She sang to herself. If wishes were fishes, then coffins could swim.
Eyes shut tight, Carol Meyers remembered her husband's silver coffin sliding out of the midnight blue Lincoln hearse just like a salmon into a trawler's hold.
Fish you will swim no more.
Why was she singing and thinking of the funeral? She hadn't been dreaming of it. Had she?
"David," she said. Her husband's name. When she spoke, her tongue moved thickly. Stale, sticky, horrible breath. How long had it been since she'd brushed her teeth? Putting it off, just like her son had always done.
Peter brush your teeth. Singing up the stairs.
Her son, Peter. In her mind, she still saw the hearse and the silver coffin, but it was Peter's voice she heard now. Plaintive and so sad.
Carol Meyers, wife without a husband and mother without a son.
Her son Peter had died before his father.
Such things should never happen.
She tried to open her eyes.
Both of them dead. Husband and son, and where was she? How old was she? She believed that once, she had been happy. Grief lacerated her throat and her eyes burned beneath their closed lids.
Long ago yesterday, David had cremated their son Peter and taken the cheapest urn, because he had refused to pay for a regular burial.
Perhaps that was why she had remembered his coffin. Slippery, silvery, sliding like a fish.
Then came the bitter memory: Carol had allowed David to bury their son that way. Shamed, she remembered how easy it had been to acquiesce, rather than fight. How weak she had been.
But hadn't she won, in the end? Outlasted David. Outlived him.
God where was she?
Still alive, but blind. Dreaming? No--truly awake. She struggled again to open her eyes.
Glued tight. Sewn shut.
But her heart was raw and open. It felt like both of them had died just--
"Yesterday?" a quiet, measured male voice asked.
"Yes," she said. Then, after a moment: "Terday." And all at once there were half a dozen voices around her. Words, all mixed together and crazy. Maybe the voices were familiar, and maybe they weren't.
"I'm Ned," the quiet voice said. "I'm your friend." Ned? He was inside her head. Far inside, like a ringing in her ears. She touched her right ear because it itched and she found a tiny bulb like a snail shell. She knew it immediately: hearing aid. But who had put it there? She certainly hadn't.
She was deaf. That was why the voices were so mixed-up and made no sense. Hearing aids did that sometimes. But when had she gone deaf? She'd always had fine hearing. Sometimes she thought that she heard too much.
"Don't be afraid," Ned, the voice, said.
She didn't know if she would see him, or the others who spoke, but she had to see. At last, grunting with the effort, Carol forced her eyes open.
Her lids split with a velcro-like tear. Eyelashes scattered downward on her chest. A semicircle of young, pinkish, scrubbed faces surrounded her.
They wore tall, striped hats of many colors. And they were grinning like fools. Like the Mad Hatter's tea party.
One of young people leaned close and took Carol's hand. But it couldn't possibly be her hand! It was the claw of a crone, age-spotted and thin-skinned, peeling here and there, with enormous gnarled knuckles, nails yellow and cracked.
"Yes, it is your hand," Ned told her.
"Shut up," she replied.
"Oh, my," the young woman said. She had curly black hair and hazel eyes. Rather pretty and vaguely familiar. Perhaps she had been one of Carol's students. "You've just woken up. Don't tell us to shut up now!"
"My husband is dead," Carol told her, feeling as though she had to repeat what had just come into her mind.
"Yes, he is," the young woman said. "Quite a few years ago. Don't be upset. Do you remember me? I'm Judy."
"Judy." The name meant nothing. Carol didn't know what to think of the patronizing tone in the young woman's voice. As if Carol was a toddler. Or a hamster.
"She's one of the nurses," Ned said. "She--"
One of the nurses. Carol turned away from the scrubbed young face.
Oh, yes, now she remembered. She had been happy. Like a toddler. Or a hamster.
She remembered a blue paper sheet with plastic on the underside. Remembered it being slid under her thin, withered buttocks. She had not understood, until that moment, that buttocks could so wither. She remembered showers, sitting in a chair, and the horrible feeling of lukewarm water slapping against her flaccid breasts and belly. And Carol could not look this girl in the face again. The shame and weakness was unbearable.
Now she realized that her eyes had been so hard to open because they were pasted shut with rheum. The sort of sticky yellow rheum that came with old age and the clogging of every orifice with dead tissue.
"Why didn't I die?" Carol asked.
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