Doctor Sleep

hot water gave out.
    He checked the incoming call window. It was a 617 area code, but the number following wasn’t the one in Bostonhe knew, the one that rang the landline in his grandmother-in-law’s condo. “Hello?”
    “Oh, David, I’m so glad I got you.” It was Lucy, and she sounded utterly exhausted.
    “Where are you? Why aren’t you calling from your cell?”
    “Mass General, on a pay phone. You can’t use cells in here, there are signs everywhere.”
    “Is Momo all right? Are you?”
    “I am. As for Momes, she’s stable . . . now . . . but for awhile it was pretty bad.” A gulp. “It still is.” That was when Lucy broke down. Not just crying, but sobbing her heart out.
    David waited. He was glad Abra was in the shower, and hoped the hot water would hold out for a long time. This sounded bad.
    At last Lucy was able to talk again. “This time she broke her arm.”
    “Oh. Okay. Is that all?”
    “No, it is not all !” Nearly shouting athim in that why-are-men-so-stupidvoice that he absolutely loathed, the one he told himself was a part of her Italian heritage without ever considering that he might, on occasion, actually be quite stupid.
    He took a steadying breath. “Tell me, honey.”
    She did, although twice she broke into sobs again, and David had to wait her out. She was dead beat, but that was only part of the problem. Mostly,he realized, she was just accepting in her gut what her head had known for weeks: her momo was really going to die. Maybe not peacefully.
    Concetta, who slept in only the thinnest of dozes now, had awakened after midnight and needed the toilet. Instead of buzzing for Lucy to bring the bedpan, she had tried to get up and go to the bathroom by herself. She had managed to swing her legs out ontothe floor and sit up, but then dizziness had overcome her and she had tumbled off the bed, landing on her left arm. It hadn’t just broken, it had shattered. Lucy, tired out from weeks of night nursing that she had never been trained to do, awoke to the sound of her grandmother’s cries.
    “She wasn’t just calling for help,” Lucy said, “and she wasn’t screaming, either. She was shrieking, like afox that’s had a limb torn off in one of those terrible leghold traps.”
    “Honey, that must have been awful.”
    Standing in a first-floor alcove where there were snack machines and—mirabile dictu—a few working phones, her body aching and covered with drying sweat (she could smell herself, and it sure wasn’t Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue), her head pounding with the first migraine she’d had in fouryears, Lucia Stone knew she could never tell him how awful it had really been. What a stinking revelation it had been. You thought you understood the basic fact—woman grows old, woman grows 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 ownpiss, 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 forearmtwisted 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 wrongthing? 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’tcome 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 ontoher 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