by Wendy Webb
And here she was, in my dream. I hadn’t seen her in so long.
“Gram,” I whispered. But when I got to the couch where she was sitting, she was gone.
And then the house crumbled around me. The scene across the street, the playtime at the creek, the parents and their laughter, all of it disappeared. I was standing in a pile of ash.
My eyes shot open, and I sat up in bed, my heart racing. My face was wet with tears. I hadn’t even known I’d been crying.
I blew my nose and took a sip from the glass of water on my nightstand, glancing at the clock. Just fuzzy red symbols. I squinted. Two o’clock? Three? My glasses were on the nightstand, but whatever time it was, it didn’t matter. It was dark, and I wanted to disappear into my dreams again, back into my past, a world that had long since disappeared, and yet had seemed so tangible and real when I was dreaming about it. I lay back down and drew the covers up to my neck, curling into a ball. I was cold deep inside.
CHAPTER FIVE
I must’ve fallen back asleep because I woke to a new day, the sun streaming in. I stretched, and then it came back to me. The voice in the hallway. The dream about my childhood. I shook my head, trying to rattle the thoughts out of it.
I looked around the room, but saw nothing unusual. There was the dresser, my minifridge, the television. The bathroom door was slightly ajar, just as I had left it. My glasses were on the nightstand. I slipped out of bed. It was the second day of my new life.
I swallowed my morning pills with a big gulp of water. The doctors said they would help. I wasn’t so sure. But I was taking them dutifully anyway, just so nobody could say I was part of the problem. Or all of the problem.
The night still hung in the air around me, like fog. Coffee was definitely in order. I ran a brush through my hair, hopped into jeans and a T-shirt, and slid my glasses on, intending to head downstairs to the restaurant.
But as I was pulling my door shut behind me, I noticed Dominic sitting on the balcony at the end of the hallway, overlooking the lake, a full carafe of French press coffee on the end table next to him. He turned his head to look at me, as though sensing I was there.
“Good morning!” he called out. His expression was open and inviting, so I walked out on the balcony to join him, my heart pounding.
The lake shimmered. Down the street to the harbor I could see a handful of boats already moored to their slips. A sailboat floated lazily by, its colorful spinnaker unfurled, and the ferry that made its way to the islands every twenty minutes was chugging its way across the bay.
Wharton was the jumping-off point for travelers to explore the Redemption Islands, a chain of impossibly lovely wooded, mostly uninhabited (save a lighthouse or two) islands that attracted campers, hikers, and kayakers from around the world.
Only one of the islands, Ile de Colette, had a community of year-round residents and summer-cabin owners as well. I hadn’t been there in a long time, but I was going to make it a point to hop on the ferry soon and take a look around.
“What a beautiful morning,” I mused, still staring out over the water.
“Join me for some coffee?” Dominic asked, lifting up his French press. “There’s too much for just me.”
I smiled down at him. “I’ll grab my mug,” I said, and hurried back to my room, where I scooped it up and popped open my little fridge, grabbing my carton of half-and-half. Back on the balcony, Dominic poured coffee into my mug, and I watched as steam rose in the chilly air. It felt good, the cool nip on my face. I settled into the Adirondack chair next to him and, after splashing my coffee with half-and-half, took a sip.
“Thank you,” I said, raising my mug. “Can’t get the day started without coffee. Especially this morning.”
“True that.” Dominic smiled. “Long night?”
I leaned my head onto the back of the chair and sighed. “First night in a new place, I guess. I didn’t sleep much.”
“I get it. A new environment, new sounds at night. Unidentified creaks and groans. It can take a while to feel comfortable.”
New sounds, indeed. I wasn’t intending to bring it up, but I heard myself saying the words.
“Did you hear anything in the hallway last night?” I asked him.
He narrowed his eyes and grinned. “No,” he said. “Should I have?”
I took another sip of my coffee. “Well, you did say the place was haunted.”
Dominic laughed then, a deep chuckle that made me feel warm on the inside. “That’s what LuAnn says. You should talk to her about it. Or Gary. He’s got the stories. Did you hear something ghostly? Chains, maybe?”
“No, just the odd moan or two of the undead,” I said, raising my eyebrows. We both smiled, but I cleared my throat. “I did hear someone, though. A woman.”
He held my eyes in his gaze for a long moment. “What did she say?”
I winced. “She asked if anyone was there, and if I would let her in.”
Dominic’s eyes grew wide. “Let her in? What? Hell no!”
I dissolved into laughter at the horrified expression on his face. “That’s exactly what I thought,” I said.
“So, you didn’t let her in?”
“A disembodied voice asks me to let them into my room in the middle of the night? I’m going to go with no every time. It’s one of my rules to live by.”
Dominic laughed and shook his head. “Sensible.”
“Are there any other guests?” I asked him. “I was thinking it was just you and me, and Gil and Jason, but another of the rooms could be rented.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t hear of anyone checking in, but I went to bed pretty early last night.”
“Same here,” I said.
Both of us exhaled then. We stared out at the water for a while, and then Dominic broke our silence.
