Paint Me a Monster (21 page)

Gaga told Mom to call Dr. Dryfus. Liz and I have told Mom to see Dr. Dryfus, but she won’t make an appointment. Once Mom said she had “rectal bleeding.” Even we knew this wasn’t a good sign and insisted she call the doctor. We’ve given up. She doesn’t listen to us.

Maybe because her stomach’s gotten so round and because she can’t zip any of her pants, she finally went to the doctor’s office last week. The doctor said something about a shadow on the liver. Something is definitely not right, and Mom’s going to the hospital tomorrow. A hospital with a specialty.

“Six weeks to six months to live,
if
she has chemo,” the doctor says. The words are splinters, short, sharp, and deep. My mind skips to what I know of six months’ time.

Mercury can rotate around the sun six times. A baby can learn to crawl. Spring buds can blossom into leafy branches, change colors, drop, and crunch. Branches become barren once more. A spider can lay more than one hundred thousand eggs. . . .

Six weeks in school lasts forever; six weeks now feels like seconds.

Six months ago was spring. I took the PSAT practice test for college. Liz shopped for an elegant satin belted formal in anticipation of the New Blossom Ball she was invited to. Evan still attended military school where the sun always shone. He didn’t want to go to high school here. He wanted to fly planes. Gaga did endless charity work. Mom did normal things, too. She shopped, played cards, got her nails done, laughed, and lunched with her friends. She bathed herself, used a fork and spoon, and ate food—six months ago. Who’d have thought then that we’d be taking turns sitting at a medical facility that specialized in cancer care? Six months ago.

The doctor listens to Mom with his stethoscope.

“Her breathing is labored, worse than yesterday. I’m afraid she has pneumonia.” He frowns. “We can’t administer chemo until the pneumonia is gone.”

Oxygen and drainage tubes and IVs are new body parts for Mom. Her hands are red from clenching the bed rail.
It takes energy to die.
For a moment, I want to run away.

The doctor sees me wince and takes Mom’s hand. “Rose, you have a grip like a vise,” he jokes.

“I’m practicing for my golf swing.” She chokes on the words and lays slump backed, fragile, against a pile of pillows. Mom’s hands drop from the rail, red palms flame against the white sheets.

Without moving, those hands telegraph a message, as electrifying as their power once was.
Mom holds the rail not for comfort, but for life! As long as her fingers encircle the rails, she knows she’s alive!

I’m on fire and shivering at the same time. The desperation in those red, irritated palms pricks me like a thousand needles. Desperation infects me! How do I make everything OK? I watch Mom clutch life as she’s clutched everything—tighter and tighter until it disintegrates. My legs give way. I lurch and crumple into a chair and listen to the beep of monitors.

Names from childhood slip from Mom’s lips. Her eyes are closed. She raises a hand in the air above her mouth, fingers V’ed as if a cigarette rested between them. In and out, in and out, Mom moves her hand above her lips.

Oh my God! She has an oxygen tube stuck in her nose, and she’s puffing on an imaginary cigarette. Oh my God! Make her stop! I want to yell. This is sick. Of course it’s sick. She’s sick. That’s why we’re here.

“Lizzie, look,” I say, imitating the smoking motion. “That’s disgusting.”

“It’s spooky. She’s somewhere else,” Liz answers, stepping back, as if she might get cancer from the nonexistent smoke.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say. Liz and I link arms and blow kisses to Mom through the invisible smoke.

For a change, the waiting room is empty. Liz and I sit at a table with an unfinished puzzle of antique valentines. We’ve worked on it all week. Yesterday, we completed a lace heart that reads,
Affectionately Yours
. The heart is delicate.

“Do you think it’s coincidental that the tables are covered with puzzles?” I ask Liz.

“I don’t know. Why do you ask questions like that?”

Hidden in the scrambled cardboard chips lies a perfect picture. Each piece, part of the whole, yet dependent on the others. If one piece is lost, the entire picture changes. Does that make the picture incomplete or just different?

“Your mother moves in and out of consciousness. The increase in medication we gave her reduces the pain, but it also fogs her mind. Yesterday she was lucid. Today is not so good,” the oncologist reports.

“Can Mom hear us?” I hope she didn’t hear the medical resident with curly hair ask me to meet him for a Coke.

I lean close to Mom’s ear. “Mom, can you hear me?”

“Let her be, Rinnie,” Evan says. He propels a paper airplane in front of the window. It soars past the clouds and glides to the airplane graveyard on the floor.

