32.
I LET MAXITO SLEEP IN.
It must have been after 9 a.m. when he finally tip-toed into the kitchen of the little adobe, rosy-cheeked and rubbing his eyes. “Good morning,” he said. “I want a sandwich.” He squinted against the morning sun. “And let’s make you some coffee, Mama.”
He stood up on his wooden step stool and I watched his little hands as he pressed the button to grind the coffee beans for me.
I remembered when I was pregnant with Maia how terrified I felt that I would abuse her. That I would torment her. And I remembered the flood of relief when I realized unabusive motherhood wasn’t so very hard. That sure – it took a diligence, probably more diligence when emotional violence was my first language. But that in the end it isn’t so hard not to ruin everything we love. It meant deferring to my child when I felt that wit’s-end rage bubble up, meant stepping back to remind myself that she was the baby here, that I was the grown-up. It meant reminding myself to behave in a way I would be proud of. It meant not always needing to be right, apologizing when I was wrong. It meant a lot of pause-taking. But it wasn’t so very hard.
I made Maxito a banana sandwich.
We sat outside. The first warm morning in March.
He fed his bread crusts to the chickens, climbed the branches of the plum tree he called his own. A blossom. “It’s getting springtime,” he said. “I love being in a tree.”
I should have had him at daycare two hours earlier, but I liked it here in the late warm morning. Just feeding the chickens. Pretending we didn’t have anyone else to care for.
MY BUDDHIST FRIEND in Albuquerque texted me the name of a gym she knew in Santa Fe. She wanted me to start lifting weights, she said. She wanted me to stay strong. And have you tried going to the dump and breaking plates? It might be a good way to get any anger out of your body without hurting anyone. She was meditating, she said, on swords that cut through delusions and into the heart of things.
I texted my Buddhist friend back: I think I’m learning something about those swords.
And now the chef texted: I want to get my African violets colored in. Tattoo date?
My stars had healed.
Yes. I wanted more.
What was a tattoo anyway, but a visual reminder of pain and healing. The memoir inked into our skin. Some symbolic way to integrate the enormity of everything.
I grabbed one of the three copies of the new Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ book I’d gotten for Christmas, remembered an image of the pierced heart of Mary somewhere in those pages. “The swords through your heart are not the ones that caused your wounds, but rather, these swords of strength were earned by your struggle through hard times.”
Here it was, “the unruined heart” pierced by seven swords. I didn’t think I’d earned all those swords yet, but maybe the pierced/unruined heart could become some self-fulfilling prophecy. Like 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.
I texted the chef back: Yes, please. Tattoo date.
MY MOTHERS’ ESTRANGED best friend’s daughter was flying in that night. Karin. She would sit by my mother’s hospice bed, read her Mary Oliver poetry. She would sing to her. She would pour me a glass of wine in the custom kitchen, shake her head, and say, “this is intense – dark and spirit-filled work – I don’t know how you’re doing it.”
I didn’t know if I was doing it.
MAIA ARRIVED FOR a long weekend.
My mother wept at the sight of her, pointed to the crow painting on her wall, “my crow,” she told Maia. “It makes me cry.”
Maia sat with her, read her passages from a book by the painting-artist about that crow until my mother fell asleep.
A FACEBOOK MESSAGE from my old friend Teagan: What does it mean for life to bear witness to death?
I didn’t answer her, didn’t want to answer her. Even Baba Yaga said that not all questions cry out to be answered. I just messaged back: You’re gonna start quoting Freud on me now?
What did it mean for life to bear witness to death? My oracle back in Portland had said I could ask questions after a year, but it occurred to me now that it didn’t promise any good answers.
IN THE YARD behind the former duplex, the living crows had started to gather. Five of them on the back fence. The snow fell. Ten of them now. It kept falling. There must have been thirty crows in the trees and on that back fence come first day of spring.
“Are there always so many crows in your backyard?” my Buddhist friend from Albuquerque asked when she stopped by to paint my fingernails purple.
“No. They’ve been gathering.”
And now here was my mother on the new caregiver Octavio’s arm. She hadn’t been out of bed in a month. She wrinkled her nose at the bottles of nail polish on the dining room table. “Are you trying to kill me? With those fumes?”
“I can’t believe you’re up, Mom. That’s great.”
