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feeble, woman dies—and then you discovered there was quite a lot more to it. You found that out
when you found the woman who had written some of the greatest poetry of her generation lying in a
puddle of her own piss, shrieking at her granddaughter to make the pain stop, make it stop, oh madre de
Cristo, make it stop. When you saw the formerly smooth forearm twisted like a washrag and heard the
poet call it a cunting thing and then wish herself dead so the hurting would stop.
Could you tell your husband how you were still half asleep, and frozen with the fear that anything
you did would be the wrong thing? Could you tell him that she scratched your face when you tried to
move her and howled like a dog that had been run over in the street? Could you explain what it was
like to leave your beloved grandmother sprawled on the floor while you dialed 911, and then sat
beside her waiting for the ambulance, making her drink Oxycodone dissolved in water through a
bendy-straw? How the ambulance didn’t come and didn’t come and you thought of that Gordon
Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the one that asks if anyone knows where the
love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? The waves rolling over Momo were waves
of pain, and she was foundering, and they just kept coming.
When she began to scream again, Lucy had gotten both arms under her and lifted her onto her bed
in a clumsy clean-and-jerk that she knew she’d feel in her shoulders and lower back for days, if not
weeks. Stopping her ears to Momo’s cries of put me down, you’re killing me. Then Lucy sat against the
wall, gasping, her hair plastered to her cheeks in strings while Momo wept and cradled her hideously
deformed arm and asked why Lucia would hurt her like that and why this was happening to her.
At last the ambulance had come, and a man—Lucy didn’t know his name but blessed him in her
incoherent prayers—had given Momes a shot that put her out. Could you tell your husband you
wished the shot had killed her?
“It was pretty awful,” was all she said. “I’m so glad Abra didn’t want to come down this weekend.”
“She did, but she had lots of homework, and said she had to go to the library yesterday. It must
have been a big deal, because you know how she usually pesters me about going to the football game.”
Babbling. Stupid. But what else was there? “Luce, I’m so goddamned sorry you had to go through that
alone.”
“It’s just . . . if you could have heard her screaming. Then you might understand. I never want to
hear anyone scream like that again. She’s always been so great at staying calm . . . keeping her head
when all about her are losing theirs . . .”
“I know—”
“And then to be reduced to what she was last night. The only words she could remember were cunt
and shit and piss and fuck and meretrice and—”
“Let it go, honey.” Upstairs, the shower had quit. It would only take Abra a few minutes to dry off
and jump into her Sunday grubs; she’d be down soon enough, shirttail flying and sneaker laces
flapping.
But Lucy wasn’t quite ready to let it go. “I remember a poem she wrote once. I can’t quote it word
for word, but it started something like this: ‘God’s a connoisseur of fragile things, and decorates His
cloudy outlook with ornaments of finest glass.’ I used to think that was a rather conventionally pretty
idea for a Concetta Reynolds poem, almost twee.”
And here was his Abba-Doo—their Abba-Doo—with her skin flushed from the shower. “Everything
all right, Daddy?”
David held up a hand: Wait a minute.
“Now I know what she really meant, and I’ll never be able to read that poem again.”
“Abby’s here, hon,” he said in a falsely jolly voice.
“Good. I’ll need to talk to her. I’m not going to bawl anymore, so don’t worry, but we can’t protect
her from this.”