You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  When I looked at her at a stoplight, I saw that her eyes were closed. To our right was a wine store where we used to buy mixed cases for guests, a florist Kate had liked, a caterer. To our left was a road that went off toward Kate’s old house, where she had lived with Evan. I peered down the road on my left, wondering what Evan and Cynthia had done with the house.

  When I glanced her way again Kate was looking at me. The skin beneath her eyes looked puffy, and her mouth had lost its color.

  “Are you exhausted?” I asked.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Just a little tired.”

  The light turned and we started down the road. “Ever wonder what your old house looks like?” I asked.

  “Their whole living room is probably devoted to nude statues by now.” We snorted, but then she said, “Never mind. It’s probably fine.”

  After a moment she let her eyes close again, but they opened in surprise as her head fell forward, her chin dropping toward her chest. This had been happening more lately. The next step was a new headrest on her wheelchair, more of a brace, to grip her skull and hold her up. I reached over as I drove, my palm and fingertips flat against her forehead as I tipped her head back again. She felt warm, her smooth skin leaving a faint trace of powdered slickness from her makeup on my hand.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I hate that. Maybe it’s worse when I’m tired.”

  I took a left onto Chambers. “You want me to stay home tonight?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t be silly. Hillary will be there. Go out. You put your time in.”

  nineteen

  HILLARY WAS WAITING AT the house when we arrived. She and Kate went into the bathroom while I changed into jeans and a jacket, called out good night, and went out to meet Jill at the Union. We got our beers and went out to the terrace, where I gave her a thumbnail sketch of the wedding. Though the air was still a shade too cold for sitting outside we did so anyway, stiff in the metal chairs.

  It was a quiet night, which bore the faint air of disappointment that neither of us was terribly vivacious. Our recent stories had all been told. We drank one beer and ordered another out of habit before realizing we were tired enough already. We left them unfinished, hugged, and walked away to our cars.

  I rolled the window down as I drove. I wanted it to wake me up, refresh me now that the wedding was done and the day was over. I wanted nothing more, I had realized as soon as I sat down with Jill, than to be silent. After a day of nonstop translating and speaking for Kate, I finally got to drive, just drive, to leave my mouth closed and stop looking searchingly around to find the cues that let me conduct other people’s conversations for them.

  At home Hillary was in the living room, the intercom monitor next to her on the couch, a cup of tea on the table. She looked up from her book as I came in, adjusting her glasses.

  “I thought you’d be later,” she said.

  “Yeah, I was tired. Long wedding.” I threw my purse on the counter and glanced at the mail: nothing for me. “How’s Kate?”

  Hillary was putting on a jacket. “Fine. Sleeping. I’m not sure that cold isn’t coming back though. She’s been a little raspy.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out,” I said.

  Hillary got out her keys. “Maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “I could have made myself hear it.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. I picked up the mail again and shuffled the envelopes. “Do you think she looks smaller? At the wedding today I looked at her and she seemed really thin.”

  Hillary leaned back against the door frame and sighed. “You’re probably right. I can’t say I’ve seen it myself, but we’re so used to her. It would make sense, though.”

  We were both quiet for a moment. “Maybe we should give her an extra shake a day,” I suggested.

  Hillary gave me a cheerless smile and said, “If she’ll let us. Couldn’t hurt.” She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Sometimes she seemed about forty.

  “Thanks for staying for a while,” I said.

  “Sure. Good night.” She waved over her shoulder as she headed to her car.

  I washed my face, used some of Kate’s eye cream. It was close to midnight when I got into bed, and I stretched out, happily tired, enjoying the cool pillow and the breeze from the open window. Just to be sure I turned up the volume on the monitor.

  I THOUGHT AT FIRST the sound that woke me was a scrape. Like a drawer, perhaps, a window forced along its frame. I was suddenly staring into the darkness, listening, not quite sure where I was or what was happening. I couldn’t decide if I had heard nothing at all or if I had been listening to it for a long time.

  Then the sound came again. It wasn’t stealthy and soft, like someone breaking in, but reckless and haphazard. Desperate. This time it sounded large and echoing.

  I could hear it in the hall as I ran. I could hear it still echoing through the monitors as I dashed into her room. I thought—illogically—that I’d see chaos in there, Kate on the floor in a tangle of sheets, possessions thrown everywhere.

  But she was right there in bed where Hillary had left her. I could see the heave of her ribs, their lurching, and I saw her eyes shine at me in the dark, the whites showing all around. This, I knew instantly, was far worse than the coughing fits of the past weeks. I was still stopped in the doorway, hands braced inside the jamb.

  I shook myself out of it. I crouched next to her.

  She had the button beneath her fingers. I put my hand over her wrist. I didn’t know if she’d had the strength or presence of mind to press it yet.

  “Do I need to call?” I asked her. My voice sounded brisk at first, as though this were just another daily question, except that I seemed so loud.

  She stared at me but didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure she could. “Do you want me to call?” I said again. I tightened my hand on her wrist.

