When the Lights Go Out Read online

  In the hospital, Mom sleeps beside me in a drug-induced daze, thanks to the steady drip, drip, drip of lorazepam and morphine into her veins, a solution that keeps her both pain-free and fast asleep at the same time.

  Sometime after nine o’clock, the nurse stops by to turn Mom one last time before signing off for the night. She checks her skin for bedsores, running a hand up and down Mom’s legs. I’ve got the TV in the room turned on, anything to drown out that mechanical, metallic sound of Mom’s EKG, one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It’s one of those newsmagazine shows—Dateline, 60 Minutes, I don’t know which—the one thing that was on when I flipped on the TV. I didn’t bother channel surfing; I don’t care what I watch. It could be home shopping or cartoons, for all I care. It’s just the noise I need to help me forget that Mom is dying. Though, of course, it isn’t as easy as that. There isn’t a thing in the world that can make me forget. But for a few minutes at least, the news anchors make me feel less alone.

  “What are you watching?” the nurse asks, examining Mom’s skin, and I say, “I don’t even know.”

  But then we both listen together as the anchors tell the story of some guy who’d assumed the identity of a dead man. He lived for years posing as him, until he got caught.

  Leave it to me to watch a show about dead people as a means of forgetting that Mom is dying.

  My eyes veer away from the TV and to Mom. I mute the show. Maybe the repetitive ping of the EKG isn’t so bad after all. What it says to me is that Mom is still alive. For now.

  Ulcers have already formed on her heels and so she lies with feet floating on air, a pillow beneath her calves so they can’t touch the bed. “Feeling tired?” the nurse asks, standing in the space between Mom and me. I am, of course, feeling tired. My head hurts, one of those dull headaches that creeps up the nape of the neck. There’s a stinging pain behind my eyes too, the kind that makes everything blur. I dig my palms into my sockets to make it go away, but it doesn’t quit. My muscles ache, my legs restless. There’s the constant urge to move them, to not sit still. It gnaws at me until it’s all I can think about: moving my legs. I uncross them, stretch them out before me, recross my legs. For a whole thirty seconds it works. The restlessness stops.

  And then it begins again. That prickly urge to move my legs.

  If I let it, it’ll go on all night until, like last night, when I finally stood and paced the room. All night long. Because it was easier than sitting still.

  I think then about what the guy in the cafeteria said. About taking care of myself, about getting ready for what comes next. I think about what comes next, about Mom’s and my house, vacant but for me. I wonder if I’ll ever sleep again.

  “Doc left some clonazepam for you,” the nurse says now, as if she knows what I’m thinking. “In case you changed your mind.” She says that it could be our little secret, hers and mine. She tells me Mom is in good hands. That I need to take care of myself now, again just like the guy in the cafeteria said.

  I relent. If only to make my legs relax. She steps from the room to retrieve the pills. When she returns, I climb onto the empty bed beside Mom and swallow a single clonazepam with a glass of water and sink beneath the covers of the hospital bed. The nurse stays in the room, watching me. She doesn’t leave.

  “I’m sure you have better things to do than keep me company,” I tell her, but she says she doesn’t.

  “I lost my daughter a long time ago,” she says, “and my husband’s gone. There’s no one at home waiting for me. None other than the cat. If it’s all right with you, I’d rather just stay. We can keep each other company, if you don’t mind,” she says, and I tell her I don’t mind.

  There’s an unearthly quality to her, ghostlike, as if maybe she’s one of Mom’s friends from her dying delusions, come to visit me. Mom had begun to talk to them the last time she was awake, people in the room who weren’t in the room, but who were already dead. It was as if Mom’s mind had already crossed over to the other side.

  The nurse’s smile is kind. Not a pity smile, but authentic. “The waiting is the hardest part,” she tells me, and I don’t know what she means by it—waiting for the pill to kick in or waiting for Mom to die.

