“We’re here, Grandma,” she whispered, and a wave of grief rolled through her.
Only to be interrupted by Jimi Hendrix.
Savannah lived an hour away, in Vacaville, but Kaylie could count on the fingers of one hand the times her sister had been over to help with Grandma in the past six months. Oh, but she’d had plenty of advice. She’d done research. She’d suggested herbal remedies. New doctors. Just last month she proposed a trip to the Mayo Clinic. As if there were a cure for advanced emphysema.
When Kaylie let her know a few weeks ago that the end was near, and wanted to keep her in the loop about their options, Savannah had responded with outrage. She thought Kaylie’s “predictions” were “premature.” She specifically said that using the words “dying” and “hospice” were manipulative on Kaylie’s part. As if she were maliciously trying to pry Savannah away from her blue-ribbon children and husband. At the end of her rant, Savannah announced that she’d “look into the situation,” and hung up.
Late this afternoon, as Grandma had struggled to draw air into her lungs, her whole body racked with pain, Kaylie spooned doses of morphine into her mouth. One after another. Once Grandma lost consciousness, it was nearly impossible to get her to swallow more, but the other options for killing her were horrifying, and so Kaylie cradled her ancient skull in the crook of her elbow, wrapping her arm around so she could use her hand to hold Grandma’s jaw open. She continued dripping morphine onto her tongue, sometimes massaging her throat to ease it down, until she finished her off at eight fifteen p.m., just as dusk softened the harsh light of day.
Kaylie knew, without a shred of doubt, that Grandma would want exactly that — to have Kaylie be the one — and exactly this, what she was about to do next.
But now that they’d at long last arrived at the pier, back at the pier, Kaylie’s will began collapsing. Not her resolve. She knew this was right. But the physical energy necessary to carry it out went missing. She realized that she hadn’t eaten anything all day, not even a bowl of cereal. She briefly considered stopping in at Skates Restaurant, just on the other side of the pier, for some sustaining nutrients, but the idea of sitting at a table clad with a starched white cloth and shiny cutlery, surrounded by the sounds of clinking cocktails, digging into sole meunière, while her grandma waited unguarded in the backseat of the Pontiac, just wasn’t right.
Kaylie stalled by listening to her phone messages. In the first one, from midmorning, Savannah simply asked, “So how is she?” This one was followed by a couple of insistent demands of, “Why aren’t you calling me back?” In the next, Savannah announced that she was coming to Berkeley, that she’d leave right after she put the kids to bed. Kaylie should expect her by nine o’clock.
She must have just missed her. By now Savannah had probably parked her Lexus in front of Grandma’s house, keyed her way in the front door, and found the empty bed. Kaylie had made sure to bring the bottles, eyedropper, and even the spoon with her, to not leave anything sketchy at the bedside, but now she wished she’d stopped on her way to the marina to drop them in a garbage bin far from home, and also far from the marina. She should chuck them now, in any case. If Savannah called the police, and that would definitely be her style, then Kaylie needed to be free of evidence.
She grabbed the plastic bag into which she’d stuffed all the paraphernalia and got out of the car, locking Grandma in, as if that would be necessary. Walking at the pace Savannah used for exercise — she called it pep-stepping — Kaylie hustled along the harbor until she came to one of the public bathrooms. Perfect. Her bagful of gear looked like it belonged to any addict, and she stuffed it deep into the garbage bin, shoving it under some McDonald’s bags. Then she crouched down by water’s edge and washed her hands, the rank iciness triggering so many memories, though she refused to cry. She had to finish what she’d begun, and she had to do it quickly.
And yet, walking back to the car she couldn’t resist stopping at the entrance to the pier, long fenced off due to structural issues too expensive for the city to fix. One of her most painful regrets was how, in the past few years during Grandma’s illness, she hadn’t been able to bring her to the pier. They’d come a few times to the water’s edge, where the Pontiac was now parked, and even tried fishing from the rocky barrier, but it wasn’t the same, not even close. Navigating a catch across those sharp, massive rocks was nearly impossible. Anyway, all their friends were gone.
Kaylie put a sneaker toe through one of the diamond-shaped openings of the chain-link fence barring admittance to the pier. It was an easy climb — only a few feet high, and no barbed wire — and a moment later she leaped down on the other side. Oh, how good it felt to walk that length, smell the barnacles clinging to rotting wood, the soft breeze a balm against the inland heat, its touch as intimate as a lover’s. And beyond, the lights of San Francisco, blinking their friendly message of hope in a ravaged country. Best of all, though, was the splash of the bay, slurping and wallowing, concealing all its bounty, so much life swimming right below her feet, the perch, bass, crabs, halibut, and stingrays. Once they’d caught a small shark.
Duong and Tham Nguyen had helped them land the shark and that night Grandma invited their family over to dinner. It was one of the best nights ever. They brought a bunch of crazy Vietnamese dishes, and she and Grandma made potato salad and green Jell-O with canned tangerine slices. The adults drank a lot of beer and smoked lots of cigarettes. They all shouted jokes into the night.
Kaylie was fifteen that year. Savannah had long since disowned her sister and grandma. She hated that they ate fish they caught themselves, hated that Grandma chain-smoked, hated even her array of friends from the pier, claimed that they were just a bunch of homeless people. “Maybe,” Grandma had answered the first time Savannah shouted that assessment, but actually they weren’t. Duong and Tham Nguyen ran a framing business in Berkeley. Pamela Roberts, an ancient black woman who fished every single day, even well into her dementia, and who everyone watched out for, had had a union job at the Ford auto assembly plant in Richmond until she retired. Shelly, a young black woman, was a public librarian in Oakland, and always fished with her two terriers as companions. James and Frank, a couple of Irish brothers, who staged loud, funny arguments as they fished, mostly for the entertainment of others, worked construction when they could get it. Everyone shared food and drinks and stories, when they felt like it, and also respected a person’s desire for solitude and quiet. Kaylie and her grandma knew everyone and their stories. Who’d recently arrived in the Bay Area, or even in the country. Who’d been left by a partner. Who was struggling to make rent. One white guy, probably around sixty, was reportedly a billionaire, and yet every Sunday he sat with his feet up on the railing, a fishing line draped into the bay, never talked to anyone, but never bothered anyone, either. Fishing was a community, and Grandma had been at its heart.
Once over the chain-link fence, Kaylie walked quickly to avoid being spotted by anyone on shore. The pier was no longer lit, and soon the tangy brine of dark night encompassed her stride. She didn’t think Savannah would look for them here. Would she? It certainly made the most sense — that they’d come here — but it was a completely different kind of sense than the kind her sister possessed. If Savannah did call the police, it was possible that Officer Marta Ramirez had filed some sort of event report, even if she hadn’t written a ticket, and they could be tracked pretty quickly. Kaylie shouldn’t dally. Because once her sister decided on a course of action, good luck trying to divert her. At the age of twelve, Savannah had talked her way into a scholarship at a private school in Berkeley. Her biggest fear was that her classmates would so much as glimpse their grandma, with her wispy hair, the scalp showing through even when she was young, and her smoky breath and exuberant manner of talking, her loud honking laugh. Savannah moved out when she was seventeen and worked at Nordstrom to put herself through community college. She won sales awards with big bonuses. She now sold high-end furniture. She’d already said, well before it was an appropriate concession, that Kaylie could have the house. Now wasn’t that generous, inasmuch as the house needed more work than its value.