Prison Baby

by Deborah Jiang-Stein

  But the eyes, her full brown eyes, still shine, clear with her love for me. They speak their own language even though she’s spent from dying and her face cannot manage an expression. Not one glimmer in her eyes speaks of death around the corner, of her apprehension or relief or maybe fear. Maybe not fear.

  My hands volunteer themselves. One runs its fingers through her few silver wisps of hair. My other hand caresses her back, finds its own rhythm, and my fingers ripple over most every vertebra and rib while I stroke with repetition from the nape of her neck down to her waist.

  My mother’s hands used to fret. Her busy fingers knit the air. I understand why from those years of my agitated youth, my extended youth to thirty or so. After we bonded, though, devoted daughter and mother, what made her fingers fret?

  I consider my mother’s hands, and her socks, dozens of socks I bring for her on visits. Soft tan cotton socks, nothing too tight at the ankle, white sport socks, short argyle wool ones, maroons and more tan and more white and another wool, any color. I buy in excess for her then: underwear, socks, robes, nightgowns. All the socks for her to sit around, lay down in, socks to fit her swollen ankles and feet, bloated from cancer sweeping to her liver, skin stretched at her ankles like fruits ready to burst with ripeness. Her favorite—blue fluffy socks—she wears like slippers, at night in bed, then days in bed.

  The next day, before I leave her bedside, Mother and I discuss my unexpected desire for children.

  “But I’m single right now,” I tell her. My latest relationship has just ended. “And what if with kids I won’t find time to follow my creative work?”

  “Women have raised children for centuries,” she says, “in all kinds of circumstances and all kinds of relationships, single or not.”

  She smiles and I hug her. She encourages me to do whatever I want. Kids, career, writing, travel, everything together.

  All of a sudden I recognize the truth of my mother. She’s a courageous pioneer. She’s been one all along. In my judgment as a child, I believed she and Dad adopted me to boost their liberal image. I guess those thoughts helped me block them out.

  Mother, ten years older than my father, adopted me while in her forties. Even more unusual, she adopted a multiracial girl, as though oblivious to the rarity of our blended family.

  My parents, already outsiders themselves as Jews in academia, marched around with their little caramel-colored girl, innovators in a segregated, pre–civil rights America, where races never integrated in private.

  I want to be brave for her, give her whatever I can.

  “Mother, do you ever wonder about the phone call from the police? Do you . . . want to hear about those years I disappeared?”

  She smiles.

  “Thanks. Not really.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BLUE SOCKS

  IT’S THANKSGIVING. FOR THE FIRST TIME in many years, eight of us gather at my parents’ house at the same time: Mother, Dad, my brother, his wife, their three young children, and me.

  Jonathan wheels Mother to the family table but she refuses food. I try to tempt her with a spoon of whipped cream to her lips but she turns her face away. Something feels different about Mother. After dinner I call the hospice nurse. While we wait, I massage her feet through the fluff of her blue socks.

  “Don’t stop. Don’t go,” she says, her gaze straight into mine. She stares beyond me and into me at the same time. I hold this look, possess it, this horizon together and fight an instinct to avert my eyes.

  “Stay with her, stay,” I command myself. Every speck of courage in me gathers for this one moment. I refuse to look away. My father on the other side of the room holds her bottle of morphine, his face directed down like he’s reading the label, but his eyes peer over his glasses. He watches us, her, his wife of almost fifty years, from twelve feet away.

  Within the hour the nurse arrives, races to Mother’s bed, then calls us together in the hall outside her room. “She’s close to death,” the nurse whispers. She turns to me. “Would you like to accompany me alone with her for a minute?”

  I stare at her, air trapped in the bottom of my lungs. I panic.

  “I’m going to wash her body, help soothe her,” she says.

  I know she asked me for this daughter-mother aloneness, but I can’t. A private and proud woman, Mother would never want me to see her naked on her deathbed. More than this, though, in truth I am scared. Terror engulfs me. Go, I tell myself, do it anyway, but I can’t.

