And that probably ate him alive.
“What do you want, Roger?” Sam had never much liked her brother-in-law, and his actions in the years following the marriage simply proved her instincts true. Both she and Amy had figured out pretty quick that they didn’t want to be left alone with Roger, as he would somehow manage to feel them up.
Susanna pretended not to know all the things that were said about her eternal mate, but Sam knew she couldn’t be that blind.
“I came to see my mother-in-law. Came to see how she’s doing.”
“Your daughter is in the hospital. That’s probably where you should be. My mother’s condition hasn’t changed in years. So, again, Roger, why are you here?”
“Fine. I came to see you or your dad. I knew someone would be here. I need you guys to talk to my wife. Susanna has thrown me out of the house. She seems to think she can handle all this better by herself. I’m not dumb enough to think she came up with this idea on her own. You told her to do it, didn’t you?”
“She
can
handle it better without you. You’ve never helped her before. All you’ve ever done is make things worse.”
“Oh, please, you know as well as I do that she’s not capable of making any decisions on her own. Never has been. She needed me to take care of her, and that’s why we got married. You know she cried for a week after we got married? Just wanted to come home and take care of you, like it was her job. I needed a wife, and I got a bawl baby. She left me on my own to raise these kids.”
“Left you on your own?” Sam looked hard at him, knowing that hatred sparked from her eyes and hoping he wasn’t too dense to see it, to feel it. In a way, he was responsible for the decimation of their family, too. He took Susanna away when the family needed her most. Or maybe when Sam needed her most. Maybe that could have been forgiven if he’d been a good husband and father, but he wasn’t and never had been.
“Well, Roger, you have done a fine job. Just fabulous. One of your children is near death, one is desperately homesick and miserable in a foreign country, and the other one’s addicted to pornography. Yes, you’ve been a fine example for your children, having an affair with your own sister-in-law. Why don’t you—”
Sam felt the sudden movement from her mother’s hand, a squeeze, and Sam turned back to her. “Momma? Momma? You just squeezed my hand. I felt it. I know you moved.” She turned back to Roger excitedly. “Go get a nurse, now. Hurry.”
“I’m not your little slave boy, Sam. I have something to say.”
“Anything you have to say I don’t have the time or desire to hear. Just go.”
“You’ll listen to me, because I said you’ll listen to me.” He took a step toward her. Sam didn’t move from the bed. Using her free right hand—the other held her mother’s hand tightly—Sam reached back and pushed her light jacket aside, displaying the service weapon she wore holstered on her hip. Roger stopped advancing but didn’t move or leave.
“I’m prepared to do whatever I have to to protect myself, Roger, and don’t you forget it. My name isn’t Susanna, and you can’t do whatever you want to me.”
Roger’s eyes widened, and he took a step back, then shook his head. “I just want my wife back. Tell her to come back.”
“She isn’t coming back, jackass. And you have no one to blame but yourself.”
His eyes hardened again. “You’re a little bitch. Watch out, Sam. That’s all I have to say.” Then he turned and left the room, and she sighed with relief.
Turning back to her mother, Sam grabbed the call button strapped to the side of the hospital bed and then tried to remove her hand from her mother’s, but Ruthie Montgomery’s grip just tightened.
Sam hit the call button with her right hand, still holding her mother’s hand with her left.
“I’m here, Mom. And you’re here, too. Thanks for letting me know.” She continued to talk to her mother in a soft voice.
Sam heard, rather than saw, someone enter the room and turned her head. “Did you need something, ma’am?” asked a young nurse. “First time the call light has gone off in this room. Kinda surprised me.”
“She’s holding my hand. Grasping it. She won’t let go. I think she’s responding to me being here. I think she wants to tell us something.”
“Oh, well … Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I know what it feels like when someone squeezes my hand.”
“Well, sometimes these patients have reactions—”
“Look at her hand. She’s squeezing my hand. She won’t let go.”
“Well, it does look like it. Maybe if you give it a moment—”
“Call the doctor. Now. Get somebody in here. My mother is responding. She’s trying to tell us something. And no one is listening.”
