by Maggie Estep
“You won’t get a signal here,” Eloise said impatiently.
“So what do we do?”
“I think we should carry her back to the van and then take her to Ava’s.”
“Carry her? But you’re not supposed to move someone who has fallen.”
“She hasn’t broken her neck, Alice.”
“Do we know that for a fact? When jockeys fall on the track, they put them on a stretcher just in case.”
“Can you refrain from comparing everything to horse racing? Our mother is dying.”
“Okay, we’ll carry her.”
Our mother, who’d never weighed more than 110 pounds, weighed even less now. I lifted her upper body, cradling her head in the crook of my elbow, while my diminutive sister carried her inert legs. The dogs were confused and concerned; Harvey licked Mom’s face, upsetting Eloise.
“No, Harvey, no!” she said.
The caramel-colored dog looked sheepish and put his head down.
We made very slow progress like that, hauling our mother along the narrow, rocky trail while trying to wrangle the dogs, all of whom we’d had to unleash. I kept imagining Rosemary taking off into the woods and Mom coming back to consciousness to find we’d lost her. But the dogs, their supremely honed instinct alerting them that all was not well with the humans, stayed close.
Eloise and I had to stop four times to rearrange Mom’s weight. Around us, the woods seemed to have grown darker, the beautiful trail now ominous, as if harboring dangerous forest beasts who could smell our mother’s weakness.
We had a particularly perilous creek crossing where I was sure we were going to drop our dying, unconscious mother into the rushing water. I almost told Elo about this nearly comical image I kept having, but she would not have gotten it, has never understood my macabre sense of humor and how holding onto a mental image of dropping my dying mother into a creek was somehow making it all slightly bearable.
We finally reached the trailhead parking lot and had to put Mom down on the ground while opening up the back of the van. Again, the dogs swarmed and busied themselves, trying to figure out how they could help with this unusual and worrisome procedure.
When we reached Ava’s driveway, Eloise hopped out and unlatched the gate. Mom had told me that before in stalling the gate, Ava had all sorts of unwelcome drop-bys from the many locals who knew she lived there.
Eloise got back in and we drove up, got Mom out, and carried her to the front door where Ava, who must have heard us pull up, came out of the house.
“What happened?” was all she could manage as she froze there in the doorway.
Eloise and I carried our mother in, and just as we were lowering her onto the living room rug, she made a startled sound and her eyes focused on me.
“Oh?” she said.
“Are you okay, Mom?” I asked.
She suddenly sat bolt upright and I saw Eloise wince.
“Mom, careful, you fell on the trail, you hit your head,” Eloise said. “Ava, call an ambulance.”
“No!” our mother actually screamed. “Please, no. I’m fine.”
My sister and I stared at her. There was blood crusted on the side of her face and she looked tinier than ever.
“Mom, please.” Eloise was squatting down at her side. “You were unconscious, that means concussion, you need to be seen by someone.”
“Eloise, I’m dying,” Mom sounded exasperated, “what does a knock on the head matter?”
“I have a friend,” Ava inserted, “Paul, he’s a physician, lives nearby. I’m sure he’d come.”
I looked over at the tall, pretty woman. I imagined she was the type who could get any man to go anywhere anytime. It wasn’t till about age thirty that I discovered I could too, that this magical power isn’t the exclusive domain of the achingly beautiful.
“How about that, Mom?” I said. “Can you at least let Ava’s doctor friend look at you?”
She rolled her eyes, then gave a little shrug. “Okay.”
Ava picked up a cordless phone off an end table and dialed from memory. There was a brief conversation and, after hanging up, Ava told us her friend would be over soon.
“He lives in Hurley,” she said apologetically, “it’s going to take him a few minutes to get here.”
“Thank you, Ava,” Mom said.
Eloise was still squatting by Mom’s side. The dogs were milling all around and, I was sure, were about to break all sorts of valuable baubles, though to her credit, Ava didn’t seem to have any ostentatious displays of wealth and fame lying around.
