So I picked out a shockingly ugly pink-and-white-and-Day-Glo-orange-striped belt, cinched up my old jeans, and went to do the exchange with my mother. She’d take Martin, and I’d take the elevator to the eighth floor.
We had a great visit. Anne-Marie was animated and involved as soon as I came in the room. She gave my belt a well-deserved insult. Leaning over, she took the book I’d brought in for her, Runaway, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro. She pulled down a pair of glasses from atop her head to read from a story she’d opened to. Later I read the stories and fixated on the line, “She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.” We all hoped that way. Anne-Marie never had the time to read all the books I’d brought her. She read just one page of the Munro and then closed it up and added it to her pile.
I brushed back her hair from her face; she was lovely. My parents had never compared us as kids. To them we were all smart and beautiful. But we knew the truth: Anne-Marie was the beauty, Natasha was the good girl, and I was the pudgy, funny one.
Three girls, all of us different, but all of us loved books. From the time we could toddle, we toddled toward books. When I was just three years old, the three of us would walk together to the library bookmobile. It stopped at a corner just a few blocks away from our house. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury describes books smelling “like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land.” For me, books do have a spicy smell, but it is a local spice, soothing and familiar. It is the smell of the bookmobile, a mixture of musty pages and warm bodies. We crowded in along the shelves, looking for what we wanted along the lower brackets; the ones above were for the grown-up books. Anchored shelves in the middle of the van were for new releases, with a slot to the side for returning due books. At home we were expected to keep track of our library books and to get them back on time. Anne-Marie and I were usually late, Natasha never.
Piles of books were stacked along the windowsill of Anne-Marie’s hospital room, gifts from friends and from family. I was borrowing as many as I brought in. Anne-Marie had just introduced me to the writer Deborah Crombie and her sleuths, Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. She reread the series while I worked my way through, virgin and loving it. I was in the middle of All Shall Be Well. The title held out hope, and when I had seen the book there on the hospital sill, I’d asked to borrow it. Anne-Marie had said yes, but said she wanted it back. We were all still planning for more time.
My father was there that morning, along with Marvin, Anne-Marie’s husband. Marvin slept in Anne-Marie’s room every night, and so he was tired every day. Sleep wasn’t easy wrapped around a woman in a hospital bed who was hooked up to all kinds of bags and tubes. I sought to make him laugh, and my father too. It was important that I play the fool and jester. When we laughed, we forgot that we were in a room with a woman who had little hope left. The optimism of forgetting stayed with us, allowing us to make plans. Anne-Marie ate her Jell-O, and we all imagined that tomorrow she’d move up to something more solid. We talked about driving out to Bellport, Anne-Marie’s house by the sea, as soon as she got out of the hospital. I promised to get her started on a new mystery series I’d discovered, written by M. C. Beaton and starring the unambitious but ruggedly adorable Hamish Macbeth, a policeman from the Scottish Highlands. I offered to bring in a couple of titles on my next visit. Anne-Marie looked skeptical—preferring London to the Scottish countryside—but I assured her that Beaton’s eccentric characters more than made up for the rural atmosphere. We all laughed again.
When Anne-Marie became tired, her eyes would close halfway and her words would stop midsentence. That was my cue to leave, to let her rest with her books and the newspaper. I kissed her and told her I loved her and I’d see her tomorrow. “Tell me again about Martin’s new shoes,” she asked, her eyes opening wide for a minute. I told her about my three-year-old’s new shoes, pink Merrells. He loved everything pink. She nodded.
“See you tomorrow,” she said.
One hour later, my sister died. She handed my mother a folded-back piece of her New York Times, said, “Read that. It’s interesting,” and then attempted to rise from the bed. Blood gurgled up from her throat, and she fell back. The nurse pushed past my mother, and told her to go find Marvin, who had gone out into the hall. But it was too late. Anne-Marie was gone.
I was driving over the Henry Hudson Bridge with Martin belted into his car seat behind me when my cell phone rang. I carried it wedged between my legs so I could answer it quickly, and I did. Jack interrupted my words about what a great visit I’d had.
“Nina, you have to come back.”
“Why? Why do I have to come back?” I started to feel sick to my stomach. Jack didn’t answer me.
“Tell me, why do I have to come back? What’s wrong?”
“Anne-Marie is dead.”
I screamed. And screamed again. I pulled the car over and continued screaming, my throat raking itself bloody and sore. Martin sat speechless behind me. He must have been terrified. When I stopped screaming, I started crying. I turned the car around and drove back into New York City, back to the hospital.
Anne-Marie had been laid out in the bed with her arms crossed over her body. A cloth was wrapped around her head, holding her mouth closed. My mother stood beside her, crying quietly, holding on to the cloth that covered her body. Marvin paced the room. Jack talked with the nurse, who was urging us to move out so that the body could be taken down to the morgue. I’d left Martin in the waiting room with another nurse, drawing pictures. Natasha cried on the couch, sitting next to my father. She held his arm as tears trembled down his cheeks, shaking along with his body as he weaved back and forth. “Three in one night,” he kept mumbling to himself, repeating over and over, “Three in one night.”
