by Allie Larkin
We heard the loud whir of my mother’s old hair dryer. We stood in the kitchen and watched the bathroom door, like we were waiting for a bear to come out of a cave. Janie got herself a glass of water and sipped it slowly. “It’s silly that we’re so nervous,” she said. “What’s she going to do, anyway? We’re adults. We can handle this.” She wasn’t very convincing.
Janie opened the junk drawer and we sorted through all the twist ties, expired coupons, plastic army men, and cereal box prizes that had been thrown in there over the years.
We were laughing over a coupon for Smurf-Berry Crunch that expired in 1985 when Diane came out of the bathroom wearing a beige silk robe. Every hair on her head was in its proper place and she had a full face of makeup on.
“Get me a drink, Van, will you?” she said, like nothing had ever happened.
I looked at Janie. Her eyes were wide. She raised her eyebrows at me. I shook my head and went to pour Diane a bourbon.
Diane sat down on the couch and pulled a cigarette and lighter from her stash under the coffee table.
“Could you at least open a window or something?” Janie said.
“It’s winter,” Diane said, lighting up.
“Secondhand smoke kills, Mom.”
“So does old age,” Diane said, flatly, “but people don’t quit having birthdays.”
Janie rolled her eyes and opened the window.
“There’s a pizza in the fridge,” Diane said. “And I’ve got a stack of movies. John Cusack this time.”
She pointed to a stack of DVDs by the television. Better Off Dead, Say Anything . . . , The Journey of Natty Gann, True Colors, and Grosse Pointe Blank.
My mom used to order the pizza and pick the movies. We hadn’t had a movie night since my mom went to the hospital for the last time. We’d all crowded around my mom’s hospital bed in those sticky pink vinyl chairs and watched a John Hughes marathon on TBS. She couldn’t eat solid foods anymore, but she had Janie go down to the hospital cafeteria to get pizza for the rest of us. “So it’s more authentic,” she said. There was nothing authentic about our last movie night. She had tubes going in and out of her from every angle. Her breathing sounded like Darth Vader’s.
I wondered if Diane’s insistence on us having a movie night again was her way of trying to erase the last one. I thought maybe I needed to do that too. So we sat down and had a movie night like everything was fine. Janie seemed to be resigned to going along with it too.
We made it through the early Cusacks, but Janie fell asleep on the couch right in the middle of True Colors, sometime around when John Cusack chokes James Spader. I went into my old bedroom and got my comforter for her. She didn’t even move when I draped it over her, like always. Janie was always the first one to fall asleep when she and Diane came over to watch movies.
“You’ve always been good at looking out for her,” Diane said, patting the seat next to her.
I sat down. She lit a cigarette for me.
“I only ever smoke with you,” I said, taking it from her. I leaned back on the couch and put my feet on the coffee table.
“As much as Nat was a good influence on Janie, I was an awful influence on you, huh?” she said, laughing.
“No, not at all,” I said, sarcastically, shaking my head. I smiled at her.
We sat there, our heads resting on the back of the couch, trying to blow smoke rings. Diane could make perfect Os, but I never could. We didn’t talk for a long time, and we didn’t look at each other. It was like we were testing the waters, figuring out if it could be okay to be together in the same space again.
“I miss her so much,” Diane said, finally. “I didn’t even know you could miss a person this much.”
“I know,” I said. My tears welled up fast and dripped from the corners of my eyes into my hair.
Diane sniffed. “Right here,” she said, “with you and Nat and Janie, this was my world.” She flicked her cigarette into a watery bourbon glass on the coffee table and picked up her current drink. “I never fit in Charles’s world the right way. Those women at the club, judging, picking apart every little thing. I didn’t fit there. I still don’t. With Nat, I fit.”
I remembered Diane, lying on my mom’s hospital bed, my mom cradled in her arms. My mom was so small. She was just bones and skin as fragile as wet tissue paper, but she looked so peaceful.
