A Matter of Mercy Read online

An early darkness slid into place on Elsie’s departure. An aide would be there at eight in the morning to change the sheet, empty the catheter bag and bathe Eleanor, but Caroline felt the weight of the night and already it was cold and heavy. The hospice chaplain was still due to stop in. Jean Keller would read poetry to Eleanor in a voice that was edgeless as cotton batting. But it was getting late, and perhaps she’d been held up elsewhere. If she had, Caroline would be alone with her dying mother until morning. She wasn’t worried about the caregiving part—she’d long since been taught exactly what to do and when—rather, it was isolation and fear that got to her.

  Eleanor wasn’t eating anymore, not to speak of anyway. A couple of spoonsful of applesauce sometimes, and she still liked ice cream for its coolness, always chocolate. Ice chips whenever she wanted them. Caroline didn’t understand what was keeping her alive. “I love you, Mom,” she said, smoothing back imaginary whispers of hair on Eleanor’s forehead for an excuse to stroke her mother’s head. Tears slid down her cheeks. She wanted this to end; she wanted it never to end, so she would not have to say goodbye. She couldn’t bear to watch the effort of her mother’s breaths, even with the oxygen that was supposed to make her more comfortable, and equally she couldn’t bear not to be at her side. She watched her mother dreaming, Eleanor’s closed eyes following some distant storyline Caroline could not share, a fact that only increased her loneliness.

  When it was obvious the chaplain wasn’t coming, and Eleanor seemed marginally awake, Caroline made herself say it. She’d put the public radio station on—Eleanor liked classical music—and chamber music was soft in the background. The only light was from the fireplace and the little brass hurricane lamp on the far table. “Mom, I’ve been thinking that—maybe.…” Oh no, that was all wrong. Not the way to tell her. “Mom, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I want you to know….” That was wrong too. Eleanor had closed her eyes anyway. It was just as well. Elsie was probably out of her mind.

  Eleanor opened her eyes. “What?” It was the clearest word she’d said all day.

  Caroline froze. How could she do this? “It’s okay, Mom. It’s nothing, really.”

  “Tell me,” her mother said.

  And Caroline was too tired to figure all the angles, to remember what she’d rehearsed or to puzzle what would burden her mother or what would relieve her. It was like a Rubik’s cube, beyond her capability to solve.

  “I’m pregnant, Mom. I thought you’d want to know.”

  The available light was low and amber but Caroline didn’t miss how Eleanor examined her with her eyes before she closed them again, and how her face relaxed then into a smile.

  “Good.”

  “Mom, I’m not sure I….” It didn’t feel right to finish the sentence when Eleanor squeezed her hand with what pressure she had the strength for.

  “You won’t be alone.” There was a long pause and Caroline thought her mother had drifted into sleep again. But then Eleanor’s lips moved again with one word: “Stay.” It was all she said, even through the evening when Caroline swabbed her mouth with the glycerin stick to keep it moist, or rubbed lotion into the fragile skin on her arms and hands and face. Busy work, anything to feel useful. She sat by Eleanor waiting, sometimes watching dark urine snake its way down the catheter tube toward the bag as if it were the most interesting thing on TV.

  * * * *

  The next day was a fog indoors and out. Eleanor hardly seemed to wake at all, and her eyes were hardly moving in their dream dance. But there was the morphine, so who could tell? Elsie came although she wasn’t scheduled. With her stethoscope to Eleanor’s abdomen, she said, “I don’t hear bowel sounds now.” She stroked Eleanor’s hand gently and said, “I’ve been thinking of you all evening, Mrs. Marcum. You’re a beautiful and brave spirit who has blessed us all.”

  After she’d checked the morphine and, it seemed, everything else she could check and double check, she gestured Caroline away from the bed. “I don’t think she’ll still be with us tomorrow. Her systems are shutting down. Hearing is the last sense to go, so go right ahead and talk to her as much as you like.” She picked up Caroline’s hand and held it. “You’ve done an amazing job, and you’re seeing it through.” She put her arms around Caroline and pulled her into an embrace that Caroline did not resist. “I’ll try to stop in again late this afternoon,” she said. “I’m scheduled at the nursing home down in Eastham, but I’ll do the best I can.”

