The Girl Below(102)

I would not write about Caleb in my journal, but I saw already how he fit into the sorry narrative they outlined. He was only the latest in a long line of futile attractions—and yet he was also the zenith. With Caleb, I had finally set my sights on a beau so inappropriate that the folly of the whole scheme had been made obvious, even to me.

I thought of Arthur the therapist, who had tried through kindness to get close enough to cure me. At the time, I’d supposed it was his methods that had failed, that I was too smart to get sucked in by transference, but in actual fact, transference had worked so well on me that the second he invoked it I had run for my life.

Arthur would have known that was a risk. It was why he had taken his time, hoping that would make a difference. It would all be written down in his notes: “This girl has been neglected and then abandoned by her father. Withheld affection is what she has come to think of as love. Discomfort will arise from any other kind, and she will bolt.”

If only he had been meaner, I might have stuck around.

While I had been cogitating, the crypt had turned from black to gray without my noticing. I started to doze, but only a short while later Pippa pulled back the curtain of my sleeping platform and tapped me on the shoulder. I started awake and, seeing her face, my first thought was that she’d found out about the tryst with Caleb and had come to give me a roasting. But what she said was, “The doctor thinks there isn’t long, and I thought you’d want to be there with us.”

I followed Pippa into Peggy’s room, thinking that I ought to have taken a proper shower, and not just sluiced myself down. I was too grubby—both literally and spiritually—to sit by anyone’s deathbed. My only consolation—and I felt like a crook even admitting it to myself—was that Caleb would be far too ashamed to mention the incident to anyone, especially his mother.

I was the last to arrive in the sickroom. Harold, Ari, Elena, and Caleb were already there, seated in a horseshoe around the bed where Peggy lay unconscious. Caleb wouldn’t look at me, and all I saw when I looked at him was a skinny little boy with bags under his eyes. I couldn’t even remember what it was about him that had so bewitched me. I caught Harold’s eye, and realized how badly I’d behaved toward him, when he’d been right about me all along.

But it was time to put all that aside because Peggy was about to die. The air around us was weighed down with the anticipation of it, and everyone was watching her, not really breathing, unsure how we’d react when it finally happened.

Like all solemn occasions, however, it wasn’t without bursts of comedy. Against family wishes, Elena had summoned the local priest, a man so vast he might have smuggled in half the village under his cassock. When he leaned over Peggy to administer the rosary, she woke up, saw the antique gold pendant around his neck, and lunged for it. “That’s mine, you rotter!” she shrieked, refusing to let go. “I know you—you’re the dirty thief from downstairs.”

Pippa explained to the priest—who was no doubt used to such nuttiness—that Peggy had mistaken him for her old neighbor Jimmy, who had in fact been a thief, but I noticed that from then on, to avoid a repeat performance, he discreetly maintained his distance.

Unfortunately for the gathered family, Peggy’s outburst turned out to be the last coherent words she would utter. Soon after, she began to shout out random names and objects, like a baby does when it first learns to talk but without any of the delight a baby expresses, just fury and agitation. Slowly, horribly, even the names and objects deteriorated until they were simply grunts and moans.

“The brain shuts down first, but patients can remain very vocal during that process,” explained the village doctor, who had done his medical training in Hull and spoke with a queer northern accent. He tried to reassure us that Peggy wasn’t suffering at all, even though it sounded that way. In fact, he said, she wouldn’t be aware of anything. I wanted to ask how such a thing had ever been proved, but sat still and said nothing.

Instead, I watched from the end of the bed and thought of my mother, of the only other death I’d seen. Except that I hadn’t seen her die. For hours and hours, I’d held her hand in the ICU, had watched the machines and pumps do their work, had prayed, and talked, and even eaten, but then, in the end, when she had taken her last breath, I had not been paying attention.

Not long after the doctor’s reassurances, Peggy’s grunts and moans declined to the most distressing noise I had ever heard: a high, sharp intake of breath, followed by a long, low, drawn-out cry of agony on each exhale. Despite what the doctor had said, I pictured Peggy being dragged into hell one fingernail at a time. After we had endured it for close to half an hour, the doctor purposefully opened up his medical bag. “I am going to make her more comfortable,” he said, quietly. He held up a series of glass vials to the light to better read their labels. He selected two, and showed them to Pippa. I didn’t hear what he said to her, but whatever it was, she nodded emphatically, and put her hand over her mouth and started crying. The doctor took out two syringes from his bag and filled them from the vials, flicking each needle to get rid of air bubbles. Holding one syringe in his teeth and the other in his hand, he reached under the sheet of Peggy’s bed and rolled her over slightly, discreetly injecting the vials into what was left of her backside. The indignity went unnoticed by Peggy, and the doctor gently repositioned her before smoothing down the sheet.