The End Is Nigh

That had been a month ago. Bob was gone, and the hospital’s doors were chained. Even the bright flyer was nearly obscured in the gray-brown haze that had settled over her neighborhood like a sepia camera filter. The San Gabriel mountain range that stood a few blocks from Foothill Park was nearly hidden beneath a sheet of brown clouds. Sunlight bled through the sky in a fuzzy ball, but less light than yesterday. So much for Southern California sunshine. Nayima had gotten used to the smell, the eye and sinus irritation, the coughing at bedtime, but she hated the way the smoke had changed the daylight. Each morning she hoped the day would be a bit clearer and brighter, but the sky was always a little worse than before, like eyesight slowly going dim.

But she could manage the flea problem.

That

she could do.

The irony wasn’t lost on her: she had only remained because she didn’t want to move Gram. Now she would have to move Gram after all, without the help of neighbors, soldiers or police officers. The infestation was too far gone for insecticides—and she’d already emptied a can, making it harder to breathe in the house. Gram had taught her how hard fleas were to kill, with her menagerie of pets in the house Nayima had been raised in since she was four. Nayima had felt like just another of Gram’s adopted creatures.

The street spread before Nayima with its alien coloring and emptiness, her neighbors’ windows dark and sleeping. Most of the driveways were clear except for a few vandalized cars left behind. The week before, a daytime marauder had come through on a loud motorcycle, raising a racket and tossing clothes into the trees. Kids, she guessed, but she’d stayed out of sight, so she wasn’t sure. A long-sleeved shirt and ratty blue jeans still hung from high fronds in the neat row of palm trees in front of the green belt.

Nayima used to walk her neighborhood for exercise, rounding the green belt and pool area, the basketball court, the rows of stucco exteriors in carefully matched paint. This day she scouted for a new home—testing the door-knobs, sniffing the air inside, assessing the space. She had visited them all before. Most had been damaged beyond usefulness by looters.

She chose the house on the opposite corner from Gram for its proximity and the bright yellow roses blooming in front, lovely and clueless. Mr. Yamamoto’s house. Inside, its Spartan decor had given looters little to muss, although broken glass glittered in the kitchen. But the house had double doors large enough to push Gram’s bed through. The lock was intact. No windows broken. No terrible odors. No carpeting to hide nests of biting fleas.

Sanctuary.

“Thank you, Mr. Yamamoto,” she said.

Mr. Yamamoto had offered to drive her and Gram to the high desert in the back of his SUV, though she’d seen relief flicker in his hollowed eyes when she’d refused. He’d had a carload already, with his daughter and grandchildren from Rancho. Instead, he had given her a box of spices, most of them characteristically useless: every Halloween, he’d handed out clementine oranges instead of candy. Before Gram got sick, she and Mr. Yamamoto had walked their dogs together. Like Gram, he was retired. Like everyone, he had left most of his belongings behind.

Gram’s old digital wristwatch told her it was 7:30 in the morning. From the dark sky, it could be evening. The day had already wearied her, and the hard part had not yet begun.

Gram was asleep. She lay slanted on her side where Nayima had left her at 4 a.m., after her careful ritualistic padding of pillows to keep her from slumping on to her back. Studying Gram’s quiet face, Nayima marveled again at how the cancer had stolen the fat from her cheeks, shrinking her grandmother to a smaller husk each day.

The usual thought came:

Is she dead?

But no. Gram’s chest moved with shallow breaths. In the early days, when cancer was new to them both, she had fretted over every moan, gasped at every imitation of a death mask on Gram’s brown, lined face. Gram was nearly seventy, but she had never looked like an old woman until the cancer. Her white hair was still full and springy, but now her face looked like she would not last the day, which was how she always looked.

But Gram always did last the day. And the next.

The bell was always on Gram’s mattress, though she had not had the strength to ring it in a long time. The hospital-grade bed had cost a fortune, equipped with an inflated mattress that was gentler against Gram’s breaking skin. It didn’t work as well without its electric pump, but Nayima kept it inflated with an old bicycle pump. Not enough, maybe, but it was inflated. The county had shut off the power to the entire area after the evacuation.

Nayima felt the magnitude of her impending tasks. Should she dress and treat Gram’s sores before or after the move? Damnation either way.

Later, she decided. She didn’t want to face the sores with the move still waiting. The move would irritate Gram’s sores with or without a cleaning and dressing first, but maybe after was best. She wished her cell phone worked, not that there was anyone to call for advice. An internet search would have felt like a miracle. The lack of advice wearied her.

As if her loud uncertainty had awakened her, Gram’s eyes flew open. Gram’s eyes had once been the brightest part of her, though they were milky now.

“Baby?” Gram said.

Nayima stepped closer to the bed. She could smell that the wounds needed cleaning—the dead flesh odor she hated. She slipped her hand over Gram’s dry palm. Gram squeezed, but did not hold on.

“I’m here, Gram,” she said.

Gram stared with the same eyes that had probed Nayima when she came home late from “movies” with her first boyfriend smelling of weed and sex. But this time, the questions were too big and vast for words, with answers neither of them wanted to hear. Nayima hadn’t let Gram watch the news or listen to the radio in weeks, so Gram didn’t know how many others were facing illness. She didn’t know the neighbors had left.

“We have to move to Mr. Yamamoto’s house,” Nayima said. “Too many fleas here.”

“The… cats?” Gram said.

“They’re fine,” Nayima said. That was probably a lie. She had stopped feeding Gram’s four cats and locked them out after the evacuation, so the cats had left too. She’d cried about it at the time, but at least cats could hunt.

“Tango too?” Gram’s eyes grew anxious. Maybe Gram had heard the lie in her voice.

“Tango’s still mean and fat,” Nayima said.

Was that a smile on Gram’s face? Gram had asked her to keep a single framed photo displayed on the table beside her bed, snapped the first summer Nayima came home from Spelman: the overfed black cat, Tango, was in Gram’s lap while Nayima hugged Gram from behind in her powder blue college sweatshirt. Nayima’s best friend, Shanice, had taken the photo. The glowing pride on Gram’s face haunted Nayima now.

Gram’s eyes started to flutter shut, but Nayima squeezed her hand and they opened again, alert. “I’m going to push you in the bed, Gram,” she said, “but it will hurt.”

“That’s okay, baby,” Gram said. That was Gram’s answer to every piece of bad news.

Nayima had stockpiled pain pills with help from Shanice, who was an R.N. and had raided the meds as soon as she caught wind of how bad things were going to be. Thanks to Shanice—who had moved next door when they were both in the sixth grade—Nayima had a box of syringes, hundreds of oxy pills, saline packs for hydration, ointment and dressing for bedsores, bed pads, and enough Ensure to feed an army. But Gram hadn’t been able to swallow anything on her own since before the neighbors left, so all Nayima could do was crush the pills in water and inject them. Gram’s arms looked like a junkie’s.