A few minutes passed with Mom growing increasingly coherent. Eloise had called Joe and he was on his way.
“By the way,” Ava said, looking over at me from where she’d perched on the arm of a beautiful, deep-red couch, “it’s nice to see you again, Alice.”
“Likewise,” I smiled at her. She really seemed all right. Like someone I could approve of for my baby sister. Though I was still thoroughly flabbergasted by Eloise suddenly turning gay and having a baby, I suppose I was glad she was doing these things with a ravishing movie star.
Eloise looked from me to Ava and glowered, like we were having social hour while Mom was sitting on a rug bleeding and, ultimately, dying.
At the risk of invoking Eloise’s wrath, I suggested making tea and Ava and I went into her lovely kitchen to put the kettle on. I didn’t know what to say to her and she seemed stumped about making conversation with me too.
“So,” I finally said, “how did you and Eloise meet?” I knew the answer but didn’t know how else to make small talk with the woman since I didn’t feel like discussing my mother bleeding on her rug in the other room.
Ava told me, in lavish prose, about meeting my mother on the Rabbit Hole trail and then meeting Eloise shortly thereafter and how my sister took her breath away.
“I’m not fond of clichés but it truly was love at first sight,” said the movie star.
“Yeah,” I shrugged, “I’ve had that. I mean, maybe not love, but an instant and deep attraction.”
“With your jailbird lover?” Ava said with a sly smile.
“Oh, you know about that, huh?”
“Yeah. I hope that’s okay.” She suddenly looked worried.
“It’s fine. I’m not guarded about my personal life. But Eloise might make me sound like more of a harlot than I am.”
Ava laughed, showing a row of beautiful, pearly teeth.
“But yes. I did have an instant attraction with my jailbird. I thought it would evaporate approximately thirty minutes after it first manifested, but there’s something about him that gets to me.”
“Oh?” Ava said, looking genuinely interested.
“It’s disarming when people are simple. And I don’t mean dumb. But he’s a simple man with simple desires.”
“I’ve had some of those.”
For a minute, I glimpsed the true heartbreaking she-beast Ava must be, the beast that was in abeyance now that she was in love with my sister.
“What about the asshole?” Ava asked then.
“The asshole? You mean Billy Rotten, the baby father?” Ava nodded.
“What about him?” I knew that Eloise had decided to give up trying to contact the jerk. Eloise hadn’t asked me if I’d heard from him but I suppose her girlfriend wanted to know.
“What’s your status with him?” she asked.
“There isn’t any status. I haven’t heard from him and I certainly don’t intend to sleep with the guy who knocked up my sister, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It was.”
I liked her forthrightness. She was, in the parlance of some of my racetrack acquaintances, a brassy broad.
The tea water was boiling and Ava had gotten four cups out.
“Should your mother drink tea?”
The question made me think of my mother in the dotage she would never have, as an octogenarian Eloise and I would have had to make basic decisions for, such as whether or not she should drink tea, when she sh
ould be bathed, what specialists she should see. I had never really thought about these things, particularly in light of the fact that Mom and I are so close in age. But for the first time, I realized that it would never come to that. My mother would not need her diaper changed, would not need me to oversee a retinue of doctors or consider nursing homes.
Having no idea if tea was recommended under the circumstances, I shrugged at Ava, who took it upon herself to brew a cup for Mom.
We’d all, including Mom, who had progressed to sitting on the couch now, started sipping our tea when Paul, the doctor, arrived.
He was of medium height and medium build, balding but pleasant looking with little round glasses and an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. Ava engulfed him in a hug and we all thanked him for coming. Mom, who stared at him menacingly for a few seconds, warmed to him quickly. He took her into the guest room to examine her. Eloise and Ava and I tried to make small talk; I asked them about Ron, their recently adopted dog. Ava got Ron to come over and demonstrate his new trick of rolling over on his back and exposing himself. It made me think of all the times I had questioned the canine species’ eagerness to do even the most absurd things we humans dreamt up to ask of them. I would have made a terrible dog.
