Death tagged along with her like a pesky neighborhood dog. Long ago, in the beginning, it was just a watery shadow which floated next to her, over and around her, the twin who was stillborn at their birth.
Even before she knew the meaning of words, she felt their rhythm; her mother rocked and sang to her of rocking babies in tree-top cradles, boughs breaking, babies falling, cradle and all. When she was a bit older, she saw, in the large picture books her mother held for her, the pieces of Humpty-Dumpty after his great fall, and Jack's broken head at the bottom of the hill, the pail and Jill tumbling after him. On another page, an old man was snoring while it was pouring and her mother read...“and he never woke up in the morning.”
In chapter books, she and her mother read of Sleeping Beauty in a rectangular glass case and Red Riding Hood in the belly of a wolf. There were stories of wicked step-mothers and nasty witches, and children hungry or lost. Often she listened to her parents tell their own stories at the dinner table. “He just dropped dead, just like that, on the sidewalk,” or, “He was carrying the plate to the car when he tripped and fell, banged his head on the steps, dead, just like that, on the path, the dish broken into pieces, the potatoes rolling everywhere.” Someone had “died in her sleep; another had “died in his own bed just like he wanted to.”
Later, in school, she learned the meanings of the words-inevitable-and-immortal- and decided that all of these deaths—even the once-twin's—were just that-- inevitable. When the neighbor's pup, practically brand new, was run over by a pick-up truck, she thought, Well, I guess that's just how it is.
A classmate turned thin and bald, and one day never returned to school; on that week's vocabulary test, she followed the directions carefully. Patsy Ann is not immortal, she wrote, underlining the word in her declarative sentence, ending it with a dark period. When she got the test back, the teacher had put a sticker on it, and had placed a small pink geranium plant on Patsy's now-empty desk. Months after, her great grandfather, whose hand twitched like the second hand of a clock, fell off the kitchen chair, his heart stopping abruptly, his hand stilled.Inevitable--that's just how it is--; this time,though, she did not write a sentence.
When she was twelve, her brother, eight years older, was shot down in the South Pacific, over Guam, the letter said. Where was Guam? Shot down and disappeared forever, though her parents pressed the Army for more details, evidence, remains, whatever. She located Guam in the bulky atlas in the school library and imagined him falling from the sky, his cap swirling like a leaf dropping from its tree in the wind.
Years later, when she was married and more than twenty, she'd push her baby in his little plaid carriage into town, stopping at the war memorial on the village green. Reading down the list of names in the glass enclosed case, she'd linger at Robert Trane, PFC. United States Army; this had been her brother, landed now and fixed forever in small brass letters.
Days lengthened, then shortened; the seasons changed; years passed. One more baby came and grew, yet an inkling tugged at her brain: a spare—it seemed to her that she needed a spare. In a novel she had once read, the mother had wanted a spare—an extra—in case something went wrong with one of her others. When the little one was born, a third boy, she named him Ezra, as close to Extra as she could get.
Years passed; the toddlers grew into teens, the infant turned toddler. She exchanged trikes for bikes. Then her first-born's driver's permit became a license to drive. With his caddying money and some help from her—she now worked part time in the assessor's office in the town hall on the green where her brother's death was stilled marked—she allowed him to buy a very used car. Its trunk was jammed shut, one back door wouldn't even open a crack, and the passenger's door window didn't crank all the way up, jiggling at anything over 25. Her middle boy loved to ride in the car, his feet stretched up on the dash, his elbow on the window ledge, fingers on the roof, tapping to the tunes his big brother played on the AM station. She liked to see them this way, the two brothers off on some foolish and unnecessary errand, or the big one volunteering to pick up the middle one after soccer practice.
Was it the sudden drop in temperature that dusky evening? Or was it the boy's speed? The ice had formed quickly and silently, spinning the car into the guard rail, ricocheting it off like a bumper car at the fair, landing it on its side, the jiggling window silenced forever, her middle one as well.
At least there was a body and a burial this time—and a spare, the little one, Ezra. She never blamed the eldest, not did she ever forgive him, and when her husband, their father, died suddenly (dropped dead, just like that, she heard her mother's voice say) newly retired by barely a month, she buried him next to her boy in the ecumenical cemetery near the town's only traffic light.
Distant from her eldest (that's just how it is), she gave her storehouse of un-used love to Ezra, now grown with a family of his own. She lived her small life in the small town which was her world; there were twice-a-week bingo nights occasionally ending with a Jack Daniels with her friend John, a bridge game now and then, monthly trips on the van to the Mall (for stockings, or perhaps to replenish the bourbon) and holiday dinners at Ezra's. There were school plays and confirmations and soccer matches to watch from the sidelines in the blue chair Ezra spread open for her—a place for her pocketbook, even. She went to the wakes of acquaintances, the funerals of friends, never asking of the world more that it could offer.
One year, as she poked with her cane in the brown, damp leaves looking for Spring—a crocus or two, the start of a daffodil, the neighborhood dog, an old thing himself, came over to nose in the smells of the earth she had unturned. Suddenly she felt dizzy and trembly, the dog graying and fading as she dropped, like a light bundle, to the ground. So this is how it is; so this is how it is. The dog nuzzled her gently, and lay down next to her, his nose on her knee, his tail raised in alert.
My turn now, she thought, as she lay in the hospital bed, refusing transfusions and tests (bone marrow? Spinal tap?
What for?); on the second night there, she heard in the far distance of the hallway, her mother's voice saying to her: remember the prayer? ...remember the prayer. Opening her eyes wide to the window and beyond, she thought she knew it by heart: Now I lay me down to sleep...what was the rest?...something, something, something keep...if I should die before I wake, something, something,something...take.
That would have to do: rummaging in her head for the missing words had exhausted her.
What for?She lowered her eye lids, turned her face to the wall, and slipped gently and quietly into a sleep that would not bring a morning.
