I Liked My Life

by Abby Fabiaschi

  “I will, Mom, I will,” Rory soothes, holding back her tears for later.

  “Don’t you dare let my death be another excuse.”

  Rory nods. “Okay, Mom, I won’t, you’ll see.”

  Around noon, Linda’s eyes jolt open. Rory continues running her hand down her mother’s arm and asks if she needs anything. “No, nothing, my baby girl.” Her breathing slows, but she clutches Rory’s hand with startling strength. “Just promise you’ll open your heart to love again.”

  “I promise,” Rory whispers back.

  Her spastic breathing and mild moans continue throughout the afternoon, but those are Linda’s last words.

  I try to keep this moment for Rory, but envy seeps in. I’m pretty sure I left the world screaming, Oh shit. Hollywood taught me that one’s last seconds are spent looping through life’s biggest moments, but all I remember is the wind carrying snot back up my face and thinking how disgusting it felt.

  My own mother’s death was no better. During our last conversation she called me a selfish martyr. Her mind was already going. I found it an amusing oxymoron, but later I uncovered a cruel truth in her words. Did I need to be needed? Did I use sacrifice to inflate my self-worth? My mother died the next day, alone and drunk. They found her covered in vomit. At the time I assumed she did it so Meg and I would regret the boundaries we set to protect our children from her drunken chaos, but later I came to see that was unfair, almost narcissistic. Her death had nothing to do with me. She just saw no reason to keep on keeping on.

  Linda’s death is exponentially more profound. She leaves in phases, willfully, as if someone is there, talking her through the steps. I didn’t have that—no light, no escort, nothing. I was simply spit back into the atmosphere. I try to extract the guidance Linda receives for my own benefit, but the conversation is encrypted. Even before her last breath, life leaves her. I sense she’s now nearer to me than Rory, not in the dimension I’m in, but closer, higher. I shudder at the idea I’ve been bypassed. I assume Linda is in heaven, so where the hell am I? As if in answer to that question, my spirit ascends, furthering the distance between the world I left and me faster than the times before. When the ride stops, I look down, terrified they won’t still be there, but they are.

  * * *

  Brian arrives as they wheel away Linda’s covered body. He sobs, the way guilty grievers do, hugging Rory almost violently.

  She stands there, letting him pull strength from her. When he pauses to catch his breath, she gently moves away. “She was ready.”

  He’s incredulous. “How can you say that? Why aren’t you crying?”

  She finds his audacity comical in that delirious way only very sad things can be to very tired people. She holds back the raw chuckle she feels. “I want Mom to be comfortable more than I want her here for me.”

  “But I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

  Rory looks at her younger brother, deciding whether to let the comment slide. “No,” she says, “you’d have to have been here for that.”

  “I came as soon as I could. You can’t just bail on a court date.”

  Rory rests an arm around his shoulder, rubbing his back the way their mother would have. “Death doesn’t wait to be convenient. And when you’re older, you’ll look back and see that life doesn’t either.”

  He stiffens. “I have a great life.”

  “You have a busy life, where you make a lot of money and eat dinner alone.” She hadn’t meant to be so pointed. “I’m sorry, I’m exhausted. I’ll call tonight so we can make arrangements.”

  I present Rory’s subconscious with the hypocrisy of her words as she walks to her car. Rory doesn’t make a lot of money, but she eats dinner alone. As her mother so eloquently pointed out, she, too, is closed to the world. If work is Brian’s vice, grief is Rory’s. I need her to recognize this as a flaw—the only one I’ve sussed after months of stalking—so she’ll take her mother’s parting advice seriously. Rory needs Eve and Brady as much as they need her. Our goals are colliding.

  When she gets home it doesn’t seem possible she’s only been gone half a day. The twelve hours at the hospital spanned a week in her heart. Greta sits patiently on the couch, honored to be Linda’s messenger. “Your mom gave me this weeks ago,” she says, handing Rory an envelope.

  Rory offers a wearied smile, unsurprised. Her mom was a schemer. “Thanks.”

