Beautiful Ruins (104)

Debra knows by heart the inflection of their concern, How IS she?

Still alive. Oh, the things she would say if she could—but it’s a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business. She’s constantly being offered homeopathic remedies by the funky people up here: magnets and herbs and horse liniments. Some people give her books—self-help books, tomes on grieving, pamphlets on dying. I’m beyond help, self-or otherwise, she wants to say, and Aren’t the grieving books more for the survivors? and Thanks for the book on dying, but that’s the one part I have covered. They’ll ask Pat, How IS she? and they’ll ask her, How ARE you? But they don’t want to hear that she’s tired all the time, that her bladder is leaky, that she’s on the watch for her systems shutting down. They want to hear that she’s at peace, that she’s led a great life, that she’s happy her son has returned—and so that’s what she gives them. And the truth is, most of the time, she IS at peace, HAS led a great life, IS happy her son has returned. She knows which drawer the phone number for hospice is in; and the company with the hospital bed; and the provider of the morphine drip dispenser. Some days she wakes slowly from her nap and thinks it would be okay to just go on sleeping—that it would not be scary at all. Pat and Lydia are as solid as she could hope, and the board has agreed to let Lydia take over the theater. The cabin is paid for, with enough left in the bank for taxes and other expenses, so Pat can spend the rest of his life puttering around outside in the early mornings, which he loves—gardening, painting and staining, pruning trees, working on the driveway and the retaining walls, anything to keep his hands moving. Sometimes, now, when she sees how content Pat and Lydia are, she feels like a spent salmon: her work here is done. But other times, honestly, the whole idea of being at peace just pisses her off. At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?

Sometimes, during her various rounds of chemo, she had wanted the pain and discomfort to be over so badly that she could imagine being comforted by her own death. That was one of the reasons she’d decided—after all of the chemicals and radiations and surgeries, after the double mastectomy, after the doctors tried every measure of conventional and nuclear weaponry against her diminishing frame, and after they still found traces of cancer in her pelvic bones—to just let the thing run its course. Let it have her. The doctors said there might still be something to be done, depending on whether it was a primary or secondary cancer, but she told them it didn’t matter anymore. Pat had come home, and she preferred six months of peace to another three years of needles and nausea. And she’s gotten lucky: she’s made it almost two years, and has felt good throughout most of it, although it still stuns her to catch a glimpse in the mirror: Who is this relic, this tall, thin, flat-chested old woman with her white porcupine hair?

Debra pulls her sweater around herself, warms her tea. She leans against the sink and smiles as she watches her son eat his second helping of eggs, Lydia reaching over to take a cheesy mushroom from the top. Pat looks up at his mother, to see if she’s caught the blatant thievery. “You’re not going to stab her?”

And that’s when a car announces itself on the gravel outside. Pat hears it, too, and checks his watch. He shrugs. “No idea.”

Pat goes to the window, puts his hand to the glass, and peers down toward the driveway, the faint glow of headlights down there. “That’s Keith’s Bronco.” He steps away from the window. “The after-party. He’s probably wasted. I’ll go take care of it.”

He skips down the stairs like a boy.

“How was he tonight?” Debra asks quietly when he’s gone.

Lydia picks at the leftover onions and mushrooms on Pat’s plate. “Great. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. God, I’ll be glad when this play is over, though. Some nights, he just sits there afterward and stares out, with . . . these distant eyes. For fifteen minutes, he’s just done. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since I finished this goddamned play.”

“You’ve been holding your breath a lot longer than that,” Debra says, and they both smile. “It’s a wonderful play, Lydia. You should just let go and enjoy it.”

Lydia drinks from Pat’s orange juice. “I don’t know.”

Debra reaches across the table for Lydia’s hand. “You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I’m just so grateful I got to see it.”

Lydia cocks her head and her brow wrinkles, fighting off tears. “Goddamn it, Dee. Why do you do that?”

Then, through three layers of floor, they hear voices on the stairs, Pat and Keith, and someone else, and then a rumbling up the steps, five, maybe six sets of feet.

Pat comes up first, shrugging. “I guess there were some old friends of yours at the show tonight, Mom. Keith brought them—I hope it’s all right . . .”

Pat is followed by Keith. He doesn’t seem drunk, but he is carrying his little video camera, which he sometimes uses to chronicle—hell, Debra isn’t sure what Keith chronicles, exactly. “Hey, Dee. Sorry to bother you so late, but these people really wanted to see you . . .”

“It’s okay, Keith,” she says, and then the other people come up the stairs, one at a time: an attractive young woman with curly red hair, and then a thin, mop-headed young man who does look drunk—neither of whom Debra recognizes—and then a strange creature, a slightly hunched older man in a suit coat, as skinny as she is, at once vaguely familiar and not; he has the strangest, lineless face, like one of those computer renderings of a face aging, only done in reverse, a boy’s face grafted onto the neck of an old man—and finally, another old gentleman, in a charcoal-gray suit. This last man catches her attention as he steps away from the others, to the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. He removes his fedora and looks at her with a set of eyes so pale blue they seem nearly transparent—eyes that take her in with a mixture of warmth and pity, eyes that sweep Dee Moray back fifty years, to another life—