She stood unsteady, leaned into Octavio, said, “Do you know what I want? I want a pumpkin chiffon pie. Just like Madre used to make.”
Madre. My Gammie. Her pumpkin chiffon pie.
I actually had the recipe. “You got it,” I said. “Pumpkin chiffon pie.”
THE NEXT DAY I stepped into my mother’s room, carrying my ugly little pumpkin chiffon pie. I couldn’t find the right ginger snaps at Healthy Wealthy for the crust, had been too impatient to let the pumpkin and egg white mixture cool properly. That pie smelled perfect, but it didn’t look like anything Gammie would have served.
“I hate you!” my mother shrieked.
I set the pie down on her desk, between the TV stand and the painting of the crow. “Okay, Mom. I give up, why do you hate me?”
“I’m not ready to die,” she screamed. “Who does that? Who doesn’t get ready to die? Do you want to know why I hate you, Tiniest?”
“Sure.” I was so tired.
“You’ve got everything and I’ve got nothing, all right? There you have it. You have a life and I don’t have a life.”
I shook my head, wanted to take a handful of that pie and cram it down her throat.
“You’ve always had a life, all right?” my mother seethed. “I’m a jealous bitch. That’s the truth about your mother. Your mother’s a jealous bitch. Are you happy now?”
“Yes, Mom,” I said. “I’m bubbling over with glee. This is exactly the kind of conversation I always dreamed of having with you on your deathbed.” I left her with her pie.
“Tiniest?” she called after me. I didn’t answer.
“Is that a pie?” she yelled.
I didn’t answer.
“Oh my God, Tiniest,” my mother cried. “You made me the pie.”
I GRABBED A pile of white dishes from my mother’s kitchen, texted the chef from the driveway: Can we get out of town for a couple of days?
Maxito would be with Sol anyway.
The chef texted back: Yes, definitely.
On the way home to my little adobe, I stopped at the dump, stood at the edge of the garbage pit and held each plate, one by one, smooth in my hands, before I raised it above my head and hurled it into the pit. The sound of the ceramic hitting concrete.
AT HOME I packed fast. The chef picked me up in her gold Jeep and we drove south down Highway 25, drove toward the lithium hot springs in Truth or Consequences.
We’d hole up in a room with a hot plate and a private mineral bath through April Fools’ Day.
“My mother is never going to die,” I mumbled.
It had been two months since her release from the hospital.
My friends on Facebook threw virtual confetti. Death is beautiful! they insisted, and This is your time with her!
How could I explain the depth of my exhaustion? I knew I should be living in the present, in these ugly and sacred moments. I thought of the little girl clinging to her father as he held her over the fire, clinging because he was all she had. But I was glad my mother wasn’t all I had.
IN THE TIBETAN Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche recalls the death of a spiritual master. He was just seven years old when he witnessed it: The old man beckoned one of his students to his side. “A-mi,” he called her, my child. “Come here,” he said. “It’s happening now. I’ve no further advice for you. You are fine as you are: I am happy with you.”
WE KEPT DRIVING fast south in the chef’s Jeep. I never thought my mother would die with the grace of a master, but now I made quick peace with the possibility that my last conversation with her might have been the one about how much she hated me.
My phone buzzed with a call. I wanted to ignore it. My mother’s landline. “Hello?”
“Tiniest?” she whispered, anxious. “You have to come here now.”
“I can’t, Mom.” I watched out the Jeep window. Citizen Cope on the car stereo. I watched all that dry red earth, watched the dry river beds as we crossed over each bridge.
My mother’s voice, frantic: “Someone put a Post-it Note on the faux finished cabinets in the kitchen, Tiniest.”
This was her problem. A Post-it Note.
I’d seen it, actually. The note. A missive about which organic beans my mother liked better. (Pinto, not black).
“They’ve ruined the paint job, Tiniest. A person who would put a Post-it on my faux finishing would do anything,” my mother cried. “You have to find out who’s done this.” Her voice cracked. “You have to fire whoever’s done this. Don’t let them anywhere near me. Please. Don’t let anyone who would do anything like this anywhere near me.”
“All right,” I promised on the phone, clicked it off. The low desert shrubs. I texted all the caregivers: Don’t anyone admit to putting the Post-it Note on the faux finishing.