“WHAT’S THE CRUELEST THING YOU’VE EVER DONE?” Moira had asked years before. They were parked just outside the fence at Cabaniss Field, at the end of the runway, watching planes practice touch-and-go landings. They had been together for a few months, and lately she’d been posing such questions.
She especially liked to ask them after they made love— Have you ever really broken someone’s heart? What’s the blackest lie you’ve told? What’s your most depraved fantasy?— then because the questioning seemed to give her such a charge, they usually rolled around again. He’d never answered in earnest, afraid what he had to offer would betray his inexperience; at twenty-six, he had no secrets worth keeping. Nor had he ever gathered the courage to turn the questions back on Moira, knowing that at twenty-two, she had plenty.
The lights of a single-engine turboprop appeared in the sky, descending toward the landing strip.
“Or, no, what’s the cruelest thing you would do?”
“Depends.”
“Would you hurt someone if he didn’t deserve it?”
“Of course not.”
“What if I asked you to? Or your mother did?”
“You wouldn’t. She wouldn’t.”
“Say we did. Say we wanted you to really hurt someone, and the only reason we wanted you to was to prove that you would.”
The plane grew nearer, a darker patch of dark in the charcoal sky. His mother was home, watching the Lifetime Network.
“Yes,” he said, “I would.”
Moira fixed her eyes on the runway, smiling slyly, obliquely. She reached across the seat, found his hand and pulled it to her lap. At first he thought she’d taken hold of him because he’d snowed her into believing he was capable of that which he wasn’t; now, her tightening grip, her slightly sweating palm, even the lights on the plane’s wings, showed she didn’t believe a single lie he’d told.
A week later, walking in Heritage Park, she told him she was leaving, that there was someone else.
“Who?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
A WEEK AFTER CHRISTMAS, LEE FOUND HIS MOTHER gasping short, high-pitched breaths. He’d fallen asleep on the couch in the den, and when he woke he switched on a lamp, expecting to see her crying. She wasn’t. Her eyes were glazed and bleary, fixed on the ceiling. He checked the oxygen tubes for kinks, adjusted the cannula in her nose. He ran warm water over a washcloth, then blotted her forehead. He wiped her cheeks and limp, listless arms. He asked her to squeeze his hand or blink, but she stayed still, her breathing sharp as blades.
At four in the morning, their hospice nurse, a stout Mexican man named Tony, answered after just one ring. Tejano music played in the background. Lee detailed his mother’s day; soggy cereal for lunch and two diaper changes; she had slept most of the afternoon and evening but was current on her pills; the catheter bag was half full; he could not remember the last time she had spoken. Tony asked him to lower the phone so he could hear her breathing. Lee held the receiver close to his mother’s mouth and wondered how long she had been in this condition. He wondered if she’d called for him while he slept.
A coma, or similar to one. Her lungs, Tony said, were filling with fluid that had leaked through the membranes, a result of protein depletion. He said lungs are like sponges and when saturated, air cannot penetrate them. He said he’d expected this—Lee realized Tony had turned off the Tejano music— and was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. In the den, her ventilator whirred. On the phone a distant nighttime static buzzed. Tony apologized.
He told Lee to place a morphine tablet under his mother’s tongue and dissolve it with water from a straw. The pill would relax her, take pressure off her lungs, though soon her breathing would likely slow to such a degree that it would completely cease. Her body was shutting down. Tony said he was coming over, but he lived across the bay in Portland, so the drive would take half an hour. Lee told his mother not to worry and turned on the television because he didn’t want her to feel alone while he went to the kitchen. He found the pills and poured water into a glass. He took one of the crazy straws that she liked and returned to the den. He smiled in case she could see.
