“I don’t understand,” I said. “My mother’s at home.”
There was silence on the end of the line.
“Hello?” I asked.
“I’m still here,” she said. “Mr. Winwood, your mother’s very sick. She’s not home, she’s here in the hospital.”
On the drive it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen my mother in months. I worked. I concentrated on Little Allen. I paid bills. I walked in and out doors all day long, watching the stock market, worrying about Gretchen, agonizing over letters. My mother had her own life. It’s the way she wanted it to be.
I was absolutely amazed at how different she looked in the hospital bed. She was in her sixties and looked like an eighty-year-old woman I’d never met before. My mother’s face was gaunt. Her hands on the outside of the white sheets were hands I didn’t recognize, bony and wrinkled, the skin dry, her fingernails longer than I’d ever seen them.
“Jesus, Mother. What is happening?” I whispered, like it was a secret. Like no one else could see what I could see.
“I’m dying,” she said calmly.
“No, you’re not,” I answered.
She waited a moment, probably to allow the ridiculousness of my answer to resonate in the room.
“Yes, I am, Early. I’m dying.”
It made me angry. While I’d been paying bills and smoking cigarettes on the back porch in the dark, something was happening to my mother, the last remaining vestige of my permanence on this Earth. And now she looked like a dead body resting in an open coffin, except her eyes were open, and she was speaking.
“Four months ago the doctor told me I had pancreatic cancer, in an advanced stage. I decided against chemotherapy. I’m ready, Early. I’ve been ready for a long time now. Don’t be afraid.”
I heard myself say, “What if I’m not ready? Did you think of that? Did you? What if I’m not ready for you to die?”
At the moment, where I stood in the cold hospital room, it seemed impossible. All of it. Like a crazy dream where you tell yourself it’s only a crazy dream. And then you wake up, and you’re glad it wasn’t real.
I left the hospital room and drove around for hours and hours. I thought of every memory of my mother. Every single detail I could recall about her, and me, and my father, and I cried like I didn’t know I was capable of crying. Wiping my face at stoplights, ashamed, clear juices running from my nose down over the top of my lips, hyperventilating at times to the point of dizziness. I ended up in a full-blown asthma attack in my grandfather’s backseat again. I pulled over to the side of the road and tried my trick of the blackboard full of words, each one slowly erased in my mind, until there is nothing to think about and the air began to flow freely again. The man on the radio said to expect lots of sunshine. He said tomorrow would be beautiful.
I had never taken the time to imagine my mother dying. After all, she was strong, removed, artistic, and detached. She wasn’t like me or my father, weak to the world around us. My mother was immortal, almost unnatural.
It must have been nearly two o’clock in the morning when I pulled back into the hospital parking lot, all cried out. My soul was dry. There was nothing left to remember. Sherilyn, the same nurse who’d called me earlier, let me back in my mother’s room. She was asleep. I sat in a chair by her bedside and looked around the room. This idea came to me. This idea of taking flying lessons, and renting a small plane on a clear spring morning, and taking off into the rising sun, turning south toward the Gulf of Mexico. In a bag on the seat next to me would be a bottle of good whiskey, a few books, and a large bottle of pills. As I cleared the coast, the white sands like snow on the beach below, I would start taking pills, swallowing each down with the hot whiskey, and reading passages from the books, my headphones off, the sound of the engine of the small plane drowning out everything. Not everyone is meant to live seventy or eighty years. Not with a soul as dry as mine.
“I thought you might come back,” she said.
Her eyes were opened in thin slits. The liquid dripped down the tubes into the place in her arm. Tape covered the needle to keep it secure in her dry skin.
“I just don’t understand, that’s all. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
“You have enough going on, Early. And what would you have done anyway? It’s better this way.”
I felt the anger rise. “Says who? Who says it’s better this way, Mother?”
She smiled a little bit, something I hadn’t seen in a long time.
“I do, Early. It’s my life, not yours. I get to decide.”
The nurse entered the room and changed the bag of liquid hanging above. We were all silent while she did her job.
“I have a million questions,” I said.
“I’m sure you do,” she whispered. “I wish I had a million answers.”
And then she started to talk, for maybe the first time in our lives together. And I started to listen, maybe for the first time.
“I wasn’t born with a lot of motherly instincts. To be honest, I really didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with you.”
I remembered what I’d read about none of us having a single cell left in our bodies from the day we were born. The person who came out of her was literally someone else.
“Your father knew,” she said. “He knew from the first minute they put you in his arms. With him around, I could count on someone knowing what to do, how to raise a baby. When he died, eleven years with no practice, I was just as lost as the day you were born.
“I can’t really apologize. God made me who I am. God and my own mother. The eternal victim. She died before you were born. I promised myself when I was a little girl never to be like her. She went from one crisis to the next, almost each self-created, and blamed everyone around her. She lived off sympathy and guilt, and killed herself on her thirtieth birthday. I was nine years old.”
“How?” I asked.
My mother looked at me, aggravated by the interruption.
“Pills,” she finally said.
It was quiet again. Unbelievably quiet.
