The Lavender Hour

by Anne Leclaire

  “I know what you're going through,” I said. “With Luke.”

  “What do you mean?” Paige narrowed her eyes, distrustful.

  “I lost my own daddy. He died when I was fourteen.”

  Paige made a soft sound that I misunderstood for sympathy. “Heart attack,” I said. My daddy slumped over the steering wheel. Daddy? Daddy? What's wrong? “I never got to say good-bye or tell him that I loved him. So in that way, you're fortunate to have this time with Luke.”

  Paige jumped up so violently, the soda sloshed on the table, splattered my jeans.

  “Well, shit,” I said. I crossed to get a sponge and wipe at my pants, and then began mopping up the mess.

  “You people don't know the first goddamned thing you're talking about,” Paige yelled.

  “I only—”

  She grabbed the sponge from my hand. “Forget that, for Christ's sake.”

  “Listen, I didn't mean—”

  “Luke's not dying. You got that? He's not dying.”

  I heard Faye's voice in my head: Know and understand your response to anger. Keep your inner calm. “I'm sorry—”

  “Just get out, okay. Just go.”

  I wouldn't take this behavior from a high school student, and I sure as shit didn't want to take it from Paige, but again I heard Faye: Accept the person's right to be angry. My anger cooled and grew a skin, like set pudding. I picked up my tote. It weighed heavy in my hand. “Tell Nona I'll call later,” I said.

  “What Ever.” She wouldn't look at me. Of course, she was right to distrust me.

  That night, I slept in Luke's flannel shirt.

  nine

  THE NEXT MORNING, I phoned Faye and related the details of the confrontation with Paige. I was afraid she might already have received a call from Nona and planned to remove me from Luke's case, but Faye said all the right things to comfort me.

  “But what about what Paige said about Luke?” I asked. “Doesn't she know her father's dying?”

  “Of course she knows,” Faye said. “But knowing and accepting are two entirely separate things.”

  “She was furious with me,” I said into the phone. I looked beyond the window out toward the horizon, where the blue sky blended into the sound so seamlessly, the line of demarcation was impossible to discern. I thought of young John Kennedy and how he had flown his plane straight into the sea, then deliberately willed the thoughts away.

  “She's furious, period,” Faye was saying. “And she has every right to be. Remember, anger is often the first reaction of family members.”

  Of course we had been told this during the training sessions, but nonetheless, I hadn't been prepared to have the rage turned on me. “I kept hearing your voice,” I told Faye. “All the things you told us about dealing with anger.”

  “Good work,” she said. “That girl's a handful, but you're up to the task.”

  A handful. That was what our daddy used to call Ashley when she was sixteen and stirring up trouble. But he had made it sound cute, which Paige most surely wasn't.

  “You asked me the other day why I didn't put one of the older volunteers with Luke,” Faye was saying. “Well, Paige is the reason I assigned you to this family.”

  “She is?” I twisted the phone cord around my wrist.

  Faye laughed. “Can you imagine Beth trying to deal with her?” she said. “Or Muriel?”

  I had to smile.

  “Right now, Paige is hurting. Four months is not a long time to come to terms with what she's facing.”

  Four months. Sometimes I forgot that Luke had only been diagnosed in January. According to Nona, that was when he finally went to a doctor with a digestive problem drugstore remedies weren't touching. Nona said it had taken six weeks of tests (CAT scan, blood work, MRI, endoscopies), of infuriating misdiagnoses (Crohn's disease, depression, celiac disease), before they were told he had pancreatic cancer. His doctor said that he had probably had it for months even though he hadn't experienced pain, explaining that the pancreas was deep in the abdomen, which made it difficult to detect and treat. He said the organ didn't have nerves of its own to carry messages of pain and that Luke's pain signaled that the cancer was spreading, pressing on nerves. An operation wasn't an option.

  “One reason Paige is angry is because her father's not fulfilling his contract,” Faye said.

  “What contract? I don't understand.”

  “He's her father. He's supposed to be there for her, to care for her.”

