“I just want to go to sleep,” she said. “Just sleep. I never want to wake up again.”
The next morning, Mama could not move her legs. She could barely breathe. There was a pain in her side, she said. Sweat shone on her forehead when she tried to talk. The blisters on her mouth had spread to her chin.
“I’m afraid.” She gripped my hand so tightly I could feel the bones of my fingers rubbing together.
“I know,” I told her. “But I’m here. I won’t go anywhere. I’ll stay right here.”
Jo came in the afternoon. The doctor had already come and gone, leaving Mama’s left arm bound to a plastic frame and that tiny machine pumping more morphine. Mama seemed to be floating, only coming to the surface now and then. Every time her eyes opened, she jerked as if she had just realized she was still alive.
“What did he say?” Jo demanded. I could barely look at her.
“It was a stroke.” I cleared my throat. I spoke carefully, softly. “A little one in the night. He thinks there will be more, lots more. One of them might kill her, but it might not. She might go on a long time. They don’t know.”
I watched Jo’s right hand search her jacket pockets until she found the pack of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth, but didn’t light it. She just looked at me while I looked back at her.
“We have to make some decisions,” I said. Jo nodded.
“I don’t want them to . . .” She lifted her hands and shook them. Her eyes were glittering in the fluorescent lighting. “To hurt her.”
“Yeah.” I nodded gratefully. I could never have fought Jo if she had disagreed with me. “I told them we didn’t want them to do anything.”
“Anything?” Jo’s eyes beamed into mine like searchlights. I nodded again. I pulled out the forms Mavis had given me.
“We’ll have to get Jack to sign these.”
Jo took the papers and looked through them. “Isn’t that the way it always is?” Her voice was sour and strained. The cigarette was still clenched between her teeth. “Isn’t that just the way it always is?”
“Mama’s pissed herself,” Arlene told me when I came back from dinner. I was surprised to see her. Her hair was pushed behind her ears and her face scrubbed clean. She was sponging Mama’s hips and thighs. Mama’s face was red. Her eyes were closed. Arlene’s expression was unreadable. I picked up the towel by Mama’s feet and wiped behind Arlene’s sponge. Jo came in, dragging an extra chair. Arlene did not look up, she just shifted Mama’s left leg and carefully sponged the furry mat of Mama’s mound.
“Jo talked to me.” Arlene’s voice was low. Without mascara she seemed young again, her cheeks pearly in the frosty light that outlined the bed. Behind me, Jo positioned the chair and sat down heavily. There was a pause while the two of them looked at each other. Then Mama opened her eyes, and we all turned to her. The white of her left eye was bloody and the pupil an enormous black hole.
“Baby?” Mama whispered. I reached for her free hand. “Baby?” she kept whispering. “Baby?” Her voice was thin and raspy. Her thumb was working the pump, but it seemed to have lost its ability to help. Her good eye was wide and terrified. Arlene made a sound in her throat. Jo stood up. None of us said a thing. The door opened behind me. Jack’s face was pale and too close. His left hand clutched a big greasy bag.
“Honey?” Jack said. “Honey?”
I looked away, my throat closing up. Jo’s hands clamped down on the foot of the bed. Arlene’s hands curled into fists at her waist. I looked at her. She looked at me and then over to Jo.
“Honey?” Jack said again. His voice sounded high and cracked, like a young boy too scared to believe what he was seeing. Arlene’s pupils were almost as big as Mama’s. I saw her tongue pressing her teeth, her lips pulled thin with strain. She saw me looking at her, shook her head, and stepped back from the bed.
“Daddy,” she said softly. “Daddy, we have to talk.”
Arlene took Jack’s arm and led him to the door. He let her take him out of the room.
I looked over at Jo. Her hands were wringing the bar at the foot of the bed like a wet towel. She continued to do it as the door swung closed behind Arlene and Jack. She continued even as Mama’s mouth opened and closed and opened again.
Mama was whimpering. “Ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba.”
I took Mama’s hand and held it tight, then stood there watching Jo doing the only thing she could do, blistering the skin off her palms.
When Arlene came back, her face was gray, but her mouth had smoothed out.
“He signed it,” she said.
She stepped around me and took her place on the other side of the bed. Jo dropped her head forward. I let my breath out slowly. Mama’s hand in mine was loose. Her mouth had gone slack, though it seemed to quiver now and then, and when it did I felt the movement in her fingers.
Across from me Arlene put her right hand on Mama’s shoulder. She didn’t flinch when Mama’s bloody left eye rolled to the side. The good eye stared straight up, wide with profound terror. Arlene began a soft humming then, as if she were starting some lullaby. Mama’s terrified eye blinked and then blinked again. In the depths of that pupil I seemed to see little starbursts, tiny desperate explosions of light.
Arlene’s hum never paused. She ran her hand down and took Mama’s fingers into her own. Slowly, some of the terror in Mama’s face eased. The straining muscles of her neck softened. Arlene’s hum dropped to a lower register. It resounded off the top of her hollow throat like an oboe or a French horn shaped entirely of flesh. No, I thought. Arlene is what she has always wanted to be, the one we dare not hate. I wanted Arlene’s song to go on forever. I wanted to be part of it. I leaned forward and opened my mouth, but the sound that came out of me was ugly and fell back into my throat. Arlene never even looked over at me. She kept her eyes on Mama’s bloody pupil.
I knew then. Arlene would go on as long as it took, making that sound in her throat like some bird creature, the one that comes to sing hope when there is no hope left. Strength was in Arlene’s song, peace its meter, love the bass note. Mama’s eye swung in lazy accompaniment to that song—from me to Jo, and around again to Arlene. Her hands gripped ours, while her mouth hung open. From the base of the bed, Jo reached up and laid her hands on Mama’s legs. Mama looked down once, then the good eye turned back to our bird and clung there. My eyes followed hers. I watched the thrush that beat in Arlene’s breast. I heard its stubborn tuneless song.
Mama’s whole attention remained fixed on that song until the pupil of the right eye finally filled up with blood and blacked out. Even then, we held on. We held Mama’s stilled shape between us. We held her until she set us free.
This page constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
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