  In my mind I saw myself pressing down on her fingers and hitting the button. I saw it so clearly I had to take my own hand away, digging my nails into my palms, or else I knew I’d do it. I told myself I still could—I just had to make her agree and then I could mash her hand down on the button and wait for the sirens. I watched her face, waiting for her to nod and let me call them.

  She was making eye contact for seconds at a time and then looking all around the room. I couldn’t get her to focus on me, and the sound she was making—it was wood cracking; it was tires on wet pavement—seemed to enthrall her, so that I didn’t know if she quite registered anything other than its rhythm. No matter how I listened I couldn’t hear words. There was nothing of communication in it.

  She couldn’t talk. I tried again, my voice even louder. I didn’t think she was even listening to me. I wasn’t even sure if she could nod or shake her head. If she was on the verge of convulsing, then nodding or shaking her head wouldn’t be accurate anyway.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “Kate, listen. Do you want me to call? Blink. Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

  I was holding her shoulders, bony and rounded in my fingers. I realized I was pressing down on her with all my weight to hold her still so I could read her face. If her body could have moved itself she would have been arched off the mattress, but only her neck did, the tendons straining, as she lifted her chin, and then lowered it, her teeth gleaming in the light from the streetlamp.

  “I can’t understand you,” I said. My voice rang through the room, all over the register, high, low, cracked. The frustration made me desperate, almost violent—suddenly I knew why people in films slapped the hysterical or uncommunicative. I got hold of myself and said, “Blink once for me to call, twice for no.”

  Kate’s gaze had been roving all around the room again, as though looking for breath in a corner or near the window, but now she met my gaze, her eyes huge.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them. She squeezed them shut again. Two blinks. Her tongue touched the roof of her mouth, just behind her teeth. Her lips curved into a circle and she shook her head.

&
nbsp; My hand had already been moving to the lifeline. I was about to press it when I comprehended what she was saying. I stopped, my hand in midair. For a second neither of us moved. In the dark her hair was a wild mass around her small face, her skin white and opaque as a ceramic mask.

  I turned on the lamp. In the light I could now see that her face was strangely mottled, red, bloodshot, but drained white around her nose and mouth.

  “Tell me again,” I said. “Once for me to call, twice for me not to.”

  She was still gasping, but she did it again, a blink. Another blink. It wasn’t a spasm. It was No.

  I stared at her. Her eyes, red-threaded, rimmed in tears, watched me fiercely.

  I reached down to her hand on the button, took hold of her wrist, and lifted it away.

  “Are you sure? Do you want me to do this?”

  It was a whisper. I’d been yelling before, but suddenly now the room was still but for her attempts at breathing, that sucking in and wheezing exhale. She stared at me, down at my hand lifting hers away from the button. I paused, holding her wrist a few inches above it.

  “If I move your hand you won’t hit it accidentally.”

  She arched her neck, a great spasm of a gasp filling the room. She nodded into the pillow and gave me an exaggerated, single blink.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “I’m moving it then. I’ll get it out of the way.”

  I set the button carefully on the floor, away from my foot, being certain not to hit it accidentally. I could tell I was moving slowly, so slowly it might have been maddening to her, but I wasn’t capable of anything faster.

  I felt us to be miles away from everyone else in the world. The room, with its one bright light and the silence outside, was like a chamber in the center of a mountain—isolated, helpless, airless.

  I climbed up on the other side of the bed, next to her. I was on my knees up near her shoulders, looking for a way to hold her, to cradle her head in my lap, to wrap my arms around her. I didn’t know how to do this. I was shifting around pointlessly, trying to find the right spot to lift her or touch her. Her eyes rolled as I moved, following me each moment.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. Finally I knelt next to her on the bed, my body folded over and my face only a few inches to the side of hers. I wanted to be closer to her, closer than this. I gathered up her hands in mine, and they felt cold and clayey, the bones shifting beneath my grip. I pushed her hair, still warm and roughened from sleep, out of her face. Her lips were turning blue at the edges. They were stretched back from her teeth, her tongue. She watched me the whole time, her gaze locked with mine.

  I could ignore her and push the button. It would take less than a second. I decided I would do exactly that. I didn’t care if she would thank me later, or hate me for it. She could do whatever she wanted later; I just knew I couldn’t watch this happen. She looked petrified.

  “Please,” I said. I leapt on that fear, relieved, and hoping I still had a good chance at persuading her. “Please let me call.”

  But she blinked and shook her head again, her eyebrows knit together. No. I couldn’t pretend now that I hadn’t understood her, and she was watching me to see if I would override her. We kept looking at one another as she struggled for breath, our gazes locked. I couldn’t look right at her, when she knew what I was thinking, and disobey her. The opportunity to ignore her and hit the button had slipped away from me for good. Everything was shifting out of place, as though the disinterested earth had just shrugged us both off its crust. There was nothing she would let me do.

  I stopped looking for opportunities to call for help. My job had just changed into something else. I stopped begging and stopped shifting around. I stayed next to her on the bed, facing her, but sat up, close enough so I could feel the heat of her body in the blankets pressed against the sides of my legs. I loosened the light bones of her fingers from the grip I’d had on them. I waited there, her hands damp and cold inside mine, and watched her try to breathe. The last time I’d been in a position anything like this, I’d had that stupid marker in my hand, tracing its way around her body.