Most of Mom’s dogs had finished their explorations of Ava’s house and had come back to the living room and we were all waiting there, quiet and vaguely desperate, when Mom and Paul emerged from the guest room.
“She’ll be all right,” Paul announced. “Under normal circumstances I’d want her admitted into the hospital. But I understand her reticence. Just please call me if anything strange happens over the next twelve hours.”
“Strange?” said my mother. “Strange things always happen to me. In fact, I can promise you something strange will happen to me in the next twelve hours,” she added with pride.
Paul smiled and Eloise looked aghast once more. My poor sister, who has never been as emotionally shut down as me, was having a very hard time with everything and obviously thought we were all being way too lighthearted.
Ava accompanied Paul to the door, looping her arm through his and speaking to him softly. I saw Eloise shoot her a look. I entertained the idea of having a talk with my sister, of explaining to her that this would all be easier if she weren’t so emotionally visceral about everything. But I realized Eloise would just accuse me of being a Neanderthal.
Mom’s paramour pulled up just as Paul was getting into his car. I saw Ava introduce the two men, saw them speaking there under the glorious huge willow tree in front of Ava’s house.
After Paul had gotten into his car and driven away, Joe came inside. He looked hollow and sad and I felt for him. He seemed to want and need to hover over Mom, so I told him he ought to take her home to his place and I would wrangle all the dogs back to Mom’s. Both Joe and Mom looked at me gratefully and I felt strange in my unaccustomed role as dutiful, helpful daughter.
Ava and Eloise helped me usher all the animals back into the van.
“I’ll be back at Mom’s in a half hour or so,” Eloise told me. I hadn’t wanted to ask. Had wanted to leave her the option of staying behind with her girlfriend, but I was glad she was coming back to Mom’s. I realized, for one of the first times in my life, that I didn’t want to be alone.
As I got into the van and started the engine, I looked out at my little sister standing next to her ravishing girlfriend and felt a pang of envy. Eloise, in surrendering to loving Ava, was experiencing something foreign to me.
I pointed the van toward the road.
I needed to get groceries so I drove through town rather than taking the shorter way back to Mom’s.
Town was packed, car traffic crawling along and the peculiar breed of dowdy white tourists that Woodstock attracts overflowing from the narrow sidewalks as they ambled past candle shops and dusty hippie stores whose survival is a mystery. Just past the village green, traffic was at a standstill as dozens of pedestrians slowly crossed the street. I looked around, trying to fathom what these people were doing here, and was startled by a familiar male figure. At first, it didn’t quite register. The guy was holding hands with a woman in a green sundress who in turn was holding the hand of a little boy.
“Fuck,” I said aloud when it sank in that it was William. Billy Rotten.
My first instinct was to jump out of the van, run up to him, and punch him in the mouth. A horn honked behind me and I drove forward, pulling off Tinker Street into the parking lot behind the hardware store. I shoved the van into a narrow space and got out of the vehicle as the dogs looked on expectantly.
“Stay,” I said, “all of you stay.”
I strode onto Tinker Street and literally came face to face with Billy and his wife and child.
His jaw went slack and his body stiffened visibly.
“Alice, hi.”
“Hello,” I snarled. I looked meaningfully at the woman at his side, then at the child. I didn’t want to scar the child for life so I wasn’t going to get too carried away. At least, I hoped I wasn’t.
“This is my sister, Tess,” Billy said then.
Shit, I thought.
“And my nephew Trevor,” Billy indicated the child. “I wanted to show them Woodstock.”
“Right,” I said. I had no idea how to proceed.
“Is everything okay?” Billy asked as the sister smiled pleasantly and the child looked all around.
“Not really.”
This wasn’t the answer he was hoping for. He looked uncomfortable.
