In Nightmares We're Alone (25 page)

“I know. I know, it’s just… I need to get away. I’m sorry; I just… do. Do you think maybe… maybe Ellen could come by or something? Just give me a few hours to not… to not have to…”

“No. Absolutely not. If she’s on her way out, she doesn’t need Ellen there. She needs you. She needs me.”

“Then why don’t—” he starts off almost shouting and I can hear him breathe to calm himself. “Then why don’t you come home?”

I know he’s not being unfair. He and Mom never got on well. She resented that I married him, thought I could do better. He’s been a saint to look after her as well as he has. Not to mention his MS. His health’s been declining for years. He walks with a cane, slurs his words. He deserves looking after himself. He shouldn’t be forced into a position as a caretaker. It’s not right.

I always planned on having enough money saved up by the time we were this age and his condition had gotten this bad that I’d retire early and he’d collect on disability. I could take care of him all day and he could rest, spend his time reading. I could finally write that novel for extra income. But I’d always imagined myself teaching in some upscale university for a paycheck four times higher than what I make in a public school. And after Dad’s tailspin and now Mom’s, everything’s fallen apart so badly I have to pinch pennies for groceries this week. I’m ten years from retirement and I’ve got no confidence social security will even be there for me anymore by the time it hits. And so I keep wishing. Wishing and wishing.

John Lennon said
“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”

That one I didn’t learn in college. I learned that one when I was a young woman with a sense of adventure. And I learned the sentiment behind it, as always, much later.

“Okay,” I tell Arthur. “Just hang on a little while. I’ll tell them I need a sub and she’ll take over at lunch. I’ll be home in two or three hours.”

* * * * *

Arthur leaves a few minutes after I get home. He’s upset and pretty adamant about getting out of the house for a while. I don’t know what Mom said or did that got to him, but I let him go. Mom’s awake now and I don’t want to get into a heated argument in front of her of which she’s the subject. So Arthur leaves and I sit down with her in the living room.

“What’s happening, Mom? Arthur’s been concerned about you today.”

“Oh, he’s just being concerned about you. I’ll be fine. I’m an old woman. I had a good run.”

“What does that mean?”

“You two need to look after each other. You can’t be cooped up over here all your lives. If they’re going to come get me, they can just go ahead and do it.”

“Mom… The doctors say you’re in good health. You’re scared all the time, I know, and I’m sure you’re lonely, but you’re up and walking around all day, and you’re… You’re okay, Mom. All this talk about people coming to take you away, it’s… I just don’t know why you feel that way. I don’t think it’s your time to go.”

“I dreamed about your father last night. I dreamed I was lying awake in bed and I reached over and he was next to me. And I told him how much I missed him and he said the same thing back to me. I was realizing how alone we both felt, and then… it just seemed sort of loving. If they want to take me away and they want to take me to him, maybe I should go.”

My eyes well up and I turn away and sniffle.

“Don’t cry,” she says. “He and I have a lot to offer each other. We belong together. You don’t need me anymore. You’re a grown woman. You’re all I’ve got in this world anymore, but I’m more of a hindrance to you than anything else.”

“That’s not true.”

“Bologna. You and Arthur belong together and Tom and I belong together, and if I need to be away from you for a little while for that to happen, it’ll be okay. We’ll all be in the same place in fifty years anyway. Is it so selfish of me to want to go with him?”

I’m not going to talk theology with her. I’m not going to tell her that now is all we’ve got and whether it’s a few days or a few years from now, as soon as her heart stops beating it will be the last time I ever look at my mother or speak to her or hold her or be held by her. I won’t lay my nihilism on her and make things worse. Instead I just embrace her and cry in her shoulder.

“No, Mom,” I say. “It’s not selfish at all. I just wish it wasn’t how you felt.”

“Edna,” she says, rubbing my back. “You’re a strong woman. We’ve always done everything we could for one another. Now this is what we both have to do. We’ll be strong. Even after they come take me, I’ll always be watching you, smiling, proud of you. It’ll all be okay in the end.”

