Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  Jane

  I honestly don’t think a visit is on right now. Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future. If so I’ll be in touch.

  All best

  Mother

  PS Please don’t try to contact me to change my mind. I know what I can – and cannot – handle.

  I took her at her word, and didn’t attempt to initiate any further suggestions of visiting in person, though I was still making a point of sending her new photographs of Emily every six months, with a little card tucked in between them, on which was scribbled something neutral like: ‘Thought you’d like to see how rapidly your granddaughter is growing up.’ Mom always sent a brief postcard in reply, commenting on Emily’s poise, prettiness, etc. But she remained steadfast in her desire to have nothing to do with me . . . until the week before Christy showed up when, out of nowhere, she phoned.

  ‘I’ll be brief,’ she said, sounding all businesslike. ‘There’s a growth inside me that has gone funny and the doctor wants me to go into the big hospital in Stamford for a bunch of tests. I just thought you should know.’

  ‘How serious did he say it was?’ I asked.

  ‘Now don’t you start sounding all concerned, Jane . . .’

  ‘That’s not fair and you know it. I’ve always remained concerned. It’s you who’ve put up the brick wall between us.’

  ‘That’s a matter of interpretation.’

  ‘Well, can I come down and see you while the tests are happening?’

  ‘I don’t see the point.’

  ‘If you don’t see the point, then why tell me about all this?’

  ‘Because I may be dying – and as my daughter you should know that.’

  She hung up. I called her back an hour later – my rage and guilt in competition with each other. She didn’t answer the phone, so I left a message. Twenty-four hours went by. Still no word from her. I called her home again, left another message and then phoned the library and talked to one of Mom’s colleagues. Mom had been checked into the Stamford Medical Center and her colleague hinted that things looked bad.

  ‘How come we haven’t seen you around here for a while?’ she asked me.

  ‘Long story,’ I said.

  I immediately phoned the Stamford Connecticut Medical Center and asked to be put through to her room. Mom answered on the second ring.

  ‘I figured I’d be hearing from you, what with all the messages you left me. Feeling bad about having abandoned me all these years?’

  ‘How are you doing?’ I finally asked.

  ‘My oncologist, Dr Younger, keeps running these damn tests. And they all end up telling him the same thing: The cancer is everywhere.’

  ‘I’m coming down tomorrow.’

  ‘Now why would you want to do that?’

  ‘You’re my mom . . .’

  ‘It’s so nice that you finally realize this fact after all these years.’

  ‘That’s not fair and you know it.’

  ‘What I know is this: I don’t really need your company right now, Jane.’

  I toyed with the idea of dropping everything and rushing down to see her, but my class schedule – and being without night-time child cover – mitigated against it. Then on the morning that Christy showed up I received a call at my office from a Dr Sandy Younger.

  ‘Your mother gave me this number,’ he said, ‘when she started chemotherapy a few weeks ago. She told me to only call you if things were beginning to look “final”.’

  That caught me short. Even though I knew – from what little information she had imparted – that she was terminal, hearing it directly from her doctor was like having a bony cold hand placed on the back of my neck.

  ‘How long does she have exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe a month, no more. I would think about getting down here as soon as possible. At this stage of the cancer the situation can deteriorate very quickly. And excuse my intrusiveness, but as I gather that you are somewhat estranged from your mother—’

  ‘Her choice, not mine,’ I heard myself saying.

  ‘There are always two sides to these stories. My one piece of advice is this: make your peace with her now. You’ll find it far easier to cope later on if you’ve achieved some sort of . . .’

  I knew which word was coming next: closure. A word which drove me apoplectic – because it posited the idea that you could actually get over certain things; that the sense of damage and hurt could suddenly be put on a shelf and filed away under: ‘Been there, done that.’ Closure was for closets, not people.

  ‘. . . closure before she passes on.’

  ‘All right, I’ll get down there tomorrow,’ I said.

  When I related all this to Christy she immediately said: ‘Don’t worry about having someone covering for you at night. I’ll stay with Emily until you get back.’

  ‘I was thinking Mom might like to finally meet her granddaughter.’

  ‘When my dad was in the last throes of his cancer he was so out of it he hardly recognized me. Anyway, if your mom hasn’t shown the slightest interest in wanting a relationship with Emily before now, why drag a little girl into the horrors of a terminal ward? That’s an early childhood memory you can definitely spare her.’

  I concurred with that, and set off the next day alone to Stamford. On the three-hour drive south I felt nothing but dread – not just at having to see my mother in the last stages of terminal cancer, but also at the immense waste of all our years on the same earth. We could never make each other happy, could never cross that threshold which separated disaffection from affection. It was always wrong between us. We both knew it – always knew it – and were never able to figure out a way of making it better.

  And now . . .

  Mom was in a three-bedded room in the oncology wing. I kept my head down as I passed by her roommates, all of whom were swamped by wires and cables and tubes and electronic monitors and all the other paraphernalia of life support. Mom, on the other hand, was relatively free of such high technology – just two lines running into each arm and one monitor blip-blip-blipping the metronomic rhythm of her still-beating heart.

