Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

  Moms could look after me and the house like in the old days, but looking after herself, that’s where I came in. She had trouble keeping the order of things straight. She kept flushing before she went to the bathroom and forgetting to after, and once I found her rolling deodorant on after she’d put on her blouse. The shower was tricky for her too, until we got her a plastic lawn chair in there, and afterward I’d help dry her off, dust her with talc, and work in the lotion. At night I rubbed her back and her legs and feet. Her legs were knotted with veins, the muscles hard like wood, but I liked to rub on them until they loosened up and she purred with pleasure. Then, before bed, I combed her hair out till it crackled and shone.

  The only problem with all this cleaning was I could no longer smell Luke anywhere. I put a onesie of his on a stuffed chimp and slept with it, but soon it just smelled like me. At night I kept waking up thinking I heard him, but it was only the whining of neighborhood dogs or the hooting and bleating of trains in the yards over by Fifth. Those were the nights I wanted something bad, when I remembered how good it was getting high. Once I got up, started going through the cupboards, thinking Bill must have one last stash. But then I heard Moms moving around. I thought she was on the way to the bathroom. “Can’t sleep, sweetheart?” She was at the door, her face dark beneath her white hair, like a negative of herself. She was holding out her hand. So I went with her, curled up beside her in bed. I still woke up, but it wasn’t so bad as alone.

  The apartment was looking in great shape when the social worker, Ms. Ross, came to visit. I’d first met her before at the courthouse. She’d asked me to step outside to talk so she could smoke. She told me how it would go, and when we were done she stubbed out the butt before it was half gone. “Trying to quit,” she told me. “Good luck,” I said, and she blushed.

  Now she looked around at the tidy living room, the swept floors, and she seemed surprised. She asked about Bill and I said he’d split, that I’d told him to go. “If you’re not part of the solution . . . ,” I told her firmly. “So you’re a single mom,” she said, making a note in her book. “How d’you feel about raising a child alone?” Which was perfect really, because I got to go, “I’d like you to meet someone.” It was like unveiling a statue. I’d told Moms to dress nice and wait in the bedroom until I called her, and now she came out, and her makeup that I’d only helped her with a little was great and she had on a tweedy suit and her pearls, only she still had her hair in rollers. I didn’t know what to say, but the social worker didn’t seem to notice. Moms just came on in and said hello, pleased to meet you, and sat herself down. I tucked an afghan around her and we went on just as happy as you please. Afterward Moms and I laughed about it. I took out her curlers and she patted her hair in the mirror and we both agreed it had come out fine.

  When the social worker left, she told me she was pleased with my progress. She said she could see that family was important to me, and then she got back in her Saturn. When she waved, I saw that under her sleeve she was wearing a nicotine patch. I went in and gave Moms a hug, and she beamed like Mr. Clean. We had visits then every two weeks, and they went well. On the second visit Luke was allowed to come and play for a while. I fed him while Moms and the social worker (her name was Carrie) watched and chatted. He was so greedy it made me laugh. The social worker kept talking about Luke—Luke this, Luke that—and Moms kept saying how Walt was a great baby too, until I explained that his name was Walter Luke. Carrie looked at her paperwork again and then at me and I said, “Yes,” and nodded at her and I saw her write it down. When Walt pooped I got out the baby works and changed him. His diapers seemed so small compared to Moms’s, his skin, as I ran the wipe over it, so soft. Afterward I just held him and held him, and it was like the best fix in the world. When I gave him up at the end of the day, I was sweating, shaking, and Moms held me and told me, “Oh, darling, I know, I know.”

