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  Lena hoped she had not opened a can of worms with the kiss. Bad enough that she had to pine after Caris. She did not want Caris pining for her, too. Why did the kiss have to be so good? So incredible, so perfect? It means nothing, just that the both of us are really good kissers.

  "Does Karl have a penis?" Caris asked.

  "N-no. Some do, but the surgery isn't quite there yet, especially to retain sensation. Maybe later."

  "It's good to see you again," Caris said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. I forgot to tell you this. Remember what you said about cows? Their eyes? I've been looking at pictures of cows. They're calming. You're right. Did you ever put a cow picture up?"

  "Mmm."

  "Is that a yes?"

  "Yes. It's a yes."

  Caris laughed. "Did you really?"

  "Yep, I really, truly did. I said I would, didn't I?"

  "Could I come see it?"

  Lena swallowed. "You can, sure. Or, uh...I took a picture of it." Lena pressed a few buttons on her phone. "There."

  The picture was black and white, to match the other bathroom pictures. The cow's head was half cocked. "Very cute." Caris gave the phone back. "Will you forward the picture to me?"

  Lena fiddled with a few more buttons. "Done."

  "Thank you." Caris gave an uneasy grin. She did not ask why Lena had taken a picture of a picture. She probably suspected Lena was scared. And that Lena did not trust herself. Because she sure as hell did not, especially if Caris touched her first. If Caris went in for another hug...oh boy. Lena was not sure how she had managed to limit her response to Caris's cheek kiss at Azizi to another cheek kiss.

  Now, it would be so easy for Lena to put her hand on Caris's knee, lean over and—shit. Lena's brain felt like a crinkly old map. Handled and folded so many times it was faded and useless. She needed to stop overthinking the situation.

  "Nothing happened," Lena said.

  Caris licked her lips. "You mean the, uh, the thing in your kitchen?"

  "It didn't happen."

  Caris crumpled her Snickers wrapper. It had lain untouched for the past hour. "Okay," Caris said slowly. "It didn't happen."

  "Right. Didn't happen." What Lena wanted was a do-over. If she and Caris had a do-over, they could make the second kiss bad and sloppy and monstrous, and presto! Problem solved.

  Not really. A do-over would make matters worse. The do-over would probably be two times better than the original. A do-over would wreck them, and Caris deserved better.

  Aw, hell. Maybe a do-over would not be so bad.

  Crinkle crinkle crinkle went Caris's hand with the wrapper, and Lena pressed her hand over Caris's, steadying it. Kisses were not what Caris needed right now. What she needed was a friend. "Caris, I, uh, look, okay. I have cards. Want to play a few rounds? Crazy Eights?" The two of them would be okay. They would be fine; they had no choice.

  "Okay," Caris said. "Cards." But she made no move to separate their hands, and neither did Lena.

  Chapter 10

  Caris had nothing against parades. The St. Patrick's Day parades were the best. They were not as showy or as glittery as the Thanksgiving and Christmas parades and did not take themselves seriously. People cheered loudly for Democratic and Republican politicians alike.

  The parade of doctors about eight weeks after the car crash reminded Caris of a parade staple, the clowns who fit into tiny cars, doctor-clowns with long faces and exaggerated frowns. The grave doctor-clowns showed Caris and the rest of the family brain scan after brain scan and explained that Dale's brain stem was fine—but there was no cortical activity. Nothing was happening in Dale's brain. Nothing could happen. The doctors liked to talk, their voices low, somber and all-knowing.

  Dale was in what doctors suspected was a vegetative state. Dale was operating solely because of her automatic body functions. Only a feeding tube was keeping her alive.

  The doctors blathered lots of information and handed over stacks of papers filled with "facts" and statistics. Shirley found her own doctors. They said the same things.

  Caris memorized the basics:

  — Most persistent vegetative state patients have no perception of external stimuli and cannot respond to such stimuli.

