by Ava Finch
She picks up the organ donor form, skipping to the middle of the page:
The Florida Uniform Anatomical Gift Act . . . authorizes any examinations necessary to ensure the medical acceptability and viability of gifts that may include heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, intestines, skin grafts, heart valves, bones, eyes, corneas, and soft tissue.
At “eyes” she feels the roiling in her stomach, and by “soft tissue” she’s swallowing knots of bile. From what she’s learned online and from Dot’s charts, her organs are not viable, diseased as they are. And her eyes have always been weak. Her body, RayAnne concludes, would be best donated intact for cancer research. She reaches the bathroom just in time. It all comes in one violent rush. The breakfast, which had gone in so cold and tasteless, comes up hot and vile.
After rinsing her mouth and swamping her face with the coldest water she can bear, she forces herself back to Dot’s room and takes the little hand resting on the bedcover, twining her fingers with her grandmother’s the way she used to when something was frightening or difficult, like waiting in the dentist’s office for her name to be called, navigating the revolving door at Dayton’s department store, or panicking on the family sailboat when Big Rick would nearly keel the little vessel over. Looking back, there had not been all that many times in her life when Dot was not there to reach out to—if not her hand, at least her voice on the phone.
Gran is always there.
From the hanging IV bag, clear drops of fluid drip into the tubes to hydrate Dot, traveling through her body to flush her kidneys, eventually ending up in the urine bag at the bottom of the bed. RayAnne stares at the bag, feeling a tug of unease. It’s only a bodily function, but the sight of it—the ginger-ale color of it, diluted, as Dot now is—feels too intimate. She does not want to be reminded that Gran’s body is merely a system—a structure of bones padded with flesh and fluid. Tubes and connectors baste her to machines; electric cords meet in a fat cable that plugs into an oversized outlet that accommodates the oversized plug that keeps it all going, keeps Gran alive. Until now, RayAnne has not noticed how the machines surround the bed like a flock of vultures.
It begins to rain outside: plops, heavy random drops.
There would be a note. How has she not thought of it before now! There has to be a note. Dot wouldn’t have ditched her family without explanation . . . she would never have just left them.
She takes the bus back to Dune Cottage Village. When she walks in the door of Dot’s cottage, a Post-it disengages from the umbrella stand to float to the floor like a feather.
The pastel-hued Post-its are plastered to so many of Dot’s things—blue, yellow, pink, and green. They flag her best belongings and bits of fine furniture: in the living room they are stuck to the antique pair of leaping ceramic trout, the Waterford carafe with the hairline fissure that reminds RayAnne of lake ice, and the Victorian rocker with upholstered arms; in the bedroom, on the little carved jewelry chest, the Empire highboy, and Dot’s pearls. They’re everywhere, yet they say nothing, no names or instructions.
In the laundry alcove, RayAnne strips off Dot’s clothes and shoves them into the washer with her crumpled jeans—all she has besides her socks, bra, and panties is the awful five-pound Norwegian sweater. Setting the temperature to hot, she tosses it in too, knowing it will shrink to the size of a tea cozy. Naked, she walks down the hall to the guest room, where a chenille robe hangs on a hook. Here are more Post-its—stuck to an etching, an Art Nouveau figurine, and of course the Morandi painting above the dresser. The Post-it on the painting is yellow. RayAnne lifts the frame from its hook and turns it, expecting to find some note or message attached to the back of the canvas. There’s nothing.
On the credenza in the little dining room are neat stacks of papers and files, all topped with blue Post-its. She paws this pile of insurance policies, bills, bank and 401(k) statements, social security forms, and mortgage documents. No note. Systematically moving on, she rifles desk drawers, the bureau, the bedside table, and anywhere else that looks like a place to hide a suicide note. That hiding a suicide note would be counterintuitive does not occur to RayAnne as she shakes down photo albums and the old scrapbooks kept for RayAnne and Kyle. She shuffles class pictures, crude handmade cards with phonetic spellings: Be my Valintine, GranMa! A Vary Mary Crismass. She tucks away a thank-you note written in crayon on lined practice paper and sets the scrapbooks aside to look at later.
There could be a safe-deposit box somewhere?
