Things We Set on Fire by Reed Deborah

Author:Reed, Deborah [Reed, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

TWENTY-TWO

KATE’S LIDS CLOSED, HER MIND trapped beneath the weight of her skull, but she could see “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” as clearly as if the form still lay on the kitchen table before her, the physician’s sharply scrawled signature still wet with ink.

Billowing ghosts swam the length of her bed. Shadows recast sunlight, throwing it back like lamps flipping on and off, on and off, on and off.

“DO NOT RESUSCITATE” on the yellow sheet of paper, signed by Kate, her physician, attached to her living will.

This was all Kate’s fault. She should have planned a better suicide. A Better Suicide, collected poems by Katherine Fenton.

If only she could laugh.

She wasn’t dead. Not yet. I Woke Up Alive, by Katherine Fenton. I Woke Up Dead, by Katherine Fenton.

Her daughters were meant to find her asleep at the table, nothing more, no drama, no choking to death while they stood by helpless, just a call to Mrs. Pearl, the neighbor, or to 911 when they couldn’t rouse her. She’d taught them to call 911. Kate was meant to be toted away on a gurney, neatly—her daughters never having to look at her again.

But…

Time had lost all shape.

Her mother’s voice in the hospital. “She’s not breathing on her own?”

Kate had clawed her way up to the surface. The dreary leaden weight of gravity, her lips dead minnows, her tongue and eyes thick black slippery pools of nothing. “Get it out, get it out.” Her mind cobbling together the pieces. Survived. Hospital. Her inability to speak, not the disease, not yet. Just yesterday, was it yesterday? She could still form words, slurred past a charley-horsed tongue. A respirator in her mouth. Lungs whooshing. Frankenstein. Get it out. Get it out. She did not want her mother to see her like this.

Someone corrected the course, put her life, her death, back on track. The nurse? “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” Kate had told her, told someone. Maybe it was understood. Someone somewhere had understood.

The respirator now gone, Kate breathed in feathery wisps on her own. Air, a strange and spectral matter, the final substance she pulled from the world, nothing.

If only she could speak. This close to leaving for good, there were things she wanted to say. And laugh. She was dying to laugh. That was funny. It all seemed funny now. Crack up over a crackpot attempt at rushing herself out when she was already so close to leaving. What had been the point? Oh. She remembered. Believing she could control the world, a fool’s mission, right down to the burning desire to manipulate the memories inside her daughters’ heads. Play God. Leave them with visions of her own making. Infuse meaning into the murkiness of confusion, recalling a childhood from decades-old conversations. Painting the past was as futile as it was necessary to get right, which one could not, ever, get right. How many versions were there? Everyone attached to her own.

Still, Kate had planted the seed. Her daughters would look back someday, remember their mother was ill, and it would be tragic, yes, but at least Kate died in her sleep.

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