The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  I end on the body, the very thing that is failing her. “You’ve spent so much time working on your physical self. Feeding it, watering it, exercising, dressing and undressing, soothing pain, feeling pleasure. You’ve spent hours looking in mirrors, trying to feel beautiful. You have treasured your body. You have despised it. And at the moment of death, you lose it. Imagine the moment before you die. You have already contemplated the fact that you are losing your money, your loved ones, your status, your identity. You will also lose the shell it all comes in. What can you do to acknowledge this? To prepare yourself?”

  Then I lean closer to her, urging her to tense and release different muscles and limbs and thoughts. “Imagine your organs are shutting down, now,” I murmur. “You have no more desire to eat or to drink. Next is your central nervous system. You can’t move. You lose your connection to your limbs. Your eyes may roll in your head, you may not be able to keep them open. Finally, your respiratory system will slow down. Breath won’t come easily or naturally.” I sit in the quiet, feeling the absence of noise press against my eardrums and my skin. “Your legs. Your hands. Your head. Your brain. Your abdomen. Your kidneys and liver and intestines. All the big and small muscles and bones. They are gone. Consciousness is moving toward your heart, your center. You’re shrinking inward to a point of light. Your breathing is getting shallower. Your energy is draining. Your body temperature drops. You can’t feel the floor beneath you because you are weightless. You are aware now that you are dying, but that is the only consciousness you have left.” I pause. “You’re opening and opening and opening into consciousness. You’re part of all that ever was, and all that will ever be. You let go. Finally.”

  I look down at Win with tears in my eyes. “You are safe,” I say. “You’re looking down at this body on the floor, with no more breath in it. You see people standing around your body.”

  I wait a beat. “It’s a few days later, now, and the body is naked and cold.”

  I count to twenty. “A few months later, there’s decay. Gases fill the body and it decomposes.”

  Win doesn’t move. “A year has passed,” I whisper. “There are only old bones.”

  I look down at her and imagine a world without her in it. “Fifty years. There is just dust. You are not here anymore. But you’re safe.”

  We inhabit that dark, small truth for a long time.

  Finally, I bring her back—first with a shallow breath, then with a stretch, then lengthening her muscles, then feeling her bones shift and her organs pump and process and her blood moving through her heart and the air filling her lungs and awareness sprawling to the tips of her toes and the roots of her hair. “What do you feel beneath you?” I ask. “Can you feel the carpet on your palms? What do you hear—pipes as water moves through them? Your own heartbeat? What do you smell? The lemon in the shampoo you use, the detergent in your bedding? What do you see?”

  Win’s eyes blink open. “You,” she says. “I see you.”

  * * *

  —

  YOU WOULD BE surprised at what people wish they’d done when they get to the end of their lives. It’s not writing a novel, or climbing to Machu Picchu, or winning a medal in ice dancing. It’s having an ice cream sundae, or watering the houseplants more. Playing cards with a grandson. Catching up with an old friend.

  My mother’s dying wish was, likewise, simple. She wanted to see the ocean one more time. That wasn’t something the residential hospice could do, but I was determined to make it happen. I talked to the doctors and priced out a transport vehicle. I bought my mother a floppy sunhat at Goodwill and sent a note to Kieran’s school saying that he would be absent the following Tuesday. But the day before we were scheduled to go, my mother took a turn for the worse. So instead, Kieran went to school, and I went to the North Shore. I filled gasoline jugs with ocean water. I shoveled sand into a Ziploc bag. I collected shells and jammed them into my pockets.

  At the hospice facility, the nurses helped me get my mother into a sitting position. I wedged pillows beneath her knees and set her feet in a basin of the water. I poured sand into emesis basins, and placed them on each side of her chair, burying her fingers in beach. I told her to close her eyes, and I moved a gooseneck reading lamp closer to her face, so she could feel its warmth. Then I placed shells from her clavicles to her belly button.

  But.

  I could bring her the memory of the ocean, but I couldn’t take away the sound of the heart monitor.

