She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,48

gets sick a lot, too. When I try to get her to drink water, she doesn’t want any, but she has to drink to keep her fluids up. I’m hoping she’ll eat something tonight. She hasn’t kept any food down for two days.”

“Maybe bring in a nurse to help?”

And what would that cost? I thought. “Maybe, if it keeps getting worse.”

I glanced back up at the clock—5:42 p.m.

“Go,” Krendal said. “I got this until you get back. Give Jo my best. We miss her here.”

“Thanks.” I grabbed a towel from the rack beside me, hastily dried my hands, smacked him on the back, and bolted for the back door.

I had to go to the apartment first and check on Auntie Jo.

I nearly knocked two people over running down the sidewalk on Brownsville. In our building, I took the steps two and three at a time.

Dunk pulled the door open, while I fumbled with my key at the lock. “Dude, she’s getting worse.”

I pushed past him into the apartment. “You need to open some windows in here. Feels like I just walked into an oven.”

“I tried, then your wonderful aunt fell trying to get out of her chair to close them. Said she was freezing. She was shaking, too. Bad. I got her back in her chair and put a blanket over her. She stopped shaking and started sweating instead. When I tried to take away the blanket and cool her off, she gave me a death stare—when a woman looks at me that way, I know it’s time to back off. She’s sleeping now.”

Auntie Jo was in her chair by the closed window, reclined, with a thick quilt pulled up to her neck. Her eyes bobbled under her lids, lost to some dream. She wore a bright green ski cap on her head.

Auntie Jo wore hats now.

Always.

I knew most of her hair had fallen out, but she wouldn’t let me see. She was too proud. I considered getting her a wig, but I didn’t know how to approach the issue without things getting weird.

A Coke can sat on the scratched wooden table at her side, smoke trailing out of the opening. “How many today?”

Dunk shrugged. “I saw her with at least five, but I think she snuck one more in the bathroom. She was in there for nearly forty minutes, without so much as a courtesy flush. She finally came out when I told her I was coming in if she didn’t.”

I found the pack of Marlboros crammed between her leg and the side of the chair. There were six left of the original twenty.

When she was first diagnosed with leukemia, I tried to get her to stop smoking altogether. Hiding her ashtrays didn’t work—I tried that years ago, and she always found another way to dispense of her ashes (like the Coke can, the window, or one of my shoes). When the chemo and radiation started, I took away her cigarettes, only to find new packs would mysteriously appear. I had no idea where she got them. I tore the apartment to pieces trying to find her hidden stash. She didn’t go out. They had to be here somewhere.

On our third or fourth visit, Dr. Pavia pulled me aside and told me considering how long she had smoked, getting her to quit might prove impossible. At this stage, quitting might actually do more harm than good. He said some patients demonstrated weight gain and heightened blood pressure when quitting. Weight gain would be a plus (she dropped nearly thirty pounds), but higher blood pressure would not. In many ways, the risks associated with quitting outweighed the benefits. He told me to continue trying, but not to fret if I couldn’t make it happen.

We had bigger problems.

The cancer had spread from her blood to her lymph nodes, spleen, liver, and began invading her central nervous system. The chemo and radiation slowed down the progress, but only a little.

Auntie Jo was losing this fight.

Then there was the pain.

“Did she take her pills?”

“Yeah, but they’re giving her tramadol. It’s working now, but barely. She’s already building up a tolerance. You need to let me get her something stronger.”

He didn’t come out and say it, but he meant heroin. Dunk brought it up a couple times before. He said when his uncle died from cancer, heroin and pot were far more effective than the oxycodone his doctor prescribed. Even better than the morphine they gave him toward the end.

“We can’t give her heroin.”

“Why