The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  I want to scream. I’m not grateful for any of it. Not for this pity dinner, not for my mother’s colostomy bag or her extended prognosis. Not for Pam’s sympathetic looks or my father’s hand on my shoulder. Fuck it all.

  I push away from the table abruptly and slam out of the room. I picture everyone around the table exchanging knowing glances. She’s a teenager, I imagine them saying.

  Poor thing.

  Fuck them.

  Fuck them all.

  I suddenly hate everything: myself, my father, the doctors, this hospital, and all those families sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table. I dig my fingernails into my palms until there are bright red little half-moons left there.

  I find a pay phone in an empty hallway and I dial the number to Michel’s apartment.

  He picks up on the second ring.

  Hi, I say.

  Hi, he says.

  He sounds relieved, excited to hear from me.

  This is hard, I say.

  I know, he says.

  We are silent for a while then. All I can think about is what it would be like to kiss him.

  I’ll see you in a few days, he says.

  Yeah, Sunday.

  I hang up the phone and stand there for a while with my hand still on the warm receiver. I imagine Michel doing the same.

  When I resurface later, Pam is swift to remind me that I should be grateful that we had Thanksgiving at all. I hate her.

  Later I try to tell my mother about it. I’ve always been able to tell her everything, even terrible things, like when I was sixteen and thought I might be pregnant. I remind her now of the Thanksgivings we’ve had at home, of the funny feasts she prepared.

  Do you remember the year you stuck Fourth of July sparklers in the turkey?

  She stares back at me. Her face is blank and then breaks into the slightest curve of a smile.

  I want things to go back to the way they used to be, I say.

  The smile disappears. Her eyes fill with tears.

  I bite my lip, look out the window. I am so angry. I hate her too.

  I am relieved when Sunday comes; my father’s figure receding behind security at the airport feels like freedom.

  I CALL MICHEL that first night back, but he doesn’t answer. I look for him the next day in the dining hall too, but he is nowhere to be seen.

  He answers the phone the second night. I can hear music in the background, someone laughing.

  Hello, he says.

  Hi, I say. It’s me.

  Oh, hey. His tone is different. More casual, distant.

  I’m back, I say.

  Oh, right.

  I wait for him to ask about my mom, but he doesn’t. A beat passes and neither of us says anything.

  Well, I say finally, you sound kind of busy.

  Yeah, he says. Sorry. We’ll talk soon.

  I hang up the phone, feeling confused. Back in my room, I lie across the bed. I’ve never felt as lonely as I do right now.

  I see Michel the next day in the dining hall. He is sitting with a girl named Kate. She is rich and from Manhattan. She has one of those pert noses that I’ve always envied. I can tell just by looking at them that they have slept together. In an instant shame seeps into me.

  Right now I am simply confused and deeply hurt. It won’t be until later that I will be able to recognize what it was like for Michel to walk into my world the way he did. Only then will I understand that my grief was too much for him. Right now the only thing I can think is how incredibly alone I am in all of this.

  Michel comes to my room one afternoon, a week later, and asks me to return a short story he had written and given to me. In the story a man and a woman hike to opposite precipices of the same mountain. Taking turns, they each photograph the other.

  I give it back to him. Almost immediately I wish I hadn’t.

  FOR A WHILE, nothing changes with my mother. My father calls almost every day. He tells me what they watched on TV, if the doctors have anything new to report, that my mother says she misses me. I wonder if she really said that or if my father is making it up. He tells me that I will spend my Christmas break, a whole month, in DC.

  I start hanging out with this girl named Katie. She has stars tattooed on the soles of her feet. So that she’s always walking on stars, she says. She has a shock of thick, dyed, black hair that is startling against her pale skin, and because she’s an RA, she has her own room. I start going there most nights after my dishwashing is done. We smoke cigarettes, listen to music.

  Katie is friends with Christopher, the boy I’ve had a crush on since the first week of school, the one I pointed out to my mother over parents’ weekend. He comes by most nights too, and the three of us sit there. I try not to look at him too often.

  Christopher is the improbable choice. He is the boy all the girls follow with their eyes as he moves through the dining hall. He is handsome and, unlike Michel, he knows it. He is tall, with a mess of blond hair, bright eyes, quick fingers. He is a jazz musician. I like the way his pants hang from his hips.

