It was a tiny town, worse than a village, inhabited chiefly by old people who so seldom died, it was really vexatious.
What a thing to remember. Annie-Vic was sure that Miss Gardham was not a ghost, and that her father was not one either. She also did not think that they were properly hallucinations. It was as if they had been locked up in her head in some alternative form nobody yet knew anything about, and now that she couldn’t control anything about herself, they had come out.
She really couldn’t control anything about herself. She wanted to toss and turn in bed. She wanted at least to turn over on her side, because she slept on her side. She much preferred it to sleeping on her back. She just couldn’t make her body move, to her side or anywhere else. She couldn’t make her eyelids open, either, even when she could feel the light on them, and even see it, more or less. She couldn’t reach out her hand to any of the people who came and sat beside this bed.
For a little while—there was really no way to judge how long; the human person is not provided with a biological mechanism for telling ordinary daylight time—she was so frightened she thought she might have trouble breathing. She couldn’t count the number of times she had told various members of her family that she would never want to be left in a “persistent vegetative state.” She had railed on and on about it during the Terry Schiavo thing, when her grandnephew Cameron, who was a doctor, had been adamant that it was never permissible to remove a feeding tube.
“Artificial life supports, yes,” he had said. “If you’ve got her heart pumping by machine or her lungs breathing that way, of course you can remove those. But a feeding tube. Food and water. You have no right to remove food and water.”
Annie-Vic had made some remark at the time that Cam’s view was a result of his newly minted Catholicism. Cam had converted to the Catholic Church during his residency in oncology. She felt bad about that now, about what she’d said. She’d been so annoyed at Cam for converting. There hadn’t been a religious person in the Hadley family for generations, and they’d been proud of the fact, but there was Cam, reading Walker Percy and going to Mass. She should have had more respect for his opinion.
“I don’t think you should never starve someone to death because I converted to Catholicism,” he had told her at the time. “I converted to Catholicism because I don’t think you should starve people to death. Sorry, Annie-Vic, but on questions of life and death, it looks to me like the Catholic Church is the only sane institution on the planet.”
Catholic Church. Sane. Who would have thought it, in her own family? What about birth control? What about censorship? They’d had a fight, that evening, but Annie-Vic didn’t think of it as having ruined her family dinner. The Hadleys always fought about things like that at family dinners. It didn’t stop any of them from staying at the table for the key lime pie.
Annie-Vic wanted to turn her head from side to side, but she couldn’t do that any more than she could do anything else. She wanted to scratch the side of her nose with the tip of her finger. It was as if some vital link between her body and her mind had been severed. Sensations came to her, but her ability to react did not. At one point, Tom Willard had pricked her with a needle. It had hurt like Hell, and under any other circumstances Annie-Vic would have jumped half a foot and cursed him, but she could make no response at all.
“She’s not responsive,” Tom Willard had said, at the time, to somebody in the room who might have been Cam, or Cam and Lisa both. Lisa down from Vassar. Annie-Vic was pretty sure she hadn’t imagined that.
“Of course, she’s not deteriorating,” Tom Willard said.
Annie-Vic had felt a great relief at that. She wasn’t deteriorating, which meant that this problem might work itself out in time. It might not, but at the moment, that didn’t seem to be all that bad. Being dead would be worse, Annie-Vic was sure. She didn’t know why she was sure. She was glad Cam was here. He would refuse if the rest of them tried to talk him into allowing the hospital to let her die. Or to kill her. It wouldn’t be just letting her die, under the circumstances, would it? They’d have to take the tubes and things out. They’d have to take the feeding tube out. They’d have to actually do something.
The door to the room opened and a nurse came in. She came over to the bed and fussed with things. She checked the tube and then went to work changing the bag at the top of it. Annie-Vic knew nothing about hospitals. In spite of her age, she’d never spent much time in them. She had always been a healthy person. The nurse leaned over the bed and put her hand flat on Annie-Vic’s face. Then she yanked up Annie-Vic’s left eyelid with her thumb. It hurt like Hell, and the light hurt even more. The nurse let the eyelid drop. Annie-Vic wondered why she could see people in her room, the real ones as well as the memory ones, when her eyelids were always closed.