Terrible Praise
Page 28
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Bargaining
Wiped. Clean as a mirror in an empty room, rootless and suspended. Caught in a black bog, paralyzed, severed from past and present—outside of time. If you have no living ancestor, what proof do you have of a beginning? And isn’t ambiguity the very nature of eternity?
Everything is more than it is normally, and less than it ever was. I’m not sure how that’s possible.
The leaves show their veined underbellies to the dusk-kissed sky. When I was a child, our gardener warned me inside when the leaves danced upside down on their branches. He said it meant rain. Mother said you could sense the storm in the wind, and she was right. She was always right. The evening breeze is charged and chilled, weighed down with dew, knocking the body instead of rushing past.
I should hurry back, I know. But leaving is the hardest part of visiting her. When the last mourner has returned home, who does she have? The only mourner, really.
Helen made the necessary calls, tearing through the yellowed pages of Mother’s moth-eaten address book. She stopped updating me on the meager list of attendees after she learned that my mother’s only known relative, my great-aunt Nadine, had been dead for almost six years.
I scrape my index finger along the elegant scroll of her name, etched forever in marble.
She was interred in accordance with her will, in her father’s columbarium at St. Boniface Cemetery. My father was buried in accordance with his, several blocks north at St. Peter’s. Mother found the thought of burial repugnant, so all that rests beside my father in the joint plots he purchased are the insects fat from his flesh. We had the argument only once. I suggested that she could store her ashes in an urn in the plot beside my dad. She stared at me incredulously for all of three seconds and asked where I had placed the Arts and Leisure section of The Times.
Even in death she’s asking me to pick a side.
Her wishes were more glamorous. I’ll give her that. Selfish, but that was always her style. Is it too much to ask that I be permitted to take one train, and grieve for both my parents in a central location?
St. Peter’s is hardly a central location Elizabeth. Besides, it would take at least two trains no matter how much of your family was buried there.
“Touché.”
How can I be so painfully aware of someone who is no longer a part of this world? Does she know that I’m here, every single night, crying and shivering at her tomb and not at my father’s? Picking her over, and over again. Promising myself to visit him tomorrow, but always stepping off the platform three stops too soon?
What do I do now, Mother? Without you to look after, to disappoint? It’s what keeps me from going home. You’ve painted your shadow into every corner of the brownstone you loved so dearly, and it only makes me feel more alone. It keeps me from getting back to work. Who is left for me to appease? To praise or chastise me? What does any of it matter now?
I could do anything. Go anywhere. Instead, I’m stuck between two cemeteries. Pinned down by the promise of another impossible tomorrow. As certain of my failures as ever I was, and without a single acerbic insult to help me along.
Mother died three weeks after Stela tried to take her from me. A second stroke. Nothing I could have done. Or so I’ve been told. For two days, I sat at the bottom of the stairs while Helen made the tough calls, desperate to throw together some semblance of a funeral. And James, with his nervous hands and timid mouth, puttered around the kitchen looking for things to clean, going so far as to rearrange the expired contents of the fridge.
There were moments when the whole house would seize up with stillness, like the body bracing for a sneeze. When I could feel the three of us inhale in unison, and hold that breath. James with a dishrag pulled tight in his hands, and Helen with her cell phone held back from her ear, the dial tone of another wrong number or dead acquaintance ringing out around us. And I would sit doe-eyed dumb, dragging my nails in the grooves of the baseboard looking for blood.
I don’t know why I did that. Why I sat in the spot where her body had crumbled and hunted with my hands for evidence of the catastrophe. A sliver of torn flesh caught in the wood. A bone fragment. Something, anything to prove that the fall was real, that my mother had an accident on the stairs. That my benign neglect and boundless resentment didn’t kill her. That she wasn’t a casualty of passive aggression. She slipped. She fell, and that’s how I lost her. But there wasn’t so much as a copper-colored crumb of coagulated blood. There was hardly any dust. My hands came away clean.
