Five Days Left (22 page)

Mara

Mara was about to review the to-do list she’d peeled from the bottom of her laptop when the phone lit up. It was Dr. Thiry’s clinic, and this time she answered, knowing they were calling to discuss the message she’d left with the service the night before, about her need for more sleeping pills.

They had checked the date of her last refill and they were clear to call in another, the receptionist said. Mara could pick it up from the pharmacy anytime. Mara grimaced at the thought of walking back in there. Maybe this time she’d make Harry’s day by sending him in for her.

“While I’ve got you,” the receptionist said, “should we schedule your next follow-up? I don’t see that we have you down here.”

“Oh, yes, that’s a great idea,” Mara said, feeling her cheeks heat with the lie. “But I don’t have my calendar with me. Can I get back to you later?”

“Of course. But try not to leave it too late—you know how he schedules out a few weeks in advance. Although it’s nothing like the pediatrician, right? I don’t know about you, but I have to book my kids’ appointments months ahead of time now. Their dentist, too. Everyone’s
so busy these days, soon the hairdresser will be on a months-out schedule.” She laughed and Mara joined in halfheartedly while quickly she reached for her to-do list and added, “Schedule L appts.”

She hung up with Dr. Thiry’s office and immediately dialed Laks’s pediatrician. “Just for the five-year shots?” the receptionist asked. “Or do you want to get the well child lined up, too? In fact, that only gets us to December, and the system lets me go out twelve months. I could get the six-year-old shots in the system, too, if you’d like. Nothing like planning ahead!”

“Perfect,” Mara said. “And you’ll send postcards to the house, right, reminding them—I mean, reminding me—a few weeks in advance?”

“Always do.”

She called the dentist next. “I thought I’d just line up her next three half-year cleanings, while I’m thinking of it,” she said. “I’m about to have a very busy work schedule and I thought I’d take care of it now, while I have a little time.”

“Oh, sorry,” the receptionist said, “but I can only log in one cleaning at a time. Maybe you could put a place marker in your calendar to call me back in six months? No mom is too busy for a quick phone call, right?”

No, Mara wanted to tell her. But some mothers are too dead.

Mara watched the phone fall from her hand. It hit the counter, bounced once and clattered onto the floor. The rectangular piece that covered the battery flew off with the impact. She could hear a tinny voice wafting up from the tile, and though she couldn’t make out the words, she could imagine what the voice was saying. She stared at it, paralyzed, until the tinny voice turned into a dial tone.

Lifting her gaze from the floor, she swept it around the kitchen and family room and pictured Laks and Tom moving stiffly, sadly, through their days. Laks sitting at the counter, head hung over her cereal but making no move to lift it to her mouth with her spoon. Too upset, even,
to pick it up and crush it between her thumb and fingers. Tom standing on the other side of the counter, barely sipping his coffee while he urged the girl to eat. The two of them walking to the curb together, the child clinging to his arm and begging to stay home from school.

And it would be the same in the evenings, the two of them picking at their dinner until Tom finally gave up and let them both get away with only one or two bites. Perfunctory bath time, neither of them in the mood to play pirate ship or any of Laks’s other silly made-up games. And finally bedtime, the most painful time of day for anyone who misses someone. Mara could imagine them clinging to each other on the girl’s bed, Tom trying to hold himself together as Laks bawled, a stack of books beside them, untouched yet another night.

Because of her. Because of what she was doing. The dial tone coming from the phone sounded to Mara now like the flat line on an EKG machine—the one-note dirge that announces someone has gone, and someone has been left behind. What sound could cause more grief? How could she voluntarily join that particular chorus?

How could she?
Mara imagined that phrase ringing out in a choir, too, a sea of voices—the moms at school, the lawyers at the firm, their neighbors. Steph, Gina, her parents. And Tom, loudest of all. How could she do this to us?

Using a stool for balance, Mara bent to retrieve the phone and shut it off. She needed the noise to stop, and with it the images of what these rooms would look like once the sound of her own flat line joined the chorus of those that had gone before, ruining lives as it rang out.

