Page 47 of All the Way to the River

All that was over.

Instead, I showed up as the invited houseguest of Stacey, who—with incredible kindness, competency, and generosity—was helping our friend Rayya to die.

And indeed Rayya was dying: This was a truth that could no longer be ignored.

Of course, we had all known that Rayya was dying for well over a year now—but knowing that someone is dying is not the same thing as understanding that someone is dying.

Now the reality had become too brutally evident to ignore.

Rayya had lost an enormous amount of weight since last I’d seen her.

Partially this was due to the drug binge and the subsequent trauma of her final detox, but it was also because the tumors (which were now clearly visible when you looked at her torso) were consuming all the nutrients she ate, in order to support their own dark and ambitious agenda.

I remembered us at the beach only two years earlier in Miami, when she was all roundish and brownish.

I always loved the way Rayya looked in a bikini—and I loved that she always wore a bikini, no matter her age or weight.

I always loved her softness, the folds of her belly, her dense, powerful, reassuring physical presence.

Now she had become frail, and her skin had taken on a bluish-yellow tinge.

The Rolex I’d given to her more than a year earlier was enormous on her thin wrist, and it hurt her to wear it because it kept banging against the bones of her hand and arm—but she wouldn’t take it off.

Her shoulder blades really were like blades.

Each vertebra of her spine was its own distinct island.

Her hands shook all the time, and there were dark, raised veins all across her body—veins that made her skin look like a road map—as her overburdened circulatory system struggled to find new pathways for her blood.

She was having trouble eating real food now and was volunteering to drink Ensure, which she had been enraged to be offered by me six months earlier.

She was walking with a cane and asking people for help.

Still, she was gorgeous.

It was that face.

Nothing could ever change or ravage it—not drugs, not madness, not cancer.

Rayya had always been beautiful, but now she was luminous.

Newborns have that look, too, and sometimes the very elderly, and the dying.

It is the look of someone who has recently arrived here, or who is soon to go home—the light of another world shining through.

In the last weeks of Rayya’s life, she seemed to have silvery moonlight streaming from her eyes, and I could not bring myself to look away.

Her physical pain was being controlled by a dose of methadone every five hours, which Stacey administered and which really seemed to be working. And she was taking no other drugs.

After all that.

So close to death, she seemed sort of … okay.

Only six months earlier, she’d been literally rolling on the floor in pain, sobbing and howling in anguish and needing to ingest opioids by the handful in order to fight back the agony, but now she seemed comfortable and strangely peaceful.

Was this a result of her own spiritual surrender?

A giving up, a giving in to? I don’t know.

I will never know. But she barely needed any painkillers at the end.

We were awkward with each other at first, as uncertain as strangers. Because how do you do this ? How do you reconnect with someone after so much pain and rage, and with the reality of death so near?

Stacey helped us out as much as she could, translating Rayya to me and me to Rayya, in a kind and emissarial fashion.

“Rayya has a very young mind right now,” she had explained to me on the phone in the days leading up to my arrival.

“And I need to warn you that she’s really reduced.

She’s lucid again, and all her anger is gone, but you’re going to see a big decline in her from even a few weeks ago.

She’s not what she was. I think it really took the life out of her to ride the dragon one last time.

She doesn’t remember much that happened over the last few months, and she’s confused about where you went and what happened to your relationship.

But she loves you and misses you, and she’s sorry for how she acted—as much of it as she remembers, anyway. ”

I don’t know what Stacey told Rayya about me , but I’m sure it was just as generous and humane.

I could see that Rayya was trying to perform for me at first, trying to demonstrate that she really was clean and sober and sane.

She asked me polite questions about my trip and told me that I looked very nice.

I had brought her a New York Giants sweatshirt (her second-favorite team, after the Lions), and she thanked me for the gift in an uncharacteristically for mal manner, like she was a kid who’d been trained to be gracious to a visiting auntie.

It was disorienting for me to see Rayya Elias—always so proud and wild and powerful—being cautious with me (with me , of all people!), and I wanted it to stop.