  About a week later Bill showed up at the door. He’d left a few messages on Moms’s machine back in Phoenix that I’d listened to and erased, but I’d been half expecting him. I guess he got a bail bondsman to get him out, but I was pretty sure he was breaking some law or other coming all the way to Oregon like that. I was in the bathroom, but I heard his voice at the door when Moms opened. She was very nice to him, but she made like she didn’t know who the hell he was. Bill just stood there and whined about this being his place and Moms told him quietly that it couldn’t be and he couldn’t come in and then she started shouting “Rape!” in her little-old-lady voice and Bill just beat it after that. The last I heard of him was his footsteps twanging down the metal stairs outside. He took the van, which was his anyway, but I figured that was worth it to see the back of him. Besides, he probably lost it to the bondsman anyway, when I called in a tip that he’d left the state. He was a tattooist, Bill, so I knew he’d do okay inside. Sometimes after a sitz bath I’d look at the little lizard he did on my shoulder and I’d think, You were an artist, Bill, as well as an asshole. Moms and I laughed over it all night, and she kept it up the whole time, saying she’d never seen him before in her life. “Come on!” I said.

  At the next visit, Carrie asked me to bring Walt down to the car with her. It had been a great visit. Moms had been playing with Walt, peekaboo and that, and when I said it was time for the baby to go, she held him for a second, kissed his head, gripping his hair in her teeth for a second. “He smells just like you did,” she told me, handing him over. “Takes me back.”

  In the lot, Carrie complimented me on the apartment, on turning my life around. “I admire the way you care for your mother,” she said. I just beamed at her. “I would like to recommend that Walt be returned to you,” she said, and I thought my smile would just break my mouth.

  “Thank you,” I said, but quietly, because the baby was sleeping. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  But Carrie shook her head. “I’d like to,” she said. “You’ve proved yourself a responsible caregiver. You’d be a good mother. But I’m not sure the circumstances in your home are ideal for a child.”

  “What do you mean?” I hissed. “Isn’t it clean enough?”

  “I mean your mother,” she said. “She’s trying her best, but she shows several marked symptoms of Alzheimer’s. I’m concerned she represents a potential danger to herself and to the baby. While you and Walt were playing I saw her get up to make coffee, put the kettle on the stove, and turn the gas on, but forget to light it. I had to turn it off myself. She leaves cleaning supplies in easy reach of the child, despite my reminders. She’s called the baby by your name at least twice in my hearing. Last visit I saw her put a foil package in the microwave.”

  “Oh, that microwave hasn’t worked for weeks,” I told her, but she just nodded, and I wanted to bite my tongue. What I didn’t tell her was that the milk in the coffee Moms made the last visit had been mine, near as I could figure.

  “I have an older parent myself. I don’t know if I could do what you’re doing. I’m sympathetic, really. But it’s my duty to put Walt first. Can you tell me you can watch him and your Mom twenty-four hours a day?”

  “Yes! Sure!”

  She shook her head.

  “So what you’re saying is it’s okay for me to be a single mom, just not a single daughter?”

  She just put a piece of nicorette gum in her mouth and chewed.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

  She looked at me. “I can’t tell you that,” she said, holding out her hands for the baby.

  I stood in the parking lot for a long time after she left. It was October, and it was starting to get dark earlier. The sky was gray, a sheet of high cloud cover with dirty little clouds below it. I watched a mother walk by with an empty stroller and a kid a little older than Walt walking along beside, pushing a toy stroller with a doll in it.

  When I went back, I looked at Moms. She was at the sink washing the mugs, even the empty coffee can. She always saved them. You never know when you might need something. When she saw me wa
tching, she dried the suds off her hands, still red from the water, and smiled. “I like your friend Carrie. What a lovely baby she’s got.”

  …

  I took the bus with Moms back to Phoenix the next week. Her friends were pleased to see her. “Everyone’s so friendly here,” she said, beaming. She marched around the room like it was a hotel or something. She ran her fingers over the shelves looking for dust. Finally she said, “I’ll take it.”

  “I’ll visit,” I told her. “With Walt.” She nodded.

  “You’re the best, Moms,” I told her, and she said, “Not hardly. Look at the mess I made with you.”

  That made me jump, but then I saw she was joking.

  “No,” she said. “You make me proud.”

  I’d waited all my life to hear her say it, and when she said it I knew she meant it, and she was wrong. Don’t you remember? I wanted to yell. Don’t you remember what I was like? The dope? The coke? The crack? The smack? The cuddly fucking toy!

