“You don’t have a million bucks,” Rory said. “You don’t look sick, Mommy.”
“But I am, honey,” Laura said slowly. “It doesn’t show. It’s inside.”
“Like cancer?”
“Sort of, but no.” Laura sighed, thinking she was possibly the only person in the entire United States tonight who actually wished she did have cancer. “Hand me that sticky paper, honey, will you?” Laura asked Rory. “I don’t want to forget everything.” She printed, Coat moisturizer for dog all gone. Cleaning to be picked up at Cantorini’s. Save one of my rings for each of the girls— my grandmother’s for Annie. Find a grief group, one for each age. Ask the woman I know, Paula Miles, at Hospice. The impossibility of compressing an entire lifetime of routines and assumptions so instinctive they were like swallowing, not something she had to remind herself to do, was like describing the color orange to a person blind from birth. But had they been struck and killed in the tunnel, somehow all of them would have grown up. Laura’s sister Angela was their legal guardian. But of course, they’d no need of a guardian.
They had a father.
She’d grown up.
She’d had a mother.
Hastily, she scribbled: Find daycare provider IN HOME. Advertise through the college. Emphasize child-development training with children who have problems. She could think of no other thing to add except, Do this no matter what it costs, for a minimum two years.
Laura finally put down her pen and asked, “Do you want me to talk to all three of you alone, without Daddy and Grandmother? Or each one at a time?”
“All together,” said Rory, beckoning to Amelia, who stuck her thumb in the corner of her mouth and shook her head violently. She stuck out one of her red Clifford slippers, new since St. Nicholas Day, for Laura to see. Laura smiled and pointed.
“Well, if my vote matters at all to anyone, I would like to talk to you alone without them,” said Annie, gesturing at her sisters and her father. Glancing her up and down, Laura was heartsick to see that Annie had chosen to wear a skirt and blouse and had French-braided her hair. Rehearsing for a funeral, she thought.
“Okay, well, that’s okay, right?” Laura asked the room at large, noticing that the sun, in a piercingly clear sky, was on the horizon. Despite the snow, there would be stars tonight.
Elliott obediently scooped Amelia up and led Rory out. After a moment, Miranda followed.
Annie sat down across from Laura in the straight chair. There was only one, and it looked as comfortable as a barstool. “Why don’t you come here and sit beside me?”
“Obvious reasons,” Annie said, curling her lip.
“I don’t smell or have anything catching,” Laura snapped.
“I mean I would obviously cry.”
“Oh.”
“And that wouldn’t get anything cleared up.”
“Do we have to clear things up?”
“Yes, a couple,” Annie said. She has made her own list, Laura thought, blinking furiously, pretending to fluff her pillow.
“To begin with, I was the one who stole the twenty dollars; I’m sorry I called you a bitch in the letter, which was from me; and I’m going to have my period soon. I smoked a cigarette at Justine’s. I bit Amelia just last night because she hit me with her lousy makeup bag and I have a huge welt on my head.”
“Well, I know all those things,” Laura replied, trying to keep her voice even. “Not that you bit Amelia. That’s a little over the top. But it shows you’re a good person that you wanted to tell me. As for your period, well, just use my things. They’re under the bathroom sink. Put the pad in your underpants. I always liked the pads because they don’t hurt or get stuck, even if they are messier, and don’t believe anybody who says you can’t swim or exercise or anything . . .”
“I meant, you won’t be there with me! Nice!” Annie hissed.
“Do you think I picked this time to die?”
“It really sucks. How can your mother do two hundred crunches a day and then die in eight hours?”
Laura shrugged. “I’m not doing it voluntarily.”
“Dad says there is a surgery.”
“I’d be mental. Not just mental. I’d have to be fed with a tube. I wouldn’t know who you were.”
“How do you know?” Annie asked, clenching her fists with their violent purple-and-glitter tips. “How do you know what you’d know? Don’t you think you kind of owe it to us to try something instead of just laying there in a nice Christmas jacket and dying?”
“Anna Lee,” Laura said sternly, “I heard what the doctor said, and he said it would be useless. On top of that, you would come to hate me.”
