by Atticus Lish
Loading the brush with toothpaste one-handed was a delicate task. He laid the electric toothbrush on the edge of the sink and squeezed out toothpaste on it. The weight of the toothpaste would make the brush roll over, and the dollop of Crest would fall off in the sink. There were too many things to hold for the number of hands he had, and he couldn’t leave Gloria unsupported, even if she seemed to float. His hands could be no further from her than the distance they could travel in time to catch her if she started falling. He had learned to rest his leg behind her so that it became a third arm while his hands were occupied. With it, he could sense if she began to lose her balance.
Once he had made the toothbrush ready, Gloria wanted to be the one to hold it. He took her hand and moved it to the brush and put her thumb over the button. He held her hand on the brush and raised it to her mouth, making sure the toothpaste stayed balanced on the bristles. You had to fit the toothbrush in her mouth without smearing the toothpaste off on her lip or teeth. He had learned to try to seat the toothpaste surface of the toothbrush against her back molars. “All set?” he asked. Yes, she said in her way. She moved her thumb to the on-off button. He pressed the button with her thumb. She would keep control and guide the brush around her teeth. His job was to follow her energy while providing support.
She spat in the sink, he gave her a sip of water to rinse and walked her back to bed. Now it was time to take her sneakers off because her day was over.
* * *
—
Corey held her hands. Gloria’s hands had shrunk until the phalanges of her fingers, those tiny bones, resembled beads on a string. You could see the radius and the ulna and the dent between them. There was no increase in thickness from her wrist to her elbow. Tiny guitar strings flickered under her skin, the last wires of muscle. Her head felt damp, hard and bony, hair damp with sweat. Her cheeks were thin. Her jaw had trouble working. It hitched sideways when she moved it.
The flesh had melted off her legs like cheese in a microwave. Her bones rose up out of the ocean and the sand poured off them. The skin draped over her thigh bones. He could see the basket of her pelvis in her pajamas—that U-shaped boat where his life was launched.
He made her comfortable and tried to leave the room to get her dinner only to have her call him back again. She was getting bedsores. A nurse came and peeled up the back of her shirt and rubbed lotion on the knobs of her spine.
Sometimes Joan called and asked how Gloria was doing.
“I’m thinking of her, you know. How’re things?”
“The same. All right.”
Corey lived with his mother around the clock. When the home health aide came, he ran out to the library on Albatross Lane, grabbed adventure books off the shelves and returned within the hour. Quincy was gray and the sky was gray and the sea was gray and white.
He stumbled across a Navy man’s memoir from World War II. He read it sitting at his mother’s bedside or in the kitchenette, listening to the baby monitor, as the night deepened. He read Lone Survivor, Service, and No Easy Day.
* * *
—
One night, Corey was trying to make Gloria comfortable and they had terrible trouble communicating. She became mutely hysterical; she rolled her eyes and begged the world to kill her with her eyes.
He applied a great deal of force to her legs in order to bend them. He lifted her head and restuffed the pillow forcefully under her cheek.
“Are we good?” Perhaps he had hurt her. Who knows? His mother was quiet.
He looked up and thought he saw Joan looking at him from the doorway.
“How ’bout now?”
But it was his imagination. She wasn’t there. All he had been seeing was the Buddha on the wall.
He got his mother in position, drew the blanket over her again and went back to his room to sleep, taking the monitor with him. While his mother lay in the dark, he prayed, “Please stay quiet.”
* * *
—
The body of the sleeper lying on the bed under blankets. The sound of her breathing. Light snoring. The smell of her macerated skin, her unwashed body and hair. The cups all over the bedroom from last night’s dinner, the residue of powder in the cups. The wheelchair like a black torture device with a bolt to screw into the back of the invalid’s head—actually just the adjuster of the headrest. The levers to tilt it, a barber’s chair of death. The dim gray light from the seashore. The sleeper’s breathing faded and returned, harsh. He sat and meditated in the dreary room. He tried to count his breaths. But his spirit wasn’t calm enough. He lacked the patience to discipline himself to this. He just wanted her life to be over. Depression followed his shameful thought. The gloom was unrelenting.
When she was asleep, he dreamed about leaving home. Her unconsciousness was deepest in the morning. For a few minutes, he thought, This will all be over someday and then…! I’ll go back to my adventure…
She blinked. The rest of her paralyzed body couldn’t move. She had opened her eyes. He saw the two dark dots, looking at him. She had been awake, but hadn’t called him. Had she sensed what he was thinking?
“Mom, do you want to get up?”
She made a vocal sound. She was saying yes, meekly.
He hurried over and kissed her head good morning. He got her up.
* * *
—
One day, Leonard called. It was gray, the house was filled with gray, his mother was lying in her wheelchair in her pajamas. There were dishes in the sink. Corey was out of shape, soft around the middle, under-slept, unshaven, living in his bedclothes. He held the phone and heard his father’s voice.
“What do you want?”
“I want to speak to your mother, Corey. Put her on.”