  Now I wish I’d been able to wash and help soothe my mother. And at the same time, I think she would’ve hated it. Or would she?

  I wait outside Mother’s room in the hall. Then, after a few minutes, the nurse calls my father, brother, and me into her room. I want to beg for mercy. To whom, though? Please, not now, not again. Please. No. Don’t. My plea, not to Mother, not to anyone in particular. I know she needed to go. I want her free from suffering.

  But I want her. I need her. I need not to lose another mother.

  I glance at the clock. It’s 11:15 p.m., the exact time the prison documents record for my time of birth. On the dot.

  I stroke Mother’s hair with one hand and wrap my other around her bony shoulder. Dad stands opposite me, my brother next to him. Mother lurches and takes her last breath. The thought flashes through me: Did she wait to die until I arrived? I lean down, my lips close to her ear. “Thank you, Mother. You’ll always be with me.” I raise my voice. I want to make sure my words reach her. I need her to hear I value her.

  I embrace my mother in her final gasp. She shudders in this dying, and fear makes me retreat. I jump. It’s her lurch for air, the suddenness. No one told me, not the hospice nurse, not my father or my older brother. I’d never read about this. It is not like this in movies. I never leaned so close to death.

  No one warned me about the deep-lung death gurgle, and how my hands would want to reach for her. All I have is touch, then the sound of her dying. Soon the touch and sound end, my hands empty in the silence.

  THE MORTUARY DRIVERS take an hour to arrive, and I covet the time alone with Mother. My brother and father had left the room right after she took her last breath.

  I kiss her cheeks, her forehead, the way she kissed mine to check my fever. I sit at her side and hold her quiet hands, cry, and stop. Cry and stop.

  I stand at the foot of her bed and wrap my fingers around her ankles, around her blue socks. I jiggle her with a slight rock, left right left, then a soft shake to see if any life has lingered. Is it real? Nothing. She’s still warm. And dead.

  Images of my mother’s anguished disintegration cover me, images of her dying moments, the urgent vitality of her life flowing away in her last minutes. A wind sweeps through me, nothing I’d ever felt before in my body, like someone has attached a fireplace bellows to me and puffs and puffs a long constant breeze through my neurons. Not air. Not sky. A breath maybe. Electricity and breath into my every cell.

  THEN I OPEN the nightstand beside her bed and discover an empty tissue box with a piece of paper peeking out. I’m snooping like I did when I found the prison letter.

  I pull out the note, her last shopping list—anchovies, capers, the bank—scribbled on a scrap of paper, along with bread, the pharmacy. Pushed into one corner of the drawer in the back sits a clear-plastic rectangular box packed with lined-up bobby pins.

  I then wander into the garage, open the glove compartment of my mother’s car, and dig around. Lodged under irregularly folded state maps, my fingertips land on a cough-drop tin filled with a collection of quarters, for parking I figure. I pocket and save the tin of coins and box of bobby pins.

  Back at her bedside, I open her nightstand drawer again and find, further buried, a banded-together stack of postcards. It’s the preaddressed cards we had mailed to each other during my summer camp in England, before everything turned bad.

  Dear Mother,

  One of the cooks let me help her in the kitchen. We made toast and maenase with oil and egg yoke.
Our wether has been fine exsept for at night it rains hard. Don’t forget to send me pencils. I miss you. But I am not home sick yet.

  One of the horses is lame so today there were only two horses to ride. My first lesson I made the horse trott. I like fast. On the farm there are 3 horses, 2 pigs, two cows and a calf. We play games like baseball. I like sports.

  Love and kisses, Debbie

  Deb Dear:

  Don’t worry about the stains on your sweater. It’s too bad if the stains don’t come out, but things like this do happen when children play. Remember to put all of your clothes together—wear your jacket and mittens, and pack your raincoat. Your father and I both get excited at the thought of seeing you soon. I go back to London tomorrow—Monday.

  Remember your manners. Be sure you thank everyone.

  Love, Mother

  Dear Mother,

  I don’t think I ever want to go away again. Whenever I am lonesome I worry about you. I am having a JOLLY good time.

