Lizette is thinking about Lily
Lizette is lying on the couch. It is a different couch, but the feelings are the same.
The feelings are: depressed, anxious, angry, jealous, resentful, fearful, and fat.
“Fat isn’t bad,” she tries to tell herself, “But what if I don’t want to be fat? Am I a bad person?” Lizette tries to tell herself she’s okay in her new body. “I don’t want to be skinny either,” she says to herself. To be honest, it doesn’t matter — what she really wants is the body she had before she was so depressed, before the cancer, before they shut down the gym. She had recently seen herself in a picture taken at Disneyland and she had not liked what she saw. In the picture, she saw how much she had changed. And she didn’t like it.
But it had always been like that. She would pose for the picture then run around to the other side of the lens and hope the resulting image would finally reflect the image in her head. But it never did. Her thighs are always too big.
Lizette listens to her fiancé wash the dishes in the kitchen. The water is running, a pot clangs against the side of the sink.
Earlier he had cried as she lay in bed. A tear had welled up in his left eye, and with the way his head was tilted, the tear slid down and then fell off his face instead of rolling down to his chin the way hers had. He was sad because she was sad with a sadness too deep for him to alleviate.
The sadness is profound and oppressive. It is why Lizette is lying on the couch. She has plans she wants to follow through on, but the very thought of movement feels heavy and futile, so she continues to lie on the couch.
Two weekends ago, Lizette and her fiancé had boiled chicken to bring to their dying dog. The dog was a pug named Lily and she had been staying at the emergency veterinary hospital since Lizette and her fiancé had brought her in, refusing to eat and vomiting bile. They had visited Lily every day since. Lizette had cried at the sight of their little dog struggling to breathe, IVs and monitors strung from her body, her eyes glazed with exhaustion and wide with fear. On the second day, Lily seemed better, but would not eat, so they boiled chicken and brought it still warm, hoping the smell and their presence would entice her to take a bite. Lily turned her head away as if the food was torture because inside, her body was rapidly falling apart, ravaged with cancer and sepsis. By the third day, Lily’s protein levels had fallen so low her very cells were deteriorating and leaking fluid and bloating her little stomach and her little paws which were cold to the touch.
Lizette thinks about the way Lily briefly resisted when the propofol flooded her veins and Lizette wonders if the drug had felt cold the way she remembers it feeling cold when she received it during her most recent surgery. In two years, Lizette had undergone three major procedures to treat her breast cancer and Lizette swears that with each procedure, she can remember more and more of those strange moments before going under. She remembers the anesthesiologist saying, “Now time for the good stuff” and feeling a pinch of cold at the site of the IV and then … nothing.
Lily had become still with her eyes open and Lizette had closed them for her with her hand as the barbiturates flowed from the syringe in the vet’s hand and into Lily and then Lily’s heart stopped and Lily died. Then all of the pain and all of the anguish and all of the agony of grief swelled up in Lizette’s heart.
Lizette turns on the couch, brings her knees to her chest to try to protect her breaking heart. “Lily is gone,” she thinks, “She is gone gone gone forever and ever and there is no going back. She is gone.”
In the stuffy exam room on a rare warm day in San Francisco, Lizette’s fiancé had lifted up the little pug out of Lizette’s arms to place her in a small bed the hospital had provided, and the legs dangled without life in them, and proved that, yes, for real, Lily was dead.
Lizette pulled a little pink blanket over Lily’s body and arranged her paws in a way that would have been most comfortable had she been alive. Then her fiancé left the room, but Lizette had stayed a little longer.
Lizette had looked at the body. And looked at it and looked at it. She marveled at the way the body looked so much like Lily but was no longer Lily. Where had she gone? Lizette was strangely grateful for the sudden bewildering realization that a body cannot contain all that life is — that life is bigger than its weight on earth and that even a dog possesses intangible energy that passes out of its vessel and disperses into the air. That whatever made Lily who she was — the particular sparkle in her eye when she tilted her head in response to the tone of Lizette’s voice — it was ephemeral and inexplicable, leaving behind a body that was nothing but broken cells breaking down even further.
Lizette had looked at the body. And looked at it and looked at it. She made an effort to commit it to memory. Lily was at peace at long last — no longer gulping for air, no longer sick with cancer rotting her belly, no longer in pain. She looked like she was sleeping. Lizette thought for a moment that Lily’s eyes might flutter open, that she might stand up and shake off the blanket and stretch and then wag her curly tail, stick out her tongue and appear to smile with that particular sparkle in her eye. Of course — that didn’t happen.
Finally, Lizette kissed Lily’s forehead and pulled the blanket to cover her completely and took one last look around the room, and then closed the door and joined her fiancé in the hallway. After they had left, the hospital staff would then come to take Lily’s body away to the morgue and cremate it.
“I wonder when her ashes will be ready,” Lizette thinks. When the ashes are ready, she and her fiancé will drive to the vet and finally bring Lily home.
Lizette sighs, lying on the couch and thinking about Lily. She hears her fiancé go outside to smoke a cigarette. Before Lily’s death, they had been fighting, and while the grief offered a brief reprieve from their bickering, it had been short lived. Lizette does not want to fight with her faincé, but the depression is so ugly and so selfish that it will not grant either of them the space to mourn their little lost dog.
Lizette is tired and scared and angry and on medical leave. Her mental health has been deteriorating for a while, culminating in a crisis of crying and screaming and bleeding and trying to do anything to stop the pain that has no visible wound but shows up on her arms and her legs as flashes of white-hot scars. Her fiancé watches her cry and he is helpless. Her fiancé watches her cry and catches her fists as they try to strike him knowing that this person — this person rendered mad and feral with rage and sadness and fear — is not the woman he loves. The woman he loves is trapped deep inside this wild shadow-shape of depression and he cries because he cannot protect her, he cannot save her.
Lizette lies on the couch, thinking about Lily, missing the days when she didn’t want to always fight with her fiancé, missing the days when she felt like herself in a body that felt better.
Her mind is busy churning through futures that are all catastrophic and there is a voice that tells her what a failure she is for not being able to stop it. When Lizette reaches for the tools that once proved to be the antidote, the voice puts its hand over hers and says, “You don’t deserve to feel better.” Lizette believes the voice because the voice is her voice, the thoughts reside in her mind, and the hand is her hand.
She does nothing but she is so tired. She is tired of being tired. She is tired of doing nothing and there is nothing to do.
So Lizette cries and listens to her fiancé come back in from smoking a cigarette in the yard. Outside the sky is flat and timeless with foggy haze. Her fiancé comes to the living room and sits down beside her on the couch.
“I miss Lily,” Lizette says.
“I do too,” he says and holds her hand.
Then they are quiet. It is the most she has loved him in a long time.
