“The Mercy Vials” by Marissa Forbes

Mary learns to recognize who is holding death’s hand. She twirls her hair tight around her index finger as she reads oncology reports and roots for those who are near recovery.  Sometimes her finger turns the same tint of blue as the lips of the bodies she wheels down to the morgue. Mary is constantly reminded that no one is ever far enough from death.

She has the kind of hair that looks like dirty steel wool but feels more like a sheep’s coat. Sometimes she lets her patients touch it. They always say, “It’s so soft,” and then they smile because her hair becomes their metaphor. But only in their moments of hope. Those moments between cancer being the roughest trauma imaginable and those when their soul is easing into the idea of what lies beyond.

Her days are just one Hickman Line or Port-a-Cath hook-up after another. Mary watches her patients’ eyes go from fearful to tired. Only tired. She knows pain will find them a few days later, as they rekindle toxic friendships with their toilet bowls.  She imagines the whole world is bald during every ten-hour shift.

And then, Mary’s estranged father-in-law, Steve, is wheeled down the long sterile hallway and tenderly moved into a reclining chair. Dr. Ringold gives her Steve’s chemo plan — his words coming at her as unintelligible as the scratches on his prescription pad. He walks away without noticing Mary tugging at the curls on the nape of her neck.

A vision surfaces in Mary’s mind — Dr. Ringold’s six-year-old daughter asking her mom who the man in the white coat was. The photo is from her 3rd birthday, when her dad showed up for the party, between his twelve-hour residency shifts, long enough to get one documented smile. Kind of like Santa or the Easter Bunny. Mary shakes away the image as she untangles the hair around her finger.

With trembling hands, she grabs the huber needle and inserts it into Steve’s fresh port. The veins in his arms protrude, swollen like worms after the rain. He is thin with skin that looks like yellowing cellophane loosely wrapped around half-cooked chicken. Steve lifts his hands and feet without being asked so Mary can put on his cold mittens and booties. His cracked fingernails and plum-bruised palms are not foreign — they are the same hands that held Mary and Umar’s hands at their wedding ceremony. Mary blinks away bad memories of that day — humiliating moments fueled by Steve — and continues her job. 

They never once meet eyes. Mary is used to the rigid and distant nature of her patients during their first treatments, but she never really knew anyone with cancer until Steve was put in her station. She wonders if he avoids her face because he hates her. She wonders if he avoids her face because he actually loves her. She has been married to Umar for six years and the honeymoon phase is on its last dose, but Mary hopes there are a few more refills.

Mary has bruised fingers herself — the space between her top and middle knuckle is shrunken and permanently lavender-colored. Sometimes she spins her hair around her pointer finger while Umar tells his stories. Long, tall, and beautiful tales told over meatloaf or after lovemaking. Other times, Mary spins her hair with patients, just to see a little of their life outside the hours they sit in front of her, possibly on their last leg of life. Mary sits with Steve, now, and begins to twirl her hair in hopes of conjuring his young face.

      She watches Steve long enough to see a look of distant acceptance fall across his face. Mary tugs and wraps a coil around her finger, tighter, as she studies his wrinkles. She sees him turn into a seven-year-old sitting on a couch, tucked cozily inside the ass indent he had worked on since he was four.

      Nothing existed outside the happiness he felt while eating TV dinners alongside his parents. He sawed at his Salisbury steak with butter knives and absorbed the news and Father Knows Best. After dinner, his parents fought as he watched through his coke bottle glasses. 

Kennedy’s brain on the leather seat of the Lincoln Continental was the first memory Steve ever really attached himself to, but Mary could see Steve connecting to the memory of now. His hands rest on the handmade throw across his lap, donated by a pod of women who meet in stained-glass churches to knit and quilt. His eyes water as he stares at the neon EXIT sign, glowing like it’s betting on his next move. They sit together in the constant humming of the fluorescent light.

Cancer took over Steve’s body the same way Kennedy’s death changed America — abruptly and with dreadful repercussions. Steve never realized how much watching JFK murdered through the Zenith TV set actually affected him. While everyone tuned out with Bob Dylan, Steve tuned right into Lyndon B. Johnson. 

