You Broke Your Neck

I can’t remember, before she went into Hospice, which hospital Theresa was in. She had been in and out of NYU, and then in and out of Rusk Rehab – the ancient wing next to NYU, where the hallways were literally lined with empty wheelchairs. Before it got so awful, I would pull one of those in to her room and sit close to her bed, rocking myself back and forth, sitting in the wheelchair, with my foot hooked on the bars under her bed. I would stop on my way there in the evening and buy two slices of pizza on 34th Street and 1st Avenue, and then I would stop again in the bodega on the corner, buying bananas and maybe a cookie. And we would sit there, in her room, and eat and laugh ourselves silly. One time, the lady next to her actually asked us to stop laughing. I think I offered to infect her with GBM4 in return for her comments. Sometime that week though, only a few days later, I brought that same old woman a package of underwear, having overheard that her daughter wasn’t coming, and she just needed her underwear. I wish I could remember what we were laughing at.

That was earlier of course. Later, there wasn’t anything left to laugh at. Well, except Joy’s dogs. Two puffball lion cubs that she hid in her PURSE of all things, and smuggled in to see Theresa. Before she got sick, Terry used to dogsit for Joy and stay in their apartment in the city. Their apartment was beautiful. Once, before T died, I stayed there with Bobby and Joy, and the dogs, of course. Joy and I sat on the small veranda, twenty stories high, and drank tea out of beautiful mugs and looked out over the east river to Greenpoint and Astoria on the other side. We talked about everything, her and Bobby and his ex-wife; Theresa and why Joy thought she married Billy… just everything. I was glad for that, because Joy and I didn’t exactly hit it off at first. Who knows why. Perhaps, on some level, I was angry and jealous at the way she would crawl into bed with T and wrap herself around her like an afghan. In the end, the last two words Theresa could ever will out of her aphasic mouth were to Joy. That day Joy brought the dogs, and curled in her bed, and cracked joke after joke, leaving Theresa hunching her shoulder and laughing, she managed to somehow say, “thank you,” to Joy.

The last few days she ever spent “home” were at Elaine’s house in Mount Kisco. I had told Susan to please count on me to “relieve” them at some point – that I was more than a friend, I was family. I can remember when I got there, Susan was getting ready to leave, and Billy was there. He gave me the run down on things in his weird and dramatic way. “OK, NOW MAR, THIS IS THE 911,” he said, ripping open the short armoir doors, exposing the TV and entertainment center hidden inside. He squatted in his short, bull-dog frame and started turning knobs and pushing buttons like he was in air traffic control or something. I honestly did not have a fucking clue what he was talking about. [911? Am I supposed to contact 911 through the sterio?] “OK, NOW TERRRRY WILL PUSH THIS RED BUTTON IF SHE NEEDS YOU…] he pushed the button and the entire system screamed to attention, some unintelligible music pounding through the speakers and the air around us. I’m sure I just looked at him in wide-eyed terror. [What the hell?] Before I could even begin to try and say anything over the cacophony, he must have un-hit the red button, or hit some other STOP RED button. I looked at Terry, who nodded in some affirmative relief, but I was simply more confused. “NOW JUST DO NOT CLOSE THESE DOORS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAR,” Billy shouted as if the music was still on. “THAT’S WHAT WENT WRONG YESTERDAY, SUSAN CLOSED THE DOORS AND THEN SHE COULDN’T HEAR THE SYSTEM FROM UPSTAIRS WHEN TERRY NEEDED HER.” [oh. Okay, this is Terry’s 911 to us] I thought as I finally exhaled; I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath. “Billy, why would I be upstairs?” “TO SLEEP, MAR,” he continued shouting. “OKAY, THERE ARE STRAWS OVER HERE. IF TERRY NEEDS A DRINK OF WATER, YOU HAVE TO HOLD THE GLASS FOR HER, LIKE THIS,” he demonstrated, offering Theresa a drink of lukewarm water on the card table next to the fold out couch. “AND YOU HAVE TO FIX HER PILLOWS LIKE THIS – ARE YOU WATCHING, MAR??? BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T FIX HER PILLOWS RIGHT, SHE CAN’T BREATH VERY WELL.” He walked around the other side of the bed, “HERE IS THE COMMODE. NOW WHEN TERRY NEEDS THE COMMODE, SHE’LL RING THIS BELL. YOU WILL HAVE TO HELP HER STAND UP, BUT DON’T FORGET DO NOT PUT YOUR HAND UNDER HER ARMPIT. YOU MUST WRAP YOURSELF AROUND THE OUTSIDE OF HER ARM, LIKE A HUG, AND THEN HELP HER TO PIVOT FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER.” He dragged Theresa from the bed, demonstrating this as if she were a rag doll in some drunken dance. “AND HERE IS HER PILLOWCASE. YOU PUT THIS IN HER LAP ONCE SHE IS SEATED ON THE COMMODE.” [oh God, what is this place? What is this? Is he leaving, God??? Please get Billy out of her, Heavenly Father. I am afraid of Billy. Please. Please. Please. What is all this? Why is he shouting? And how on earth could Susan have left me here alone with this lunatic?]

