by Diana Welch
Then one day at school, I was at a “Children Who Lost Their Parents” meeting with Rita and another new friend, Susy Flanagan. The odd little club was formed by the school’s social worker, who had sought each of us out. I was describing my anger at Mom, and Susy started to cry. She had lost her father the year before to liver cancer. “I never told my dad I loved him,” she said. “He died in a hospital bed before I got the chance to say good-bye.” Susy’s story snapped me out of my fog.
That afternoon, I came home from school and walked down that hallway. Nurse Patti was there, sitting in a chair knitting a sweater for her friend’s new baby and chatting with Mom, who was sitting upright in bed, two pillows wedged behind her bony back, playing solitaire. Her face lit up, as always, when she saw me at the bedroom door.
“Hello, my darling,” she said. “How was your day?” Every afternoon session started off this way. Mom was remarkably cheerful and upbeat despite her haggard scarecrow frame, her veins a murky blue beneath jaundiced skin.
“Fine,” I said and went to sit next to her on her bed. Before she could say anything else, I grabbed her hand. It felt small, like a child’s, and so fragile I worried if I squeezed too hard it might break. Before she could say another word, I said, “Mom, I just want you to know that I’m sorry I’ve been so grumpy lately.”
Her big brown eyes grew glassy.
“And I just want you to know that I love you.” The words came rushing out, a torrent. I squeezed her hand to repress my urge to give her a big bear hug. She weighed less than one hundred pounds. My weight could crush her.
“It’s okay,” she said, tears now streaming down her chiseled cheeks. “Just know that I love you more.”
And with that, I wrapped my arms around her, and she let out a deep cry, a mix of joy and despair wrapped in relief. That moment was proof that her kids would one day forgive her for dying. One just had.
From that day on, I spent every afternoon with Mom. Fuck college applications and Latin class. By mid-November, Mom started to talk about Thanksgiving. “We’ll use the good china,” she said. She was determined to celebrate, excited about Dan coming home from TP. Diana would be there, too. The Chamberlains had agreed to drop her off.
The day before Thanksgiving, Amanda and I went grocery shopping: Mom ordered a twenty-two-pound turkey and gave us a list. We bought sweet potatoes and string beans, plus celery, apples, raisins, and onions for Mom’s famous stuffing, canned pumpkin for pie, and a bag of fresh cranberries for homemade sauce. Once we were done shopping, Amanda and I decided to drive into New York City to visit Amanda’s friend Patrick, who was working at Carumba, a Mexican place on Broadway. We drank two pitchers of extra-strength sangria and stumbled back to the Karmann Ghia at midnight. Somewhere on the Saw Mill Parkway, I frantically began to roll down the passenger window, but not soon enough. Vomit splashed against the dashboard and half-open window and all over my favorite acid-washed Guess jeans. Amanda was furious. As we pulled into the driveway, she said only, “This better be cleaned up by breakfast.” Then she slammed the door and stomped into the house.
The next morning, I woke up Dan, who’d got home the day before. “I’ll give you twenty bucks to clean Amanda’s car, no questions asked,” I said. He jumped at the offer and spent the morning chipping frozen puke from the Karmann Ghia’s seats and floor and door while Amanda and I started Thanksgiving supper.
Auntie Eve arrived with homemade muffins and quickly started bossing us around the kitchen. There were potatoes to peel, cranberries to boil, silver to polish. I ironed the linen tablecloth before laying it on the dining-room table. Karen Kayser arrived from New York City with champagne and chardonnay and began chopping onions for the stuffing as I rolled out a piecrust and Amanda peeled apples. When Diana arrived, everyone cheered and clapped. She ran around giving everyone hugs.
Diana helped me set the table with Mom and Dad’s gold-rimmed wedding china and crystal wine goblets. I went back to Mom’s room to let her know dinner was ready and gasped when I saw her. She was dressed in the blue mohair sweater I’d given her for Christmas the year before. A long black velvet skirt hid the tubes and bags, and she had wrapped her head with a brilliant blue and black scarf. She even applied makeup for the first time in well over a year. Her cheeks were blushed pink, and a soft silvery blue highlighted her deep brown eyes. She painted her lips a dark ruby red.
