Louisa Meets Bear (25 page)

David begins in the balanced but slightly shrill cadence of an eldest child forced too early to abdicate cuteness for responsibility. (“
Bossy, bossy
,” Sam used to taunt when David, left in charge by their mother at the swimming pool, would refuse to spend the lunch money he'd been given for the four of them at the Good Humor truck.)

Marnie has trouble paying full attention to David's long-winded speech. Today—David pauses for dramatic emphasis—makes eighty-eight days their mother has been in a coma. Yes, it is true, very few people have come out of a coma lasting that long. This, however, is beside the point. Even if
no one
has ever regained consciousness after a head injury such as Raya sustained, it is impossible to predict the course that any individual's illness might take or, for that matter, what treatment innovations might be discovered. A hundred years ago, no one would have believed you could transplant a heart.

Marnie pours milk into the pallid decaf. We are not God, David continues. It is not our job to determine another person's D-day. Rather, it is our duty to care for our mother as long as she remains alive and to do everything in our power to make her comfortable in the meantime.

David folds his hands and scowls, annoyed, it seems, that anything more need be said.

Sam counters in short staccato sentences. David is simply paraphrasing the Hippocratic oath. He's approaching this like a doctor. But Raya is not their patient. As a family, they have an obligation to make choices that honor her personhood, that don't place their own sentimental needs over those of the community. It is their own sentimental need to keep her heart pumping even if she has effectively died.

“It's not a kindness to her,” Sam continues. “Raya was a woman of great dignity.” Sam's voice catches, and Marnie can see her sister swallowing to keep herself under control. “She can't talk, she can't move, she can't even breathe by herself.”

“That sounds like social engineering,” David says, circling back through Sam's words for the kill. “Like you're advocating that a council determine who should live and who should die.”

“That's exactly what we do,” Sam says, her voice rising. “What do you think it means that we pay for heart transplants for two thousand people a year and leave millions of others shut out from hospital care because they have no insurance?”

They go on, her sister and brother at opposite ends of the table, Marnie seated in between, superfluous to their argument, the shape of which she could have predicted: David's devotion to his doctorly humanism where value lies in any life, no matter the condition or cost, versus Sam's devotion to the defense of the powerless over the powerful such that each drip of Raya's IV is simultaneously an affront to Raya's autonomy and a school lunch wrenched from a child.

As their father would have forecast, Sam is the stronger rhetorician, with each of her arguments prompting David to greater and greater grandstanding.

“And
who
,” David says with exaggerated slowness, “
who
should decide how many days Mom gets to use a respirator?”

Marnie feels her neck muscles tighten and cramp. They seem too small, too intimate, the three of them. She wishes that someone else—Ben or even Nancy—were here with them.

“You?” David says, his finger cutting the air, fast like a metronome set for a march. “And, just to take the hypothetical situation, what if you had ulterior motives for not wanting her alive?”

Marnie breathes deeply; perhaps if she could relax herself it would calm David too. And then,
sharp
, like someone stomping on her foot, she realizes who it is that's missing. Alan, who will have been dead twenty years in two days. She covers her eyes, trying to ward off Alan's painting of the six of them as a table setting, the wooden box filled with letters to God that she and Raya found under Alan's bed the summer they painted his room, Alan's face in the coffin, waxy and older-looking as if the passage into death had catapulted his body ten years forward in time.

David and Sam stop talking. Marnie squeezes her dripping nose between two fingers and bats at a tear rolling off her cheek.

“Damn it,” Sam says, “damn it to hell,” and then hides her own face. David gets up and awkwardly wraps his arms around the back of Marnie's chair. He stands huddled over Marnie until she gently pushes away from the table, disengaging her body. “I'm okay, I'm okay,” she says.

David goes to the half bath by the kitchen and brings back a ceramic box with Kleenex inside. Marnie and Sam blow their noses on Nancy's scented tissues.

“I'm sorry,” Marnie says. “Just the two of you have gotten so far astray.”

Marnie blows her nose again and then looks up at her brother and sister. “Can we start over?”