  “Please. If you can,” Caroline said. “I’m so scared.”

  “I know. I’ll call the office and see if they can send over an experienced volunteer,” Elsie said. And then Caroline was alone again.

  Through the day, Caroline occasionally thought she was handling herself well, but then, just as often, that she was failing every test. Exhaustion overtook her and then she’d rally. She’d find courage to sit with her mother, hold her hand and say, “Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’m all right. I’ll be all right. I promise you.” But then tears would win and she’d duck into a bedroom. No one came.

  In the mid-afternoon, Eleanor’s breathing slowed. Caroline’s first impulse was to call for help, to try to rouse her mother, and failing that, to run from the scene herself, out to the porch or farther, to the beach. To be anywhere but here. But Elsie’s voice came into her head: you can help her … hearing is the last sense to go. And there was a competing impulse: not to let her mother down in the end if, this was the end. Caroline sat on Eleanor’s bed and gently removed the oxygen tubes so she could get to her unimpeded. She worked her arms beneath her mother’s back, leaning her own body forward and lifting her, the weight of twigs now, into a full embrace.

  “Mom, if it’s time, it’s all right to let go. I’m here, and I’ll always love you. You’ve been a wonderful mother, and I’ll carry you in my heart forever. Thank you for your good life, thank you for all your love. Thank you for being there for me.” Caroline stroked her mother’s cheek with her own, speaking softly into her mother’s ear.

  Her mother exhaled a whoosh sound once. Then there was a pause and a ragged intake of breath, and Caroline knew.

  “I love you, Mom. Godspeed,” she whispered.

  A kiss. A last exhalation, and then nothing more. Caroline held her mother and wept.

  Chapter 11

  She’d been terrified that she’d attend her mother’s death alone and of course that’s exactly what happened, but now it felt right. Then, fifteen minutes later, it was untenable to be in the house with her mother’s body, yet she didn’t want to relinquish it to a stranger. Her eyes were runny and wet, but she wouldn’t give way.

  Instead of calling the funeral home or even one of her mother’s friends, she called Elsie’s cell phone. “No, it’s all right. I’ll get there as soon as I can,” Elsie said. “Make yourself a cup of tea, take a blanket to stay warm and go out and sit on the porch. Would you like me to call someone else for you?”

  No, there was no one else. Only Elsie could be trusted while her mother was lying there, vulnerable as a pale orchid.

  She did, however, what Elsie told her. The nurse’s instincts were right. Caroline needed to be out of the house yet guard her mother. The morning had been foggy and overcast, but now a weak sun was trying to break through and she angled her face southwest, leaning against a porch support. She sat on a cushion borrowed from a chaise lounge, the blue blanket from her room shawled around her, over her jacket. Ginger peach tea, a gift from her mother’s friend Sharon two or three weeks ago, in the thermos Eleanor used to take into the studio with her.

  The tide was high, a good thing because it would have been painful to see Rid, or, more accurately, his truck. Caroline thought of his dog and wished the Lab were with her now. Annie—no, he’d called her Lizzie, yes, Lizzie—would curl next to Caroline now with her chin on Caroline’s thigh while she fondled the velvet ears and whispered, you stay right here now girl, good girl, good, good girl. The dog would wash Caroline’s face with that eager kissing tongue and c
omfort her.

  She had to pee twice, which she accomplished in a thicket of beach plums on the far side of the house. This constant pressure like an insistent thumb on her bladder was because she was pregnant. Eleanor had smiled and said, “Good. Now you won’t be alone.” Eleanor must have been out of her head from the morphine when she said that. The air was getting colder, the light thinner: that was how Caroline marked the passage of time toward dusk. No watch on her wrist today. She’d had the presence to note that her mother died just after two o’clock. They’d want to know that for the death certificate.