  — Any movement or seeming response to external stimuli is purely coincidental. Don't look for patterns. They're not there.

  — PVS patients have normal sleep-wake cycles. They are capable of moving their limbs, although only as a reflex. They can open their eyes and smile. It may seem like they are tracking objects or people with their eyes. Don't delude yourself. They're not looking at shit.

  — PVS patients cry, laugh, groan, moan, scream and make a whole host of noises. They ain't feeling or saying shit.

  — Most PVS patients cannot chew or swallow food. They require feeding tubes.

  — The feeding tube is usually the only life-sustaining piece of equipment necessary, as PVS patients can breathe on their own and their brainstems are relatively fine.

  — It costs about $250,000 a year to care for someone in a PVS. The first few years of care are the most expensive, sometimes running into the millions per year.

  — Life expectancy for PVS patients depends in part on why they are in the PVS. If it is because of a traumatic brain injury, the life expectancy is generally higher, although paralysis often accompanies traumatic brain injury. The life expectancy prognosis is bleaker if the cause is lack of oxygen to the brain.

  — Survival more than ten years is rare. The cause of the vegetative state itself is often the cause of death. Other big reasons for the short life expectancy are complications such as secondary infections (pneumonia), urinary tract infections, pulmonary tract infections, general system failure, strokes or tumors.

  — No treatment or cure exists.

  What gave Shirley optimism:

  — If PVS patients do wake up, they are more likely to do so during the first month—and without warning.

  — There is controversy over consciousness in PVS. Some PVS patients, as many as forty percent, may be misdiagnosed. They are actually minimally conscious and capable of meaningful activity, such as tracking objects purposefully and slightly moving their hands.

  And the grimmest facts of them all:

  — If patients do not emerge within the first year, they probably never will. If, somehow, they do emerge after the first year, they are very likely to have severe disabilities.

  — The younger and healthier the patient is, the longer she should live.

  Dale was neither of these things. She was fifty-six years old and had been at least thirty pounds overweight before the crash. Thank goodness Shirley had money. Dale's insurance did not cover everything.

  Dale had left a living will, dated about three years prior to the car wreck. Caris had one, too. Benefits of being married to a fussy lawyer. Their living wills gave each other authorization to make medical decisions on the other's behalf. One of the first things most living wills dealt with were conditions such as persistent vegetative states, and Dale's living will was no different. Dale stated that in such a case, she would want treatment, meaning life-prolonging measures, such as the feeding tube, for one year. If there was little or no progress after the year, Dale wanted the tube pulled.

  Fairly clear. No mention of what to do in cases of paralysis, though. The paralysis would compromise Dale's quality of life greatly if she were to emerge from the PVS. Caris was not sure Dale would have wanted that—depending on other people for such basic needs as the toilet, for example. Peeing and shitting in her bed.

  Shirley was buoyant. Science was making leaps and bounds. Stem cells were marvels. And with therapy, quite a few paralyzed people walked again. Caris could sense Shirley maneuvering behind the scenes, setting up grounds to challenge the living will if Dale remained in the PVS come April.

  Lena was a shadowy presence. She showed up for every meeting with the doctors but said little. She usually sat across from Caris, and sometimes Caris would stu
dy her, her eyes, brown or green, her pinched lips, her unreadable expression, and wonder what she was thinking. Lena was lovely in her own distant, closed-off way. More lovely, more beautiful than Dale. Sometimes Lena would meet Caris's gaze, and neither of them would break the eye contact right away. Caris would remember how they had been at Starbucks, just sitting there, Caris's hand beneath Lena's, them just sitting, doing nothing, just enjoying the feel of each other.

  *****

  Caris got a letter from Lena, through postal mail. This one did not have a salutation. It read:

  REGINALD PHILIP ISMAY, reads my father's grave marker. Have you been to where he is buried? Goodacres Memorial Gardens in Arlington. I hate the name. Goodacres? Gardens? Okay. Okaaay. I visit once a year, on the anniversary of his death.