  Her forgetting it just made me remember it more.

  I started crying then, but she told me, “Shh, shh, shh.

  “I like it here,” she said. She hugged herself and looked out the window. “You can see the world go by.” I stood with her and watched a bunch of kids slide by on Roller Blades. Moms waved a little. I thought they’d give her the finger, but they didn’t see her. A line of cars turned the corner, the sun flaring off the windshields one by one, like flashbulbs. “I like it here,” she said again, closing the drapes a ways.

  Later, on the street outside, I looked back up at her room and I waved. I couldn’t see her; that desert sun was shining on the glass. I hoped she wasn’t there, but I thought maybe she was. I got on the crosstown bus and rode down the street with my arm out the window the whole way, and then we took the corner. I thought of her at her window, dazzled by the light, turning around, her arm gone sore from waving, her eyes adjusting to the dimness of the room.

  On the Terrace

  MY BROTHER LIES in a Midlands hospital dying of AIDS and I can’t think of a single thing to say to him. I sit by his bed reading a newspaper while he sleeps, carefully turning the pages. Every few minutes I try to look up to see if he’s awake. I watch the circles of condensation bloom and fade against his oxygen mask, and then go back to my paper.

  My mother knits when she’s here. A warm sweater for me, she says, holding up the pieces, pressing them against me. She smoothes the wool over my chest or shoulders and tells me I don’t look after myself. She goes on knitting even if my brother’s awake, and the snipping of the needles fills the silence between them when he’s too tired to speak and she can’t say a word without crying.

  She calls her crying “waterworks.”

  I take her home each night at ten or eleven and we have a cup of tea together. I put a hot water bottle in her bed and leave her in front of the TV before I drive back to the ward. She can’t go to sleep straight after seeing him, and often I come back in the morning and find her snoring softly on the sofa. She thinks one of us should always be at his bedside when my brother wakes. She wants us to make the most of his last conscious hours, and when the crisis comes she doesn’t want to rely on the nurses to phone us in time. This shift system was the only way I could make sure she got any sleep.

  By the time I get back to the hospital the next day’s newspapers are piled in bundles in front of the small newsagent’s kiosk in the lobby, and I buy two or three of them—Times, Telegraph, Guardian perhaps. I’ve been doing this for a week now, but it’s still strange to see tomorrow’s news on the front pages so late at night. Events seem to float free, as if they could happen as easily today as tomorrow or the next day.

  On my brother’s ward, the night nurses know me now, and we exchange whispered good mornings in the dead of night.

  I’ve taken two weeks of annual leave to be here, and my brother feels bad about that. He tells me I don’t have to stay. But I don’t mind it at the hospital. It’s peaceful, and I can’t remember the last time I had the chance to read a newspaper from cover to cover. It wouldn’t bother me if my brother slept right through the night, but usually he wakes every couple of hours, sometimes for a minute or two, sometimes for much longer. The medication makes him drowsy and has messed up his sleep rhythms.

  He wakes blinking from a doze, but if he’s been sleeping heavily he kicks his legs, swimming back to consciousness. He might go on like this for a minute or two, and I put my paper away and watch him until he wakes or falls back to sleep. His body makes only a slight ripple under the blanket when he’s still. The bed looks unmade, as if someone had just slipped out for a moment, closed the covers to keep the warmth in, but left those thin rumpled folds. A sharp tug from one of his brisk nurses would make it all neat.

  The problem is we’ve already said all the things we should say. Last week when I came down he’d been rushed into hospital and they didn’t think he’d make it. In the few hours after he regained consciousness, he made me go over the arrangements with him. I told him not to worry about our mother. He told me he loved me and I told him I loved him too, and at that moment—after not seeing each other or even talking on the phone for maybe three years—I think we actually meant it. At least we both wished we did. Since then the crisis has passed and he’s stronger now, though not out of danger. For a few days we just repeated things we’d already said until we began to sound insincere, and since then we’ve had nothing to say to each other. I think we’re afraid. Things are better between us now than for a long time, and we’re afraid we’ll say something to spoil it.