Rummaging in shelves under the television, she comes across the DVD of Little Big Man and absently puts it in the player. It resumes playing where Dot had last stopped, with Old Lodge Skins speaking skyward, challenging his maker: “Thank You for making me a Human Being! Thank You for helping me to become a warrior! Thank You for my victories, and for my defeats! Thank You for my vision, and the blindness in which I saw further! You make all things and direct them in their ways. I am gonna die now, unless death wants to fight. And I ask You for the last time to grant me my old power to make things happen.”
And then Old Lodge Skins dies, sort of.
After a moment, rain dropping on his forehead, Old Lodge Skins opens one eye and props himself on an elbow, nodding toward Dustin Hoffman, adding, “Take care of my son here. See that he doesn’t go crazy.”
Old Lodge Skins gives death another go, but fails to die. He gets up from the ground and walks slowly off into the rain.
She moves into the kitchen, where a single white Post-it is stuck to the refrigerator door, the only one with any writing, Dot’s hand in blue Sharpie ink: Eat Something.
A reminder to herself?
Both refrigerator and freezer are stocked to the gills with foil packets and Tupperware containers. A list taped to the crisper has little round stickers the same color as the Post-its, and each sticker is followed by a name. The list is a key. RayAnne is yellow (naturally, being Dot’s Ray of Sunshine, her Yellow Bee.) Big Rick is blue, Bernadette pink, and Kyle green. Their name colors correspond with the stored food and the many Post-its around the house that obviously designate what items are intended for whom. Taking out a container with a yellow sticker, she leans against the counter, peels the lid, and stares. It’s a snack she hasn’t seen in decades, one she and Dot used to make together—celery sticks filled with chunky peanut butter and topped with raisins, a creation they called “turds on a log.”
The peanut butter is difficult to swallow, but she chews dutifully. She looks again at the single Post-it instructing Eat Something, a diminutive square on the field of brushed stainless steel. In a slow dawning, RayAnne realizes this is it. The suicide note.
Eat something.
The many things Gran prepared and tucked into her fridge are meant to be good-byes.
RayAnne backs up against the dishwasher and slides to the floor, cross-legged, cradling the open Tupperware, blinking up at the note. Her choked laugh catches on the chewed celery. She picks up another stalk. It has a vaguely astringent taste and the strings catch in her teeth. Salt from her tears mingles with the sweet taste of raisin.
When the phone rings, she peers at the caller ID. It’s Ky. She doesn’t answer because she has nothing to say. Instead, she goes to the den and makes up the pullout bed for him. The guest room is already set for her father when he shows—if he shows. RayAnne calls the motel down the beach and reserves a room for Bernadette.
Searching for an extra pillow, she opens the cedar chest at the foot of Dot’s bed, but there is no bedding. She paws through a few tissue-paper-encased layers of old clothing in clear zipper bags. Curious, she unpacks a few, each individually wrapped, with little packets of lavender and cloves to keep the moths at bay.
As she unfolds the clothing and lays garments across the bed, she understands they all somehow belong together. A one-piece seersucker jumper with a skort, a shirred bathing suit with disintegrating foam bra cups, an eyelet-hemmed linen shift.
There are accessories too—strings of beads, a pair of pearly rimmed Ray-Bans, huarache sandals, a pair of white pumps, garish clip-on earrings of Bakelite pineapples, a lace-edged nightgown with matching bed jacket.
She’s seen the black-and-white images of most of these things in photographs. In the living room, she pulls out the ivory wedding book from a shelf and totes it back to the bedroom. These are Dot’s honeymoon clothes, her trousseau. RayAnne leans against the cedar chest with the album on her lap. On the first page is a tanned and smiling young Dot standing in profile on a Cuban beach, wearing her complicated swimsuit and rhinestone sunglasses. She has a lovely figure, which RayAnne does not recognize as being the mold for her own. In another snap, Dot kneels on a blanket with her hands busy in a wicker picnic hamper, her bare heels peeled from the huaraches. In one of the few colored shots, Dot is sitting on Ted’s knee at a table set under a palm, wearing the seersucker jumper. An evening shot captures them both at an outdoor café in Havana, Dot in the yellow linen shift with matching bolero jacket, legs primly crossed at the ankles, drinking from a tall glass, cigarette in hand. RayAnne forgets how handsome Ted was. In the front of the album is the wedding portrait of them on the steps of the courthouse. Dot in a tailored suit with a corsage of lilies, looking at the camera as if she cannot believe her luck; Ted, clutching her hand but leaning away, as if to get a better angle, looking at his bride the way a cat looks at string.
