Jennifer Weigand
Waiting for them was hell. If the caregivers didn’t come in the next five and a half minutes, even Lyla’s summer breeze air freshener wouldn’t mask the smell of the mess. Her gurgling stomach warred with the television program about waterfront properties. The noise of the crashing waves and the host’s voice—she and Stan dubbed him “Microphone” two or three years ago—did nothing to dampen her body’s traitorous outburst. Neither did wrapping her arms around her midsection. This sack of sagging skin and weary bones betrayed her. Again.
Lyla’s face warmed, and heat flared through her chest. It would be awful enough if Purple Walker stopped by to dish about the bubbly woman dating the man with a fedora. The woman’s husband lived in memory care. Purple Walker whispered about it to everyone, judging, condemning. Lyla would be the next spark to her gossip flame, and those smiles during bingo and jokes at dinner would burn. Her budding friendships would turn to ash.
Mabel hearing this abomination was ten times worse.
“I can’t believe you pressed my button,” Lyla said, her thumb pounding the volume on the remote so Megaphone’s voice could drown out the tsunami inside her body.
Mabel stole the device. “I can’t hear you when it’s that loud.” She turned the TV down. “Well, my heart can’t take you ending up on the floor.”
Lyla snatched it back. She picked at a thread on her sweatpants instead of cranking up the sound and placed the remote on the end table next to her most treasured photograph.
“You’re my least favorite friend,” Lyla said. It wasn’t true. Not after forty years of friendship.
“I love you too,” Mabel said, squinting at the screen and adjusting her glasses.
Lyla shifted on the couch. Mabel and Allison were the only ones left who loved her. And despite disapproving of Lyla’s choices the past few months, Mabel respected her.
Allison didn’t. Not anymore.
Lyla’s stomach complained again. Did Mabel hear that? She better not have. Lyla didn’t know what she’d do if Mabel saw her differently, a sandcastle disintegrated by waves. If she lost someone else.
She braced herself.
But Mabel’s eyebrows, gray threaded with slashes of silver, didn’t raise. Her hazel eyes didn’t widen or stray from Megaphone.
Mabel’s ears were bare. She forgot her hearing aids. The heat in Lyla’s chest cooled. Maybe that lapse in memory and Megaphone’s artificially white grin was enough to distract Mabel.
But even good friends lie. Like when Lyla witnessed Mabel pressing her legs together while waiting for a caregiver. Her friend claimed it hadn’t happened before. Two days later, Mabel apologized. Confessed that she wasn’t honest with Lyla because she wanted her to move into her assisted living building. Pleaded with her, saying she needed someone to open her blinds, coax her out of bed, and catch her when her legs gave out.
So Lyla agreed to crown molding and high ceilings, stainless steel appliances and fresh gray paint. To doing what other people wanted. To this elegant jail.
“What I wouldn’t give to visit that beach. With him on it, waiting for me.” The corners of Mabel’s lips rose, deepening the lines in her face, and she winked.
Lyla’s heart squeezed. “Me too.” Except with Stan instead of Megaphone. Five locations remained on her and Stan’s beach bucket list. Including this one.
If only.
It’d all be different if Stan hadn’t left her. If he’d told her his symptoms. She’d be someone else. The woman she was. Not a shell, flung by the sea’s aquamarine hand onto the beach, discarded and displaced.
“I swear, this thing is broken.” Lyla pinched the call pendant between her index finger and thumb. She angled it so Mabel could lean over and inspect the flashing red light through her zebra-print bifocals.
“It’s working.” Mabel removed her glasses and lifted her sequined shirt before rubbing her lenses with its lining. A pallid roll of skin splayed over her waistband.
Glancing away, Lyla leaned over the worn beige armrest, the patch of sunlit leather warm against her forearm. She lifted the picture frame from the driftwood end table.
“Come on, body,” she muttered. A few years ago, Lyla could push off the furniture without resembling a flopping fish. Or grunting.
Lyla thrust her body toward Mabel, transferring the photo to her other hand and almost careening into her friend. That earned her the side-eye.
Maybe she’d do those home exercises the physical therapists gave her after Mabel left. After she found them. And made it to the damn bathroom. Three and a half minutes more. Those caregivers better make it.
Lyla ran a thumb along the turquoise frame’s edge, and her finger snagged on the chipped corner. It was rough, biting. The opposite of Stan’s embrace when they bought the photo.