  Like Lily, I thought, my mind suddenly flashing to my mama. Okay, it was ridiculous, I suppose, but I felt abandoned. Lily had taken care of Ashley and me after my daddy died, and she'd been there for me all through the period of my illness and recuperation, and then she just disappeared. Off on a new life with the dentist.

  “And Paige is probably feeling guilty, too,” Faye was saying.

  I pulled my mind back. “Why should she feel guilty? You mean because of the drinking?”

  “Because Luke's dying.”

  “But why would she feel guilty about that? It isn't her fault he's sick.”

  “No. Any more than it was your fault that Lowell had a heart attack.”

  I tightened the phone cord around my wrist, breathed against the tightness in my chest.

  “After Luke dies,” Faye continued, “Paige will need someone to talk to. I think she'll turn to you then.”

  After Luke dies. The words stung. I pushed them away.

  “How are things going other than that?” Faye said.

  “Okay, I guess.” What would Faye say if she knew about the shirt I'd taken?

  “Well, cheer up,” Faye said before she hung up. “You're doing fine.”

  DURING THE next weeks, neither Luke nor Nona mentioned Paige to me. When she stopped by to see her father, the visits never coincided with mine, though I didn't know if this was by accident or deliberate design. I would have liked to have seen her. After the conversation with Faye, I felt softer toward Paige.

  Over the days, I gathered and hoarded the details of Luke's life, as if preparing for famine. I learned that it was he who completed the crossword in the daily papers and that he had majored in literature at a small independent college in Vermont but had left before getting a degree. “Too much sand in my shoes,” he told me. “I had to come back to the Cape.” Nona's version was that Luke treasured his independence too much to work for anyone but himself. “Just like his father,” she said. Nona had been divorced for years. Luke's father was currently living in Santa Fe with his third wife. “So far away from the ocean,” Nona said in disbelief. She didn't know how he could stand it.

  I was spending more time with Luke. My hospice responsibility required two visits a week, but almost from the beginning, I stopped by more often. We rarely talked about his illness. He continued to take delight in besting me at backgammon. He told me that his great-grandfather on his father's side had immigrated to Prince Edward Island from Ireland. I'd smiled when he told me that. That black hair.

  Sometimes we listened to music. Marvin Gaye. Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Neil Young. Other times we'd sit in companionable silence. And then, for no particular reason, he'd start talking. He told me what it was like growing up on the Cape. He'd started fishing when he was thirteen. Never wanted to do anything else. He said he only went to college to please Nona. She'd been saving for his education since he was born, working every job she could find.

  When Luke knew I was coming, he would leave his door open. Occasionally I read to him. He liked Steinbeck. After I finished The Red Pony, I got a copy of East of Eden from the library, but he wanted to stick with the short stories. He never said it, but I believed he thought he didn't have enough time left for novels. I refused to accept this. Some days he just wanted me to sit with him. He said I brought a calmness to the room, and, recalling what Nona had said about his ex-wife's inability to sit still, his words would make me happy. I could not admit, even to myself, how deeply I had come to care. When I remember those blessed day
s when things were still relatively good, I remember all of this, and I remember the background song of the birds.

  Luke was different than any man I had ever known in many ways but especially in his connection to the natural world. One day he told me he was going to teach me how to recognize birds by their calls. Blue jays. Grackles. The bossy English sparrows. Nuthatches. And the titmouse—as gray and timid as the name suggests, a tiny, feathered nun. At first, all I could hear were tweets and trills, indistinguishable one from another. “Close your eyes, clear your mind, listen,” he told me. At first, I learned the easier ones. Catbird. Cardinal. Chickadee. He told me that instead of a larynx, birds had a syrinx, two-sided so they could sing several notes at once. When we sat and talked like that, I could almost come to believe a future was possible.

  “Birdcalls differ from their songs,”he told me one day. “Calls are innate to each breed, but songs have to be learned.” I quizzed him about the difference, and he said calls were to signal danger, to claim territory, things like that. “Then what is song for?” I asked. “For joy,” he said. “Simply for joy.”