  Her appearance stunned me. Though I was prepared to see her in death’s clutches, nothing really readied me for the appalling change she had been put through. Not only had she lost all her hair, but she had shrunken in size, her ashen skin drawn tight across her now-tiny skull. When she opened her mouth, I could see that only a handful of teeth remained within. The cancer had triumphed, denuding all her features. But when I sat down beside her and took her still-warm, emaciated hand, I was immediately informed that her vitriol towards me had not dimmed.

  ‘So . . . you arrive for the final curtain,’ she said.

  ‘I arrived to see you, Mom.’

  ‘And you didn’t bring your daughter with you. My one and only chance to see her, and you deny me this . . .’

  Don’t get angry, don’t get angry . . .

  ‘You’ve never been denied access to her,’ I said quietly. ‘You’ve denied yourself access to her.’

  She withdrew her hand from mine.

  ‘That’s a matter of interpretation,’ she said.

  ‘I simply didn’t think this would be the right moment to bring Emily into—’

  ‘Your father called me the other day,’ she suddenly said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. Your father called me. Told me that walking out on me was the worst decision he ever made in his life and that he was planning to come to Stamford in a couple of days and remarry me right here in this hospital.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, trying to sound neutral. ‘And where did Dad call you from?’

  ‘Manhattan. You know he’s now the CEO of a very big metals company. All that bad stuff you revealed about him – well, it was all proven to be the lies I knew it to be. Not just lies, Jane – slander. But the truth will out and your father is now top dog again. He’ll be here tomorrow to retake his vows with me.’

  ‘How wonderful,’ I said.
/>   ‘Yes, it is. The ceremony is scheduled for noon.’

  ‘And he’s going to swear undying love to you?’

  ‘Undying . . . because he now knows that leaving was the worst mistake he ever made. He told me that on the telephone, nearly breaking down, cursing himself for listening to you all those years ago and—’

  That’s when I got up and charged out of the ward and into the nearest restroom, locking myself in a stall and fighting back the need to scream and shout and pound the walls and get that woman’s voice out of my head. But this desire was subsumed by the sobs that grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let it go. My mom is about to leave this life and all she can talk about is . . .

  Before the sobs could escalate into something more primal and extreme, a certain corner of my brain (the part that always argued in favor of self-preservation) said: ‘Enough . . .’ I let myself out of the stall and negotiated my way through the maze of corridors that was this wing of the hospital. Within five minutes I was back in my car and tearing north on Interstate 95, putting as much distance as I could between myself and Mom. I drove non-stop, arriving back in Cambridge just before midnight. Christy was awake, sitting in the living room with a glass of wine, but not surprised to see me.

  ‘I’ve been trying to ring your cellphone for the past couple of hours. But I figured—’

  ‘I had it turned off.’

  ‘The hospital called.’

  ‘Has she . . . ?’ I asked.

  ‘Around two hours ago. The doctors were wondering where you were.’

  ‘I was . . . running away.’

  Christy stood up and put her arms around me. But I didn’t break down or convulse with sorrow or shake my fist at the heavens and demand to know why my mother had been such a sad angry woman who had to take it all out on the daughter who simply craved her love. No, I didn’t have that purgatorial moment of grief which should accompany a parent’s death.

  All I felt was . . . exhaustion.

  ‘Go to bed,’ Christy said, seeing just how wrecked I was. ‘Get nine, ten hours – and let me worry about bringing Emily to school tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re too nice.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said with a smile.

  I did as ordered – and actually slept ten straight hours without interruption. When I woke, there was a note from Christy:

  By the time you read this, Emily will be happily ensconced at her crèche. I hope you are a little more rested – and as OK as you can be under the circumstances. And you might want to call your beloved Theo on his cellphone. He rang here while you were sleeping and wanted you to know that they have just done an American deal for the movie . . . for three million dollars.

  Congrats, I guess. You’re rich.

  Eight

  THE NEWS OF Theo’s windfall was subsumed by a far more pressing concern: arranging my mother’s funeral.

  Upon waking up and finding the note from Christy that Theo was in the money, I immediately phoned the hospital and began to make arrangements. Within an hour not only had I organized the collection of the body by a funeral home, but I had also rung the local Episcopal priest in Old Greenwich and sorted out the service in two days’ time. Then I called the library and informed her colleagues that she had died. I also asked one of them to contact any friends she might have in the community to pass on the news and tell them of the service Friday morning.

  Once that was all completed, Christy was back in the apartment and making coffee. I accepted the mug that she placed in front of me, drew in a deep breath and phoned Theo. He answered on the first ring – and immediately sounded like a man who had just broken the bank at Monte Carlo.

  ‘Well, hello there,’ he said, all expansive and friendly. ‘Listen, real sorry about your mom. That’s tough . . .’

  ‘Might you like to explain to me where you’ve been for the past three weeks?’

  ‘London, Paris, Hamburg and Cannes – and do I have news for you . . .’

