I follow her gaze. There in the hall, a brown-skinned woman sits perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap as if she were in a church. I didn’t see her earlier, although she must have been in plain view when I exited the elevator. Surely she must hear, but she doesn’t look up when the nurse mentions her. It takes a moment for me to recognize her as the Jamaican woman from last Thanksgiving, the one who waited indifferently while my mother stalled her guests.
“Everyone wanted to contact you earlier,” the nurse explains. “But your mother refused. She insisted that you not be disturbed. Nothing we said could budge her. Your mother’s a stubborn lady, in case you didn’t know.”
I don’t bother to respond. The nurse goes on apologetically; I can tell she’s afraid she’s overstepped.
“Sunday she woke up in the middle of a storm, she was terrified. I answered her call, and it took a while to calm her. I think she was disoriented by the noise of the wind. After I’d sat with her a minute, she had me crank up the bed so she could watch the storm. I left her like that—just sitting in the dark. And who knows what convinced her, but later she handed one of the Brooklyn women a piece of paper with a telephone number on it. Then she couldn’t stop asking us when your flight was arriving.”
With the pads of her fingers the nurse pats her temples. Fine fines spread from the corners of her eyes and stretch over her cheekbones, a faint web of fatigue. She looks at me with a swift and vague pity.
“You must be tired,” my mother tells me.
“I’m fine,” I say. I’m trying to make sense of what the nurse told me. I’ve never seen my mother terrified. I’ve never seen her afraid of anything.
“Why don’t you go wash up, and rest? The nurses will have whatever you need. I’m not going anywhere.” The joke is hurried; in the few minutes I’ve been at the nurses’ station, exhaustion has blunted her features. Now it occurs to me that she wants me to leave before I notice. “When you’re rested you can come back. Then we’ll have time to talk properly.”
Gingerly, I kiss her cheek. Then I lift my suitcase and go. She doesn’t close her eyes until she sees I’ve reached the door.
As I pass down the hall, I nod to the Jamaican woman. She looks at me, then through me.
The nurse tells me I can sleep in a spare conference room; I go to the door she indicates. I enter and shut the door behind me. Setting down my suitcase, I allow myself to draw a deep breath:
Even in this hospital with its antiseptic smells, it is impossible to miss the difference. I felt it the instant I stepped off the plane: the air here is thick, soft. I draw another deep breath, and the air in my lungs seems to promise miracles. American air.
My mother may get well. Anything, I tell myself, is possible.
Light enters the dusty pane above the sofa, and dances on the floor. Five stories below is Morris Park Avenue, a wide river of pavement marked by cavernous underpasses and weedy lots. I watch a bus start up at a light; exhaust stirs the trash. Discarded wrappers and loose papers wave like flags, welcoming me home.
The book of psalms is at the bottom of my suitcase. When I retrieve it, the cracked binding under my fingertips is a small comfort. I settle on the sofa. I open the book and read silently. “From the depths of my despair I cry to You O Lord.” I repeat the words aloud, but they fall from my lips without a destination. O Lord? I don’t know how to pray. Instead I press a hand to the greasy window and watch America blur between my fingers.
I fall asleep with the book open on my chest.
The nurse who stops me in the corridor indicates the bottle of orange juice and plastic-wrapped oatmeal cookie I hold. “She’s not eating, you know.”
I nod, and step along with a knowledgeable smile that does not falter until my back is to the nurse. Ignoring the thumping of my heart, I pretend that the snack cradled in my sweating hands was for me. The woman from the Center, still on the bench, watches me pass. This time I’m the one who won’t meet her eyes.
My mother is waiting for me, and turns pertly as I enter. She is wearing a fresh white nightgown. Faint pink lipstick shines on her lips, there is color in her cheeks. I glance around the stark room; she must have hidden the makeup. I didn’t know she knew how to put makeup on.
She’s trying to make this easier on me.
