Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  That’s how I suspect my eyes appear to Mom as I go about the grim business of extinguishing her life. There’s anguish in them. But there’s love too, and maybe a single poisonous drop of the hatred she has accused me of.

  Words, endless words I’ve said to serve the moment. So many half-remembered scripts and scattered quotes. If only I could bring myself to speak straight from the heart, there’s time. There’s so much time. It takes far longer than I imagined. Far, far longer. And never once does Mom look away. Still, I don’t stop, and when it’s over, there’s no mistake about it and not the slightest resemblance to a death on stage or screen.

  The color drains from her eyes by degrees until they’re dull and fixed. The pupils dilate and darken into black holes that admit and emit no light. An opposing force that I wasn’t aware of until now eases under my hands. When I raise the pillow, her jaw drops and her mouth gapes at an angle.

  I tuck the pillow under her head and close her eyes. Her mouth won’t shut. Then I stumble to the kitchen and wish I had something stronger than wine to drink. Something to deaden the trembling that starts deep inside, then spreads to my fingertips.

  When Candy calls from the Hilton and says she’s there with Maury, I almost blurt out what I’ve done. I hurry her off the phone, but she’s caught the alarm in my voice. Minutes later, it doesn’t surprise me—even if it does amp up my inner turmoil—to hear her key in the front door. I rush to her the way Mom described Dad rushing at the knife. “She’s gone,” I say.

  “You let her leave?”

  “Mom’s dead.” I hug her face to my chest so she can’t see my eyes.

  “You said she was asleep.”

  “I thought she was. But when I went to check on her, she wasn’t breathing. I tried CPR. I tried mouth-to-mouth.”

  Candy breaks into deep racking sobs that spread from her core to her extremities, like the shaking in me. I dread letting go of her, and she doesn’t seem to have any desire to leave my arms. We’re more than willing to postpone whatever comes next and stay locked together in grief and relief.

  Finally, though, a priest, an undertaker, Maury, and Lawrence have to be notified. I phone Lawrence, while Candy goes into the living room to have a last look at Mom. I call the local funeral parlor, but can’t bring myself to dial the Hilton and break the news to Maury.

  Candy comes back from the living room dry-eyed and purposeful, behaving with the same ritualistic calm as she does in her role as a Eucharistic minister. Taking the telephone from my hand, she calls the church and almost immediately a young, smooth-skinned Filipino priest arrives and begins administering what used to be referred to as extreme unction or the last rites. He calls it the anointing of the sick. It doesn’t matter that Mom isn’t sick; she’s stone dead. The priest thumbs oil from a gold container and dabs it at her ashen skin. Candy and I station ourselves on either side of him. She responds to his prayers while I, the former altar boy, act as little better than a dumb witness.

  Then two sturdy fellows, black-clad and solemn, show up in a hearse and shoo us out of the living room. Over my shoulder, I catch sight of them unfolding a zippered body bag. I can’t bear to see more. In the kitchen I shamelessly slug down the last of the wine. It’s not enough. Nothing will ever be.

  By the time Lawrence arrives, aromatic of aftershave lotion and crisp winter air, I’m quite drunk, not just from pinot noir, not only from all the booze I’ve swilled today, but from the magnitude of the moment, the enormity of what I’ve done. At last I break into tears, and find myself crying on Lawrence’s shoulder. He comforts me, murmuring, “There’s nothing worse than losing your mother.”

  Meanwhile Candy takes charge. She thanks the priest, discreetly palms an offering into his hand and promises to get back to him about the requiem mass. She escorts the undertakers as they wheel Mom on a gurney out to the waiting Cadillac. Through the venetian blinds, I watch my sister assure the neighbors that nothing is wrong except that a very old woman has passed away.

  When she returns, I’m still sobbing and have an excuse not to discuss practical details. As soon as I can decently do so, I say that I have to leave. “I want to tell Maury in person.”

  Candy doesn’t object. She appears as eager as I am to be on her own.