I’d just left the room for a minute. After days of sitting with my mom, holding her hand, letting Diane and Janie bring me food, taking sponge baths in the sink in the hospital room, I’d gone for a walk with Janie. I needed some air. And when we came back, my mom was gone. I hated Diane so much for that. For being the one who held her. For being the one who spent those last moments with her. But maybe my mom was waiting for me to leave. Maybe she didn’t want to do that to me, to die on my watch. Maybe she was protecting me. Maybe Diane was too.
I looked over at Diane. She looked harder than she used to. Her jaw was tight. Her eyes were sad. I wondered if she’d laughed, really laughed, since my mother died.
The two of them used to get going and they’d be red-faced, tears streaming down their faces. You couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but you got the feeling they could still understand each other. It was one of my favorite sounds. I loved lying in bed, listening to them out in the living room, laughing.
“Nat was so strong, leaving your father, going out on her own,” Diane said, taking a sip of her drink. “I married Charles because I thought I had to. My parents couldn’t afford for me to finish college. I wasn’t going to get to go back, and I didn’t feel like there was anything out there for me. Charles showed up at the club and he was older and ready to get married. His parents hated me, but once I got pregnant, it was all said and done and they just had to get over it.” She swirled her glass around in her hand, watching the bourbon make a whirlpool.
“You’re strong,” I said. “My mom always said you were a force to be reckoned with.” I felt like we were talking like two adults, like it was the first time we ever had.
“I made the best of what I had to work with, maybe,” Diane said. “But I always wondered who I could have been if I’d had the courage to do it on my own like Nat. She was a far better person than I could ever be.”
She used the sleeve of her robe to wipe her eyes. I hadn’t realized she’d been crying.
“That’s why I saved that money for you,” she said. “A few stocks, some savings bonds. A little here, and a little there, so Charles wouldn’t notice.”
“Why did you tell me it was life insurance money?”
“I didn’t want you to feel like you owed me anything, and I wasn’t sure you’d take it if I told you the truth,” she said. “I didn’t want you to be like me. I wanted you to finish school. I wanted you to find someone you love. I didn’t want you to feel trapped, because you grew up here, around money, and maybe you’d think it was easier to just marry someone who could take care of you.” She looked over at me. Her cheeks were wet. “I didn’t want to see that fire and independence die. That part of you is all Nat, and I’ve already lost enough of her.”
“Thank you, Diane,” I said, choking back tears. “Thank you.”
She wiped her cheeks and took a deep breath. “Even though I saved that money for you for the right reasons, maybe I didn’t give it to you at the right time. I can see why you might be mad and maybe you should be.” She sniffed.
It was the closest thing to an apology I’d ever heard Diane give to anyone.
“You gave me my picture back,” I said. “I thought you were done with me.”
She looked at me, mouth open. “I found it in my purse and thought you’d get a kick out of it. It wasn’t-” She took a deep breath. “I am not now, nor will I ever be, done with you, Savannah Leone. I told Nat I’d take care of you, so you’re stuck with me, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
I smiled.
She drank the last dregs of her drink. “Go to bed,” she said, su
ddenly composed again. “I called movers to load up the truck for you. They’ll be here at eight.” She got up, poured herself another bourbon, walked into my mom’s room, and closed the door.
I got up and went to bed in my old bedroom for the very last time. I lay there in my old flannel sheets and wished I could hear my mom and Diane laughing in the living room.
Chapter Forty-five
Diane was gone before we woke up. She’d managed to leave without waking Janie. She’d even left us a plate of bagels and a note: Headed out for the day. Have a safe trip. D. P.S.: Thought you might need a reminder of what a real bagel tastes like.
I studied the note while Janie was in the shower. I went into my mom’s bedroom and sat on the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in the pillowcase. For a moment I thought, I can’t take this away from her. Diane was using this place like her own secret clubhouse. Maybe she needed it.
