Things Unsaid: A Novel

by Diana Y. Paul

  “You asshole,” Joanne blurted before she could stop herself. “Do you want to destroy any shred of dignity I have left? Bankrupt me and our daughters? I need half the proceeds from the sale of our house.”

  “Bitch. I’m not the one who wanted this divorce,” Al said.

  She wanted to chew the smugness right off his face. “And I suppose your living in that house while I had to pay rent somewhere else doesn’t count in the housing settlement?” She wanted to listen to Jules’s advice: “Don’t fight over petty things. It will cost more.” But she couldn’t help herself. This wasn’t petty.

  “If we don’t come to an agreement, we’ll be forced to go to litigation,” was all that Seligman said.

  Papers were signed, subtracting the amount of the home repairs but not Al’s estimated labor. No consideration was given to the rent she paid for her tiny apartment. The net sum that would go to her after attorney fees would be enough to pay off her loan, but not all of her surgery and therapy. It would leave her nothing to live on but what Jules could provide. A Real Gem still had no value.

  Where was Jules when she needed her?

  RECOVERY

  “Mother’s suffered a stroke.”

  Jules had received the same message every day for three days from both Joanne and Andrew. Joanne had enlisted Sarah and Megan into the mix, too—Jules had gotten a “Grandma is dying” text from each of them.

  “I know,” she texted back.

  Jules was walking while reading their texts. It was two blocks from Bayview Apartments to the Palo Alto Addiction Recovery Services. That was her routine now. Her morning began by standing below the window of Zoë’s room and waving. The front desk receptionist, Trudy Wang, had given her Zoë’s daily schedule—against all rules and regulations, but Trudy seemed to feel her pain, so much so that she was willing to risk her own employment by giving Jules that information. Did she have a family member going through the same thing? Jules wondered. Her actions made more sense if that were the case.

  So Jules waited in the perimeter of the outside courtyard and never veered off from staring at the corner room on the third floor. She would love to throw a pebble up at the window, Romeo and Juliet–style, to try to get her daughter’s attention. But she was afraid of drawing the attention of the center’s staff.

  She felt her phone vibrate. More text messages from Joanne or Andrew. They were supposed to keep her posted about her mother’s condition, but not at ten o’clock and two o’clock. She had instructed them not to. They kept texting anyway, but she never read them or texted back until bedtime, and then she shut down her cell phone for the night.

  Jules had read that spouses often can’t bear the loss of their partner. But her father’s loss was an ambiguous loss, wasn’t it? For their mother? Perhaps for all of them? Less than a month since he had died.

  Her phone buzzed yet again. Jules caved and looked at the e-mail from Joanne: “I’m at the hospital with her—University of Washington Hospital in Seattle. They’re still doing tests. To see how extensive the damage is. A clot in her brain, they suspect. Can you come as soon as you can?”

  Jules’s mouth went dry. Teetering, grabbing at one of the bushes on the grounds to steady herself, she wiped the sweat from her hands onto the denim. Left a dark stain.

  Jules’s knuckles turned white. Her other hand clenched into a fist. She could picture her sister crying, bent over, as she composed that e-mail. She kept reading: “Mom was so upset, Jules. That you didn’t come to the memorial service at Tahoma—for the military honors and everything. I think it was just too much for her.”

  Earlier that week, their mother had been in the SafeHarbour walk-athon to raise funds for breast cancer. All the little old ladies had dressed up like the Seahawks. There was newspaper and television coverage and everything. Their mother placed third. She had thought they might want a photo of her, the best-looking woman in the seniors group, so she’d had her hair done the day before in anticipation and had heavily sprayed it so her bangs wouldn’t curl with her sweat. Always ready. In her fanny pack were her favorite cosmetics. An audience cheered her as she crossed the finish line.

  Joanne and the girls had taken her to Fuki Sushi afterwards. She said it was to remind her of their father, even though she refused to step into the place when he was alive. But she picked at the food. Didn’t really eat much. And by the time they got her back to Joanne’s apartment, Joanne said, they knew something was wrong.