“My mother is dying of cancer and you screwed my baby sister.”
“Uh …” Billy looked nervously at his own sister. Then at the kid. “What?”
“Eloise. My sister. Cute tiny girl with dark-brown hair? You met her in Central Park?”
“Uh … what?” Billy Rotten squinted.
“You don’t remember?” I was just about screaming. Billy’s sister had hustled her child a few feet away to look into a shop window.
“I … I’m confused,” said Billy, glancing to see where his sister had gone, or maybe to take in the fact that the tension in our bodies was inciting passersby to stare.
“You had a one-night stand with Eloise, my little sister. Before having several-nights stands with me.” With every fiber of my being, I was resisting telling him Eloise was pregnant. She had decided the guy was too much of a lout to be told and I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to prove her wrong. I loathed him for making me feel things I was unaccustomed to feeling and then leaving me high and dry.
“Eloise is your sister?”
“Yes.”
“What are the odds of that?”
“It’s not funny, Billy, William, whoever the fuck you are.”
“But it is strange.”
“You’re a flaming asshole.”
“I’ve been told that.”
I wanted to bash his skull in with a lead pipe.
“Alice,” he said in an oily voice, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“All of it,” he said, making a big helpless gesture. “You and me. Your sister. I didn’t mean any harm.”
“Oh, please.”
“You scared me. I ran. Same, ironically, with your sister.”
“That’s ironic all right.”
“What do you want me to say here?”
“I don’t want you to say anything. I just thought you should know. You fucked me and you fucked my sister and we were both fucked up by it. Have a nice day.” I turned and walked toward the van.
“Alice!” he called. Some tiny, idiotic part of me felt hopeful. Like he would come running to explain some unruly set of emotional problems that had led to his not calling me. I had, I realized, been hoping he was married, that this explained his disappearance. It was too harrowing to consider that after all my years of carefully selecting men who couldn’t possibly hurt me, I had been duped, had fallen for someone who sat by laughing as I tumbled into the void.
“What?” I turne
d back for a second.
“I’m sorry.”
“Big deal,” I said, and then kept walking.
I sat clutching the steering wheel, choking the thing. Ira had jumped into the front passenger seat with Candy and Carlos. He licked me and, in his enthusiasm, bumped me hard in the chin.
“Away, beast.”
“Where were you?” Eloise demanded when the dogs and I tumbled in through Mom’s kitchen door. “I was worried.”
“Went to the store.”
I deposited the grocery bags on the kitchen table. After sitting in the van trying to breathe for close to forty-five minutes, I had finally snapped out of my stupor and driven to the grocery store.
“What’s the matter with you? You look ashen,” my sister said.
“I’m upset about Mom.”
“It’s about time.”
“What’s with you, Eloise?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why so snarky and vindictive?”
“Vindictive? Me?”
“Never mind.” I didn’t want a fight.
“Don’t never mind the situation. What are you saying?”
“It’s just …” I sighed.
“It’s just what, Alice?”
“It’s just that everyone experiences pain differently. Reacts to it differently. I realize you don’t believe I actually have feelings and the concordant pain, but I do, Eloise. I don’t appreciate your being judgmental about how I’m dealing with my grief.”
I didn’t look at her. Had taken a seat at the cheerful kitchen table and was gazing down at my hands that suddenly fascinated me.
“I’m sorry,” I heard my sister say in a small voice.
I glanced up and saw how sheepish she was looking, how tiny and wounded, like a stabbed dove.
“It’s okay,” I said, reaching over and patting her hand.
We fell silent then. Awkward, embarrassed by having such a direct conversation.
“The dogs,” I said, standing up, “I have to get the gimpy ones out.”
“Oh, I did that already,” Eloise shrugged.
I stopped in mid-stride. Unsure what to do now.
“Mom’s at Joe’s?” I asked, just for something to say.
“Yeah.”
“When are you going back to Ava’s?”