“Maybe she’ll wake up later.” Liz looks up from the newspaper and bites her painted fingernails. “Does anyone have a nail file?” She uncrosses her legs and removes her shoes.

“You aren’t going to gnaw your toenails, are you?” Evan asks.

“I have an emery board in my purse, dear,” Gaga says. She jostles through her plaid tote and unloads a wallet, glasses case, an address book, compact, and pen, all the color red, before she pulls the emery board from a gray plastic sleeve. Gaga hands it to Liz and rearranges the contents of her purse.

“Pop Pop brought the most luminous red roses to the hospital when your mother was born. Her skin was as velvety as the petals. That’s why we named her Rose,” Gaga muses.

“Mom, wake up,” I say again. The words settle like dust, too faint to make an impression. “I love you, Mom. In spite of what you said, I love you.” I hope she hears me. I think of yesterday when it was my turn to sit with Mom while the others went to lunch. . . .

“Can I get you anything Mom? Would you like some ice cream?”

“No. I’m not hungry.”

“Mom, you have to eat. You have to eat to get stronger for the chemo.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“How about fudge? You love fudge.”

“TV.” Mom grunts, lifts a few fingers, and points to the dark screen. The effort it takes for her to raise her hand prompts me to move my own. The heels of my hands massage my temples and soothe my need to ask why I was treated differently from my sister and brother.

“Ask,” I plead to myself. “Ask.”

I’m scared to ask and scared to hear the answer.

I remember when Mom encouraged me to jump from the dock into the lake at camp. “It’s only cold for a minute. Jump!” she wrote. “Don’t be afraid.”

I hated the cold. I hated the things that made the bottom rough, slimy, or squishy. I didn’t want to touch those things.

I’m on the dock, and I have to jump.

“I have to ask you a question, Mom.”

She turns toward me.

“Why did you treat me differently from Liz and Evan?”

“Because with you . . . I created a monster,” Mom whispers. “You were the bad seed.”

“What? I didn’t hear you. I’m a monster?”

“Yes. You heard correctly, a monster.”

She strains to shift her position. Her abdomen, distended and tight with fluid and tumor, insulates her from my interrogation. I don’t want to be responsible for making her weaker. I don’t want to be a burden. Besides, I’m not a monster . . . am I?

It’s shortly after two in the morning when the call comes. Our request not to resuscitate was followed. I tuck my nightie into a pair of pants and slip on a pair of bell bottoms, a flannel shirt, and a pair of cowboy boots. The air is heavy with the coming day’s chill, but the hospital will be warm. The scuffle of Liz’s fur slippers rakes the ground behind me.

By the time we get to Mom’s hospital room, several nurses have gathered to assist the doctor. One nurse asks if we’d like to wait in the hall while the tubes in Mom’s chest are removed.

“I’ll wait downstairs for Evan and Gaga. He’s picking her up. They’ll be here soon.” Liz pulls a tissue from the box on Mom’s bedside table and blows her nose.

“I’m staying,” I say.

True to the end, Rinnie.
I hear myself think.
You have to find out the how and why of things. It drove Mom nuts. Now she’s dead, and you’re still at it
. I have to understand, I tell myself. I’m a salmon swimming upstream.

“What time did she die?” I ask.

“Her saturations dropped quickly. She expired at 1:57
a.m
. We’re sorry for your loss. Your mother was a fighter,” the doctor says.

“Yes, she was,” I say.

“Did you take the vitals?”

“They’re recorded,” a nurse says, as she clips a pen to her folder.

“What did you take?” I break in, worried a piece of Mom is gone without my approval.

“Vital signs—blood pressure, level of oxygen, pulse, respirations.”

“Oh, OK.” I pause. “May I touch her?”

The doctor nods. “If you like. She was a fighter,” he says again. “She never gave up. I liked her.”

Mom’s arm is cold. When my finger presses where her pulse should be, there is little give. I rest my palm on her wrist. It’s small, like mine. I outline the hilly ridges of her knuckles. The hilly ridges . . . cold, like the hills in Miracle Park in winter.

“Can we go sledding?” We beg our parents. It’s the snowiest day of the year. “Miracle Park! Miracle Park! We want to go to Miracle Park!” we scream.

Mommy and Daddy drag our sleds up the hill again and again. Liz, Evan, and I swoosh down the hill. It’s cold, but it’s fun. The cold keeps the snow from melting. The cold makes our hot cocoa taste better. It doesn’t hurt to be cold, Mommy.

