The Maid's Diary(13)

I walk faster. A more purposeful stride.

I hear my mother countering him. “Leave Katarina alone.”

The balloon of grief in my chest suddenly explodes. Tears surge to my eyes, and I feel like this thing is going to consume me. Lives gone. Opportunities gone. I failed them. I’ve failed me. And I am thankful for the rain—the insidious coastal mist of a rain that hides the salty wetness on my face.

I stumble slightly on an exposed root. Catching myself, I glance up. And I see it—a wooden bench bolted into a smooth slab of rock that looks out over the gunmetal sea.

“This,” I say, turning to Boon, “this is the spot.”

“Someone has already memorialized this place, Kit. Look, there’s a plaque on the bench—it’s someone else’s grieving place. They paid for this bench.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. It’s donated in the name of this other dead person. Besides, it would be fitting, wouldn’t it? Me and my mom, the parasite recyclers of other rich people’s garbage, using some other rich person’s memorial. Secondhand clothes—secondhand benches.” I face him. “It’s not like they own this rock, or the park. It’s a public park. For everyone’s enjoyment. They just funded it.”

“It’s a joke, Kit. Jeez—what’s going on with—” But he swallows his words. He knows what’s going on. I’m having trouble dealing with this. That’s what’s going on.

“Sorry,” I say. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Okay. Fine.”

I shrug the backpack off my shoulders and fish out the urn. Then freeze. I can’t do it.

So Boon and I sit for a while on the bench. In the soft rain and fog. Me holding tightly on to the biodegradable bamboo cylinder in my lap, suddenly unable to let my mother go.

All these years, thinking I would be fine without her wrongful judgment. Now—

I run my hand over the bamboo. It’s so smooth. The funeral director told me I could bury the urn after scattering the cremains, maybe even plant a tree on top of it, and it would decompose.

The fog presses in. The forest drips more heavily. We can hear the distant sound of the city, the far-off wail of a siren.

Boon says softly, kindly, because Boon has always been kind to me, “We should do it, Kit. I need to get to work. So do you.” His set-designing job in “Hollywood North” awaits. He’s working on the second season of a TV series about a coroner. And my new clients’ home awaits—I’m wearing my Holly’s Help uniform beneath my coat. Still, I’m unable to move. I’m welded to the bench with the cylinder of Mom’s ashes between my hands. Tears begin to stream down my face. My shoulders heave.

Her ashes have sat on my mantel for an entire year because I couldn’t bring myself to do this. As though I wanted her there on the mantel continually pointing her accusing finger at me. “See, Katarina, you clean up the mess of other people’s lives, yet you can’t keep clean your own. Now you can’t even dispose of your dear mother’s ashes, the mother who gave up everything in native Ukraine for you so you could have a better life. You never could finish things off properly. You even dropped out of school after we saved all the money for your university education. Too much drinking. Too much partying. Bad crowd.”

Boon puts his arm around me. He says nothing. He’s just there for me. There are all kinds of love, and the love I have for Boon is just one kind. He’s my best friend. I will do anything for him and he will do the same for me. It’s a bond stronger than blood.

“You know what her last words to me were?” I say quietly.

Boon makes a moue beneath his dripping rain cap. “Let me guess.” And he commences a perfect imitation of my mother’s Ukrainian-accented voice. “You could have amounted to something, Katarina.”

I laugh-choke. “No. No—it went like this—” I take a moment to collect my own theater voice, then in a precise echo of our “conversation” in the hospice room, I say:

“I need to get out of here, Katarina. Help me get out of this bed. At once.”

“Mom, you’re weak. You’re going to fall. I’ll call the nurse for—”

“No, no! Dear God, I have to leave this place.”

“Stop, Mom. Let me help you lie back.”

“Leave me alone! Let go of me! Mother of God! Hail Mary, dear Jesus, 911, help me somebody! Help get Katarina off me. Let me go. I will kick you, Katarina. I will kick you so hard, I will donkey kick you!”

Boon stares at me. Then a slow smile curves his lips. “Donkey kick?”

I give a snort of laughter, wipe my nose with the back of my hand, nod.

“What’s a donkey kick? I thought it was a yoga move.”

“Probably the hardest kick my mother could imagine. Kicking backward, you know, like a horse.”

“Maybe someone on the farm she grew up on was kicked by a donkey.”

“I have no idea. It was partly the medication, partly the natural dying process. There are stages, you know? Like there are specific stages in pregnancy, there are identifiable, predictable stages in the process of leaving this world.”

“Guess that’s why there are doulas at each end—both entry and exit can be pretty violent and traumatic. And scary.”