Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,137

muscle relaxants, but at home he turned away when I tried to give him his pills. Only Lola could get him to take them, and her days were numbered—once hospice started, she would no longer be needed. Instead, we would have a head nurse who checked in three times a week, plus two rotating shift nurses who spent an hour at the house in the mornings and evenings, every day. The first night home from the hospital, after refusing to take any pain medication, Dennis was restless. His voice returned in the form of ghoulish cries, unintelligible and unfocused, and he was soothed only by my lying next to him in the little hospital bed and singing softly in his ear. At first I sang the lullabies I remembered from when Margo was a baby, but then I sang songs I knew he liked, by Neil Young and Jimmy Buffett and Dolly Parton. He didn’t sleep, but he lay still; if I fell asleep, he would stir and cry out again, and I would be jarred awake, and resume my soft singing.

After a week of this—Dennis no longer seemed to need real sleep; he was in a stupor most of the day, and the line between awake and asleep had blurred—Lola told me I would need to ask the hospice nurse for liquid morphine to add to Dennis’s feeding tube. This was Lola’s last shift before the arrival of the hospice nurse the next day. Forcing painkillers on Dennis was not a job I felt I could pursue, so to change the subject, I asked Lola about her plans. She said she was going back to Ecuador.

“So soon?” I said. “Do you have a beau there?” I didn’t normally pry, but I was rattled in the face of losing her.

She didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “My father is dying. It’s been coming for a while.”

“I had no idea,” I said.

“It’s fine,” she said. She looked at me. “You will need to get some sleep.” She knew what was ahead of me though I still didn’t—the empty hours, the helplessness, the boredom. She went into the living room to say good-bye to Dennis. She stroked his hand, and he turned and made an expression that I took for a smile. She murmured quietly for a minute or two, and he grunted in response, and then she stood and bent to kiss him on the forehead. She passed me as she left. “Take care of yourself,” she said, and I said, “Thank you for everything.”

The next day, while Stuart gave Dennis a bath, I called Lola’s agency and left a message for her supervisor, saying that she had been a lifesaver and offering to be a reference should she ever need one. I never heard from her again. If Stuart acknowledged the end of her tenure at all, I didn’t see it.

The head hospice nurse’s name was Olivia. She was our constant during the weeks of rotating nurses and shifting medication schedules. She told us that Dennis’s listlessness, his swollen legs, his disorientation, the heavy snoring that substituted for breathing all came from lack of oxygen and the buildup of carbon dioxide in his blood. She brought in an oxygen tank, and from then on, he wore a clear tube under his nostrils, hooked around his ears. Every so often I was shocked by the sight of him. Olivia started him on liquid morphine. He was barely able to focus on my face when I stood above him, so I lay next to him for hours at a time, day and night.

One night, three weeks after hospice started, when we were alone—Bette had flown in from New Mexico, and Gloria and Grady were at the house most of each day, so we were rarely alone—I was bleary from sleeplessness and from remembering song lyrics and thinking of what to say to fill the silence. In desperation, I went to the bookshelf and took down the book of Wallace Stevens’s poems that Dennis had given me on our wedding day, and read to him until he fell asleep. When he woke, moaning, I read some more. I told him I remembered reading poetry with him when we were first married. I told him I remembered everything.

We fell asleep together after that, and he woke crying out and I fed him and read some more, and we fell asleep again. I woke as the sunlight began to worm across the floor, and