He spoke to his mother as if she were a child. He pried her mouth open while her eyes stared vacantly forward. Her tongue was pasty, rigid. Her breath smelled oniony. Her jaws clenched, making a muffled chewing noise. When he held them open, the high-pitched breathing became a strained groaning. He relented. He closed his eyes, forced himself to breathe. Please, he thought, please. After a moment, he opened her mouth again. She bit him. Then again. Then he lifted her tongue, held it awkwardly with his finger, and positioned the tablet. He leaned over to suck water into the straw, then trapped it with his thumb on the top. Once released into her mouth, the water dribbled down her chin and drained into her throat. Liquid gurgled in her chest. Her body coughed. Then she lay still. Lee opened her mouth and saw the tablet, still dry. He drew water into the straw again, set it directly on top of the tablet and watched its edges effervesce. He climbed into the bed. Through all of this, he talked to her. Tony had said, “Let her know you’re there. She can hear you, and she’s scared.”
He complimented her and he lied; he spoke of his father, because, suddenly, he understood she’d want to hear of him. He recalled for her the months his father had spent beneath his old Subaru, reversing the transmission’s gear configuration just to see if it would work; the time they had tubed down the Frio River and the current kept pulling him into the weeds so that finally he followed them on the far bank; his singsong way of answering the phone. Lee spoke calmly, and hearing his voice, he realized his mother’s life was ending in these very moments. He turned off the television. He put his arm around her shoulder, cradled the fragility of her bone, flesh. He asked her questions, then answered them. When he ran out of things to say, he cleared his throat and began singing.
He sang “Amazing Grace” in a near-whisper, like a lullaby. Her teeth began to grind and she started groaning again. Her head lolled, her fingers twitched. Her dry, peeling lips lost color. Lee sang louder, ashamed to realize his voice had a sudden, pleasing resonance, a warm reverberation buoying his tone. He started and abandoned and returned to different verses without thinking. The harsh, labored panting began to taper. He kept singing. He did not let his voice waver, but concentrated on maintaining a clean, even pitch, for slipping off-key seemed unpardonable. His mother’s breathing calmed further. He sang, sang, sang. And when her lungs finally and quietly gave in, when her fingers went still and her jaw relaxed, he kept singing as he pulled the quilt to her shoulders and closed her eyes with his hand. He stayed beside her while the world started rushing away. He plummeted through an opening emptiness, his body surrendering as if the earth and gravity were receding. He floated through nights on Russell’s couch and through the funeral, and he kept floating until he landed in his bed with Moira.
The rain came harder as he moved inside her. She straddled him, and he touched her eyelids, her mouth, neck, breasts. Her skin was milk-blue in the night. He fought to remember each time they’d made love before, entrusted her to envelop and consume him, like the rain outside, like the ocean, to make him feel as she had years earlier, to say his name and remind him who he was.
Moira held his face with her warm, trembling hands. She said, “It’s okay.”
She draped her arm and leg across his body. Headlights from a line of cars cut through the window of Lee’s room, then she rolled onto her back and said, “Ice cream turns my stomach.”
“Not your average pillow talk.”
“I wanted to drive you. I didn’t want you to be alone.” She sat up, bunched the sheets around her. Her hair shone as she stared out the window. Lee felt his heart beating. She said, “Maybe I made a mistake. Do you wish this hadn’t happened?”
“I kept thinking of you. When it was happening, I couldn’t stop.” Just as he said this, as he wished he hadn’t said anything, he realized it was true. Holding his mother, when
he owed her his strictest attention as he owed her his life itself, he’d been unable to keep Moira at bay. Just on the other side of the moment, she was biting her bottom lip, playing pool; she was dousing her eggs with Tabasco sauce; she carried a baker’s rack down the stairs when Russell moved into his apartment, carried it because they’d said she couldn’t; she was tussling with him in the mornings, teaching him the beauty of occasional sexual stillness, and he was resting his cheek on her stomach afterward. As soon as she had come to Lee years earlier—he’d never been so deluded to think he’d pursued and caught her—he’d started waiting for her to leave. When his mother was dying, his heart had leapt because he knew Moira would come back.
