in the lot but remained in the car. The gray clouds above had dissolved to little more than streaks and smears, mere scuff marks on a blue sky. She took a deep breath and looked through her window toward the old stone building. It had once been the Masonic Home serving the old and infirm of the order and their wives. But as the old geezers advanced toward extinction, it was primarily their wives who had taken up residency there. But the real estate was worth a mint. It’s hard to win a fight in which you don’t get a vote. Sorry ladies. The Masons sold it, and the facility changed hands. The wives were out. The doors were thrown open. Geneva was first in line. The grounds were beautiful. The cost, significant.

  Masons or no, the community was a small and closed one, the kind where everyone in it knows everything. So Geneva tried to take her cue from Hester Prynne and wear her so-called sin without shame. She opened the car door. As she approached the front of the building, she gathered herself, lifting her ribs from her pelvis, letting her head reach up from her neck. She mined herself for height, claiming each fraction of an inch. She would meet squarely the gaze of anyone who cared to stare.

  She signed in and made her way to the intensive care wing. Outside Ralph’s door, Geneva met Vernita — Ralph’s guardian, her babysitter. Vernita was a frumpy, middle-aged Native American woman with a bad perm and dark framed glasses. If Vernita had a judgment, if she were on one side or another in the case of the humpstress of Parkview, Geneva couldn’t tell.

  Vernita followed Geneva into the room and took the chair farthest from the bed. The circumstances were not intimate, as was the point. Under surveillance, Geneva felt as though she floated slightly outside the surface of her own skin, watching herself be watched. Though in the past she had preferred telepathic communication to talking aloud to Ralph, now it seemed uncaring, as though the silence were evidence against her. So, she kept up a blameless patter.

  “Ralph,” she said in greeting and then paused at the dresser to snap the tape into the deck. She hit the play button, and Louis started to sing. The volume was modest, but still, the music organized the room, said how it’s going to be. Geneva took slow steps toward the bed stand where she put down her purse. From its outside pocket, she withdrew a crystal on a fishing line she had brought along to hang in the window. She dropped it into the palm of her hand and then bent over and planted a kiss on Ralph’s forehead. Then, she stood there staring at him, turning over in her mind for amusement’s sake the question as to how far she could go before Vernita blew the whistle. Could she lick his cheek? Suck his earlobe?

  She walked around the foot of the bed. Approaching the window, she withdrew a hook with a screw bottom from her coat pocket. She pushed the screw’s pointy end into the top of the window frame. She waited for Vernita to try to stop her. Second demerit for violation of Parkview property. But, as Geneva’s back was to her, she didn’t even know if Vernita were watching.

  Three more hard twists and the screw was in tight. Geneva looped the end of the fishing line and hung the crystal. The sun was positioned perfectly. Dozens of dots — red, purple, gold, and green — jiggled into being, spraying light across her cheeks and shoulders and down the front of her coat. Beyond the window, the lawn was a mix of new green and raked dirt. Geneva looked out to the paths paved for wheelchair access to nooks with park benches and bridges with guardrails. Slightly farther out was a small grove of Russian Olives surrounding a small pond. Geneva used to wheel Ralph to it before the time came when he would become completely disoriented if he left the building. Then, even if he left his room. His fear made him dangerous. Fear tends to do that.

  She turned from the window.

  “1967,” she said, moving toward the bed as Louis’s version ended and Ruth Brown’s began. “It was written in 1967.” She removed her coat and placed it on the back of the chair. “George Weiss and Bob Thiele wrote it. Weiss wrote a ton of hits. Elvis. Ella. Sinatra. All the greats sang Weiss.”

  Had Ralph been conscious, he would have rolled his eyes and smiled, so gracious to endure her chitchat.

  “Thiele had his own radio show when he was just fourteen,” she said. “Jazz.”

  The dots of light swayed slightly as the crystal turned, rolling right then slightly left. They danced across the bedspread. Geneva listened to Vernita listening, trying to discern whether she was tuned into the music or to the drone of her own thoughts.

  “Know who recommended Ruth Brown to Atlantic?” Geneva said. “Duke Ellington. Ruth put Atlantic on the map.”

  Glen Campbell was next. The break between was a nanosecond longer than Geneva thought perfect.

  She knew nothing of Glen Campell’s version, other than that it was. So there was no patter of trivia or regurgitation of old liner notes, nothing to conceal from herself her true thoughts: conversations with Ralph had greatly improved with his Alzheimer’s. No reactions for her to react to. No opinions about what she had to say that were really opinions about what it meant about her that she would have such an opinion. Ralph’s conversational style was often that of the politician’s. Skip addressing the argument. Undermine the credibility of the arguer. It was a sensational diversion. Content never survives the strategy. Yet, she had never given up hope, not really, that it might change. It took Alzheimer’s to cure her of that hope. Well, maybe not cure, but it had forced a refocusing of it. The hope for change became the hope for answers. There was a reason she had chosen Ralph. A reason it had felt so right. The reason simply had not yet revealed itself. But it would. It just took patience.