“Well, it’s not that easy—”
“Can I speak any plainer? Get the doctor.
Now
.”
“Fine,” the young nurse said, scrambling out of the room, but not without giving Sam several nasty glances as she exited.
“Momma, I know you hear me. I know you are listening. I know you’re in there. Talk to me, please. Talk to me.”
She doesn’t have anything to say. She lost her mind the day I died.
Sam wasn’t sure she was hearing Callie’s voice. She’d never been sure. Maybe Callie was wrong: There was that month Ruthie made hamburgers for every meal. Before she stopped functioning completely. She stood over the stove, sobbing, making hamburgers, waiting for Callie to come in and say thanks for making her favorite meal.
No one could console Ruthie. Sam remembered wrapping her arms around her mom’s legs and crying with her, but Sam’s father just sat at the table and waited for the meal.
Why did he do that?
You’re finally listening to me. Finally you see.
“No,” Sam said out loud. “No!” She didn’t want her mother to be lost forever. Okay, so Sam had already been raised as a motherless waif, but there was still time. There were stories to be told and laughter to be shared and games to be played.
Random thoughts of Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land roamed through her head. She’d spent countless hours, as the youngest child, begging her older siblings to take some time out and play a game with her.
Most of the time, the answer was no. But every day after her older sisters shuffled off to school, Momma would take a break from the cleaning and ironing, and sit down on the floor with Sam, playing at least one game of her choice. No matter how busy Momma was, she always played at least one game.
“Remember when we used to play Candy Land, Momma? I always wanted to go live in Candy Land, and you always told me it wasn’t a real place. You told me that it was imaginary, but there was nothing wrong with going there, to that imaginary place. That I could visit that place anytime I wanted, and that would be okay. Everything there would always be okay. I just had to remember to always come back home, because I was loved and needed. You told me that all the time.”
Sam felt the tears sting her eyes as she remembered the days they spent on the floor, Sam lying on her belly, feet up in the air, the old, worn shag carpet tickling her tummy where her shirt rode up.
“Is that where you are now, Momma? Are you in your imaginary place? Where everything’s fine? Because I understand that, but I need you to come back home.”
Sam laid her head down on the bed beside her mother’s hand and let the tears flow. Her grasp on Sam’s hand suddenly slackened, and Sam raised her head and looked up to see there was no change on her mother’s face. No indication she even knew anyone else was in the room.
“Please come back, Momma. Please.”
“She’s never been gone, Sammy,” her father’s voice said behind her.
Sam jumped and turned to her father. “Dad, she squeezed my hand. I mean really hard. She responded to me. I think she might be coming out of it.”
“Now I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Sammy. She’s in there. I always told you kids that. But as for getting well enough to walk or talk again, well, that just isn’t going to happen. She squeezes my hand, too, sometimes. It’s just an involuntary reaction or muscle spasm, the doctors say.”
Sam’s hand was still in her mother’s and again Sam felt a squeeze.
“Dad, she’s responding. She is; I know it.”
“Well, what’s going on in here?” said a harried young doctor as he came through the door and walked to the side of the bed where Sam stood. “I understand you had some kind of reaction from the patient? Of course, I’m sure you’re aware that often these reactions are involuntary or muscle spasms.”
“She squeezed my hand. And wouldn’t let go. She’s responding. We need to do something, run some tests.”
The doctor gave Sam a sad but polite look, then asked her to move as he took over her position, holding Ruthie Montgomery’s hand. “Ruthie, this is Dr. Farr. Can you hear me? If you can hear me, squeeze my hand. Okay? Ruthie?”
He stood over her for a moment, looking at her expectantly, but nothing happened.
“Ruthie, can you hear me?” he asked again.
He stood up and shook his head, saying to Sam, “I’m sorry. I know you wanted to believe it was more. But it isn’t. I think we should all go now so she can have some time with her hus—” The doctor had been holding Sam’s mother’s hand while he spoke, and his eyes suddenly widened.
“Uh, she just squeezed my hand. You’re right. She is reacting. She is hearing us.”
