by Ava Finch
By the time the doctor finally shows, she has flipped mindlessly through the pages of two issues of Good Housekeeping and one AARP. RayAnne rises from the aqua vinyl couch when she sees the white coat coming her way. Even at ten paces she sees the doctor is wearing the sort of solicitous look that can only mean bad news. “Miss Dahl?” He clamps her damp hand between his two dry palms, a gesture that makes her swallow hard. “I’m Dr. Phillips.”
She searches his face. “When can I see my grandmother?”
“In a while, Miss Dahl.” The doctor motions for her to sit and seats himself just across. “Just as soon as we go over a few things.” He speaks with a drawl, so maddeningly slow each word might be strained through molasses. “Is there anyone here with you? Any family?”
“I’ve been trying to reach them.” RayAnne pulls the phone from her pocket and shakes her head at it. “My brother’s been trying to get on a flight from Minneapolis. My dad, Big—Richard, Dot’s son—is probably off on a bender somewhere.” She fights the quiver of her chin. “And my mother’s on some Druid island with no cell reception. So, yeah, it’s only me.”
He makes a hammock of his hands between his knees. “That’s a shame. You shouldn’t be alone for this news.”
“News? She’s not . . . ?”
“No. No, but your grandmother is not simply unconscious either. She’s in a coma.”
“A coma?”
“Yes. A coma caused by an insulin overdose.”
“Insulin? But that’s not . . .” RayAnne frowns. “Gran’s not diabetic.”
“No, she is not.” Dr. Phillips is knitting together each word. In the duration of their conversation he might have crocheted a hot pad. She wants to hit him.
“You said overdose?”
“The probable reason she overdosed—the likely reason—would have been intentional, and not so surprising, considering her cancer has advanced to stage four.”
“Wait.” RayAnne feels a wave of relief. “You’ve got the wrong patient. My grandmother doesn’t have cancer. You’ve confused her with anoth—”
He shakes his head. “Miss Dahl, I’m afraid your grandmother, Dorthea Dahl, does indeed have cancer. I’ve been treating her for months.”
She looks now, and sees his nametag says “Oncology.” “I don’t . . . what cancer?”
“This is what I was afraid of. She didn’t tell you. Your grandmother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer several months ago. Her prognosis was—is—not good. As I said, stage four.”
“I don’t understand.” The air surrounding RayAnne begins to pixilate.
And just like on television, the doctor lays a comforting hand over her arm. As she looks at his slender fingers, he says, “Miss Dahl, it doesn’t get any worse. I’d just begun the process of setting her up with hospice care. This sort of cancer—”
“You keep saying cancer, and overdose . . .”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Miss Dahl. This must be a terrible shock. The insulin overdose was very likely intentional, meant to cut her suffering short, to spare her loved ones the sort of rugged ending that is so typical with this disease—to spare you.”
Spare? Nothing, but nothing, is making sense.
“If the ambulance had arrived ten minutes later, your grandmother would have probably died as she’d intended, sitting in her deck chair.”
“Died as she intended?” RayAnne’s voice is someone else’s, a flat drone. “But wait . . . how did she get here?”
“She is only here because her dog woke a neighbor, who went over to see if everything was all right. They called the ambulance.” He stands and nods toward a glass door and window halfway down the hall, offering his arm. “Shall we go see her?”
RayAnne grasps his arm to pull herself up as much as to steady herself. “But. When is she going to wake up? She is going to wake up?”
He faces her, and as he answers the question, she stands in a glitch in time—his words slowly ricochet and shift in the light and angles of the shadowed corridor. Two minutes later, she lets go of his sleeve. Dr. Phillips spoke softly, words punctuated with varying pressure on her hand and the blinking of his kindly eyes. Though she had clearly heard the words “brain” and “function,” RayAnne erases them from her mind and deconstructs his sentences, editing and striking out words to meet her own urgent need—to know that her grandmother is alive.
He guides her down the corridor, supporting her elbow in the palm of his hand. “This is her room.” Once inside, he lets her go but hovers just behind, as if she’s on training wheels. She takes cautious steps to the side of the bed with the fewest machines and cords and hanging bags of liquid. Once her hands are on the bedrail, Dr. Phillips backs discreetly out, leaving her looking down at the slight mound on the bed that is Dot.
