Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  Mother reached into her purse and drew out the bottle of Seconal that Grandmother’s doctor had prescribed to help Mother sleep. I remember the capsules were bright blue. “You’ll help me, won’t you?” she said, and I looked around, because she didn’t seem to be talking to me. Her voice was low, soft and suggestive, not one she’d used with me, though I’d occasionally heard her speak to Roger that way. But, of course, Roger wasn’t there. I was.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  By then, Mother had crossed the room and gotten Grandmother’s water glass from her bedside stand. She brought it over and sat on the empty bed, the pill bottle still in one hand. With something near a giggle, she said, “Quick, empty these,” and began opening the capsules and pouring the powdery white contents into the glass, which she held between her knees.

  I was slow to comply and this time she looked not at, but right through me and said, “Come on, help me.”

  All the pills together made perhaps a quarter-inch deep reservoir of powder in the glass. Mother got up and poured several inches of water into the glass. Of course, the powder floated. Without seeming to particularly watch or listen for an approaching nurse, Mother sat down and began to stir the water with a straw, in trancelike rhythmic circles. Slowly the powder turned translucent and seemed to disappear. I comforted myself with that, though I couldn’t have been fooled because I hurriedly collected the empty pill bottle, slid it into my pocket and went over to take the other chair by Grandmother’s bed. Then we sat and waited.

  While we waited there in the light, already sliced, which had begun to dapple as a tree outside filtered it even before it reached the blinds, Mother did not speak except once. “Don’t think you can stop me,” she said, features hardened to a grim mask. I thought she must be speaking to me because a wave of “no, no, no” had begun to rise in my chest. But she wasn’t. She was staring right at her own mother’s face. Still, the tone was enough to keep me still and make me prop Grandmother’s head when she woke and drank through the straw her daughter held to her lips.

  AFTERWARD, MOTHER SEEMED in no hurry, even when Nora poked her head in the door and asked if Mrs. McNeil needed anything. Mother didn’t answer. “No, thanks, we’re fine,” I said. My voice must have revealed my turmoil, but Nora mistook it and crossed to me. Her thighs sandpapered each other between noiseless nurse’s-shoe steps. She put an arm around my shoulder.

  “You okay?” she said gently.

  “Yes.” Tears came to my eyes. Nothing undid me quicker than kindness.

  “It’s so hard, I know, the waiting. Has she been awake since her last shot?”

  “Not yet,” I lied.

  “Just as well,” said Nora. “Just call me if there’s anything I can do. Dr. Henderson left new orders this morning so we can give her a shot every three hours instead of four. That may help. You can never tell about these things.” She picked up Grandmother’s wrist to take her pulse. “Slow,” she mouthed to me. Mother sat like a zombie through this conversation. I saw Nora look twice at Mother, but then she just sympathetically patted Mother’s shoulder on her way out of the room.

  Part of me was in a panic, and part of me took charge. I took the glass into the bathroom and washed it repeatedly with soap. After I dried it, I brought it back into the bed area, set it on the stand and poured an inch of water into it, as though it were what she’d left in the glass. I unwrapped a new straw and set it in the glass. The straw Mother had used to stir, I folded over and over and put into the pill bottle in my pocket.

  That done, I sat back down, thinking to wait until Mother was ready to leave. But there was too much churning in me. My grandmother lay there, her breathing slow and labored, a slight rattle to the shallow exhalation, and I knew I couldn’t pull it off if she died while we were still there. I’d crack in Nora’s misguided sympathy, a fault line of guilt spreading rampantly across me. I touched Mother’s shoulder and said, “It’s four-thirty, Mother, we should leave,” as if the time were relevant.

  “Don’t think you can stop me,” Mother said hoarsely to her mother, and, to my amazement, got up to leave.

  “Get some rest,” Nora said as we passed her in the hall. “Try not to worry. We’ll call you if there’s any change.”

  “Thank you so much,” I answered, but, of course, Nora had no idea what I was really thanking her for, how she had put her arm around me like I was a good person, worthy of her care.

