Five Days Left

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  As Harry stooped to open the cab door for her, she wondered if the same someone or something that had sent her Tom then also sent her Harry now. In the past few days, an idea had started to creep its way out of the recesses of her mind, nagging at her until she had no choice but to think about it before it scurried away again, into the shadows: If she could let a stranger open a car door for her, was it such a big step to let her husband help her? Or to let her parents?

  Look at the progress she had made last night alone, allowing her mother to organize dinner, her father to set the table. Maybe she could work her way up to smiling, rather than fuming, the next time they offered to weed the garden. From there, was it that great a leap to let a home health nurse comb her hair, help her dress? Last week, she would have said those ideas were far too impossible for her to consider. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  But then, anything was easy when you only had to do it for a few days. If she knew she would have to take Harry’s elbow for another few years, let her parents make and serve dinners a few times a week for the foreseeable future, would she be so gracious? Could she allow a nurse to brush her hair, her teeth, wash her naked body, if she knew it would happen for a thousand more days, not just a few?

  She lowered herself carefully onto the seat while Harry held a protective hand between her head and the top of the door frame. Inside the car, he busied himself with his trip log for a minute, studiously avoiding the rearview mirror.

  “Thank you,” she said softly.

  He nodded as he started the car, but didn’t look up. “Okay, then. Off we go.”

  He flipped his visor down and she saw the photo of the little girl again. At an earlier time, she might have pushed a little. Come on, tell me a bit about her. How old is she? Who is she? Why don’t you want to talk about her? It’ll make you feel better to get it off your chest, out in the open.

  But that was a lifetime ago. Back when she was oblivious about how lucky she was to have nothing in her life that was unfit for public consumption. No dark, twisted vines of truth not fit for sharing with others. She turned her face to the window and watched the Disney Channel streets of Plano flash by.

  • • •

  Mara assessed the long hallway that led to the school library, then glanced at her watch and pursed her lips. It was eleven twenty-eight; library class started at eleven thirty. It had taken her longer to walk into the school than she had allotted for when she’d told Harry what time to get her. And now she had cut it too close—the bell would ring in two minutes. She picked up her pace, hoping to get to the safety of the unpopulated library before the noise set off a reaction in her limbs.

  At the same time, she tried to calm herself. Stress had an even more pronounced effect on her body than noise—that one was most definitely an HD thing. She’d read about it in a pile of articles. Avoid stressful situations, especially in public. Being watched by multiple sets of strangers’ eyes made things worse for everyone, even those without excessive CAG repeats.

  Think happy thoughts, she ordered herself. Think how delighted your daughter is to have you here today, how excited she was to learn you were coming. Think about what Tom said, about retirement being the worst news for you but the best for her. Think how much more time she’s had with her mother in the past few months—time for afternoon snacks and arts-and-crafts projects and stuffed-animal tea parties in the backyard. Time that she never had before, with a mother always in too much of a rush, too preoccupied with briefs and discovery and trial prep. The greatest loss of the mother’s life to date—forced retirement—had led to the greatest gain in the daughter’s.

  Which went to show how a different vantage point led to such dramatically different interpretations of the same situation. Here Mara was, determined to remove herself from the planet ASAP to spare Laks from having a mother who was so much less than what Mara wanted to be for her daughter. But wasn’t it possible that just being here—here at school, here at home, here, instead of in the office, or in the ground—was all the girl needed? When it came to parenting, wasn’t here much better than gone?

  And wasn’t that true even if being here ultimately meant walking down this hallway looking like a wind-sock figure, then gliding down it in a wheelchair? Even if it meant, finally, not being able to come to library class at all, but being propped up in bed when Laks got home, and listening to how her day had gone? Was the requisite skill for motherhood coordinated movement? Or was it love—enough love that you’d let the chance to escape go by so you could be here for your child, in whatever condition?

