Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

E LSA SLIDES HER HAND PENSIVELY along the dim silver bar at the end of the hospital bed. She is in a bad mood. All three girls have come up to visit Katherine this time. George has left Stephen with Nanny Anna, who will already be teaching him how to play rummy and soak salted peas for the next day’s soup.

After Christmas, Katherine had taken a turn for the worse. Although George had followed the instructions that the medical team had given him to increase the amount of morphine for her should he need to, he rapidly lost confidence, phoned the hospital and had been advised to bring Katherine back in.

Six weeks later, and she is now in a different hospital closer to home. This hospital caters to cancer patients with different needs. Their care is palliative, they say. They are past offering any promises now.

The sun seems inappropriate in its brightness as it shines in through the hospital window, painting all their faces in a creamy orange light. It makes them all look like their faces have been buttered. It makes the little ridges on Elsa’s frowning brow stand out in relief.

Elsa is in a bad mood today because her mother has forgotten her name. Her mother is not like an old drunk woman anymore. She is propped up in the bed by firm pillows, the green candlewick bedspread covering the two bony sticks that are her legs. She is quiet and she is staring at Elsa, her eyes like deep brown pools, as though Elsa is reminding her of someone she once knew. But Katherine has not remembered any of their names, Maureen’s, Elizabeth’s, Elsa’s, or George’s. Her large eyes suggest a confused tolerance of the strangers in her room. They have brought her flowers and homemade birthday cards, each letter of “Mummy” written in a different color. The cards have been decorated with glitter, which has rubbed off onto their fingers. Little pieces of glitter can be seen, here and there, on their faces where they have scratched themselves absentmindedly or anxiously and on Katherine’s face where the girls have kissed her, spreading the glitter like a love infection. They all twinkle now in the cream-filling buttery sunlight, a microscopic firmament watching the mother star grow dimmer.

Elsa turns to give her mother a look, but it is a timid challenge. She wants her mother to know she is annoyed. She ping-pangs her fingers against the steel bar at the bottom of the hospital bed. Her mother is staring at Elsa, her lips a tight, thin line and she is saying nothing, her eyes like two saucers of submission, like the eyes of a Biafran child, Elsa thinks. It is now difficult to tell which is the greater enemy, the cancer or the medication, as both are eroding her mother piece by piece.

No one talks. The strange figure in the bed has put a stop to all that. The birthday wishes have been given. The flowers have been arranged in the bulbous-shaped vase that sits on the bedside locker. The vase too squat to hold the full length of the long, elegant stems, the flowers have immediately outgrown their welcome.

George has filled in for all the things Katherine might have said to the children, about the cards, about school. He is father and mother now, an interpreter of sorrow and a guide to the stranger in the bed. These sights before you are the daughters you love, he might have said to Katherine. Don’t let their bad mood bother you. They are unable to change the story of their lives, which is unfolding before them.

The door opens and a nurse steps in, smiling and apologizing for interrupting them. She talks loudly to Katherine and checks the drip that feeds into the cannula on Katherine’s hand. She talks softly to George, telling him that the consultant will be on his rounds very shortly, if he’d like to talk to him. She lifts the sputum bowl from beside Katherine’s bed and leaves the room. Her shoes squeak against the hospital floor, making a rude noise.

A new silence and then ping pang against the bar.

George speaks.

“Let’s go out for some orange juice. Would you like that?” Elizabeth lifts her head quickly from the magazine she has been reading, startled in the belief that her father has said this to her mother. However, George is not looking at Katherine as he speaks. He is looking at his three daughters. Maureen, who has been sitting nearest to her father, utters a simple “Yes.” Elsa turns to them with a scowl.

“I don’t like the orange juice here. It tastes soapy,” she says.

The strange woman in the bed still stares at them.

“We’ll see what they have.” George beckons to them to move. They kiss the strange woman in the bed briefly, not really wanting to touch her skin, but that’s all she has to offer them. That’s all she is now. Elsa looks at her mother’s hand, the fingers of which are still holding one of the homemade birthday cards. Her mother’s fingers are the glittery twigs of a tree, with fingernails like large spoons.

Has she woken up or is she now falling asleep? It is difficult to find the one detail that can confirm for her which it is. Like sometimes on waking up in the morning it is, momentarily, impossible to remember what day it is or what important things have to be done. The struggle, on these occasions, is a mere glitch. Now ill, now sedated with morphine, Katherine’s consciousness does not have the same ability, nor the same interest, to discriminate anymore between what is real, what is memory, and what is simply wishful thinking, and the glitch is almost all there is. She exists in that space now as though on an ocean swell that might never end, where the horizon offers her glimpses of other worlds, which vanish as quickly as they appear.

Sometimes, though less and less now, she experiences a moment of searing clarity on the rising arc of this ocean, knowing who she is and where she is and why she is connected to tubes and monitors. Everything comes into focus. Definite, precise, sensual. These moments can stay with her for minutes at a time. And then slowly the clarity fades. She hears words in her brain that confuse her but might carry with them the sense of home, or of a doctor’s face, or of the taste of chocolate, or all of these at the same time. She takes the downward sweep, or it takes her, and once again, she cannot tell whether she is awake or asleep.

Now she turns her head slowly on the hospital pillow and sees George beside her. He sits on the chair next to her bed. His eyes are closed. The room is full of oyster light as the sun is dipping in the sky. And she knows what the sun is and where it is and how soon it is to its setting. All is clear to her. She looks at George. She looks how the light from the sun falls on the black hue of his hair, intensifying it, and illuminating the streaks of gray at his temples until they appear almost blond. She looks at how his brow furrows deeply even while he sleeps. The shadows of worry on his lids. His broad shoulders hunched against the back of the small chair in which he sits. His arms folded around his chest as though he is giving himself a gentle hug.

Katherine sees it clearly as the sun slips farther down in the sky. She sees it as she looks at George sleeping in the chair beside her bed. How her love for George and George’s love for her has held everything together. How the threads of their love for each other are deeper and more entwined than any dream or any nightmare. A love lived, not imagined.

George stirs for a moment from his sleep. He slowly raises his head and rubs the back of his neck with his hand. Then he turns to look at Katherine. He smiles when he sees that she is awake. In her eyes he can see that she is with him.

“I love you,” he says, and he takes her hand.

It could never be more real than this.