Talk Before Sleep

by Elizabeth Berg

  “It’s okay. I want you to do what you need to.”

  She nods. “Want to help me pack?”

  We are deciding what underwear she should bring when we hear the door open. “Probably Sarah,” Ruth says. “She said she’d stop by before work.”

  It is not Sarah, though. It is Joel, holding a bakery bag and a white, long-stemmed rose. “I know what you told me,” he says. “But I wondered …” He looks at the open suitcase on Ruth’s bed, then at her.

  “I’m going to my brother’s,” she says. “In Florida.”

  He nods, then asks, “Why?”

  “I just need to. Full circle, something like that. I’m not sure I can explain it. But things are not … I’m not going to get better, Joel.”

  He stands still, then puts the bag and the flower down. “Want some help?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I just wanted to see you again, Ruth.”

  “That’s okay.”

  He crosses over to her, puts his arms around her, and I leave the room, close the door behind me.

  In a few minutes, he comes out, eyes reddened, and goes to the door. “I don’t know why I came back. She asked me not to.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mind.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance she might come back here?”

  I look slowly around at her living room, then at Joel.

  “Okay,” he says, and, with exquisite care, closes the door behind him.

  It is late at night. Ruth and I are lying in her bed, arms around each other. I am crying quietly, blowing my nose into Kleenex after Kleenex.

  “You should take my plants,” she says. “And I want you to have all my rocks and seashells. And the birds’ nests. I’m giving my books to Helen.”

  “I don’t want to take anything,” I say. “I want to leave things for you to come back to.”

  She nods, and I see the shine of tears in her eyes as she looks around her bedroom. “I don’t think I’m coming back, though.”

  “But I want you to,” I say. I am being nonsensical. I am acting like a child, I know it. This can’t be helping her.

  “I will come back as a little breeze,” she says. “You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I’m still listening. So you can still talk to me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to always talk to me. I think I’ll hear.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “You guys help Michael clean out this place when I die. I don’t want him to have to do it alone. Eric said he’d help, but I don’t want him to. I don’t want him touching my stuff, even if I have forgiven him. And I want you to come over real early on that day, throw away anything that might be embarrassing.” Her eyes widen suddenly and she says, “Take my vibrator, okay? You have to take that with you tomorrow! I don’t want anyone to find that.”

  “I’ll build a glass case for it,” I say. “Give it a plaque, TEN ZILLION HOURS OF USE, AND STILL WORKING.”

  She closes her eyes. “Are you sleepy?” I ask. “Don’t go to sleep.”

  She opens them again. “All right. But stop crying.”

  I am.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “How do you know? Maybe this is allergies.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  “I love you, Ruth.”

  She rubs my arm, sighs.

  The phone rings, and she says, “Let the machine get it. I’ve said good-bye to everyone. I don’t want to say it anymore.”

  We hear Helen’s little-girl voice saying, “Ruth, are you awake? I just wanted to call you again. I just wanted to talk to you. Ann?” A long pause, and then she hangs up.

  “Was that mean?” Ruth asks.

  “I don’t think so. I think she’ll understand.”

  “You all should stay close, take care of each other,” Ruth says. “Each of you has so much. Have you seen that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to stay in touch with every single one of them,” she says. “You especially. You need them.”

  I am thinking that I know I won’t. That everyone might try, but that, inevitably, I will pull into myself, keep my distance. I am going to lose Ruth, and she is not replaceable, and that is all. But I say, “Yes, I’ll keep in touch with everyone. L.D. and I have plans to go bowling next Thursday.” Actually, this is true.

  Ruth nods, turns to look out the window. “Open the curtains some more, will you? I think Venus is really close to the moon. I love when that happens.”

  I open the curtains wide, sit on the floor beside her bed. There’s not a cloud anywhere; it’s a good show tonight.

  “I hope Andrew puts my bed by the window,” she says.

