by Maggie Estep
12. ELOISE
Ron was licking my feet and Ava was sitting at the far edge of the bed, sulking. It was evening now and I’d been back and forth from Ava’s to Mom’s several times but had only seen my mother once. She was having a very bad day, even by the standards of the terminally ill, and had only been conscious for a few minutes. She had asked after Ava in a way that worried me, a way that implied she was wondering about my future, wanting to assure herself that I had found a mate. I tried to make her believe I had. I actually did believe I had. Until about 8 p.m. At which point Ava had started sulking.
“Cut it out, Ron,” I said to the dog. This was his new thing. This obsessive licking of a human’s hands or feet whenever he felt tension in the air.
Ron momentarily stopped bathing my feet and looked up at me.
“Go do something else,” I said. He tilted his head, then went back to licking. I sat up and tucked my feet under me. Ron tried to lick my face.
Ava had her back to me. We had been fighting, ridiculously enough, about the baby’s gender. She wanted a girl and had announced that the kidney bean—sized thing living in my belly was in fact female. I had told her I’d prefer a boy, at which she’d had an uncharacteristic fit of pique culminating in even more uncharacteristic sulking. She was sitting at the edge of the bed with her back to me. She was ignoring Ron’s shenanigans.
“You’re supposed to be nice to me,” I ventured.
She spun around so fast I got dizzy.
“I am nothing but nice to you,” she said violently.
“What’s wrong, Ava? What did I do?”
“You don’t want me to really be a part of this.”
“A part of what?”
“Of your life. The baby’s life. The end of your mother’s life.”
“What?” I stared at her with my mouth open. “Where are you getting this?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just sense it.”
“But it’s not true, Ava,” I said, reaching over to touch her arm.
She pulled her arm away.
“Ava, my love, please, what’s this about?” I felt nauseous.
Ron was looking from me to Ava and back but was too concerned to lick now.
Ava’s face knotted up and tears came to her eyes.
“I’m frightened of you,” she said in a small, weak voice.
“Frightened? Of me? But why?”
“I see how your sister is. So proud of her black heart. Proud of all the hearts she’s broken. She’s harder than cement. I know you must be the same way and I’m just not seeing it.”
“That’s crazy, Ava, I’m not like Alice. I never have been. And anyway, even Alice isn’t as bomb-proof as she pretends to be. She had her heart broken just yesterday.”
“Alice?” Ava looked suspicious.
“Her jailbird. He’s getting back with his ex-wife.”
“I don’t know whether that constitutes heartbreak.”
“She loved him. In her own fashion.”
“It’s that fashion that concerns me. The Hunter girls fashion.”
“We don’t have a genetic defect,” I said defensively. As much as I’ve always thought my sister a heartless slut, I don’t want other people thinking of her as such or, worse, accusing me of being the same way.
“There is no Hunter girls fashion,” I said, glowering at my girlfriend. “I have been through a fair amount of love affairs but so have you. In fact, probably more than me. You’re the one who’s a glamorous movie star with people of both genders clamoring at your door just to catch a glimpse of you. If you really want to get into all this, we can, just that I didn’t think we ever would. I thought there was a level of trust between us that I hadn’t experienced with others. It’s part of what made me love you so immediately and so strongly.”
Ava was staring at me and she looked shamed. Strands of her long blond hair were falling in her face. I reached over and pushed one of them back. I saw that there were tears in her eyes again.
“You can’t cry on me,” I said, “that’s too girly. We can be lesbians, but we can’t be pathetic, sniveling women.”
“Crying is not pathetic, Eloise.”
“Crying is, almost without fail, a ruse. A drama-seeking missile, not authentic emotion.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Of course.”
“That explains a lot.”
“About my black heart? About the Hunter girls fashion?”
“Yes,” she said somberly.
At first I thought she was joking, playing with me. Then, when her face remained bunched and dark, I realized this was no game. She truly believed me to be emotionally defective.
