Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  She missed her period. She tried to count back but the last weeks had been of such befuddlement and distress, and her own fear surged over her to the point where she couldn’t make sense of time. She waited and felt sick and convinced herself this was only anxious response to those events. Until it didn’t come again. She’d had enough sense to place a small dash with a red pen on the calendar and for days before and some few after, she studied that date with growing dread and also a growing certainty.

  Finally she went to see her mother.

  Who said, “You have to tell him.”

  “What if he leaves me?”

  Jo thought a moment and then said, “When I first realized I was pregnant with you, I was horrified. At my age! I thought. How would I ever manage? Then, of course, when you were born I wondered How did I ever doubt? You’ll see. Things are never how we expect, babies perhaps most of all.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t need to. But, one piece of advice?”

  “Yes?”

  “Wait another month. First trimesters can be very tricky. Whatever he says, if you lost the baby, neither of you would ever be the same. I know of so many women who’ve miscarried in those first months.”

  A pause and then Ruth said, “You?”

  Jo rose. She said, “Go home and wait. I’d say August would be about right. We’re not talking about me, are we?”

  She studied him carefully during that next six weeks. And nothing she saw allowed her to discern how he might respond. He went about his days much as always. Although she did reflect, once his terrible hangover had passed, once he’d slept through much of the week and then regained himself, he’d studied her a few times in a way that felt new, but he’d never questioned her in any sort of detail about Brian, about what had been reported or explained to her. It was as if he didn’t want to know. It was very much as if Brian Potter had never been there at all. And as the weeks passed with her growing certainty and imagining of what she’d tell him, she understood that however she divulged her news, she must do so in a way free of the details of the stories Brian had told her. It would be up to Oliver to ask, or not. So she had to draw upon the essence of that very long day and still remain true to Oliver’s privacy. She wondered if he would understand that of her. And she had terrible visions of his flaring righteous anger and her failing then, and rising and spilling the details of all she knew that he’d kept from her and the absolute rupture between them this would bring, beyond any hope of repair. And daily she knew she was pregnant and the baby would stick and felt aimed like a missile toward some uncertain day in August. She lay sweating at night, locked herself in the bathroom to cry during the days. Burned food. She was not herself and knew she was not and during all of this Oliver seemed to float through his days much as he always had. But she couldn’t even be sure of that. Perhaps he was watching her the same way she was watching him. Her mind was a terrible twisting wheel of broken spokes and over-greased gears. And on top of all of this she was pregnant and lacking all joy in that wondrous fact, except in those rare calm moments alone when she’d rest her clasped hands over her belly where she felt the slightest of swellings and spoke her mind, not words but her mind to the child within her and promised every kind and good thing she could promise. And stood, strengthened, and walked a little way back fully into the day.

  It happened by accident. She’d planned to tell him Sunday, the twenty-first, after breakfast. She planned to make waffles, which he liked, and sausage and fried eggs. A good breakfast but not elaborate or special, except that it was a Sunday. Which she thought would allow them as much time as was needed. And had resolved to tell him whatever he might ask—she owed him that, even if it meant opening subjects, issues, that he’d obviously chosen to keep from her. But she would also be strong and make clear her position, her solidity within herself, regardless of his response.

  What happened was at supper Friday night, beans and franks, applesauce and sweet corn, sliced tomatoes, an ordinary meal for the season, he’d mentioned that on Sunday there was an auction in Cornish New Hampshire and possibly some tools he’d like and would she care to come and she sat across the table from him and took a breath and drank from her glass of water and then said, “Oliver? I’m pregnant. And the baby is from when Brian Potter was here back in the spring. I’m not proud of it at all and I’ll answer any questions you have. But however you feel, I’m going to have this baby. So, whenever we get done talking about all the things you might want to talk about, the question you have to answer is Are we going to have it together or am I going to have it alone.” And held her level gaze upon him as she also began to cry. And watched as he rocked back and forth in his seat and then after a very long silence he stood and left the house. A few minutes later she heard him drive off.

