Terrible Praise Read online

  We don’t walk along the pier. Even on a workday the foot traffic would be too heavy for her to navigate. It’s a beautiful day with a soft, cool breeze floating in from the harbor, so we stroll down Lakefront Trail and I choose a bench beside the water away from the joyful squeals of children at play. Mother settles down beside me to watch the circling gulls as I shield my eyes with my hand and look out at the end of the pier jutting into Lake Michigan.

  “Thinking of your father?”

  I start in my seat and turn to my mother. She’s struggling with the zipper of her black Windbreaker, caught on her tracksuit underneath. I place my hands over hers to help and she rolls her eyes, releasing an exhausted sigh.

  “How did you know?” The fabric loosens around my fingers and the wind whips her light jacket out around her, billowing gently in the breeze. With blue-veined hands she immediately clenches the front of her coat, pulling it shut over her chest. I don’t know why she wanted to unzip it in the first place, but I let it go.

  “He loved it here,” she says. “He used to take you to the pier when you were a little girl.”

  I smile at her, but her focus stays fixed on the slow progression of a rust-encrusted tugboat creeping along the horizon.

  “I remember.” My father and I came here often. I forced him to take me on the boat tours at least once a week, though he never complained. I was in love with the view of the skyline from the water, and my enchantment was all the reason he needed. I couldn’t believe how large, how beautiful my hometown was, with its skyscrapers glinting like diamonds as the light trilled down their windows, spires like needles in a geometrical haystack, all of it man-made. The miraculous effort required to forge such a sprawl inspired me to believe anything was possible.

  Mother purses her lips and nods, long and slow. Now is not the time to push her. She never mentions him anymore and the good days are becoming increasingly rare. This is all the time we have.

  “Did you love him?” It sounds more like a plea than I intended. My heart gallops as I prepare for any number of plausible reactions from my eternally animated mother. She turns her head, and her eyes soften slightly when she reads the panic in mine.

  “A long time ago.” The papery skin of her palm pats me twice on the thigh and then withdraws, tugging the edges of her coat back into place. She surprises me when she tilts her gently bobbing head in consideration, parts her lips. “And on occasion when I would watch him with you.”

  I press on, because that is a more generous response than I anticipated. “Do you miss him?”

  She makes a soft noise through her nose that is somewhere between somber and annoyed, but she doesn’t look at me. She keeps her eyes on the endless expanse of blue and green, the indifferent tide, watching the waves roll in. “Sometimes,” she concedes. “Not the way you miss him.”

  I turn toward her. “How then?” My leg leans against the back of the white park bench and I wrap my arms around my shin, resting my chin on my knee. The well-worn denim tickles my skin, but I remain motionless, entranced. She never talks about him. If she’s willing to do so now she can have my full attention, even if she won’t give me hers in return.

  “Lately, I find myself wishing he was alive,” she says breezily. “So that I would not have to burden you the way that I do.”

  “Mom…” I reach out to touch the sleeve of her coat. She leans away, which doesn’t shock me in the least. I don’t like to be touched when I’m feeling vulnerable, a trait I most certainly inherited from her. She’s angry now, I can see it in the tilt of her chin—up and defiant—whether the irritation is directed at me or at him is really anyone’s guess. And be that for his misdeeds or her own loneliness, I’ll never know.

  “A good father and a good husband are not the same thing, Elizabeth,” she snaps. I drop my leg back to the ground and face the lake.

  How can someone who is inches from me feel so much further away than the memory of a face I have not seen for fourteen years? I remember perfectly the way his stubble scratched my lips when I stood on tiptoe at his bedside and kissed his cheek. The delighted faces of the nursing staff when I fumbled my way through the first three minutes of Tchaikovsky’s “Allegro Moderato” on my violin, the last thing I played for him. The chirping of the heart monitor growing uneven, longer between bursts before he flat-lined, is a chorus that sings between my ears to this day.

  But I couldn’t tell you the last time I hugged my mother.