      Just out of high school, Steve got loaded up, smacked up, and then put a hell of a lot of helmets on rifles. Helmets of friends. He forgot real life while he shouted, “BARBEQUE!” across the mud and dripping green leaves in Vietnam. His night vision got foggy, and his toes turned soggy white, but he kept it up and marched on until the notion of “Catch-22” shoved him back into the tree line as he watched another Zippo Raid. 

Mary wants regret to find Steve while he is stuck in his chair with a new kind of poison rushing through his arm. This poison promises to kill his cancer, but feels like the same red and orange, foul and seared kind of poison that he ran from for most of his life. She wants the smell of Swanson dinners burning to the metal tray in a too-hot oven to creep into the space around him — somehow that’s the only vision bringing him joy as he sits, cold, in the chemo room. She monitors his vitals then lifts his shirt sleeve and says to take a deep breath as she tugs the needle twice. Mary tells him to breathe out when she gently disconnects him from his CADD pump.

The nursing home shuttle is waiting for Steve when Mary wheels him out of the hospital. She goes back in, scans her badge, and clocks out at the first computer cart she finds.

Her husband lounges across the mustard yellow couch with a six pack on the coffee table, half gone. The crochet blanket slowly slides down the back of the couch and over his shoulder. One thing Umar learned from his dad was how to fill a garbage bag with empty beer bottles. Can’t forget, though, he also learned how to hang a couple purple hearts in the kitchen above the sink. Mary knows Umar doesn’t want to relive his dad’s story. But he would make a better father, she knows. She can see it. Or maybe, she just holds too tightly to her savior complex and dreams about the family she wants — if only enough pain can be erased from their lives. From Umar’s life.

With tired care, Mary takes the pot roast from the fridge and sets the oven to preheat. She prepares dinner every morning while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in the early light of the day. Every dish is all but cooked when she gets home, so she drinks one glass of wine most nights while she waits the forty-five minutes to an hour for the meat and veggies to bake. Umar eats dinner with her and tells stories about all the adventures he wasn’t having anymore; he longs for the fights that had made him tough.

Mary takes a few more bites, chews a final piece of roast slowly before finally interrupting Umar.

“I saw your dad today.”

Umar chuckle-chokes, “I see him in my nightmares.”

She remains quiet. The wallpaper on the wall behind Umar’s left ear is peeling and the wood panel underneath lives exposed, giving a tiny glimpse into how her home looked to her husband as a child, how it looked before Steve moved to Bellrose Nursing Home. Umar had only ever called this house, along with a handful of outposts in the Middle East, “home.”

Mary watches him stuff another bite into his mouth. He looks nothing like his dad. Umar’s hair is pin-straight black, and it’s perpetually charged with static as if he just pulled off a sweater. It wasn’t just the debate Umar had in his head over which box to check under “ethnicity” on paperwork, it had been the real not knowing. When he was young, people constantly asked, “What are you?” He would flip through blank pages in his mind. For a lot of years, he really had no idea if he was anything everyone guessed: Thai, Sri Lankan, Puerto Rican, Vietnamese, half-breed. Finally, Steve told Umar about his mom, but the coward just wrote it in a short letter that he stuffed into Umar’s duffle bag before Umar went to Iraq for his first tour.

“No, Umar. I saw him today. At work,” Mary says, then chugs her water.

Umar pushes the half-chewed beef back onto his fork with his tongue, waiting for more information to serve itself to the dining table.

“He has lung cancer, Stage Four.”

Umar huffs, “Well, he ate nothing but Hungry Man dinners and snorted all sorts of things with Hendrix records playing on repeat most of his life. What do you expect?”

“I just thought you would like to know,” she says.

But Mary wanted to gauge his reaction, wanted to see if he would open up.