  Maybe she was breaking some dumb-ass law by not calling anybody but Elsie, come to think of it. She shrugged her shoulders slightly. It wouldn’t be the first or the worst law she’d broken, so the hell with it. What could they do to her that wouldn’t make her life easier now? If they put her back in jail, at least she wouldn’t have to plan her time. Caroline rested her head on her knees, which she’d drawn up against her chest for warmth. She’d go back to Chicago after she finished things up here. Would she sell the house, though? Lord, that would kill Eleanor. Now there was an ironic word choice. But could she afford the taxes if she weren’t living and working here? How about renting it out? Why hadn’t she figured all this out in advance?

  Elsie’s car crunched at the top of the gravel drive. Caroline lifted her head to watch it come into sight. She wasn’t aware of tears, though she’d blown her nose a couple of times, but her faded jeans had navy circles dark and moist as the receiving earth staining her knees when she stood.

  * * * *

  Elsie had parked in the early Cape twilight and the two women hugged.

  “You’re shivering,” Elsie said, drawing the blanket back up and around Caroline’s back from where it had slipped down. “Let’s get you inside. Would it be all right for me to say goodbye to her?”

  “I think so. I’ve already said goodbye, though.”

  “You don’t need to do it again. What you need is to go upstairs, take a warm bath and maybe lie down. Have you called the funeral home?”

  Caroline felt a flush of shame. “No. I know I was supposed to, but…”

  “Shh. You’ve done everything exactly fine. Nobody could have done a better job than you’ve done here.” Elsie touched Caroline’s cheek and lifted her face like a child’s, by a finger under the chin. “Look at me. I’m telling you the truth. I’ll make the call now. You’re using Adams Mortuary, right?” she said.

  Caroline nodded. In the dusky light, Elsie’s face was pale and tired looking. Caroline realized it must be past the time for her to have gone home, but didn’t mention it.

  “Who else should be called? Your mother’s friends. You call one of her closest friends and ask her to call the rest for you. Then you take a bath. I bet it would feel good to put those lavender bath salts I was using for your mother in it, you know? I’ll bring up something to eat and some tea.” And Elsie led her into the house.

  After calling Noelle, Caroline headed upstairs at Elsie’s urging. Halfway up, she turned back to the nurse who had positioned herself at the bottom between Caroline and her mother’s body. Caroline could see the shape of Eleanor’s legs and feet and wanted to hold her again, even knowing that some embrace had to be the last, and the one she’d already given, the one in which their mingled breaths had hung in the air between them, should be the one.

  “I told her. I think it helped her let go. I didn’t promise her, but I know what she wants. I just don’t see how I can do it.”

  “You don’t have to deal with this tonight. Just go get undressed. I’ll be up in a few minutes with the salts. Remember, warm—not hot—water.”

  Minutes later, Caroline studied herself in the bathroom mirror while the bath water ran foamy, lightly scented: puffy, bloodshot eyes, circles smudged beneath them as if by Eleanor’s thumb in one of her charcoal renderings. In fact, now that she looked closely, her whole face looked swollen. Her roots were showing; it was way past time for a highlight job, unless the gray could be considered a substitute. And look, she thought: matching new wrinkles around both sides of my mouth. Even if I wanted to, I’m too old and beat up now to have a baby. How can I look so old and feel like such a child? An orphan. Who in the world do I have to help me? Elsie will be leaving. Oh God, where did my mother go?

  And suddenly, she was crying at the too-largeness, the mystery of things, needing to make them small enough to think about, to get her arms around. But there was another death coming. And there’d be no Elsie to pull the blanket up around her, draw a bath, make her tea, with kind, recognizable words in a familiar world. She was stammering, in the realm of the inexplicable and unanswerable; comprehensible language had become both utterly trite and desperately needed.

  * * * *

  It had to be done. It was the right thing to do, and yet Caroline’s mind went flimsy as milkweed seed over a memorial service. Bless Eleanor for having told the hospice chaplain what she wanted. One of her own clean-lined vases on the altar with autumn foliage in it. A matching urn in which Caroline had had the mortuary put her ashes. A flutist, a vocal soloist, some of Eleanor’s favorite poems and readings, a picture of her at her wheel out in the meetinghouse foyer.