  “The old bitch,” Mother said to the dashboard as I guided her into the passenger side of the car, but then she was silent as I drove us back to Grandmother’s apartment. I didn’t even stop to get a carry-out supper. We’d been there for perhaps an hour, barely moving, neither of us speaking, when the phone rang. The head nurse said simply that Mrs. McNeil had died quietly, without waking again after we left, and she was so sorry for our loss.

  7

  I’D BEGUN TO BE TERRIFIED. MOTHER didn’t seem to be coming out of her stupor the evening Grandmother died. I heated some canned soup and fixed her dry toast—exhausting the groceries we’d laid in—and then helped her undress and get into bed. She spoke almost not at all and when she did, it made little sense. “It’ll work,” she said once, and I realized she could have been thinking of almost anything. I was much less sure.

  I slept little that night, trying to figure out what had to be done. I needn’t have bothered; in the morning, Mother’s old self appeared. “We’ve got a lot to do,” she announced. “We need to call Roger and get over to the nursing home to get her things. I guess they’ll arrange cremation…we need to see about that.”

  “Do you need to call Uncle Jake?” I asked tentatively, not really sure, even, what I was supposed to call him.

  “He can rot in hell,” she snapped. “The only thing he’s going to get is the bills forwarded to him. What use has he ever been to me?” It wasn’t a question I could begin to answer.

  IN FACT, IT HAD WORKED, or seemed to have at the time. The nursing home did arrange cremation, and must have called Jake, too, because Mrs. Short, the administrator, said that Mother had been “cleared” to receive Grandmother’s ashes. “Like it’s some privilege” was her response, muttered in an aside to me. Later, she told me, “What I want is to be free of her once and for all.” Still, when Mrs. Short held out the cardboard box, double-tied with white cotton string, she accepted it.

  Mother went through the apartment, taking virtually nothing. “What would I want to remember? Let Jake deal with it,” she said, and left the keys in the building manager’s mailbox. “I want to get out of here before he shows up.”

  And then we were on the road again, headed south. On top of the jumbled heap of our bags and what Mother had taken from Grandmother’s apartment loomed the cardboard box. Mother occasionally addressed an angry remark to it, but other than that, she showed no consternation.

  “What are we going to do with…it?” I asked her.

  “Find a suitable final resting place,” she answered.

  “Are we taking…her…home with us?”

  “Not if the sky opened up and rained gold coins. I intend to be free of her forever.”

  This kind of owned hostility was a new side of my mother. Of course, she’d always had a lion’s share of anger, but it pounced at its target from its stance on God’s righteous will, rather than from anything Mother thought or didn’t like or didn’t want. I was frightened as she drove on, not knowing exactly where we were headed next, or why. Ironically I remembered thinking it was like driving headlong over a cliff.

  I DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT long. The second day on the road, Mother said, “Roger’s semester is over on the fifteenth. We’ll get there the fourteenth and help him close everything up. Then we can drive on home in tandem, save on motel rooms and the like.” This was the first thing she had said in a long time that sounded like a good idea to me. I felt like someone who’d been in an earthquake, unable to trust the ground, sensing tremors and faults everywhere. Would I tell him what we had done? The que
stion hung and thrashed in my mind but didn’t diminish my need for him. Surely he’d find a way to understand. He knew her.

  “That’s more than a week away. What will we do until then?”

  “It’s not like we can’t arrive early,” she said, irritably. “But I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. Seems stupid that someone who grew up in the west has never seen the Grand Canyon. Well, my mother was terrified of heights, so of course, we never went. Just like we couldn’t go up in the mountains. She said the idea of looking down made her think she’d lose her mind and jump. Didn’t it, Mother?” This last was addressed over her shoulder to the cardboard box—which seemed larger than it had the day before, but doubtless, that was my imagination. “So, let’s go take ourselves a look.”

  “That will be wonderful,” I said, an answer programmed by old, robot enthusiasm for any plan of Mother’s. I was taking as few chances as possible.