  Christopher’s girlfriend has left campus for the rest of the semester, gone to Spain or South America or something, and suddenly he is everywhere: sprawled across a couch in Howland common room, cross-legged on rich Dave’s bed and keeping time to Charlie Parker, leaning against a wall outside the post office when I go to check my mail.

  It’s impossible: me and him. I know this, but still I can’t stay away. Our paths keep crossing. Sometimes I think it’s just because of his friendships with Dave, who lives in my dorm, and Katie, but maybe it is more than that. Whatever it is, Christopher starts appearing at my door in the evenings. A bottle of whiskey hanging from his hand, a pack of cigarettes in his shirtsleeve.

  I let him in and he takes a seat in the corner of the room. We don’t talk much. We listen to music. We smoke cigarettes. Sometimes we go outside, stand in the snow, and look up at the night sky, at the stars there, their singular brightness seeming just as improbable as any of it: me and him, my mother’s death, the future beyond them.

  We don’t talk about my mother at all, even though I’m pretty sure he knows. We don’t touch either, even though I can’t think of anything I want more. I don’t even know why I want him so badly. Because I’m lonely? Because my mother is dying and touching boys feels like the opposite of that?

  I don’t know why Christopher keeps coming back to my room, but I don’t dare ask him. Instead I just open the door and let him in, night after night. On one of those nights, after he is gone and I am alone again in the old armchair in the corner, I practice saying it aloud.

  My mother is dead.

  She is not dead yet. She is in her hospital bed in DC, but I want to know how it will feel to say it.

  My mother is dead.

  I say it several times.

  My mother is dead.

  My mother is dead.

  The words become living things. They scuffle at the corners of the room, and I wrap my arms tight around me, trying to keep still so they will not notice me.

  CHRISTMAS BREAK FINALLY comes and with it a flurry of papers handed in, bags packed, and dorm rooms glanced over one last time before slamming the door, running out into the cold to catch a bus to a flight to a place I don’t want to go.

  DC is the same. My mother is the same: Gray. Slack. Tired. Not my mother.

  She is out of the hospital now, and in a hospital bed in the study of my half sister’s house, just outside DC. My father has three children from his first marriage, and one of them, Candace, lives with her husband and son in a suburb in Virginia.

  My father and I sleep upstairs in guest rooms, and my mother occupies the downstairs, with nurses and hospital equipment, gently dripping IVs, and pink plastic bedpans.

  I smoke cigarettes in my nephew Brian’s room. He is only a few years younger than me, and we stay up late playing video games and drinking red wine that we have snuck from the kitchen after dinner.

  On the first day I try to
talk to my mom again, but it’s like she isn’t there, like she has already checked out of the world. I tell her about school and my last papers, about Christopher and the snow that finally blanketed the mountain. All these things she once would have cared about, but her gaze focuses in and out and she doesn’t respond, other than to nod.

  I sit upstairs in my room after that, sobbing into a pillow so that no one will hear me.

  My father takes me for a drive a few days later.

  Claire, he says, you know that the situation isn’t good.

  I stare out the window. My father is seventy-five years old. For most of my life people have thought he was my grandfather.

  She’s dying, he says. His voice is gentle.

  I don’t say anything. I want out of the car, out of this moment, away from all of this.

  But there is nowhere to go.

  After we get back to the house I stand in the doorway of the study, watching my mother sleep, missing her.

  My father asks me to be on call that night and he gives me a baby monitor. He says he is tired, that he needs a break, but really I think he just wants me to spend more time with her.

  She wakes up at least once a night, he says. All you have to do is sit next to her, comfort her until she goes back to sleep. She’s just scared, he says.

  That night, while we’re playing video games and drinking wine, I swallow a little white pill that I’ve been carrying around in my pocket all day.

  What’s that? Brian asks.

  Kind of like a quaalude, I answer.

  Where’d you get it?

  My dad, I say, washing the pill back with a swig of wine.

  Brian shrugs and then unpauses the game we are playing. The tinkling sound of scoring resumes. I’ve already forgotten that it is my night to get up with my mom.

  Hours later I stumble to bed in the guest room. My father has set up the baby monitor by my bedside and the little green light glows in the dark. It’s the last thing I see before my eyes close.