  I read something once about something called terminal lucidity. I didn’t know if it’s real or not, a fact—scientifically proven—or just some superstition a quack thought up. But I’m hoping it’s real. Terminal lucidity: a final moment of lucidity before a person dies. A final surge of brainpower and awareness. Where they stir from a coma and speak one last time. Or when an Alzheimer’s patient who’s so far gone he doesn’t know his own wife anymore wakes up suddenly and remembers. People who have been catatonic for decades get up and for a few moments, they’re normal. All is good.

  Except that it’s not.

  It doesn’t last long, that period of lucidity. Five minutes, maybe more, maybe less. No one knows for sure. It doesn’t happen for everyone.

  But deep inside I’m hoping for five more lucid moments with Mom.

  For her to sit up, for her to speak.

  “I’m not tired yet,” I confess to the nurse after a few minutes, sure this is a waste of time. I can’t sleep. I won’t sleep. The restlessness of my legs is persistent, until I have no choice but to dig the melatonin out of my pocket when the nurse turns her back and swallow those too.

  The hospital bed is pitted, the blankets abrasive. I’m cold. Beside me, Mom’s breathing is dry and uneven, her mouth gaping open like a robin hatchling. Scabs have formed around her lips. She jerks and twitches in her sleep. “What’s happening?” I ask the nurse, and she tells me Mom is dreaming.

  “Bad dreams?” I ask, worried that nightmares might torment her sleep.

  “I can’t say for sure,” the nurse says. She repositions Mom on her right side, tucking a rolled-up blanket beneath her hip, checking the color of her hands and feet. “No one even knows for sure why we dream,” the nurse tells me, adding an extra blanket to my bed in case I catch a draft in my sleep. “Did you know that?” she asks, but I shake my head and tell her no. “Some people think that dreams serve no purpose,” she adds, winking. “But I think they do. They’re the mind’s way of coping, of thinking through a problem. Things we saw, felt, heard. What we’re worried about. What we want to achieve. You want to know what I think?” she asks, and without waiting for me to answer, she says, “I think your mom is getting ready to go in that dream of hers. Packing her bags and saying goodbye. Finding her purse and her keys.”

  I can’t remember the last time I’d dreamed.

  “It can take up to an hour to kick in,” the nurse says, and this time I know she means the medicine.

  The nurse catches me staring at Mom. “You can talk to her, you know?” she asks. “She can hear you,” she says, but it’s awkward then. Talking to Mom while the nurse is in the room. And anyway, I’m not convinced that Mom can really hear me, so I say to the nurse, “I know,” but to Mom, I say nothing. I’ll say all the things I need to say if we’re ever alone. The nurses play Mom’s records some of the time because, as they’ve told me, hearing is the last thing to go. The last of the senses to leave. And because they think it might put her at ease, as if the soulful voice of Gladys Knight & the Pips can penetrate the state of unconsciousness where she’s at, and become part of her dreams. The familiar sound of her music, those records I used to hate when I was a kid but now know I’ll spend the rest of my life listening to on repeat.

  “This must be hard on you,” the nurse says, watching me as I stare mournfully at Mom, taking in the shape of her face, her eyes, for what might be the last time. Then she confesses, “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.” I don’t ask the nurse who, but she tells me anyway, admitting to the little girl she lost nearly two decades ago. Her daughter, only three years old when she died. “We were on vacation,” she says. “My husband and me with our little girl.” H
e’s her ex-husband now because, as she tells me, their marriage died that day too, same day as their little girl. She tells me how there was nothing Madison loved more than playing in the sand, searching for seashells along the seashore. They’d taken her to the beach that summer. “My last good memories are of the three of us at the beach. I still see her sometimes when I close my eyes. Even after all these years. Bent at the waist in her purple swimsuit, digging fat fingers into the sand for seashells. Funny thing is that I have a hard time remembering her face, but clear as day I see the ruffles of that purple tulle skirt moving in the air.”

  I don’t know what to say. I know I should say something, something empathetic. I should commiserate. But instead I ask, “How did she die?” because I can’t help myself. I want to know, and there’s a part of me convinced she wants me to ask.

