The Exact Same Moon Read online

  I plunk myself back down in the booth. The woman said it will take a few hours before the vans arrive. Fine. Fine. Fine. Sooner or later you just surrender. When you’re stuck, you’re stuck. This must be what a false labor feels like, from the baby’s point of view. Contraction, contraction, then … nothing. Just more waiting. I wonder why I’m so stuck on this labor metaphor.

  I lean back. I shut my eyes. I take a few deep breaths, sink into the moment. Eventually I feel it. I feel her. My mother. She was always so—bony. That’s how it was. That’s how it was to be in my mother’s arms. I don’t remember the kind of soft, mushy experience you imagine a baby feeling when you hold one. I don’t know why my mom was bony. She’s not an overly thin woman. Just a regular-sized woman. But she’s not mushy. I mean, there is nothing mushy about my family in general. We’re not kissy. We’re not huggy. There’s an emotional warmth, but not a physical one. It’s like, sometimes you just want to wake up and be Italian. Mamma mia! Slobber, slobber. Sob, sob. Kiss, hug, slop, slop, slop. “I love you! I love you! Mamma mia!” See, I wouldn’t mind a good dose of that in our family.

  I think if I ever have a child, I’ll work on becoming Italian. I’ll be mushy and sloppy.

  Well, that’s funny. I mean, listen to that. “If I ever have a child.” That child idea has been popping into my head a lot lately. It’s strange. The idea comes into my head like the rumbling of a far-off thunderstorm. Then it vanishes.

  Maybe it all goes back to being the baby of the family. That’s your identity: baby. You cling to “baby” because, well, that’s you. When the baby of the family imagines herself as a mom, it’s always a far, far-off sort of thing. I’m the baby of our family. This is the way it has always been for me. But now I am, well, I am thirty-nine.

  Hours pass before the vans arrive. Mack, who sticks right here by my side, has been entertaining me with flying stories. I still can’t quite forgive him for cheating on Claire all those years. He follows me out to the curb. “Well, bye,” he says. He asks if he could have a hug. I offer my hand instead. He shakes it. “I can’t go without meeting people,” he says. “It’s why I come here.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “One last thing,” he says. “I married the one I loved.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Oh, everybody knew that. But on the last night, you know, it was a heart attack.” He takes his hat off. His hair is wiry gray. His forehead has a crease on it from probably a lifetime of hats. “She had several before. I figured she would make it through again, I really did.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “And I never told her I loved her,” he says.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “I should have told her,” he says.

  I nod, trying not to take sides, which really is quite impossible when you are face-to-face with one of the sides. “Maybe she knew,” I say. “Oh, she had to know.”

  Crozer Chester Medical Center is where my dad worked before he retired, where he served as chief of medicine, and it’s the hospital with which my brother’s practice is now affiliated. So there’s a certain comfort zone here in this orange brick building clinging to the edge of Interstate 95. I worked here one summer when I was still in high school. I liked wearing the white nurse’s uniform and the shoes. I liked strutting around the hospital in that get-up, feeling like a medical person, even though I wasn’t one and knew I never would be. You learn some things about yourself early on. You learn if you are a person comfortable with seeing tubes sticking out of people’s arms, or if you aren’t. I swear even as a kid my sister Claire could see the arm-tube deal and she would want to run and help the person. I was more the runaway type from the get-go. Sick people scared me. Sick people still scare me. This isn’t the most unique character flaw a person could have. But I think that many people, by the time they reach my age, have had some experience with sick people, so they get better at it. They start knowing what all the tubes are for; they have a familiarity with beds that go up and down; they no longer even notice the thick, sour hospital smell. I am not one of those people.

  My mom is out of the ICU, reportedly in Room 109. I am trudging there. I see Claire first. Oh boy, she looks awful. Now see, Claire is bony. And when she’s tired, she looks even bonier. She’s got fiery red hair, borrowing from my maternal grandmother’s Irish side, and a long, thin face from my grandfather’s French. I got more of the total Lithuanian deal from my dad’s one hundred percent Lithuanian side.

