by Jason Letts
CHAPTER 7
It wasn’t until the next day that I got around to calling Lindsay back. I was in my office with a few minutes on my hands before Keenan and I were scheduled to have a conference call with Gary Polling about getting started with the partnership. I wasn’t sure which of these calls I was less enthusiastic about.
My sister picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. Everything’s OK though. I know the stuff on the Internet looks bad, but I’m really not bothered about it. I hope you didn’t freak out too much when you heard about it,” I said, absentmindedly clicking on some news links.
“Freak out about what? No, I wasn’t calling about you. That’s not what I need to tell you about,” she said.
I pulled my hand away from the mouse and cast a suspicious look toward the phone, as if it was behaving poorly. I couldn’t say I minded that my sister was oblivious when the rest of the world was discussing my recent sexual history and peer rivalries.
“What is it then?”
“It’s about Mom.”
Lindsay had a terrible habit of saying too much when she didn’t need to and not enough when she needed to say more. Left to my imagination to wonder what kind of problem my mother could be having out in the farmhouse up in the hills of the Catskills where we grew up, it was a tossup between a new drug addiction and a new deadbeat boyfriend.
“Why don’t you go ahead and cut the suspense and tell me what the issue is?” I said, a little annoyed. I heard a groan of disgust over the line.
“Mom’s got a brain tumor. They’re not going to be able to get it out. She’s only got a couple of months left,” she said. Her voice was chiding, which was ridiculous because if she’d just come out and said that I would’ve been appropriately aggrieved about it.
“Cancer?” I gasped. “Is she at the hospital? Did she just get the diagnosis?”
As ambivalent as I was about my mother and her, shall we say, reverse-helicopter parenting style, it was already cutting deep that her situation was terminal. Somehow I felt at risk, like a part of me would die if my mother died.
“No, she’s not at the hospital. She’s at home. Evidently she was having headaches and blackouts, vision problems a few months ago and went to see a local doctor who had her taken to Albany Medical Center. They’ve done everything they’re going to do, and other than some in-home care, she’s pretty much just waiting around to die. Dad was still her emergency contact, not that they could get in touch with him, and I didn’t even find out until earlier this week when she kept forgetting the names of things and was asking me the same questions over and over. She let it slip that she’d seen a doctor and I was finally able to wrangle the whole story out of her.”
“Wow,” I said.
“That wasn’t the first call I’ve had with her since she found out either,” Lindsay went on. “I think she was going to die without telling us.”
It wasn’t until then that I realized I was breathing heavily, sweating even. Worse, that conference call with Gary was starting in about one minute, but I felt like I was going to be so distracted I’d be totally useless.
“That’s terrible. I can’t believe she didn’t tell us right away,” I said, as it crossed my mind that it’d been nearly five years since I’d spoken to her at all. “Do we need to go right up and see her now?”
“Actually Patrick is fighting off the last of a bout of hand, foot, and mouth disease, and he’s been completely miserable. The soonest we can go is Saturday,” she said.
“Aww, poor little man. I’ll meet you at your place and ride up with you,” I said before telling her that I absolutely had to go. But there was one more thing I had to say. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Lindsay said.
I was in a daze as I walked into Keenan’s office. My eyes were watering and the mortality of everything was stamped on each thought I processed. Keenan took one dismayed look at me and opened his mouth just as the phone began to ring.
He hit the button to accept the call on speakerphone. My lips were zipped tight. I felt like if I opened them at all I’d lose my composure completely.
“Gary,” Keenan said cheerfully. “Let me start by thanking you for speaking with Sarah who’s here with me and coming to an agreement. I gather we’re going to help get you in a new ride.”
When Gary Polling’s voice came through, all I could think about was how sickening it had been for him to try to exploit my interest in a deal for his personal sexual satisfaction. At the moment I felt like I could never say another word to him.
“That’s right,” he said. “They had an E-Class on display at the festival, but I’m wondering if we couldn’t bump that up to an S-Class. I mean, I’m doing you guys such a big favor here.”
Keenan narrowed his eyes as he turned to his computer. He clacked on the keyboard until his jaw started to widen.
“If I’m not mistaken the S-Class is more than forty-thousand dollars more than the E-Class, almost twice as much,” he said, visibly dismayed.
“The interior is so much nicer though. You can really feel the difference. There’s a lot of bang for the buck,” he said. Keenan was wringing his hands.
“I think the offer Sarah made you for an E-Class was more than generous, and we’re going to have to hold you to what you agreed to. Now if we could get down to work here on how to start transferring our ad lineup to get them running on your exchange, the best way to do that would be with a few tweaks to your ad creation tool. Getting the pipeline right for maximum efficiency would make all the difference.”
Grumbling came through the speakers.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to make any changes there. The system we have is perfectly serviceable. Besides, as much as you might want a top-of-the-line model, this is the one you agreed to use.”
Keenan took a look at me, wincing, and all I could do was shrug and nod. This seemed to just be the kind of guy Gary Polling was.
