16.
WINE-TIPSY IN THE DARK OF OUR SHOP WHILE MAXITO and Sol slept, I clicked onto Facebook. My mother had updated her profile to show that she no longer had any children. I unfriended her, then felt like a worm. Did I really just unfriend my dying mother? I poured myself another glass and typed a rambling status update.
My old friend Teagan commented, Geez, talk about our parents having no use for us the minute we’re not who they trained us to be.
I LOOKED AT my old hobo birds painting propped against the wall, looked out the window. The dark of the new moon. I didn’t want to sleep with Sol on the red couch in the back room, so I curled up in the giant Mexican equipale chair in the corner of the shop and fell asleep in my pink tutu like some kindergartener who’d just projectile vomited at the talent show.
Morning was a ringing phone in the pocket of my hoodie. Hospice. I’d left a voicemail telling them my mother was alone and asking them to check on her more often, but I guess the fuzzy intake nurse was also the fuzzy exit nurse, because it was her voice on the phone now saying, “Well, hello there, dear Ariel. I’m calling to let you know that well – as luck would have it – your mother fired hospice yesterday.”
I sat up in the equipale, tried to smooth my tutu. “She fired hospice?” Who fires hospice? Hospice is free. When you don’t want to see them, you just don’t open the door. I must have been silent for a long minute.
“Ariel?” the intake/exit nurse tried. “Are you all right, dear? May I be frank with you, Ariel?”
“Frank?”
Sol poked her head in from the back room, whispered, “Coffee?”
I nodded. Please.
“Yes, dear,” the hospice lady was saying. “You want to be conscious as your mother declines, don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to be conscious, but I said, “Sure.”
“Well, my little Ariel,” the nurse started, her voice all sing-song. “I’ve been in this conscious dying business for a long time and I’ll tell you that most people, when they’re dying, want to pull everyone they love in close and just hug ‘em tight. But there is a notable minority of people who need to be alone. It may well be that your mother will die alone, Ariel. I think you would be wise to prepare yourself for that possibility. Six weeks or one year from now, a worker or a delivery person or a neighbor will knock on your mother’s door and your mother won’t answer the door. That worker or delivery person or neighbor will smell that distinct odor of death and they will call the police and your mother will have died. You’ll get a call from the police. I think you would be very wise to prepare yourself for that call.”
I didn’t ask the fuzzy hospice lady with her sing-songy voice how one might prepare oneself for that call. I just said, “Oh.” I said, “Well, thanks.” I said, “Take care.”
Sol brought me coffee in a red mug. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s fine.”
WE PUT A note on the shop door that said, “By appointment only.” Sol would sell the candles and make house calls. I’d wake in the predawn and train-commute to the university to teach the college kids how to invent improbable stories. On those still dark mornings as I walked along the tracks to the train station, I told myself that I didn’t have a mother anymore. But I still flinched every time my cellphone buzzed. The call I didn’t know how to prepare for. The smell of death.
“You did your best,” someone on Facebook said.
But had I?
Done my best?
I felt like a failure.
LATE AFTERNOONS, THE train home from Albuquerque barreled through desolate reservation after desolate reservation and a voice over the loudspeaker announced that we weren’t allowed to take pictures of what was left of Native land.
NIGHTS HOME AT the shop we cooked on the old camping stove we grabbed from my mother’s backyard.
What was I doing here?
Living with my mother had been its own nightmare, but in that duplex that wasn’t a duplex anymore, at least Sol and I had been united in our oppression. Our problem was my mother and whatever piece of furniture she was screaming for Sol to move. Now I was the only one for Sol to glare at. She lingered at the mime school until she had to pick Maxito up from preschool. She announced that she would no longer accept money for veterinary services, that she would only work for trade – it was a matter of principle and pet health.
I rolled my eyes. “Chicken eggs and free massages aren’t going to cut it as your family contribution.”
But Sol didn’t like when I talked to her that way. She crossed her arms and stomped her feet and didn’t say anything. I hated the silence, so I went and bought her a piece of cake from the Chocolate Maven and I said I was sorry and I leaned into her and she patted me on the back and kissed me on the head and whispered, “It’s all right.”
I crept into the front of the shop to grade papers, lit a Baba Yaga candle.
SATURDAY MORNING MY cellphone buzzed with a local number I didn’t recognize.
Could it be the cops already? Had someone reported the smell of death?
“Hello?”
“Is this Ariel Gore?” The voice was deep with the softest Texas twang.
“Yes?” I felt a stabbing pain behind my chest bone.
But it wasn’t the police. “Ms. Gore? I’m a family mediator and attorney here in Santa Fe. I specialize in child abuse and neglect. I’m calling about Maximilian.”
Lump like a piece of hot coal in my throat. My first terror, of course, is that something has happened to him, but I glance back and he’s right there on the red couch laughing at Bell, Book and Candle, a bunny mug full of hot cocoa on the table in front of him. But maybe something had happened to him we didn’t know about? “Yes?”
“I’m calling on behalf of your mother,” the voice said. “She’s worried about Maximilian.”
I swallowed hard, took a good breath and let it go. “He’s doing well,” I said. “He’s well taken care of.” I glanced over at him. His perfect skin. His steady smile.
“All right,” the voice said. “Well, your mother would like to have visitation with Maximilian once a week. She would like you to bring him to the house to do art. She would not like you to bring Sol. She would like you to go to the house alone with Maximilian.”
I felt nauseous, but I didn’t want to give this guy anything. I knew enough about family mediators and family court attorneys. I’d spent seven years in a protracted custody and visitation battle with Maia’s dad back in California. She was grown now and he was long dead, but I still woke some nights in the cold sweat terror of that courtroom. No, you don’t give these guys anything. I said, “I’ll have to think about that.”
He didn’t say anything. I put a Nina Simone CD on the player behind the counter. Maybe Nina Simone could walk me through this. But as soon as Nina Simone started in, Sol appeared and pressed eject, put Johnny Cash on instead. “Well,” the voice on the phone said. “It’s within your mother’s rights to file suit for legal visitation. If she’s concerned about her grandson’s well-being, we will of course feel obligated to make a report to Protective Services about abuse or neglect. I understand that you don’t have immediate access to a full bathroom ...”
I didn’t think the voice was finished talking, but I was finished listening. “I see,” is all I said. I clicked the phone off, closed my eyes, and for the first time I prayed, “God, please just let her die already.”
LIVE WITH ME for a year. Then you may ask questions. That’s what my oracle had said. But Sol was the one who picked up the phone in the front of the shop when it rang later that morning, and Sol didn’t ask any questions. All I heard her say was, “Eve, don’t ever call here again.”