by Fiona Maazel
“Damn,” she said.
Indra came flying out of her room, screaming. She had just heard it on the radio. “New Jersey? It’s in New Jersey?! Holy crap it’s in New Jersey! Mom, we have to go to the country!”
I watched her try to crawl inside her mother, as Hannah gently slid down the wall to a sitting position. She pushed up her sleeves, and it was true: Her arms were tracked with hatch marks.
“Oh, Hannah,” I said. “Honey. What are you doing to yourself?”
She yanked at the cuff of each sleeve while Indra continued to mewl. “Mom, what are we going to do?”
“It’s okay, baby. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
Indra was not consoled. She was way past consolation and into the hard facts. “Mom, you, me, Grandma, and Luther can barely fit in the car. If we have to take stuff—how are we all going to fit?”
Holy smokes. So much for the angel in every child, so much for the children are our future. This miserable little twit was trying to freeze out my sister.
“Shhh,” Connie said. “Just settle down.”
Gloria undid a roll of her hair, then another. She piled the curlers on the table. I braved the three steps between me and Hannah without incident. The floor tiles appeared cubed and motile. I tried to swipe them out of the way. Hannah slapped my hand. “Stop that,” she said. “Go home.”
“Honey, listen. It’s just withdrawal. It’s temporary. I didn’t think it would be this bad. Besides the wean, I’ve been clean for almost three months. I swear.”
Her face was stony, and again she told me to go away.
“Hannah, who do you think I’m doing this for? Me? Izz? I’m trying to straighten out for you. It’s why I came back at all. Oh, look, don’t cry. Just pack up your stuff and you can come home with me.” I tried to stand on my own. Instead, I groped for the ice bucket.
Connie said, “You are a piece of work, you know that? What makes you think just because you’re ready to say sorry, everyone else is ready to accept it? What kind of narcissism is that?”
I had nothing to say. I just felt tired. I just wanted to sleep.
“Hannah,” I said. “Listen. This is a time for family. Especially if the plague is back. You me and Izzy need to stick together. You think when push comes to shove Indra’s gonna look out for you? In this house, the gerbil comes before you.”
“His name is Luther,” Indra said. The spite in her voice was incredible.
“Hannah,” I said. “Be reasonable. Just come home.”
But my baby sister, somewhere along the line she got way smarter than me. “You can’t just stop taking drugs and show up all of a sudden.”
“What? Why? What’s wrong with trying to be a better person so that you can help your family?” I put the question to her, feeling like I’d dodged a bullet.
“You don’t even know me,” she sniffled. “You never pay attention.”
“I always pay attention! What do you mean? We’ve done tons of things together!”
She continued to stare at the floor. I’ve never had this dream, but I bet it’s bad, when you wake up in court just as the judge renders his verdict against you. Was I on trial? I didn’t even know! Only in my version of the dream, the dream as I live it every day, I go right back to sleep because what the hell, the judgment’s been made.
Hannah took to the couch and drew a pillow to her chest.
Connie looked at me, shaking her head. “You are definitely leaving.” She gestured to the door.
I looked at Hannah intently, thinking: What if I don’t ever see you again? It was possible. With superplague en route to New York, anything was possible. She was my half-sister. Seventeen years between us. She’d grown up without my help, and she was right, I didn’t know her at all.
“Today,” Connie said, and pressed her palm to the small of my back.
Gloria, who had a bobby pin in her mouth, asked Hannah to assist with a hairpiece and comb, which, once in place, concealed the curls she’d just spent hours setting up.
I watched Hannah, the slant of her eyes picked up in the reed of each lip, and thought how much she looked like our dad.
“Thank you for taking care of her,” I said to Connie. She was ushering me out the door. “Also, if you leave town, can you just call to say where you are?” More like shoving, she was shoving me out the door.