  My dazed drive to the Hilton has the quick cuts and illogical leaps of a dream. There’s no continuous landscape, just a chaos of flashing lights, billboards, street signs, and franchise names. It’s a miracle I keep the car on the road. For an instant I question why I do. But I reach the hotel, climb out of the Chrysler, and slouch against the front fender. For a time—I can’t estimate how long—I gaze at the acre of asphalt. When the yellow lines of parking places start strobing in my watery eyes, I go inside.

  The swipe card turns the red light green and I step into a room that smells of congealed grease. Maury, in his Windbreaker, waits on the sofa like an expectant schoolboy. On a tray in his lap there’s a half-eaten hamburger, an untouched plate of French fries, a Coke, and a lengthy menu of cable channels. He hasn’t turned on the TV.

  “I have some bad news.” Careful not to crowd him, I sit at the far end of the couch. “Mom’s dead.”

  “I didn’t do it,” he exclaims.

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “I don’t know what she told you and Candy. But I never hurt her.”

  “Calm down, Maury. No one’s accusing you. She took a nap and just quit breathing. We should be grateful she died in her sleep.”

  Maury’s agitation grows. He has to set the tray on the floor to prevent his food from spilling. “She asked me to kill her. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t!” Desperation pours off him like a desert flash flood races over rock.

  “I understand.” As much for myself as for him, I wish he’d let me touch him, let me slide an arm around his shoulder.

  “She didn’t want assistant living,” he says.

  “No, she didn’t. Mom lived a long time and had a rough life. Now she’ll rest in peace.”

  I hear a faint buzz in my ears. Is it the sound of my inner shaking? Or one of the noises Maury makes?

  “I need to get down on the floor,” he says.

  “Go ahead. I don’t mind.”

  “I need to be alone,” he says.

  I withdraw into the hallway. When he starts moaning, I walk to an alcove where a soft drink machine and an icemaker hum a lonely lullaby to each other. I’d like to lie down on the floor myself. I’d like to sleep, never to wake. Instead, I dip into the ice bin and press a fistful of freezing nuggets to my face.

  When my cheeks are numb, I toss the ice into a rattling trash can. Then I return to the room and listen at the door. Out of politeness, I knock before opening it.

  Maury’s in the bathroom, readying himself for bed. Although I’ve eaten nothing since noon and long for another drink, I get ready too and am grateful when we are both in bed and the lights go out. The silence, the separate beds, the sense of words unexpressed—all this recalls the excruciating, drawn-out dissolution of many an old love affair. Now, as then, the distance between person and person, between what I’ve done and what I’ve failed to do, feels unbridgeable. The urge to apologize battles with an instinct that I’ve talked enough, that I’ve already done too much damage. Still, I dither. Do I owe it to Maury to reveal what Mom told me? Will it lift a burden? Or drive him to despair?

  Had he known the truth, he might have agreed to Mom’s request. Nobody could blame him—nobody except the sort of merciless Furies who sentenced him to life in the first place. But rage and revenge aren’t Maury’s style. That’s me. That’s Mom. Maury’s no murderer. The fact that he was framed falls into the same category as my finding out that I have a different father. News he can’t use.

  “Quinn,” he speaks up, as if from the end of the world.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sad.”

  “I’m sad too.”

  “I’m sad that the last thing I did in her life was run away from Mom.”

/>   “You did the right thing. You’re a good person,” I say.

  “Why did she ask me to kill her?”

  “She was so old, she was off her rocker and didn’t know what she was doing.”

  Maury sinks into what I trust is sleep, but I don’t dare doze off for fear of nightmares. Mom was no more off her rocker at the end than she was at any point in her life. She had her reasons for choosing to die. Among them, I’d guess, was the habitual desire to absent herself. In this instance she took her toxicity to the grave and left behind something for Candy and Maury. As for what she left me, perhaps she believed that by dying at my hands she bound me to her for eternity.

