I ran down after her. The fall wasn’t impressive though it was the whole flight. What was impressive was that after years of this same fighting—slaps taken and returned, the cursing, the door-slamming, the horrific shit we said to each other—I was shocked, no I was terrified, that I was as strong as I thought. Once I had tipped the power balance, I was at sea, sinking with regret.
You’re okay, I said, binding her hands so she couldn’t hit me, trying to comfort her. You’re okay. I watched her register, in that underwater, sodden way, that she was at the bottom of the stairs. Just get up, I said firmly.
I got her into bed and wanted nothing more than for her to be in control again. It was far, far too late. I was already partially living with my best friend, Taja, whose family had a generous habit of taking in strays. I was already failing out of high school. My grandparents stepped in, negotiated. My mother and I saw the therapist we had been with for years. We tried again. A month later she kicked me out and changed the locks.
She threw my clothes away in big black trash bags. Christina called me to retrieve them before they were picked up. I rode my skateboard up to the house from the alley. My sister watched from the upstairs bathroom while I poked into trash bags. I waved at her. I’m OK. I skated away with one bag sitting on the front of the board, another on my back, wearing the pajamas I had slept in the night before at Taja’s house. I rode to Walt’s Wharf, the seafood restaurant where I was employed as a hostess. I clocked in. I have always found solace in work, real mind-blunting labor. I found my work clothes in the trash bags, the white button-down horribly wrinkled. I found my clogs. It’s fine. I’m free, I told a concerned coworker. I was never going to be controlled. I was never going to be dependent on anyone. Was that it? The first moment I knew I could burn a bridge and survive? That my survival became colored by spite?
That fall down the stairs was really the end of any pretense of my mother and me being able to live together. Adults I knew worried about me, offered to feed and house me. Even my teachers heard about it. I lived with my best friend for the next two months. I’m not sure what my mother told her friends, about who or what instigated our separation. Sometimes she would call the police on me and say I was a runaway. They would show up to claim me. She’s an alcoholic, I would say to them. She kicked me out. I’m not safe there. I had an older boyfriend who helped me take steps toward an emancipation. I went to a few Al-Anon meetings with senior girls who were already on the verge of getting sober. I was sixteen.
After that night we attacked each other, we stopped speaking for a long time. We never spent more than a few days under the same roof until she was released from the hospital and I moved in to be her nurse for the summer.
* * *
First, we were told she would never wake up. Then, if she did, she would never speak or walk. Then three weeks later her eyes opened. Blink, blink, blink. That’s all my mother did. She blinked, at the strangers around her, plastic tubes filling up her throat. We talked in careful, soothing voices and touched her hands. We thought we were connecting, as if she knew us.
Did she, in fact, want to be touched? How horrific to be handled by anyone and have no recourse. How condescending, to not know where you are or who you are, and everyone in the room cooing at you like you’re an infant. Sometimes her blinks were pained, panicked.
My aunt: She was technically dead. They weren’t even going to operate. Your grandfather stopped a surgeon in the halls who was leaving—his shift was over—and begged him to come back. He stood there weeping and said, Save my baby. It’s here my aunt sighs. I wouldn’t have done it.
* * *
The night of my mother’s aneurysm she was at the gym. She had turned forty-seven one week earlier and was going through a renaissance with her body. She was keeping herself “bikini ready.” She was engaged to her boyfriend, Bruce. He would be her third husband. They met on eharmony.com. They were shopping for rings and had a trip to Hawaii planned for the next month.
She was working out with a trainer. I’ve asked many times what exercise she was doing. The gym won’t tell me. Treadmill? Weights? Just stretching? I believe she complained of a headache. She remembers a headache. And then she hit the ground.
I do not remember my aunt or my grandfather escorting me to her room at the hospital. I remember the nurse, Jamaican. She sang hymns to my mother’s unconscious body day and night.
I remember Christina and me in the hallway of the ICU, and greens, the color of illness. We’re drenched in green light, and various adults are trying to prepare us. I ask my sister if she wants me to go in first and she shakes her head. We hold hands. As we walk down the hallway, I look into every window of every room, trying to meet the eyes of every patient.
I think now it’s a blessing that our loved ones are often so unrecognizable. No one looks like themselves in the hospital. The veil of illness has come over them. The woman they said was my mother had a face ballooned from the blood. Wrinkleless, her cheeks like an ironed sheet. Her head shaved, a line of staples curving over the left side of her skull. A puzzle forced back together. Her body sunken into the bed, silicone breasts floating on the surface. She still had flecks of dried blood in her ears.
Bleeding out of the ears is bad, my aunt said firmly. It means brain damage if she lives.
What undid me was my mother’s tongue, bloated and protruding, suppressed by the tubes of machines making her breathe. Her tongue like a dog’s, like a child mimicking disgust. Or exhaustion.
She’s just a little girl, I whispered into my sister’s ear. It was my first thought. Look. I tried to turn her toward our mother, who I reasoned was not really our mother. I think I was saying that she wasn’t responsible any longer. That she was our child now, that we mustn’t think of her as a mother. It’s okay, she’s just a little girl.
