CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Hoyer lift still hasn’t been delivered, and until it gets here, Bill is the lift. He’s singing Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” while securing a gait belt around Richard’s legs, just above the ankle. It’s evening, and Bill has already brushed Richard’s teeth and washed his face. Even though Richard won’t go to sleep for another five hours, it’s time to get him from the wheelchair to the bed. Richard is Bill’s last patient of his shift, and Bill is Richard’s last hired help of the day, and Karina can’t get him out of the chair. So to bed he goes.
Bill weaves a second gait belt around Richard’s torso and secures it snug around him while Karina looks on. Bill grabs the suction wand from the rolling cart next to him, flicks the machine on, and vacuums out the saliva pooled in Richard’s mouth. Bill has learned through experience to do this prior to moving Richard, otherwise the puddle of saliva waiting in Richard’s mouth tips forward when he’s vertical, spilling out and onto Bill. His job is not for the squeamish. He then fits a soft cervical collar around Richard’s reclined neck so his head won’t flop forward. He arranges Richard’s socked, belted feet parallel on the pivot disc, a human-size lazy Susan placed at the base of his chair, adjacent to his destination, the bed. It takes a grown man and all this time and equipment to move him a few inches. Bill squats in front of Richard like an Olympic skier.
“One, two, three.”
Bill pulls on the gait belt around Richard’s chest with his right hand while lifting him under the shoulder with his left, and in a forceful snap, Richard is standing on his paralyzed legs.
The extensor muscles in his legs are spastic and rigid, making it possible for him to bear his own weight. While completely unresponsive to any voluntary command, like a child’s plastic action-hero figure, he can be stood up if balanced properly. Bill lifts and rests Richard’s arms atop each of Bill’s shoulders to keep them from hanging down and pulling painfully on Richard’s shoulder sockets. Bill’s biceps are positioned under Richard’s armpits, his hands clasped around Richard’s back. Richard stands slightly taller, but they’re pretty much eye to eye.
“My friend David would be so jealy if he knew I got to slow dance with you like this every night. He has such a crush on you.”
Richard raises his eyebrows, requesting more information.
“He saw you play at BSO three years ago. I almost went with him. Isn’t that funny? I almost knew you before I knew you.”
The belt around the bottom of Richard’s legs keeps his ankles from rolling out. Without it, he’d be standing on top of his anklebones instead of the bottom of his feet. Bill keeps him balanced on his feet for at a least a minute before moving him along, somehow intuiting how delicious this feels, to be stretched out and vertical, his bones stacked and bearing weight, like finally standing after a transatlantic flight in a cramped plane seat. Richard’s been sitting in this chair, in the same position, for eight hours. Richard sighs, enjoying the sweet relief of being an erect structure, visiting the memory of being an upright man.
Their slow dance ends when Bill spins Richard ninety degrees on the pivot disc, so that his butt is now up against the bed. Using the gait belt around Richard’s middle, Bill lowers him carefully onto the mattress. As always, Bill sticks the landing.
“I still think I could do that,” says Karina.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, honey. I make it look a lot easier than it is. Believe me. You don’t want to drop him. You could both get hurt. Wait for the Hoyer. It should be here any day.”
Bill tugs on each side of the slide sheet, squaring Richard’s body in the center of the bed, and arranges Richard’s arms and legs like flowers in a vase. Reaching over to the bedside table, Bill grabs what looks like a one-liter clear-plastic water bottle. He reaches under Richard’s boxer shorts, pulls out his penis, inserts it into the bottle, and waits a few seconds. As usual, nothing happens. The waiting was just a courtesy. Bill then pushes down on Richard’s abdomen with the heel of his hand, pressing firmly on his bladder over and over, as if he were pumping water from a well. It works, and the bottle slowly fills with urine.