Stela was thorough.
Did she feel it when it happened? My immense sorrow? My shameful relief? When I stopped the chest compressions and collapsed at my mother’s bedside, wringing my hands and screaming her name? Could Stela sense my grief? And do I have the right to be offended by her absence when I twice demanded it?
I don’t. I have no right to be angry with Stela when she has been entirely honest about what she is, and what she is not. No more than I have the right to parade myself around as the grieving daughter, when all I asked of either of them was to leave me alone.
I’ve visited the Art Institute on two separate occasions since the funeral. Both times I found myself in the Sculpture Court, standing at the frozen feet of Truth. I stared painfully hard into her wide vacant eyes, until my vision blurred and I could have sworn she reached for me. It’s a strange place to find comfort, and an odd reminder of Stela when I have so many others.
My bicep begins to throb as though conjured by the thought her and I drop my purse at my feet, rolling the limb up and down to shake the ache away. That grip in my gut is gone. The slow heavy drop in my stomach when she’s near. The electric tingling that crawls across my skin, making me shiver with goose bumps no matter the temperature. I’m trying very hard to hold on to what she did, what she tried to do, and hate her for it. But the truth is that no matter how misguided and abhorrent her actions, they made a sick kind of sense. It’s what she was also trying to tell me at the hospital. I just couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t accept that my mother wasn’t in that body on the bed. That she wasn’t waking up, wasn’t coming back. I still can’t.
What I know is that things hurt less when Stela was around. Being near her, physically close to her, was the only thing worthy of my attention. It was like being submerged in a warm bath, even when Stela herself was cool to the touch. Knotted muscles would relax. Cares I didn’t realize I was carrying would quiet. Everything took a backseat to the fact that she was there.
Some nights she would come to me so late that I would feel it happening in my dreams. My body seemed to sink, and I would wake up curled deep into my mattress with her hair tickling my eyelids. Certain of her presence before I ever registered her with sight.
Now this ache in my arm with its puckered scar is the only proof I have that she was real. It’s worse with the changing weather, the downward swing of autumn. I would have it examined, but how would I explain a gunshot wound?
I reach up with a grimace and pull the dead flowers from the bronze votive beside my mother’s name, tossing them over my shoulder into the stiff grass. I remove a fresh bouquet of white tea roses from inside my coat. They won’t last the night, not in this cold. But what does? Flowers wither and die. So do people.
Reason enough to romanticize Stela, I suppose. She was a constant: immovable, unyielding, fixed, unaged, and unchanged. Something you couldn’t lose, though I somehow managed to.
James was easier to push away than I had hoped. A few random explosions of anger directed his way, and he disappeared. No more late night takeout deliveries dropped at my door. No magazines, no conversation. One minute he was standing in my kitchen with tears in his eyes, and the next he was gone.
Helen still calls to check in, like she’s taking my temperature, like she’s walking me through a preliminary exam.
“How are you feeling today?” A stethoscope to the chest. Breathe, and hold it.
“I’m fine Helen.” And exhale. Good.
“He’s busy, I’m sure.” And exhale.
“Such a nice young man.” Hold it.
Aunt Nadine rests in the top left corner of the columbarium, beside my grandfather. She was his youngest sister, closer in age to his only daughter—Mother—than any of her own siblings. One can only speculate as to the reason two women who were so close would go without speaking for nearly fifteen years. Nadine was a striking woman, tall and poised like my mother, with one glaring contrast—Nadine was warm, personable, and affectionate with everyone she met. Especially my father.
The last time I was in a room with her was just after his funeral. During the wake, she held me close. She cried, a deep, bellowing howl as she rocked us both. My mother clawed me out of her arms with punishing fingers, and I remember the sound but not the sight of Mother’s cool thin hand striking my aunt’s flushed and freshly powdered cheek.
