Crazy Enough (30 page)

Suzi2 came to help with the sorting of Mom's things and to have some lunch. She had a big manila envelope with her and, after lunch, gave me a look signaling a need to talk to me alone.

“Your ma would want you to finish this. I think you should.” She handed me the envelope. We were in Mom's little kitchen. All the cabinets were open and her cups and glasses, mugs, and Tupperware were in boxes on the counters and on the floor along with a big garbage bag for all the food she'd left behind, mostly condiments. I opened the envelope and read the heading on the handful of papers inside, “The Circle Adoption Services.”

“She started about a year ago, I was helping her, but she just didn't finish it. These folks have her adoption records.”

“Her birth mother?”

“Yup. You can finish it because you're her daughter and she's gone now.” Her eyes were red but she didn't cry. She was on a mission. “You should finish it, Stormy.”

She had a thick as chow-dah New England accent, full on pahk the cahhh, so when she said my name it sounded like “Staw-mee.”

I took the envelope and promised I would see it through.

After Suzi2 left, my brothers and I started hauling the boxes and bags down the elevator and to our cars. Everything we didn't take with us was given or thrown away. I said goodbye to John and Henry and watched them pull away through the sooted wet dregs of a half-assed snowfall. I went to my car, got in, and took a deep breath. My nose and mouth were suddenly full of lily of the valley, smoke . . . Mom?

The sheets. Shit.

Throw them away
.
Only sheets. Act normal.

I often worry about looking crazy, in general, and that concern always becomes more urgent whenever I'm in proximity to any hospital or mental-health-care facility. For good reason. I could easily picture a couple of big guys in white coats, bringing me inside. They gently tell me what's best for me while feeding me pills, then tuck me into bed with straps that go all the way around it, and a sleepy roommate who had eaten her own hands.

Act normal.

Normal. I was in the parking lot, standing in the wet pre-Christmas cold, next to a giant, mean-looking dumpster, screaming into the balled-up bedding of my dead mother.

People walked by me, I imagine to visit their family members, to celebrate an early Christmas. They had arms full of bright and shiny wrapped packages and little ones fussing in their just-for-Grandma, itchy holiday finery. A few tossed me uncomfortable glances hurrying through the sloshy cold, probably knowing full well what my deal was. They, too, would soon be tossing out some leftover, allegedly biohazard, belongings of their own dead loved ones.

This soft, Mom-scented pile was the last stuff that had given her comfort. She had been warm and safe, in a warm puff that held
her sweet until something woke her up, something made her get up and get her half-awake self into her wheelchair. But the last moments of her living, dreaming, nothing wrong, warm, her Christmas plans humming in her blonde little head, cradled on this pillowcase, breathing softly into these sheets, she was fine. There was an open suitcase on the floor, readying for a Christmas trip to her adopted stepmother's. There were Christmas cards ready to be sent. She was fully intending on living awhile longer. She had gone to bed and nestled in, fully expecting to wake up again, as we all do, every night.

Of course you're going to throw away the last thing that gave her comfort.

Shut the fuck up.

Just like you threw her away. Come on. It's cold. They're just fucking sheets. She didn't even die in them, fer chrissake.

No, she was alive in them, and minutes after she pulled herself out of them she was dead.

Stuff them into the Dumpster. Say goodbye. Do it. What's your problem?

“Fuck you,” I said out loud, then shoved the stuff in the wet maw of the big metal box.
Only sheets, they're only sheets
.

Mom was happy at the end. Of course, I only knew her for two days out of the six years I ran and hid from her while she had lost her leg and found herself. I told myself she was happy at the end. She sure had looked happy.

The boy who found her said she looked like she was asleep. Peaceful and pink with no evidence of distress leading up to the end. In every room at the facility, there were emergency call buttons, one by the bed and one in the bathroom. Mom hadn't pushed hers,
so it was safe to say she wasn't suffering. Mom loved emergencies, especially when she was the headliner, but she rolled into the great unknown without fuss or fanfare. She simply had gotten up, put her one-legged, paraplegic self into her wheelchair, navigated around her open suitcase on the floor, in the dark, got to the bathroom, onto the toilet and . . . was gone. Just like Elvis. The boy came in the morning to collect laundry and do a general check in and said she looked fine. She had only been gone maybe a half hour.

It was a bit insulting, to my brothers and me, that after a life so hell bent on misery and self-destruction, our mother died as soon as she got some peace. Mom wheels into her little halfway house of happiness, and God or whoever, goes and kicks the plug out. Oops.