  I don’t know what time it is, maybe three or four in the morning, when I open them again. I can hear my mother crying softly. I don’t know how long she’s been crying, but her soft mewling lights up the monitor with each intonation. My limbs feel like sandbags. I am warm and loose and so, so heavy. I push my way out from underneath the covers and make my way downstairs.

  There is a tiny light on in the corner of my mother’s room, and I stand for a moment looking at her. She is curled onto one side, her arms wrapped around her abdomen. She looks so small underneath the sheets.

  I step forward finally and ease myself down onto the side of her bed. She doesn’t seem to notice that I am there.

  Mom?

  She continues to cry. I reach out and begin to stroke her hair. The quaalude has left me feeling open and loose. I am not afraid of her.

  Mom, I say again. It’s okay. It’s okay.

  I murmur these words to her as I stroke her hair, smooth my hand in circles over her back.

  It’s okay. It’s okay.

  Her crying fades to a gentle whimper.

  It’s okay. It’s okay.

  My eyes are closed now too, and I lay my head down against her shoulder.

  Mom, I miss you.

  She is quiet now, her form gently rising and falling with each breath.

  The memory of this moment will become the sole thing that prevents me from completely evaporating with guilt in the years to come.

  Mom, Mom, Mom, I say quietly. The word like some kind of prayer.

  We stay there for a long time like that, and when I wake up the next morning in my bed upstairs it will be hours before I remember any of it.

  OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK Christopher decides not to return to school. He tells me this over the phone. He is going to work for his uncle in New Jersey for a while, painting houses, saving money. Then he plans to move to San Francisco.

  Don’t you want to finish college? When he doesn’t reply I immediately feel stupid for having asked. Naive and girlish.

  The last time I see my mother is the day I drive back to school. She is in the passenger seat of my father’s car. He has dragged her out of the hospital bed, wants to take her for a drive, to remind her of the world outside. He has wrapped her in blankets, and her skin is the same gray as the seats of the car.

  I lean in through the open door, try to put my arms around her, but it’s awkward and I just kind of press myself against her.

  Her voice is hoarse, her hands claw at me just a little. I love you so much, honey.

  I do not know that this is the last time I will ever see her.

  Months later, years later, when I think back on this moment, I’ll wish for so much more from it. In my head I’ll scoop her up from the car seat like an infant. I’ll hold her against me, burying my head into her. Mom, Mom, Mom. Years later I’ll cry hard and loud, wishing I had done exactly this.

  But instead I just give her that awkward hug and then I climb into my car. I let out a breath, light a cigarette, and put both hands on the wheel. I had insisted on leaving, on returning to school, but now that I’m actually doing it I feel uneasy.

  It’s a seven-hour drive back to Marlboro and already late afternoon when I leave. As I drive the last hundred miles through Massachusetts and into Vermont, a snowstorm sets in. I can hardly see the road, the world outside a blurry white eclipse. I drive thirty miles an hour, smoke cigarette after cigarette. I listen to the same songs on repeat.

  I am frightened as I drive through the storm. It’s not the snow or the road that I’m afraid of but the fact that I’m doing this alone. Just four months ago my parents were driving me to college, our cars laden down with flannel sheets and lamps that would clip to the headboard of my bunk bed.

  On that three-day drive from Atlanta to Vermont my mother rode in my car with me, my father alone in the Acura, leading the way along the highway. On the last night of the trip I broke down crying at a restaurant in Massachusetts. My mother sat outside on the steps with me, rubbing my back.

  Why did I pick a school so far away? I mumble through my sobs.

  My mother smiles, leans into me. She wasn’t sick again yet.

  Because you’re brave, she says. And ambitious and hungry for the world.

  Tears ran down my cheeks, and I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to Atlanta and to my bedroom in the basement. Back to curfews and dinner times, back to being a kid.

  My mother rubbed my back, and we sat there until I stopped crying.

  I think about this now as I drive through the snow, through Massachusetts in the middle of the night, my mother asleep in her hospital bed in DC.

  As I finally make my way to campus it is a dark, dead place, and I instantly want to take everything back. I want to go home. I want my mother.

  TWO WEEKS GO BY. I trudge back and forth to my classes. Christine is gone all the time, busy with a new playwright boyfriend. Christopher is in New Jersey. Michel is nowhere to be seen, having holed up after his brief relationship with Kate fizzled out.