  Caroline didn’t have a black dress. Eleanor had one, though, and so Caroline, who didn’t care if it was a little tight, found herself sitting in the front row of the Unitarian Meetinghouse in Provincetown in her mother’s dress with Elsie beside her, Julie behind her, and her mother’s oldest, best friends, completing a protective circle. In case I faint, she thought, which didn’t seem entirely impossible as she’d thrown up that morning. And they don’t even know.

  She tried to listen. This is important, she told herself. This is to honor your mother. Pay attention. But she was distracted by nausea and astonishment: the church was standing room only. If she herself died now, who would come? She’d cut off her own roots so thoroughly, twice really, first from here when she’d fled to Chicago and now from Chicago, where she’d never made real friends anyway.

  “Eleanor asked that we close this memorial service with a specific sung version of the twenty-third psalm,” Caroline heard Barbara say. “She particularly wanted these words as a gift and comfort to her daughter, Caroline, for whom her love will endure beyond all boundaries of earth and time.”

  Caroline jolted at the sound of her own name. Elsie took her hand and held it on her own gray wool thigh. The soloist stood and sang, and when she reached the last verse, Caroline heard her mother’s last words to her. “…no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home.”

  The benediction followed, a final directive from Eleanor. God be with you till we meet again. And it was over. She had only to make it through coffee in the big room downstairs, the people wanting to hug and kiss her, people she knew by name from childhood, people she was embarrassed to see, people who knew she’d been to prison and who’d have even more to talk about if they knew she was pregnant.

  Sharon had people sign a guest book. Noelle stood behind the coffee table while Karen and Carol kept replenishing the cookies they’d all baked. Such kindness, even though she’d pushed them beyond arm’s distance. How were they finding it in themselves to be so nice?

  It was exhausting to respond to people, saying the same thing over and over. They formed a straggling line to speak to her but then lingered, talking to each other, balancing cups and the background noise grew. Finally, she reached the end of hands that wanted to squeeze hers and search her face for something she couldn’t give them. “Say the word when you want to go,” Elsie said, when the crowd was finally thinning. “You’ve put in enough face time. These people will all go when you do.”

  “Do you go to all your patients’ funerals?” Caroline asked, thinking how hard that must be, when every patient is terminally ill, how many funerals a year Elsie must have to go to.

  “No,” Elsie said. “I have different relationships with different patients. And it makes a difference when a family member doe
sn’t have anyone else, you know? I tend to get closer then.”

  Caroline hugged her, tearing over. It was another surprise, what made her tear and what didn’t. “Thank you for being here. It’s not enough, but thank you so much.”

  “Don’t feel cut adrift. We’ll stay in touch. You remember—we do things differently out here.”

  As the women gathered coats and purses, both Noelle and Sharon offered to have Caroline come to their homes for the night. When she declined, they offered to spend the night with her. “Really, I’m all right,” she said. It had to be faced. There was no point in putting it off.

  That night, she opened a bottle of wine and lit a fire. Alone. She shouldn’t drink, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to keep the baby. She put on the public radio station, too tired to pick out discs. Feet on the coffee table, she began reading through the guest book to see which names she could still match with faces. So much of the day was a blur, she could understand how she’d missed most of it but not this—in black block printing, toward the front of the book. Ridley Neal.

  * * * *

  The night wasn’t as problematic as her mother’s friends thought it would be. The next days were much worse. The service behind her, Caroline was left with a collection of sad details like so many dying bouquets, one of which was, literally, so many dying bouquets, even though she’d requested memorial contributions to hospice instead of flowers. The hospital bed hadn’t been picked up yet, although she’d called twice. She was donating the bedside commode to hospice, along with Eleanor’s cane and walker.

  Her mother’s clothing would be the worst. Opening the door to her mother’s bedroom on the fourth day, she took a few steps in and sank down on the big bed Eleanor hadn’t slept in for months, but she and Rid had. That much drained her.