  How long had this been going on, how long had I been here? I was afraid to talk to her because I felt I must concentrate on letting her communicate if she wanted to. Nevertheless I became aware of soft sounds I was making without meaning to, a long shushing, a sibilant murmur. I brushed her hair off her face though it fell right back with each spasm, letting my hand linger on the curve of her skull. I wanted to be calm and comforting, but I felt my mouth trembling uncontrollably.

  I laid my hand against her forehead, then her cheek, and she closed her eyes, briefly, as if in comfort, so I left it there. Her skin was chilled; a fresh sheet of moisture had risen from her pores. I stroked my hand over her forehead. I thought she might keep her eyes closed now, that that might make it easier. She was concentrating. I could tell. She was still gasping, her mouth open so wide, her chin high in the air, as if to let in as much air as possible, but I could hear her lungs letting up. Her chest beneath my hand wasn’t rising and falling as hard. It felt more like a flutter, a tiny shudder of the fragile bone.

  Her eyes sought me out again, her gaze darting around, as though she couldn’t quite believe I still held her and needed to see me too. She was frightened, but losing the strength even to show it.

  This was not how I had ever thought she’d be. I’d imagined her stoic.

  Her face was genuinely blue now, her lips lavender, and finally she arched her neck, her head starting to drive farther back against the pillow as she reached for breath, and it was like the motion couldn’t finish itself. She lost momentum part of the way through and relaxed.

  I felt a fog of stillness fill the room. Kate’s eyes were still turned in my direction but the darting, frantic energy was gone. I stared back into them even though I knew she no longer saw me. I felt myself to be a rapidly dissolving shape, a dimming shadow.

  In the rest of her body, there was no sag of relief in muscles that hadn’t been able to hold themselves taut in the first place. All that movement and effort had been concentrated at her neck, her mouth. I could only see the release in the way the pillow no longer creased as deeply from her pressing her skull into it. I waited for her face to relax too, but it didn’t, not all the way. Instead a rush of air was released from her lungs, whatever she had kept or managed to claw into herself, and I felt its tepid warmth against my face where I still leaned in close to her. I smelled the faint must of saliva and the artificial mint of her toothpaste, the cooling heat of her breath as it returned to the air she’d snatched it from.

  I WAITED THEN. I sat next to her, holding her hand, and waited for another twenty minutes. We had only discussed it in the vaguest terms: Wait. Then call. We had never talked about what I was supposed to do in the meantime.

  I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t go get a drink, or put a robe on. I couldn’t go about the business of comforting myself while she lay there. I didn’t even want to get her papers, her will, her living will, her lawyer’s contact information, from their clearly marked folder in the front top drawer of her file cabinet. But I did shut her eyes, tip her jaw up so her mouth was closed again. Outside it was still pitch dark.

  I couldn’t feel my body. My awareness of it went in and out: Suddenly I would realize I was holding my eyes so wide that they must have been bulging, that my lower lip was drawn away from my teeth, my shoulders hunched so far forward my back hurt. Then I would try to fix it, and a minute later I’d realize I’d tensed up again.

  Finally I got up to call. I couldn’t just reach across her to the phone, like reaching across a table, so I went to the kitchen and called from there. I unlocked the front door and turned the porch light on. Then I went back down the hall.

  When I got to the door of her bedroom I went in slowly, as if something would have changed while I was gone. For a moment I was sure something had. Maybe I’d been wrong about everything—she was merely unconscious. I was no doctor
; it was to be expected that I was too inexperienced to find a weakened pulse. I had a mighty faith in my own incompetence just then. I had misinterpreted the whole thing. What did I know? There would be a movement on the bed, a turn of the head, and she would take a breath and speak to me.

  I went around the corner and peered in: the window cranked open, a filmy curtain billowing in and sucked back against the screen, the panic button on the floor, the rumpled blue bedspread drawn up off the corner of the mattress, the gleam of her hair on the pillow, her impervious profile against the white sheet.

  I picked up the panic button and set it down next to her on the bed, thinking it didn’t look good, so far from her. But I wasn’t faking anything, I thought, suddenly fearful. I was just tidying up. I fixed the comforter, smoothing it down over her. The outline of her body showed through it, the long twin hills of her legs, the flat plain of her belly and chest. Her body had been drawing into itself all spring. She must have known this, though she had not discussed it with me. Perhaps she hadn’t thought she could: The notion of making eggs and stews for her, as I had wanted to so badly a few weeks before, as though it would have helped, struck me as ruinously stupid. I’d focused on the wrong thing and let her approach this completely alone, as if she’d asked me for morphine and I’d petted the back of her hand.

  twenty

  THE LONG DISTANCE ACROSS my parents’ backyard had lent an odd drama to certain childhood memories: I had several images of my father walking the length of the grass toward me as I sat on a swing set and watched him approach, my toes braced in the dusty hollow beneath, my fingers smelling of iron from the chains of the swing. Was I really out there so often that every time he had to tell me bad news—my grandmother had died, my kindergarten best friend was moving—that was where they found me, or did I simply race out there the moment I sensed something coming?