“Honey, try to lie down and rest. I’ll sit up with Helen.” The meaning of Ned’s words drifted into my consciousness.
“I’m fine. I’ll just stay a little longer.”
Ned pulled the other chair close and sat down.
“I was just dreaming about my dad. Helen kept saying it would be all right.”
When I woke up again, I was lying in the bed next to my mother’s, sunlight streaking through the gaps in the blinds. Ned must have coaxed me into the bed before he left. There was bustling outside the room. The nurse would be invading again. She was only doing her job, but all the disturbances had accomplished nothing. The door cracked open, and I turned toward it, preparing my vexation, but Gabe stuck his head into the room.
“Hi, Mom. How’s Grandma today?”
“About the same.” Always the same.
Gabe came closer, and I groaned a protest as a rare hug pinned my upper arms against my body. He was tall enough that I had to look up at him though he was just starting high school. I worried about his reluctance to show his feelings. So like Helen, but they understood each other.
Gabe glanced at his grandmother, his voice remaining steady, with only a slight tremor around his mouth.
“Dad said he’d come by at lunchtime. He had to go round on some patients this morning.”
“How are you getting to school?” I grasped at the mundane, with its easy, identifiable answer.
“Tom’s mom said she’d swing by and pick me up when it’s time. She’s been bringing all kinds of food to the house. She says we need to keep our strength up.”
“That’s nice of her. She’s a nice lady.” I said this mechanically, and I heard myself and wondered what it mattered.
“Yeah, I guess so, but she’s not a very good cook. Mom, you don’t look too good.”
“Gabe, I’m your mother, not one of your friends. You’re not supposed to insult me, remember?” I tried a laugh but failed. I welcomed the look of concern on my boy’s face.
“Well, you’re in here early this morning,” the nurse said to Gabe as she came into the room. Then turning to me, she added, “And you’re in here late. You do need to get some rest. There’s no telling how long your mother will be like this.”
I recognized her concern for me, but her words seemed callous. She needed to do her job, and she couldn’t if she became involved with each patient. I knew that from Ned, though he seldom talked about his work.
“I did sleep some last night. Gabe, could you sit by Grandma while I run down to the cafeteria and grab a bite to eat? I’ll be back before you have to go.” I made my way to the door, abandoning my mother to the care of my son.
“Has there been any change?” Ned asked, as he entered the room.
I turned from where I’d been standing next to my mother’s bed. “Please stop asking me that every time you come in. If there’s any change, I’ll tell you.”
Ned walked over and put his arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry, Rachel.”
I buried my face in his shoulder, vaguely wondering why he loved me. It certainly had nothing to do with my looks. I’m plain: brown hair, brown eyes, irregular features. I looked up at Ned and brushed my lips against his. I suppose he accepted my occasional short temper as the other side of my enthusiasm, my ready changes a counterbalance to the evenness for which I loved him.
“Do you think she’ll be all right?” I asked him again.
“I don’t know.”
“I didn’t even get to tell her about the baby.”
“Rachel, you’ve got to get some rest. You don’t want to endanger the pregnancy.”
“I know. It’s taken us so long. It’s just that when I’m away from her bed, I’m afraid. I keep thinking about how I wasn’t there when my dad died.”
Ned nodded at the familiar grievance.
“Rachel, we don’t know what’s going to happen. This could drag on for weeks. When I come back after work, you go home and have dinner and get a good night’s rest. Please do that for me. Tom’s mom brings food over every day.”
I hesitated but then relented. “I know you’re right. But do I have to eat Tom’s mom’s food? Gabe didn’t exactly give it rave reviews.”
“Oh, yes. Let us not doubt Gabe’s culinary expertise!” He kissed my forehead and went off to his own floor.
I absently rubbed the slight bulge at my middle. We hadn’t wanted to tell anyone until I was further along and we felt more sure that everything would be all right. The day of Helen’s accident, I had been on my way to her house to give her the hopeful news. It was the girl that she had been wanting for so long.
When I was young, I told my mother everything. The telling made excitement more real, or unpleasantness less harsh. If the effect came from the telling, and not the attitude of the listener, I was too young to notice the difference. After Dad died, my mother and I had only each other, but Helen was always so reserved. In time, I, too, became less forthcoming.
As I approached college age, there was one particularly strained subject between us. Helen began to talk about marriage, how critical it was to find a good husband at an early age. When I later announced my intention to go to graduate school, she saw this as a further postponement of my finding a husband. I didn’t tell her that I’d already found the man I hoped to marry. It was small and selfish of me, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of thinking that her prompting had influenced me.
After dating Ned for several months, I did tell Helen about him and proudly introduced him to her. When we later became engaged, she immediately began to press us to set a date. I was in grad school by then, and Ned was in medical school. Despite a lingering rebelliousness against doing my mother’s bidding, Ned and I did decide that we would be happier being together while we finished our studies, and that, though it would be difficult, we could do it.