  “I’ll call him tomorrow when you’re flying out there. I’ll tell him to. And I’ll tell him to get wild strawberry Jell-O and good sheets. Some purple freesia, to keep next to you.”

  “Yes, okay.”

  I look out the window for a while, thinking of what else I’ll need to tell Andrew. “Let her do whatever she wants,” I’ll say. “She may all of a sudden ask to go to the movies. You should take her.” There is a bright star, close to one end of the crescent moon and slightly below it, as though it is hanging by a string. “Is that Venus?” I ask. Nothing. “Ruth?”

  I turn around, look at her. She is sleeping, a weariness in her face so profound that it literally takes my breath away. I turn out her light, cover her, go to sleep in the living room. To be too near her on the last night would be unbearable. I don’t know why. I only know it would be. I lie on the sofa and start the last wait.

  I awaken thinking about the first patient I took care of who had multiple sclerosis. She was in tough shape. I came into her room once at five in the morning. I was working nights, making rounds with my flashlight. Everyone was asleep but her. She sat at the edge of the bed, getting dressed—she was being discharged that day. She’d done her bra and panties, and now had rolled her nylons in her hand in preparation for pulling them over her legs. “You’re up early,” I said, and she smiled and agreed that yes she was. There was the slightest hint of dawn coming through the window, a gray pinkness I could see pushing up over the horizon. It was chilly in there. “Would you like a light on?” I asked, and she said no, that she liked to watch the day come. “Aren’t you getting dressed awfully early?” I asked and she said that it took her a very long time. “An hour, start to finish, on a good day,” she said. “Today is not a particularly good day.”

  “Oh,” I said, and the tone of my voice revealed a pity I hadn’t meant to show.

  She looked up at me. “I am going to tell you something now that you will find hard to believe.” I waited, listening. “I am happier now than I ever was.”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “You don’t believe me,” she said.

  “No, I … yes, I do.”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t. You’re so young. When I get home, I’ll write you a letter and try to explain it. You’re a good nurse, you have real feeling and compassion. The rest will come to you.”

  I was embarrassed, and I looked at my watch and pretended I had to leave. Later, I got a seven-page letter in a spidery black script from her, telling me that it took MS to let her see, to let her feel, to let her know she was grounded in her own life. She invited me to a conference for patients with MS. I went with her, listened to a speaker talk about new treatments with steroids. All around me were people in wheelchairs, on crutches, halted in the middle of their lives by an unkind hand on their shoulder. That is what I thought. And yet most of the faces I saw were not bitter. I thought it was only a form of manners, but I was wrong.

  Now I lie in Ruth’s living room, watching another dawn come, thinking that when you are aware you are dying, the path narrows, and there is room eventually for only one person—you, not distracted by anything else and therefore able to see all that couldn’t be seen before. And that this can be such a great gift that you shiver inside at the tak
ing of it.

  We are quiet on the way to the airport, all of us busy with the chatter in our own heads, I suppose. Michael is in the back seat, tapping out an occasional riff on his knee. I steal looks at him in the rearview mirror. His eyes are hers, and I am so grateful, suddenly, for the quiet genius of genetics. “You know, you can always come to our house,” I always mean to say to him. But I haven’t yet. The suitcase he brought is alarmingly small, nothing more than a backpack, really. I wanted to take him aside when I saw it, say, “Go and get a big suitcase. I don’t care if it’s empty. You carry it anyway.”

  Ruth stares out the window, impassive; dreamy, even. I sit up straight; keep to the speed limit; remember to signal; wonder, when we hit the highway, if there is any other car the length of this road with passengers so extraordinary. And then realize that of course there is. How is it that we dare to honk at others in traffic, when we know nothing about where they have just come from or what they are on their way to? Ruth used to keep a cardboard sign in her back seat that said, PATIENT, CANCER CARE CENTER. It was so she could park for free in the hospital lot when she went for chemotherapy. But she kept it in her car all the time in case she got stopped for speeding. “When the cop sees it, he’ll feel too sorry for me to give me a ticket,” she said. “I might as well get some perks from all this.” Once she asked me if I’d like her to get me a sign. I said no. Now I wish I’d said yes. I also wish I’d taken one of the morphine pills she used to offer me. All I’d ever done is this: once, while taking a bath, I looked down at my breasts and slapped them.