The last time I remember seeing Mom happy was in Little Boar's Head. So we would have her service there. In her stuff I found a framed picture, of the five of us, in front of “Kittywake,” the shingled beach cottage my dad's parents would rent every summer. In the photo, Mom gleamed next to my dad, my brothers were in matching bathing suits, and I was snapped in mid-yell. I was probably crowing “Cheeese!” Mom was holding my shoulders. Though I was about four in the picture, my white sprout of a ponytail on top of my head was higher than her hip. We were all very tan, and looked happy. Mom hadn't tried to kill us yet, though I later learned she had already begun trying to off herself around the time the picture was taken. It looked like the capture of a happy moment, though. So I kept it, and my brothers and I started to plan the service based on it.

We would do it at St. Andrew's By The Sea, a tiny church on a shady hill just off Route 1A. John, being the oldest, would do the eulogy. Henry would do a reading and I would sing a song. It would be a quick and personal service with all Mom's favorite hymns, mostly Christmas carols. Then we would go to Ray's Seafood for fried clams
and lobsters that we could eat outside off sticky red-and-white-checked tablecloths. A perfect send-off for a woman we would never forget, but didn't know all that well.

Dad, my brothers, and I decided to scatter her ashes ourselves before the service. Family and friends were coming from all over, and it was shaping up to be a beautiful, hot July day, but at five something in the morning on the beach, the sun just peeking through the gray dawn over the ocean, it was chilly. We met directly across the street from Kittywake. Our little house, full of happy salt-water-taffy memories, was still there. Sort of. Now a monstrosity stood with it or rather,
on
it. An unfinished construction project literally straddled the original cottage. Some madman had tried to build a new, ultramodern thing, yet still incorporate the original house's footprint for some reason. At some point, though, whoever they were ran out of money and abandoned the whole horrible mess. It looked like Kittywake was getting slow-motion raped by a huge, tacky mansion from Florida.

Henry brought flowers. Dad brought big Styrofoam cups of Dunkin' Donuts coffee and Mom . . . half of her, anyway. The other half had gone to Grandmother Banks, who had her small service for Mom, earlier in the year.

We had one large Ziploc baggie full of dust and weird, nubby . . . bits. We mixed her ashes in with flower petals and both brothers and I scooped up a handful each, to pour into the Atlantic.

One at a time, we waded into the water to, I guess, meditate or pray before we released her.

I took my scoop of Mom and some flowers and high-stepped into the ocean. My feet quickly began to ache from the cold, and I
couldn't think of anything to say. I stood holding the gritty stuff in both hands, cupped together, wondering what part of her body I had. Her knee? Her head? She was a small lady, so there weren't a lot of ashes to start with. Did they blend the ashes? I guess they had been shaken pretty well in their bags for some time, six months?

“I'm sorry, Mom.” I looked for a sign, her face in the clouds, her voice in the seagulls screeching overhead. Nothing. I secretly hoped for a sign. Something magic, something significant that would tell me she was all good where she was, she was complete, happy, and I was forgiven. For some reason, I assumed there would be something, a nudge, a nod from the other side.
Mom always said that she was magic. One of her doctors told her that. I'm pretty sure it was the same doctor who said I should be crazy by now. Maybe I am. I'm freezing and wet, my mom is dead, I might be holding her actual face in my hands and I'm incapable of coming up with a single fucking worthwhile thing to say. I am an utter ruin of a human being.

“I'm . . .” Then I dropped her. My hands just opened. Ashes swirled like powdered milk and the flowers floated.

Nothing. I rinsed off my hands in the water and trudged out to my dad. We watched my brothers wading out and he patted my back. I tried to look as if I
had
felt a significant shift, that I had made peace, that all was well, but I just felt wet and cold and pissed at myself.

I went to my hotel and dressed for the service as half of our mom floated away.

I think the minister was a bit appalled with our sendoff, but I could care less. He was a nice man, but this was our deal.

The service was a perfect blend of Episcopal tradition and customized extras. John's eulogy was legendary, quoting from the
Book of Matthew, blending in a ripping rendition of the blessing of the Holy Hand Grenade from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Henry read a children's story, I planned to sing one of my songs.

Henry was always the tough one, the straight one. Besides getting angry once in a while, he was usually fairly stoic. While reading the sweet bedtime story that he read to his children but never heard from Mom, tears started to shine in his eyes. The poor guy hung in there as best he could, but started to lose it towards the end. I was crying openly, but trying to be quiet. Everyone was, out of respect and surprise to see my brother, who looked like a Heisman Trophy in a Brooks Brothers suit, regress to a sad little boy.