Drink.
And why the breadbasket has a 3x5 note card taped to it:
TEN DAYS, NO MORE. THEN THROW IT OUT!
“You’ll be okay,” my mother says. “You all will.”
“You don’t know that,” Dad says.
“We both do,” she says.
My father looks at me, helpless. I look back at him with a determined expression that conveys: this is right and it is time to save her life by letting her go. A look that hides the fear and exhaustion I feel inside. There are so few people in the world who love me, and soon there will be one less.
My father swallows, then composes. He turns back to my mother, who quietly says into my father’s ear, “Thank you for taking such good care of me.” Her eyes are closed, like she’s dreaming.
Thirty-Two
Outside the window of my parents’ bedroom, the moon is a haze of pale light covered by the thick gloom of charcoal clouds. Down below is our wide, lush yard, cared for by my father. I see movement in the yard’s far corner and tilt my head forward. But it’s nothing.
Behind me, my father sits in a chair beside my mother, who lies beneath fresh, flannel sheets. He asks her, “Do you need more water?”
I turn to see her shake her head. Seconds ago, she swallowed down pills that her doctor gave her with explicit instructions: “If you take more than one dose of this, it would be lethal.” Hint, hint.
Elsa’s jittery in the doorway, staying put at my request, but her nerves are apparent. She chews at the tip of her index finger while trading her weight from her left foot to her right, then back.
“Thomas,” my mother says. She reaches for me from her bed and when I move to her, she tugs at my untucked shirt so I’ll lean down. She kisses me near the mouth with dry lips and I kiss her back. Her breathing is weak and shallow.
“Does it hurt?” I ask. I sit on the bed.
“Probably,” she says with a smile. She takes my hand. Hers feels like cool paper. “I love you,” she says.
“Me, too,” I say.
“No, say it. I want to hear.”
“I love you, Mama.”
She closes her eyes and makes an mmm sound.
It’s more than I can handle. I pull away from my mother and she lets me go. I don’t take my eyes off of her as I go back to the window to suck in a series of deep, calming breaths.
I glance over at Elsa who’s pressed her forehead against the doorjamb while holding a Kleenex to her face.
My father holds my mother’s elbow in his left hand while his chin rests on his right fist. To look at him, he hasn’t slept in weeks.
It’s fifteen minutes later when my mother becomes delirious. “Helen?” she says, and none of us understand. “Helen.”
My father and I realize she’s talking to Elsa, so Dad snaps to get her attention. Elsa, the pretender, the interloper, is still in the doorway with her head down. The snap makes her look up.
When she does, my mother lifts her arm and waves Elsa over. “Come closer.” Elsa comes closer. “Closer.” Elsa stands at the corner at the foot of the bed. “Take care of these two little shits,” she says. “Take money from my purse and buy them ice creams.”
Elsa nods, her mouth a quivering frown as tears stream down her face.
My mother’s energy spikes and she turns to my father with sudden clarity. “When Joshua died, that was the most terrible day,” she says as a matter-of-fact while my father holds my mother’s hand to his forehead. “Wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Dad says, nodding.
Then she turns to me and stares. “You’re such a beautiful young man. But you do need to get that haircut.” An echo of what she’d tell me when I was in my teens and twenties.
“Okay,” I say, and my face goes hot.
Next, Mom stares at the ceiling, her eyes glossing. “I’m plum worn out.”
For the next silent minutes, we watch her breathe.
To break the roiling of tension, I stand and go to the window, stare out into the blank night.
When I turn to my mom and tell her, “Mom, please, I know you need to go, but it’s okay to stay. I’m here for as long as…”
My father holds up his hand, a stop sign. Which cuts me off.
“She’s gone,” he says.
“What?” I ask, staring at him. I swallow, then follow his eyes as he looks down at my mother, his wife.
“Your mother has passed,” he says.
“How?” I say. But of course I know how.
Elsa, at the foot of the bed, makes a choking sound. Then my father starts crying. Somehow, I don’t. When Elsa turns quick toward the door and takes a step to exit, my father snaps again, which stops her mid-step. He says to her, “No. Not yet.”
Elsa acquiesces, wiping her eyes. Then follows with a pair of wet sniffles.
“I just want to remember,” my father says, his hand still on Mom’s right elbow.
While I hold my mom’s cooling hand, I ask Dad, “Is it okay?”
After a while he says, “I guess so.” He looks at me while he guesses so. “I think so.” He kisses my mother’s forehead, then looks down at her, finally, before he decides, “Yes.”
Thirty-Three
The next morning, I wake from a deep, dreamless sleep to Elsa whispering my name. When I open my eyes, she’s kneeling on my bedroom floor, holding her phone out in front of her. I’m flat on my stomach, my cheek on the sheets, a pillow pressed against the top of my head. I don’t say a word. Just blink.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.” Then I remember: my mother’s dead. “But it’s Ryan.”