  ‘Your news is less important to me than the fact that you have vanished from our lives for nearly a month.’

  ‘I was off making us money. Big money. Like one million dollars to Fantastic Filmworks . . .’

  ‘Congratulations, well done. The thing is, all that money is actually secondary to the fact that—’

  ‘Secondary? You would think that. Because it’s so you, so Jane. Piss on my parade and tell me how little value I have in your life.’

  ‘You dare say that after telling me, if you had to choose between me and that psychotic freak you adore, you’d choose the freak in a New York minute.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t belittle me.’

  ‘I am not belittling you. I am angry – justifiably angry – because you abandoned us.’

  ‘Jane, I’m sorry that your mother is dead, even though you understandably couldn’t stand the bitch.’

  ‘Thank you for that sensitive observation.’

  ‘What do want from me? Lies?’

  ‘You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?’

  ‘Do you have proof of that? Documented proof?’

  That’s when I threw the phone across the room.

  There was a moment’s shocked silence, during which Emily looked up from her coloring book and said: ‘Mommy threw a phone.’

  ‘Mommy probably had very good reason to throw the phone,’ Christy commented.

  ‘Mommy needs a drink,’ I said.

  But I didn’t take the vodka that Christy proffered because I had to drive all the way back south to Stamford. Christy called the head of her English Department at the University of Oregon and spun some story about a family emergency and said she wouldn’t be back for seventy-two hours.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said after she hung up the phone.

  ‘Yes, I do. And please don’t tell me that you don’t want to put me to any trouble. You’ve got more than enough on your mind right now. And if you want a piece of cheap advice, here it is: get your money back from Theo now . . . and with interest. Once you’ve been refunded your investment, inform him that he no longer has a part to play in your lives. Not that he’ll want to be a participant in Emily’s upbringing. I hate to say it but the guy is a case of arrested development.’

  ‘But you liked him when you first met him . . .’

  ‘Sure I did. Because he’s eclectic and original. And yeah, I encouraged you to keep the kid . . . not because Theo was destined to be named Father of the Year, but because I knew you would never live with yourself if you had—’

  I put my finger to my lips.

  ‘Oh, please . . .’ Christy said. ‘Anyway, look at Emily and tell me that my advice – which was simply a reflection of your own instincts – wasn’t the right call.’

  ‘You knew what I wanted, I guess.’

  ‘No – you knew what you wanted – and you got it. And she is magnificent. Even if I still can never see myself crossing that frontier, I have to admit that whenever I lay eyes on Emily, I am very envious.’

  As if on cue, my daughter looked up from her coloring book and said: ‘Christy talks funny.’

  A half-hour later they saw me off. I hugged Emily after loading my bag – packed with a black suit – into the truck of the car.

  ‘Why Mommy goes?’ she asked.

  It was the one moment I almost broke down. Emily saw this.

  ‘You’re sad!’ she said.

  I shook my head and blinked back tears.

  ‘Your mom is just very tired,’ Christy said. ‘Tired of other people making her sad.’

  ‘I don’t make Mommy sad,’ Emily said.

  Now I almost completely lost it. But I somehow managed to keep myself in check and held Emily close to me and whispered to her: ‘You are the best thing that ever happened to me.’

  Then, with great reluctance, I handed her back to Christy.

  ‘You sure you’ll be all right driving?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll be just fine,’ I lied and promised to call as soon as I reached Stamford.<
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  As it turned out I got through the drive without the requisite moments of guilt-sodden grief. Perhaps I was just too numb. Or perhaps the one-two punch of Mom and Theo had rendered me strangely defiant – as I told myself that there was no way I’d allow myself to fall apart at their expense. And yet . . . at extreme moments like this one, the regret nonetheless manages to swamp everything. Especially if it is rooted in the very simple realization that it didn’t have to be this way. Even though you also know that when it’s wrong, it remains wrong – and no amount of dialogue will ever make it right.

  When I reached the hospital I was directed to the morgue. I had told the funeral director that I would be arriving around three p.m. – and sure enough he was waiting for me in the lobby of the hospital mortuary. I had expected some Dickensian stick figure in a cut-away frock coat and tall hat. But having been recommended by the hospital the firm of Sabatini Brothers, I should have realized that the funeral director awaiting me would be an Italian-American.

  As it turned out, Anthony Sabatini was a short, bulky man in his early forties and dressed in the requisite black suit. He was so solicitous and decent, without being in any way oleaginous, that I took to him immediately. I sensed that, courtesy of his chosen profession, he was something of an expert when it came to sizing people up in extreme circumstances. Though I said nothing to him, he grasped right away that I was on my own here with no one to support me through the next few days.

  ‘You can see your mom now if you like,’ he said after introducing himself and insisting that I drink a cup of mediocre hospital coffee with him. ‘But, to be honest, the last phase of cancer really robs the person of much of their original looks. It would be better if you let us do some restorative work first.’

  ‘I saw her yesterday – I know how she was at the end. As it’s going to be a closed coffin followed by a cremation—’