  She’d never known where he’d gone, those two days. That evening she’d cleaned the house top to bottom and went to a sleepless bed after midnight, then crashed to wakefulness with the sun well up. She was making furious and unbelieving and frightened plans for her life as a single mother throughout the day. Still, midmorning Saturday she drove down to the village and passed by his parents’ house and then slowly all about the village but could not spy his truck. Finally she went into Snow’s Mercantile and bought a case of canning jars that she needed and, since it was a Saturday had the chance to chat with her mother-in-law who was the same as ever. Or hiding her son from the harlot wife. Anything and everything was possible. She went back to the house and gathered bushels of tomatoes from the garden and made a cauldron of sauce and canned that and then thought of going to talk to her mother but would not do that yet—the step seemed final and premature at once. She slept that night but not well and was up early Sunday, with coffee, a single poached egg on toast, the yolk-rimmed plate still before her when she heard the truck and he walked back in and looked at her and said, “It’s our baby. Do you understand? That’s how it has to be.”

  Now the girl she’d fought for was gone. And she knew it was her fault. When, days after his unexpected outburst, days after she told Katey what truth she could allow herself, she’d finally had the moment to ask Oliver why he’d said what he said. And he’d looked upon her with a weary set to his face as if long awaiting this question. His eyes skittered away from her quickly, then back again. “I don’t know, Ruth. Honestly, I don’t. It was just … I’m sorry. I love you both so much. I do.”

  She noted he didn’t ask her forgiveness, didn’t ask how Katey was. He knew how Katey was. The girl ratcheted up high, going through her days, studying at night, cordial but cool to her mother, tender and kind to Oliver as ever. Bending to offer her cheek for a goodnight kiss from him. Their morning banter as Ruth was rushing out the door to be at school the half an hour before Katey needed to be there. Almost as if everything was the same, as if nothing had changed. And, to her shame now, she’d wanted to believe it, almost had been able to believe what he’d said.

  Because in that moment, in the immediate moment, she’d been struck with why he’d revealed this news. Meant to shock of course and shock it was. But not for Katey. For her. She’d spent several days quietly taking stock of herself. And what she realized was that the adolescent girl had tired of Ruth’s constant battles, of the daily, weekly insufferable prodding over expected chores and over schoolwork and all of the ways that Ruth was trying to help press her daughter into assuming responsibilities around the house, as well as her academic achievement, all the while as Katey was excelling at school and also dismissive of the need to make her bed each morning, to do her own laundry, to pick up and hang towels wet from the shower. To turn down her record player as she studied in her room. And Ruth had realized she’d been frightened by the news that was flowing into the house of this new generation, of the rebellion and rejection that was everywhere it seemed, in a way she didn’t understand or comprehend and this pushed her even more and her daughter had, at some point over the last year but well before Oliver dropped his
own bombshell, come to see her mother as the embodiment of all that was good reason to rebel against, to refute, to refuse. And carried that knowledge within herself daily, a knowing placed in silent stockade against those things she found most unreasonable that issued from her mother. As if her mother was living proof of all Katey was hearing and, most importantly, feeling, all that resonated within her.

  To what point, truly, Ruth’s relentless hectoring? Katey was an excellent student and always had been. In short months she’d be valedictorian of her class. Though sworn to secrecy until it was announced during Commencement, she already knew she had the Green & Gold full scholarship to the University of Vermont. And, within all of this, doubtless, was the girl’s knowledge that her time here, in this house, was shrinking very fast. And then she would be gone, out into the world. Out into her world.