He had approached Lyla from behind and wrapped his arms around her as she examined the frame in the beachfront shop. Like he used to when they were first married, and when Allison played with pots and pans on the kitchen floor while Lyla cooked dinner. Even though he had cocooned her within him more often the past few months, she didn’t expect it in public and had jolted. A clatter resounded, splicing through the heavy, damp air. Behind the register, the teenage boy’s face flushed. He mumbled something about paying for damaged items per store policy. Stan tried to additionally purchase a new frame, arguing they could dispose of the other, but Lyla refused. That frame was a memory.
Movement beside her sent Lyla’s heart sprinting as she crashed back into her prison cell. Mabel pressed her index finger against the glass. “Should have fought Allison harder on that.”
“You’re right,” Lyla said. Having the same conversation every few weeks was easier than correcting her only friend.
She did fight Allison. But of course, her daughter knew best. Said Lyla couldn’t be a “photo hoarder” anymore and that assisted living didn’t allow too many nail holes in the walls. Lyla would probably never see her collection of travel photos. They’d forever sleep in boxes, tucked in under sheets of dust in Allison’s basement. Until Lyla died and Allison threw them out.
She suppressed a groan and used the hem of her t-shirt to buff the fingerprint smudge. It smeared Stan’s sun-scalded shoulder in the photo.
Their guide had snapped the picture after Lyla and Stan pushed their palms into the wet, sandy shore, waves still lapping at their ankles. They rested there, laughing and regaining their breath after the exhilaration and exertion of snorkeling. Celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a myriad of striped fish and spherical mazes of coral was Stan’s idea. Their last moment of joy captured on camera before he died three days later.
Lyla lowered the photo onto the couch cushion. Her interior plumbing couldn’t take stretching to set it on the end table.
With a flash of plum sequins, Mabel lowered her shirt and donned her glasses. “They’ll be here soon.”
“You’re right.” Mabel was wrong. It’d probably be another ten. It was all ridiculous. Lyla only fell twice at home. Her real home. Maybe she should have remained there and convinced Mabel to move in with her. Together—
A knock sounded. Finally.
The door opened, and Purple Walker poked her head in, her sandy wig askew, curls dipping into her eyes.
Lyla’s abdomen sank and cramped simultaneously. She had one minute and forty-five seconds, possibly less. If she waited, she’d avoid an ambulance ride, possibly another broken hip, surgery, and months of therapy. According to those physical therapists. And the nurses. And Allison.
Then again, belly flashes between friends were one thing. Trusting eighty-eight-year-old bowels to hold out was another.
Her heart thudded as she gripped her walker. She used to be independent. She could do this. Lyla was imprisoned, not helpless.
“What are you doing, rule breaker?” Mabel asked, pointing to the “Call, don’t fall” sign above Lyla’s TV.
Lyla couldn’t spare half a second responding. She heaved herself up, her movement jerky but effective, until it wasn’t. Her unreliable body paused as she stood, like the Ferris wheel she and Stan had ridden as teenagers.
“Your hands were supposed to be on the couch.” Mabel’s arms flailed in Lyla’s peripheral vision, like those flimsy things would hold her weight. They brushed Lyla’s back and side as she careened into the plush cushions with a plop.
Damn.
A sheen coated Lyla’s skin, and her abdomen protested. She had about a minute. Probably less. Lyla placed two fists on the seat, but Mabel huffed. “Now wait one second, you impatient prune.”
“We’ll talk another time.” Lyla waved at Purple Walker, but she didn’t leave. Fine. Mabel could deal with her.
Lyla pushed off the seat, wobbled, and steadied herself with her walker. With her fingers clenching the handles, she shuffled toward the doorway leading to the bedroom. Six feet. She could make it there. And to the bathroom beyond.
Behind her, clothing rustled. Good. Mabel would chase Purple Walker away.
As Lyla approached the corner of the TV stand, she looked over her shoulder at Mabel. “I’ve only got so long to live. I won’t spend it sloshing in excrement.” Let Purple Walker talk. Lyla’s jokes used to leave Stan gasping for breath.
Almost at the front door, Mabel shook her head, her eyes warm.
Lyla could do this. Her heart bobbed, a buoy in the ocean. She could be the woman in the photo.
She lifted her leg to take another step, and something stabbed her. Pain pulsed through her leg. A strangled sound interrupted Megaphone’s booming voice and the click of the door.
Lyla lost her grip, and her body sank.
***
The movers put that stupid TV stand three inches too close to the doorway. It was their fault that Lyla never made it out of her living room. That the men brought the stretcher next to her and transferred Lyla’s collapsed, wilted body onto it. And that her leg throbbed.
