The Voiceover Artist by Dave Reidy Page A

nurse had given me a beige plastic cylinder with a button I could press to dose myself. To stave off the cloudy-headedness, I would wait as long as I could, pushing the limits of my endurance, before plunging the button and releasing the morphine into my blood. The first time I watched the clock, I lasted an hour before the pain became too much. Then, fifty minutes. Two days later, I could manage only twenty minutes. Fighting the tide, I tried, in the middle of the night, to go from twenty minutes back up to twenty-five by dropping the device over the edge of the bed, but at eighteen minutes, I was wailing, begging the nurse to return the cylinder to my trembling, outstretched hand.
    The day I awoke to what I guessed would be ten minutes of barely tolerable clarity, I asked for my boys. I had a vague awareness that Connor was home from school and that he and Simon had been sleeping at my apartment. I had no memory of Frank coming to visit me and no desire to see him.
    Connor appeared at my bedside. He covered the back of my free hand with his and smiled down on me, trying to give me some of the confidence he had in surplus. Simon hung back behind Connor. I could not see his face.
    â€œSimon,” I said. I’d tried to call him, but what came out was a hoarse whisper.
    Connor turned his head to him and said, with some impatience, “Mom wants you over here.”
    When they were standing side by side, I said, in a voice I knew they’d one day forget, just as I’d forgotten Simon’s, what I’d called them in to hear.
    â€œIt’s impossible—” I said. I took a shallow, wheezing breath. “How much I love you—” Another breath. “Both.”
    â€œWe love you, too, Mom,” Connor said, answering for himself and Simon. “We love you tons.”
    A faulty wire crackled and a light flickered in the frosted light fixture above us. The heart-rate monitor beeped, counting up to some number I couldn’t guess before the many short beeps were answered by a single long one. I tried to focus on my sons, to drink them in, as if they could do what morphine did, only better.
    â€œHow’s your breathing, Mom?” Connor asked.
    Something in my throat was clicking with each little inhalation.
    â€œI’m going to go check in with the nurse, okay?” Connor said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
    I nodded once, slowly. Connor leaned over and kissed me gently on the forehead. Then he glanced at Simon and walked out of the room.
    Simon didn’t take Connor’s place at the head of my bed. He stayed where he was, near my right leg, its femur close to bursting with tumors. Since the day a doctor told me I had only a few months to live, I’d been picturing my last moments with Simon. I’d imagined him wanting to say goodbye and hating that he could not.
    Simon kept his eyes on mine as tears pooled in their bottom lids. He gave me three deep, slow nods, a gesture I imagined spoke as clearly to me as any voice could have:   I know you love me,   it said.   I love you, too.

    Then Simon stooped to lay his head on my bony breast, and he held my head in his hand, leaving nothing worth saying unsaid.

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    Â 
    Frank Davies
    Â 
    CONNOR CAME HOME  for his mother, not for me.
    He stayed at her apartment until she passed. He called the funeral home. He met with the priest. He sent the death notice to the newspaper. He stood beside her casket throughout the seven-hour wake, accepting condolences from May’s cousins and old friends and the church ladies who read the obituaries for something better to do than wait for their own funerals. Connor did everything May would have wanted—right down to seeing that her favorite prayer, the Memorare , was printed on the mass card—and he did it all himself. Neither Simon nor I were any help, for our own different reasons.
    They buried May on a Thursday, in a plot within spitting