When we married, I thought I would have my mother’s full approval, but then her complaints began to center on our not having children right away. A child would have been very difficult with both of us in school, and she knew it. Still she persisted, but never when Ned was around. She was very fond of him, and I think that she felt comfortable with him, but she never talked about children when he was around. At first I was glad that Ned didn’t have this extra annoyance, but as time passed, I resented the fact that I was bearing this alone, serving as a buffer between Ned and my mother. Now that I had lived with Ned for so many years, I realized that I could easily have discussed it with him. He would have been supportive of me, without condemning my mother. But back then, I was still insecure, afraid of letting anything spoil our life together, so the anger simmered and my resentment against my mother grew.
I had other married friends whose parents would now and then teasingly ask them when they would have a grandchild, but with Helen it seemed an urgent, personal need. As her only child, I was her sole hope for grandchildren, but I got tired of reassuring her that Ned and I wanted children.
“How long do you have to put it off? I’ll never live to see my grandchildren.” I’d remind her that she was still young and that even if Ned and I delayed children for a few years, there was no need to worry that she would not one day have succeeding generations gathered around her. I believed this. When we’re young, we believe that we’re spontaneous, that we revel in change, all the while denying the irrevocable and unexpected change of death. For even the most doubting young people, the future will be as they envision it.
While Ned was finishing his first year of residency and I was still working on my dissertation, we had our first child, but Helen was oddly disturbed that it was a boy. Only a few days after Gabe was born, she asked whether we would soon try to have a little girl. The old badgering made me angry, and I was hurt at the slight to my sweet newborn.
“How can you start on that already? Why is Gabe not enough for you? Please be happy with me! I thought this was what you wanted!”
“It’s just that it’s such a joy for a woman to have
a daughter,” she stammered. “You can share so much with her. . . . Besides, then Gabe can have someone to play with.” It seemed to me that she added this last sentence only to placate me.
“You and Dad had only one child! Don’t you think that I would have liked to have someone to play with?”
As soon as the words were out, I regretted them. My mother recoiled.
“We tried, but we weren’t blessed with another child” was all she said.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” I knew that it had cost her to tell me even this. Dad used to joke that he had told Helen every thought he’d ever had and that he didn’t know anything about her life before the day he met her. She would just laugh and not deny it.
“And I’m sorry about starting on you again. It’s just that it’s so important to me.”
“Why is it so important to you?”
“We won’t talk about it anymore.” And we didn’t. We never again talked about my having another child. I didn’t share with her my miscarriages, or that Ned and I had even quit hoping.
The afternoon at the hospital passed with no change, and when Ned came that evening, I did leave for a while. On my way out I stopped by the cafeteria, unwilling to abandon my days-old vigil. The lights suspended from the ceiling were inadequate for the large space and lent the room a perpetual twilight. I got a cup of coffee and found a secluded spot in a corner, near a large yucca plant whose swordlike leaves stabbed my back whenever I shifted. I sipped the bitter coffee, put some creamer and sugar in it, then tasted it again. Then I remembered the baby and pushed the cup away. I got up and walked out the door.
I hadn’t been able to get much sleep, and after dropping Gabe off at school the next morning, I drove to the hospital to relieve Ned.
“Has there been any change?” I asked, then remembered how I’d snapped at him for that question. Before he could answer, Helen’s voice said, “Hi, honey.”
I felt a sudden rush as I walked over to the bed. “How are you feeling?” But she didn’t answer.
“She’s been going in and out for about the last hour,” Ned said. “I tried to call you, but I guess you’d already left with Gabe.”
“This means she’s going to be all right, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know, Rachel.” Once again, I found Ned’s unwillingness to tell me what I wanted to hear frustrating. The downside of being married to a doctor is that they can’t speak from the easy hope of ignorance.
“You look terrible yourself.”
“Yeah, I guess I’ll go up to the call room and shower and shave before I go on rounds.”
I leaned over my mother and began to whisper.
“I have something to tell you. I’m pregnant, and we already know it’s a little girl. That’ll make you happy, won’t it? Now you’re going to get all better, and we’ll spoil the baby together.”
I searched her still face. I pulled up the chair, rested my arms on the bed, and waited. Finally, there was a slight motion. I looked into my mother’s gray eyes.
“Too late,” she mouthed. “I am like Ana. I have failed Juliana.” Then she was gone.
26
RACHEL
Those next few days are a blur. I think I concentrated on trying to figure out what my mother had meant as a buffer between myself and grief. I interrogated the doctors, but all they said was that sometimes when older people are in great physical distress, they hallucinate or have strange dreams whose reality they insist upon. That was the only explanation offered for why my mother had mentioned two names that I had never heard, but Ned said there had been no other signs of confusion in those intermittent moments of consciousness.
My mother’s death was hard on Gabe, and I worried about him. They had been good friends. I knew what it was to lose someone you love at a young age. I was just Gabe’s age when my father passed away. He had a heart attack and died two days later in the hospital. I saw myself sitting at the kitchen table, smearing my tears on my shirtsleeve.
