The penultimate gasp
Her cough has a rhythm to it, a percussive syncopation that reminds her of castanets. Half a lifetime ago, she danced professionally in Madrid. She spent her days in the studio and her nights in smoky cafes, sipping tiny cups of espresso and puffing on Fortunas. Now she is a suburban mom who prepares balanced meals and drives her daughters to dance class.
The doctor watches her cough, his youthful face a mask of professionally detached pity. She can’t believe he’s so young. He must have gone straight from the womb to medical school. She wishes she could will herself to stop coughing, but she knows she must wait it out.
Her ribs ache as she reaches a hacking crescendo. At last, she spits the offending glob into a red-flecked tissue. She wipes the blood from her lips and meets the doctor’s dispassionate gaze. She is stoic right back.
“It’s cancer, isn’t it?” she asks.
“Yes, Maria. It is.”
He tells her in straightforward language that it is untreatable. Intractable. Terminal. Then he writes her a raft of prescriptions for morphine derivatives that will calm her cough and ease her pain, one way or another.
For the first time in ten years, she desperately craves a cigarette.
She may be terminally ill, but her family needs to eat. So she chops vegetables while her husband chats with the girls at the kitchen table. They watch YouTube videos and the girls’ favorite teachers. She wonders idly if she will ever have a night like this again, an unremarkable night when her presence is not a dark harbinger of grief to come.
Mark, her husband, is forty like she is, as pale and straight as she is brown and curved. Violet is ten, a dancing string bean with Maria’s dark skin and her husband’s striking green eyes. And Cara is six, sweet, beige like cookie dough, and unformed.
To Maria, they are immortal. They will never age. The idea of telling them about her cancer adds an unpleasant edge to her morphine-induced nausea.
And yet it must be done. They have a right to know. And she has a right to be known. She inhales sharply and stifles a cough. She is about to open her mouth when Cara explodes with laughter.
“What’s so funny, little one?” she asks.
“On Daddy’s phone! A big fat man! Eating a pie! He’s so fat! It’s disgusting!”
Mark shakes his head and tucks the phone in his shirt pocket. “Cara, it’s not nice to make fun of how people look. You know that.”
Cara, who lives and dies by her father’s approval, turns suddenly solemn. Violet, fierce and protective, rushes to her defense. Maria’s heart aches, knowing how her older daughter will try to comfort Cara, to mother her, despite her own aching grief.
“Dad, you shouldn’t be so hard on Cara. That man was eating a whole pie by himself. He’s choosing to be fat. It’s his fault, so why can’t we blame him?”
The room falls silent.
Maria holds the kitchen knife in midair, while Mark struggles for a diplomatic way to tell his daughter not to be a judgmental little snot. Her husband and daughter talk passionately about society and social media, conformity and difference, while her daughter’s clarion voice blaming her.
It’s mom’s fault. She used to smoke. She chose cigarettes over us.
“Maria? Did you want to say something?” asks Mark, looking and sounding puzzled.
She realizes her mouth is hanging open. She closes it and says nothing all night.
Every night, she means to say something about the cancer hidden in her chest. And every night she cooks dinner instead. Paellas and roasts and the sopa de ajo that made her breath stink in Madrid. The morphine has killed her appetite, but she enjoys nourishing her family. She watches them tear into dinner with greasy-lipped enthusiasm. They hardly notice she isn’t eating. And that suits her just fine.
She wants to say goodbye, she really does. But she dreads their blame even more. She remembers when Cara, her youngest, went through a clingy phase. “Why are you leaving me, mommy? Why? Why?” she’d shriek whenever Maria left the room.
She always answered that question with a smile and a wink: “I’m not leaving you, silly. I’ll be back in just a minute.” But how would she answer it now?
Her days get longer and harder. Her cough steals her breath away. The back of her tongue tastes like copper, like blood. She really should be pushing an oxygen tank. And she really should say something to Mark, whose increasingly wrinkled brow clearly shows he doesn’t believe she’s suffering from “a bad cold.”
After one particularly difficult day, she stays up long after her husband has reluctantly gone to bed. She sits in the living room, which is dark except for the television screen, and Googles the lethal dose for her strongest prescription. A chilly smile flickers across her face. She has more than enough.
She contemplates the idea of an early exit, turning it over like a cool, smooth stone. She imagines slipping quietly out of life.
Writing a perfectly worded note to express her feelings more eloquently than a dozen tearful conversations ever could
Sparing her family the messiness and cost of a lingering death
Escaping their blame…
…and her own, gnawing guilt that she had starting smoking in high school and didn’t quit until she got pregnant. When she stubbed out her last cigarette, she thought she had gotten away with it. She was so sure she was healthy and virtuous, until her rotting lungs gave her away.
She remembers being young and wild and brave, carving out a life in a foreign land. She loved dancing and drinking and going to sleep in the light of the dawn. Does she really deserve to die for those few years of fun, for those cigarettes that made meeting people so effortless? Is she the rightful object of her family’s imaginary blame? She doesn’t know.
But she does know she can be brave, at least one more time. She turns off the television and goes to wake up her husband.
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