by Joanell Serra
Always Six O’Clock
Alone on the beach, I cry in private while my patient husband lies down in our sparse apartment across the street. I mean my husband, the patient. But yes—he is also patient. Mostly. Slippery words.
Another week of medical chaos has passed, and my love is still here, alive. But instead of pride as a caregiver, I feel heaviness in my bones. Each day of this journey infuses my body with the densest mineral: grief. All I want is to save him. A simple wish. A desperate prayer.
I find myself on my knees, watching birds gather on rotting piers. On my knees, in prayer position, listening to the music of water cover the amber pebbles, then recede.
I want to be good, I say to the God of my understanding. But there’s nothing left in me to give. I can’t be a good caregiver, mother, writer, or friend. Can’t face dragging the ninety-pound dog to the vet or begging the pharmacist to fill a prescription at closing time. Can’t spend another hour fighting insurance companies while making high protein snacks. I just can’t.
I lie down right there on the sand and imagine dissolving. I remember the meditations I practiced in my pre-cancer life: becoming a rock, a tree, a cloud drifting in the sky. I long to be held like that, to be pollen floating in the breeze, a drop of precipitation in the summer fog. I don’t want to be in human form anymore, hobbling along my prickly path.
Make me something else or make this life better.
I’ve been asking for this—pleading, demanding, bargaining—since his diagnosis. But the universe has not budged.
I sit up. I need to pull myself together before I go back upstairs to the tiny apartment that isn’t a home, just a place to live while we endure. So close to chemo! people say. So convenient! And all I can think of is the David Byrne lyric: This is not my beautiful house.
Somehow, I must conjure a meal in the tiny kitchen—some repast he can tolerate, maybe even enjoy. Food with all the right vitamins and elements to heal him. Though no matter how much protein powder I slip into his smoothies, or how many hormone-free turkey meatballs he manages to swallow, the pounds evaporate. Unlike our medical bills.
The water is calmer this afternoon, a wide gray-blue tapestry with scattered white ribbons. I wipe away tears and snot and inhale its briny scent. Is the salt content of my tears the same as the salt content of this brackish water? Could I swim in my tears if I cried long enough, like Alice?
It’s not the first time the cancer journey reminded me of Carroll’s rabbit hole—being both very big, trying to hold everyone in my arms, and very small, disappearing from my own life. Every day, we rush to appointments only to discover we’re too early, or too late, or at the wrong location altogether. The hospital changes plans and doesn’t call or notify us. What time is it? I am always asking. And where are we supposed to be?
The Mad Hatter drank tea endlessly because time was stuck at six o’clock. Six is when our dog must be fed—she barks furiously by 6:04—and when my husband’s dinner must be started. There is a deadline. A major surgery has left him with almost no esophagus. Lying down with food in his stomach is dangerous, so he must digest for hours before bed. Hence the deadline: not a morsel after seven.
I’m never ready for six o’clock, and it’s always creeping closer. The pebbles at my feet roll back and forth, and I try to let their music soothe me. I should go inside, but my legs refuse.
I squint at something black twenty feet out—a shape pops up between waves like a shadow puppet. Then nothing. A cormorant, maybe?
I step to the water’s edge, and it reappears—nearer now: a black circle, two blinking eyes. My heart lifts as I recognize a seal. His head bobs like a black balloon on the surface, his eyes fixed on me. He’s closer than I thought.
“Oh!” I say. A surprised laugh bubbles up.
He stares back, his eyes a dancing brown liquid. His eyes are the universe. Light flashing from elsewhere, wisdom from the deep. They hold me. He sees inside me. I know he is here for me.
We’re right here, his eyes say. You are never alone.
The water at my ankles is colder than I expect—wetter, too, somehow. As if I believed I could swim without getting wet, like a cartoon version of myself. I go deeper. He waits.
“You came for me.”
His whiskers fan delicately from his sweet, spotted mug. I notice how much he looks like my dog or maybe that my dog looks like a seal. I step in farther—another step, then another. The water licks my thighs, and I pause. He moves so swiftly that if I hesitate, I’ll lose him.
I surrender to the salty cold. To my feet leaving the rocky shore. To the pull of whatever lies beyond.
I’m coming, I try to tell him, in some interspecies language, as if he doesn’t already know.
Finally, someone on the other side has sent for me. I can go to another world. Another dimension. Maybe I’ll try life again someday—a better version, like switching theaters at a multiplex, but this one is too dark.
Perhaps I am reincarnating right here, birthed by the bay as my human form loosens. Water surges behind me as I undulate, feeling flipper-like legs. I feel the bliss of weightlessness. Darkness opens beneath, not unlike a night sky. A universe above. A universe below.
I close my eyes. Reach into the depths. Kick.
They came for me. I am going home.
And somewhere, the clock strikes six again.
Author Joanell Serra (she/her) is a writer living in New York and California. Published in many journals, her books include the novel The Vines We Planted and the anthology (Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Pandemic. She writes non-fiction about the intersection of mental health, spirituality, and cancer caregiving and fiction that brings speculative elements into domestic stories. She received her MFA from Randolph College.
Artist Mauro Marinelli is an artist who lives and works on his farm in Spencer, New York.
Gulf Stream Magazine 