  So of course I went last week. I usually go in the evenings when it is cooler, so I can stay a while. Mom used to go in the mornings and leave a rose. So, imagine my shock when I went last week and there was a rose. You left it, didn't you? (Or maybe Grandma or Granddad did.) Did Mom take you to her first husband's grave? I'm not sure if that's romantic or creepy. It's both, I suppose.

  So, there is a space next to Dad's plot. For Mom, of course. Mom never told me much about him. She said it hurt her too much. Oh, she told me the basics—what I call questionnaire information. Not the important stuff—what made him laugh? What made him sad? She talked about that stuff only a few times. I don't have a single memory of him.

  Maybe this sounds awful, but this vegetative state thing? Mom is in there, laughing her lily white coma ass off at us, pointing fingers at us. She'll come out when she's damn well ready and wants to. When she's made us suffer enough. All she did was lie and manipulate. I'm done with her bullshit. That's what I think some days.

  The real situation, though, is that she would not want this. She's gone. She's dead. Grandma is deluding herself. Do you buy that stuff Grandma says? About science, how in a year or five years, we never know what medicines there will be, medicines better than Zolpdiem. The study that says forty-seven of sixty-five patients with locked-in syndrome indicated they were happy? I read that study. It had lots of holes.

  Whenever I touch Mom, she is so dry and brittle that I half-expect her face to crumble. Her eyes are doll eyes. Mannequin eyes. It's a shame. I wish she wouldn't have done this. She didn't have to try to kill herself. By a year Grandma will have Mom on Zolpidem and other medications and deep brain stimulation and God knows what else, and she'll try to coax more time out of you. Maybe you'll give it. I kind of hope you do. I don't want my mother to die. Even though she is already dead.

  Karl and I went out to Klondike last weekend. My sole Saturday night off this month. It's a gay club in DC. He got me drunk (okay, I helped get myself drunk, too) and I ended up making out with a few random women. Hell if I remember their names or what they looked like. I've stayed away from Caroline. Don't worry.

  Hope all is well with you. Have you been back to Dr. Frowny Face? I hope you're enjoying Donovan now. I'll come by to visit him sometime soon. Promise. Well, hey, I guess I'll see him at the birthday party this Sunday. Gotta love Grandma, huh? See you soon.

  - Lena

  Chapter 11

  Dale turned fifty-seven years old three months after the wreck. Lena entered the hospital, her stomach like a rock. Shirley was throwing a birthday party. "Just a little something with cake," Shirley had said on the phone, but Lena wondered. She wanted to turn around and drive away. Cough cough. Coming down with something nasty.

  A birthday party, really? Lena hoped it would not be an awkward, overboard shebang with balloons and streamers, apparent gaiety with her mother's lifeless form in the midst. Shirley had the tendency to overshoot sometimes.

  Don't be such a Sour Sally. Might do you good to celebrate.

  Lena got on the elevator. She was one to talk about balloons. She had brought two. Yep, two balloons. To this fake-a-roo birthday party. Granted, they were little helium birthday balloons on sticks in a vase.

  Still, they were balloons.

  She did not feel right showing up empty handed. Shirley and George were bringing cake. Caris was bringing drinks.

  Lena: nothing.

  So she'd stopped at Safeway for a quick card. Only it hadn't been so quick. All the cards seemed in bad taste, considering her mother's situation.

  Balloons it was, then. One was blue, her mother's favorite color, and read HAPPY. The other was green and read BIRTHDAY!

  Lena's grandparents, Caris and Donovan were in the room, and Shirley squealed. "Perfect! George, see. Lena brought balloons. I was telling your grandfather we needed to dress this party up."

  Shirley set the vase holding the balloons next to the cake. "Chocolate cake," Shirley explained with a beam. "Your mother's favorite."

  Lena ventured a smile at Caris, and Caris smiled back. A few seconds longer than necessary. Maybe more than a few seconds longer.

