The Calling Read Online Free PDF

said drowsily. “I couldn’t get up … my legs wouldn’t …”
    “ I shouldn’t have left you out here all night.” He managed to get her legs straightened out, to get her back on the couch, under a warm blanket, with a soft pillow behind her head.
    That afternoon, he bought her the whistle.
    “ When you need me, use the whistle. You got that?”
    She nodded.
    “ Night or day, it doesn’t matter. If you need me for something, blow the whistle.” He paused, hearing his own words echo through his mind, and a cold, shuddering realization swept over him. He didn’t know when it had happened, but somewhere along the line they had swapped roles. He was the parent now, she the child.
    “ What if I can’t?”
    “ Try it.”
    Like everything else, her lungs had slowly lost their strength over the past few months, but she was able to put enough air into the whistle to produce a short, high-pitched hum.
    “ Great.”
    That was – what? – three weeks ago?
     
    Blair sits up in bed. The streetlight outside his window is casting a murky, blue-gray light through the bedroom curtains. The room is bathed in that light. It feels dark and strangely out of balance. He fluffs both pillows, stuffs them behind him, and leans back against the wall. Across the hall, the light flickers, and he knows the television is still on in his mother’s room. It seems as if it’s far away.
    He shudders.
    Let her sleep, he thinks. Let her sleep forever.
    Sometimes the house feels like a prison. Just the two of them, caught in their life and death struggle. The ending already predetermined. It feels … not lonely, at least not in the traditional sense of the word … but … isolated . Outside these walls, there is nothing but endless black emptiness. But it’s in here where life is coming to an end. Right here inside this house, inside these walls.
    The television in her room flickers again.
    Blair stares absently at the shifting patterns on the bedroom door across the hall. He used to watch that television set while she was in the bathroom. Sometimes as long as an hour, while she changed her colostomy bag …
     
    “ I’ll never be close to a man again,” she told him a few months after the doctors had surgically created the opening in the upper end of her sigmoid colon. The stoma was located on the lower left side of her abdomen. “How could anyone be attracted to me with this bag attached to my side? With the foul odor?”
    “ Someone will come along, and he’ll love you for you. The bag won’t matter.”
    A fleeting sigh of hope crossed her face, then she stared at him for a while, and that was that. She hadn’t had enough of a chance to let it all out, so she kept it all in. The subject never came up again. And what she did on the other side of the bathroom door became something personal and private to her, something he half decided he didn’t want to know about anyway.
    If he had a choice.
    “ How’re you doing in there?” he asked her late one night. He’d had to help her out of bed into the wheelchair, and out of the wheelchair onto the toilet. That was all the help she ever wanted. But she’d been in there, mysteriously quiet, for an unusually long time.
    “ Mom?”
    “ I’m okay,” she whispered.
    “ Need any help?”
    More quiet.
    “ Mom?”
    “ What?”
    “ Do you need any help?”
    “ I’ve lost the clip.”
    “ The clip?”
    “ For the colostomy bag. It’s not here.”
    “ You want me to help you look for it?”
    “ No. See if you can find another one in one of the boxes in the closet.”
    “ What does it look like?”
    “ It’s … a little plastic … clip.”
    He found one, the last one, buried at the bottom of a box. It had the appearance of a bobby pin, a little longer, perhaps, and made of clear plastic instead of metal. “Found one.”
    “ Oh, good.”
    He pulled the sliding pocket door open, more than was necessary if all he had intended to do was hand her the clip. The bathroom was