“Maybe that answers some of your million questions,” she said. “Maybe not. You know, we like to believe we get better every day. We like to believe we wake up every morning a little better than the day before. I’m not sure it’s true. Maybe we peak long before we get old.”
The quiet seemed to settle around us, and my mother’s eyes closed slowly. She whispered, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and we’ll talk some more.”
I sat in the hospital room for at least another hour and watched my mother sleep, and then I watched her die. There was no shouting or convulsing. No struggle to hold on for one last word. She just died, and left me very, very alone in the big world, with a dry soul, a family history of suicide, a guilty conscience, and tears rolling down my cheeks.
She also left me a letter, folded neatly in an envelope:
James Early Winwood,
From the day you were born you were taught to be strong. As tiny men, even learning to walk on your little legs, you are all told not to cry. Crying is weak, and men are never to be weak.
Men stand tall, they wear uniforms, they fight on battlefields, real and created, and they provide for their families.
At some point, some critical point, in order to truly know God and yourself, you must separate what you have been ingrained to become from what you must do. We must be weak to truly know anything. This weakness will let you say, “I love you,” to those you love, to cry for no real reason, to reach those places inside your heart I was never able to reach until the end. You see, it isn’t really weakness at all, is it?
The greatest debate inside every human in the history of civilization is the debate over the proof of the existence of God. But there is no debate. No need to argue or require. There is a God, because there must be, and that is all to be said.
I thank God for you and your father. Without you two I would have never known love, spoken or unspoken, never known the reason for this l
ife. God will bless us both, now and forever. I know this to be true. He has told me many times when I have been tired and needed to hear His whisper.
I love you,
Your Mother
As you might imagine, she left her affairs in perfect order. The house was packed up, everything in boxes, with notes where each box should go. I never found the letters from Bruce, but she left me a box of things about my father, and it was like getting to know him for the first time.
Inside the box I found his little league baseball trophies, pictures of me as a baby in his arms. The three of us on the beach. The same snow-white sands, building a castle at the edge of the surf. My mother was smiling in the picture, the same smile I’d seen with Bruce’s arm around her shoulders.
There were poems my father had written, and letters to my mother, and little, odd things like an old bullet, three baby teeth in a small, black, cloth bag, a firecracker, and a picture of a dog that I’d never seen before, and all those other things that reminded me how little we know our parents. And now there was no one left to ask the million questions. Those people who created me, those with the closest connection, were both dead. And Allen Jr. held me so tight, and watched me like a grown man watches a child.
He stood next to me at the funeral and put his hand on my shoulder when I couldn’t hold myself together. Gretchen sat two rows behind with her mother and Russell Enslow. She looked at me with misunderstanding, perhaps the same way I had always looked at my mother.
Samantha was lost in the role of providing comfort to a crying man, but I will never forget Allen coming home from college and sitting up late at night with me. Calling the office every day for months, pretending he needed this or that, when it was me who needed. The very boy whose father I murdered. The very boy who turned to me after his own daddy’s funeral and asked if I would be the one to throw the ball with him in the front yard from now on. And with this very boy, who had become a man, I would forge the strongest bond I would ever have with another person in my lifetime. Perhaps even stronger than the bond that I held with my long-dead father.
How the current of life flows as we struggle in the waters to get to one side or the other, to control our own destinies, when all along the current will decide. The current will take us, willing or not.
five
If my first marriage was like the lighting of a match, quick and bright, burning out as soon as it began, then my second marriage was the opposite, a slow rot. After Allen moved out and my mother died, there was an unforgivable onset of loneliness. At least it seemed Samantha was unable to forgive me, for anything, but particularly my hints of insecurity. She had hated Allen Kilborn Sr., but at least she respected the man.
I couldn’t figure out how to fix things between us, or if I wanted them fixed at all. I couldn’t even figure out how to get laid in my own house, with my own wife, in the bed I paid for. It was more complicated than sex with a complete stranger, and my mind began to drift to the idea of other women. Kate, or the lady across the street getting her mail from the box on a Saturday morning, short pants and gardening gloves. I had a particular fantasy where I walked over to her garage, we didn’t say a word to each other, and she simply positioned herself bent over the hood of her black BMW, and then pulled down her shorts to her ankles and watched me over her right shoulder.
I felt guilty about it. The Bible says the sin is committed with the first thought of lust, but my mind wouldn’t leave it alone. It was easy to shift the blame to Samantha. She was cold, unproviding. She’d rejected me so many times, how could I expect anything different? But still, I struggled with the immorality of it all. I knew if I took the first step toward making it real, more than just a fantasy, it might actually happen. If not with the woman across the street bent over the BMW, another woman, somewhere else, bent over something else. It wasn’t the fear of getting caught. It was the fear of not getting caught, and becoming like those men who cheat on their wives every time they go out of town, like it’s just something men do, they can’t help themselves, regardless of vows, or promises. I think if you do it once, it becomes easier the next time, and the next.
The letters from Kate kept coming. All full of innuendo and code. She was unhappy, I was unhappy, so I wrote back, in the same code and innuendo, imagining her husband would see the letter one night when Kate drank too much red wine and got caught taking the box down from the top shelf to peek inside.
