When the Lights Go Out(83)

The room around me is blue. Blue walls. Blue sheets. A comforting, pastel shade of blue. I’m not on the lawn after all. I’m not outside, lying in the shadow of the building from which I fell. Rather I’m in a room, on a bed.

A woman stands beside Mom, lathering lotion onto her arms and hands, massaging the purplish, blotchy skin. I know who she is because I’ve seen her before, at the hospital before Mom died. She was Mom’s nurse, one of them anyway. A woman named Carrie who was more religious than any about applying lotion to Mom’s hands and feet, about turning her so she didn’t get bedsores. Even when I begged for them to leave her alone so Mom could sleep.

She looks over at me and says, “Well, it’s about time,” and that’s when I know that we’re all dead. Mom, the nurse and me. They’ve just been waiting for me to arrive.

I know how Mom and I died, but I wonder, how did she?

“That stuff knocked you out cold,” says the woman who squats on her haunches beside me, a second nurse. Her hand rests on my shoulder, the very same hand that only moments ago rattled me, mouth purring into my ear, Psst. Hey you, hey, Jessie. Earth to Jessie.

“What stuff?” I ask, feeling dazed and confused. Behind me, from a record player, Gladys Knight sings to me. There’s the greatest sense that I’m still falling, though I’m well aware that it didn’t hurt when I hit the ground. That when I crash-landed into the concrete beside the apartment building, I felt nothing. I don’t even remember it happening. I must’ve been dead by then, I decide. A heart attack, a broken neck.

The room whirls around me. I push myself up so I sit, perpendicular, no longer lying down on a bed. There’s a puddle of blankets on the floor, a pillow beneath my head. The second woman rises from the ground beside me and pulls the strings of a window shade so that they rise. I’ve seen her before. She’s the same woman who kept me company the night before Mom died, and now she too is dead like me. How can that be?

How can we all be dead?

More blinding yellow infiltrates the room, making it hard to see much of anything clearly. But Mom. I see Mom. My eyes go back to Mom. To Mom sitting there. Mom, in the flesh. No longer listless. No longer bed bound. She looks sleepy still, her eyes glazed over, and yet on her face, a smile. “How about some ice chips, Miss Eden?” Nurse Carrie asks, offering a single piece of ice from the end of a spoon.

“The clonazepam,” I hear, and it takes a minute to realize the nurse is talking to me, that I asked a question and she’s answering it for me. “The stuff doc gave you to sleep. He’ll be happy to hear it worked. You needed a good night’s sleep. You were dreaming,” she says. “Calling out, kicking in your sleep. Must’ve been one hell of a dream.”

And as I finally start to get my bearings, I realize where I am. I’m in Mom’s hospital room. Mom. Who sits six feet from me, upright, sucking on a cube of ice. Not six feet under, but six feet from me. No longer ashes, but now whole.

The clonazepam. The melatonin. That I remember. My own bloody, inflamed eyes. The doctor, concerned, offering something to help me sleep. Watching a newsmagazine show on the TV, a story about identity theft, while waiting for the pills to kick in, the nurse tucking me into bed, telling me about her daughter, dead in a car accident at the age of three. The purple swimsuit, her daughter collecting shells from the sea. That I remember.

By the time I woke up Mom was dead, except that she wasn’t dead.

It was all a dream.

My eyes adapt. The light becomes less painful, less blinding.

And that’s when I see a man in the room too, and I know straightaway that it’s the man from the dream. And I wonder if I’m still dreaming. If this is like the purgatory of dreams and I’m trapped somewhere between sleep and awake, having to atone for my sins before I can fully wake up. His back is to me as it’s almost always been because he’s there on a chair before Mom. He sits, though I see it in the body posture, the carriage, and I know that it’s him. I’m not chasing him anymore because now he’s here.

Ping, I hear then. Ping. And I turn to watch the movement of lines across Mom’s EKG, the spikes and dips of her heartbeat.

“Dad,” I breathe, my voice gravelly and hoarse. My heart throbs. Because after chasing him for all those days and nights, after spending my entire life trying to find him, he’s here.

He’s been here all along, waiting for me to wake up.

Except that as the man turns to me, I see that he’s different. His face is not the face from my dreams. There’s no facial hair anywhere, and his eyes are a grayish-green like sage. They’re not brown. His hair is streaked with gray and there are lines across his face, forehead lines mostly, deeply set. His arms are blotched with pale pink scars.

It dawns on me then, slowly. Of course he’s different from the man in my dream. Because in real life I never saw his face. I only caught a glimpse of the back of him when I was a girl, before Mom snatched the photograph from my hand. Before we read a book, before we ate ice cream. Now I remember. I never saw that photograph again until it returned to me in a dream.

There’s a book on his lap.

He leans forward, gathering Mom’s hands into his. Hers are limp. He strokes her cheek, and I see in his eyes the look that he has for her. A look of adoration, a look of love. It makes me feel embarrassed, watching them. This moment of intimacy. It’s not for me to see.