Forcing herself to look closely, RayAnne takes in her grandmother’s powdery face, white, as if made up for Kabuki.
“Gran?”
When she neither moves nor responds, RayAnne looks to the monitors as if they might blip some response. “Gran?” The glowing green lines travel landscapes of hills and valleys, with ticks of neon that indicate her various functions. The line showing her heartbeat is shallow as a scallop of lace. The schuk-shuck of another machine fills Dot’s lungs. Numbers that mean nothing to RayAnne flash slowly. The breathing tube is held in Dot’s mouth with tape, a sight that on its own is enough to start RayAnne’s shoulders quaking. Not trusting her legs, she pulls a chair tight to the bed and sits. Careful of the IV, she takes Dot’s hand, which at least looks enough like her grandmother’s hand, though it is bonier and crepe-ier than she remembers. “Oh, God.” Wide-eyed, she stares over the bedrail at Gran’s profile.
“Oh, Gran. What’ve you done?”
SIXTEEN
RayAnne faced the camera, not with her usual smile but a solemn expression. “Filmmaker and photographer Lynette Hanson was already an antiwar activist when her son Josh, a NATO worker, was killed in Iraq. After his death, she spent five years making the film One Hundred, which premieres at Sundance this January.”
Lynette had already been interviewed dozens of times on her tour to promote One Hundred, and it shows. Her focus was impressive, wearing a look RayAnne translated as a sort of armor worn when facing a camera. Settled in Penelope, they’d been fishing near the reedy shore where cattails swayed, most of their interview layered over with images of silent film footage.
“One Hundred is structured like a Ken Burns documentary, in that it’s comprised mostly of stills interspersed with video or film. Each segment stands alone—is that right?”
“Yes. Each one-minute biography documents one of a hundred lives—one hundred of the tens of thousands whose lives have been lost in the Middle East.”
RayAnne added, “The film has no delineation between ‘sides.’ Equal weight is given to all.”
“That’s right, because this has been everyone’s war.”
“And with no narration, the film possesses no single language.”
Lynette’s smile was Mona Lisa sad. “Loss is often beyond language. The decision to not apply words to these images was very deliberate; I wanted the imagery to say everything.”
While they’d been talking, five lives had played out across the screen in as many minutes: an Iraqi teen, a Canadian nurse, an American soldier, a rebel soldier, and an elderly Muslim woman. A typical visual biography commenced with a baby picture, followed by snapshots of childhood or school photos, video snippets of life events such as cake candles blown, bikes ridden, kites flown, diplomas grasped, brides kissed. Each life distilled to the length of an American television commercial. The final shots were the last photo taken or last known photo of the deceased, sometimes a framed portrait held in the lap of a family member, sometimes set upon a grave, propped on a coffin lid, or, in the grisly instance of the teen, laid flat on his dead body. Few images besides the video segments are o
n screen more than a few seconds. With no music it was more silent than a silent film, a layer of hollow eeriness rendered across the images. The only sounds rang at the end of each life—the spare tone of a single chime delineating one from the next.
The camera panned from Lynette’s determined and prematurely lined face to settle on RayAnne’s, just as a tear she’d been holding back broke to make its way down her cheek, clearing a channel in her makeup.
After the shoot, RayAnne had stood with the crew in the catering tent, watching herself cry on camera. No one spoke. As soon as the segment was over, Amy began making a face, as if sniffing wet litter. She cleared her throat. “So political, and honestly . . . waaay too sad. Viewers aren’t going to like it. We can’t air this.”
Cassi swung around to Amy, who had begun to get up. “But you admit it’s powerful?” To see emotion on Cassi’s face was a rare thing, and she was emoting daggers.
“Of course, Cassi.” Amy said. “But we’re not reporters. Fishing is supposed to be entertainment. As far as war and death? Well, some of our sponsors might even—”
“I’ve checked.” Fully expecting Amy to balk, Cassi had prepared. “Only two have military contracts—OspreyVision is a supplier of night-vision goggles, and DryStash makes body bags.”