  And Ruth realized that Katey, once she’d learned the truth of her parentage, had turned a different eye altogether upon her mother. That—and Ruth had poured herself a stiff gin and tonic with this understanding—Katey was aloof and pleasant and distant because she had come to pity her mother. Not to dislike her, or spit bitter against the unfairness of Ruth’s demands upon her. But to pity. She’d come to see Ruth as a woman who had settled. Who had not made the life for herself that she wished and all the noise she heard from her mother was less about what her mother hoped and expected for Katey, but was a blind and unreflected purge of anger over her own life, the failures of her own dreams and ambitions. Whatever, Ruth conjured the girl thinking, those might once have been.

  Fire to smoke to ashes.

  Endings and beginnings are often intertwined, which is not something a girl of fourteen might understand but a woman almost forty certainly does. For the survivors, death is less an absence than an unraveling.

  Jo Hale pulled a coat on over her heavy flannel nightgown one February morning and still in her fleece-lined slippers walked out to get the morning paper. The weather had warmed the previous afternoon and there’d been sleet in the night before the sky cleared and the mercury fell almost to zero by dawn leaving a glaze of ice cracked like an old mirror over the flagstone walk. Jo went down and was not found until some hours later when the rural-delivery mailman’s truck paused beside her box, seeing what he’d first thought was an old blanket humped halfway to the house. At the hospital in Hanover it was learned she’d broken a hip, had a fracture of her pelvis and bruise on the back of her head which indicated a probable concussion. When admitted she had a temperature of almost 104, pneumonia from the exposure, and it was a full day before she regained consciousness. Ruth had been with her throughout that first long night, sitting bedside holding her mother’s hand, a hand grown slight and waxy, fingers of knobbed arthritic bones under skin spotted brown and bright red. A pale yellow light was thrown through the tipped-open door, the intravenous bag held by a ceiling hook, the tube wending down to where the needle was buried in her mother’s arm. Earlier the doctor had told all of them that the morning would be a new day and they should hold hope—that Jo was strong and otherwise in good health. Ruth had sent Oliver and Katey home for the night, wanting to be alone with her mother. Who had not yet once stirred and Ruth somehow doubted she would. In the pale light she studied her mother reared high on hard pillows, the bed cranked up to ease her breathing, to help allow the drip into her arm, and she had never seen her mother this way. The folds under her chin sagged tired, her hair was loose and wispy on the pillow. Her chest rattled as she slowly drew in and then slowly released each breath. And Ruth sat and held her mother’s hand and leaned forward from the hard plastic chair and rested her head against her mother’s hand and for some long moments closed her eyes. A nurse woke her when she came in to check the IV bag.

  In the morning Jo was awake and lucid. Oliver and Katey had returned barely after sunrise and they were all together in the room when the doctor returned to check Jo over. Somehow during the night the drip needle had been removed from Jo’s arm, which was the arm she raised to pause the doctor before she sent her family from the room. “Go have breakfast,” she told them. “While I talk with this young man, here.” Her voice dry, shredded, as if so many corn husks lodged deep within her throat.

  The family huddled in silence in a small waiting room. Katey sat apart, tissues balled in her fist, rubbing her eyes. An older man appeared, in soft gray flannels and a tab collar, white hair cut neatly short, the ruddy just-shaved face of health and righteousness and introduced himself as the chaplain on call and asked if he might assist them. Both Ruth and Katey looked at him and then both away and Oliver spoke softly and thanked the man for his concern but No, they were fine. Then again, they were alone in the room.

  The doctor returned and announced that Jo was again sleeping, which was the best possible thing for her just now. She’d suffered a series of great shocks to her system and they must be patient. He spoke in terms of a long haul to regain her full health and suggested it might be best if all of them carried on with their day, that Jo needed rest and was under the best of care. When Katey stood and announced she’d not leave her grandmother, the doctor, a young man who carried his fatigue handsomely upon his face, allowed his eyes to settle on Ruth and she saw his message was a partial one, that perhaps he wanted some help to discern all her mother had said.

  She’d stood and told Oliver to take Katey to school, that her mother needed rest and certainly for the time, only one of them was needed. Katey protested but Oliver was quick and gentle with his arms upon the girl’s shoulders. Though none of them knew it, it was the last time there would be such simple solution toward harmony for the next couple of weeks.