  I drop Michael and Ruth at the door, then go on to the parking lot. It is early afternoon, cold and clear. A good day for flying. Safe. “What if I die while I’m on the plane?” Ruth asked, just before Michael came. “God. How embarrassing. I mean, for him.” I slam the car door, consider that when I see it again, she will be gone.

  When I come into the terminal, I see L.D. standing beside Ruth. I hadn’t known she was coming. Ruth told everyone to stay away, that it would be too hard. I see L.D. embrace Ruth, then turn and walk away. We say nothing as we walk past each other. Her hands are shoved into her pockets. She is dangerous.

  “Did you get the tickets?” I ask Michael.

  “Didn’t have to,” Ruth says. She holds up two envelopes. “L.D. traded in the ones she had for Phoenix.”

  “Really?” At first, I feel a blunt stab of anger, but then the mask drops and I am only afraid. I see now how much L.D. carried hope for all of us, and how much we needed her to do that. I manage a weak, “Oh. Good.”

  Ruth turns to Michael, asks him to go and get a newspaper from the nearby stand for her to read on the plane. Then, to me, “Let’s get this over with, okay? I never have liked good-byes.”

  “Ruth, do you want me to come with you? I will. I’ll go get a ticket right now. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  She smiles. “No. Go home, Ann. Hug Meggie. Be nice to Joe. He’s not bad, for a man.”

  “I want to come with you. How can I let you go like this?”

  “Here comes Michael,” Ruth says, as though it is an answer. And as though I understand and agree with it, I nod. Then I take in a breath, smile, wrap my arms around her, hold her tightly. Her wig smells like her perfume. The dress she has on beneath her tweed coat has a delicate lace collar, and the fabric is black, printed all over with tiny white flowers. I watched her finish making that dress one night when I was at her apartment. She loved the fabric so much, and she put high hopes on what that dress might do for her. She was wearing her half glasses, and she sat hunched over the sewing machine. “You look like a grandma,” I told her, and she grunted disapprovingly. The light at the back of the machine hummed, there was a pleasant thunka-thunk as the fabric ran under the presser foot of the machine. When she finished the last seam, she snipped at the black thread with her beautiful scissors, then turned the dress right side out to show me how it looked. “And God created the universe,” she said. Supposing He did, I thought. He couldn’t have felt that much different when He was done.

  Ruth is wearing L.D.’s pearl studs, a little makeup—lipstick, some black mascara. She looks only slightly pale. You wouldn’t know. “Something to drink?” the stewardess will ask her, bored. Bored!

  “Ruth,” I say, and start to shake.

  “Don’t,” she whispers.

  I kiss her cheek, pull back. “Okay. So call me when you get there.”

  Yes.

  “Or I’ll call you.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can call me anytime, you know. The middle of the night. Really, anytime you want. For anything.” Tears roll down my face and I brush them away impatiently, as though they are someone else’s, as though they are rain.

  “I’ll call you, Ann. I have to go.”

  “I know.”

  Neither of us moves. “Do you need a wheelchair, Mom?” Michael asks, finally. “The gate’s a long way down.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she says, and when he leaves to get one, she says, “Go now. Pretend this is something normal. And don’t think about me on the way home. I don’t want you to crack up your car and sue me.”

  “What would I sue you for?” I ask. “You haven’t got shit.”

  “Oh, boy,” she says. “Are you wrong.” And now she is crying.

  I watch Michael push her away. I have never seen anyone look that way in a wheelchair, sit up so straight and proud. She makes you think it’s the only way to get around. She makes you think she’s lucky.