Strange to think that Mother would rather spend an eternity entombed beside the woman who may or may not have ruined her marriage, instead of taking her place beside my father. But that was the way Mother held a grudge. Forever. I wonder if this is her way of keeping them parted. Her way of keeping tabs on Nadine, and ensuring that my dad is as alone in death as I suspect my mother was in life.
I talk about my mother as though she’s still alive. It isn’t healthy. I catch myself speaking to her aloud on a daily basis. Sometimes the words don’t make it past my lips, but I hear her whisper the answer in my ear. Logically, she has been reduced to a handful of elements: calcium, sodium, potassium, a sprinkling of carbonate, a dash of dental fillings.
What worries me is the overwhelming anger rising at the back of my throat. Suddenly, every living thing becomes an insult. I rage at everything being as it should be, as it always has been, regardless of my loss. With no thought of me.
I’m uncertain as to when, exactly, you became a raging narcissist, but I’m positive your father is to blame.
I wheel around as though my mother is somewhere within reach. But she isn’t there. The only person goading me, is me.
I tear the white roses from the votive and crush them underfoot, because it makes no difference. The white petals brown against the concrete in a sickeningly sweet smudge. In my haste to leave and catch the train I kick my purse, and the contents spray up into the air—cosmopolitan confetti. It’s the sharp snap of my cell phone smacking the pavement that ends my tantrum and pulls me back to myself. The shatter of broken glass.
I take a breath, let my head fall forward and press against my mother’s marble plaque.
When I’ve recovered, I crouch down on my knees and gather the shards of splintered plastic that once formed my phone case. My battery, though dented, is largely intact. I flip the phone over with a dismal groan, my reflection fractured on the screen. With careful hands, I snap the battery back into place and swipe my finger over the jagged glass to unlock it. Like an addict, I open the conversation history first, frantically scrolling down the threads—well past my mother—until I find her.
S.
Last message received nearly three months ago. I press my thumb over the icon. Then my index finger. I drag my finger. I scrounge through my belongings strewn across the pavement for an eyebrow pencil to use as a stylus. But the texts won’t display. I click several other conversations to no avail. The phone falls from my hands, and it’s like she’s left me all over again. A loneliness and a physical ache in my chest, so pronounced that I clutch the front of my shirt. I quit my crouch to sit on the cold cement, my back pressed to the marble wall.
I picture the door Stela once described, buried in an untouchable place somewhere inside. I can see it in my mind, know this as the space she occupied only by the blankness I find. Intentional nothing where there should be something. Without petulance, anger, or fear I throw my weight against that door. I pull at a handle I know is there, but can’t see. I trace the sealed edges with my fingertips, but the door won’t budge.
“Stela.”
I’ve stopped myself so many times, it’s an odd relief to say her name out loud.
An icy breeze frosts my tear-tracked cheeks. With chilled fingers, I rock forward onto the balls of my feet and set about sweeping my personal effects back into my scuffed purse, grinding to a halt when I smell it, earthen and faintly floral. My heart beats in my throat and I freeze, waiting for her to emerge from the shadows. The wind rushes past my ears, howling in the dark, but the scent is no stronger than before. Something slides beneath my palm, distinctly organic, and I recoil. A pinch of ground petal and pulp, the remnants of my mother’s roses.
A nervous, unstoppable fit of laughter barrels through me with the force of a freight train. I should call Dr. Richmond. Explain to Arthur that I lost the referral to the therapist he recommended. I had been through an ordeal before my mother died. Now I can add extreme avoidance of people and responsibilities to my growing list of symptoms. I swear, if there were a pill that could isolate and expunge the last four years of my life, the entirety of this waking nightmare, I would take it without a second thought. Mother would understand.
I sling my purse over my shoulder and take the hand offered to me, rising on stiff legs. “Thanks.”
I manage two solid steps, and then the ground falls out from under me.