“Why didn’t you come get me?” I asked my mother.
“I didn’t want you to have to be there when . . . when the end came.”
“You had no right! You knew I wanted to be there, but you didn’t come get me!”
“I’m sorry. I just thought . . .”
“You wanted Daddy all to yourself! You knew he’d want me there, too, but you didn’t want to share him with anybody.”
“Rachel, that’s not true! I thought it was for the best.”
“You thought! I told you I wanted to be there when, if . . .” But I couldn’t finish. My mother’s face looked so tired, but I felt no pity for her.
“Oh, Rachel, I’m so sorry if I did the wrong thing, but I did it from love for you. I know what it is to see death as a young woman, to carry that moment with you, to make promises that will bind you all your life. I wanted to spare you.” She stopped abruptly, as though she had just revealed too much.
“Did Daddy have something he wanted me to promise?” I snatched at the hope that there would be something I could still do for him.
“No. He just said to remember he’ll always love you.”
The fall quarter at the university didn’t start until late September, and I was looking forward to school starting again to at least sometimes take my mind off the loss of my mother. I was assigned to teach a beginning Spanish class, a three-hundred-level class, in which students started to read some literature but were still working on their language skills, and a class on Latin American drama, which was my area of expertise.
Even with the pressure of publish or perish, I enjoyed my chosen profession and knew that I was luckier than most. I was paid a comfortable amount of money, without needing to make any life-or-death decisions. At times it felt like plodding, but a new insight into some novel or play was still exciting, and I loved that moment when I saw a spark of discovery in a student’s eyes.
I believed that working in another language gave me an alternative way to think, and now it somehow felt like a connection to my mother, even though she had only spoken English. From the time I had entered high school she had encouraged me to study Spanish. Even when I decided to major in Spanish language and literature, she hadn’t tried to dissuade me from choosing what many parents would have viewed as an impractical major: “Maybe when you have children, you can teach them to speak Spanish, too.”
It had been a week since I’d told Ned that I would go over to my mother’s house and start to sort through her things. He offered to help, but it would have been hard for him to get away from the hospital. Besides, I wanted to be alone in my mother’s house. Somewhere in me was the hope that I would find something that would help me understand her. Although I doubted there would really be any revelation, as long as I didn’t go over there, I could hold on to that possibility.
I spent a long time that day looking out the window of my second-story office, which shared one large window with the first floor, where the window was near the ceiling. Here the only natural light emanated from the bottom three feet of the room, and all of a sudden it felt like everything was upside down. I stared out at the students on the quad, whose activity seemed so pointless.
I wondered what I would tell Ned. I’d shunned my mother’s house again.
I hadn’t expected to find solace there. I pulled up to the simple brick house, parked the car, and unloaded the boxes I’d picked up from the grocery store. I started with the sewing room, really just a closet. By starting with the smallest space, I hoped to make more measurable progress.
The stacks of cloth were neatly folded, and the box of bobbin threads radiated colors, not knowing that more somber shades were now in order. My mother would sit at the sewing machine, stitching a side seam in a new dress for me. Rushing in through the back door, I’d wrap my arms around her. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She’d reply automatically, concentrating on her work, and I would further delay my play by observing the mysterious process by which a dress is made. When Dad cam
e in, she’d look up in surprise and remark that he was early, even when he wasn’t.
“Yeah, I finished all my service calls,” he would answer, then come over to give us each a kiss, pushing aside the colorful scraps. “I missed my girls today. I’m going to change my clothes.” The words of love flowed easily from him, and he neither expected nor received a like response from Helen. I don’t know how he felt about that. Maybe, even after all their years together, he still found her reticence intriguing. There was something always held back, a hint of what he hadn’t won but could perhaps someday secure.
“All right” was all she answered, standing to gather the unfinished dress and tools into her sewing basket. “I’ll start supper.”
After Dad died, I provided whatever overt show of love there was between us. As I matured, I would try to penetrate my mother’s gossamer shelter. No matter what circuitous route I chose, we always arrived at the same place.
“Mom, Aunt Sandy isn’t so reserved.”
“We’ve had different experiences.”
“Like what?” But she never answered.
“It’s just that it’s kind of hard sometimes. I always feel like there’s something you’re hiding.”
“Hiding? You know I love you. Don’t I show it by the way I act, by everything I do for you?”
“All right, Mom, all right.”
27
RACHEL
I returned to the present and finished gathering up the loose fabrics, placing them in one of the cardboard boxes. Next I explored the contents of my mother’s sewing box, trying on the thimble, surprised to find that it fit me perfectly, the tiny decorative ribbon encircling the bottom frayed and faded. I had intended to give away everything from this room. I’d never learned to sew, and now I regretted having never asked my mother to teach me. I’d keep the thimble and the pair of embroidery scissors shaped like a pelican.
The Lines Between Us Page 12