  “A hit-and-run,” she admits while dropping into an empty armchair in the corner of the room. Same one that I’ve spent the last few days in. She tells me how the girl wandered into the street when she and her husband weren’t paying attention. It was a four-lane road with a speed limit of just twenty-five as it twisted through the small seaside town. The driver rounded a bend at nearly twice that speed, not seeing the little girl before he hit her, before he fled.

  “He,” she says then. “He.” And this time, she laughs, a jaded laugh. “I’ll never know one way or the other if the driver was male or female, but to me it’s always been he because for the life of me I can’t see a woman running her car into a child and then fleeing. It goes against our every instinct, to nurture, to protect,” she says.

  “It’s so easy to blame someone else. My husband, the driver of the car. Even Madison herself. But the truth is that it was my fault. I was the one not paying attention. I was the one who let my little girl waddle off into the middle of the street.”

  And then she shakes her head with the weariness of someone who’s replayed the same scene in her life for many years, trying to pinpoint the moment when it all went wrong. When Madison’s hand slipped from hers, when she fell from view.

  I don’t mean for them to, but still, my eyes fill with tears as I picture her little girl in her purple swimsuit, lying in the middle of the road. One minute gathering seashells in the palm of a hand, and the next minute dead. It seems so tragic, so catastrophic, that my own tragedy somehow pales in comparison to hers. Suddenly cancer doesn’t seem so bad.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry,” but she shoos me off and says no, that she’s the one who should be sorry. “I didn’t mean to make you sad,” she says, seeing my watery eyes. “Just wanted you to know that I can empathize. That I can relate. It’s never easy losing someone you love,” she says again, and then stands quickly from the armchair, gets back to tending to Mom. She tries to change the subject. “Feeling tired yet?” she asks again, and this time I tell her I don’t know. My body feels heavy. That’s as much as I knew. But heavy and tired are two different things.

  She suggests then, “Why don’t I tell you a story while we wait? I tell stories to all my patients to help them sleep.”

  Mom used to tell me stories. We’d lie together under the covers of my twin-size bed and she’d tell me about her childhood. Her upbringing. Her own mom and dad. But she told it like a fairy tale, like a once upon a time kind of story, and it wasn’t Mom’s story at all, but rather the story of a girl who grew up to marry a prince and become queen.

  But then the prince left her. Except she always left that part out. I never knew if he did or if he didn’t, or if he was never there to begin with.

  “I’m not your patient,” I remind the nurse but she says, “Close enough,” while dimming the overhead lights so that I can sleep. She sits down on the edge of my bed, pulling the blanket clear up to my neck with warm, competent hands so that for one second I envy Mom her care.

  The nurse’s voice is low, her tone flat so she doesn’t wake Mom from her deathbed. Her story begins somewhere just outside of Moab, though it doesn’t go far.

  Almost at once, my eyelids grow heavy; my body becomes numb. My mind fills with fog. I become weightless, sinking into the pitted hospital bed so that I become one with it, the bed and me. The nurse’s voice floats away, her words themselves defying gravity and levitating in the air, out of reach but somehow still there, filling my unconscious mind. I close my eyes.

  It’s there, under the heavy weight of two thermal blankets and at the sound of the woman’s hypnotic voice, that I fall asleep. The last thing I remember is hearing about the snarling paths and the sandstone walls of someplace known as the Great Wall.

  When I wake up in the morning, Mom is dead.

  I slept right through it.

  eden

  May 16, 1996

  Egg Harbor

  Aaron showed me the house today. I’m in love with it already—a cornflower blue cottage perched on a forty-five-foot cliff that overlooks the bay. Pine floors and whitewashed walls. A screened-in porch. A long wooden staircase that leads down to the dock at the water’s edge where the Realtor promised majestic sunsets and fleets of sailboats floating by. Quaint, charming and serene. Those are the words the Realtor used. Aaron, as always, didn’t say much of anything, just stood on the balding lawn with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, staring out at the bay, thinking. He’s recently taken a job as a line cook at one of the restaurants in town, a chophouse in Ephraim. The cottage will more than cut his commute time in half. It’s also a steal compared to our current mortgage, and set on two acres of waterfront land that spans the heavily wooded backcountry to the rocky shores of Green Bay.

