by Laura Furman
“But I have no appointment—”
“We can wait until he sees you. Daniel can watch the girls.”
“No, babe, no need. We can make an appointment properly and go later in the week, you can extend a week or two and take me.”
“Mum.” Marian came to sit next to Essie on the couch, put an arm around her shoulders. “We should see him right away, okay? It could be nothing. But let’s get it checked as soon as we can. I don’t want you to worry.”
Essie felt Marian’s arm tightening around her, Marian’s head resting softly on her shoulder. The letters lay abandoned in Marian’s chair. Essie wondered, she truly wondered, if she was dying. She believed she was. But it was a distant idea, more faint than she expected. The more palpable question was how long her daughter might stay.
• • •
The doctor pierced her with a needle, extracted fluid, sent it off to the lab. “In a few days we’ll know more,” he told them. Marian sat next to Essie, holding her hand, her face tight.
The plane tickets could not be changed without exorbitant fees. Daniel had to go back to work. The girls could not miss another week of school. “We may hear from the doctor before the flight,” Marian said, a limp offering.
Essie did not bother to answer.
“Mum, let’s sit down with Dad and tell him.”
Essie shut her mouth firmly, again said nothing.
“I can tell him if you’re nervous. But he should know what’s happening. Maybe he can help.”
Essie snorted. Marian crouched on the floor before Essie’s chair, looking up at her like a child. “The doctor says there’s a good chance nothing is wrong. But listen”—she held Essie’s knees—“I don’t want you to feel alone while you’re waiting.”
Essie could think of nothing to say to this beyond the obvious. So she said nothing.
Marian put her forehead on her mother’s knee. “You understand I have to go? I wish I didn’t, Mum. I wish I could stay.”
“What good is wishing?” Essie asked, and her daughter didn’t answer.
The night Marian and her family flew home, Essie hired two taxis to take them to the airport so that there would be room for her to see them off. She held Nicole in her lap until the last moment—after Daniel had unloaded all the suitcases, even after Daniel said, “Come on, girls,” and Marian counted all the tickets and passports.
“Check again,” Essie told her, kissing the top of Nicole’s head, her arms tight around the child’s chest. “Check the date to be certain.”
The girls were dressed in blue jeans and long-sleeved shirts, as though they had already left her for another climate. It was nearly eleven o’clock, long past their bedtime, and in the harsh lights flooding the airport entrance, they looked pale and drawn. They had already said goodbye at the house: to neighbors who had come to wish them goodbye; to their grandfather; to Ritu. But where are the cats? Where are the cats? Both began to cry. It was no good explaining that cats come and go, that the mother cat must put the kittens to sleep, that Grandma would find the cats tomorrow and deliver all their messages. “We have to say goodbye to the cats!”
They had stopped crying by the time they reached the airport but their faces seemed strangely hollow and serious, as if the past few hours marked the onset of a wild acceleration and they had already begun to grow older—girls Essie would hardly recognize in a year or two when she saw them again, if she saw them again. Did she have a year or two? They had not heard back from the doctor. When Marian called his office that afternoon, she was told the results weren’t yet back from the lab.
“Mum, you’ll be fine,” Marian kept saying. “I’ll come back. I’ll come back if anything happens.”
“Something has already happened,” Essie told her.
“Just see what the doctor says, Mum.”
Essie shook her head, a parrying motion. What was the point? She knew where things could lead. Daniel, she noted, said nothing.
“I’ll come back.”
Her daughter was crying, the way she cried sometimes as a girl, streaming tears and silence. For a long while she clung to Essie, shoulders shaking, then she moved away, a sleeve to her face. Essie’s spectacles were useless, the airport lights blurred and flaring through the wet lenses. She took them off and tried to rub them dry. She must have a last good look at her daughter. By the time she put them on again Marian and her family had moved the few steps from the curb to the departure hall. No visitors were permitted inside but Essie watched the doors swallow them up, the girls looking small and forlorn, Marian still in tears, turning to wave a final time. After a few minutes, Essie climbed back into her cab.
