The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(26)

“I don’t think I will be able to go on if Teresa dies,” he said. I nodded. These are the kinds of words we know to use in times like these. Like times like these.

“I mean, I won’t go on,” he said. His hand still shaded his eyes. He wasn’t using abstraction. This was not the story of the American hero who endures and endures. This was, he thought, the end of his love story. Which was the only story that mattered to him.

I thought about my brother. I tried to imagine what his life would feel like, at twenty-one, to lose both parents at once. My stomach dropped six floors to the street and my heart was pounding and I felt desperate to run the three hundred miles that moment to my brother’s college and knock the kegs away and gather him up in my arms and grip swords to slice open the guts of anyone who approached.

I nodded at Davy with total calm, accepting the terms.

*

It’s her birthday. Seven months after the stroke.

Davy orders a cake. It must be covered in brown icing, he says. To look like leather. There needs to be a handle on one side of the cake, and little patches of brightly colored frosting made to look like postage stamps. One must say Paris. Another Venice. Germany. In the center, as if written on a luggage tag, ice the words Visualize Travel.

A sweet idea, we all agreed. My brother, my grandmother, my two aunts, and I heard the cake plan in separate phone conversations in the week or so before her birthday. Sweet to daydream about something like that, like a unicorn.

My mom was living at an acute rehabilitation hospital. Neighbors, nurses, and other family members came to the party Davy threw for her. They sang. They ate the Visualize Travel cake. I didn’t.

I stayed in Alabama, trying to keep my head above water in school, trying to protest the idea that this birthday might be her last. People told her how good she looked for sixty-five, and in the video I watched of the party, which kept panning back to her in a wheelchair out on a wooden deck, her head is moving around all the time, like there are bugs flitting toward her face that she must escape. Guests lean in low and close to her to express their love, talk twice as loud as normal. She looks at them. Looks away. It is hard to know if she wants to respond but can’t, and feels too frustrated to hold eye contact, or if responding is just one of an infinite set of possible movements, and looking away, to an evergreen’s low branch, is the one she chooses right now. There is no such thing as too much love. But somehow, it is clear that this is too much.

I watched the video and watched the video. I watched myself not being there, watched her overwhelmed with well wishes. For a while I was going home every few weeks, and then after a while, after the first three months, I went back every couple of months, but it was never enough. Every time I went I thought about dropping out of school to stay with her, because that is what a loving daughter would do, but then I kept not doing it.

*

A month after her birthday party with the Visualize Travel cake, I came home for a visit and Davy stopped at a travel store on our way home from the rehab facility. “Be right back,” he said to me in the car. He returned clutching maps and travel books on Italy.

“We’re going to eat pasta and drink wine and look at the fountains,” he said, using the knuckles on his hands to jab at the tears beside his eyes. I think about my mom’s tracheotomy. The sound of the nurses suctioning the phlegm from the quarter-size hole in her throat because she cannot swallow, because she was choking too often on her own saliva.

“We always wanted to go when we retired,” he said. “If we ever had the money.”

“Do you have the money?” I asked.

“We’ll find a way.”

“What way?”

“We’re working it out.”

He didn’t give me any more information and I thought it would be rude to keep asking, thought maybe there wasn’t actually a way, and the plan would fail, and we would all remain home, safe. They’d just had to sell the house. How would there be money for the trip? How would a doctor okay her to travel? How could they decide to leave us behind? None of it seemed possible. But even the far-off, distant, impossible idea of it made me feel like I didn’t fit inside the car anymore, that I couldn’t sit beside him without exploding.

“Do you really think she’ll be able to travel?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice soft and tender, but there was a knife in it.

“She wants to.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s always wanted to.”

“And now?”

“I asked her. Very clearly. And she very clearly responded yes.”

“She did not respond yes! She cannot talk! This is so selfish,” I wanted to scream at him. “So dangerous! So dumb! So terrible to take her somewhere far away to die!” I wanted to list all the threads of idiocy and self-obsession that would have concocted this plan, but I stayed quiet. I was afraid of him cutting me out. And I was afraid that it wasn’t just about her. Maybe he needed something, a wish, a dream, to keep him going, too.

We drove in silence for a few minutes, him wiping his face and neither of us looking at the other. Living in our own private continents across the chasm of the gearshift. Both our hands moved to our wet eyes at the same time and then there was only one of us and a mirror image. Wiping away the evidence. As in the human brain, connection across hemispheres is nearly impossible.