We Are Not Ourselves(189)

? ? ?

There was a skull in a box in the closet. It was a specimen of Ed’s; he’d taught anatomy with it. He’d called it “George,” but she refused to call it anything but “the skull.” He’d taken it out every now and then to show it to Connell and his friends, a grisly spectacle she’d always insisted on cutting short. The boys poked their fingers through the eye sockets, dug their nails into the grooves in the pearly skullcap, probed the crenellations in the ivory teeth and clacked the hinged jaw in dummy conversation. One year—Connell must have been eight or nine—she threw a Halloween party for all the kids on the block. “George will be making an appearance tonight,” Ed said to Connell at the breakfast table that morning, and when the party was in full swing, all the kids assembled in the basement, Ed donned a black robe, charred the bottom of a pan, and spread the black char all over his face. He shut out the lights in the basement as he descended the stairs, and when he reached the center of the circle in which they’d been arranged in anticipation of some kind of surprise, he spoke in a deep voice and held the floating skull up to the flashlight. The kids shivered and screamed in delighted terror—including Connell, who knew it was coming.

Ed said once that when he died he wanted his skull to be used in anatomy classes. He had been delighted by the story of a classically trained stage actor who willed his skull to the company he’d been in, to play the part of Yorick in Hamlet, thereby assuring his immortality.

She took the box down from the closet and set it on her desk. She had never opened it. She lifted one of the cardboard flaps, then another, then the last two, slowly. She shuddered to see the top of that cranium, but she lifted it out of the box and set it facing her on the desk. Despite her years of nursing, her encounters with death, the anatomy classes she’d taken, she’d never been able to shake a basic awe in the face of relics of the body. She sat staring at that empty gaze. The whole time she knew Ed, there had been a skull behind his features. The man whose skull this had been, whose flesh had hidden this bone, had had his own ties of family and friendship. It struck her that she was much closer to the end than the beginning.

She thought of donating it to the science department at Saunders High School, then decided against it. There would simply have to be an orphan skull lying around after she was gone. Connell would find a home for it or take responsibility for throwing it out. He would be the arbiter of its fate, as he would decide what to do with her body, as she had decided what to do with her husband’s, as someone would decide what to do with his.

? ? ?

The more she thought about Ed’s turning down NYU all those years back, the more she began to entertain other, more mysterious possibilities: that he may have had reasons other than vocation for evading ambition’s prod; that he may have needed BCC more than they needed him; that he may have been afraid of changing his routine or exposing himself to closer scrutiny; that he may have known more than he let on; that he may have known it earlier than she’d ever thought possible.

? ? ?

The study had lasted three years. She’d kept him on the medicine another two, until it was too hard to get him to swallow the pills. It wasn’t entirely to spite her that he resisted: he had an instinctual fear of choking.

The drug didn’t have a name, just a string of letters and numbers—SDZ ENA 713. Later it acquired a name, Exelon, and could be prescribed. A lot of things were different later. Later they put patches on people so they didn’t have to take pills. That would have prevented a lot of trouble.

She asked herself, when she was feeling low, whether it was the medicine that had caused him to go so rigid that he couldn’t be picked up when he collapsed at the end. Rigidity was one of the side effects. Would she have been able to keep him home longer if she’d taken him off the drugs? Would he have avoided dying in a strange bed?

Sometimes she lay in bed thinking that somewhere they might be making drugs that would have changed everything. She knew she would find that bittersweet, though Ed would be thrilled. Advances in science were the things that made him happiest in life. Advances in science, and Connell. And herself, she had to admit. That was usually when she broke down.

? ? ?

Many nights, she worked herself into a panic trying to imagine what would have become of him in his last years if she’d divorced him as she’d briefly considered doing before an explanation emerged for his sudden cruelty. Try as she did, she couldn’t picture where he would have lived or who would have taken care of him. As time passed she came to believe that she had been fated to be there for him at the end, that being there for him was what everything in her life—her care of her mother, her career in nursing—had prepared her for, that it was, in a sense, her life’s great work. In this way she was able to sleep soundly again.

This was his final gift to her: to silence her regrets about the paths she hadn’t taken.

? ? ?

She kept going to the nursing home. She’d grown attached to seeing the other patients. She brought them cookies and sat in the television room with them, watching the evening news or reruns until it was time to go home. Some nights, she read to Mrs. Benziger from a magazine, but mostly she made herself useful by changing the channel when they grew restless with whatever program was on.

One night, as she was leaving, Mr. Huggins came toward her down the hall, pushing his walker. The overhead lights had been shut off for the night, and the only illumination came from a dim table lamp, which, reflecting off his stark white hospital robe, made him look like the herald of some malevolent spirit.