Hospice
BY CALYN CLARE
A girl lies in a hospice bed, clutching an open book - "Understanding Druidry, by E. P. Wallace." Her knuckles are white with tension. These days, she holds everything like this, as is she's scared inanimate objects will grow wings and try to fly away. She's becoming more possessive as she becomes less human, pooling the remnants of her strength, desperately clutching whatever she holds dear.
"Druidry seems masochistic," she comments absently, eyes dissecting each word, each page. "For millennia, thousands of these people have worshipped the balance between the beginning and end of life. But when we die, everything we accomplish becomes obsolete in a second. That's why we're so afraid of death; we’re scared to lose everything we've ever worked to obtain. And yet, Druids seem almost thankful for that. I don't understand why."
I'm just here to change her sheets. Maybe she's just here to tell me her opinions on a religion I barely knew existed. I rub my hand over her wrist for half a second, and snatch it back. With such skeletal limbs and pale skin, she looks like she's freezing, despite surplus blankets piled upon the bed. She's seventeen, but so small she may as well be ten. I give her extra applesauce, when she can stomach it, knowing full well it won’t do anything in the long run. Protecting a dying child is in my nature, as a mother. Now, it's my job. A morbid occupation, but I’d rather be subject to hospice nursing than given no work at all.
I see her drawing, sometimes: thin people in billowing clothes. She scribbles wispy words around the figures, mostly quotes from the book she's reading. Often, the sentences aren't quite complete, beginning and ending at random. Her conversations have such a tendency to drift that they can barely focus. The drawings themselves are so thin-lined and light that they're a step away from not existing at all.
At some point I realize that she's been scratching out all of the faces. None of her drawings have heads. Above each neckline is only a mass of black chicken scratch.
"It's you," she explains, upon handing me a used napkin. I'm just here to give her a cup of tea. Maybe she's just here to give me a used napkin. Tentatively, I sit on the edge of her bed studying her gift.
Among stains from past cups of tea, there is a small sketch of a woman. She wears a large cotton dress and knee socks, but no shoes. Her limbs are thin as pins, each hand protruding from each sleeve, hanging, purposeless. Above the collar, a skinny neck. Above the neck, chicken scratch.
"How do I know it's me if you haven't drawn my face?" I ask.
"I can't draw your face," she replies, indignantly. She sips her lemon tea and returns to her book. I notice that she's not moved from page two hundred and four in the past week. I realize that her eyes aren't moving, just glazed over, blinking every so often. Her hair is falling out onto her pillow again. I gather it in my hands, before leaning over her shoulder to peek at the open page. All it consists of is a detailed map of northern Scotland.
"I've heard Scotland's beautiful," I say.
"Scotland?" She asks, looking up. I frown back at the book. The map is labeled in large print. I point to it.
"That's a map of Scotland."
"Oh. I wasn't reading the map," she responds, "just these pencil marks. Look, someone erased a word."
I squint. Against the faded white background, Loch Ness has been circled. The word "EXPLORE" has been written in messy capitals, and then sloppily erased.
"I'm going to go to there someday."
Her words get lost in my head for a minute. She stares at me. I stare at the paper, mind blank. I don't want to explain why she won't be able to visit Scotland. I am sure she already knows. She's a smart enough girl, but her lucidity is slowly fading. She gets thinner every day. Her cheeks are hollowed, eyes sunken, words rasping.
When I walk in a week later (with another cup of tea), I find her immobile, eyes closed, expression peaceful as it often is in sleep. "Understanding Druidry" by E. P. Wallace still rests in her hands. She's drawn a figure in the middle of page 205. It's naked, bent to the ground as if in hysterical mourning. The head is missing, replaced with chicken scratch. My fingers graze her wrist and it is too blue and she is too still and suddenly I am stuck like a fly in amber, staring at the figure in her book.
A caption is written in arthritic capitals above the figure: "It's not you, it's everyone." Silently, I pore over each speck of graphite until my eyes begin to glaze over. Is she referring to the figure in her sketch, or the audience viewing it? What do her words have to do with anything?
To do with her?
Maybe it's not only my face she deemed impossible to draw. Maybe to her, faces didn't matter. No one mattered anymore. Or maybe they mattered too much, and looking at them hurt.
There's so much meaning in a face; maybe she was too scared. Maybe she didn’t want the last face she ever saw to be a crude, scribbled rendition in the margins of a yellowing book. There's a square in my back pocket. It's a used napkin with a picture of (supposedly) me displayed on the back. I want to pull it out, but I don't, for fear the picture will have changed. After an artist dies, their art always increases in value. I don't know if I'll find a different meaning in the drawing, now that she's gone.
I'm wearing a skirt and a t-shirt. I ask myself if the change in wardrobe somehow caused her current state; if maybe the absence of a cotton dress and knee-high socks shocked her to death. If my insistence upon wearing shoes despite her drawing me without them upset her so much that she died just to spite me. It’s absolutely stupid, but I think about it anyway.
I keep my fingers on her wrist for another moment, as if she’ll still be alive as long as they’re there. As if the moment I pull away, she’ll evaporate, leaving behind nothing but her book to signify that she was ever there at all.
When I reach for the intercom button, she has not disappeared. But now she doesn’t seem real. Instead, I see her as a wax figure, and I feel more isolated alone in this room than I ever have in my life.
"You'd better get down here," I mutter into the hospice intercom. "She isn't waking up this time."
"We're coming," a voice sighs on the other end. I know who it is, but between these white walls, it could be anyone. All knowledge you've tucked away evaporates not a second after walking through these doors.
"Wait. This was your first one, right? First one you walked in on?" It’s the voice from the intercom again, still there, gentle and concerned. "Are you okay?"
"I suppose. I think I expected something different."
"What did you expect?"
Three quiet people push a stretcher through the double doors to my left. I have the impulse to push them out. This room is our special place. And then I remember that a hospice room is nobody's special place. People come and go, it hosts death after death, there are never miracles here. I realized this a long time ago, but I've been having problems remembering things lately. I wonder how much I'll forget.
Into the intercom I say, "I was prepared to lose a stranger. Right now, I don’t even know who I am anymore."
The man on the other end gives a sad chuckle in response and then says a few other things that I hear but fail to register. I don’t say anything else. I can’t think of anything else to say.
A dead girl is lifted from her bed, and I study the full-body mirror hung on the wall. A thin woman faces me, wearing a black skirt, a blue t-shirt, and white sneakers.
I feel the drawing in my pocket again. Slowly, I reach down and slip off my shoes.