Sam’s chest tightened up as she considered his words. Her mother could hear them. Maybe she would come back to them. Maybe she could regain those lost years.
“You’re all making too much of this,” Sam’s father said gruffly. “She’s been squeezing my hand for years. Now I think it’s time for her to rest. You’ve been bugging her too long. You’re tired, aren’t you, Ruthie. Don’t worry; I’ll make them leave.”
“She squeezed my hand again,” the young doctor said excitedly. “I’m going to order up some more tests, see if these are real responses, and not just quirks—”
“We don’t have that kind of money.”
“I will pay for the tests. Whatever they are. Just do it.”
“Sam—”
“Dad. Just let me do this, okay? Please?”
Her father turned and walked from the room without another word, and Dr. Farr excitedly explained what he had in mind.
Sam listened closely as he told her his plan. But the words were hard to comprehend, because all she could think about was that her mother was finally responding.
About time,
Callie’s voice said in Sam’s head.
About damn time.
THIRTY-FOUR
The call Sam received at midnight woke her from a dead sleep. She’d been dreaming about little girls with beautifully curled pigtails and immaculate braids, dancing around her as she cried in the center of a circle of torment. No one was there to help her. Her father was standing just outside the circle, holding Susanna’s hand, but not looking in Sam’s direction.
The tears on her face were real, she realized as she scrambled for her cell phone.
“’Lo,” Sam answered.
“Sam, this is your father. I’m sorry to have to wake you so late, but I’m afraid your mother … well, your mother has passed away. She went peacefully in her sleep.”
Sam shook her head, unable to process or believe what her father was saying. Just earlier that day, Ruthie Montgomery had been grasping Sam’s hand, holding it, communicating.
Passed away? Went peacefully?
Sam sat up and looked at the clock, scanning her room, looking for any sign that this was a dream, that at any moment she would wake up and her mother would still be alive, albeit catatonic and in a hospital bed.
“Sam, can you hear me?” His voice sounded ragged and old and stressed, but not alarmed or panicked. Had her father ever been alarmed or panicked? She couldn’t remember a time when he was anything but stoic.
“She can’t be dead. There was nothing wrong with her. Well, nothing wrong with her body, anyway. How could she just die? Are you … Is this a dream? Are you kidding me?”
“No, Sam, I’m sorry, it’s true. They called me about an hour ago. One of the nurses discovered her when they did their regular bed check.”
Grief clutched Sam’s chest, and she fought back the tears as the reality of her father’s words hit her. Dead. Really dead, this time. Not just a ghost of the person she used to be but no longer talking, breathing, walking.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” was all Sam said.
Then she hung up the phone and fell back in her bed, hitting the pillows, crying like a baby for the first time in years. She didn’t know why she was so distraught. In reality, she had lost her mother years and years before. Apparently, some part of Sam had always believed she would get her mother back. That somehow, those years would be made up.
Now it would never happen. Now, Sam truly was motherless.
It wasn’t so different from before. So why did she feel so empty?
Why did she feel as though she had lost so much?
THIRTY-FIVE
Sam spent the next morning with her father, making funeral arrangements, picking out caskets and burial plots, and putting together the clothes that her father insisted her mother would want to be buried in.
It was standard Mormon practice to bury active temple-going Mormons in the same attire they wore to practice their sacred ceremonies and rites. Sam cried as she pulled out a new pair of temple garments, obviously never worn. Her father must have bought these with the hope that someday her mother’s mind would return and they would again go to the temple, like all the other good Mormon couples their age. Sam’s father had already laid out a plain white long-sleeved dress, white stockings, an unworn pair of white shoes, a white slip, and sitting next to it a small packet of ritual temple clothing.
Other than a trip to the Salt Lake Temple to participate in a “baptism for the dead” ceremony—an experience she found both abhorrent and ethically wrong—she had never participated in any temple rituals and did not understand the meanings of the clothes in the packet: a robe, an apron, a sash, and a veil.
Her father had told her that two of the “sisters” from the ward would be coming with her to the funeral home, as only other temple-endowed Mormons were supposed to dress the deceased in their sacred clothing.