“But you must have programmers who could make these adjustments very quickly,” Keenan said.
“Nobody over here is sitting on their thumbs. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and that doesn’t include redoing parts of out interface that work fine as is.”
Keenan sighed, and I could tell he was being careful not to make his frustration audible. As for me, I found myself drifting farther and farther away from the conversation at hand. How could I expend any energy on mollifying this guy when my mother was dying?
I couldn’t help but think about what it would mean for her life as a whole if its conclusion was imminent. If I suddenly developed a brain tumor, would I be able to live with myself knowing that I spent so much time working with advertisements? Was I actually doing anything to make a difference, or was I just creating fodder for online trolls?
The questions stayed with me straight through the weekend when I got into Lindsay’s car and rode up I-87 toward our childhood home a shade north of Saugerties, a point that any map could tell you is firmly in the middle of nowhere. Patrick hadn’t recovered from his illness and had remained at home with his father, Jamie. Lindsay had a face full of concern. She drove with her nose over the steering wheel like any second the road in front of us was going to give way to a bottomless pit.
We pulled off the highway and began winding through the backroads that had once been basically our backyards. Having spent so much time in the city, I’d nearly forgotten what so much empty, undeveloped space looked like. A cold sense of dread swept over me, and not just at the prospect of seeing my mother in a debilitated condition with fraying faculties.
I realized I didn’t want to face a childhood I only escaped by the skin of my teeth and a mountain of student loan debt.
We called our home the farmhouse, but there was really no farm that went with it. The forest gave way begrudgingly to a small patch of land with a Victorian style house on it. When I left for college I remembered taking a last look at chipped blue paint and broken
porch boards. Now the place seemed on the verge of collapse. Lindsay pulled into the driveway and crept along slowly. The unkempt lawn screamed of a tick infestation. A fallen tree had missed crushing the house by about ten feet and hadn’t ever been cleared. The limb of another tree was resting ominously on some power lines. The stuffed mailbox promised an assortment of horrors that society was waiting to inflict on us.
“What are we going to do with this place after she’s gone? I have to imagine the land has some value,” Lindsay wondered aloud as we got out of the car.
I didn’t respond, choosing instead to wonder how I had made it out of here alive. It also crossed my mind that I would have to say something to my mom when we saw her, and I didn’t have a clue beyond offering some sympathy for her impending doom. The memories rushed in to punctuate every thought. I’d say, “I’m so sorry about the tumor…and for letting you keep that TV perched on the sink right next to the bathtub.”
But instances of thoughtless negligence were only the beginning of my parents’ crimes.
The door creaked as it opened, and we entered a space that felt even chillier and unwelcoming than the outdoors. What struck me most was how everything, the walls, the floors, the furniture, the wall decorations, all looked so faded that they couldn’t have ever been new.
“Hello?” Lindsay called up the stairs. I looked instead toward the kitchen, where a row of bourbon bottles lined the wall. Her taste for them was something she picked up from dad.
At the same time, there were things I saw that immediately hit a soft spot. The living room had a small closet attached for no logical reason whatsoever, and I jammed a small chair in there and watched TV through slats in the door. Once we got upstairs, I glanced in my bedroom, which had been my sanctuary and my prison after Lindsay had left for college. Nothing inside had been touched, my bed waiting there for me to climb into it as if I’d gotten out of it this morning.
My mother’s bedroom was at the end of the hall. Before my dad left, I was just old enough to remember hearing them having sex and wondering what all the noise was about. Since then, Elizabeth Faverly had worked a number of random jobs, like public library clerk, janitor, or secretary. The only lucky break she had was earlier when my father had his pinky crushed and got a worker’s compensation award, which she managed to get a hold of first when he left.
Her history made me remember what a privilege it was for me to actually have the flexibility and freedom to want to pursue a meaningful life. My mother’s life seemed tailor made to simply pass the time, and now it looked like she’d passed almost all of it.
When we entered her bedroom, I’d been expecting something much worse than what I saw. She didn’t seem all that different than the last time I saw her. Slightly more gray in the hair, but it was all there. She was in bed, but that seemed to be because she’d just woken up and not because she was sick. The image of her there burned into my memory as what I would look like when I got old.
“I can’t believe you came! It’s so good to see you. How is your little one?”
My mother gushed at my sister while I peeked over from behind Lindsay’s shoulder. Her smile only faltered a little when she saw me.
“Patrick looks worse off than you are, but he’ll get better. We came as soon as we could,” Lindsay said. There was a wooden chair painted blue and a brown bench against the wall near the closet where we sat. Mom’s bed had a quilt comforter that seemed to be held together mostly by cat hair.
“Hi,” I said to fill the lull. “Are you in pain? Can I get you anything?”
The forced smile I saw was one I could remember distinctly from so many different moments in my life. After getting reading honors in grade school. After winning a trip to see a Broadway play in eighth grade. After making the varsity soccer team. After surviving my attack.
