3. TO SPEND ONE NIGHT WITH YOU

Solitaire wants to bring Em home.   She isn’t asking for much -- a few hours, a night, at most.  The fact that he’s dead strikes her as irrelevant.

“You can’t take him home.”  The nurse’s tone is flat but emphatic, brooking no argument.

Em is lying on a narrow hospital bed in the corner of a curtained room.  Solitaire is sitting on the edge of his bed, hunched face down, somewhere between a defensive crouch and a possessive sprawl,  over his upper body, her arms spread out like wings across his chest.  She’s been in this position for roughly an hour and when she raises her head to the nurse, her cheeks are creased and streaked. 

“He’s mine.”

The night nurse, whose name is Kristee, looks down at her.  She sees trouble, maybe hysteria.  Her resolve hardens.

“It’s against the law.”

“What law?”

“A city ordinance states that the deceased must be removed from the premises in an hour.”  She speaks in the quaintly distanced argot of a police briefing.  “After that the body starts to putrefy.”  

Solitaire wants to tell Kristee that if she fills Em's nostrils with ambrosia and red nectar as the Greek Gods did for fallen heroes, his flesh will remain uncorrupted. But she doesn't.  

Kristee looks at her watch.  “It’s already past four.  I've left a message at the mortuary to come and get him as soon as possible.”

Em is at a hospice in the foothills.  He has been there since Friday night when he was dismissed from the hospital and sent home to die.  For reasons having mainly to do with transportation, he has been remanded to this hospice, but only on a temporary basis.  He is to come home in a medical transport van on Monday.

“This isn’t a dying facility, he can only stay the weekend,” an administrator admonishes her. 

This is news to Solitaire.  She was under the illusion that a hospice was precisely where people went to die.  So.  No dying allowed.  Well, no matter.  She didn’t want Em to die there, anyway.  But now, in what looks like bald-faced defiance of the house rules, he has died there.

The call comes at two-thirty Monday morning.  She rings Em’s sons, but their phones are off.  Picking up a bag already packed with his clothes -- socks, underwear, khakis, a royal blue shirt -- she leaves the house at three o'clock.  In the black, starlit silence of the desert night, with a chill wind blowing off the mountains and random traffic lights blinking robotically over the empty street crossings, she winds up bone-dry River Road into the cactus-strewn hills north of town.  

A few hours before his death, without her knowledge, Em had been moved from a private room to the cramped, curtained-off corner of a double room. Arriving at hospice on Sunday night, she had found him on his back beetle-like, legs splayed, naked, sheetless and shivering beneath a glaring ceiling light, a diaper around his ankles.  His hospital johnny coat, ripped off, lay on the floor.     

Now, in death, he lies obediently in the johnny coat.  The sheet is pulled up under his chin; his mouth and eyes are half open.  Slit-eyed and slack-jawed, he appears vaguely imbecilic.  She cradles his head in her arms and rocks; a groan of pain rises out of her gut and her tears spill onto his brow and into his eyes.  She wants to go home and howl at the heavens.  But she has duties to perform.  She presses her fingers gently but firmly down over his eyelids, closing them, kissing them shut.  The mouth is another matter.  Even in the dim light she can see that his lips are blue-ing up, and when her cheek brushes against his mouth it feels, not rigid, but rubbery. His jaw is beginning to set.  She must work quickly.

Solitaire has seen plenty of dead bodies, but has never been to a “viewing.” It has not occurred to her that mortuaries are probably equipped to handle any and all contingencies.  No doubt they have pulleys and tackles that can winch a man’s jaw or any other resistant body part into any conceivable position.  Still, she doesn’t trust them to do it right and she doesn’t want to send Em off to Eternity looking as though Death had found him carelessly snoozing at the opera, catching a few z’s halfway through the third act of “Siegfried.” 