She clutched the scratchy sheet lining this poor excuse for a mobile bed with one hand and inspected the ceiling for cracks. Lyla didn’t need more eyes widening with pity or mouths flattening with disappointment. It was enough that the clucking cluster of voices—the caregiver that finally came, the nurse, the paramedics—exchanged information over her head like she couldn’t hear them. Except Mabel, who silently cradled Lyla’s other hand.
Lyla released the sheet and wiped the moisture off her cheeks as she breathed through her mouth. She should have bought two air fresheners. Though Mabel didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps good friends could see each other differently and choose to stay. Even when one of them was lying in their own shit.
A hand pressed plastic to her ear, and Allison said something through the phone. Lyla couldn’t make it out.
“Can you turn Megaphone off?” Lyla asked the conglomeration of heads above her. The chattering continued. Stan would have known what she meant. “Can someone turn the TV off?” The paramedic with the rumpled shirt disappeared, and the background noise ebbed.
“Hi. What’d you say, Allison?”
“Mom, you’re there for those people to help you. You know you can’t get up by yourself.”
Of course she’d start right in without a “hello.” Not to mention that tone, and those words. Allison was not her mother. And Lyla was not a child. After dropping the tissue, she wrapped her hand around the phone. “What’ll you do when Sadie sticks you in a place like this?”
Allison sighed, and Lyla tensed. The words that followed her sighs always scraped at Lyla’s patience, her heart. “I’m going to press the button and wait, Mom. Like you’re supposed to.”
Whooshing filled Lyla’s head. What could she say? It was the same conversation on repeat. A tilt-o-whirl suctioning Lyla to her seat as the carnival car rotated.
“Did you hear me, Mom? Just wait until they come.”
Allison was trying to help her. It was why she pushed Lyla to move somewhere without four bad reviews, all posted after Mabel moved in. True, this place wasn’t a great option, but being without Stan was difficult enough. She needed Mabel. After Lyla made her decision, Allison didn’t return Lyla’s calls for a week. Until the morning she took two weeks off work to help Lyla clean out her house and move. Her daughter cared, even if she no longer smiled at Lyla like she did when she was a young girl. So it reached her eyes.
The weight of disappointing her daughter piled atop her chest, like the stones she and Stan collected to toss into the water. Each breath became more constricted. Until pressure built around Lyla’s fingers.
Mabel was squeezing her hand. “Ly?” she asked. Mabel’s eyes searched hers.
She was a sweet, steadfast friend. “I need some ice cream,” Lyla said, her voice thin and creaky. Like the voice of someone else.
She said it to smooth the line between her friend’s brows, but the crease only deepened. How could Lyla discuss how she shouldn’t have to worry about disobeying Allison in front of all these people? She was no child. And she shouldn’t have to risk the indignity of sitting in her own filth.
Lyla’s body buzzed, swirled. This couldn’t be her life. When did her independence, her happiness, wash out to sea? When did she let herself drown? Was it when Stan died? When she closed the blinds and passed the time dreaming? When she moved here? After? Did it matter? She couldn’t change it.
If only things could be different.
And maybe they could be. Losing Stan didn’t have to mean that Lyla lost her identity.
She could dive into the ocean for the shards of herself. She’d search. Ignore her spasming lungs until she found those broken pieces, buried under layers of pebbles and sand. She’d push off the bottom, and swim, gasping when her head broke the surface. She’d grasp her essence in her fist. Protect it throughout her remaining days. Years.
Lyla was done handing over her independence. She didn’t need that damn call button. Or the caregivers. She’d do everything on her own. Even if Allison didn’t understand, and if it hurt her daughter’s feelings.
Her throat tightened. When she was pregnant with Allison, she thought she’d always be truthful with her daughter. How naïve. “Okay, Allison.” Her eyes welled at the lie. “I will next time. I love you.”
Another sigh, but this one seemed resigned instead of impatient. “I love you too, Mom.”
Lyla handed the phone to the nurse with purple plastered beneath her eyes. As she dropped the phone into her scrubs pocket, she said, “Your daughter means well.”
Closing her eyes, Lyla envisioned the woman she used to be. The woman she’d be once more. Even if it meant more falls. Hell, even if it killed her. She’d be with Stan that way, and she’d leave this life as herself.
No longer a shell. Never again broken.
“Yeah,” she told the nurse. “So do I.”
—
Jennifer Weigand has had her short stories, poetry, and memoir published in multiple literary magazines and anthologies after giving herself permission to write again in her mid-thirties—and earning an honorable mention in one anthology. Her characters often have medical conditions and navigate complex, abusive relationships. When she isn’t reading with her young son or co-leading a women’s writing group, you can find her lifting heavy weights or working as a medical speech-language pathologist. She’d love to connect with you at jenniferweigandwriter.com.