RayAnne lays the album aside and digs deeper in the chest. The wedding outfit is there. She unrolls the jacket—dusky-blue nubby silk with amber-colored piping and a row of spherical tortoiseshell buttons. The belt buckle is also tortoise, as are the tiny buttons on the back of the amber silk sleeveless top. The skirt is slit down the back. RayAnne stands in front of the mirror and holds the jacket over her bathrobe. Dot had been exactly her size, once upon a time. She turns this way and that. The suit is the sort of versatile finery women wore in the postwar years—elegant enough to marry in, dressy enough for a party. There is a pair of elbow-length gloves of tawny doeskin. The ensemble is modest enough for church, demure enough for a christening, and, it occurs to RayAnne, somber enough for a funeral.
The thought is like a switch, flipping her back to the automatic mode that has enabled her to function without thinking. She meticulously soothes creases from the wedding suit, finds a padded hanger in the closet, and dresses it, counting the many buttons as she does. Finding the task rather restful, almost narcotic, she finds more hangers for the other outfits, pushing Dot’s regular clothes far into the dark recesses of the closet. Once the honeymoon trousseau is spread across the closet rod, she matches the footwear casually underneath, poised as if they might just spring into step. Corresponding little purses are slung across the shoulders of the garments, and she wraps scarves around the stems of the hangers’ wire necks. On the shelf just above, RayAnne places two of the summery hats to crown the diorama of Dot’s best past. The closet is now populated with a wardrobe of best memories.
Back at the cedar chest, she digs to the bottom to find a gift box from a fancy, long-defunct department store. RayAnne opens the lid to a collection of letters, matchbooks, postcards, ticket stubs, announcements, birthday and anniversary cards, pressed flowers, notes, bits of glitter and ribbon. A few dozen tissue-thin blue envelopes are addressed to Dot in Ted’s hand. The box is a repository of her grandparents’ courtship and marriage. RayAnne quickly puts it back—the idea of pawing through this part of Gran’s past is too much like some scene from a sappy novel.
“Okay,” she says aloud, rising from her knees. “Okay,” she admonishes the lid of the cedar chest as she closes it. “Enough.” In the silence of Dot’s house, RayAnne’s voice is like a drip, just words falling from her lip like an unreliable faucet.
RayAnne returns to the closet and lifts the hanger dressed in the lacy nightgown and satin bed jacket.
Her forehead rests on her crossed arms on the edge of the hospital bed. She could be weeping or asleep. Lights in the room and hall have been dimmed for the night. Sniffling, RayAnne turns and burrows her head into the warm palm stroking her hair. Suddenly she opens her eyes. Dot is sitting up, her old self, smoothing the bangs away from RayAnne’s damp forehead.
“Gran?” RayAnne blinks slowly, raising her head.
“Wasn’t supposed to happen like this, sweetheart.” Dot’s looking around, frowning at the many machines. “There I was, all ready to go—and now this business.”
RayAnne follows her gaze. There are twice as many machines as there were before, but instead of beeping, they now chirp quietly like songbirds. The digital screens no longer blink and glow in a neon green but with a mellow, warm apricot light. And how lovely Gran looks. Color in her cheeks, her hair glossy and pearly white. Her blue eyes are bluer, clear and shining.
“But you can’t just leave us, Gran.”
“I have to go sometime, don’t I? So I found a way. At least I thought I had.” She sighs, “That goddamn dog.”
“Why . . . why didn’t you give us any time to be with you, to say real good-byes?”
“And put you all through some Terms of Endearment hoo-ha? I certainly didn’t mean to go trussed up like this.” She rattles the hospital bracelets, which, like the machines, have multiplied to dozens on each wrist.
“Oh, Gran.”