She looks around warily -- she doesn’t want to be apprehended by Nurse Kristee, whom she now perceives as her adversary -- and hearing the nurse and the tech chattering volubly over the charts and seeing that the coast is clear, swings into action.  She puts the heel of her hand under Em’s chin, works her right leg up so that her knee is against her elbow and by exerting sufficient slow, steady upward pressure with her thigh, levers his jaw shut.  She waits, leaving her hand in position for a count of ten, then gently removes it.  The mouth holds for a second, then slips back open a fraction.  She repeats the process and this time it stays shut.

Round One to her.  As Theseus slew the Minotaur, as Heracles beheaded the Hydra at Lerna, so she, Solitaire, will triumph over Kristee at this hospice named, with exquisite, presumably unintended, irony … Odyssey.

Now for Round Two:  the change of clothes.  She raises the head of the bed, removes the hateful johnny coat, takes the long-sleeved blue shirt from the bag, unbuttons it, then pulling Em forward, puts his right arm into the sleeve.  It is when she tries to get the shirt around his back that she runs into trouble.  Em is a big man – six-two, 180 pounds – and she just isn’t strong enough to do this by herself. She is up on the bed wrestling with Em and the shirt when the tech, Socorro, wanders into the cubicle.  A look of alarm animates the tech's stolid expression and she bolts from the room, returning, predictably, with Kristee.

“You can’t put that shirt on him – "

"Yes, I can ... if you help me..."  She grunts with the effort of trying to hold Em up.  She's got her knee in the middle of his back and is trying to insert his left arm into the sleeve.

"It's too late -- he's got rigor mortis."

"He hasn't, damn it ... look!"  Solitaire takes Em's arm and gently shoves it as though it were a swing.  The movement is stiff, but undeniable.

Solitaire is triumphant.  "You see! ...  you see!" she cries.

“You can discuss this with Mr. Cantwell... the Grief Counselor,”  Kristee says.  “He's on his way, but it will take him an hour to get here.  He has to drive in from Benson.  I'm going to call him again.”  

Solitaire folds.  Conceding the round, she curls up beside Em, whose blue shirt is now half on and half off, while she awaits the arrival of the Grief Counselor.  In his absence, Solitaire muddles through on her own, grieving without counsel.

Her anguish advances in waves, surging like surf, crashing, crushing her, knocking her flat, then ebbing, subsiding, sluicing out, leaving a sloshing tidepool of tears, rank with pale anemones and sea grass, slack weeds of woe, tiny crustaceans of useless guilt, small hollow shells of remorse, worn shards of sadness, thoughts scuttling like sand crabs  … all the effluvia, the pitiful flotsam and jetsam  washed up and depleted in death’s wake.  She lies panting, exhausted, briefly numbed, waiting for the next wave, even now gathering momentum in the recesses of her heart.  Then, in the silence, she hears a sound, a faint stirring and rustling, and realizes with a stab of shame that the sound is The Other Patient … the other dying man behind the curtain….

What are the rules of correct behaviour here?  Is there a paradigm?  An existing etiquette for a double-occupancy chambre des morts?  Should she thoughtfully tamp down her tears, stifle her sobs? It seems inconsiderate, at the very least insensitive, to carry on like Hecuba while the poor man is – so she supposes – in extremis.   Or is he merely, in line with professed policy, weekending here?  Even so…

Solitaire wants to go home now.  But it seems she can't.  She must wait for the Grief Counsellor and the Mortician.  She doesn't want to wait.  What are they to her or she to them?  She longs to mourn her fallen husband as the ancient Greeks mourned their dead.  She wants to wash Em's poor tired body, anoint his wounds – his cracked skin and clotted sores and purple bruises -- with oils and sweet-scented lotions, cloak his body in fine muslin, wrap him in purple robes and lay him on a bier mantled in white. 

In the privacy of their home, in the presence of family and a few friends, Solitaire wants to rage like Achilles over Patroclus, shriek and tear her hair like Hecuba, claw the skin from her face, swoon like Andromache over Hector, groan, hurl imprecations at the Immortals, utter elegies and lamentations all night long.  It’s unlikely, of course, that she would do any of these things, it’s not her style.  But if she should … then, why not?  Why should she be denied this last rite? This last right?  This last night?

                                        

“For never sorrow half so deep
Shall pierce my heart again!”