The Art of Falling (22 page)

Kandelbaum had our dishes washed by the time Pete entered the kitchen to say good night. His presence reminded me of the point of my visit. I asked if he could cover the shop one day that week so Kandelbaum could drive Angela and me down to Bethesda. Pete said he could do it the next afternoon.

“Tomorrow?” In one moment it seemed her illness had worn on so long I couldn’t endure, yet in the next, when relief was offered, it came too soon. “Let me check with Angela.”

We moved to the front of the shop so I could use the phone. No one answered. I was sure Angela was too shaky to go out, and the phone was right by her bed, and I’d left Mrs. Pope with her.

“That woman is going to be the death of me. I’ll find out what’s up.”

Kandelbaum reached for his jacket. “Maybe she’s back at the hospital.”

“Or in the shower.” I laid a calming hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, she said she was staying put. Go home and rest. You’ve got a bit of a drive ahead of you tomorrow.”

• • •

Back at the apartment, things weren’t right. No one was home. I smelled paint. The glass table was askew, votives had tumbled onto the floor, and water had splashed across the rug. An electronic beeping—the phone was off the hook. A tangle of oxygen and IV tubing lay on Angela’s bed.

A sound on the stairs startled me. Steps approached. I looked into the hallway and saw Mrs. Pope carrying a bag up the stairs.

“It’s you.” I steadied myself on the railing.

“What’s the matter?”

“Angela isn’t here,” I said. “The place is a wreck.”

Mrs. Pope shuffled past to take a look. “I couldn’t have been gone twenty minutes.”

“Maybe her mom came for her?” It made no sense the moment I said it. Angela’s suitcase, the one she wheeled back and forth to the hospital, lay open on the floor. Inside it, the feathers, baby shoe, and other trinkets from her Tree of Life lay nestled, motionless, on top of her clothes.

Mrs. Pope leaned over to pick up a spilled jar of paint. “It looks like some sort of struggle—”

“I’ll get a sponge.”

I opened the bathroom door. Flipped on the light.

Angela was on the floor, propped against the wall, her snow-white blanket clutched in her hand. Her ashen face looked now, in death, the way it must have looked in the last few moments of life—mouth open, eyes wide, fighting for air.

“Oh dear god, not now. Not like this.”

Mrs. Pope was at my shoulder, but only for a moment. She called an ambulance, told me not to touch anything. But nothing could keep me from Angela. Even in death she inspired in me a strength I never knew I had. I knelt, cradled her head in my lap, and pressed her eyelids closed.

Oh
Angela, if only you hadn’t been alone. If only you hadn’t been so frightened.

I leaned in close and told her a story. That she was home, safe in the bed she slept in as a girl. That her mother understood that the race was over, and had come to her side. That her father was here, too, begging forgiveness. That Marty had brought bread and wine, and we’d joined him in a ritual celebrating her release from pain. That friends from the gym, and all of the patients she’d ever collected at all of the hospitals, and a whole chorus of CF kids that she’d inspired had come to send her off, their breath energizing the air like noisemakers on New Year’s Eve. That we’d all wanted a turn holding her hand before she dozed off.

That she did not slip beneath a thick blanket of morphine. She fought well, even at death’s doorstep. We’d all been with her as the snow fell, blanketing her body, and she had heard our lullaby.

I stroked her cheeks as their warmth waned. And all the while, my tears fell on her unmoving chest.

• • •

Commotion. Sirens, their sudden cessation. A policeman telling me to step away, tossing her blanket to the side. Pulling Angela into the center of the room. Laying her on the blue-green carpet that created our sense of oasis.

Yes, she should rest there. I reached for her blanket. A pillow.

The heels of the officer’s hands thrusting into Angela’s chest.
What?
Another siren. Banging in the hallway. Paramedics rushing in—“Are either of you family?” The woman shoving gloved fingers into Angela’s mouth, the man cutting open her shirt. Mrs. Pope crying, still clutching the bag she’d held when she first came home from the store, the paramedics attaching electrodes to Angela’s chest. A scream ripped from mine: “Don’t touch her!”

