The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  After a while I look at the clock. It is almost eleven. I gather my books and head back to the writing center. A single light glows in the upstairs room. The stairs creak as I make my way up them.

  The tutor is a senior named Michel. He’s French Canadian and his name is pronounced Me-SHELL. I say it out loud a couple of times, and he looks at me quizzically.

  We’ve never spoken, but I’ve seen him in the dining hall, observed his height, the angle of his jaw, his blue eyes. He is handsome but doesn’t seem to know it. He wears an old coat with worn elbows. There’s something about the coat. It’s not like the ones the rich kids get from thrift stores. The coat is real; it’s the best he can do.

  I sit down opposite him and push my paper across the table. I am ashamed. I know it is badly written. I know that he has been reading papers all night and that he surely wants to go home.

  I sit quietly while he reads, and I stare out the windows at the snow and parked cars. I think about my mother, about when I will see her next, about yet another hospital we will all become familiar with.

  Suddenly I am crying.

  Michel looks up from my paper and narrows his eyes. He says nothing.

  My mother has cancer, I blurt out. She’s going to a hospital in DC. I’m supposed to go there for Thanksgiving, instead of going home. My father says she is going to die.

  I’m aware of my voice, young and husky. I don’t know why I’m telling him all of this, but it feels good to say it out loud.

  Michel sets my paper down on the table. It will remain there, forgotten. Somehow the following week I’ll finish it, hand it in.

  My father committed suicide a year ago, he says in response.

  He just says it. Not without emotion, but as if he can’t bear for me to go on without knowing this.

  The sentence hangs there in the air between us.

  The room is electric. It feels like we are touching, even though we aren’t.

  Michel says it again: My father committed suicide.

  After that our conversation unspools like smoke. We sit at the table for the next couple of hours, long past the time the center is closed, talking, leaning forward in our seats. Michel tells me about his father. I tell him about my mother. In some moments we are shy, our eyes seeking out the corners of the room. In other moments we are brazen, the room charged with the strange energy we have created.

  It’s my father’s birthday, Michel says. Right now, tonight. He tells me this at midnight, and then together we watch the second hand on the old clock on the wall sink over into a new date with an audible click.

  Now it’s my birthday, he says.

  Our birthdays are one day apart, he continues. When we lived in different time zones, my father would call me when it was eleven here, midnight there. For that one hour, we shared a birthday.

  I am dumb with awe. I can think of nothing to say.

  Michel begins to cry, and I watch the tears drip down onto his sweater. This boy who is almost a man, who is almost a stranger, begins to cry.

  He tells me that he’s never told anyone all of this, that he’s never cried for his father, not once in this whole last year.

  I am silent, marveling at the power we have to unlock a person.

  We stay up all night, talking. At some point we move to the empty dining hall. It is always left unlocked, giant cereal dispensers and milk available for students all night. We fill bowls with granola and sit across from each other, the food in front of us an afterthought.

  Michel tells me all the things he wished he’d told his father. He is stern in his insistence that I not make this same mistake with my mother.

  You have to tell her this stuff now. You might not get another chance. He leans forward, his blue eyes barreling into me.

  Okay, I nod.

  And sitting there across from Michel, I really think I will. I feel energized and empowered. I feel awake and alive and more determined than ever. Before tonight my mother’s cancer just seemed like this thing that was just happening to all of us. But Michel has made me feel like I can actually play a part in what happens next.

  Hours later, when dawn breaks, I am lying awake in my top bunk, replaying the evening. Michel’s instructions, his careful and urgent sentences, float down over me until I am covered in them, breathing in lightly through my mouth.

  But the thing I do not realize is that, no matter how I feel in this moment, I do not really think that my mother will die.

  FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, Michel and I are inseparable. We have opened something, unlocked a door, crossed a threshold. But there are limits to where we go once inside.

  I am determined to stick to my vow of celibacy following the disgust I felt with the anarchist, and I inform Michel of this on the second day that we hang out. I immediately regret this decision because all I want to do is bury my head in his neck, feel his hands in my hair.

  One afternoon he invites me to visit his apartment in town. He is a senior and does not live on campus. He drives an old, beat-up car and picks me up in the late morning.

