Called
My mother had not opened her eyes since ten to one that morning, and by noon the word the nurses used was unresponsive, said carefully. Deb told me what to expect. The breathing would change. The hands and feet would cool and take on a color she called marbled. It might be hours or it might be a day or two, and no one could say which. I recognized the tone. It is the one I use on people whose ceilings are coming down, exact about what and vague about when.
Marisol came in at noon to turn her. She talked to my mother the whole time, low and cheerful, Miss Joan, I'm going to roll you toward me now, here we go, and said nothing to me. When she went out I said thank you, and she said "Mm-hm" to the corridor.
I took the phone out at 1:15. It had been buzzing against my hip for half an hour and for half an hour I had wanted to let it.
The first one was from Adam, sent at 12:40.
I went to the sheriff. It's on the record. All of it's mine.
I read it once, in the corridor by the ice machine. On Monday I had told him there was a light, and he had driven to a desk in Aldine and put his name under it, and now it was in a file with a number on it, and a week from today it would be in the Sentinel, in type, on kitchen tables up and down County Road 612. All of it. I had handed him that sentence myself, on a fire lane, in the voice I use on the phone with policyholders, and he had taken it to a sergeant and signed.
My hands were steady on the phone.
I typed a reply and deleted it. The first draft was Adam. The second was Adam, I and a cursor. I say his name to him some forty times a day, and I stood in a hospice corridor and could not get a second word to follow it. Then I put the phone face down on top of the ice machine, where it hummed once against the steel, and went back into 114 and sat down.
The second message had come in at 12:58, and I read it at the bedside with the concentrator going. It was from Heartland's Employee Relations, and it confirmed Monday. Two p.m., the Grand Rapids office, Conference Room 4B. Please bring your employee badge and no other materials. Your access to the claims system and the SIU database has been suspended pending review. It was a good letter. I have written the second paragraph of that letter myself, to other people, about other things, and I knew exactly which phrases were there to be kind and which to be entered into evidence. I had a story ready for Monday, a clean one, the kind that keeps a person employed. I had had it ready since the twenty-eighth. I closed the email without deciding anything.
At three I went out to sign the visitor log, which I have done at every visit since August without reading the page. Today I read it. The book lives in a binder at the counter with a pen on a chain, and the sheet for the fourth had my name at the top for the morning and, lower down, in block capitals, ADAM VOSS, in at 2:38, room 114, with nothing in the relation column. The out column was empty. I turned back through the sheets. He was there on the twenty-second of September. He was there on the second of October, in at 10:15 and out at 11:40, and on the twenty-seventh, in by nine. Every one had a time out, in the same square hand that labels lumber in our garage, except the last.
Leah called at twenty to four.
"He's at the cottage," she said. "He won't answer."
"How do you know he's at the cottage?"
"Because I called the landline and he picked up and didn't say anything. I said his name four times, Claire. Then he put it down." Behind her I could hear a dishwasher and a television going in another room. "And Doug Halloran called me. Me. He wanted to know whether my brother was in the hospital, because he walked off the job Tuesday and left his tape measure hanging on the newel post. Is he in the hospital?"
"No."
"Then what is going on with him? Is this the ashes? Is this Monday, whatever happened Monday? What did you say to him?"
"I'm at Birchwood, Leah. My mother's dying."
The dishwasher went on for a few seconds by itself. "Oh," she said. "Today?"
"The nurses say days. Today or tomorrow, they don't say." I looked at the binder on the counter, at his name with its empty column. "Adam was here yesterday, Leah. Wednesday afternoon. He sat with her for a while, and I wasn't here for it."
"He didn't tell me that."
"I don't think he's telling anyone anything."
"The kids are at their dad's till Sunday. I'll come up tonight. I'll get him out of that boathouse if I have to drag him." Her voice caught on something and went on past it. "Tell her I said. I don't know what. Tell her I said hi."
"I will."
I didn't tell her about the sheriff.
Marisol came in at eight with a paper cup in each hand, and set one on the tray table by my elbow and kept the other. "It's from the machine," she said. "So it's bad." She checked the line in my mother's arm and lifted the blanket at the foot of the bed and looked at her feet and put it back.