I remember the smell of my sister’s hair when I held her face hard to my neck. I remember being grateful that she has always smelled the same. (When they first handed her to me, covered in brown fur, sullen, wrinkled, red, I was twenty-one months old and said to the adults, My baby.)
But I can’t remember noise. None from Christina or the machines keeping Nancy technically alive. I remember thinking if my sister cried it wasn’t my turn to cry, that we would have to cry one at a time.
I left my sister with my aunt in the waiting room. I excused myself to the restroom, shut the door, locked it. I looked at my own eyes, my mother’s eyes, my grandmother’s eyes, my great-grandmother’s eyes, and I said, over and over, She’s just a little girl.
* * *
Long Beach Memorial hospital was proud of my mother. After three weeks in a coma, she opened her eyes. They removed her throat tubes—scratching, then scarring her vocal cords—and she gnawed on syllables. Groans. Yelps. More time passed and she spoke. Nonsense at first, lovely infantile gibberish. She still relied mostly on blinks: one for yes, two for no. On the cover of their newsletter, the hospital published a photo of her sitting in a wheelchair in their community garden. She’s collapsed into one side of the chair, like an infant that can’t hold its own weight yet. She was considered a miracle recovery.
* * *
My grandfather and aunt were desperate to buy time, to buy more physical therapy, more medical attention. There were too many unknowns (Would she speak? Would she walk? Would she be able to work again? Drive? How would we afford twenty-four-hour care?). We read that the first three months were crucial in determining the success of recovery. My aunt got us two additional months at the hospital, and during that time, hope seethed through us. The right side of her body was initially completely paralyzed, but after a month of daily acupuncture and physical therapy, she could do small steps with a walker. She would be coming home.
I was supposed to be in New York City that summer, where I had been every summer and winter break since college started. I lived with my boyfriend Max’s family on the Upper East Si
de, a generous and warm family where everyone, even his seven-year-old sister, was intellectually inclined. We often danced in the living room after dinner. Max’s mother was my best friend—we went to yoga together, gossiped for hours. I was somewhat undomesticated after years with my father—I didn’t get haircuts or buy clothes. She took me to her salon. Bought me a Lilly Pulitzer dress. We regularly got manicures together. We all went to their house in Vermont for weeks in August and swam in a lake. While friends took unpaid internships at theaters and PR companies, I unpacked boxes at the Borders in Columbus Circle. I wore a back brace while breaking down pallets and did overnight shifts counting inventory, and I still felt privileged because I was close to books. I was so infatuated with the city, the archaic East Coast and its customs, that I sometimes cried when I drove in over the bridges. Seal Beach was claustrophobic and dismal by comparison.
But my sister begged me to come home. My grandfather demanded I come home. There was talk of my not being able to finish college because of expenses. Everything was on hold until we saw what we were dealing with. Your mother needs you, my grandfather said. There would be no New York. I had missed so many classes in Rome that my teachers didn’t know how to grade me. I took my finals, then flew back to Los Angeles. A miracle recovery.
We didn’t have money for full-time care, but two days a week we had a professional nurse, Luz, from the Philippines. She was a little lax with my mother, but she was kind. Five days a week I was the nurse, with my sister helping when she could, although this became another thing I imagined I was protecting her from. I often wonder what would have become of my mother if that care ratio was reversed. Or if Christina had been in charge. I know that I tried.
My mother was the size of a hummingbird. The hospital escort carried her up the stairs to the master bedroom, carried her in his arms like a little girl. She didn’t remember her house—those wide frightened eyes, her pulse racing so that I could see it flickering on her wrists. She didn’t speak a word that first day.
Home is where the miracles started shrinking. Her fiancé, Bruce, who was present at the hospital every day for months, visited less and less. Then his calls shrank as well. Each one left her confused and agitated as she tried to connect to him and remember him. After one phone call, in which my mother mostly mumbled and nodded, I asked to speak to him.
I need you to stop calling.
He cried into the phone. It felt obligatory. He was spineless, the kind who can’t be around other people’s pain without revealing their own weakness. I had only met him once.
It’s just…I have a son…I’m not rich…I can’t…
Bruce, I said, through my teeth, of course you can’t. No one is blaming you. Grow up and stop calling her. She’ll forget in a week.
He continued crying. Eventually I hung up on him. Yet for all my bravado, very few things gut me as thoroughly as the memory of her saying in the bathtub, in that squeaky, doll voice, I have a boyfriend, right?
She had to ask for her memories back from me. When I recall the times I’ve had steel in my blood, where I wanted nothing but to survive, it’s my grandmother’s voice that comes out in me. I felt nothing looking at my mother, though her face was falling. No. You don’t.
* * *
Her brain will make new connections, Dr. Chan had assured me. In the beginning she had no memory at all, no recall even of her daughters. But slowly the long-term storage unpacked itself. We didn’t know if the short term would ever quite arrive. It was over a month before she knew her own name, or what time of year it was. He gave me instructions on how to nurse her. We had exercises, physical and mental, daily. I read books on brain trauma. Biweekly acupuncture appointments. She had a weekly meeting at the hospital where she sat with the other survivors and they tried to talk but mostly just sat together, their aliveness its own success story. I bought flash cards for different age levels, games, crossword puzzles, coloring books and colored pencils.
