How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  I found myself wishing the man had a mirror in his bedroom so that I could see—really see—the body that had gotten me here. I had never paid my body much mind. I didn’t have the body of an athlete or an outcast. It was just… mine. Not the kind of body people praised or remarked upon, really. But now, pressing myself into the bed’s many pillows, I felt my body and realized that my body could be a passport or a key, maybe even a weapon. A body like a brick thrown through a sleeping house’s window. I got hard then just thinking about all the things I would be able to do with myself.

  After finishing his shower, the man stepped back into the bedroom without a towel on and saw me rubbing my chest with one hand while holding the picture frame with the other. With a smile that was almost disturbing in its effectiveness, he pushed me back onto the bed while taking the photograph away from me. He turned it facedown on the nightstand then set upon me like the sunlight itself.

  9MAY 2004

  LEWISVILLE, TEXAS

  I had just gotten into bed when I heard my mother call my name from her side of the apartment. I ignored her.

  Every few nights lately, she’d been having nightmares that usually ended in her screaming out my uncle’s name in the dark. “Albert,” she’d yell with her eyes closed. “Albert,” as she tossed and turned on her pillow. She sounded like she was a little girl again, trying to wake up her big brother. But whenever I shook her awake, she’d stare at me without seeing me, her face streaked with tears, then fall back asleep instantly. When I would ask her about these episodes in the morning, she’d have no memory of them.

  The second time she said my name this evening, she sounded closer, like she was out of bed. Her voice was strange, somehow soft and raw at once. I jumped out of bed, scaring Kingsley.

  I could barely make out her silhouette in the dark living room. The image stunned me into silence. Wearing her black housedress, she was half crawling, holding on to the back of the couch as she slowly pulled herself toward me.

  “Saeed,” she rasped, “I can’t breathe. Call 911.”

  I ran to the phone, watching as my mother slid back down to the carpet. She settled into an awkward kneel. The dog, calm for once, sat with her while I spoke to the dispatcher. An ambulance’s red and blue lights soon lit up the apartment complex’s parking lot.

  I put Kingsley back in my bedroom and watched the paramedics give my mother an oxygen mask. They tested her pulse and blood pressure, quickly and calmly. By chance, they had her sitting in the chair facing our altar. Having these two white men in our home, inspecting my rasping mother as she sat in her threadbare housedress, made me feel dizzy. I sat down on the couch to still myself.

  Speaking slowly between deep breaths, still winded but more herself, my mother finally spoke. “I collapsed in the parking lot after work today.”

  Her eyes met mine. She looked like she was ashamed she hadn’t told me. I was ashamed I hadn’t noticed. As far as I could remember, she had just come home like any other day and gone into her room to watch TV. I glanced at the kitchen counter on the other side of the room: a pack of cigarettes sat right next to her orange pill bottles of heart medication, alongside the piles of bills and the new stack of forms and packets from NYU. My hands clenched into fists.

  “I thought it was the heat,” she said after pausing to inhale more oxygen. “A security guard found me and took me to my car. I rested for a few minutes, until I got my breath back.” She looked at me again. “I really thought it was the heat.”

  It was as if I were seeing my mother clearly for the first time in weeks. The dark circles under her eyes, the crow’s-feet, her chapped lips, her rough, dry hands, and chipped fingernail polish. Look what you’re doing to your mother, a part of myself whispered. She’s killing herself for you.

  The sons of single mothers inevitably encounter well-meaning family members who like to remind us about our role as “the man of the house.” The statement usually made me wince, the way it implicitly merged the roles of son, father, and husband; the way it erased the grown woman to whom the house actually belonged. But standing in our living room, watching her gasp, I realized that the two paramedics were looking at me, as if a question had already been asked and they were patiently waiting for an answer. My mother, hunched forward, resting her elbows on her legs, was also staring up at me. I felt larger than I had any right being, encased in the body of an adult but ignorant of how to use it.