Dizziness swallows me. I sit. Yes, I’m well rested now. Yes, the flight was fine. I bought a snack, is it all right if I eat in here? I inch the orange plastic chair as far from the window as I dare. I’m certain that the shadows on my face are well disguised; I’ve checked in every bathroom mirror between the cafeteria and here. But before her steady, almost black eyes, I feel a twist in the pit of my stomach. Immediately I recognize this nausea; it’s as familiar as my own name. I’ve failed her and I’m about to be found out.
I stand. I have to look adult, purposeful. I have to show her I’m the new, trusted Maya, so different since she went to Israel. I cross to the window and try in vain to open it. I mumble something about getting a little more air.
“Maya,” she says.
In this stark, clean room there are only a few distractions: the spare rail of the IV, with its knobby, indifferent wheels; the small stack of mail on a shelf behind the headboard; the chair on which I sit. And my mother’s travel bag, set just inside a half-open locker, awaiting some imminent departure.
“Yes?” I can’t stifle the anguish in my voice.
Her eyes take me in. I try to meet her gaze. At last she says, “I’ve longed to see you.”
The confession stretches like a soft broad carpet between us. I sit motionless, amazed. Then, without meaning to, I start forward in my chair. I will cross the space between us to touch her thin hands—will they still feel familiar after all these years? Will the large-pored skin of her face be warm under my wandering fingertips? Surely if I curl my fists into hers, if I lie beside her in the bed and breathe her breath, I’ll grow warm and sleepy like a child.
She is talking. Her rasping voice searches for purchase in the bright room. “Tell me, how are the Shachars?” Her eyes glint eagerly in their hollows.
I don’t know what it is she’s yearning for. But I settle back in my seat to try to give it to her.
I’ve promised myself that I won’t tell my mother any lies. So I tell her about Ariela’s dolls and Dov’s girlfriend Rina. I tell her about Shmuel, the grace of his thick hands. Although I’m uncertain how she will receive Nachum’s crudeness, I repeat some of his anecdotes. She laughs. Encouraged, I tell her more safe stories, stories with beginning, middle, and end. “Last week I went traveling in the south. Gil and I camped out with a group of people, Dov’s friends.” I talk about the wadi, about the scenery; I even relate Dov and Rina’s arguments about his army career, omitting Gil’s role and mine in their exchanges. We travel the desert, I spread the view of the rising hills before my mother’s grateful eyes.
Still, listening to my own words, I feel seasick. Lying has become such a habit that the truth is only one among many stories I choose from. Nothing more.
After a while I’ve run out of truth. In my confusion I find myself hesitating longer and longer between sentences, trying to come up with a next anecdote. I can’t remember anymore whether what I’m saying is what actually happened, or only what might have.
But my mother is still waiting, alert to my every word.
I strike out from shore. I show her the sights I saw with Dov’s friends after leaving the nature preserve: the swaying green of towering trees at Ein Ovdat, the sudden blue of the Red Sea after hours of tawny stone. I describe the snake path and the ruins at Masada; I know these places so well from the tourist brochures that I half believe I’ve been there. I speak on, swallowing the terrible freedom of lies. Why tell the truth, I argue to myself, if it won’t make anyone happy? The excursion I describe to my mother ends with a beach barbecue in Eilat. We return peaceably to Jerusalem, there is no interruption of our trip. There is only a telephone call to me at home from Tami, letting me know my mother is
in the hospital.
I stop, daring her to admit this one truth I have named.
She closes her eyes. Her hands are folded on the blanket. How thin the fingers are, bones shedding disguise. I recall her standing in the entryway of the Center, wrapping her long hair swiftly into a bun. And I remember the volunteer who paused, children in tow, to admire: “If I had your shiny black hair I’d wear it down at my waist every day.” My mother hardly smiled at the compliment. “No time for vanity,” she countered. And then, perhaps to mask her embarrassment at the attention, she checked her wristwatch—set exactly on time because she didn’t need to trick herself into promptness. I can picture her just as she appeared that morning: nails efficiently short; skirt severe; low artificial-leather pumps only slightly scuffed. She bent to collect her briefcase and left with only a nod; such a slender back for such an iron will. The volunteer and I traded exasperated looks.
