by Rex Pickett
I climbed out of all my clothes, except my underwear, and slipped into the adjoining queen. When I heard my mother snoring I switched off the TV. I tried to fall asleep, but anxiety kept me pitched wide awake. Half a Xanax didn’t do much to assuage the rising sense of dread, so I took the other half. I closed my eyes.… The mistakes I had made.…
Sometime in the middle of the night I was rudely awakened by my mother crying out for Joy.
“Joy isn’t here anymore, Mom,” I said into the darkness. “It’s me, Miles.”
“Oh, I forgot,” she said, sounding frightened and disoriented. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
Three times that first night I was roused from sleep to take her to the bathroom. I vowed then and there to cut the diuretics–damn the edema and the threat of congestive heart failure!–until we had made it to Wisconsin, fearing I would go mad and end up in lockdown.
chapter 16
The next morning dawned brilliantly blue, awash in sunshine… if you weren’t in my head. I roused my mother early because I wanted to make Billings, Montana by nightfall, the first of two stops I had calculated in my insomniacal night on the MacBook. She asked me to bathe her, as Joy had done every morning, but I begged off, saying I would do it when we got to Billings.
She didn’t like the break in routine and let me know it in a withering diatribe, which I let pass over me like a scudding thunderstorm. Dependent on me, what could she could do except whine until she wore me down? or I wore her down?
After a hurried breakfast at the motel, we got into the Rampvan and wended our way onto the I-90. Once on the interstate, I took stock of the fact that I hadn’t slept much. My nerves were jittery, shot. As we passed through the mountain resort town of Coeur d’Alene, on a beautiful, placid, sapphire-blue lake, I checked the mileage gauge and saw we had gone only 165 miles! My brain was already fried; I needed Jack to take over so I could… have a glass or two of wine, it occurred to me with a sudden, sickening epiphany of self-loathing. With fear gripping me in a way any drinker would understand, I realized I was going to have to go cold turkey if I was ever going to deliver my invalid mother over to her sister in Wisconsin.
I tried to maintain my concentration on the road, but found myself dropping out, then suddenly swerving in panic when the tires jolted over the lane divider bumps. Coffee stimulated me awhile, but then dropped me back into that narcotized daze, the road undulating interminably out in front of me as if it had no terminus, or as if at some point, when I had fallen asleep at the wheel, it would hurtle me off the edge of the earth and debunk Columbus. Several times I considered stopping at a motel and just sleeping, even if that meant prolonging the trip, because it seemed almost an impossibility that I would be able to make the 600+ miles to Billings. And, more annoyingly, my mother’s rest stop visits were starting to fray my nerves. It was all I could do to keep from exploding every time she blurted out in a rising tone, “I’ve got to go!”
We rode on through the beautiful topography of Idaho and western Montana, passing grassy valleys speckled with feckless livestock, grazing under an amplitude of celestially blue skies, punctuated here and there by mushrooming cumuli. The freeway was blissfully empty, but with every mile ticked off the odometer it felt like the minute hand on a condemned man’s watch. There were moments when I was certain I was going to lose it. I debated more Xanax, but I feared falling asleep at the wheel. Under any other circumstances I could have enjoyed the freedom and exhilaration of a road trip, but I felt more like I had been kidnapped and someone in the back was holding a loaded gun to my head. My mother!
To maintain my sanity I called a few people and got back to others who’d left messages. I had a brief conversation with my book agent. She asked hopefully whether I had worked up a proposal for my next book. Giving my mother a backward glance, I told her I had something in the inchoate stage that I’d tidy up and ship off to her as soon as I got back to L.A. Though I was still angry at Marcie, I was emotionally weak and looking for any kind of solace, so I phoned her. I informed her what the new circumstances were and she commiserated with me for a bit until it felt like disingenuousness had crept into her words. I couldn’t stand her shallowness anymore so I changed the subject to business. She ran some lecture and cruise ship proposals by me, but I told her I couldn’t deal with any of them until I got back home–when I said home it sounded like some phantasmal place, an Edenic realm that I was moving ineluctably away from, not toward, as if I had taken the wrong road and was now circumnavigating the globe just to get across the street! I found my brain pullulating all kinds of foolish imaginings. Some made me laugh; some made me want to cry; some made me sure I was not long for this world.