We hold each other for a while and lie together on the couch. The tough old bird Mom always was, now it’s a different kind of strength I’m seeing, a subtle strength you could confuse with weakness. In fact I’m not entirely sure it isn’t a weakness I’m confusing with strength.

Elie Wiesel wrote,
“Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.”

That’s why Arthur had to run out like that. It’s what was eating him. Mom talked to him like she’s talking to me now, and he knew she died last night or early this morning, just as I know she’s dead in my arms as I’m holding her.

And so we come to another thing they don’t teach in college: how to resurrect the dead.

* * * * *

Arthur hugs me when he gets home, tighter than I think he’s hugged me in years. He kisses my cheek and tells me he’s so sorry he left earlier. He says he got scared and he knows he breaks easily and isn’t always pleasant to be around but he’s going to try to be better. He asks Mom how she’s feeling and says he’s happy we can be here together right now, no matter what the future brings.

I don’t wonder as hard where he’s been as I used to when we were younger. I don’t know where he gets his bursts of strength and love when he’s like this, but love of any kind is so precious right now I don’t care where it came from.

The truth is my cynical thought is he’s either done something awful or broken off something awful he’s been doing. A mistress, an addiction. Maybe he puts away money I don’t know about and bets it on the races. Maybe he got lucky on a bet or he almost smoked a cigarette and threw it down after the first drag. Maybe he believed all the pain in this house was punishment for some sin of his and he broke off a relationship just now with some younger woman he’s been seeing and he’s proud of himself for finding the strength.

I don’t know where that comes from, that bitterness in me, that thought that love has to come from a place of selfishness, of pride. But I feel no judgment. If any of these things are true, they don’t bother me. If he doesn’t say what happened I won’t ask. If it’s something upsetting and he doesn’t need my help, I’d rather not know. This is our marriage. It’s a partnership more than any petty kind of mutual possession or puppy love. Life is hard, and whatever he has to do to get through his is forgivable by me.

“If you expect nothing from anybody,”
wrote Sylvia Plath,
“you’re never disappointed.”

When Arthur is not with me, it is his life he is living. There are times I need him, and some of those times he is here. I have learned to accept things as they come, and it is pleasant when he has his arms around me at the right time.

Ms. Plath may have been onto something. But we all know the ending to her story, so she might just as easily not have been.

* * * * *

A few hours after we’ve gone to bed, I wake up to hear Mom next to me, talking in her sleep. She says Dad’s name, something about missing him too. I force a smile because I’m tired of crying.

“I’ll be there soon,” says Mom, a little louder, a little less dreamlike.

I have to think about whether I want to wake her. If I do, I decide, I’m only doing it for me. If she’s with Dad in her sleep, she’s happy, and that’s something she should have. I try to nestle my head back into my pillow and get back to sleep when I feel her rouse behind me.

“Edna,” she says softly. She puts an arm around me.

“I’m here, Mom.” I say. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“I was talking to your father,” she says.

“I know.”

She holds me and puts her face in my hair.

“Do you remember the first time you brought Arthur over for Christmas dinner?” she asks.

“Of course. Is that what you were talking about?”

“No. I was just remembering how inquisitive Tom was and how the whole thing felt like a job interview.”

I laugh. “It was pretty awkward.”

“He was so worried about a college girl hanging around with a boy who’d dropped out. He always had such high hopes for you. He was really proud though. Do you know that?”

“I know, Mom.”

“I just always felt like that dinner got the three of us off on the wrong foot. I wished we had it to do over.”

“It’s okay. It’s past now.”

“Did I ever tell you, at the end of the night, when you went out on the patio with him to say goodnight, what I said to your father?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was trying to watch from the window, to make sure the two of you weren’t getting up to too much mischief out there. And he told me that you kissed him. And I said, ‘I know. She’s gonna marry him one day too.’”

I laugh softly. “You told him that? That first night?”