She ran her fingers through her hair. He caressed her flesh, the curvature of her ribs and the space between the bones, then he let his hand fall to the bed. A torrent of memories swirled: how, massaging his mother’s back, he’d always waited for the first moment she kindly said he could stop; how after he’d taken her for a Demerol injection at the ER, she’d blissfully said, “From now on, I’m going to do better”; how before the local tremors took over her hands, she’d been delighted for days by crayons and coloring books. Now he felt wistfully desperate, as he had when Moira had been prone to asking her grave questions. What would she ask tonight? He imagined his furtively beautiful answers, imagined them arousing her and delivering the two of them into another sweating tangle of limbs. More than anything, he wanted another chance. Below his longing was a whirling disgust for having spoken of his mother, for drawing the comparison that would remind Moira of the night’s gravity and rekindle, whether by guilt or kindness, the ruthless passion he so desired.
She climbed on top of him again, placed her hands above his shoulders. Sweat glazed her skin. She said, “I’m so sorry.”
He smiled and raised himself to kiss her. She let him, but that was all. She draped her hair behind her ears, then lowered to her elbows and began stroking his face, peering at him in the near-dark. Again she whispered, “I’m sorry.” She pressed her cheek to his, then lay beside him; her body relaxed. Years before, in Heritage Park, when she had claimed to both love him and no longer love him, when he begged her to stay and knew she wouldn’t, he’d felt the same dread. He listened to her easy breathing, listened until it quieted. On her hip, he felt a tiny half-moon of raised flesh. Possibly the scar had been there for years and his greedy fingers had never noticed it, but he suspected the wound was more recent, the consequence of a mundane miscalculation, a timely slip on wet pavement or a hard pivot into an open kitchen drawer. Such a small thing, but it intimated the trajectory of Moira’s coming life: Soon she would be working in an office, a dour job to help with a mortgage; she’d be married to a kindly, complacent man; she’d be pregnant. If she remembered this night, the memory would be fleetingly sad—a last example of who she thought she’d become; Lee’s presence was arbitrary. He knew this as surely as he knew she’d be gone before sunrise. Her lungs filled and emptied with air, and when she was immersed in the steady rhythm of sleep, he crept out of the room.
The den still stank of cigarettes and old talcum. The odor hollowed him, turned his ankles to puddles. Moonlight slanted through the blinds; the rain had stopped. He lay in her hospital bed, naked and shivering, and covered himself with her quilt that smelled of the petroleum jelly he’d rubbed on her cracked lips. He had the distinct sensation of being borne toward a cliff. His thoughts went not to his mother—each memory of her seemed as irretrievable as a half-forgotten dream—but to the women at the funeral, to Russell, and to Moira, for suddenly—keenly, terribly—what they had understood all along became clear: This was only the beginning. Nothing would estrange him from the rootlessness ahead. Fits of sobbing would seize him when he least expected, in traffic and the shower, in the grocery and two years later, in his St. Louis classroom—and tonight, as he clutched the bed’s guardrails and clung to the red tinsel his mother had never seen. He would hold on too long. Then, he was swept over the edge and weeping for all of them, weeping like a man who was dying or a newborn child, blind and terrified and gasping for breath.
HIS MOTHER HAD SOAKED IN A BATH AFTER THEY returned from Mexico. When she stepped into the den, she smelled of soap and steam. She situated herself in the recliner and said, “I’m sorry I got upset in the car. Maybe I drank too many margaritas, but they were so good.”
He lay on the couch, watching the late news. The Santa piñata stood atop the television. He said, “Water under the bridge.”
“Did you talk to Russell? Did he have a nice holiday?”
He nodded, though he hadn’t spoken with him at all. Russell would have asked about their trip, about her health and spirits, and Lee would have been obligated to contrive hopeful, winsome answers. Tonight he lacked the energy for such condolences.
