by Pamela Ribon
“Jennifer, will you please meet me in the bedroom?”
Your mother’s formal invitation was enough for me to know that I needed to follow as you once again stomped through a cloud of competing feminine perfumes.
I found the two of you standing in your mother’s closet, ripping dresses from the hangers, tossing them over your shoulders as you searched for that one Holy Grail of a dress.
It was like a final clearance sale. You were in a race, both of you dead set on winning, and it was eerily quiet.
“Please stop,” I remember saying.
“It’s my dress,” you muttered. “She said I could have it.”
Smidge said, “You can’t have everything you want, Jenny. Learn a life lesson.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to learn something, Mama.” You grabbed my hand and clutched it, keeping me from going anywhere. “Tell her, A.D. Tell Mama what to do.”
This was it. There was to be no more stalling, no more excuses. I couldn’t believe you were making this happen after all this time, after all the reasons not to, you just cut it all away and demanded that it end right then and there.
“You have to tell them good-bye now,” I found myself saying, the words barely audible, my voice breathy with emotion. “You have to tell them, Smidge, while they’re still out there.”
Smidge was shaking her head. “No. No, I don’t want to,” she said, sounding so small herself, even smaller than she’d already become.
“Look at those women out there taking your books and thanking you for them. Why do you think they’re doing that? They know. You can pretend to be mean and selfish and spiteful all you want, but we all know what you’re doing. You’re trying to slink away. Well, you owe it to us to die like a decent person. Quit being scared and fix it. We all have to be here once you’re gone, so let us say our good-byes.”
“Wait, we need Daddy,” you said, wiping your eyes. “Mama, we have to get Daddy and then we can tell everybody else.”
“Tell everybody what?”
That was your father, of course, standing in the doorway, walking straight into the end of his life as he knew it.
THIRTY-THREE
This story gets harder, Jenny, because you know as well as I do that it is winding down. I’m going to do my best to shelter you from any of her suffering.
It happened so quickly. She was fine, so fired up with direction and to-do lists, until one day, when she just wasn’t. Her voice had gone raspy, every breath rattled. Her shine was gone, and I knew it embarrassed her to look that way, unable to style herself the way she liked. I tried, but it was such an effort just to get her to the bathroom, doing anything that required washing her hair grew difficult. She stayed in bed, attached to a small oxygen machine.
One day she made me do fifty jumping jacks, right at the foot of her bed. Then she ordered thirty squats. “Look at that,” she said, sinking back into her pillows as I bent and stretched, grunting and gasping. “Look how healthy you are. That’s amazing.”
“Don’t tease me. I’m so out of shape.”
“You’re doing it. That’s impressive. I can’t do that. Look, something you’re finally better at than me. Do it again.”
“Can I catch my breath first?”
She smiled. “Yeah, you go ahead. Show off.”
One morning we were going through photographs. Smidge always made prints from our digitals, and I’d never been so grateful that she’d been so meticulous in documenting our trips.
“This whole plan,” she said, as she closed the book from our trip to Thailand. “I can’t believe how you just dropped everything for me. That was nice of you.”
“It was. Especially since you’ve been so mean about it.”
“Well, listen. I free you. You’re fired. Whatever it is you need to hear.”
I smelled the beginnings of one last trick. “Right.”
“I’m serious. After I’m gone, you do whatever you think is best.”
“Passive-aggressive freedom.”
She patted the back of my hand. “Take these albums, by the way. They’re yours now. I’m so happy you get to have them.”
“I can’t believe you just said I’m not taking over your life. After all this. Why are you saying that?”
“Because I know what’s going to happen,” she whispered, and then she fell asleep. She kept doing that, by the way, giving out little psychic warnings and then passing out, like all this paranormal activity was just too much for her.
Smidge had plenty of morphine, but she didn’t want to take it. Besides making her feel “swimmy,” it would make her fall asleep. She didn’t like sleeping away her days. She wanted to be alert enough to boss us around. Henry and I each had a notebook that we’d keep on ourselves at all times. We never knew exactly when Smidge would remember another task one of us needed to take care of after she was gone. One day she spent an hour telling me exactly how to tend to her irises. Maybe you felt like everybody treated you like a dummy, but your mother spent twenty minutes carefully explaining what “deadheading” was to me, like I was going to Edward Scissorhands her garden the second she was gone.
She must have given Henry directions for every remaining minute of his life, including the kind of woman she wanted him to marry, if it wasn’t going to be me. I know she was pushing for me, openly. But Henry dismissed it. “She belongs to Tucker,” he said to her then.
“I don’t,” I argued.
“She doesn’t,” Smidge agreed. “You’ll see.”
Then she had her Seconal fantasies. She’d read about Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, and she would talk about it with me like she was fantasizing how to renovate her kitchen. She fawned over pills like she used to gush about paint swatches.
“Isn’t it amazing, what they’re doing?” she asked me. “Letting people do what they want, letting people go who are ready. It’s so beautiful.”
I know it was the painkillers, but when Smidge would turn mystical, so angelic and peaceful, it unnerved me. That wasn’t the woman we knew. She was changing. She was weakening.
