Look After Your Brother Ch 3
Their Ma took sick when they were fifteen. She lost weight, and couldn’t work. The boys did what they could to bring in some money, and the neighborhood helped them to pick up the slack. When the pain got so bad that she had to go to the doctor, it was too late. The tumors had spread from her woman parts through all of her guts. The doctor gave her some pills and sent her home.
Some days the pills helped. She could take care of herself, and talk to the boys about their futures. She tried to teach them everything. The three of them never spoke of it, but they knew her remaining days upon the earth were growing short in number.
Most days the pills didn’t do anything. A nurse was sent by the state, and she put a tube in Ma's arm, and showed the boys how to use a needle to put the morphine into the drip. For a few weeks that worked better, but the pain was growing and the drugs couldn’t keep up with it.
They prayed, silent lips moving as the beads of their rosaries slid through their fingers. Nothing changed. Their Ma didn’t get any better. They took it as a sign that they should act.
They left her with Mrs. O'Donnal and went to see the doctor, to ask what he could do for her. They were in the waiting room for three hours before he could see them. He was a tired man in a faded blue shirt. His eyes looked faded too, dead and almost colorless.
Connor let Murphy do the talking, let him explain the situation. "Please, sir, you have to give her more," Murph begged him. "She hurts, all the time now. Please, there has to be a way."
"It's beyond my control," the doctor told them, over and over again. "There is nothing I can do. There are laws, you know. She's at the limit I can prescribe. You wouldn’t want your mother to become an addict, would you? It's beyond my control." He turned his eyes back down to his desk and made little notes on his clipboard, as if they had already left.
The helplessness, the frustration, was too much for Murphy. "If she was your ma ya'd have her drugged out of her fucken mind!" He grabbed a pen from the desktop and went after the doctor's throat. Connor caught Murph halfway through his leap, knocking him down and dragging him kicking and swearing from the office building before security showed up. The doctor watched them go and didn’t say a word.
At least the police weren’t waiting for them when they got home.
"There's always a way, Murph," Connor said later, as they sat on the fire-escape, sharing a cigarette.
Murphy took the cigarette, blowing the smoke up at the starless sky. "Yeah?"
Connor was quiet for a long time. "She's not going to be getting' better, Murph. You know that and I know that, aye?" Murphy nodded and passed the butt back over. Their eyes met through the wispy smoke. "There's things that will kill the pain that don’t come from the druggist. If we have the courage for it."
Murphy chewed on the side of his thumb and sighed. "Heroin? Fuck, Connor..." There were some things that were taboo in their world. A man could drink himself to death on whiskey and beer, maybe smoke a little pot on the weekends. But heroin? Crack? Such things had no place here. It just wasn’t done.
There was no other way.
"Okay, yeah, how?" Murph asked at last.
A feeling of strength swept through Connor. He wouldn’t have to do this alone. "I'll think of somethin'."
They sat on the fire escape for a long time that night.
"Something" ended up being a night job for Connor, helping a friend of ma's wash windows for the small boutiques downtown. He only needed one of the boys, so Murph looked for work elsewhere; running errands and doing odd jobs around the neighborhood.
The first time was the hardest, pretending they knew what they were doing while they bought the little packet of tan powder, cooked it up in one of the spoons from the kitchen, and pushed the needle into their mother's skin. They put it into the muscle, to make it slow, to make it last. They all three wept as Ma's body relaxed for the first time in days. She slept, in the peace where the pain had lived for so long. They held her between them, and she slept.