  The paramedics said she had stabilized enough to decide on her own if she wanted them to take her to the hospital or if she wanted to drive herself in the morning, but they said this while still looking at me. When my mother met my eyes I knew she was thinking about the prospect of medical bills in light of an ambulance ride. So I spoke up, before she could decide against it, and asked the paramedics to take her to the ER. They helped her onto a stretcher and carried her out of the apartment. I stood on the landing, with Kingsley in my arms, as they loaded her into the ambulance and drove away.

  Walking from room to room, getting dressed while also picking up things I thought she’d need at the hospital, I noticed that all the lights were still off in the apartment. Had we been standing in near darkness all this time? Once I had a bag of extra clothes for her as well as her medications, her prayer beads, and her purse, I got in her car. It was quiet enough that as I put my keys in the ignition, I thought I could hear the ambulance’s sirens in the distance.

  When I pulled into the parking lot outside the hospital, I gathered my mother’s belongings and walked toward the nurse’s desk. The ER was mostly calm except for a patient screaming in one of the rooms. I raised my voice a bit to say my mother’s name over the disturbance and watched the nurse as she typed “Carol Sweet-Jones” into the computer. Just before the nurse turned back to me, the curtains in one of the rooms whooshed open and revealed my mother waving her arms about as she tried to fight off two doctors. She was shouting, drenched in sweat with her hair wild. The patient I’d heard in agony was my mother.

  “No, no!” she screamed, her voice not her own. “I must win!” Then she raised one fist triumphantly in the air and screamed, “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” so loudly the other nurses at the station, who until then had been unfazed, actually looked up in shock. The curtains whooshed closed again, sweeping the surreal tableau out of sight. I stood there stunned, staring at the shadows moving behind those curtains until the nurse appeared beside me. I had been standing perfectly still for so long that I realized I should probably move, or do something, anything. But what? My stare slid down the curtain and fell to the floor. It stayed there until the nurse guided me toward a small, sea-foam green waiting room.

  Suddenly alone, I felt the images I’d been able to keep at bay start seeping in. If I kept my eyes open, I could still see my mother fighting for her life, her face streaked with tears and sweat, spit leaking down the side of her drugged mouth. If I closed my eyes, I was back on the pulpit in the church, kneeling beside my grandmother. That summer was far enough away for me to pretend I had forgotten about it. The waiting room’s humming silence turned into the preacher’s voice. “Put every ailment, every disease on her until she breaks under the weight of the Holy Spirit. Show her your plagues and save this child. Amen,” he said. “Amen,” my grandmother echoed. I never believed that man’s prayer had any power, but—all these years later—the possibility that my mother’s mother did believe in it sapped the air from my lungs.

  I realized I hadn’t called any of my family members yet. I walked outside, and in the parking lot I tried to catch my breath. I couldn’t fall apart tonight too. I counted each exhale until I calmed down, drawing comfort from the heat and the dark. I started dialing my grandmother’s phone number but changed my mind before the first ring and called my uncle instead.

  When Albert answered, words streamed out of my mouth, monotone and unceasing. I’m not sure I even let him speak. I told him everything, afraid that if I paused, I would realize that I was talking about my mother and not some stranger. “I�
�ll call you back after I talk to the doctors,” I said, finally catching my breath. Then: “Can you tell Grandma?”

  He was quiet for a moment. I thought about my mother calling out his name in her sleep. “Okay, Saeed. Call me back as soon as you can.” He sounded hesitant, maybe a bit disappointed. But I couldn’t explain why, in such a crucial moment, my grandmother’s voice was not one I wanted to hear.

  * * *

  WHEN THEY LET me see my mother, I noticed her housedress, or what was left of it, had been cut up and put in a Ziploc bag that now rested on the nightstand. She put on that dress almost every day after getting home from work. It was the dress she wore whenever she showed up in my dreams.

  “We were just seconds from having to cut open her chest,” said the doctor. He said something about congestion, something about her heart. I was still staring at the Ziploc bag. He kept talking, trying to explain the sudden change in my mother between the time she left the apartment and the scene I’d witnessed just twenty minutes later in the ER, but I couldn’t hear him. My mother, drugged, barely awake, was talking softly to the nurse at her bedside.