  “She kept taking her compact out,” Joanne had told Jules later that night when she called to tell her the news. “Wiping her forehead, which was sweaty. Said she felt clammy. Oh, around ten o’clock she started really complaining that she wasn’t feeling so hot.” Joanne’s voice cracked.

  “But you know how Mom can be an unhappy camper. I thought the music and alcohol might have given her a bitch of a headache. So I was getting the futon made up for her to spend the night when I heard a crash. There’s Mom—lying on the kitchen floor, still conscious but she was having trouble speaking. The right side of her face looked like an awful Halloween mask. Droopy, lips all twisted—like a Munch.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I called 911. But, Jules, I was shaking so hard I could hardly push the buttons on the phone. Wanted to get Mom to a hospital as fast as I could, but I was too afraid to drive. I think this is it. It’s serious. A stroke. Massive.”

  Poor Joanne! Jules had almost been able to hear her sister’s heart pounding.

  “Oh—” Joanne’s voice had broken off. There was a pause. “When can you come out here? I can’t do this all by myself.”

  That was the last time Jules had spoken with Joanne on the phone. She hadn’t answered her calls since.

  Jules looked up at the window again. She had memorized her daughter’s schedule—every meal, every group and private session. Even her exercise and art classes. Zoë had exactly thirty minutes at ten fifteen in the morning to either shower or read. Her free time. Like a postal carrier, even in the rain, Jules stood there under her umbrella promptly at ten fifteen. To wait. To hope. And again at two fifteen she stood there. And waited. And hoped. Another thirty minutes for Zoë to be by herself. What did Zoë do at those times? Did she read? She knew her daughter loved novels about family sagas. No vampire fiction for her. Just family curses. But then again, Zoë had changed. Maybe her taste in books had, too.

  How she wished she were allowed to leave books for her. She had tried once, but Trudy warned her that the security guard would be called if she dropped by the waiting room again.

  Jules texted Mike to let him know about her mother’s condition. And that she was with Zoë. She would not fly to Seattle yet. She just couldn’t.

  Almost at the end of the week, Jules saw Zoë for the first time since she was admitted to rehab. December 18, 2:22 p.m. What a smile! Her moment with Zoë. And Mike had been there that day with her. Luckily, Zoë had not taken the OxyContin for long, and had only taken it in small dosages. She was resilient. Her doctors were very pleased. And so was she. Ecstatic. A miracle. Recovery.

  “Rehab will soon be a thing of the past,” Zoë declared proudly. “My doctors say I can go home soon.”

  To be a family again, Jules hoped.

  She reached out and touched her daughter’s hair. Zoë had never liked her touching her hair—not since she had become a teenager. She’d say her hair needed to be washed. Or that Jules was messing it up. But Jules couldn’t resist touching it now. Her daughter’s hair was lovely again. Long and lush. Not falling out in patches, as it had been before rehab.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Pause. “I know you don’t like me touching it, but I just love your hair.” She cried into her daughter’s hair, kissing the top of her head the way she had when Zoë was a toddler.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I know what you’ve done for me.” Jules was surprised to hear her daughter’s voice break as she said that. Zoë didn’t like anyone to see her cry. “Quiet crying,” she had called it when she was in k
indergarten. So Jules pretended not to notice now.

  She cleared her throat. “We’ll talk about college options later. I’ve been doing a lot of research on psychology programs for you, sweetie. And your dad is on board, too. We’ll work this out together.” She willed herself not to tremble.

  They kissed, a mother-daughter, shy sort of kiss.

  “You chose me after all,” Zoë whispered.

  Waiting standby at the SFO airport for a flight to Seattle on Alaska Airlines, Jules curled up under her jacket on a vinyl-and-steel chair. She was bone tired. The waiting area was as dreary and depressing as her mood. Going to see her dying mother. Beige dominated the curtains, walls, linoleum.

  When they brought Zoë home, Mike hadn’t said anything before but now volunteered to stay at her apartment while she flew out to see her dying mother. She had loved how he used to crawl into bed with her and they fell asleep curled up, warm and safe, in a spooning position. The silence had been reassuring.