Early,
I keep remembering those days locked up in your apartment.
It was a long time ago, but not so long. I also remember the first time I ever saw you out by the cemetery where we used to go back in high school to see Onionhead. You kept staring at me, and now it’s me doing the staring. Maybe you could explain why I need to send you letters. I have several theories, but I’d like to hear yours. Maybe you could explain why you wrote me back after all those years, especially when I did all I did to you.
It’s hard to even figure out why anymore.
Kate
I would lie awake on the couch and imagine sending a letter saying, “Meet me in Kansas City, next Saturday, in the lobby of the airport Sheraton Hotel, and stop asking why.” I’d buy a plane ticket, invent a reason to go to Kansas City on business, and spend a weekend of naked bliss in a hotel room. Would she show up in the lobby, or was she only willing to dance around the words of handwritten letters? If I actually sent the letter, and got on the plane, and sat in the lobby pretending to read the paper, and Kate actually got on the plane and showed up through the front door with a red dress, how would our lives change? It was like the fantasy with the lady across the street, or suicide, or the murder of Allen Kilborn. Once it became more than just an idea. Once it began to happen, it was like the current, out of control, deciding for itself.
Besides, I would tell myself, “It was a mirage.” One of us needed to be smart enough to remember how bad it was and how bad it probably would have gotten. I was a kid. I fell in love with my own imagination. A girl that didn’t exist. How long can such a thing last? Not long, apparently. So how could anyone expect it to work itself out twenty years later? But still, the Kansas City hotel weekend was worth all the hours thinking about it.
As my mind drifted and my marriage crumbled, Samantha scheduled counseling. We sat in the office of Dr. Paulette Long. She kept us at a safe distance across her antique cherrywood desk. The woman was entirely pointy. Thin, her face coming quickly inward to the sharp nose. I didn’t like her the moment I saw her, and I don’t think she liked me either.
“So, why don’t we start with you, Mr. Winwood. Tell me a little bit about your marriage.”
“I think it would be better if Samantha starts.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
There was an awkward silence. She reminded me of a big pencil.
“Okay, Samantha, would you start?”
It seemed to me they’d met in the office before, without me, and discussed their strategy for proving I was to blame for everything wrong in all of our lives.
Samantha said, nervously but rehearsed, “There’s a distance between us. I don’t feel the closeness we had before.”
It got quiet again. Apparently, it was my turn to say something.
“There’s no closeness because she sleeps as far away from me in the bed as she can get without rolling off on the floor. My wife hasn’t touched me in three months, and before the occasion three months ago when she nearly fell asleep in the middle of intercourse, it was about four months before that.”
Dr. Paulette Long stared at me with her dark, beady eyes.
“I think, Mr. Winwood, Samantha was speaking of emotional distance, emotional closeness. Not physical.”
“No shit?” I said.
It came out wrong. Sarcastic, impatient, like a man in the room with two conspiratorial women and seven months of locked-up sexual tension.
Samantha said, “Are you having an affair, Early?”
I thought to myself, if
imagining the lady across the street bent over the hood of her black BMW with her white panties around her ankles constitutes an affair, then I’m guilty. But it doesn’t. It might be a sin, but it’s not an affair.
“No,” I said.
Dr. Long asked, “Why would you ask that, Samantha?”
It sounded like they were actors in a bad movie. They each knew exactly what to say.
“Well,” Samantha spoke, “it may sound silly, but I read about certain clues when your husband is having an affair. There are just things I’ve noticed on the list.”
“Like what?” the doctor asked.
“Well,” Samantha spoke again, “he stays late at the office for one. He recently got a haircut and new shoes. He doesn’t try to kiss me or touch me anymore. Those things are on the list.”
I couldn’t listen to much more. “You know what? This is stupid. Maybe eating is a clue also. Or scratching my ass. That could be a clue.”
The doctor looked down her runway nose. I didn’t wait for her to ask another question.
“I stay at work late so I can afford our oversized house in a rich neighborhood that my wife can’t live without. I haven’t tried to kiss or touch her because after you’ve been turned down fifty times in a row with stupid excuses like falling asleep at eight o’clock, or having PMS two weeks before her period, you’d stop trying, too. Who likes being rejected over and over?
“And the haircut. I get about four or five haircuts a year, every year, since I’ve been a grown man. I had no idea the timing of the haircut and new shoes had such significance. Maybe I should grow my hair down to my asscrack and wear these shoes until my toes stick out the holes.”
Samantha was crying. The doctor hated my guts.
“Mr. Winwood, you have a great deal of anger. We need to find the source of that anger.”
“Let me just ask you this,” I said, “are we searching for the source of my anger for my benefit, or for the benefit of this marriage? Because honestly, Samantha, do you want to stay married to me?”
We were all struck with the possibility that she might say no, but after only the tiniest of hesitations, Samantha said, “Yes. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. Allen loves you. We’re a family. If you’re going through some mid-life crisis, get a motorcycle, write a book, whatever.”
The Wait Page 17
