The Nicotine Chronicles Read online

  So he had to make it there in time and she had to hold on. He had to say goodbye. He had to tell her one last time that he loved her.

  When he was born, Lina, who was fifty-two and a great redheaded beauty, took one look at Sol and made him her favorite in the world. She was a manicurist at Saks Fifth Avenue in the city and twice divorced, and everyone in the family, in Brooklyn where he grew up, thought her love for Sol was because she never had children of her own. An illegal abortion in the early forties, at the start of the war, had sterilized her.

  But Sol didn’t care about the family’s theories. Lina had made him feel more loved than anyone ever had, including his own mother. Sol and Lina. Theirs was a love affair between an older relative and a little boy—who had become a middle-aged man—that had lasted fifty years.

  And Sol knew that he had killed her. That she was dying because of him.

  Three days ago he had told her he was taking a job in LA, but would be back once a month to see her. Which had been a lie. He’d be lucky if he’d make it back every two months on the money he was going to make, but he knew it didn’t really matter what he told her. Her memory was completely gone. She’d forget what he had said ten minutes after he left. She’d forget that he had even been there.

  Still, he had hated to leave her. Hated that he had to move to LA. But he didn’t have a choice, didn’t know what else to do. He was a washed-up cop. Fifty years old. Had worn a uniform for the NYPD his whole career; never became a detective. Retired at forty-eight and started working security, but couldn’t hold a job.

  He’d boxed—Golden Gloves, Police Athletic League, smokers—since he was a teenager and it had scrambled his brains. He didn’t process things right anymore, and it seemed to kick in after he left the force. He didn’t know what exactly was wrong—he was afraid to go to a doctor—but words and the names of friends that should be easy to access were increasingly gone. He’d reach for them in his mind but there’d be nothing there. The files were empty.

  And if somebody pissed him off, there seemed to be no ability to pause, to assess: he would just lash out. And he’d always had a good right hand. Which still worked. Too well.

  So he was hitting people—hurting people—he shouldn’t. And when he hit them, they felt it for a long time. He was a solid six one, 190. A light heavy. And he looked like an ex-pugilist—thick, immobile neck; rugged skull, covered in buzzed-down black-gray grizzle; square jaw; thin white scars in black eyebrows.

  He was ugly and handsome and his mind was going. He felt like he could hardly remember his own life. He knew he had done things—grown up in Bay Ridge, been a cop, got married, went on trips—but it was like a book he had read a long time ago: the details had faded and the story had happened to someone else.

  But not Lina—she was etched deep in his mind. She’d been there from the start, always loving him, always caring for him, and she had outlived everyone—his mother, his father, all of them.

  But then he went to LA and he cursed himself for abandoning her, and all because he was broke. He’d burned a few bridges—his outbursts weren’t well-suited to security work—and he’d gone six months without a job and was running out of money; his pension wasn’t enough to live on.

  Not knowing what else to do, he’d called an old friend, an ex-cop who’d moved to LA years ago and ran a bodyguard service. Sol told him things had dried up in New York—without going into much detail—and the friend offered Sol a job. It helped that he hadn’t seen Sol in a decade. He didn’t know that Sol wasn’t quite right anymore. That something was broken in his head.

  And Sol didn’t let on, and within a week of their call, Sol had emptied out his apartment near Fordham, in the Bronx, and was ready to go. He’d been divorced since his midthirties and lived simply. It was easy to erase himself, to remove any trace of his life in New York.

  And no one would really notice that he was gone. He was an only child, and as his mind betrayed him, he pulled away from the few friends he did have.

  So all packed up and ready to go to LA—he had reduced everything he owned to his one large suitcase—he told Lina about the job that Thursday. She’d hardly spoken the last six months and she didn’t say anything when he told her. She just nodded and seemed to smile, and then turned the palm of her right hand upward on her wheelchair arm. That was how she communicated of late, small gestures, mostly of resignation and acceptance.

