“If Soren’s up for it. He likes it better when we get room service.”
“He doesn’t always get what he wants. I think that’s pretty obvious.”
Was Morty scolding her? But it was true: she often felt toward Soren as one might feel toward a blatantly favored sibling.
So Morty put on the lanyard with his name tag, took Tommy’s copy of his schedule (annotated with names he ought to remember but always forgot), and made his way to the far reaches of the hotel, the conference and screening rooms. Tommy returned to their suite and waited for Soren to wake up.
While he showered and dressed, she ordered him breakfast, and while he ate in front of a morning talk show, she answered e-mails.
The base of the mountain was only a few blocks away, and the air was pleasantly warm. They walked slowly, like an elderly couple, looking into shopwindows and making fun of the theatrical cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats, a woman’s silk gown embroidered with a large sequined saguaro cactus.
“It looks like a trident phallus. I don’t think even Dolly Parton could pull that one off,” said Soren. He seemed to be in a good mood; maybe the mountain air had a healing effect.
Tommy bought their tickets, and they sat on a bench beside the platform where the cable car would pick them up. They were the only people waiting. Looking up the daunting slope, Tommy could see two pairs of hikers on foot, following the dirt track beneath the cable line.
She put on her sunglasses and watched the descending glass pod in a quiet trance. Capturing the sunlight in prismlike flashes, it looked like a giant iridescent beetle. When it pulled up beside them, the doors slid open, and six people got off, including two children who started racing down the flight of steps to the street, their parents yelling at them to stop, slow down, wait! Soren was watching them, silent. Tommy repressed the knee-jerk urge to read his mind, to make herself feel guiltier than she already did about wishing she were with Morty, even back in the airless Gold Rush Salon, grinning relentlessly at strangers, coping with the bottomless bureaucracy of Morty’s juggernaut success.
No other passengers showed up, and they rode to the top without comment. Tommy wondered if Soren’s eyes were closed behind his sunglasses. His head was inclined against a window, as if he were riveted by a single view rather than the widening panorama of the village tucked snug in its luxurious valley below.
When they got off at the top, they had to walk around an impressive stack of long white florist boxes, each tied with a pink ribbon. There must have been fifty. A slender young man in a blazer and tie paced alongside the boxes, talking on a cell phone in an agitated tone. Pinned to his lapel was a gold name plate. Phillip. From his seethingly enunciated dictates, it was obvious that he was a wedding planner and that someone was actually going to get married in this lofty spot, sometime later in the day; also, that someone else had fucked up.
“Where are the vases?” he said, each word a threat. “I need them by noon or it will not be pretty.”
Tommy and Soren walked on in the prescribed direction, toward the deck with the promised view, reaching over the mountain range, its summit shrouded with snowdrifts even in June.
Soren spoke for the first time since they had boarded the gondola. “Some people are planning a wedding, some a funeral.”
“Soren, you’re doing all right. You’ve got to be positive,” said Tommy.
“Sweetheart, I am positive. That’s my problem. Do you know there’s actually a magazine for us corpses-in-waiting? It’s called Poz. Sounds like a magazine for dogs and cats, doesn’t it? But no. I see it at my doctor’s office. He gets that plus Popular Photography plus People. How alliterative of him, right? And his first name is Peter!”
Tommy laughed.
“But who do you think is actually going to pick up that magazine in a room full of strangers? I mean, we can look around and figure out who’s there for the same reason we are—nobody’s fooling anybody—but still. I have no desire to look at articles on, what, how to keep my Mediport in tip-top shape? How to minimize estate taxes for my loved ones? How to avoid getting fired for being in a terminal way?”
“You aren’t terminal. You can’t think like that.”
“Tommy, dear Tommy, don’t go all Pollyanna on me, please.”
“I’m just—”
“Stating the facts. Keeping hope alive! Good for you.” He quickened his pace and walked out in front of her, toward the railing with the informational plaques, the you-are-here maps. A father was posing his wife and five children against the vista, getting ready to take a picture.