For a moment I considered her behavior a kidnapping and wondered how long before I engaged a lawyer or the police. On the other hand, Connie, Gloria, Indra, Hannah, and Luther in the country—a country house, I presumed—beat out, for safety, our apartment or the chicken plant. So it was pragmatic, this turn of events. In everyone’s best interest.
“Hannah,” I said, beseeching. But she didn’t even look up, which added a new component to the afflictions of my body, such that the soldiers at war actually seemed to pause in their labors to acknowledge it: sorrow, chief assailant and keeper of secrets, for instance, how best to kill you over the course of your whole life.
I heard the chain lock in place on the other side of the door. I was not done being sick. And the door, it felt like wax against my forehead.
I wooed myself down the hall, down the elevator, past the empty desk, and outside, which was desolate but for an atmosphere of complete and utter panic.
Forty
At home, it was as expected: Stanley knocking on Mother’s door, Mother embalmed in a high from which there was no escape.
I asked how long.
“Couple hours,” he said. “At least.”
I think I groaned, or growled, I don’t know, whatever the sound of fury. I wanted to take an ax to the door.
We were standing in the hallway. Stanley continued to knock and call her name in the sort of voice meant to relax a wild animal.
“Stanley, don’t be an idiot. Just open the door.”
“It’s locked.”
“Break it!”
“I don’t want to break it.”
By now, the soldiers were losing conviction; some were even defecting to my side. The mission? Loathe Stanley.
“She’s been in there a couple hours and you’ve just been standing here? Knocking on the door like a butler?”
There was no limit to how much abuse I could heap on him, which made me crazier still.
“Mother!” I hollered, and pounded on the door. “I’m coming in.” Normally, my shoulder against wood was no contest, but as I was in a rage, as the thud against my skin was welcome, I managed to jerk the door open with three attempts.
Her room was dark, curtains closed. It smelled of sheets that needed changing. Not a bad smell, but thick and sleepy, like the musk of a house unaired for years.
She was curled up in bed. I could tell she had been crying from the swell of her pores and the spackle crusted at the levees of each eye. She’d been on a tear since the moment we got back from Bluebonnet not even a day ago. She wore sweats that extended well beyond her hands and feet, and which ballooned well beyond her frame, so that if not for that pale face, she’d be hard to locate among the bedcovers in disarray.
I opened the curtains. Against the light, she took refuge under many throw pillows.
I said her name. She said close the curtains. They were opaque red satin, sold at auction from some dead lady’s estate.
I sat on the edge of the bed, which was one of those NASA foam deals that cast your body every time you lay down. Personally, I found this disgusting. And revealing of people who want to be enveloped, even digested, by the oblivion of sleep.
“I don’t feel well,” she said. “Take my temperature?”
Because there are only so many gestures with which to express and possibly mitigate frustration, I pressed at my temples with an aim to dent the skin, to puncture the skin, and let my thoughts wheeze out.
“You said you were gonna eat.”
“I have been eating.”
“Crack is not food.”
“Don’t get high and mighty with me. I know where you’ve b
een, remember?”
I couldn’t tell if she meant the womb, rehab, or chronic unhappiness, which, to be fair, I was still in.
“Plague’s in New Jersey,” I said.
“I know. I saw the news. What’s happening out there?”
“Just what you’d expect”
“Hannah?”
“Connie Denton’s. She’s got a country house or something.”
“You and Stanley?”
“I don’t know. Probably back to Wanda’s. You can come, of course. You should. Raymond could drive us. There’s a decent hospital up there, too.”
“Raymond quit. He went to Puerto Rico.”
“There’s plague in Puerto Rico.”
“Try telling that to Raymond. Besides, what good’s a hospital? One thing your father was great at was total destruction. You get it, you die.”
“Why do you have to say stuff like that? You all seemed happy enough.”
“Even you can’t believe that.”
“Mom, you need to be in a hospital. You look awful.”
“I do not.”
I went to the bathroom and returned with a handheld mirror.
“Get that thing away from me,” she said, swatting.