  The drive to Brattleboro, the town at the base of the mountain, is about twenty minutes of hairpin curves, slowed by the occasional logging truck. We chatter idly in the front seat, the enclosed space presenting an unexpected intimacy.

  Michel lives in a tall building in the town’s center. At eighteen I don’t know many people who live in apartment buildings. Michel’s studio consists of a large room with an old, queen-size bed as the focal point. We stand in the center of the room, awkwardly, and I try to pick out something to remark on, but my gaze only falls on the muscles in Michel’s neck, his jawline, and the way his hair waves slightly behind his ears. His eyes are sad, his lips full.

  Let’s go for a walk, he says.

  We set out along Main Street and duck into the town’s only bookstore, which sells a combination of new and used books. I run my fingers across the titles, hovering here and there, trying to decide on a book to pull out that will impress him.

  Michel himself pulls out title after title without hesitation, and I make a list in a little notebook I carry around with me. Michel is a writer. He is almost finished with a novel. He has written dozens of short stories. He is meticulous about them, combing through the words like a surgeon afraid of leaving something behind.

  E. Annie Proulx. He says the name with the same stern tone he used when he spoke about my mother. Years later I’ll read a review of Michel’s first published novel that compares him to Proulx, unknowingly bestowing on him the highest compliment he could have.

  My mother becomes the silent chaperone of these afternoons with Michel, her threatened existence the reason we are spending time together. She is the subject we return to when the sexual tension between us rises. In a coffee shop Michel’s hand stops on the small of my back, and both of us go rigid. He removes it. We breathe again.

  So, when do you leave for DC, he asks?

  After the coffee shop we go to the Price Chopper. Michel fills a basket with day-old bread, dented cans of soup. I’ve never been in a grocery store like this. It dawns on me that there is no one to pay his rent for him, no credit card with which to buy his groceries, like the one my father gave me.

  We walk by the river, taking turns holding the bag of groceries. We are careful not to let our hands touch when we switch off. We stop under a bridge, sit next to each other on a concrete piling.

  What do you want to do with your life?

  I want to be a writer, he says.

  You are a writer.

  Not yet, he says.

  He doesn’t ask me what I want to do with my life. I want the same thing he does, but I don’t tell him that.

  Back in his apartment we eat our soup and bread, sitting on milk crates. When it’s time for me to go, we stand near the door. A friend from school is giving me a ride back up the mountain and she is waiting.

  Michel and I step carefully toward each other, and in one easy move he folds me into him. He is so tall and broad and wa
rm. I want to crawl inside him and sleep there. We stand pressed together for a long time. I turn my face inward, breathing him in, my lips on his neck.

  I kiss him there; I can’t help it.

  He pulls back slightly. I know he is looking for permission to kiss me.

  But I gently push away and walk out the door.

  I leave the next day for DC.

  THE FIRST NIGHT in the hospital I burn with Michel’s words. I sit on the edge of my mother’s bed. I haven’t seen her since parents’ weekend, and she looks worse than ever.

  My mother was once a very beautiful woman, statuesque with a perfect sheath of white-blond hair that fell to her shoulders. She turned men’s heads well into her fifties. But now her skin is gray, her cheeks sunken and sagging, and tubes snake their way from her nose, disappearing into the sheets. The skin hangs on her arms like threadbare towels on a laundry line.

  She was operated on a little over a week ago. The doctor removed her colon entirely and created a colostomy bag by drawing part of her intestine through an opening in her abdomen. It provides a new path for the feces leaving her body.

  The bag hangs from a hook on the side of the bed. I am careful not to kick it with my boot.

  My mother reaches up and touches her hair.

  You cut it, I say.

  She nods, fingering its short length. Does it look awful, she asks? Her voice is slurred as though she is drunk.

  No, just different, I say.

  She drops her hand back to the sheets, closes her eyes.

  With a sharp pang, I realize I miss her.

  My mother was forty when I was born. She met my father in her late thirties, had already been married twice, but had never had kids. Even at eighteen I already know that she poured all her energy into raising me, as though by giving me so much of herself she could somehow erase the mistakes of her past.

  Mom, I have to tell you some things.

  She opens her eyes and slowly finds mine.

  We’ve never talked about it. What it would be like if she died. She’s been sick for four years and we’ve never talked about it. I don’t know where to start.