“You don’t have to audition for my affection,” I told her. “You don’t have to prove anything to me, or earn me back. My heart already knows who it belongs to.”

This seemed to relieve her a bit, but I could still see the doubt in her eyes: Was that really true ?

I myself didn’t really know. Was it?

Who even were we anymore?

That first night, when we were alone together at last in the same bed (Stacey’s guest bed, which she had made up beautifully for us and had surrounded with candles and flowers), I had to learn how to hold Rayya’s body in new and more careful ways so as not to hurt her.

She had more bruises and sore spots and less mobility.

Our uncertain physicality with each other seemed to be the bodily representation of our uncertain emotionality with each other.

She was fragile —a word I would never before have associated with Rayya.

Alone with me in the dark, cautiously, slowly, she began to speak.

She told me that she had been having dreams of her parents lately, both of whom were long dead.

Almost every night since coming to Stacey’s house, she said, either her mother or her father would come to visit her in her sleep.

She found these visitations upsetting, she confessed.

It was beautiful to see her parents again, but she knew they were drawing near in order to help escort her out of life—and that broke her heart and filled her with fear, because she was frightened of dying.

“I don’t want to go, baby,” she admitted. “I’m not ready to die.”

It was the first time she had ever said those words.

She went on, “I don’t know how to die. And it’s been kind of freaking me out that you haven’t been jumping in to solve things.

I don’t understand why you don’t have a plan for me, because you always have a plan for me.

It scares me a little bit that you aren’t trying to organize all this anymore.

I’m feeling it in my heart as a condemnation. ”

I said, “Sweetheart, you kept telling me that I was controlling your life, so I had to step back and let you find your way. Isn’t that what you wanted? You get to decide what you need now. I’ll help you as much as I can—but you get to make the plans now.”

“But what if I don’t know what to do?” she asked.

“Maybe I don’t know what to do, either.”

She took that in, and we were quiet for a while.

After a long silence, she said she had been dreaming of her grandmother a lot, too. Her grandmother—her “Tay-Tay”—was coming to her in dreams and speaking in Aramaic, which Rayya could barely understand. She saw other relatives in her dreams, too, including ancestors she knew only from photographs.

“It’s almost like there’s a gathering happening on the other side,” she said. “It’s like they all know I’m dying, so they’re coming for me. Or maybe I’m getting closer to them? It’s hard to know.”

She told me that she’d had a dream the other night in which she was trying to explain to her mother that she needed everyone to be “super fucking calm” around her from now on, because dying was so difficult and scary, and then her mother asked, “But are you yourself calm, habibi ?”

We both laughed at that—a little corrective mothering from the beyond.

“What was your mom wearing?” I asked, knowing that Georgette Elias had been always famous for her style.

“Brown suede culottes and a V-neck sweater with a lacy ruffled shirt underneath,” Rayya said. “Her classic red Chanel lipstick. Her hair just right.”

In another dream, she told me, she was visiting her father in the hospital room where he had died from pneumonia many years earlier.

Nobody else would talk to him, Rayya said, because they all thought he was already dead, but he winked at her in his friendly and conspiratorial old way and said, “Come over here, binti .” ( Binti is the Arabic term for “my daughter,” and it’s what Rayya’s father had always called her, with dearest affection.) In the dream, he took her hand and told her, “Don’t ever let anyone convince you that you’re a bad person.

” She replied to him, “But Daddy, look at all the bad things I did!” He said, “So? You think other people haven’t done bad things?

Never let anyone shame you, binti . You are extraordinary. ”

Then Rayya started crying and said to me, “Baby, I fucked everything up so bad with us. I don’t even know what happened.

We had such a small amount of time to be together, and I wasted it away.

Everything was so beautiful between us, and I had everything I’d ever wanted, and then suddenly it was gone.

I don’t even know why I did it. I guess I just had to wad everything up and throw it in the trash one more time.

And then one day I woke up here in Detroit, and I didn’t even know why I was here or where you went.

But I know I was bad. I’m so, so sorry.”