What We Have (35 page)

“Yes, she’s crawling,” I said, unnerved.
Between earth and heaven
, I thought, remembering the lines from
Hamlet
I’d been reading on the plane.

If she caught her mistake, she didn’t show it: She was moving on.

How were my students? What about my department, what were the other professors like? Who—this was so my mother—was I having lunch with?

“Oh—different people,” I told her. I mentioned a few names.

Actually, I liked my colleagues—the ones I’d met so far. I just hadn’t been eating lunch with them. Instead, I ate at my desk, facing a gray plaster wall with lighter gray squares on it where somebody else’s posters used to be. I underlined passages in
Hamlet
. Some days I called home and asked Annabel if I could talk to Sacha. Annabel was always willing to try and make this happen, but Sacha would thwack unhappily at the phone with her hand and whimper to get away. My voice when I wasn’t in the room with her confused her and made her cry. Sometimes I called Jacques and we talked in code. “How is she today? Any better? Did they change the morphine dose?”

One day I called Julie, and she said my father was thinking about canceling out patients for a while so he could spend more time with her during the day. We knew that was a bad sign. He’d wanted to save that until absolutely necessary.

I didn’t tell my mother that I went to campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays and prayed (except being me, I didn’t pray, it was more like intense wishing) that I could get through my classes and make it home before I fell apart.

None of my colleagues knew what was happening with my mother, except my chair. I couldn’t exactly ask for time off—I’d just started. I’d just had eight months off! I’d already had to ask my chair to see if we could slow down my tenure clock. When I’d taken the job back in February, I’d asked for credit for my two and a half years at Georgetown. Now, I wanted to give the credit back.

I didn’t tell my mother any of this.

I’d been rehearsing anecdotes to tell her, bringing stories for her the same way I’d brought photographs, dozens of them sticking together in my book bag, almost all of them identical shots of Sacha, pulling up on things, stepping on the feet of her terrycloth onesies so they stretched out behind her, but before I could show her, she was beckoning again for me to come closer, struggling to get something out of the drawer of the bedside table. Her eyelids lowered, she was suddenly fighting off exhaustion, it seemed to have dropped over her like a parachute, she couldn’t fight it, but there was something she wanted to do before she fell asleep for what must have been, even just that day, the dozenth time.

 

THIS VISIT, SMALL THINGS BOTHERED
me. The fact that Ray, who my parents were paying seventy-five dollars an hour, couldn’t even make my mother a new cup of tea when she asked for it. I found her microwaving the same wretched cup of brown water when I came downstairs, and I wanted to strangle her.

“How about some
fresh
tea,” I said. Who knew how much time my mother had left? She almost never wanted to eat or drink anything, and when she did, why couldn’t she have a cup of tea that was drinkable?

Ray put her lips together, looking past me.

It was easy to get mad at Ray, to take things out on her. But in fact, Ray wasn’t a bad person. In fact, she was pretty compassionate, in her own way. Later, when I found her down in the kitchen while my mother was napping, she explained that my mother’s biggest enemy now was pain. If she took enough morphine to be “comfortable”—Dr. Brenner’s new goal—she felt like she was completely out of it. Couldn’t read or write. Couldn’t stay on the phone for more than a few minutes. The morphine made her unbearably sleepy—she dropped off, just like that—and it turned her mouth to paper and didn’t so much get rid of the pain as—this was Ray’s version of my mother’s description—“put it next to her, somehow.” So she tried to tough it out, struggled with Ray over every ounce—no, no, she didn’t want that much—it was liquid, a funny shade of gold—but then she hurt so badly she cried and begged for more, only to get hysterical again (Ray’s description) when Ray brought it, begging her to pour half the dose down the drain.

It wasn’t fair blaming Ray, trying to make things all one way or another.
Good and bad
, my mother used to say, joking about the ways in which people divide life up so neatly—the good nurse, the bad nurse. All one thing or another. But of course it wasn’t that simple. When we weren’t here, my sisters and I, Ray helped my mother in ways we couldn’t fathom. Already, impossible as it was for me to understand, my mother—who could always do everything (except knit)—couldn’t do most things for herself. She needed help going to the bathroom. She couldn’t get in or out of the bath by herself. It was Ray and Dora who were there now, lifting her, helping her, listening to her stories, and maybe that was why I was so irritated with Ray, not because she kept reheating the same cup of tea my mother sipped but wouldn’t drink, but because Ray stayed, permanent, paid, and all I did over and over again was come back here just to leave.

 

MY MOTHER SLEPT ON AND
off all that afternoon. When she woke, sometime after five, the workers were gone, the hallway was quiet. Dora, who I hadn’t met yet, was parking her Toyota in the driveway, and Ray was packing up to leave. One watch giving way to another. The changing of the guard.

My mother was calling me. She wanted to talk to me before Dora came. In this tiny space between nurses, this space left for us to be just us, alone.

Mother, daughter.

Nobody else here. No sisters, no baby, no husbands. Not even my father. Just my mother and I: the two of us. Early evening light coming through the shutters. Her wig had tipped to one side while she slept, and if I had been another kind of person, I would’ve scooped her up in my arms and held her tightly against me and sobbed. Instead, I stood uneasily in the doorway, still feeling sick to my stomach, my eyes swimming, wishing there was something I could do to make any of this better.

“Ame,” she said, her voice hoarse. Her voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else.

Hamlet’s ghost
.