“Now that your day has started, what will it hold?”
I took a last sip. “I thought maybe I’d ramble around town this morning and get reacquainted with the place. It’s been a while since I’ve been here.”
He nodded. “What brought you back?”
The inevitable question. “I just needed a break,” I said. “I’m a professor. I was on sabbatical last year, and I’m gearing up to go back to work in the fall. Not sure I want to, actually.”
I winced at the thought of it. I hadn’t admitted this out loud to anyone, but I wasn’t sure I had it in me. The first student—or worse yet, his or her mother—who complained about a grade would do me in.
“A professor, huh? What do you profess?”
I smiled at that. “Modern American literature.”
“Is that right?” he said. “Why literature?”
“Why?” I asked, furrowing my brow.
“Why do you spend your life focusing on that? What’s important to you about it?”
His eyes were filled with curiosity, looking not so much at me, but into me. I couldn’t remember if anybody had ever asked me that before.
“I’ve loved reading since I was a kid,” I said. “But I noticed that, in college, I wasn’t reading much. Not for pleasure. Just the books I was assigned to read for classes. I hadn’t read anything current in years. So, when I decided I wanted to go into teaching—I loved the idea of spending my life on a college campus—it just made sense to me to follow my passion where it led. As it turns out, I really love the idea that I’m giving students the opportunity to read fun and interesting current works of fiction in contrast to all of their schoolwork. I like to think I’m giving them a respite from studying.”
“Now that doesn’t sound like a lady who doesn’t want to go back to teaching.”
I had said the words, and meant them, but I couldn’t imagine getting back to the normalcy of my job. September would indeed arrive. Students would file into my classroom. I’d get through it, one way or another. That was what the doctors said, at least.
He took another sip of his coffee, and I noticed his perfectly chiseled jawline.
“So, did you write the
great American novel on your sabbatical?” he asked, eyeing me over the rim of his coffee mug. “Isn’t that what literature professors do?”
I winced. “Not exactly,” I said.
The image of my mother floated into my mind.
“This is going to be so hard for you,” she had said, looking up at me with sunken eyes from the bed where she lay dying. They were the last words she ever said to me. But they were not the last words she spoke.
I had turned my parents’ guest bedroom into a hospice, bringing in a hospital bed for her and hiring nurses to come in around the clock. They had wanted to move her to an actual hospice facility, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I was the one making the decisions then; my dad was too strangled by his grief and terror to do anything but hold her hand and tell her how much he loved her. They had started their lives in that little house in the small town where they both grew up, and that was where my mother would end hers if I had anything to say about it, not in some sterile hospital room hooked up to God knew what kind of machines.
My parents had met just after my dad returned home from serving in World War II. He was making his way through the crowd on the main street of their little town to find a good place to watch the Fourth of July parade honoring the returning vets. The street was packed with townspeople, waving flags and wearing red, white, and blue.
“Wilder!” It was his best friend, George, standing with a handful of guys, the usual suspects with whom my dad had spent his youth. “Old man Stinson says we can watch from the roof of the White Cross.”
They’d all shuffled into the White Cross Pharmacy and headed up the back stairs to the roof, just in time to see the high school marching band making its way down the street. They were playing “In the Mood.” Leading the band was the drum majorette, throwing her baton high in the air and twirling around before catching it on the way down.
My dad nudged George. “Who’s that?”
George gaped at him. “Who’s that? It’s Claudia Cummings, brainless! Every guy in town is after her. Get in line, pal.”
He didn’t get in line. He marched right to the front of it. On their first date, he took her to a supper club he couldn’t afford that featured live music, and they danced the night away. They were engaged shortly thereafter, and he spent the next year trying to convince her father and grandfather he was worthy of this extraordinary girl.
They were married a year after that, and moved into a little story-and-a-half house they built, not unlike other postwar houses around town. Word had it, they bought the first television in town, and friends and neighbors would come over to watch this brand-new form of entertainment in my parents’ living room.
My dad was transferred for his job—sales—several times during the intervening years, ending up in Minneapolis, where I was born, in the house by the creek where the snapping turtle lurked.
But as my parents neared retirement age, their thoughts drifted back toward their hometown. By chance, the little postwar-era-style bungalow they had built when they first got married went on the market, so my dad bought it as a surprise for my mom, and they settled into their last chapter in the house where they had begun their first.
My mom was delighted to find that, all of those years later, the art deco fixture she had picked out for their bedroom ceiling light when she was a young bride was still there.
It was the last thing she saw before we transferred her to the hospice room we had set up for her.
A framed picture of the two of them as a young married couple hung on the wall, and it always gave me an unsettling feeling about the passage of time. There they were in that photo, so young and beautiful, dressed up for a night on the town, my mom in a flowy green dress and my dad, dapper as ever, in a suit and bow tie. Nearly seventy years later, she lay dying in that same house.
She had often said that the years had passed so quickly, in an instant, an entire lifetime filled with home, children, love, loss, career success and then retirement, my parents’ golden years spent kicking up their heels with friends and family until my mother couldn’t kick anymore.