One morning you looked out the window and asked, “Why is there a lady sitting on our front yard?”
Your mother eased her way over to you and glanced through the curtain. “That’s just your grandmother,” she said. “Don’t go out there; she’s evil. Henry, lock the door.”
I jumped to my feet. “She’s here? Your mom is here?”
Henry peered out the window. “So that’s the Lizard. She’s much prettier than I thought she’d be. Why is she sitting out there? You think she’s scared to come in?”
“Oh, she tried earlier,” Smidge said. “She came knocking on the door like that was okay. I told her she can crawl back under whatever rock she slithered up from.”
“You have to let her in,” I said.
Smidge gave me a weary glance. “I don’t have to do anything.”
“She’s here for you. I haven’t e-mailed her in months. Someone must have told her what’s going on.”
“You e-mailed her? You e-mailed my mother?”
“I thought I’d be more frightened to admit that to you, but you aren’t very good at hitting, pinching, or throwing anymore, so yes, I e-mailed your mother. I thought it would help.”
“You thought wrong,” Smidge said, shuffling to her bedroom. “Send her away.”
You frowned and stamped your foot. “Uh, excuse me, Mama!” you shouted, sounding so much like your mother in four words it froze the room. “Think how sad you’d be if I wouldn’t let you talk to me right now. She just wants to say good-bye like the rest of us. Now you let her in.”
Your mother finally took some orders. They just had to come from the next in line for her throne. Jenny, I must say, you took to bossing well.
Sometimes she would yelp so loudly we worried what would happen if you heard her. She didn’t like you coming into her room when she was in pain, and it must have seemed to you like a lot of grown-ups keeping you out of the way. Please bel
ieve it was for the best you never saw her like that. I could barely take it. Henry was a wreck. Instead of “Grampy Camp,” it was “Gramma Camp,” this time around, with your newfound partner in shopping and gossip. Your grandmother made sure you got out of the house and kept up with the business of being a teenager. Smidge was so worried about you during that time. We all were. But the Lizard, who preferred to be called Lydia, was there for you. She loved you from the second she saw you, and you were attached to her as well. We all ended up very grateful she came as soon as someone who’d been at that party gave her a call. She was surprisingly quiet and patient. Sometimes I feel like we all imagined her, so desperate for a guardian angel to help us navigate this unfamiliar and devastating terrain.
Lying in bed with Smidge one night, listening to the rise and fall of her chest, I watched her breathe, something that was now an active part of her. Keeping her breath going was the most important thing she was doing, what her body fought to do constantly.
“I don’t like this,” she said. It was quiet, plaintive.
“I don’t like this either,” I said, brushing her hair back from her forehead. “Why is marsala such a jerk?”
“I was supposed to go out like a rock star.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re pretty gross and skinny. A lot of rock stars go out this way.”
She smiled, allowing herself a small cough. “But they get to have the good drugs.”
“Look on the bright side. With this tumor where it is, it’s kind of like you’ve got three boobs. That’s special.”
“I hatechoo.”
“Hatechoo more.”
She nuzzled her head into my shoulder. “James only made a pass at me that day because he was scared. It wasn’t a real thing. He panicked and shoved his hand on my breast. I was more disappointed than anything else.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“I do. I didn’t tell you to be in charge of you, but because it would have ruined your day. It was your special day, and you were the bride. After I hit him, we never once came close to talking about it again. It was like it never happened, because it barely did. He loved you. He didn’t want me. I think he was just like, ‘Oh, I’ll never touch another boob again. Okay, there. I just did it. Now, I’ll never touch another boob.’”
“That makes sense. It sounds like him.”
“Do you miss him?” Smidge’s voice was getting quieter as she drifted off to sleep again.
“Sometimes,” I admitted.
“Me too,” she said. “He was good at messing with you.”
I searched everywhere, but I couldn’t figure out how to get my hands on Seconal. It just seemed impossible. People could get crack, score meth, steal babies, and rob banks, but I couldn’t find a bottle of barbiturates? It felt like I’d wasted my life being a law-abiding person. It made me want to learn how to hotwire a car, make a shiv—knowing how to live a life of crime suddenly seemed more useful.
I was angry I couldn’t find a way to give my friend that bowl of applesauce lovingly spiked with the contents of one hundred opened capsules. One tiny meal could end her suffering within minutes after she had wanted to. I could give this compassionate ending to her dog, but not to my best friend. Amazing that there were still new ways to feel so helpless.
One night I was so distraught I walked through the rain, wandering until I reached Tucker’s house. I knocked on his door and I stood there until he opened it. “Tucker, I don’t have anybody else. My whole world is dying back in that house.”
“Come here,” he said, pulling me into his arms. “It’s okay, come here. Come sit.” He brought me into the house.
After I calmed down, he said he had a confession to make.
“I have to tell you something,” he said. “There’s someone new in my life. Someone I’m very attached to.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised that my heart gave a sharp pang of regret, surprised that I could feel anything through all that hurt I’d been swimming in. “Is she nice?”
