“Are you going to lose your job?” she asks.
Samantha blows her nose again, harder, and says, “No, Mom, don’t worry. Everything’s fine. I’m going to call the boys before they go to bed.”
Kathryn remains beside her on the couch while Samantha talks to each of the two younger boys in turn, asking if they did their homework, if Christopher worked on his sophomore speech, Matty, his Spanish. She says to one that she doesn’t think she’ll make it to the soccer game. Did Dad wash his uniform? Make sure he throws it in tonight if he didn’t. She says to the other, text me if you want to go anywhere after school tomorrow. Just because I’m not around doesn’t mean you don’t have to ask.
“Because I need to,” she says into the phone. “Because I just do,” she says again. Then, “I’m sorry. We’ll figure it out.”
It dawns on Kathryn that she is the problem. The boys are asking for their mother, and she’s here, not home with them.
She tries to rise abruptly, but hovers in midair. Samantha gives her the boost up and rises too, keeping a steadying arm around her. “Where’s your walker?” she asks.
Kathryn doesn’t retort that when her daughter needed her because she was crying on the couch, Kathryn didn’t need her walker to cross the room to get to her.
“Don’t walk without it, Mom, okay?”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
“Fine.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Fine.”
Samantha stands by while she pulls one leg after the other into her bed. Then Samantha retrieves the walker from where Kathryn stranded it and parks it pointedly alongside the bed. From Kathryn’s view at eye level, it’s like a little cage; if she wants to get out of bed, she has to step right into its box. Samantha turns out the all the lights, leaving the little night-light in the bathroom to glow.
She, Kathryn, is the problem, and it’s not her fault. She told Samantha that she was fine in her apartment in Tacoma. She had her car, the social security that covered her rent, and there were no attendants to bully her and plot to make her homeless on the street. Sometimes she has dreams she is sleeping under a bridge, and then she wakes up, and Samantha is not there, and even though Kathryn is not under a bridge it still takes her a very long time to figure out where she actually is. She lies very still while she does this, so that when a woman charges in, all loud and fake-happy, saying, “Time for breakfast, Miss Kathryn! Do you want some help getting up?” she tries to play possum for as long as possible, because she does not know that person.
There is a strange light coming from the other side of the studio. At first she tries to ignore it so it will go away, and then, as surreptitiously as possible, she raises her head enough to see what it might be.
It is one of them, a dark figure crouching, but before she can cry out, her eyes adjust slightly and she sees that it is Samantha sitting at Kathryn’s small table, tapping away on her laptop, her face glowing as she leans toward its screen.
As the problem, she knows she is the one who needs to go, though where, she can’t say yet. They will have won, those people here who mean to put her out, but she’ll have won, too, being away from their clutches. She’ll bring her pocketbook, her charge plate. She’s left home before, taken a train, gone west.
Samantha does her best, but she has her hands full. And she needn’t have upset the applecart in the first place—Kathryn was fine in her apartment in Tacoma, driving herself to Fred Meyers or Safeway, buying her milk and eggs and cans of soup. Kathryn liked it that way and she’ll get things back to normal as soon as possible. She will have to go it alone, but she’s prepared for that—the way she was alone in the narrow bed at Woodstock, and the narrow bed of her marriage, and that of her divorce-become-widowhood, and is alone now in the new twin bed Samantha bought for her here.
Aloneness has been her constant companion: The children left, didn’t they? And before they actually left, they always wanted to be away, doing this or that with other people. Carl didn’t leave, she made him go, but the aloneness after amounted to the same thing. She left her father, too, but only because she was a superfluity to him, a person warming the teakettle, someone who didn’t quite fit into his routine. He actually marked her absent in his little book when she stayed home from church after her mother’s death. As soon as he left the house, she’d go lie down on her mother’s bed and cover herself with her mother’s winter coat, curling up as small as she could under its woolen weight. Morbid, he called it, when he found her sleeping there.
But by then aloneness was already her special friend, slipping its cold arm around her when she was a girl left behind at school, watching her mother’s white-shirted bearers disappear down the trail like the last flickers of candles before unseen fingers pinched them out.
CODA
Boston, 2015
The winter shadows lengthen, and the sun flares orange and goes out. Samantha draws the blinds against her reflection in the windows. Kathryn occasionally stirs, mostly without talking, but sometimes she’ll stare and murmur things to the place she has business with, a place beyond Samantha. And sometimes she’ll look straight at Samantha and say, almost unintelligibly, but Samantha can make it out, I love you, baby.
Kathryn sleeps during Samantha’s meals on trays and during Mark’s calls and the family’s visits. She sleeps when Samantha and the aide give her a sponge bath, rubbing lotion on her limbs and dressing her in a fresh flowered housecoat, worn backward like a hospital gown. She sleeps when Samantha raises or lowers the head of the bed or tilts her slightly one way or another, rolling towels as wedges to keep her angled and not flat on her back. Samantha reads and does yoga, looks out at the frozen trees, returns cups and trays to the dining room, and keeps a chart of the morphine drops.
In the days to come, only one of Kathryn’s eyes will open—and that just a thin crescent. It gleams in the dark and seems to hold Samantha’s, but she knows this is not really true. Her mother’s eye is fixed and unseeing. Kathryn’s body, always small, is now, without food or water for two weeks, so flat that it scarcely makes a shape in the covers. By miraculous luck of the calendar, Samantha has been able to accompany her mother this whole final part of the journey; it’s as if Kathryn purposely picked the time between semesters to die, knowing it was when they could be together day and night without interruption. The boys come over some evenings to do their homework, and they text her, but no one is suggesting that Samantha come home.
The shadows lengthen, the sun flares orange and goes out. On the fifteenth day, her mother’s breathing comes in little fish gasps, her mouth ajar. Samantha angles her toward the window to catch every flash of birdwing, every thin ray of winter light. She sits on the edge of the bed and holds her mother’s hand, silky warm. The good eye is open its slit. Once in a while Samantha says something, some commentary on the still and unchanging world outside, or some encouragement that her mother can go when she is ready, follow whatever new thing is revealing itself. She also says ordinary things like, the boys will be coming home from school now, they’ll be letting the dog out. She tries to conjure the running dog for her mother to see.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go to the editors of publications in which some of these chapters first appeared: “Your Best Yet,” at Harvard Review; “Pie,” as a Solo for Ploughshares; “The Big Goombah” (under the title “Boys’ Choir”), at The Carolina Quarterly; and “Ultraviolet,” at MussoorieWriters.com.
I appreciate, more than I can say, the generosity of Suzanne Berne, Paul Doherty, and Elizabeth Graver, who indefatigably read and commented on multiple drafts of this shape-shifting project. I am grateful to the National Endowment of the Arts for a fellowship that allowed me time to write, for a grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation that supported travel to Finland, and to Boston College for providing, through several channels, both writing time and resources for research. Finally, it’s been a gift and a privilege to be represented
by Emily Forland and edited by Pat Strachan.
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