Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (9 page)

“Oh,
please
!” Elizabeth almost shrieked. “What about high school? What about
college
? Piper, you are so wrong.”

“I am so not wrong.”

Elizabeth thought for a second. “Okay, if you were blond, beautiful, and queen of the world, maybe,
maybe
the music you liked didn’t matter, but for the rest of us, trust me. It mattered.”

“You were beautiful. I’ve seen the pictures.”

“I was cute.”

Piper shrugged, as if there were no difference between beautiful and cute, when of course there was. Looking at Elizabeth’s face now, though, Piper could see that all the cute was gone, that a dry, pale angularity had taken over. Piper felt sadness rise around her.
Fine,
she thought.

“You know what, though,” said Piper, “I was popular—there’s no two ways about
that
—but I was never really cool. Not like the Talking Heads girls. You remember the Talking Heads girls?” Piper and Elizabeth had not gone to the same college, but it didn’t matter. Everyone knew the Talking Heads girls.

“Oh, yeah. With their little lopsided haircuts. And those black leggings under skirts. Boys loved those girls.”

The two sat without speaking, remembering and listening to James Taylor sing about Mexico. Then Piper said, “I went to see Teo Sandoval yesterday, like I told you I was going to. I took him your chart.”

Elizabeth’s expression of mild thoughtfulness didn’t even shift. “Don’t tell me,” she said. Her voice was soft, but it was a command. “I mean, it’s fine that you went. But don’t tell me what he said.”

“But—”

“I stopped. Almost a week ago. I wanted to stop, so I stopped.”

Upon hearing this, in spite of everything she knew, in spite of what she’d waited hours and hours to tell Elizabeth, Piper’s first thought was to say, “No, you can’t stop. You cannot. You have to keep fighting this.”

Piper didn’t say this. Instead, she dropped her head and looked down at her lap. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for pressuring you into—” Elizabeth cut her off again.

“Piper,” she said. She waited for Piper to meet her eyes. “I know you think you and Tom talked me into it. But you didn’t. Or maybe you did. But not in the way you think. I wanted to do it. The thing is…” Elizabeth paused and Piper held her breath. The whole room seemed to hold its breath.

Elizabeth smiled. “The thing is, it’s okay to do something just because the people you love want you to. Sometimes that’s a good enough reason.”

Piper stared at her.

“You hear me?” asked Elizabeth.

Piper nodded, her eyes stinging. How could she ever be without this person?

“Listen, Betts,” she said, finally, “I hate to break this to you, but I think that girl Graciela hired to help her clean your house?”

“Mindy?”

“I think Mindy’s been using 409 on your stainless appliances. In fact, I’m almost positive.”

Elizabeth’s laugh was the best, most alive sound in the world. When she could speak, she said, still laughing, “Now,
that
is the worst news I’ve heard all year.”

Piper cleaned the appliances, of course, rubbed the silken cleaner over every inch, then polished with small circular motions until her wrist began to ache. Afterward, after she’d picked up Carter and Elizabeth’s daughter, Emma, from school, stopping on the way to buy paper towels and two bunches of remarkable, nearly red lilies, one for the kitchen table, one for Elizabeth’s room, and after she’d trimmed the stems and put the flowers in water, after she’d fed the children apple slices and peanut butter at Elizabeth’s kitchen table, Piper baked the chicken, filling the rooms of Elizabeth’s house with its gold-tinged aroma.

As she performed these tasks, Piper had a sense that they were more than tasks, that they were the edge of something large that would unfold, pushing its way into the future. As Piper tidied Emma’s ponytails, wiped peanut butter off Peter’s chin, assembled potatoes and wedges of onion around the chicken, she understood that she would go on to fill days and weeks with helping, would wake up mornings feeling the day’s emptiness, how it stood waiting to be filled with duties the way you’d fill a jar with coins.

But what also began that day, without Piper deciding or even knowing, was a kind of campaign, a gathering of forces. Against—what?—cancer? Maybe death itself, although Piper would have recoiled in disgust at the melodrama of waging a campaign against either one, would likely have recoiled at the whole idea of waging a campaign at all. “Oh, please,” she would have sneered, “get over yourself.”