  But he wasn’t sure she had understood what he’d said, and if she had, he was certain that she would soon forget it. He parted from her that day as he always did, kissing her on the top of her head and saying, “I love you, Aunt Lina,” and then walking off, unable to look back, not wanting to see her alone in her chair, forsaken.

  He flew to LA the next day, Friday, and was supposed to start work on Monday. He got that cheap motel room on the edge of North Hollywood, and on Sunday morning the nursing home called. As soon as they told him she was dying, he realized that she had retained what he said and it had broken her will. Had killed her. Forty-eight hours after he had left, she was dying.

  3.

  When he landed in Newark, he called the nursing home, which was in Leonia, and they said she was still alive. He got in a taxi and hoped that she would hold on for another forty-five minutes.

  He had put her in the nursing home, which was called Maple Ridge, ten years ago. Before that, she had been living in a small apartment in Queens since the early eighties, and Sol had visited her there every Sunday, unless he had to work, for years.

  As Lina aged, she lived quietly, had very few friends, and spent a lot of time knitting Sol beautiful sweaters and scarves, which she would present to him on their Sundays, when they’d have lunch and play cards. They did this for almost two decades, but then after she turned ninety, she kept having falls, and he was constantly going to the ER in Forest Hills to retrieve her.

  Luckily, she never broke a hip, but after a while it was clear she couldn’t take care of herself anymore, and so he looked at a bunch of places and Maple Ridge was the nicest, nicer than the ones in New York, and without fail, since he put her there, Sol had kept up the tradition of visiting her every Sunday, as well as every holiday.

  Getting to Leonia from the Bronx hadn’t always been easy—he had to cross the George Washington Bridge and something was often going on there, even on Sundays—but he didn’t care about the drive. It was worth it to him to sit in traffic: he loved being with Lina. She was the one person all his life that he felt comfortable with, that he could just be at ease around, not have to prove anything.

  And they’d always had good conversations. They would talk boxing—she was the one who introduced him to the sport, watching it with him on Saturdays when he was a kid; and they also covered city politics and baseball and his problems with women. She was from another time, a more glamorous time, a real lady, and she was his best friend. Just about his only true friend.

  The first few years at the nursing home, they could still play cards—gin rummy was their game—and he’d take her out to eat. But eventually she became wheelchair bound, her dementia was in full bloom or full decay, and for the last year, they would just sit together without talking. Sometimes he’d read the paper or a book. It seemed to make her happy just to look at him.

  4.

  The traffic was light on a Sunday night, coming from Newark Airport, and he got to Maple Ridge by ten p.m., gave the driver a big tip for luck, and rushed into the facility, which had a hushed feeling, the quiet of sleep.

  He signed in at the front desk and inhaled the nursing home’s familiar smell, urine, which they could never erase, no matter how hard they tried. Then after scribbling his name and the time on the ledger, he walked quickly down the long, quiet hallway to Lina’s unit. When he got to the nurse’s station he couldn’t remember the name of the nurse who was sitting, mostly hidden, behind the raised counter.

  She was staring intently at her computer screen and didn’t sense that he was there—she hadn’t heard hi
m approach, the floor was covered in a thin carpeting, good for wheelchairs—and he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t say Excuse me to someone he knew so well—he had spoken to her hundreds of times over the years. He should say her name, make her look up at him that way. But he couldn’t find her name, it was missing, and he just stood there in the hallway, frustrated, almost wanting to cry. What is wrong with me? he asked in his mind, though he knew the answer.

  Then he put his hand on the counter and that caught the eye of the nurse, and she looked up from the glow of her desktop. She was a middle-aged Filipina, tiny and round and kind, and her eyes, behind her gold-rimmed glasses, filled with tenderness when she saw it was Sol. Her name was Angelie, but Sol couldn’t bring it up. Where her name should be, automatically, was empty space.

  “Is she still alive?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Angelie said, and she came around the counter to hug him. They all knew at Maple Ridge how much he loved Lina.