My legs won’t move. I barely remember to breathe. The elongated shadows of the trees, edge closer, stretching toward me. The antique lamps evenly spaced up and down the narrow walkways, threading around graves, burn bright in a sentient way. I wait for her voice because I don’t have the courage to turn around. If she’s there, what’s next? If she isn’t, will tomorrow be more of the same?
Something stirs inside me. That familiar quickening, all pulse and nerve endings. A rush of blood—not mine—moving through my veins, surging, remembering where it belongs. A gust of wind, laced with traces of rust or iron, whips the back of my coat up around my tights.
I close my eyes and follow my body, turning around as though commanded. Run, is that what I want to do? My head swims, and I know I’m going to hyperventilate. She must know it too, because two cool hands cup the sides of my face, and the current of her touch wakes every fiber of my being to life. Every hair follicle on my arms stands on end, every cell in my body buzzes. I cover her hands with mine, and when my eyes open my vision is blurred.
“You are too beautiful for tears, my darling.”
Stela traces the wet tracks on my cheeks with her thumbs, smoothing the moisture into my skin. Her black eyes soak up the light stolen from the stars, a silver sheen around the edges. She looks nothing like I remember. Her straight curtain of blond hair spills over the tops of her shoulders in heavy tangles. The knowing twist of her lips is subdued, soft and full of the blood of another nameless victim, parted as though she means to say more. Her eyes are as treacherous as ever, but heavy, aimless as they search my face instead of burrowing to the core of me. The front of her blouse is soiled and torn, splotched with crimson fingerprints. She doesn’t need to dress for the weather, but normally she prides herself on her appearance.
Never have I wanted or needed to say more. She must sense this, because with a soft hush she pulls me closer and rests her forehead against mine. Her name is a caught breath and little else, but it manages to carry a question and a request. Stela swallows her name, sealing her mouth over mine.
My body trembles with adrenaline when we part, too soon for either of us. The ache in my arm subsides the moment Stela wraps her hand around my bicep, as though she’s encouraging her blood to pool beneath her palm as she directs it to the pain. The relief is instant.
“The wound still hurts you.”
Her words tickle the corner of my mouth and I try to take a step back to answer her properly, but she wraps her arms around my waist. Her grip is steadfast but gentle, a breakable hold. I press myself against the front of her shirt. “It aches in the cold, and when the weather changes.”
“Why are you here?”
Stela’s laugh is weary and she doesn’t hide her exasperation. Her fingers are still at the back of my neck. She meets my stare with her onyx eyes, and once again I sense the tempestuous gulf hidden in their alluring depths.
“Why did you call to me?”
My mouth hangs open prepared to reply, but my wit dies on my tongue. She is changed. More demanding somehow, even in her touch. “I needed to see you.”
She purses her lips in a thin line and kisses the creased skin of my forehead, her gaze distracted as she studies the darkness around us. Her lack of focus, the tight, coiled stance worries me.
“To what end?” she asks. The question is as abrupt as it is direct. She cradles my chin in her hand, and her restless eyes scour my face for an answer.
“What do you mean?” Panic sours the back of my throat. I’m torn between running away from her, and pushing myself back into her embrace. She registers this new uneasiness, and runs a hand slowly down my back.
“You are no longer a secret I can keep, Elizabeth.” A guarded answer, carefully worded. Again, her gaze shifts just over my shoulder, bouncing off the top of my head and sweeping across the sleeping grass. Like a cold fist fear curls itself in the pit of my stomach as I drop my hands quickly from her torso, and seek to become less conspicuous.
“They know about us, don’t they? The others.”
The smile she gives me is affected, uncharacteristically anxious. She nods and—as if deciding all at once that her presence here with me is already known—she places a hand between the buttons of my coat and closes her eyes, savoring my heartbeat.
“Stela, how?”
Reluctantly Stela opens her eyes and pretends she didn’t hear my question.
“Can you feel me?” she whispers. She brings her mouth close to mine, and her fingers inside my jacket part the buttons at my collar until she can slide her palm against my skin. It’s an incredibly effective form of evasion.