The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

Pierce made a little gesture, almost embarrassed, with his manicured hand, and hurried away. Rebecca walked up the hallway and found her mother’s room. The placard in the slot by the door already said MARTIN in brisk blue hand lettering. Like the coins dropping in the pay phone, it was another ratcheted notch into the new reality. Rebecca took a deep breath and entered the room.

  The curtains were drawn, blocking out the late afternoon sun completely. The room’s bathroom jutted into the central space, and it was not until Rebecca cleared its corner that she saw her mother in the hospital bed. Phoebe, who had always looked like a vigorous sixty-year-old, had aged twenty years in a couple of hours. She seemed heartbreakingly frail amid the array of tubes, racks, and monitors—a crumpled bit of gray debris, like a sparrow that had smacked into a windowpane. The oxygen tube beneath her nostrils looked alien and imposed, a grotesque plastic smiley face. Her hair, which Phoebe kept clipped short in an elegant silver bob, was mussed and wispy.

  Rebecca moved to the bedside and reached uncertainly to soothe her mother’s hair into place. Phoebe stirred beneath her touch, which was heartening. The IV unit clicked like a weird metronome; the oxygen tank hissed softly. On the monitor, Phoebe’s heartbeat showed in jagged pulses of green light.

  “You’re going to be okay, Mom,” Rebecca whispered. “I’m here now.”

  She called Mike at McDonald’s half an hour later. There was no way around it; someone had to deal with Mary Martha. But she dreaded Mike’s reaction to the crisis, to her need. It had been a phone call like this that had essentially ended her marriage with Rory, on a day when she’d been caught at work and unable to pick up the infant Mary Martha. Rory had flaked out on her, as he always did, for the usual lame reasons; she’d had to pick up Mary Martha herself, and she’d lost her job. She’d taken the baby and moved out the next day.

  Someone absurdly young answered the phone at McDonald’s. “Hello! Stanyan Street McDonald’s! How can we help you today?”

  “Is Michael Christopher there?”

  “Who?”

  She could hear the fast food chaos in the background. Someone was hollering something about french fries. “Michael Christopher? He works the grill, I think—”

  “Oh, sure, Mike. Hey, Mike!…Mike! Telephone!”

  The receiver clattered to some hard surface. A moment later Mike picked it up, sounding tentative, as if he suspected a mistake had been made. “Hello?”

  “Mike—”

  “Rebecca?”

  To her horror, she began to cry. It was the last thing she had wanted to do. She wanted to sound brisk and cool, to let him know there was no pressure, that she just needed a small favor, this one small thing, that she had no intention of burdening him with too much of her life.

  “Rebecca, what is it?” Mike asked. She could hear that he had moved someplace quieter.

  “I’m at the hospital. It’s my mother. It looks like a stroke.”

  “Oh, God. Do you want me to come down there?”

  “No! No, no, there’s nothing to be done here. She’s sleeping now. But Mary Martha—”

  “Of course. I’ll go get her right away.”

  “Is this going to get you in trouble at work?”

  There was the briefest of pauses, and then Mike, gently incredulous, said, “I’m sure these hamburgers will get cooked without me.”

  “There’s no food in the house, I’m afraid. I was going to do some shopping on the way home. I was going to buy milk, cereal, rice, fish, broccoli….” Her throat was tightening again, and she tried to choke back the sob. “I was going to buy peanut butter,” she said pathetically.

  “I’ll see to it.”

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to get home.”

  “We’ll be fine. You do what you have to do.” He hesitated. “What are the doctors saying?”

  “That we’ll have to wait and see how bad it is.”

  “Okay,” he said, and she felt him pause, groping to say something supportive.

  “Don’t you talk to me about God,” she said. “I don’t want to hear a word about God right now.”

  Phoebe surfaced briefly, just before seven o’clock that night. She obviously recognized Rebecca, giving her a fond, weary smile, but she still couldn’t remember her daughter’s name. She thought she might be in a hotel and seemed disconcerted by the liberties the room service personnel took with her. She still expected her husband to show up. But there were flashes of a Phoebe who knew what was going on.

