Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  This time I was the one inhaling her scent, memorizing that Chanel No.5, as if I could commit every inch of her to my memory now and hold it for later.

  But I knew—I already knew from losing my father—that in a year, two, five, there would be holes and gaps that I’d never be able to fill, and that only made me clutch harder, hold tighter, the rage inside building anew at those twin devil diseases of cancer and clots, that were mounting a dual war on the only parent I had left.

  I ran a trembling hand along her hair, soothing and calming her sobs, switching roles. I drew in a breath, forcing myself to put my own tears aside.

  In some intuitive sense I’d realized a startling twist in our relationship—she needed me to be strong. Now. She’d said as much back in the van earlier. She needed me to take care of her, to take over the wheel. To tell her where to go, what to do, what direction to take from here.

  If I broke down, if I became the needy one, my mother would set herself aside and tend to me—because that’s what mothers did.

  And that, I knew now, was what Rosemary Delaney had done, in her own way for me for the past thirty-six years. It may not have been the way I would have dreamed a mother should be. Or the way my childhood friend Lisa Rindell’s mother had parented her, with Oreo cookies and handmade jumpers.

  But it had been the best way my mother knew how to do it, and I hadn’t ended up in jail or addicted to meth, so clearly it hadn’t been all bad.

  Now, it was her turn, and I had damned well better suck it up and find a way to put on a smile, even as everything within me fell apart, piece by shattered piece, as it lost the woman who had come to mean more than I ever realized.

  My mother is dying.

  And I had to learn how to deal. Immediately.

  I swiped the tears off my face before drawing back and facing her. “It’ll be okay, Ma, we’re going to fight this.”

  She shook her head, defeat heavy in her eyes, her shoulders. “There’s not much we can do.”

  “There’s plenty.” I didn’t know whether or not that was true, but did know there were chapters of that book she had yet to dog-ear. “There are other books, other doctors.”

  Her face took on the stern, don’t-argue-with-me Rosemary look. “Hilary, the doctors told me—”

  “Ma,” I said, cutting her off, not wanting to hear her death sentence, not again, not wanting to hear her give up. I only had so much strength in me right now. “I don’t give a damn what the other doctors told you. Like I said, there are other doctors. Besides, since when have I ever listened to anyone? Maybe it’s time you took a cue from me.” I planted my hands on either side of her hips and reflected that Rosemary look right back at her. “We are not giving up. Not now. And I am not letting you give up.”

  A smile took over her face, but it barely reached her eyes. And when she spoke, I still heard tears. “You’re stubborn, you know that?”

  I had to swallow so I wouldn’t cry, because in her face, and in those words, I saw the reflection of everything I thought had driven me crazy about my mother. And now I realized that was the very thing we needed for the days ahead.

  Stubbornness. Who’d have thought that was exactly the key I’d be looking for to drive this bus forward?

  “Well, who the hell do you think I inherited that trait from?” I sucked in another breath, and with it, one more ounce of strength. “We are going to fight this together, Ma.”

  “Together?” She was asking for a promise.

  For a commitment. For me to be there for the long, tough haul ahead. For me, the undependable one to finally step up to the plate, and not let go of the bat when she needed me most.

  I smiled and I nodded, even though it hurt my face to be brave. “Of course. You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easily, did you? Not after all these miles.”

  Then I drew her into my arms again and hugged her very, very tight.

  So that my tears could fall behind her back.

  nineteen

  “Why did the blonde get fired from her job at the pharmacy?”

  “I give up,” my mother said.

  “You can’t give up. It’s not allowed. You have to make an educated guess.”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron when you’re telling dumb-blonde jokes?”

  “Probably. Now come on, guess.”

  My mother thought a minute, her mood considerably brighter than when I’d arrived that morning. She’d been picking at her breakfast, barely eating any of the bland oatmeal and plain toast she’d ordered from the hospital cafeteria. I’d smuggled in a cheesecake muffin and a grande mocha with caramel from Starbucks, then sat down with the joke book, determined to get her laughing. It had taken one chicken crossing the road, two ducks in a bar and three monkey jokes before she’d found her good humor.