Last night, my father called the hospital to report what had happened. I watched him closely as he spoke into the phone. Everything decelerated. I became aware of my fingers. The cramped way my feet felt in my shoes. My shoulders were still tensed and started to ache. All actions felt deliberate, my father’s slightest facial tics rich with meaning. By the time he’d hung up, maybe ten minutes later, I felt impossibly exhausted. I was upright, but my eyelids started to close. After they’d come to take my mother’s body, I was so tired, it became difficult to stand. I got into my bed. I didn’t care that I had to share it with Elsa. I’d never felt so tired in my entire life. I closed my eyes, and it was all darkness straight through to Elsa whispering me awake.
“Can you talk?” Elsa asks me, now.
“Debatable,” I say, without moving.
“If there’s anything I can do,” she says.
I turn my head slightly and try to give her a look that says: there’s nothing to be done.
“He can call back,” she says.
I shake my head, then work my arm out from under the blankets and hold it out, palm down. She puts the phone in my hand, and I grip it loosely. She goes out of the door as I set her phone on my face, and let my free arm dangle over the side of the bed. I breathe into the phone to alert Ryan it’s me.
“Thomas?” he asks.
“Mhmm,” I grunt, mouth closed.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“Depressed.”
I hear him take a breath. “I’m sorry you lost your mom,” he says.
“Me, too.”
“Anarchy and EO submitted official offers for Elvis.”
I blink. Then I blink again.
“That doesn’t matter now, I know. Just thought you might like some good news.”
I take a deep breath and a lung-clearing exhale.
“Do you want to get off the phone?” he asks.
“No,” I say. I breathe in, then out, then in. “Yes.”
“Then I’ll call later,” he says. “I just wanted you to know I’m here. Okay?”
I nod. Because of the nod, the phone slides off my face, and onto the floor. I reach down and drag my fingers slowly along the carpet. When I finally find it, I do
n’t check if Ryan’s still on the line before I hang up.
Soon after, Elsa knocks on the door. I don’t tell her to enter before she pushes it open and peeks in. “Okay if I come in?”
I hold out her phone and she takes it.
“I’m going to leave today,” she says. I see her red carry-on that’s been wide open since I arrived. It’s packed up, standing upright against the wall. “It’s time.”
•••
I come downstairs just after 10:00 a.m., and Elsa has, by request, made my father lunch for breakfast—penne pasta topped by a red sauce riddled with tomato chunks and sprinkled with basil.
“Do you want some?” she asks me.
“Okay.”
As Elsa prepares a plate for me, I sit across from my father at our kitchen table. His lips pinch together and he nods at me.
I look down and nod right back.
He picks up his fork, digs a tomato chunk loose from the noodles, and takes a bite.
“Any moment now, I expect her to come from behind some door,” Dad says, sounding winded. “I woke up earlier and opened every door in the house, just to see. Then I went back through and did it again.”
I look and see Elsa’s holding my plate, waiting for the right time to bring it to me.
My dad looks straight down into his plate. She takes a step forward, then stops when he says, “Who ever came up with ‘grown men don’t cry’?”
“Yeah,” I say, though something inside me is holding on, holding back.
Elsa steps forward again. This time she puts my plate in front of me.
“That hasn’t been true for twenty years,” Elsa says, and rubs my father’s back. His body starts to shudder, and I watch a single, sizable teardrop fall on top of a concentration of red sauce, creating a crater.
I start breathing heavy and lean back in my chair.
“Please don’t do that, Tommy,” Dad says. “If the thing breaks…” He takes a breath. “Let’s keep everything else the same, at least for a minute.”
I sit the chair upright.
“Sarah is leaving us,” I tell Dad.
Elsa looks at me like, Don’t say it like that.
“To give you two space,” she says.
“Plenty of space, now,” Dad says, then clears his throat. He snaps a look at me. “But you’re staying?”
“Nowhere to go,” I say. “Nowhere to be.”
We eat in silence—my father across from me, Elsa holding her plate close to her face while she stands with her back to the bend of the kitchen counter, between the stovetop and sink.
•••
After noon, Dad stands in the doorway to my bedroom. He asks Elsa, “You have everything?”
“I do,” she says, standing up, pulling the handle out of her red roller bag.
I’m already standing, staring at my poster of The Beatles, the one my mother gave me for my fourteenth birthday: Shea Stadium; Tuesday, August 23, 1966.
“From Mom,” I say.
“I remember,” he says. It’s a minute before he says to Elsa, “Ready when you are.” Then he turns and goes.
•••
On the way to the airport, Dad says, “They’ll cremate her tomorrow.” The words create pressure in my head. First it’s like fingers pressing my temples. Then my entire skull. I ball up my left fist and put it in my right hand and squeeze as hard as I can, making my teeth clench. “Then another day, and we can pick her up.”
•••
First we drop my rental car at the airport, then circle back to drop Elsa off for her flight. It’s Dad who pulls her luggage from the trunk and sets it curbside.
“You’re all set?” he asks.
Elsa says yes.
Dad tells her, “I have to say, I dread going back to that house.”
Elsa reacts by launching herself at my father, wrapping her arms around his neck. She presses her cheek against his collarbone.
When she lets go, she turns and takes the handle of her bag and heads toward the glass doors that separate when she gets close. I catch up with her right inside the door and stand in front of her so she can’t easily pass.