She was okay with basic emotions. Happy, she read off a card. That’s right. Do you remember a time you were happy? A tree or a flower, structures of civilization. Do you know the names of any trees? What happens when the light turns red? She could identify a hospital. An airplane. A family.
I don’t want to do this, she said, and considered her hands in her lap.
I know. I put the flash cards down. Me neither.
* * *
A dream of mine from that time of a parade on a country road: pastoral New England, a dirt road and cattle fences beside it. The parade is more like a caravan, everyone wrapped in tunics. Some wrapped their faces and I knew they were God. There is a broken section of fence. Through that break, which I know is the break in my mother’s brain, each person throws a trinket, an offering. Lockets, bread, dolls, scarves. I am standing aside holding tools, anxious for the parade to finish so that I can get back to repairing the fence.
It’s there in the dream: my small reserves of patience, waiting for an apology, a recognition of the pain she caused me, an idiotic, child’s amount of hope that she would care what happened to her.
* * *
At night, I listened to my mother’s fluttery, hummingbird breaths and felt the force of how quickly lives change. Not just hers, but mine. Wiping out her memory had wiped out my entire childhood. I had Christina, but she was younger than me. Our versions of events vary wildly. It felt like there was no witness to my growing up, no one paying attention anymore, as if the backdrop had fallen away revealing an empty soundstage. The aneurysm also took away our chance to fix anything between us. It was all gone.
Eventually my sister and I slept together in another room with a baby monitor. That first week I slept on a cot in my mother’s room, sometimes right outside the door if I couldn’t handle it anymore. “It” wasn’t the gross stuff. I didn’t care about taking her to the toilet. Cleaning out the staples in her skull. I didn’t care about showering her, trying to shave her legs, trying to tweeze the hairs around her nipples which had grown long and wavy at the hospital. Didn’t care about helping her with tampons when her period surprised us. Didn’t care about brushing her teeth, icing bruises that welled up every time she hit a wall.
It was her breathing while sleeping. Panting while dreaming. I knew in her dreams she didn’t know what happened to her. She would wake up confused all over again. Where am I? And who? When I watched her sleep, I understood that to love is neither exhilaration nor safety, but instead this: painful, too tender, forcing a forgetting that’s close to forgiveness.
Long Beach, California
When I arrive to take my mother to her first doctor’s appointment in at least five years, her boyfriend, Larry, is home. He opens the door already crying, on the offensive. I plummet into the surreal, repetitive reality of drug addicts and the mentally ill. It’s a place I can navigate, which is why I don’t immediately get back into my car or call the police.
Please, he begs me, his morning tremors in full effect as he grabs my arm, you have to take her.
My mother is sitting on the couch with her arms crossed, mouth set. I’m not going.
Get your walker, Nancy. I had been calling her by her first name when I felt I had to be firm with her since I was thirteen.
She can’t walk, Larry says.
I can walk, she says, contentiously. But I’m not going to.
I use my smoothest voice: Why don’t we try, Mama?
It takes both of us, Larry on one side, me on the other, to pull her to standing. She’s yelling at us the entire time, scratching along the walls of the house, her legs shaking. I see how weak her muscles are, how her limbs buckle at the slightest pressure. At the doorjamb she starts crying. Her nose is running over her face and into her mouth, her hands are flapping, I can’t do it, I can’t breathe. That’s when I lift her. She calls to Larry for help but holds still. I carry her against my body, rigid, across the lawn and into the street. I put her dow
n outside my car and say, Put yourself inside, I know you can do it.
It takes ten minutes, but she does it, dragging her partially paralyzed right foot into the car with two hands. I shut the door and turn to face her boyfriend, whose terror of me is palpable. When I really look at him, I notice how gaunt he is. Something wrong with his pancreas, I’m remembering. I really don’t know which one of them is in worse shape.
You should have called me, I say to Larry, using my manager’s tone, in which I used to admonish servers for being late. My mother watches us angrily from inside the car, like a dog who has been banished. He turns away from her, still crying, trying to hold on to me, a stream of bullshit splattering out of his mouth:
He tries, but he can’t live like this, he can’t keep her secrets anymore, God how he’s suffering. His children tell him to leave my mother but he just can’t, he loves her too gosh-darn much, chivalry isn’t dead. But my mother hasn’t left the house in years, she made him stop going to meetings, she drinks two bottles of wine a day, she forces him to drink, he tries to stop her but she wakes up after he’s asleep and she walks to the liquor store to buy her booze.
It’s here that I stop him, that I decide this farce cannot go on.
Larry. You’re telling me that that woman—I point to my mother through the car window—that woman WALKS to the liquor store by herself—in the middle of the night—and buys booze?
He holds on to both my shoulders. Every night. I can’t stop her.
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