  Patience. The virtue that was its own reward. Not that different, really, from having a high pain threshold.

  A quick knock on the door
preceded its opening. An aide, a young man, arrived with a cart. For a brief second, in his eyes and smirk, Geneva believed she detected herself in his mind, naked and wrinkled-ass, riding Ralph into the sunset. On the bright side, it was probably the first time in a decade plus that a man had undressed her with his eyes.

  She stood slowly and stared at him like she were wearing her birthday suit and that it was his good fortune to see. He averted his eyes.

  “Let me step out,” she said, and she flipped her coat from the back of her chair. She snapped off the tape deck as she left, disappointed she wouldn’t hear the tape from start to finish as a whole.

  In the hall, she paused to pull on her coat. A nurse she knew well acknowledged her with a mere chin nod and then averted her eyes. Being watched and avoided amounted to the same thing. She would rise to the occasion of it but couldn’t deny that she cared. Being misunderstood is to not be known. Existing only to oneself grows tiring.

  Geneva turned to head for the front door when a young woman emerged from the next room. She had short blonde hair and a tiny piercing in her nose. She carried a clipboard and wore a name badge. The girl flinched when her eyes met Geneva’s. It was Alice. The social worker. She did not seem to imagine Geneva naked.

  Geneva adjusted her coat on her shoulders.

  “Boo,” she said flatly.

  Alice looked beyond Geneva’s shoulder for an escape. Open warfare was not her forte.

  “We obviously know who each other are,” Alice said nervously.

  “Is,” Geneva said. “Who each other is.”

  Alice steadied herself, focusing for battle.

  “I’m sure your intentions weren’t to do harm,” Alice said, her words clipped, like she was in a hurry. “But my responsibility isn’t your intentions. It’s the resident’s experience.”

  “And my husband’s experience was what?” Geneva said, in a voice darn near a purr. “How do you know he wasn’t fully lucid, calling out ‘Give it to me, mamma’?”

  “If that were the case,” Alice said, “you should have submitted that information to the board. It would have been of interest to his doctor, too, I’m sure.”

  “What are you,” Geneva said, “twenty-four, twenty-five?”

  “I don’t see that it’s relevant.”

  Geneva crossed her arms over her chest.

  “You have no idea all that you don’t know,” she said.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Alice said.

  “You have not been authorized to apologize on behalf of my feelings.”

  Alice readjusted the clipboard on her hip. She was younger than Tatum, Geneva could see. Younger than Paris. She was right-on from head to toe, from haircut to sensible and cruelty-free footwear. She was a righter of wrongs; the meter of justice. The terrible grays of experience had yet to tarnish her absolutism.

  “I have extensive training in geriatric, psychiatric matters,” Alice said. “My master’s thesis. . .”

  Geneva burst out with a laugh, interrupting her.

  “I’m sorry you. . .” Alice said and then stopped herself.

  “Have you ever considered ‘I’m sorry I’?” Geneva said.

  “I have nothing to apologize for.”

  “And yet, you keep saying sorry.”

  “Excuse me,” Alice said. “I have rounds.”

  Their eyes locked, but as Geneva looked, the fight drained from her. The girl knew nothing, but how could she know otherwise? Her youth, the piercing, the clothes — they misinformed. She wasn’t righteous. She was self-righteous. She stood not for justice but for control. Geneva believed in heroes, revolutionaries, and fighters of the good fight. But that’s not what she had here. Alice was a person whose power in life would come from red pens and a deftness with bureaucratic processes. In other words, she had no power. How, Geneva wondered, had she ended up in battle with such an inferior opponent?

  “Move,” Geneva said, without energy, as Alice stood between her and the lobby. The idea of stepping around Alice did not occur to her.

  Alice moved. Geneva left the building. She stood on the front steps and grunted a laugh. The sun was blasting. The sky, screaming. The day was hollering, hallelujah. In Montana, spring days are rare. April snow could turn to rain, and rain might piss from the sky through June. The Memorial Day weekend could feature wet and sloppy snow. Sometimes, spring showed up for a day or two in February, then another two in May. A Tuesday and Wednesday, perhaps. But then, by Thursday, the thermometer might snake up to ninety and within weeks turn everything brown and bring on yet another taxing fire season. But, nonetheless, today, here it was. The rarity. The gorgeous spring day.

