Free Exit Laughing by Victoria Zackheim Page B

told the waiter.
    When she became homebound, feeding-tubed, and unable to care for herself or pay for help, her doctor called the Servants of Mary, nuns from a local convent who ministered to the sick and dying.
    My people, I thought.
    The first time I met Sister Alicia, her physical appearance stunned me. I’d never met a real nun before, no less one who was over six feet tall and covered head to toe in a bright white habit and coronet. When Sister Alicia’s looming presence entered the room, I swear to God, the entire space was bathed in a warm golden light. Sunbeams surrounded her, even at night. Sister Alicia radiated love.
    Nancy had lost the ability to speak, swallow, and walk on her own, and her descent into hopelessness matched my own descent into helplessness. Sister Alicia’s presence was, indeed, a gift to both of us.
    When she arrived every evening, Sister Alicia immediatelycradled Nancy’s hands in her own and said a silent prayer, which Nancy admitted was comforting. She would then routinely remove Nancy’s slippers, retrieve a bottle of lotion from her traveling bag, and massage her feet with such tender reverence that awe replaced whatever sadness had wrapped around my heart.
    One evening, Nancy’s computer’s new top-of-the-line voice-assistive technology software malfunctioned, and her computer couldn’t speak the words she painstakingly typed. Nancy’s only hope of communicating was by pen and paper. Her hands failed her, and I couldn’t decipher what she needed. The confident swoops and curls of her once perfect penmanship had devolved into thin, shaky chicken-scratch. Our mounting frustration gave way to her angry tears and impossible-to-understand moaning and grunting, and such a scene was definitely not alright with me. Emboldened by the memory of my father and our purifying laughter the night before he died, I tried to lighten things up.
    Nothing caused a rise, not even a reenactment of the time her wheelchair caught air bumping down Westwood Boulevard. Next, I opened a book of her original essays and the more I read aloud, the more captivated she became. My confidence grew.
    “Yes,” I thought, “I
am
good at this.”
    Sister Alicia was in the kitchen, and I had an idea. I tiptoed into Nancy’s bedroom, opened her filing cabinet, and took out the bottle of Grey Goose Vodka we’d hidden months before. In the living room, I pulled it out from under my shirt whispering “Taa daa!”
    I didn’t have time to ponder exactly what kind of sin I was about to commit, because in my mind I was simply doing my job. Sneaking vodka into a dying woman’s feeding tube, with a nun doing dishes in the next room, was bound to lighten things up. I snuggled close to Nancy on the couch and held the open bottle under her nose. Like two Catholic schoolgirls, we got the giggles. Sister Alicia, humming a church hymn, was preoccupied and I had to act fast.
    I uncorked Nancy’s feeding tube. My hands trembled.
    Noticing a sterilized urine testing cup on the coffee table, I grabbed it, opened it, and poured in the equivalent of three shots of holy water. When I saw Sister Alicia emerge from the kitchen, I sloshed the urine collection cup behind my back. Nancy and I tried to stifle our laughter. Instead, we became hysterical, rolling on the couch and gasping for air so desperately that Nancy really did begin to struggle and we had to turn up her oxygen. As I leaned over to reach the machine, clear liquid delight dripping from my hand, a half-full bottle of Grey Goose was revealed behind me. I closed my eyes, hoping that whatever I couldn’t see Sister Alicia couldn’t see either. Nancy snorted, and Sister Alicia laughed so hard that the wings of her coronet jiggled. In plain sight of God, this loving nun, and our ancestors watching from heaven, I pulled a generous gulp of Grey Goose into the syringe and shot it directly into the feeding tube. Probably a little too fast. But still.
    We three, an unlikely