  I could give her the coastline, but only as much as could fit in a room.

  I could make her a mermaid, but she couldn’t go back to the sea.

  That’s why I’ll move heaven and earth for my clients. To make sure they get that last heart’s desire. That there’s nothing they haven’t had a chance to finish, before they leave.

  * * *

  —

  TWICE DURING THE day, I’ve called Meret to see how she is doing. The second time, she told me to stop treating her like one of my clients, and I nearly cheered. I will take an angry daughter any day over one who is weeping, or—worse—silent and blank.

  Win starts running a fever after dinner and complains of pain urinating; she likely has a bladder infection. I wait for the hospice nurse on call to show up and confirm the diagnosis and give her antibiotics before I leave. It is nearly 11:00 P.M. by the time I get home.

  The house is dark. Even the light in Meret’s room is out. I open the door as quietly as I can, to find a small candle flickering in the entryway, set right in the middle of the floor. In the near distance—at the juncture of the entryway and the living room—is a second candle burning.

  I blow out the first flame and move to the second. From there, I can see another candle pointing toward the staircase, and then three dotted like lighthouses all the way up.

  The last candle burns just outside the closed master bedroom door.

  Inside, the four posts of our bed have been strung with Christmas lights. They provide the only light in the room, but it’s enough for me to see that hanging from the ceiling are photographs. They twist on short lengths of fishing line, buoyed by the currents of air-conditioning. There’s a picture of Brian, holding the stuffed monkey that he shoots from a cannon to explain vectors to freshmen. One of Kieran—still lanky and young, holding a lobster he’d taken out of a trap. Meret as a toddler, wearing a lopsided strawberry hat—the one and only item I’ve ever knit. There’s a picture of Meret as a newborn, and another of her at an elementary school holiday concert in a red velvet dress. There is a photo of Brian standing next to the sign announcing the top of Mount Washington, and another of him in a tuxedo. There is the last picture I have of my mother, smiling from a hospice bed.

  I see a movement from the corner of my eye, and Brian steps forward from the corner, where he has been watching me. “What’s all this?”

  He doesn’t answer directly. “You don’t see black holes, you know.” His voice shakes, as if he is nervous. “They just pull you in. No light escapes, so you wouldn’t either. They say if a person actually approached a black hole, he’d be torn apart, because the gravity is that great.”

  I sit down on the edge of the bed.

  “Since astrophysicists can’t actually see black holes, they had to figure out another way to find them. They look at how planets and other matter moves and reacts around them. They see things falling in, or at the brink.”

  Images pirouette above my head. “There aren’t any pictures of me.”

  “No.” Brian steps forward and pulls me up, positioning me in the dead center of the room. “That’s because you’re our star. You hold us together. Without you, there’s no life. No gravity. No me.” He hesitates. “No us.”

  I realize that he is trying to communicate in a language he knows and understands. That for him, this is crystal clear.

  “You think you know the edges of your world,” Brian sa
ys. “And then it turns out there’s all this dark matter out there. I fell out of orbit, Dawn.”

  I look at him, the familiar planes of his face, the level of his chin, the sickle-shaped scar that cuts through his eyebrow. He is trying to find his way to me again; I can meet him halfway. So I put my hands on his cheeks. “How do we get back on track?”

  In response, he sways forward. He stops before we touch, I inhale what he exhales. It makes me think of Abramović, the performance artist, and her lover, fainting in the same square of air. “Is this…” he asks. “Can I…”

  I rise up on my toes and press my lips against his.

  For a moment, he goes still. His heart, flush against mine, kicks hard. Then he grabs me tighter, his palms skimming from my shoulders to my waist, as if loosening his grip means I might float out of reach.