  And there’s a garden. A ten-by-twenty-or thirty-foot space overrun with brambles and weeds. It’s in need of work, but already Aaron has promised raised beds. There is a greenhouse, a sorry sight if I’ve ever seen one, set in a sunnier patch of the yard where the grass still grows. Small, shedlike, with aged glass windows and some sort of clear, corrugated roof meant to attract the sun. The door hangs cockeyed, one of its hinges broken. Aaron took a look and said that he can fix it, which comes as no surprise to me. There isn’t a thing in this world that Aaron can’t fix. Cobwebs cling to the corners of the room like lace. Already I’m imagining rows and rows of peat pots of soil and seed soaking up the sun, waiting to be transported into the garden.

  Nearby, a swing hangs from the mighty branch of a burr oak tree. It was the tree that cinched it for me. Or maybe not the tree itself, but the promise of the tree, the notion of children one day causing ruckus and mayhem on the tree’s swing, three feet of lumber fastened to the branch with a sturdy rope. I envision them climbing deep into the divots of the tree’s trunk and laughing. I can hear them already, Aaron’s and my unborn children. Laughing and screaming in delight.

  Aaron asked if I loved it as much as him, and I didn’t know if he meant whether I loved the cottage as much as I love him, or if I loved the cottage as much as he loves the cottage, but either way I told him I did.

  Aaron left the Realtor with our bid. It’s a buyer’s market, he said, trying to finagle the asking price down a good 10 percent. Me, I would have paid asking price, too afraid to lose the cottage otherwise. Tomorrow we’ll know if it’s ours.

  Tonight I won’t sleep. How is it possible to love something so much, to want something so badly, when only hours ago I didn’t know it existed?

  July 1, 1996

  Egg Harbor

  The boxes are plentiful. There is no end to the number of cardboard boxes the movers carry through the front door, delivering them to their marked rooms—living room, bedroom, master bath—stomping across our home in dusty work boots. Sixteen hundred square feet of space needing to be filled as Aaron and I divvied up our gender-appropriate tasks, he directing the movers with couches and beds while I unpacked and washed the dishes by hand and placed them in the cabinets. I watched the many laps they took, each man’s head beginning to glimmer with sweat. Aaron’s too, t
hough he hardly carried a thing, and yet the authority in his voice, the obvious clout as grown men trailed him through our home, heeding his every word, was enough to catch my eye. I watched him round the home time and again, wondering how I was so lucky to have him all to my own.

  It wasn’t like me to be lucky in love. Not until I met Aaron. The men who came before him were deadbeats and drifters, bottom-feeders. But not Aaron. We dated for a year before he proposed. Tomorrow we celebrate two years. Soon there will be kids, a whole gaggle of little ones spinning circles at our feet. As soon as we’re settled, Aaron always said, and now, as my eyes assess the new home, the sprawling landscape, the sixteen hundred square feet of space, three bedrooms—two vacant and left to fill—I realize the time has come and like clockwork, something inside me starts to tick.

  When the movers’ backs were turned, Aaron kissed me in the kitchen, pinning me against the cabinets, hands gripping my hips. It was unasked for and yet very much wanted as he kissed with his eyes closed, whispering that all of our dreams were finally coming true. Aaron isn’t one to be sentimental or romantic, and yet it was true: the cottage, his job, leaving the city. We’d both wanted to get away from Green Bay since the day we were married, his hometown and my hometown, so that two sets of parents couldn’t show up at our door on any given day, unsolicited, waging a secret battle as to which in-law could occupy the most of our time. We hadn’t gone far, sixty-seven miles to be precise, but enough that visits would be preempted with a simple phone call.

  Tonight we made love on the living room floor to the glow of candlelight. The electricity had yet to be turned on and so, other than the dance of candlelight on the whitewashed walls, the house was dark.