It’s
for
them, she reminded herself. She was doing this
for
them. Not
to
them. She had to focus on that. She sat at the kitchen table and regarded her to-do list. If she distracted herself with the pain she would cause, and lost sight of the pain she was trying to prevent, she wouldn’t get through her list of tasks. And she would never be able to go through with the final one.

“It’s
for
them,” she whispered, and then, louder, she said it again. “It’s
for
them.” She lifted a pen and wrote “FOR THEM” on the top of her sticky note, and made herself say it again, even louder this time. “It’s
for
them.”

She cleared her throat, straightened her shoulders and struck through the item she’d added to her list a few moments ago: “Schedule L appts.” Scanning the rest of the sticky note, she gave a determined nod. With two days to go, she was nearly finished with her calls and e-mails, but there were other important items she still needed to complete. “Tom—advice” was at the top of the note and still unfinished. Sticking the note to the table, Mara turned to her laptop and opened the document she had started weeks before—a bulleted list of advice she had been compiling for Tom as new ideas came to her. She typed the information about scheduling appointments months in advance below her admonition to be sure to buy Laks’s shoes one size too big so she had room to grow.

Above the shoe-buying tip: buy the pants with the hidden elastic and buttons in the waistband, so they’ll be long enough for her legs but still able to cinch tightly enough to fit her tiny waist; don’t be shy about playing the widower card when the PTA starts hassling you to help with the gift-wrap fund-raiser in December and whatever else they come up with—those things are huge time sucks, and though the women will try to convince you otherwise, it’s more about their needing something to do than the school needing money; for that matter, play the widower card to get Laks whatever teacher she wants most—the office will tell you they don’t take requests, but they take them from the PTA and they won’t be able to say no to the widowed doctor; always, always ask for Elizabeth at the hair salon—Marian drags her comb too roughly over Laks’s scalp and she will scream bloody murder for the entire appointment and all the way home.

Sixty minutes later, Mara struck a line through the “Tom—advice” item on her list and sighed. What to do now? She’d sent e-mails to everyone she’d written down and suffered through a frustrating, passive-aggressive call with Tom’s mother, who was already drunk enough, at nine fifteen in the morning, that she’d never remember to mention the
call to Tom. She’d checked the forum for word from MotorCity. There was none, and unable to fake her way through the topic SoNotWicked had posted today—fitting exercise into a busy schedule—she had signed off quickly. She assessed the stack of magazines beside her laptop, lifted one and scanned the cover, tossed it back on the pile.

It was only nine-thirty. Harry wouldn’t be there until eleven, and she had already showered and dressed. Sticking her bottom lip out, she blew a long stream of air upward, making her short bangs ruffle against her forehead. She peered at the remaining items on her list. Her letters to Tom and Laks were finished; she would allow herself one last review tomorrow before printing them, but there were no more big changes to make. She lifted a pen and struck through that item, and the next: last night, she had gone through the two plastic boxes she kept under the guest room bed, one of cards Tom had given her over the years—for her birthday, their anniversary, Valentine’s Day—the other of artwork Laks had brought home from school: a handprint turkey for Thanksgiving, with seven googly eyes and three feet, but only one tail feather; a snowman whose head was bigger than his body, and who wore a ball cap like the one Tom ran in, rather than a stovepipe one; a pink heart, much bigger on the left side than the right (“Medically accurate, even if not all that artistic,” Tom had said).

It was risky, she knew, rereading all Tom’s love notes, running her hand over the shirts in his closet. Going through all of Laks’s drawings, her first printed words. Burying her nose in the girl’s stuffed animals. Sex with Tom. It was picking her way through land mines—any one of them could explode in her face, shatter her resolve. But it would feel cowardly not to meet the sights and smells and all of it. Like apologizing in the dark.

There was a selfish reason, too. She wanted to absorb it all, let it seep through the layers of her skin and drip into her bones. Take it all with her.