“Listen, pet, if I had told you, it would have been too hard, and you wouldn’t have let me go, would you? Not the way I wanted to. Admit it.”
“But killing yourself?”
“I preferred to think of it as beating my pancreas to the finish line. I couldn’t tell you, because you’d have kept me here, so ill.” Dot reaches out to knuckle away a tear from RayAnne’s cheek.
“RayAnne.”
“Yes?”
“Remember when we used to call you Rayliable? I swear, you are the only sensible person in this family.”
“Sensible?”
“Well, sensible enough. And capable. We could always count on you to do the smart thing. Now I need you to do the right thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know very well what I mean.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I’ve had a life, RayAnne. I loved your granddad so much. We worked so hard and we had such fun. So many friends! And your father—oh, he was a holy terror, of course, but such a funny little boy. Shame you didn’t know him before he got so full of himself. And my little Betsy, so much like you . . . I’ve never told you that, have I? Like twins, you two—when you were born it was like getting her back—so sweet.” Dot shrugs. “And Ky? Who can help but love Ky?”
“But—”
“You’ll be kind to Mr. D?”
“Mr. D? Gran, did he have anything to do with this?”
“Shush. I’ve had every good thing in life and then some. And now I’m done, RayAnne. Stick a fork in me—who said that? Some martyr on the spit . . . never mind. Don’t let the others see me here—it’s bad enough you’ve had to. And by the way, I’d rather not die in this awful room.” She cups RayAnne’s jaw with a warm palm and tilts, forcing RayAnne to look her in the eye.
“Say good-bye, now, RayAnne.”
“No. No.”
Gran’s eyes challenge, like a stare down. One of them will have to blink, and RayAnne understands that it will be her.
“Say good-bye, sweetie.”
RayAnne wakes with a start. Dot’s hand falls open on its side. Machines hum; the heart monitor bleeps. The breathing tube is still in place. Gran is the same pale shell she was an hour before. The dream had been so real. Tears pulse from somewhere at RayAnne’s core, like some aching sponge being wrung.
At the nurses’ station, the clock reads three a.m. when RayAnne slides the signed “Do Not Resuscitate” form across the counter to Deborah. “Can you page Dr. Phillips?”
Deborah looks slowly from the form to RayAnne. “You�
�re not going to wait for your family?”
“This can’t . . . she can’t wait.” RayAnne shakes her head.
“You sure, hon?”
RayAnne nods. “Can you help me with this?” She hands over the dry cleaning bag with Dot’s lace-edged nightgown and bed jacket. “And there’s one more thing.”
There is a balcony terrace on the west end of the wing with a few tables with umbrellas meant for guests and ambulatory patients, though she’s never seen anyone but orderlies there, smoking through their breaks. “The terrace. Can we wheel her out there?”
Deborah holds the nightgown and bed jacket as if they are jeweled and meets her eye. “Sure thing, girl.”
Dot is in her honeymoon nightie and bed jacket. Her pearls are in place and her hair is neatly combed and tucked behind her ears. The bed is no longer flat but cranked to a reclining position.
Dr. Phillips unhooks the machines himself while Deborah sees to other details.
They gently motion RayAnne out of the room to remove the breathing tube. Dr. Phillips explains, “There might be . . . sounds.”
When RayAnne returns she sees there are no more wires tethering Dot to the terrible machines, to life. Even the little finger clamp is gone. When she whispers, “Thank you,” it sounds loud in this new quiet with the machines turned off.
It’s just Dot, asleep.
At her nod, the orderly swings the bed from the wall and pushes it out the door; Dr. Phillips steers with the side rail. They make an odd procession along the dim corridor, pausing briefly at a recessed wall grotto, where Deborah snaps two canna lilies from a floral arrangement and hands one to RayAnne. The other she tucks into place under Dot’s hand.
The bed is wheeled through the double doors and onto the terrace, where the orderly sets the brake and Dr. Phillips drags a patio chair close for RayAnne, then lowers the bed rail. Deborah makes the sign of the cross over her wide bosom and gives RayAnne a teary smile before backing away. The bed faces the direction of the sun, which will rise within the hour. Dr. Phillips discreetly closes the glass door, leaving them alone.