“I hate you for not doing it! How do you like that?”
“Not much.”
“I hate you for being so selfish you don’t even think of Daddy or the poor baby. She won’t even remember you!” Annie screeched.
“Do you want her to remember me as a thing that had to be turned over in bed for her sores and fed through a hole in her stomach? Because that’s how it would be, Annie. I’m not lying. I don’t want to say that to you, but that’s how it would be. You have to help the baby remember me, Anna Lee. You have to help her.”
“Thanks a lot! I suppose I have to be the big grown-up now like you did when your father died, because Dad is going to be this huge limp psycho, and I’m going to have to take care of Rory and the baby and totally have no life of my own! Thanks!”
Until now, Laura had not regarded her family history as particularly tragic. Too late, she saw it for the disjointed thing it had been. “I don’t expect that! Dad will take care of you, and Grandmother . . .”
“Oh, Grandmother! She’s so sweet!”
“Well, I think this will change her. It changes people,” Laura said stoutly. “Anyhow, Anna Lee, don’t you feel even a little sorry for me that I have to leave you? I’m the one in this dumb bed, after all. I’m the one who got stuck in the Big Dig, when I should have come here right away . . .”
“Could they have done anything if you had come sooner?” Annie’s face was suddenly a child’s again, as if the sun had shouldered its way from behind a threatening cumulonimbus. A child’s face, helplessly broken open by hope.
“No, absolutely, honey. No, it would have made no difference at all.” Laura tried to soothe her.
“You should sue the city!”
“For having a lousy old car?”
“For keeping the ambulance from getting there faster! People do it all the time. They sue for everything!”
“Anna, please . . . ,” Laura pleaded. “You have every right to be angry with me, but I wish you wouldn’t do this now, because you’ll hate that you did it later and that will make you feel lousy . . .”
“Which brings me to another thing,” Annie said. Laura wished she had a watch. She feared Annie was using up her allotted time. Everyone had to have a piece of time. There was her mother to think of, and Elliott, her siblings.
“What else?” she asked.
“I want to change my name,” Annie told her. “I want to be named after you.”
“Laura? I don’t think Anna Laura sounds too . . . it doesn’t go together.”
“No, Annie Laurie. I happen to know that’s what you wanted to name me. But Dad wanted to name me after that stupid song, about the cherry tree and the little old farmhouse, and you gave in, like you always do.” Annie’s fury was fearsome. In her ignorance, Laura had believed this reaction would take years to unveil itself.
“Well, I don’t always give in, but you’re right.” Though practically geriatric by the standards of their crowd when they married, Elliott had insisted on naming Anna after a stupid Al Kooper song, simply because he had worn out the album playing the bass organ riff over and over. “You can change your name if you want. You don’t even have to go to court. You just change it. Start by changing your school papers. I will love your being named after me.”
“Because that was my baby song, you know!” Annie said, standi
ng up, her stocky little frame a pillar of rage. “You sang it to me. For love of Anneee Lauree, I would lay me doon and dee!”
“You remember that, my darling, darling?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Annie said, turning to stalk from the room, shouting, “Next!”
“Wait!” Laura called, sitting up. “Let me touch you, Annie. Not for you. For me.” Annie, dragging her feet, crossed the floor and held out her hand. Laura kissed her still-a-child’s palm and before closing Annie’s fingers, whispered, “Look at your lifeline, Annie, long and strong! Gosh, you’ll be an old babe! And how many lovers cross your heart line, one coming up pretty soon!” Annie’s lips twitched. Oh, St. Anne, Laura prayed, help me not to break and beg. Help me be the mother you were. “Annie, you’re my heart. Annie, forgive me.” She looked up at her daughter, whose eyes were fixed on the rising sun. “You can send Rory now,” Laura whispered, releasing Annie’s hand, grateful to see she held it still gently closed. Annie stood by the bed, so erect her back was nearly arched, straight as a cadet, and stared out the window.
“The sun is coming up, finally,” Annie said, “and it’s not snowing so much. Probably won’t have a white Christmas.”