  The hint of a smile appeared on Mara’s lips and then grew wider as she quickened her pace down the hall. Had she just convinced herself it was better for Laks if she stuck around longer? Talk about win-win.

  She was halfway down the hall when the two classroom doors closest to her opened at the same time. The nearest door was to room 112, Laks’s classroom. She could hear a young voice instructing the class. There must be a substitute today; Laks’s teacher was an older woman. As she moved closer, Mara could hear the sub calling out instructions about lining up in single file inside the classroom so today’s line leader, Samantha, could lead everyone to the library. Slightly farther down the hall, a woman Mara recognized as a fourth-grade teacher leaned against the door frame of her classroom, her mouth giving orders Mara couldn’t quite make out.

  She moved past room 112 quickly. But as she neared the fourth-grade classroom, the teacher disappeared inside and a throng of ten-year-olds spilled out the door, jostling and chiding one another as they filled the hallway, blocking her passage. From the other direction, a clear voice spoke. “Okay, then, Samantha, you may lead everyone into the hall. Please stand quietly until the bell rings, though.”

  Mara heard the kindergartners shuffling behind her. Short of physically pushing fourth graders out of her path, she couldn’t see a way past them. She looked back quickly and saw Samantha’s single-file line had already fallen apart; the five-year-olds spanned the width of the corridor. She heard the loud rush of her own heartbeat in her head as she stood, trapped, a group of rowdy ten-year-olds on one side of her, a cluster of five-year-olds, including her daughter, on the other.

  And then the bell rang.

  The clanging rolled past Mara’s ears in slow, undulating waves, and for a horrifying sixty seconds, everything occurred in stop-frame before her:

  Her torso lurched sideways as the noise knocked the balance out of her. Her reaction time being HD-dampened, she couldn’t respond fast enough to counterbalance the sideways movement of her body and the momentum took the rest of her with it, causing her to take two quick steps forward before she crashed loudly into a locker.

  A group of fourth graders turned to stare, as did most of the kindergartners.

  The mouths of the children closest to her, Laks among them, opened in shock as Mara struggled to pull herself upright but lost her grip on the locker and fell to the floor. Trying again, she pushed up but the fourth graders’ loud cackles seemed to slide right into her muscles and paralyze them, and she fell again.

  A fourth-grade boy yelled, “Hey, look, that lady’s drunk!”

  A dozen fourth-grade voices laughed, followed by as many kindergarten ones.

  A girl screamed, “Someone needs to call nine-one-one! What’s a drunk person doing in the school?”

  Another said, “Don’t laugh, you guys! Don’t laugh! You’re being mean!”

  A few stopped laughing. Others laughed louder.

  The substitute teacher, hand over her mouth, told her class to get inside the room as fast as they could. But the kindergartners were frozen, gaping at Mara.

  “I said, get in the classroom this instant!” the teacher said. “Samantha! Lead everyone into the room, right now! Samantha! Children! Everyone! Come quick!”

  All but one of them obeyed, and Mara could hear the buzzing of voices inside room 112. “Freaky” and
“crazy” wafted out the door and into the hall, ringing in her ears along with the echo of the bell and the murmurs and laughter of the fourth graders.

  “You!” the substitute hissed to the one kindergartner who hadn’t followed Samantha into the class. “You!” the teacher called again. “I said to come in this instant!”

  From her hands and knees, Mara raised her head and locked eyes with the child standing motionless and wide-eyed in front of her.

  “Mama!” Laks scolded, her voice in a low whisper as she cast her eyes from her mother to her teacher to the fourth graders and back to her mother again. “Stand up! You need to stand up right now!”

  The look of humiliation on her daughter’s face, the accusation in her voice, brought hot tears to Mara’s eyes. She willed herself to tune out the older kids gawking and laughing at her, willed her arms to obey as she tried another time to push up from the floor. It worked, and she stood tall, a proud smile on her face until she realized what a pathetic thing it was for her to feel proud of, and ordered her mouth to straighten into a line.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “The bell went off, and the noise . . . and for some reason it’s so much worse today. I lost my balance, and then . . . I wouldn’t have come if I’d known it would be this bad. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

  She took a few tentative steps toward Laks, and as she did, another fourth-grade boy yelled, “She’s really drunk! Look at her walk!”