I phoned Jack. It was barely noon and I could hear the familiar slurring in his voice.
“What’s up, Miles?”
“Out here on the road. Seeing double. It’s brutal, dude, it’s brutal.”
“I feel for you, man. Don’t know what I would do.” He burped some beer.
“What I’d love to do is pull over and go get hammered somewhere, but that isn’t going to make my problem”–I glanced over at my mother whose head was lolled to the side–“go away.”
“Hang in there. It’s only a few more days.”
“I don’t know why I got myself into this mess.”
Jack grew silent. This was not the partying, joke-a-minute Miles he had grown fond of. This was the dyspeptic Miles, the side of me that didn’t appeal to him. I could tell he wanted out of the conversation when he said, “I’ve got to jump, Miles, this is Rick.”
“All right. I’ll check back with you later.”
My mother needed constantly to urinate and was not shy about announcing the fact. On her fifth such request, I flew into a veritable rage: “Mom, to stay on schedule we have to make Billings. I can’t keep stopping like this. I’m losing my momentum. Can’t you hold it?”
“No. I have to go,” she insisted.
“Maybe we should stop at a hospital and fit you out with a catheter and a bedpan?”
“Please. Stop.”
I swept a hand across the desolate passing terrain out the window. “Where?”
“I don’t care. I have to go, damn it! Next stop.”
“You just went.”
“I have to go! I’ll pee in my pants!”
“Don’t threaten me, Mom. I’m onto your wiles.”
“You’re just irritable because you want a drink.”
“Fucking A I need a drink!”
I peeled off angrily at the next off-ramp. It led to a rural frontage road, fissured with cracks, weeds sprouting through them. I drove a long ways through barren nothingness, searching desperately for a rest stop or a gas station or anything. What the fuck was there an exit for? I fulminated in my sleep-deprived brain.
“I’ve got to go,” my mother wailed.
In a moment of apoplexy, in the grip of white-line fever, I slammed on the brakes and threw the shift lever into Park. I scrambled out of the van, opened the side door with a slam, flipped the ramp down, jumped in and got behind my mother and pushed her out into the hot sunlight. I wheeled her across a stretch of dirt corrugated like a washboard by the summer heat and months without rain. She bounced in the chair as I roughly pushed her away, out of the view of passing motorists. I had no idea where I was taking her. Maybe to the edge of that fantasized cliff where I morbidly imagined hurtling her into the abyss!
Finally, out of eyesight of the freeway, I stopped, set the brakes on her wheelchair and crossly offered my hand. “Here. Give me your hand,” I said, feeling the blood throbbing in my face.
“What?” she said, looking utterly bewildered.
“Come on, you’re going to pee standing up.”
“Don’t make fun of me. I’m your mother!”
“You said you had to go. So, go!”
“I’m not going to pee standing up!”
I walked away from her and stormed back to the Rampvan, my rage unquestionably exacerbated b
y the fact I had had nothing to drink in close to twenty-four hours. I glanced back at the gutted case of wine in the back and debated opening a bottle to calm my nerves. But the consequences of a DUI, a mini-spree, with just me and my mother and the 1,000-plus-odd miles left to Sheboygan quickly chastened me, lashed me to the pillory of abstinence. In the moment of that realization I felt emotionally raw, naked to the world, on the precipice of a genuine nervous breakdown–the kind you see in movies where white-coated men converge on you with tranquilizer guns and straitjackets. I started to laugh at the absurdity of it all, the image of just me and my mother out in the middle of nowhere, she trying to piss and I attempting to hold to the crumbling ramparts of sanity.
My laugher stopped abruptly when, ever so faintly, as if out of the wilderness of my worst night, came my mother’s cry, “Miles! Miles!”