  I wondered what birds did to show grief. But perhaps, unlike us, they knew only rapture, not sorrow.

  So the days passed, filled with questions and struggle and punctuated by occasional moments I would later come to think of as nearly sacred. It was hard to tell the blessing from the curse. Sometimes he dozed while I read. He was getting morphine now and was noticeably weaker. And frequently the room smelled of foul emissions that embarrassed us both until Jim rescued us by making a joke about how Luke's farts were industrial-strength, so bad even Rocker wouldn't stay in the room with them.

  More than once, while Luke slept, I sketched him, memorizing the bones of his cheeks and brow and jaw, his elegant hands. The planes of his face stood out like farmland in the spring, before it was softened by crops. His pain and my giving him comfort created a growing intimacy between us, and therein, of course, lay the danger. He recognized this more often than I and would pull away, draw back into himself, but I would wait patiently, tend to him, and he would come back. Occasionally, nights when I was alone at my cottage and struggling to sleep, I allowed myself to fantasize that he would go into remission.

  Like Luke, Nona too was losing weight. And aging. Her roots had grown out a good two inches, and the white stood out in stark relief against her dyed jet hair. She seemed to have shrunk another inch in height and constantly smelled of arthritis ointment. When we sat at the kitchen table, I'd catch her massaging and kneading her hands, working her thumbs across misshapen knuckles and wrists. When I left, I would embrace her, and lately she had started to hug me back.

  ONE MORNING, Nona met me when I arrived and looked so distressed, nearly ill, that I was instantly alarmed.

  “Nona,” I said after a quick embrace, “what's wrong?”

  “I don't know what do to anymore.”

  “What's going on?” A knot of anxiety thickened my throat.

  “Luke's not eating. Last night he asked me to make him some of my macaroni and cheese. His favorite thing as a child. But he only ate a bite, and even that he couldn't keep down.”

  “Oh, Nona,” I said.

  “He's just wasting away, Jessie. Not eating enough to keep a flea alive. Fluids are about all he's managing.”

  Panic edged in. Weeks or months? Yes.

  “What about those milkshake things?” I asked, remembering the cans of Ensure stacked in the cupboard. “Have you tried them?”

  “He won't touch them. They cost about as much as a good sirloin, but he says they taste like chalk. All I know is that he has to keep eating. If he goes on like this…”

  “Maybe you could try something different,” I said. “Like smoothies.” Toward the end of my six weeks of radiation, I had pretty much existed on smoothies.

  “What are they?”

  “Yogurt and fruit drinks,” I said. “They're easy to get down. And yogurt has acidophilus.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Acidophilus? It's the good bacteria that makes a healthy climate in your intestines.”

  “He sure could use something healthy in there,” Nona said, smiling a bit. Jim had gotten us all joking about Luke's farts.

  “I'll bring a blender tomorrow,” I said. “And some fruit. What does he like best?”

  “Blueberry,” Nona said. She looked better, hopeful.

  I felt a flash of guilt for my part in Nona's optimism. We had been told to offer courage and hope—whatever the stage of disease—but we had also been cautioned against offering false promise. I found the line between the two was slippery. But false or not, looking back, I know that I was clinging to hope as tightly as Nona. Hope is so strong. So unwilling to give up. Even now, I marvel at its power. It carries us sometimes. It had held me through the worst of times, and, of course, it was hope for a new beginning that had led me to the Cape in the first place.

  “Where are you off to today?” I asked. Members from Nona's church had set up a driving schedule. Someone drove up from Wellfleet and took her out so that she didn't have to rely on Helen for everything. I couldn't imagine being so reliant on others. I had asked her once why she never got her license, and she said when she'd gone for her test years ago, she'd driven right up on the sidewalk and sideswiped a fire hydrant before she'd even pulled out of the registry parking lot. The inspector had failed her on the spot, and she never got up the nerve to try again.

  “Oh, I guess we'll ride around for a bit.” She had run out of errands. “You know what I'd like to do?”

