Her keys on the kitchen table. Her coat in the closet. She sent the kids upstairs to get into their pajamas. She called up to her boyfriend, who was in bed reading a textbook, What are you doing in bed, you total slug! and then, after checking the messages on the answering machine, looking at the mail, she trudged up to my niece’s room to kiss her good night. Endearments passed between them. My sister loved her kids, above all, and in spite of all the work and the hardships, in spite of my nieces reputation as a firecracker, in spite of my nephews sometimes diabolical smarts. She loved them. There were endearments, therefore, lengthy and repetitive, as there would have been with my nephew, too. And my sister kissed her daughter multiply, because my niece is a little impish redhead, and its hard not to kiss her. Look, it’s late, so I cant read to you tonight, okay? My niece protested temporarily, and then my sister arranged the stuffed animals around her daughter (for the sake of arranging), and plumped a feather pillow, and switched off the bedside lamp on the bedside table, and she made sure the night-light underneath the table (a plug-in shaped like a ghost) was illumined, and then on the way out the door she stopped for a second. And looked back. The tableau of domesticity was what she last contemplated. Or maybe she was composing endearments for my nephew. Or maybe she wasn’t looking back at my niece at all. Maybe she was lost in this next tempest.
Out of nowhere. All of a sudden. All at once. In an instant. Without warning. In no time. Helter-skelter. In the twinkling of an eye. Figurative language isn’t up to the task. My sister’s legs gave out, and she fell over toward my niece’s desk, by the door, dislodging a pile of toys and dolls (a Barbie in evening wear, a posable Tinkerbell doll), colliding with the desk, sweeping its contents off with her, toppling onto the floor, falling heavily, her head by the door. My niece, startled, rose up from under covers.
More photos: my sister, my brother and I, back in our single digits, dressed in matching, or nearly matching outfits (there was a naval flavor to our look), playing with my aunt’s basset hound — my sister grinning mischievously; or: my sister, my father, my brother and I, in my dads Karmann-Ghia, just before she totaled it on the straightaway on Fishers Island (she skidded, she said, on antifreeze or something slippery); or: my sister, with her newborn daughter in her lap, sitting on the floor of her living room — mother and daughter with the same bemused impatience.
My sister started to seize.
The report of her fall was, of course, loud enough to stir her boyfriend from the next room. He was out of bed fast. (Despite physical pain associated with his recent surgery.) I imagine there was a second in which other possibilities occurred to him — hoax, argument, accident, anything — but quickly the worst of these seemed most likely. You know these things somewhere. You know immediately the content of all middle-of-the-night telephone calls. He was out of bed. And my niece called out to her brother, to my nephew, next door. She called my nephews name, plaintively, like it was a question.
* * *
My sister’s hands balled up. Her heels drumming on the carpeting. Her muscles all like nautical lines, pulling tight against cleats. Her jaw clenched. Her heart rattling desperately. Fibrillating. If it was a conventional seizure, she was unconscious for this part — maybe even unconscious throughout — because of reduced blood flow to the brain, because of the fibrillation, because of her heart condition; which is to say that my sister’s mitral valve prolapse—technical feature of her broken heart—was here engendering an arrhythmia, and now, if not already, she began to hemorrhage internally. Her son stood in the doorway, in his pajamas, shifting from one foot to the other (there was a draft in the hall). Her daughter knelt at the foot of the bed, staring, and my sister’s boyfriend watched, as my poor sister shook, and he held her head, and then changed his mind and bolted for the phone.
After the seizure, she went slack. (Merediths heart stopped. And her breathing. She was still.) For a second, she was alone in the room, with her children, silent. After he dialed 911, Jimmy appeared again, to try to restart her breathing. Here’s how: he pressed his lips against hers. He didn’t think to say, Come on, breathe, dammit, or to make similar imprecations, although he did manage to shout at the kids, Get the hell out of here, please! Go downstairs!(It was advice they followed only for a minute.) At last, my sister took a breath. Took a deep breath, a sigh, and there were two more of these. Deep resigned sighs. Five or ten seconds between each. For a few moments more, instants, she looked at Jimmy, as he pounded on her chest with his fists, thoughtless about anything but results, stopping occasion ally to press his ear between her breasts. Her eyes were sad and frightened, even in the company of the people she most loved. So it seemed. More likely she was unconscious. The kids sat cross-legged on the floor in the hall, by the top of the stairs, watching. Lots of stuff was left to be accomplished in these last seconds, even if it wasn’t anything unusual, people and relationships and small kindnesses, the best way to fry pumpkin seeds, what to pack for Thanksgiving, whether to make turnips or not, snapshots to be culled and arranged, photos to be taken — these possibilities spun out of my sister’s grasp, torrential futures, my beloved sister, solitary with pictures taken and untaken, gone.
EMS technicians arrived and carried her body down to the living room, where they tried to start her pulse with expensive engines and devices. Her body jumped while they shocked her — she was a revenant in some corridor of simultaneities — but her heart wouldn’t start. Then they put her body on the stretcher. To carry her away. Now the moment arrives when they bear her out the front door of her house and she leaves it to us, leaves to us the house and her things and her friends and her memories and the involuntary assemblage of these into language. Grief. The sound of the ambulance. The road is mostly clear on the way to the hospital; my sister’s route is clear.
I should fictionalize it more, I should conceal myself. I should consider the responsibilities of characterization, I should conflate her two children into one, or reverse their genders, or otherwise alter them, I should make her boyfriend a husband, I should explicate all the tributaries of my extended family (its remarriages, its internecine politics), I should novelize the whole thing, I should make it multi-generational, I should work in my forefathers (stonemasons and newspapermen), I should let artifice create an elegant surface, I should make the events orderly, I should wait and write about it later, I should wait until I’m not angry, I shouldn’t clutter a narrative with fragments, with mere recollections of good times, or with regrets, I should make Meredith’s death shapely and persuasive, not blunt and disjunctive, I shouldn’t have to think the unthinkable, I shouldn’t have to suffer, I should address her here directly (these are the ways I miss you), I should write only of affection, I should make our travels in this earthly landscape safe and secure, I should have a better ending, I shouldn’t say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn’t say she had her demons, as I do too.
~ ~ ~
These stories first appeared in the following places: “The Mansion on the Hill”in the Paris Review, and in Pushcart Prize 24; “On the Carousel”in Fence; “The Double Zero”(based on Sherwood Andersons “The Egg“) in McSweeney’s; “Forecast from the Retail Desk”in the New Yorker; “Hawaiian Night”in the New Yorker;“Drawer”in Esquire;“Pan’s Fair Throng”in Conjunctions, and in a gallery pamphlet at a show of Elena Sisto’s paintings; “The Carnival Tradition”in the Paris Review;“Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set”in Primal Primers, and on Word.com; “Boys”in Elle;“Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal”in Lit, and in Fiona Giles’s anthology Chick for a Day; and “Demonology”in Conjunctions, in Pushcart Prize 21, in O. Henry Prize Awards, in The KGB Bar Reader, and in Survival Stories.