The stress was too overwhelming. I broke down, clamped my hands over my eyes and wept. Her plaintive calling rang out louder, an echoic summons for help. I wanted to find a gun and put her out of her misery. Hell, both of us. How did I end up on this madcap adventure to Wisconsin? Why hadn’t I seen the friction that was building between her and Joy and taken more drastic measures to mollify it? I hadn’t been paying attention because I’d been having too good a time with Jack. With Laura, with Natalie… and my one unsinkable great love: Pinot Noir. I had at myself until there was nothing left but a bloody pulp of a conscience.
“Miles!” my mother caterwauled. “Miles!” It wasn’t going to stop; it wasn’t going to go away. She was the infant child I had encouraged–okay, pretty much forced–two women to abort… for just this fucking reason!
Maybe this was my fate. Maybe all the whoring and drinking post-movie success had landed me in this karmic enantiodromia where the world was now turned impertinently inside-out. Worse, there was no escaping it. An invalid mother, due to a series of cruel circumstances and poor planning, had yoked me to the earth. I was no longer Icarus soaring toward the searing sun. The wax holding my wings together had melted.…
Spurred by an implacable sense of duty, I climbed back out of the Rampvan and trotted in to where I had abandoned my mother and her incontinent bladder. I was sick with worry wondering whether I–let alone she–could make it to Wisconsin. But as I ran toward her I grasped one thing: If I didn’t surrender to every one of her needs, no matter how petty they might seem, this titanic struggle between the two of us would hurtle me off the deep end to wrack and ruin. In surrender–total surrender–as my revelation unfolded, there existed the possibility of sanity, of seeing this through.
There, on a small rise, alone, she sat in her wheelchair, her head thrashing around in a way that recalled a sick farm animal’s, crying out my name over and over. I rushed toward her, tears blurring my eyes, and hugged her in the wheelchair. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m really sorry.” She convulsed in my arms, wracked with sobbing. “It’s just been so damn hard. And now with everyone gone, out here in the middle of nowhere.…”
It felt weird to hold her in my arms. I flashed back to when my father was officially declared dead and we had hugged. Her body felt so foreign to me then, as it did now. But I held on to her, because she seemed relieved that I was embracing her, reassured by the envelopment of my arms that it was all going to be okay, that I was strong enough to get us through it. To her I had been the prodigal son, and to me she had always been the dutiful, but unfeeling, unaffectionate mother. Now, in this wretched moment of forlornness–her need to be cared for and my trepidation that I couldn’t do it without Joy and Jack–we fused together in a palpably emotional exchange of mutual support.
“I know I’m a burden,” she bawled into my ear.
“No, Mom. What happened to you couldn’t have been prevented. But it doesn’t matter. This is where we are now. This is where we are. Okay. You’ve got to have faith in me. You’ve got to believe I can pull this off. I know you think I’m a wanton drunk, and you’re probably not too far off, but I went down a different path in my life that didn’t prepare me for this moment.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’m going to get you to Wisconsin if it kills me. All right?” I said, forearming the tears from my eyes. “Now, let’s go and find you a restroom.”
I got behind the wheelchair, unlocked the brakes and pushed her off back down the slope. To passing motorists we must have looked like two souls in desperate need of salvation, lost along the road on our pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
I rolled my still-shaken mother slowly across the dirt path to the Rampvan and got her resettled inside.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“I was scared.”
I hooked an arm around her shoulders. “I know. I’m sorry. I had a bit of a meltdown there. Maybe I need some of Joy’s Mary Jane.”
My mother smiled a laugh. “Oh, no, then you’ll really flip out on me.”
I laughed back and patted her on the shoulder. “All right, you ready to go?”
“Oh, yes.”
I closed up the back door, circled around to the driver’s side, climbed in, turned the key, and backtracked to the interstate. The mini-break-down had served as a kind of anodyne; my resolve was not just restored, but stronger than it had been at any other moment since I’d made up my mind to undertake this journey. The decision to stop battling my mother engendered in me a massive sense of relief. I experienced a quieting of the mind, a suffusion of peace in every ravaged corpuscle of my emotionally raw soul. There’s catharsis in surrender. Unfortunately, there’s no catharsis in stopping drinking, only a cloacal upsurge of everything wrong you have wrought.