The life Umar led started because Steve overheard a guy in the hardware store talking about ordering wives. Steve sent requests to Viet Cong and traded his father’s car notes to get himself a wife who came with expensive postage. Soon enough, a petite wife arrived with a big belly.  She laid in bed for a week before giving birth to a little boy. She cried for another week then went home empty-handed. Steve was left holding a roly-poly boy with a head full of straight black hair. 

They wash the dishes together, then go to bed where she tries to get pregnant again. Umar finishes and then takes a shower while Mary lifts her hips and puts two pillows under her ass.

He stumbles out of the bathroom through the steam and says, “You know, my dad said, ‘At-ah Boy,’ when he dropped me off at the airport? I really did feel proud all the way through boot camp.”

Mary knew that Umar didn’t really feel that way until a couple of tours later after changing “At-ah Boy” to “I’ve never been prouder of you” when telling the shit-for-brains new recruits that same story.

Mary asks, “Should we tell Franky?” as Umar slides into bed.

Umar rests his arm on Mary’s hip and just before falling asleep mumbles, “Frank is the last person on this Earth who would give a damn about Dad dying.”

The name Brown on the chemo schedule tortures Mary for a few days. She appreciates that surname, she fears that name, and she decides she could terminate the man she shares that name with. She puts Mary above “Critical Care Nurse” on Steve’s medical file. If she keeps their relationship mum, it’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It’ll all be fine in the end.

When the medicine chills his veins, Mary places a knit hat on his head. Steve’s silver ponytail loosens, so Mary reties his hair while he watches Growing Pains reruns on the TV hanging off the wall in the corner of the chemo room.

She asks him, “Do you remember me?”

Steve’s shaking hands caress a fabric square that’s filled with tiny, colorful, lit-up lanterns on the lap blanket. Mary tightens the curl at the nape of her neck and sees the full moon on the night Umar’s mother left. Mary sits down so her face is in line with Steve’s.

Mary twists her hair tighter around her finger, holding Steve’s gaze. She sees him holding Umar in his cloth diaper, trying to recall any name that seemed Asian enough, like it could come from Vietnam. But all he came up with was Umar.  Steve had just guessed, and he knew he was wrong. So wrong that he spent his life trying to make Umar sound like Nguyen. So wrong that he never realized all he needed to do was really hug his sons.

“He knows you’re here,” Mary says, “but he doesn’t want to see you.”

Mary looks for disappointment or distain in Steve’s movements, but he is just twitchy and thirsty. She brings the orange juice straw to his peeling lips. He shakes his head to signal enough after a couple sips.

She still can’t accept the image of this shriveled man in his prime — with loose Hershey kiss-colored curls and a chiseled jaw — selling knives door-to-door and being good at it. Umar told her Steve got a promotion to selling bigger knives to meatpacking plants across America not too long before Umar’s little brother showed up.

“Do you want me to find Franky?” Mary asks as the automated heat comes through the vent over their heads and swells around them.

“It was the same bad dream,” Steve coughs and orange spit drips onto the handmade quilt hiding his toothpick thighs, “Only this time Franky’s mom died in labor, and I was left holding a Wop boy in pampers. Same black hair as Umar, but wavy this time.”

Steve named his second surprise son Frank—a strong name, easily connected to a heritage.

“Franky had the same aching cry as Umar, but higher this time,” he says quietly.

Steve closes his eyes and Mary knows he’s focusing on the painful points in his body. She knows he feels like the holes he had long ago ripped in his mattress with his teeth, in a fury, on the night he kicked Franky out of the house. He had torn into his youngest son’s room and punched the wall, then the peach-fuzzed faces of Frank and his lover. Steve clenches his fists, his veins now look like the shattered pieces of mirror that had scattered across the carpet that chilly evening.

Finally, Steve says, “No, just tell Umar that I never thought the desert would be as bad as the jungle,” Steve’s feet twitch again, “But I was wrong.”

Mary uncoils and coils her hair then she steps into Steve’s memory of walking Umar through the airport the day Umar went to bootcamp.