  Today I went to the sea for the whole day. We ate lunch and drank tea there. It’s fun buried up to my neck in the sand. At first when I went in the water I got scared then I got use to it. The waves are JOLLY big.

  Love, Debbie

  AS THE MORTUARY workers roll Mother’s body towards the door on a gurney, I shadow the attendants. I’m thankful she and I said everything we needed to say to one another before she passed away.

  They load her into a body bag, all the life, all the fight in her gone. My mind taunts me with my battle against her, with all she endured. How did she wait for me so long? How did she stand by me through all I did to her?

  I want—need—to give her more, and she’s gone.

  Gone. Death does not honor our desperation for a second chance. Nor does it obey the cry for reconciliation.

  That night, I pull on all my mother’s socks, one over the other, all the socks except the blue ones she died in. She was cremated in her blue socks.

  Hopelessness tries to drag me down into its hole but I won’t let it. I need to prove to myself and to Mother my love for her, my respect. A stranger to the temple, back in Minneapolis I attend the mourner’s service every night and I sit Shiva for 365 consecutive sundowns and recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourning. I haven’t done any one thing in my life for 365 consecutive days. My orthodox uncles who taught me the prayer do it for seven days. But I can’t—won’t—stop. My devotion to the mourner’s service shocks everyone, most of all me.

  GRIEF BITES AND stings. I need to occupy and distract myself, and while I might not have the DNA for impulse control, I discover in those first twelve months without Mother my extra gene for quirky, off-the-wall creativity. I sink my sorrow into the only outlet left, since I no longer drink or drug, and put my nonlinear, bouncy brain to good use and invent a few products. The creativity helps lift the shroud of constant sadness. I work nonstop, with a fount of ideas. Some tank, but I don’t care because I don’t call mistakes failure.

  My father begins his descent into the horrific world of mind subtraction: Alzheimer’s. My time’s up on a new life designed to care for myself and focus on my work.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  RETURN TO THE VEILED LADY

  MY FATHER’S DAILY HOUR-LONG WALKS TURN into all-day wanderings into neighborhoods where we can’t find him. His repetitions of “Where are we?” and his empty gaze give us clues he needs to see a doctor. My father’s disappearance cell by cell reminds me that I adored some things about him, qualities I’d forgotten because of his eruptions of violence.

  His capacity for deep compassion and ease with his emotions brought me close to the most tender side of this man. He’d often shed tears when he heard a story about someone in need. And he held great admiration and respect for laborers and blue-collar work—maybe that was the socialist in him.

  When I was in high school and still living at home, one night after dinner I broke a teacup in my mother’s china collection and felt terrible. My mother lit into me, but my father defended me. “She feels bad enough,” he said, “no need to scold her.” That was it. I felt released from the guilt and protected by my father.

  On one of his last travels alone, I took him to the airport and we sat over tea at a table by a window. He asked me, out of nowhere, “Do I dominate you?”

  Right in front of me, I knew then where I learned my blunt honesty.

  He must have sensed how my walls of protection and tension built up in his presence.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  That’s all we said. But his question caused me to reflect. We had a special way with each other, soft moments clouded by his infrequent and unexpected violence. And then there was our contest of wills, the special way I knew to aggravate him on purpose, to provoke him.

  THE DAY MY father finds out he is losing his mind, he can’t recall two-syllable words on the doctor’s orders. Table, walnut, diving. He says he sees them swim away, first one, then the other two. Words float from a once measured vocabulary. After a lifetime of scrutinizing Paradise Lost, he replies, “Alas, I thought as much,” the day doctors diagnose dementia. It’s his dancing companion, this madness, for the next ten years.

  “Don’t much like the idea of an existence without my mind,” he tells me on one of our visits to the neurologist. “Toenails,” he adds. “After the mind goes, there is not much left but toenails.”

  Thank God for toenails, I think. At least there’s something left.

