Spent (15 page)

35

I
n my small coastal
California hometown, a storm had caused an electrical outage. I drove through thick-as-cotton Arcata fog, careful at the wheel. Visibility was so bad that I couldn't see the shabby farmhouses and lazy cows telling me I was home, but I stared hard until I felt it. Rain spat bullets on my windows, and seagulls flew through the downpour. I thought maybe the white birds meant good news, like they do in Hallmark cards. They meant she would get well. When I pulled up to the hospital, it was nearly dark, running on a lame generator. The hospital looked shabby and unkempt, and this pissed me off to no end. Her room smelled like Pleasures: bleach and air freshener and there was a Christmas tree with a wimpy strand of gold garland and small red bulbs that hung from its branches. That tree infuriated me.
What do they know?
She brightened when she saw me, held up her wrist to wave me over.

“I like your new watch,” I said.

“You can't have it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's mine.” She giggled. Morphine made everything silly and fuzzy.

I sat close to her and told her about my lemon bars. “Not as good as yours,” I said. I touched her hand. She winced.

“It hurts to move,” she said. I walked over to the Christmas tree, removed the bald garland, and rearranged the stupid bulbs so they were all towards the front.

“That's better,” I said. She wrinkled her nose at me. My step-dad hovered in the background.

She moaned when she sat up. Every time she did, my chest clenched. She couldn't stand without me holding her. On the slow walk to the car, she held her elbow in the air. “Wait. No diapers. If I piss myself, that's it. Promise me.”

At home, under a thick, pink blanket, in a room that was once used as her office, she puked her guts out all day long. Her neon orange vomit filled the bucket I held for her. When I was not rinsing that bucket, I sat in her office chair and typed on her computer. “I like that sound,” she said.

Chris rummaged in the kitchen for a lighter and appeared in the doorway. “She's on a lot of morphine,” he said. I figured this meant the job of sorting through the boxes of family photos would be mine. It's a thing we'd discussed on the phone several times, a thing we'd put off again and again. She wanted to go through the albums one last time, tell me the secrets they held. There'd be photos of hillbillies with long fingers, tanned skin and big noses. Wide foreheads like mine. I was ready to listen.

Chris opened a window, lit a Marlboro, and stared outside towards the sand, ocean, and pasture. He leaned into the fresh cold air with bewildered, gray eyes, and blew smoke. Beside Mom on the table was a glass of ice water with a bendy straw and a purple candle, flickering. It smelled like baby powder. She rocked forward slightly as though she were engulfed in thick syrup; she was unrecognizable.

“Can't we take her off that shit?” I sat on a table directly across from her, but she looked past me. Albums were in a pile on the floor along with bags of pictures in white envelopes, all labeled and dated meticulously. I held up a picture of Mom in a garden picking strawberries. She was about sixteen years old, an honor student with reading glasses decorated with rhinestones. She wore her light brown hair short and her even white teeth held the promise of fresh breath. She could've been the face of Dentyne gum. She stood near a fence, holding a fat red strawberry. “Look, Mom,” I said. She stared at it for a long time but didn't recognize the girl in the photo.

Mom was happy in the dirt. She loved gardening. My childhood was spent picking blueberries, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, and huckleberries from the backyard. Jars of blackberry jam with shiny gold lids; rhubarb and honey were poured over vanilla ice cream. Summers were spent in the bushes, picking peas and blackberries. I plucked cherry tomatoes from vines. I found a picture of me wiping tomato seeds on my jeans. I remembered how I bit into the fruit and how seeds squirted my T-shirts.

“That's not my mom,” I said, staring into her unfocused eyes, then put my hand on hers.

“The pain gets worse and worse,” Chris said.

“Take her off of it. We need to talk.”

A long silence, then “alright.” He blew more smoke and stood against the wall by the window. We didn't give her any more morphine for the rest of that day or night. I barely slept through her moaning.