  I’ll never know. She was, after all, a liar from a long line of liars. As I reflect on all that I don’t know, I add to it all the people I never really knew before—Dad, my biological father, and in some respects Mom, Candy, and Maury. But at least now I know myself. I am a doting son. I’m everything Mom yearned for me to become. A success. A source of pride. An object of envy. The family moneybags. And obedient to the end.

  I could argue that she asked for it. I could excuse it as a mercy killing. Or I might maintain that I acted out of the same twisted love as she showered on me. But none of this changes anything. I am a man who murdered his mother. At last the guilt I’ve felt for so long has found its crime; my dread has discovered its source.

  Even if I were inclined to confess, who could I tell? Apart from an anonymous priest, who would it matter to? Not Candy. She doesn’t deserve another crippling blow. Not Maury. He probably wouldn’t believe me.

  No, I’ll keep my trap shut and I won’t do the Oresteia. I’ve done it. I’m not going to ghostwalk through it a second time for the benefit of the BBC. But I’ll finish my memoir. I’ll restart it and stick to the facts. I’ll keep Tamzin on the payroll and, I hope, in my life, but I won’t depend on quotes to tell the story. Whether or not it’s what the publisher wants, I’ll recount my personal history as it happened, settling the debts that the dead bequeath the living. Primary among them is the truth about Maury, telling on the page what I cannot bear to tell him in person.

  “Quinn,” Maury speaks up. “You said you have your own way of praying. Can we do that now? Pray for Mom your way?”

  It’s too late to explain to him that I’ve lost my way and need to find a different one. So I recite the Hail Mary, and Maury joins in at the end, “Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.”

  Candy

  Did I cause it? Did I try to control it? Could I have cured it?

  Rattling around in my brain, like pebbles in a bucket, these questions echo the key lessons I learned years ago at Ala-Teen. During Dad’s drinking days, Mom sent me to meetings where they taught the cardinal rules that you should never assume you caused or can control or cure anybody else’s problems. But as I kneel in a church pew examining my conscience, I feel guilty on all three scores; I’m to blame for Mom’s death.

  Sure, she’d been hinting for years, not so subtly manipulating me. Her worst sin, it crosses my mind, may not have been her foul temper, her vicious mouth, or her relish at smacking around me and the boys. Her worst sin might have been her conviction that she had a right to bully us into doing her bidding right up until the end.

  But why run on about her faults? Today isn’t about Mom’s sins. It’s about mine. And the darkest smudge on my soul comes from thinking that somebody owed me a favor. After nursemaiding Mom for years, I counted on Maury or Quinn to step up to the plate. I knew what she wanted. What I, deep down and in secret, wanted. So when Maury told me what Mom asked him to do, I could have warned Quinn by phone from the hotel. Instead, I took my sweet time driving home. If I hadn’t, Mom might be alive today.

  Then where would we be? A lot worse off—reluctant as I am to say that out loud.

  After the sacrament of confession was repackaged as reconciliation, I expected it to become more popular. I mean, no more breast-beating, no more shame-ridden whispering. Just a friendly chat with a priest about toning up your soul. Not that different from talking to a personal trainer about losing weight. But this Saturday afternoon, the traditional time for penance, the church is practically empty, and the parish has cut down on its utility bill by dimming the lights. I almost trip over three nuns in black habits gliding quietly up the center aisle.

  When I slink into the confessional, it’s not an old-fashioned cubicle, dim and hushed, with an unpadded kneeler and a screen between the penitent and priest. It’s a bright canary yellow room with two armchairs and a pole lamp in the corner. Any chance I’ll feel at ease flies out the window when I find that Father Ramos is on duty. I was hoping for the pastor, not the priest who anointed Mom on her deathbed.

  He grins and gestures to the empty chair. I mutter, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” and staring at my boots, I let go. What pours out of me seems hideous. “I loved my mother,” I say, “but sometimes I hated her, too, and wished she was dead. I’ve got to admit I wished one of my brothers would kill her. And that’s what I’m afraid happened. I’m afraid my younger brother killed her.”

  “Why do you say that?” Father Ramos cheerfully inquires.

  “Just, you know, an intuition.”

  “Is there any proof?”