  “Is it very, very bad?” she asked Rebecca after a nurse had taken her blood pressure, refused a tip, and left the room smiling.

  “They say we’ll have to wait and see,” Rebecca said, wondering what would constitute very, very bad for Phoebe at this point. Was it very, very bad that she couldn’t move her right arm and leg, that her vocabulary was hit-or-miss, that her face was drooping and she was talking out of one side of her mouth like Jimmy Cagney? Somehow these things seemed more manageable than Phoebe believing John Martin was still alive. Rebecca was dismayed by the rawness of the grief she felt each time Phoebe mentioned her father; a wound she thought had healed had been torn open as if it were new. She didn’t have the heart yet to tell Phoebe her husband was dead. She wasn’t sure she ever would.

  “Could you see to my orchids?” Phoebe asked, an encouragingly pragmatic turn. “They’ll need water.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re a good girl, um—”

  She smiled sadly. “Rebecca.”

  “Of course. Rebecca.” Phoebe sighed. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.”

  “You’re doing great, Mom.”

  Phoebe met her eyes, an eloquent, doleful look, blurred by exhaustion.

  “You’re doing great,” Rebecca repeated. She took her mother’s good hand, and they sat quietly for a while until Phoebe fell asleep.

  A nurse came by half an hour later to add a sedative to the IV mix; the doctor wanted Phoebe to sleep through the night. Rebecca stayed for another hour, then kissed her mother’s cheek and made the long journey to the Sunset. She fell asleep on the train and rode all the way out to the ocean before she woke up, and rather than waiting at the turnaround for the train’s inbound run, she walked the ten blocks back up the hill to 38th Avenue. The neighborhood seemed weirdly normal; she realized that she had half expected dramatic changes everywhere she looked. But the TVs glowed gray through the usual windows, the Vietnamese restaurant at the corner of 45th did its usual brisk business, and the usual crowd of tough teenagers milled and whooped in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. Rebecca walked slowly, conscious of the dim stars above her, beyond the streetlights and the city’s glare. It seemed like a very long time since she had noticed the stars.

  The house was quiet when she walked in, with only the kitchen light on, but the kitchen was empty. The table was strewn with crayons, scissors, and scraps of colored construction paper—Mary Martha and Mike had been making get-well cards for Phoebe. Rebecca picked up her daughter’s effort, a bright blue card with a big, smiling yellow sun on the front. Inside were three stick figures with the wild hair that denoted females in Mary Martha’s art, holding hands. One was big, one was medium, and one was small. The card read, in Mary Martha’s laborious lettering, I LOVE YOU GRANDMA. I HOPE YOU FEEL BETTER SOON.

  Rebecca felt a brief, unwilling chagrin; she was not sure she would have thought of such a constructive way to focus her daughter’s reaction. It seemed petty to resent the fact that Mike had managed to break the bad news so well, but she could feel a twinge of grudging, along with an uneasiness, a sense of a big event in Mary Martha’s life having happened without her.

  She realized that there was activity in the backyard—a bright light, and movement. She went to the back door and saw that Mike and Mary Martha were huddled over the pumpkins’ cold frame, adjusting some kind of lamp on a tripod stand. Rebecca hesitated; the two of them seemed so content and she hated to be the party pooper; then she told herself that was ridiculous, that she
was just feeling sorry for herself.

  She stepped outside. Mary Martha ran to her at once, aglow with somber excitement. She was wearing her pink night-gown, her bunny slippers, and Mike’s jacket, which hung down past her knees, but she clearly felt the gravity of her mission.

  “We’re going to give the pumpkins to Grandma now,” she told Rebecca proudly.

  “You’re up way past your bedtime,” Rebecca said. “And you shouldn’t be out here in your slippers and nightgown.”

  Mary Martha’s mouth made a startled little O and then snapped shut into a frown at the injustice of this.

  “I’m sorry,” Mike said, a step behind her. “I guess we got carried away by the special circumstances.”

  “What in the world is all this?”

  He looked sheepish. “A grow light. These plants are going to need some help.”

