Grace: A Novel

By Janet Hubbs

Based on a local crime and set against the lull before everything changed for America in the summer of 2001, this novel looks at people battered by the happenstance of their own lives and by the defining event of the turn of the century, the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. The novel is concerned with how people survive and how some even manage to reach a state of grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477212806

Janet Hubbs

Janet Hubbs was born on Brooklyn, New York and educated in the New York city public school system. She holds a BA degree from Westminster College and an MA from Syracuse University. She also was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship at Princeton University. She is retired from Ocean County College where she was an English Professor, Coordinator of the English Program, and Assistant to the President for Institutional Effectiveness. She lives at the Jersey Shore and has a cottage on Cape Cod. Her daughter and son-in-law live in Connecticut with their two sons. She is the author of a critical study of the poet Richard Wilbur, of three previous novels, and of a collection of poems.

Book preview

Part One:

Winter 2000

Chapter 1

When she heard her husband would live, she was vaguely disappointed.

She felt she had kept him alive for the past five years and she was bone weary, exhausted. Something within her craved closure. But she knew that as long as he was living, her fate was written. Her exhaustion bought no reprieve. Her love and devotion were irrelevant.

She smiled and thanked the doctor who brought the news. He was a serious young man, this doctor, shiny forehead, new to the case, and smug about the results of the catherization as if he personally had authored the fact that her husband’s affected arteries were only thirty to fifty percent clogged. We wouldn’t consider a by-pass at those percentages, he was saying.

She looked over at her husband, ravaged, cancer-ridden, more than six feet tall and 140 pounds, incapable of walking more than a block, taking seventy pills a day and dialysis three times a week and she tried, just for the sake of it, to imagine him undergoing heart bypass surgery. She smiled again. Percentages, she repeated. No, she said, of course not, those are really fine percentages, aren’t they?

With her hands clasped in front of her and her slight stoop, she looked a little like an obedient servant. Her eyes had a slight slant at the corners, although she had no Asian ancestry, but the eyes created her look of inscrutability. She was tall, thin, her rich dark hair pulled back tightly into a knot at her neck. Her clothing was severe, cut well, expensive. She wore a white collarless blouse under a black jacket over gray slacks and looked vaguely priestly. She wore a small gold hoop in each ear. She was a neat woman, and pretty, prominent cheekbones, green eyes. But she was very pale. Her skin was translucent. She had once been beautiful.

She walked softly across the polished green vinyl squares in the floor and went back into her husband’s room in the cardiac care unit. Like all the rooms, arranged around the perimeter, it had a glass wall looking out onto the nurse’s station. At the center of the station were the television screens with all the EKGs blipping regularly along in bright green images, zip-zap, and other of the vital signs also broadcast, blood pressures and heart rates changing with the motion of the patients their in beds behind the glass walls. Whenever one would stir or turn, the screens would register a change, a little electronic frenzy implying digitally that it would be preferred if the patients lay still. The nurse there was doing paper work, glancing up at the screens every so often. She was a young woman with long, straight red-blond hair; she wore a white skirt and a pale blue smock.

As Regina came back into her husband’s cubicle, he awoke. He had been sleeping when the doctor arrived with his news about percentages. He smiled weakly. What’s the news, he asked. Regina spoke his name—Thomas, she said—you probably won’t be able to have that by-pass you’ve been craving after all. You don’t need it. Good percentages. She explained while Tom let go of half of his smile, kept one side of his mouth pulled up. And there doesn’t seem to be any damage to the heart muscle. So I’ll live happily ever after, he mumbled. Regina looked out at the nurse and smiled toward the pretty girl. Then she turned back to her husband. I better call the children, she said. She looked at her once-handsome husband and found that she could still be shocked and benumbed by his look. The word she kept pushing away was emaciated.

Their son, Tommy, 32, married and living here in New Jersey, and Willie, a daughter (Wilhelmina, after Tom’s mother), 28, unmarried, living in New York City were their two children. They had both gone back to their respective homes late last night when it appeared that Tom was either out of—or had really never been in—danger. Now she would call them and tell them he was coming home again, possibly in a few days. This was the ninth hospital stay in the last two years, the third in the last five months. During the summer, the crisis was a rapidly escalating infection in the arm that bore the dialysis shunt. From the look on that doctor’s face, the infection had been very serious, very stubborn. After that there had been a sudden, radical and inexplicable decline in the white blood count and then just as hospice was being seriously discussed there came a sudden and radical elevation of the white cells, also for no visible reason. Now, close to Christmas, it was this mild heart attack. Medical emergencies are a way of life for our family, she thought. And then she wondered if something that became routine should still be called an emergency. She wondered a great deal lately about just what was real in her reconstructed universe.