  Now, turning, curled up fetal-style, alone in a plastic chair at the airport terminal, she thought of her mother and her Zoë and reached inside her purse for her travel pillbox. She knew she would have to nibble on some Ambien if she was going to sleep on the plane.

  LETTING GO

  The University of Washington hospital room machinery was all shiny stainless steel. Jules shuddered involuntarily. Merely looking at her mother was painful, even alarming. She seemed shrunken—an unbelievably small homunculus, spine twisted. The turquoise hospital clothes seemed draped over a cadaver that was getting smaller and smaller before her eyes. It both was and was not her mother’s face. But she had waited for her after all. Was Andrew coming?

  She hugged Joanne, whose eyes were all glassy, lids tear swollen, and her sister seemed filled with water—insubstantial and vulnerable.

  “Hello, Mother. How are you?” Jules bent over her mother’s bones to give her a kiss on her cheek. Joanne walked over to the other side of the bed and patted their mother’s hand, and Jules robotically copied her. The hand she touched was cold, like their grandpa’s hands had been in his open casket, Jules remembered. Like Italian marble. The only dead body she had ever touched.

  “It takes … a lot of … to talk,” her mother rasped.

  Jules and Joanne looked at each other in silence. Sarah and Megan sat there, quietly watching.

  “Why don’t you two go downstairs and get something to eat?” Jules suggested.

  “We don’t want to leave Grandma,” Megan said, her large doe eyes turned downward.

  Even Sarah’s eye shadow seemed to have lost its glitter.

  “Hello. How are you doing, Mrs. Whitman?” the attending nurse, clipboard in hand, asked brusquely, walking over to look at the machine readings. “She’ll be here when you come back,” Joanne whispered to her two daughters. “Go on. It’ll be good for you to get a little fresh air.”

  Sarah and Megan left the room. “It won’t be long now,” the nurse said to Jules and Joanne, smiling gently. “I take it you’re family.”

  Jules cleared her throat and nodded.

  “Well, I’ll tell you … she has a very strong will to live, in spite of her vital signs. She doesn’t want to let go.” Still smiling, the nurse left, dimming the light as she went.

  “She’s mumbling,” Joanne said, bending over their mother’s mouth. “Mom’s saying what a hateful man Dad was!”

  “No! You’re kidding, right?” Jules leaned in and put her left ear closer to their mother’s mouth. It was hard to get close to her; it always had been.

  Her mother picked at the hospital sheets—agitated, jerky—as if she were having a small seizure. Her pressure was dropping. Her pulse was decreasing rapidly. But her eyes still seemed to give off heat.

  “Your father’s such a … selfish man,” she now gasped into Jules’s ear. She doesn’t remember that Dad is already dead. Jules felt disconnected, like she was looking at some exotic animal in a zoo. All she needed was to take out a notepad and write field notes. “But … I was selfish, too. Didn’t know how not to be.” Her mother’s voice gathered force, compelling and apologetic all at once. “Mother … mother …” Jules thought that’s what she heard her mother saying. She was probably delirious.

  Her mother tried again: “I wanted to be a good mother. I tried, but I don’t think … I don’t think I knew how.”

  Her eyes closed, but she kept talking in her sleep. Her skin was a purplish-blue, her legs a network of green veins. She would be mortified to see her diva appearance had vanished, Jules thought. To see what she looked like in the end.

  Jules took both of her mother’s hands in hers: cold, almost unbearably so. Their mother had always been self-conscious about those hands, thinking that the curves of her fingernails were too rounded, like claws. Now her nail beds were aquamarine. She breathed in short little pants, stopped and started again. Her hands were folded in on themselves like clams. Jules had always been afraid of those hands, but now she kissed them gently.

  She wanted her mother to leave this world now. In a moment when she seemed more at peace—not in a rage. Jules stroked her hand, then gently glided her fingers up her arm. She heard rattling, the sound of dying, deep in her mother’s lungs and upper throat. But it was almost rhythmic—musical, even.