She did not look down at her mother; but neither did she move.
* * *
In the quiet room, where other people only wept or slept, Elliott offered his mother-in-law a cup of coffee. He peered into the pot. Even to his indifferent nose, it smelled burnt.
“I think I should make a new batch,” Elliott told her, “but there doesn’t seem to be any coffee or filters.”
“I’d rather have tea,” Miranda told him. Elliott rifled a grubby little basket. He found tea bags.
“Hot water from the tap?” he asked brightly.
“No, Elliott. Just take plain water and run it through the coffee machine once to clean it out, then do it again so it boils. Wouldn’t you rather have tea also?” Miranda asked him. “It’s calming.” She tried to pull Amelia up onto her lap, but Amelia, who sat bobbing her thumb in her mouth and staring catatonically at two four-legged cartoon creatures—both vaguely shaped like televisions, who seemed to alternate between bashing each other with kitchenware and dancing in circles—kicked both her stout legs like pistons, until Miranda, with a nearly inaudible cluck of her tongue, let her go.
Elliott heard the tiny criticism, though, and noted it.
He found himself watching the cartoon creatures, which had now stuck themselves together with some kind of glue, butt to butt.
“I think we can pour it now,” Miranda told him with a slight cough. “I am parched.”
As he handed her a paper cup with a rolled lip, Elliott noticed that Miranda, in addition to carefully spraying and brushing back her expensively cut hair, had applied tiny, barely visible lines of paint between her lower lashes. How, he thought, could a woman on the way to her daughter’s deathbed summon the presence of mind to apply the most elaborate of makeup tricks, the kind meant, he supposed, to fool the eye for black-tie occasions? And dress so carefully, her stockings matching her low-heeled shoes, her shoes matching her bag?
Was this simply how Miranda managed not to fly to bits?
“I thought,” he began, and stopped.
“You thought,” she prompted him.
Elliott pulled Amelia onto his lap. She lay back against him. “I want a water,” Amelia said.
Elliott let Amelia sip some of his lukewarm, sugary tea.
“Won’t that keep her up?”
“She’s not going to go to sleep anyhow.” Elliott shrugged.
“I want a pee wee,” Amelia said. Elliott took Amelia into the antiseptic washroom, with its high high seat. “I don’t want to get on that. It will die me,” she said.
“You won’t fall in. Daddy will hold you,” Elliott said.
“I want Mama, though,” Amelia said apologetically. Elliott thought, Should I get Laura? Would she be touched, perhaps too much, at the humble sweetness of this task? But suddenly, as Amelia clung to his arms, Elliott heard a few drops flow. “Go ahead, honey,” said Elliott. “Go on and let the wee out.” For some reason, the tensile grip of Amelia’s arms brought home to him the enormity of his life’s cataclysmic change. An empty bed. A single line of pairs of shoes. Drawers and drawers filled with no scarves and unmated socks and a shower rod without bras drying, like miniature banners, on rows of hangers. Turning off the alarm, alone, waking in the dark, without Laura, like a heat-seeking missile, having nudged her firm butt against his back, until he literally was over the edge of his side of the bed. Would the day still bloom without Laura’s sleepy murmur, “Time to make the doughnuts, Ell. Time to hit the deck.” Athena’s whining growl of awakening, as she rose, hind end first, from her pad on the floor. The smell of Antonia’s Flowers, the bottle he gave her every Christmas. Would the grass grow now that they would no longer bicker about who’d mowed it last? Would the sun rise now that they could no longer beg each other to get up and make the oatmeal and give the other just five more precious minutes of sleep before the onslaught of the day? Carpooling and dinners, school forms—he and Laura joked that school for three children generated more paperwork than the Pentagon—all on him, all for him, all without Laura to remind him that none of it mattered, that tomorrow would be soon enough? Amelia looked up at him with her widely spaced, always tentative gray eyes.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything will be okay.”
He washed Amelia’s hands between his own and dried them on a cheap, nonabsorbent paper towel. Why give people in crisis such short shrift? he thought. Why not pillows, blankets . . . muffins?