  Mom, I say, I just want you to know . . . I start but cannot finish.

  What do I want her to know? Michel’s words ring in my ears, but they are his to say, not mine.

  I’m never going to stop, Mom. I say this finally, tears springing like little stars in the corners of my eyes.

  I’m not sure what I mean, but I want her to know that this fervor I have for life—that it won’t go away, that I won’t let anything defeat it. I stare at the metal chain behind her bed that turns on the light.

  I can’t look at her.

  She nods at me, her eyes bright with pain. I know, she says.

  I ramble on for a bit, and when she is sure I am finished, she closes her eyes, leans back against the pillow.

  I sit waiting, breathing through my mouth, as though I am out of breath.

  She opens her eyes finally.

  Claire.

  I think she is going to soothe me, but what comes next isn’t that.

  Can you help me with this bedpan? She motions to a small plastic tub on the bedside table.

  I blanch but nod.

  It’s awkward, trying to help her. She pulls the sheet away and lifts her bottom for me to shove the pan under. I don’t know if I’ve done it right, but she’s releasing anyway and I can hear urine hitting the plastic.

  She moans as she pees, and the sound settles over me like a shiver.

  The days come and go after that. I walk the corridors, memorizing the layout of the hospital. I’m good at this. I’ve been visiting hospitals since I was fourteen. There’s a cold, dead garden that I stand in for long minutes, blowing plumes of cigarette smoke up into the air, stubbing the toe of my boot against a concrete planter.

  I sit in her room for hours at a time, leaning back in my chair, careful not to disturb the colostomy bag. There is a tennis match on the television. My mother watches with limp concentration, her mouth open, her lips dry and cracked. She used to be fanatical about tennis. Every summer her arms grew stronger and more bronzed by the month. At night she would complain about her backhand, going over the details of the day’s match at the country club.

  My aunt Pam comes into the room suddenly, breaking my reverie. She is my mother’s younger sister. Their relationship has always been a complicated one, fueled by competition, but for now they seem to have put that aside.

  My mother smiles weakly at her.

  Sally, Pam says with a bright smile. She treats my mother as though nothing has changed, and I am both jealous and resentful of this ability.

  Oh, you’re so dry, honey, she says. Let’s get you all fixed up.

  Pam grabs a little tube of Vaseline and rubs a smear of it across my mother’s cracked lips. My mother presses her lips together, musters another smile.

  Let’s see these feet, Pam says, pulling back the sheet. Oh, I bet we can do better with these too.

  She grabs a bottle of lotion and begins to gently rub my mother’s feet. My mother closes her eyes.

  I watch all of this silently from my chair. I wish I could do these things for her. But I can’t. The truth is that my mother’s body disgusts me. The truth is that I am terrified of it.

  I can’t shake the idea that she is rotting from the inside out, like a piece of fruit, bruised and swollen in places. I am afraid to touch her. I miss her beauty, miss her tanned, fit form. I am sick of the sutures and the colostomy bag. I don’t like her cracked lips or her scaly feet. This creature is not my mother.

  Later a nurse comes to bathe her. She helps my mother out of bed, spreads a towel over the floor for my mother to stand upon. The nurse unties my mother’s hospital gown, tosses it into a corner.

  My mother is naked, her form hunched over, her skin loose. I can see the bones in her spine, bumping down her back. The nurse runs a sponge over them. In my chair I pull my knees even tighter to my chest.

  The nurse hands my mother a warm, wet washcloth, and my mother puts it between her legs. She looks over at me.

  This is where we live, Claire.

  I don’t know what she means. I become perfectly still, trying to will this moment from happening.

  I want to go home, but I don’t know where that is anymore.

  I want my mother back, but I know that she is already gone.

  I don’t want to remember any of this, but I know that I will.

  THE NEXT DAY my father and I join a few other families, in a windowless conference room off the cancer ward, for Thanksgiving dinner. I pick at the turkey on my paper plate as I listen to the other families talk about how grateful they are that their loved one is still alive.

  I’m grateful for the doctors here, one of them says.

  I’m grateful my father has lived two years past his diagnosis, another says.

  Everyone is nodding at one another, tears brimming in their eyes.

  Someone suggests we all hold hands and say a prayer.

  Fuck this, I think.