The Laws of Gravity (36 page)

He waved the torn piece of paper on which she had scrawled “Gone out. Don’t worry.” He waved it over his head, his eyes wild. “What kind of a note is that? You call that a note? I was going out of my mind. What if you’d gone out to kill yourself?”

“What if I had?” Nicole said calmly. “I’d have left you a better note than that. Besides, Mimi was with me.”

“A fact that you forgot to mention!”

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She sank down into a kitchen chair. Her face looked puffy. “It was so beautiful out.”

He kneeled before her, instantly contrite. “Was it?” he said. He sounded wistful.

She realized that he was angry mostly because it wasn’t him she’d chosen to take along. “My great darling.” She put her palm flat on the top of his soft hair. “You I love,” she said. It was a joke between them. The engraver had gotten it wrong on their wedding rings, and instead of writing I love you, had engraved
You I love
. The misengraving had become a secret code between them.

“You
I
love,” he’d said. “Now let’s get you back to bed.”

Now she never moved from her bed, except to stagger to the toilet and back, and sometimes not even for that. For two weeks now the pain had raged out of control, a wild animal that could not be tamed. Her lungs kept filling with fluid. She’d blow up like a balloon, and then they would have to pump the fluids from her body and she’d be all right for a day, maybe two. Only she was never really all right. She went from morphine-laced
stupor to an agony that seemed centered in the middle of her body, an iron anchor that held her to the bed. She had only felt this kind of pain once before, in labor, during the transition phase, and then at the end of it she’d had little Daisy to hold in her arms. Soon she must let go of all holding.

Jay climbed into the hospital bed and clasped her hand. The night nurses were always kinder than the strict day nurses; they allowed this kind of thing. Nicole felt like the Woggle Bug in one of the later Oz books, parts of her stick-thin, other parts swollen. She could no longer stand to look in a mirror; she could hardly bear to have Daisy look at her, for fear her daughter might only remember her this way. Jay was running his thumb softly up and down the back of her hand. In the old days, that touch had been a prelude to lovemaking. She tried to turn toward him, but the mere shift of her body brought a jolt of pain like a stroke of lightning, and she lay flat again, watching his hand on her hand. Tears spurted to her eyes. “No more!” she cried out in her new hoarse voice. “No more!”

The days got worse, and longer. Finally, late one night, Aunt Patti, Jay, and Mimi all gathered in the room. Jay brought her chips of ice to suck; Mimi brought flowers; Aunt Patti had provided a music player that was now playing old Sinatra songs.

“Why is this taking so long?” Nicole asked.

“I have to break up the ice with this plastic knife,” Jay said.

“That’s not what I mean.” Her words came slow, broken up by pain or morphine, or both. “Why is
this
taking so long? I’m ready. I’m ready to go.”

“No, you’re not,” Jay said. He came over to the bed and leaned over her as if to do—something. Some act of rescue. Mimi and Aunt Patti turned toward her.

Nicole raised her voice. She was actually yelling. “I
am
ready—but you won’t let me! None of you. Why won’t you just let me go?”

“Easy now,” Jay said.

“It’s not easy—it’s too hard. Why can’t you let me go?”

“Oh, Nicole,” said Mimi.

“Why won’t someone help me? Why are you holding me here?”

Aunt Patti turned away from the music player. “We can help you,” she said. “If that’s what you really want.”

“It’s what I really want,” answered Nicole.

A day or two later the judge received his strangest invitation yet in the mail. It was not an invitation to give a lecture, or to visit a foreign country, to contribute to a charity, or to teach a class. He had received all those invitations and more. This was an invitation to a funeral. It was the funeral of Nicole Greene, but under date and time were written the words “To Be Announced—please watch the papers.” And she had signed it herself, in a loose raggedy scrawl.

“That is absolutely heartbreaking,” Sarah said. “A woman sending out invitations to her own funeral.”

Sol turned it over in his hands, as if the blank back of the card contained some secret message. It certainly was peculiar. “I think—” He hesitated. “She wanted to take her life into her own hands. I think that’s what
the trial was all about for her. And this”—he turned the card yet again—“is very generous. It’s an act of forgiveness.” He wondered if her cousin Ari Wiesenthal had gotten the same card.

He had not. But it was not because Nicole had not made one out—she had. And she had even added the words. “Please come.” But when Jay saw the envelope, he confided to Mimi, “I just can’t do it. I hope she’ll forgive me. But if I saw him, I might just kill him. And Nikki wouldn’t want me to go to jail for murdering her cousin.”

Mimi patted his arm. “It’s all right, Jay. Really, it is. You’re carrying enough.”

