The End of Eve

by Ariel Gore

  I called the night nurse service from a parking lot. Yes, I needed someone for the first three nights at least. I did the math. All these nurse hours would add up, but there was no way I could move into the former duplex full-time again. My mother’s social security check would pay for ten nurse-nights a month. It boggled my mind to think that people poorer than me dealt with this kind of thing every day. People with less flexible jobs. I stopped at the new candle shop that had replaced ours, bought a Virgin of Guadalupe, headed to the Southside to pick up Maxito from his Spanish immersion daycare.

  I knocked on the arched door the way I always knocked.

  Maxito’s pretty teacher opened the door the way she always opened it, but she didn’t quite make eye contact. Two unfamiliar white people stood behind her.

  I could see Maxito and his friend Diego playing with colored blocks in the main room, but something was off. The place smelled skunky like weed and smoke. “Everything all right?”

  “Not really,” Maxito’s teacher hummed.

  One of the white people piped up. “We’re with the Children, Youth and Families Department. We’ve suspended Ms. Martinez’ license until she works out a number of issues. This day care facility is now closed.”

  Ms. Martinez’ lip quivered, but I just shook my head. Of course this day care facility was now closed.

  I took Maxito’s little sweaty hand in mine, led him outside. As I lifted him into his car seat, he bit his lip. “Will I be able to play with Diego tomorrow?”

  I squinted into the afternoon sun, buckled him in. “Probably not tomorrow. But you’ll see him again soon. How about we go get a Lego set?”

  “A pirate set?”

  “Sure.”

  Subject: We need help in Santa Fe

  From: arielgore@earthlink.net

  Date: January 31, 2012 4:57:20 PM MST

  To:

  Greetings friends and friends of Eve,

  As many of you know, my mom was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer over two years ago. Her health has taken a sudden turn, and I need your help now.

  After three weeks in the hospital, she’s being released into home hospice care. This is not a 24-7 care service. I need friends willing to come for a few days or week each to help her here at home.

  Please let me know if you can take on any time in February or March.

  Thanks so much,

  Ariel

  I SENT THE email to the twenty or so old friends I could think of. No one I knew of had come to visit since we’d moved to New Mexico, but maybe now they would come. I hated to sound helpless, had been trained that asking for help meant I was a loser, but I had to grow up. I had to admit there was no way I could pull this off by myself.

  Like a miracle they wrote back. A few of them wrote back, anyway. Yes, maybe they could come. They would check their calendars. Yes, three days or a week? They could probably commit to that. They’d had their hard times with Eve, they said, but they loved her. Maybe they even had some frequent flyer miles. They would check.

  Leslie would come for a week if I bought her a ticket. Her son, Leo, would come next. A new-age priest we’d always known in California could do a long weekend. An old friend, Afton, would drive from Los Angeles. Would it be all right if she brought her seven dogs? Tom could be here as soon as he got home from the Middle East. A nurse who’d been part of my stepdad’s church community could come the weekend I had to go teach a writing workshop in Iowa City. My godmother, Deborah, would come from Monterey. Carmen would fly in from El Salvador.

  I bought calendars and dry-erase boards, flowers and dark chocolate, medication logs and cheap wine. I set up the DVD player at the foot of my mother’s hospice bed, bought The Maltese Falcon and The Letter with Bette Davis. I set up the music player. Stacked Cat Stevens, Carol King, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez.

  I tried to be honest with my mother’s old friends: “If you need to see her alive, come as soon as you can. But if you can hedge your bets, we’re probably going to need people for at least a few months.” Was it harsh to put it that way? I didn’t know.

  She could live five more years, the oncologist had said, but the palliative care nurse shook her head at that. “Oh, darling,” she said, “let’s just budget for six months. Your mum’s on her journey.”

  Maxito focused on his pirate Legos. “Beautiful,” he kept saying. “Pirates are beautiful.”

  It was starting to get dark, but no one turned on a light.

  Six months. That worked for my brain. I could plan for six months.