  “I can’t go back to sleep,” she whispered, almost girllike.

  “You need to, Ms. Jones. You need to go back to sleep,” said the nurse as she brushed a wisp of my mother’s hair away from her face. Her tenderness stung me. A stranger was so much better at taking care of my mother than I had been.

  “I’m afraid that if I go to sleep I won’t wake back up,” my mother answered. She looked at me, or maybe just a dream of me, then turned away as she drifted back to sleep. I drove myself back home, curled up in her bed with Kingsley, and slept for a few hours.

  * * *

  SHE STAYED IN the hospital for a couple of weeks. Friends of the family went with me to the series of events at school organized to celebrate the graduating senior class. At one ceremony, each senior stood onstage and was given a red rose while a teacher announced what college we would be attending in the fall. When she said my name and then New York University to loud applause, it felt like an indictment.

  One morning during debate class, my teacher’s phone rang. The director of the speech and debate program at Western Kentucky University wanted me to come audition for a spot on their nationally and internationally competitive team. I had recently qualified for high-school nationals and would be competing in a few weeks. They’d heard about me from some other students who had also graduated from my high school and gone on to compete successfully at WKU. My mother was still in the hospital so I flew to Nashville by myself, using my mother’s Delta benefits to cover the cost. One of the team’s coaches picked me up at the airport and drove me to the campus.

  I flew back to Texas the same afternoon and drove directly to the hospital. A nurse stopped me in the hallway just outside my mother’s room and told me she would be well enough in time to attend my graduation ceremony. The nurse put her hand on my shoulder then and added, “I know it’s been hard. You should try to get some rest when you can.” I forced a smile and watched her walk away.

  “You look tired,” my mother said when I walked into her room. Sitting on the edge of her bed, I told her that I had visited WKU and that I had accepted a full scholarship from the school’s speech and debate team. Her eyes lit up, a sudden brightness that went out as quickly as a flare. She held my hand and squeezed it faintly, trying to smile, as she closed her eyes and eased back onto her pillow.

  Congestive heart failure: that’s what the doctor had been trying to tell me. From what I had been reading online, my mother’s body wouldn’t truly recover so much as bide its time against her heart’s inevitable betrayal. For months her chest had been filling up with fluid, and it would always be at risk of doing so again. Her heart was essentially drowning.

  Watching her sleep that day, shame set in. I had hoped my good news about the scholarship would cheer her, maybe even heal her in some way, easing the stress of the last month. I’d felt heroic flying home: I had figured out a plan for us and pulled it off. Just to watch it fizzle upon contact with the world. The smallness of the victory only underscored how little I understood.

  It was as if I wanted credit for rescuing my mother from a fire that I had set and couldn’t put out. I wasn’t the man of the house; I was the kid who’d finally lit his first match.

  PART THREE

  do you know what it’s like to live

  someplace that loves you back?

  —DANEZ SMITH

  10AUGUST 2004

  BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY

  “You really want to make an impression, don’t you?” Mom said.

  I was wearing a blue paisley button-down shirt that had a few thin, almost see-through panels, pin-striped boot-cut khakis, and brown leather Chelsea boots that were so narrow they changed the way I walked.

  “I’m about to show these Kentucky bitches how it’s done,” I said, cocking my knock-off Kenneth Cole sunglasses. Whether she intended to or not, she was the one who taught me that clothing could be armor.

  Mom was waiting by the front door in black high heels and a black wrap dress, sunglasses on even though it was overcast outside. Like the kind of women you’d see in New York, I thought, then forced myself to forget it as I picked up our suitcases and set them outside the front door. She lowered her shades and looked me over. We were both geared up for the journey ahead.