“When’s the last time you looked at yourself? You’re barely here. Mom,” I said, and thrust the mirror back at her. “You’re gonna die like this.”
She lifted her head a little. “Now where have I heard that before?”
“You are the most selfish creature on earth.”
“I know.”
“What? What do you know?”
“That I’m dying.” She sounded so weary, I knew she meant it. “But I also don’t much care.” And I knew she meant that, too.
“Mom, if you just stopped with the drugs. You were doing so much better at Bluebonnet. We could talk. You know, I’d tell you stuff and you’d listen.”
So there it was: Mother was to me what I was to Hannah. We had learned by example or were programmed from the start; in either case, both of us filled our roles perfectly.
“My darling girl. I wasn’t doing better at Bluebonnet. I just wasn’t doing drugs.”
The muscles in my neck were not getting paid enough for this shit; I hung my head. Everything this day had wrought was beginning to roil and bubble over. First Eric, then Hannah, now this.
“Mom, you can’t just tell your kid that you don’t want to live anymore. Don’t I matter? Don’t you care what happens to me?”
I was still sitting on the edge of the bed when I tipped over like a traffic cone. She touched my cheek with her palm, and kept it there. That her touch was consoling broke me down entirely.
“Of course you matter. And you will be fine. You won’t turn into me, you are stronger. You certainly won’t make the same mistakes I did.”
“How do you know? I’m already a mess. And I can’t learn if you won’t stay to teach me.”
“Because I know.”
“This is crazy. I’m not going to back you on this one.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m calling 911.”
“And saying what? That your mother’s dying and refuses treatment?”
“You don’t have to die! Just shut up about dying!”
“Lucy, listen to me. Quinty has all my papers and he knows what to do and has assured me that even if all hell breaks loose, you will be provided for. The only reason I’m not just writing you a check is because probate will protect you come tax time.”
I covered my ears. “Shut up! Shut up! I can’t listen to this.”
She stared at me with excessive calm, the calm of a mind made up for good.
I cheered up a little because I thought I’d found the glitch in her story. “You told Quinty you wanted to die? I don’t believe that.”
“No, you let Quinty think I had cancer. So I didn’t have to say much at all.”
“Okay, just tell me this is not happening. Do you understand that there’s a maniac out there releasing superplague all over the country? Do you realize Hannah is so messed up she’s been cutting herself? And you’re just going to leave me all alone?”
She took a long breath that spasmed into a bid for air that grew her eyeballs tenfold. When it was over, she turned away from me and said, “We both know I’ve been gone for years.”
Her resolve was almost magnificent.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“You found the letters? I knew you would.”
“You wanted me to?”
“Yes. A person should be known by someone.”
“I am not someone. I’m your daughter.”
“And I wanted you to know.”
“It’s true, then? About Dag?” I could feel her nodding.
“I’ve made some mistakes.”
“You’re not supposed to say that! You’re supposed to say, But if I hadn’t met your father, I would not have had you.”
More coughing. “I haven’t been a good mother, I know. But if I had a choice to trade you for Dag, I would not have done it for anything. I never wanted to lose you. But if I had the chance to do it all over, from the start, so that if I chose Dag you would never have been, then I don’t know. You can’t miss what you’ve never had.”
“Yes you can.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you try to start up again with him? You could have gotten a divorce.”
She laughed. “Your father certainly thought I belonged with Dag. But I was not so sure.”
Oddly, this came as a disappointment. Since learning of Aggie’s sailor and then Dag, not to mention my circumstances with Eric, it seemed like our experiences were supposed to be some kind of referendum on love. All in favor? None. But Izzy’s story didn’t fit. It was more complicated. I wanted to despise her not just for messing up her kids, but for adding to Nana’s legacy—the Monsen women forgo love. Instead, she was uncertain if she’d ever loved at all.
“Mom, you can get help. Your life is not over. You’ve got family. And chances. Maybe he’s even still waiting for you.”
