After the End(70)

thirty-one





Max


   2016


I only brought Pip to Mom’s house once, right after we got engaged. After that, Mom flew to the UK, or we met downtown, and I’m glad, now, that I didn’t fill 912 North Wolcott with memories I can’t shake. Instead I see my ten-year-old self, my sixteen-year-old self. I see bikes thrown on the sidewalk, Hubba Bubba and Capri Sun. I see illicit beers my folks knew about but ignored.

I drag my case up the steps, and the front door opens as though she’s been waiting by the window ever since my flight landed. Like the street itself, she looks the same, yet different. Older, yet still Mom.

“Oh, my poor boy.” She holds out her arms, and I smell musk and baking and the indefinable scent of home. The wind blows a clutch of burnt-orange leaves into the house.

She didn’t come to England for the funeral. She visited not long before Dylan passed, hiding her shock at how much he’d deteriorated since her last visit, and by the round-the-clock care he had always needed, but which by then required a nurse as well as either Pip or me.

“We said our goodbyes,” she told me, when I offered to buy her ticket. “I don’t need a funeral to remember that beautiful boy—he’s right here in my heart every single day.”

“Pip and I will come and see you soon,” I promised. We, not I.

“I never thought she was good enough for you,” Mom says, when we’re sitting in the living room, on the bright blue sofa she bought after Dad passed, because I need some color back in my life.

“Mom!” It’s so outrageous a burst of laughter escapes my lips. “Pip and I have been together for thirteen years, and you have never once said anything of the sort.”

“Well, I thought it.” She purses her lips and sets down her mug with a clatter. I stifle a yawn, the heat and the jet lag combining to suddenly make me bone-tired. “I’ve made up your old room. Why don’t you go take a nap, and I’ll fix us some dinner?”

The twin bed I slept in till I was nineteen has been replaced by a double, pushed against the wall to fit it in, and covered with a pink comforter too warm for the season. I don’t need to look under the bed to remember the burn in the carpet that grounded me for a month. The walls, once a dirty cream, have long since been repainted, but if I look carefully I can see the grease spots left by the putty gluing my posters to the walls.

I’m exhausted but wired, my head full of a thousand voices, a thousand memories. Pip, when Dylan was born, her hair plastered to her face with sweat, and never looking so beautiful. Dylan playing football, arms swinging with the effort of kicking a ball without falling over. Pip knitting by Dylan’s hospital bed, reading him a story. Dylan in Houston. Another scan, another shot of radiation. Dylan, Dylan, Dylan . . . I turn onto my side and curl into a ball, my head buried beneath my pillow to block out Pip’s voice. That wasn’t a life!

Dylan lived. He lived.

Hot tears push past my eyelids. I remember the way his face lit up when someone he recognized walked into the room, I hear the high-pitched, crazy sound that passed for a laugh. Dylan lived. Maybe it wasn’t the life we wanted him to live, but it was a life. It was his life.

Later—it could be an hour, it could be three—I hear the door pushing open and I know Mom’s standing there, trying to decide whether to wake me up or not. The thought of making conversation—the thought of just getting out of this bed—is suddenly overwhelming. I feel safe, in this bedroom that used to be mine, and so I stay here.

I stay for the rest of the day, and for the night. I hear Mom come in, before she goes to bed, and I sense her indecision as she hovers in the doorway. Should she wake me? Say good night? In the end she pads quietly across the room and closes the drapes, and I feel the bed dip as she sits on the side. She sighs, and on top of my guilt at pretending to be asleep, I add the guilt that my mother still has to worry about me, forty years after she started.

Sometime after six I get up to use the bathroom. There’s a tight band across my chest, and a fluttering where my heartbeat used to be. I drink a glass of water, but the band pulls tighter. It’s like indigestion, only I haven’t eaten anything; like a stitch, only I haven’t been running. I go back to bed, and only when I’m back in a ball, with the pink comforter pulled over my head, does the band ease enough to let me breathe.

I’m woken by a phone ringing. I feel around for my cell, pulling it into the darkness of my comforter cave. I watch my boss’s name flash over and over. I put my thumb over the speaker to dull the ringing that pierces the fog and makes my head hurt, and wait for it to stop.

He calls again an hour later. And an hour after that. I switch the phone to silent, and count the calls for no discernible reason. Seven. Eight. Nine. Mom brings me chicken soup.

“You don’t look well. Do you have a fever?”

“I think I might be getting something.” The tightness in my chest has been joined by sticky, clammy sweats; by a stomach cramp that sends me rushing for the bathroom.

“Should I call a doctor?”

“No, it’ll pass.”

It doesn’t pass. When I shower, Mom whips through my room, emptying the trash of tissues, and clearing half-drunk cups of water. Occasionally she’ll open the window, only for me to shut it again. She brings soup, sandwiches, pieces of roast chicken. Jell-O and ice cream, like I’m nine years old. And all the time, the band in my chest wraps tighter and tighter around me, and the voices in my head grow louder.