Are you still inside your armor of flesh? Do you know your body has stopped working? I watched out for you, but you saw something else. You didn’t see me.

Mom and I were two sides of the same story. It began the same for both of us.

Once upon a time, two baby girls were born. Like all babies, these babies wanted to be loved. Like all babies, these babies were lovable. Like all babies, these babies came without directions. Once upon a time.

The babies grew and so did their desires. One baby grew up in a fine house with parents who smiled fine smiles at the world. But as the baby became a young girl, a hole grew that bled into her heart—she couldn’t please her father.

The other baby also grew up in a fine house, with parents who smiled fine smiles at the world. But, as this baby grew into a young girl, her parents argued every day and every night. One day, her parents went their own ways to live their own lives. This young girl had a hole that bled into her heart. Her parents, busy with their own lives, couldn’t take care of her.

“It’s time to remove her from life support,” says the nurse who took the vitals.

“Will blood gush out?” I ask.

“No. Don’t worry. She’ll be OK.”

“Be gentle.”

“We’ll be careful.”

One nurse lifts Mom’s shoulder while a second nurse gathers the tubes. They adjust the hospital gown Mom wears and pulls the sheet up under her arms. I brush her hair off her forehead with my hand.

Evan, Liz, and Gaga knock on the half-closed door.

One by one, we exit the limousine, our heels dimpling the wet grass. The drizzle thickens and turns the sky to an ashen gloom. I can’t imagine a better day for a funeral. It’s a soggy cream puff sort of day.

Except for the gravestones, the cemetery—with its perfect slopes—could be the park where we used to sled. Several men offer to hold an umbrella over me as I work my way to a white canopy, but I’ve stopped worrying if the flip I worked so hard to style gets wet.

“No thank you,” I say. “My grandmother is still in the car. Make sure she’s under an umbrella, please.” My face is wet, but there are no tears.

The slanted rain bastes my legs. I count sixteen raindrops. One drop for every year of my life.

“Rain is God crying,” Mom used to say.

Two rows of chairs, four across, wait, empty. A man escorts my grandmother, my Gaga, to the seat closest to the rabbi. Gaga’s sister, Aunt Millie, follows and is about to sit next to her, but I squirm in first. Liz and Evan follow. It’s our mother being buried, and we want front-row seats. My aunt finds a chair beside my mother’s brother, Uncle Matt. Mom would love this casket. It’s . . . beautiful . . . shiny . . . dignified . . . the best of the best.

I glance behind me. Behind a collection of familiar faces, bundled against the cold, is Verna. Wrapped around her is one of Mom’s old coats. A paisley hat with an upturned brim, another hand-me-down from Mom, shields her head. I recognize the unusually tall lean silhouette and sloped shoulders next to Verna from the one time Mom and Dad took us to her home to drop off a New Year’s gift. It is her husband. The person who wanted her home at night.

“Please lower your heads for a moment of silence,” the rabbi says.

I wonder if Mom’s head is by his feet or at the opposite end. Her view would be best if her head was near the rabbi’s feet.

“Death is a part of life,” the rabbi says. “God controls the length of our days. But we are in control of what we pursue in life. We are in control of the pursuit of life. For fifty-six years, Rose Samuels Gardener pursued life—and happiness, wholeness, and mastery—all of her days.”

My heart aches. She didn’t find it.

“God is the Rock,” the rabbi continues. “His work is perfect. Everything he does is just and fair.”

I prickle.
Fair?

Gaga dabs her eyes and gives my hand a gentle squeeze. I squeeze back and don’t let go.
At the funeral home last night, Mom didn’t look like my mom. Her face was fuller, her hair a shade too dark. Visitors came and went. When Jack, Kenny, David, and other friends from school came by early, we retreated to the anteroom. It gave Liz, Evan, and me a chance to get some fresh air. Members of the Knitters Guild, Mom’s bridge club and their husbands, the lady golfers from the club, Gaga’s best friend Violet, a slew of people from Temple with whom Mom had grown up, and Mr. Bonatura, our sixth grade teacher, stayed a long time. Clerks from the stores we patronized came to pay respects, but when Mr. Algrin and Mr. Heuland walked in together, I could hardly believe my eyes.
They’re here for me!
I reached for a tissue for the first time. I never expected teachers from school to come
here
.