  “I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT see how you can sleep your way through this spectacular country,” Mother said. “You’ve never seen it before, who knows when you will again, and you waste the opportunity.” She was right. I’d slept most of the day, whenever it wasn’t my turn to drive. I’d slept as though I were fevered or drugged, a thick, dreamless sleep through Washington and on south, into Oregon. As much as I wanted to go down 101, which traced the curves of the ocean coast with a lover’s finger, when Mother put us on the inland route 5, I hadn’t even bothered to mourn. The dream of sightseeing I’d had on the way west seemed just that: the dream of a child. Other images pressed themselves against my eyes, like blue capsules, a clear glass, the iridescent wings of the sunlit fly that had bumped and buzzed its way across the window while I sat on the empty bed. I could not believe what my mother had done, what I had helped her do. And an unthinkable thought had passed through the darkness of my mind like a shooting Dakota star barely glimpsed. For just an instant, I could imagine Mother in a nursing home, myself stirring a skim of white powder into the translucence of water.

  Did she sense it? A moment later she reached across the seat and patted my thigh. “Well, I know you’re tired. Come on, lay your head on my lap.” When I did, she stroked my hair a while, driving with one hand as she lulled me back to sleep.

  “IT HAS OCCURRED TO ME that my father may come to me, now that she’s gone.” Mother made this cryptic statement shortly after she announced that we would treat ourselves to a motel room in Riddle, still a way north of the California border, that night, worn-out as we both were. “And now that we’re out of her house….”

  I braced myself, and thought about Roger. Hang on until we get to Roger, I told myself. He’ll know what to do. Mother left the highway and drove into the town, ignoring a cheap Mom and Pop motel on the outskirts. The nondescript town plunked apropos of nothing in southern Oregon, was old and run-down. A main street of two-story buildings was the only show, with nothing higher except a decrepit three-floor hotel. Mother pulled up in front of its brick exterior as though she’d known exactly where she was headed, and said, “You keep the car running while I see if there’s room.”

  While I sat in the car, a parade of hot rods passed. I could hear them before I could see anything except their headlights darkening the late twilight in contrast. Teenagers were crammed into souped-up cars, roaring their engines as they laughed and shouted through open windows. I could see some of them raising beer bottles to their lips. As each drew abreast of me, I felt music throbbing from the car. A few couples rode motorcycles, boys driving, and dark, loose-haired girls with crimson nail polish circling their arms around the boys’ waists. The wind of the ride lifted the girls’ hair and the fabric of their blouses like the dark-tipped wings of the gulls at the Cape. One threw back her head in the exhilaration of flight as they passed me tethered, motionless, alone.

  “There’s room. Come on, get your bag. There’s parking in the back.” Mother had almost broken into a trot coming down the hotel steps, her face animated with exertion or pleasure as she passed beneath a painted Rooms To Let sign above the porch. “This is what it’d take, an old place like this, a place with history. My father worked around Medford for a while…I sort of remember the name Riddle, because it was…funny.”

  Of course, I did as I was told. I always did, until the time I didn’t. But, as I’ve said, there was a lot of sky to fall before then.

  THE ROOM LOOKED LIKE THE building, which looked like the center of town: a throwback. A double bed, covered with a thready chenille spread was in the center, a wooden rocker and a battered floor lamp on the side near the single window and a dresser against the far wall. Faded floral wallpaper peeled up from the baseboards in several places. A communal bathroom was down the hall and around one corner. It gave me the creeps.

  Mother seemed delighted with the room, pronouncing it perfect. She turned on the one lamp and began rooting through her suitcase. “You’d better go get ready for bed,” she said. “If you think you’re going to sleep in this bed with me, you’ll take a bath.”

  I had no idea how one goes about getting ready for bed in an old hotel with shared bathrooms. Surely one doesn’t walk through the hall in a nightgown? I decided I’d bathe and put on clean underwear beneath the clothes I’d worn all day, just to get back to our room. I picked up the clear plastic bag containing my toiletries, a towel and clean underpants, and quietly left for the bathroom. The bag embarrassed me, much too intimate to dangle from my clenched fist in the public hallway, as were the towel and underwear. But I didn’t know what else to do. Mother, busy with her suitcase, seemed to be nearly in another world, behind a door at which I dared not knock.