David sits. He chews on a cuticle. Sam taps on the table. Marnie exhales loudly. “The issue, it seems to me,” she says, “is what Mom would want. I know she never did a living will, but that doesn't mean we can't make our best guess about what she would have said.”

“She was in excellent health,” David says. “I'm sure she never expected to be in this situation for at least another decade. But, even if she had told us clearly what she wanted, it's unclear whether the hospital administration would abide by our verbal report.”

“That,” Sam says, “is the legal question. Marnie's right. The real question is do we have any clues as to how Mom felt about all of this?”

“I've been thinking about it,” Marnie says. “I really don't.”

When Marnie last visited Raya, she'd been struck by the sounds: the whir of the respirator, the drip of the IV, the hum that seemed to come from the walls, the occasional clang from the hallway of a metal cart hitting a doorjamb. Only Raya had been perfectly quiet.

David has sunk low in his chair at the head of the table. He looks lost, as though the move away from the medical-ethical domain has left him without bearings.

Marnie has the uncomfortable feeling that there's something she's leaving out, something she should be telling her brother and sister. She closes her eyes to concentrate, and again the plastic rain bonnet, unfolded and drifting loose in space like a kite broken free from its owner, enters her mind. The mustard envelope. The mustard envelope with the second police report.

In the first report, the driver of the bread truck claimed that Raya had darted out in front of the truck. They'd all dismissed this as the driver's desperate attempt not to lose his job. Now, though, the bakery's insurance company has found a witness—the boy onto whose parked car Raya had flown. Sixteen and stunned by the blood, he'd bolted around the corner to vomit, not returning until after the ambulance and police had left. A second police report has been filed in which the boy states that he saw the whole thing. She had a newspaper under one arm and a plastic scarf tied over her hair, the boy is quoted as saying. The truck was coming one way and she was walking the other. Suddenly she walked right in front of it. It was like she didn't even look.

“It's not the kind of thing you talk about in once-a-week phone calls,” Sam says, “whether you'd want the plug pulled if you were in a coma.”

“Listen,” Marnie says, so softly she's unsure if she's actually spoken out loud or if the word has been drowned out by the screech of Sam's chair legs.

Standing, Sam stretches her arms overhead, fingers laced, balancing for a moment on her toes. “I could use a drink,” she says. David slumps farther into his chair. Marnie raises her brows and points at the centerpiece.

“Shit. I forgot about Higher Power here.”

David jerks himself upright. He looks at his watch. “Fuck it,” he says, “let's go to the Millhouse. I could use a double scotch myself.”

*   *   *

Marnie hasn't been to the Millhouse since high school, when a boyfriend supplied her with his sister's ID so she could get served. Except for the video poker screen over the bar and a CD juke player, the place is unchanged: a cavernous room with a long wooden bar on one side, a dance floor and pool table on the other side, tables covered with green-checked cloths in between. As they walk in, Marnie examines the faces of the people at the bar. Three men, young, in gray work clothes, maybe guys from the tire plant in the next town, are downing beers. An obese woman with pale wispy hair nurses a drink while her companion, a small mustachioed man, punches something on a remote-control box he points at the poker screen. He looks up at the screen, grins, and claps silently.

Marnie and Sam order wine, and David orders a double scotch. Sam takes out a pack of Marlboros. “You mind?” she asks, almost desperately. Both Marnie and David shake their heads no.

“When was the last time you were here?” Marnie says, looking at Sam.

“It's been decades. Probably one summer when I was home from college.”

“And you?” Marnie asks David.

David sips his scotch and touches the Marlboro pack. “Can I have one?”

Sam makes a low whistle. “Just don't tell Nancy it was mine if she smells smoke on you.”

“I come here on occasion.” David smiles. “After an afternoon of too many little old ladies complaining of flatulence and irregularity.”

Sam stares over David's shoulder in the direction of the bar. “That woman,” she says. “She looks so familiar.”

Marnie glances up. The obese woman is walking toward them. When she nears the table, she stops a few feet back, as though taking into account her girth. “Excuse me,” she says. “Aren't you the”—she touches a damp upper lip—“the Kleins?”

Marnie and Sam look at David.

“David, David Klein. And you're…?”

