29.
MY MOTHER DIDN’T WANT A BIBLE IN HER ROOM. SHE didn’t want The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She didn’t want Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She was getting better, dammit, and all this talk about God and science and the afterlife was bumming her out.
Where was Leslie, anyway?
“Here’s Leslie.”
My sister arrived wearing all white.
I picked her up at the shuttle stop near the train station, stopped with her at Healthy Wealthy for a bouquet of white flowers.
“Leslie,” my mother hummed, but then she kind of hissed at her: “Took you long enough.” She clung to her morphine pump, smirked even as she hissed.
Leslie smiled. “You thought I’d come faster? Knowing the loving welcome I might expect?”
“I have to pee,” my mother sighed. “You have to help me get up to pee.”
Leslie untangled the tubes, lifted our mother out of bed and into the bathroom. She stepped just outside the bathroom door, chose the moment to say, “you know, Mom, I got an email from your lawyer. Did you really intend to leave this house to your maid’s daughter in Mexico and not to me and Ariel?”
“Oh God,” my mother groaned. “I must have been really mad when I did that. What if I die right here on the toilet before I have a chance to change it?”
“Like Elvis?” Leslie laughed.
“Not funny!” my mother shrieked.
I left them to it.
I had paperwork to attend to. Medical powers of attorney and financial powers of attorney. The man at the bank teared up when I pushed the notarized papers across his desk. “I’m gonna miss her,” he said. “You know, sometimes on a slow day, we all just sit around waiting for her to come in and stir up some shit.”
It seemed an odd tribute, but what could I say? “I can only imagine.”
The banker at the next desk straightened his bright blue tie, looked sad. “Did she ever try to get you fired, man? She tried to get me fired three or four times.”
My banker nodded. “Three or four times at least.”
“Well, guys,” I said. “I’m glad you appreciated her.”
I took a mint candy from the bowl. And as I stuffed all the notarized papers back into my turquoise purse, a word fell out: “Light.”
I’D BEEN CARRYING all these words around for the last few weeks. Just words on strips of paper. Like cookie fortunes except each paper strip contained just one word.
I’d been dropping them here and there. Not on purpose. Just when I reached into my purse for my lipstick or a few pennies. A word would catch, slip out, fall to the floor.
I started noticing the words here and there. Like a trail of breadcrumbs. Or evidence I’d been someplace before.
The word “monkey” on the chef’s dining room table.
I pointed to the word. “Monkey?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know where it came from.”
I didn’t confess that the word was mine.
SEE, I HADN’T been writing through any of this. Wouldn’t start writing until summer. I wondered what it meant: A writer who didn’t write, walking around with little slips of paper in her purse, scattering words like wildflower seeds, hoping for the best.
One of my first memoir teachers, Floyd Salas back in California, said we could all write stories to convey our single human heart/soul to another human heart/soul and, in doing so, break us both out of our isolation.
But these word-seeds seemed lonely.
“Airplane” taped to the bathroom mirror in my little adobe south of town. I’d been meaning to write a story about a trip I took once, alone. About a time when the world felt expansive.
“Stung” in the grocery store aisle near the shelf with all those fancy bottles of mustard where I stood for so long, trying to decide between the spicy green chile and the organic Dijon.
“Radio” next to my mother’s hospice bed.
IN THE KITCHEN of the former duplex, Leslie cooked the things my mother had cooked for us as babies – mashed carrots with parsley and butter, leek and potato soup, banana smoothies. She fed my mother with a tiny silver spoon, filled the freezer with baggies of prepared food to last a couple of weeks. She packed up to leave now, but her son would come next.
In the dim light of the living room, we met with the director of Milagro Home Care. She’d cared for her adult son when he was bed-bound before his death, started her nonprofit. She could send caregivers whenever we needed them. Could we pay twelve dollars an hour? Yes. My mother had a little savings left. We had the social security, too. We could sell the Prius for maybe ten thousand dollars. We could pull this off for a few months.
“It’s of course best for our caregivers if you can pay them,” she said softly, “but just so you know, if your mother does live a long time, we won’t stop coming just because you’ve run out of money.”
I cringed, wanted to assure the woman that we would always figure out how to pay the caregivers, but I remembered my new experiment-to proceed as if a little bit needy wasn’t the worst thing. And I said, “thank you.”
LESLIE’S TEENAGE SON, Leo, arrived wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, his hair grown out long after a winter spent camping at Mt. Shasta. He sat with his grandmother in the half-light of her room.
I headed out to meet Carter Quark for a beer at Tomasita’s, waited there for the priest from California.
The chef texted Carter from Connecticut as we ordered a second round: Behave yourself, CQ.
We laughed at that. I said, “Maybe I’m the one who needs to behave herself.” And we laughed harder. Laughed until we cried.
We were waiting for a priest, I’d said, so I guess Carter imagined some Catholic in black. He raised his eyebrows when Carol the new-age earth mama from California stepped in with her cane and flowing cottons.
THE PRIEST AND Leo took turns at my mother’s bedside, feeding her and rubbing her feet, taking her to the bathroom.
The lead hospice nurse had frizzy blonde hair with dark roots, came every day to change the bandage on my mother’s bed sore. She filled the pill boxes, checked the battery on the morphine pump.
Another hospice worker came on Tuesdays and Fridays, bathed my mother with sponges.
I read the caregiver logs in the mornings. Nights of vomiting and pain. Daily notes that said, “Eve is anxious.” Weekly notes that said, “When her friend Moe Hawk visits, she becomes agitated, throws up when Moe Hawk leaves.”