He supposed such niceties were reserved for the birthing rooms, the places where relatives waited for good tidings.
“You were going to say . . .” His mother-in-law ambushed him when he and Amelia emerged.
“I wondered what you had told the girls,” he finally said, “so I would know later.”
Miranda sighed. “I wasn’t going to tell them anything, but Annie asked right away if her mother was very sick, and of course then it was how sick, and then it was who would look after them . . .”
“All this on the way from Natick?”
“I’m sure you can explain things better later on,” Miranda told him. “I certainly didn’t volunteer anything they didn’t ask.”
“That’s good.”
Miranda sighed again. “Her father . . . Laura’s father.” She sighed in reverse, a long, repentant, inward breath, but her expression—so far as Elliott could tell—was not fond but exasperated. “He’d fallen in the shower and cut himself shaving. I heard him fall, or Suzie did, and I thought it was the cut that made him so woozy; he was bleeding. They stitched the cut. Can you imagine? He died four hours later.”
“I suspect they thought he’d live, even if he were impaired somehow.”
“They may have; but that’s not what they told us,” Miranda said decisively.
“So you feel as though you’ve been through this.”
“I don’t mean this as an insult to you, Elliott, but however much you love your husband, it can never feel the same as losing your child. Your child dying. I still don’t believe that it will happen. I keep thinking the surgeon will find some . . . some way. I can’t look at her, sitting there all shiny and with her hair brushed, and make that square with her being fatally ill. Dying while we watch, helpless to do anything for her.”
Elliott said, “He said there was no hope. Doctor Campanile. Virtually. That we could put her on life support to harvest her organs.”
“You refused that.”
“No. It’s what she wants.”
“Elliott, that’s . . . beastly. Don’t you think it actually encourages doctors not to try as hard?” Miranda asked. “That’s what Juliet thinks.” Juliet was Miranda’s younger sister.
“This doctor is a pretty square shooter.”
Rory, her eyes rubbed nearly raw, walked into the room and asked for a Pepsi. Elliott fished in his pocke
ts and gave her a dollar in change.
Rory sat down. “It’s exhausting me,” she said solemnly.
“And so it should,” Miranda told her granddaughter. “You are very brave, Aurora Miranda.”
Rory leaned against Elliott’s knee. She felt immense, weighty, her sixty sprightly pounds a limp mass. “Dad,” she said.
“Hey?” Elliott hugged her, subtly shifting her weight from his tingling knee.
“Are we going to have to sell our car? And our house? Because Mommy died?”
“No, who told you that?”
“Caitlin Carver’s mother got divorced and she had to sell their house.”
“Oh, Rory. Mommy and I aren’t getting divorced. We’ve never been mad at each other like that and we never would be. We won’t have to sell our house. Everything in our house will stay just the same. Don’t worry, baby girl.”
“How about the dog? She eats, like, ten pounds of food a week. We’ll have to sell Athena . . .”
“We won’t have to sell Athena.” Rory kicked off her shoes and padded out into the hall to the pop machine. “Dad?” she asked softly, glancing back in. “Am I going to have to quit?”
“Quit what?”
“The gym? I know how expensive it is, and Mom says I’m ready for private lessons, but you don’t have to get them for me . . .”
“We’ll have to . . . figure things out,” Elliott said. “It’ll be all right.” Rory left the room, and they heard her drop the quarters, then the clang of her pop can hitting the tray. “Why is she thinking about selling the dog?” he wondered aloud, half to Miranda and half to himself.
“Children do,” Miranda said. “They did, mine, when their father died. They were going to . . . Elliott, you certainly can tell me to shut my mouth if you wish to, but I have been here. Mine, they were going to hold a garage sale and sell their old clothes because they were afraid of the very same sort of things. It wasn’t exactly selfish. It’s not exactly as though they’re self-centered . . . it’s more as though they’re programmed for self-preservation first . . . I can’t explain.”
“You’d think they’d think of nothing but their mother.”
Christmas, Present Page 5