  The scholar melts into a slow drip through stages of childhood. He reads books with the pages turned upside down. He thumps the wall with the palm of his hand next to the elevator button in the lobby of his assisted-living center, his face puzzled as to why the elevator won’t respond to his wall banging. Pained and fascinated at the same time, I witness the curse of my father’s Alzheimer’s. The disease steals his critical, cerebral style, yet as the intellectual professor fades, Dad softens. It’s also the first time in my life I see his face open, without a beard, and his gentleness glows from his cheeks.

  AS DIFFICULT AS I found my father and as much as I rejected my mother, they and their friends influenced me in the deepest of ways. They introduced me to great writers, painters, a few physicists, all family friends who dined and drank at parties at our house every month, sometimes twice a month. My parents kept a social household, and their literary circle impacted my worldview about marching to your own drumbeat. Some were gay or lesbian, some drank like pirates, or were depressed or flew between highs and lows on who-knows-what, and some were institutionalized with off-and-on “insanity,” as my parents would describe it.

  I can’t say I learned to write from this exposure, although I’m sure all those nights of poetry readings helped me fall in love with words and the sound of language. Since I never talked, I listened a lot.

  I’m also sure my early rebellion against academia and what I viewed then as artistic and literary arrogance stems from this background.

  A FEW YEARS before my father dies, my life as a mother begins. Motherhood never seemed possible in my former life. How can I raise children and care for others when I couldn’t even take care of myself?

  My father and I become a little closer before he passes away because I like him better with his tender side, even if it’s in dementia. I’m also shocked how his regression parallels the same stages of development as my now seven-year-old daughter—only in reverse.

  The night he dies, my daughters and I visit him. My youngest, then around three, holds his hand and tucks her little yarn-toy lamb on his pillow, right by his ear. He is on his way out, nonresponsive other than the moment when his body softens from its labored breathing into a sigh. Hospice musicians play harp and guitar off to the side of the room, and I remember then one of the sweetest things my father did for me, for us.

  He took me to a few R&B concerts before I was old enough to drive. He knew I loved music, hated to talk, and we would sit, basking in the melodies together. The two of us together at small club jams, full of
mostly people of color, with Roberta Flack onstage or large auditorium blasts with Donny Hathaway and others. Me and my father, whose six-foot-five frame made him stand out as the only white man around. Even though I felt embarrassed about him at my side, I loved it at the same time, my loving father brave enough to venture out with me this way, even though he lacked courage in some other ways. I loved him and hated him, and in the end, only loved him.

  HE DIED THE night of our visit with the baby lamb toy. While we waited for the mortician—my girls and my niece, Madeline, played Crazy Eights with the deck of cards I found in his dresser. Right at the foot of my father’s bed, next to his lifeless body, they giggled and shuffled cards. When the mortuary workers arrive, along with my sister-in-law, we all escorted him alongside the gurney, his body in a brown, vinyl body bag like my mother’s, down the long nursing-home halls into the parking lot.

  Later that night, in the underground parking lot of our apartment building, my oldest daughter, who’d been teaching herself to ride her bike for almost a full year but still couldn’t stay upright, hopped on her bike as I reached into the car to take her sister out of the car seat. I turned around and she sailed past me on her bicycle. No training wheels, just free riding on her own. Life not only goes on, it soars, where joy can live inside loss and grief.

  MY CHILDREN ARE still young as I begin to write this, and I believe their story is for them to tell, not me, which they’ve confirmed. Like any parent, I’m protective of them. My world doesn’t need to be their world.

  As a new mother, I’m not prepared for the pressures of parenting and one day, frustration about something I can’t remember erupts. I’m alone at home and strike the edge of my daughter’s crib. My right hand fractures into bits. I wonder then if I’ll ever stop this fight with myself, with the world. While I’d never dream of placing a hand on one of my girls or anyone else, I want this battle with myself ended. My hand in a pink cast for months, I walk them to pre-school with this constant reminder about my unpredictable inner turmoil. I consult a specialist in trauma and grief, along with another professional who treats soldiers with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I feel like a soldier, a warrior. I learn that not just soldiers live with PTSD but also survivors of rape and abuse—and inmates.