She sighed. “Lucy, bring me that jewelry box?”
“Are you fucking kidding? You want to get high now?” I grabbed the box and turned it over. “Oh, sorry,” I said, and picked up the rings from the floor.
“Give Hannah your father’s. You can do with mine what you wish.”
It fit perfectly. “I can’t deal with this,” I said. “I have no hope in my life.”
With what energy she had left, Mother went upright. She was almost shouting. “Don’t say that. If you didn’t have hope, you’d be in the exact same place I am. Don’t underestimate your strength. And your faith.”
“Mom, just stop this. The people downstairs can probably hear you wheezing. I’m calling an ambulance.” She did not protest. “I am,” I said, and picked up the phone.
It occurred to me that I was trying to exact something from her in exchange for not calling an ambulance, and when I paused to gauge the options, it seemed like remorse, like I was wanting remorse.
I dialed as slowly as possible, which doesn’t buy much time when you’re dialing 911. After I hung up, I knew the ambulance would be here shortly. I tossed some underwear in a plastic bag. Grabbed her toothbrush. Told Stanley we were going. And throughout, I felt something like excitement, the old excitement, because people at the hospital would be distracted by the threat of plague, and the staff had probably been put on code red alert, which would leave no one to notice if I slipped behind the desk and into the med room, where the means to reprieve were several. I was not going to do this, but the thought conned me into feeling like I had something to live for, even if the rest of me knew it was not so. Not at all. Not even close.
Forty-one
I hardly slept. No one can sleep in a waiting room and I am no exception. No sooner did Mother get set up in the ICU than she went into heart failure. I gather she has acute heart disease and that her lungs are working at only 20 percen
t. Beyond that, I don’t know. The doctors have not been forthcoming, and I don’t have the courage to press. They’re so busy. And the chief, whenever a patient asks why this drug or what about the meds I was on or how soon or how long, he’s like: Look, at your house, at your job, you might be the boss, but here, it’s my show and I’m gonna run it. Okay? Don’t worry. Try to get some sleep. Followed by a smile and opaque directives to the night nurse, who probably meant well when she took this job twenty years ago.
At the moment, I am being regaled by a child. He has just told me that a crocodile cannot expose its tongue. I’m not sure what to do with this information, but he seems to want thanks. He’s been in this waiting room for two hours. Stanley got here at dawn so it’s us, the kid, and his parents. The kid does not tire. He’s about six. If not asking about the tubes down Grandpa’s throat, he’s playing Superheroes, in which arms are spread, flights made, and from the aforesaid, identities are revealed. Only not so much. Since every hero has the practice of circling the room, it’s hard to know Captain Kipple from Luna Moth. The mother guesses the Hulk each time. I think she’s playing the odds. The father makes up superheroes, which drives the kid nuts. “Sandwich Bologna Man!” he says. Not sure which is more painful, the scene in Mother’s ICU or this guy who’s obviously going to attempt humor for the rest of his life, to attempt and fail, and, in so doing, embarrass the crap out of his son and augment reservations long held by the wife—that her husband’s a dufus, whose dufusness has no rival and which fawning, slurping gestures in bed do not forgive, have never forgiven, though it could be nice, right about now, that slurpy thing, since this hospital is the pits and she is depressed.
The kid’s running in circles, going swooooooosh.
“Ghost Rider,” I say.
“No, no, he’s the Hulk. Definitely the Hulk.”
The dad says, “Escape Panic Man! In a crowded situation, there is no one better.”
I cock my head because this is actually funny, at least within the context of lethal plague among a people inclined to stampede anyway. Seems like hundreds go down at the Hajj every year. Soccer games in Peru. The morning Tickle Me Elmo hits Kmart. Just yesterday there were rumors of an herbal plague talisman at a GNC downtown. Ten were injured, including one woman whose ribs were so trodden, it took surgeons eleven hours to find and remove the slivers and chips.