  “Just so you know, honey”—Greta presses her hand against her heart—“your mom had a lot of clarity yesterday while you were tutoring. We talked about her childhood, her dancing, her labor with you. Did you know she picked Rory because it sounded powerful?”

  “Yeah, she told me that.”

  “Well, yesterday, she called you her lion and I realized why she thought of Rory as a powerful name—Roar-y.” Greta giggles. “Only your mom would think of that. She was quite a lady.”

  Rory embraces Greta with ostensible gratitude. “Thank you … so much, for, well, for everything.”

  “I’m going to miss her. And you. Stay in touch?”

  Rory nods. Greta and Linda were the same age, both widows. They grew so close over the past few years that Rory had come to consider Greta part of the family. That she doesn’t intend to disappear with her last paycheck is a relief to Rory.

  Greta collects her things and goes. Rory sits on her mom’s cot and opens the letter. There’s no greeting, just Linda’s distinctive script.

  Don’t put me in a coffin like your father. I have no desire to continue taking up space in this world (or to be consumed by maggots, for that matter). Have me cremated and buried in our plot. No wake … No death dress or makeup … No postfuneral potluck. I’m not beholden to any religious rules—I am myself a spiritual being. If you have a memorial, make it a celebration. This is not a tragic death. I’m ready.

  And Rory, me leaving should give you time to focus on you. Enough already with the pain and guilt. You’ll see Emma again, when the time is right. Until then, I’ll watch over her. You’re here with a purpose. Anaïs Nin wrote, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” or something like that, and she’s right.

  I’ll be sending love, Mom

  Rory’s mind explodes with images and recollections. The way she said “God bless you” right before you sneezed. Her hard laughter the day I put lines all over my body with permanent marker because I wanted to be a tiger. When she spoke at Emma’s funeral and said that nothing will ever make sense again, but we still need to seek goodness wherever we go.

  She sits in the room her mom faded in, enjoying her scent, reading the note again and again, weeping. When she finishes, Rory dries her eyes with a lightness any mourner would covet. Rory did right by Linda; she won’t suffer the way I did.

  When I told Meg last Christmas I felt somewhat responsible for our mother’s death, she laughed it off, saying, “Mom dug her grave one drink at a time.”

  True enough, but it wasn’t always that way. I have three years on Meg; I remember things she doesn’t. Before the zany jogging suits and hallway puke and everything else, she was a middle-class socialite, if there is such a thing. She attracted strong personalities like her friend Eve and my father. The hostess with the mostess, everyone agreed.

  At eleven, I was the only one unimpressed.

  I saw my mother as someone who let life happen to her. The cookbooks she loved, the clothes she wore, even mundane decisions like which flowers to plant each spring were all based on popular opinion. She’d rather be boring than risk ridicule. This fear was likely born from her own bad habit of calling out anyone who dared to differentiate. Though I was too young to know it, there’s a strong correlation between judgment and insecurity.

  I watched in awe as my mother’s girlfriends broke the mold. I remember Eve stopping over after a court appearance, decked out in a smart suit, telling me about the time she led a band of ladies to a D.C. women’s rally. “Can you believe it was 1972 and women still didn’t have equal protection under the law?”
I replied to my hero that, no, I couldn’t believe it. She told me to hold on to my chair because here it was—1982—and fifteen states still hadn’t ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, which was signed in both houses a few months after the rally Eve attended. I understood the legislation as historic, and in my naïveté, Eve played a major role. When I asked my mother if she went to D.C., she warned me to be careful what I wished for. “Equal rights? Sheesh. There’s a lot your father does that I want no part of.” I was disappointed. Women were demanding change, willing to serve in the military if that’s what it took, and yet my mom seemed proud that she voted for whomever my father told her to.

