Her mom had pancreatic cancer that had spread to her liver, lymph nodes, and lungs. That’s what Aunt Judith had to say. From the quiet comfort of her sitting room sofa, surrounded by hundreds of homey knickknacks, picked up from vacations and outings and all kinds of special occasions, each one a testament to family and good times and a bright future, Aunt Judith told Sarah that her mom had inoperable cancer. She said it gently, quietly, slowly, leaning in closely, covering Sarah’s hands with her own. The train had hit. Sarah hadn’t gotten out of the way.
After a few minutes, when the first rush of tears had evened to a steady flow, Sarah noticed that Aunt Judith had her head down and seemed to be avoiding eye contact, like she had other things to say.
“What is it? Tell me,” said Sarah.
“She doesn’t have very long. The doctors say six months...or less.”
Later on, during a period of red-eyed numbness, Aunt Judith shared some other details. She said that even though her mom’s health had been steadily deteriorating, she had refused to go to the doctor until the day when Aunt Judith and Mr. Theo showed up at her house and gave her no choice. She also said that after getting the news, her mom had, in her peculiarly timid way, made only one request: in exchange for allowing herself to be dragged by her sister from one cancer specialist to another in a vain search for even a glimmer of hope, Mom had extracted a pledge that Aunt Judith would be the one to break the news to Sarah. That explained the note and her mom’s calm reticence. The two sisters had also agreed that nothing would be said until Sarah had finished finals and had come home with her diploma, which actually followed the bad news by only a matter of a few weeks.
Six months and a pile of regrets, that’s what remained after Sarah’s meeting with Aunt Judith. The pleasure and sense of accomplishment at having graduated didn’t exist. The joy and excitement of an upcoming wedding had vanished. And the regrets didn’t look all that great either because she didn’t have any time to wallow in them. They had to wait. The six months came first. Mom came first.
Of course the time went by way too fast but in some ways it didn’t. During those days, for the first time since age six or seven, Sarah lived her life with both feet in her own house, instead of one foot in the house and the other in Aunt Judith’s waiting limousine. For the first time, since before she even knew what it meant to have a wandering eye, her eyes didn’t wander up to Sunny Slope Manor. And neither did her heart. It belonged to her mom, the one who had lived a quiet and devoted life. For five and a half months Sarah lived that same quiet and devoted existence, right beside her mom, and she reveled in every second of it.
Their lives together felt different, especially the way they talked. When Mom brought up God, Sarah didn’t roll her eyes and die of boredom. She listened with the sincerity that her mom deserved, that she’d earned from a lifetime of selfless devotion. And, for the same reasons, Sarah answered her mom’s questions with a new kind of honesty. She said that she believed in God but that she also had doubts. Doubts because of all the people who said they believed in the same God but seemed to show it in conflicting ways; people like her very own pious mother, compared to the impious Aunt Judith who nonetheless still made professions of faith, compared to some skid row wino who cries repentant tears at the mission, but never seems to get enough of God’s strength to stop doing the things for which he needs to repent. Sarah shared these doubts, and others, and to her surprise, Mom’s ears didn’t catch on fire from the heresy. She just smiled and said, “Well, that means I need to keep praying for you. And if I can do it after I die, I’ll keep praying for you then, too.”
This new way of talking didn’t start and stop with just Sarah. The gentle honesty also seemed to rub off on her mom, along with some occasional boldness, too. One day, out of the blue, she said, “Sarah, do you love Mack?”
Without giving it a second thought Sarah said, “Yes, Mom, I do. Even after all this time, I still love him.”
“Do you love Grant?”
“Of course I do. That’s a silly thing to ask.”
“Your words say one thing but your eyes say another.”
“Oh. I see. And is this eyeball reading something you’ve been practicing for very long?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Mother. I wouldn’t be marrying him if I didn’t love him. Now stop being ridiculous.”
