Her horror friends bring over Chinese food late at night when she’s already under the covers in a bathing suit and knee socks, and they spread out all over the floor, eating lo mein with their fingers and discussing tracheotomies, incontinence and hemorrhaging. Sleep, they tell her, we’ll lock up when we leave.
Late one evening, Peter the cyclops calls. He’s heard about her dad and wants to know if there’s anything he can do.
Libby, though wound up and hungry, feels touched. “Come over and do my laundry for me one day.”
“No, really?”
“Really.”
He hedges and then suggests she take it to the laundromat, where they’ll wash, dry and even fold it. Imagine that. “One, two, three,” he says.
“I did that and they lost my freaking laundry,” she tells him. “It’s gone. Vanished!”
“Really?”
“What do you want, Peter?” He’s quiet, and it’s clear he has nothing to offer. But never mind him; what can she expect from a cyclops? Libby discovers deep in the recesses of her dresser drawer many wearable things—old tank tops and lacy bras with the tags still on. She’s running out of clothes again, but there’s still something for the morning.
She stuffs her laundry into a backpack, all of it, including the bathing suits and the muumuu, and she takes it to the office, where she packs it up in one of Gautreaux’s Seagram’s boxes. She addresses the overnight packing slip to the hospital, calls the mailroom for a pickup, and ten minutes later a young man with a wire cart carries the box away.
There is some problem with the elevators. Flashing lights, a bleating noise. Misbuttoning Bilox’s coat, Libby weakly considers the stairs, but then she spots the handsome kid who looks like Neil Lubin, who didn’t take her to the prom, as he rolls his empty wire cart down the hall. “Is there another way out?” she asks.
“There’s always a way out,” he says slyly. “Freight elevator.”
“Show me,” Libby says, hanging onto his sleeve. She’s bone-tired and wants a helping hand. Without thinking, she hoists herself onto Imelda’s desk and lowers herself into his wire cart. “I have a freaking headache,” she explains. He is as kind as he is good-looking. He finds her an aspirin and gives her a paper towel to blow her nose and deposits her outside the service entrance at 44th and Lexington, where a light rain mists their heads.
The next day, the doctors make another attempt to wean her dad from the ventilator, but he struggles for breaths and his eyes dart wildly around the room. Libby stares anxiously at the monitor, which measures his vital signs, as if this will make his lungs work better. He starts mouthing words, and she stands there dumbly, trying to understand until finally she runs into the hall yelling, “He can’t do it! He can’t!”
Now, exhausted, he sleeps. Libby sits beside him, patting his hand. She wears a cocktail dress, argyle knee socks and the large, shapeless sweatshirt with many zippered pockets. On her dad’s nightstand she notices a trick-or-treat bag decorated with goblins and witches. There’s a note attached that reads, “Libby, provisions for the long haul. How you doing?” Inside are a combination of sweets and health foods and multivitamins. Libby’s eyes tear up, and she is overwhelmed with love for the girlfriends and finds herself wishing they were her friends, wishing her dad could have another chance with one of them if he wanted it.
A friendly nurse brings in the Seagram’s box and says, “Do you know what this is?” Before Libby can get out of the chair, the nurse tears off the cover of the box, and together they stare down at the dirty, faintly smelly laundry.
“Mine,” Libby says.
Libby grabs quarters from her purse and then shifts through the trick-or-treat bag, stuffing one of her zippered pockets with a V-8 juice, another with homemade chocolate chip cookies and another with a bottle of multivitamins. The Seagram’s box is large and cumbersome, and she weaves unsteadily down the hall until she finds an abandoned wheelchair to place it on. Outside, she rolls the wheelchair across the street to the mini-mall and into the laundromat, past the long line of washers, all of which are in use. The attendant, an elderly man who jingles with coins, looks at her strangely and tells her to come back later. She leaves the Seagram’s box and wheels the chair back to the hospital.
Later, when she returns, the air has changed. The darkening sky is a swirl of winter grays, like an old bruise. The same attendant pushes a mop and tells her he’s closing in five minutes. She sits on the folding table, as if her unmovable presence will make him soften. The cocktail dress rides up her thighs, exposing the bare skin above her argyle socks. She touches the stubbly hairs.
The attendant sweeps lint into a pile and eyeballs her sitting on the folding table. “I can lock you in, if that’s what you want. Do you want me to lock you in?”
“All right.” You can never be locked in, only locked out, she reasons. “I’ll be very neat,” she tells him.
The man finishes sweeping and ties up several garbage bags, turning to her every so often to see if she is still there. Libby tries to smile, but can’t quite pull one off. Her body feels leaden and she’s struck with the terrible feeling that maybe she, too, is dying. She pats her ears and then feels her neck for enlarged lymph nodes. Reaching into one of the zippered pockets, she pulls out the vitamins and dumps a couple on her tongue. She unzips another pocket and washes them down with a V-8, then unzips another pocket and nibbles on a cookie. She slides her hand under the sweatshirt and does a discreet mini breast exam.
As soon as the man leaves, she separates the whites and darks, gathers her quarters and gets three loads going. She stretches out on the folding table, looks over at the sloshing, soapy water and feels a kind of hope. Please God, she thinks. She doesn’t wish for anything in particular, just that things remain as they are a while longer; she simply needs to be suspended in the moment. Time, she believes, is a kind of hope.
The police escort her back to the nurses’ station, where the nurses gather around her. There’s whispering. The elderly laundry attendant confides, not quietly, that “she looked like a crazy to me.” Dumpy Downer impatiently eyes the small crowd and moves toward Libby, touching her elbow.
“I need to speak with you and your father,” he says.
“What about my laundry?” Libby asks, looking at the cops, then the nurses and then the mean-spirited laundry attendant. Everyone talks at once, and the cop’s radio sputters at noisy intervals. “We know her. It’s fine,” the friendly nurse says. “There’s no need to make a fuss,” the boisterous nurse says. Dumpy Downer is now yanking on her arm. Finally, the cops and nurses wind up flirting with each other as Libby is pulled into her dad’s room, and the door is closed behind them.
The bottom line, begins Dumpy Downer, is that her dad can’t live without a ventilator. His lungs can’t do it. They’ve made every effort. Sad to say, but there’s no justification for keeping him in the CCU. He’ll have to go upstairs to the ventilator wing. The doctor frowns. He’s been through so much. There is another option. They can put him on a morphine drip, make him as comfortable as possible, turn off the ventilator and leave it in God’s hands. Libby reels, feeling static travel up her neck and gather in her head. She slumps into a chair. God, she thinks; what does He have to do with it, the slacker. Staring at Dumpy Downer’s round, freckled head, she can tell he’s not a believer. He believes in medicine, and medicine’s failed here. Well, off to the ventilator wing.
“Let’s turn off this goddamn thing,” her dad writes on his pad. He’s sitting up, a picture of health. You flip the switch on invalids; her dad looks as if he could be going to the grocery store. Really, if anyone were to ask, she would have thought that a dying person would be half-gone, unrecognizable, yet her dad is here, terribly present, cocking his head to the side when he hears something dumb. When a vein quivers beneath his eye, he reaches up to touch it.