  “You never feel it,” she whispers and I am more than reluctant to further any discourse between the two of us.

  “Never feel what?”

  “Age. Not really… You start to register its effects on your bones when the weather changes. And then the aches are there year-round. That registers, of course, don’t misunderstand. But your heart doesn’t change with your body. You’re still the person you’ve always been. Exactly as you are now, with an old woman peering back at you in the mirror.”

  From the corner of my eye, I watch her for tears that will never fall. Her eyes mist, her jaw tightens as she swallows the pain of her own words, and I wish more than anything that she had kept them to herself. But something tells me if I remember nothing else my mother has said to me, I will remember this when the skin on the back of my hands grows thin, and the veins protrude on the surface. When the staircase in the home I stand to inherit—much sooner than expected—looks insurmountable, and my knees lock every time I bend, these words will ring in my mind the same as the concerto of my father’s monitors do.

  “I should have thrown myself in the harbor the moment I was diagnosed.” She nods as though firmly agreeing with herself, morose and undeterred. It’s too much honesty for one day, and far too melancholic for the lovely morning light.

  “That’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” I nudge her with my shoulder.

  She smiles suddenly and laughs, a rare one with her head thrown back. She swats my sternum with bony fingers.

  “You started us down the road of difficult discussions, Elizabeth. Don’t begrudge the patient her sullen outlook when you’re still bristling with youth.”

  A reluctant smile curls the corner of my lips, because I don’t blame her. In her position, I might find the harbor a viable option too.

  “‘One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly,’” I quote. The words are readily familiar to her. She takes a moment to consider them.

  “Madame Butterfly?” she ventures.

  “Nietzsche.”

  “No, it was Madame Butterfly. I’m sure of it.” She stands and zips her Windbreaker with ease. She’s proud of herself, I’m proud of her too—impossible as she is—she still has her moments, and in those moments, she’s the sharpest mind I’ve ever encountered despite the disease ravaging her brilliant brain.

  “It’s nearly the same line. In Madame Butterfly, it was: “‘Those who cannot live with honor must die with honor.’”

  She scoffs at my correction. “Peaches and pears, Elizabeth.” An expression she picked up from my great aunt Nadine, another forbidden topic.

  “Apples and oranges, Mother.” I smother a grin when she fashions a contrived glare.

  “Well, now you’re just being rude.”

  I take her arm and we make our way back to the land of the living.

  * * *

  The ritual of rounds is comforting, even though the patients change regularly. Honestly, any time I can spend out of the house is a welcomed reprieve. In the afternoon, I leave my mother in Helen’s capable hands. A fellow nurse who retired after thirty-six years with this hospital and quickly found that an idle life was not for her. Helen reached out to me after her four months of extensive travel—India, Greece, a whole month in China—and offered to give me a hand with Mother. The woman is a saint, and the money I pay her is hardly enough to fold, but she insists that Mrs. Dumas is not the most difficult patient she has had in her charge. I hope she never says that to my mother, as she does so love a challenge.
r />   I review the patient log and see an all too familiar name, Richard Longfellow, fifty-two, massive stroke. He has yet to open his eyes, but the daughter refuses to give up hope. Cases like the Longfellow’s show exactly what a poor a nurse I really am. I can’t distance myself like the veterans. I struggle with their levity, their coping mechanism. Empathy is not something I can entertain one moment and shut down the next. I’ve always known that bedside nursing was not a great fit for me, but then my mother had her fall. It was the summer before I was set to move to Baltimore, and when she came out of surgery we were told that her undiagnosed Parkinson’s was already quite advanced. I needed something stable and close to home. Nursing, I reasoned, would be my time in the trenches. That was four years ago.

  This will be the third night in a row I’ve had to watch Ms. Longfellow hold vigil at her father’s bedside, stroking his hair and weeping quietly. After the morning I’ve had, I just don’t have it in me to face her. The pain of losing a father is something I know well, and don’t care to feel again.

  “James?”