“I didn’t want you to worry about me or feel obligated to do anything. You’ve got your own lives to live now,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t spare some time to make sure you’re comfortable or that your care is in order. You should’ve told us right away,” Lindsay said, plainly scolding her. My mother took on a look of remorse so pure it was a wonder she didn’t begin to cry.
“It’s comfort care really. Someone drops in with dinner. She’d wash me if I asked or tidy up, but after taking some pills I mostly send her on her way. But I can still fend for myself. My final affairs are all in order,” she said.
“You mean funeral arrangements?” I asked, drawing a reproachful look that made me regret speaking up.
“No, I haven’t done any of that. I’m talking about my will. Don’t take this personally, Sarah, but I’m leaving everything to Lindsay. She can figure out what she needs for her family and what’s fair for you. I can’t handle digging through that in my state.”
“Oh,” I said, wondering how she went from barely needing any medical care to being unable to divide by fifty percent so quickly. But it really didn’t surprise me. She had long ago given up any pretense that I was as loved as Lindsay. My sister gave me a bashful nod, which I took to mean that she would do the right thing. I had a rough guess from things Lindsay had mentioned that Mom had about ten thousand in cash left, then there was some debt on the house remaining that would eat into any proceeds from a sale.
“Have you gotten outside much? Spring is in the air and the river must be gorgeous,” Lindsay said, introducing a lighter topic.
“A little, but I get out of breath so quickly. At least I’ve been reading a lot lately. The library doesn’t know what hit them,” Mom said.
I began to ask what she’d been reading when there was a crash and screech from the cat downstairs. It sounded like a bowl had shattered.
“Oh, what has he done this time?” Mom groaned.
“I’ll take care of it,” Lindsay said quickly, hopping out of the chair before I could move a muscle. It was a shame because I would’ve much rather cleaned the kitchen floor, but instead I looked back toward the bed to see my mother casting an unflinching gaze at me. Her face looked paler than I remembered now, and there wasn’t any movement of the sheets to suggest she was even breathing.
“So what are you doing these days?” Mom asked, almost managing to be polite about it.
“I’ve been working for a marketing company. My boss is really great. He just sent me on a trip to Austin, Texas for a festival presentation,” I said.
“Sounds nice,” Mom went on. “How did that go?”
“Pretty good,” I said, sighing a little. “I made some arguments but I felt like the only one who really cared was this one guy from Washington state.”
My mother cringed, shifting away from me ever so slightly.
“How did your boss feel about you sleeping with the man at the festival? Oh, come now. I haven’t forgotten how things work. But I did think I taught you better than to go laying with man after man depending on who was around.”
My whole body seemed to clench up, my jaw, fingers, toes. Whatever tumor she had didn’t manage to disrupt her penchant for doling out her tough love as she called it. I was too old to take it without a fight though.
“Are you sure you’re not imagining saying something? I don’t recall you ever speaking to me directly about the subject, and you certainly weren’t teaching by example,” I said.
I think I would’ve preferred it if my mother had gotten angry and vindictive, but instead she retained the same tired, apathetic expression. I always got flack from her no matter what kind of boyfriend I had and what the circumstances were, but I wasn’t prepared for where she’d go next after I resisted.
“I told him that I only wanted one, that my sweet baby girl was more than I ever needed. He hated the noise though and was already disappearing for a week at a time here or there. No clue what he was doing or with whom. But then he came back one night half drunk and horny. Saying that I was fed up with him and that he needed to keep his hands off me did nothing. Lindsay’s starving cries didn’t do anything
either. I just couldn’t stop him and the whole time Lindsay was screaming. No one was going to feed her but me and I couldn’t get to her. By the time it was over she was in a state I’d never forget. Before she was settled he’d slunk out again.
“When you were born and I saw your face for the first time, I knew you were going to be trouble. But more than that, I knew that two screaming kids would eventually drive him away for good.”
My throat went dry and for a moment I couldn’t speak. Even when I managed to cough a little, I didn’t know what to say. I felt like this could’ve been a tragedy that brought us together, but instead my mother shifted the blame onto me for it and so many other things in her life. There was a part of me that hardened then. It was like she was already gone, if all she was going to do was blame me for existing.
I was about to say as much when I heard creaking on the stairs. Lindsay was returning, and my mother’s eyes shifted eagerly to the door. A look of joy settled onto her face as my sister walked in, brushing her hands.
“I can’t believe you came. What a surprise! I thought you’d bring that little bundle of joy, but instead you brought…who is this?”
Sunday night I had a dream that my teeth were falling out and my skin was peeling off. It was all I could think about Monday, leaving me unsettled and uncomfortable the entire day through. I planned to hit the gym as soon as the workday was over to try to boost my mood, but a visit from Keenan a half hour before quitting time changed that.
“If I’d known it was going to be like this I’d never have sent you to talk to Gary. I think I get why they’re a second tier player. It’s not because their platform is deficient or doesn’t have the reach. It’s because their CEO exudes waves of frustration and disappointment. It’s got me tearing my hair out,” Keenan said, flopped against the chair in my office.