  I close the car door, put on my seat belt, search the dashboard for the claim ticket. I can smell her, feel her. I look over at the seat she sat in, then out the front windshield. It seems much too wide, and for a moment I think I got in the wrong car. I get out to check the license plate. No. It’s the right car. Just the wrong size. When I get home, I’ll tell Joe we need a new, smaller car.

  I pay the parking lot attendant, an outrageously beautiful young black woman who is playing a radio loudly, tapping her heel against the rung of her high metal stool to the rhythm of someone I’ve never heard. “Have a nice day,” she says, and I say, “You, too.” And then, “Why are you doing this? You could be a model.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “Really,” I say. “You should call someone. I think there are agencies in the Yellow Pages.”

  She smiles tightly, looks pointedly past me.

  “Oh—sorry,” I say, looking into my rearview at the cars lined up behind me.

  “It’s okay. But if you could just move on, now.”

  I ride inside the shell that drives my car home, wondering why I said what I did to the parking attendant. I believe it was the need to try to keep saving something.

  When I pull into my driveway, I see a plane passing directly overhead. Of course it isn’t Ruth. I only make it be, and I watch it until it disappears.

  The house is empty. Meg is still at school, Joe at work. The living room looks different from the way I remember it. I feel as though I’ve been gone for years, and am a stranger here now, vaguely uncomfortable and overly aware of colors and light and the placement of the furniture. I feel as though I’m wearing a kind of bodysuit that keeps me from feeling the real air of home.

  I put my suitcase on the stairs to get carried up later, go into the kitchen, open the refrigerator door. Yes, that is the butter we buy. There is some leftover vegetable soup, the ABC kind, Meggie’s favorite. I shut the door. The coffeemaker is still on and I turn it off. Joe. He forgets. I look out the window over the kitchen sink for a while, then go to check the answering machine chine for messages. The light is blinking and I hope it’s Ruth, saying, “Oh, all right, you big baby! Come with me.” I could still get there. I have time. Or if I miss that flight, I could wait for the next one. But it is not Ruth, it is Helen, saying, “I hope it crashes. I hope one person dies instantly and the rest walk away. Is that a terrible thing to say? Call me.”

  I go up to my bedroom, pull the shades, get into bed with my shoes
on. When Meggie comes home from school, I get up to fix her a snack. “Do you have homework?” I ask, handing her a plate of apple slices.

  She nods. I realize that she is acting as though she’s afraid of me.

  “I’m just sad,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “I took Ruth to the airport today. I don’t think I’ll get to see her again, and so I’m feeling a little sad.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay, so I’ll just … could you just do your homework, Meg?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  I go back to bed until Joe comes home. I hear the door slam, hear Meg greeting him. “I think we have to go out to dinner again,” she says.

  He comes into the bedroom, and I feel him sit at the edge of the bed. “Ann?”

  I say nothing. I try to, but I can’t.

  “Can I turn a light on?”

  “No.”

  “Are you … do you want to go out to dinner with Meggie and me?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Well, I’m just going to take her, then.”

  Silence.

  “I’m really hungry,” he says.

  What is that? I want to say. What is “hungry?” What is the matter with you? How can you even say that to me, that you’re hungry? But what I say is, “She shouldn’t have gone. I can’t believe what she stole from US.”

  Joe sighs. “I know you feel that way. But maybe she only meant to spare you all something.”

  “No!” I say. “You’re just scared. You don’t want to deal with it even secondhand. You’re glad she’s gone because now you can get back to your regular life.”

  “That’s not true. And it’s not fair.”

  “Daddy!” we hear Meggie call. “I’m hungry!”

  “I’ll see you later,” Joe says. “I’ll bring you something back.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “Maybe you’ll change your mind. I’ll bring you something back.”

  He closes the door quietly. I pull the quilt up higher, then cast around inside myself for a moment, looking for symptoms. Then I think, Oh. That’s right. I’m not sick. It’s just grief. I look at my watch. In about half an hour, I can call her. But maybe they got there early. Sometimes there’s a good strong tailwind.