  “What's that?”

  “I'd like to go home. I miss my house.” It was the first time I'd heard her offer one word of complaint.

  “Well, why don't you go there for the afternoon?”

  “I don't know. That would mean I'd have to ask someone to drive me there, and then bring me all the way back here. That's an hour for the driving alone.”

  I spoke without stopping for one moment to think. “Why don't you go back for one night? It would do you good.”

  “How can I? I can't leave him alone.”

  “I'll stay here.”

  “I couldn't ask you to do that.”

  “Of course you can. I'm not doing anything else. It will do you good.” I reached out and stroked her head. “Get your hair done. And you could use a night of undisturbed sleep.”

  “I don't know,” she said, but a bit more convincing was all it took. Within twenty minutes, she had packed the few things she'd need. Luke was sleeping and she wanted to wake him, then decided against it, reluctant to draw him from sleep. Recently, sleep and drugs had been his only sure escape from pain. She scrawled him a note instead.

  I saw her off, then went to Luke's room and sat by his bed, sketching him, happier than I had any right to be. As soon as he stirred, I flipped shut my pad, set it on the floor. I told him Nona had gone back to Wellfleet and would return tomorrow. He read the note Nona had left and then studied me for a minute, not saying anything.

  “You won't be alone,” I said quickly. “I told her I would spend the night.”

  He turned and looked out the window, his face shut down, as withdrawn as he'd been the first time I saw him.

  “Unless you want me to call someone else,” I said, now nervous.

  “Don't you have anything better to do than sit with a dying man?” he asked. He still wouldn't look at me. I could see he was slipping into that separate place he went to, the closed-door, loud-television place of isolation. He did that without warning, switching from trust to withdrawal and, occasionally, to bitterness. Once he referred to himself as the rubber plant. “Just set me on the porch and water me,” he said.

  “Look,” I said, in a cool, no-nonsense voice, knowing sympathy or pity would only drive him further away, “if you would rather have someone else here, I can arrange it, but Nona hasn't been home in months, and she needed to go there. She's tired. She needed a break.” I thought I had lost him, but he came back.


  “Sorry,” he said. “I'm being a perfect asshole.”

  “Nobody's perfect,” I said, and was rewarded when he gave a small smile.

  “It's just…,” he began.

  “What?”

  “Yesterday. You didn't come.”

  I perched on the edge of his bed. “Luke,” I said, “I wasn't scheduled to come yesterday.” We both knew the schedule was a joke. As I said, I was dropping by four or five times a week.

  “I know,” he said. He closed his eyes, sighed. “It wasn't that you didn't come. It was that I missed you when you didn't.”

  I picked up his hand, unable to suppress the joy his words gave me. “And that's a bad thing?”

  “Yes,”he said. “Given the circumstances.”

  “It doesn't have to be.”

  “We both know it does. There's no future in it, is there?”

  I turned away so he wouldn't see my eyes fill with tears. “Well, what is it you want from me? Do you want me to stop coming? Do you want Faye to get another volunteer?”

  “I want…,”he said.

  I waited. I knew it would kill me if he said yes.

  He sighed a long, deep sigh. “I want to get in your car and take a ride.”

  “Anywhere in particular?”

  “I want to go down by the cut.”

  I saw he was serious. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “And then I want to head over to Harwich Port and get a Dairy Queen.”

  I hesitated. As far as I knew, he hadn't left the house in weeks.

  “I want to do something ordinary, something normal.”

  I studied him for a few minutes.

  “Please,”he said. “I want to be with you somewhere outside this room, this house. Somewhere where we can pretend for a minute that things are normal.”

  I FOUND him a clean sweatshirt and shoes, helped him dress. Of course, there was no way we could leave Rocker, and so he came along, too. By the time Luke had walked to my car, leaning on me the entire way, he was weak and out of breath, and I was already second-guessing the outing. I slid into the driver's seat and sat for a moment, trying to decide if we should continue, when he said, “Well, what are you waiting for? A push or a shove?”