Book Four
25.
“OH, DARLING,” THE VOICE THAT ANSWERED MY MOTHER’S landline had a British accent. “I’ve just rung the ambulance.”
Cold January morning and I sat sipping black coffee on the porch of my little adobe. “Ambulance?”
“Yes, darling. I’m your Mum’s palliative care nurse. We’re just taking her to the hospital to get her pain under control.”
Palliative care nurse. I scooted the words around in my brain. “From hospice?”
“No, darling,” the voice said. “Your Mum got herself booted from hospice again.”
I pulled a blanket around my shoulders, stared at the round-top mountain I could see from my porch. I was alone in the house for now – Maxito off with Sol for a few days, Maia back in Los Angeles, Abra not yet home from winter break.
I’D SPENT DECEMBER house sitting for a friend in Portland. Took Maia and Maxito to the Nutcracker ballet.
Hot Wheels and Lego sets and a tattoo gift certificate under the tree.
At Oddball Studios off Clinton Street, Maia got a portrait of Gammie as a 1940s pin-up. “Your great grandmother was a pin-up?” The tattoo artist with an anchor inked on his neck seemed impressed when Maia unfurled the old picture from The Los Angeles Times. Gammie sitting arched-back on the sand in her bathing suit, coy smile up to the camera, with the caption “Beauty on the Beach.”
I’d emailed back and forth with my mother a few times from Portland, told her I could help her out on Wednesdays when I got back to New Mexico. I figured I could handle Wednesdays. One day a week. And the first Wednesday had gone well enough. When I got there she was screaming at some worker in the entryway and he scurried off with his hammer muttering, “your mother’s a witch.”
But my mother shook her head. “That guy had ego problems.”
I gave her a quick hug and she flinched when I touched her shoulder.
She wore a loose black sweater, pointed to the lightbulbs in the kitchen that needed changing.
The kitchen. A six-burner commercial gas stove, rustic faux-finished cabinets, antiqued metal and mahogany counters, a deep farmhouse sink. When I stood on the stepladder I didn’t worry that she might push me. She seemed too weak for that kind of thing now.
I took her shopping list to Healthy Wealthy, bought organic chanterelle mushrooms and mint citrus tea.
When I got back, she asked about Maxito, said, “All right, thanks, Tiniest. I’ll see you next week.”
NOW IT WAS Wednesday again and I held the phone to my cold ear.
“Don’t worry, darling,” the voice said. “We’ll get your mum settled in and you can come along and meet us at the hospital later this afternoon.”
“I can come now,” I offered. It wasn’t that I felt any pressing need to rush to my mother’s bedside, it was that I had a date with a cute chef I’d been flirting with on Facebook and I didn’t want to get held up at the hospital. I mean, I’d gotten my legs waxed. That’s what I was thinking: I just got my legs waxed.
“No, darling,” the palliative care nurse said. “You’ll meet us at Christus Saint Vincent’s Hospital later this afternoon.”
I thought to argue, but the voice sounded like somebody’s good mother, so I said, “All right,” and I hung up thinking, Please, God, my mother’s already ruined my life. Don’t let her wreck my date.
The cute chef on Facebook was a friend of a friend. She’d just buried her father, said she only wanted red chile and new tattoos. I’d told her I agreed that death and chile and tattoos were an excellent combination, but I didn’t tell her I knew anything about dying parents.
I messaged her from my cold porch now: Collecting new reasons to get tattooed by the minute. I wanted stars on my hips.
She didn’t ask for further explanation and I didn’t offer any. She just messaged back: Still on for 5 o’clock, I hope?
I hoped so, too.
INSIDE, I TOOK a random book from the shelf. In Quest of Candle-lighters by Kenneth Patchen. I ran my hand across the black and white cover, asked: What now? I opened to a random page and read this: “My God I can smell death all around me.” I shook my head, wanted to shake it off. What kind of an oracle was that? I wanted to try again, turned the page and read instead, “right now I insist that right now some beautiful girl is sitting on the bank of a river with a copy of this book in her hands and right now she has a rose in her hair.”
Yes. This could be my new oracle.
There would be an end to all this death someday. Fast forward and right now some beautiful girl is sitting on the bank of a river with a copy of this book and right now she has a rose in her hair.
I PULLED INTO the parking lot of the hospital on the hill at 3:30 that afternoon. The buildings were adobe-brown like all the buildings in Santa Fe.
The sound of my boots on asphalt, automatic sliding glass door, boots on tile.
Inside, all white walls and low ceilings, paintings of desert rocks and Native women. Santa Fe paintings.
The man who sat behind glass wrote my mother’s room number on a card for me. Lay people with “volunteer” badges pinned to their chests shuffled through the hallways carrying clipboards and offering communion to some of the patients.
An old man in a baseball hat gave me a brochure with the word “healing” above a crucifix.
I thanked him, stepped into the elevator, opened the brochure. Good news! Jesus has already borne your sickness, so you don’t have to!
A right turn down the hall, then right again. I didn’t think much of it all. I’d been to see my mother in plenty of hospital rooms back in Portland. But when I peered around the doorframe into her room, the sight of her made my breath catch.