I was torn. I wanted to be levelheaded, adult, functional, but my heart hurt.
“I’m going to my mother’s,” I said, getting up from the bed.
Ava said nothing. Stayed rooted to her spot at the edge of the bed. Ron looked at me expectantly as I pulled drawers open and threw on jeans and a white T-shirt.
“I’m taking Ron,” I announced as I put on my socks.
“Why?”
“I need solace.”
She gave me a dirty look.
Ron jubilantly followed me out of the bedroom and downstairs, where I snapped a leash onto his collar, slipped my feet into my sandals, and headed out the door to Mom’s Honda that I’d been using.
Ron jumped into the backseat and sat up, alert and excited. I turned on the CD player and put on my beloved recording of Paul Anka’s “You Are My Destiny” as performed by an obscure but great band called Ferdinand the Bull. I notched the volume up to nearly ear-splitting and peeled out of the driveway.
It was an inky night and driving through it should have scared me but I felt incapable of fear. I just drove.
By the time I got to Mom’s twelve minutes later, I had listened to the song three times, singing along at the top of my lungs. You are my destiny/You share my reverie.
But I wasn’t sure who I was singing to.
I left Ron in the car and went into Mom’s kitchen to see which dogs were loose so Ron didn’t have to deal with a full-on assault the moment he walked in. Several dogs barked and swarmed me. I patted heads and shushed and called out to Alice. I got no response, then found her in the living room, lying on the couch with headphones on. She was wearing blue and white striped pajamas and had her hair pulled on top of her head in an uncharacteristic ponytail. Mickey, the new pit bull, was wedged between Alice and the couch cushions with his enormous head resting in the crook of her neck. Alice’s eyes were closed and she looked at peace; as I noticed this, I realized I couldn’t remember ever seeing my sister at peace. I tiptoed back out of the living room and went to retrieve Ron since only Mickey and three others appeared to be loose.
When I came back in, Alice was standing in the kitchen looking dazed.
“Oh,” she said, “where did you come from?”
In that moment it seemed like there were myriad ways to answer that question, but I opted for the straightforward.
“I was at Ava’s.”
“Do you want some cake?” Alice asked.
“Cake?”
“With white icing. Don’t you like that?”
I studied her carefully. She was behaving very strangely. Remembering that I liked cake with white icing? She had never been one to bother remembering those little life details, knowledge of which signified a level of intimacy Alice and I had never really had.
“Yes,” I said, “I love cake with white icing. How did you know that?”
“What do you mean?”
“You never remember things like that.”
Alice looked confused. She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. Mickey, who had been standing plastered to her side, tried to climb into her lap.
“No, Mickey.” She gently pushed the big spotted dog away. “I’m sorry, Eloise,” she said, looking up at me, “I’m sorry.”
Just as I’d never seen Alice look at peace, so had I neve
r heard her apologize sincerely. I thought I might start weeping so I turned to the fridge and pulled open the door, nearly yanking it off its hinges in my quest to view this cake with white icing.
“No,” Alice said to my back, “there, on the counter.”
I glanced over and saw a frumpy white cake. It looked homemade.
“Who made this?”
“Me.”
“You’re baking?”
“If I’m going to hole up here in the woods after Mom is gone, I’d better learn to cook.”
It all ripped me apart. Her talking about our mother being gone, the idea that Alice was opening herself up to something as banal as cooking. Everything was shifting, nothing was as it always had been.
I started crying then. I don’t remember the exact moment. Whether it was taking the first bite of the homely but delicious cake, or maybe when Alice extracted from me the details of the fight with Ava. But the tears came and Alice wrapped me in her arms and held me for a long, long time.
We were like little kids then. The ocean of differences calm.
It was a strange feeling.