Like Cassi, RayAnne had been determined on this one and spoke up. “I say we watch it again. And if you still don’t agree, we’ll ask the CEO of JailBait; he lost a son in Afghanistan.”
Before Amy had had a chance to protest, Cassi had queued up the segment from the middle, RayAnne addressing Lynnette.
“It’s easy to understand why you were motivated to make this film, but I wonder how you found the wherewithal to do it? To do the research and collect photos and videos from grieving families. How did you bear it?” The silence between RayAnne’s question and Lynette’s answer was laced by the incongruous sounds of Location—lake water patting Penelope’s hull, birdsong, distant motorboats.
“RayAnne, as painful as the process was, it was easier than doing nothing.” She looked directly into the camera. “As any mother or grandmother out there understands, doing anything is easier than facing the grief of losing a child.”
Thinking of that episode now, sitting next to Dot’s hospital bed, RayAnne cannot shake the memory of Lynette’s film, and no sooner does she close her own eyes than vignettes of Dot’s life leech into her consciousness: the hand-colored photo of Gran as a frowning child, bangs cut ear to ear and her head crowned by a huge ribbon; a teenaged Gran laughing on a bike. Some images RayAnne can recall for herself: Gran’s face blurred behind a proffered spoonful of something, Gran refusing to meet her eye after she’d managed to attach dozens of clothespins to the tail and ears of one of her lap dogs. Gran slapping down a poker hand before raking in the coins. Her dropped jaw at the zoo when they saw a bull elephant’s erection and dissolved in laughter.
She cannot, will not, allow silent images of Dot to be followed by the single low chime. RayAnne drifts in and out of a fitful half sleep, sitting straight up in the chair, almost glad for the jolts, the interruptions of a hundred voiceless hospital noises.
Around the time the sun comes up, the same Jamaican nurse who’d been so cranky during the night cheerfully bustles into Dot’s room, her shift nearly over, humming as she opens the drapes. She seems surprised to find RayAnne still there, yawning and knuckling her eyes. The nurse’s tag reads “Deborah.” She steps deftly around RayAnne to check machines and fluids, all the while texting notes and levels into a sort of BlackBerry device.
She pockets the device and says, “You should go get some rest, girl. Eat some food, yes?” She pulls the sheet taut beneath Dot, rocking her little body on the mattress.
RayAnne winces, shaking her head. “I’m not hungry.”
Deborah urges, “Go. She be the same when you get back.”
RayAnne does need to pee, badly. “Leave?”
Deborah lays a clean gown on the bed and briskly rolls Dot to her side. RayAnne reaches out in a panic, as if Gran might roll right off the bed. Deborah unties the loose knot where the gown ties at the back of Dot’s frail neck. “Miss, dis little lady isn’t going anywhere.”
RayAnne hesitates, wanting to lean in and help, but at the same time knowing she cannot handle watching Gran be trussed and turned like a chicken. Cradled in Deborah’s sturdy brown hands, Gran’s arm looks like a sleeve of waxed paper. The nurse persists. “Off you go. You got a motel room? Someplace to take a nap, maybe a shower?”
She hadn’t thought that far. “I suppose I’ll go . . .” RayAnne frowns. “To her house.”
“You go there, then.”
RayAnne looks hard at Deborah, her good-bye catching roughly in her throat as she backs out of the room.
In the cab to Dune Cottage Village, RayAnne is almost relieved to discover her cell phone is completely out of battery. By now her family will all know to come and will be arriving when they can. She’s saved from making calls she’s too tired to make to say things she cannot trust herself to voice. This is something no one can fix—not her mother or Kyle, and certainly not Big Rick. RayAnne is now cut off as much by distance as by the wall of confusing terms and heavy facts the doctor has stacked in front of her. How could she relay Dr. Phillips’ news when she cannot believe it herself—that Gran is barely Gran at all?