  “Did you sleep here or something?” I ask Claire.

  “Sleep?” she says. “Very funny. I just sent Dad and Kristin home. The nurses are changing her. We can go in in a minute. Did you hear about the septic tank?”

  “Huh?”

  “They have to dig the old septic tank out before they close on the house.”

  “Dig it out?”

  “That’s what the EPA guy said. Plus, they found radon. So they have to do a whole radon thing.”

  “Oh, jeez. Dad’s not good at this sort of thing under the best of circumstances.”

  “Exactly,” Claire says.

  We’re talking here leaning against the wall. A cinder block wall painted pink. I ask Claire to tell me everything she knows about this disease. This seems to brighten her mood. She gets comfort from using her brain. She tells me Guillain-Barré Syndrome, or GBS, can hit anybody, any age, for no reason that anyone can yet determine. One of her eighteen-month-old patients even contracted it. It often seems to come after a virus. “Remember Mom had that cold?” she says, as if determined to get to the bottom of this.

  “Yeah, but … a cold? That was a cold.”

  “There’s also a theory that you can get it from eating partially cooked chicken,” she says.

  “Mom wouldn’t eat partially cooked chicken,” I say.

  Claire tells me that in GBS the immune system suddenly goes haywire, and starts attacking the lining of the nerves, which deteriorate, so the nerves short out. “Kind of like if all the insulation came off an extension cord,” she says, and then explains that in GBS the paralysis usually starts at the feet and moves up the body. “Do you remember Mom said she felt like her feet kept falling asleep last week?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, that must have been when it started. Some people, it happens really fast, some slower.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “I know.”

  I’m tracing my finger along the ridges of the shiny cinder blocks. Pink? They painted this place pink? I feel like I’m stuck inside somebody’s intestines.

  “But the lining of the nerves grows back,” Claire says. “So most people get, you know, better.”

  “How long does the getting better take?”

  “A long time.”

  “How long is long?” I say.

  “A year?”

  “I can’t believe this! This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. You’re fine one day and the next day you’re totally paralyzed, checking out of life for a year?”

  “I know,” Claire says. “I know.”

  She tells me about my mother’s breathing. As the paralysis creeps up the body, in many cases it strikes the muscles that enable you to breathe. This is what started happening with my mom. “They’re hoping that it has stopped just short of that,” Claire tells me. “If it doesn’t, they’ll have to intubate. Mom seems pretty determined to avoid that.”

  “That’s a big deal, to intubate?” I ask.

  “Well, if it’s your throat they’re putting the tube down …”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So Mom knows all this is going on?” I ask.

  “Oh, totally. Mentally she’s just, you know, totally Mom.”

  I let out a rather enormous sigh, which Claire interprets with pinpoint accuracy.

  “You’re not good at this,” she says.

  “No.”

  “I’ll go in with you. I’ll stay.”

  �
��Yeah.”

  “Come on, let’s go in.”

  See, I’m choking up. I’m doing the look-down thing. The hair-in-the-face thing. The bite-the-hell-out-of-your-lip thing to keep-yourself-from-crying thing.

  Claire goes in first. I follow. I shake my head. I shake my brain loose. I have to look cheerful. My role in the family is: the cheerful one. Certainly with my mom. “Oh, thank God I had you,” my mom has always said. “You would wake up in the morning and sing and play with your toes. Those others were terrible. Terrible! You were such a nice break.” Cheerful! My job right now is to look cheerful. My mom shouldn’t see some blubbering idiot. That would only make her feel worse. I am the cheerful one, so be cheerful, damn it!

  It takes some doing, but I force my face into a smile and quicken my pace. “I made it!” I say to my mom, as I burst into her view. “Hey, I’m here! Oh, I’ve been stuck in the Bradford airport, you wouldn’t believe that place. Hey, you know what! You look great! You really do!”