With that little dustup the conversation ended. Strangely, her mom didn’t seem to care that Sarah’s feathers had been ruffled, not in the slightest. No apology got offered, which was very much unlike her apologetic mom. And then five minutes later she happily offered to take Sarah shopping for a wedding dress…so Sarah could properly marry the man who, according to the clairvoyant eyeball reader, she didn’t even love. Sarah declined the offer. Besides her mom’s schizophrenic attitude about the whole thing, Sarah didn’t care to talk about anything related to the wedding, or to even think about it, because she knew her mom wouldn’t be there to share it.
Only one other conversation proved to be too much for their newfound openness: the one where Sarah apologized for the thousand little ways in which she had made her mom feel like second fiddle to Aunt Judith. The same eyes that through the years had continuously admired Aunt Judith’s beauty and style had also repelled at the sight of the one who truly deserved to be admired—no matter how she dressed or wore her hair. The same ears that had eagerly listened to Aunt Judith’s worldly advice had often turned a deaf ear to the advice of a caring mother. Sarah saw this shame quite clearly. Unfortunately her mom didn’t. At least that was what she said. “Don’t be silly, dear. You never did any such thing. You’ve never been anything but a wonderful, loving daughter. Now you stop troubling yourself.” She refused to see it, which took away some of the sting, but still left the regret very much intact.
Sarah’s mom died on November thirtieth, three months after her fifty-fifth birthday, two weeks shy of the six month prognosis. By the time of her death, she’d been bedridden for three weeks in her little living room, on a special hospital bed that Aunt Judith had arranged. Those last days proved to be the hardest and most depressing for Sarah, harder even than her actual death, because by this time, what was left of her body had been rendered almost useless, and the severity of the constant pain seemed to be growing daily and sometimes hourly. Apart from some hand-holding and occasional snippets of semi-coherent conversation, she didn’t have much of a life. Then the morphine drip started, the respirator mask went over her face, and Sarah’s mom all but disappeared. Unconscious and lost in a morphine fog, unable to breathe without a machine, she stopped living but she didn’t die. She suffered loss of life, according to any sane definition of the word, but not the peace which comes only through actual death. With that peaceful hope lingering somewhere nearby, all Sarah could do was pray. She prayed for it to all be over. Not for miracles, or signs, or one last heartfelt conversation. Just a peaceful death. She wanted nothing else.
Given her mom’s fondness for doing the exact opposite of what all the bossy people in life told her to do, perhaps Sarah should’ve expected the unexpected.
On the night of her death, when the doctor said that she’d be gone within a matter of hours, Sarah and Aunt Judith took turns watching over her. They held her hand, soothed her forehead with a damp cloth, and whispered things into her ear. As Sarah ministered in this way, she suddenly heard her mom’s voice quite clearly, though not clearly enough to make out the words. She leaned in and tried to understand. Aunt Judith got up from the nearby couch where she’d been resting. The muffled words kept flowing. Then Mom raised her hand and fumbled with the respirator mask. Aunt Judith leaned over the bed. Sarah removed the mask, put her face close to her mom’s, and said, “It’s ok Mom. I’m here. Your Sarah is right here. And so is Aunt Judith. She’s right here too.” Mom turned her head, stared into her daughter’s eyes, and said in a quiet, clear voice, “Listen to me Sarah. Even in a storm you can walk with God. Even in a storm.” And then she closed her eyes
and stopped breathing. Sarah quickly slipped the respirator mask back over her mouth and nose, but nothing happened.
“I love you, mom. I love you,” said Sarah.
“Abbey. Abbey,” said Aunt Judith, receiving no response except lifeless silence.
They continued their wistful gaze for a moment longer, leaning forward, wanting to hold back the veil even though they knew it had already fallen. Sarah’s mom was dead. Slowly they turned to each other. They looked at the pain on each other’s faces, and saw, as if in a mirror, their own pain. They saw not only the great loss of a loved one, but the loss of one who had loved them so greatly. They both knew it. Sarah rose from the bedside chair and fell into her aunt’s arms.