  The palliative care nurse’s cellphone beeped. She read a text from someone, looked up at me. “All right, darling,” she said. “They’ll bring your mum now.” She stood up suddenly, clicked her cowboy boots on the tile floor, grabbed the tape and a rolled-up piece of paper from the table, and unfurled the red and black sign. She marched over to my mother’s bedroom door and taped it up. DNR. Do not resuscitate.

  28.

  Pot Stickers at Yummy Café

  “I JUST NEED MY MORPHINE PUMP AND A CHECKBOOK,” my mother said as the palliative care nurse and the night nurse helped her into her bedroom. Helped. Maybe that’s a euphemism. They carried her, one on each side.

  She wore the loose-fitting Mexican embroidered cottons I’d left for her at the hospital, looked too thin to be wearing them.

  I knew people would still call her beautiful, but she had that look of death now – eyes sunken, teeth too prominent.

  She’d never asked to come home from the hospital, had in fact refused to leave, but this was how they released people. This was how they released my mother, anyway. The only other option was Casa Que Pasa, the nursing home where the state itself had deemed residents in “immediate jeopardy.”

  As the nurse-women lifted her into her hospice bed and started hooking up the tubes, my mother gazed at a painting of a crow on the wall. “That’s the last painting I bought,” she sighed. “It’s my friend. My crow. The artist found my crow dead out on the old highway. Think of that. She painted its portrait. She used its bones in art pieces. She buried its organs. She let the river carry away its feathers. Think of all that.”

  The night nurse’s face relaxed into an easy smile. She was smitten. I could tell. And I prayed she would stay smitten, that my mother would stay charming, that everyone who set foot in this house would fall under her spell – fall in love with her – and fucking help me.

  My mother glanced at the pile of DVDs, kind of threw her head back to the extent she could throw her head back.

  “Do you like old movies?” The night nurse asked.

  My mother beamed. “The Maltese Falcon is only the greatest screenplay ever written.”

  I sat down next to her hospice bed, showed her the calendar so far. Leslie would fly in tomorrow evening. Matea, the night nurse, would be here every night at least through the week. Others would come soon. So many people loved her. So many people wanted to come.

  My mother stared at me. “You’re not going to leave me again, are you, Tiniest?”

  The last blue light of evening through the window.

  “I won’t be here all the time,” I admitted. “I’m going to keep my rental. But you’ll never be alone. We’re making sure you’ll never be alone.”

  My mother nodded. “Okay.” She sounded afraid. “I don’t want to be a burden.” She’d never seemed to mind causing a cyclone of chaos, but there was no glamour in burden. “I should have just blown my brains out,” she whispered, too quiet for the nurse-women to hear.

  As they arranged pills and pains patches, I ducked into the kitchen to put on a pot of water for tea.

  Matea appeared next to me. “Your mother,” she said. “She’s Frida Kahlo.”

  My heart swelled with hope. Yes. Please let my mother stay charming. “She’d be flattered that you think so,” I said. “She’s certainly a big Frida fan.”

  Just then my phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from the chef: Do you need me to kill your mother
yet?

  I texted back: Not yet.

  She texted again: Have you eaten?

  I tried to remember. Had I eaten? I hadn’t eaten anything that day. Had I eaten anything the day before? I didn’t think so. But the hunger was growing on me. I liked the odd comfort of this empty feeling. I didn’t know if I wanted to eat. But I knew I wanted the chef.

  She was flying to Connecticut in a couple of days to clean out her dad’s apartment, to take care of his “affairs,” as they say.

  I texted back: Meet you in an hour?

  The ridiculousness of it wasn’t lost on me. The mother/ daughter/caregiver who couldn’t feed herself.

  My mother slept, the low hiss of her oxygen machine.

  The palliative care nurse gathered her things to leave. “Everything’s going to be all right, darling,” she said to me.

  Matea would call my cell with any news.

  I wrote her a check for six hundred dollars for the first three nights, couldn’t stop saying “thank you.”