“Does she have a DNR?”

“Yes. Yes.” Crawled to her box of medical papers, heart thumping as I reached in, eyes struggling to focus. I had to stop this; it was wrong; she was finally at peace. By the time I produced the paper, they had turned on the EKG.

The room fell silent. The lifeless desert stretched around us in every direction, offering no breeze to stir its sands or resurrect the fallen feathers. We watched with ridiculous hope as the machine whispered its long, flat line.

The rip when the man took the readout for the policeman. The final click as the woman shut off the machine.

“I understand she suffered a long illness. Had you made arrangements?”

Had she suffered a long illness? All I could remember just then was the way she fought for a long life, and how long she’d waited for love.

Kandelbaum. The thought of him broke my heart. I couldn’t tell him any of this by phone. And he didn’t need to witness the evidence of her final, frantic struggle. Better he saw her once she was all put together, at the funeral. I opened a drawer and pulled out her black socks.

Eventually, they all packed up. Emergency over. In the absence of known arrangements, they told us to await the coroner. After they left, I pulled the sheet back from Angela’s face—after watching her struggle for air for so long, I couldn’t take the look of it.

So quiet without the rattle of her lungs, the hiss of her oxygen. Mrs. Pope and I sat beside her.

One last time, I squeezed her cool hand, its inability to respond frightening and absolute. She wore the bracelet Kandelbaum had placed on her wrist. She’d never taken it off. She’d been so excited to show it to me, flipping her wrist this way and that, I hadn’t noticed: there weren’t two strands of entwined pearls, as I’d first thought. There were three. Like three lives that had come together to make something bigger, more complex, and more beautiful than any one of them could have created alone.

Mrs. Pope pulled a bottle of lotion from the bag she’d been holding. “Her skin was dry,” she said. I nodded. She squirted the lotion onto her hands, pulled back the sheet, and rubbed it into Angela’s arms. I recognized the familiar juniper scent. “There you go, dear,” she muttered. “There, there.”

Soon men arrived to lift Angela onto a stretcher and wheel her to the door. Her final exit.

For a moment, I thought of slipping the bracelet off her wrist. But I didn’t need to keep it any more than I needed to cling to Angela’s body. Both were mere symbols of something more vital anyway. The coroner wheeled her out with the bracelet right where Kandelbaum had wanted it.

When I shut the door, I looked to her Tree of Life. Habit, I guessed. I wanted the toss of its feathers to register the tornado wringing out my heart—already forgetting that Angela herself had stripped the tree.

Mrs. Pope left. I had work to do. Work I couldn’t bear to do, but work I would do, for Angela. Before I left the apartment, I took one last look around. So much of her still here. Her tiny camels caught my eye—one an awkward, humpbacked sawhorse with a blue smile—and above, a sky whose clouds even looked sunny. The empty branches of her Tree of Life reached toward me, yearning to be filled. I hit the dimmer, setting the sun on the place where we’d rested. One of us waiting for death, the other, for life.

He answered my knock from the other side of the door. It could have been quite late. I’d lost track.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

When he opened the door, I knew I’d never hold him at arm’s length again. I choked out the name I’d rarely used. “Marty.”

“She’s gone,” he said.

I nodded. I’d gotten sleepy in the taxi and walked the final blocks to his apartment so the air could slap me awake. Now the coldness and rigidity of the pavements had seeped up my legs. Only an empty doorframe stood between us, but he seemed so far away.

In one step, he was out in the hallway, and we collapsed against one another.

We sat on the couch while I told him what little I knew about Angela’s last moments on earth.

“She was beautiful in every way,” he said. “You shouldn’t be alone. And I…I…Stay here tonight,” he said. “Would you?”

I reached into my coat pocket for a tissue and felt the luggage tag I’d picked up from the floor. “I need to call Angela’s mother.”

“I could do it if you want.”

“I need to do it,” I told him.

I dialed Angela’s mother from the bedroom. For longer than I thought possible, she spoke in her typical measured manner, gathering facts and repeating them, perhaps attempting to convince herself through even tones that nothing all that earth-shattering had happened.

