The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(3)

*

For my whole life, I have been scared, terrified, of losing my mom.

I am losing my mom.

While I’m standing among explosive containers on a quiet Oakland night, she is humming at a nurse in one of her daily therapy sessions, because she no longer has language. While I am running a flame along my palm, she is running her hand across the half of her body that can no longer move. She touches it a lot, the paralyzed side. Perhaps it doesn’t feel like it belongs to her. She touches everything around her. Kitchen table, fork, husband, we say as she touches those things, to let her know they still belong to her, too. Wound, we say as she touches her head where it was opened after her brain would not stop bleeding.

She is a yes person, a woman of adventure. When I begin to doubt that I can pull this off, I stop and think of her.

The only way to do it is to do it.

There is no trick.





THE ARCHITECTURE OF A WAVE

One day after the stroke

October 2010

Her arms were tucked against her sides. She had been arranged.

“Prepare yourself,” my stepdad, Davy, whispered into my hair when he hugged me outside her hospital room. I’d just arrived from across the country after a night of emergency phone calls. I was not prepared. My mom was in a hospital bed, covered in machines. There were remnants of fluid, blood and yellow secretions, dried all along her head. A ventilator taped across her mouth pulled her skin taut.

I started to whisper something to Davy, but he stopped me. “She can’t hear you,” he said. “She won’t wake up.”

“Until when?” I asked.

He let out a sigh that caught in his throat halfway, the air turning into a sob that turned into a cough that turned into silence. We stood beside one another, not touching.

She was in an induced coma. They had filled her with barbiturates to knock her out. That’s what a nurse told me, when I asked, after being in the room with my mom for ten minutes and then fleeing to find some goddamned information. I pinched and pinched and pinched myself.

“What is happening?” I asked another nurse. She squeezed my shoulder like a football coach.

An induced coma reduces the rate of cerebral blood flow. After her blood slowed, they hauled out the chain saw. I do not know if they actually used a chain saw. Probably not. But it had to have been a big saw to cut away half of a human skull.

When I came back to her room, Davy, my aunt, and my uncle stepped outside.

“We’ll give you a few minutes alone,” they said. “To say what you need to say.”

*

Two weeks before, a handwritten note had arrived from her that said, for no reason, she was proud of me.

*

I walked into the room. Sat in a chair beside her bed. I knew she would not open her eyes. She would not say babygirl, that high-pitched, delighted greeting that was all mine.

The bandage covering her head poofed out over the opened area because her brain was so swollen, because the bleeding would not stop. It looked like a piece of popcorn that had begun bursting from its kernel. Her head was shaved.

Her hospital-room window looked out onto the roof of another building, a large, flat rectangle coated with something like pressed gravel. There were seven seagulls standing on the roof. Fat, white bodies with bright orange beaks and spindly legs.

She had had a hemorrhagic stroke.

I needed to say the important stuff.

*

“Mom,” I said, touching her arm. All my insides were aflame.

I kept my hand on her arm. The ventilator wheezed. Took my hand off to cover my mouth. I thought I’d scream. I thought I’d throw up every single thing I’d ever eaten. I needed to tell her the things I’d done such a shitty job telling her. Open. Your. Mouth. Speak.

The fire in my lungs turned to ash. Every word I’d ever known was burned.

Out the window, the seagulls were all facing the same direction. Seven seagulls, evenly spaced, their faces pointed the same way. I stood up and looked where they were looking. A parking lot, scattered trees, a road. I didn’t believe in omens.

Davy came in and sat beside me. He gave a few details. The very private specifics of an emergency.

The vomit and shit when he’d walked into their bedroom.

The eyes rolled back in the head.

The speed with which the paramedics came.

The unknowing at the hospital.

The chaplain assigned to him as he waited.

“When I saw the chaplain, I knew,” he said. “That’s when I knew how bad it was. I didn’t know until then, but it was the chaplain that made me understand. The hospital assigns them to families who are losing someone. Even after I said no thanks to his counseling, no to prayers or hand-holding or any of that shit. He kept coming back, checking on me, asking how Teresa was doing. So I knew. They thought she’d die for sure.”

His voice was steady this entire conversation—the shock of it, maybe. The up-all-night-at-the-hospital of it.

The gulls were not facing the window. That would be too obvious. An omen.

Outside, there were bay trees and beyond that the dried-out October hills and far beyond that, twelve miles at least, the Pacific, which is where those birds must have come from originally. And if that was true, if they’d left the salt and spray, taken wing from the smooth sand, found wind to ride and flapped and let their feathers carry them here, then were they here for her? Did they know? Did they come to guide her back to the ocean?