After tending to the dogs, we went into Mom’s room together. Joe had called, asking us to bring some things over for her the next day. It hadn’t been said out loud, but our mother seemed to want to stay at her lover’s. Alice thought it had something to do with the dogs, with not wanting these creatures she had rescued to worry over her decline. I thought it had more to do with Mom wanting to be with Joe. Her last-minute love. Maybe it was neither. Maybe the newfound devotion of her daughters was too much for a sick woman to bear. Maybe we would never know.
Alice found Mom’s favorite nightshirt in one of the dresser drawers and I was left to search through the hall closet for the Scrabble game that came with a Lazy Susan. After we’d stockpiled these items, along with face cream and bath oil, we both found ourselves frozen in our mother’s bright-green bedroom. She’d been in this house for a long time and it was full of her. Full of pieces of her I had never known and might never come to know.
“She’s dying,” Alice said after we’d been quiet for several minutes.
“Yes,” I replied simply.
Alice sat down heavily on the bed. Mickey immediately jumped up next to her and put the upper half of his body in her lap. She absentmindedly stroked his huge white head. A few seconds into this, Candy appeared, some instinct alerting her that her human was handing out affection to the new interloper. Candy put her delicate front paws on Alice’s shoulder and leaned close to lick her ear. My sister, who had repeatedly told me how grossed out she is by licking of any sort, did not protest or move.
“I think I want to sleep in Mom’s room tonight. Do you want to sleep in here too?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, sitting down next to her on the bed, “I do.”
Maybe it should have seemed odd. Two adult sisters who barely got along sharing a dying mother’s bed with each other and with as many dogs as could fit. Maybe it wasn’t odd. It was the natural evolution of everything falling apart.
I’d just gotten to sleep when I heard dogs barking and a light was thrown on. I opened my eyes and saw Alice standing in the bedroom doorway speaking with someone I couldn’t see.
I sat up and craned my neck. It was Joe; his face was gray.
“It’s time,” he said, peering around Alice and seeing that I was awake.
“Time?”
“Your mother’s time has come. Sooner than expected.”
I didn’t know what to say or do and, as Alice and Joe stared, waiting for Joe’s words to have their effect on me, I grabbed hold of Ron, who was curled at my feet. I closed my eyes and squeezed the blond mutt.
“Come on, Eloise,” Alice said, gently but firmly.
I got up. Took my clothes from the top of the dresser and went into the bathroom to put them on. Ron followed me.
Alice and I moved around settling the dogs back in. She locked Mickey, Candy, Ron, and Ira in the bedroom with some chew toys since they were the likeliest candidates for anxiety over the humans departing at an unusual time.
We were all three silent as we followed Joe, who lit the way with a flashlight, over to his house.
Though I’d been in and out of Joe’s house many times over the last week, I hadn’t really noticed it and, in spite of everything, took a moment to marvel at the clean spaciousness of the place. From the outside, it was a somewhat humble-looking blue clapboard house. Inside, though, a tall ceiling soared over a big room holding nothing but a grand piano and a painting of a petulant nude woman.
“It’s so lovely in here,” I heard myself murmur, at which both Alice and Joe stared at me like I was insane.
Alice and I followed Joe beyond the vast room, down a hallway and into the bedroom, much of it taken over by carts filled with medicine. The hospice nurse, a thin red-headed woman who Joe had summoned a few hours earlier, was sitting on a straight-backed chair off in the far corner. She was reading a paperback and barely looked up when we came in. She was, I suppose, used to the scenes of death and the heartbreak of those left behind.
Mom looked awful. Even twelve hours earlier she had still looked like Kim Hunter, a comely fifty-something woman. Now, her face was hollow and gray. Her eyes were closed and her black hair was plastered to her skull. The nurse had an IV going and its threatening needle protruded from Mom’s right hand. There had been days like this before. Days of IVs and oxygen and nurses and doctors. Mom had always bounced back. But she’d never looked like this.
“She was awake about fifteen minutes ago,” Joe said.