“Mom?”
She sat propped in her hospice bed, typing something on her computer.
“Who’s Moe Hawk?”
“Oh,” my mother sighed. “She’s a mental case. She’s a white woman who thinks she’s Native American.”
“Do you want her to keep visiting?”
My mother looked up. “Moe Hawk yells at me. She says I’m not allowed to say I’m dying or I’ll die. She says you’re all just waiting for me to die. She makes me eat too much.”
“We don’t have to let her in, Mom.”
But my mother shook her head. “Moe Hawk’s a mental case, Ariel. You can’t fault someone for being a mental case.”
THE HOSPICE SOCIAL worker wore a Hawaiian shirt, stood in the kitchen and handed me a list of funeral homes and cremation services. I’d have to pick one, she said, make arrangements before I left town to teach my writing workshop.
“Do you think she’ll die in the next couple of days?” I asked the social worker, but she just shrugged.
It seemed crass to make plans for my mother’s remains when she was still alive, but I did as I was told, made the calls from my cellphone in the driveway, acted like I was managing. Cremations in Santa Fe cost two to three thousand dollars, but there was a service in Albuquerque where they only charged one thousand. And they could pick up her body here in Santa Fe. Was it tacky to choose a cut-rate cremation service? Everything seemed wrong.
A text message from the hospice nurse: Is it true that Moe Hawk is your mother’s sister and authorized to terminate all caregivers?
I texted back: Absolutely not. I have no idea where she came from. My mother says she’s a mental case. Let’s get word to everyone not to leave my mother alone with Moe Hawk.
THE CHEF POSTED pictures on Facebook. She’d found her dead mother’s chemo wig in her dead father’s apartment, put it on and started drinking whiskey, taking photos and posting them. Photo after photo.
I texted her: Come home. You’re losing it.
And she did. Flew home a day early. Knocked on the door of my little adobe just before midnight on Valentine’s Day, said “be mine?”
We slept on my couch because I still didn’t have a bed. And in the morning, I asked if she was ready to meet the family.
WE CARRIED RED roses into my mother’s room, but the room was all a glare. White sunlight too bright.
We sat at my mother’s bedside as she drifted in and out.
She seemed confused. “Everything is a dream,” she whispered. “Am I dead?”
Leo tried to adjust the curtains, but that strange light wouldn’t stop pouring in.
“If I ‘m dead, I want more flowers,” my mother said softly.
The chef carried the bouquets in and out of the room, repositioning the same flowers in different vases.
My mother sighed. “Thank God for all these flowers.”
These multiplying flowers.
I wasn’t sure if I was self-conscious because of the chef – if I was seeing the scene with outsider eyes – or if my mother did seem suddenly closer to the other side.
I POSTED ON Facebook: It’s getting sketchy here. If any friends who haven’t come still want to see my mother, now is the time. I’m sure she’ll be available to you in the afterlife, so there’s no need for overdramatic travel. But we have life here now.
“Wow,” the chef said as we left. “I ‘m glad I got to meet her.”
It was almost time to pick up Maxito from his new preschool.
“Do you want to meet my boy, too?”
MAXITO RAN CIRCLES around our little table at Yummy Café We got all the winks and nods, must have looked like some old lesbian couple out for their annual Valentine’s dinner with their hyperactive kid – not like two death-soaked daughters on their fourth date.
“Do you think,” I asked the chef when the waiter brought Happy Family, “if I go to Iowa, she’ll be alive when I get back?”
The chef kind of nodded and shook her head at the same time. “Maybe,” she said. But I knew she didn’t believe it.
“Do you think I’m a jerk? Leaving?”
The chef shook her head. “No. Definitely not.”
The writing workshop I’d scheduled in Iowa City. I could have cancelled it. But I didn’t.
NEXT MORNING AND my mother wanted a hug before I left. We weren’t huggers – not as mother and daughter – but I leaned over her bed, hugged her for a long time. When I stepped away she was crying. I said, “Are you okay?”
She said, “That’s a tall order.”
I guess it was. “Is there anything you want to tell me before I go?”
My mother didn’t say anything.
“Is there anything you need from me?”
Tears rolled down her face. “It seemed so easy at first,” she whispered.
“What does it seem like now?”
She stared at me. “Fix it,” she said, and she sort of snapped her fingers.
“What do you want me to fix?”
She snapped her fingers again and said, “fix the email.”
I wasn’t sure if there was something wrong with her email account, or if she was talking about something metaphorical, but I said, “of course. Consider it fixed.”
She closed her eyes, started to drift off, then jerked awake. “Tiniest?”
“Yes?”
“I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“I’m ready for The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.”
And I said, “All right.”
“I don’t want any more bullshit.” Her tattooed eyeliner seemed so heavy now on her skeletal face. “Tell my friends I’m dying. Put a sign on the door. Tell them I don’t want any more bullshit.”
I nodded. “No more bullshit.”
“Take my makeup bag with you,” she said. “Take all the lipstick. I’ll never wear it again.” But she hesitated, thought better of that, said, “no, wait, leave the makeup. Ronaldo might come and see me. Make the sign and bring me the book, but leave the makeup bag.”
I nodded. “Good thinking.” When I took a Sharpie out of my purse to make the sign, the word “Clock” caught and fluttered to the tile floor.
“PILLOW” IN THE airport bathroom stall as I was leaving.
“HOME” NEXT TO a dumpster behind a bar in that little Midwestern town I hardly knew.