“You’ll have to forgive me,” Maeve said, rolling down her window to meet the frigid air, “but if I don’t have a cigarette right this minute I’m going to die.” She pulled one out then handed me the pack so I could decide for myself, then she handed me the lighter. Soon we were each blowing smoke out of our respective windows.
“As good as that dinner was, this cigarette might be better,” I said.
“If you did an autopsy on me right now you would find I am nothing but dark meat and gravy, with maybe a tiny vein of mashed potatoes inside my right arm.” Maeve was careful about her carbohydrates. She had forgone the Norcross pie in order to have a tiny slice at Jocelyn’s.
“I could present you at grand rounds,” I said, and thought of Bill Norcross sawing into the carcass of the turkey.
Maeve shuddered slightly. “I can’t believe they make you cut people up.”
“I can’t believe you make me go to medical school.”
She laughed, and then pressed her fingers to her lips as if to quell her dinner’s revolt. “Oh, stop complaining. Seriously, apart from dissecting other human beings, tell me one thing that’s so terrible.”
I tipped my head back, exhaling. Maeve always said I smoked every cigarette like I was on my way to my execution, and I was thinking this really should be my last one. I knew better, even though those were still the days when doctors kept a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of their lab coats. Especially orthopedists. You couldn’t be an orthopedist without smoking. “The worst part is understanding you’re going to die.”
She looked at me, her black eyebrows raised. “You didn’t understand that?”
I shook my head. “You think you understand it. You think that when you’re ninety-six you’ll lie down on the couch after a big Thanksgiving dinner and not wake up, but even then you’re not really sure. Maybe there’ll be some special dispensation for you. Everybody thinks that.”
“I never for a minute thought I was going to die on the couch at ninety-six, or be ninety-six for that matter.”
But I wasn’t listening, I was talking. “You just don’t realize how many ways there are to die, excluding gunshots and knife fights and falling out windows and all the other things that probably aren’t going to happen.”
“Tell me, Doc, what is going to happen?” She was trying not to laugh at me, but it was true: death was all I thought about in those days.
“Too many white blood cells, too few red blood cells, too much iron, a respiratory infection, sepsis. You can get a blockage in your bile duct. Your esophagus can rupture. And the cancers.” I looked at her. “We could sit here all night talking about cancer. I’m just telling you, it’s unsettling. There are thousands of ways your body can go off the rails for no reason whatsoever and chances are you won’t know about any of it until it’s too late.”
“Which makes a person wonder why we need doctors in the first place.”
“Exactly.”
“Well,” Maeve said, taking a long pull on her cigarette, “I already know how I’m going to die so I don’t have to worry about that.”
I looked at her profile lit up by the street lights clicking on, by the lights Andrea had turned on in the Dutch House. Everything about her was sharp and straight and beautiful, everything about her was life and health. “How are you going to die?” I don’t know why I asked because I sure as hell didn’t want to know.
Unlike the medical students in my class who sounded like they were idling over a catalog of disease when hypothesizing their deaths, Maeve spoke with authority. “Heart disease or stroke. That’s how diabetics go. Probably heart disease when you factor Dad into the equation, which is fine by me. It’s quicker, right? Bang.”
Suddenly I was angry at her. She had no idea what she was talking about, and anyway, this was Thanksgiving, and we were supposed to be playing a game, not unlike the Norcrosses dealing out their hands of Hearts. “If you’re so damned worried about a heart attack then why’re we sitting here smoking?”
She blinked. “I’m not worried. I told you, I’m not the one who’s going to die after dinner at ninety-six. That’s you.”
I threw my cigarette out the window.
“Jesus, Danny, open the door and pick that up.” She gave my shoulder a smack with the back of her hand. “That’s Mrs. Buchsbaum’s yard.”
CHAPTER 17
“Do you remember when we lived in the little house, and Mrs. Henderson next door got a whole box of oranges from her son in California?” our mother would begin, sitting there beside the hospital bed in the private room Maeve had been moved to. “She gave us three.”
Maeve was wearing the pink chenille bathrobe that May had picked out for her years before, and Mr. Otterson’s tight bouquet of little pink roses was there beside her on the night stand. Her cheeks were pink. “We split two of the oranges three ways and you cut off all the zest and used the juice from the third orange to make a cake. When it came out of the oven you sent me over to get Mrs. Henderson so she could have cake with us.”
“Those were pioneer days,” our mother said.
They cataloged the contents of the little house with great affection: the nubby brown couch with maple feet, the soft yellow chair with a spattered coffee stain on one arm. There was the framed painting of a blacksmith’s shop (where had it come from, they wondered; where had it gone?), the little table and chairs in the kitchen, the single white metal cupboard bolted to the wall above the sink: four plates, four bowls, four cups, four glasses.
“Why four?” I was looking at the monitor, thinking the cardiac output could still be better.
“We were waiting for you,” my mother said.
My mother, under the safety of Maeve’s wing, found it easier to speak.
“My bed was in the corner of the front room,” Maeve said.
“And every night your father would unfold a screen beside the bed and he would say, ‘I’m building Maeve’s room.’ ”
When they lived in the little house they did their shopping at the PX on the base, and carried the groceries home in an ingenious sack my mother had made out of knotted string. They collected tin for the tin drive, watched the neighbors’ baby, worked at the food pantry the church opened to the poor on Mondays and Fridays. It was Maeve and our mother, always the two of them. In the winter my mother pulled apart a sweater one of the women from church had given her and knitted it into a hat and scarf and mittens for my sister. In the summer, they weeded the garden that all of the families had planted together—tomatoes and eggplants, potatoes and corn, string beans and spinach. They put up jars of relish and made pickles and jam. They recounted every last one of their accomplishments while I sat in the corner with the newspaper.
“Do you remember the rabbit fence that trapped the rabbits in the garden?” my mother asked.
“I remember everything.” Maeve had left her bed and was sitting up in a chair by the window, a folded blanket across her lap. “I remember at night we’d turn out the lights and bring a lamp into the bedroom closet, and push out the shoes so we could sit on the floor and read. Dad was on air raid patrol. You had to pull up your knees so you could fit and then I’d come in behind you and sit in your lap.”