The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke Page B

these lines like guy ropes when I was so tired I couldn’t walk anymore and a voice in my head said: Do you see this love? And do you still not believe?
    I couldn’t deny the voice.
    Now I think: That was exhaustion.
    But at the time the love, the love, it was like ropes around me, cables that could carry us up into the higher floors away from our predicament and out onto the roof and across the empty spaces above the hospital to the sky where we could gaze down upon all the people driving, eating, having sex, watching TV, angry people, tired people, happy people, all doing, all being—
    Of course this didn’t happen; I got the nurse, and she replaced the morphine bag. And then my mother shuffled over to the couch with her IV pole and we curled up, and I pulled out my laptop and scooted close to her and we watched an episode of some show on DVD. Periodically the computer would freeze and we’d shake it.
    I tried to sleep on the pullout couch but its plastic mattress was noisy. I made the couch back up and sat on it. Machines beeped all around me in the antiseptic hallways. Every now and then my mother moaned. I got up to give her a jolt of morphine. Outside the window lay Bridgeport Harbor, one of the least picturesque pieces of waterfront on the northeast seaboard. The city lights were a peculiar wan orange. The room in which my mother lay was functional, scattered with coyly folding plastic tables, buttons for reclining and inclining, and wee tubes of toothpaste. (You won’t be needing much.) This is where we die, I thought, stripped of any fleck of the festive. Dying is bureaucratic and fluorescent. Beyond the window, a Metro-North train pulled into the station and paused. The timing was so familiar from my trips on the train to see my parents that I imagined I could hear the ding signaling the doors were about to close, and the gravelly voice announcing this was the train to New Haven. I turned the words over in my mind. I could see the small outlines of figures within, like characters in a story, a Cheever story perhaps, going home to their unhappy, flawed homes, the only homes we have on this planet, the train swinging smoothly along the tracks, lit up and shiny, silhouettes bending over their magazines and computers, pressing onward into the night.
    In the morning, when she woke, she said to me, “Can you take me home, honey? I think if I go home I’ll feel better. I’ll be able to straighten my throat.” She gestured to her throat. “It needs to uncrinkle. Last night I dreamed that you were all in the living room with me at home, and you all were sitting in the chairs very straight, and I couldn’t do it, and I was very frustrated. And you told me if I just moved chairs I’d be able to sit straight like the rest of you, and I wanted to, but I couldn’t get out of my chair.”
    Â 
    Â 
    I GOT THE FLU my father and Eamon had. Driving back from the hospital, I developed a heavy feeling in my stomach. I went to bed early. I woke nauseated an hour later and vomited up my dinner in the toilet.
    I was so sick I couldn’t sleep. I threw up again and again, unable to keep water down or get as far as the bathroom. For some reason—I can’t remember why, exactly, except that we were so clearly in need of help—Jim was there, and he cleaned everything up. “You don’t have to do that,” I said weakly.
    â€œIt’s OK,” he said matter-of-factly, wiping my vomit from the floor with an old towel. The dog came in, wagging his tail, then Eamon behind him.
    Eamon knelt by my bed, almost still a child, growing into himself. “Hey Meg,” he said softly. “Hey, I think you should smoke some of this. It’ll make you feel better.” He pulled a joint out of his pocket and held it up hopefully.
    â€œIt helped me when I was so sick,” he said. “I gave some to Mom and it helped her.”
    â€œOK,” I said.
    He