We Are Not Ourselves(188)
He pushed his way through the revolving door. His mother was fanning her face with her hand as she tried to tell him what he already knew. His uncle stood by, saying nothing.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
He had missed his father by two hours. His mother had gotten permission to keep his father there long enough for Connell to say good-bye.
His uncle Pat drove to the home like a Formula One racer, leaning into the turns. While his mother sat on the divan by the entrance, Uncle Pat walked him down the hallway to his father’s room and left him alone. His father’s eyes were open. Connell stared into their beautiful blueness awhile, though they stared at something else, and he smoothed his hair down as he always did when it stuck up. He kissed his forehead and cheeks. He was cold. He talked to him, though he knew he wasn’t there anymore. His mouth was open. He looked at his cracked tooth. He wouldn’t need teeth anymore. He wouldn’t need anything.
His mother came to get him after a while. “That’s probably enough,” she said.
He gave his father another kiss, and on the way out he stopped in the doorway and turned and looked back. He was about to return to his father when he saw the stern, imploring look his uncle was giving him. The expression on his mother’s face said it was painful for her to be in the room with his father, that she’d been holding out for Connell to come home but the time had come to say good-bye. It must have been difficult for her to look at his father the way she’d looked at the corpses of so many patients over the years. It must have seemed like there was no difference between him and the rest of the numberless dead. He closed the door with a quiet click and they all walked out to the car.
94
It was pneumonia that killed him. As the brain had deteriorated, the body parts had stopped working. His lungs filled with mucus. He drowned in it.
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After he died on March 7, 1999, she decided that if there was such a thing as a next life, she wanted to return under another sort of banner entirely—something ebullient like “Holiday” or “Sunshine.” This time through, though, she was Eileen Leary; she’d never remarry. This was life: you went down with the ship. Who was to say that wasn’t a love story?
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She slept on his side. She didn’t like his side particularly, but she couldn’t bring herself to sleep on her old one. Whenever she did, she lay there thinking of all the nights she’d slept facing away from him, and she wanted one of them back—a single one would be enough—so she could turn her body toward his.
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She knew he would have wanted his remains to contribute to the body of knowledge. The neurologists who’d diagnosed him weren’t going to order an autopsy, though; they were convinced that it had been Alzheimer’s and had long ago closed their investigations. The team that had conducted the drug study wasn’t going to order it either.
She could have paid to have him autopsied anyway. She would have had to do a little paperwork to have the body moved from one county to another. The whole procedure would have cost eight thousand dollars, or about how much she’d been paying per month at the end to keep him at Maple Grove. It struck her as unseemly to attach any dollar amount to the privilege of peering into the riddle of a mind as fine as Ed’s. They should have been clamoring to do it for the honor alone.
In the end, she couldn’t bring herself to have it done. She couldn’t stand to think of someone cutting her husband’s head open. His teeth were broken, his gums had grown red and swollen, he had straggly hair, his once-proud muscles had atrophied to saggy sleeves, he had cuts and scabs everywhere, his skin had turned hoary from lack of exposure. She couldn’t imagine destroying his body any further. And the thought of his being dissected like that, when he had so often been the dissector himself, filled her with a palpable revulsion. He went intact into the earth, all the questions answered that would ever be answered, all the unasked ones forever unasked. Science had reached the end of its utility. All that remained was the body, and she wanted to give it tenderness.
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After all that trouble she’d gone to to put a leather band on the LeCoultre watch, Ed had never worn it. It had sat in its box for thirty-two years.
She took it out of the case. Under the velvet platform in the bottom of the box the gold band lay like the desiccated skin of a snake. She went to a jeweler and had it put back on. The restored watch was worth a good deal of money, due to its pristine condition, its collectible nature, and the high price of gold, but that was immaterial now, as she buried him wearing it.
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The new tools she’d bought after the workers stole his old ones had never been used. A few weeks after his death, she paid someone to haul them away, along with the contents of his office: crates of records, VHS tapes, his science textbooks. The books were outdated. No one listened to records anymore. The tapes were fuzzy recordings Ed had made on the black-and-white set, old movies and documentaries about cathedrals and bridges. Connell had no interest in any of it. It had all run out of currency.
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In the surfeit of time that widowhood allowed, she had a recurring vision of her husband in the early days of the disease, after he’d retired. He was still handsome. His hair was thinner, but it had not lost its striking blackness, and his blue eyes coruscated in the light, though the whites had yellowed. He was smaller than he used to be; his clothes fit loosely on him. It was early afternoon, but the room was dark, save for the glow of the television and some sunlight filtering through the drapes on the patio door. When the trees shifted in the wind, the room pulsed with greater light. The lamp on the end table could have offered more lasting illumination, but in the flurry of activity that accompanied her departure she had forgotten to turn it on. He could not summon the fine motor skills to turn it on himself. He had been sitting there since eight in the morning, watching the channel that she had decided offered the best chance at diverting him for the length of her workday. He had, by then, seen every episode of the detective show he was watching, though his failing memory offered an ability to see familiar things afresh. He lost the plotline somewhere in the middle of the episode. What caught fire in his mind were the rudiments of narrative: a ringing retort, anguish on a face, a happy reunion. He could still feel. He could still cry. He did cry, without knowing he was doing so. He felt the tears drying on his face afterward, and it was as though he had awoken from an unhappy dream. He could no longer read. By the time he reached the end of a sentence, he had forgotten where it began. He could decipher headlines in the newspaper; from them he cobbled together a sense of what was happening in the world. He was left with television, and when she was around, listening to music or her reading to him. He was hungry. He tried to go to the kitchen. He had a hard time rising from the couch. It took a couple of attempts, but he eventually succeeded. When he returned he couldn’t find the remote control. He didn’t want to watch this channel anymore. He couldn’t follow the story. He knew there was something about a murder, some kind of investigation. Those detectives who were always there were working on the case. There had been some kind of theft. Something was missing.