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157 part four The Hand’s Memory Next, Helen? You know what’s next. You say, “Not that. Anything but that. Not again.” I’m writing this on a stormy day. The wind must be blowing forty miles an hour. It makes me feel unsettled, uneasy, even a little afraid. There could be power lines torn down by falling limbs. I think I should shut down my computer and pull the plug. I wish I were not alone. I would like to talk to someone, but I can think of no one I want to call. You see, Helen, I don’t want to go through it either. I’ve only just come to a kind of understanding about Teacher, and now I’m ready to do away with her? No, I’m not ready, but it’s something we have to go through. You know we do. From the moment you first learned the word death as a child, you knew you would have to witness hers. And in a way, she’s had you convinced she was on the verge of death for at least twenty years, longer even. So you’d been preparing for it all that time. Something would happen— they’d take her to the hospital—and you’d think, “This must be it. The end.” But then she’d recover and come home and be all right for a while. Sometime that summer of 1936, you rented a cottage on the beach somewhere on Long Island for her to get some rest. One day she felt so well she walked down to the water, telling you she felt like a swim. But the instant the water hit her ankles, she collapsed in a heap and an ambulance was called. You were sure, absolutely positive, that this time it must be the end. But then it wasn’t. She got better. Fall came, and you all went back home to Forest Hills. So when the actual end came, you were not prepared. It seemed like just another crisis, not the final crisis. After the fact, you wrote of “the eight hour struggle to catch her breath,” but it wasn’t as if it started at a particular hour when you could say for a certainty, “This is it, the beginning of the end.” And those eight hours played out second by second, each 158 Blind Rage second announcing itself as the last, followed by another second announcing itself the same way, with no letup, the tension in your body and your brain always bracing for the cataclysmic final second only to find another and another playing out hour after hour. You felt her struggle for breath, her gasps and coughs, as convulsive jerks and spasms. Her rib cage bucked in a way that did not feel quite human, as if some creature were trapped inside her chest, hurling itself headfirst against that cage of bone. All the while you massaged her neck and shoulders, struck anew at all the weight she’d lost since—when? When exactly had that begun? All you knew was that each time you touched her, there was a split second when she felt unfamiliar. It was not the fleshy, bloated body that had inflated around her during middle age. And it was not the tense, wiry body of her when she was young. You felt her bones under her skin as you had when she was young, but there was none of the taut elasticity there had been in the young body. The joints felt lax, the very surfaces of the bones felt rough through the thin layer of skin, as if they could wear right through from the inside out. A lot of this time, she could not speak to you. Her hands were busy clutching at her mouth, her throat, or reaching out into space for you, for Polly, for drugs—you didn’t always know for sure. At times you kept repeating the question, “What can I bring you, Teacher?” saying it aloud or into her hand. But mostly you said nothing. You stroked her hand, trying to still the uncontrollable bucking of her body, trying to keep her hand warm. Every once in a while, her hand twitched in a way that meant she was trying to speak to you. Her fingers would curl and stretch into one or two letters, then falter. Or you would smell her warm, stale breath in your face, in measured...

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