Never Coming Back(86)

“You might write about her someday,” Sunshine said. “Never say never. You’re her word girl, after all.”

I talked to my mother sometimes now, in the dark of night, when I was far away from the place where she lived. It was easier to talk to her bundled up on the porch, with Jack next to me and Dog in his urn inside and Sunshine and Brown a mile away. I asked her questions and I waited for the answers to come floating up the hill, from the dirt road, from the huge and silent trees that surrounded me. Answers like fireflies, floating up out of the darkness.

“Ma?”

Sometimes she answered. Sometimes she didn’t.

“Ma, I don’t know how to handle this.”

“Yes, you do.”

Immediate and clear. An answer unlike the not-answers she used to give me when I was a child.

“You’re already handling it,” she said, “even if you don’t know you are.”

“Handling it how? Driving down to visit you? Watching Jeopardy! with you? Talking to Annabelle and Eli? Hanging on to Sunshine and Brown? Reading to you from the seagull book?”

“Yes.”

“‘Yes’? That’s all you got? A one-syllable answer?”

“Yes.”

Then she was gone. You could feel when someone was with you and you could feel it when they left. Three yesses in a row. If my mother said I was handling it, then maybe I was. Maybe this was what handling something—something huge and overwhelming, something with no way in and no way out—felt like.

Maybe Sunshine was right, and the day would come that I wrote about my mother. Things that I remembered about her, things that were caught inside me, trapped and wanting a way out. Maybe I would sit here on the porch, with a notebook and a pen, and build a house for my mother. It would be a house for me and her, a house with plenty of wood for the winter, cupboards filled with jars and cans, Dog curled up with his stuffed monkey, a place where we could live forever. When my mother thought I wasn’t there she would lie down on the floor and listen to Len. She would read her seagull book for the thousandth time. She would think about the dreams she had for her life, the dreams I never knew she had. Dreams that I still didn’t know about, because I never asked. She would tell me about Eli, maybe, or maybe she would keep the memory of him for herself alone. When Leonard Cohen sang “Hallelujah” she might start to cry. She might play that one song over and over again, because she was alone, and who would know? Who would care?

My mother might think that she was alone. But she would be wrong. I would be with her, watching over her, in that house made of words.





* * *





It was a morning of sun so anemic that I kept glancing at the sky through the window, thinking it was about to storm, but no. Just early winter in upstate New York. My mother and I were sitting on the Green Room couch, me massaging her hands, one finger joint at a time. This had been a recent discovery and so far it was working. Every time she was bewildered or agitated or asking the same question over and over again, that brain-fog look of confusion on her face, I would take her hand in mine and say, “Let’s sit down, Ma. Let me work the knots out.” And she would sit down and I would begin, one finger joint at a time, softly and gently, in hopes of avoiding pain for her. At this stage, we could not tell if something was hurting, and she herself didn’t always know.

Or that was the way it seemed. How strange not to know if you were hurting, not to know if something was pressing on a nerve or a swollen joint or a bruise. But once, months before, something didn’t feel quite right and I looked down to see my fingers kneading a purple-green bruise on her forearm. “Oh, Ma,” I said, “I’m so sorry. That must hurt like hell. How’d you get that bruise?” But she just looked down at it in mild interest, as if her arm and its bruise belonged to a stranger.

And the cold. She was always cold, or so it seemed, a condition that had persisted for months now, despite the layers and layers of clothes she would keep putting on even after an aide or Sylvia or I persuaded them off. Multiple socks. Her winter coat. A radish hat made for her by Sunshine. I had come upon my mother huddled on her bed under three blankets, propped on all sides by pillows. “Ma? It’s eighty-six degrees in here, according to the thermostat. Aren’t you hot?” Face pink and hair damp with sweat, she would shake her head no and pull the blankets closer. It seemed impossible that she could be cold, but then who was I to say what was possible and impossible for my mother? Who was I to decide for her? Her world, which might be part of this world but also might not, might be a world filled with chill.

“Ma, I’m going to run to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

Down the hall I went, to the bathroom that I thought of as my bathroom, as our bathroom, with “our” being everyone who walked through the doors of this place to visit someone who lived here and then walked on out again to go elsewhere, an else not here, a place called home. This bathroom had handicap rails but was used only by visitors, those like me who strode in and locked the door and did our business and flushed the toilet and washed our hands and glanced in the mirror and strode back down the hall to our parent or grandparent or sister or brother or aunt or uncle or wife or husband. It took me three minutes total.

But when I turned the hall corner, there was Sylvia, standing next to the Green Room doorframe, her hand half covering her mouth.