She didn’t know and didn’t think further. She had made a commitment a few years ago, with the help of her sometime-therapist, to avoid an analysis of her fate: AA, avoid analysis. For a person with a distinctly analytic bent, this was not an easy resolution to keep, but she kept her mantra alive. AA. Think only of those things that can keep him alive. Dwell on that. You are allowed only one obsession. Do not think about why me, why us, and how will it end. Focus on the task at hand. Excellent advice. Take it. Call the kids.

She left the CCU, walked the labyrinthine halls of the hospital, a little shakily on the highly polished tile floors (she had had only two hours’ sleep the night before), took the big, creaky elevator down in company with a nurse and an old lady on a gurney, crossed the gray carpet of the lobby with its huge plate glass windows against the black night, and went out into the cold where she could use her cell phone to call the children. She walked around the path to the rear of the hospital and stood by the railing, looking down at the parking lot and then out at the river. In the foreground was the big steel bridge that crossed the river, spotted with lights, the bridge that later she would drive across to get home. She idly wondered how many times she had actually driven across this bridge to get to this hospital to visit Thomas. Then she stopped wondering. She didn’t let the thought lead her. She fumbled in her purse for her mobile phone. She wasn’t a contemplative person. She was analytic, but not contemplative. Her thinking had purpose.

She dialed her daughter first, knowing this would be the short call. She had a no-frills daughter, as she told people. Willie was capable of hour-long telephone calls, but they had to be about something. Small talk wasn’t a legacy from an analytic mother and a pragmatic, somewhat cynical father. She answered the telephone quickly, was glad to hear Dad was going to get home (no one ever said that Dad was o-k any more), asked if she could do anything, and then when the answer was no, as expected, said—so get rest and food, Mom and take a Tylenol PM. I love you both. End. That was Willie. Tommy would want everything spelled out, every detail, each artery, and each percentage, would want to think for a moment about getting another opinion and mildly question the wisdom of Dad getting home so soon. He would want to arrange to talk to this new doctor, the cardiologist, tomorrow and perhaps also see the oncologist and are you home Mom? No? Good. I think Dad needs you to be with him for a little longer. Well, dear, I’m out in the parking lot and it’s a bit chilly, so I think I’ll go back in now. Yes, I will stay until he falls asleep. And check the meds, of course. I always do. I will. Yes, I have a jacket on. Love you, too. Kiss the babies.

Tommy was such a peculiar child for her and Thomas to have had, such a detail man, so lacking in anything resembling a sense of humor. She remembered one day when he was in college in Pennsylvania, when she and Thomas were there for a visit, parents’ weekend or something. They had driven over to his fraternity house on the Sunday morning to pick him up for breakfast and as they parked, Regina saw Tommy up on the porch, laughing. He had been laughing so hard he was bent over, his hand held out as if to ward off an intruder. Regina had been touched. It took a lot to get this much laughter out of Tommy. When she got to the porch, Tommy had stopped laughing out loud but was still shaking his head, chuckling, and so Regina had asked what was funny. When Thomas told her, she just looked at him. What he said was that the frat dog had his tail broken.

Apparently one of the larger boys living in the house had tripped and accidentally come down hard on the fraternity house dog’s tail and had hurt it pretty badly. They’d taken the dog to the vet and had just called in the results about the break to Tommy who was proceeding to have hysterics over the news. Regina looked again. Why would that be funny, she asked? Mom, Tommy drawled, and started laughing again, not hysterically as before but richly and with an uncharacteristic enjoyment. Regina had been mildly stunned. Tommy was not a cruel person and had been raised with animals and brought up to believe in their need for kindness, gentleness. Indeed there may have been something mildly humorous about the incident that Regina didn’t quite get, but even her enormous sensitivity toward animals could not fully explain her distaste. She didn’t like her son that morning. It had something to do with the fact that he usually laughed so little and then had laughed so much at an animal’s pain. She found this perverse.

They had gone on to the pancake place and had had a pleasant breakfast with all the pancakes and goo that the chain restaurant worker smiled gleefully over while serving (more syrup? more spiced peaches?). Regina never said anything about the dog’s tail to Thomas because she couldn’t think of how to talk about it without demeaning her son. But she never really forgot it. Nothing similarly sadistic that she knew about had happed again and her son Tommy had grown up to be a patient, humorless businessman, husband, and father, as she suppose she might have expected—no more, no less. Sometimes Regina was bemused wondering how she could have such a straight-man for a son, how she could have so entirely missed communicating to him her belief that humor often saved her life when sometimes the funny side was the only side one could safely see but that real pain was never, ever, funny, not an animal’s, not a human’s.