  “Okay,” Ma said, a twinkle in her eye. “She was fired because she kept trying to sell the Q-tips as rectal thermometers.”

  “Ma!” I covered my mouth to keep my laughter from waking her roommate, whose biggest problem seemed to be narcolepsy. “I cannot believe you said that. You are bad.”

  “Hey, it’s all your influence.”

  I put up my hands. “I take no blame for that. It’s your own twisted mind. But I have to admit that was a pretty good one.” I looked down at the book. “Okay here’s what it says. The blonde was fired from her job at the pharmacy for failing to print the labels on the prescriptions. ‘Helloo,’ she argued,” I said in a high-pitched goofy voice, putting on the full blonde act, ‘“The bottles didn’t fit in the typewriter.’”

  My mother’s laughter rang like Christmas bells. “Oh, Hilary, that one was even worse and much tackier. But so, so funny. It’s a good thing you’re a blonde.”

  “Hey, who better to tell blonde jokes?” I grinned. “Now, do you want to know how to thin your thighs, rid yourself of those pesky wrinkles?” I shuffled through the magazines beside me, reading the blaring headlines and their impossible promises aloud. “Or how to get men drooling over your amazing fashion sense?”

  “Hmm,” Ma said, putting a finger to her lips, thinking it over, “I choose how to get the men drooling, because my fashion sense could use a little work.”

  “What, you’re thinking of giving up the suits? The pumps?”

  “Maybe it’s about time. I am retired, after all. Aren’t I supposed to be going around in polyester pants and a sun visor?”

  “Only if you’ve got the matching bowling shoes.” I flipped through the first magazine, then turned it around, showing her pages of too-thin models in flouncy skirts with high-heeled boots, cowl-neck sweaters and hair that no one had in real life. “There you go. Fashion that attracts a man.”

  My mother looked down at her diamond-print hospital gown. “And I take it this is the kind that attracts frogs instead of Prince Charmings?”

  “Exactly.” I gestured at my own less-than-runway-worthy attire. “Though I can’t talk. I could pretty much pass for homeless.” Nick had never complained, I thought.

  That brought back a pang. He still hadn’t called. I’d stopped calling him, because I couldn’t stand the ringing, the cheery voice mail. The no Nick on the other end.

  And facing the fact that I’d probably lost the last great guy I’d ever meet. Right now, though, I was dealing with a lot, and trying to figure out the mess between Nick and I was one thing too many.

  “Then we’ll have to go shopping together,” my mother said. “Make a day of it, take the train to Washington Center, grab some lunch in Boston.”

  “That would be…interesting. You and me, shopping. We don’t exactly have the same taste, Ma.”

  “What, you can drive all the way across the United States with me but you’re afraid to tackle a department store?”

  I grinned, then tossed the magazine to the side. “All right. I’ll take your shopping challenge and raise you a shoe department. We’ll find some man-hunting-worthy attire for you, something more professional for me—”

  “
Something befitting a budding restaurant entrepreneur—”

  “I like the sound of that,” I said, and as I did, I realized that I was excited about the possibility of owning my own restaurant. About a future that involved…dare I think it…responsibility. Challenges. Self-motivation. Big steps for a girl like me. “And after that, we’ll both get some really killer shoes that are not pumps.”

  “I happen to like my pumps.”

  “Ma, they are the ugliest shoes ever created by God or man, and you need something cute and more appropriate for a traveling woman such as yourself. Some kind of flats with—” I waved my hand “—I don’t know, ornamentation.” I grabbed one of the magazines, flipped the pages until I found a picture that summed up what I meant. “Like those. They have a cute bow and everything.”

  “Those women have dainty feet. I have squat Fred Flintstone feet.”

  “You are being uncooperative.” I wagged a finger at her. “That is not part of the plan.”