Not quite in the present, RayAnne feels herself suspended just under it, coming up for air now and then, long enough to wonder at the automatic motions she’s been making. Waving down a taxi; or drinking from a Styrofoam cup, only realizing it’s coffee once she drinks it, unable to recall how it got into her hands; or looking out the cab window at palm trees; or reading the names of stores when passing the strip mall—names she’s seen a hundred times that only now strike her as ridiculous: Toys “R” Us, Steak Escape, Dollarmania, Dressbarn. She wonders how she can be doing such normal things when Gran is floating somewhere that isn’t quite life but not quite death.
She keeps hearing the word in Dr. Phillips’ drawl, his three-syllable ca-ahn-cer. As for his conviction that Dot attempted suicide—he’s wrong. She wouldn’t. As the cab rolls on, RayAnne watches people on sidewalks and driving along as if it’s just another day. When she pulls up to the gates of Dune Cottage Village, RayAnne does not wait for her change but dodges out and jogs as best she can in her snow boots to Dot’s door, her sleep-deprived brain musing that this could all be a joke, and not a very funny one. What she needs right now is to open the door and find Gran standing in her kitchen.
RayAnne lets herself in with the key duct-taped under the seat of Gran’s going-to-market trike. She stands in the foyer, shedding her parka and the boots that have been on her feet for incalculable hours. Taking several breaths before venturing in, she tentatively pokes her head into rooms that are far neater than normal, as if Dot had been expecting company. In the guest room there’s a stack of fresh towels on the bed. In the hall RayAnne takes off her clothes, bundles them into a ball, and lobs them toward the laundry closet.
Sitting in the bathtub, she lets the water run until it’s up to her chin. While soaking, she watches her weird reflections in the chrome handicap bars bolted to the tile. A half dozen warped circus versions of herself stare back in a sort of visual onomatopoeia, her face looking exactly how she feels. When she thinks of Gran, something inside warps as well.
Her big toe fits perfectly in the faucet, a cork to stop the drip. When she’d been about ten or eleven and staying with Dot one summer, they’d watched an old rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show, one with a particularly silly bit in which Laura Petrie gets her big toe stuck in the spigot while locked in the bathroom. Rob came to her rescue, of course, but when he went to break down the door, he covered his eyes, which seemed to RayAnne to be more like something a brother or fireman would do. She wondered why a husband would be afraid of seeing his own wife’s body, because Rob Petrie seemed afraid. During the commer
cial, RayAnne wriggled up from the floor to the sofa, looked Gran in the eye, and asked, “Gran, did Grandpa Ted ever see you naked?”
Dot sputtered some of whatever she’d been drinking and laughed. “Just twice.” The answer confused RayAnne until much later, when she heard the punch line to the old Catholic joke—once for each child conceived, implying sex was only for making babies. Odd she can remember such detailed moments of a decades-old afternoon of watching television but can remember nothing of her cab ride from the hospital.
An hour later, toes and fingers completely pruned, RayAnne plods back down the hall, unsteady with exhaustion. Something is off in the rooms she passes, something she’d only vaguely registered when she’d first come in—small flags of pastel paper or stickers stuck to objects: pictures, lamps, and furniture. Closer inspection reveals them to be Post-it notes. In Dot’s bedroom her gaze settles on the bureau, where the velvet Mikimoto box is clammed open with her grandmother’s pearls laid out in a neat spiral, the matching earrings clipped to a pale yellow Post-it.
Her eyes shutter closed. She cannot imagine Dot laying out her treasured jewelry for the last time. The idea makes her knees feel like glue. Her grandmother going room to room, ill, moving from possession to possession, alone with her awful secret, attaching little tags to the precious belongings she was leaving behind.
RayAnne goes down softly to the carpet like a puppet, in sections. After a few minutes she crawls over to Dot’s bed and climbs in, burrowing, covering her head with Gran’s pillow, smelling Gran’s smell.
You can be too tired to sleep. It’s afternoon when she finally gives up. She pulls on a pair of Dot’s elastic-waist pants, which settle low like hip-huggers, long in the crotch. She abandons them in favor of a skirt that she can cinch with a safety pin, then blindly pulls on a T-shirt. Wrapping herself in a lightweight cardigan, she doesn’t notice until stepping into the glare of the bathroom that the sweater is covered in Dot’s hair.
