Last Things (20 page)

My mother fumbled around in the desk for a pad and pen. She would leave a message in the bottle, she said, and I could send it out to sea. She stuffed the paper in the bottle and we went outside. Behind the hotel was a wreck of a beach. We walked across it to where the ocean began. I felt like a spy waiting for a secret messenger, but the sand was empty. My mother threw the bottle into the sea. “There,” she said, swaying slightly in the wind. “There.” In the moonlight, I could see our footprints in the sand, curving away from the hotel.

That night, as I fell asleep, I remembered the story that went with the footprint picture.

Once there was a man whose life was filled with pain and sorrow. It hadn’t always been that way, but it had been for long enough that it was all the man could remember. One day he cried out, O Lord, why have you gone away from me? Why have you left my side? Jesus appeared then and showed the man a movie of his life. Beneath the scenes of other, happier days was a picture of two sets of footprints on the beach. See, Jesus said, I walked beside you always. You were never alone. Then the movie speeded up. There was a scene of a woman crying, an empty crib, a dark, boarded-up house. Beneath the scenes was the picture of the beach, but this time there was only one set of footprints. The man cried out, How could you have left me in my time of need? Your footsteps vanish in my darkest hour. Why did you forsake me? My friend, Jesus said. Don’t you see? That is where I carried you
.

I woke up very early and thought of the bottle floating out to sea. It was almost morning. Outside our window, someone was humming. There was the sound of cars and then all at once of rain.

My mother was still fast asleep. On the dresser was the map she had bought in the gift shop. During the night, she’d marked a new route on it and circled San Francisco in red. She stirred suddenly, but she didn’t wake. This was the first time I had seen her sleep in
six days. I’m becoming a new thing, she’d told me. While she slept, I shone a flashlight on her, half afraid of what I’d find.

I was hungry and searched the hotel room for something to eat. I looked in my mother’s pocketbook and under the bed. In the trash can, I found half an apple and a few potato chips in a paper bag. I took these out and ate them. At the bottom of the bin was my Disneyland flyer covered with grease. Also, a brochure for a hotel in Anaheim. I cleaned these up and put them in my pocket. Across the room, my mother tossed and turned in her sleep. She mumbled something, then was quiet again.

I got dressed and went outside to the pay phone. In my pocket, I had a matchbook with the hotel’s name on it. I dialed my father’s number. When he came to the phone, I started to cry. “Grace? Is that you, sweetheart?” he said. “Grace? Just tell me where you are.”

When I got back to the room, my mother was up. “Where did you go?” she asked. She had makeup on and her favorite dress, but her breath was rotten. “The beach,” I said. I got back under the covers and closed my eyes.

“No, no, don’t be a sleepyhead,” she said. “We have to be on our way.”

I hid my face from her. I can be there by midnight, my father had said. Whatever you do, don’t let her leave.

“I’m sick,” I whispered. I chewed on a corner of the sour blanket to make this true.

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “You just need some fresh air.” She threw the covers off me and pulled me out of bed. “Just freshen up and we’ll be off.” She paced up and down the room as if she couldn’t keep still. “No time for dawdling, Grace.”

I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I could hear my mother singing to herself in the next room. “Five minutes,” she called. I was so hungry I felt light-headed. I leaned over the toilet and tried to throw up, but nothing came out. I wondered what to do. Was my father already on a plane? Should I leave him a clue? But how would I know where she planned to go?

I opened my mother’s travel case and looked inside. I took out her pink bubble bath and poured it down my throat. It tasted like soap and perfume and made me gag, but I kept it down. I opened the bathroom door. “All set?” my mother said. She took our suitcases out to the car. I sat on the bed and put on my shoes. Suddenly I felt the bubble bath rising up in me. I ran to the toilet and vomited up a pink mess. “Grace, are you all right?” my mother called. She followed me into the bathroom and I threw up all over again. “Oh my goodness, you poor child,” she said. She helped me back to my bed and tucked me in. I could still feel the sickness rolling around inside me. My mother brought a cool washcloth and held it to my face. “Go back to sleep, my love,” she said.

I slept for a long time and woke to the sound of a key in the door. “It’s just me,” my mother said when she
saw my startled look. “I brought you soup and ginger ale.” I tried to eat the soup, but it made my stomach hurt. I pushed it away and closed my eyes again. It was hot in the room. I tried to remember what it felt like to walk outside in the snow.

My mother held her hand to my cheek. “I think I should take you to a doctor,” she said. I told her I didn’t want to go, but she wouldn’t listen. She searched the room for her car keys. I looked at the clock. It was only nine. “Please, just let me sleep a little while,” I begged.

My mother hesitated. I closed my eyes and made my breathing slow. I was afraid she might swoop down and carry me off, but after a while I heard her turn on the TV. I counted to a thousand, then I opened my eyes. My mother was watching a movie about Louis XIV, the Sun King. Afterwards, she seemed excited and talked on and on about all sorts of things, but she didn’t say anything more about the doctor.

“Do you realize that back then everyone was completely filthy? Even the king’s wigs were filled with bugs and dirt,” she said. “Meat was so rotten that spices were as valued as gold. Often, when a man undid a woman’s corset, he was so overpowered by the smell of her that he fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts.”