  “No.”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  Do I dare be honest? Maybe Father Ramos won’t grant me absolution unless I run to the police and rat on Quinn. “I haven’t mentioned this to a soul.”

  “Good.” His smile brightens. He’s so young and beardless, I have the uncomfortable feeling that I’m confessing to a child.

  “For sure, you’re sad about your mother,” he says. “You were very close to her. But the closeness between a mother and daughter can be hard and confusing. Such talk belongs here, though, under the seal of the sacrament, not outside where it could cause trouble for your brother.”

  “I blame myself, not him,” I say. “I really did wish she’d die so I didn’t have to take care of her anymore and I could get married and move to North Carolina.”

  “You deserve a husband. Your mother wished that for you.”

  “Still, I’m worried about my brother and what will become of him.”

  “That’s between him and his conscience, between him and his confessor.”

  “He doesn’t have one. He lives in London.”

  “There are priests in England.”

  “He doesn’t go to Mass.”

  “Maybe he’ll start. Pray for him.”

  “I will. I do. But I feel guilty.”

  “That’s natural when a parent dies and a child goes on living.”

  “Father, I’m no child.”

  “You’re still God’s child. You’re your mother’s child,” he says in a fake paternal voice that doesn’t match his hairless face. “This will all pass with time. Now say a decade of the Rosary for the repose of your mother’s soul and make a good act of contrition. Go in peace and God bless.”

  And that’s it. After he absolves me and I say my penance, I’d like to claim I feel cleansed, that, as the talk shows say, I’ve achieved closure. But it’s crazy to think I’ll ever recover from Mom’s death.

  Still, I don’t have the luxury of falling apart. Too much remains to be done. She named me executor of her will, and I have to obey her wishes. Like always, she spelled them out in no uncertain terms. She wanted no wake, no open casket. She wanted cremation and a requiem mass. She wanted hymns at the service, and one old-time torch song, “Laura,” which, in my opinion, belongs in a cocktail lounge, not a church.

  As for her estate, she divided it between Maury and me. The house, Lawrence estimates, will in this inflated market fetch the flabbergasting sum of a quarter of a million dollars. Her insurance policy will pay us fifty thousand apiece, and in the biggest shock, her savings account contains a hundred thousand dollars hoarded up from Quinn’s monthly
checks. By rights this money should be handed back to him, but Quinn says no, it’s my dowry and Maury’s trust fund.

  The other dreary, teary details I’ve postponed until after the boys leave. Before I put it in the hands of a real estate agent, the house has to be cleaned and repainted. There’s also the rust-bucket Chevy that has to be towed from the driveway and Maury’s sawdust boat that needs to be … I don’t know, shoveled out of the attic. What I dread most is sifting through Mom’s personal belongings, giving stuff to Goodwill, getting rid of junk, and deciding who keeps what. It figures to be summer before I’m free of worry.

  • • •

  As if I didn’t have enough on my mind, at the last moment on the drive to church for the memorial service, Quinn volunteers to say a few words. It stands to reason that he’s the one to do a eulogy. I couldn’t speak without falling to pieces, and Maury talking in public would be a nightmare for everybody, especially him. But while Quinn has the stage presence for the job, I’m frantic that he’ll spout stuff totally off the wall or slip into one of his accents or imitations. That’s the thing about Quinn—you never know which one of him will show up.

  Dressed in solid black, he’d be easy to mistake for a priest. Or since he’s not wearing a Roman collar, a Protestant minister. Lawrence looks nice in his blue blazer and gray wool slacks. Sadly, only Maury seems out of it in his Windbreaker and jeans, kneeling at the end of the pew like the church custodian.

  During the mass, Mom’s ashes rest in a wooden urn on the top step of the altar, next to her favorite photograph—a full-length shot of her in her wedding gown. That’s not how I’ll remember her. At her best—and she did have good moments—I think of her down on her knees, not in prayer, but planting roses and azaleas in front of the house. She loved flowers, and they knew it and flourished in her care. Tears come to my eyes.