  Tonight I look up and see he’s awake. I’ve become engrossed in my paper—something about Thatcher and Europe—and I feel a sudden flush of guilt, caught out, more interested in the world than in him. But he’s not watching me. He’s reading the back of the paper, the headlines, the sports news. I hold the pages very still and watch his eyes move. When he’s done with what he’s reading, he looks at me and I say gently, “How’re you feeling?”

  “Bored,” he says.

  And then he asks me to tape the football match the next day and bring in our mother’s TV and VCR tomorrow night.

  “Will you do that for me?”

  “Okay,” I say, a little dubiously, not sure if I’ve been insulted, if he’s bored by me.

  “Only don’t watch it,” he says. “Don’t listen to the score. I’m not watching it with you if you know how it ends.”

  …

  The first time I ever saw my brother in a hospital was when he was eight and I was five. He’d had his tonsils out and he wasn’t allowed to eat anything but ice cream. “The doctor said so,” he told my mother. I was speechless. I thought he meant forever. I thought he meant he got to eat nothing but ice cream for the rest of his life. A bowl came while we sat there and we watched him eat it. Each time he took a mouthful he twisted the spoon before withdrawing it, licking it clean. It slipped slowly between his lips, like a bright steel tongue.

  On the way home my mother bought me a block of Neapolitan ice cream—stripes of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate like a flag. My father had left us about a year before, and all she cared about anymore was that the three of us got along.

  The second time, my brother must have been fourteen. He’d broken his leg. My mother sat beside him at the head of the bed and I sat on the other side by his foot with a felt-tip in my hand. I looked at the huge looming cast and studied the strings and pulleys that held it up. I couldn’t think of anything to write on all that whiteness. Later, after the other kids on the ward had come and scribbled on it and the plaster had gone gray with dirt at the edges and picked up fluff, I could have done it, but then, when it seemed so bright and perfect, I had no idea what to write. I had carved graffiti on desks at school with my compass point. Once Jase Johnson and I had drawn an arrow above the urinals. “Follow me,” the arrow said. “Not much further now.” Jase had had to get on my back with me grabbing his legs to stop him sliding off to write the last bit, right in the
corner where the ceiling and the wall met, a sign saying, “You’re pissing on your shoes.”

  But I couldn’t think what to write on my brother’s cast.

  “Time to go,” my mother said.

  “Just a sec.”

  She said she’d meet me down the hall. She wanted to talk to the doctor.

  When she’d gone my brother said, “I didn’t tell.”

  He meant he hadn’t told anyone that I had pushed him off the low brick wall at the end of our drive when he’d broken his leg. At school, in the toilets, I’d seen his name in a line of graffiti. Just his last name. I thought it meant me for a moment, and then I realized it meant him.

  I didn’t say anything. I stared at his cast thoughtfully and sucked my pen.

  “It’ll be our secret,” he said.

  I stooped down and pretended to scribble something on the base of his foot.

  “What’s it say?” he said. “What’s it say?” But I just ran off.

  …

  I leave him at eight or nine each morning and drive home to pick up my mother. I roll my newspapers into a tight tube, and when I set them down on the kitchen table they slowly unclench. We have breakfast together, and then I drop her at the hospital and come home to sleep. My room hasn’t changed since I left for college—the same movie posters on the wall, the same clothes in the drawers. I can’t sleep in it, it feels too small, and often in the afternoon I get up, pull on my old, short robe, and look in my brother’s room. His is the same, unchanged, with pictures of footballers all over the walls. He took them down when he came home a few months ago but didn’t put anything up to replace them, and after he went into hospital this time my mother put them all back. They’d been up so long that the wallpaper had faded around them, and she just had to match the posters to the gaps. I walk around his room now, hands behind my back, peering at them, not wanting to touch anything. He never let me in here when we were kids. If he caught me, he’d push my face against the wall and twist my arm back until tears came to my eyes.