I tried to pull my mother away from the bed. “Let’s go, Mommy. That’s not Anne-Marie anymore.”
“Yes, she is,” my mother corrected me. “Yes, this is Anne-Marie.” She turned back to my sister, back to stroking her cheek, holding on to her hand above the sheet.
But that body was no longer my sister. Anne-Marie was gone. We could still have her with us in words and memories and photos. She was ours to remember and talk about and dream about. But she was gone from herself, never to know or feel or talk or dream, ever again. That was the first horror of losing Anne-Marie: she lost herself. She lost life and all its wondrous, incalculable possibilities. While the rest of us would live on, she would not. It was all over for her. Even if I thought the spirit of her person might persist in another dimension or another space—and how could I know this or deny this?—her place on earth as she felt it, tasted it, knew it, was gone. Lights-out, over, forever.
As horrible as losing her life was, there was even more horror for me in that Anne-Marie knew it was happening. I had failed to protect Anne-Marie from knowing her death was coming. All my books and foolery and stupid clothes could not stop her from knowing. She was too smart to ignore the truth that came with the doctors’ visits and the test results and what she felt inside.
From the time she was a child, Anne-Marie had used intelligence and intuition to see through lies and bullshit. She quit the Brownies after two weeks because the mothers running the troop just could not explain the arts and crafts. Anne-Marie did not see the point of making lanyards, and until the mothers could justify the wrapping of plastic strings around and around, she was out of there. As an adult, she eviscerated long-held assumptions about Renaissance architecture and constructed whole new ways of looking at societal and civic impacts on church construction in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She knew Jack was the man for me before I did, and she knew my kids would be beautiful before they were even born. She had the very rare ability to see and understand all sides of any situation or problem or endeavor, clearly and without prejudgment. When her doctors used clinical terms and a calm, quiet tone to discuss the usual course of bile duct cancer and the possibilities of treatment, she understood, lon
g before any of us did, that the treatment was palliative only. She felt the cancer moving inside, strangling life out of her with every step. Death was on its way.
Only once did I see my sister break down during the three months of her illness. One Saturday in March I went in to see Anne-Marie at her apartment while Jack took the boys to the Museum of Natural History. We sat next to each other on the couch in her book-lined study. I remember how suddenly she reached over to hold on to me, to hug me close to her, pulling me up into her thick gray cardigan so that my face was buried in her hair and her face was buried in my hair. She wanted to be close, but she could not look me in the eye as she said what she knew.
“It is so unfair.”
The words filtered through to me. It was unfair that she had to die. She said it only once. I understood. I held her to me, and there was nothing I could say, except over and over again that I loved her. I have that gray sweater now, and I wear it in the winter. I know how unfair life is. But while we all know life is not fair, Anne-Marie knew it more. And it horrifies me that I could not take that knowledge away from her and bear it myself, for her.
In The Master of Petersburg, author J. M. Coetzee imagines Dostoyevsky feeling the same horror. Dostoyevsky’s son has just died in a fall. The death saddens Dostoyevsky, but what haunts him is that his son knew his own death was coming and there was nothing he could do to spare his son that knowledge: “What he cannot bear is the thought that, for the last fraction of the last instant of his fall, Pavel knew that nothing could save him, that he was dead. . . . It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air.”
I was the one left knowing, but I knew too late, and my knowledge never helped my sister. What good could my knowing do me now? I had more questions every day, and no wisdom to provide the answers. What had my father meant with his repeated incantation of “three in one night”? How could I have denied my mother so soon, telling her that body was not her daughter? How could I explain death to my children without taking away their innocence? How would any of us ever be able to go back out into the world and live, smile, talk, plan ever again?
The questions formed in my mind, and no answers came. Piling up, one on top of the other, the questions came down heavier and heavier until my head ached and my back bowed from the weight. The questions dug in deep, anchoring me to the fact and to the sorrow of losing my oldest sister.
Sorrow for me became the ceaseless pain of knowing I could not protect my sister from death. All I wanted was to be the one who knew: “Let me be the one who knows!” I wanted to be the one who bore the death, and leave all the others, Anne-Marie included, free to go on.
Chapter 2
Return to the Bookmobile
Words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
CYRIL CONNOLLY,
The Unquiet Grave
AFTER ANNE-MARIE’S DEATH, I BECAME A WOMAN OF TWO PARTS. One part of me was still in her hospital room, the afternoon she died. The room with its reclined bed, easy chair, TV, and piles of books. The silver tripods holding bags of fluid, painkiller, and horrible brown liquid that drained from my sister’s blocked stomach. The tray overflowing with newspapers and Jell-O packs. The balled-up socks I’d brought in that were too small to pull onto my sister’s swollen and blue feet. The brush with strands of dark blond hair.