One minute, she was a young bride, the next a powerful career woman in corporate America—she used to tell me she was Wonder Woman in disguise, and I believed her, and still do—and the next, she was dying. Fragile as a baby bird. Emaciated by not just cancer but the treatment meant to hold it at bay.
“This is going to be so hard for you.”
It had all happened so fast.
On her last day, they had arrived with the hospital bed in an effort to make her more comfortable, but then there was the matter of moving her into it. She was completely immobile at that point—all her muscle was gone; she couldn’t even raise her own head. She claimed to be ninety pounds, but I didn’t believe it. Seventy? Eighty? She was the definition of skin and bone. That was what the cancer had done.
To move her to the hospital bed in the guest bedroom, my brother and I just scooped her up and carried her there, holding each other’s arms to create a sort of chair, her riding in the middle.
“I feel like Cleopatra!” she’d said, smiling from ear to ear.
Earlier, the minister had come and given her the last rites. He asked us all—my dad, my brother, and me—to hold hands around her bedside while he said some words I didn’t hear or understand. I held one of her hands; my dad held the other. At one point I caught her eye, and she gave me a little smirk. Too much fuss for her.
Her longtime doctor had visited, too, earlier in the day. My dad noted several times at the funeral that the doctor was famous for not making house calls, and yet there he was. He came for my mother.
“You have taught me so much about how to live life to the fullest,” the doctor had said to her, holding her hand. “It has been my honor to know you.”
I watched from the doorway as he’d put a hand on her cheek. “You are an extraordinary woman,” he said. “You have lived an extraordinary life. You have raised a wonderful family together with your husband of a million years. Such a marriage you’ve had. We’re all envious of it. You have so much to be proud of. To look back on. You will live on in your son and daughter and their children if they ever get busy and get on with their lives. You will not be forgotten.”
My mother managed a smile and a nod.
“Be at peace, wonderful lady,” he said. “You will leave this earth better than you found it. That is all any of us can ask.”
I had never seen this—a deathbed farewell. So that was how it was done. I hadn’t done it. I couldn’t. I hardly said anything to her that day.
My mom looked up at her doctor and smiled. “Take care of him,” she said, and I knew she meant my dad. “He’s going to need all hands on deck when I’m gone.” Her voice was thin and papery.
A solemn look passed between them. “Like I would care for my own father,” he said, and I watched him wipe a tear from her eye.
Later, after my mom had closed her eyes, the hospice nurse pulled me aside. “She’s in a lot of pain,” the nurse said. “We usually give them morphine at this stage to keep them comfortable.”
I nodded, my own grief strangling my words into silence.
“Do I have your permission to—” She held my gaze. “You don’t want her in any pain.”
I looked into this woman’s eyes, and I knew what she was saying to me. My mom weighed all of eighty pounds at this point, and she was in terrible pain. She’d had her last rites, and her family was gathered. This was the end.
My mom was already drifting into another world, her eyes fluttering open and closed. I wondered if Gram, who had passed a decade earlier, and my other brother, Randy, who had died of a heart attack shortly thereafter, were nearby.
“Please do what you can to keep her comfortable. We don’t want her in any pain.”
And I knew it was the end. A feeling of utter panic shot through me. One dose of morphine and the person who had loved me first and fiercest, my rock of steadfast support during every crazy and ill-advised deci
sion I had ever made, my touchstone who made me laugh during good times and cried with me and shored me up during hard times, the woman whose wit and wisdom were razor sharp, would never open her eyes again and, soon, would not be alive on this earth any longer.
How could that possibly be? And then what would I do?
I had been with her through it all, from the day we sat in her oncologist’s office and heard the diagnosis of stage four cancer, through three years of chemotherapy every other week that eventually took her hair and fifty pounds off her already-small frame.
She didn’t care one bit about the hair. The day she got her wig, she texted me: “I look ten years younger! Why didn’t I do this earlier?”
Texting. That was a new thing for her. I had bought her an iPad for Christmas that year to replace the dinosaur of a desktop computer she had been using for eons.
“Hey, look who is texting,” she wrote in her first-ever message. She and my dad had zipped off for a weekend in Wharton after a round of chemo. As she always did, she contacted me to let me know they had arrived safely. “We are staying a couple of nights. Why not? The weather is gorgeous. We live our lives day by day. So far, so good! Love, M & D.”
All of it came flooding back as I was sitting on the deck with Dominic that morning in Wharton.
“I didn’t write the great American novel,” I said to him, finally. “I was taking care of my mom. Cancer.”
The words burned on my tongue. I was afraid to look him in the eye, to have him see the tears in mine.
“She passed.” It wasn’t a question. He knew.
I nodded. And those tears came.
He reached over and took my hand. “I’d say I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t cover it. Not when you lose your mother, the kind of mother I believe you had.” His face was unbearably kind.
“She was the best,” I squeaked out.
“I hope you’ll tell me about her sometime. When you can.”
I knew her passing was coming, during the last year of her life. Even so, I was wholly unprepared for the vast emptiness she left behind.