She glanced at the list again and realized she had missed one thing: looking at all the paintings and other art they had acquired over the years. Starting in the living room, she ran her hand the length of the
mantel and over the expensive ceramics their overpriced decorator had insisted they buy right after they moved in. There were four in all, whimsical, Chihuly-looking pieces whose bright colors matched perfectly the intricate custom tile work around the fireplace. Tom had remarked that the pieces would make great vases and the decorator almost hit him. Not one drop of water was to go in them, on them or anywhere near them, she admonished; they had cost more than many people spent on their first car. They were to admire, not to use.

By then, Tom was days away from firing the decorator. The two of them had practically come to blows over Tom’s decision to change the custom fireplace from gas to wood burning. A quaint, old-fashioned idea, having a real fire, the decorator had condescended in her moneyed Texas drawl, but they needed to think about resale. No one with the means to buy this kind of house would be willing to kneel on the hearth and fuss with dirty logs and ashes. Mara had to stop Tom from filling the ceramic pieces with flowers before the woman’s next (and final) visit. She smiled now, thinking how proud he would be to see her holding one of the pretentious objects in her clumsy hands, risking a fatal fall to the tile below. She placed it beside the others and moved on, running her fingers over the etchings in a cut-glass picture frame. This, she wouldn’t take risks with.

It was a picture of her and Laks, taken last Thanksgiving. Mara is sitting on the floor of the family room, legs spread wide, while the girl reclines between her mother’s knees. Laks is pitched at a wild sideways angle and she is peering up at her mother, her mouth open, mid-laugh. Mara’s head is tilted toward her daughter, her mouth as wide as the girl’s. Her arms are draped over the small shoulders and the girl is gripping one of her mother’s elbows in each small hand. They had sat that way for an hour, chatting and cuddling, while Tom snuck off for the camera.

The bridge of Mara’s nose began to burn.

“No.” She said it firmly, pressing fingers into her eyelids as she looked away from the photograph. “No.”

For
them, she reminded herself. She was doing Laks a favor. Tom,
too. And she was almost there. This was not the time to start questioning her plan.

Or was it the very time?

Mara made herself look at the picture again. Mother and child, cuddling and chatting. Was there anything better? On winter days in Montreal, Mara would trudge home from school in the bitter cold to find Neerja waiting in the kitchen with hot chocolate and cookies. Mara would climb into her mother’s lap and feel warm arms around her as she chatted away about what she had learned, or who had been sent to the office, or what games they had played at recess.

As she got older, she sat in the chair across the table from her mother but she never outgrew the routine of chatting with Neerja about her day. And although she stopped telling her mother everything, she still confided in her. Not because Neerja always had the best advice—their generations and upbringing were different enough, in fact, that Mara sometimes had to stifle a laugh at the solutions her mother proposed about boys and friendships.

But Neerja always listened as though what Mara had to say was the most interesting thing in the world. She always nodded along, and Mara always felt understood, and like her mother was on her side, even when she was telling her about how she’d gotten in trouble in class or received a bad grade on a test or forgotten to hand in her homework.

At the end of high school, when Mara had an after-school job, they moved their chats to the evenings, before bed. Throughout college, when Mara lived on campus and then in apartments with friends, they couldn’t sustain daily visits but they called each other. And here they were still, dropping by each other’s house a few times each week, though lately it was Neerja coming to Mara. Mara still didn’t tell her mother everything, and she still had to hide a smile from time to time over the advice her mother gave. But they were still talking. Mara still confided in her. Neerja still listened as though hearing what her daughter had to say was more important than anything else she could do.

Mara listened to Laks the way Neerja listened to Mara. It was the greatest gift she knew how to give the girl, the loudest expression of her love. And even if she couldn’t keep it up for a few decades like her own mother had, she could make it last past Sunday. Long after she stopped being able to greet Laks with after-school snacks, or play tea party in the backyard, she would still be able to listen.

And maybe the dozens of things, hundreds even, that Mara wouldn’t be able to do for Laks anymore wouldn’t matter as much, as long as she could still do that. Because looking back on it, it wasn’t the hot chocolate or the cookies or even Neerja lifting Mara onto her lap and holding her tightly around the waist that had meant so much to Mara. It was the listening.