At home the mosquito netting was still draped over her bed, where the girls had slept with her for their last nap. The cotton cover was rumpled from their bodies. Francis had slept in another room for years but Essie could hear him snoring and the evidence of his peaceful rest at such a time filled her with bitterness. The windows were thrown open and outside she could hear cats brawling, a tangle of raw-throated screeches and howls.
A few hours before dawn she switched on the light to begin a letter to Marian. She tried to chronicle all that had happened in the scant time since they had parted: the impatient cab driver, rushing her departure from the airport, the vacant hours sitting up by the telephone in case the flight was canceled. She described the dark house and Francis’s useless snoring, the cramp in her hand from writing, her prayers for their swift return; she described the way the knowledge of her own death was stealing over her, a certainty she could feel in her bones and her muscles and yes, in her breast—she did not have to wait for the doctor to tell her what her body already knew—and even then she could not stop. Here was the way to keep Marian tethered to her, a stream of confidences no one else could share, a comfort mother and daughter might only find in each other. Words poured from her, a spill she could not check—her fear that she would slip away before seeing her daughter or sons again, her dread of disease, of her body rotting away from the inside—did Marian remember visiting Aunty Ann in the nursing home, did she remember the rattling cries, the smells? She wrote about the solace she found in placing herself in the Virgin Mary’s hands. You too might have done this, my girl—place yourself at the mercy of Mary and not worry so much about the costs of things. Who knows how God would have provided if you had decided to stay? She wrote about her faith in being reunited with both her parents, the father she had lost when she was only a girl, the mother who had raised her; she leapt ahead generations and wrote about all her hopes for her granddaughters. You must bring them up in the Church, so that they too have a light in these darkest times. Eventually she began to reprise the terrible shock of Marian’s decision to marry an American—the fainting spells, the long nights of weeping, the visions of this very moment, sick unto death with no children beside her. Even now I can hardly believe you are wrenched from me at this crucial hour, she wrote. We may never see each other again. But these are the nights I foresaw when you married, which you did not. She filled twenty pages before her eyes began to ache, and even when the room was dark again, Essie lay in bed, her mind turning with what she was too tired to write.
The late night at the airport had upset Essie’s routine and she woke later than usual, the departure lingering like a hangover. Her ankles seemed swollen, her calves like rods, her limbs so heavy they might have been waterlogged. The world made its swollen turn, slow and stupid, senseless with miles. The day throbbed with hours. Everywhere she looked, something needed cleaning or putting away, but she sat in her chair, a pad of letter-paper in her lap, and watched dust tumble through dry shafts of sunlight like tiny shavings of wood. She imagined that splinters, fine as hair, worked their way into her skin every time she pushed through the air of the empty house.
She was alone. Francis had disappeared to his club, frowning at nothing. Ritu had dressed in salwar kameez and gone to the shops, viewing this as a treat since Essie usually insisted on going herself. Essie had
intended to continue her letter to Marian but her efforts in the middle of the night seemed borne by a feverish energy, a kind of blood-letting. She sat in her chair now, depleted and drained, and listened without interest to whatever passed beneath her window, the mild traffic of a morning underway. Women’s chirping voices, cars moving slowly past the rut in the road, a stiff volley of barking from the dog next door. Birds screeched like policemen with whistles, squawking over nothing; a motorcycle stuttered past, the sound loose as a chest cough. Essie ignored the long drifting calls of vendors, flung out like fishing line. She ignored the bell at her gate which set off the neighbor’s dog again, and eventually she jotted down a few desultory lines. But the letter began to seem flat and useless. It would not reach Marian for two weeks at least. Marian herself would not arrive home for another day—that’s how wide the world was. And even in her passion the night before, Essie found she could not express the full sweep of her thoughts. Each memory had eight or ten more at its back—a dozen, a hundred—too many to record so that anyone would understand how quickly and powerfully they came upon her. She could write and write, letters enough to span the globe; she imagined the lines of longitude and latitude in her own handwriting, floating gently over green and blue. And still it would not be enough to record the longings of even a single moment. Everything she hoped for was connected to everything she remembered and everything she had lost—a web spreading in all directions. Words moved in single file.