As my mother rests now in this bare hospital room, I imagine an outing to Coney Island. I imagine my mother trailing behind the line of children on the rain-pocked sand. Someone produces a camera and she shies away from the pallid flash; the chemo has failed to do its work, her regrowing hair is wrapped in a kerchief and she does, after all, have enough vanity, this once, to stay out of the camera’s view. The photograph will turn out well and she will send it to me, as if the children, sharp and energetic against the heavy sky, might distract me from noticing her absence. As if the image might prevent me from noticing that she wasn’t going to be around to run the new day-care facility she and Faye fought so hard to secure. That there was never going to be a hiking trip to Bear Mountain with the children—not for my mother.
Finally I understand that her letters have been as full of lies as mine.
The drops of fluid fall to the chamber, become a thin fine of liquid, disappear into her arm. I see now that these were our final months together, and we spent them sending coded messages across oceans. My mother has aged ten years in these six months, while I’ve stood still halfway around the world, listening to my own heartbeat.
Day merges with night, there is no sense to the numbers on the hospital clock. People from the Center come and go with respectful nods to me, the Jamaican woman returning most frequently.
My mother’s voice is rough with excitement, and a patch of real pink glows in each cheek. “Your father would have hated that drive into the desert.” She laughs. “Heights made him dizzy.”
“Mom.” I face her stubbornly. “Does Dad know?”
She huffs in practiced disgust. “Your father. I didn’t tell him I was here, but some of my colleagues”—she rolls her eyes—"decided he had to know. I suppose it isn’t surprising that they tracked him down—they had no way of knowing how he gets when anything frightens him. It was a long, long telephone conversation, Maya. Good thing he can afford that kind of phone bill, I kept telling him. He told me to be quiet about the bill, couldn’t I stop being practical just once?
“So, you see, it was just like old times between us.” Bitterness salts her laughter. “He kept asking did I need anything, I said no. He said I should know he stood ready to jump on a flight that minute.” She lifts one hand, drops it to the covers. “Mr. Romantic. He always was good at the extravagant offer. I said he could fly to New York if he liked, but I didn’t need anything and he’d be wasting his money. ‘Make a donation instead,’ I told him. I knew that would set him off. He gave me the usual hard time for a while, about how I never did let anyone help.” She falls silent. A moment later, she adds, “And why should I let people help, when I know they’ll just screw everything up?” She winks. I know what she means, don’t I? But her eyes are wet. She looks confused.
Dread prompts me into speech; I’m afraid that my mother is going to ask me for advice. After all these years of asking help from no one, she’ll relinquish her authority and lay it in my hands. And if she does, I’ll know she’s decided to die. I rush to reassure her before she can doubt herself. “I know just what you mean,” I say.
My mother pats her hands together. Then, heavily, she sighs. “So we hung up. And if I know anything about your father, I know he was relieved. He didn’t have the nerve to come. Your father never had the nerve.”
A loud swish of wind rattles the windowpane; we both look at the sturdy glass.
“I never stopped loving your father,” she says.
I turn away from the window, but she is still staring through the glass.
“It’s true. It was just that neither of us could quite manage to live with the other. So he went off to a more comfortable life, and I followed my heart and stayed with my work. But I didn’t ever fall out of love with him. Don’t ask me why.” There is perplexity in her voice. She glances at me, acknowledging what we both know: She’s never confided in me this way.
“After the divorce, I think I gave up on some notion of happiness. So maybe that’s why I took risks with my own safety, maybe that’s why I did things other people weren’t willing to do. Because once you stop caring for your own happiness, you can do those things.” She worries the single button at her throat. Then, with a faint smile, she addresses me. “It’s no matter, Maya. There are worse tragedies in people’s lives than love that doesn’t work. Maybe you haven’t seen that yet, but you will.”
“Mom, maybe I should call Dad again. He’d come.”
“No.” She pronounces the word firmly. She isn’t confused or in need of advice, after all. “I don’t want that, Maya. Your father and I have gone our separate ways. I may love him, but I’ve learned how to be without him.”