  By the time I was twelve her dependence repulsed me. Puberty kicked in. I scoffed when she offered up homemade cookies, saying obnoxious things like, “You do realize you wouldn’t have to be on diets all the time if you stopped eating so many cookies, right?” Where the hell did I find the nerve? (Looking back, I have an idea where. She and my father had started to have a rocky go of it. I’d snicker alongside him as he berated her for letting any tiny household task slide. I mean, really, Janine, he’d say, leaning over the counter into her personal space, what the hell were you doing all day? How his disappointment became my anger is less clear. All I know is I let my aversion be known, and by my thirteenth birthday, my mother was drunk before noon. It was as if she turned into the useless character my father and I cast her as.)

  If at first I was just a kid in need of proper discipline, once my mother morphed into a raging alcoholic I became a teenager with a vendetta. We were neglected—forgotten at practices, undersupervised, left to clean up bodily fluids that my mother was unable to contain—but I never examined how it got to that point. I never wondered why my mom self-medicated. We were too busy raising ourselves to question the reason we were raising ourselves.

  My persecution was relentless. I took care to point out her flaws in front of an audience, so all would know I hadn’t been infected with her same feeble nature. I poked and poked and poked.

  The enormity of how I contributed to her backstory came crashing down on me last November. Brady and I were on a date night and happened into the same Thai restaurant my family went the night of my college graduation. It had been twenty-two years, but the ambiance was oddly preserved. When I spotted the booth we occupied, the scene rushed to my mind: over dinner, my mother declared in her scrambled speech that my next major milestone would be marriage. I looked at her with irreverence. “I don’t need a husband to make milestones, Mom.”

  Her eyes widened. I assumed I’d upset her sensibilities, which had been my intent, but that night with Brady all those years later I had more context. I was, by then, a mother myself. Looking back on the scene, I saw her expression for what it was—not shock, but fear. My mother was afraid of me. She shook her head fiercely, swearing she only meant it’d be the next big celebration in my honor. My father, Meg, and I all rolled our eyes. There’s no such thing as going from a drunk to a solid point. “I’m not a prize,” I said, enunciating each word to highlight my mother’s slur. “Women are honored for things besides marriage and children. I know that’s hard for you to understand.” I accentuated you to be sure the insult was clear, but there was no need. She’d been my tomato target for years.

  After reliving that graduation memory, I analyzed our relationship in a way I hadn’t thought to when we were both alive, and neglected to after her sudden death when there was a coffin to buy and awkward postfuneral party to host. During this unexpected slump, I dissected every fight we had with maternal goggles on, and came to see my mother wasn’t out to get Meg and me. She just couldn’t handle life. Perspective matured, I grew to view her addiction as almost predictable. She was a small-town girl who married her high-school sweetheart. My father had a strong, demanding personality. He controlled her highs and lows from the age of sixteen. They had no mortgage left on the three-bedroom house they bought in 1968. She didn’t see what more one could want. Not upsetting the applecart, as she often preached, had served her well.

  But society turned on her. What was once a woman’s duty suddenly became passé. All her friends got jobs while my mom was busy swapping recipes with the grandmothers in our neighborhood. Imagine how stunned she must’ve been to realize the community no longer held her blind familial devotion in high esteem. Even my father wished he’d attached himself to someone more cosmopolitan, more worldly. And so he did—on the side. I envision my mother growing weak from abandonment and disrespect and finding strength, or at least solace, in Carlo Rossi’s wine jugs, a man whose picture we saw so often Meg called him our grandfather.

  So what came first? There’s no doubt she was a shitty mom from twelve on, but did I send her on that course? During the family portion of what proved to be another failed rehab attempt, a doctor in a crisp lab coat explained the science behind the disease of alcoholism. It was all right there: my mother was genetically screwed. There were dozens of triggers—me, my dad, traffic—but only one person in control of the hand lifting that glass to her lips. And yet, the memory of how ungrateful and unpleasant I was gnawed at me. I started questioning my own evening chardonnay, my own loneliness. Brady traveled a lot. Eve got her license. I was free, but I was lost. My mother was long gone, but her memory suddenly had a grip on my present.

  Meg and Brady had no patience for it. A drunk is a drunk because they like to get drunk, they said. But I felt guilty. My role in it all haunted me. Brady will be alarmed when he reaches that part of my journal. It’s a relief he’s sticking to an entry a day. I have six more months of documented sanity.