Finally, Billy must have stopped yelling. Magically, Theresa was back on the bed, and he was fluffing her pillows for the 100th time. “Billy, we’ll be okay, really. And don’t worry about some emergency 911 stereo system, I am not sleeping upstairs.” “You’re not?” Theresa said her first words since I got there, other than hello. “No, T. Why would I sleep upstairs?” “WELL, WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO SLEEP? YOU HAVE TO GET A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP.” I turned to answer Theresa, ignoring his loud insanity. “I’m going to sleep in the next room, Ter, on the black leather couch – I’m going to open the French doors between the two rooms, and I’ll be less than twenty feet away from you all night. If you need me, I’ll hear you. Okay?” Theresa seemed to relax then. As if she could stop trying to hold it together. Billy was still yelling about a good night’s sleep, but I just looked at Theresa and smiled. “Why would I sleep on a separate floor of the house? That doesn’t make any sense. If I simply came for a visit I wouldn’t sleep that far away. Besides, I want to be with you, Theresa. I want to sit here and shoot the breeze and watch TV or read to you. Whatever you need.” She looked at me with a deep love. We had been friends a very long time by then. Through sobriety and non-sobriety, through boyfriends and husbands and lovers and chaos and peace, through birthdays and holidays, we had cut an invisible path through every diner in New York State, leaving an invisible line of memories and love.

That was the last time we would really ever talk to each other. She simply wasn’t able to form words by the end of that weekend.

Billy left at some point. Relief is not a strong enough word. I remember waking up on that black leather couch in the room adjacent to Theresa that night. Some scratching every few minutes. I was afraid it was Billy breaking in to rape me. That was such a horrible fear, that he was outside the many-paned glass windows of that room, scratching around, and that he would come in and rape me, and Theresa would be unable to do anything to stop him. She would lay there, imprisoned and hear him rip off my clothes and fuck me. I think in my nightmare, he strangled me to death as he came.

It was the hamster, I realized many terrified hours later. Scratching around in its cage. If you knew Bill’s dynamic with me, you’d understand why I went that crazy route in my head. I lay there on the couch then, calming down as the hamster ran on his wheel, and listened to Theresa breath in the other room.

Later, she would call to me to help her to the commode. And I would wrap my arm around her, facing the same direction, in some weird synchronized ballet. I would slowly move her, pivoting her weight from side to side on her feet, left pivot, right pivot. And something outside the glass doors caught my attention, and as we pivoted, moving slowly to the right, her weight shifting, I turned my head to look out the window and felt an electric shock go through my body. I held Terry tighter as everything seemed to go white for a moment, like I’d been hit by lightning. [don’t drop Theresa, whatever you do, just do not drop Theresa.] [I think I’m hurt though, I seemed to answer myself from some other place, in some other voice. I think I really hurt my arm.]

In some weird 20/20 hindsight, in my daydreams, an angel slowly descends in that moment, and wraps me in her winged arms. She lowers our beloved Terry to the commode (which is what I did), gently lowering her pajama bottoms, and dropping the pillowcase into her lap (which is what I did next), but this angel then leans in and whispers the truth into my ear, the truth we wouldn’t find out until eleven weeks later, long after Theresa had died at 48 years old. The angel leans in and says in some breathy whisper, y o u b r o k e y o u r n e c k .

I broke my neck. I somehow, in that moment, smashed wide open two of the cushiony gelatin disks that keep your vertebrae from hitting each other, and in the process, I had slammed the fluid that should be inside those disks, all over my cervical spinal column.

Oh, and life? Well, life would never be the same for me.