  Then she took him down the hall and into Lina’s room, which was in shadows, and they went past her roommate, whose blankets were up to her chin. She was a heavyset woman in her eighties and the light from the hallway shone on her face, and she looked at Sol with scared eyes. The roommate loved Lina, and just on the other side of the curtain that separated them, she knew that Lina was dying. Sol nodded at her, trying to convey reassurance, while also scratching in his mind for her name. He had known her for a year, which was a longer tenure than most of Lina’s roommates; there had been a lot of death in that room.

  Then he and Angelie were on the other side of the curtain, and there was a nurse sitting in a chair by Lina’s bed. Lina’s little bedside lamp was on and the nurse had put a pillowcase over the lampshade to dim it, and it cast a faint glow on Lina, who lay curled on her side, facing the thin light.

  She was breathing raspingly, and her white hospital blanket was pulled over her bony shoulders, and her red hair, which had turned a beautiful orangish-white with age, was damp on her skull. Her cheekbones were protruding and her skin looked yellow and waxy. She was radically different from how she had been just a few days before.

  Angelie whispered to the bedside nurse, “This is the nephew. He’ll sit with her now.” And the nurse, whom Sol didn’t recognize, stood up and walked past them, without saying anything, just nodded at Sol with sympathy and left the room.

  “She’s with hospice,” said Angelie, and then she went to Lina, bent over her, stroked her head gently, and said, “Sol is here.”

  But Lina didn’t wake, and Angelie adjusted her covers, and then turned to Sol and said, “I think she’s been waiting for you. We told her you were coming. The doctor didn’t expect her to make it this long.”

  “I never should have gone to LA,” Sol said. “I did this to her.”

  “No,” said Angelie. “You can’t think like that. It’s Miss Lina’s time. She’s ready to go. And you know—she always does what she wants and this is what she wants.” She had a nurse’s take on death—its inevitability and its beauty.

  Then Angelie left the room, and Sol sat down in the chair vacated by the hospice nurse. Lina’s hand, like a child’s, was up near her chin, poking out from the covers, and he took hold of it and it was tiny and cold in his large fist, but her fingers still looked beautiful and elegant. Her nails, which she had always been proud of, were painted red.

  He then squeezed her hand ever so slightly and she opened her eyes and knew that her Sol was there, that he had come for her.

  5.

  The first four nights, he stayed by her side. They brought him a reclining chair, but he hardly rested; it was too uncomfortable and he couldn’t sleep. And he was afraid to sleep. What if she went while his eyes were closed?

  They let him use a shower and brought meals to him from the dining room. The nurses charged his phone and he called his friend in LA—his new boss—and told him what was happening. The friend told him to take as much time as he needed.

  Because of her stroke, he couldn’t give Lina water—she would drown—and so what was going to kill her in the end, slowly, would be thirst, dehydration. They had thought that Sunday morning, when they called him in LA, that she was going quickly, but with Sol by her side, she suddenly wasn’t in a rush.

  She slept most of the time, but every now and then she would open her eyes and he wasn’t sure if she saw him or not. That first night she definitely seemed to acknowledge him, but after that it was unclear.

  He held her hand for hours at a time and like some kind of mantra, he kept on saying, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” He wanted those to be the last words she heard.

  He only left her side to go to the bathroom or bathe. He was becoming wildly sleep-deprived but was obsessed with the idea of being there the exact moment she went. He was determined she shouldn’t be alone and, secretly, not that there was anyone to tell, he’d come to have a selfish desire to witness that last moment, like it was something exotic or forbidden. As a cop, he’d seen several people die, but this was a vigil. A deathbed vigil. And he was waiting for it: that moment, that divide, when she would be here and then no longer here.