The long speech has exhausted her. The shadows under her eyes have deepened and she breathes shallowly. “Tell me more,” she says.
I cast about for a subject. I can’t think of anything new, fact or fiction, to tell her about the desert. But the silence is lengthening, so I begin. “Tami and Fanya had a fight.” Without embellishing or masking a single detail, I relate the conversation on the way to the airport. When I conclude with news of Fanya’s engagement, my mother doesn’t respond. Thinking she might need more time to rest, I tell her about Nachum racing after his wife in the crowded airport. And about how, when at long last I turned from checking my bag, Fanya stood beside the counter waiting for me. She was holding her granddaughter tight against her, and Ariela was snoring lightly, her head tilted back against her grandmother’s belly. Beside them stood Nachum, with his arm firmly around Tami. Tami’s cheeks were streaked with tears, but her head was nested in Nachum’s chest. “It’s all right,” he was saying. He reached out his free hand and laid it on Fanya’s shoulder, but it was Tami he was speaking to when he repeated, “It’s going to be all right.”
I am aware of setting this picture before my mother as evidence, although I can’t say what exactly it is I’m trying to prove.
The door swings with hardly a sound, a nurse enters, and my mother’s eyes lift gratefully to the wall clock. The nurse steps forward, holding a syringe of what I guess to be pain medication. A slight nod of my mother’s head tells me I’m to leave.
The hall is empty now, even the Jamaican woman is gone. I sit on the low bench and fold my hands in my lap. I choose not to think about the flat littered streets outside this hospital; I skip over the breeze stained with the smell of damp cigarette butts and exhaust, bypass the traffic and graffiti, and I think, instead, of clouds mercifully blurring the horizon. I think of trees and rain. On my tongue I taste soft American air. She will get better, I tell myself. Nothing can go wrong here that cannot be fixed.
American promises. The disapproving phrase comes, from nowhere, into my head.
“She’ll rest now,” the nurse says beside me. She’s appeared from my mother’s room noiselessly, as if she takes special pleasure in making the hospital feel like a funeral parlor.
I nod; then, with the most professional air I can muster, I ask, “What’s the next step in my mother’s treatment?”
“Honey”—she looks down at me with a sympathy so thick it’s
suffocating—“this is a hospital for terminal patients. Your mother has decided not to pursue any more treatments.”
I sit very still, and soon she’s gone.
It might be an hour that passes, or two. I don’t move. I spend the time trying to breathe. All the air has gone out of this corridor.
The thoughts come at intervals, logic operating at a glacial pace. I realize: My mother isn’t going to call me to account. She isn’t going to see through my makeup and my lies. She’s too tired.
I don’t, in fact, need to worry about being found out at all. The Shachars won’t telephone my mother.
Because she’s dying.
And I knew it all along, even if I never admitted it. I knew it well enough, last fall, to act. I pulled one loose thread from my mother’s life: She never moved to Israel. And out of it, out of this one fiber with which she might possibly have accepted a daughter’s help, I wove a cloth of stories big enough to wrap both of us.
Now though, I see that it is necessary to unravel what I’ve spent so long creating. It is necessary to throw away my mother’s approval once and for all. I remember my high school lab partner turning to me in sympathy when she saw my chemistry grade. “Your mom is gonna flay you.” I tell myself: It won’t be so bad, being that disappointing daughter again. I’ll show her the truth. Tears stinging my eyes, I imagine my mother rising out of the bed in fury at my lies and my weakness. Disowning me, saving herself.
I wash my face in the bathroom adjoining the conference room. Meticulously I remove every trace of makeup. Then I turn off the fluorescent lights, so the room is lit only by the single window. I lie down on the sofa and try to sleep.
I dream of the woman from the apartment downstairs. She beckons to me with surprising grace; she speaks and I can’t make out her words.
Waking, I try to chase the dream from my mind. I never understood what my neighbor wanted—all I know is that I failed her. She’s dead, I remind myself. What’s the use of dreaming she might help me?
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