At last I called New Jersey. “You don’t have to send my brother anything,” I told Jack.
“I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” he said back.
There wasn’t much of an answer for that.
“He loves the birdsong tape. And the fudge.”
I was glad it was impossible for Jack to see me. I was in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Giselle curled on my lap. I had all the lights turned off to cut down on my electricity bills. I had recently applied for a job at Acres’ Hardware Store, only to be told I was unqualified.
I had my hand over the phone receiver. I was crying.
“I know what you’re doing,” Jack said.
“You’re such an expert.” I sounded snotty and bitter and desperate.
“About some things. Most people cry for good reason. Most people smile for good reasons, too.”
The next package he sent contained wind chimes. My brother had us put them up by the window. He smiled whenever he heard them. It was a gift for my brother, but it was also a message to me. There was something still worth having in his world.
“Did I know this guy Jack?” Ned asked. He was at the point of repeating all of our conversations. His memory was gone, and the here and now was going as well.
“No,” I said. “Nobody did.”
“He has good taste.”
“Seems to,” I had to agree.
At night, when Nina was exhausted, I sat with my brother and read him fairy tales.
“Read the one I like,” he said one night.
“It’s not in this collection,” I lied.
“Liar.”
But I would not read the story about death, not now, not when we knew what the ending was. I read “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Juniper Tree” and “Brother and Sister”; I read about fishermen’s wives and horses that were loyal, and then I told him the story I’d made up, about the frozen girl on the mountain.
“Now that’s a sad one,” my brother said. “All she has to do is pick up her feet and walk away and she won’t turn to ice. Even when we were kids and you told me, I never understood that girl.”
I wanted to change what was happening, but it couldn’t be done. I bit my tongue a thousand times a day. I wasn’t about to wish for anything. I was afraid of wishes still. But Nina wasn’t. She had gone to her doctor, who said she could no longer travel. My brother had made it to sixth months. He loved to put his hand on Nina and feel the baby moving. Nina didn’t tell me, but she bought the tickets for his dream. She started to teach me how to give Ned his injections of antibiotics and Demerol. She taught me how to work the IV when he needed more fluid.
“What’s the best way to die?” I asked Jack one night. I usually called him at work, but this time I’d phoned him at home. He still seemed surprised to hear from me, but he answered me right away.
“Living,” he said. He didn’t even have to think about it. It was as if he’d always known the answer.
When Nina told me she wanted me to take Ned to California most of what I felt was terror. Her doctor had told her she couldn’t make the trip because of her condition. But surely I wasn’t up to the task. I wasn’t up to anything. My brother was leaving so fast. He was in diapers now. He was going backward in time. Every time he woke up he talked about the butterflies. Once in his life, that’s what he wanted; well, this was that once. Nina had called a friend in Monterey who would pick us up at the airport in San Francisco; Eliza, a nurse, would come with a rented ambulance and take us to her house. The migration was already happening, she’d told Nina. Eliza’s husband, Carlos, would take us to Big Sur, where the monarchs spend the winter. We would get there by ambulance if necessary.
“It’s too much for him,” I said.
“It’s not enough,” Nina told me.
She had that stony look. She was the woman who’d been reading about the hundred ways to die. She wanted my brother to have everything he’d ever wanted.
I packed a bag that night. A carry-on, since the suitcase would be filled with medicine. Nina hired a medevac plane. She had already taken a second mortgage on the house. If she never had another car, if she and the baby had to walk everywhere, eat rice, read by candlelight, she still wanted this. Even if she couldn’t be there.
“You’re going to see the butterflies,” she said to my brother on the morning it was to happen.
“No.” He smiled at her. He didn’t believe it. He was still traveling backward through time. Younger than he had been on the night my mother died. I was the older sister now. I was the hand to hold.
“I can’t go, because of the baby, but your sister’s going to take you to California.”
“What do you know?” My brother closed his eyes, exhausted just thinking about it.
“I know I love you,” Nina said.
She was kneeling beside his bed. I had never witnessed such an act of generosity. Ned had on both pairs of socks Jack had sent. There were the wind chimes swinging back and forth in the window. I had been wrong about everything. I was terrified to go.
“Don’t worry,” Nina said. We had to take him to the airport by ambulance — how could I not be worried? “You’ll manage.”
At least her friend Eliza was a nurse. I wouldn’t be all alone in this.
“Are you sure you want to go ahead? You probably won’t be with him when it happens.” When he goes, I meant to say. But I couldn’t.
Nina put her arms around me. She told me a secret. “I will be,” she said.
We gave my brother his maximum amount of Demerol and got on the plane. There were two EMTs with us, so I slept for a while. When I woke I felt weightless. There were clouds all around us. My brother was hooked up to an IV and the machine made a clicking noise. I realized the clicking inside my head had disappeared some time ago and I hadn’t even noticed. I could see Ned’s feet, the socks Jack had sent him. I might have sobbed. One of the EMTs, a man about my age, sat down across from me and took my hand.
Over the Rockies, my brother was in pain. The sky was the brightest blue I’d ever seen, dotted with puffballs. I wondered if this was what the sky was like in Italy. So blue. So open. We were floating through space and time. But I didn’t wish we would always be there. I knew this was only an instant. I gave Ned one of his injections, to make sure I was capable, with the experts looking on.
“There you go,” the EMT said. “Just like an old pro.”
I didn’t want to get to know him, or the other one, the young woman. I didn’t have any space for anything more than I was already carrying. I described the clouds to my brother.
“Cumulus,” he said. 200
His mouth was dry, so the woman EMT traveling with us gave him ice to suck on.
“Ice,” he said. “Very nice. Unless it’s on the porch.”
Ned and I laughed.
“Private joke,” I told the EMTs.
Ned was asleep when we landed at San Francisco. The ambulance was parked on the runway and Nina’s friend Eliza was there. She and Nina had grown up next door to each other in Menlo Park, and she was Nina’s opposite, dark and jovial, even now when Ned cried in pain as he was being transferred.
“We’ll have him in a nice big bed soon,” Eliza reassured me. “We’ll take good care of you,” she told my brother.
Eliza telephoned Nina from the runway and then held the phone up to Ned’s ear. He smiled when he heard his wife’s voice. I don’t know what Nina said to him, but she comforted him somehow, and he slept all the way to Eliza’s house in Monterey, a long trip, so tiresome I fell asleep myself, sitting up, my check against the window.
When I opened my eyes all I saw was green. And then the sky, and then the clouds.