“I’m sorry and goodbye,” Elsa says.
Two days ago, I wanted her gone, wished I’d never met her. But now she’s the only Sarah who ever met my mother. I don’t know how to say goodbye, or how to act or react, so what I do is hug her with everything I’ve got.
“Oh,” she says. Then, “Thomas?”
I hug her like it’ll bring my mother back to life. Like the real Sarah isn’t far, far away.
“Thomas?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re kind of crushing me.”
•••
Back in my father’s car on our way home, Dad says, “That’s a darling girl. Whoever she is.”
I don’t respond. I’m too busy looking out the window at the flat, expansive, prosaic nothing. Bland scenery that’s comprised of brown-green, highway-side grass, billboards with numbers I hope I never call, and colorless cars infinitely exiting and appearing.
•••
That night, my father orders Imo’s Pizza and we eat it at the kitchen table without plates.
“I’d like to come to California soon,” Dad says. “If that’s okay with you.”
“It is.”
“You wouldn’t be too embarrassed by your old man?”
I laugh a very small laugh, almost a hiccup, then suppress it. I’d much rather swim in this rare, quiet pain than let anything free me.
“And call whenever,” I say. “Call all the time.”
“I might,” my father says.
Which reminds me: I’ve yet to charge my dead phone.
My father scoops up a middle square of pizza and looks at it. Then drops it back into the box. “Tomorrow your mother will be ashes,” he says, and rubs one palm against the other to clear it of the breaded sand from the pizza crust.
•••
The next morning, like yesterday, and every second since my mom passed, every single motion I make feels willful—a consciousness to every breath and blink. I’m careful when I go into my roller bag to find a clean T-shirt, clean boxers. As I airlift them clear of the surrounding clothes, I listen for every flit and crinkle.
“Your mother is ready,” my father says from my doorway, and for just a flash I think she’s alive. That they’re going to the store. But then I know, it’s her ashes, at the crematorium. A single word comes to my tongue, but I don’t say it: sift.
“I can’t go alone,” Dad says.
I stand, grab my shoes. Go to the bed to put them on.
“Well, put on some pants, first.”
•••
On the way back from the crematorium, Dad tells me, “She didn’t want a funeral.”
Mom, the only child of an only child. Dad’s childless brother Chuck living on a farm in the middle of Oregon.
“I’ll call Chuck and tell him,” Dad says. “We don’t need people flying all over the place. Nobody wants that.”
•••
Mom’s ashes sit in an urn on the coffee table. It’s granite colored, a narrowed neck with a flat lid.
“I figure you’ll head home soon,” Dad says.
“What if I stay?” I ask. Because why go anywhere, anymore?
“Then you stay,” he says.
He stands up, kisses his fingers, and holds them on top of Mom’s urn until his eyes go red.
•••
It’s dusk when I plug in my phone in the kitchen and watch as it powers up. When it’s fully on, an alert sounds: sixteen new voicemails. All from Ryan.
Instead of listening, I call him back.
“Thomas, hey,” he says. “Sorry to keep calling. You get my messages?”
“Messages,
” I repeat.
“Yeah,” he says, hesitant. “It’s just EO was pressing. Anarchy’s very keen, but they’re playing it patient. And I’m sure this isn’t at the front of your mind, if you’re thinking about it at all, so I’m sorry to be calling, really. I just…”
“Your messages,” I interrupt, letting the last s create a tingle on my tongue.
“Right,” he says. “EO wants to buy outright, Anarchy wants us to write the script.”
“Okay,” I say.
“So, yeah, we just need to make a decision. I left the numbers on your voicemail,” he says.
“The numbers,” I say.
“Yeah, EO’s saying a hundred and twenty-five thousand.”
“That one, then,” I say.
“Right, but while Anarchy’s half that, we’d get points on the back end. If it gets made.”
“That one, then,” I say.
“Well,” he asks. “Which ‘that one’?”
Outside I see a flicker of movement through the kitchen window. I look up, and in a wash of moonlight, against the backyard’s back fence, standing with her back to me, amidst a bed of fading flowers, is Sarah.
“Thing is, you sell an idea, who knows where it ends up?” Ryan says. “So, I vote we write it.”
I unplug my phone from the charger, push open the sliding glass door, the screen door after that. I step through the yard, eyes on Sarah.
“If we sell to EO, it’s just a signature followed by an instant paycheck,” he says. “But if we go with Anarchy, all we have to do is turn in a first draft to get paid. They’d give us twelve weeks. But it means you’d need to come home.”
I’m about to tell him EO. So I don’t ever have to go back to San Francisco, so I don’t ever have to go anywhere. That I am here, and it took me so long to get here, and now Sarah is here, too, so there’s no longer reason, ever, to leave.
Then Sarah turns, standing amidst pink and purple flower blossoms, and my phone beeps a sharp warning—low battery. “So what do you think?” Ryan asks as she writes on the inside of her left forearm. She holds out her arm to show me two words: Find me.
“Where?” I ask Sarah.
“What?” Ryan asks me.
Sarah looks up at me with an eye roll, like I never get it.
Collision Theory Page 10