The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(38)

She presses and releases her lips with little smacks just after she wakes every morning, like each new day has a taste she wants inside.

With one arm slipped beneath her good arm and one arm reaching over her bad one, his body stands in for her right side and they pivot to the wheelchair. There were disasters and then emergencies and then crises, and now this day after day. It is quiet.

“She has the softest skin of any person I’ve ever known,” he told me when I was young, when I was a teenager, recently at the hospital. “It’s surreal. Touch it. Here. No, touch it.”

As an act of kindness, or apology for tragedy, a lot of people give my mom lotion. It comes in the mail, in birthday packages, appears on their doorstep. Maybe they know about the skin. Want to help preserve that miracle. But I find myself, when I help clean out drawers, with an armload of lotions, lilac, eucalyptus, rose, fresh linen, in glass bottles and blue jars, in plastic tubs, oblong or circular, organic, elixirs, Chinese, tubes for the eyes, for daytime, for scars, for nighttime, and the metaphor of trying to carry so much is too obvious and also fundamentally right, that leaning stack piled against my chest, against Davy’s, even though we know, we know, it will tumble.

*

The house they rent, close to the house they sold, is entirely covered in wood slats like the hull of a ship. It seems that they might always be about to embark. My mom is in her wheelchair. Not Bubbles, the off-roader, but the regular insider called “the chair.” She spends all her time there, except for when he lifts her onto or off of the toilet or into or out of bed or the car. Occasionally I lift her onto or out of something, but I often feel like an intruder. There’s so much tenderness required for transporting a paralyzed body. Sometimes I hide in the other room when it is time, because I am a small, scared person.

There had been a trip to the emergency room two months earlier for the wound on my mom’s head, which wouldn’t heal right. It was where they’d permanently cut away the bone plate to allow enough space for the swollen, bleeding brain. The incision would not heal. The skin around it was dead. Months and months. Infections came. And then she started having seizures. A month before I leave for the sideshow, she’s in the hospital for seizures. They are scheduled to leave for Italy three months after that.

A week before I leave for the sideshow, she is back home. The days become regular again. Bills. Laundry.

My mom’s back is to me, wheelchair scooted right up against the couch. She stoops slightly forward and then straightens up, her left arm disappearing in front of her and then arcing out wide as she straightens again, a gray T-shirt between her fingers. In addition to relearning how to do many tasks as she slowly heals, she must learn to do them with her left hand.

A pile of clean laundry lies on the couch in front of her, T-shirts and socks and bras and sweatpants that I had been planning on folding very soon. Any day now, in fact. But here she is, the mother I spend hours convincing myself isn’t the same person living inside her body anymore. Because what would that be like? How would it be possible to carry on?

Here she is with a rumpled gray T-shirt between her fingers, shaking the wrinkles out.

I hold my breath. She shakes a lot, little spasms. Sometimes big ones. Seizures. I haven’t seen anything like this in almost three years—my mother, right there, completing a chore.

She sets the T-shirt down on the couch, away from the pile of laundry, and smooths it flat with the palm of her hand. She cannot see me behind her. Here is her bony hand, the one that was always covered in different shades of dye from her textile business, and more recently, the hand that was hooked up to so many IVs that it took on its own face and attitude, a medical Medusa.

That hand was the only thing that moved in the first months when it didn’t appear she’d ever really wake back up. I watched it like watching would conjure a prayer. Watched it twitch against the starched white hospital sheets, move slowly up from her side, trembling, toward her head to touch the skin covering her brain on the half of her head where her skull had been removed. Watched it touch her eye—here, now here—dried blood, dried rivulets of brain fluid against her temples. I’d watch that hand make its way back home to her side, tremble, and begin it all again, that journey up to try to understand what it was missing, here and here and here. I’d grab it to kiss it still and whisper terrible apologies and the hand would rest calm and motionless for a moment before it pulled away, readied to move on. She moved on and then they made her come back.

She spent a full month in the ICU after the stroke. Each day was the last day. Then the new last day.

Six weeks after the stroke, when the doctor got her to sit up in a chair, propped up by pillows on all sides, for thirty minutes straight, we clapped like mad.

Two and a half months after the stroke, on New Year’s Eve, she waved a noisemaker we’d brought in to celebrate. Yes, yes, let’s celebrate! Davy, my brother, and I said. She started physical therapy. Sitting up without pillows. Standing up with the help of a few therapists and slings.

A brain infection sent her back to the ICU.

Then she had to start all over again.

*

My mom’s palm flattens each crease with careful rhythm and precision against the couch. I don’t help. I want to see what she can do. If she completes the task, then my assumptions about what she is capable of are wrong. Then I am underestimating her.

It took me a few days after she had her stroke to say the words I love you. They were fire in my lungs. I knew they needed to come out. I love you, I said, very quietly, the words slurred. I tried to say it more. I love you, when I left the hospital for the day. I love you. I was just never sure if she could understand it.