When he swells inside me, when neither of us blinks, I wonder if this is what it’s like for the moon when she pulls the tide and changes the shape of the world.
We don’t have a washcloth. Brian’s beard has scratched me raw. His hands are broad and restless on my spine, and my hair is damp against my face. “We’re going to have to clean the comforter,” I whisper.
“Worth it,” Brian grunts.
I squeeze him with my legs. “That is my new favorite sport,” I whisper.
He buries his face in the curve of my neck. “Imagine the gym memberships you could sell.”
I laugh and feel him slip out of me. There is wetness and mess and I don’t even care. Brian cradles me, my back to his front, idly playing with my hair. I look up at the ceiling, at the starry string of lights, at the absence of me. “Can’t you get too close to the sun?” I murmur.
“Not in my metaphor,” Brian says.
“Tell that to Icarus.”
He yawns. “Who?”
Brian’s breathing evens, a bellows behind me. I think he has fallen asleep, when I feel his words on the back of my neck. “I need help,” he confesses.
So do I,I think. I catch his fingers with my own, ceding the space and the silence.
“I managed to hurt the person I love most in the world. And I want to ask my best friend how to fix it,” Brian says. “But they’re one and the same.”
I am not sure what he is apologizing for. A single act, or many. I don’t want to know. I realize I should apologize to him, too, but maybe that is the problem in my marriage—that we have been tethered too long to our past, and we need forward movement.
I don’t want to slip back. I was a student of history; I know this. The shadow of a thing doesn’t exist without the original to cast it. A dry bed was still once a river. A bell unrung is still a bell.
—
IN THE MIDDLEof the night I get a call from the hospice where my mother died, where one of my longer-term clients—a woman with Parkinson’s—has taken a turn for the worse. I slip out of bed, telling Brian that someone is dying. I drive to the facility and talk to the nurses about Thalia—the forced respiration, the mottling in her limbs. Then I go into her room and assess for myself that she is actively dying.
She’s been unresponsive for a few weeks, so I knew that it was coming. I take my phone out and cue up a playlist of Broadway songs. Thalia had been a showgirl, a Rockette. She was married for sixty years to a producer, who died in 2012. They never had any children; she’s outlived her friends. In Amsterdam, if you have no one to survive you, a poet is hired to write and read a few lines at your funeral; this is obviously not the case in America. Thalia hired me so that she would not have to die alone.
I sit down beside Thalia and reach for her hand. The skin is paper-thin, the veins a purpled map. Her hair, a white tuft, has been brushed back and secured with a pink ribbon. Her cheeks are sunken and her mouth hangs open. A tabby kitten—a generational offspring of Cat, I imagine—curls at the foot of her bed.
The last time Thalia was conscious, she told me how, as a kid, she would sneak down her fire escape when her parents were fighting and make her way to Broadway. The curtain rose at 7:00, which meant at 8:30, everyone came outside to smoke. Ushers didn’t check tickets on the way back in, so she would blend in with the crowds and hover in the rear of the theater, scoping out the empty seats. Every now and then a wealthy couple would eye her—a teenager—oddly, but who was to say she wasn’t the child of a couple in the row in front of them, or off to the right? She never got caught, and she saw the second acts of over a hundred shows for free. “I used to wonder,” she told me, “whydothose Sharks hate the Jets so damn much?”
“Thalia,” I say, aware that hearing is the last sense to go, “it’s me, Dawn. I’m here with you.” I gently squeeze her hand.
Her breath is wet and thick. The cat’s tail flicks. Soon, then.
I don’t sleep; I bear witness. Broadway scores run on repeat:Kiss Me, KateandWest Side StoryandShowboatandA Chorus Line.Kiss today goodbye.
My phone dings once; a text from Brian.Bed is too big without you.
I start to type a reply but cannot figure out what to say.
After a few hours of vigil, my eyelids feel gritty and my mouth feels full of chalk. Nurses move in and out of the room in regular intervals, checking vitals, asking me if I need anything. Just before the sun rises, Thalia opens her eyes. “Are you here to take me?” she asks.
It is not the first time I’ve been mistaken for the angel of death. When it gets this close, clients have one foot in this world and one foot in the next. Some see a light. Others see people who’ve died. I had an elderly client once call out to a man named Herbert, who turned out to be a high school boyfriend that died in World War II. A college kid with an inoperable brain tumor saw a stoic, silent man in suspenders and boots sitting on the edge of his bed.His name was Garmin,the boy said,and he said he was supposed to watch over me. When I told my client’s father this, he went white and said that Garmin was the name of his grandfather’s brother, whom he never knew and never met because he’d died in a mill accident in his twenties.
I don’t know what makes people see what they do before they die. It may be dopamine, or oxygen deprivation. It may be meds. It could be brain cells firing one final time or a short circuit between synapses. Or maybe it’s a way of saying that you may not know what comes next, but it’s still somehow going to be all right.
I don’t tell Thalia that I am here for her, but I lean so close that my breath falls like a blessing. “Rest,” I tell her. “You’ve done what you need to do.”
When Thalia dies, it is like an old filament bulb that glows for a moment after it’s turned off, and then loses its vibrance and its light. She is there, and then she’s not. There’s a space in the world the size of her small body, but she is gone.
The cat jumps off the bed and slinks out the door.