  My coworker raises his shaggy blond head, and slides his chair along the edge of the nurses station nearly colliding with my legs. I take a step back and he chuckles, swallowing a sizable bite of his wilted vending machine sandwich.

  “Liz?” He smiles. I have asked him repeatedly not to call me that. Essentially an eight-year-old boy at heart, it’s done nothing but spur him on. He’s the same self-assured, self-obsessed, hopeless flirt that every woman has dated at least a half a dozen times before thirty. The fact that his endless pestering and youthful charm garner little to no response from me has recently made him double his efforts. In all fairness, if his reputation wasn’t so well known, I might have succumbed to his relentless advances when I first started here.

  “Would you take bed four-ten off my hands tonight?”

  James squints, comically furrowing his brow and strokes the soft, faintly red stubble on his perfect jaw. “That depends…” He lets the condition linger in the air between us, but my nerves are raw from the long morning at home. I don’t ask him what it depends upon. I raise my eyebrows and drop the clipboard on the counter between us, squishing his sad excuse for a dinner. He laughs openly at my unwillingness to play. “C’mon. What’s in it for me if I do?”

  I clasp my hands and rest my forearms on the Formica ledge of the desk. “I’ll take four-twelve off your plate,” I offer.

  He leans forward in his seat. “I was thinking more along the lines of an extracurricular incentive,” he stage whispers.

  The line is completely played out and he knows it. Still, it’s hard not to smile a little at his persistence. “I would think the Hippocratic Oath and simple camaraderie would be reason enough to help a friend.”

  “Oh, so we’re friends now?” he teases, shaking the hair from his eyes with a flick of his neck. He’s too pleased with himself. My scowl does nothing to temper his enthusiasm. “I can see how you would think that,” he continues, “but as usual you overestimate my ethics and underestimate my attraction to you.” James cracks his knuckles loudly and leans back in his chair.

  I manage a heartfelt sneer and retrieve my discarded clipboard, resigning myself to another evening of Mr. Longfellow and his forlorn daughter.

  “Besides,” James shrugs, “can’t give you four-twelve.” He dusts the knee of his powder blue scrubs with a disinterested hand. “It’s an empty bed.”

  I turn in my tracks and James grins, pleased to have kept my attention this long.

  “William Moore? When was he released?”

  “He wasn’t. Died a few days ago.” James pitches the last few bites of his dinner into the waste bin and pretends to organize the stacked folders in front of him.

  I can’t explain why I find this news unsettling, but something starts in my stomach and works its way through the rest of my body. Like a sudden chill without the cold, without a cause. “When, exactly?”

  James leans back in his seat, hands clasped behind his head with a smile that says he’s already won simply by inviting further questioning.

  “Forget it,” I mutter. I turn to take my leave a second time, but he relinquishes his chair and halts my progress with two warm hands on my shoulders.

  “Wait—wait—wait…”

  I shake his hands off and take a step back. He sighs.

  “I’m on inventory tonight,” he concedes. “You fill the supply order and I’ll take four-ten off your hands. Fair?” I wait for a last-minute addendum, but James merely extends his hand to seal our bargain. We shake and trade clipboards.

  “Thank you.”

  James winks and pushes past me to check in with the Longfellows. “What are friends for, Liz?”

  The supply closet is a long, narrow room that sits in the center of the ward. The main entrance is through the breakroom behind the nurses station, but there’s another door at the back that opens onto the hall. I take the long route, telling myself I want to avoid the bustle of the common area, the perpetual line at the coffeepot. I stop outside room four-twelve, lingering on the empty bed turned down awaiting a new patient, and glance to the emergency exit to my right. For a long while I stay fixed to that spot, uneasy, before I round the corner and seek out the waiting room across the hall.

  It’s hard to recall exactly what happened that night, and impossible to say why it suddenly matters. However, I do remember bits and pieces, looking in upon this dark little cove. I was on the phone arguing with my mother, which is nothing new, and I saw a woman I didn’t recognize, headed for the back exit. I step inside the waiting room into the nearest chair.