At the next rest stop, felicitously a mere ten miles down the highway, I dutifully rolled my mother into the bathroom. As I waited for her to do her business, I spoke through the stall’s door, “We’ll stop at every rest area if you want to, so don’t worry, okay?”
“Okay,” she said meekly.
“I’m here for you until we get there, okay? I’m sorry I exploded.”
“I’m such a burden,” she said, starting once again to cry.
When she called out she was done, I helped her back into her sweat pants, draped an arm around her neck, and said, “It is what it is, Mom. I’m sure Hank, Doug and I weren’t a lot of fun when we were toddlers.”
“Oh, you were terrible. I could have brained you,” she said, as I pushed her back out into the harsh sunlight, both of us laughing, albeit for different reasons.
We drove on. Through lush valleys framed by majestic mountains, creeks slashing blue tortuous swaths through them. Now and then I spotted fly fishermen whipping their rods back and forth to get just the right length on their casts before setting their flies on the rippling currents, envying them. I babbled to my mother and she babbled back at me–golf, men and women professionals, our low common denominator. Anything to keep awake, keep the white-line fever from engulfing me, and quash the panic that abstinence had beset me with.
On the open road, my mother, in a manifestly more relaxed mood, narrated a story from when she first met my father. A captain in the Air Force, he flew her in a light plane from her hometown of Sheboygan across vast Lake Michigan to Grand Rapids, where he resided. There were advisories due to thunderstorms, she told me, “… and he just flew right into them,” she said, making a little whistling noise that mimed the sound of a projectile. “Oh, we could have been killed,” she said. “I kept telling him to turn around, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He was so reckless.” I tried to picture my air force captain father with his Dennis Quaid The Right Stuff grin emblazoned on his face, oblivious of the meteorological perils, while others around him hangared their planes to ride out the storm in the nearest bar.
“But you made it, obviously?”
“Oh, that single-engine plane went up and down, up and down. I got soooo sick.”
For some reason that made me laugh. There’s catharsis in laughter, too. And I hadn’t been finding much to laugh about the past couple days.
“You know, Rusty was stationed in Montana before you were born,” my mother recalled.
“Oh, yeah?”
“We were in Helena. Oh, it was so hot in the summer. And we had noooooo air conditioning,” she trilled, vividly recalling the time.
I marveled at the lucidity of her way-back memory compared to the spottiness of her day-to-day one. She often had trouble remembering if I had visited the previous day, but when you asked her about something that happened forty years in the past, it’s as if time had embedded that memory into her consciousness and, though half the tissue in her brain was dead, she could journey back there and recall moments that one would have figured would have been out of her reach.
We reminisced in tandem with the countryside flying past, traveling back in time as we moved ineluctably forward in space. Somewhere out ahead, I was even letting myself hope, lay the prospect of a new beginning for my mother.
A hundred miles from Billings I noticed the tank was nearing empty. After we’d filled up and I’d toileted my mother and rolled her back into the van, I detoured into the convenience store and found two locally brewed handcrafted ales. Buying a bottle of each, I climbed back into the van and cracked the first. I tried to conceal this from my mother, but she hadn’t lost her raptor’s eye for the subtlest movements and changes in her surroundings, particularly when liquids were involved.
“Are you drinking beer?” she asked.
I showed her the bottle. “Just two,” I said. “We’re almost in Billings,” I rationalized. “Because, I can’t go cold turkey.”
She nodded. I was only watching in the rear-view, but I’d have sworn that nod was accompanied by a look of understanding, even acceptance, as if, she, too, had once battled her demons and come a cropper. Of course, to question my drinking would have incurred the risk of my questioning hers. Whatever her motivation, she just said, “Oh.” Then added, “Your dad liked beer.”
The beer soothed my nerves as we rode past picturesque landscapes into Billings, Montana. Situated in the Yellowstone Valley, the city is engirded by gently sloping mountain ranges. The Crowne Plaza, where I had booked us, appeared in the flesh as on its Web site to be not only Billings’s tallest building, but its nicest hotel to boot. It featured an on-premises restaurant, an essential after the day’s punishing drive.