“Don’t appease me,” she said, unwrapping a pack of cigarettes, “but I’d like to hear what you remember about the old holidays. That’s fair on Christmas.” She blew a plume of smoke into the air. “Don’t tell me about sneaking into your presents. We knew about that.”
“You did?”
“Don’t ever become a thief. You don’t hide things very well,” she said. “Tell me something else. I won’t get upset.”
Immediately, as if he’d been awaiting the opportunity, he said, “I used to lie awake, listening to you and Dad set out the gifts. You always wanted them arranged a certain way.”
She laughed a little laugh, then stayed smiling. “I did, I did.”
“I’d wait until you had everything perfect, then pretend to wake up. I made noise to warn you.”
She turned to the window, the tip of her cigarette glowed orange when she inhaled. A wave of guilt swamped him. Maybe all of their Christmases blurred and conflated in her mind, but more probably she remembered what he hadn’t mentioned, what in his fatigue he’d not thought to avoid. On at least one of those mild December mornings—though over the years he suspected it was their annual tradition—she and his father had made love after arranging the presents. From his room, Lee had heard their muffled voices in the hall, heard their bedroom door easing closed and bodies sinking into a mattress. After they opened gifts, his parents shared cigarettes. His childhood seemed a haze of bluish smoke. He could not recall what his mother had looked like then, though he could imagine her as a child, opening her own gifts. She was a wistful girl who would never want college or money, just a husband to care for her, a child she could care for. Maybe tonight she felt she’d wanted too much.
“You have a good memory,” she said. “I do, too. It’s not always a blessing.”
“No,” he said, “I guess not.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, then lay back in the recliner. She said, “I’m sorry you’re going to remember all of this, all of what’s coming. It’s not fair.”
By rote, he began, “We just need to—”
“Don’t say anything, Lee,” she interrupted. “I’m okay tonight. I’m optimistic.”
She pulled up the quilt, raised her knees so her feet rested on the cushion. She was trying to keep her eyes open, and though he wanted to encourage her before she drifted off, to thank and exalt her, he said nothing. Ever so slightly his heart had started to cave in and render him silent. When he looked again, her eyes were lidded and she was breathing peacefully; he lowered the volume on the television, so she wouldn’t wake. If the night could relieve them of the day, he believed the morning would find him rejuvenated, replenished.
“Maybe optimistic is wrong,” she said, suddenly awake. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll be gloomy, but I think we’ll survive this. Next Christmas, we’ll drink margaritas in Mexico. You can bring Russell, maybe that little sister of his if she’s here, and this will all seem like a bad dream. Won’t that be nice?”
He couldn’t answer. Her lighter snapped, the fragrance of smoke wafted. He sensed her staring at him, but closed his eyes and stayed quiet. As his mother waited for his familiar, reassuring voice, he rolled over and prete
nded to sleep.
CORPUS CHRISTI
Bret Anthony Johnston
A Reader’s Guide
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A Conversation with Bret Anthony Johnston
J. RENTILLY
J. Rentilly: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Did you grow up in a household of readers or writers? What were your first experiences with writing?
Bret Anthony Johnston: My parents were voracious readers, so I was always surrounded by books, and I’ve always wanted to be surrounded by books. I’ve never wanted expensive cars or mansions or yachts, but I’ve always wanted a huge library, one that I know I’ll never be able to finish reading. Still, I never thought that any of the books I’d surround myself with would be ones I’d written. I enjoyed writing, though; I enjoyed the challenge of making a part of imagination real, believable.
JR: You were once a professional skateboarder. Can you give some background on that, on what it meant to your life?
BAJ: I started skating in junior high; I sold my television for money to buy my first skateboard, and aside from a long break around the time I went to graduate school, I’ve really never stopped skateboarding. I skated competitively for a number of years in Texas, and I toured the country as a “professional” in the early nineties. I was never one of the heavy hitters in the sport, not even close, but I did pretty well in contests, and before I “retired,” I had a couple of national sponsors. There was no money in it, not really, at least not for me. I quit competing after
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