She made a childlike, inarticulate sound that meant “Who?”
“It’s Leonard, Mom. He wants to talk to you.”
She moaned.
“Are you sure?”
She closed her eyes.
He put the phone to her ear and held it there until she let him know that her conversation with his father was over and he could hang up now.
* * *
—
He looked through the blinds and thought ahead to his mother’s death. He looked out at the ocean. While a home health aide fed his mother in the other room, he sat on his bed and watched a movie called Act of Valor. In it, a SEAL team rescues a woman who has been tortured. As she lies in an assault boat headed for medical evacuation next to a warrior who has been shot in the head and clings to life, his comrade says, “It was not for nothing.” She reaches up—her fingers have been drilled through with a power drill—and her savior clasps her bloody hand.
Corey watched this scene and broke down weeping silently in his room.
* * *
—
Sometime later, Leonard called again. He asked Corey how he was faring, with seeming care.
Corey closed the door so his mother wouldn’t hear him lie and told his father he was in training for a fight, which he was going to win.
“That’s wonderful.”
“You don’t have to believe me.”
“But of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
“You’re not my father,” Corey whispered. “My father’s name is Tom. He’s a construction worker. Your most hated enemy. He gives me jobs. He looks out for me. He’s a fuckin’ man.”
“This is all too wonderful. I’m so happy for you.”
“I bet you are. And I’m marrying his daughter.”
“His daughter?”
“Yes, his daughter. She’s a track star at UMass. You can look it up.”
“And what’s her name?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“When’s the wedding?”
“Do you think I’m lying? Do you really think I would lie about loving someone
?”
“I think you’d say anything to me.”
“You’re gonna feel so stupid. Her name’s Molly Hibbard. Get a pen.”
* * *
—
The bills came in the mail. The church visited. The Faheys didn’t come, and Corey thought bitterly of the two of them, father and son in their docksiders. The home health aides trooped in and out. He napped on the futon when they were here feeding his mother. The social worker visited in the afternoon and saw the blankets he had been sleeping in, the bills on the coffee table, the dishes in the sink.
“Where’s Joan? She isn’t helping anymore?”
“She’s been gone forever.”
The rent was unpaid. The social worker checked the refrigerator and the cupboard. She told Corey that he was at the point where he was going to have to accept more help from strangers.
“I don’t trust anyone else around her.”
“A nursing home is not unregulated.”
“I’m not doing that to her.”
“The patient is running out of food. That can’t happen. So, unless you can find some other way to turn things around, that’s likely to be her best bet.”
“I don’t want to give up on her.”
“It’s not giving up. You’re tired.”
He let her tell him what he wanted to hear. She took charge and went in and talked to his mother.
* * *
—
The ambulance traveled with its lights on, but without a siren. Corey followed in the hatchback. They passed an umbrella-drink Chinese restaurant, the North Quincy T station’s stadium parking lot, an urban high school with grilled windows, a McDonald’s, a shopping plaza with a Dollar Tree, and turned seaward, down Commander Shea Boulevard, onto the Squantum Peninsula.
The home was hidden in a lonely place between abandoned concrete structures attached to the roadway and the shoreline. The ambulance stopped and turned out its flashing lights. Corey parked and hurried over to help unload his mother.
He walked with his hand on the rail. The attendants pushed his mother’s gurney through the electric doors. The lobby resembled that of a hotel or conference center.
A gaunt woman in a nurse’s blouse asked, “Who is this?”
She marched off and struck the elevator button. Once the bed was loaded on, he, the attendants, and the nurse all stood close together without speaking.
“Are you okay?” he asked his mom.
She closed her eyes at him.
They reached her floor and wheeled her to a room. The staff, composed of men and women, argued about who was going to make up the room. Gloria was transferred to another bed. The attendants took their gurney out and left. Gloria’s room was blue. The window opened on a black expanse.
* * *
—
The day after his mother moved in, he asked the staff how she was doing. They said they couldn’t tell him; it was a HIPAA violation; he’d have to ask her next of kin. He said he was her next of kin; he was her son. They said they didn’t know that. Could he fix this confusion? They offered no answer, so he suggested one: “Should I get in touch with the social worker?” You might do that, they said.
He called Dawn Gillespie and couldn’t reach her but left a message, and later in the day, no one opposed him when he went back into his mother’s room to sit with her, so one might conclude that he had been officially recognized as his mother’s son; but when he tried to confirm that he was legitimately here, the staff only shrugged as if they didn’t know this for certain and still suspected he was taking advantage in some way. An air of mistrust hung over the home; he seemed to be trespassing at his mother’s bedside.
* * *
—
He spent five days sleeping on chairs in her room, keeping an eye on the staff.
“Who are you?” the night staff said on the sixth night.
“Her son.”
They told him he had to leave.
“I just want to spend the night with her.”
He knew she was dying. Still they insisted he leave. When he protested, they threatened to call security. He said goodbye to his mother and went home.