  George cut the cake. It had white frosting and read HAPPY BIRTHDAY in blue letters. The cake was good. Moist, not too sweet, and Caris whispered to Lena that she would have a letter arriving in the mail probably Monday. Weird relationship they had, but given the situation and who they were to each other, it worked.

  The party progressed better than Lena thought it would. No singing "Happy birthday." No forced joviality. Just cake, drinks and chatting. Reminiscing. But Dale was in a wheelchair, on the outskirts of their chatter. With these eyes. These awful dead glassy eyes absorbing nothing.

  Lena's stomach was still a rock.

  Shirley, sometimes in a choked-up voice, talked about Dale's past birthdays. Some were stories Lena had heard a million times, but a few were new.

  "Last year," George said. "This time last year. Dale came up for the weekend. You remember, Caris? You went to a movie with Shirley. Dale and I went boating, just the two of us. The wind was in her hair. She'd never looked happier." He glanced toward the woman in the wheelchair. "Do you remember, sweetie?"

  Donovan cooed.

  An exquisite sorrow creased George's face. "Have you cried?" he asked Lena.

  "What? Cried? No."

  George frowned. "Me either."

  "I have," Caris said. "Two or three times but not like I should. If that makes sense. My first night home after having Donovan, I kept waiting for the hospital to call with the news Dale had died. The call never came. When that call comes…" Caris let her voice trail off. "It's the limbo."

  "I haven't cried at all," Lena whispered. Not even about the children. "What do you think that means?"

  "It's the limbo," Caris repeated. "It blankets everything. It's contagious."

  "Dale's coming back," Shirley said firmly. "You just wait and see."

  "You're delusional," Lena muttered under her breath.

  "What?" Shirley asked.

  "Nothing, Grandma."

  *****

  When Lena got home, she called Joanna. "I was hoping I could do something with the kids soon. They'd like that, I think."

  "Okay," Joanna replied slowly. "Do you mean just you and the children?"

  "Whatever you are comfortable with. You're their mother."

  "Right, right," Joanna said. "Well, let me talk to Malik and the kids. I'll get back to you."

  "All right," Lena whispered. "Thanks." She hung up and fixed herself a glass of water. Joanna was not going to call back. Wasn't going to talk with Malik and the kids.

  Part of Lena was relieved.

  *****

  Caris had gone through several drafts of her reply to Lena's latest letter. Lena's father, Reggie, and Dale had married in Honolulu, Hawaii, when they were both twenty-six. They were slender and dark. They looked like different sides of the same coin. In the wedding picture, Dale wore a lacy, soft white dress and a purple lei: femininity personified. The modern Dale hated that picture. "I was a sucker for tradition," Dale had said.

  Five years after the wedding, Reggie was dead from AIDS, leaving behind Dale and their four-year-old daughter. Reggie w
as healthy, vital, alive in the wedding album. In subsequent pictures, he was increasingly pale and sickly.

  Reggie and Dale had taken a somewhat convoluted path to the altar. They were both young achievers. They became best friends at college, at the University of Virginia, although Reggie was three years behind Dale. It did not matter they were both gay and could not, did not want to, complete the physical component of their relationship with each other. The emotional part was enough. They happily fucked other people but knew they wanted children one day. They wanted the traditional "family life." It was a different, more closeted world back then. They got married and hoped the honeymoon was the only time they would need to have sex with each other. It was—and luckily for Dale and Lena. Otherwise, they might have gotten the virus, too.

  Dear Lena, Caris wrote.

  Your mother loved your father. To be honest with you, it's one reason I thought your mother and I would have a great marriage. She talked about him like she really, truly loved him. Like he was her soul mate, despite the fact they were both gay. Your mother wouldn't take marrying again lightly, or so I thought. I used to think—and still do—that your mom loved him in every way. But he didn't love her back in the way that counted. Interesting how sexuality works, isn't it? It's possible that for your mother, her first marriage was not one of convenience.