“Mom!” I exclaimed. “You look beautiful!”
She beamed a smile and said, “I’m hungry!” When Patti pushed the wheelchair into the dining room, everyone erupted into applause. Mom sat at the head of the table, Diana to her right, Dan to her left, and proceeded to eat a bit of everything and even asked for a glass of champagne to make a toast.
“I want to raise my glass to my children,” she said. “You each make me so very proud.” We all raised our glasses and took a sip of champagne, then dished out the pie. Diana ate a plate of whipped cream, Dan ate three servings of pumpkin pie, his favorite, and Mom finished her glass of champagne before excusing herself to go back to her room. Everyone got up to give her a hug and a kiss.
The Chamberlains came to get Diana soon thereafter. Saying good-bye was not as painful as I expected. Somehow the success of dinner made everything feel temporary. Mom’s cancer, Diana’s absence—maybe they weren’t forever after all. Even Amanda seemed giddy as we washed the dishes together. “She really rallied!” Amanda said as she hand-dried the silverware.
“I know,” I said. “She ate everything on her plate!”
And while we didn’t say it out loud, I know we both felt the same tiny spark of hope. Maybe, just maybe, Mom would pull through after all.
AMANDA
THEN THE MOANING started. Liz and I heard it first thing the next morning, these ghostly noises coming from Mom’s room and floating through the rest of the house.
Thanksgiving had been more than Mom could take. The nurse told me that after dinner, Mom went back to her room, got wretchedly sick, then slipped into a state of semiconsciousness. She had started having seizures a couple months ago, but after Thanksgiving they got so bad that the nurses had to keep her doped up. Still, she moaned in her sleep. I’d come home from school and hear her all the way in the kitchen. It was awful.
Liz and I escaped to Manhattan as often as we could. We’d go to clubs, drinking and dancing—anything to get away from the misery that was our house then. In the city, we could forget about everything. We were wild. One night at Danceteria, we were drinking margaritas. Liz went off to find some lifeguard from the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club she had a crush on. But after a while, she was nowhere to be seen, so I went looking for her. It was late and we needed to go home. I found her slumped in the men’s room, wasted. My friend and I had to carry her out of the club because her legs were like Jell-O. As we were stumbling toward the car, we passed a group of guys. Liz looked up and slurred, “Hey, guys, wanna party?” I wanted to kill her! She couldn’t even fucking walk! I threw her into the back of the Jeep.
It was 4:30 a.m. when we got home. Liz managed to stumble upstairs. Then, suddenly, a shoe came flying over the banister. I looked up to see Liz’s swollen face peering over the balcony that overlooked the great room. She was spitting onto the floor below. I was furious and whispered loudly, “What, are you going to puke, now? Go into the fucking bathroom!” Her face disappeared, and I heard this huge crash. The night nurse came running out to see what was going on, and I told her everything was under control. I went upstairs to see what happened, but the bathroom door was locked. I could hear Liz crying on the other side. When I finally got her to open the door, I saw that she had somehow managed to smash the full-length mirror into smithereens. She was barefoot, standing in a pile of broken glass, whimpering.
LIZ
I DON’T REMEMBER any of that. I do remember waking up because my feet felt like they were on fire. And I remember the morning. From time to time, I’d hear Mom shout “Da!” and was never sure if she was calling for my father or her
s.
By late November, Mom no longer recognized me. The only noises she made were guttural, deep sounds that racked and rattled her ninety-pound frame. They sounded so big they might shatter her bones, tear through her flesh. They sounded as though they hurt.
Then one day, I arrived to a quiet house. I started walking toward Mom’s room, but Patti stopped me from coming in.
“Mom’s not feeling well,” she said through the closed door.
“What’s new?” I called back, thinking this was weird.
Then I heard a shallow cry, thick and mumbled, as if Mom had cotton in her mouth.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked, leaning my head against the door.
