Pieces of My Mother (13 page)

“Melissa, are you coming back down?” my aunt calls from the bottom of the stairs.

I close the file cabinet.

My mom sits slumped on the toilet. She asks me to bring her a magazine and a cigarette. “Do you really need a cigarette, Mom?” I ask.

“I do,” she says.

“Okay…”

I don't know how her body can even absorb a cigarette at this point. She can hardly straighten her spine. I light a cigarette and hold it up to her lips. As weak as she is, she clamps down on the filter and manages to inhale. Her eyes roll back and I detect a flash of pleasure—but then it is gone, like a bird just flew through the room and out the window. Why am I feeding my mom a cigarette when she cannot eat solid food anymore?

“How about a magazine?” she asks.

I ask her what kind of magazine she wants, and she says it doesn't matter. I know that she stopped reading months ago. The buildup of ammonia in her brain keeps her mind in a fog. She can't track thoughts in order. She cannot follow words on a page.

Her mother died at forty-six. “Drank herself to death” was how I always heard it from my mom. I never got to meet my grandmother but I learned she was a Ford fashion model, a dark, brooding Joan Crawford type with translucent skin and intense eyes. She danced on Broadway with Buddy Ebsen and had a studio contract to go on with her film career. Somewhere early on, she lost her way.

I have her journals, her modeling portfolio, and the old promotional posters from her debut movie,
Titans
of
the
Deep
. My mom gave me them years ago when she wanted to rid her life of memories that were too sad for her all of a sudden. In the red leather journal inside my desk drawer back at home, my grandmother writes: “If I ever marry and settle down to a mediocre family life, and accept the plebeian life, I will regret it every day of my existence.”

She settled and had three children, my mom being the youngest. Her only son was killed in an avalanche as a teenager, along with six other boys, during a summer wilderness camp. It was national news in July 1955. An ironic detail was that the boys had traveled in a used hearse to their destination in the Canadian Rockies. Within five years of the accident, my grandmother was dead from the same kind of alcoholic liver cirrhosis that her daughter is now dying from.

I grab a
National
Geographic
off the bathroom sink and set it on my mom's lap. She opens it and rubs her fingers along the corners of the glossy pages. I sit on the edge of the tub in front of her, ready to catch her if she loses her balance.

She pretends to be reading something on the page but her mind is somewhere else. I feel like she's trying to show me that she's okay, that she can still do the things she's always done. She is pretending to read and I am pretending that this does not break my heart. She's trying so hard to stay in this world now.

“Am I ever going to get my mind back?” she asks as she holds on to the edge of the page. I cannot answer this question for her. My throat is full of dry leaves. It hurts to swallow. All I can do now is keep her cigarette burning so that she can at least have the familiar scent of smoke as she breathes. And I know this is all wrong. She watched her father die of lung cancer after his years of smoking two packs of Pall Malls a day.

What if he could see his daughter right now? And what would he say to me, here, holding on to her last cigarette? I want to shout out to him that she has done this damage to herself. She didn't want to give up drinking, and now it is going to kill her. She will die the same way her gorgeous mother did at forty-six. A body full of bad fruit and a beautiful mind losing all reason and empathy. Why must history be repeated? And what can I do to change the course of things to come?

• • •

When my mom drifts off to sleep again, I retreat upstairs and open her file of letters never sent. The brittle newspaper clipping is tucked into the manila folder. It is stapled to several sheets of lined paper with my mom's handwriting. The scent of aged paper creeps into my sinuses as I unfold the creases. The brief article reads:

Ashes of Climber Rest on Mountain

Alberta, Canada—July 28, 1955

The ashes that were the last mortal remains of a 15-year-old Philadelphia schoolboy were scattered Tuesday over the towering slopes of Mount Temple in Banff National Park, writing the finish to a tragedy that stirred a continent. Young David Chapin was one of seven teenaged climbers who perished July 11 when an avalanche thundered down on them at the 9,500-foot level of the treacherous peak. Only four of the party of 11 that started the climb survived. The boy's heartbroken parents felt that the slope on which he had spent his last moments would be the fitting resting place for his body. So, Tuesday afternoon a small light plane circled the snow-clad mountain and David's ashes were cast free to rest among the peaks forever.