But then, without so much as a cursory glance at the view, Soren turned toward the restaurant. Tommy couldn’t tell if he wanted her to follow. Just inside the door, he held it open and looked back. “I’m getting a hot dog—or whatever excuse for nutrition they serve up here. You want something? Or are you planning to join the jolly McMormons over there?”
They chose an indoor picnic table next to the window on the side of the mountain view.
“Sit,” Soren said. He insisted on going up to order the food. He came back with French fries and a paper plate of corn chips under a pool of fluorescent orange cheese.
“Dig in,” he said. “Sometimes this is what does the trick for me these days. A carbohydrate orgy. The only kind in which I may indulge at this stage of my life. A shame, considering specimens like our friend Phillip out there, guarding his lilies.”
After wiping cheese from his lips, he cringed dramatically and said, “Oops. Wrong company.”
Tommy made no comment. She couldn’t tell if Soren was trying to amuse her or to pick a fight. She ate a few fries. They had a wooden texture and tasted as if they’d been reheated several times. But her mouth was full when Soren said, “If I weren’t sick, if I’d been healthy as a horse these past few years, you’d be gone, wouldn’t you.” He still wore his sunglasses, so Tommy couldn’t see his eyes. “You’re taking care of him so he can take care of me.”
It took her a blessed moment to chew and swallow the terrible fries. “I thought about leaving,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you, one way or the other.”
“I don’t believe that, but never mind,” said Soren. “Anyway, I sort of dare you to stay through what’s to come. As Luscious Phillip said about his missing vahzes, it will not be pretty.”
“Soren…”
“Tommy, you can’t hide how little you like me. Though why should you?”
Was he actually trying to drive her away—or maybe, if she could stop and think of him more kindly, trying to “liberate” her? Was there a perverse generosity in this confrontation?
“I could say the same of you,” she heard herself say.
Soren shook his head. “Not the same. You were there. You had it in for me from the start. You like to pretend you don’t run the show. But”—he raised his hands, greasy palms outward—“I am forced to admit that I’m grateful you’ve stayed.”
She could say nothing to this. She could hardly thank him, and it was too late to protest his assertions—and pointless. Soren might be vain, but he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t blind. She said the only honest thing she could: “I do not run the show.”
He pushed the remainder of the nachos toward her. “Let’s agree to disagree on that.”
Dutifully, they spent a few minutes admiring the view. And when the gondola arrived at the summit from its latest ascent, they had to wait for two large cardboard cartons to be unloaded by the wedding planner and a lackey.
“The vases, do we think?” said Soren. “And don’t tell me it’s a good omen.”
They rode down in silence, but it felt to Tommy like a peaceable silence. She understood that Soren had been wanting an opportunity to say what he said to her in the restaurant. When they returned to their suite, Soren went into his bedroom, though not before thanking Tommy. She might have left to track down Morty, but she stayed. She called Brooklyn and spoke to her father, who seemed disturbingly unable to comprehend why she was calling
from Colorado. She browsed through the New Yorker and ate a fancy chocolate bar from the room’s array of overpriced temptations.
Soren was still asleep four hours later, when Morty returned to the room.
“I’m starving,” Morty said. “Without you there, I forgot to have lunch. Shall we go out now and bring something back? Leave him a note?”
“No,” said Tommy. “Just do room service.”
Morty bowed. “Your wish is my command.”
The return trip to New York was a terror. The small plane to Denver tilted and plunged on the fickle currents of mountain air. The flight crew remained seated, and the only sound inside the cabin was that of passengers vomiting into their air-sickness bags. Tommy sat several rows in front of Morty and Soren. She willed her stomach to behave.
If Morty was invited to Aspen again, she would decline to come along. If she survived this flight.
In Denver, Soren’s face looked as pale as raw codfish. They arranged to ride the airport golf cart to their connecting gate. “I don’t think I can do this flight,” muttered Soren as Tommy and Morty guided him to a seat in the waiting lounge.
“You have to,” said Morty. “We are not staying over in Denver. It’s too much of a production. Let’s get you home. All of us.”