“Laura Mulvaney. That's my married name. But I was Laura Preston.”

Sam's eyes open wide. “Laura! Laura Preston. Oh my God.”

Laura Preston had been Alan's girlfriend. She pushes back a strand of her wispy hair. “I've put on a lot of weight.”

Sam, who never turns red, turns red.

“It's okay,” Laura says. “No one recognizes me anymore.”

Marnie pulls out the fourth chair at the table. She touches Laura's hand above the wrist. Soft flesh rests like a pillow over the bone. “Please,” Marnie says. “Join us.”

When Alan first met Laura, she'd been in Sam's biology class, a year younger than Alan, with white-blond hair that reached her waist and pale droopy eyes. Every night, Alan would interrogate Sam about anything she might have learned about Laura, but all Sam ever had to tell was that Laura never said anything and always got the highest grade in the class. It had taken Alan two months to get up the nerve to call Laura and ask her out. Sam coached Alan on what to say. Then David wrote him out a script. In the end, Alan had Marnie role-play the call with him. He was dumbfounded when Laura immediately said yes. Until Alan left for college, they'd been inseparable. Once he was at Amherst, they talked every night on the phone. At Thanksgiving—only a week before his suicide—he told David he was going to have to get a part-time job to pay the bills.

“David, Sama, and Marnie,” Laura says.

“Right,” Marnie says. “Only now Sama is Sam.”

“Sam,” Laura repeats. She wheezes slightly, and Marnie wonders if this is normal for her or if she's upset at seeing them. “I'm sorry about your mother.”

David raises an eyebrow.

“I read about it in the local paper,” Laura says. Her eyes are lost in folds of skin and it's hard to tell what she might be feeling.

Thinking about it now, Marnie realizes that she hasn't spoken with Laura since the last Thanksgiving Alan was alive. After Laura had eaten with her own family, she'd come over to join them for dessert. Marnie can still picture the table: her parents at the two ends; Sam and David on the side by the window; Alan, Laura, and herself opposite them. When David asked Laura where she was planning to apply to colleges, Alan answered for her: Smith, Mount Holyoke, the University of Massachusetts. All places near Amherst.

Raya inquired if Laura knew what she wanted to study.

“Paleontology,” Laura whispered.

“What's that?” Sam asked.

“Bones,” David said. “Bones and fossils.”

Raya shot David a sharp look. “Let Laura speak.”

They all turned to look at Laura, and Marnie remembers now the way Laura pushed a clump of her hair behind an ear only to have it cascade back over her cheek as she murmured, “The study of the origin of life.”

Ten days later, when the phone call came about Alan, Marnie's first thought was about Laura. Raya called Laura's mother to have her tell Laura. Marnie had been shocked when neither Laura nor her parents came to the funeral. Later, when Marnie would see her in the hallways at the high school, Laura would lower her head. Then, after New Year's, she hadn't come back to school.

“Would you like a drink?” David asks Laura.

Laura looks over at her companion at the bar. She waves in his direction but he's staring at the video screen and doesn't notice her.

“Sure,” she says. “He can play that thing for hours.”

“Invite him to join us,” Marnie says.

“Best just leave him be. Jimmie's not much of a conversationalist.”

David beckons the waitress and orders more wine for Sam and Marnie, a sea breeze for Laura, and another scotch for himself. He takes a second of Sam's cigarettes, and begins the catch-up with Laura, exchanging his family and job details for hers: married to Jimmie over there, no children, bookkeeper at the Pontiac dealership.

Marnie finishes her first glass of wine. Unaccustomed to drinking in the afternoon, she can feel the effects—the slowing of her thoughts, the widening gulf between what's in her head and what can be put into words. Across the room, there's a table of older people having some sort of celebration. One of the women, short and plump with a reddish bouffant and a maroon pants suit, gets up and puts some coins in the CD player, and soon something that sounds like the Benny Goodman big band comes over the speakers. The woman pulls one of the men to his feet and onto the dance floor. They move like people who've been dancing together for decades, in a polished synchrony, smiling gently at each other; within seconds, the years, the pounds, the wrinkles drop off and they're spinning like Fred and Ginger.