  “The pumpkins think it’s August,” Mary Martha offered, with a conspiratorial glance up at Mike, who winked at her.

  The look of adoration on her daughter’s face sobered Rebecca somewhat. She took a deep breath and said, as mildly as she could, “Well, this is all pretty amazing, I’m sure, but it really is time to get you to bed, young lady.”

  “Did you see the cards we made for Grandma?”

  “I sure did,” Rebecca said. “They’re beautiful. I particularly liked the picture of you and me and Grandma.”

  “It was my idea to cut out yellow paper for the sun,” Mary Martha said.

  The durable ceremonies of normality were soothing. Mary Martha washed her face, brushed her teeth and hair, and insisted on her usual bedtime reading. Rebecca read an entire chapter from The House at Pooh Corner while her daughter listened with quiet absorption.

  When Rebecca set the book aside, Mary Martha said, “Is Grandma going to be all right?”

  “I think so. She may be a little…different. A little confused. She may not be able to walk as well.”

  “I lit a candle for her.”

  “What?”

  “At the church. Mike lit one too. And we said a prayer for Grandma to get better.”

  Rebecca was silent for a moment, absorbing this. She realized that she was furious. It seemed absurd, and petty, to be so angry. Nothing was more natural. Mike had spent most of his adult life in prayer; she should have been grateful that he was able to offer her daughter something of the comfort of faith. But somehow it only sharpened her own sense of helplessness, her outrage at events slipping out of control. It made her daughter seem, to a tiny degree, like a stranger to her.

  She controlled herself and bent to kiss Mary Martha’s forehead.

  “We all want Grandma to get better,” she said.

  In the kitchen, Mike was washing the dinner dishes. He’d made Mary Martha pancakes, a dinner of pure comfort food. Somehow this only enraged Rebecca more. Her mother had had a stroke, and Mike was making a party out of it. He was pulling the same kind of thing that Rory always pulled and making her be the bad guy, the nasty representative of reality. It was all pumpkins in the wintertime and God will make Grandma better, and meanwhile Phoebe was slumped in a bed at S.F. General, with three kinds of plastic tubes in her and a useless arm and leg, her mind skidding sideways like a truck on ice.

  “Have you eaten?” Mike asked.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Mike picked up on her tone at once. He finished rinsing the plate in his hand and set it carefully in the drainer, then turned to face her.

  “Mary Martha said you took her to the church,” she said.

  “It seemed like the thing to do. She was pretty upset.”

  “Did it even occur to you to ask me if it was ‘the thing to do’?”

  He met her eyes. “It honestly didn’t.”

  “You had no right to lay that kind of trip on a little girl.”

  Mike took a deep breath. He was angry, she noted with a little thrill; he was struggling to be patient. “She asked me what we could do for her grandmother. I told her what people have been telling each other for thousands of years when they’re confronted with their helplessness in the face of life and death. I told her we could pray. And I think it helped her.”

  “So it’s happy lies. Twenty years in a monastery, and all you’ve got to show for it is happy lies for six-year-olds.”

  He ducked his head stubbornly, refusing to meet her glare.

  “And if Phoebe dies? If the mumbo jumbo doesn’t work? What are you going to tell her then?”

  Still he would not look at her. Rebecca waited for a long moment, then said, “You really had no right.”

  Her purse was on the table. It diluted the effect, but she paused to rummage through it for her cigarettes before she turned and stalked out the back door.

  On the porch, she plopped down on the top step and lit up, venting the smoke at the waning quarter-moon over the ocean and taking another savage drag. From inside the kitchen she could hear the sound of running water, equally furious. It took her a moment to realize that Mike was finishing the dinner dishes. That was a novelty, in the midst of a domestic dispute. Rory would have been smashing plates by now.

  The clatter of wet dishware ceased. There was a silence, long enough for Rebecca to suspect that Mike had slipped out the front door and gone back to his own apartment, but then the door opened behind her. Mike stepped out onto the porch, sat down beside her without ceremony, and reached for her cigarettes. She liked that, that he felt free to help himself, that he didn’t make a big deal out of it. He had brought two glasses of wine with him, she saw, as a peace offering perhaps, but she didn’t feel like reaching for one yet. It seemed like giving away too much.