Morty made Soren take a sleeping pill after they boarded. Tommy slept, too, worn out by her sustained fear on the earlier flight.
Somehow, as if the extreme turbulence en route to Denver had shaken free his will to live, Soren’s health never recovered.
By the end of the summer, the more dependable drugs had begun to lose ground. Tommy and Morty had been home from the tour for a month when Soren went into the hospital overnight for the first time, with an alarmingly fierce nosebleed.
Tommy did not ask questions. Morty offered no explanations.
When Soren came home, it was clear he had turned a corner: the wrong one. He was scared. Tommy began to wake up two or three times a week to Soren’s keening hysteria from the upstairs bedroom. Sometimes he wept; other times he cursed Morty, senselessly and often incoherently.
Soren had always refused to talk about his parents, characterizing them as “wicked, wicked people.” All Morty knew was that he had grown up somewhere in Illinois, “a place that is so not Chicago.” One evening when the three of them were sharing dinner in the kitchen, mostly in glum, ruminant silence, Morty startled Tommy by saying to Soren, “I wonder if you might think of being in touch with your family.” (Was he afraid to bring this up when they were alone?)
“That would be you,” Soren said. “You are my only family, darling.”
After a pause, Morty said, “Your parents will always be your parents.”
“Right on up to the pearly gates, where they expect to be welcomed with hula dancers and goblets of sacred punch, oh yes. Though you could pull out their fingernails one by one and they’d never acknowledge my existence.”
Morty glanced at Tommy.
“They’d want to know you’re not well,” she tried.
Soren looked at her with an oddly bright expression. “Tommy, dear, my parents are beyond evangelical. They are evangelissimo. If they haven’t disowned me already, this”—he leaned back to gesture with both hands at his wasted body—“well, this would do the trick. In spades. In every suit, jokers included. And don’t get me started on my sisters. They probably have five kids apiece by now, with those cultishly virile husbands of theirs. They married twins, if you can believe it.”
Sisters? Had Morty known Soren had sisters?
“Please stop talking about those people,” Soren said. “Please. They have nothing to offer me, and I certainly have nothing to offer them beyond shame and righteous hemorrhoids. Which might give me some satisfaction if I had the energy. But I don’t.” He reached toward Morty and prodded him with a spoon. “Now tell me about those cancerous punks, honey, what trouble they’ve cooked up today. I know you’re on fire out there in your sanctum.”
After Morty had helped Soren to bed that night, he came back downstairs. “Do I hire a detective and find them anyway?” he asked Tommy.
“That is not a decision I want to weigh in on,” she said. The talk of family, of parents, had only stoked the guilt she felt at not keeping closer tabs on her father. She had called him while Soren was upstairs, but she got his voice mail. Concerned—it wasn’t yet eight—she had then called Dani. “Come on, Tommy,” he said, without concealing his irritation, “Dad doesn’t answer the phone these days once he’s watching his TV shows. You know that.” But she didn’t.
Even fake, cynical cheer soon took too much effort for Soren. His fear of death seemed to rise from within until it was right beneath his translucent skin, as evident as the blood flowing tenaciously through his veins.
On one of the coldest mornings that winter, following a long, wakeful night of listening to Soren scream, “I will not die! I refuse to die! I FUCKING REFUSE!”—his ragings untempered by Morty’s oblique murmurings—Tommy answered the ringing phone and, after asking if Morty could return the call, was told that the news this caller had to relay was very important. Was he there?
Reluctantly, she went through the living room and called up, waking Morty. She handed him the phone midway up the staircase and went back to the kitchen to make coffee. A few minutes later, Morty came into the room, barefoot, in his striped flannel robe, sat at the table, and started to cry. “It’s too much,” he sobbed. “It’s too much, too much, too much.” Diagnosis had won the Newbery Medal.
She gave him coffee and put a hand on his shoulder. She wanted to tell him not to let Soren’s illness poison his success. “Go sleep on the couch in the nursery. I’ll take his breakfast upstairs,” she said.