I pulled my mom’s quilt over my lap. It was the quilt I hid under when I was scared of lightning, that helped make a fort in the living room, that my mom bought with her first month’s paycheck. I realized that I couldn’t let Diane take this from me. And I knew she didn’t want to.
I took the quilt. I left the sheets. I wadded them up and left them in the clothes hamper. I took the bed. I thought maybe I’d put it in the room with all the anchors.
I took the nightstand. In the top drawer, there was a diary, pink and shiny with a little gold lock, like a child’s. There were pill bottles and letters, a few empty paper cups, receipts, slips of paper, and a copy of Tuesdays with Morrie that I’m sure Diane bought for her. I shoved a throw pillow in the drawer to keep everything from moving around. I didn’t want to go through my mother’s nightstand too carefully. It didn’t seem right. Maybe someday, with a bottle of wine and some Joni Mitchell, and incense burning like it was a ritual, but I couldn’t go through it like it was just packing.
I went into the kitchen and pulled out the glasses and dishes I wanted to take, leaving them on the counter to give Janie something to do. She wrapped them in newspaper and packed them while I went through my mom’s closet. I heard something break in the kitchen while I was sorting through sweaters, but I didn’t feel like checking on what it was. None of our dishes ever matched anyway, and if it was something important, like one of the set of the Dr. Seuss juice glasses we had to eat gobs of jelly for months to collect, I didn’t want to know about it.
I took the bigger, bulkier sweaters that would fit me, and left the smaller ones that would fit Diane. I don’t know why. I couldn’t imagine leaving the house in one of my mother’s sweaters, trying to recognize her scent hiding deep in the fibers, or worse, realizing it had been washed away completely, and I couldn’t picture Diane wearing a cotton roll- neck sweater from The Gap, but I felt like I needed to divvy them up between us.
I slipped my mom’s Boston records into the bottom of the box and piled sweaters over them so Janie wouldn’t see. She and Diane always made fun of my mom and me for listening to Boston. I folded the tops of the sweater box in on itself to close it.
“This one is done,” I said, taking it out into the living room and putting it in the pile with the rest of the things I was taking.
“It’s weird that she didn’t say good-bye,” Janie said.
“I feel bad taking everything from her,” I said.
“It’s your stuff,” she said, shoving some extra newspaper in the box with the glasses. She wrote Fragile on the side with one of my old scented markers. “Don’t feel bad. If she had a problem with it, she wouldn’t have hired guys to help us move this stuff.”
Janie moved on to the bookshelves. I grabbed an empty box and went into the bathroom. I left the towels, except for the big ratty beach ones. I took the shower curtain with the purple embroidered fish and orange bubbles. I left the bath mat; I couldn’t remember it ever being ours anyway.
I’d taken almost everything from my room a little bit at a time over the years, so there wasn’t much left. I took the posters off the walls. The blue poster putty was dried out and it cracked off, leaving oily spots on the walls. I threw out the poster of a dolphin jumping over a rainbow into the ocean and the Hang in There kitty. I kept my U2 poster and the one of Basquiat and Andy Warhol in boxing gloves and shiny shorts, even though I knew I’d never hang them up again. I rolled them up and wrapped a hair elastic around them.
I packed the record player and the answering machine. I pulled the box of Christmas ornaments out of the crawl space. When Janie wasn’t looking, I snuck the sombrero magnet into her purse.
Janie finished packing the romance novels. We left the magazines in the baskets under the coffee table. Later, the movers took the coffee table and the couch, and the baskets were all that was left in the living room.
It looked so small. My mom and I had lived in this space with just three rooms and a bathroom, and it had never felt small until now.
When the movers had loaded up everything, Janie came over and hugged me. “It’ll never be the same again,” she said.
“It already wasn’t,” I said.
“What do you think Mom will do with it?” she said.
“Meditation room,” I said, laughing. I could picture Diane in a black leotard and high heels, sitting cross- legged on a pillow with her eyes closed, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Yoga studio,” Janie said.