She stood up and paced around the room. Then she grabbed a pencil off the table and waved it like a sword. “Have you ever seen a duel, Grace?” she asked. “Imagine, if you can, two horribly smelly men meeting
in a square to fight. They insult each other cleverly while all around them spectators cheer. Then they walk ten paces and turn. The last one to draw his pistol is shot dead. Then everyone goes inside and has a feast.”

“Why do they duel?” I asked.

“Because of a woman, of course,” she said. “At the feast, the woman who caused all the trouble is given a place of honor at the table and between courses she clasps the victor’s knee.” A car pulled into the parking lot and my mother paused. We could hear it idling outside the window, then it turned off.

“Of course, the dead man lay dreaming,” my mother said. “For that is precisely what love is.” She sighed and held the pencil to her lips. She looked at me oddly as if I was a stranger to her. “One day you’ll be just like me,” she said. “Do you know that?”

She told me that at the end of death there was a long tunnel and in it awaited everyone you ever loved. But if you never loved anyone there was just an empty room. You went into the room, which had many beautiful things, and you waited there for someone. Time passed easily in this room, she said, and so it was always a surprise to learn that so much had passed.

Someone knocked on the door. My mother drew her pencil like a sword. “Who goes there?” she called.

“Anna? Is that you?” my father asked.

My mother looked at me and then she looked away. “Come in, Jonathan,” she said and unlocked the door.

My father paid a man five hundred dollars to drive the Purple Pig home. He took it to the car wash to get the smell out, but it didn’t work. “Jesus Christ,” the man said when he picked it up. “What died in here?”

On the way to the airport, my mother didn’t talk to anyone. My father took her hand in his. His hair was gray at the roots where the dye had worn off. “You’re nothing but bone, Anna,” he said. She didn’t tell him she was evolving. She just looked out the window at the empty sand. “How did you find us?” she asked him finally. “Credit-card receipts,” he said.

On the plane, I ate steak and mashed potatoes and seven bags of peanuts. My mother turned and looked at me. “I see you’ve recovered,” she said.

I watched clouds drift past my window. After a while, it was too dark to see anything. I tried to sleep, but I was afraid something would happen if I closed
my eyes. Across the aisle, my father was speaking to my mother in a quiet voice. He talked and talked to her, but she didn’t say a word.

In the middle of the night, my father pointed to his watch and said, “Look, Grace, we lost an hour. Where do you think it went?”

I looked at my father’s watch and then at my own. “Did we lose it in the desert?” I asked, thinking of the darkness there. My father laughed and shook his head.

“He came while you were sleeping,” my mother said, “and stole your hour away.”

Later, on the way back from the airport, she handed me a note.
YVNE
, it said. I knew it was Annic, but I couldn’t translate it from memory. I stared at it for a long time, hoping to remember, but nothing came to me. Finally, I put the note in my pocket and went to sleep. As soon as we got home, I went upstairs and got out my decoder key. LIAR, it meant.

For three days after we got back, my mother wouldn’t come out of her room. My father left food and flowers outside the door and slept on the couch in the living room. Sometimes she’d sneak out in the middle of the night to take the flowers, but she always left the food. I had an idea that my mother might talk to Edgar, but whenever I called his house there was no
one home. My father said he hadn’t heard a word from him since we left for New Orleans.

On the fourth day, my mother came out of her room. She said that she had seen a man in the street beneath the yellow light who beckoned to her repeatedly. His face was orange, she told me, and his body was striped like a bee’s. But as soon as she went to the door, he vanished.

That night, my father made a list entitled
What You Believe/What Is in Fact True
and wrote on the right side:
The man you saw was most likely a crossing guard, guiding neighborhood children across the street
.

My father drove to the library and checked out a stack of psychology books. Then he made my mother take a test he found in one of them. He showed her pictures of a man and a woman and told her to arrange them into a story. The pictures were in black-and-white. There was a woman standing alone, then a man came in the room carrying flowers, then there was a picture of the flowers on the floor and the man and woman standing apart.

My mother told the story like this: flowers on the floor, woman standing alone, man entering with flowers, man and woman standing apart. “What led up to this?” my father asked, pointing to the flowers on the floor. “The expression on her face,” my mother said.

The next day, he took her to a doctor, who said her brain wasn’t working properly because it was missing
a kind of salt. He said this after my mother stayed up all night and made me a gingerbread house out of frosting and dimes. On the way home, my mother threw the pills he had given her out the window and threatened to jump out of the car, but my father hit the electric locks before she could. Later my mother wrote furiously on the
What You Believe/What Is in Fact True
list until she fell asleep. When I was sure she was out, I poured a little bit of salt in her ear. Now she’ll remember her old life, I thought.

That night, my father told me if my mother didn’t improve he would have to take her to the hospital. “We’ll have to be strong, Grace,” he said.

But the next morning my mother came out of her room and announced she would make pancakes. I thought she looked very pretty, expertly flipping them through the air. Her eyes were ringed with purple because she hardly ever slept anymore. My father stood tentatively in the doorway. “Anna,” he said, “there’s a meteor shower tonight. Would you like to watch it with us?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I have a date with the crossing guard again.” She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. He laughed too. Later, when the lights streaked across the sky, my father sang, “Chicken Little’s mistake was an easy one to make,” and danced with my mother on the wet lawn. “La di da, my love,” she said, the night before she disappeared.