  I have the intense desire to leave, to close the door and never enter this room again. But a strange familiarity in the air keeps me there. It takes a moment for the memories to focus, as though I’m staring through a dirty lens. I close my eyes.

  First, a dark silhouette, and then a shock of perfectly blond hair. We’re roughly the same height, though she may have had an inch or so on me. Similar build, but there was something sunken in her face that lent an unhealthy thinness to the rest of her. I could sense her apprehension when I sat down beside her, like a change in air current. I know I tried to get a better look at her face, but she kept herself turned away in her seat. She succeeded in hiding most of herself behind the straight curtain of her hair until I stood in front of her.

  Suddenly, the fog clears. The smooth firm skin of her jaw, the electric charge I felt when I held her face in my hand returns with such force that I open my eyes immediately and leap from my seat, staring down at the empty chair as though it’s somehow to blame.

  I stagger out into the hall, struggling to catch my breath, and count the gleaming floor tiles until two vacant black eyes appear in my memory—as close as they were that evening.

  “Goodnight, Elizabeth,” she had said over her shoulder, slinking through the emergency exit without another sound.

  “Stela…” I whisper. Despite my discomfort, I sense the beginnings of a smile on my face. Her name is strangely intimate and oddly familiar. As though we know each other well, which is ridiculous, as I know we haven’t met before. Unless you believe in reincarnation, which I do not. But this emotion is distinct, and one I’ve been feeling frequently the last few days without associating it with my unexpected visitor. It hits me hardest when I’m alone, usually in the fleeting moments before sleep. A sensation like being watched, minus the panic that should accompany such an intrusion.

  From down the hall I hear Mrs. Whitley in four-eleven begin her nightly pledge of allegiance mixed with a few indistinct jokes from the staff, and the routine brings me back to the present with a shiver. Just like that, the sensation is gone. I look over the darkened doorway of Mr. Moore’s vacant room once more before I slip inside the supply closet and seal myself away to fill the order.

  * * *

  Morning walks have become Mother’s new favorite form of torture. Often rousing me at five or six in the morning when I have only slept for as m
any hours. She shuffles into my room and throws the curtains back, seemingly surprised every time the room fails to brighten. When I don’t readily hop to my feet to greet the day she flicks on my bedside lamp and smacks the tops of my arms, cautioning that I will sleep my life away if I stay in bed.

  “Honestly, look at your blankets.” She frowns, yanking the duvet off me.

  “Good morning to you too.” I yawn.

  “Elizabeth, it looks like you’ve been fighting with your bed.”

  I sit up stiffly and take in the disarray, rubbing my hand roughly over my face to scrub away the last vestiges of sleep. “Yeah, I haven’t been sleeping well lately.”

  “Nightmares?” she scoffs. “Rubbish. You’re too old for them, dear.”

  I throw my feet onto the floor and crack my neck. My mother makes a sound of disgust and stares disapprovingly at me.

  “Something like that,” I admit.

  “Are they recurring?” she probes with folded, clinical hands. A dry laugh catches in my throat as I stand with a lazy stretch.

  “Please don’t psychoanalyze me, Mother. It’s too early.”

  She harrumphs and totters down the hall calling after to me to get dressed. I make my way to the bathroom, bouncing more than once off the wall with my shoulder, and run a groggy hand over the wallpaper, feeling for the switch. The moment I flip on the light I turn with a start and press myself flat against the wall. My heart races as I stand clutching my chest.

  I’m alone.

  But for a second I swear there was someone behind me in the mirror. I curse under my breath at my sleep-deprived delirium as I wait for the shower to heat up. My reflection is exactly as disheveled as I feared. The bags under my eyes are a sickeningly deep purple. I inspect them with my face pressed against the glass until the mirror fogs over with steam.

  “You shouldn’t walk in the cold with wet hair,” my mother admonishes over a steaming cup of black coffee in her shaking hands.