“She’s nice,” Tucker said, grinning, letting a slight laugh escape his lips. “She’s really pretty, and sweet, and as soon as I can, I plan on making her stop pissing on my rug.”
He pursed his lips and made two kissing sounds, sending the floppiest, big-eared, huge-pawed hound dog pouncing into the living room. She was nothing more than a wiggling butt attached to a pair of huge, watery brown eyes that saw only Tucker.
“She’s so cute,” I said, finding myself crying again, because when you’re in that kind of mourning you’re easily touched by the beginning of life. There it was, years of love ahead of them, a promise of a future.
“I also moved into my entire closet,” he said to me. “I thought you’d like that. But I’m selling the place.”
“You are?”
“I was thinking about how I’m always going to the airport to pick people up or take them there. I never actually get on a plane. Smidge is dying with twice the life experience I ever got. I can’t sit around here anymore.”
He pulled a blanket up over my knees, noticing I’d been shivering.
“I’m sorry for how I talked to you,” he said. “I was being such a hypocrite. At least your lady-boss had your back. Mine left me years ago. And now it’s time for me to leave.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“My ex lives in Kentucky, so I figure I’ll start with whatever is the very opposite side of the planet from there. Which is kind of in the middle of the Indian Ocean. But Australia’s close enough. Maybe you’ll come visit,” he added.
“Maybe,” I said. “I wish I could make you stay here.”
“You don’t mean that. And you don’t have to stay here either,” he said. “They won’t make you stay.”
“Nobody’s making me do anything.”
“You’re a good girl,” he said, leaning forward to give me the lightest of kisses.
I slid my hand down his arm until I found his hand. “Hey, do you know where I can score some Seconal?”
THIRTY-FOUR
Vikki led the hospice. Turns out she was an expert at palliative care. She taught Henry how to bathe his wife, when to give her which medicine, how to prop her up at night so she could sleep without feeling like she was collapsing into her tumors. She refused to move into a portable hospital bed, insisting on staying in her room, on her mattress. There were many medicines, some of which Smidge didn’t want to take. Her doctor came by, bringing even more. He charmed her until she agreed to take most of them.
I’d always heard people referring to their loved ones in end-stage care as having “good days and bad days.” I quickly learned what that meant.
The good days were when people came to visit. Nobody ever came empty-handed. To this day, I can neither smell lilies nor eat macaroni and cheese without thinking of your mother’s final days.
The Christmas season entered quietly, and we were all intent on ignoring it, except that Smidge wouldn’t have it. “Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting for Christmas. Bring on the presents.”
Seth Sampson brought your mother an enormous stuffed giraffe. It was apparently an inside joke between them, because Smidge let out a scream of laughter so loud and sudden that everyone came running to check if she was okay.
Thankfully, she didn’t have too many bad days. Maybe because she had too many people ready to assist the second she felt any discomfort. We weren’t going to let cancer be in charge. Henry and I took shifts. When one of us was with her, the other tried to be with you. Your grandmother did everything else. She was an excellent cook.
One day I found Henry in his shed, staring at his tool box. “Nothing here will fix it,” he said. He was pale as a moth wing, quietly shaking.
I went searching for you, and made you do that dance number you were learning for jazz. It was soon apparent that you hadn’t learned it all the way, but you kept your eyes on your father as you moved your feet. “See, and then I do this!” It wasn’t until you were on yo
ur fifth encore he realized you had long ago run out of steps and were stalling.
You kept that house alive during that time, Jenny. I don’t know if anyone told you that. It would have been so easy to wallow, to fall into that pit of anguish, but you were someone to protect, someone who nurtured us when we hit our low points, and you seemed so grateful to have us all together.
Which is why I was so shocked when you decided to have a “Come to Jesus” moment with me. You cornered me in the kitchen, trapping me between the island and the refrigerator.
“She’s waiting for you,” you said. “It’s not about Christmas. It’s you.”
“Jenny, don’t make it sound like it’s up to me.”
You sneered like I had stepped in something and dragged it through the carpet. “Don’t be a chicken. She’s going to wait as long as she thinks you need her.”
There was no way it was my fault that Smidge was still holding on. Vikki kept insisting it was just a matter of time—no matter how many good days would convince us that she might live another month, another year, maybe turn around and cure herself once again—a bad day would always follow, one where she would falter, grow weaker, sleep most of the day away, and cough through the night.
“If I can say good-bye to my mother,” you said, “then you can say it to yours, too.”
You were right. All those years I let Smidge boss me around, be the overprotective pit bull by my side, was because I needed her to be the one coming out swinging when life dealt me its biggest blows. That’s why I couldn’t handle her cancer the first time around. It was too scary to have my surrogate mother leaving me, to be abandoned yet again. It wasn’t fair that no matter how obedient I was, no matter how much I did everything right, she could still go away at any time.
Having a mother is only a guarantee until the day you are born.
Tucker got the Seconal. He pressed a paper bag into my hand, and like a good Southern man, he wouldn’t tell me how he got it, or where it came from. His only concern was that I understood that he’d done it. The directions were on a piece of paper inside.