He wasn’t so sure, but nonetheless he shredded the envelope into pieces, and threw them into the cafeteria garbage can, under mounds of cottage cheese and discarded salad, apple cores and half-drunk cartons of milk.

Daisy was sleeping over at her friend Claudia’s house. Nicole sat propped up on pillows, watching them quickly, nervously tearing open the morphine patches. The late afternoon sun shone outside the window. All she could see was the line of traffic, red taillights glowing on the expressway nearby.

They were unwrapping all of the patches they had on hand. Plus the ones they had managed to squirrel away. Aunt Patti had been especially good at arguing for more, alternately charming and bullying the nurses, playing one shift off against another, accusing the hospital of incompetence. Nicole called, in her new, deep, hoarse voice, “Jay!”

He turned around. His face was so full of sadness, so full of fear.

She licked her chapped lips. She said, “I want you to know what I’m thinking.”

He nodded, waiting for her to continue. Everyone else stopped their preparations a moment. Aunt Patti’s hands were full of the morphine patches.

“After I gave birth to Daisy, I sent you home for clothes, remember? I gave you a list. And you brought me this crazy stuff. The red-striped maternity pants and pink top. And the wrong boots. I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere in this outfit.’ Remember?”

He nodded again.

“You went home for me, and brought back the things I wanted, and you never complained. You never said a word.” Nicole’s eyes filled with tears. “I was such a—stupid—vain—ridiculous.” She shook her head hard, as if to clear it. “I was always so lucky! So lucky.” She shut her eyes and reached out. His hand entirely enclosed hers, square and broad and muscular. An athlete’s hand, still. Jay’s hand. “I want that on my gravestone, ‘She was lucky in love.’ That’s what I’m thinking. I want you to know—” She must have fallen asleep, because it was another minute or two before she said, “Jay. I’m just running back home to get something. This time I’m going ahead of you.”

“Don’t go yet,” Jay said.

Nicole nodded and closed her eyes again. This time she did not reopen them. He thought, Never in this life will I see those eyes again. He could not bring himself to move, or to let go of her hand.

Aunt Patti said, “Are you ready, doll?”

Nicole moved her head up and down on the pillow to nod yes. “We’d better hurry,” Aunt Patti said, “before the nurse comes back and we all get
arrested for murder.—Mimi, keep an eye on the door. If someone starts to come in, go out there in the hall and tell a joke. Try to make it funny for a change.”

Mimi made a noise between a sob and a laugh. She placed herself at the door while Jay and Aunt Patti set to work applying the patches. “Hurry!” Aunt Patti said every minute or so. “Hand me two more.” Mimi hurried over with the patches in her hand, set them on her friend’s chest, on the V where the white skin shone translucent above the green hospital gown. She could still feel Nicole’s breathing——but it was shallow. She pressed her hands down as if she could speak through her palms, as if she could say good-bye with just the weight of her hands against her best friend’s heart. Then she went to stand guard at the door.

Nicole’s chest burned; every breath was an agony, as if she were drowning. Her lungs were filling, her body was exhausted; she’d gone too far from shore. She heard from far off a babble of voices, sped up, slowed down, a warped record. Among them she made out the sound of a familiar loved voice, very close to her ear, a boy’s voice, one she had come to know as well as her own. All its inflections were familiar, yet she could not name him. He murmured, “I’ve got you,” but perhaps it wasn’t that at all, perhaps it was someone else now saying, “I’ve got to,” or a woman’s voice saying, “You’ve got to—”

She smelled the sting of salt air. A hint of pine and raspberries. There was a thrilling buoyancy in her body. She felt herself rocked in an embrace that bobbed up and down in waves. She felt sun on her face, the warmth of it, though it must have been the hospital lights glaring down. The pain writhed inside her like a snake. And then it all stopped. As sudden as that. She had come up for air. Her pain disappeared as if it had been wiped off
a slate. Nothing intervened with the sounds of the hospital room. For the first time ever she heard with absolutely perfect clarity, without even the interference of her own heart beating, blood rushing through her body. The relief was incredible. In that crystal stillness and calm, came the sound of her machines, making a new, loud noise, a ringing sound, a rustle of bodies, footsteps, and outside her window a bird sang once, two times.

A minute later Jay said, “I think it’s over.” Then, “We can take them off now. My darling. My poor darling. Look at her resting.” They shoved the used morphine patches into Aunt Patti’s enormous tapestry bag.

The room was filled with the strangest silence, Mimi thought, like falling into a well, a deep, stern, eerie silence, and then she realized what was missing—it was the sound of Nicole’s labored breathing. And in the midst of that absolute silence, heartless Aunt Patti began to cry.