Within Arm's Reach

by Ann Napolitano

  “You faked it with Gracie yesterday, too, didn’t you.”

  Another smile. “Only for a little while. Besides, she talks to you more honestly about the baby than she’ll talk to me. I like to listen. Do you think she’s taking care of the baby all right? I wonder if she’s eating well. Kids these days eat all kinds of junk.”

  I say, “Gracie seems a little uneasy.” Then I stop, and fold my hands in my lap.

  Mrs. McLaughlin gives me an annoyed look, then turns slowly to see who has arrived.

  Louis is standing in the doorway. “Should I leave?” he says, in a joking tone. “I learned a long time ago that a man shouldn’t interrupt two women talking.”

  “You’re right,” Mrs. McLaughlin says. “Why are you visiting me so often?”

  Louis crosses his arms and rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. He looks like a massive tree in danger of tipping over. “We’ve been worried about you,” he says.

  Mrs. McLaughlin makes a disapproving noise in the back of her throat. “That’s not why you keep coming here. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I suppose it’s none of my business.” With that, she rolls over onto her side and closes her eyes.

  I am tempted to cross the room and tickle or shake her until she can’t help but stop pretending unconsciousness. Louis is my least favorite visitor. He is so clearly uncomfortable when he is here that he makes me uncomfortable. A few times I have set him to work fixing a broken window shade or adjusting the dresser’s loose leg. Those are the least painful visits, but today nothing in the room is broken and we are left circling each other. I adjust the blankets at the end of the bed and straighten the magazines on the coffee table.

  As always, Louis doesn’t sit down. He gets that pent-up look on his face as if there is something he badly wants to say but he can’t find the words. I know that he wants to talk about Eddie. His expression is just an exaggerated version of all the looks I have gotten over the last several months from people who find out that my husband died. Their faces strain with pity and sympathy and the inarticulate desire to offer a comfort they know does not exist. There is something else to Louis’s expression, too, that I can’t put my finger on.

  I make polite conversation because I can’t stand the silence. The ache in his face goes right to my heart, and I can’t help but remember that Louis was the one with Eddie when he died, not me. I remember waiting at the door of the emergency room when the stretcher was unloaded. I knew the moment I saw my husband that he was already gone. Any nurse worth her salt can tell if a patient’s dead from across the room. We check pulses and breathing just to make certain, to offer proof to the family. But I can tell with one look when a person’s soul has left the body. In the weeks right after Eddie died, before I shed Catholicism and tried to look at life in a more balanced way, it used to bother me terribly that I wasn’t with my husband in his last moments. I should have been with Eddie when he died; he shouldn’t have died with his boss and a bunch of paramedics.

  After I ask Louis how Kelly is and how the business is and how long he thinks this heat wave can last, I want to ask him to leave. I want to tell him that all this daily conversation with his daughters and his wife and his sisters-in-law is enough of a struggle. I want to tell him I have not talked this much in years, and then only with my husband, not with a group of strangers. I want to tell him that the break he started in me at the funeral has opened up again, and that when I drive home at the end of the day, I have to hold carefully to the wheel so that I don’t start to cry over how sweet the summer air smells, or a memory of making love, or the knowledge that I want to have more children. I want to tell Louis Leary that I can barely take what is going on inside of me. I do not have any room left to hold on to his feelings about the loss of my husband. I think at some point my stony face convinces Louis, at least for this afternoon, and he leaves.

  LOUIS REMINDS me of Eddie, but the rest of the McLaughlins pull my heart in an unexpected direction. It is their eyes, which, except in Lila, are blue or green down to the last person. In their eyes, I am reminded of my own family. My own parents, and my own brothers and sisters. I am reminded that I look more like these strangers than I do my brown-skinned children. And even if I had been able to ignore the McLaughlins’ pale skin and light eyes filing past me every day, I would have been unable to avoid making the connection between my heritage and theirs because Mrs. McLaughlin won’t let me. As she says regularly to Kelly and Louis, she allowed me to be hired only because I am Irish.