The room that used to be her office still looked the same—square and dinky with pale, peach walls like the lipsticks Mom and I used to order from Avon catalogs in the early eighties. The pink lipsticks I wanted had names like Melon Crunch and Sugar Breeze. On one wall, was a picture of Mom dressed in a brown pantsuit with a silky striped scarf. When I was about nine, I stood in her walk-in closet and watched her dress for work. I studied her orderly and mysterious system, careful to stay out of her way. Her taupe polyester vest exactly matched her short, snug, secretary skirt. I was crazy about her legs. My legs were chunky, muscular, tap-dancing stumps compared to her slim horseback-riding calves. Mom's slender thighs stretched and floated as she twirled in the full-length mirror. We both admired her legs shimmering and stretching in Hanes control top panty hose. She layered her pink and brown lipsticks to make just the right shade of bronze. I wanted Mom's lips, so I smeared her pink stain all over my mouth, which turned my lips orange. She giggled. “That's it.” She brushed pink powder on my cheeks and sent me off to school like that. I watched her curl her thick hair into meticulous brown waves. Those mornings, I learned how to be a girl.

On another corkboard were postcards from Spain. Mom took a trip with her friends and brought me back two small ceramic bowls with blue flowers painted on them. Next to the Spain pictures, snapshots of her cats: Willow and Sam dozing in her rhubarb plants. In the background were the two elegant, brown horses; one of them was blind.

The tan office carpet had new groove marks where the feeding tube rolled and beeped. The beep was louder than an alarm clock, a jarring, horrible sound. The little robot feeding tube pumped neon pink-orange fluid into my mom's stomach through a red, angry hole. Under pink-coral blankets, her eyelashes fluttered and her hands clasped shut in front of her chest. She wore her wedding ring. She wore her watch. She wore fuzzy pink-striped socks. She wanted to read the paper. I handed it to her.

On her outdated computer, I had translated a Finnish poem about springtime and flute music and being in love. It was neither springtime nor was I in love; it was an assignment for school. The instructor posted recordings of the poems being read in Finnish; certain hints of words meant
to wake up thick with dreams
.

Awake, she said, “Can I have a glass of water?” I held a glass of ice water with a straw that was long enough to reach her mouth without her having to move her head much. I stretched it out and made sure it wouldn't dribble water down her chin. That would've irked her. She hated messes. It dribbled, and I dabbed her chin with a paper towel.

Her face had more spider veins than I remembered. Her hair had grown back gray and thin. Her shapely legs had shriveled to toothpicks. I held the blue glass to her mouth, and she sipped the milk. “I'm too hot,” she said.

She pushed the melon colored comforter aside and threw up white curdled milk on the blankets. I grabbed more paper towels. Warmed a washcloth in the sink. Held it to her forehead. Her hair was damp from sweat. The fever was back. On the desk was a pile of bills and files. She used to keep papers in meticulous paralegal-style order, but now everything was in disarray. The afternoon sun faded to fog. I opened the window.

She was clammy. Her eyes now focused and clear.

“I'm dying,” she said.

“I know.” I wanted to cry, but I just sat there stiff as a redwood.

The next afternoon, when she was asleep, I crept into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and grabbed a tub of fat-free Cool Whip, using my fingers as a scoop until my mouth overflowed with the low calorie white foam. I chased it with half a package of semisweet chocolate chips. Then I went for the pumpkin pie that was still in the package. I hated pumpkin pie. I ate three pieces in four minutes.
You're disgusting
.

I walked back into the office where Mom dozed and slid the window open a crack to allow the chilly wet air to sweep through the room, until she protested the cold. I fussed over the daffodils her neighbor, Charlene, brought over, and I casually changed her sheets, hoping she didn't notice she'd peed the bed. I held a cool washcloth to her forehead. “Am I going to the bathroom?” she asked, but it came out like an accusation. She asked again. “Am I?”

I wanted to lie, but her sad, gray marble eyes knew mine too well. I washed her hair in the kitchen sink with vanilla-scented shampoo. The warm water was nearly hot, but she shivered anyway. Outside, her horses snorted and dug their hooves into the mud.

I wrapped a dry towel around her head like a turban and I led her by her bony hands back to the bed.

“I wish I could be your best friend for longer,” she said.

“Me too.”

“You promised,” she said, reminding me of our agreement, as if I had forgotten. I felt inept. I didn't know finality except what I'd seen on television: villains folded in half from a neat, single gunshot, dancing in slow motion, then collapsing softly in a small puddle of stage blood. This wasn't that. “I don't want to die,” she said.

