From the small chair in the farthest corner of the hospital room I can see the sky, now clear of fog, and the tops of the pines.  A big crow bounces on a high branch, unfazed by the fractious, gusting wind, searching the ground like a pirate with a spyglass, left eye, then right.

             Marion is asleep in the big guest chair, turned around so she faces the windows, her back to anyone entering.   The bed is her ottoman; her legs are stretched out, crossed at the ankles, feet bare, an old, chipped pedicure on toes that point in several unnatural directions.  Her body is a sad bag, misshapen and swollen from steroids, many surgical procedures and hospital stays, two recent years of wheelchairs and obsessive eating and 87 years of gravity.  A smaller, female version of Jabba the Hutt, a mudslide of slack flesh. 

            This woman was once a beauty, a pinup, a skinnydipper, a clotheshorse, a wearer of tennis skirts and jaunty hats.  Who started having surgeries eight years ago so she wouldn’t have to wear flat shoes instead of high heels, a quintessentially Marionesque crusade.  But her asthmatic lungs, stiffened by smoking, limited her healing and foiled the results, each stay in a hospital leaving her gasping and immobile, confused, infected, damaged.  She is dying, only more quickly now.

            Note to self:  Keep moving, especially if it hurts.

            Triple arthrodesis (ankle), bronchial aspergillosis, pseudomonas in a surgical wound, negative-pressure wound therapy, pneumonia, pneumonia, can’t breathe – call 9-1-1, total hip replacement, THR failure, repair and revision, can’t breathe – call 9-1-1,  pneumonia, aspergillosis flareup, full-time oxygen, fall – call 9-1-1, fall – call 9-1-1, fall – call 9-1-1, can’t breathe can’t can’t breathe – call 9-1-1.

            Marion’s house, where I’m staying, sits in a clearing.  Crows, fifty or sixty strong, clogged the trees this morning, their scolding beating at my ears, each bird trying to outscream the others.  A murder of crows, an apt term.  Since when are there crows in Carmel, I wonder.  A beautiful woodpecker and some quail were all the birds I ever saw in these quiet woods, flitting above the deer.  Crows eat carrion, roadkill, garbage.  Where have they come from?  Where are they going?  They screech and caw and caw, opening their throats to the sky.            

            I turn my gaze back to my sleeping stepmother.  She’s in a classic Marion getup.  A thick, soft, white blanket wraps her from knees to chest, her favorite orange wool scarf circles her neck, one fringed end flung toward a shoulder.  She’s wearing huge, square sunglasses.  Bright red.           

            She’s awake, blinking at me.

            “That’s quite the movie star look this morning,” I say.

            She lifts her chin, tilts her head, a three-quarter shot.

“Let me guess.  Marilyn Monroe.”

 “Greta Garbo,” she says in a hoarse whisper.

“I should have known.  Why is she your favorite?”

“Mysterious.”  She winks behind the tinted glass.

            We sit across from each other, the bed between us, and talk about what she ate for breakfast, who came to visit last night, which friends are sick, dying, gone.  I’ve heard all these bits before, but she doesn’t remember telling me.  I listen and coo appropriately for an hour, slightly more, until her voice is shredded like fabric rotten in the sun.

            Her eyes are closing and she slips to sleep, her chin on her collarbone, fingers crooked twigs in her lap.  Each breath sounds like air rattling down a chimney full of wet gravel.  Her chest expands, a flabby sack, and then collapses with a whoomph and a shudder.  As she inhales, I raise my shoulders, trying to help.

            Crack crack

            The crow has flown to the windowsill, its ringed black talons curled on a close iron perch, pressing its scruffy black feathers against the glass.  He’s looking intently at Marion with his left eye, then swivels to me, staring, rude as the righteous.  Before I can stand up to shoo him, he looks back at her, leans back and … crack … snaps his head forward, jabbing his sharp black beak at the glass.

            Crack CRACK

image of Greta Garbo is in the public domain