The next morning, instead of going to her immediately, he went for a jog on the beach, came home, picked his way through the messy house. The day went by. He told himself he would go see her that night.
When Corey was gone, a nurse went into Gloria’s room, rolled her on her side, while holding a conversation with another nurse who was changing the wastebasket. She folded the sheet in half under Gloria’s shoulder, went around the bed, pushed her the other way, and pulled the sheet off. She shook out another sheet and rolled Gloria two more times to get it under her.
Gloria lay in her hospital bed, a hose taped into her throat, painted with betadine. The curtains were open enough to let in the cotton-gray sky, a colorless glare. The trundling of a food cart, the clattering of trays, the squeaking of the mop wringer and the sluice of dirty water. People’s shoes, walking away. A distant thundering echo of a steel door swinging shut in a tiled hallway, and silence. She lay breathing imperceptibly through her open mouth, her eyes closed.
* * *
—
As she lay in her final coma, This is it, she thought.
She was remembering things she hadn’t thought about in years.
The autumn day had been crisp as an apple when she’d met Leonard. And he had lied about his name. When she’d found out the lie, she hadn’t cared—not then—because she’d believed he would save her.
She’d believed in him with all her heart.
He had given her pot to make her a better lover. Their love life had gotten off to a fast start. He had wanted her to use a sex toy. He had insisted on penetrating her with larger and larger objects. When she’d told him this wasn’t fun for her, he had disappeared.
A year later, he showed up at a coffeehouse in Central Square where she was working in an apron. From across the counter, he’d acted kind and calm—as if he had grown.
“Look, I was never fully trusting. I didn’t think we would last,” he told her on her break. They were having cappuccino. She noticed his new affectation, the fedora, and decided to see it as charming. His speaking style had changed. The very blue-collar Boston way he had talked—fuckin’ Revere, fuckin’ Malden, fuckin’ winter’s long as fuck—the sharp jabbing fucks—had gone away. Now he talked deliberately and colorlessly, which reassured her.
He seemed to have undergone some kind of enlightenment while they were apart. She wondered what he could have experienced to make him change. She was jealous of his spiritual alignment. Over the year they had been apart, her intellect had stalled. His had rushed ahead. He said he was doing an important dissertation. She imagined nights with him, the two of them writing.
He didn’t mind that she was seeing another man. In fact, he even walked her to that man’s apartment on Commonwealth Ave. It was a twenty-degree winter’s evening. Brick and limestone architecture, the trolley running down the avenue, frozen air, the burning orange sunset, a frigid cosmic fire, the sense of distance, the turrets of the apartments, the courtyards, gates and gargoyles, the wealthy, the hints of a Jewish presence near Newton, of European immigrants, bookstores and secrets. Parting from her, he said, “I’ll be thinking about you up there with him.”
He picked her up afterwards and took her home. The physical evidence of her first partner didn’t bother him.
She left her boyfriend, who didn’t care about losing her anyway, and committed herself to Leonard—if that was his name. Her whole life was in this transfer of herself. Only then did she tell him that he had made her pregnant the year before and that she’d had it taken care of.
She moved all her chips onto him. Her parents meant nothing to her. The sheer daring of the move meant it had to pay off.
But it did
n’t. He broke her down without building her up. He worked on her and worked on her until she quit school. Only too late did she realize it was because he hadn’t gone himself.
One day before the end, Leonard took her to his house in Malden. She’d been here before and knew about the murderer he had told her lived across the street. In the kitchen, Leonard rewarmed some pork. She thought he was being sweet. He had nice wood floors. Curtains on the windows. Sun coming through the glass. People were playing in a park outside, littered with soda cans and bits of trash—skinny loud boys, burly threatening men. They congregated on a porch a few doors away. Yet she couldn’t hear them, as if the glass were soundproofed. She let the curtain go. The apartment was quiet, perfectly quiet, she thought. Leonard’s house was big enough for three. “This place is really nice,” she said. “You ever think about fixing it up?”
It was utterly bare except his room. Of all the rooms in the house, only one had Leonard’s things. A mattress on the floor, a desk, a book or two. A closet he opened briefly and shut again. It contained his uniforms on hangers. She knew he was in law enforcement in some capacity at least. She wandered around a part of the house he didn’t use and saw old portrait photographs in sepia—family figures, various women and men, Italians. A wooden cross leaned on the mantelpiece. The diminutive body of Christ, realistically carved, displaying his interlocking ribs and abdomen, loincloth, tender legs, the expression of mournfulness.
They ate in the barren kitchen. A single cheap pot with a black handle sat on the drain board. He had a white Formica counter flecked with tiny leaves of gold. She knew she was pregnant. She was wondering what she was going to do now that she had dropped out of school. He told her he was going to be accepted on the force at a police agency, maybe even the Staties. His physics studies were on hold. “I’ve been dealing with too many mundane things for far too long.” When he had his career settled, he was going to return to the dissertation he was writing and transform physics as we know it.