“I sure did. I knew you would. When I was about the same age I brought Tom home to meet my parents and they weren’t thrilled with my choice of boyfriend either, but I knew I was in love with him and so did he and we didn’t mind anything my parents said. And when I looked at you and Arthur I knew, that’s my daughter. And Tom and me, we’d better get used to it, because that boy’s not going anywhere.”

“Well, you were right, Mom.”

“I know I was. And you’ll be together the rest of your lives, just like your father and I were.”

“I hope so.”

There is a long silence and her voice turns somber. “I sure miss him.”

I stroke her shoulder. “We all do, Mom.”

“Oh, stop that,” she says, pulling my hand away. “Arthur doesn’t. And you don’t miss him like I do. That’s okay though. He was mine and mine alone.”

I know she’s in pain, but it hurts to be told I don’t miss my father.

“Darling,” says Mom. “Would you give me a few minutes alone? I’d just like to sit here in the dark and think about him.”

“You… You want me to leave you?”

“Just for a few minutes. I’ll be fine.”

I sit up in bed groggily. She’s either getting better or worse now. By her tone of voice I’d say worse, but I have to wonder if the request for independence is a positive development. I get out of bed and walk through the doorway. I turn back.

“Do you want me to leave this open?”

“You can close it. I’m done being silly. It’s just an old house.”

I gently shut the door to the bedroom and go out into the kitchen. From under an upside down bucket in the cabinet beneath the sink I grab a pack of cigarettes and thumb one off. Ten years ago Arthur quit and I quit alongside him, save for three or four a year on the hardest days. A couple packs hidden away at our apartment in the city, a couple packs hidden away here at Mom and Dad’s.

I go out on the front porch and light it with a barbecue lighter. I put my elbows up on the railing of the balcony and lean over, sucking smoke deep into my lungs.

This porch, where what feels like at least two lifetimes and a half ago I stood with Arthur six months after we started dating and I told him Dad didn’t mean anything, he wasn’t good socially but he’d warm up to him. This porch where I snuck that goodnight kiss even though I knew Dad was watching and he’d be grinding his teeth inside. Right here. Nearly three decades treading water and here I am on the same porch.

When I was fifteen years old I stood out here with my arms on the railing in the middle of the night just like this, smoking a cigarette just like this, and Mom came outside and caught me. She screamed at me and slapped me around and told me if I smoked those things I’d die before she did. She was wrong.

I smoke the cigarette down to the filter, crush it out in the garden, then walk out to the curb and drop the filter in the trash. I stand outside a few more minutes not to bring the smell of smoke in with me. When I do go in I brush my teeth again and rinse out my mouth with Listerine before I knock gently on Mom’s door and open it.

I go to the bed and sit next to her. I whisper to her. I put an arm around her. And after a while when something feels wrong, I start to shake her, to say her name louder. I almost turn the light on, but I’m not ready. Instead I sit at the foot of the bed and cry.

A few minutes later when I stand up to leave the room, I happen to spot the sheet of paper sticking up from the top of Dad’s old typewriter, as though Mom, in that brief moment when I was gone, sat down at the table to type something before lying back down peacefully. I flip the paper release over and pull the sheet out of the carriage. I take it out in the hall to look at it.

Centered at the head of the paper are a few short words:

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

Moby Dick, I think. Definitely Melville.

I stare at it for a long time. I don’t understand. I know Mom read the book and we talked about it briefly when I was in college but she never gave the implication that it had a deep significance for her. To stand up from the bed in her last minutes to write one sentence…

I want to love this. I want to feel more connected to my mother than ever, but I can’t understand why she would write it.

A little while later I go into the guest bedroom and climb into bed in front of Arthur and pull his hand over to hold me. I’m so overwhelmed with emotion and confusion I’ve forced all my senses to numb, so I’m silent and still when I lie down with him but he still rouses a little and holds me close.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. “Mom just died.”

* * * * *

A cigarette here. A dead mother there.

Back and forth between Mom and Dad’s house picking up boxes and taking them to storage, taking things home. A refrigerator, a dishwasher, that story you wrote about a magical garden in third grade. Dig it up, put it in a pile.