  I packed up Maxito and his pirate Legos, headed over to Sol’s place to leave him for the night. “Is Nonna sick?” he wanted to know. He hadn’t seen her, had been playing in the living room, but he was learning to overhear things now.

  “Yes, baby,” I said. “She’s sick. She might die.”

  Maxito nodded, serious. “One of my chickens died.”

  “Yes. That was sad.”

  And he nodded again. “That was so sad.”

  The chef texted: Pot stickers at Yummy Café? Or I could cook for you here.

  I felt needy. Uncomfortable in my neediness. It had been exactly one month since her father’s death and the chef was worrying about what to feed me. But it struck me as maybe part of my damage, too, the way I dreaded being considered. Maybe I would try an experiment: I would proceed as if being a little bit needy wasn’t the worst thing.

  If waiting for love wasn’t love, maybe love was something different all together than that complicated/elusive thing I’d been trained to wait for. Maybe it was simpler, too. Just some small thing we could use. Like a broken piece of glass, some string. Like an order of pot stickers late at night. Like vegetable broth with bok choi at Yummy Café.

  Like a kiss in the chef’s gravel driveway and “do you want to come in?”

  Like the truth that her question had no double meaning. I could say yes or no without unforeseen consequences.

  Like a book of matches.

  Like a salted caramel in her palm.

  29.

  Light and Other Scattered Words

  MY MOTHER DIDN’T WANT A BIBLE IN HER ROOM. SHE didn’t want The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She didn’t want Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She was getting better, dammit, and all this talk about God and science and the afterlife was bumming her out.

  Where was Leslie, anyway?

  “Here’s Leslie.”

  My sister arrived wearing all white.

  I picked her up at the shuttle stop near the train station, stopped with her at Healthy Wealthy for a bouquet of white flowers.

  “Leslie,” my mother hummed, but then she kind of hissed at her: “Took you long enough.” She clung to her morphine pump, smirked even as she hissed.

  Leslie smiled. “You thought I’d come faster? Knowing the loving welcome I might expect?”

  “I have to pee,” my mother sighed. “You have to help me get up to pee.”

  Leslie untangled the tubes, lifted our mother out of bed and into the bathroom. She stepped just outside the bathroom door, chose the moment to say, “you know, Mom, I got an email from your lawyer. Did you really intend to leave this house to your maid’s daughter in Mexico and not to me and Ariel?”

  “Oh God,” my mother groaned. “I must have been really mad when I did that. What if I die right here on the toilet before I have a chance to change it?”

  “Like Elvis?” Leslie laughed.

  “Not funny!” my mother shrieked.

  I left them to it.

  I had paperwork to attend to. Medical powers of attorney and financial powers of attorney. The man at the bank teared up when I pushed the notarized papers across his desk. “I’m gonna miss her,” he said. “You know, sometimes on a slow day, we all just sit around waiting for her to come in and stir up some shit.”

  It seemed an odd tribute, but what could I say? “I can only imagine.”

  The banker at the next desk straightened his bright blue tie, looked sad. “Did she ever try to get you fired, man? She tried to get me fired three or four times.”

  My banker nodded. “Three or four times at least.”

  “Well, guys,” I said. “I’m glad you appreciated her.”

  I took a mint candy from the bowl. And as I stuffed all the notarized papers back into my turquoise purse, a word fell out: “Light.”

  I’D BEEN CARRYING all these words around for the last few weeks. Just words on strips of paper. Like cookie fortunes except each paper strip contained just one word.

  I’d been dropping them here and there. Not on purpose. Just when I reached into my purse for my lipstick or a few pennies. A word would catch, slip out, fall to the floor.

  I started noticing the words here and there. Like a trail of breadcrumbs. Or evidence I’d been someplace before.

  The word “monkey” on the chef’s dining room table.

  I pointed to the word. “Monkey?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know where it came from.”

  I didn’t confess that the word was mine.