  Luck was with me. I didn’t see anyone in the hall and I began to relax just a little. It was a large, old-fashioned bathroom. The shower I’d imagined wasn’t there. Rather, an enormous claw-foot tub was in one corner. There was a sink, its pipes exposed beneath, and a small oval mirror hung above. The toilet lid and seat were up.

  If I’d had any sense at all, I’d have washed my face and hands, used the toilet and gone back to our room and lied through freshly brushed teeth that I’d bathed. But I stood in the center of the bathroom, skinny and dumb as a scarecrow, fiddling with a lock that turned in each direction, but which, from the inside, never seemed to secure the door. I opened it halfway and tried the lock various ways until, from the outside, the handle wouldn’t turn. Then, I shut it and replicated the number of counterclockwise turns that had locked it. Hesitantly I took off my clothes. The tub looked grayish, and I wondered what I was supposed to do to clean it after use. Then it occurred to me to wonder when it had been last cleaned. Still, I adjusted the water to comfortably hot, and knelt to bend double and put my head under the faucet to wash my hair. My shampoo acted like bubble bath as the water rose, and when my hair was rinsed and the water nearly to the top, I lay back and breathed. How long may one stay in a shared bathroom, I wondered. Where was there another in case someone else needed a bathroom?

  There was a knock at the door, and I timidly called, “I’ll be out soon,” quickly beginning to scramble to a stand, even though I’d been obsessive about trying and retrying the lock. I must have confused myself about the lock operation, and I must not have called out loudly enough, because suddenly the door opened and a man was in the room less than five feet from me. His eyes swept my naked body midway in the act of standing, and he hesitated a split second before addressing my chest. “Excuse me, miss,” he said, taking a step backward as I panicked and floundered for the towel I’d left on the toilet seat. My heart thudded uncontrollably. When he shut the door, I could see his afterimage on its painted wood, like an apparition burning into my mind.

  “WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?” my mother demanded.

  “I’m not sure, I was so scared. He had brown hair, sort of curly.”

  “My God. God, God, God. I think that was my father, looking for me.”

  “I…I’m…I don’t know, I’m not sure.”

  “What did you do,” she demanded. “Did you say a
nything?”

  “I was scared. I may have screamed a little, and I tried to get a towel.”

  “You little fool. If you’ve done anything to startle my father away, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “I didn’t mean…” This is the truth: it hadn’t for a minute occurred to me that my dead grandfather had somehow opened a locked bathroom door and accidentally appeared to me instead of my mother.

  “You never mean anything, but you still do it, don’t you?” She meant cause problems. Mother picked up a towel into which she’d folded some other things, and her bag of soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, and the like and headed for the bathroom. I didn’t notice that she had also taken the separate little bag that contained her makeup.

  While she was gone, I hurriedly locked the door behind her, changed into my nightgown and unlocked the door so as not to annoy her when she returned; the big metal key that fit into the old-fashioned keyhole beneath our doorknob lay on the dresser where she had set it down. In perhaps forty-five minutes she was back, perfumed and nightgown-clad, with her hair freshly brushed and makeup on. One shoulder of the gown was pulled down to rest against her upper arm as though casually. While she was gone, I had sat in the rocking chair and tried to pray, but words stuck and sank half-formed, as though my spirit had filled with quicksand.

  “He didn’t come,” she said flatly. “We’re going to turn the lights out now and wait for him. Don’t you dare make a sound. Get into bed.”

  I did, of course, and she climbed in next to me but sat up against a pillow expectantly. I made my body as small as possible and tried not to move or breathe in an audible way. An enormous tension loomed like another being in the room. Mother had not drawn the shade, and a streetlight just below us threw an arc of light through the window she’d left partly open. Outside on the street, the hot rods still roared and honked their way up and back, and in my mind I heard the carefree laughter. Next to me, with eight inches of deliberate space between our bodies, my mother glittered away from me. Her face was lean and bright as a full moon, revealing everything and nothing at once as she waited.