"Marisol."
She waited, with her hand still on the blanket.
"I'm sorry about the car."
"Not tonight," Marisol said.
She said it without heat. At the door of 114 she stopped with her hand on the frame, still looking at the corridor and not at me.
"Talk to her, if you've got anything. Hearing's the last thing to go."
"She hasn't answered since one o'clock last night."
"That's not what it's for."
I drank the coffee. It was too hot and tasted of the pot it had sat in, and I drank all of it, because I had eaten nothing since Tuesday, and because it was the only thing anyone had brought me in a week.
The night nurse took the pulse and the pressure at ten and again at midnight, and after midnight she stopped writing them down. Renata is a big calm woman who hums when she works, and she stopped humming. My mother's breathing had a pattern by then. A run of breaths, shallow and quick, then a run that went deeper, then nothing, a stretch of nothing, and then the run began again. In the nothing I found I had stopped breathing myself. At midnight the nothing was twenty seconds. At one it was thirty. I timed it against the clock over the door, because I time things, and I did not stop myself.
Her hands had gone the color Deb had said. I took the right one off the blanket and held it. It was cool and lighter than a hand should be, and the nails had a blue under them, and the fingers had the straight square look of someone who kept books, and they did nothing when I held them.
At ten to one the night before she had asked me a question, and I had let eleven breaths of the machine go by and given her nothing, and she had let me. She had said all right and asked me for the other thing instead.
At two I pulled the chair in as close as it would go.
"Mom," I said.
The concentrator pushed and hissed. The line on the monitor did what it had been doing.
"She called me," I said. "I heard her. I didn't go."
My hands began to shake.
I had never seen them do it. The right one, the one holding hers, moved against her fingers like a leaf, and I put the left one over it to stop it and the left one shook too, and both of them shook the blanket. I let them.
Her breathing didn't change.
The run came, the shallow run, and then the nothing, and I waited through it, and then the run began again at the pace I had learned. Nothing in her face had moved. I don't know what I had thought would happen. That she would open her eyes. That she would say something dry.
I said it again, to be sure, and to hear it.
"She called me. I heard her. I didn't go."
Then I sat, and the room went on around us. Somewhere down the hall a call light chimed, and Renata's shoes went past, and stopped, and went on.
Some time after four the nothing went past a minute. Renata came in and stood at the foot of the bed with her hands folded in front of her and didn't say anything, and I understood the standing. I looked at the clock over the door. I look at the time first. It was 4:09. A breath came, a small one, smaller than the ones before it, and I waited for the next at the pace I had learned, and I waited past the pace, and then I waited for twice that.
Renata came around the bed and laid two fingers under my mother's jaw and looked at her watch for a full minute. Then she looked at the wall clock, and then back at her watch, as if the two might argue.
"Four-ten," she said, and wrote it on the chart.
Her hand was still warm. It would be for a while. I kept it.
I sat with her until the forms came. Renata brought a clipboard and a pen and stood while I signed. She asked which funeral home, and I gave her the name of the one in Aldine, and she wrote it down without asking why it wasn't the one in Traverse City. Then she went out, and I heard her say something low to Marisol in the corridor, and neither of them came in. I sat in the chair Adam had sat in. My mother's mouth had fallen a little open, and someone had turned off the concentrator, and the room was quieter than I had ever heard it. The cannula had left two red lines across her cheeks. I watched them. They faded while I watched, and by the time I looked away they were gone. Nobody had told me how much of that room was the machine.
The last thing she asked of me was this. Let him keep it. He's carried it this long. I had told her I already had, and she had said good, and it was the last thing she said to me.
Her hand was warm in mine. She gave me no answer, and I wasn't owed one.
At twenty to five I stood in the corridor by the ice machine with my phone. I didn't draft it. I typed it with my thumbs while the machine dropped a load of ice into its own bin.
She's gone. I'm going to the landing. There's a part you don't have.
I sent it before I could reread it. I have never in my life sent anything I hadn't read twice.
Marisol was standing at the door of 114 when I went back for my bag. She had a fresh blanket over her arm, folded, and she looked at the coat in my hand and at my face.
"Go," she said. "I've got her."