  “I wouldn’t let any other kind of person sit in my bedroom while I sleep, I can tell you that.”

  “Mother, keep your voice down. That’s a racist thing to say.”

  “No, it’s not. I like every other race perfectly well. But I want my own with me while I’m sick in bed.”

  This appraisal of my value is startling because I never think of myself as Irish anymore. My own children have beautiful brown eyes, just like their father. I look at their dark skin and never think of my own pallor. Fifteen years ago I gave myself over to my husband, and to our family. I am one with them, and I am nothing apart from them. I made that choice when I fell in love with Eddie. I was nineteen years old at the time, and in my first year on full scholarship at Bergen County Nursing College. I was working two part-time jobs after classes, so I didn’t have many friends. Eddie was a few years older than I was. He had moved to New Jersey from Mexico with a cousin the year before and they were part of the construction team working on the building where most of my classes were held. I noticed him the first day of the semester. He was sitting on the school steps during a break, reading a book.

  I had never had a real boyfriend before, and despite the influence of all my loud brothers and sisters, I was very shy. But something crazy came over me when I saw this young man. He seemed to be clearly outlined in a sea of blurry white nursing students. I walked up to him as bold as day and offered him the cold can of soda I had just gotten out of the soda machine. He looked at me as if I was crazy, which I was, and said, “No thank you.” But the next afternoon I did the same thing, and wasn’t discouraged when he said “No thank you” again. I figured out his work schedule, so that I was always there when he was getting off work for the day or just for a break. He was terribly polite, and I gave him no choice but to talk to me. I made him laugh, even though I had never thought of myself as even remotely funny. I heard bright, witty remarks come out of my mouth that I couldn’t believe were my own. The craziness stayed with me, and it didn’t take me long to realize it was love.

  When I told my mother the wonderful news, she went hard and cold. I was the last of her thirteen children. She was exhausted, and no longer open to new ideas. “If you marry a spic,” she said, “you won’t be welcome in this house anymore.”

  Of course I married him, and my heart narrowed and grew at the same time, and I stopped thinking of myself as Irish. I kept my maiden name professionally, but everywhere else I was Noreen Ortiz. I cut all ties with my mother and my brothers and sisters. When Eddie died and the pain seemed too great to bear alone, I thought of reaching out to my family. But my mother was dead by then, and my siblings scattered. What had once been a big noisy family seemed to have completely disappeared, pulled up by the roots. So I bore the pain alone and concentrated on my children and returned to work and was too tired to entertain any more sentimental thoughts.

  But now Mrs. McLaughlin seems intent on reminding me of my family. My past and my history are one of the few subjects she is interested in.

  “Where did you grow up?” she asks one morning.

  “Paterson. Just about twenty miles from here.”

  “My husband grew up in Paterson. Did your parents tell you Irish stories?”

  It is raining outside, so we are trapped in her room. At least I am trapped. Mrs. McLaughlin looks perfectly comfortable on the loveseat. Her cheeks have good color today. But I want badly to move around, to throw open the window and door, to let in the wind and rain. I have
grown claustrophobic lately.

  Mrs. McLaughlin clears her throat to get my attention.

  “Yes, of course,” I say. “My father told us stories when I was very young. He talked about leprechauns and fairies. All his favorite jokes started with a priest and a leprechaun walking into a bar. He had what seemed like a hundred variations on the same joke.”

  She says, “What made him stop?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said he told the stories when you were very young.”

  “Oh. He was an alcoholic. He left my mother by the time I was six. He came and went after that, until he passed away when I was a teenager.”

  “My husband was a dreamer, too.”

  “A dreamer?”

  “He sometimes drank too much.” Mrs. McLaughlin nods. “You and I have a lot in common.”

  I turn and look at her, tiny and old, content to sit still while I pace the room like a caged animal. My period had already started when I woke up this morning, and I am bleeding heavily. I can feel the blood flow out of my body. Mrs. McLaughlin is so pale she appears bloodless. It has probably been forty years since her last menstruation. “You think so?” I say, to be polite.