  On Wednesday night, the fourth night of the vigil, something beautiful happened. It was around two a.m. and she became radiant. Her eyes were suddenly open and clear—she definitely knew he was there—and she looked beautiful. It was like eighty years had been shed, and she was a twenty-year-old woman, full of health and life, and something akin to joy seemed to inhabit her face. And her eyes seemed to be talking to him, telling him that she loved him. He almost felt like some kind of miracle was occurring, that the stroke was reversing itself, and he squeezed her hand and whispered, over and over, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  And this time of radiance lasted about two hours and then passed. She fell back asleep and hardly woke the whole next day. From that point forward, she seemed to worsen even more. Death was imminent.

  On the fifth night, Thursday, he couldn’t take it anymore—the reclining chair, the sleep deprivation—and he broke down, got a taxi, and went to a cheap motel, not far from the nursing home. He told Angelie—who had the night shift again and whose name he had come to remember when he heard someone use it—to call him at any sign that Lina was close. To not worry about waking him and that he would come back right away. Angelie promised she would call.

  So he left the nursing home at one a.m. and was back by seven a.m., and Lina was still alive. He stayed with her that day till two a.m. and then went back to the motel room, which was a twin to the one in LA—shabby and reeking of dead smoke, which Sol hated.

  He’d always hated the smell of smoke, had since he was a child. He associated it with his father, a cruel man, an unhappy man, who sometimes took his belt to Sol. Nicotine always seemed to be coming out of his father’s pores, which disgusted Sol, and their house always smelled of smoke, like the remnants of his father’s anger.

  Then his father died from smoking: a heart attack, like an ax blade, took him down when he was sixty. He was sitting at the breakfast table, fell out of his chair, and was dead. The doctor said it was because of cigarettes.

  Then Sol’s mother—whom Sol loved very much, she was Lina’s niece and also had beautiful red hair—died six months later of lung cancer. She had inhaled secondhand smoke for thirty-five years of marriage, and Sol wasn’t with her when she went. She died on the operating room table when they tried to remove a tumor from her lung, and he didn’t get to say goodbye.

  6.

  On the seventh day of the vigil, which was Saturday, a massive storm hit the East Coast in the afternoon. It was a modern nor’easter—vicious and cataclysmic and a month early in the season.

  The rain beat against Lina’s window, and it was dark by three p.m. She was lying on her side, facing Sol and the window, and at five p.m. her hands grew icy cold and her breathing became intermittent and labored. He stood up and pulled back the blanket at the end of the bed—her feet had turned purple. It was coming now. Thes
e were all the signs, and like the time of radiance, it lasted about two hours. The intervals between her ragged breaths grew longer and longer, each breath seemed like it might be her last, and then she would fight to take one more. Sol thought of her as a boxer who is losing but wants to go the distance, and he thought, too, how people always tell their loved ones in these moments, It’s all right, you can go, just let go.

  But he didn’t want to do that. He wanted her to make it through the last round, and it seemed to be what she wanted. She was fighting so hard with each breath to hold on, and so he started saying, “Take one more breath, Aunt Lina . . . Take one more breath . . . I love you . . . I love you . . . I love you . . . One more breath . . . One more breath . . . I love you . . . I love you.”

  And all the while he held her hand and then her jaw did something strange and grotesque and violent, it seemed to unhinge and then reset, and then she took one more breath and this time it was her last. No more breaths came.

  An hour later, Angelie came around the curtain to check on them, and Sol was still holding Lina’s hand. He was quietly crying and said, “She’s gone.”

  7.

  He returned to the motel around nine thirty. He’d watched them pack her body in ice—she had willed herself to a medical school—and then one of the nurses gave him a ride. No taxis were running in the storm.

  The streets were like rivers, and when they got to the motel, the parking lot was practically flooded. It was an old-fashioned, single-story motel—the walkway outside his room was exposed and right on the parking lot—and he got out of the car, thanked the nurse for the ride, dashed into his room, and still got soaking wet.

  He went to turn on the lights and realized that the power was out. The room was dark and he opened the curtains to the large window that faced the lot, but no light came in. When they had pulled into the lot, he hadn’t noticed how dark it was—the rain was beating down so hard on the windshield and the lights from the nurse’s car had lit a path to his room.