Then there was the other part of me, the part that left the hospital room at a gallop and never looked back, for fear of what I would see. I began a race the day Anne-Marie died, a race away from death, away from my father’s pain and my mother’s sorrow, away from loss and confusion and despair. I was scared of dying, scared of losing my own life. I was scared of what dying did to family left behind, the loneliness and the helplessness. The horrible second-guessing: Should we have tried other doctors, other treatments, other methods?
I was scared of living a life not worth the living. Why did I deserve to live when my sister had died? I was responsible now for two lives, my sister’s and my own, and, damn, I’d better live well. I had to live hard and live fully. I was going to live double if my sister couldn’t live at all. I was going to live double because I had to die too, one day, and I didn’t want to miss anything. I set myself to a faster and faster speed. I drove myself through action and plans and trips and activities. I wanted to make my parents smile again and keep my kids from thinking about death. I wanted to love Jack and walk for miles with Natasha. I had to make up for everything that everyone around me lost when Anne-Marie died.
I began coaching Martin’s soccer team, and offered to help out with Peter’s Lego robotics team. I took on leadership of a PTA committee. I set myself on a fitness regime and went to see every doctor with any authority over a region of the body: ear, nose, and throat; vagina and breast; eye; knee (arthritis from an old soccer injury); and colon. Two years before Anne-Marie died, I’d quit working, and there was no way I was going back to work now. I had to be available to everyone in my family, from the youngest (Martin) to the oldest (my father). I tried to anticipate every need and offer all kinds of encouragement.
Three years at increasing speed, and then I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get away from the sorrow. I could not guarantee my own life span, or anyone else’s. I could not make everyone around me safe and happy. My forty-sixth birthday was looming, and suddenly all I could think about was how my sister had died at forty-six. I had always heard that middle age catches a person wondering, Is this all there is? But for me it was the question posed by my sister’s death three years earlier that banged harder and harder against my brain.
Why do I deserve to live?
My sister had died, and I was alive. Why was I given the life card, and what was I supposed to do with it?
I had to stop running. The answer to those questions would not be found in constant activity. I had to stand still and take time to merge my two parts back together again, the one caught in my sister’s hospital room and the one stuck on a treadmill set to the highest speed. There was a link between the life I had before and the life I had now. My sister was the link. In that link I would find my answers.
I looked back to what the two of us had shared. Laughter. Words. Books.
Books. The more I thought about how to stop and get myself back together as one sane, whole person, the more I thought about books. I thought about escape. Not running to escape but reading to escape. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that “words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.
I had been reading a lot in the three years since my sister died, but the books I chose were closer to torture than to comfort. The raw clarity of pain in Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, her account of her husband’s sudden death, intensified my own sorrow. Then there were the weeks I read only the ridiculous but sweet and addictive Aunt Dimity mysteries by Nancy Atherton. Aunt Dimity may be dead, but she still has the power to communicate her very wise advice to the living. How I wished—I cried!—for such communion with Anne-Marie.
I read all the Barbara Cleverly novels starring Joe Sandilands because Anne-Marie had read them all and told me they were great, and I wanted to know her again; I wanted to understand what she loved and what she found worthy of her hard-to-get respect. I reread one of her favorite books from when she was just a little kid, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. I had her Scholastic Book Club copy, priced at fifty cents but priceless now with “Anne-Marie Sankovitch” written in her handwriting on the inner flap. The last pages of the book had been lost over the years. I hunted down a replacement copy on the Internet so I could finish the reading of it.
I’ve used books my whole life for wisdom, for suc
cor, and for escape. The summer before I entered middle school was the year I began to step away from childhood and toward who I would become as an adult. I suffered my first heartbreak, my first death up close, and my first inkling that life was just not fair. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh held me together during those bewildering and scary rites of passage.
The summer began with my best friend, Carol, moving away from my neighborhood. Throughout elementary school Carol and I played together after school, almost every day. I’d first noticed Carol in kindergarten. I’d noticed her because she had a thick, soft, woolly bath mat for her napping rug while I had a rag rug, thin and flat like a pancake. Carol allowed me to place my rug near hers during naptime, and even to rest my head on a fluffy corner of her mat. We became best friends, walking to and from school together every day. Afternoons were spent playing together at her house or mine. Fifth grade was our Gilligan’s Island year. Every day after school we would watch a Gilligan’s Island rerun on TV and then we would play, pretending we were the ones cast away on a deserted island. I was always Ginger, and Carol was always Mary Ann, and the gist of our play was how we both loved the Professor. All our adventures on the deserted island revolved around the Professor. Because we were friends, best friends, we both got to have him in our afternoon games, using the doorjambs of rooms as stand-ins for the straight and narrow Professor. We kissed those doorjambs and laughed like hyenas. The thought that he might prefer one or the other, Ginger or Mary Ann, or might find someone else (ha—not on a deserted island), never occurred to us. We were prepubescent, innocent, and happy.
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Page 2