  She gives me a measured look. “We’ve both lost too much,” she says. “More than our share.”

  THAT AFTERNOON Mrs. McLaughlin takes a longer nap than usual. I stand by her bed at four o’clock, trying to decide whether to wake her. The sky has cleared, and I don’t want her to miss out on her walk. She needs the exercise. I can tell, looking down on her, that she has not regained the weight she lost during her hospital stay. She makes no impression on the mattress. She lies on top of it with no impact, no pressure. She weighs perhaps eighty-five pounds, which is the weight of my eleven-year-old daughter. Mrs. McLaughlin is stronger and more independent now, but when she first came home from the rehab hospital, I had to lift her in and out of the bathtub. She was a bundle of papery skin and light bones in my arms. An old woman’s body is one of loss. Loss of sensuality and suppleness, loss of muscle and bone mass, loss of color. Everything is fading away. You can catch glimpses of the woman who was once there, but no more.

  Mrs. McLaughlin opens her eyes suddenly and stares up at me.

  I try to smile soothingly so she’s not startled by the fact that I am standing over her. I say, “It’s time for our afternoon walk. You should get up now.”

  She stays perfectly still, her hands folded on her ribs. “I just saw your brothers and sisters,” she says. “I was trying to pick out your voice, but there was so much noise, and you were too little to speak loudly enough for me to hear you. You were just a baby.”

  I put my hand under her shoulders and help raise her to the sitting position. It is common for older people to have vivid dreams, and to confuse their experiences asleep and awake. It suddenly occurs to me, though, my hands on this old woman, that if my mother were still alive, she would be close to Catharine McLaughlin’s age. My older brothers and sisters would be the age of her children, my nieces and nephews the age of Gracie and Lila.

  I say, “Mrs. Ronning had her TV on too loud again. The noise must have disturbed you. I’ll go next door and speak to her when we get back. Come on now, up you go. Would you like to use the bathroom?”

  Mrs. McLaughlin shakes her head no. She slides her legs over the side of the bed. When she is standing, I hold on to her elbow to help her balance, and she slides on her shoes. I hang her cardigan around her shoulders. I hold a hand mirror up to show her that her white curls look just as crisp and neat as before her nap. Together, my hand still under her elbow, we head out of the room. We navigate the stairs slowly, and I use my shoulder to push open the outside door.

  Only when we are out in the sunlight and freshly cleaned air, do I feel myself relax for the first time that day. I tip my head back and feel the sun warm on my face. Then I remember my duty, and look down at Mrs. McLaughlin. She is squinting against the light, an expression of sleep and confusion still on her face. Perhaps I rushed her out of her nap because of my own eagerness to get out of that room.

  “We’ll take it slow now,” I say. “Just to the parking lot and back.”

  “I never saw the children in my dreams before,” she says in a groggy voice. “I’m usually awake. I see them around the big tree outside my window. They’ve always left me alone when I sleep.”

  “Did you dream about your children?” I ask. “Kelly and Meggy and Ryan?” I add the specifics to try to bring her back to reality. We are taking slow steps down the path. I think now that it was a mistake to bring her outside before she was truly awake. Most falls take place when older people are tired and distracted, unable to concentrate on each step. Mrs. McLaughlin’s recovery from surgery is too recent to be jeopardized by a fall. I should have known better. I am rarely this careless.

  “No,” she says. “I saw you, and your brothers and sisters.”

  I stop walking and look at her with real concern. I have never known her, since she went off the strong pain medications, to become altered. “Maybe we should turn back,” I say. “It’s not as nice out as I thought it was.”

  “No,” she says, and shakes her head. With the gesture, some of the fog seems to clear from her eyes. “I have to explain this to you. I knew, when I opened my eyes and saw you standing there, that it was time to tell you.”