My mom was twelve when her brother died. At some point, she stapled her own account of the tragedy to the newspaper clipping.

I was the one to know first. Pam and I were going to go swimming, and we had just walked out of the house. The phone rang, I answered, said Mother wasn't home, and wrote down the message—to call Emergency Operator number 62.

Pam was my best friend and had been since the second grade. We shared so much together, all the delights and disappointments of tomboys. But she made me very mad that day. She kept insisting that I hurry up, and I couldn't because I knew something was wrong—I even knew with whom.

Mommy came home right then, and I told Pam to go on and I would catch up after I gave her the message. Oh, I was so afraid. I just sat on the steps and waited. Poor Mommy, she just folded down on her knees and covered her face and said, “Dear God, no.” I ran in and tried to hold her but she wouldn't let me. So I said, “David's really alright,” and she ran into the bedroom. I knew he wasn't. I knew he was dead.

The phone was just dangling, so I picked it up and said, “David's alright now”—and the man said, “God, I'm sorry. Can you give me your father's number?” Mommy came out of the bedroom right after I hung up and got mad at me for telling them Daddy's office number. And she quickly called him, told him not to answer any more calls but to get home immediately.

He was my only brother, you see, and he and Daddy were so very close. Mommy didn't even hold me then, and I got scared thinking about what would happen when Daddy got home, so I got my book and went out to the woods to read. I did too—
Wild Animals
I Have Known
by Ernest Thompson Seton. I read about a cougar, a badger, and a bear.

Then I heard Daddy calling me across the pond so I went home. He was sitting on the rattan stool with his back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling and crying. Mommy was across from him in the soft chair with her head resting in her hands. I sat down on the hearth, and Daddy said, “Your brother has been killed in an avalanche with six other boys. Now, you don't have to see your friends or you may want to. They will know about it because it will be in the papers.”

Then he got on the phone and called all the relatives and my sister who was away at camp. I went and sat on the bed in David's room and listened to what Daddy was saying. He asked my sister if she wanted to come home and she didn't. And he asked Mommy's mother to come up and help. And he told his father, “David's gone, Dad. Yup. It was an avalanche—six other boys caught too. Hmm-hmm. It was the way he would have wanted it. You know how he loved the mountains—we must be thankful for that. No, Dad, I'm going to fly out there tomorrow and see what I can find out. Their group leader didn't get caught but he's been hospitalized for shock.”

Later, Mommy said she didn't believe in God anymore. I cried myself to sleep, trying to bury myself into the mattress and find something of David.

Daddy was already gone when I woke up the next morning. Mommy was still asleep but there was a lot of noise from somewhere. I went to the kitchen and the noise became voices from the garage. So I looked out, and there were all our neighbors and friends standing in the garage and out in the driveway. They all had dark colors on and some had armloads of food. The enormous ham on the kitchen table registered then. The Deans were our immediate neighbors, and David, my sister, and I loved them very much. I ran to Harriet who was coming to me, and for the first time I cried because David was dead, and not because he wasn't there to make me happy when Daddy and Mommy were being so strange.

Harriet comforted me and said everyone should come in and have some coffee. Mommy came out then and oh, she looked so terrible. Betty Mathews, her best friend, comforted her and told her she didn't have to worry about a thing. There was enough food for a week, and the reporters had already come and been told where to go in no uncertain terms. The telephone had been turned over to an answering service that wouldn't let any calls but family ones get through. Mommy said she would have gotten out the guns if she had seen the press people.

I went to stay with my friend Pam and her parents. I stayed there two weeks and found out what happened through the papers. I went home occasionally, but Mommy had fallen down and broken a tooth and was in too much pain to say much.

I only cried once the whole time, and that was when I saw
Life
magazine. They had pictures of the bodies being carried down the mountain on mules. I am horrified now by the idea that I could see such a thing. I was twelve years old, and I saw a bunch of canvas sacks draped over mules. And I knew one of those sacks was my brother.

I want to go back in time and hug that twelve-year-old girl in the wake of her brother's death. This voice of my mother, young and vulnerable, one that I have never heard, breaks my heart. I see her sitting on the hearth as her father tells her that her brother is gone forever. I feel her world darken and close in around her. I want to catch her from falling. But it's too late. How can someone endure such a loss and come out of it healed?

