No 4: STRING OF PEARLS

REBECCA KOPELMAN

Brisa liked to touch things that many people had touched. If she could put a street corner in her mouth and swallow it like an uncoated pill, she would, just to taste all the shoes and bodies that had passed through. When the Mother and Daughter left the house to shop or to get drunk, Brisa would put her head on their pillows. Hold their forks and knives. Pull the fair strands from their hairbrushes. She had no particular attachment to the women, but she liked their things. She liked the smoothed edges of use. She liked knowing how they lived. How they had lived before she knew them. And she didn’t kid herself–she knew she didn’t really know them, in the same way that they didn’t know her, and she didn’t know The Old Woman who she was helping to die. They would only ever know each other, the four of them, to the extent that they needed each other. 

The Daughter, with whom Brisa shared a bunk bed, had big, nervous eyes. She would’ve been so pretty, Brisa thought, if she weren’t so off-putting. The Old Woman’s house was creaky and poorly insulated, a summer home hastily converted. Brisa was so cold some nights that she just stayed up and listened to the snow touch the gray roof, the machines settling in the next room. The Daughter breathed like she was awake, even when Brisa knew she was sleeping.

She had a smell like tonsil stones, and Brisa sometimes caught her staring at the Mother, sighing wistfully with a cheek resting in her hand. Like she had a crush. It gave Brisa a chill. She had daughters, back home, and none of them would’ve thought to look at her that way. They liked her too much to love her so swooningly. She loved them too much to let them look at her that way. But the Mother seemed to like the earnest tug at her sleeve. 

The two of them spent hours lingering in the doorway together, the Mother and Daughter, watching as Brisa rolled the Old Woman over to check for bed sores. The Daughter looked to her mother for permission to laugh each time the Old Woman farted wetly or burped unselfconsciously in Brisa’s face.

The Old Woman had probably been nasty, back when she had the strength. Brisa was attuned to these things. The fear in the Mother’s tight little laugh. The way she half-smiled at the do not resuscitate order above the Old Woman’s head. On her way to check the Old Woman’s vitals one night–this was back in January, in the early stages of her hospice care–Brisa came across the Mother, hunched over the Old Woman’s cot, which was white and caged in on one side like a crib. The Mother was looking at the Old Woman, her eyes wide and wavering. The Old Woman was only pretending to be asleep–Brisa could see her eyes twitching beneath their swollen lids. I hate you, the Mother was saying. I hate you. I can’t wait for you to fucking die. Brisa cleared her throat loudly. The Mother and the Old Woman both started.

“Oh,” said the Mother, unbowing her head abruptly. “Hey, Brisa!” Her voice was artificially bright, like she was talking to a toddler, or a puppy. She stood creakingly and walked to the door, muttering a goodnight and something about going shopping tomorrow.

People thought Brisa was stupid, but she wasn’t. It amazed her, really, that anyone would trust their loved ones to someone they felt the need to speak to like an idiot. They acted like she couldn’t hear them laughing behind their hands. 

Because she was too sick to drink water, Brisa fed the Old Woman ice cubes. She liked to watch her gray tongue poke out from between her gray lips like a dry little reptile, alive and thirsty for something only Brisa could give it. She liked being needed. Sometimes, when she held the Old Woman in her arms while bathing her, she thought of her daughter as a baby, now grown-up. Now radiant and faraway.

“I have two daughters,” Brisa told the Daughter once, in a bid to connect. This was when they first met, when Brisa was making up the top bunk in silence. The Daughter sat, half-listening, with her forehead against the window pane. Brisa thought for a moment. “Three, actually,” she said. “Three, if you count the third.” The third, the youngest, had always seemed so foreign to Brisa—like she wasn’t even her own. Brisa often forgot about her because she was so much more beautiful than the rest, though she would never think it that way. Her collarbones are like knives, she thought instead. Her teeth flash in the sun.

Now, Brisa sat up in her bottom bunk, pressing her bare feet to the cold floor. She wondered what it would be like to lie in a bed like a crib, to hold bulging hands with her own radiant daughter. To reach out with a gray tongue, thirsty for something only a stranger could give her. To touch someone that so many people had touched. To swallow the bed, the railing, the Mother and the Daughter whole, one after the other. Like a string of pearls.

“Why don’t you want me around?” the Daughter said somewhere in the dark hallway. Or maybe it was the Mother. Their voices sounded so similar. “I miss you,” she continued. “That’s all.” A desperate tremor ran through this voice, though. It must have been the Daughter. “Let’s just get out of here. Please.”

Brisa wondered whether her own daughter missed her. Her radiant daughter. Her daughter with the collarbones like knives. No. One day her daughter would sit by her bedside (this, Brisa could see very clearly) and she would say I hate you. I hate you. I can’t wait for you to fucking die. And Brisa would do it. She would fucking die. 

But before then, she would wake up in the morning pale and the Mother and Daughter would be gone. She would hold the Old Woman’s face in her soft, pink hands. She would lie down and she would touch all the things they left behind.