  We are at the top of a small incline in the center of the path. Mrs. McLaughlin turns around, so she is looking back toward the Christian Home for the Elderly. I am already thinking of calling her doctor upon our return to her room. It can’t hurt for her to have a checkup. Perhaps she has a blocked artery to her brain. It is a common problem with the aged, and easily fixed.

  I put my hand on her arm. “Let’s head back, shall we?”

  She says, “My husband gave me visions when he died. I’ve had the chance to see my mother and my father, and the children I lost. I’ve spent time with them. I see them more and more frequently now.”

  She speaks so quietly, I have to strain to hear her. But the slight hot wind has died down, and I catch each word. There is no one else in sight, and I have the odd sensation that Mrs. McLaughlin and I are alone in our own bubble of space at the top of this hill. I think of my husband, and his boss, Louis, and this job. I wonder if these connections have been there all along, and if it is only now, months after the loss of Eddie, that my heart is open enough to see them. Is life made up of strands that link us all?

  “That must be nice,” I say.

  “My twins were just babies when I lost them. They were . . . stillborn.” Stillborn seems to have been lodged deep in her throat—it creaks out. “But I will see them again in this life. I’ll see them in Gracie’s baby.” Her face lights. “And my little girl will be there, too.”

  I know how to listen well. It is an important part of nursing, an important part of providing comfort. I bend my head toward Mrs. McLaughlin and let her go on.

  “I was afraid to tell anyone about the visions for a long time. I was afraid they’d lock me up. Look what’s happened to my poor Ryan. My children can be unreasonable. But when I realized who you were, I knew it was all right for me to tell you.”

  “No one’s going to lock you up,” I say in my best calming tone.

  “I knew you looked familiar,” she says. “It still took me a while to place you. Of course, there is the name, but you look like your brothers and sisters.”

  The summer air sneaks under the sleeves of my nurse’s uniform and gives me a chill. I don’t know why in that moment I begin to take her seriously. I don’t know why I no longer believe she is confused. I say, “You know my brothers and sisters? How?”

  She is gazing at me, her head tipped to the side. Her blue eyes on my blue eyes. “You were the baby,” she says. “Patrick and I knew your mother, poor Mrs. Ballen. We brought her a casserole, or maybe it was a pie. But you were the baby outside my window, tied to the tree with your brothers and sisters. Noreen Ballen. Baby Ballen.”

 
I cannot look away from her eyes as she says my name. I don’t understand what is happening. I know I should, and I am searching . . . and then suddenly I remember. When I was very young, that was how my mother kept track of all thirteen of us. My mom was alone and afraid that one or more of us would run off and get in trouble. To keep control she would tie us to a big tree in the center of our backyard while she cooked and cleaned inside the house. My brothers and sisters and I developed games that we could play with one another around the trunk of the tree. We tried to forget how embarrassing it was when someone stopped by and saw us there, or when Mom didn’t hear one of us calling and calling that we had to go to the bathroom. And how the neighborhood stray dog would run around and around us, just out of reach, taunting with loud barks because he was free and we weren’t.

  I speak carefully, wondering how it is possible that my past lies in this old woman. In this stranger. “You saw my family in a vision?”

  “Your oldest brother and sister want me to set them free. They wave their arms at me, pleading.” Mrs. McLaughlin’s eyes darken, then grow light again. I wonder if she is seeing them now. I feel a pang beneath my ribs.

  “Maybe your brother and sister sent you to me,” she says. “Maybe they think I can set you free.”

  I put my free hand on the waist of my white uniform where the material gathers into a neat seam. I am too shaken to speak, but I feel the nurse, the professional in me, summon words. “We should keep walking.”

  “I don’t know how to do it, though,” Mrs. McLaughlin says. “I can’t seem to help my own children. I couldn’t keep them safe and alive. I wasn’t there for Ryan. I can’t make the ones I have left be happy. I don’t know why I’m being expected to help a stranger.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” I say, in a voice I don’t recognize. “I’m not your responsibility. I can take care of myself.”