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jessie

I don’t have to see myself to know what I look like.

My eyes are fat and bloated, so bloodshot the sclera is bereft of white. The skin around them is red and raw from rubbing. They’ve been like this for days. Ever since Mom’s body began shutting down, her hands and feet cold, blood no longer circulating there. Since she began to drift in and out of consciousness, refusing to eat. Since she became delirious, speaking of things that aren’t real.

Over the last few days, her breathing has changed too, becoming noisier and unstable, developing what the doctor called Cheyne-Stokes respiration where, for many seconds at a time, she didn’t breathe. Short, shallow breaths followed by no breaths at all. When she didn’t breathe, I didn’t breathe. Her nails are blue now, the skin of her arms and legs blotchy and gray. “It’s a sign of imminent death,” the doctor said only yesterday as he set a firm hand on my shoulder and asked if there was someone they could call, someone who could come sit with me until she passed.

“It won’t be long now,” he’d said.

I had shaken my head, refusing to cry. It wasn’t like me to cry. I’ve sat in the same armchair for nearly a week now, in the same rumpled clothes, leaving only to collect coffee from the hospital cafeteria. “There’s no one,” I said to the doctor. “It’s only Mom and me.”

Only Mom and me as it’s always been. If I have a father somewhere out there in the world, I don’t know a thing about him. Mom didn’t want me to know anything about him.

And now this evening, Mom’s doctor stands before me again, taking in my bloated eyes, staring at me in concern. This time offering up a pill. He tells me to take it, to go lie down in the empty bed beside Mom’s and sleep.

“When’s the last time you’ve slept, Jessie?” he asks, standing there in his starch white smock, tacking on, “I mean, really slept,” before I can lie. Before I can claim that I slept last night. Because I did, for a whole thirty minutes, at best.

He tells me the longest anyone has gone without sleep. He tells me that people can die without sleep. He says to me, “Sleep deprivation is a serious matter. You need to sleep,” though he’s not my doctor but Mom’s. I don’t know why he cares.

But for whatever reason, he goes on to list for me the consequences of not sleeping. Emotional instability. Crying and laughing for no sound reason at all. Behaving erratically. Losing concept of time. Seeing things. Hallucinating. Losing the ability to speak.

And then there are the physical effects of insomnia: heart attack, hypothermia, stroke.

“Sleeping pills don’t work for me,” I tell him, but he shakes his head, tells me that it’s not a sleeping pill. Rather a tranquilizer of some sort, used for anxiety and seizures. “It has a sedative effect,” he says. “Calming. It will help you sleep without all the ugly side effects of a sleeping pill.”

But I don’t need to sleep. What I need instead is to stay awake, to be with Mom until she makes the decision to leave.

I push myself from my chair, strut past the doctor standing in the doorway. “Jessie,” he says, a hand falling gently to my arm to try and stop me before I can go. His smile is fake.

“I don’t need a pill,” I tell him briskly, plucking my arm away. My eyes catch sight of the nurse standing in the hallway beside the nurses’ station, her eyes conveying only one thing: pity. “What I need is coffee,” I say, not meeting her eye as I slog down the hallway, feet heavy with fatigue.

* * *

There’s a guy I see in the cafeteria every now and then, a little bit like me. A weak frame lost inside crumpled-up clothes; tired, red eyes but doped up on caffeine. Like me, he’s twitchy. On edge. He has a square face; dark, shaggy hair; and thick eyebrows that are sometimes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses so that the rest of us can’t see he’s been crying. He sits in the cafeteria with his feet perched on a plastic chair, a red sweatshirt hood pulled over his head, sipping his coffee.

I’ve never talked to him before. I’m not the kind of girl that cute guys talk to.

But tonight, for whatever reason, after I get my cup of coffee, I drop down into the chair beside him, knowing that under any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have the nerve to do it. To talk to him. But tonight I do, mostly, I think, to delay going back to Mom’s room, to give the doctor his chance to examine her and leave.

“Want to talk about it?” I ask, and at first his look is surprised. Incredulous, even. His gaze rises up from his own coffee cup and he stares at me, his eyes as blue as a blue morpho butterfly’s wings.

“The coffee,” he says after some time, pushing his cup away. “It tastes like shit,” he tells me, as though that’s the thing that’s bothering him. The only thing. Though I see well enough inside the cup to know that he drank it down to the dregs, so it couldn’t have been that bad.

“What’s wrong with it?” I ask, sipping from my cup. It’s hot and so I peel back the plastic lid and blow on it. Steam rises to greet me as I try again and take another sip. This time, I don’t burn my mouth.