  Dallas–Fort Worth Airport to Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta Airport to Nashville Airport. An hour’s drive north on I-65, crossing the state border from middle Tennessee into Kentucky before passing the fields, farms, subdivisions, and town squares that eventually announce themselves as being part of a town called Bowling Green. Then it’s a right turn onto Normal Drive and you can steer yourself into the parking lot in front of Barnes Campbell Hall.

  Welcome to Western Kentucky University.

  We laughed when we finally found the entrance to campus. The first banner we drove past advertised the school’s freshman orientation program, known as the “M. A. S. T. E. R. Plan.” The sign happened to be hanging near a brick building that didn’t look all that different from a plantation.

  “Master, huh?” Mom chuckled before turning at the stoplight. “Good luck, baby.” I broke out laughing too, almost giddy. I was just happy to see her smiling again, settling back into her perfect deadpan.

  I had almost forgotten what I was wearing until I started carrying both of our suitcases, all filled with my clothes and belongings, up the six flights of stairs toward my dorm room. Mom would either wait in the rental car or make trips to Target while I walked up and down the stairs, passing kids and parents all wisely wearing T-shirts and shorts, speaking with Kentucky and Ohio accents.

  By the time I’d hauled everything up to my dorm room, sweat had dyed my shirt a deeper shade of indigo. My aching feet made me wince with every step I took. Mom took one last look at me, scanning me from head to toe with her shades lowered. She smirked again.

  “Well,” she said, looking up at my dorm. “Don’t have sex without a condom.”

  She hugged me one more time, then got into the rental car without another word. She started to pull away before I could even register whether to laugh, or to chase her down with the thousand questions still on my mind. We did this to one another, shocking each other to distract both of us from an impending ache. It worked, in a sense. I just stood in the empty parking space, noticing that the air was thick with the chatter of cicadas. It hadn’t occurred to me how much I would miss her until she was already gone.

  * * *

  ALONE IN MY new room for the first time all day, I put my sore feet back down and slowly took off my boots. I unbuttoned my ridiculous shirt, prying the cloying fabric from my skin. I peeled off my jeans, balled them up, and threw them into the corner. The damp clothes soaked up dust and cobwebs. I’d need to do something about that dust.

  Digging through my suitcases, I put on the first tank top and pair of shorts I could find, then started unpacking my books. When I got t
o my worn paperback of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, I sat down again and turned to the scene where a character walks past the arch in Washington Square Park. Going to my classes at NYU would’ve meant passing through that park nearly every day.

  I didn’t just feel far away from the city now, I felt small. I felt estranged. I put the novel down and headed for the door and, I swear, by the time I crossed its threshold, my bare dorm room had played a trick on me.

  On the other side of that door was a boy—one who hadn’t really spoken or introduced himself to other students all day; one who could’ve made up any new self he wanted—yet who was somehow the mirror image of the pin-striped and paisleyed Saeed who’d arrived that morning. He was from Lewisville—Oh, not Louisville, we say Lewisville… it’s, uh, it’s just north of Dallas… haha, I guess… I don’t know, it’s just a suburb, nothing special. He wasn’t quite sure how to explain his being in Kentucky. He didn’t have a story yet. He was the speech and debate scholarship student who found himself stuttering for the first time in his life and mangling his hellos. His hands were shoved deep down in his pockets whenever he talked, like if he dug deep enough maybe he’d find his bearings. When a girl who said she was from LaRue County pointed out the twin birthmarks on his shoulders—one darker, one lighter—Saeed offered up an embarrassed smile and a mumbled excuse about cobwebs and needing to find a broom. And if, by chance, you asked him if he thought that girl was hot, he wouldn’t give you a clear answer one way or another. He would just rush on to the next sentence and ask where you were from.

  It just happened. I met one guy who lived down the hall from me and that guy’s roommate and another guy who lived on the floor just below mine and then my roommate—the six-foot-four son of a tobacco farmer who’d never been outside the state of Kentucky—and I closeted myself again. No one shoved me back in there. Maybe I’d just been standing in the doorway of that dusty closet, tripped, and somehow fell back inside.