—
In a way, after all, she did end up nursing Soren—and, by the end, sharing with Morty the brunt of his terrified abuse. Remarkably, as if his fear fueled his tenacity for life, Soren held on for another year, during which Tommy realized that she and Morty had, effectively, become Soren’s parents themselves. But unlike a parent, she did not entertain hope. She knew that he was dying.
The week before he went into the hospital for the last time, he said to her, “Who are you to just walk in here, to stand there like…Who are you? Huh?” She was changing the sheets while he sat slumped in the armchair Morty had squeezed into a corner of the bedroom as a place of vigil. Morty was in the studio, on a conference call with his editor and agent; Tommy had been downstairs and couldn’t ignore the sound of Soren’s retching.
At first, she thought he was suffering from one of the disoriented riffs that occurred more and more often as he relied on the strongest narcotics. Though Morty had turned the thermostat unnaturally high, Soren was shivering.
“It’s just me. Tommy,” she said as she folded back the quilt.
“Oh, just you,” he scoffed. “Just you, you, poor little you, the chambermaid who stands to inherit the kingdom.”
“Soren, get back into bed.”
“You get the prize. You win,” he said as he followed her orders, still shivering. “Hooray for you! Healthy, fleshy, normal you!”
“Let me take your temperature.”
He did as she asked, glaring at her over the thermometer clamped between his desiccated bluish lips. She turned to look out the window at the studio, hoping to catch sight of Morty returning to the house. He hadn’t done any real work, any solitary creative work, for over a week. (“For the first time in my life,” Morty told her, “bureaucracy is keeping me sane.”)
Behind her, she heard Soren say, “And you get Morty. Don’t you?”
She turned around. She crossed the room and took the thermometer from his hand. “What is it?” she said coldly.
“It?” He looked puzzled, suspicious.
“Your temperature.”
“Does it matter? Does it fucking matter one way or the other? Hot or cold, I’m cooked. Just slice me up and serve me to the guests. Feed the scraps to somebody’s dogs.” He lay back on the freshl
y slipcased pillow and closed his eyes. “Thank you,” he whispered.
When Morty returned to the house, she told him they had to hire a live-in nurse. They could take the boxes of books out of the nursery.
“Now we know why we named it that,” Morty said drily.
The nurse who came was a man, fortuitously solid as a tree trunk, because his arrival coincided with a new symptom in Soren’s decline: sudden physical collapses. From downstairs, where she remained as often as she possibly could, Tommy would hear and even feel the concussive impact of Soren’s falling out of bed or faltering on the way to the bathroom. The falls increased until they seemed to occur a dozen times a day. She would hear Morty and Stan in gentle concert, trying to calm Soren.
When he fell, the dishes in the kitchen would shudder inside their cupboards, the lights in the chandelier blink.
Skeins of harsh coughing gave way to bitter respites of gasping and weeping. Morty would gallop down the stairs, lunge into the kitchen, cursing and shouting for a bucket, rags, newspapers, sponges; didn’t they have more towels somewhere? Didn’t they have enough fucking money to buy more towels?
Tommy ran endless loads of laundry. She made broth, measured Pedialyte, bought invalid accessories at a medical-supply store in Stamford. She made thick meaty sandwiches for Nurse Stan, poured tall glasses of milk and iced tea and orange juice. She would do anything, so long as she could remain downstairs.
When Soren began to cough up blood, Morty called 911. As the EMTs carried Soren through the kitchen, he swiveled his head crazily, and Tommy knew he was looking for her. He wore an oxygen mask over his mouth and could say nothing, so she came close enough to let him see her. His eyes were bloodshot but wide open.
What could she say to him? She squeezed one of his forearms through the blanket, shocked at how bony it was. She said, “Good luck. Be strong.” Was that cruel? Stan and Morty left with Soren.
It was late afternoon, light fading through the latticework of the surrounding trees. Tommy was in the middle of making squash soup. She finished and cleaned up. She admired the bright yellow satiny surface of the liquid, a false comfort.