There’s nothing wrong with the hospital’s coffee. It’s just the way I like it. Nothing fancy. Just plain old coffee. But still, I dump four packets of Equal in and swirl it around because I don’t have a stir stick or spoon.

“It’s weak and there are grounds in it,” he tells me, giving his abandoned cup the stink eye. “I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “Guess I just like my coffee stronger than this.”

And yet, he reaches again for the cup before remembering there’s nothing left in it.

There’s an anger in his demeanor. A sadness. It doesn’t have anything to do with the coffee. He just needs something to take his anger out on. I see it in his blue eyes, how he wishes he was somewhere else, anywhere else but here.

I too want to be anywhere else but here.

“My mother’s dying,” I tell him, looking away because I can’t stand to stare into his eyes when I say the words aloud. Instead I gaze toward a window where outside the world has gone black. “She’s going to die.”

Silence follows. Not an awkward silence, but just silence. He doesn’t say he’s sorry because he knows, like me, that sorry doesn’t mean a thing. Instead, after a minute or two, he says that his brother’s been in a motorcycle accident. That a car cut him off and he went flying off the bike, headfirst, into a utility pole.

“There’s no saying if he’ll make it,” he says, talking in euphemisms because it’s easier that way than just saying there’s a chance he’ll die. Kick the bucket. Croak. “Odds are good we’ll have to pull the plug sometime soon. The brain damage.” He shakes his head, picks at the skin around his fingernails. “It’s not looking good,” he tells me, and I say, “That sucks,” because it does.

I rub at my eyes and he changes topics. “You look tired,” he tells me, and I admit that I can’t sleep. That I haven’t been sleeping. Not for more than thirty minutes at a time, and even that’s being generous. “But it’s fine,” I say, because my lack of sleep is the least of my concerns.

He knows what I’m thinking.

“There’s nothing more you can do for your mom,” he says. “Now you’ve got to take care of you. You’ve got to be ready for what comes next. You ever try melatonin?” he asks, but I shake my head and tell him the same thing I told Mom’s doctor.

“Sleeping pills don’t work for me.”

“It’s not a sleeping pill,” he says as he reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out a handful of pills. He slips two tablets into the palm of my hand. “It’ll help,” he says to me, but any idiot can see that his own eyes are bloodshot and tired. It’s obvious this melatonin didn’t help him worth shit. But I don’t want to be rude. I slip the tablets into the pocket of my own jeans and say thanks.

He stands from the table, chair skidding out from beneath him, and says he’ll be right back. I think that it’s an excuse and that he’s going to take the opportunity to split. “Sure thing,” I say, looking the other way as he leaves. Trying not to feel sorry for myself as I’m hit with that sudden sense of being alone. Trying not to think about my future, knowing that when Mom finally dies, I’ll be alone forever.

He’s gone now and I watch other people in the cafeteria. New grandparents. A group of people sitting at a round table, laughing. Talking about old times, sharing memories. Some sort of hospital technician in blue scrubs eating alone. I reach for my now-empty cup of coffee, thinking that I too should split. Knowing that the doctor is no doubt done with Mom by now, and so I should get back to her.

But then the guy comes back. In his hands are two fresh cups of coffee. He returns to his chair and states the obvious. “Caffeine is the last thing either of us needs,” he tells me, saying that it’s decaf, and it occurs to me then that this has nothing to do with the coffee, but rather the company.

He digs into his pocket and pulls out four rumpled packets of Equal, dropping them to the table beside my cup. I manage a thanks, flat and mumbled to hide my surprise. He was watching me. He was paying attention. No one ever pays attention to me, aside from Mom.

Beside me he hoists his feet back onto the empty seat across from him, crosses them at the ankles. Drapes the red hood over his head.

I wonder what he’d be doing right now if he wasn’t here. If his brother hadn’t been in that motorcycle accident. If he wasn’t close to dying.

I think that if he had a girlfriend, she’d be here, holding his hand, keeping him company. Wouldn’t she?

I tell him things. Things I’ve never told anyone else. I don’t know why. Things about Mom. He doesn’t look at me as I talk, but at some imaginary spot on the wall. But I know he’s listening.

He tells me things too, about his brother, and for the first time in a while, I think how nice it is to have someone to talk to, or to just share a table with as the conversation in time drifts to quiet and we sit together, drinking our coffees in silence.

* * *

Later, after I return to Mom’s room, I think about him. The guy from the cafeteria. After the hospital’s hallway lights are dimmed and all is quiet—well, mostly quiet save for the ping of the EKG in Mom’s room and the rattle of saliva in the back of her throat since she can no longer swallow—I think about him sitting beside his dying brother, also unable to sleep.

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.” He’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.