He had taken a seat at the edge of the bed and was looking down at Mom. He reached over to push a strand of hair off her clammy forehead. The sorrow in his face was almost unbearable and, in that moment, I felt much worse for him than for myself or Alice. Joe loved my mother like I’d never seen anyone love my mother.
Alice was kneeling at the other side of the bed. She had propped her forearms on the mattress and was staring at Mom, as if willing her awake.
“What happened?” I asked Joe, pulling a chair over so I was near him.
He looked confused.
“I mean, why … um … why the turn for the worse?” I felt like an idiot as soon as I said it. I’d always thought of cancer as a very slow killer, but I’d actually known several people who’d gone very quickly. “Never mind,” I added, though Joe showed no signs of answering me.
I sat watching Joe and Alice stare at Mom. But something was gnawing at me.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, though neither Joe nor Alice even looked up.
I went through the big piano room and into the kitchen where there was an old-fashioned wall phone. I picked the receiver up, stared at the rotary dial, then slowly dialed Ava’s number.
I let it ring twelve times, but nothing. I hung up and tried again. This time, on the sixth ring, her sleepy voice answered: “Yeah?” She sounded incredulous.
“It’s me. Mom’s dying. I’m at Joe’s house. Will you come over?”
There was the slightest pause. Then: “I’ll be right there.”
I thought terrible things. Terrible because they were irrelevant things having nothing to do with the last moments of my mother’s life. I thought about breakfast. I thought about Ava’s lingerie. I thought about the time Alice hit the Pick 6 for 122K and offered to buy me a car, back before I’d fallen in the manhole and struck it rich. I thought about everything except my mother and the many tendernesses and torments that had passed between us.
She was rattling now, that death-rattle sound, descriptions of which I remembered, maybe from Camus’s The Plague, maybe from some other hideous but beautiful account of death. Her breathing was so labored I just wanted it to stop.
I got up several times. Walked through the piano room, into the kitchen, outside. Sometimes Ava would follow me. Not intruding. Just making sure I was all right.
I was there at the bedside, when, close to dawn, Mom opened her eyes.
&nb
sp; Alice had gone to get Ira, the three-legged hound mix Mom had rescued six years earlier and still hadn’t found a home for. Though Mom always claimed not to have favorites and not to consider any one of these orphans as her personal dog, it was understood that, in fact, Ira was very much her dog and, as such, had a right to say goodbye.
“Ira,” Mom said in a tiny, hoarse voice.
“I thought you’d want to say goodbye,” Alice said.
Mom’s eyes got glassier. Ira put his lone front paw on the edge of the bed, wedging himself in between Joe and Alice, and gave Mom’s shrunken, sweaty face a tentative lick. He intuited, as dogs do, that there was something gravely wrong. He was gentle with her.
“Ira,” Mom said again.
This was her last word.
I saw her hand move. Scrabbling at the sheet, reaching for Joe’s hand. Her own hand relaxed once it found his. I saw her gripping him fiercely. Then her eyes stared straight ahead.
Light was starting to show at the window.
“She wants us to go swimming,” Joe said.
The nurse had closed Mom’s eyes so she wouldn’t keep staring out at those she’d left behind. Ira was whimpering. Alice was slumped in a chair. Ava was holding me.
“Swimming?” It was Randee, the nurse, who acknowledged that Joe had said something.
“Last night,” Joe explained, “Kim told me she’d die by dawn and we should all go swimming. Specifically skinny-dipping.”
Alice’s head snapped up and she stared at Joe.
“That makes sense,” Ava murmured.
“It does?” Alice sqinted at my girlfriend.
“Well,” Ava seemed nervous now, “yes, sort of. To me.”
“How so?” I asked Ava, turning to look at her tear-streaked face.
Ava had wept more than I had. More than Alice or even Joe.
“She wants us all to be together doing something liberating. Help release ourselves. And, by extension, her. She doesn’t want us holding onto her. She has places to go.”