“No, love, it’s fine, all under control,” Patti chirped back.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She had another seizure,” Patti explained as she cracked the door open a sliver. I could see one eye and a freckled slice of her cheek. “This was a toughie.”
I insisted on coming in, and Patti was right. It was a toughie. To begin, the cadaver lying in the bed was no longer my mother but a skeletal outline, paper-thin flesh pulled over jutting bones. Her extended belly made her look pregnant and anorexic at once.
She was asleep—Patti had knocked her out. The seizures had been bad—starting with leg twitching in September, which led to full-body tremors by October and crazy muscle spasms in November. It had gotten so bad that Mom’s leg would jump from the bed as if electrocuted while the rest of her body stayed perfectly still. It made playing Scrabble and backgammon hard. But this one trumped all. This one was so bad that she clamped down her jaw and bit so hard that she shattered her top and bottom teeth, as if the cancer really was tearing her apart from the inside and her only recourse was to chomp down. If she kept her mouth closed, she might contain the cancer, for to scream her body might fragment into a million little pieces and scatter, scatter, scatter.
After that, Mom and I stopped having our after-school talks. I’d come home to moaning and go to sleep to it as well. When I forced myself to go into her room, it smelled like urine and formaldehyde and rot. It smelled like death and because she was close to it, there was no point in fixing her teeth, which looked, when she smiled in her semicatatonic state, like shark teeth, like broken bottles. Her mouth was saying “Keep out” without making a sound. I understood. It was no longer Mom. The monster within had won, and now it was only a matter of time.
DIANA
I WOKE UP in the middle of the night, wanting desperately to see Mom. It was a yearning that I can’t explain, a pain almost, in my stomach, my lungs, my heart. Like ripping. I knew that I needed to go to her, as though she were in the room beckoning me, extending her arms toward me. But when I sat up to look for her, there was no one there; the room was empty except for a little girl sleeping in her bed next to mine. I swung my feet off the bed and sat for a little while, waiting. Nothing. No one. I walked down the stairs and stood in the doorway to the Chamberlains’ bedroom. Mrs. Chamberlain sat up in her bed; she must have seen my silhouette against the amber hallway light.
“What is it?” she whispered. Her bed was far away from the door.
“Can we go see my mom?” I whispered back, still hovering in the doorway.
She had taken me home once before, in the night. I had woken up with a willful desire to see Mom and went downstairs to ask Mrs. Chamberlain to take me to her. She had said nothing, just got out of bed and told me to put on my coat and then drove me through the dark and to Mom. I thought we could do that again.
Instead she whispered, “Go back to sleep.” I turned silently and walked back up the stairs to her daughter’s room. I got back under the covers and stared out the window on the far wall, but there were no trees waving, only sky. Eventually, I slept.
The next morning, I woke up alone. I walked downstairs, and everyone was getting ready for school. When I stood in the doorway to Mrs. Chamberlain’s walk-in closet, she stopped swimming through her hanging sweaters and turned to me. Her face was serious. “How did you sleep?” she might have asked. I don’t remember. All I remember is her telling me that Mom died early that morning and that I didn’t have to go to school that day. So I turned around and went upstairs and got back into bed. I don’t remember if I cried. I do remember that I felt like cotton, floating apart from the stem.
LIZ
I WOKE UP to Daisy Stewart standing over me. I’d gone to sleep alone the night before—I think I was the only person in the house other than Mom and the night nurse. I’d been listening to the Alarm’s “We Are the Light,” my favorite song, over and over again. The album was still spinning on the turntable. It was 8:30 a.m., and my first thought was that I was late for school. Then my second thought was “Why’s Daisy here?” But she answered before I could ask.
“Your mom died this morning,” she whispered.
“Why didn’t you wake me up earlier?” I asked.
She shook her head, her eyes watery, and said, “I wanted to let you sleep a little longer.”
AMANDA
LIZ WASN’T ALONE the night Mom died. I slept next to her, in the same bed even. But I showed up late, after she was asleep. And Uncle Buzz was sitting like a useless lump in the kitchen when I came home. He arrived that night; it was as though Mom had been waiting for him. I couldn’t understand how Mom could love this guy so much. But this was before I realized how important my siblings are to me, before I knew what it was like for us to be apart. Mom died the next morning—at 6:13 a.m. on Friday, December 13, 1985.
