Never Coming Back(9)

“Things that you want to say to her, say now. Even if it seems like she’s not there, like she’s not listening. Say what you need to say anyway.”

Sylvia, the kind nurse with the encouraging smile. She took me aside in the hall after the first of our monthly Life Care Committee meetings, in which we—the doctor and nurses and aides and I—went over details of my mother’s care. Clara, can I talk to you for a minute? Words that lead nowhere good, ever, but everyone stops for them anyway. I leaned against the cool tile wall and listened as she told me that the one rule was that While there will be good days and less-good days, over time the condition only worsens and If you have issues or conflicts that you need to resolve, do it now and The same thing applies to happiness, to joy. Share them with her, but do it now.

How, though? Too many of the words between my mother and me were hard words, words with tall boots, stalking across the bottom of my brain in ugly uppercase.

“You mean like secrets? Secrets I never told her?”

“Maybe,” Sylvia said. “But when it comes to secrets, particularly long-held secrets, consider carefully whether her knowledge of them would ease her mind or yours. You don’t want to unburden yourself only to shift that burden to the listener.”

Ma. Ma. Ma. Ma, look at me. Ma, remember me. Could we do it? Was it too late?

“Okay,” I said to Sylvia, that dumb word okay, but Sylvia smiled and I smiled back at her, squashing the questions that I wanted to ask, that I needed to ask in order to get the answers that I would need in the future. The future was steamrolling down upon us—second by second we were living in a future that didn’t exist a minute ago—and my mother was disappearing. Was this the way being on Jeopardy! felt when no matter how fast and hard you pressed and shook and clicked the buzzer, it didn’t make a sound?





* * *





It happened too fast and it was too big—way too big—and too much was unsaid and wrong between my mother and me before she started to disappear. Too much had been left untold and now there was too much to tell, the words locked tightly within us both, tangled up with the don’t-tell-anyone and the your-mother’s-never-coming-back. A game of Twister gone awry. Bruises and torn ligaments and broken bones.

A year went by of this new life. Visits with Tamar, Life Care meetings, the drive back and forth from Old Forge to Utica that the Subaru and I knew by heart, evenings on the porch with me and Jack Daniel’s and the solar fairy lights glimmering from the white pines I looped them around, evenings when I thought about my mother, what I had and had not done.

I had moved back in early September and now it was early September again and the light was fading. The sun came up later and went down earlier and the bitter winds of winter were nigh upon us. Oh, don’t be so filled with dread, Clara. Don’t be such a monger of doom, a predictor of pain and suffering. Winter is not a time of death; it’s a time of rebirth. Of hibernation. Of fallowness, that fertility may spring forth again come the thaw. The Greek chorus behind me, full of scorn at my fear and loathing of winter.

“So how’s The Fearsome?” Brown asked. “When’s she coming back, anyway?”

I had told Sunshine and Brown, in the face of their repeated questions about my mother, that she wasn’t around. That she had decided to travel the world, go wandering through Europe and Asia, all the places she had never been, a solo traveler on an odyssey. Lies upon lies. Once conjured, lies feed upon themselves. They get greedy. At some point they turn real and take over, tumors muttering, Feed me feed me feed me.

“Maybe never.”

“But isn’t she weary of wandering yet?”

Brown was fond not only of exclamation marks but of rhyme and alliteration. In the one literature class we had taken together back in college—Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare, which ran together in my head, then and now, as chaucermiltonshakespeare—that class in which we all sat together next to the giant window, he used to copy down his favorite examples from the passages the professor read aloud. It was a fall of bright skies that year, and sunshine, the literal form of it, spilled through that window and set Sunshine’s red-gold hair on fire, metaphorical fire. Her hair alight like the New Hampshire trees in the fall, on the mountains visible beyond the classroom.

“It’s hard to imagine The Fearsome anywhere but Sterns,” Brown said. “When I think of her I picture her eating out of jars and chopping down trees. Not presenting her passport to some grim Eastern European customs officer.”

“She never chopped down trees, Brown,” I said. “She split logs that other people delivered to us into woodstove-size chunks. Big difference.”

It was a difference that Brown and Sunshine didn’t care about. When they had first met my mother, lo those many years ago at college, they formed an image of her as a woodswoman who spent her days up in the Adirondacks chopping down enormous trees. A female Paul Bunyan. That was long ago, when Sunshine and Brown were new to a rural landscape, when they ferried back and forth from Manhattan and Boston, respectively, on school breaks. Before the three of us spent the summer before junior year together, living and working in Old Forge, which was when they fell in love with the Adirondacks. They were nothing like me, a country girl raised by a country woman.

“Semantics,” Brown said.

“It is not semantics. There is a profound difference between chopping down a tree and splitting chunks of that tree into small pieces suitable for a woodstove or a fireplace. Which you should know by now, seeing as you just had three full cords of fireplace wood delivered and stacked.”