Sarah thought she knew what those strange last words had meant. It meant that her mom had worried about things right up to the bitter end. That made sense…but maybe it didn’t. Maybe her mom had been trying to tell her something important. When Sarah asked about it the next day, Aunt Judith waved her hand and said, “That didn’t mean anything, dear. Your mother loved to worry about things. Throw that together with the morphine, and everything else that had happened, and that’s what you get. It didn’t mean anything.” Sarah accepted this explanation mostly because she didn’t have the energy, or the mental wherewithal to do much of anything else. Besides, Mom had been a bit of a crank when it came to “storms”; she saw them everywhere.
Whether Sarah’s mom had actually seen something, or not, if Sarah had made the smallest effort to scan the horizon, she would’ve seen for herself the ominous signs of a gathering storm. Those signs had a name. They were called Veronica Newfield.
Veronica had always brought out the doomsday in Sarah’s mom. When Mom found out somewhat after the fact that Veronica had been smoking weed since the ninth grade, she took it to mean that her warnings had gone unheeded, and that she needed to redouble her evangelizing. Sarah, an innocent bystander, definitely felt the heat of hellfire and heard the gnashing of teeth, even if Aunt Judith didn’t. The whole thing meant next to nothing to Aunt Judith. As long as Veronica stayed out of the newspapers and didn’t openly sully the family name, she didn’t care what her daughter smoked. And when a strange rumor circulated that Dorthea Railer had been the one supplying Veronica with the weed, Aunt Judith laughed it off as totally preposterous. But even if it were true, according to her logic, it only proved that Veronica had the remarkable good sense to get her illegal drug from the safest possible source. It proved responsibility and maturity. And even though that particular rumor most definitely had to be false, it didn’t change the fact that Veronica had gone almost two years, since the little incident in Santa Marcela, without getting into even a speck of real trouble. That’s what Aunt Judith called impressive. Mom called it suspicious. Sarah sided with her aunt. Sometimes Veronica got stoned and acted weird but Sarah had seen her act a lot worse before she ever started getting stoned. If for no other reason than the fact that Veronica had been spending more and more time locked in her room, Sarah had to agree with her aunt: life with Veronica had been getting more tolerable as she got older.
That’s the cousin Sarah left behind when she went away to college, somewhat troubled, but a cousin who went to high school and managed to get decent grades—even if the teachers did let her slide a great deal. When she could be forced out of her hot pants and hip huggers, she wore a size six dress and looked very presentable, even healthy. With a longish face and ears that liked to poke through limp, dishwater hair, she didn’t have the good looks of her mother, but she did have her father’s beautiful blue eyes, and conscientiously made the most out of everything else.
Now, four years later, only the thinnest shadow of this cousin remained. And Sarah, too preoccupied with the circumstances surrounding her mother, never noticed. She didn’t need to be a hero, or a saint, or a sage. She just needed to do what she’d always done: keep an eye on her cousin. She didn’t do it and that would become her biggest regret of all.
Chapter 18
Even though they had started out in the same family and shared a common bond of parentage, Dorthea had never had any kind of relationship with Judith Newfield, at least not a civil one and definitely not one that made her privy to the goings on at Sunny Slope Manor. Likewise, Dorthea had grown up in the same small town as Bill Newfield and, at the time of his death, was the second largest property owner next to him, but that hadn’t gotten her any kind of access to the man or to the Castaneda Corporation, the Newfield empire that traced its wealth back to the Castaneda Spanish Land Grant of 1814. She moved in the wrong circles. Not even reliable second hand intelligence about the Newfields easily came her way. Abigail might’ve been a decent source of such information had it not been for an overdeveloped fear of committing the sin of gossip; she’d rarely talked about anything useful. And yet, despite this almost complete lack of affiliation, Dorthea Railer knew more about the Newfields, including Castaneda, than they knew themselves.