  We kiss like we haven’t in years—like that is all we are going to do, like we could taste the world in each other. We lie down on the bed and stay like this for hours, for centuries. I move against him, wanting more, but he holds my hands flat on either side of my body. He kisses his way along my jaw, scrapes his teeth at the base of my throat. When I manage to reach for his shirt and try to pull it over his head, Brian darts away. Instead, he skirts his fingertips over me. Brian has always been a scholar, and I have become the subject.

  I’m completely undressed, and Brian isn’t. I arch against him and try to cage him with my legs. Instead, he crawls off the bed, leaving me to ache. I come up on my elbows, thinking he will finally take off his clothes, but instead he kneels. He bows to me, sliding his hands from my knees to my thighs, and his mouth closes over the core of me.

  This. This is what it means to be alive.

  It feels like lightning when I come, so stark that I look down at my hand against the sheet, expecting a burn. “I’m sorry,” I gasp, and Brian looks up at me, surprised. “I wanted us to be together.”

  I realize, with an aftershock, that I mean it.

  With a strength I didn’t know I have, I pull Brian down to me and roll so that he becomes my feast. I taste each patch I uncover. He catches bits of me as I move—a wrist, a shoulder, the underside of a breast—but I am everywhere at once. I rock on him, over him. I look into his eyes.

  I can’t remember the last time we did that. Usually, we hide in our own pleasure. We use each other to get where we need to, in our own little hedonistic bubbles. It’s safer than peering through the windows of his eyes and glimpsing something I might not want to see.

  Or letting him peer through mine.

  When he swells inside me, when neither of us blinks, I wonder if this is what it’s like for the moon when she pulls the tide and changes the shape of the world.

  We don’t have a washcloth. Brian’s beard has scratched me raw. His hands are broad and restless on my spine, and my hair is damp against my face. “We’re going to have to clean the comforter,” I whisper.

  “Worth it,” Brian grunts.

  I squeeze him with my legs. “That is my new favorite sport,” I whisper.

  He buries his face in the curve of my neck. “Imagine the gym memberships you could sell.”

  I laugh and feel him slip out of me. There is wetness and mess and I don’t even care. Brian cradles me, my back to his front, idly playing with my hair. I look up at the ceiling, at the starry string of lights, at the absence of me. “Can’t you get too close to the sun?” I murmur.

  “Not in my metaphor,” Brian says.

  “Tell that to Icarus.”

  He yawns. “Who?”

  Brian’s breathing evens, a bellows behind me. I think he has fallen asleep, when I feel his words on the back of my neck. “I need help,” he confesses.

  So do I, I think. I catch his fingers with my own, ceding the space and the silence.

  “I managed to hurt the person I love most in the world. And I want to ask my best friend how to fix it,” Brian says. “But they’re one and the same.”

  I am not sure what he is apologizing for. A single act, or many. I don’t want to know. I realize I should apologize to him, too, but maybe that is the problem in my marriage—that we have been tethered too long to our past, and we need forward movement.

  I don’t want to slip back. I was a student of history; I know this. The shadow of a thing doesn’t exist without the original to cast it. A dry bed was still once a river. A bell unrung is still a bell.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night I get a call from the hospice where my mother died, where one of my longer-term clients—a woman with Parkinson’s—has taken a turn for the worse. I slip out of bed, telling Brian that someone is dying. I drive to the facility and talk to the nurses about Thalia—the forced respiration, the mottling in her limbs. Then I go into her room and assess for myself that she is actively dying.

  She’s been unresponsive for a few weeks, so I knew that it was coming. I take my phone out and cue up a playlist of Broadway songs. Thalia had been a showgirl, a Rockette. She was married for sixty years to a producer, who died in 2012. They never had any children; she’s outlived her friends. In Amsterdam, if you have no one to survive you, a poet is hired to write and read a few lines at your funeral; this is obviously not the case in America. Thalia hired me so that she would not have to die alone.

  I sit down beside Thalia and reach for her hand. The skin is paper-thin, the veins a purpled map. Her hair, a white tuft, has been brushed back and secured with a pink ribbon. Her cheeks are sunken and her mouth hangs open. A tabby kitten—a generational offspring of Cat, I imagine—curls at the foot of her bed.