He fixes his gaze on Mary’s finger wrapped in hair like a mummy. His hands clench until his fingers are white and when he closes his eyes, the image of a pocket embroidered with a gold set of wings with the words “American Airlines” in Helvetica along the bottom burns on Mary’s eyelids. The last time Steve had seen Franky was that same day he said, ‘At-ah Boy” to Umar. Franky exited the same plane Umar was to board. Mary unwraps the hair from her finger and holds Steve’s hand for several minutes.

A coughing fit starts in Steve’s lungs, and he releases his hand to bang his fists on the arms of the chair. Mary walks away and his wide bloodshot eyes follow her white clogs clicking on the white tiles. He seizes the remote that’s velcroed to the chair and presses the call button three times.

She comes back with three empty glass vials. She asks, “What’s your favorite TV dinner?”

He’s confused but takes a gasping shallow breath and says, “Salisbury steak.”

“Imagine you’re on the couch, in your spot. Nice and snug.”

She plugs a vial into a syringe connected to his catheter.

“You’re watching The Wonder Years,” she continues, “and you’ve got a butter knife in one hand.”

Steve’s body tenses under the blankets. He pictures a Hungry Man TV dinner in the oven with the highest setting. His body relaxes in the chair, and he feels like a little boy, comforted by the images of sitcom families flashing. He ignores the oven timer beeping. The smell of blackened food burning to the metal tin rushes over him. Steve ignores the fire alarms, ignores flames rising in his body. In his mind’s eye, he sinks into the ass indent on the couch.

The remote drops from his rough hand. Mary feels the release from her husband’s family trauma as she returns the catheter to Steve’s port. The vials clink in her scrub pocket. Relief breathes into her baby ideas, into her future family when she presses the code blue button.

Dr. Ringold declares the time of death and gives her Steve’s medical file. Once alone in the office, Mary plucks a few strands of her hair out, right behind her ear. She places them in the folder before slipping it in the “Deceased” section of the file cabinet.

She focuses on her reflection in the windshield the whole way home. Her puffy face reflects green, yellow, and red and back again as she repeats, “It’ll be ok,” until she opens the front door of her home.

Umar sits on the couch with a fifth of whiskey in his hand and a full beer on the coffee table. The bottle sweats like it’s been waiting patiently for Mary to walk through the door.  She intentionally drops her bag loudly and rummages through the fridge creating a couple unnecessary condiment clinks as she pulls out the lasagna she prepared that morning. She pours herself lemonade instead of Riesling.

Umar’s voice startles Mary, “How’s ol’ Steve-o today?”

Mary rubs her fingertips together, as if rolling an imaginary cigarette. Her eyes dart around the room like she is trying to remember which cabinet has the plates. Her attention freezes on a bag of raw baby carrots on the counter she forgot to steam that morning.

“Oh, I just remembered that I forgot to pick up the pregnancy test from the drug store.”

Mary hides her satisfaction with having changed the subject.

“So?” Umar pulls down the oven door and takes a big whiff of the air that rises out, “No one does lasagna as good as you.”

Mary sips her lemonade and watches the oven timer countdown. She doesn’t have a lucky number, but she wakes up every night at 11:59 pm and makes the same wish: baby. Her body just jars itself awake so she can manifest her wish at the end of every night, and she pushes herself to make baby the first thought of each new day.

During dinner, Mary focuses on the gash in the wallpaper while they eat their lasagna in silence. She is even careful to not swallow too loudly. Umar finishes and sighs a long sigh, massages his belly, then gets up to clear their plates. He comes back with two shot glasses.

“I really should not, there could be a baby.”

Mary looks at her lap and shakes her head in a “No, thank you.” He fills them both to the brim and puts the bottle down gingerly, as if it holds all the stories he would never get to tell.

“You look like you had a long day,” Umar says, scooting one glass toward her, “One shot won’t hurt anyone,” he continues.

Mary tugs at her hair, getting a glimpse of Umar holding a negative pregnancy test. She gulps the amber fire water down and shakes her hands like she is drying her nails.

“There’s no baby anyway,” Umar says.

Mary sees his hope of no baby swell through his body.