  “And you are being very bossy. Like a mother.”

  I sat back and laughed. “I am, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah.” A smile stole across my mother’s face, one I’d never seen before. “I think you’re going to make a wonderful mother someday, Hilary. If you choose to have children of your own.”

  “Oh, I don’t know…” But as my voice trailed off, I found the thought coming to my mind, as if all along that biological clock had been waiting for something to turn it on. Some trigger to open it up, take it out of the box, put it on the shelf and start it going.

  Could I parent a child?

  Could I see myself down the road, married to Nick, the two of us with a little girl? A little boy? Living in a three-bedroom Cape with the white picket fence that Nick wanted, wrapped around all of that?

  “You really think I could be a mom?”

  “Yeah,” Ma said. “I really do.”

  Of all the people who would think that about me, my mother ranked last on the list. I’d always thought she considered me to be the most irresponsible person in the world. In fact, she’d told me exactly that after she’d left Reginald with Nick and me for the weekend. The pig had gotten lost for three hours because we’d neglected to leash him when he’d gone outside for a potty break.

  We hadn’t expected him to make a break for it. But hey, if I’d been the pig, maybe I would have run, too.

  Either way, ever since the toll booth in Massachusetts, Sally in Sandusky, Carla and Louie and their weird hot-dog casserole, and the odd way the hospital rooms seemed to bring us closer together than the cramped interior of a Mustang could, my mother had begun to see me in a different light.

  A grown-up light. One with different possibilities for my future, different paths than I’d been taking.

  And I suppose I’d begun to see myself in that light, too. So I heard that clock ticking and for the first time considered answering it.

  “Are you going to hang around to be a grandma if I decide to have children?” Hope and a future hung in that statement, a white-picket-fence future I still wasn’t sure I wanted, but if it made my mother try harder, made her listen to her doctors, then I’d give that fence a little more thought, too. “Somebody’s going to have to tell me how to raise them.”

  She smirked and eyed me, knowing full well I’d just thrown a trump card on the table, and the Rosemary Delaney I knew came back. “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all I ask, Ma.” I gave her a smile. “That’s all I ask.”

  Dr. Gifford rapped lightly on Ma’s door, then entered the room with the same slightly hunched, limited-presence gait as before. He gave each of us a nod. “Good afternoon. How are you feeling, Mrs. Delaney?”

  Ma glanced at me. “Much better. Thank you.”

  “Glad to hear it. We’ll let you go home tomorrow. Everything looks good—filter’s working as we planned.”

  “She’s safe to travel?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Safe as can be. Just take it easy going back to Massachusetts. Don’t push it. And check in with your primary care physician when you get there.” He gave my mother a smile, then patted her knee. “I’ll see you tomorrow before you leave.”

  Then he was gone, the door shutting with a soft whoosh behind him.

  “I bet you’ll be glad to get back home.” I picked up a magazine, flipping through it for another item that might tickle my mother’s funny bone. I was glad we were returning to Massachusetts, to a state where I knew doctors and hospitals were as plentiful as skyscrapers.

  “Hilary, I want us to keep going.”

  I paused, my finger running down the table of contents, my brain caught up in capital-lettered titles and cleverly written paragraphs. “What did you say?”

  “I said I want to keep going. I want to finish our trip.”

  “Ma, I understood why you said this back in Indiana. That was you being stubborn, wanting to pretend nothing was wrong, you were fine, all that. But now I know what’s going on with you. And we both know it’s really best if you go back home. For one, you’ve just had surgery and for another, you have…other things to deal with.” I didn’t want to come right out and say she had a battle with Death to fight, but we both could hear the implication left hanging in the air.

  One I hadn’t quite completely accepted yet, as much as I tried. It still didn’t seem real, concrete. I’d deal with it in chunks, a little at a time.

  Ma shook her head. “We need to keep going. I need to get to California.” She put up a hand, cutting off my objection before I could voice it. “Whether or not you want to face it, Hilary, I am dying. I may have a month, a year, two years. Hell, maybe God will take pity on me and give me five. But either way, I don’t have much time left.”