DAN
I WAS IN detention when my dorm master came in and whispered to the teacher in charge, and I just knew, that was it. As we walked through the quad, he put his arm around me, kind of like, “Sorry, buddy.”
I kept it together but felt all this shit swirling inside of me. I broke down the second I saw Liz and Amanda waiting for me in his office. Liz came up and hugged me, and then Amanda put her arms around both of us and Liz said, “Mom died at 6:13 this morning.” We stood there for a while, hugging and crying.
Back at home, Liz and Amanda asked if I wanted anyone to come to the funeral, and I thought of Parker Sweeney. He was a good kid. He looked like a blond albino bird with the palest skin you could imagine. He was the only friend I asked to come.
We stayed in Mom’s house alone for a couple days after she died: Liz, Amanda, her friend Rasheeda, and me. We all got high together and were like, “Well, this is it. We’re fucked.”
It was the first time that my sisters really welcomed me into the whole getting wasted thing. And I was like, “This is what it takes?”
part three
WINTER 1985 – WINTER 1991
Together on Fire Island (l–r: Karen, Diana, Dan, Liz, Amanda)
DIANA
THE FUNERAL HOME was warm, filled with golden light, food, and flowers. A wake, they called it, although by then I knew it was just a send-off for the big sleep, gone forever. There had been one for Dad, but I didn’t remember going and wasn’t sure if I had been invited. But here I was, waiting my turn to go up and kneel in front of Mom’s closed coffin, to say good-bye. Everybody was there—Dan, Liz, Amanda, Auntie Eve and Uncle Harry, people from school and from the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club. Actor people. Most were crying; I could hear them sniffling. But not me; I wasn’t going to cry in front of everybody. I focused on the floor, which was carpeted, and on feet, which were all stuffed into dress-up shoes.
When it was my turn to kneel in front of Mom’s coffin, Auntie Eve’s granddaughter Bridget came with me. As we knelt, we whispered to each other, not knowing what to do. Eventually, we both put our hands in prayer position and giggled nervously. Then I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, because I thought maybe we were being disrespectful. I was supposed to be saying good-bye to Mom, so I tried to picture her sleeping inside the shiny wooden box, her face made up and her hair curled as though she was going to work, but I couldn’t.
The last time I had seen Mom was when Mrs
. Chamberlain drove me to her in the middle of the night. She had been sleeping with her head flung back, her mouth open, while her forgotten-about wigs stared at me from the dresser. That night, I had tried to superimpose Mom’s smiling face on the white Styrofoam ovals that held the wigs up in head shapes, but I couldn’t do it. Then, as now, I couldn’t conjure Mom alive on command. I figured it was up to her to come to me. She always did love it when I saw ghosts.
So I got up and walked over to a clump of empty metal folding chairs and sat there by myself as people came up and apologized to me about my life. Even my math teacher, this mean old lady with bad breath and a wart on her chin, leaned into my face and told me how deeply sorry she was. All I could think about was how she made me go up to the blackboard to sort out impossible problems that I didn’t understand. She should be sorry about that, I thought.
The next day, at the funeral, I sat between Mrs. Chamberlain and Liz in a hard wooden pew. I spent most of my time focused on widening the gap between Mrs. Chamberlain and me as much as I could without kicking her away. As I pressed into Liz with my shoulder and hip, Mrs. Chamberlain leaned away from me, too, her left leg crossed over her right. Though her head faced the altar, I could see that she was looking at me from the corner of her eyes. This satisfied me somehow. I was supposed to be thinking of Mom, up there, in the box, but all I wanted at that moment was for Mrs. Chamberlain to see me clinging to my sister, whose right arm was wrapped around my body, protecting me. I wanted Mrs. Chamberlain to see that it was my sister I wanted, that this was where I belonged. I wanted to hurt her with this knowledge so that she would get up and walk out of the church and leave us alone. She didn’t.