“I have something for you. Do me a favor—” She shifted, pain flashed across her face. To be alive for her now was to hurt. She gestured in the direction of the bedside table. “Open up that drawer and see if you can find a little box—”

I walked around the bed. The drawer, like all her drawers, always, was painfully neat. On the shelf below the drawer, there was a thick blue volume. An oncology textbook. My father had told us she’d asked him for it sometime this summer. She didn’t want the dumbeddown version, she’d told him. She wanted to know what was coming, the official version, not Cancer Lite.

In the drawer, there was a tube of ChapStick. A black velvet box. A paperback—something from the Hemlock Society, whatever that was. This is what she kept next to her now. I took the box out, held it, waited.

“Open it, Mellie.”

Inside, there was Sylvia’s ring. The gold ring with the moonstone set in a bezel. The stone had a face carved in it. I knew this ring by heart—we’d always called it the “moon ring.” My mother had kept it in her jewel box, with several other family heirlooms. Sometimes, when she was getting dressed to go out on a Saturday night, sitting at her dressing table in her bedroom, she’d let Sara, Julie, and me take her jewelry out and lay it out on her bed. She kept the moon ring in a special box, way at the back of her jewelry case. It was always the one I begged to try on.

The ring had a special history. Sylvia had gotten it for her sixteenth birthday. She wore it every day, my mother told me—never took it off. Her godfather had it made for her in Africa. Other rings came and went—her engagement ring, her wedding band. But the moon ring was the one she always wore.

“I want you to have it,” my mother said now, and before I could protest, she told me she was giving an important piece of jewelry to each of us. Sara was getting the diamond ring Jerry’s father had given his mother when he was born—to celebrate. A boy, after three girls in a row. Julie was getting a ruby: my mother’s birthstone. All three rings passed down from one of my mother’s parents. Something of hers for each of us to have.

I stared at the ring.

I remembered how I used to beg her to let me hold it. I loved the way the light shone through the gray-mauve stone, the kindliness of the carved face.

Now, I wanted to close the box and hand it back to her. It was hers, and though I knew my mother had always been preemptive, a planner, that she wanted to give her treasures away while she still could—that this was, in some last, implausible way, a chance to see a glimpse of the future, to see her ring on my finger—I didn’t want to take it.

Maybe I thought if I didn’t, this moment would hang, suspended, that I could stave off what was coming. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t accept this, I couldn’t do what she was asking me to do. But her eyes were already starting to close. In a minute or two, she’d be asleep again.

I took the ring out of the box and slid it on my finger. The gold was slightly warm.

And it fit. Like all these years, it had been waiting for me.

THE BRITISH HAVE A SAYING,
“safe as houses.” I remember hearing it while I was studying at Oxford, and it stuck in my mind. When Sandi opened the front door to the stucco house we’d been waiting to look at—there was something fiddly about the lock, it took a minute—that saying came back to me, because the overwhelming feeling that washed over me was one of safety.

Maybe it was because the house was made of stone, maybe because it seemed so solid—bigger than any of the other places we’d looked at, with higher ceilings. I’m not sure. I only know that as soon as we opened the door, a feeling of relief flooded through me. We stepped inside a vestibule inlaid with intricate red tiles. Beyond, we could see into a front hall filled with light.

In actual fact, the house needed lots of work. It had been built in 1910, and lived in by only three families, each for a quarter of a century. None of the previous owners had been ready to undertake the house’s most pressing projects, and by the time we saw it, it was a mess of bad wiring and desperately needed a new roof; we wouldn’t be allowed to open the side door that led out to the porch until we could afford to have the bricks relaid, and there were signs of water damage in the basement. We took all of this in, but none of it mattered.

It might have been partly exhaustion that led us through room after room, wide-eyed, touching the tips of each other’s fingers, breathing out to each other little phrases of admiration. “High ceilings.” “Another fireplace.” This was the house Jacques had asked about a while ago, a square stucco house set just a bit too close to a street just a shade too busy—that’s why we even had a chance of being able to afford it. That, and the fact that the owner, a tall ebullient woman with a shock of white hair and penetrating eyes, had recently determined she was done with the suburbs and wanted to move downtown. The owner had seen as many buyers as we’d seen houses. Rejected on all counts. Sandi and the other agent whispered speculatively to each other—the difficult buyers meeting the difficult sellers. Who would have believed it? And who would have believed that we’d like each other right away, all the difficulty on both sides evaporating?

We loved the house. We loved the old bell system that let people buzz different rooms from the kitchen. We loved the old stone porch, the wide staircase. The house was closer to the university than I might have liked, and Jacques, list in hand, was stricken by how much work it needed, but there was a tacit understanding between us that these things were tolerable, that what mattered were other things—how solid the floors felt. How the back door opened into a garden that was level, if overgrown. At the top of the stairs and to the left was the room that settled it for me. It had belonged to the owner’s daughter before she went to college; she’d scratched her name in one of the many windows that lined the room on two sides, overlooking the bramble-filled garden. I knew right away this would be Sacha’s room. We were done looking, this would be home.

It worked, the way things sometimes do after lots of effort spent elsewhere, with surprising ease. The negotiations were amiable, the owner fair, the lawyers polite, the closing date speeded up, and because the house was less than half a mile from the House with the Green Shag, the owner let me come with my blueprint paper and my measuring tape and my video camera, and I took notes on dimensions and hired painters in advance and took videos for my mother, room by room. Sometimes my hand shakes when I take pictures, and that day it shook even more than usual. I still seemed to have whatever stomach bug had been bothering me off and on for the past few weeks—I was probably fighting off the flu—so I knew the movies were coming out a little fuzzy, but at least she’d get the main idea.