Pill Pieta

A short story

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

Pill Pieta

I

The deep ache enveloped Marlene and squeezed tightly and more tightly until she could barely breathe. She closed her eyes and folded her hands in prayer and let the pain finish what it was doing as she focused on the wall in front of the bed in her room. A picture was there, one she had found at a flea market. It was the Pieta, it said on the bottom. Mary holding the dead Jesus. She prayed, as the pain raged and clamped around her. She asked through her tears, ‘God, why don’t you let me stay with my boy a little longer?’

Finally, as usual, she could breathe again. Once her heart stopped pounding the lancinating pain receded like a spear pulled out, and then the old, familiar, deep pain returned. She spread her arms out, lying there, as if nailed to the bed. The baseline pain of every waking minute. She then thanked the Lord for one more day. She looked over on her night-stand.

There the clear brown bottle of pills sat, grail-like. She had used them, for a while. But no more. Because she knew that her boy needed them more than she did. And she smiled like a saint, knowing that she could still render this service to the son who was all she had left of the his father.

He burst into her room, unshaven, his shirt and shorts the same as yesterday. His eyes passed over her and landed on the bottle, then flitted away. He pretended he didn’t know they were there. She pretended she didn’t know why he came to see her.

‘How’s my baby? How’s my Tommy?’

‘I’m fine mama. Fine. Just checking on you. Do you, do you need anything?’

He shook a little, his hand tremulous as it touched hers in a passing imitation of concern. He squeezed her hand; his palm was sweaty and the beads of moisture gathered on his forehead. His face flushed, the sweat seemed pink or red against it. She had seen it. He came to her, mostly, as last resort.

The pain rose up again, her back, her neck, her hips; oh good Lord her hips! But she dared not show him. She must be strong! She was strong for his father. She would be for their child. Their baby boy, with so much promise! Such a good boy.

The squeezing, crushing came again. Her breath caught.

‘Do. You. Need any…thing baby?’ She emphasized you, turning his false question of her into all the sincerity of a woman in love with her child. ‘Baby, can I make you some dinner, are you hungry?’

‘No, I don’t need nothing to eat. It’s just, well you know my head and how it pounds. That new doctor down at the Red Valley Clinic, he won’t give me nothing except damned ibuprofen. You know how it hurts, don’t you?’

She remembered the night the police came by and told her that her baby had been attacked. It was twenty-five years past. He wasn’t doing anything, just minding his business. In the hospital he told her, through bandages and broken teeth, ‘mama, some dude just come up and hit me with a pipe! I swear on daddy’s grave I didn’t do nothing!’ She knew he didn’t. Tommy was a good boy. In her heart she knew it. Good like his daddy.

The concussion gave him headaches. Years of headaches. Until finally he got his check started. Not much, but it was a little to add to the retirement the coal company gave for his father’s death.

She never saw a dime of it. That was OK. (The pain took her breath a second as she remembered.) She had her own Social Security Disability. But he used the coal company money to treat his pain. It helped with his medical bills and prescriptions. But after a few years, the doctors (damn them all as charlatans and Pharisees, she thought), well they stopped writing his pills and called him a liar. They put him in rehab and gave him methadone for a while. And him a good, good boy with a bad turn of luck.

Marlene looked up at him, at his eyes, blue like his daddy. ‘What do you need baby?’ She made him say it. It wasn’t cruelty, but her need of his need. She still mattered. Her time was short and she needed to matter.

‘Could I maybe have a couple Oxys? I mean, I know you got the cancer and all…but I’m hurting a lot. It ain’t like your pain. I know that. But could I maybe, just a couple?’

She reached her thin, wasting hand over to the bottle by her bed and opened it carefully. She smiled as she realized it was a child safety bottle. He sometimes took them without her permission. Naughty child, hand in the cookies and all. Like when he was small. Like when he would sneak his daddy’s whisky in high school.

‘Here you go sweetheart. Mama hates it when you’re in pain.’ She put three in his hand. A lavish gift and more than he asked for.

Tommy leaned over and kissed her, gently, on the head. ‘I love you mama, you’re the best. You take such good care of me. You watch, I’m going be something. I’m applying at the new Toyota plant. I want to get off this disability. I do! I’m getting stronger!’ She pulled him close. She wanted to hold him across her lap like Mary held her boy. She was too weak.

‘I know you are. I know. I believe in you. You’re strong like your father.’ Strength did not save your father, she thought quietly. Strength made him beautiful, brave and foolish. Made him run into a narrow space in a collapsing tunnel to save a stranger. Handsome, strong fool. Strength killed him. Be weak, my darling, and be near, she whispered to herself. The pain shot up and down her back again like lightning, like hornets, as it did every day.

Tommy bounded off to the kitchen. ‘I’ll bring you some soup; you like chicken noodle, don’t you, don’t you mama?’