She sat propped in a chair, her eyes closed, head back and mouth open. Surrounded by machines that beeped and glowed. An oxygen tube in her nose.
I stepped back from the doorway to steady my breath. What had I expected, anyway? The mother of my childhood? Dark 1970s perm? Defined biceps, still strong enough to leave a mark when she hit me?
I crept into the room, quiet as I could, but she opened her eyes right away and smiled. “Tiniest?”
I set the healing brochure on her bedside table. “You better be careful,” I warned her. “There’s a whole lot of Jesus up in this place.”
She laughed, kind of shrugged but then didn’t shrug – winced at the shrugging. “I got no problem with Jesus,” she said. She had black radiation tattoos inked across her chest. There was the alternate beeping of the heart monitor and the morphine pump. The sound of the oxygen machine. “Ariel?” she said suddenly. “You look gorgeous.”
I gestured toward her morphine pump. “I bet everybody looks pretty good when you’re on all those drugs.”
She smiled, but tears welled in her eyes. “Tiniest?” She sighed. “You came back to me.”
I sat down on a cushioned pink chair in the corner of the room, scooted closer to her. “I only came because I heard you were going to be on your best behavior from now on.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I must have been on a lot of drugs if I told anyone that.”
And I had to laugh.
I knew my mother was impossible, and worse. But some part of me had always liked her.
NURSES AND ATTENDANTS shuffled in and out of the room, adjusted the machines and brought white bread sandwiches and plastic cups of red Jello.
My mother scowled at the trays. “Can you imagine serving this to someone in a hospital? Give me a piece of paper. I have a shopping list for you.”
I kept my eye on the wall clock as she wrote her list in red ink. “I have to go in a few minutes,” I told her. “I can bring you the food tomorrow.”
“Go?” She looked panicked, wrote faster.
“I have to pick up Maxito,” I lied.
Tears rushed down her cheeks. “I need a book, Tiniest. You can’t leave me here without a book. Please. I need you to go to the bookstore for me.”
Florescent light and the smell of disinfectant.
“I can’t, Mom.”
Her face crumpled. “I’m begging you, Tiniest. I’ll die of boredom in this place. They’ll turn on the television and it won’t be Anderson Cooper. It will be some idiotic thing. Some ... reality cops.”
I could feel my heart contract in my chest, but no. I was going on a date. I wasn’t going to the bookstore. Maybe my date would be hot and easy or maybe it would be strained and awkward – I didn’t care – my mother was not going to be the one to ruin it for me. “I’ll go and see if I have anything in my car,” I offered. My car was a disaster heap of Christmas cards and overdue bills and clothes and toys. Surely there would be a book in there somewhere.
Tile hall, elevator, tile steps, glass doors, asphalt.
Nothing in the back seat.
I dug through the trunk, finally found a hardback some publishing company had sent as a review copy a long time ago. Free From Lies. I squinted at the subtitle, Discovering Your True Needs. Who knew what it was about?
My mother was asleep when I stepped back into her room, so I left the book on her bedside table and pocketed her red-ink shopping list.
THE CHEF TEXTED directions to her house. She lived on a busy street, driveway exposed, so I parked around the corner. I didn’t need anyone in this small town whispering about where they’d seen my car. I carried a basket of fresh eggs down the block and up the walkway to her door.
The chef. She was cuter than her profile picture, had a shy swagger, gray hair and blue eyes. She invited me in, offered me a glass of wine.
I thought her house seemed too clean, but I wrote it off to the recent death.
We wore the same black engineer boots, sat on her leather couch.
IN MY MEMORY, I told the chef about my mother.
In her memory, I did not.
I’D BEEN READING about the “cognitive deficits” caused by stress and grief. That the two of us could carry on a conversation is, apparently, impressive. The fact that neither of us would later remember what we’d said is, it turns out, perfectly normal.
I REMEMBER SHE showed me the African violets she’d had inked on her upper arm the day after her father’s funeral. Just the black outlines and gray shading so far. The skin around it had just started to peel. She said she liked the physical and tangible pain of that. Death and tattoos.
But when we stepped into the studio on Topeka Street maybe an hour later, all the artists were booked up.
It would just be a red chile night.
Enchiladas at the mall.
I remember a table by the window.
I remember I touched the chef’s arm.
I remember comparing exes to make sure we had at least three degrees of separation.
I remember that I laughed.
NEXT MORNING I woke alone on my cowboy bedroll in my little adobe, wasn’t so cold.
I’d agreed to meet the chef back at the tattoo shop just before noon. We arrived wearing the same brown Frye harness boots and she blushed at that, watched over a low wall as a boy with a butterfly on his face etched stars into my skin. Each black outline and each gold shading hurt in just the right ways, deep and hungry. I wanted to scar myself like this with talismans. I wanted to ward off all the hard things that hadn’t happened yet. I wanted to remember these cold days; remember how it felt to be cut like this, to ache and to bruise, to peel and tend the wound, to heal.