Still, there were moments over the next few weeks when what could only be called defiance ran into and through her body like a current.

One gray morning, Piper opened the door to two young men delivering a hospital bed. She’d been expecting them. The men were nice, polite, and they didn’t just drop off the bed, but placed it in the space Tom and Piper had made for it in the dining room the night before, angling the bed per Piper’s instructions, in such a way that Elizabeth would receive the morning sun.

But even though the men were nice, Piper hated them. She hated their big hands and their baseball caps. Their leather work boots—laced halfway up and the exact color of a Twinkie—made her want to scream. Mostly, she hated that they were strangers, strangers bearing witness to the private, shattering truth that a person in the house could no longer climb stairs and to the deeper, more private truth that the sick person desired to be downstairs in the heart of her home, among the people she loved.

While testing the workings of the bed, one of the men had said, admiringly, “It’s fully motorized. Top of the line,” and Piper had wanted to wring his neck, clobber him with his own clipboard. “Top of the line,” as though the family were lucky to have such a bed in their house, as though Elizabeth should count her lucky stars.

After the men left, Piper went into the kitchen and made a Bundt cake, buttery and full of apples, redolent of cinnamon. Elizabeth’s favorite. As she cracked the eggs, she whispered between clenched teeth, addressing no one and nothing she could name, “Fine. Fine. You did that. It’s done. Elizabeth will sleep in the goddamn dining room. But this?” Piper almost threw the cupful of sugar into the bowl. “This you can’t do a thing about.”

She meant the cake. She meant the act of making it and the way it would turn out to be exactly right, a small, tangible victory. Piper stirred and stirred and stirred, saying with her whole body, “There is a limit. There is a limit to what can be taken away.”

What truly surprised Piper, what she would look back on years later with wonder, wasn’t the fury or the defiance. Instead, it was the peace.

It seemed impossible that you could stand in a kitchen making hot chocolate and grilled-cheese sandwiches with your best friend dying in the next room, the voices of her children tangled up with the voices of your own, that you could butter bread and watch, through the window, the trees relinquishing their leaves and hear the silvery tumble of water into a kettle, and be suddenly aware that what resided at the heart of every shape and sound was peace. A rightness hovering above all that was wrong, shimmering, like heat rising from a street in summer.

It seemed impossible, but it wasn’t. Piper stood inside those moments and understood, as deeply as she’d ever understood anything, that living with Elizabeth’s dying was the truest thing to ever happen to her. “Right here, right now.” She thought again and again, “Right here, right now.”

As with all things involving the care, feeding, and sleep times of small children, the period of Elizabeth’s dying quickly fell into something close to a regular schedule. The most regular element in the schedule, its anchor, was that on weekday mornings, Tom and Piper woke their respective children early, got them dressed, and Tom dropped Emma and Peter off at Piper’s house for breakfast. After that, the rhythm of a particular day shifted according to Elizabeth’s needs, her levels of fatigue and pain.

For instance, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Piper took all four children to school, then shopped, ran errands, or squeezed in a kickboxing class before picking up the little ones at their preschool, phoning the Donahues’ house on the drive back to see if Elizabeth were up to having the children at her house. When she was, Piper would take them there, feed them lunch, and await the twelve-thirty arrival of Ginny Phipps. When Elizabeth needed quiet, Piper would take Peter and Meredith to her own house, and Ginny would arrive and play with them there, while Piper left to pick up Carter and Emma at Tallyrand.

On these days, the children might stay at Piper’s house all day, making mobiles out of sticks, fishing line, and autumn leaves or baking sugar cookies with Ginny, running around the yard, heaped like puppies on the family room floor watching the Wiggles, singing along at the tops of their lungs. Sometimes, Peter, who still napped, would fall asleep amid the noise, and Piper would carry him to Meredith’s crib, pausing in the gray, feathery-edged dimness of the room to touch his hair or the creases the carpet had left on his cheek.

But often Elizabeth wanted them at her house, wanted them all, hungry for voices, bodies, and motion. Tom mounted a television in one corner of the dining room, up high so that Elizabeth could see it, and the children would array themselves around her, curled or sprawled on the bed or floor, tangled up in the big armchair, both confused and enchanted by the oddity of television in the dining room. Elizabeth would watch the children watching TV and Piper would watch her watch them.