“Maybe you won't die, Mom. Maybe you'll get better.” I gave her my best smile and forced myself to look into her eyes, so deep with loneliness. I kept my sorrow hidden, stored away for a more convenient time when I could feel things. I dried her hair. She sat up.

“Do it, but don't tell me when you have done it. I want to go to sleep and never wake up.”

“Does Chris know?”

“We talked.”

“I want to be cremated,” she said. “Write this down.” I took dictation: “Royal blue glass vases, purple and blue napkins. Irises, lilies, lemon bars, tea. Chocolate chip bars. I want it overlooking the Humboldt Bay, in the afternoon. Let me write the guest list,” she said, stroking the corner of my yellow legal pad. I handed her a pencil and, in her graceful, paralegal script, she wrote the names of friends and songs to play. At the bottom of the page, she wrote, “Her strength was her heart.” She was a speechwriter and straight A achiever. She kept a tight lid on her chaos. My childhood was neatly stacked and color coordinated. Mom taught me the simple algebra of love and order, but there was no order here.

I walked in circles and stared into space for hours. Chris found me in the kitchen holding the vials of morphine.

“Are you sure?” he asked. He smoked a Marlboro and squinted into space through exhausted, craggy eyes. He was flipping through a travel book for Costa Rica.

“We planned to take this trip as soon as she was strong enough,” he said. He looked like he hadn't slept for a year.

“Do you have enough morphine in the house?”

“We can't undo it once it's done,” he said. “Enough there to kill ten horses.”

“What if we get caught?”

“I spoke to her doctor. No autopsy. I can't keep doing this. We talked about it. I'll lose everything.” Fire burned the backs of my calves. I heard her voice from the other room. I could hear her pain getting worse. Feel it eclipsing the whole house. I was silent, but her moaning was getting louder. She was too proud to be kept alive in a puddle of orange piss.
What a fucking rip-off
. “This goes into the feeding tube. Directly into her bloodstream,” he said, between drags. “Press this,” the syringe was fat and clear.

“I don't want to hate her,” he said.

You don't already?
He'd taken weeks off work to make the trips to San Francisco for surgeries and treatments. Weeks in and out of hospitals to sit by her side.

We walked into the bedroom where Mom was sleeping. I emptied one syringe into the feeding tube and another one into the same spot and he put his hand over mine. I didn't look at him. My other hand was holding her hand, which was folded across her stomach. She didn't wince from my touch now.

The room shrunk with the heat of our bodies waiting for death. A few moments passed but nothing happened. Chris pushed another vial into the tube. One after the other, and another, until we had emptied several. We watched her eyelids, listened to her breathe, but her chest kept swelling with breath. I played soft music so she could drift into a familiar tune and get sucked under. It continued for hours.

At three in the morning, my step-dad said, “If she doesn't stop breathing, we'll put a pillow over her face.”

“I can't.”

“But she'll die in our arms.”

I walked out of the room, collapsed on the brown couch that still held the indentations of her body.

The clock said 4:12
a.m.
when I heard my step-dad say, “She's not breathing anymore.” He wrung his hands and paced in front of the fireplace, then walked downstairs to the bedroom they had shared for eighteen years. I needed Mom's legs. In the cold room, I saw that he had removed her wedding band. I played with her toes. She still wore her fuzzy, pink, striped socks. I placed my hand on top of her stiff thighs and kissed them.

She was white as Arcata fog.

I thought I'd scream
and there'd be blood everywhere. I thought cymbals would crash. Lightning would strike. I'd throw a bottle at a window and make it rain glass shards. I'd be on the ground, writhing, run to the sea naked and jump into the freezing sea. But none of that happened. Not by a long shot.

Death is more like the ocean, tired and heavy and cold.

I borrowed Chris' truck—I needed to get out, to drive, to be alone; I didn't know what I needed, I didn't know shit, but I wanted my mom.

I flipped an illegal U-turn. That's when I got pulled over. After the cop left, I sat on a wet stone and waited for the ocean to show me what me-without-Mom looked like.
Would it make me walk with a limp? Would I cry? Would it be like walking with no arms?
I waved my arms around. The new alone was a big silence that floated around me like mist, but the nuts and bolts of losing you took years to sink in.