  Her eyes are smiling. I think they really are. And she does look good. I mean, for a paralyzed person. It’s not like she was in a car accident and has bandages. She’s just … lying down. Mostly she just looks like … my mom. My mom has a pleasantly round face, intelligent green eyes, and a jaw that often stays clenched, as if she’s holding back, holding back telling you the history of everything you’re talking about, because she’s read about it, she’s read a biography of all those characters you’re mentioning; she often reads seven books a week.

  That’s the difference. Her jaw isn’t clenched now. No, there is nothing holding that jaw in place. This lends a softness to her face I’m not used to. And she does look quite out of place in her pajamas, out in public like this. She’s the type of woman who wears pantyhose and a skirt and a neat little blouse and a sweater vest to go to the grocery store or to sculpture class. She never even wears pants, unless it’s to garden. She gets her chocolate-brown hair washed and set and styled every Friday, and she has a lot of faith in perms. In fact, this present perm is really holding up under the circumstances. She will be glad to know this. “Hey, your hair looks good!” I tell her.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  I look at Claire.

  “She’s saving her breath,” Claire says.

  “Saving it?”

  A nurse comes in. She’s in white nurse pants and a colorful smock with cats all over it. This is so not the outfit I want to see on a nurse. I think back on my crisp white dress. And those white pantyhose. Damn. What’s happening to the world?

  “Okay, Claire!” the nurse says to my mother.

  She’s calling my mom by her first name? Oh, boy. And my mother isn’t protesting. Oh, boy. Normally, my mother would not hesitate to rebuff the uncalled-for familiarity, remaining loyal, as she does, to the Victorian tradition in which she was raised. But she isn’t protesting being called “Claire” by this stranger. She is saving her breath.

  “It’s three o’clock so we have to do this again, Claire,” the nurse says, holding up a clear gizmo with a blue ball inside.

  “She has to make the little ball reach fifteen hundred ml,” my sister tells me. If she can do this, it means her lungs are still able to take in enough air.

  The nurse pushes the button that makes the bed go into a sitting position. She holds the gadget up to my mother’s mouth. My mother looks at it, closes her eyes. She is conjuring something. She opens her eyes, wraps her lips around the mouthpiece, breathes in, breathes in so hard her head and shoulders tremble, in, in, in, she’s a soldier, she’s an army defending her homeland, she’s making the little blue ball jiggle past 1000, jiggle to 1200, jiggle, jiggle.

  “Fifteen hundred, Claire!” the nurse says. “You did it! Good girl, Claire!”

  My mother collapses. I’m standing here smiling. Smiling, I am, because this is my job. I’m saying, “Yay!” with my eyes. “Way to go, Mom!”

  My mother is looking at me, exhausted, every inch of her exhausted from this fight that has barely even begun. I’ve never noticed this before, and maybe it is just in this moment, but my mother looks like a bird. A sparrow. A baby sparrow without feathers, and no mother to come to the rescue.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I have a baby. A baby! My baby, as it turns out, is a peanut M&M. A green peanut M&M. Hmm. Well, that’s okay. I love my baby. It doesn’t even seem weird to have a baby that is a peanut M&M. But she is somewhat difficult to handle. She’s so tiny. I’m trying to give her a bath. And I have out the infant tub. It’s a regular-sized infant tub. I think: Why do they make these things so huge? I’m trying to figure out how to put my baby down so I can run the water. I think: Why don’t they make some kind of little holders for babies? So I go get a coffee cup, which I am going to put my baby in.

  But then—I drop her. I hear the plink, plunk, plink. She goes rolling under the radiator. I’m on my hands and knees, calling, “Baby? Baby? Where are you, my tiny little baby?”

  I see her. I reach into the dust and muck and pull her out safely.

  Hmm.

  It appears her nose has fallen off.

  Well, it’s a good thing there is so much to do. When there is a lot to do, there is no time to feel. Yes, yes, yes, this is exactly the way it should be. Everybody with a critically ill parent should have a house to pack up, a house holding twenty-five years of memories. And it should be a big house, a six-bedroom house with a huge attic and a vast basement, oh, it should hold about ninety million times more stuff than you could ever squish into a two-bedroom apartment at a retirement village. And you should have no idea what your parents want done with any of this stuff, your mother too ill to speak, and your father too terrified of losing her to care about earthly things. Yes, you should have to stand there in that giant house with your brother and sisters, and you should all be utterly immobilized, wondering what on earth to do with all of this stuff. And just for good measure you should have a guy with a backhoe in the backyard digging up the old septic tank and radon guys in the garage discussing ventilation.

