I'm Glad My Mom Died(43)
“It’s just the best option, since I don’t drive and you can’t anymore.”
Even though it’s just a fact, Mom looks down. I can tell I’ve hurt her feelings.
“I might be able to drive again someday,” she says timidly, like a child would to seek reassurance from an adult.
“I know you might,” I say with loaded positivity, the way an adult would to reassure a child.
We both look at her wheelchair, the wheelchair she’s recently been given to utilize “when she needs,” an allotment that has gotten more and more frequent by the day. In the moment her doctor told her he thought she could use one, we both pretended it would be fun. She said I could push her around at Disneyland and I said yay. Then I went into the hospital bathroom and sobbed but there was no toilet paper left in the stall so I used a toilet seat cover to dry my eyes. And then I went back out and said yay again.
This goddamned wheelchair is the furthest thing from a fucking yay. It’s a death sentence. Neither of us can admit it, but that’s what it is. Once you’re a cancer patient with a wheelchair, you’re never gonna be one without it. You’re gonna die a wheelchairing cancer patient. Fuck this.
“All right, sorry about that,” Grandpa says as he comes out of the house to meet us in the driveway. “I’m ready to go now. Clean pants.” He gestures to the pants he just changed into after spilling his entire tumbler of coffee on the first pair.
I take a seat in the back, surrounded by the moving boxes I already piled into the Kia. I watch as Grandpa lifts Mom into the shotgun seat, folds her wheelchair up, and piles it into the trunk. And with that, we’re off to my apartment. My first-ever solo apartment.
We pull up to the Burbank complex a little over an hour later. The complex is okay. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it makes sense logistically. My new managers (I switched during season three of iCarly) arranged for Nickelodeon to pay for my lodging here and for a production assistant to take me to and from work. (I don’t drive since Mom says it’s probably too difficult for me and that my energy in cars could better be spent elsewhere, like “learning lines or planning tweets.”)
I would never admit this to Mom, I’ve only told her I’m devastated about being away from her, but I’m excited too. I feel guilty about that excitement, considering the fragility of her health, but the feeling is undeniable. I get to be on my own. I get space to myself. Life to myself.
Grandpa carries Mom into the apartment while I carry the first few boxes.
“I got you a present, Net,” Mom says as Grandpa sets her down on the couch. Since Nickelodeon’s paying, Mom insisted on the pre-furnished place. She pulls a wrapped gift from under her arm.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I even curled the ribbon,” she says as she hands the DVD-sized present to me. She’s gotten more desperate these past few months. She’s gotten more desperate and I’ve gotten more angry. I don’t know if my anger is a direct result of her desperation, but it’s at least a partial result of it. I can’t fucking handle how desperate she is. The sicker she gets, the cuter she becomes in her intonation, the more innocent she becomes, the more she pleads with me. It’s like she’s begging me to not slip away, and I want to scream, YOU’RE THE ONE SLIPPING AWAY! I could swear she can tell that I want to scream because she doubles down on the cuteness. Which makes me want to double down on the scream. But I don’t. I keep it in. And then she looks at me with her big eyes and I know she doesn’t, she couldn’t, but I almost feel like she’s enjoying this. I almost feel like she’s enjoying the pain. Like it’s a representation to her of how much I care.
“Aren’t you gonna open it?” Mom asks.
“Oh. Right.”
I unwrap the present. It’s a DVD of The Sting. Mom loves Robert Redford. I do too, but she loves him more.
“I figured we could watch it tonight after you unpack.”
“Oh, okay. That’ll be great.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mom says, removing her hat to scratch her bald head. “And then, um, I was thinking… I don’t have chemo tomorrow, so I could spend the night. You know, if you want.”
She looks at me, doe-eyed, wringing her hands nervously. I immediately know what this is. This is not Mom spending the night. This is Mom spending every night for the foreseeable future. This is Mom moving in. I don’t want her to spend the night.
“Sure, you can spend the night,” I say.
And I continue to say it every single night for the next three months, until eventually, she doesn’t even ask it anymore. She just expects it. This is not my first-ever solo apartment. This is our apartment. We are roommates.
43.
I’M SITTING ON THE LOG ride at Six Flags, stuffed into the front seat of the log with five iCarly crew members tucked into the seats behind me. My co-worker Joe, the one seated directly behind me, keeps touching me. At first I couldn’t tell if it was an accident since I know he’s in his thirties and has a girlfriend, but now it’s happened so many times that I’m sure it’s on purpose. I say nothing because the truth is it feels nice. The truth is I want him to touch me like this.
Our friendship has been flirty for the past few months, ever since we were the first two in the room before a table read. Joe and I got to talking and he mentioned his favorite movie, Dazed and Confused, which I went home and watched that night so that we’d have something to talk about the next day. I wanted so badly to impress him since he was older and wiser than me. We swapped Words with Friends usernames and Joe started offering me rides home from work, where he’d play Daft Punk albums front to back and explain to me what made their music so genius. I didn’t really like the electronic sound but I loved that Joe wanted to teach me why I should.