“So it’s over,” she said, at last. “Our work.”

“But I understand you may be close to a cure.”

A brief silence. “It could be years yet. My daughter was my reason for working.”

“Angela would want you to help those you can.”

“Penny, I know what you’ve been doing for her, and how taxing it’s been. In my absence, you have been a mother to her—”

I heard a sound, something guttural. From her, from me, both. We’d been skating on thin emotional ice and we fell through, flailing for a firm surface. I let the sobs wash over me.

Dara was wrong. It was Angela, with her stubborn, unconditional love for life, who had mothered me.

“Thank you, Penny, for being there. And taking care of…of her tonight.”

“What else can I do for you, Dr. Reed? Help you contact friends?”

“I can’t think. I’m very tired.”

“I’m at Marty’s.” My voice faltered, recovered. “Do you want to speak to him? Would it help?” I broke then. “He loved her so much—”

“I can’t. Not yet. Save the things on her Tree of Life, would you?”

“They’re already packed. She was going to bring them. She tried, you know. She wanted to get to you.”

• • •

Marty’s rumpled sheets chilled me through my clothes; I shivered while sleep refused me. I went to the bedroom door and peeked out. He was asleep, a tissue clutched in his hand. I crept into the living room and lay next to him on the sofa bed. His warmth broke down the adrenaline that had propelled me through the evening hours, and I slept.

When the phone woke us in the morning, I was spooning his back, my arm curled around his waist. He looked around the room as if he didn’t know where he was, or where to find the phone.

“You going to get that?” The flannel shirt covering his back muffled my words.

He answered in the bedroom but soon poked his head back through the door.

“It’s Dara Reed. She hasn’t slept. She says she’s been waiting till a decent hour to call back and talk to you.”

• • •

When I got off the phone, I followed the smell of brewing coffee and toasted bread into the kitchen.

“What did Dara say?”

I sat down at his little table. “She’s been making arrangements all night.”

“This is good,” he said. “So many will want to know about the service.”

I picked up my toast and set it back down. “It’s not what you think. She took her.”

“Dr. Reed took Angela?”

I nodded, still unable to believe what she’d told me. “Her voice was so…animated. She said that after we spoke last night, she realized I was right—her work with Angela didn’t need to end. Angela could still help with the research. Her daughter may have left clues that could still be a gift. She started listing things: her lungs, her pancreas, her intestines, her DNA.”

“An autopsy.”

“Her body is already in Maryland. Dara isn’t planning a funeral.” Sorrow seized my chest. “I didn’t call you to come see her and now there won’t be a service. Gone so fast…it’s like she left a vacuum…no air.” I held on to him, gasping. “I’m so sorry, Marty. So, so sorry.”

When I had calmed, he whispered, “The god in Angela was fierce. Her spirit had become so large her little body couldn’t hold it any longer. I had no need to see it.”

I couldn’t eat much. Instead, I played with the grapes in the amber glass compote in the center of the table. My mother had one like it when I was growing up. I used to pinch the plastic grapes and watch them spring back to their former shape, until their resilience failed. They eventually looked more like raisins, and she threw them away. When I pinched one of Marty’s grapes, the skin split and light green flesh burst from it. I shouldn’t have been as startled as I was; Marty wouldn’t have anything fake in his house. I let the juice run down my wrist. “Angela wouldn’t want a funeral. She would have wanted a…” I couldn’t say the word, at first. I felt entitled to my grief. But I forced it, for Angela, from a mouth twisted with pain. “A celebration.”

“Maybe when we are feeling better.”

“Yes.”

We moved to the couch. Since Pete was already set to cover the bakery for the day, we shared stories about Angela until our words slowed and our eyelids closed and we slept, propped against one another, until late afternoon.

• • •

We stopped by a liquor store for some empty boxes and took them to the apartment. I expected a more dramatic scene upon my return—yellow police tape over the door, or perhaps the door once again standing mysteriously open, as if God were coming for Marty and me, too—but everything was locked up tight. Then again, sometimes drama takes a more subtle form: Mrs. Pope had brought up Angela’s newspaper. It waited for her by our door.