Essie pushed the letter aside and closed her eyes. She fell briefly to sleep, upright in her chair. When she woke she was still alone but light blazed in the window. Francis would soon be home and she was not up to cooking. I have very little appetite, she thought of writing to Marian. This may be a sign of what is to come. She must see what could be warmed for lunch.
The refrigerator was old, full of jars she had not labeled, but on the top shelf was a glass of fresh yogurt. The house is full of reminders that you are gone, the letter in her mind continued. Everywhere I look I find something that pains me—even the curds I made for the girls. She paused, wondering how best to convey the pathos of the uneaten yogurt. I should not have made more with so little time left. But it is so difficult for a mother not to feel hopeful. Up to the last minute, I felt certain, in the circumstances, you would change your mind. Daniel had to go back to work, that is one thing. But would a few days more have been such a sacrifice, knowing what I am going through? She imagined the way she would describe her pleasure in seeing the girls eat, how much she already missed pulling chicken from the bone to feed them by hand.
Now here is the chicken dish they liked. I’ve shown you how to make it but I don’t know what spices you can get there. Last night, you remember, Daniel took three big pieces, so there is not enough for today. Never mind, I can go without.
A faint scraping jolted Essie from her thoughts. She turned, expecting to find a rat. Instead she saw the ginger kitten, scratching an empty sack of rice. The gray was close behind, sniffing the whisk broom Essie had left in the corner; the mother was nowhere to be seen.
“And what are you doing back again?” she said aloud. “No one wants to see the likes of you,” she told them. “All your friends have gone.” Still she made no move to chase them away. The gray cat abandoned the broom and began to investigate the rough black surface of the grinding bowl. The ginger, the cat named Ritu, stood perfectly still and stared up at Essie, one of its claws still hooked in the burlap. Essie had the strange and unwelcome impression that the cat was awaiting instructions, or perhaps the opening of negotiations.
A sudden soft leap, and the ginger perched on top of Ritu’s grinding stool.
“Tcha! Get down from there.”
The cat drew its legs together on the small surface.
“Go on. Get down.” Essie clicked her tongue and after a moment’s hesitation, the cat dropped to the floor. The gray sidled closer, reminding Essie of the way Tara sometimes reached for Nicole’s hand.
“Such nonsense,” she said, but in a warmer tone. The gray stretched up its head on its thin neck; the ginger made a plaintive noise. “Little beggars, the both of you.” The cats watched as she returned to the refrigerator and snipped open a container of milk. “Outside,” she told them, and they followed her onto the balcony, crowding near her heels as she stooped to leave the bowl for them.
For the next several days Ritu was permitted to feed the cats. The kittens always turned up first, leaving the mother cat to brood below in the shady corner of the garden. She would only join them after a slow, stealthy advance. Essie would not admit to her own part in this uneasy truce; she refused to pay any attention to their comings and goings and made a point of complaining about the price of milk. When Marian called to say they had arrived safely, Essie reported that the cats were sleeping on the balcony.
“You see, babe, what happens? Every day they come, bold as you please.”
“What about the doctor? Have you called the office again?”
“Why should I call? He can call when he has his results. Until then, I know what I know.”
“Mum—”
But she refused to discuss the knot in her breast, refused to give Marian that satisfaction. Birthdays, anniversaries, feast days, school concerts, sports matches—the parade of moments she might have shared with her family if they lived near—all thinned to voices on a phone line. But she was not willing to accommodate such distance in the matter of her dying. Marian had left; very well, let her feel the consequences. The Marian of her letters, the Marian to whom she revealed all the movements of her soul, seemed a different person than the Marian on the phone. The Marian of the letters was the daughter Essie thought she had raised, the daughter who would have stayed.
“The girls miss you so much,” Marian told her. “They loved being in India. On their first morning home Daniel made them tea but both girls cried. They said the tea didn’t taste the same.”
“Use the tea I packed for you,” Essie urged. “Make it yourself. Your husband doesn’t know how to do it properly.”