  “Mother? Why don’t I ask the nurse for something to help you sleep?” Jules whispered, as if she were talking to Zoë when she was a baby. She stiffly bent down to kiss her mother. The air seemed to puff out, a blowing of the lips with every exhalation. Her mother’s lips, once so beautiful, ruby red and vital, looked defeated. Jules looked away.

  Andrew blew into the room, throwing off his heavy overcoat before sitting down to snack on potato chips and pretzels. Joanne and Jules both looked at him, and then down at the coat he had thrown on the floor. Stepping around it like it was the outline of a murder victim at a crime scene, Joanne took a few steps towards him and tried to hug him. He leaned back, jaw dropping, as he saw their mother. He remembered her lecturing on what his and Abigail’s son should look like, a cram course on Mendel’s theory of genetics, so many years ago. Almost ten.

  Even with Andrew sitting down, the room suddenly felt too crowded. Too confining and claustrophobic. The space seemed to be shrinking, closing in on them. Like their mother.

  “You know, I hear her voice inside my head,” Andrew said, choking on the words. “And Dad’s.” He rose and went to their mother, bent down to kiss her forehead. She doubled over coughing, but nothing came up.

  “Would you like something to drink, Mom?” Joanne asked as she tried to fluff the pillow beneath her head.

  “No!” she panted. “Everything … tastes … bitter. I want … I want … to die. I never thought it would be like this.” And with that, their mother’s mouth collapsed. She exhaled once, very loudly and harshly, a fish out of water. Two long shudders followed. Her eyes snapped wide open, unblinking, looking less lifelike than her Sarah doll. Then they fluttered shut like a moth too close to the light. Fluid, perhaps a single tear, leaked out. Jules dabbed it with a Kleenex.

  Jules ran down the hall. She spotted the attending nurse at the on-call station, chatting with one of the doctors. Jules waited until the nurse noticed her before stepping closer. The doctor, glancing at Jules, left.

  “I think our mother has died. Can you please come quickly? Tell us what’s happening? If she’s still alive?”

  The nurse reached out to touch Jules’s hand. Ordinarily she didn’t like to be touched by strangers, but the nurse’s touch soothed her.

  “Let’s go,” the nurse said as they walked together to room 583.

  When they entered the room, the nurse checked the machines. “She’s not gone yet,” she said gently. “Almost, but not yet.”

  As if sleepwalking, Jules went to her mother and bent over her hands again. She held one of them as she reached into her tote bag. She had read someplace that talking to the dying was a comfort to their departing soul. That hearing was the last sens
e to go.

  “Mother, it’s just us here: Joanne, Andrew, and me,” she said, She pulled out her copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  Somewhere deep in her mother’s throat, gurgling bubbled up. “Don’t leave,” her mother rasped—or so Jules thought. Her voice was so faint now. Hard to hear.

  “Are you ready now?” Jules whispered softly, feeling nauseous, though she didn’t know why.

  Her mother’s eyelids were still, but her hand tightened like a vise on Jules’s.

  There’s still time, Jules thought, to be the good daughter. So she opened her book—a book for the dying, for transitioning from one rebirth to another, for change—to the page that was folded over. The words she read throbbed, pressing up, behind her collarbone. She remembered how little Max, her student, had described words as having power, the power to surprise. “Words move,” he’d told her.

  Jules read: “If we cannot stop struggling to hold on to our old life, all our fear and yearning will drag us into yet another painful reality. Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home.”

  Andrew blew his nose. Joanne sobbed.

  “At death, we lose everything we thought was real. Unless we can let go of all the things we cherish in our life, we are terrified.” Her throat tightened. The words became blurry on the page. She stopped reading.

  Then Jules began to sing—“Someone to Watch Over Me,” her mother’s torch song.

  Joanne and Andrew hummed along, halting frequently, choking, quietly patting Jules on the back.

  Her mother’s memorial service was only the second one Jules had been to. The first was the open-casket affair of her Sicilian grandfather, who’d died over forty-five years ago, the day before Father’s Day.