‘I do,’ she said and mustered as much of a normal voice as she could. ‘And a Dr. Pepper, OK dear?’

He agreed. But he forgot. He took a pill (or two) and once he felt his headache improve he drove down the drive to see a friend, or a girl, or something else. Marlene didn’t mind. Mama didn’t care. He came to her in need and that was the best thing of all. She no longer cared about food.

It was Good Friday when she knew that she would leave the world. Knew without anxiety or fear; knew with certainty. The drugs and tests and chemotherapy; all of it was water under the bridge. Friends and family came to say goodbye and went back to their lives. Shaking their heads at her and at her life. She was happy, even when she heard ‘bless her heart.’ Even when she heard ‘that worthless son; a pity.’ Heard it from the other room.

Pastor Warren stopped in and they prayed. She did not tell him, but she did not care much for Jesus. However, she loved Mary. There were no priests nearby but she didn’t care. She understood a mother’s love. Raised a Primitive Baptist, she thought that nonetheless, maybe like a Catholic she could call out to Mary. Sometimes she did. No rosary, just a simple, ‘Mary you know me, you know a mama’s heart. Have mercy on me and on my boy, Tommy. He’s a good boy. Take me to you and your son. I’m sure he’s a good boy too.’

Sometimes she talked to Mary. ‘Bet you’d have given him a pill, up there on that cross, wouldn’t you Mary? If you could have slipped it up to his swollen lips with a little Dr. Pepper.’

The hospice nurse came out and Tommy stood in the doorway. The nurse asked what Marlene needed. She was in a hospital bed now. It raised her up and down; the machine and remote control a rare pleasure to her, like a carnival ride; the kind her parents could never afford. Her boy was seldom there to move her and the pain now was as close to unbearable as she could imagine. The nurse always asked her ‘what’s your pain on a scale of one to ten?’

‘It’s bad. Really bad today.’ That was as good as she could do. The spasms and shocks, the aches and pressures came in waves and torrents, running across her bones like a stream out of its bank. Like the endless lightning of a Spring night. It took her breath. Filled her with static. But made her at least feel alive. She laughed when she thought of pain like fireworks lighting a summer night.

‘Doctor Davis has given you a prescription for morphine. It’s much stronger than what you’ve had so far. Do you understand?’

Marlene smiled. ‘I do. I know.’

In the doorway, Tommy’s ears perked. Morphine. He thought about his headaches.

‘You can take it when you like. I know it’s bad now.’

Marlene grimaced. ‘It comes and goes. Not…so…bad.’ Her nurse knew better, as the tears welled in the dying mother’s eyes, and her forehead furrowed, her hands gripping the bedrail. Tears less for her body or her departure than for her son, for leaving him.

‘There’s no reason not to take it. It’s right here. Your son picked up the prescription.’

‘Where’s my son? Where’s my boy?’

‘I’m here mama, I’m right here.’ He touched her hand and fluffed her pillow, in a way that said he knew nothing about pillows, or blankets, or pain or loss. It was acting. Mama knew that.

II‘

‘How long, do you think?’ Her nurse said she did not know. But maybe two weeks, maybe three.

Marlene’s heart leaped up. ‘Can I have any refills on the (she gasped quietly)…on the morphine?’

‘You have three. I hope you need them dear, I really do. I hope you live and live and live if that’s what you want.’

‘Oh, I’m ready to go to my man. But I’ll miss my Tommy. I’ll miss him. Worst of all, he’ll miss me. It will just break his heart. But I just don’t want to hurt.’ She nearly slipped and said, ‘I don’t want him to hurt.’ She said it as the pain stretched her and pulled her apart. Scourged her ruthlessly. The cancer in its victory dance. Her eyes looking up to Mary.

Across the room, Tommy said ‘I’ll miss you mama. Every damn day.’ He cried quietly. And after the nurse left, and it was just the two of them, he came and sat by her bed.

‘Mama, can I do anything? Can I? I love you, you know?’

‘Mama loves you too. With all my heart.’ She reached out and took his hand. She kissed it. And into it she placed five morphine pills. As she died, she ran each one through her fingers, lovingly, the pharmaceutical grade beads of a rosary. She whispered, almost silent, ‘Ease his pain, ease his pain, ease his pain, ease his pain, ease his pain.’

‘You’re the best mama ever,’ he said. A headphone in one ear, he had not discerned her words. He kissed her and left the room. He wondered just what he would do. But there were things to sell she would no longer miss. That was something. And the small house and two acres would be his if he could keep the bank away.

She waited through the pain, waited to hear him drive away. She waited, breathing slowly, smiling and knowing she was still useful to her boy. Still a good mother.

A few days later she fell asleep at last, imagining that she held him at last, across her lap, like Mary held Jesus. She prayed that he would come back from the dead land where he lived. She prayed as she was finally free of pain.

Across town, risen briefly from his withdrawal, her son went about his life a while longer.