They could not talk for long; the rates were too high.
“Wait, babe—so much to tell you! Daddy is up to his old tricks, every night at the gymkhana, so everything falls into my lap. Even the coconuts—this fellow Gopi still hasn’t come.”
Marian had begun to say goodbye, her voice hollow.
“Just let me say a quick hello to the girls.”
But Marian had put them to sleep. The connection was scratchy with a slight delay; words tumbled into their echoes. “Tell them I send tight hugs. I pray for them every night. Tell them to read their Bibles. The breast is paining a bit, but only slightly. Pray I’ll be taken quickly, without too much pain.”
“Please call the doctor, Mum. Don’t put yourself through this.”
“Ask the girls to pray for me.”
“The girls will write soon. Lots of love.”
Essie’s voice rose, high and cracking over the static. “Tell them not to worry, Grandma is looking after their cats. Only they must come back soon.”
“Goodbye, Mum.”
Essie held the receiver until she heard the click. “Hallo? Hallo?” she said loudly, just in case, but the line had gone dead and after another moment she put down the phone. She went into the kitchen, where Ritu was washing up with a bucket of hot water and where Essie could see the cats on the balcony, napping against the balustrade. The mother shot instantly to her feet, whisking down the stairs, but the kittens only yawned, showing small sharp teeth, and stretched up their heads to greet her.
Days passed slowly, sagging with heat. Blossoms dried to soft brown skins and trees hung heavy, fruit swelling like goiters. Essie bathed her limbs each night with cold water and slept on top of her bed. This heat wave has given me a rash. You remember your brother used to have them as a baby? By now addressing her thoughts to Marian had become habit, as though all that passed through Essie’s mind was part of a letter she was composing to her daughter. I should stay
out of the sun but then who will do the marketing?
A batch of notes came from Marian and the family, all in a single envelope. Marian’s was rushed and glancing; she was busy with programs for the girls’ school, she would call again soon. Daniel had enclosed a postcard he wrote during their layover in the Frankfurt airport, which Essie examined but decided was not pretty enough to save. Nicole wrote on colored paper that was printed with flowers, each word with round, careful letters. How are the cats? Essie read. We have no cats here. We love you. Tara drew a picture of the cats with sharp triangle ears and whiskers stiff as bristles.
A week later, another fat bundle arrived from Nicole’s first grade class. Marian had just visited their classroom, wearing a sari and telling the children about life in India. The teacher hoped Mrs. Almeida would not mind if the children wrote to her with some of their questions.
Essie emptied the packet onto the dining table. All the letters were written on rough, grainy paper, scored with solid and dotted lines to guide the children’s pencils. Essie sifted through them, looking for Nicole’s and picking out a line here and there.
What do you eat for breakfast?
How many languages do you speak?
Do saris [printed over a streak of grimy erasure marks] ever fall off?
Dear Grandma, she found at last. Have you ever seen a real tiger?
Essie put down the letter. Yes, she thought. Once when Marian was nearly two, they had gone to visit Essie’s uncle, a conservator of forests in the south. They were driving through a protected stretch of jungle with six others packed in a small car, moving slowly, cautiously, around the blind turns. Do you remember, my girl? Essie sat with Marian on her lap, hot and sweaty, tired of jolting along bad roads when they suddenly rounded a corner and saw a tiger reclining in the center of the road. It lifted its huge head to stare at the oncoming car. Quiet! Everyone, quiet. They braked, not daring to pass. Essie could still remember the feel of Marian struggling to stand on her lap and see. She had caught the child’s fists in her own hand, preventing Marian from thumping on the window. For three hours they waited while the tiger slept. After a time Marian fell asleep, her skin sticking to Essie’s. The tiger had stretched in a shady patch of the road, protected by a thick canopy of trees until the sun bore down overhead. See, Essie’s uncle whispered. The tiger remained in the sun a few minutes, so still it seemed dead, then suddenly, with a lazy roll, it stretched, rose to its feet, and ambled back into the trees, out of sight.
