El Niño

Sheila loved the sound of rain. It swept away all her worries. Outside the window, miles of sandy desert scrubland reminded her that she hadn’t heard that sound in a very long time. As if the tension in her guts — drawn tight like an elastic band — would ever let her forget.

“I’m sorry. Tell me again what I need to do?”

“Well, Miss Dannaher — it is miss, isn’t it? — as your mother’s healthcare proxy, we do need you to make a decision about whether we continue treatment in light of the most recent test results.”

Sheila wasn’t sure where this new resident had come from and why he was acting as if this was a new conversation for her. If he’d bothered to read the chart, he’d have seen that Sheila’s mother had been waging war against her “final illness” for over twelve years. In that time, Sheila had had similar talks, the ones where fledgling doctors tripped over words like “hospice” and “palliative care,” on an almost annual basis.

“She has an advanced directive, doesn’t she Doctor — it is doctor, isn’t it?” Sheila was thinking ahead to the cigarette in her purse, the one she’d been holding on to for the past eleven years. The moment it had been earmarked for had finally arrived.

“Yes, she does, but…” The rickety yearling doctor was off script now and the panic was plain on his face.

“Well then…” And she walked out.

In the courtyard, sitting on her bench among the barrel cacti and yucca plants, Sheila looked out at the mountains that penned the desert into the valley. She thought about their last hike from the pass to the top of the mountain. They had stopped at their favorite overlook and surveyed the valley below for the thousandth time. Sheila’s mother spent an eternity there, looking out, looking down, looking at Sheila.

“Should we go on then?” she asked finally.

Sheila dug the cigarette from the coin pocket in her purse and held it gently. A bank of dark gray clouds was slithering over the tops of the mountains, sending gusts of dusty wind down into the valley and into Sheila’s face.

Above her, the dried and dangling palm leaves rustled with a sound like the pattering fall of rain.