What mystified Piper was that, most of the time, Elizabeth even seemed to welcome the presence of the strangers, to drink them in, too. Because her house was trafficked through by strangers now, daily: a shockingly young doctor, home health aides, nurses. When Piper or Tom wasn’t with Elizabeth, and sometimes even when one of them was, a stranger was present. Some of the strangers were quiet, some spoke almost constantly. One made Elizabeth laugh by talking back to the guests on
Oprah
or
The Today Show
the way Elizabeth and Piper always did: “Oh, get off your high horse, mister!” or “Newsflash: that red turtleneck makes you look straight-up fat.”

No matter what their hands were busy doing, if Elizabeth was awake, the hospice workers kept as much eye contact with her as possible, as though to affirm, “You are here. You are not just a body damaged by illness. You are Elizabeth,” which made Piper want to weep with gratitude. In fact, Piper alternated between wanting to embrace the hospice workers (an impulse on which she never acted) and wanting them to disappear from the face of the earth.

“Hospice,” a strangely delicate, weightless word, Piper noticed, one that could be either whisper or hiss.

One night after Carter and Meredith were in bed, Piper sat at her kitchen table with Kyle’s laptop open before her. Because many of Elizabeth’s friends had asked Piper what they could do to help, Piper had decided to create a system of dinner drop-offs. While it would have been easy enough to ask people to cook main dishes that would freeze well and to bring them whenever they chose, Piper thought that freshly prepared, still-warm dishes would taste better, and she believed emphatically that each main dish should be accompanied by a healthy, vegetable-based side dish. Additionally, she wanted to build variety into the system, to avoid the potentially demoralizing effects of, say, evening upon evening of pasta.

Consequently, the schedule of dinners had become a three-part package: a cover letter describing the system and including the particular culinary likes and dislikes of the Donahue family members (no pimiento, no sesame oil, no smoked fish, et cetera); a schedule of who would bring dinner, one to two hours prior to the six
P.M.
dinner hour, on which days; and a phone-number list so that the dinner providers could consult previous dinner providers as to what they’d brought so as not to duplicate recent menus.

When Piper had been working at this for about half an hour, Kyle pulled out the chair next to hers and sat down. Glancing quickly sideways, Piper saw Kyle’s hands clasped on the table in a formal manner.
Oh, for God’s sake,
she thought,
whatever it is, not now.

“Piper,” he said, quietly.

“Two secs,” said Piper, although she knew it would be much longer.

“Piper,” Kyle said, “we need to talk.”

Piper heard the intensely serious note in his voice. The intensely serious note irritated her. The nights that followed the days of caring for Elizabeth’s home and family in addition to her own fell into two categories: wired, almost feverish nights when the energy refused to leave Piper’s body, or hollowed-out nights. This was a hollowed-out night.

“Hey, Kyle,” said Piper, knitting her brows at the computer screen, “can you show me how to do that program again? You know. Whatsit. The table thing. Um, the, oh gosh…”

“Spreadsheet,” Kyle supplied, enunciating the word with a precision that managed to convey patience and impatience at the same time. Then he reached over and closed the laptop.

“Why.” She leveled a deliberately expressionless stare at him. “Did you do that?”

“Piper,” he began again, his voice softening, “we have to talk. You know we do.”

This surprised Piper, the assumption that she knew what was coming. She had no idea. She merely looked at him, waiting.

“Look, Piper, I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time, but you’re never—”

“Don’t say it,” she said, cutting him off. “Don’t say I’m never here.
You
are never here.”

Kyle sighed and looked down at his laced fingers, nodding. “You know, that’s true. I haven’t been spending a lot of time here lately.” He looked up at her. “Don’t you ever wonder why?”

Suddenly, Piper felt rocked by exhaustion, by the need for sleep. Her head felt heavy on her neck. “I don’t know,” she said, searching for the answer he wanted, the one that would end the conversation and allow her to go to bed. “Maybe? Maybe I wonder?”

Kyle made a huffing, exasperated sound and squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head as though in disbelief, then popping his eyes open. Like something out of Looney Tunes, Piper thought. She cringed away from him, pressing her shoulder blades hard against her chair back.