  Mara frowned, confused and annoyed by the fourth graders and their drama. What was the kid talking about? The Falling Lady Show was over, and she was walking perfectly fine. Why didn’t he find something else to exaggerate about?

  As her mother inched closer, the girl took a step away. “Mama, they’re laughing at you! The big kids are laughing at you! And the kids in my class are calling you names!”

  Mara’s entire body was on fire with shame. This was so much worse than the cereal aisle. “I’m so sorry,” she croaked, the lump in her throat leaving little room for words to escape. “Mama is so sorry. I don’t know why my body’s behaving so badly today.”

  “You can’t go to library now! Please don’t go to library!” Tears slipped down the girl’s cheeks and she swiped at them angrily.

  “Of course not. I’ll go home.”

  Laks nodded, still swiping at her tears. The fourth graders fell quiet as their teacher finally appeared. Mara heard one of the boys start to recite what had happened, but the woman’s voice cut him off, announcing they were late, it was time to get to the gym, he could tell her later.

  “Should I walk out with you, Mama?” It was plain in the girl’s tone what she hoped the answer would be.

  “No, sweetie, that’s okay. I’m fine now, see?”

  She reached to touch her daughter’s hair, but Laks retreated a step, then another. “I have to go,” she whispered, stealing another furtive glance down the hall. “Teacher said.” She made a move toward her classroom and looked at her mother impatiently, waiting to be released.

  “Of course,” Mara said, waving the girl toward the classroom. “You go. I’ll be fine. The cab will be here soon. I’ll wait out front—”

  “Can you wait over behind that one tree? So no one can see you from the windows?”

  Mara nodded quickly and turned away.

  She was slumped at the base of the tree, head in her arms, when she heard the cab pull up. Harry leaped out and ran to her, his door wide open, car still running.

  “What on earth? Ya look like you’re tryin’ ta disappear.”

  She raised her puffy red face to his and opened her mouth to speak. No sound came out, and she shook her head slowly, looking past him toward the car.

  “Sure,” he said gently. “We’ll go home.” Without another word, he part-led, part-carried her to the car, helped her in and fastened her seat belt.

  As he drove, Mara stared blankly out the window, not seeing the bright colors of Plano but only the dark, angry, tearful eyes of her daughter as the girl, humiliated, pleaded with her own mother to hide out of sight of the other children. She stopped trying to wipe away the tears that streaked her face, stopped holding a tissue to her running nose, stopped pressing her fingers against her puffy eyes to try to restore them to their normal size. She’d let Harry see her like this if he looked at her in the mirror, let him see her ugly, splotchy, puffy, snot-streaked face when he helped her out of the car at home. She deserved it. She deserved that embarrassment, and so much more, after what she had put her daughter through.

  She let out a grunt of disgust at her idiocy in the hallway, when she had almost convinced herself that being here, under any conditions, would be better for Laks than being gone. Her eyes still closed, she sensed Harry shift in his seat at the sound of her voice and she could picture him looking back at her, concerned, eager for an explanation. She turned her head toward the window and pressed her forehead against the cool glass, letting his questions go unanswered as she chastised herself for her foolishness.

  Of course the girl wouldn’t be better off having her around under these conditions. There was no justification for exposing Laks to more of this. Mara could imagine the shrieks of laughter on the bus as the child’s wind-sock figure of a mother teetered on the curb waiting for her school bus. The gawking as, later, they noticed the girl’s mother was now in a wheelchair. The whispering as the rumor got around that now the woman was confined to her bed. Now, if you went to Lakshmi Nichols’s house for a playdate, you didn’t see a mom standing at the counter with freshly baked brownies; you saw a closed bedroom door. Or worse, an open one, beyond which a sickly, wasted woman lay staring out at you, or through you.