“What did she call it when my mom took that yoga class that time?” I asked.
“I believe she said it was ‘new age hippie communist bullshit,’ ” Janie said, laughing.
“How is yoga communist?”
“Who knows,” Janie said. “She just says things. They don’t always make sense.” She stepped out into the middle of the room. “You know what I would do here?”
“What?”
“I’d leave it just like this so I could come up here and do cartwheels.” She raised her arms and her right leg and jumped into a lopsided cartwheel.
I joined her. We did clumsy cartwheels until our wrists hurt and we were laughing so hard we couldn’t get up again.
We lay on the floor next to each other and stared up at the skylights. I remembered lying on the rug, coloring with Janie when we were kids. She always stayed in the lines, and I never did.
Janie kicked me lightly on the side of my leg. I looked at her. She said, “Don’t you ever, ever stay away from me.” She looked over at me. “No matter what, okay? If someone makes you an offer, I’ll double it.” She was laughing and crying at the same time.
“This could work out well for me,” I said, kicking her back.
“I need you,” she said.
“I know. Me too.”
“You need you, too?” she asked, leaning her head on my shoulder.
“Yes,” I said. “Desperately.” I leaned my head on top of her head. “And you.”
We lay there for a while longer without saying anything. I was soaking it all in, and I think she was too. I was trying to memorize the way the light looked on the floor, and the way the rug felt against my arms.
Janie got up and said she had to get something at the main house, but I think she was just trying to give me a little room to say my good-byes.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that my mom was there too, but she just felt farther away. I thought about what Diane said about fire and independence. And I thought about all the nights my mom and I stayed up late with mugs of hot chocolate, blasting Boston and playing board games, all the inside jokes and the crazy craft days, and crawling into bed with her when there was a bad thunderstorm; none of that was here. It happened here, but it was gone. All I could do was take her stuff and the things she taught me and the things I remembered about her, and try to do my best with them. I’d lost Alex, but I had a life to go home to. It was small, and it was simple, but it was a start. I had my freelance work and my new house. I had Peter and Janie, and Agnes, and Louis, and, of course, I had Joe. My mom would have been happy for me. I think she would have
been proud of the way I was finally learning to carry on without her. And she would have loved Joe.
I got up and walked around the carriage house apartment, running my hand along the bookcase, and looking out the window of my bedroom one last time.
I went into the kitchen and washed Diane’s glasses out by hand with lots of soap, rinsing all the cigarettes into the garbage disposal. I lined up the glasses upside down on a dish towel on the counter next to the sink.
I went into my mom’s closet and stepped up on the shoe rack to reach the back of the very top shelf. I pulled down the carton of cigarettes my mom kept in secret so Diane would never run out in a crisis. I grabbed the auxiliary bourbon from behind the dishwasher detergent under the kitchen sink. I left the bottle and the cigarettes next to the glasses on the counter.
I found my purse and got my keys out. Using another key, I pried the ring apart so I could get the carriage house key off. It was my first key; all the other keys on the ring had come after. I knew Diane would let me keep it, but I was ready to leave it behind. I placed it on the counter with the rest of my offering.
There were probably more things I could have packed up, but I was done. I closed the door without doing a final scan of things and went to find Janie.
Chapter Forty-six
Janie wanted to drive back, and against my better judgment, I let her. She ground the gears and drove ten miles under the speed limit for the entire trip, but she was so excited to be driving a truck that I didn’t have the heart to tell her to pull over so we could switch.
I watched for frozen waterfalls striping the layers of rock on either side of the highway. Sometimes they ran directly down the grooves the dynamite left when they’d blasted to make the road.
There was a deer trail running alongside the highway. I watched it run up and down the hills we drove past until it disappeared into some shrubs.
We were about an hour and a half late getting back to the condo. Peter and Agnes were already there, ready to help load the rest of my things in the truck so we could take everything over to the new house.