  “Ma, no—”

  “Don’t argue with me. I can’t—” She bit her lip and tears sprang to her eyes, choked in her voice. “I can’t do this if you argue with me.”

  I didn’t want to cry. I had vowed to be strong, to be the one she could rely on, the rock my mother stood upon. But now, as she drove home the reality of her mortality, and asked the impossible of me, the sand shifted beneath my feet again, and I found my strength crumbling.

  “Ma…” I didn’t finish the sentence, I didn’t argue, and I didn’t let the tears get any farther than the back of my eyes.

  “Take me to the Pacific, Hilary. Let me dip my toes in the water. I did that with the Atlantic, and I’ve always wanted to do it with the ocean on the other side of the country. That was a dream your father and I had, all our lives. That’s all I want. Because—” And then it was her turn to cut off her words, to turn away, and swipe at her face.

  “Oh, damn it, Ma. We can’t keep this up or the stupid hospital will run out of tissues,” I said, trying to inject a joke, some distance from all this heaviness, but it got all tangled in a sob.

  Ma let out a half-laugh, half-sob and dispensed tissues to each of us, cheap scratchy slips of paper that did little more than blot the damp from our faces. After we’d cleaned up the worst of the damage, she met my gaze. “Will you take me? Please?”

  “Why? Why has this trip been so important? It had nothing to do with Grandma’s china cup collection and love seat, did it?”

  “No.” She shifted against her pillows, adjusted her blanket. Stalling. I’d have never thought that the woman who had argued cases that had been splashed on the front page of the Boston Globe would avoid the subject.

  But then again, arguing for a defendant in front of a judge wasn’t about telling a personal truth. I realized then that my mother was more like me than I’d thought. She may have been the Bulldog in the courtroom but when it came to getting personal, she ran from the emotional flames as easily as I had.

  So I waited. She was stuck in that hospital bed. She wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was I.

  “I want to go to San Francisco because of your father.”

  “Did Dad always want to see the Pacific Ocean? The Golden Gate Bridge or something?”

 
; She laughed. “He didn’t give two figs about the Pacific Ocean or any particular place. All he ever wanted to do was experience life. Or at least, that’s what he used to want, before…” She grabbed another of those crappy tissues, but didn’t use it. “Before we lost the baby. Your father changed after that.”

  “Changed? But I’ve seen videos of Dad before I was born, and when I was a little girl. I don’t remember him changing. I never saw…the trigger.” Everything my mother kept mentioning about change had never been some big moment in my life. All those days in those home movies seemed the same to me. My father, always jovial, always the jokester, mugging for the camera, my mother shying away, waving off my father’s attempts to get her face on screen. My father’s one-liner filled narrations of Christmas, Easter, summer vacations, first in jerky eight-millimeter, then, later, in the smoother, less grainy VHS format.

  I’d searched my memory a hundred times but never seen a detour, a door opening down the dark path my father had finally chosen. No big sign that pointed to a change in him, a different man than the laughing, happy one immortalized in life-size cardboard back in my mother’s motel room.

  Just a gradual decline, like a shade drawing closed, a little at a time, so slow you almost couldn’t tell the light was gone until everything went dark.

  “There was never anything on the surface, Hilary. If there was one thing your father was good at, it was keeping that part of him hidden.”

  “Even you didn’t know?”

  My mother studied the blanket, her neat, perfect nails. “No. I never saw any of it coming.”

  That was what I was most afraid of in committing to Nick. That was the elephant in the room I kept circling and avoiding. If things changed with him, with me, with us…and I never even realized it? What if I just blithely went along, never seeing his sadness, his dissatisfaction, until one day when he either walked out or ended it all with a bullet?

  If I maintained the status quo, kept the boat we were on from changing course, then maybe Nick and I would never take the detours my parents had. Because I couldn’t bear that. Not a second time.