If my mom hadn't lost her brother, David, she
would
have been a different person. Maybe she would have been able to cope with the challenges of being a mother. Maybe her mother wouldn't have drunk herself to death. I cross into that forbidden landscape of what would happen to me if I lost one of my children. I'd drink myself dead too. I wish that just once I could be brave enough to let down my guard and give myself permission to be the girl who throws herself across her mother's body and weeps. What will it take for me to break? To fall down and admit how truly scared I am of her leaving this time?

I turn on the heat in the rental car and call my husband in tears. “I don't know what I'm doing here,” I tell him.

“It's alright. You can stay as long as you need to,” he says gently.

“No, I can't. I don't want to. I promised Dominic and Bella I'd be back for New Year's.”

“We're okay, really,” he assures me.

In sixteen years, my husband, Anthony, and I have never been apart on New Year's Eve. On our first New Year's Eve together, we hopped into his '66 Bonneville at a quarter to midnight and drove along the Pacific Coast Highway searching for an unpopulated stretch of sand. We parked in the darkness and listened to the surf pound the shore for a few moments. Then we stripped off all our clothes and ran toward the water. We ran full speed, naked, hand in hand into the Pacific Ocean.

We held on to each other in the deep water and stared up at the huge, pale moon over us. My body was shaking, the water moving all around us in swells. I was fearful of the ocean—always dreaming of drowning in the waves. But in those seconds, I felt safe like I never had before. I trusted his arms around me. I think I trusted the whole universe.

We galloped back through the surf and onto the sand, bitterly cold and laughing. We had emerged from the Pacific Ocean and into the beginning of the new year, baptized and restored.

God, I miss that kind of trust in myself. I need the girl willing to jump in the ocean at midnight right now. I need to believe that water will keep me afloat. A lodestar, the briny ocean, the giant moon, and the faith that I am safe.

My husband helped me through some difficult years when we were first dating. He was making the rounds as an actor in Los Angeles, and I was studying to get my undergraduate degree at UCLA. I'd sometimes fall into uncontrollable crying spells, even though I was happy and deeply in love with him.

“What's wrong?” he'd ask.

“I don't know,” I'd always reply.

I didn't want him to know that there were feelings inside me that were frightening and had no explanation. I didn't want him to know that I was leavable.

I remember him holding my shoulders and looking into my eyes, “You are a
good
person, Melissa. An
inherently
good person, and you matter in this world. Do you understand that?”

These words were unbearable. I fought them. I told him he was wrong, that I was not a good person. I was damaged inside.

“Inherently good,” he said over and over, until I began to trust that he wasn't was going to change his mind and walk out on me.

I still need him to teach me how a family stays together—no matter what happens.

“We'll be waiting for you,” he tells me before hanging up.

I exhale. These are the moments when I feel lucky in love.

I start up the engine and drive toward downtown. I'm anxious about traveling too far from the house in case anything goes wrong while I'm gone.

I stop at the gas-station market and buy a roll of butter rum Life Savers and two scratch-off lottery tickets. My mom always wanted to win the lottery. In fact, she's counted on it. Years ago, she insisted that when she hit the big jackpot, she was going to buy me a horse that could jump the moon. Then she was going to get her face lifted and eyes done. She and I would go to a pricey resort where we would sip on fancy drinks served in pineapples and have our toenails painted at the same time. Winning the lottery was going to change her life.

She's awake when I get back, lying on her side with Sparky and her other dog, Trinket, nestled behind her knees.

I hand her a ticket.

Then I realize that her fingers can't manage the scratch-off part.

“I'll do it for you, Mom.”

“Thanks, darlin'.”

I scratch her ticket until my thumbnail turns grimy. “Nothing this time,” I tell her. I feel foolish for buying her a lottery ticket. She's never going to win.

I scratch my ticket. It's a two-dollar instant winner.

“You've always been the lucky one,” she says to me. “You got that luck of the Irish from your dad.”

She's right about this. My father never failed to remind us that we came from a family of Irish storytellers and that luck and blarney ran deep in our roots.