It’s important to know the enemy. That’s why she knew them. And that’s why she knew that Veronica would call the phone number on the little purple card in the little purple gift bag, which she’d found in her car that day after school. On the card Dorthea had written, “I’ve never forgotten how, as just a little girl, you bravely came to my rescue. I do hope that you’ll give me a chance to repay your kindness. Please call. Love, Aunt Dorthea.”
Veronica’s life, even at sixteen, the age when Dorthea reintroduced herself, looked like a giant yawn. She’d had the best of the best and it hadn’t done anything for her. She’d seen it all, or as much as she thought she cared to see, and that hadn’t done anything for her either. By the time Dorthea came along, Veronica had become very much the pouting, bored princess who’d found nothing new under the sun. Instead of fixing the problem by fixing her rotten personality, she turned to Dorthea and her little gift bags. She called the number on the card. She called the first time, as Dorthea knew she would, for the ease of it, and because she liked the excitement and kookiness of getting weed from a famously scary person like Dorthea Railer, and because going behind her mother’s back to “Aunt Dorthea,” her mother’s biggest enemy, made the whole thing just a little bit funny. After a while, when Dorthea started putting bindles of white powder into the bags, Veronica called because she had to.
After that first phone call, when Veronica ventured back to the hotel, Dorthea had everything waiting for her, just as before. Horrick waited by the rear exit and looked as friendly as possible—given his circumstances. He took her up in the same private elevator. She made the same walk from the elevator, past the painting on the wall, past the castle guards, through the darkened foyer, and into the living room with the big window. Just as before, she found Dorthea in a rocking chair, dressed up like a harmless grandmother, watching Lawrence Welk on an old TV. Dorthea greeted her like a favorite relative and invited her to sit on the homey looking sofa that stood next to the rocking chair. For the next ten minutes they talked about school and friends and things happening at the manor. This little talk became a permanent part of their meetings. If Veronica didn’t feel like talking, Dorthea plowed ahead anyway. If the questions made Veronica mad, or suspicious, Dorthea threw in quaint stories about old time Prospect Park or the interesting pickled squash she’d come across or the benefits of a high fiber diet. Then she’d ask more questions. After that Veronica got the bag that she’d come for, and they parted company. Until the next time.
They met, they talked, and Veronica got her bag. And sometimes she got more than that because over the years Dorthea made it her business to be as helpful to Veronica as possible, especially if it meant keeping her out of trouble, such as the time when Veronica smashed her car through a backyard fence down on Cypress Street; Dorthea made the problem go away without Veronica having to lift a finger.
Dorthea wanted power. Veronica wanted a good time. Dorthea accepted her payout over time. Veronica wanted it immediately. Dorthea sacrificed beauty and style so that she might appear kindly
and benign. Veronica suffered the boredom of weekly conversations with an old lady. After two years, Dorthea had all the power she needed and Veronica no longer knew what it meant to have a good time.
Chapter 19
Sarah wanted to get lost. Lost from death, from life, from sadness. She wanted to wrap a blindfold around her brain, drop it off in the middle of nowhere, and let it wander around for a year or two. On the back of a horse you can sometimes get lost like that. Something about the rhythmic clop of their hooves, the swaying of their bodies, the tick-tock regularity of their swishing tails. Sometimes it starts before you even get on, with the grooming, as your eyes hypnotically track the moving plume of dust and the visible path made by each stroke of the brush across the hide. Then there’s the blessed mindlessness of routine: put on the saddle pad, put on the saddle, drape the stirrup over the saddle, reach under the horse for the cinch, tighten the cinch, adjust the stirrups, slip the bridle under the halter, attach the bridle, remove the halter, tighten the cinch again, mount the horse, ride off on the loneliest trail you can find. Sarah liked the barn for many reasons. After her mom died, she liked it because it helped her to get lost.
She still enjoyed Mack’s company, though, even if it meant she couldn’t get lost every time she felt like it.
Tea Cups & Tiger Claws Page 21