  Geneva walked down the steps, into the spring day but not able to be part of it. She crammed her hands into her pockets. Nurses and aides and administrative staff took their breaks walking the asphalt paths. A lone visitor pushed her loved one in a wheel chair, pausing to feel his hands for coolness or warmth and adjusting blankets accordingly. Geneva pointed herself in the direction of the pond and the Russian Olives. Annoyances, large and small, came between her and the afternoon’s glory.

  It wasn’t just Alice. Unfair though it was, she found herself blaming Ralph too for her current slew of irritations. She thought the thought she tried hard not to think: she wanted Ralph to die. She wanted him dead retroactively. She wanted the wisdom, the gift, that was the product of commitment. The lesson. She wanted it all realized. Commitment, she knew, from the outside, can look like martyrdom, or even laziness. But for her it was about trust. She had to trust her own judgment. There was a reason for her choices, and she wanted the reason revealed because then it would be over.

  She would be free to think about something else.

  Soft human sounds traveled on the air. Two employees in polyester pants and shapeless sweaters speed-walked by, arms pumping, the low, gravelly sound of workplace gossip passing back and forth between them. Geneva felt the over-the-shoulder glance as they passed and heard the shift in volume and tone. That’s her. She didn’t hear the words, but she didn’t need to.

  An unexpected sniffle snuck up on her. She blinked back a few tears. Tears because she had tried and her best wasn’t good enough.

  The sun is on my face, she told herself, arguing with the tears.

  She looked up into the screaming sky and tried to open herself to it. Be as wide. Be as true. But the dark question crept in her heart: did she not love Ralph, or did she not know how to love? Who was the problem, the subject or object?

  Of all her damned questions, it was damnedest. Ralph had loved her, this she knew. But he had not been interested in her. This, she felt. As for her, perhaps it hadn’t been Ralph whom she had been interested in all these years. Perhaps, what she was interested in was love.

  A handful of barn swallows appeared in the sky before her, dipping into view, zigzagging on the hunt. They were the first of the season, and Geneva stopped to watch the aerial ballet. They swooped and rose with grace, never gliding, never at rest in the sky. They flew over her head, and she turned to watch them, about-facing back the way she’d come. The air around her collected the warmth of the sun. Ralph’s sponge bath, no doubt, was over.

  She brought her eyes back to the earth. The home sat before her on the landscape, heavy and solid, looking to her like a glamorous prison. She wanted to be released. Geneva headed back to the choices she had made, but she stopped when she reached the bottom of the steps to the building. They looked to her like Everest, a great effort to climb. Back to her chaperone. Back to her shame. Back to the world that had shrunk and defined her. Back.

  Back at Ralph’s room, Vernita was waiting outside, armed, as Alice had been, with a loaded clipboard.

  Geneva hit the play button as she walked toward the bed. She flopped into the chair. She tried to shut her mind and hear only the song. I see trees of green, red roses, too. . . Ray Charles was singing. A blind man. And yet, she was not moved. “Moved” and mad can’t
share the same spot. Mad digs in too deep for movement, and Geneva was mad. Mad at Ralph. And mad at Alice for reminding her of it. What might she have done in this world had she not been wasting her creativity, turning her psyche into a pretzel, trying to love right, trying to make her love right?

  She was mad at all of it, and she was mad at being mad on a day the earth was singing.

  The sun had traveled and no longer hit the crystal. Ralph’s lower lip protruded farther than his top one, ever so slightly, the mildest of pouts. Geneva thought of younger days when she would lay in the crook of his arm and run a moistened index finger over the swell of it. The memory made her push air through her nose. At the time, she was young and had no idea of the size of the gulf between what he wanted of her and what she had to give. And she had no idea of the nature of the burden of being with one who wanted not too much, but too little.

  When the tape ended, Geneva stood. She would not be checking into the nearby Super 8. She was going home.

  Geneva pushed hard on the gas pedal. The speedometer pressed forward. She vacillated between self-righteousness and self-doubt and found them equally crippling. A hunger for a life without Ralph, without all the questions about him, about them, about love, overcame her. She slapped the steering wheel with her hand. Her breath grew shallow, and the skin on her face seemed to tighten. She wanted it all done, processed, sewn up, and digested. Whoever she would be when it was all over, she wanted to be right now. She leaned over her steering wheel and let a good, solid scream rip. Her Saab tore down the highway. The flow, Geneva thought, could kiss her ass.

  But the flow, alas, misunderstood. It thought she said, “Kick.”

  The wail of a siren hit her ears, and cherries appeared in the rearview. Geneva cursed and hit the blinker. Pulling to the shoulder, she reached to the glove compartment for the proper I.D.’s. She watched the officer approach in her side-view mirror. Standard issue cop: leather jacket, long legs, and mirrored sunglasses. She rolled down the window. He took her license and registration.