  In the yard below them the ridiculous pumpkin lamp glared above the makeshift cold frame. It looked like an archaeological dig down there, or a weirdly abandoned movie set.

  “How much did that damned thing cost?” she asked.

  Mike shrugged.

  “Too much for a guy making minimum wage, I’ll bet.”

  “I got a raise. I’m the main man on burgers now.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Mary Martha is really into this pumpkin thing. She says she and Phoebe carve them every year.”

  This was true. Phoebe had a grand, New England notion of the rituals of autumn, and she and Mary Martha had always shared a rowdy Halloween. The two of them would drive down to the fields near Half Moon Bay and pick out several of the biggest pumpkins they could find, then come home to Phoebe’s backyard and spend hours drawing wild faces on them in Magic Marker before the messy hilarity of the gutting. Mary Martha’s loyalty to the tradition was undeniably moving.

  Rebecca stubbed her cigarette out and reached for a wineglass. Mike waited a judicious beat, then reached for his own. They sat for a moment without speaking.

  “God, what a nightmare,” Rebecca said at last. “I turned around and there she was on the sidewalk, crumpled up like a beer can. She couldn’t move her right side, her face was drooping like a bloodhound’s, and she was trying to pretend that nothing had happened. Like it was bad form, somehow, to have had a stroke. A faux pas.”

  Mike smiled. “She’s got a fierce sense of style.”

  “She thinks my father is still alive. I just want to lie down and cry every time she asks for him.”

  “Have they said anything more about her long-term prospects?”

  “I’ve been dealing with this doctor named Pierce, who looks like the smoothest guy in a singles bar and smells like a cologne counter. He seems very uncomfortable telling me anything except the names of the chemicals he wants to run through her. I’m hoping that tomorrow I can find a human being who’ll give me a straight answer.”

  “Sometimes they really don’t know. They gave my mother six months, at most, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and she lasted almost two years. Toward the end, they gave her six weeks, and she died three days later.”

  Rebecca glanced at him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “That was five years
ago. I didn’t want to talk about God then either. But I was always amazed by how good it felt to light a candle.” He hesitated. “Look, I’m genuinely sorry, if I overstepped—”

  “I know you meant well. You’re wonderful with Mary Martha. There’s no one I would rather have her with.”

  “I was just glad that you felt you could call me.”

  She sat in silence for a long moment, afraid he would reach out and touch her. Bob would already have tried to take her hand. Rory would already have been out the door. But Mike held off.

  “I’m so afraid I’m not going to be able to do this,” she said.

  He did take her hand then, and somehow it felt right.

  “Someone’s going to have to go out to Phoebe’s house tomorrow and water her orchids,” she said. “Someone’s going to have to be with Mary Martha. I don’t want her at the hospital for a while yet, until Phoebe’s a little more presentable. But I’m going to have to be with Phoebe.”

  “Okay,” Mike said.

  “I know this isn’t what you signed up for.”

  He smiled. “It must have been in the fine print somewhere.”

  “I’m serious. I mean, isn’t that what the monastery was all about? You haven’t had to buy groceries for twenty years. You haven’t had weeping women calling you on the phone.”

  “I’m here for you,” he said. “I know that doesn’t sound like much.”

  “You haven’t had to make a six-year-old eat green vegetables,” she said. “But you are really going to have to get that kid to eat some vegetables.”

  As they readied themselves for bed, she felt the quiet solemnity of it, the inevitable suggestion of marriedness. He’d had his chance to bolt and he hadn’t taken it, and now they were standing here in their boxers and T-shirts, brushing their teeth together after a very bad day. She reached for the dental floss afterward, which she had not done since they had been sleeping together, feeling it was unsexy. But Mike took a stretch of floss too, with the slightest smile, acknowledging the new territory.

  In bed, she slipped into his arms and they lay quietly together. She could feel the tension in her body, clenched against the comfort of darkness. She’d left the curtains open, and the low glow of the pumpkin’s lamp in the yard below threw a patch of light high on the wall near the window.