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Bernadette is half propped up on pillows. Her skin is sallow and her hair sparse, but what hair she has is energetically white. Her eyes flutter open. “Finally.”
She has a tube in her arm, but that’s all. They’ve taken Bernadette off everything except morphine. They’ve given up on her.
“Smuckers is so excited to see you.” I go over to her bed and set Smuckers next to her. Smuckers licks Bernadette’s fingers, and the love that comes over Bernadette’s face makes her look soft for a moment. Like a nice woman.
“Smuckers,” she whispers. She moves her lips, talking to him. I can’t hear, but I know from past conversations that she’s saying she loves him. Sometimes she confesses she doesn’t want to leave him, doesn’t want to be alone. She’s frightened about being alone.
Feebly she scratches Smuckers’s fur, but she’s focusing hard on me, whispering something fervently. I draw near. Eggplant, she seems to be saying.
“Are you hungry?”
“Eggplant…” she says, voice weak.
“Yes, Bernadette?”
“Eggplant makes your complexion…” she winces hard, “…wormlike.” She manages to infuse the word wormlike with incredulous contempt, as though I’ve performed such a feat of fashion monstrosity that she needs to muster all her strength to let me know.
“Damn. I was going for slug-like,” I joke as I adjust Smuckers so that he’s not on her tube.
She sniffs and turns back to Smuckers.
Over the three years I’ve known her, Bernadette has always been judgmental about my fashion choices. Did you get that out of a 1969 catalog for librarians, Vicky? Did JCPenney have a sale on drab pencil skirts? At times I literally seem to hurt her eyes, what with my uninspired ponytails and glasses and whatnot.
I have this suspicion that Bernadette came from money but that her fortune dwindled over the years. Clue one: her apartment is in an expensive neighborhood, but it’s really shabby inside, like it was once grand and went to ruin. Also, her clothes are worn versions of what was expensive maybe fifteen years back. Really, she seems to spend nothing on herself. But Smuckers? Nothing is too good for Smuckers. No expense spared.
I take her hand and put it where Smuckers most likes it so Smuckers will settle down.
“Smuckers,” she breathes.
I have this impulse to set a comforting hand on her arm, but human contact is not something Bernadette would ever want from me.
I’m really only around as an extension of Smuckers, a conduit for Smuckers’s important communications. Other than that, I’m chopped liver. If Bernadette could somehow automate me or keep me in a sardine tin with just the corner rolled up so my voice can escape, she would.
She looks up at me expectantly. I know what she wants. What does Smuckers have to say?
I’m at a loss for what to say, or rather, what Smuckers might say. I never signed up for this fake pet whisperer gig with her, and what with her being on her deathbed, it seems especially wrong.
But she’s waiting. Glaring. She wants a communication from Smuckers. She won’t rest until she gets one.
I suck in a breath and put on my whisperer expression, which I would describe as a curious listening face. “Smuckers says that you shouldn’t be afraid to die,” I say.
She waits. She wants more.
“He wants you to know it’s going to be okay, even though it might not feel like that right now.”
She nods, mumbles to Smuckers.
In terms of subject matter, this is getting into new territory. Smuckers has typically confined himself to lifestyle commentary—requests for certain styles of neck scritching or flavors of Fancy Whiskas dog treats.
Now and then he’ll speculate on the antics of pigeons outside the window. He has certainly never exhibited any divine wisdom about death or special understanding of esoteric secrets of the cosmos.
But I can tell from Bernadette’s face that she likes hearing that Smuckers supposedly said that.
“Vicky,” she says to Smuckers. “Vicky will care for you.”
“You know I will, Bernadette,” I say. “I’ll care for Smuckers as if he were my own flesh and blood.”
Though not literally. I don’t plan on racing around Central Park eating goose poop with him.