Karina looks away, trying to offer a sense of privacy, a strange and futile gesture. Richard’s body parts are in varying states of nudity and being handled all day long. He is showered, toileted, wiped, washed, dressed, and undressed. His body is simply another task to complete, a job to do. His naked body is treated neutrally by every home health aide, every visiting nurse and physical therapist, a thin layer of a latex glove between his skin and actual contact with another human being. His is just another penis, just another saggy ass, just another patient’s decrepit body. So Karina doesn’t need to look away. He’s just another ex-husband with ALS.
When his bladder is emptied, Bill tucks Richard’s penis back into his boxers and leaves the den to wash the bottle in the bathroom. Now Karina takes over. She lifts Richard’s T-shirt, attaches a syringe of water to his MIC-KEY button, and flushes the line. Normally refreshing, the water feels alarmingly cold in his belly. She then switches to a pouch of Liquid Gold.
“Okay you two.” Bill is now wearing his hat and coat. “I’m off like a slutty prom dress.” He gives Karina a one-armed hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Be good,” he says to Richard. “See you tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Bill,” says Karina.
Richard slow-blinks. It’s the end of the day. He’s too tired to form words.
Karina presses slowly and steadily on the syringe plunger, delivering Richard’s liquid dinner into this stomach. The entire meal takes about a half hour, and they usually have the TV on to keep them company, occupied, and safely distracted, but today, the TV is off. Bill’s singing must’ve snagged a circuit in Karina’s brain. She’s humming “Like a Prayer” while she stares vaguely at the wall, a slight smile on her lips. He wonders what she’s thinking about.
She’s had a lightness about her since she returned from New Orleans. He hears her singing pop songs while cooking in the kitchen and noodling jazz riffs on her piano in the mornings. He’s been catching her face enjoying distant daydreams. Her energy has changed. Her presence feels less heavy, less oppressive, happier, hopeful even, and while he can’t put his paralyzed finger on the reason for it, this unexplained shift in her has provoked a corresponding shift in him. He watches her face, and he recognizes her again, the woman he fell in love with so long ago. She’s feeding him, taking care of him, and what he’d been selfishly viewing as an act of martyrdom or duty, he suddenly sees as an act of love.
His heart swells, overwhelmed, and as she hums Madonna, he remembers the first time he heard Karina’s voice, her Polish accent, how desperate he felt to hear her speak to him, his delight when she finally did. He stares at her green eyes, her amused mouth, and hopes she catches him looking at her.
Just like all those years ago, he aches for her to speak to him. He’s never told her that he’s sorry for cheating on her, for hurting her, for stealing that smile from her lips for so long. But he is sorry and hopes that she somehow knows this, that she can sense the regret and apology in him the way he can sense this new joy in her. He wants to hear her voice tell him that she’s okay. He wants to be forgiven. He wants.
The syringe is emptied. Karina refills it with a second helping. As she’s reattaching it, her warm, gloveless hands touch his bare, concave stomach, and although from her perspective, her hands are in the business of feeding her ex-husband through a PEG tube, for Richard, the touch feels intimate, personal, human.
At first, embarrassed, he hopes she doesn’t notice that he’s hard beneath the bedsheet and his boxers, but then he hopes she does. Every day he wakes to morning wood and can do nothing but wait it out. He hasn’t masturbated since his left hand left him in October. He purposefully no longer imagines anything sexually desirable during this daily rise and fall. But now, as he’s unexpectedly turned on, he imagines Karina touching it, touching him, and his desire is excruciatingly urgent, building in his penis, his heart, and his mind, silently begging for her to notice. He wants her to lie down next to him, to kiss him while stroking him. He wants to be a man and not a failing body in a bed. He wants to be touched, to be loved, to come. It’s been so long. He wants.
She finishes the syringe, flushes the tubing with water, and caps the MIC-KEY button. She lowers his shirt, pulls the covers up to his chest, and stands.
“Okay, you’re good until ten. You want the TV on?”
He stares at her, unblinking.
“You want anything?”
He smiles. If only he had the strength to tell her.
She hesitates, eyeing him quizzically. “Okay, I’ll check on you in a bit.”
She leaves the door to the den cracked open. He sits in bed and stares at the open door, listening to the sounds of her making her own dinner in the kitchen, wanting.