  SEE, I HADN’T been writing through any of this. Wouldn’t start writing until summer. I wondered what it meant: A writer who didn’t write, walking around with little slips of paper in her purse, scattering words like wildflower seeds, hoping for the best.

  One of my first memoir teachers, Floyd Salas back in California, said we could all write stories to convey our single human heart/soul to another human heart/soul and, in doing so, break us both out of our isolation.

  But these word-seeds seemed lonely.

  “Airplane” taped to the bathroom mirror in my little adobe south of town. I’d been meaning to write a story about a trip I took once, alone. About a time when the world felt expansive.

  “Stung” in the grocery store aisle near the shelf with all those fancy bottles of mustard where I stood for so long, trying to decide between the spicy green chile and the organic Dijon.

  “Radio” next to my mother’s hospice bed.

  IN THE KITCHEN of the former duplex, Leslie cooked the things my mother had cooked for us as babies – mashed carrots with parsley and butter, leek and potato soup, banana smoothies. She fed my mother with a tiny silver spoon, filled the freezer with baggies of prepared food to last a couple of weeks. She packed up to leave now, but her son would come next.

  In the dim light of the living room, we met with the director of Milagro Home Care. She’d cared for her adult son when he was bed-bound before his death, started her nonprofit. She could send caregivers whenever we needed them. Could we pay twelve dollars an hour? Yes. My mother had a little savings left. We had the social security, too. We could sell the Prius for maybe ten thousand dollars. We could pull this off for a few months.

  “It’s of course best for our caregivers if you can pay them,” she said softly, “but just so you know, if your mother does live a long time, we won’t stop coming just because you’ve run out of money.”

  I cringed, wanted to assure the woman that we would always figure out how to pay the caregivers, but I remembered my new experiment-to proceed as if a little bit needy wasn’t the worst thing. And I said, “thank you.”

  LESLIE’S TEENAGE SON, Leo, arrived wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, his hair grown out long after a winter spent camping at Mt. Shasta. He sat with his grandmother in the half-light of her room.

  I headed out to meet Carter Quark for a beer at Tomasita’s, waited there for the priest from California.

  The chef texted Carter from Connecticut as we ordered a second round: Beha
ve yourself, CQ.

  We laughed at that. I said, “Maybe I’m the one who needs to behave herself.” And we laughed harder. Laughed until we cried.

  We were waiting for a priest, I’d said, so I guess Carter imagined some Catholic in black. He raised his eyebrows when Carol the new-age earth mama from California stepped in with her cane and flowing cottons.

  THE PRIEST AND Leo took turns at my mother’s bedside, feeding her and rubbing her feet, taking her to the bathroom.

  The lead hospice nurse had frizzy blonde hair with dark roots, came every day to change the bandage on my mother’s bed sore. She filled the pill boxes, checked the battery on the morphine pump.

  Another hospice worker came on Tuesdays and Fridays, bathed my mother with sponges.

  I read the caregiver logs in the mornings. Nights of vomiting and pain. Daily notes that said, “Eve is anxious.” Weekly notes that said, “When her friend Moe Hawk visits, she becomes agitated, throws up when Moe Hawk leaves.”

  “Mom?”

  She sat propped in her hospice bed, typing something on her computer.

  “Who’s Moe Hawk?”

  “Oh,” my mother sighed. “She’s a mental case. She’s a white woman who thinks she’s Native American.”

  “Do you want her to keep visiting?”

  My mother looked up. “Moe Hawk yells at me. She says I’m not allowed to say I’m dying or I’ll die. She says you’re all just waiting for me to die. She makes me eat too much.”

  “We don’t have to let her in, Mom.”

  But my mother shook her head. “Moe Hawk’s a mental case, Ariel. You can’t fault someone for being a mental case.”

  THE HOSPICE SOCIAL worker wore a Hawaiian shirt, stood in the kitchen and handed me a list of funeral homes and cremation services. I’d have to pick one, she said, make arrangements before I left town to teach my writing workshop.

  “Do you think she’ll die in the next couple of days?” I asked the social worker, but she just shrugged.