  Definitely.

  You will have no chance to feel anything.

  “You know what, I think the magnolia is about to bloom,” Alex says. He’s on the phone. He’s still at the farm. I’m still here in Philly. It could be that I’ve been here a week, or it could be I’ve been here a month. I am not remotely sure. The phone is white. It’s in my room, my old room, the room I got when I turned sixteen. The closet door still has the red, white, and blue sticker on it from our nation’s bicentennial, the year of my high school graduation. Scrawled on the yellow wall next to me are phone numbers of friends I wish I could remember.

  “The magnolia?” I say to Alex. “Oh, it’s too early for that.”

  “Well, I’m looking at it right now, and it’s ready to pop,” he insists.

  “It’s early,” I say.

  “It’s April,” he says.

  “April? Are you sure?”

  “Definitely April,” he says. “I just sent our taxes in.”

  “You did? All by yourself you did those horrible taxes?”

  “I did.”

  “Wow, I love being married.”

  “Well, you married a good one,” he says.

  “Oh, I get the prize for having the best husband.”

  “No, no, no, I get the prize for being the best husband.”

  “Oh. Right. Okay.”

  “So you’ve already been to the hospital?” he asks. “You’re not doing the afternoon shift today?”

  “Claire and I switched,” I say. “Just for today, though. I gotta tell you, I don’t like the morning shift.”

  “No.”

  “Too many doctors coming in, poking at her.”

  “How was she?”

  “Same. She didn’t eat anything. Maybe like a half of one of those Ensure cans.”

  “Oh.”

  “And now her sodium level is way down again. She’s pretty disheartened by that.”

  “It was staying steady there
for a while.”

  “I don’t know what happened. They get one thing fixed, and then the next thing goes kerplunk. And when the sodium is down, she’s just wiped out. Wiped out. And just everything has shut down.”

  “I know.”

  “And who knew sodium could be such a big deal? Who knew people even had a sodium level?”

  “I know.”

  “The neurologist was in, sticking little pins in her feet. No reaction. None.”

  “Well, they said it’s going to be a while,” he says.

  “Yeah, well, I like my four-to-ten shift better. All the doctors are gone by then.”

  “Yeah.”

  Four to ten. That’s been my main shift. We’ve divided our days this way. My mom really needs someone with her all the time, at least during waking hours. It’s not enough for her that there is a nurse down the hall. She can’t call the nurse. She can’t push the call button. She can barely speak. She can’t feed herself. She can’t hold a spoon. She can’t brush her teeth. She can’t scratch her own nose. Maybe, in another family, they’d trust the nurses to do all of this. Maybe in another family they’d have to. But this is the way ours works. I’ve often thought that our last name should be Rally. We are the Rally Family. One of us is down, the whole clan comes in for the rescue. All for one and one for all. We have always been this way. I like it this way. It makes all the suffocation worth it. I remember as a kid when I first learned about people who were homeless. People down on their luck, living in the streets. I didn’t get it. I literally could not comprehend. “But where are their families?” I would say. Hard luck just meant you had a lot of family around you all of a sudden. It took deliberate effort to imagine a life that worked any differently.

  So with my mom sick, this is what we do. My dad arrives in the morning, sometimes as early as six, sometimes so early the guards ask him for ID. He goes in there in his suit with his little red bow tie, the uniform he always puts on before sunrise each day, he goes in there with his shock of bright white hair, silky smooth hair covering his big Lithuanian head, he goes in there, and he stands over my mom’s bed, and he reads her prayers out of his little prayer book. He feeds her a poached egg, the one thing she can seem to stomach. Then he reads her love poems. The doctors doing their rounds have learned to wait outside until he finishes a verse.