Scott Turow - Personal injuries

There were no prizewinners for the worst disease, Bobbie had told Evon. He knew this from his practice. The body could fall apart in gruesome ways not even envisioned in nightmares. But this one, `this rotten motherfucker of a disease,' as he repeatedly called it, was perhaps the most insidious. Your body deserted you. The voluntary muscles weakened, spasmed painfully, and then stopped working at all. Even the minutest volitional reflexes eventually disappeared, blinking usually being the last to go, rendering a patient entirely inert. In the meantime, intellectual functions remained unimpaired. Rainey thought. She saw. And worst of all, Robbie said, she felt. Inside and out. Movement ended with ALS. But not pain. She suffered intensely and could not writhe or lift her hand far enough to massage the muscles knotted in misery.

The Feavers had tried every potential remedy-herbalists and homeopaths and acupuncture. They'd volunteered for experimental drugs and had been accepted for one trial, a medicine that after ninety days left Rainey on the same steady downward slide. They had even gone to see a woman with a ridiculous machine made up of old vacuum tubes and a long flashing neon wand that she waved over Rainey's torso while making a 'woo-woo' noise with her mouth. The scene, Robbie said, would have been worth a laugh, had they not been so humiliated faced with the unreasoning depths of their desperation.

The Feavers' bedroom, where Robbie still slept, was full of contraptions. Evon crept to the threshold, but went no farther inasmuch as Rainey was in the bathroom. In her absence, Robbie toured the room, pointing out various machines he'd previously described. There was something called a Hoyer lift that brought Lorraine, when she had the energy, from the large hospital bed to her wheelchair, An adjustable tray table held a speakerphone, the Easy Writeran appliance to hold a pencil-a mechanical page turner for reading, and two remote controls for the huge theater-style TV A glowing computer monitor sat beside the bed, along with an alphabet board on which Rainey pointed out letters when she became frustrated by her efforts to speak.

All of this, of course, had cost-monumentally. Including the caregivers' fees, the figure she'd heard Robbie repeat was more than $2 million. He would soon blow through the lifetime cap on his insurance and already had a suit pending against the company for several hundred thousand dollars in covered expenses they'd refused to pay. But in a situation with few blessings, money was one. He had money, buckets of money, a hundred times the resources of most families, whom this disease routinely brought to the verge of bankruptcy. In their case, Mort had told Evon once, Rainey simply would not live long enough for Robbie to spend everything.

The process of retrieving Lorraine from the bathroom was under way. Evon retreated while Robbie assisted the aide, a tiny Filipina named Elba. Down the hall, Evon heard them encouraging Rainey as she was restored to the chair and wheeled back.

The night before, a Sunday, Robbie had gone to a wedding. Rainey had been too fatigued to go, but having promised to take his mother, Robbie attended, ferrying the old woman back and forth from the nursing home where she lived. Rainey slept in snatches between bouts of muscle cramps and had apparently missed his return last night as well as his departure this morning. Robbie described the evening's doings now.

"Mother of all Jewish weddings. Right down to the sculpted chopped liver. Great food, bad wine. And even so, my Uncle Harry was drunk like always and got so sick he didn't notice that he'd flushed his false teeth down the john."

Much more softly, Rainey answered. Her faint mumbling speech, a wobbly ghoulish drone with a glottal hiccup at the end of every word, was growing worse every day. For this, too, Robbie envisioned mechanical aid, a computer controlled voice simulator that could be operated so long as Rainey had any voluntary movement remaining, even flexing her brow. Evon had heard Robbie's discussions with his wife's former colleagues in the computer industry who were helping. The hardware had been purchased and stored somewhere in the house, but the Feavers held out against each of these changes as long as possible, since no matter how convenient they were, there was no way to avoid the emotional impact of the lengthening shadow of decline.

"To the nines," he answered now. "Everybody. Inez bought a three-thousand-dollar dress-where she gets three thousand for a dress is beyond me-and as soon as she walks in, there's Susan Schultz in the same thing. Then my Aunt Myrna shows up in this tight white number, a lady of what? Sixty? And through the fabric and her panty hose you can see the outline of the tattoo on her fanny. You don't pick your family, right? I took my ma out on the dance floor in her wheelchair and whirled her around a few times. She got a real bang out of it."

Evon heard Rainey's voice again.

"I wish you'd been there, too," he said more somberly.

He refused to linger on the downbeat. Whatever his private moods, with Lorraine, Robbie was determined to be the spirit of brave optimism. On the phone, Evon had often heard him counterpoint his wife's reports of deterioration by reminding her of some other physical element that seemed to be withstanding the physicians' dire predictions. Frequently, he'd turned to the computer in his office to tap out a message to her, especially when he'd heard a good joke. "E-mail," he explained to Evon, an innovation to which Lorraine had introduced him. Now his tone ascended cheerily as he announced Evon. She girded herself.

A blast of air freshener could not fully conceal the many odors that shrank the large room-excretory smells, liniments and lotions, cramped body scents, the greasy effluvium of machines. As Evon entered, Robbie was massaging Rainey's arm to alleviate a spasm. She was in her wheelchair, the HiRider, a huge impressive motor-driven affair, with elaborate padding and smaller wheels. Robbie had described the chair. It not only moved smoothly in every direction from a joystick control but rose to a standing position, so that once she was strapped in, Lorraine could even greet guests at the door. Tonight she simply sat, held upright by two belts across her waist and chest. She wore a high-fashion running suit, on which the zippers had been replaced with Velcro. From the corner of her mouth a crooked tube protruded, attached to a bottle of distilled water on an IV standard, which provided a steady drip to replace her saliva.

Even behind this obstruction, Rainey Feaver's beauty had not fully deserted her, although she looked decades older than the woman in the photo behind Robbie's desk. The muscle waste had emaciated her, and left her head canted slightly to the left, but she apparently asked her attendant for makeup every day and her dark hair retained its luster. Somewhat caved in, her face was still striking. The remarkable violet eyes of the photograph remained vivid and fully focused on Evon as she approached.

Hopelessly ill at ease, Evon did her best: She'd heard so much about Rainey. Robbie was proud of her courage.

Lorraine considered that and slowly worked her mouth around several words. Her lips had lost most of their elasticity and barely responded. Rough to be you? It made no sense, and Evon had to turn to Robbie for help.

"Lovely to meet you," Robbie translated. He explained that certain letters had grown impossible-'I's especially. He smiled at his wife and touched her hand. "She always called herself a JAP."

"Rame joke," Rainey said with protracted effort. Evon laughed with Elba and Robbie, but despite all warnings, Lorraine's acuity was jolting, a dismal register of the vast inventory of thoughts and feelings even now going unvoiced. The laughter, which had rippled through Rainey like a light current, led to a spell of coughing. This reflex, too, was weakened, and in order to clear Lorraine's air passages, little Elba bolstered Rainey and applied a cupped hand repeatedly against her back, speaking sweetly in her sharply accented voice.