I pulled out clean clothes and went into the kitchen to change. I could bet Mrs. Pope had scrubbed the bathroom, but I couldn’t go in. Not yet. Marty packed away Angela’s personal effects, which he would ship down to Dara’s. She owned so little. Angela was used to living from a suitcase, and her dearest mementos were either small enough to hang from twisted wire or incorporated into the very walls of the room. I tried to lift a file box from the bottom shelf of the bookcase and couldn’t. Inside I found years and years of neatly filed medical bills. A three-box chronicle of a life with cystic fibrosis, told in payments. We lugged everything down to his van. The sun was already starting to set.

“Do you want me to hang around?” he said. “It’s getting late and UPS won’t be open until tomorrow anyway, so if you need me to stay—”

“I’m fine,” I said, giving him a hug, although I wasn’t sure of it. Something inside me created an uncomfortable pressure. I couldn’t stay still any longer.

• • •

Did I know what I was looking for? My feet thought so. They took me to Bebe’s. On a Sunday evening, the studio could be all mine. It wasn’t until my hand searched my jacket that I remembered—I’d surrendered the key to this life. I patted my pocket as if I’d meant to do that and walked on.

Blocks later, I found what I needed at the city’s very heart, tucked beneath the historic curves of the City Hall complex. A ball of spotlights dangling from its arch lent the space below a theatrical flair. A lone sax keened from somewhere deeper within the complex; I was where I needed to be.

Would my body hold up? I articulated my feet while prancing in place. Took a few lunging strides. Circled my arms. I had aches and limitations, to be sure, but could no longer allow them to define me. I had to trust this body now. Tonight.

Because I needed, more than any other time in my life, to dance.

I wanted Angela close to my heart, but I already carried so much inside I couldn’t accommodate this new grief. The angry serpent in my belly coiled to strike. I wrenched my shoulders left and whipped my arm to the right.

My own deprivation contracted my abdomen. I fought back with a mighty arch, flinging unwanted memory out through my fingertips: that false food, filling me up without feeding me. Hurt, angst, guilt, shame—their explosive energy rose again within me. Not up my throat, but out through limbs whose choppy movements tugged me this way and that. Misguided love became a spiraling floor pattern that wound inward until I had to reverse just to keep moving. Mistreatment and betrayal shot from me in a dart of long leaps. Holding on to them was no longer an option; I couldn’t fight them in that tight, dark space. I needed them out where I could work with them.

The golden light from above glanced off an elbow, a foot, a curve. The globe of spotlights cast multiple versions of me onto the sidewalk. I did not dance alone. My partners were night spirits, a confluence of shadow and light.

Blood surged through me, rejuvenating my muscles and releasing the fluids trapped in my legs. Life itself rushed in and out of my lungs. I was changing the space in this city. With each steamy exhalation, I extended my influence into it; with every breath I took, it became more a part of me.

I stripped down to a camisole and flung my sweater to the side. I swung my upper body down and up for the joy of it, to feel the icy air caress my neck and the crook in my elbow and the underside of my wrist.

Space, the beloved partner I turned my back on when I’d forsaken my career in dance. It had been with me all along, waiting for me to awake to its presence.

I lifted my fingers to stroke the air. To thank it for this dance. To give myself to it, as to a long-lost lover. Beyond the arch, the Avenue of the Arts stretched before me. Colored lights flashed up its facades, joining my dance: Purple. Blue. Green. Car headlights swept over me like follow spots. Small crowds had gathered on the corners across the circle, pointing and staring in my direction.

High above me, a bell tolled the hour. I stood still, panting, allowing air to reach the newly exposed surfaces within me. Nine times it rang, one for each of the months I’d known and loved Angela. Its vibrations pierced me through, and my grief for Angela rushed in.

Perhaps sensing the show was over, a smattering of applause drifted from across the street.

I pulled back into the shadows and wept.