  The doctor, once they were alone, said to Ruth, “She’s fuddled. I’d have to say with good reason, all she’s been through. But still it’s a concern and so you should know.”

  “What do you mean, ‘fuddled’?”

  He shook his head. “I gave her morphine, for the pain and to help her sleep. She needs rest to clear her mind.”

  “There’s never been a thing wrong with my mother’s mind.”

  “That may be a problem.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s refusing to sign off on any further treatment. Any at all.”

  Jo had a single window in her second-floor room that looked out the rear of Mary Hitchcock upon a pair of tall hemlock trees. The boughs held clumped snow and a blue jay flew onto the branches to worry the cones and then away. Ruth couldn’t hear the harsh call of the bird and wished she could. From an angle late-afternoon sunlight pooled against the ranks of needles, lighting up their dark oily stiffness. It felt a long time toward spring. Her mother spoke from the bed behind her, addressing her back which Ruth had turned upon her. Not from the words but to hide her slide of tears, her vacant yet oddly tight focus upon the coming and going of the brilliant winter bird.

  Jo said, “The past few years have not been kind to me and I’ve hidden that from you because I’ve hidden it from myself, much as I’ve been able. Which I see now, was quite a good job. I’ve had shingles three years running and can’t tell you the last time I had anything one could call a night of sleep. Much less an afternoon or morning free of pain. Most evenings a toddy or two allowed me to forget all that and have a blessed short hour when I felt my old self. But there’s little in life more wretched than falling asleep at eleven only to wake at one and know that for all intents and hope, the night is done. Think about the long hours from then until dawn. And the day stretching ahead. And now, then. I’m broken to pieces. What would you have me do? Lie here and hope to heal enough to be taken home and live in a wheelchair? My house as good as lost to me—sleeping God knows where? And people, strangers, in and out throughout the day? I wouldn’t have it. And No, you nor Katey can do that sort of work and I wouldn’t have you—think now if I managed through another year or two and became even more ill, less able to tend myself. Even insensible. We both know it happens. I will not have you grow to hate me and hate yourself for wishing me to finally
die. I’d loathe myself and loathe myself ever the more for finding myself without the ability to change a thing. Which, you see, I still have. And intend to use that power while I do.”

  “What?” Ruth turned then and faced her mother. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m in terrible shape. And I won’t allow them to do a thing to, what? Humpty-Dumpty, put me back together again? Because I’m also in a place where that young man, Doctor Jensen, can help me. Gently. And you must never ask him, because I plan to fool him as much as he needs fooling in order to help me with what I need. Which is, my dear, to not go gentle into that good night. ‘Rage against the dying of the light.’ That fool, Thomas. I’ve already raved and burned aplenty with old age.”

  Ruth wiped her face and suddenly stalked to the bedside and did her best to loom and leaned in. “How can you say this?”

  Jo was suddenly crumpled against the pillow, her silver hair shot with thinly washed gold from the last of the sun and Ruth could hear clearly through the shut window the proud and raucous call of the jay. “Perhaps he had the right idea,” Jo said. “At least he drank himself to death before the passage of years could catch him. And now they’ve caught me. No matter, you see, poetry is all that’s left of life in the end. Perhaps God lurks somewhere behind it, the closest place he might be found, I think. It’s simple really, my lovely girl. I’m done eating. Simple as that.” Then her eyes closed for a time and the sun crossed the rest of the window and rose pale above and the jay didn’t return and the slice of sky was a blue so brilliant it was almost green and then it went to black and the overhead lights showed her mother sleeping or so it seemed and Ruth had almost turned to go when once more Jo opened her eyes and as if only seconds had passed said, “Do you know the last thing I ate that I truly savored? Not a holiday dinner or oatmeal in the morning but the true last thing?”