  For the first time, I wonder where my mother is. Perhaps Linda had a welcoming committee because the predeceased were excited for her arrival. Would I blame Mom for thinking she deserved death to herself? I can almost hear her encourage my father not to go to any trouble, that sometimes it’s best to leave good enough alone.

  Once again I find myself involuntarily elevating. Just the act of questioning my position relative to hers sparks the shift. My spirit hangs on a ladder and I just climbed several rungs.

  I struggle to re-focus on Rory, the change instantly evident. My prowess is weakened. I can no longer make out thoughts as if there’s a script to match. I need to sync the bits and pieces I extract with what I know and what I infer. Tick, tock. I’ve officially been put on notice that my time is running out.

  * * *

  Eve is defensive the next morning when Rory cancels their session. “Is this because of me?”

  “You?”

  “I know it was none of my business to ask all those questions the other day.”

  Rory senses the importance of setting the record straight. Here too is a girl with enough guilt on her hands. “No, no,” she assures. “My mother passed away.”

  “Oh. My. God. She died? And you’re calling me?”

  The comment makes Rory self-conscious. “It was expected,” she justifies. “She was ill.”

  “Yeah, but still. I’m sorry. I didn’t, like, know.” Then, to Rory’s astonishment, Eve starts to cry.

  “It was her time,” Rory says, before catching her mistake. Eve’s cry goes an octave higher. For Eve, this isn’t about Linda, it’s about me, and it hadn’t been my time. “Are you going to be okay, Eve? Is your dad home?”

  “Don’t ask about me! God. This is about you. I know that. I’m sorry, Rory. I’m so sorry I’m crying. I don’t know why.”

  Rory does. Every new death brings back the full weight of those already gone. I don’t need to be able to read every thought to know that memories of her daughter, Emma, have been flooding Rory since Linda’s death, the same way that thoughts of my mother have been pestering me. “I shouldn’t have told you all that. I just didn’t want you to think it was about the other day.”

  “I’m fine,” Eve manages, this time with a voice strong enough to convince Rory it’s acceptable to hang up.

  But Eve isn’t fine. She curls up on her bed and howls, the way she did when she first l
earned of my death. My daughter truly believes she failed me. Her loss isn’t pure like Rory’s, it’s layered thick like mine with should have and could have and would have if only I’d known. It’s the worst kind of grief. I try to persuade her of her innocence, but Eve resists. I settle for focusing my energy on sending her warmth, hoping she feels my presence, my love. She coughs between sobs, choking on mucus. After an hour of this storming she falls asleep, raw from a running list of perceived failures.

  If only there was a way to explain.

  Eve

  This is going to suck. I look at the other teenagers who were sentenced to community service. I’m the only girl. The oldest guy has a translator because he doesn’t speak English (Dad will have a fun rant about taxpayers’ dollars when he hears that). The youngest is covered in tattoos and has what looks to be a weapon of some sort wedged in his oversized jean pocket. The remaining two are chewing tobacco and spitting it in a shared empty Pepsi bottle. Camp Ray may want to rethink its recruiting pool.

  “Thank you, everyone, for getting here early.” As if the court gave us a choice. “I’m Robin Winters, director here at Camp Ray. After orientation this morning, arriving at quarter of eight will be fine.” The other four delinquents grunt their relief. Seven a.m. competes with morning hangovers.

  The director is right off the set of The Parent Trap, wide-rim safari hat and all. “Camp Ray is the only state-funded summer program available to special-needs children. The kids are between the ages of nine and twelve, with conditions ranging from deafness to cerebral palsy. Everyone alternates between drama, water sports, and crafts. Each station lasts an hour. There’s an assigned aide for every three kids and a camp counselor in charge of each station.”

  She walks through our limited role, referencing her clipboard as if she couldn’t possibly remember the three responsibilities entrusted to the delinquents: greet campers each morning, get them to their correct starting station based on group color, and assist between sessions with preparation and cleanup.