  The last time Thalia was conscious, she told me how, as a kid, she would sneak down her fire escape when her parents were fighting and make her way to Broadway. The curtain rose at 7:00, which meant at 8:30, everyone came outside to smoke. Ushers didn’t check tickets on the way back in, so she would blend in with the crowds and hover in the rear of the theater, scoping out the empty seats. Every now and then a wealthy couple would eye her—a teenager—oddly, but who was to say she wasn’t the child of a couple in the row in front of them, or off to the right? She never got caught, and she saw the second acts of over a hundred shows for free. “I used to wonder,” she told me, “why do those Sharks hate the Jets so damn much?”

  “Thalia,” I say, aware that hearing is the last sense to go, “it’s me, Dawn. I’m here with you.” I gently squeeze her hand.

  Her breath is wet and thick. The cat’s tail flicks. Soon, then.

  I don’t sleep; I bear witness. Broadway scores run on repeat: Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story and Showboat and A Chorus Line. Kiss today goodbye.

  My phone dings once; a text from Brian. Bed is too big without you.

  I start to type a reply but cannot figure out what to say.

  After a few hours of vigil, my eyelids feel gritty and my mouth feels full of chalk. Nurses move in and out of the room in regular intervals, checking vitals, asking me if I need anything. Just before the sun rises, Thalia opens her eyes. “Are you here to take me?” she asks.

  It is not the first time I’ve been mistaken for the angel of death. When it gets this close, clients have one foot in this world and one foot in the next. Some see a light. Others see people who’ve died. I had an elderly client once call out to a man named Herbert, who turned out to be a high school boyfriend that died in World War II. A college kid with an inoperable brain tumor saw a stoic, silent man in suspenders and boots sitting on the edge of his bed. His name was Garmin, the boy said, and he said he was supposed to watch over me. When I told my client’s father this, he went white and said that Garmin was the name of his grandfather’s brother, whom he never knew and never met because he’d died in a mill accident in his twenties.

  I don’t know what makes people see what they do before they die. It may be dopamine, or oxygen deprivation. It may be meds. It coul
d be brain cells firing one final time or a short circuit between synapses. Or maybe it’s a way of saying that you may not know what comes next, but it’s still somehow going to be all right.

  I don’t tell Thalia that I am here for her, but I lean so close that my breath falls like a blessing. “Rest,” I tell her. “You’ve done what you need to do.”

  When Thalia dies, it is like an old filament bulb that glows for a moment after it’s turned off, and then loses its vibrance and its light. She is there, and then she’s not. There’s a space in the world the size of her small body, but she is gone.

  The cat jumps off the bed and slinks out the door.

  I wait a moment before I go to tell the nurses. I hold Thalia’s hand and look into her face. When you look at someone whose life has just ended, you don’t see horror or pain or fear. You see peace. Not just because the muscles relax and the breath has left—but because there’s a deep satisfaction, a conclusion. It never fails to move me, what a privilege it is to be at this moment, to be the bearer of their story.

  I take out my phone, open my calendar, and start to read.

  Manoy Dayao, who waited nineteen years for a winning lottery drawing to get to the United States from the Philippines. Three months after he and his wife arrived, he was diagnosed with cancer. I was hired when he was already unresponsive. He didn’t speak English, and I did not speak Filipino, so I asked his wife for his favorite song. “New York, New York,” she told me. Frank Sinatra. When I started to sing the first line—Start spreading the news—Manoy suddenly opened his eyes and belted, I’m leaving today. And he did, three hours later.

  Savion Roarke, who had perfect color—like perfect pitch—and could hold any hue in her head and match it to a sample.

  Stan Wexler, who worked for Western Union for forty years, and whose great-grandson was teaching him to text. In telegraph code, he told me, LOL used to mean loss of life.

  Esther Eckhart, whose son was a singer on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic, who died with him crooning to her on speakerphone.