Mary just needed liquid courage. “He died.”

Since the day Umar met her at the Veterans Clinic, Mary had always talked about babies when there was something else she didn’t want to talk about. He pours another shot and waits for her to either swig the glass or rely on the first shot to tell him more.

“Cardiac arrest, suh…sudden,” she stutters, “I mean…there weren’t any signs it was coming on the monitors.”

Mary reaches for Umar’s hand, and he lets her hold it the way she holds her patients’ hands. Umar breathes deeply twice and then gets up and goes to bed. Mary is left in the kitchen to think about tomorrow’s dinner, tomorrow’s shift, the pregnancy test she might fail tomorrow.

Mary wakes up a few minutes before her alarm clock and whispers, “Baby,” like usual, then sits in the kitchen with black coffee in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other. The cigarette lays on the table, unlit. She watches the reflective glare on the white tobacco paper coming from the Iraq Campaign medal that hangs in the window. The cigarette blurs and becomes a baby bottle and she hopes now that Steve is gone, maybe, Umar is ready to be a dad.

She chops the lettuce and tomatoes for hamburgers at the counter but keeps blinking back at the cigarette, making sure it is still there. Still her early morning companion.

Mary remembers every negative pregnancy test as she seasons and forms the hamburger patties. After every negative symbol on the white plastic stick, she cried alone in the bathroom and then had a breakdown in the kitchen as dinner burned. Umar always told her, “All you need in life is a little whiskey and love.”  She started praying around the fourth test, even though Umar said Jesus was never really one to listen anyway. Umar was kind on the night that she had a negative test. He always scraped off the black parts and ate all his dinner. Smiling.

At lunch break the next day, Mary chomps through her celery and peanut butter snack and washes it down quickly with Coca-Cola. She wants enough time to go to the drug store and pick up a pregnancy test before the next string of radiation-ridden bodies enter the chemo room.

The air conditioning and sterilized smell of the hospital hits her face when she returns. Mary pees on the stick and slips it back into the pink box. Dr. Ringold enters the break room before Mary can stuff her purse containing the box of probably disappointing answers to her future into her locker.

“We need some clarity on Steve Brown.”

If Mary could shrink down and fit herself into her locker she would. But Mary holds her purse closer as Dr. Ringold puts his hand on the bottom of her back and leads Mary down the hall into his office. His tuna salad sandwich is left half-eaten on his desk and the acid of nausea rises in her throat from the stench. She swallows it down. Mary already knew what clarification he wanted — she already practiced what she would say.

Mary sits in the chair across from him with her fingers tussling her hair, trying to find the right strand to twirl.

Dr. Ringold opens Steve’s file and Mary holds her breath. He only looks at the top page, so her steal-wool hair stays hidden in the folder — roots and all becoming one with the history of Steve.

“There weren’t any warnings on the monitors that the heart attack was coming,” Mary says as he scans the code call record. She reaches into her purse for comfort — gripped in her hand is the pregnancy test. She can’t help but pull the plastic possibility out and place it on her thigh.

“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Dr. Ringold says without looking up, “I just have to put my initials right here confirming that I followed up with you.”

Mary begins crying. Deep, heavy, heaving, snot infested tears. She looks up at Dr. Ringold and smiles.

About Marissa Forbes
She/Her/Hers

Marissa Forbes (she/her) is an artist, writer of all genres, a creative instructor, and mother. Her poetry books, Surviving Peter Pan (Beyond the Veil Press) and Brief & Bleeding Margins (World Stage Press) were published in 2023. Other published poems and short stories can be read on marissaforbes.com and @word_nerd_ris. She is the Managing Editor for Twenty Bellows and a teacher for the Denver Chapter of Community Literature Initiative’s 10-month Poetry for Publication program. She was awarded an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing in 2021 and a Pushcart Nominee in 2023. Forbes has resided all over the country but now lives a colorful life with her two children, father, dog, and cat in Denver, CO, where she hones her personal mission of amplifying marginalized voices through the healing power of art and community.