  At five, Laks was too young to hide her disgust about how her mother had acted. She was too instinctively open about her feelings to pretend everything was fine, that her mother’s behavior wasn’t embarrassing. One day, though, she’d learn to filter her emotions. She’d figure out that it upset her mother, and her father, if she said anything negative about Mara. She’d learn to keep her feelings to herself, and they would roil away inside her, a toxic blend of humiliation and revulsion, bitterness and anger. How could anyone say that would be better for a child than having her mother simply die?

  Mara had witnessed it, a glimpse of what was to come, when she was first diagnosed. She’d overheard one of Dr. Thiry’s nurses mention the name of a nursing home where one of their patients lived, and she’d driven there herself, lying her way into a tour with a tale about her failing mother. It had taken her no time to spot the HD patient; the woman sat in the corner of the “activity room,” a thin blanket lying in a heap on the footrests of her wheelchair while she gyrated wildly from the waist, bending forward, then to the side, then forward again, her face in a stiff grimace.

  A man stood beside her and two teenage children, a boy and a girl, sat slumped in plastic chairs to the side. The woman’s gaze was fixed on an empty chair several feet away, and though the man’s mouth moved constantly, the woman gave no indication that she heard him, or that she was even aware he was there. The children might have been waiting for a train, Mara thought, as unengaged as they were with their mother. Their heads were bent over phones and they each wore headphones and moved their heads to a beat only they could hear.

  But then, it was hard to blame them, since their mother was so devastatingly unengaged with them. It was easy to imagine the kids trying, on earlier visits, to talk to her, to fill her in on what they’d been up to since they’d seen her last—what they’d done in school, on the sports field, with friends. And being met with the vacant stare Mara saw on the woman’s face now. A stare that told them she hadn’t truly heard them. She no longer even knew them. As Mara’s tour leader droned on about activity nights and field trips and meal plans, Mara watched as the man picked up the blanket and spread it over the woman’s legs, tucking it snugly behind her waist. Within a few seconds, it was at her feet again,
and he smiled patiently as he bent to retrieve it again. He patted the woman’s shoulder and resumed his patter.

  The woman dislodged the blanket again, and as the man stooped again to retrieve it, Mara saw the boy nudge his sister with his foot. The girl looked up from her phone and her brother indicated with his chin the pickup game their parents were playing. He glanced briefly at his father before rolling his eyes dramatically at his sister. She rolled hers back and shook her head, her upper lip curled in disgust. Their father stood, bringing them back into his peripheral vision, and quickly they dropped their chins back to their phones and resumed their rhythmic nodding, pretending they hadn’t noticed a thing.

  Mara never told anyone she’d gone to the nursing home, but she intimated a few times to Tom that she knew what the end stages of HD would be like for her, and how hard it would be on Laks. And on him. Tom claimed it would be perfectly fine. Not ideal, perhaps, but they would find a way to deal with it, and they would be just fine. But he was only speaking wishfully, Mara knew. She had seen reality. She had glimpsed their future.

  She stole a glance at Harry and considered what she’d been debating as they walked to the cab earlier, about whether she might be able to let go of her independence, accept help from Tom and her parents and home health care workers and, ultimately, nursing home staff, for the sake of having more time with Laks. But all that would do, she saw now, is lead to more days like today. More snickering, more gawking, more whispering. More humiliation for Laks. Until Mara was in a wheelchair in the corner of some activity room, kicking off her blanket for the tenth time while her daughter pretended not to notice how pathetic her mother had become.

  At the house, Harry rushed to Mara’s door to help her out of the cab, but she waved him away and pulled herself out. She let him follow closely behind her as she made her way up the walk, but when he reached out to help her up the front step, she shook her head firmly and he quickly dropped his hand. At the door, she handed him cash for the fare before fumbling with her keys.