Her arms wrapped about her body for warmth, Regina hurried back into the hospital. She passed the officious young cardiologist on her way back to the CCU and smiled faintly. True to her promise to Tommy, she checked with the floor nurse about all of Thomas’s medications. She had them all labeled and arranged as the hospital required, a protocol painfully learned from previous visits when added to the stress of the new malady, whatever it was, was the stress of administering pills for all the other illnesses and what the doctors called complications. The cardiology nurse, however, was a no-nonsense type, gave a slow nod, and seemed to understand the complexity of dosages and sequences of Tom’s daily regimen, a veritable pharmacopoeia.

Regina looked over into Tom’s room. He was sleeping again; time to go. Shall I go then, she asked the nurse? Yes, please, you look ready to drop and I think he’ll sleep soundly. He has no more pain and we don’t need any more tests tonight. Go home, Mrs. Werner, and get your rest. I have your number. I’ll call if there’s a need—but I don’t think there will be. She gave Regina her card. Regina smiled, gratefully. Her dealings with the medical personnel she had encountered over the past several years were various, but this woman was the kind she liked the best—professional, straightforward, no seeming agenda beside patient care. She looked at the card. Grace O’Hara. Pretty Grace with the straight red-blond hair and lightly freckled nose. Thank you, Grace. I will be off then. And … thank you, she said again.

Regina suddenly felt a thousand years old. When she let herself think about Tommy’s illness or, she supposed, illnesses, which wasn’t often in the visceral sense (or, in all the gory details, as she defined the term), she thought she could not do this again, not one more drive to or from this hospital, not one more condition to care for and worry about and fear the recurrent symptoms of, not one more doctor to meet and question and trust or not trust, not one more exorbitantly expensive and uncomfortable test for Tom to endure with the de rigeur anxious wait for the results (which were always, always ambiguous, good-news, bad-news results), and not one more prescription or set of prescriptions to fill and somehow fit into the medication regime. No more. No. Not me. Why me. I want to go shopping. But then she stopped thinking because she knew she would do it all, over and over, for as long as it took for Thomas to die. That was the end—when he was dead. And she could not want him dead.

She drove home carefully, as always a little too fast, but paying close attention because she was very tired. She looked at the river when she drove over the bridge and looked at the lights from the houses, one of which was hers, glinting off the black water like little metal darts or silver fish flashing in the night. She glanced at the digits on the dashboard telling her the time, her speed, the temperature. Inside the car it was seventy-two degrees. Outside it was twenty-eight. On the calendar at home, it had today labeled as December 10, nearly Christmas. She had her tree up already, presents made or purchased and wrapped, and a small closet filled largely with toys and games and desired sundries for the grandchildren. She moved life along, hers and the parts that belonged to the others that touched hers. She had not, however, sent Christmas cards this year. She had this irrational fear that Tom would die before the cards arrived and that people would then be opening a card from a dead man.

Her neighbors’ houses were all fashionably draped in tiny white lights, glittering in the cold. She remembered how when she was young, her mother thought external Christmas lights vulgar—they look like roadhouses her mother would say of the decorated homes—and all her childhood house ever had was a wreath at the door and the tree lights shining dimly through the glass drapes in the front window. It had been a sedate house, that house of her childhood but a house in the city, closely aligned to other houses, closely aligned to the sidewalk and the city life the sidewalks bore. It was very different from the house in which she and Tommy dwelt, this house on the river and by the shore. This year, she had strung tiny white lights only on the fir trees at either side of the front door. It was all the cheer she could manage. The front-door wreath was of grape vine and a clump of holly with red berries. Her mother would have approved.

Her house too, she supposed, was sedate. Like most of the houses around, it was set well back from the road, up a gentle slope, partially blocked from view by the old trees that grew in front, the property trimmed with neat shrub beds and flower borders in the summer. It was a symmetrical house, divided by the staircase that led up to the second floor, bigger, friends said, than she and Thomas now needed, but when people asked her if she’d sell it, she looked surprised. I like it, she would answer. I love it. I don’t think of it as being any particular size.

It was an old house. It had been renovated and enlarged over the years, and the kitchen had been changed around, updated from time to time. But the house still looked sedate, symmetrical, and graceful, she liked to think. The garage which once stood separate and to the side was now connected to the house with what was once a kind of breezy porch, but now was a breakfast room with windows, front and back, flanked by window boxes which overflowed with pale flowers in the summer. It was through this room that she now entered the house from the garage. She smiled as she passed by its old trestle table and six Windsor chairs. She walked on, through the kitchen and dining room and out into the center hall foyer. She set