When the Lights Go Out(52)

He heard her cries as he sat there in his own front room, sucking away on his cigar. No doubt he heard her cries, though later, as the ambulance carried her away and he stood watching from his porch steps—merely a snoop and not a Samaritan—he claimed he did not.

I pay extra attention to the sidewalk as I walk along, taking care not to step on the cracks. Not that it matters because Mom wouldn’t feel it anyway if my footfalls broke her back. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

I cross the street, refusing to say hello to Mr. Henderson, refusing to meet his curious eye. I dig into my bag for the keys, climbing up the stairs and to the front door.

This neighborhood has been around for near forever. Most of the homes are circa 1920-something, during some sort of housing boom when thousands of bungalows sprung up overnight, fulfilling dreams of homeownership for that exploding middle class. Because the homes were practical and affordable. And because there were a ton of them. Up and down the street, all I see is nothing but trees and brick, trees and brick. Trees and brick as far as the eye can see. I have no doubt Mom chose Albany Park to live because it’s relatively affordable, a good place to raise kids. Money was a luxury Mom and I didn’t have. Not that I can say I grew up poor, because I didn’t. But Mom was frugal and we weren’t rich.

We planned a big dinner out for when the cancer was finally in remission for the second time around. Gibsons Steakhouse. Mom was going to buy a new dress to wear because she never spent money on herself. Any time there was a little extra to spare, she spent it on me.

Needless to say, Gibsons Steakhouse never happened.

The day Mom found out the cancer was back, she was sitting outside on the front stoop when I got home from school. She’d been to the doctor for back pain, the kind that no amount of ibuprofen could fix. Pain she hadn’t told me about until that afternoon. She thought it was a herniated disc, back strain, sciatica. Effects of the job.

As it turned out, it was the breast cancer, back for vengeance. Metastasized to the bones, the lungs.

She told me to sit. She held my hand, caressed each finger one at a time while I committed to memory the length and shape of her fingers, the asymmetry of the knucklebones, the blue rivers of veins that swept across the thinning skin.

She said to me that day on the stoop, Jessie, I’m dying. I’m going to die.

I cried. But she said it was all right. She wasn’t afraid to die. She was stoic. When? I asked, like some stupid child. Like Mom had any way of knowing exactly when it would happen.

What she said was Sooner or later we all die, Jessie. It’s only a matter of time. And this is mine.

I unlock the door and step inside. I’m inundated with the smell almost immediately. The smell of Mom. Her hand lotion, Crabtree & Evelyn’s Summer Hill. It nearly knocks me from my feet. It’s diffused through the rooms and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think that Mom was still here with me. Heart still ticking, not yet dead. I hear that death rattle, the saliva pooling there in the back of her throat. The nurses’ gentle footfalls, close enough to touch. As if they’re still there, still walking in orbits around me. Lathering lotion on Mom’s hands and feet, turning her every few hours to keep bedsores from forming on her skin.

The smell of the lotion is overpowering. It binds to the millions of tiny little hairs in my nose, bringing me to my knees every time I breathe. Mom.

And I find that I’m looking for her, half-certain that when I turn she’ll be standing there in the arched doorway of the kitchen, sagging body leaning against the doorway because she doesn’t have the energy to hold it upright anymore, a soft cotton hat covering her bald head. Asking how I got along at school today in that way that she does, teeth gritted through the pain that managed to breeze in and past the narcotics sometimes.

How’d you get along at school today, Jessie?

But it’s not real, I remind myself.

The nurses are not here.

Mom is dead.

And only then am I aware of the silence. Of the earsplitting silence that now worms its way through the cracks of our home.

I don’t know where to begin. I searched the entire home already, but I look anyway, starting in my bedroom, planning to work my way down in search of the social security card. I pluck desk and dresser drawers from their tracks. I dig beneath clothes I’ve intentionally left in the dresser drawers, those I no longer need. I lift rugs from the floor and check beneath. I canvass my closet. No luck.

I make my way to Mom’s bedroom, where I see that the liquidator has begun to tag items for sale. Mom’s clothes now hang from a rolling rack beside her bed. I run my hands over a knit cardigan, her favorite. If I’d had my wits about me at the time, I would have had Mom cremated in the cardigan so she could spend all of eternity in it. But instead she wore a hospital gown, white and wrinkled with snowflakes, a single tie on the otherwise open back. The funeral home gathered her body from the hospital within hours after she died. But there was a mandatory waiting period before the cremation could begin. Twenty-four hours, in case I changed my mind.

I spent those twenty-four hours parked outside the funeral home’s doors, sitting on the curb because they didn’t have a bench. And because I couldn’t bring myself to go home without Mom.

The liquidator will take some 40 percent of all sales, which is fine by me. Anything so that I don’t have to be involved in the process, so that I don’t have to watch our possessions walk out the door in the arms of someone new.